The Hidden Hand of Death Page 4

  “Aren’t I noble?”

  “Can you help me?”

  “I’m sorry, Detective. It’s just too strange.”

  Hill blew air out of his mouth.

  “I thought you might say that. I have a trade for you.”

  “A get out of jail free card? I won’t need it. I’ll never be in jail.”

  “I’m reaching into my pocket again.”

  “I’ll try not to shake.”

  Hill pulled out an envelope from his jacket pocket.

  “This is for you but only if you take the case.”

  “What’s in the envelope?”

  “All the cops found out about your late wife.”

  “I asked for that about fifty times. They said they’d never show it to me.”

  “I made copies. No one will know you’ve got it.”

  “How do I know it’s real?”

  “I know the type of people you deal with, Ryder. I’m not one of them. I shoot straight.”

  “Can I look at it first?”

  “No. You agree to help me find my sister, and then I’ll give it to you to see.”

  “How do you know I won’t just say I’ll look for your sister and then focus on what’s in those pages?”

  “I don’t know that. But like I told you, I studied you. I think I know you. I think you shoot straight too. I think we’re more alike than different. The truth is, Ryder, I’m desperate. I have to believe that.”

  Hill sat back for a minute.

  “You have a sister, Ryder?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Hill’s face crinkled up. He decided not to push the strange answer.

  Instead, Hill spoke again. “My sister is a year younger than I am. I always protected her. Like I feel I have to protect everyone in the city. But my sister is different. She’s delicate. Small. But you better believe no one pushed her around. They knew what I would do. And then she’s gone. I was supposed to protect her. It’s simple, Ryder. I don’t think I can keep doing my job if I can’t find out what happened to her. It’s a matter of my personal survival. I need your help.”

  Gertie came over to fill my coffee cup. I took a few sips. The coffee burned going down my throat.

  “We haven’t settled on pay, Detective.”

  Hill breathed heavily for a few seconds. “I’ll give you every dime I’ve got.”

  “Is that a lot of dimes?”

  Hill looked down.

  “No. Not really.”

  I took out my pad.

  “I got another job to do as well. I can do both at the same time, but you should know my time is divided.”

  “That’s more than the cops are doing.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Daisy Miles.”

  Hill took another piece of pie. He looked as though he enjoyed it a lot more than the first piece.

  “I carry around a bag packed with troubles, Mr. Ryder. I told you I protected my sister. In another way, my sister raised me. She was a second mother. Sometimes she was a first mother. She was younger, but she’d cook for me. Do the laundry. I’m ashamed of it now, but that’s the truth.”

  Hill took one more piece of pie.

  “I’m sorry about asking about any sisters. It’s just that I looked and couldn’t find any of your relatives.”

  “You know about my grandfather?”

  The Detective shook his head.

  I leaned forward.

  “My grandfather died dancing…at the end of a rope.”

  The Detective reflexively laughed.

  “That’s good,” I said, “You’re not hopelessly drowning in despair.”

  “I’m not. I’m hopeful, Ryder. Please. This is me begging. Someone told me you were the saint of lost causes.”

  “Don’t beg. And I’m no saint of any kind. And the cause isn’t lost as long as your sister is out there somewhere. And I don’t know anything about any of my grandfathers or any other relative.”

  “I’m real sorry. You can believe it or not, Ryder, but I’m real sorry. You want a retainer?”

  “No. It took some guts on your part to talk to Jack Ryder much less ask for my help. Let me take a look at what you’ve got. You bring me copies of all the paperwork you can get. Bring it here and leave it with Gertie.”

  “You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you? You’re making me break the law to protect yourself.”

  “Get it to Gertie within a couple of days. And get some pictures of Daisy and her husband. Whatever you can get.”

  Another silence descended on us.

  “It’s decent of you to do this, Ryder.”

  “Why don’t you wait and see what happens. Simon.”

  The Detective left and Gertie came over.

  “I brought you another piece of pie. You look pale.”

  I nodded.

  “I guess I’m the nearest you’ve got to a fill-in aunt, Ryder, so I’m going to ask what you meant when you told that detective that you didn’t know if you had a sister.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. As I got the story, I was left at an orphanage, one on the Lower East Side. No note. No identification. Just a blue blanket and me in a basket.”

  “It must have been tough in the orphanage.”

  I shrugged. “At that point there were a lot of kids there. It was normal to me. I grew up, left, went to school for a while, worked, and somehow I ended up who I am and where I am.”

  “You don’t know any family?”

  “Nope. Gertie, I don’t know my real name. I tried out different first names. Ryder was the name of the woman who saw me lying outside the step of the orphanage. It was at night and I was evidently shaking. She knocked on the door. They took down information about her so they would know she wasn’t the birth mother. They gave me her last name though. That seemed right. Really, though, I have no identity.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It gives me the chance to make up my own identity. I create who I am.”

  I stood up.

  “Thanks for caring, Gertie. I’ve got to get home to get some sleep.”

  She nodded and watched as I went out of the diner into the chilly night that looked as though its darkness stretched into eternity.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I lay down, but three minutes later I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I looked at the material Hill had given me about Maggie.

  I got the paper and didn’t want to look. At the time they hadn’t told me the cause of death, just that she was dead from a gunshot. No one suggested it was self-inflicted, an assertion that my mind would have immediately rejected. I knew suicides who were too selfish to understand the guilt that the survivors would feel. But I didn’t think Maggie was that kind of person. In fact I knew it.

  Later I decided that maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t told me because she really had shot herself and they wanted to spare me the grief of such knowledge. At that point, my mind raced with agony and indecision deciding that if she had killed herself there was a logical reason for it. Maybe she had learned she had some terminal illness and wanted to shield me and avoid the intense pain that too often comes just before the end of life.

  I carried around the probability of her suicide as though it was a weight burdening my back and shoulders constantly.

  I picked up the paper. It was a normal police report. I recognized those.

  Deep breath, Ryder, I told myself. You’re the tough guy. You’re the guy who kills people. You can read about a suicide.

  There had been the weapon. But, to my surprise, there had also been cleaning supplies. The cops decided she had in fact been cleaning the weapon and then decided to use it.

  I wasn’t so sure. There was also the possibility of an accident. Maybe she didn’t decide to use it. Maybe the weapon discharged while she was cleaning it. Maybe it really was an accident.

  Why hadn’t the cops given me that option?

  And then I thought I knew.

  I was Ryde
r. They wanted to make my life as miserable as possible. They wanted me to think that I had driven her to self-inflicted death.

  I was about to put the report down, feeling better about myself, feeling very sad for Maggie after deciding it was, after all, an accident.

  That’s when I saw it.

  At the very bottom it said, “One detective had a different view. He asked about whether it could have been homicide. Someone could have done it, brought along the cleaning supplies, and set up the scene so that we would logically conclude it was a suicide or an accident. In either case, all eyes would be turned away from the possibility that someone murdered her.

  This conclusion was rejected by the detective’s superiors. We did no further investigation about the possibility of a homicide.”

  The report ended there.

  I thought all the air had been taken out of my body.

  It was Maggie, but I had to force myself to think clearly. She had no enemies. If someone wanted to kill her because of me, they would have made sure I knew about the connection. They would have called me and said that I had been the cause of it. No, I was going to stick to my original idea. Here, I thought, the cops were right. For me, the idea of an accident made the most sense. It wasn’t comforting but it was sensible.

  I got up and walked around.

  After a few minutes of a swirling head, I realized I owed Detective Hill. He had let me to where I had wanted to go. My wife most likely suffered an accidental death. I wasn’t responsible.

  I fell on the bed and slept for six more hours.

  The clanging of the telephone woke me up.

  It was Vinny.

  “I got the information for you,” he told me. “It’s been raining, but we stuck with it.”

  “What did you find?”

  “What you’d expect Ryder. Remington is a careful guy. There are always people around him guarding him. But you’ll like this. Yes, there are always those guards. Except for one period of a half hour each morning.”

  “Where is he without his men?”

  “He’s got this estate in Southampton.”

  “I know that.”

  “Okay. So each morning around eight o’clock he goes out and he chops wood. He puts it in a nice pile. He’s going to have a winter’s worth of the stuff at the rate he’s going. We’re supposed to have a snowy February so he’s getting ready.”

  “And there’s no one around him at eight in the morning?”

  “No. Hey, that’s what you wanted from me and so I delivered. You want to ask me the next question?”

  “Consider it asked.”

  “All right. There is no good rifle angle. There’s some very thick bushes all around the property. But you can’t just walk through the bush. And there’s one tree outside the bushes near where he does the chopping. One of my boys climbed up there. But bad news. No one said Remington was an idiot. When you’re in the tree, Remington is too close to the bushes to see him.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “You want an opinion?”

  “Sure, Vinny. Go ahead.”

  “Don’t do it. You won’t get it done. There’s a reason he’s stayed alive this long. You know people have tried it. They’re no longer with us.”

  “There’s no alternative, Vinny.”

  “All right. So go out to his estate in the back. Look at the bushes and the tree. You’ll see what I mean.”

  “Thanks Vinny.”

  “You got that bonus ready?”

  “Let me take a look. But I haven’t forgotten you.”

  I headed out to Southampton, driving slowly, trying to reach the estate at sundown when Remington’s people would have the most trouble spotting me.

  I stopped off in a sporting goods store in Riverhead to buy what I wanted.

  “This is the best one I got mister.”

  “Thanks.”

  I kept on driving. I pulled over on Main Street in Southampton to let the sun go a little lower.

  Finally it was time.

  I parked a block away from Remington’s estate, tucked the pruning saw I had bought which was inside my jacket and walked to the back of Remington’s medium-sized land.

  I probed the bushes with my hands. Vinny had been good with estimating distances. I saw the tree was exactly where Vinny had said. I paced out to where Vinny told me Remington stood each morning so I could try to cut through the bushes.

  Slowly, I began to saw away. I worked carefully and silently. I knew a killer can’t be an impatient man. I tried walking on the estate until I couldn’t go any further and then went back to the sawing. The sweat rolled down my face like I contained my own waterfall.

  The whole process took three hours, but by the end, I could walk through into Remington’s back yard without there seeming to be a hole in the bushes that could be seen from the yard.

  I walked into the back yard and immediately saw that Vinny had made a mistake. Remington wasn’t chopping firewood. Instead he had chopped wooden planks and put them in a pile. I wasn’t sure what the planks were for. Maybe a platform of some sort, or a deck. Maybe some benches. But it didn’t matter. The solution was the same one I had planned.

  I was torn. I knew I should come back another night. But the bush cuttings might be discovered and then they could set up a trap for me. I would have to take my chances.

  First I needed a minimum of rest. I waited as long as I could and then walked over to the pile of planks and started moving some of them. They were heavier than I expected. Again, time was being used up. I checked my watch. Then I went back to work.

  It didn’t work the first three times I tried. The planks kept collapsing on me. I made more noise than I wanted and worried that I would be heard, although the house was a considerable distance away.

  I had to take frequent breaks. I thought I was in good shape and was shocked to discover that I didn’t have as much endurance as I expected.

  It worked on the fourth try.

  I checked my watch.

  I decided it was a go.

  It was then that I took out my revolver.

  I listened carefully. Again, Vinny was right and Remington was sticking to his schedule.

  I heard the sound of an axe against the wood.

  Suddenly I jumped out of the cavity I had created in the wood pile where I had been hiding.

  Remington looked up. There were no bodyguards around.

  There was no talking.

  I shot Remington twice in the head and ran for the bushes.

  I went through those bushes and kept running. My body burned with excitement and exhaustion. I needed sleep, a lot of sleep. But I kept moving my legs toward my car. I got to it and drove. I had already used an alias to sign into a motel. I put the car in a used-car lot and took the one I had bought that afternoon. I drove the new car, which wasn’t very new at all, to the motel.

  Then I lay down and let the feeling of satisfaction and irony of killing to stop further death rock me to sleep.

  I woke late in the afternoon, walked to the restaurant nearby the motel and ordered food.

  Now I would have to look for Amy Pascal and warn her in case Remington had already given an order to kill her. He would have told his brother Everett.

  I would help her get away.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The more I considered my next step, the more lost I felt. I wondered what would happen if I found Amy Pascal and in doing so I was in fact leading killers to her. Had there been a hit ordered by Remington before he died? If so, would the hired killers still carry out the orders? And if I found Amy without leading anyone to her, was she capable of going into hiding and staying there by herself?

  I walked around Greenwich Village. It was there on those twisted streets that I went to think.

  I was on MacDougal Street. The Eighth Street Theater was right around the corner. I read the store signs, looked into the faces of the people. These were life’s searchers, I decided, people who didn’t fit on the farms or small
towns from where they came. They had a desire to paint, a desire their parents and friends found laughable. They were looking for their own brand of love, a brand acceptable in the freewheeling life of the Village but not in America generally.

  Then I went to the diner. It was there that I developed at least the beginning of a plan. I liked to write out my whole plans, but in this case I wasn’t sure what was going to happen at each stage.

  Gertie came over with my food.

  “There was a woman in here. Foreign. Had an accent. I’m not so good with those, Ryder. She was looking for you. I told her to come back. She was skittish. Maybe she’ll come back or maybe she won’t.”

  “Thanks, Gertie. I have a lot to do. I wouldn’t mind a potential client who just walked away.”

  But that was not to happen.

  A woman, small, attractive, well-dressed, very shy walked up to Gertie who pointed to me.

  Great. At this rate I’d have plenty of clients just before I died of exhaustion.

  The woman approached me.

  A great painter could have sketched the agony on her face.

  “Excuse me, sir. Are you Mr. Ryder?”

  I really wanted to say that Mr. Ryder had died and gone to a place of eternal quiet. But I looked again at her face and agreed that yes indeed I was Mr. Ryder.

  She didn’t move. I’d have to pull the information out of her, always an exhausting project.

  “Won’t you sit down, Miss…?”

  “My name is Helga Levin.”

  There was, as Gertie had said, a distinctive accent. It was German.

  “Why don’t you tell me why you wish to speak to me, Miss Levin.”

  She nodded but remained silent.

  “Gertie, why don’t you bring over a cup of tea and a piece of cake for the lady.”

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Ryder. I didn’t even realize I was hungry.”

  Gertie got the tea and cake. Miss Levin took a sip and then she looked ready.

  “You were about to tell me why you came to see me, Miss Levin.”

  “Mr. Ryder, you’re going to think I’m crazy.”