Pulse

by John Lutz

  He was average height, lean, and muscular, wearing a white shirt, and a tie with a loosened knot. His brown slacks were made voluminous by pleats. He had dark wavy hair, open Irish features, and an engaging white smile.

  The kind of guy people would describe as a lady-killer.

  Quinn wondered how close that description was to the truth.

  He introduced himself and, when the woman who’d escorted him was gone, Quinn told Louis Gainer he wanted to talk to him about Ann Spellman.

  At the mention of her name, Gainer seemed about to start sobbing.

  But he didn’t. Instead he simply nodded, his eyes moist, and led Quinn to a room containing a long table and ten identical wooden chairs down each side. There were matching black leather upholstered chairs at each end of the table. In one corner were a fax machine and phone. A computer with a large flat-screen monitor mounted above it was in another. The walls were adorned with framed color photographs of what looked like building lobbies. There were no people in any of the lobbies, only ferns.

  Gainer sat down in a large leather chair at the head of the table, and motioned for Quinn to sit in the first wooden chair on his left. Some kind of power play?

  Quinn lowered himself into the chair and was surprised by how comfortable it was.

  “What exactly does your company do?” he asked.

  Gainer seemed relieved that they weren’t getting right to the topic of the late Ann Spellman. “We design and install both public and private common spaces, taking into account ambience as well as functionality.”

  “Ah,” Quinn said. He leaned slightly toward Gainer. “And Ann Spellman was one of your designers?”

  At the mention of the victim’s name, Gainer winced. A normal enough response. They’d been close. “She was one of our best designers, and was in charge of one of our industrial units.”

  “Yet you fired her.”

  “No, no. The board fired her. We—they had no choice.”

  “Something about her work or attitude?”

  “Something that became inevitable,” Gainer said.

  “Her reaction to being dropped by you?”

  Gainer obviously didn’t like where the conversation was going. “You mean on a personal level?”

  “The most personal.”

  Gainer seemed to give that some thought, shifting position in his high-backed chair. “Well, yes. It was partly my fault for letting our relationship go as far as it had. She and I were good with each other, but in a temporary way. I knew that, and I thought she did. When I had to end it, I knew how she’d take it. Especially since I didn’t give her the kind of explanation I owed her.”

  Quinn thought there were a lot of I’s in that answer. “And what was that explanation?”

  “I’m in love with another woman. We’re going to be married.” Gainer sighed and looked at a blank wall as if there were a window in it and he was gazing outside. There was a lot of light, but it was artificial. There were no windows in what had to be the conference room. “You can see the company’s position. At least I could.”

  “Hell hath no fury ... ?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You might have told her the truth,” Quinn said, “given her a chance to react. She might have surprised you and wished you well.”

  Gainer smiled sadly. “That would have been a surprise, all right.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That the company was letting her go for economic reasons. That it was a board decision and had nothing to do with her competency.”

  “How did she react?”

  “By calling me a sack of shit.” He breathed in and out and looked ashamed. “Maybe she’s right.”

  “And then you told her you and she were over?”

  “No. She naturally assumed that. I mean, after I told her I was firing her. She thought I was cutting her loose from the company because I wanted to end our affair finally and forever. I don’t recall which of us, or either of us, came right out and said it was over. But believe me, it was understood.”

  “And this conversation was when?”

  “Three nights ago.”

  “And that was the last time you saw her alive?”

  “Or dead,” Gainer said.

  “Where were you last night?”

  “When Ann was killed? I was with the woman I’m going to marry. I have restaurant receipts. After we had dinner, we went with friends to the theater. I even happened to run into a man I went to school with. During intermission.”

  “You seem to be covered for every minute.”

  “Like it was planned?”

  Quinn smiled. “Don’t get ahead of me, Mr. Gainer.”

  “I mean, I could have paid somebody to kill Ann, and made sure I had an alibi. But I had no reason to harm her. She was gone from here, gone from my life.” He wiped away what might have been a tear. “To tell you the truth, I miss her. We were lovers. We were also good friends.”

  “Friends or not, the company couldn’t take the chance.”

  “No. We couldn’t even let her come back for her things. Had them delivered to her.” He looked beseechingly at Quinn. “You don’t know how fiercely competitive this business is. You have to be a hard-ass just to survive.”

  “Like my business,” Quinn said.

  “Yeah. From what I’ve heard.”

  Quinn stood up. “Anything to add?”

  “I don’t know what it would be.”

  “Maybe a confession.”

  Gainer sat back as if struck by a blow. “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “I’m trying to be cooperative. I didn’t do anything. I’ve got nothing to hide.” Gainer wiped at his eyes again. “Go ahead and check my alibi.”

  “We will.” Quinn saw the fear in Gainer’s expression, along with the hope. This guy should never play poker. “I know what you think, Mr. Gainer, that maybe you should have lawyered up and gone mute. That you handled this meeting wrong. But you didn’t. Not if you told the truth.”

  “Do you think I killed Ann? Or hired someone to kill her?”

  “No,” Quinn said. “Right now, I don’t.”

  “Thank you,” Gainer said.

  Quinn went to the door. “But that’s right now.”

  23

  Since it was the last door, they were together.

  In Ann Spellman’s apartment building, Sal and Harold had knocked on all the doors but this one, 6-F. It didn’t promise to open on any new or pertinent knowledge of Spellman’s murder.

  The slot in the mailbox down in the foyer had simply said A. Ackenheimer. The woman who opened the door said nothing. She simply stood and stared at them through rheumy, faded blue eyes. Her mousy brown hair was a mess, as was the baggy flannel nightgown or robe she wore even though it was four o’clock in the afternoon.

  A close look at her suggested she was in her forties, but she was like a woman trying to appear older. An even closer look revealed a certain glint in her eye. Harold thought that if she really got it together, with makeup and a hairdo, she might be attractive. No, probably not.

  Sal leaned toward her slightly, sniffing for alcohol. Found something like smoked salmon. It could have been fish for lunch, but she looked as if she could be high on some other substance. He smelled nothing potentially incriminating.

  “Miz Ackenheimer?” Harold said, as if attempting to wake her.

  “Right on the first try,” she said in a throaty, fishy voice.

  “A for Alice?” Harold said.

  She smiled widely. “Amazing.”

  Harold grinned beneath his bushy mustache and shrugged. “I’m kind of psychic sometimes, Audrey.”

  She shook her head. “You, too? Amazing. Some people call me Amazing Ackenheimer. My given name is actually Audrey, but I’ve used the name Alice.”

  “Are you in show business?” Harold asked.

  Sal had had about enough of this. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about Ann Spel
lman’s murder,” he told her in his rasp of a voice that was even deeper than hers.

  “It sounds like you might juggle or something,” Harold said, “with a name like that.”

  Sal glowered. Harold was being Harold here, with the last potential witness. It irked Sal.

  “No,” Audrey Ackenheimer said. “I’m not in show business, though I can juggle. And I know nothing about Ann Spellman’s murder. She’s not—wasn’t—even on this floor. And wasn’t she killed someplace else altogether?”

  “Not necessarily altogether,” Sal said. “Her apartment, her neighbors, might have something useful to tell us.”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Audrey Ackenheimer said.

  “Did you know her at all?”

  “Only to nod to on the elevator about every two weeks.” Suddenly she paused and looked off to the side.

  “Something?” Sal asked.

  “I was just remembering ... last week I accidentally pushed the wrong button in the elevator and the door opened on her floor. Ann Spellman’s. Well, there’s a straight look down the hall to her apartment, and I saw a woman standing in front of Spellman’s door. Then I looked again and she wasn’t there. I suppose Ann Spellman let the woman in.”

  “This was when?

  “Wednesday, I think.”

  “The day before Spellman’s murder.”

  “Evening before,” Audrey said. “About seven o’clock. I was on my way to meet someone for dinner.”

  “Could you describe the woman?”

  “I was meeting a man.”

  Sal said nothing, looking at her hard.

  Audrey Ackenheimer shrugged beneath her tent-like robe or night gown. “The woman was average height and weight, I suppose. Had on a light raincoat because it had been drizzling all evening. As she was entering she turned slightly, and I would have gotten a good look at her face, except ...” She shrugged again in her noncommittal way.

  “The elevator door closed,” Harold said.

  She looked at him and grinned. “Amazing!”

  “That’s you,” Harold said. “I’m psychic.”

  “Hair?” Sal asked.

  “Yes,” she and Harold said simultaneously. They both laughed.

  “Jesus!” Sal said.

  “I think brown, light colored like mine, but I’m not sure. The lighting isn’t great in the halls here. We keep telling the super about it, but nothing’s ever done.”

  Sal rummaged through his notes. Harold had already talked to the super, a guy named Drucker who’d spent the murder evening with his wife in front of a blaring flat-panel TV that took up half his apartment wall. Sal had discussed him with Harold and read Harold’s notes. Drucker knew nothing.

  “Little guy with blond hair and a mole near the tip of his nose?” Harold asked.

  “Yes. You’ve talked to him?”

  “Never saw him or even heard of him before just now,” Harold lied.

  Audrey’s eyes widened. “That’s amazing!”

  “No. You’re ama—”

  “Stop it!” Sal said. Harold could turn any interrogation into a shit storm.

  “I wouldn’t recognize the woman if I saw her again,” Audrey Ackenheimer said, thinking it was time to get serious before Sal blew his cork. Harold, the nice one, looked at her and kind of rolled his eyes, letting her know he understood. “I have seen her around the building before. Once from a distance, coming out. Another time from the back as she got in the elevator.”

  “On her way to see Ann Spellman,” Sal said. “If she was home.”

  “Might have paid her a visit, anyway,” Harold said. “If she was sure she wasn’t home.”

  “What about men?” Audrey said.

  Sal looked at her. “What about them?”

  “I did see a storybook-handsome guy, kind of stocky, with wavy dark hair, come and go a few times. Saw him and Spellman leave together once holding hands.”

  “I think we know who that is,” Sal said.

  “Any other male callers?” Harold asked.

  Audrey gave them her shrug again. “Couldn’t say yes or no.”

  It was the woman who interested Sal. He wanted to know if she actually existed outside Audrey Ackenheimer’s and Fernandez the super’s imaginations. No one else seemed to have seen this woman, except maybe Theo the cat. And cats were notoriously uncooperative witnesses.

  “I don’t spy on people’s personal lives,” Audrey said. “Poor Ann Spellman could have been chaste as a nun, or led a life of wild debauchery. It’s something we’ll never know.”

  Sal didn’t agree with her, but didn’t say so.

  24

  There wasn’t much pain if she kept her little toe scrunched up.

  Pearl was striding along West Seventy-ninth Street toward the office, wearing her New Balance jogging shoes. They were her most comfortable shoes for walking, but her left sock had bunched up and might be causing a blister. She figured she didn’t have far to go, so the hell with it.

  She had spent much of the day verifying Louis Gainer’s alibi for the night of Ann Spellman’s murder. Gainer’s fiancée had been aware of his relationship with Spellman, and she described it as “long over.” Pearl let that one pass. It looked like Gainer was innocent, so why screw up a marriage before it even started?

  Restaurant receipts and witness statements indicated that Gainer and his fiancée were where he’d said they’d been, with the people he’d named. And the old college friend Gainer had run into in the theater lobby at the approximate time of the murder described their meeting the same way Gainer had. The play they’d attended was titled Chance Encounter. Gainer wouldn’t have chosen that one to lie about. Unless he had a dangerous sense of humor, or no sense of humor at all.

  If anything, Gainer was too alibied up for the night of Spellman’s torture and murder. Something Pearl would keep in mind.

  Does this job make you cynical, or what?

  Pearl’s cell phone, clipped to her belt beneath her light linen blazer, came to life and instinctively her hand moved toward it.

  Then paused.

  Pearl had a new phone that enabled the use of individual ring tones to identify callers. She stopped walking as she heard the musical strains of “You Talk Too Much,” Joe Jones’s old rhythm-and-blues hit from the sixties. When she looked at the phone’s caller ID, sure enough, she saw Golden Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey. Where her mother lived, and called from at the most inopportune times.

  Not that this was one of those times. But still ...

  While she was debating whether to take the call, the phone fell silent.

  Her mind had been made up for her. She told herself she’d been about to answer, even though she didn’t feel like hearing her mother harangue her for everything from her job to not being married, or for being married to her job.

  She decided she really didn’t want to talk with her mother—or, rather, listen to her—even though she had a spare moment.

  Pearl smiled. There was nothing like being honest with oneself.

  No doubt her mother had left a message. She’d listen to it later.

  As she clipped the phone back on her belt—turned off, just in case—the movement of her head caused her to glance behind her.

  A tickle moved up her spine. Subtle, but she recognized it.

  Something was wrong. She scanned the block she’d been walking along. Nothing seemed unusual. Yet in her initial glance, something hadn’t been right. She knew it. Like many cops with a talent for tailing people, she had a talent for knowing when someone was tailing her.

  There!

  A woman, slim, average height, wearing yellow, one of those girly sundress outfits that were popular these days. Moving gracefully away from Pearl, slipping in among the throng of pedestrians coming toward her. Even in the bright yellow dress, she’d disappeared. Half a block away, and she made the last of the walk signal. It would be impossible for Pearl to catch up with her.

  The woman was familiar, but in a way Pear
l couldn’t grasp. There was something unsettling about her.

  Then it all clicked into place, how Pearl had caught glimpses of the woman on the subway platform, near the deli she frequented, crossing the street near the office. During the past few days, she and the woman had been in the same place at the same time too often for it to be coincidental.

  The woman was a talented tracker, but not a pro. That was how Pearl had spotted her. A pro would have kept her wardrobe drab and wouldn’t have worn the standout yellow dress.

  Still, there was something about this woman that suggested she wasn’t to be taken lightly. Something that triggered an emotion deep in Pearl’s consciousness. Fear? She wasn’t sure. Not of what it was or why she was feeling it.

  Was the woman Daniel Danielle? It wasn’t impossible. After all, the original Daniel Danielle was sometimes Danielle Daniel, a woman by all appearances. One who’d disappeared in a Florida hurricane decades ago, had never been seen again, and was listed officially as dead. One of the worst disasters in Florida history had done the job of the state and executed Daniel Danielle, clearing the docket.

  Officially. There was a word that put Pearl on her guard. The presumed dead killer, or a copycat, appeared to be operating in New York.

  Another possibility occurred to Pearl. The woman tailing her might be a confederate of the killer, working for him and with him. Helping him to learn about Pearl as he prepared to make his move on her. He might have done that with his earlier victims, stalked them, perhaps deliberately letting them know he was there so they would worry, become worn down by their anxiety to the point of surrender.

  He’d be there to accept that surrender.

  Pearl thought about that.

  Be ready, you schmuck. I’m ready, too.

  When she reached the office, Quinn was there alone, seated at his desk and reading something inside a yellow file folder. He glanced up when Pearl entered, and it registered on his face immediately that he knew she was distressed.

  He laid what he’d been reading aside and sat back, waiting, swiveling his chair an inch this way, then that, causing a soft eek, eek.