Diamond Solitaire pd-2 Page 25

  He managed it

  Now it was a matter of leverage rather than brute strength and stoicism. With both feet securely positioned, he heaved himself upwards, raising his torso clear of the water. Clawing at the higher rungs, he began a steady ascent up the side of what he now perceived as a stone pier.

  And as he climbed, his brain began to deal with his bizarre situation. Dimly at first, but with increasing clarity, he recalled where he was and why. He understood the reason for the pain that afflicted him, not just in the shoulder, but-as bis circulation was restored-in his head and lower back. It had been a savage beating, and his attackers had assumed he would drown. Maybe the extra poundage that he was finding such a handicap while climbing the rungs had saved him. The body blows-apart from those to his skull-had been cushioned. In the water, his built-in insulation had kept him alive for longer.

  But he still felt grim.

  Not to say unsafe. He hesitated on the higher rungs, wondering whether anyone would spot him and throw him back again. A mere push in the chest would be enough. He wouldn’t survive another ducking.

  The darkness was an ally. He put his head above the wall, satisfied himself that no one was near and then climbed up the remaining rungs and flopped like a beached whale.

  With no choice but to lie still, he waited for his pulse and breathing to reduce to rates he could cope with. He was getting messages from parts of his body that had suffered injuries he hadn’t registered. Now his face was smarting. He put his hand to his left eye and felt a large swelling. There was a cut across the center of his nose.

  He couldn’t tell how long he’d been in the water. There had certainly been an interval while he was unconscious. Presumably the shock of immersion had revived him.

  In the open, darkness is never total. He rolled over and peered across the expanse of open ground between the pier and the warehouse from which his attackers must have come. The limousine had gone, maybe-he told himself optimistically-with the men as passengers. The instinct of killers is to leave the scene.

  What now?

  Clearly, he needed to get to the police. It was vital that they were informed what had happened, for the Manflex connection was no longer tenuous. Those people were revealed as willing to kill, and he wanted them interrogated as soon as possible. He wanted to hear David Flexner’s explanation.

  He just hoped he was capable of staying on his feet long enough.

  Staying? He realized that he had yet to get to his feet, and now he was about to try. The effort required was immense. He achieved the standing position by a process of crouching for a while, then stooping, propped with hands on knees, and finally trying unsuccessfully to straighten and groaning at the effort. Movement was going to be a painful, shuffling process that made him think how useful a zimmer-frame would have been. Even the light shore breeze threatened to bowl him over.

  Obviously he needed to find a way back to the streets, but getting there would be like finishing a marathon. To be positive, he still had both shoes on. All he seemed to have lost was his hat.

  In the next twenty minutes he made it across the waterfront, over a no-man’s-land cluttered with rubbish, and down a slope to where one of the West Side streets terminated. The nearest block of tenement buildings didn’t really have the look of a haven for a half-drowned, badly-beaten Brit, but he staggered to the first door he could find, and looked for a doorbell-a facility the household lacked. He rapped the woodwork with his knuckles. Nobody came. He could hear nothing from inside.

  He tried two more houses before anyone appeared, and this was a small, black boy who stared. Anyone would have “Hi,” said Diamond with an effort of the imagination.

  The stare persisted.

  “Are your parents about?”

  A blink, and then a resumption of the stare.

  “Your Mum and Dad? Sonny, I need help.”

  The boy frowned and said, “Where you from?”

  He didn’t want to go through that again, not in the state he was in, but the kid had broken his silence, so: “From England.”

  “England?” The kid raised a hand as if to strike him.

  Just in time, Diamond saw what was intended and let his own right hand come in a sweeping movement to slap against the boy’s in salute.

  A short time after, wrapped in a blanket, he was seated in a wicker armchair in the living room of the basement apartment, surrounded by a large Afro-Caribbean family. They brought him coffee laced with rum and they put a Band-Aid on his nose.

  Twenty minutes or so of this treatment revived him remarkably. He was ready to move on. They wanted to know where he was going and he named the police at the 26th Precinct.

  When the amusement had subsided, the boy’s father offered to drive him there.

  Thus it was that towards ten P.M., Sergeant Stein of the 26th, passing the front counter, was confronted by the disturbing spectacle of a grinning man, notorious across New York for the terms he’d served for armed robbery, carrying a heap of wet clothes, accompanied by Superintendent Diamond dressed in a blanket, a Band-Aid on his nose, his left eye black and closed.

  The explanation had to be given twice over, because Lieutenant Eastland, who was off duty, was called in to make decisions. He didn’t go so far as to smile at Diamond’s state, but he wasn’t sympathetic. “So what we have,” he summed up, “is a link with Manflex through the child’s mother. You set out to investigate, and you were beaten up and dumped in the river. By who?”

  “Come on,” said Diamond angrily. “There were no lights out there except the car headlights. The girl who called herself Joan I’d know. But the point is that David Flexner himself must have given these people their instructions. Something I said must have really upset him.”

  “You surprise me,” said Eastland.

  “What did you say?” asked Stein.

  “Just that I wanted information about the research Dr. Masuda was doing some years ago in Yokohama on a grant from Manflex.”

  “I wouldn’t have said this was grounds for murder,” commented Eastland. “Are we sure of this connection’”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean can we be certain that these people who jumped you were sent by Flexner?”

  “It’s inescapable. The girl told me she was working for him. She knew about the meeting. She knew where to find me, and when.”

  “Okay, we’ll pull him in and see what this is about.”

  “One more thing,” said Diamond.

  “You want to see a doctor?”

  “I want to get my clothes to a laundry.”

  “Okay. How you feeling now?”

  “Impatient��� to see Flexner.”

  “You should rest”

  “Go to hell.”

  In fact, he did get almost an hour on the cot he d slept on the previous night They had to wake him when Flexner was brought in, and then he felt worse than ever for the short sleep. Every part of him ached.

  It was agreed that he should observe the first interview on closed-circuit TV. Lieutenant Eastland pointed out that Flexner had no reason to believe that Diamond had survived the attack. A first principle of interrogation was to give nothing away.

  The young, long-haired man on the screen certainly looked uneasy, revealing in body language how agitated he was at being brought in for questioning. He flicked the tip of his tongue repeatedly around the edges of his mouth and worked his hands around his face like some actor overplaying Hamlet..

  Eastland’s voice started up, giving the routine information about the taping of interviews. “You give your permission?”

  Flexner nodded.

  “Would you mind giving a verbal response?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You agree to us taping the interview?”

  “I agree.”

  “Okay.”..

  While Eastland went through the preliminaries of establishing Flexner’s identity and address, Diamond watched the young man keenly. For a business tycoon,
he was pretty unconventional in style, dressed in T-shirt, jeans and wind-cheater with the mane of blond hair extending to his shoulders. It was pretty well the description he’d given of himself over the phone.

  “You know a guy called Diamond-a British cop?” Eastland asked. He wasn’t in shot. The camera was continuously on Flexner.

  “I know the name, that’s all. He called me this afternoon.”

  “He called you? Is that an accurate answer, Mr. Flexner?”

  Flexner raked a hand nervously through his hair. “What I mean is, he wrote me a note. I called him at his hotel.”

  “Let’s have the truth, huh?”

  “I’m sorry. Was that important?”

  “Everything’s important. Do you still have the note?”

  “Not here.”

  “Can you tell me the contents, accurately?”

  Flexner closed his eyes as he spoke, as if trying to visualize the note. “He wrote that he was an English detective inquiring into a murder and an abduction, the abduction of a child. He wanted to meet me for information about the kid’s mother who carried out research sponsored by my firm in Yokohama, Japan, in the 1980s. Her name was Dr. Yuko Masuda. He signed himself Peter Diamond, Detective Superintendent.”

  “And he gave a number for you to call?”

  “The Brightside Hotel. I took it seriously. I looked up the records on this woman. Then I called Mr. Diamond and fixed a meeting at Battery Park, in the ticket office for the ferry.”

  “Strange place for a meeting.”

  Flexner gave a shrug. “My circumstances are pretty unusual right now, for reasons unconnected with this. It was simplest to meet him someplace outside the office.”

  “Battery Park? Why not his hotel?”

  “Battery Park is a short taxi ride from my office. It’s also a place a stranger to New York could find easily.”

  “So did you go there?”

  “Sure, but I was delayed. He wasn’t there.” Flexner leaned forward in his chair as if a sudden thought had come to him. “What happened to this guy? Is he okay?”

  “You tell me what happened to you,” said Eastland.

  “I turned up at Battery Park-”

  “No,” said Eastland, who was letting nothing by. “You tell me what delayed you.”

  “A smoke alarm.”

  “What?”

  “A smoke alarm went off in a storeroom on the twentieth floor.”

  “What time?”

  “Around six forty-five, just when I was ready to leave. Someone had dumped a cigarette in a trash bin. It ignited some tissues.”

  “In a storeroom?”

  “That’s where it was found. The result is I didn’t get down to Battery Park until twenty-five after seven, and the guy wasn’t around. I looked around, I asked-”

  “Okay,” said Easdand. “So let’s make this very clear. Did you at any point instruct anyone else to meet Detective Diamond?”

  “No. I just told you. I went myself.”

  “Who else knew you made this appointment? Your secretary?”

  Flexner shook his head. “I handled it myself.”

  “Is your phone system secure?”

  “So far as I know.”

  “You said that you consulted the records on this woman. Did somebody fetch them for you?”

  “No, we have them on computer. We keep records of all our sponsorships and research programs. I accessed them on the modem I have in my office.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  “I was alone in there. Look, would you mind telling me what happened?”

  “Detective Diamond was met by a woman who said she was sent by you. You know about this?”

  Flexner swayed back in his chair, frowning. “Sent by me? No, I don’t. I didn’t speak to anyone.”

  ‘Take your time, Mr. Flexner. Think back. You’re quite certain you mentioned this meeting to nobody?”

  “Positive.”

  “Maybe someone overheard you speaking on the phone. Is that possible?”

  “I was alone in my office. The door was closed.”

  “Yet this woman-who called herself Joan, by the way-found Detective Diamond in the ticket office, told him you were unable to get there and drove him in a black limousine to the waterfront area in the West Forties, where some goons were waiting to work him over good and sink him in the Hudson.”

  “I can’t believe this.” To his credit, Flexner was looking as if he meant what he said. He’d gone extremely pale.

  “You’d better,” Eastland told him. “And you’d better start thinking who this woman is, and why it was necessary to do that to a guy you arranged to met. You don’t have to answer right off.”

  “He’s dead?” Flexner asked.

  “Go over it in your mind, Mr. Flexner. There may be something you forgot. I’ll be back.”

  Flexner was left staring. There was only the sound of the interview room door being closed.

  Eastland came into the room where Stein and Diamond had been following the interview. “Well?”

  “I’d like to question him,” Diamond said. “I still want the information he was going to give me.”

  “You think he’s speaking the truth?”

  “He made a pretty good impression.”

  “Yeah?” said Eastland with heavy irony. “Maybe none of this happened. That’s a phantom black eye you have.”

  “I still want to question him.”

  “Not yet”

  “This is urgent”

  “We can break this guy, no problem,” Eastland bragged.

  “He claims he told nobody he was meeting you. That’s got to be horseshiL”

  Diamond contained himself, but with difficulty. There was a real danger that Naomi’s plight would be overlooked in the eagerness to break David Flexner. Breaking him, as Eastland candidly put it, was not the way to get the crucial information. “Listen, I think we should test the truth of what he’s saying this way. He arranged to meet me. That’s not in dispute. So he must have had something to pass on about Naomi’s mother.”

  “It was a blind, just to set you up.”

  “Let’s find out Let’s ask him what he can tell us. If he is telling the truth, it may lead us to Naomi.”

  The lieutenant obviously wasn’t impressed. He spread his hands as if his point had just been proved. “Peter, my friend, you were asking about research the woman was doing seven, eight years back. That’s not going to tell us who’s holding the kid tonight.”

  “It scared someone into wanting me killed. It can’t be all that remote,” said Diamond. “Let him talk while he still has an interest in cooperating. If you go in there and scare the shit out of him, we may get nothing.”

  “Keep him sweet, you mean?”

  “Play along with him. It won’t take long, for God’s sake.”

  Eastland weighed the suggestion. “You could be right.”

  “I’ll do it,” Diamond offered.

  “You? No way. He thinks you’re stashed away in the morgue, and we don’t want to disillusion him. Okay, Diamond, we’ll play it your way for a while. Just tell me what you would have asked him.”

  Diamond outlined the strategy. Without going all the way to convincing Eastland, it seemed to mollify him somewhat.

  In a few minutes, the questioning started up again. Eastland went straight to the point. “Tell me about Yuko Ma-suda.”

  “There isn’t much. I haven’t met her,” David Flexner replied. “She’s just one of thousands who have carried out postgraduate research funded by Manflex or one of its associate companies.”

  “She’s unimportant?”

  “I didn’t say that. According to our records, we’ve been sponsoring her research for ten years or more. She’s written some papers on the treatment of drug and alcoholic comas using sympathomimetic drugs.”

  “Using what?”

  “They imitate the effects of the sympathetic nerves. Adrenalin and ephedrine are examples.”

  “I’ve he
ard of Adrenalin.”

  A sigh from Flexner betrayed some impatience.

  “Alcoholic comas, you said?” Eastland continued. “You mean these drugs pull the patients out? Restore them to their senses?”

  “Inspector, all my information comes from a file entry on a computer. I am neither a biochemist nor a doctor.”

  “Okay, okay. And what else does your computer tell you?”

  “The usual stuff. Her age, address, qualifications. She isn’t one of our employees, you understand, just a postgraduate research student”

  “Does the file show that she is married?”

  “Yes. Masuda is her married name.”

  “And is her child mentioned?”

  “It wouldn’t be. That’s irrelevant to us.”

  “She’s based in Japan?”

  “Yokohama.”

  “And she’s been doing research continuously since when?”

  “1979.”

  “Long time.”

  “Research sometimes does take a long time.”

  “Do you get updates on her work?”

  “Not personally. The company keeps tabs on all our research programs.”

  “Did you know mat she’s been missing from her home for a couple of months?”

  “No, I didn’t know mat. It wouldn’t necessarily come to our attention for some time unless someone reported it”

  There was a pause in the questioning, as if Eastland was reluctant to move on, but couldn’t think what else to ask. finally he said, “Is there anything else on this woman’s record that you planned to tell Detective Diamond?”

  “No,” answered Flexner. “Naturally, I wanted to be as helpful as I could, but that’s all I could have told him. You’ve heard it all.”

  “Forgive me, but it doesn’t sound like the secret of the Sphinx,” Eastland commented. “Why did you need to meet with Diamond like a couple of CIA agents? Why not simply call him on the phone and tell him what you had?”

  Flexner shrugged again. “I guess I wanted to be sure who I was dealing with. We don’t give out information about people as a rule.”

  “You didn’t trust him?”

  “I thought it right to meet him and make sure. I couldn’t invite him to the office. He’d have had to run the gauntlet of the press. They’re camped outside my building.”