Nice Place for a Murder by Bruce Jay Bloom Page B

breath, so I took the opportunity to say “But?” There’s always a but in stories like this.
    “But then Ingo heard about it,” Hector continued. “He was furious. He called in the police and insisted that Sosenko be prosecuted. Sosenko wouldn’t have had a prayer at a trial, and the public defender pled him guilty to assault with a deadly weapon. Bottom line, Sosenko got one to three. And he was such a bad-ass in prison that he served every last day of the three years.”
    “So? You telling me Sosenko is getting even now for the time he spent in prison?”
    “Looks like it.” 
    “And this all happened when?” I said.
    “The assault?” He took the file folder back from me and thumbed through the papers inside. “It’ll be six years ago in January. That would make it just a month before I joined the company.”
    “So Sosenko’s been out of the slammer for nearly three years, now, right?” I said. “You have to wonder why he’s waited all this time to make his move.”
    Hector shrugged. “Maybe it’s been on his mind, preyed on him, finally pushed him over the edge.”
    “He had three years in prison to think about it. Why start killing people now, just like that? Something must have happened.” I got up and walked to the window. Hector’s office had a fabulous vista of the west side cityscape, to the Hudson River and beyond, into New Jersey. “There’s something else that mystifies me. Sosenko is an appalling excuse for a human being. He’s threatened people, beaten people, caused big trouble wherever he’s gone. But he hadn’t actually killed anybody that we know of, not till now.”
    “Matter of time,” Hector said. “It’s not as though he just suddenly turned vicious. Seems like he was born vicious. He was a killer waiting to happen.”
    “Maybe.” I looked down onto Madison Avenue, the faraway people and trucks and taxis. Up here you couldn’t hear a sound. Julian Communications was above all that street hustle. “How old is he? Do we know?”
    Hector searched through the folder again. “Six years ago he was thirty-five. He’s forty-one.”
    “On the old side to do a first killing. Guys like him, animals, mostly they’re younger,” I said. “Anyway, now we’re assuming he’s after Ingo, looking for revenge. That means when he drowned Newalis, it was by mistake. Thought it was Ingo out there for his usual afternoon swim. He must have been watching Ingo for a while, to know about that. But me, I’m a problem for him, because I got a look at him out there. That’s why he wants to make me go away, too, finish what he tried to do out on the water. And if I’m right, then he wasn’t after Lisa. It was me he wanted to shoot. He probably followed her to my door.”
    Hector got up and came to stand at my side. “Sounds right,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder as we looked out at the skyline together. “But it’s wrong.”
    “Me wrong, really?” I said. “Hard to believe.”
    “Sosenko was stalking Arthur Brody. That’s what Brody’s going to tell you about, why he asked you to come in today. It’s not just Ingo that this guy wants to kill. He has a hard-on for the whole company. It seems we’re in a war. Us against Sosenko.”
    “You believe that?” I said.
    “I think I do.”
    “If you’re right, we need help. I can’t protect everybody.”
    He gave me back the folder, and steered me toward the door. “Talk to Brody. I’ll take you to his office.”
     
    The huge corner office was a poem to minimalism. An endless expanse of carpet with only a pair of sofas in the way as I crossed the room. Unadorned windows looking on the west with the same view Hector had, and on the north all the way to the George Washington Bridge uptown. A massive desk, bare except for a pad of lined paper and a chrome cup filled with freshly sharpened wooden pencils, all exactly the same length. Evidently Mr. Brody did not have pencils re-sharpened. Used just once, then given to