Pulse

by John Lutz

  Rory settled back into the soft upholstery and steered with one wrist draped over the wheel. The air conditioner worked well; the motor was smooth, and there were no rattles. He pressed the radio buttons until he found some rap, then turned up the volume.

  And saw the girl tacking up a MISSING DOG poster.

  He recognized her immediately and slowed the car, staring at the way the breeze pressed the material of her blouse and slacks against one side of her body, the way her back arched as she held the poster high with one hand and hammered with the other, how her dark ponytail swayed slightly as the breeze blew and she worked her arm to drive the nail into the wooden telephone pole. It was a pole pecked with dozens of nail holes from notices of garage sales or other missing-pet appeals. There was a canvas bag at her feet that probably held more posters. Rory was in love with her, and she ... well, she liked him. No, she more than just liked him, he was sure. He hoped. Sherri Klinger was her name. The more he repeated it to himself, the more he found it oddly melodious.

  She was in advanced studies, smart like him. He could talk to her and she understood. And he understood and agreed with almost everything she said.

  He hadn’t known she owned a dog.

  When the car slowed to a complete stop just behind her, she turned and recognized Rory. She dropped the hammer into the canvas bag, picked up the bag by its strap, and walked smiling toward the car.

  He switched off the radio, then held down the button to drop the window.

  “Rory,” she said, leaning down to look at him. She seemed glad to see him. “Don’t you know you’re too young to drive?”

  Rory gave her what he thought of as his dynamite grin. “Too young for a lotta things I do.”

  “I’ll just bet.” Her face, which he thought about so often before he slept, became serious. “You haven’t seen Duffy, have you?”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “My dog, dumb-ass.”

  “That him on the poster?”

  “Good guess.”

  “Haven’t seen him.” How easy it is to lie, when you know it’s saving someone you love from pain. “He run away?”

  “Yeah. It’s not the first time. But it’s the first time he didn’t come back.”

  How much more terrible she’d feel if I told her the truth. “And now you’re going around town tacking up posters.”

  “That was the last one.” She motioned with her head toward the poster on the phone pole.

  “Wanna drive around for a while and look for Duffy?”

  “I dunno.”

  “I’ve got a little bit of time before I have to get the car back.”

  “Your mom even know you’ve got it?”

  “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

  She grinned.

  “Hop in,” Rory said. “For Duffy.”

  “For Duffy,” she repeated. She hitched the canvas bag’s strap over her shoulder and walked around the front of the car to get in.

  He watched her walk, the way her hair flounced, the subtle rhythmic sway of her breasts, feeling a mixture of desire and satisfaction.

  This dog-poster thing, he’d turned it his way.

  39

  New York, the present

  Neeve Cooper sat alone on a bench in Central Park and read more manuscript pages of Overbite, the vampire novel Paranormal Books, a small publisher, had assigned her.

  She wielded a sharp red pencil in her right hand and from time to time made a mark or jotted a message on the pages. Whatever she penciled had to be legible. This would be published as an e-book, but also in audio and print forms. Her editing would find its way into all formats.

  For almost five years Neeve had been an associate editor at Noir and More, a publishing house with offices on Hudson Street. Then Noir and More had been bought (absorbed, the execs liked to say) by Schmelder and Kott, a large German publisher and distributor of skiing equipment. The problem was that half the Noir and More employees, including Neeve, hadn’t been absorbed with the rest of the company.

  So she had become a freelance editor, copyediting manuscripts for publishers that, like Noir and More, were short of employees during this hard time for publishers. Neeve considered herself lucky to have hooked up for freelance work with Paranormal. She could make enough to eat and pay the rent, but she sure got tired of reading about vampires and zombies. Her book before this one had been about a vampire cat. The worst part was, halfway through, she found herself enjoying the damned thing.

  She glanced at her watch, then took off her reading glasses and brushed back the lock of long dark hair hanging down one cheek. She was a pretty, brown-eyed woman in her mid-thirties who looked younger and had at one time considered pursuing a career in ballet. She had the powerful, lithe body for ballet, and the balance. Then she’d been horrified to find that she was growing boobs, and large ones that the other girls envied. But those girls didn’t want to be ballet dancers. Neeve had considered surgical reduction, but her mother said that was insane, and besides, she’d known women who’d had breast reduction and their breasts had grown large again.

  At eighteen, Neeve was finished as a ballet dancer. She enrolled in college and pursued an English degree.

  Some of the grace from her ballet days showed as she bent effortlessly and stuffed the rubber-banded vampire manuscript into the computer case on the ground. Neeve used the case for print manuscripts (it was the perfect size unless they ran over six hundred pages). She draped the case over her shoulder by its padded strap, then picked up her knockoff Gucci purse and stood up from the bench. Several people observed her walk away. A few of the men seemed hypnotized. It was like watching a dance.

  Neeve knew she’d have to hurry to get to the Pig in a Poke restaurant on time. She was meeting three friends there at twelve-thirty, which was only fifteen minutes away. She lengthened her stride and her legs seemed long even in her flat-soled jogging shoes. The long stride emphasized the artful turn of her ankles and the musculature of her calves. Some shape on this woman.

  At the first intersection outside the park she had to stop with a knot of other people to wait for the walk light. She noticed she was breathing hard. Out of condition.

  It also occurred to her that she didn’t have to hurry. If she was half an hour late, her friends would still be there. This wasn’t a business lunch of the sort she’d gotten so used to at Noir and More. There was no need to be on time. She was self-employed, and that carried with it some definite advantages.

  She walked slower and smiled. Self-employed. In business for herself, by herself.

  The future was uncertain, but she’d been getting enough work lately. Reading vampire novels wasn’t all that bad. And one of the large publishers had agreed to e-mail their manuscripts to Neeve, which meant she could use the editing software on her computer. This lugging around of pounds and pounds of paper would cease, and she could still get out of the apartment from time to time. She could take her laptop with her. It wasn’t half as heavy as a text-on-paper manuscript.

  Neeve tried to think around her trepidation and the moodiness she’d fallen into. She decided she could use a little uncertainty and adventure in her life. Publishing was changing, and no one could predict exactly how. Once she learned to get used to the uneasiness that accompanied that situation, she might learn to enjoy the world of the freelancer. Maybe this was one of those times when opportunity visited in disguise.

  Suddenly Overbite didn’t seem so heavy.

  The Alfred A. Aal Memorial Library smelled exactly as a library should—of perspiration-infused wood and old books. It was also suitably hushed.

  “We don’t have to be as careful about Ms. Culver as we used to,” Penny said to Feds, after he’d timed pecking her on the cheek when the chief librarian was looking the other way. “She’s depressed these days.”

  “Too bad,” Fedderman said. “Library business down?”

  “You could describe it that way. She’s worried about e-books.”
r />   “Aren’t we all?”

  “It isn’t funny, Feds. It would be like you being edged out of work by robotic cops.”

  “That’s already happening.” He glanced toward the front of the library and the distraught Ms. Culver. “She should have learned by now to deal with progress. And libraries aren’t going to simply disappear overnight because all of a sudden some people are reading books on little screens. She needs to lighten up, for her own good.”

  “Ms. Culver tends to catastrophize,” Penny said.

  “Is that a word?”

  “It is now. It might not make much sense for her to build what is a very real problem into some kind of dilemma, but everybody has a pet issue.”

  “It can be that way in my work. With Quinn. He doesn’t catastrophize, but he sure gets obsessed with the job. He kind of locks in, not so unlike Ms. Culver.”

  “Speaking of your job, I saw in the news that a patrolman was shot to death by a car thief in the Village last night.”

  “Young guy named Messerschmitt,” Fedderman said. “Been on the job less than a year.”

  “Was he married?”

  Fedderman figured Penny already knew the answer to that one. He was getting used to her methodology. “Married and with an infant son,” he said.

  “See what I mean about being a cop’s wife?” Penny said. “I don’t even know this woman and I broke out crying when I saw that on TV news. I found myself identifying with her.”

  “You don’t have a baby, Pen.”

  “Being a smart-ass doesn’t make this a less weighty subject, Feds. You tell me I shouldn’t worry about you, and this poor guy wasn’t even on the job a year and he’s dead.”

  “He pulled his gun when he didn’t have to,” Fedderman said.

  “How could you know that?”

  “Word gets around fast. The car thief was cornered and panicked, and had a gun of his own. He was sixteen years old.”

  “Are you saying it was this Messerschmitt’s fault?”

  “I’m saying he made a mistake I wouldn’t have made. And he wouldn’t have made it after spending more time on the job. And you’re wrong, Pen, in thinking the longer you go as a cop and don’t get hurt or killed, the more the odds turn against you. It’s the other way around; the longer you go, the less likely you are to do something that bites you.”

  “Anything can happen,” Penny said.

  “Even to people who try to live their lives in a bubble of safety. Like a library.”

  “You’re impossible, Feds.”

  “I want to show you there’s no reason to be afraid for me.”

  Penny looked exasperated. “You carry a gun. The people you deal with carry guns. Enough said.”

  “Maybe your sister should have had a gun.” The moment he said it, Fedderman knew he was in trouble.

  And he was wrong: Penny’s sister, Nora, probably would have been murdered by the brutal serial killer who’d taken her life, even if she’d owned a gun. The aggressor, the one who moved first, almost always won the struggle. They knew this, the predators of the world. The Sullivan Act made it difficult to own or carry a gun in New York. The predators knew that, too.

  “Don’t stand there and give me a lot of Second Amendment bullshit!” Penny said.

  “All right. I’m sorry.”

  Penny turned around and busied herself shelving books. He knew she was plenty angry, and she’d be thinking again and talking again about how he should consider changing occupations.

  “Pen ... ?”

  She wasn’t going to answer. She slammed a book into place so hard the shelves swayed. A man browsing in Biographies gave her a stern look.

  Fedderman knew there was nothing to be done until she calmed down. All because Messerschmitt hadn’t kept his gun in its holster.

  It was impossible to talk with Penny when she was feeling, and acting, this way. He turned around and trudged toward the library exit, up near the checkout and return counter, silently cursing.

  He didn’t like the way this point of contention was going with Penny. Each time they talked about it she seemed to become more and more worried. Madder and madder.

  One thing he’d learned about Penny: she usually did something about her anger.

  How the hell was this going to end?

  He knew how cops’ marriages too often ended.

  He reached the tinted glass door, leaned heavily into the metal push bar, and felt the heat from outside.

  When he looked back he saw Ms. Culver glaring at him as if he were an e-book.

  40

  Sal said, “I think we need to talk to Pansy Lieberman again.”

  “Not a name you often hear,” Mishkin said, “Lieberman.”

  Sal looked at him. It was hard to know about Harold.

  The two of them were on the street in front of Deena Vess’s apartment building. They’d been canvassing the surrounding buildings, and in the one next door Sal had encountered Pansy Lieberman. Unlike most of Deena’s neighbors, she’d talked. Maybe it had been worthwhile. “She claims she saw a woman who might have been leaving Deena Vess’s apartment unit at around the time of the murder.”

  “If she’s from the building next door, how did that happen ?” Harold asked.

  “I’ll let her tell you, Harold. That way we can see if her stories are the same.”

  “If they’re exactly the same—”

  “I know, Harold. That suggests she’s memorized the story and she’s lying.”

  “I was gonna say we wouldn’t need a second set of notes,” Harold said.

  Sal doubted that. “Let’s go talk to Pansy,” he growled.

  Pansy’s apartment was on the same floor as Deena’s, with a view of a window in Deena’s building that might be on a landing. Sal wondered if that had anything to do with anything. If Pansy Lieberman was one of those people who wanted to be part of a homicide investigation just for a brush with their idea of celebrity, she would have probably taken advantage of that window to the building next door to embellish her tale. But she hadn’t. The window didn’t figure into it.

  “Come on in,” she said with a wide grin. She was one of those beautiful women who seem not to know it. Or maybe they take it for granted. Pansy was in her early thirties, wearing dark slacks and a gray and white striped blouse that made her look like an extremely attractive convict. She had dark hair almost short enough to be called a buzz cut. Beauty that she was, her ears stuck out almost at right angles from her head. The ears, with her wide grin, gave her an elfish, mischievous expression. She was wearing floppy slip-on sandals. Sal noticed that the toenails of only her left foot were painted, with brilliant red enamel. Had they interrupted her?

  She noticed him staring at her feet and read his mind. “I don’t paint the nails on that foot when I’m practicing,” she said. “It makes them slippery.”

  “I see,” Sal said, but he didn’t.

  Harold had been looking past him at the glossy, open New Yorker spread out on the floor by the sofa. “You’ve been turning pages with your foot,” he said.

  Pansy smiled brightly. “How astute of you.”

  Sal wondered how Harold knew that. Then he noticed the way the magazine’s pages were crumpled, and that there was a scant but definite print of a bare foot on one of them.

  “You slipped on your sandals to answer our knock on your door,” he said, realizing with a tinge of dismay that he was trying to keep up with Harold and impress this woman.

  “I only had the right sandal off,” she said. She smiled again. “I didn’t want to greet you walking crookedly. You might have insisted on a breathalyzer test.”

  Sal found himself wondering what kind of witness she’d be in court if the case went in that direction. “Could you repeat to Detective Mishkin what you told me?” he said, wanting to get back on point.

  “I assumed that was why you were here,” she said. She drew a deep breath, as if she might be planning to tell her entire story without inhaling. “Mrs. Metzger, wh
o lives in the building next door, is visiting her daughter in Minneapolis,” she said, “and I went to her apartment to feed Lewis, because that’s our agreement.

  “Lewis a cat or dog?” Harold asked.

  “Fish.”

  “Uh.”

  “I look after Lewis,” Pansy continued, “and when I’m gone for any length of time Mrs. Metzger waters my plants.”

  Harold looked around and saw some scraggly-looking geraniums, along with flowers he didn’t recognize, in plastic pots and trays.

  “Anyway,” Pansy continued, “I was on my way back here and I took the stairs, like I do sometimes for the exercise. When I was on the landing near Deena’s apartment, I glanced down the hall and saw a woman walking away from her door, toward the elevator.”

  “Had she just left Deena’s apartment?” Harold asked.

  Sal gave him a look that meant No prompting.

  “I couldn’t say for sure,” Pansy said. “But she might have.”

  “Could you describe her?” Sal was pretending to take notes. It wasn’t necessary. So far, the stories matched up okay.

  “Actually, I couldn’t. She was facing away from me both times.”

  “Both times?”

  “Yes. I’d seen her once before, on the street, when she hurried to get into a cab at the corner. I recognized her light blue raincoat and umbrella.”

  Here was something new. In the corner of his vision, Sal saw Harold jot it down on his notepad. “Had she come out of Deena Vess’s building that time?”

  “I can’t be positive.”

  “But you’re sure it was the same woman?”

  “Yes. She passed right by me on the sidewalk, but it was fast, and I’d been looking the other way. Besides the coat and umbrella, there was something distinctive about her. Something that didn’t seem right. Maybe it was because for some reason she seemed too old to be one of Deena’s friends. I imagined her as almost middle-aged. And she moved with a kind of confidence.”

  “If we showed you photographs ...” Harold said.