Dark Maze
the back room, but that
was unlikely. The way things looked, the wife—Carolena, going by the upstairs neighbor—had come out from behind the curtained back door to find her husband dead out in the store. And certainly from the look of the gash that halved Benito’s neck, the killer had been ever as swift and sure with this deadly job as with the two before.
How did I know it was my killer who had now struck three times?
I knew.
I turned and looked through the crowd of frightened faces held off by Luis and his friends, to the darkened park on the other side of Tenth Avenue, the park where I had met him, and listened. “... this is mainly how I now have the artistic thrill of being a painter these days.... I wish you would cross over there to the bodega sometime before next week’s special —so you can see up close how I captured the essential terror ..."
I knew. The proof was there. But I did not have to look at it right away. It would wait.
Just now, the widow inside screamed her loudest. And prayed. And six squad cars roared up the avenue and dispersed the crowd, and the streets and sidewalk became brilliant with flashing blue, red and white light. And more cars came, blockading the avenue and the side streets.
I held up my gold shield as uniformed cops swarmed at me. I called out my identification: “Detective Neil Hockaday—Street Crimes Unit, Manhattan!”
Now I was surrounded by uniforms, at either side of the doorway. Somebody said, “We’ve got a team on the roof and a couple of teams around back. If he’s in there, we got him.” Somebody else called something to the widow in Spanish; she did not respond. She kept rocking and screaming and praying. The blood kept flowing.
"Han matado a mi esposo... Dios, guardar mi esposo!"
“I’m going in...” I said.
“You wearing a vest?” somebody asked me.
“I’m going in!”
There is nothing like murder to calm a room. Outside the bodega, the lights were flashing and the people were shouting and the terrible screams of the widow Carolena floating out the door quickened the night. Inside, the screams seemed somehow quieter with every step I took toward her. When I passed very near, on my way to the curtained door, they seemed no more than wind in trees.
I stood very still near the counter. Nothing in the bodega moved besides the gently screaming widow, and there was no other sound. I saw a seven-inch box cutter lying on the floor near the dead man’s feet. Muggers who cannot afford guns use these weapons, known as shanks.
It was an ugly, efficient knife—and sticky with blood. The tip of the retractable blade was still pushed up through the smooth steel handle. That blade, so capable of slashing open the strongest packing box with a single swipe, so capable of laying raw a man’s windpipe and vocal cords.
The curtain over the back door did not move.
The widow, in the trance of her shock, paid no mind as I moved past her.
I looked at the floor as I advanced toward the back room, careful not to step into the streams of blood filling wood grooves. At the edge of one small pool of blood was something green: a feather. I bent and picked it up, and slipped it into my shirt pocket.
I touched the curtain over the passage to the next room. Then I pulled it open.
On the other side was an extension of the store space fashioned into a one-room apartment with a separate alcove at the front containing a sink and toilet and makeshift stall shower. The place was empty.
The bodega owner’s wife had probably been sitting in a rocking chair with her sewing, judging from the kit of needles and thread and a button jar sitting on the seat, and some shirts and a pair of trousers slung over an arm. Up front, her husband was tending the store. Maybe she thought it had grown too quiet, maybe she called his name and he failed to answer, then maybe she got up from her rocking chair, put down her sewing things and shut off the television set to listen; then she bustled out the curtained door and found her husband fatally wounded.
That was how it played.
I returned to the other room. The cop who had asked about a vest was standing just inside the door, and I saw by the stripes on his shoulder patch that he was a squad leader from Midtown North. His name tag said Sergeant Walsh.
Beyond the sergeant, out in the street, I saw a new kind of blue-white light. They were kleigs, the kind of lights used by television camera crews at night.
I walked up to
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