He returned to the work site.
Andy was waiting in the pool of light cast by the big lamps. He eyed the surrounding darkness with suspicion. He was still pale.
“Nothing there,” Ted said.
“A minute ago, there was.”
Ted switched off his flashlight, snapped it onto his tool belt. He jammed his hands into the fur-lined pockets of his quilted jacket.
He said, “This is the first time you’ve been sub-street with me.”
“So?”
“Ever been in a place like this before?”
Andy said, “You mean in a sewer?”
“It’s not a sewer. Storm drain. You ever been underground?”
“No. What’s that got to do with it?”
“Ever been in a crowded theater and suddenly felt... closed in?”
“I’m not claustrophobic,” Andy said defensively.
“Nothing to be ashamed of, you know. I’ve seen it happen before. A guy is a little uncomfortable in small rooms, elevators, crowded places, though not so uncomfortable that you’d say he was claustrophobic. Then he comes down here on a repair job for the first time, and he starts feeling cramped up, starts to shake, gets short of breath, feels the walls closing in, starts hearing things, imagining things. If that’s the case with you, don’t worry about it. Doesn’t mean you’ll be fired or anything like that. Hell, no! They’ll just make sure they don’t give you another underground assignment; that’s all.”
“I saw those things, Ted.”
“Nothing’s there.”
“I saw them.”
10
Down the hall from the late Dominick Carramazza’s hotel suite, the next room was large and pleasant, with a queen-size bed, a writing desk, a bureau, a chest of drawers, and two chairs. The color scheme was coral with turquoise accents.
Burt Wicke, the occupant, was in his late forties. He was about six feet tall, and at one time he’d been solid and strong, but now all the hard meat of him was sheathed with fat. His shoulders were big but round, and his chest was big, and his gut overhung his belt, and as he sat on the edge of the bed, his slacks were stretched tight around his hammy thighs. Jack found it hard to tell if Wicke had ever been good-looking. Too much rich food, too much booze, too many cigarettes, too much of everything had left him with a face that looked partly melted. His eyes protruded just a bit and were bloodshot. In that coral and turquoise room, Wicke looked like a toad on a birthday cake.
His voice was a surprise, higher pitched than Jack expected. He had figured Burt Wicke to be slow-moving, slow-talking, a weary and sedentary man, but Wicke spoke with considerable nervous energy. He couldn’t sit still, either. He got up from the bed, paced the room, sat down in a chair, bolted up almost at once, paced, all the while talking, answering questions—and complaining. He was a non-stop complainer.
“This won’t take long, will it? I’ve already had to cancel one business meeting. If this takes long, I’ll have to cancel another.”
“It shouldn’t take long,” Jack said.
“I had breakfast here in the room. Not a very good breakfast. The orange juice was too warm, and the coffee wasn’t warm enough. I asked for my eggs over well, and they came sunny-side up. You’d think a hotel like this, a hotel with this reputation, a hotel this expensive, would be able to give you a decent room service breakfast. Anyway, I shaved and got dressed. I was standing in the bathroom, combing my hair, when I heard somebody shouting. Then screaming. I stepped out of the bathroom and listened, and I was pretty sure it was all coming from next door there. More than one voice.”
“What were they shouting?” Rebecca asked.
“Sounded surprised, startled. Scared. Real scared.”
“No, what I mean is—do you remember any words they shouted?”
“No words.”
“Or maybe names.”
“They weren’t shouting words or names; nothing like that.”
“What were they shouting?”
“Well, maybe it was words and names or both, but it didn’t come through the wall all that distinctly. It was just noise. And I thought to myself: Christ, not something else gone wrong; this has been a rotten trip all the way.”
Wicke wasn’t only a complainer; he was a whiner. His voice had the power to set Jack’s teeth on edge.
“Then what?” Rebecca asked.
“Well, the shouting part didn’t last long. Almost right away, the shooting started.”
“Those two slugs came through the wall?” Jack asked, pointing to the holes.
“Not right then. Maybe a minute later. And what the hell is this joint made of, anyway, if the walls can’t stop a bullet?”
“It was a .357 Magnum,” Jack said. “Nothing’ll stop that.”
“Walls like tissue paper,” Wicke said, not wanting to hear anything that might contribute to the hotel’s exoneration. He went to the telephone that stood on a nightstand by the bed, and he put his hand on the receiver. “As soon as the shooting started, I scrambled over here, dialed the hotel operator, told her to get the cops. They were a very long time coming. Are you always such a long time coming in this city when someone needs help?”
“We do our best,” Jack said.
“So I put the phone down and hesitated, not sure what to do, just stood listening to them screaming and shooting over there, and then I realized I might be in the line of fire, so I started toward the bathroom, figuring to hole up in there until it all blew over, and then all of a sudden, Jesus, I was in the line of fire. The first shot came through the wall and missed my face by maybe six inches. The second one was even closer. I dropped to the floor and hugged the carpet, but those were the last two shots—and just a few seconds later, there wasn’t any more screaming, either.”
“Then what?” Jack asked.
“Then I waited for the cops.”
“You didn’t go into the hall?”
“Why would I?”
“To see what happened.”
“Are you crazy? How was I to know who might be out there in the hall? Maybe one of them with a gun was still out there.”
“So you didn’t see anyone. Or hear anything important, like a name?”
“I already told you. No.”
Jack couldn’t think of anything more to ask. He looked at Rebecca, and she seemed stymied, too. Another dead end.
They got up from their chairs, and Burt Wicke—still fidgety, still whining—said, “This has been a rotten trip from the beginning, absolutely rotten. First, I have to make the entire flight from Chicago sitting next to a little old lady from Peoria who wouldn’t shut up. Boring old bitch. And the plane hit turbulence like you wouldn’t believe. Then yesterday, two deals fall through, and I find out my hotel has rats, an expensive hotel like this—”
“Rats?” Jack asked.
“Huh?”
“You said the hotel has rats.”
“Well, it does.”
“You’ve seen them?” Rebecca asked.
“It’s a disgrace,” Wicke said. “A place like this, with such an almighty reputation, but crawling with rats.”
“Have you seen them?” Rebecca repeated.
Wicke cocked his head, frowned. “Why’re you so interested in rats? That’s got nothing to do with the murders.”
“Have you seen them?” Rebecca repeated in a harsher voice.
“Not exactly. But I heard them. In the walls.”
“You heard rats in the walls?”
“Well, in the heating system, actually. They sounded close, like they were right here in these walls, but you know how those hollow metal heating ducts can carry sound. The rats might’ve been on another floor, even in another wing, but they sure sounded close. I got up on the desk there and put my ear to the vent, and I swear they couldn’t’ve been inches away. Squeaking. A funny sort of squeaking. Chittering, twittering sounds. Maybe half a dozen rats, by the sound of it. I could hear their claws scraping on metal... a scratchy, rattly noise that gave me the
creeps. I complained, but the management here doesn’t bother attending to complaints. From the way they treat their guests, you’d never know this was supposed to be one of the finest hotels in the city.”
Jack figured Burt Wicke had lodged an unreasonable number of vociferous, petty complaints prior to hearing the rats. By that time, the management had tagged him as either a hopeless neurotic or a grifter who was trying to establish excuses for not paying his bill.
Having paced to the window, Wicke looked up at the winter sky, down at the street far below. “And now it’s snowing. On top of everything else, the weather’s got to turn rotten. It isn’t fair.”
The man no longer reminded Jack of a toad. Now he seemed like a six-foot-tall, fat, hairy, stumpy-legged baby.
Rebecca said, “When did you hear the rats?”
“This morning. Just after I finished breakfast, I called down to the front desk to tell them how terrible their room service food was. After a highly unsatisfactory conversation with the clerk on duty, I put the phone down—and that’s the very moment when I heard the rats. After I’d listened to them a while and was positively sure they were rats, I called the manager himself to complain about that, again without satisfactory results. That’s when I made up my mind to get a shower, dress, pack my suitcases, and find a new hotel before my first business appointment of the day.”
“Do you remember the exact time when you heard the rats?”
“Not to the minute. But it must’ve been around eight-thirty.”
Jack glanced at Rebecca. “About one hour before the killing started next door.”
She looked troubled. She said, “Weirder and weirder.”
II
In the death suite, the three ravaged bodies still lay where they had fallen.
The lab men hadn’t finished their work. In the parlor, one of them was vacuuming the carpet around the corpse. The sweepings would be analyzed later.
Jack and Rebecca went to the nearest heating vent, a one-foot-by-eight-inch rectangular plate mounted on the wall, a few inches below the ceiling. Jack pulled a chair under it, stood on the chair, and examined the grille.
He said, “The end of the duct has an inward-bent flange all the way around it. The screws go through the edges of the grille and through the flange.”
“From here,” Rebecca said, “I see the heads of two screws.”
“That’s all there are. But anything trying to get out of the duct would have to remove at least one of those screws to loosen the grille.”
“And no rat is that smart,” she said.
“Even if it was a smart rat, like no other rat God ever put on this earth, a regular Albert Einstein of the rat kingdom, it still couldn’t do the job. From inside the duct, it’d be dealing with the pointed, threaded end of the screw. It couldn’t grip and turn the damned thing with only its paws.”
“Not with its teeth, either.”
“No. The job would require fingers.”
The duct, of course, was much too small for a man—or even a child—to crawl through it.
Rebecca said. “Suppose a lot of rats, a few dozen of them, jammed up against one another in the duct, all struggling to get out through a ventilation grille. If a real horde of them put enough pressure on the other side of the grille, would they be able to pop the screws through the flange and then shove the grille into the room, out of their way?”
“Maybe,” Jack said with more than a little doubt. “Even that sounds too smart for rats. But I guess if the holes in the flange were too much bigger than the screws that passed through them, the threads wouldn’t bite on anything, and the grille could be forced off.”
He tested the vent plate that he had been examining. It moved slightly back and forth, up and down, but not much.
He said, “This one’s pretty tightly fitted.”
“One of the others might be looser.”
Jack stepped down from the chair and put it back where he’d gotten it.
They went through the suite until they’d found all the vents from the heating system: two in the parlor, one in the bedroom, one in the bath. At each outlet, the grille was fixed firmly in place.
“Nothing got into the suite through the heating ducts,” Jack said. “Maybe I can make myself believe that rats could crowd up against the back of the grille and force it off, but I’ll never in a million years believe that they left through the same duct and somehow managed to replace the grille behind them. No rat—no animal of any kind you can name—could be that well-trained, that dexterous.”
“No. Of course not. It’s ridiculous.”
“So,” he said.
“So,” she said. She sighed. “Then you think it’s just an odd coincidence that the men here were apparently bitten to death shortly after Wicke heard rats in the walls.”
“I don’t like coincidences,” he said.
“Neither do I.”
“They usually turn out not to be coincidences.”
“Exactly.”
“But it’s still the most likely possibility. Coincidence, I mean. Unless...”
“Unless what?” she asked.
“Unless you want to consider voodoo, black magic—”
“No thank you.”
“—demons creeping through the walls—”
“Jack, for God’s sake!”
“—coming out to kill, melting back into the walls and just disappearing.”
“I won’t listen to this.”
He smiled. “I’m just teasing, Rebecca.”
“Like hell you are. Maybe you think you don’t put any credence in that kind of baloney, but deep down inside, there’s a part of you that’s—”
“Excessively open-minded,” he finished.
“If you insist on making a joke of it—”
“I do. I insist.”
“But it’s true, just the same.”
“I may be excessively open-minded, if that’s even possible—”
“It is.”
“—but at least I’m not inflexible.”
“Neither am I.”
“Or rigid.”
“Neither am I.”
“Or frightened.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You figure it.”
“You’re saying I’m frightened?”
“Aren’t you, Rebecca?”
“Of what?”
“Last night, for one thing.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Then let’s talk about it.”
“Not now.”
He looked at his watch. “Twenty past eleven. We’ll break for lunch at twelve. You promised to talk about it at lunch.”
“I said if we had time for lunch.”
“We’ll have time.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We’ll have time.”
“There’s a lot to be done here.”
“We can do it after lunch.”
“People to interrogate.”
“We can grill them after lunch.”
“You’re impossible, Jack.”
“Indefatigable.”
“Stubborn.”
“Determined.”
“Damnit.”
“Charming, too,” he said.
She apparently didn’t agree. She walked away from him. She seemed to prefer looking at one of the mutilated corpses.
Beyond the window, snow was falling heavily now. The sky was bleak. Although it wasn’t noon yet, it looked like twilight out there.
12
Lavelle stepped out of the back door of the house. He went to the end of the porch, down three steps. He stood at the edge of the dead brown grass and looked up into the whirling chaos of snowflakes.
He had never seen snow before. Pictures, of course. But not the real thing. Until last spring, he had spent his entire life—thirty years—in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and on several other Caribbean islands.
He had expected winter in New York to be uncomfo
rtable, even arduous, for someone as unaccustomed to it as he was. However, much to his surprise, the experience had been exciting and positive, thus far. If it was only the novelty of winter that appealed to him, then he might feel differently when that novelty eventually wore off, but for the time being, he found the brisk winds and cold air invigorating.
Besides, in this great city he had discovered an enormous reservoir of the power on which he depended in order to do his work: the infinitely useful power of evil. Evil flourished everywhere, of course, in the country-side and in the suburbs, too, not merely within the boundaries of New York City. There was no shortage of evil in the Caribbean, where he had been a practicing Bocor—a voodoo priest skilled in the uses of black magic—ever since he was twenty-two. But here, where so many people were crammed into such a relatively small piece of land, here where a score or two of murders were committed every week, here where assaults and rapes and robberies and burglaries numbered in the tens of thousands—even hundreds of thousands—every year, here where there were an army of hustlers looking for an advantage, legions of con men searching for marks, psychos of every twisted sort, perverts, punks, wife-beaters, and thugs almost beyond counting—this was where the air was flooded with raw currents of evil that you could see and smell and feel—if, like Lavelle, you were sensitized to them. With each wicked deed, an effluvium of evil rose from the corrupted soul, contributing to the crackling currents in the air, making them stronger, potentially more destructive. Above and through the metropolis, vast tenebrous rivers of evil energy surged and churned. Ethereal rivers, yes. Of no substance. Yet the energy of which they were composed was real, lethal, the very stuff with which Lavelle could achieve virtually any result he wished. He could tap into those midnight tides and twilight pools of malevolent power; he could use them to cast even the most difficult and ambitious spells, curses, and charms.
The city was also crisscrossed by other, different currents of a benign nature, composed of the effluvium arising from good souls engaged in the performance of admirable deeds. These were rivers of hope, love, courage, charity, innocence, kindness, friendship, honesty, and dignity. This, too, was an extremely powerful energy, but it was of absolutely no use to Lavelle. A Houngon, a priest skilled at white magic, would be able to tap that benign energy for the purpose of healing, casting beneficial spells, and creating miracles. But Lavelle was a Bocor, not a Houngon. He had dedicated himself to the black arts, to the rites of Congo and Pétro, rather than to the various rites of Rada, white magic. And dedication to that dark sphere of sorcery also meant confinement to it.