by John Lutz
Quinn thought over what Lido had said. It wasn’t much, but it could easily be checked and might save some legwork. And Lido was desperate to help solve this murder. Quinn could understand that part.
“I’m not sure how this helps us, Jerry.”
“You know how, Quinn. It’s a piece of the puzzle. It introduces S and M into the case. It’s a goddamned lead!”
“He’s right,” Fedderman said. “And there’s the letter S on the victim’s neck chain. Could stand for Socrates.”
“I’m with Feds,” Pearl said. She picked up a paper clip and threw it at Lido as hard as she could. He flinched as he might before incoming artillery fire.
“Okay, Jerry,” Quinn said. “You’re on. And you get paid.”
“I don’t want any pay,” Lido said. “Not now. Not yet, anyway.”
“Don’t play the martyr, Jerry.”
“I’m not playing, Quinn. You gotta know that.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I’ll learn more for you,” Lido said. He struggled up out of his chair, almost tipping it over. “I’ll be back. Report in.”
“Do that, Jerry,” Quinn said. “We’ll set you up with a case file so you have more to work with.”
Lido sniffled and wiped his nose. “That’d be great. I thank you, all of you. I really do.”
He stumbled toward the door, bracing himself against the wall again, leaving more smudge marks, brushing a framed photo of the New York skyline and knocking every building crooked. He managed to open the door and half fell through it, and somehow closed it behind him.
The three detectives stared after him.
“There goes a walking powder keg,” Fedderman said.
“Too bad we don’t have an umbrella stand,” Pearl said. “He could have knocked that over, too.”
“So what was Socrates’s Cavern?” Pearl asked.
“It was on the West Side,” Fedderman said. “All voluntary, or so they said. Bad girls and boys in cages, bondage and discipline, flogging.” He finished stirring the coffee he’d gotten, along with a fresh cup for Pearl, and laid the spoon on a napkin alongside the brewer. “Some weird shit went on there, games for consenting adults. Even more than that, was the rumor. Believe the whispers and they were into some heavy action.”
“You talk like you were there,” Pearl said.
“I was. Not long before the place closed in the seventies. An assault call. But when we got there we couldn’t find a victim. Well, I mean about half the people we talked to were victims. A good percentage of them wanted to be handcuffed and taken in just for the experience. I had a young partner, DeLancy. He asked some dominatrix dolled up in black leather what a golden shower was. They started having fun with him, and he didn’t seem to mind. We left without arresting anybody.”
Pearl leaned back in her chair, away from her computer that by some miracle Lido hadn’t knocked off the desk. “So what did you think, Feds? I mean, you think the sex devil was at work there big-time?”
“My sense of the thing is that the same behavior that was going on there is still going on, only then it was more…”
“More intellectual,” Quinn said. “That gave it an air of semi-respectability and upper-class clientele.”
“Like the Playboy Clubs?” Pearl asked.
“Like the Playboy Clubs with handcuffs and whips,” Quinn said.
“Is it possible our killer just happens to be named Philip Wharkin?”
“And just happened to write his name in blood on the bathroom mirror?” Fedderman asked.
“More likely,” Quinn said, “he’s somebody who knows who Philip Wharkin was and is using the name. Fashioning himself after Wharkin, maybe as a way to rationalize his crimes.”
“Maybe there’s a new, modern version of Socrates’s Cavern,” Fedderman said, “and we’re just now learning about it.”
“Or that’s what he wants us to think,” Pearl said.
“I’m halfway there,” Fedderman said, “thinking that’s what it is.”
“Wishful thinking,” Pearl said scornfully. “And not with the part of you where you wear your hat.”
Fedderman ignored her. “I remember when we raided Socrates’s Cavern. There were women there leading men around on leashes.”
“DeLancy,” Quinn said.
“Yeah. My old partner. Freddy DeLancy.”
“As I remember, he got tangled up with a woman from Socrates’s Cavern. Broke enough regulations they had to make up new ones to cover what he was doing. He left the NYPD and moved out to California.”
“Became a nudist,” Fedderman said. “The club must have influenced him.”
“That’s not really the same thing,” Pearl said. “Socrates’s Cavern and a nudist colony.”
“Oh, DeLancy didn’t belong to any kinda colony. He was what you’d call a lone nudist, and in public places where it wasn’t a good idea. Like on buses.”
“Back to the point,” Pearl said, “we’ve got what might be a modern version of Socrates’s Cavern, or we got a nut operating on his own who knows about the club and is imitating it.”
“Or he’s not so nuts and wants us to think there’s a new Socrates’s Cavern,” Quinn said.
Fedderman said, “I’m thinking there is a new one.”
“You’re hoping,” Pearl said.
“So what if I am? Detective work can be interesting sometimes, right?”
“You’re easily led.”
“Me and DeLancy,” Fedderman said.
Pearl said. “I don’t like to think about it. Or maybe I do.”
9
Nora Noon stood near her booth inside the brick school building on the West Side, where the weekly flea market was held. It was warm and drizzling beyond the door at the end of the long corridor, slightly cooler but dry inside the school.
The rain was bad for the market in general, where most of the antique and specialty booths were lined up out in the schoolyard. But for Nora it wasn’t bad at all. The small woman with the big, good-looking guy had strolled past her booth three times, the woman eyeing a one-of-a-kind cotton wrap designed and created by Nora. She knew what the woman was thinking: She and Nora were about the same size, and both of them quite shapely, so if Nora sewed something that looked good on her, Nora, it would look good on most women Nora’s size and build.
The woman and the good-looking guy slowed and approached the booth. The guy gave Nora the up-and-down glance she knew so well, but she didn’t mind. Hell, she was used to it and kind of liked it, now that she was pushing thirty. A silent compliment.
Standing at Nora’s display of light coats, the good-looking guy kept his distance while the small woman reached out and stroked a light gray cashmere and cotton creation with a matching sash and scarf that doubled as a collar. She was quite pretty up close, with blond hair and dark roots, like Nora’s hair, and almost startlingly beautiful dark eyes, unlike Nora’s blue eyes. The woman fondled the label.
“This is you?” she asked. “ ‘Nora N.?’ ”
Nora smiled and nodded.
“You have a shop?” the good-looking guy asked, having moved a few steps closer. He was broad-shouldered and had a neatly trimmed gray beard.
“I have places where I display,” Nora said. “Sometimes I’m my own model.”
The good-looking guy smiled. He was something for as old as he must be. His wife, or whatever she was, looked twenty years younger.
“I work in a space near where I live in the Village, and I sell at places like this and over the Internet. Everything is one of a kind, and I design for real people, not six-foot, onehundred-twenty-pound models.”
“With eating disorders,” the good-looking guy said.
Nora smiled. “Sometimes.”
“I sure like this,” the small woman with the dark eyes said, slipping into the coat. And she should, Nora thought. It looked great on her.
“Made for you,” Nora said, “even though we haven’t met until today.”
The
y played out the familiar scene then, the small woman being reassured by Nora and the good-looking guy that yes, she looked terrific in the coat.
And you do look great, Nora thought. It would be a pleasure to sell to this woman. She thought back over the work that went into the coat’s design, and then the hours getting the cut and stitching just right. She knew the woman was going to buy the coat. Right now, Nora felt so good about what she was doing. She was in the right business and would make a major go of it. Someday the Nora N. brand would sell to the major buyers, be in the finest stores. No doubt about it, if she just kept working. And she would keep working; she was getting better and better at the design end of the business, and developing an accurate sense of what would sell.
“How much is it?” the good-looking guy asked. He asked it like a man ready to be generous to his lady.
“Three hundred dollars,” Nora said.
The shapely dark-eyed woman, looking sexy as hell in the soon-to-be hers coat, gave him a look calculated to melt. The good-looking guy shook his head and smiled in a way that made Nora like him. “Okay by me, if it’s what you want.”
That was it. The guy had too much class to try to talk her down; he knew the coat was a bargain at three hundred.
Nora gave him a smile. You’ve got faith in the Nora N. brand, too.
The good-looking guy paid with Visa, and Nora watched the happy couple walk away, the small, shapely woman clutching the coat in its plastic bag tight to her side.
It might be raining outside, but Nora was inside where the sun was shining.
By the time the antique and flea market closed, the rain had stopped. Mark Drucker, who sold furniture he repaired and refinished at the flea market, used his dented white panel truck to drive Nora and her merchandise to where she rented space in a former produce warehouse near her Village apartment. When they were finished unloading clothing, they used part of the day’s proceeds to buy a pizza at K’Noodles and then parted. Drucker drove back to Chelsea, where he lived alone, as Nora did, and Nora sat for a while and sipped a second Diet Coke.
She watched people passing on the other side of the window, the men, mostly. Nora thought about Mark Drucker and the good-looking guy. She knew Drucker, though not a matinee idol, was a quality man, and she could sense the same gentleness in the good-looking guy. Men aren’t all bad, she thought, even though they’re all men.
Nora thought about her father, and her brother Tenn, before Tenn was killed in that auto accident. The car that rammed into Tenn’s had been stolen and driven by a black man who’d had too much to drink.
A black man.
Maybe that had been part of the problem, the man’s color. Nora had many black friends. It was wrong to see them all in a different way because of what had happened. It had nothing to do with political correctness. Racism simply didn’t make sense. It wasn’t logical and belonged in the last century. She wasn’t a racist. She knew she wasn’t.
Or maybe she was. It would explain a few things.
She suddenly didn’t feel as optimistic as she had a few minutes ago, before Mark had left the restaurant and driven away in his rattletrap panel truck.
Nora moved her glass aside on the tiny table and stopped staring out the window at the people who were not like her, who did not have her kind of problem. Instead she rested her head in her hands and closed her eyes, almost but not quite crying. She was sure she wouldn’t cry. That, at least, was one thing she could control.
I really screwed up!
I was so sure.
My God, how could it have happened?
Whether she understood it or not, it had happened. And there was nothing Nora could do to change the past. Nothing she could somehow alter to escape what she’d done.
The past was like a goddamned trap.
If only it all happened some other time, before Tenn was killed. ..
She pulled her hands away from her face and stared at the glistening wetness of her palms.
Those are tears.
I am crying.
I really screwed up.
Will I ever stop paying the price?
10
Pearl and Fedderman searched everywhere in Millie Graff’s apartment for pornographic material or other evidence that she was involved in a deviant lifestyle. Quinn had instructed them not to tell Harley Renz what they were doing, or why, unless they found something. There was no point in unnecessarily stirring up Harley.
Except for the aftermath of murder, the apartment was neat. Millie had been a tidy housekeeper. The sink held no dirty dishes. The small, stacked washer-dryer combination in the bathroom held no wadded clothes. The furniture was arranged with symmetrical precision. On the kitchen windowsill was a ceramic planter with bright red geraniums that appeared healthy even without recent care. Pearl thought briefly about watering them, then decided that wasn’t the thing to do at a crime scene.
“Something…” Fedderman said, holding up rumpled black net panty hose. “Sexy, I’d say.”
“Remember Millie was more than just a hostess in a hot new restaurant,” Pearl said. “She was also a dancer. We need to keep that in mind. Look in her closet and you’ll find highheeled shoes that look like implements of torture, maybe with steel taps on them.”
Maybe they were instruments of torture. Quinn hadn’t known Millie at all as a grown woman.
“Here’s some kind of tight elastic thing,” Fedderman said.
“A leotard,” Pearl said. “Also worn to shuffle off to Buffalo.” She had a feeling she should be the one searching through Millie’s dresser.
“Buffalo?”
“Keep looking.”
“Whoa!” Fedderman said, after a few minutes. “How about this?” He sounded like a kid who’d found a trinket in a treasure hunt.
He was holding up a vibrator dildo. He’d found it in a padded brown envelope taped to the back of a dresser drawer, a favorite hiding place of many an amateur. In addition to being blue and having buttons at its base, the vibrator wasn’t at all lifelike but had ridges in it and a small protuberance near the bottom, obviously meant for clitoral stimulation. Obviously to Pearl, anyway.
“This what I think it is?” Fedderman asked, grasping the object between finger and thumb and handing it over to Pearl.
“It’s not to let you know your table’s ready,” Pearl said.
“So Millie had her fun.”
“Yeah, like millions of other women in New York.”
“Pearl…?”
“Don’t ask,” Pearl said.
Fedderman wisely took her advice. He put his hands on his hips and looked around. “We’ve tossed the place pretty thoroughly.” He knew tossed wasn’t quite the word; they’d be leaving the apartment almost exactly as they’d found it. As if Millie Graff might do an inspection and approve of their work. “So we searched everywhere and this is all we came up with, this-It kinda looks like some weird electrical bird with a long neck.”
“Millie was what cable TV would call normal,” Pearl said.
Pointing to the vibrator, Fedderman said. “Quinn isn’t gonna like that we found it.”
“Let’s put it back where we got it,” Pearl said. “Quinn won’t be shocked to know about it. Hell, it isn’t whips or chains. It’s a woman’s private accessory.”
“When I think accessory,” Fedderman said, “I think purse or maybe scarf.”
“Right now,” Pearl said, “I’m thinking testicle clamp.”
Fedderman winced and then motioned with his head toward the vibrator. “One thing we oughta know about that…”
“Yeah,” Pearl said, and pressed one of the buttons. The vibrator began to quiver and jumped so violently she almost dropped it. At the same time, it flickered with a dazzling blue light.
“That’s really something,” Fedderman said in admiration. “I mean, how the hell can we fellas compete with that?”
Pearl switched off the vibrator and handed it to him. “We found out what we wanted to know. The batteries
are up and the… accessory is in good working condition. Now put the damned thing back where you found it.”
“There’s no writing of any kind on the envelope it was in,” Fedderman said. “So it wasn’t mailed to her.”
“Not in that envelope, anyway. That one is probably just for storage.”
“It might help if we knew where she bought it.”
“I imagine the first thing she did when she got it was remove the price tag,” Pearl said.
“Or instructions,” Fedderman said. He brightened. “Maybe I should look for instructions.”
“Put the goddamned thing back,” Pearl said. “We’ll tell Quinn about it, and tell him we didn’t find any handcuffs or leather restraints or masks or what have you. Millie was a good girl. Let’s let her stay that way.”
“You know a lot about this stuff, Pearl.”
“I spent a lot of time with Vice.”
“Well, all of us-”
“It’s time to get out of here, Feds.”
He silently agreed. Pearl watched as he replaced the vibrator in its padded envelope. He slid the dresser drawer back onto its tracks and made sure it was closed all the way. They took a long last look around the apartment. Both of them could feel the strange silence and sadness that lingered at scenes of violent death.
They left the apartment, with its neatness and geometric arrangement of Millie Graff’s life, for the landlord and movers to disassemble. Soon every memory or touch of her personality would be gone. Her refrigerator would contain different brands of food. Someone else would be sleeping in her bedroom, soaking in her bath, hurrying to answer the buzz of her intercom. She would be totally gone from the still point and center of her existence. Her home would belong to another.