Three-Day Town - By Margaret Maron Page 0,91
belts, while Dwight hurried outside and up the ramp to the sidewalk. Even though he was almost running by the time he reached the corner, his eyes searched the sidewalks for Deborah’s form. The Upper West Side was coming awake and starting another workday. Early commuters streamed past him, newspapers under their arms, cartons of coffee or tea in one hand, fare card in the other as they flowed toward the nearby subway station and down into the subterranean tunnels.
At the market, Dwight quartered the store like a birddog casting back and forth for a downed bobwhite. As he feared, Deborah was not there. Nor did he see anyone in a brown uniform.
As he returned to the apartment building, two more prowl cars pulled up with blue lights flashing to park next to the first two responders. Sigrid got out of one car, Detectives Sam Hentz and Jim Lowry emerged from the other, while three more uniformed officers joined them.
“Start at the beginning,” Sigrid said before he could thank them for coming, so once more Dwight described waking up in the empty apartment, of determining what Deborah must be wearing, of hanging over the balcony to scan the sidewalks, of seeing a man in a brown uniform help the sanitation workers load the heavy bags from this building.
“But it wasn’t the night man—Horvath—and he says he’s the only employee on duty until eight o’clock, so who the hell was it and where is he now?”
Sigrid had gotten even quieter than usual as she concentrated on his words. Now she turned to Lowry and said, “Call Sanitation. Find out where that truck is and tell them to hold it.”
“Oh, shit!” An iron band tightened around his chest as her meaning sank in and he remembered that Antoine Clarke’s body would have been set out at the curb had that porter not hunted down the missing wheeled bin.
White-faced, he described how heavy the bags had seemed and how the slender man had swung the last one back and forth until he finally got enough arc to sling it up into the maw of the truck.
He read the look that passed between the three detectives and knew they were thinking the same thing.
“Describe him again, please,” Sigrid said. “You said a hat and a brown uniform. Coveralls or jacket and slacks?”
“I didn’t look that closely,” Dwight admitted.
“But thin?”
“Yes.”
“Black? White?”
“The light was bad, but I have an impression of light skin. Certainly not real dark.”
“Any facial hair?”
“Not to notice. He—” He broke off as a slender young man entered the basement from the outside door. “What the hell? That’s him!”
Before the others could stop him, he rushed forward and grabbed the newcomer by the collar of his brown uniform jacket. “What have you done with her, you bastard?”
Scared and bewildered, the new elevator man cowered and put up his hands to ward off the blow. “Done with who? When? I just got here.”
“You’ve been here since six-thirty. You were out on the sidewalk. I saw you.”
“Not me, man. What’s going on?”
Hentz put a hand on Dwight’s shoulder. “Calm down, Major.”
“James Williams?” Sigrid asked. “The new elevator man?”
“Yes, ma’am. Just started yesterday.”
“Okay,” Dwight said, lowering his hackles. “I get it.” He released his hold. “Sorry.”
Jim Williams straightened his jacket. “But for real, man, what’s happening?”
Before Sigrid could tell him, her phone rang. She glanced at the screen and signaled for Hentz to finish explaining.
The uniformed cops returned from the back to report. “Nothing obvious, sir. We need keys to get into those storage bins and look behind stuff.”
“Forget it,” Hentz told Dwight. “The locks belong to the owners and even Lundigren didn’t have duplicate keys.”
He sent the three officers to check the nearer buildings to see if any of the night people on duty had watched the garbage pickups earlier and had noticed any activity from this building.
Sigrid ended her call. “That was Tillie,” she told Hentz. “We’re putting out an APB on Sidney Jackson.”
“Sidney?” Dwight exclaimed. “The evening man?”
Sigrid nodded. “My sergeant got in early and started going through the pictures the party guests gave us. There’s a clear shot, time-stamped, of Antoine Clarke opening the elevator cage at ten-ten and again at ten-fourteen, which means that Sidney Jackson doesn’t have an alibi for at least part of the relevant period. That elevator was so crowded, I couldn’t even swear myself who was working it when I got here Saturday night.”
Hentz pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Like waiters and salesclerks.”
“Invisible men,” she agreed.
“Yeah, that could’ve