-24-
Just before dusk, the tall thin man with the ice blue eyes stooped under the yellow police tape. Stumbling over broken brick pieces, he walked up to the detective standing over the body. The detective looked at his neatly pressed white shirt, tie, and light blue suit, and accepted his card. After reading it he smirked and shrugged his shoulders.
“Okay, so no surprise, you’re an attorney,” the detective said in a nasal Yonkers accent. “But the name don’t ring any bells.”
“No reason it should,” Paul said in his even, accent-free voice. “I represent the owner of this building. When he hears about violence in the South Bronx, he gets curious. When he heard it happened next to his building, he asked me to check it out.”
“Tell him he better either relax or buy property in a better neighborhood,” the detective said. “Actually, this one looks pretty routine. Spanish guy, around thirty. Took a good shot in the face. Broke his nose. Some scratches too. Then I guess they got sick of playing around and shot him. Probably over drug territory. Either that or a jealous girl friend. Believe me, there’s nothing odd or special about that.”
“How many times?”
“Eh?” The detective’s mind was already elsewhere.
“You said he was shot,” Paul said, keeping his voice polite. “How many times?”
“Oh.” The detective lifted a note pad and scanned, as if looking for some nonessential bit of information. “One bullet. Nine millimeter. Through the heart, low and inside.”
“Powder burns?” Paul stared down at the corpse’s face, showing no emotion.
“Nope. Wasn’t that close.”
“But he wasn’t running I see,” Paul said, squatting down. “That’s an entry wound in his chest.”
“Hey, who are you, Columbo? Why don’t you go chase an ambulance or something?”
Paul responded to the policeman’s ire with a smile. “You’ve been very helpful, detective. Mind if I check the inside of the building while I’m here?”
“Help yourself. Just stay out of my people’s way.”
“Oh, I always try to do that,” Paul muttered under his breath. He stepped up the outside stairs and entered the darkened hall. He noticed the broken light bulb hanging above him. With his automatic held close to his right thigh he climbed the stairs, avoiding the broken ones. At the top he examined the body in the hall, sitting up against the wall. It was J.D. Griffith, a merc and a gunfighter. He knew the man only by reputation, but that reputation was excellent.
The apartment door was ajar. He pushed it just enough to slip through and pushed it almost closed behind himself. Once inside he drew a penlight from his jacket pocket and quickly checked the room. To his seasoned eyes, scattered shell casings and bullet holes in and around the tattered couch told a story. Not far away he found a splotch of blood on the floor behind the easy chair. It was too red to be the result of a bullet wound. Blood from a shallow cut, he thought, or from someone’s mouth or nose after a blow. Further in he found the fat man Stone had saddled him with. No need to touch him to know what had happened. The left side of his neck was torn, and a hole above his left eye was crusted over with dried blood.
“Amateurs,” Paul muttered. His contempt for them was so often justified. Pocketing his light, he slipped out of the flat and down the stairs into daylight. Across the street he got into his brown, two door mid sized Chevrolet and pulled away. He would let the police discover the mess upstairs on their own.
A block away, he was still shaking his head at the incompetents who turned up in his profession. He had offered the fat man and his Mexican friend a chance to step up, to play in the big leagues. An error, certainly, but perhaps not a waste. Natural selection had cleared the field of two men who did not belong there.
And he learned that he had certainly underestimated this Morgan Stark.