Everybody Dies

I'd shown him my business card and explained that I was working for a tenant of his who'd had some goods disappear. He didn't want to make it a police matter until he'd ruled out the possibility of employee pilferage. That was probably what it was, Kramer said. Somebody who already had a key, went and made himself the boss's silent partner.

By the time I left him I had a list of the tenants on the side of the building where John Ke

I had a sandwich and fries at a diner across the road, asked a few questions there, then returned to E-Z Storage and used Mick's key to have another look at the murder scene. I could still detect all the odors I'd smelled the night before, but they were fainter now.

I'd brought a broom and dustpan, and I swept up the broken glass and dumped the shards into a brown paper bag. There was a reasonably good chance that one of those chunks of glass held an identifiable fingerprint, but so what? Even if it did, and even if I found it, what good would it be to me? A single print will nail a suspect, but it won't produce a suspect out of thin air. For that you need a full set of fingerprints, and you also need official access to federal records. What I had was useless from an investigative standpoint, and would be useful only when a suspect was in custody and a case was being made against him.

But it wasn't even good for that. The crime scene had been compromised beyond recognition, with the murders unreported, the bodies spirited away and tucked in an unmarked grave. What I held in my hand was evidence that a bottle had been broken. I knew people who'd call that a crime, but nobody who'd want to run prints to hunt down the man who'd broken it.

I stood inside the doorway, listening to traffic sounds, then lowered the steel door all the way down. I couldn't hear anything now, but it was hard to say what that proved; the traffic hadn't been all that loud.

What I was wondering about was the noise of the gunshots. I was assuming the killers had lowered the door before opening fire, but that wouldn't necessarily render the cubicle soundproof.

Of course they could have used suppressors. If so, that made it a little less likely the incident had been a spur-of-the-moment response to an unexpected opportunity for gain. A couple of resourceful sociopaths could have been on the scene, could have seen all those cases of booze. And they could have been carrying weapons at the time- some people, more than you'd think, never leave home unarmed.

But who routinely carries a silencer? No one I'd ever known.

I raised the door, stepped outside and looked around. Half a dozen units away, a man was shifting cartons from the back of a Plymouth Voyager, stowing them in his cubicle. A woman in khaki shorts and a green halter top was leaning against the side of the van and watching him work. Their car radio was playing, but so faintly that all I could tell was that it was music. I couldn't make it out.

Aside from my Ford, theirs was the only vehicle on that side of the building.

I decided the killers probably hadn't needed to muffle their gunfire. The odds were there hadn't been anyone around to hear it. And how remarkable would a few loud noises be? With the steel door shut, anyone within earshot would write off four or five shots as hammer blows, somebody assembling or disassembling a packing case, say. This was suburbia, after all, not a housing project in Red Hook. You didn't expect gunfire, didn't throw yourself on the pavement every time a truck backfired.

Still, why shoot them?

"Names and addresses," TJ said, and frowned. "These be the dudes renting alongside where the two dudes got shot."

"According to the storage company's records."

"Somebody's bad enough to shoot two dudes and steal a truckload of liquor, you figure he'd put his real name down when he rents storage space?"

"Probably not," I said, "although stranger things have happened. There was a fellow a couple of months ago who robbed a bank, and his note to the teller was written on one of his own printed deposit slips."

"Stupid goes clear down to the bone, don't it?"

"It seems to," I agreed. "But if the shooters used a false name, that's a help. Because if one of the names on our list turns out to be phony- "

"Yeah, I get it. So we lookin' for one of two things. Somebody's got a record, or somebody that don't exist at all."

"Neither one necessarily proves anything," I said. "But it would give us a place to start."

He nodded and settled in at the keyboard, tapping keys, using the mouse. I'd bought him the computer for Christmas, at the same time installing it- and him- in my old room at the Northwestern. When Elaine and I moved in together I'd kept my hotel room across the street as a combination den and office, a place to go when I wanted to be alone, sitting at the window and thinking long thoughts.

I'd met TJ on Forty-second Street long before they prettied up the Deuce, and early on he appointed himself my assistant. He turned out to be not merely street-smart but resourceful. When Elaine opened her shop on Ninth Avenue, he took to hanging out there, filling in for her on occasion and revealing a talent for retail sales. I don't know where he lived before he took over my old room- the only address we ever had for him was his beeper number- but I guess he always found a place to sleep. You learn a lot of survival skills in the street. You'd better.

He'd since then learned computer skills as well. While I leafed through Macworld magazine, trying to find something written in a language I could understand, he tapped keys and frowned and whistled and jotted down notes on the sheet of paper I'd given him. Within an hour he'd established that all the names Leon Kramer had supplied belonged to living human beings, and he was able to furnish telephone numbers for all but two of them.

"This don't necessarily mean that all the information's straight dope," he pointed out. "Could be somebody rented a bin and put down a real name and address, only it's a name and address belongs to somebody else."

"Unlikely," I said.

"Whole deal's unlikely. I'm at my storage locker, and I happen to see you got all this liquor in your storage locker, and there I am with a gun in my pocket and a truck parked alongside?"

"The first part's plausible enough," I said. "You're there and you spot the whiskey. But why shoot me?"

"On account of you might not care to stand idly by while I load your booze onto my truck and drive off with it."

"Why not wait?"

"Come back later, you mean."

"Why not? I've got a station wagon, I'm not going to haul off more than a few cases. The rest'll be there when you come back with a truck and somebody to help with the heavy lifting. You can even do it at night, when it's less likely anybody'll see what you're doing."

"You go away and come back, you got the padlock to contend with."

"So? You drill it out or hacksaw it. Or spray it with Freon and take a hammer to it. What do you figure is trickier, getting past a padlock or taking out two men?"

He tapped the sheet of paper. "Sounds like we wastin' our time on these here."

"Unless somebody on the list happened to see or hear something."

"Long odds against that."

"Long odds against most things in life."

He looked at the list of names and numbers, shook his head. "Guess I got some calls to make."

"I'll make them."

"No, I'll make them. They mostly in Jersey. You make them, they go on your phone bill. I make them, they be free."