by John Lutz
For too long Betsy had suffered a lonely and miserable existence without Henry. Without understanding. Without love.
England was fighting for its survival, and there was no time for romance, but that’s when the most irresistible kind of romance found a way.
To be on the safe side, Betsy swallowed a second pill.
After making sure the blackout curtains were secure, she dropped backward onto the bed as if launching herself sightless into a dark abyss.
She so welcomed the escape of sleep.
Only a few minutes after lying down, she heard air raid sirens. The raids were occurring more and more often, almost becoming routine. Unless you happened to be in the target zone. Then nothing routine might happen ever again.
Fate. That was all it was about. Good luck or bad.
Betsy knew she should wake up all the way. Go to the building’s lower level, or to the underground stop a block away. But she didn’t want to be in the crowded train tunnel, or alone in the musty basement, or share her terror with old Colonel Tattersilk from upstairs who, when they were sheltered, seemed to be hoping for loud near misses so he had an excuse to hug her close in the night.
She didn’t want to get up. She was so, so tired . . . Exhaustion was an antidote for fear. That and the mind-numbing regularity and frequency of the air raids. The waves of German bombers, with smaller fighter planes sometimes flying escort. More and more often they were engaged by RAF fighters, leaving twisting, turning white contrails hanging like indecipherable messages in the sky.
Betsy lay motionless in the darkness, waiting for tonight’s crisis to pass. Maybe the Luftwaffe wouldn’t visit England tonight. Even Germans had to rest.
After a while the air raid sirens seemed to be fading. Sleep was about to claim her, and she was willing.
Betsy might have been dreaming the throbbing hum of the marauding German aircraft. Dreams and reality were becoming almost interchangeable.
It sounded as if there were a lot of planes, but they were well off in the distance, to the south, perhaps still out over the channel.
Too far away to care about. So spent was Betsy that she decided to ignore the German bombers. Britain was winning the war in the air. Churchill had said so just yesterday. The raids were becoming less frequent, and the odds that bombs would fall where she was were slim.
She slipped back into sleep, and didn’t awaken even when aircraft engines pounded directly overhead.
She never woke up.
24
New York, the present
Building super Fred Charleston and his wife, Serri, sat side by side on the sofa, trying not to look frightened. That wasn’t easy, with the big cop and the busty beauty with the intense dark eyes sitting in chairs opposite them.
They were in the super’s cramped apartment on the first floor. The big cop, Frank Quinn, was slouched in the chair where Serri usually sat, reading her papers or watching TV and bitching about how badly the world was being run. The Middle East, especially, concerned her.
Charleston was a stocky, fidgety man in his forties, with unruly black hair and a face made to look pinched by an oversized nose that left him little upper lip. He wore a gray outfit that was more or less his super’s uniform. His wife, Serri, was also in her forties. She had blond hair that was lighter than her eyebrows. She would have been attractive were it not for an air about her, as if she minute by minute detected a different suspicious odor.
“So you figure you and Serri began this big argument about seven thirty?” Quinn said to Fred Charleston. Cops’ eyes, neutral yet at the same time unnerving, bore into Charleston.
“I know it was around seven thirty,” the super said. “Serri was upset about poison gas in the Middle East, and it got so I couldn’t finish my dinner, which we always start to eat at seven on the dot.”
“Why is that?” Pearl asked.
“So the tenants know,” Serri said. “That way they won’t be pestering Fred and me during our dinner. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit they pull.”
“But last night, you pestered him. Or so he says.”
“No, I can become a pest, I know. And a loud one. But sometimes you gotta stand up for yourself.”
“That’s for sure,” Pearl said, flashing looks at Quinn and Fred, becoming Serri’s friend and ally in the war of the sexes.
“It ain’t like you’re an expert on the Middle East,” Fred Charleston said to his wife. He glanced toward the kitchen. “Now, poison gas, maybe.”
“See the crap I gotta put up with?”
“Yes,” Pearl said.
Fred gave Pearl a surprised look. The big cop wasn’t going to get involved. He looked neutral as the Supreme Court. Fred was being ganged up on here. He said, “We’ll be helpful as we can.”
“You don’t have to be an expert to see what’s wrong over there,” Serri said, looking at Quinn, then at Pearl. “And I figure what Fred and I say to each other’s private anyway. None of the neighbors’ business.”
“True enough,” Quinn said, “but you can count yourself lucky some of those neighbors were eavesdropping last night, and you two were giving them a show at the same time Jeanine Carson was being killed. Of course, the time’s not nailed down. Stories change. The investigation is fluid.”
“Fluid? You mean just because I found Jeanine’s body means I might have murdered the poor woman?” Charleston asked. He seemed astounded. Serri didn’t.
“Might, sure,” Quinn said. “Going into an investigation, we suspect everybody. Starting with the last person to see the victim alive, and the first to see her dead.”
“Like on TV.”
“We like it when it ends like on TV, too,” Quinn said. “All wrapped up tight and tidy for a commercial.”
“Seems to me the first person to see a victim dead would be the killer,” Fred said. He had a nasty, almost invisible little grin. Quinn was beginning to dislike him a lot.
He wasn’t the only one. Pearl looked peeved.
“Don’t get all smart with us,” Pearl said. “Alibis were made to be broken.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Serri asked.
Wrong way to go, Pearl thought, remembering how, in domestic cases, the partners often wound up siding with each other against the investigating officer.
“It’s just something we say.”
“Fact is,” Quinn said, “most of the tenants don’t recall hearing the fracas between you and your wife.” He didn’t mention that the tenants on either side of the super’s apartment did hear it. Quinn fishing.
Fred rose like a gullible guppy to the bait. His features reddened—a man with a temper. “These old walls are about two feet thick. That’s one of the reasons folks rent here. Neighbors don’t tend to overhear each other’s conversations in this building.”
“There’s always the vents to carry sound,” Serri said. Nipping at her husband. She leaned slightly forward when she spoke, and projected a tireless tenacity.
Quinn was beginning to side with Fred, even though he disliked the man. Maybe because he disliked the wife more. Pearl was secretly grinning at him.
“Wouldn’t know about vents,” Fred said, in control of himself now, if not his wife. “I work mostly on the plumbing.”
“Which is how you discovered the body,” Pearl said.
“Roy Culver, who lives in the apartment above Jeanine Carson’s, had a leaky toilet where the bowl went into the stack and needed it looked at. He knew I was gonna go into his apartment this morning—you can ask him.”
“Did,” Pearl said.
“Looked like water from the bowl was gonna run down into Jeanine’s bathroom, right underneath, and it had to be stopped right away or there’d have been a lotta damage.”
“Culver called you last night, but you waited till this morning to tend to the plumbing.”
“Had no idea as to the seriousness of it until I actually looked at it and learned the stack was involved. That’s when I knew I had to talk to Jeanine,
and fast. Get her permission to do some work in her apartment. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t let myself into her place on my own, nor anybody else’s, but you know how much destruction water can do.”
“We do,” Quinn said. “And the neighbors did hear you arguing almost nonstop till about midnight.”
“That’s when the wife got tired,” Fred said.
Pearl glanced at the seething energy that was the wife. It was hard to believe she was ever tired.
“Is it possible,” Quinn said, “that the neighbors heard the victim and killer arguing and assumed it was you and your wife?”
The super was silent for a long time. “I guess it is,” he finally said. “But truthfully, it ain’t in the least likely.”
“Hmph,” Quinn said, nodding thoughtfully.
All of a sudden nobody had anything to say.
“I’ve gotta agree that the Middle East is a bitch,” Pearl put in, looking at Serri. It was odd how, even with her blond hair and blue eyes, Serri Charleston possessed a vaguely Middle Eastern countenance. Or maybe Mayan. Strange . . . Like two components that didn’t mix. “Your maiden name—” Pearl began to ask.
“O’Reilly,” Serri said.
“She might be half Irish, but she’s knowledgeable on the Middle East,” Fred said. “Television, newspapers and all. Serri thinks all those explosives used on innocent people is a crime.”
“I guess she’s right,” Quinn said.
“Acts of war,” Serri said. “All that military hardware being used over there.”
“You’re not an expert on munitions,” her husband told her.
“I know a war when I see one. And don’t tell me I don’t know munitions.”
Quinn was beginning to get weary of the problem with the Charlestons’ marriage. It was a dogfight not to join. He and Pearl didn’t want to get embroiled in a politically charged discussion.
“I guess war is war,” Pearl added. Nothing like a little overarching, meaningless philosophy to throw a blanket on things.
“It’s what happened in Jeanine Carson’s apartment last night that interests us,” Quinn said.
“The neighbors would recognize our voices,” Fred said, having given the overheard argument scenario more thought. “We both have real distinctive voices.”
Which was true.
Serri Charleston said, “We’re alibied up,” “Hmph,” Quinn said. “You do watch a lot of television.”
“Including the military channel.” Serri, not letting up.
“That might be what the neighbors were hearing coming from your apartment last night.”
“They were hearing the real thing,” Serri said. “And it don’t look like me or Fred shot at each other. And I never noticed any tank tread marks on the carpet.”
“But then you weren’t looking for them,” Quinn said.
“Actually,” Pearl said to both Fred and Serri, “we’re more curious about what you might have seen or heard than about whether you have alibis.”
“We told the cops in uniform about where we were and what we done and how it came to pass that I found poor Jeanine Carson’s dead body,” Fred said. He swallowed hard and seemed suddenly in danger of vomiting. Then he appeared to have fought back the impulse. “All that blood and . . . the rest of it. That ain’t a sight I’ll soon forget.”
“We know how it is,” Quinn said softly.
“I don’t see how the two of you stand it,” Fred said. “The business you’re in.”
Quinn ignored the comment. “There’s a lot of art on the victim’s apartment walls,” Quinn said. “She ever talk to you about it?”
“No. She was into art. Some kind of art repairer for the museums is what I gathered.”
“An artsy type,” Serri said. “Liked to think so, anyway. Had a thing about French painters. At least that was my impression.”
Quinn stared steadily at her. Her expression was blank. Being with Serri was something like being with Harold.
Fred Charleston had turned pale and was making a visible effort to breathe evenly. Concentrating. Trying to get his memory out of that bloody apartment, away from the dead woman. Not paying the slightest attention to what his wife was saying. He’d pay for his lack of attention later.
Quinn decided the super couldn’t be faking it. Vomiting would certainly add to his credibility, but Quinn had learned how to read people like Fred, and figured the henpecked super had never killed anyone. Quinn didn’t need to see any real regurgitation to be convinced.
The queasy super’s story seemed simple and honest enough. Quinn thanked him and his wife and stood up, letting them know the interview was over. Pearl left a card on the coffee table, snapping it down as if it were a high card out of a deck, and said, “Call us anytime.”
Fred stayed seated, still obviously upset by walking in on a butchered woman who had been a tenant and at least something of a friend. An artsy friend at that.
“Thanks both of you for your help,” Quinn said. He meant it; he had seen a lot of what it was like when someone’s life intersected suddenly and bloodily with the dead.
Serri stood, tucked the card in a pocket, and escorted them to the door.
“It’s jarring to discover a dead body,” Pearl said. “Especially when it’s a murder victim. Sometimes a session with a professional counselor can help. Jeanine Carson’s death seems to have hit your husband hard.”
“Like a rocket-propelled grenade,” Serri Charleston said. Still in the Middle East.
“Those things make a lot of noise, cover up a lot of other noises,” Quinn said.
Leaving her to wonder.
25
Quinn wished the mayor smoked cigars. Then he, Quinn, wouldn’t have to wonder so much, be so uneasy. He could never remember when and where cigar smoking was legal in New York. Or what the penalty was if you were caught puffing illegally. Death, probably. If not by lethal injection, then from the cigar.
So here Quinn was, walking to the office from a subway stop that disgorged its passengers in a neighborhood just now being gentrified. Amid the paint fumes, the rancid scent of ages-old plaster dust, the stench of trash and garbage still curbside for pickup, the odorous assault of exhaust fumes, strolled Quinn with his offending cigar.
The horrified and angry glances of a cluster of passersby indicated to Quinn that he was probably breaking the law. He puffed on.
Quinn’s cell phone rang. Nothing tricky about it—just the regular, well-worn repetitive ring that had presaged so many meaningful conversations since Alexander Graham Bell had turned the device loose on society.
It took Quinn a few seconds to wrestle the thing out of his pants pocket.
He squinted down at the tiny illuminated screen. Renz was calling.
“What’ve we got, Harley?” Quinn asked, veering toward a low brick wall in front of a vacant-looking stone building.
“A break,” Renz said.
Quinn sat down on the wall and exhaled cigar smoke.
“Are you smoking one of your Cubans?” Renz asked. Casually, as if an admission of guilt might slip smoothly out of Quinn.
“Cuban what?” Quinn asked, with an inner smile.
“Never mind.”
“So what’s the break?”
“We found Jeanine Carson’s cell phone tucked down between the cushions of her sofa. The sofa was the kind that opened and became a bed, so the phone slid down out of sight in the mechanism.”
Quinn felt his interest quicken. “Anything helpful on it?”
“Maybe. There were a lot of calls to the phone from Andria Bell’s number.”
“Any recorded messages?”
“ ’Fraid not. The last such call was made from LaGuardia airport the morning of Andria’s death and the mass murders at the Fairchild Hotel. Another call that day, from Jeanine Carson’s phone, went to a Winston Castle.”
A new player?
“Is that a person or a place?” Quinn asked.
“Both, in a way. A guy named Winston Castle owns
a restaurant called the Far Castle, on the Upper West Side. He runs the establishment, along with his wife Maria.”
“I don’t know the place,” Quinn said.
“It hasn’t been open all that long. One of those trendy theme restaurants. It’s been renovated to resemble a medieval castle, with towers, narrow vertical archers’ windows, concrete cornices, gargoyles, and a serene English garden where customers can dine among statuary and topiary. The garden was put in when the neighboring building, a closed lamp and fixture shop and showroom, collapsed and created an empty lot. Castle extended his long lease on both lots. Did it in such a way that the leaser receives a cut of restaurant profits.”
“You’re telling me this Winston Castle is a kinky businessman type.”
“Weaver went to the restaurant to size him up. She said phony stands out all over him.”
Quinn didn’t like the idea of Weaver running around without his supervision, but he knew there wasn’t much he could do about it. And he trusted her judgment.
“Anyway,” Renz continued, “there was enough space and rich enough soil to extend the garden. There’s even a miniature but baffling English hedge maze.”
Quinn was surprised. “A valuable piece of Manhattan real estate used for a garden and maze?”
“Yep. New York for you. When Castle is asked about selling it, he laughs and tells prospective buyers he’s planning on putting in a moat and alligators.”
Quinn looked across the street, where a Con Ed crew had arrived and had put up cones and sawhorses to divert traffic. Four husky guys wearing hard hats, swaggering around and striking poses as if they were on camera. And maybe they were. One of them was wrestling a jackhammer from the back of their dusty van.
“And Jeanine Carson talked to this guy on her phone the day Andria Bell died?”
“Talked to him or his wife.”
“Maybe she called to order takeout,” Quinn said. He took a silent pull on his cigar and exhaled carefully, turning his face away from the phone.