A Cast of Killers (29 page)

The producer reached the elevator and jabbed
the button impatiently. T.S. stared at him out of the corner of one
eye. Lance Worthington was a small man, not more than five-eight,
with short arms and stubby legs and a rounded head. There was not
much of note about him: he moved impatiently with jerky motions,
wore expensive shoes, had thinning hair and only a pair of small
dark eyes stood out in an otherwise nondescript face. Until he drew
attention to those ears. The producer tugged at one, then jabbed
the elevator button a few more times for good measure and looked at
his watch. If the elevator didn't hurry, T.S. would be left
standing in the hall holding a whole lot more than his keys in his
hand.

Fortunately, a car arrived and Lance
Worthington boarded. T.S. caught a final glimpse of his thinning
scalp and small round head just as the elevator door shut.

Boy, did T.S. hate those ears.

Auntie Lil was steamed. The desk sergeant at
Midtown North would not let her past the entrance area.

"I demand to see Detective Santos," she told
him for the third time.

"Demand away. The man's not here." The
sergeant leaned forward and parked a fist against his chin so he
could get a better look at Auntie Lil. He was a budding novelist
and was collecting colorful characters for his first book. This old
dame was a doozy.

Auntie Lil glared at him. "You certainly take
a casual view of your job."

Out of habit, the sergeant checked the
position of her pocketbook. It looked big enough to hurt if swung
with sufficient force. "Lady, I cannot make a man appear when he is
not here. I am an officer of the law, not a magician. Would you
like to see anyone else in connection with your problem?"

"No. When do you expect him in?"

"We expected him in this morning," the
sergeant replied. "When he actually arrives is anyone's guess.
George is that kind of guy."

She did not bother to thank him—what for?—and
marched from the precinct angrily, shouldering past a handcuffed
suspect and throwing him against a folding chair. The suspect
tripped over it and landed on the floor. The arresting officer
looked after Auntie Lil in admiration, but she was moving too fast
to accept the compliment.

She reached Mike's American Bar and Grill
before T.S. It was deserted, except for a woman behind the bar and
a handful of Mexican cooks sitting at a table enjoying cigarettes
before the lunch rush. For some inexplicable reason, huge clusters
of plastic grapes hung from the ceiling in endless waves and fake
Grecian columns were parked willy-nilly throughout the interior.
Oversized wine glasses served as flowerpots for silk grapevines
that cascaded across the center of every table. The bartender, a
willowy young woman with straight brown hair and enough black
eyeliner to last Cleopatra a lifetime, wore a sheet wrapped over a
leotard in an approximation of a toga. She watched Auntie Lil enter
with professionally distant interest. In Mike's neighborhood, you
never knew what was going to walk in the door. It was always best
to reserve judgment until right before you yelled for the
bouncer.

"Give me a double Bloody Mary," Auntie Lil
ordered. Her fruitless visit to the precinct called for strong
measures. She slapped her pocketbook on the bar and scraped a stool
up closer to it. "Extra, extra spicy. I'd ask for ouzo, but I hate
the stuff."

"Greek is just our theme this week," the
bartender assured her. "Next week, we're going Oktoberfest." If she
thought it was unusual for a little old lady to be slamming back a
double Bloody Mary in midday, she wasn't going to point that out.
"Having a bad day?" she asked.

"Having a bad week," Auntie Lil decided as
she sipped at her Bloody Mary.

Since Theodore was certainly taking his sweet
time, she decided she might as well get some work done while she
waited. There was a pay phone directly behind her, against one
wall, and a chair was arranged in front of it. Unfortunately, so
was a cook. One look from Auntie Lil, however, and he quickly
murmured something in Spanish, rang off and hustled back to the
safety of the kitchen. He, too, had been working in the
neighborhood long enough to know that you never judged a book by
its cover, no matter how creased it might be.

Bob Fleming answered the phone on the first
ring. "Homefront," he said.

"If you don't sleep there, you might as
well," she told him. "This is Lillian Hubbert."

"Of course." He sounded more cheerful than
the day before. "I got a good night's sleep in my own bed,
actually. Some of my volunteers showed up and we got two kids to
call home last night. And one is thinking about entering a resident
drug rehab. It looks like it could be a pretty good week after
all."

"People still looking at you funny?" she
asked.

"Not today. No one's seen me yet. What can I
do for you?"

"Did you find Little Pete? Will he talk to
me?"

"I think so," he told her. "Stop by later and
I'll let you know for sure. I ran into him this morning. He's
thinking about it. But he's scared."

"Why is he scared?" Auntie Lil asked.

"He was on the streets a couple of nights
ago, three I think, and saw some rich guy in a limo flashing around
photos of the old woman, dead. Scared the hell out of him. He said
the guy had a mean-looking face, looked like a serial killer or
something. Of course, he's a kid and he's got an imagination, so
... I don't know the connection, but that old lady meant something
to Little Pete and he's definitely afraid of the man in the
limousine."

"A silver limo?" Auntie Lil asked.

"No. He said it was a black car."

She couldn't figure out how a rich man in a
black limo could fit into what they knew. "What about Timmy?" she
asked Bob Fleming. "Did you get to talk to him?"

"No. He's still avoiding me. Little Pete
doesn't know why. But I found out a bit more about the man who's
keeping Timmy. According to Little Pete, Timmy's got a regular job
with the guy. It's not a sugar daddy thing. Strictly business. I
don't know exactly what that means, but I can guarantee you that it
doesn't involve Social Security. Maybe you can find out more."

"I will," Auntie Lil decided firmly. "Thank
you. I'll see you this afternoon."

She hung up and nursed another third of her
Bloody Mary down the hatch. Things were looking up. Little Pete
could tell her something about Emily, she was sure of it. She
checked the clock. Where was Theodore? On an impulse, she dialed
Midtown North and, to her surprise, was connected to Det. George
Santos almost immediately.

"Talk fast," the detective said without
waiting to hear who it was. "I've got a stack of messages waist
high that I have to return."

"We have located The Eagle for you."

"The man who was sitting next to Emily,"
Santos repeated, obviously recognizing her voice. He wanted to
humor her before she started to fill him in with endless details.
He sighed again. "Okay, Miss Hubbert, what's the beef?"

"He entered Emily's
apartment building at 1:30
a.m
. last night and has not left
yet."

"The apartment building where you think she
lives," Santos corrected her.

"Regardless of whether Emily lived there or
not," Auntie Lil conceded, but only because it suited her current
purposes, "reliable sources saw The Eagle enter. And he has not yet
come back out."

"Look, Miss Hubbert," the detective said. "I
know you're trying to help and I know that you care about the woman
who died. But I can't keep running off on wild goose chases. I just
don't have the time."

"Please, detective," Auntie Lil pleaded with
uncharacteristic mellowness, fueled by the hefty Bloody Mary. "I
won't ask you to do anything else. Please just have someone check
all the apartments there. I know The Eagle is in there. He's a tall
black man with an eagle tattoo on one of his upper arms. If you can
find him, I can find the witness who saw him leaning over Emily the
day she died. I have people looking for him now."

"You what?"

She backpedaled quickly. "I mean, I heard
through a friend that they've put the word out at St. Barnabas that
the police need to speak to whoever sat near Emily that day."

There was a skeptical
silence.
"I
'll
see who's available to recheck the building," he finally promised.
"But only because there weren't any new murders waiting on my desk
this morning."

"This afternoon," Auntie Lil corrected.

He rang off before she tortured him any
more.

Returning from 1515 Broadway, T.S. detoured
past St. Barnabas in an attempt to find the funny old man who had
first spotted The Eagle. Franklin had not yet been able to find
him, but was sure he'd turn up sooner or later. There was a long
line waiting for the soup kitchen to open, but no demented old
characters with half of their hair shaved away. While he was there
searching for familiar faces, Fran walked past him and hurried down
the basement steps without giving him even a second glance. She was
seriously preoccupied with some problem. And T.S. wanted to know
what it was.

He followed her partway down the steps. She
unlocked the gate and stepped through, forgetting to lock it again.
Before she could unlock the basement door, Father Stebbins opened
it for her, greeting her with a wide smile. To T.S.'s complete
amazement, Fran brushed past the priest without comment. Father
Stebbins stared at her with a worried look on his face, but she
marched past him into the kitchen area without so much as a
hello.

Now that was something, T.S. thought. But
what?

Father Stebbins noticed T.S. standing at the
gate. "The kitchen doesn't open until three o'clock," he told him
kindly.

Not only had Father Stebbins not recognized
him, he'd thought he was a soup kitchen client. So much for T.S.'s
theory about the impact of the right attire. On the other hand, he
decided, he should be grateful for the anonymity. He slipped back
up the stairs while Father Stebbins relocked the gate. The old
actresses were not in line yet. They were probably roaming the
streets, gathering useless information on innocent people. Well, so
long as they were happy doing their jobs, no one was getting
hurt.

He cut across Forty-Sixth Street to get
another look at Emily's building. If Herbert's team was on the job,
he didn't see them. But he saw something even more interesting.
T.S. spotted a silver limousine approaching the front of the
building from the west and hurried to get a better look. He stepped
into the doorway across the street and watched as it glided to a
stop in front of Emily's building. A tall blonde with lots of hard
angles but not much meat on her hopped out of the back seat and ran
a few doors down to the corner store, leaving the car door open. A
small, round head covered with thin strands of black hair and
decorated with two tiny ears emerged from the back seat. It was
attached to the tan of an expensive cashmere coat. Lance
Worthington marched up the front steps of Emily's building and
leaned firmly on a buzzer. T.S. could not see which one. The
producer leaned on the buzzer again and turned away impatiently.
Halfway down the steps, the front door opened and Leteisha Swann
stuck her gawky neck and heavily painted face out the door as she
called after Lance Worthington. The look of irritation that crossed
his face was clearly apparent, even from T.S.'s viewpoint across
the street. The producer shook his head gruffly and climbed into
the limo. Undaunted, Leteisha Swann followed him to the car. The
door was shut firmly in her face. She glared through the back
windows, tossed her hair behind her head—a move that nearly
dislodged her cheap wig—then turned on her spike heels and
sauntered down the block toward Ninth Avenue.

So, Lance Worthington had not been waiting
for Leteisha Swann. Who else in the building could it be?

"Got a quarter?" T.S.'s
concentration was interrupted by a bedraggled old woman, who stood
before him grinning a gap-toothed smile and extending a dirty palm.
She looked like someone right out of
Oliver!

T.S. fumbled in his pocket for a dollar bill
and tossed it her way, returning to his scrutiny of the silver
car.

"Thank you, governor. Most kind of you," the
old hag cackled in a Cockney accent. "Care for a quick tickle in
return?"

T.S. was shocked. He turned to her and
prepared to launch into a lecture, but the old bag lady surprised
him by bursting into a merry laugh.

"Got you," she said. She lifted the matted
hair off of her forehead, rearranged her face and straightened up,
grinning at T.S.

"Adelle!" T.S. was not amused. He was
appalled. She had looked exactly like a crazy old woman lost on the
streets. A little too much like one, in fact. It frightened him.
Where they all that close to the edge?

"Don't let it bother you, guv'," she told him
with a bawdy nudge. "I can fool anyone when I put my mind to it."
She cackled again and moved down the sidewalk, adding over her
shoulder: "You're not the only eyes watching that building, you
know."

The encounter was still bothering him when
the blonde emerged from the corner store holding a pack of
cigarettes and a small brown paper bag. The door to the back seat
of the silver car opened and she climbed inside. Just then, the
outer door to Emily's building swung open with a bang and a young
boy ran down the steps. His blond hair gleamed harshly in the
autumn sun and he wore a tight black T-shirt, equally tight black
jeans, and brand new tennis shoes worth about a third of T.S.'s
monthly pension check. The boy followed the blonde into the silver
car and it pulled swiftly away.