by John Lutz
“I honestly don’t think I could identify her. She might be in her forties. Indeterminate hair color. There was nothing distinctive about her walk. And I never did actually get a good look at her face.”
“But you were close to her for a while.”
“Only for a moment, when she stepped on my toes. And on this foot, as luck would have it.” Pansy held up her bare right foot. “I was in too much pain, and looking at my poor, poor toe instead of noticing what was going on around me. The woman apologized but didn’t slow down and was walking away when I looked up to tell her that was okay, that I walked on that foot all the time.”
“Anything memorable about her voice?” Sal asked.
“Not really. A little deep and throaty. It could be she’s a smoker.”
“What about scents?” Harold asked.
“Pardon?”
“Did she smell any particular way? You know, like perfume, tobacco?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Was this other encounter also the day of the murder?” Sal asked.
“No, I’d say about a week earlier. That’s why I didn’t remember it right away.” She sat down in a beige chair with wooden arms and tucked her trim legs beneath her. Sal wished his legs were still that limber. Well, actually they never had been.
He looked at Harold, who gave an almost imperceptible nod. They had no more questions. That is, about the case.
“Why?” Sal asked.
She appeared puzzled.
“Why were you turning New Yorker magazine pages with your bare toes?”
“To make my toes more dexterous.”
“And to get to the next cartoon,” Harold said.
“That, too.”
“That doesn’t exactly answer my question,” Sal said.
“True.” Pansy smiled. “I’ve gone back to school to major in anthropology. I was wondering what it might be like to learn to use our feet the way our primal ancestors might very well have done. When you get in the habit of using them like hands, you’d be surprised how natural it comes to feel.”
“Our primal ancestors wouldn’t have understood those cartoons,” Sal said. He didn’t understand some of them himself.
“Oh, you might be surprised. Many of the cartoons don’t require language in order to be understood. “
“That they might have understood the cartoons isn’t her point,” Harold said quickly. Kind of testily, Sal thought. How men must love rescuing or defending poor little Pansy. How she must manipulate them.
“And the point is?”
“Empathy,” Pansy said. “I want to experience at least some inkling of how our ancestors must have thought while performing delicate tasks with their feet. What they must have felt.” She smiled and shook her head. “I guess you think that’s crazy.”
“No,” Sal said, wondering how many of their primal ancestors had subscribed to the New Yorker.
“We do that ourselves in our work,” Harold said. “We try to empathize and figure out why some of them killed. Why some are still killing.”
“That could be dangerous,” Pansy said. “We have roots that might be deeper than we know, and set in soil that would terrify us.”
“That’s why empathizing is as far as we go,” Harold said. “That’s the key difference between us and the people we’re trying to find and stop.”
Pansy aimed her warm glow at him, obviously pleased. “You are a very perceptive man.”
“It’s my job,” Harold said. “It makes me that way.”
Sal thought he might retch.
“Can you stay for some tea or coffee?” Pansy asked. “Both of you.” But she was looking at Harold.
“Thanks,” Sal said, “but we’ve got more calls to make.”
“Another time?”
“If you think of something pertaining to the case,” Sal said. “Call me. Leave a message if you have to, and I’ll get back to you. You have my card.”
Pansy followed them to the door and watched them for a while before moving back out of sight and locking herself into her apartment.
On their way down in the elevator, Harold said, “I wonder what else she can do with her toes.”
“That woman might be twenty years younger than you, Harold. Harold?”
“Sorry. I was empathizing.”
Jerry Lido, Q&A’s resident computer genius, came over to Quinn’s desk, shaking his head. If it could be traced anywhere on the Internet, Lido could find it. He seemed to possess some kind of innate GPS.
“Whaddya got?” Quinn said, looking up and noticing the expression on Lido’s face. He knew Lido had stayed up most of last night, drinking and communing with his computer. Now he appeared exhausted but triumphant.
“I found a few places where the skate keys could be bought on the net, hacked into their records, and came up empty. It was near six o’clock this morning by then. I took a short nap, then cleaned up some and had breakfast at a place down on Houston.” Lido was grinning.
Quinn was getting impatient. “And?”
Lido dropped a skate key on the desk. It looked identical to the one pressed into the flesh on the forehead of Deena Vess’s corpse.
“I got it at this little bike shop in the Village, also sells skateboards and such. Also roller skates, though not the kind that need keys. But they do have a bunch of those keys in a little bin near the front of the store.” Lido’s smile slipped away. “That’s the problem. Anybody coulda come in and stole one.”
“Did you ask if they’d sold any lately?” Quinn already knew the answer.
“They haven’t sold any in almost a year,” Lido said. “The guy let me have that one for free.”
“A dead end,” Quinn said glumly.
“Yeah. Not the key to the case.”
Quinn returned to his paperwork with the doggedness of a man getting accustomed to frustration, not liking it any more for the familiarity. “Go have some more breakfast, Jerry.”
What was the key to the case?
41
It was like watching dinosaurs at play, if you overlooked the huge, knobby tires.
The roar had awakened her at eight o’clock sharp and continued steadily for the last three hours, so she never got back to sleep. Mildred Dash stood at her apartment window and watched the earth-moving equipment across the street.
The brick and stone walls of the buildings had come down days ago. Now the dinosaurs were scooting the wreckage around, even moving some of it with cranes (so like a brontosaurus, a crane), so it could be scooped up, loaded into squat and powerful dump trucks, and hauled away.
Mildred was tall and a bit too statuesque to be attractive. Though refined, even regal, in bearing, she was too rough hewn to be feminine. Her gray-tinged black hair was coarse, her features chiseled but not finely. Her nose was slightly too prominent, her chin too pointed. When she was very young, the boys had considered her a knockout. Now those same boys would have found her a little scary, like a dreaded substitute teacher.
Meeding Properties, and Enders and Coil, had learned not to take her lightly.
She was still wearing her robe, and wasn’t planning on going out today. There was no way she could escape the feeling that if she left her apartment, left the building, the neighborhood, even for a short while, the dinosaurs would attack. She would return not to her home but to ruins.
As a former practicing attorney, she knew the value of a fait accompli. The destruction of her building wouldn’t harm anyone, if the building was completely unoccupied. Even if she’d had enough legal claim to delay demolition almost indefinitely, her arguments would become moot in the dust of debris. Mildred Dash knew how the law worked—and how it didn’t work.
As matters stood, Jack Enders would continue his attempts to intimidate her, and kindly rattlesnake Joseph Coil would continue his folksy charm assault. They continued in their attempts to assess her, to read her motives and her intentions. It didn’t make sense to them. Of course it wouldn’t—to them. Even if she were to explain
it to them, they’d nod their supposed understanding and then offer her money. Or at least try to talk her out of her intransigence. Become her saviors instead of her pursuers.
Mildred understood the puzzle piece that was missing, and whose absence caused all their other assumptions to be off the mark. Meeding Properties, and Enders and Coil, knew about the limited time she had left. They didn’t see why she wanted to spend it here, in the midst of demolition and debris. This had been her life, with her husband, her children, her tragedies and joy. Her meaningful life had been here, was still here.
Still here.
It was so simple, so foreign to them, that they overlooked it, couldn’t see it.
She refused to end her life before she died.
Jody found herself alone in the offices of Enders and Coil. Dollie, the receptionist, was up front in the anteroom minding the phones, but that didn’t count. Dollie didn’t venture back into the main offices unless she had a good reason, and with Jack Enders and the associates in court, and Joseph Coil on his way to Philadelphia to take a deposition, there wouldn’t be a good reason.
Jody took one of the two flash drives she’d bought on credit from an office supply and computer shop on East Fifty-fourth Street, and slipped into Enders’s office.
It was more than merely quiet in there; it was hushed. Jody had been told the offices of Enders and Coil had been specially insulated so they were virtually soundproof. That wasn’t quite true. If she listened closely, Jody could hear the rushing sound of Manhattan traffic.
Enders’s desktop computer sat blankly on its oak table nestled to the side of the desk. With a glance out through the slatted blinds covering the window to the hall, Jody booted up the computer. She’d lightly searched the office a few times and had no trouble coming up with the list of passwords Enders used. Genius9578 gave her access. She slipped the flash drive into a USB port on the side of the computer and copied the files and e-mail contents of Enders’s hard drive.
It took less than five minutes.
She removed the flash drive and returned it to her purse, then repeated the process with the second flash drive in Joseph Coil’s office.
So much more convenient than rummaging through paper files in steel cabinets, Jody mused. She regarded technology as her friend.
Jody and her friend were going to see what they could learn in addition to what she already suspected about Enders and Coil. And Meeding Properties.
Safely back in her own shoebox-sized office, she had to smile. She also had to admit to herself that she enjoyed what she was doing. It wasn’t only trying to right a wrong. It was also the secretiveness, the spying, the taunting of fate. She liked figuring the odds, then proving she’d figured right by experiencing the danger and accomplishing her goal. The danger. God help her, she loved the danger.
If either Enders or Coil had caught her copying the contents of their computers, all hell would not only have broken lose, it would have run riot.
Jody understood that what she’d done was illegal, and there would be no point in pretending she hadn’t known. Not only would she have lost her internship, she would have lost all possible chances for a position at a respectable firm. If she’d been caught copying files, she probably would have been arrested and charged. After all, this was a law office.
On the other hand, the law was malleable.
42
The Happy Noodle was within easy walking distance from where Neeve had been working on the Overbite manuscript in the park. Still, she was slightly late when she walked into the restaurant for lunch with her friends and former colleagues.
Melanie, who arranged these occasional lunches, had made the reservation and was sitting at the head of the white-clothed table. Rhonda and Lavella were on either side of her. Each woman had before her a drink along with folded paper napkins, twisted red plastic swizzle sticks, and a few squeezed lime wedges.
“Train delay,” Neeve said, by way of explaining why she was fifteen minutes late. The truth was that her purse, and the heavy computer case containing the Overbite manuscript, had slowed her down, and she’d felt faint. She’d found a doorway to stand in, where the swarms of people on their lunch hour wouldn’t buffet her and she could catch her breath. She figured she might be experiencing a sugar crash, after only a doughnut for breakfast.
She’d felt around in her purse, found what was left of a wrapped Tootsie Roll, and popped the chocolate morsel into her mouth.
It did seem to help, as she proceeded more slowly to the restaurant, feeling her energy level gradually rise.
She sat down next to Lavella and placed her purse and computer case on the floor, propped against her chair leg.
Lavella was a beautiful black woman who worked as an associate editor at one of the big publishing houses. She glanced at the computer case.
“If the food server steps on that stuff, you’re gonna need a new computer,” she said.
“No computer in the case,” Neeve said. “Manuscript.”
“New thriller?”
“Vampire novel.”
“Surprise, surprise. Any good?”
“It sucks.”
The server, who looked a lot like a young Susan Sarandon, arrived. She didn’t step on the computer case, and jotted down Neeve’s order for white wine, and a fresh round of drinks for the others at the table.
The four women fell into easy conversation. They talked about the fact that Rhonda and Neeve had been forced into the ranks of the self-employed by the shrinking and consolidation of major publishers. About the encroachment of e-books. About a new book Lavella’s publisher was bringing out that claimed there was a secret government plan to cause the bond market to crash. About a launch party at a mystery bookstore. About Melanie’s new boyfriend, who used to play in the NBA and whom the other three had never heard of but pretended they had. All four women decided they liked a new bestselling thriller about a serial killer in New York. They were smart, strong women who enjoyed a good vicarious scare.
Though Neeve was a drink behind the others, she still felt slightly tipsy as they finished their lunches of soup and salads and left the restaurant. Beneath a large sign that indeed depicted a happy noodle, they wished each other luck, hugged each other, and went their separate ways.
Neeve was in a much better mood and was pleased to notice she was easily walking a straight line, so must not have drunk too much. What? Three glasses of wine? Four? Well, she’d had pasta with her drinks. Rather, drinks with her pasta—an important distinction, in Neeve’s mind.
The afterglow of drink and food was making her sleepy. By the time she’d reached her building and stood before her apartment door, she knew her plans to work some more on Overbite were going to be put on hold. A short nap was in order.
Self-employment. It has its advantages.
43
Quinn sat at his cherrywood desk in his den, reading Sal and Harold’s respective reports, wishing he could smoke a cigar. His Cubans remained unlit in a small humidor in the desk’s bottom drawer. If he actually lit one anywhere in the brownstone, even near the brownstone, Pearl would smell the tobacco smoke and bitch at him. And now a second nose was in the picture. Jody wouldn’t actually say anything to him about the scent of tobacco smoke, but she would regard him with a sad and disdainful expression that was very much like Pearl’s.
Quinn absently touched his shirt pocket where a cigar wasn’t and reflected that it would be nice if eyewitness accounts were actually as accurate and useful as they were in TV police shows and the movies.
If ifs were skiffs we all would sailors be.
Something his daughter, Lauri, used to say. She lived in California, where she was doing okay, according to her occasional letters or cards. A few times she’d sent some e-mails, with photographs of her and some guy she was dating. Gary, Quinn thought his name was. There were palm trees in the backgrounds of all the photos, as if she was trying to make a point. She’d never return to New York.
Quinn wondered i
f Lauri and Jody would get along.
Separated by a continent, it was possible that they would never meet.
Made melancholy by such thoughts, Quinn considered phoning Renz and seeing if the NYPD had any new information that might help in the investigation. It could be a good idea to remind Renz that information flowed both ways.
On the other hand, it was always annoying to talk with Renz. If Renz wanted to pass on information to Quinn, he’d call, so why should Quinn subject himself to having to listen to the conniving and ambitious commissioner?
Why would anyone willingly subject themselves to Renz? Such encounters left an odor of corruption and had a lasting effect, like radioactive garbage.
Quinn decided it would be better to feel melancholy.
Renz lay on his back in the hotel room bed, still panting. He knew if he didn’t start losing weight, sex with Olivia would kill him. He grinned. On the other hand, if he kept having sex with Olivia he was bound to lose weight. Hell, Olivia might kill a healthy man.
He could hear Olivia tinkering around in the bathroom, then the faint hiss of the shower. Renz wondered if she had another appointment booked. He knew Olivia was one of the highest-paid call girls in the city, though he never found out exactly how much she charged. That was because she was free for Renz, as long as he kept the vice squad away from the supposedly honest escort service where she was employed. It was odd, Renz sometimes thought, how the fact that no money changed hands made things different. A real relationship had developed. For Renz, anyway. He wasn’t sure about Olivia Dupree, which wasn’t her real name.
He knew her real name, and more than that about her.
Olive Krantz had been raised by strict Baptist parents in St. Louis, where she started getting into trouble with the police when she was fourteen. By the time she was eighteen, marijuana possession and peace disturbance had become breaking and entering and prostitution. Even at fourteen she’d looked more like a beautiful woman than a teenager. By eighteen she’d been devastating. And she’d devastated the lives of two mall security guards who were caught on video exchanging merchandise for sex. The woman in the grainy security camera video hadn’t been identifiable, and Olive Krantz had walked away without being charged.