Pulse

by John Lutz

  Everyone was trapped in the same isolated cabal, whether they liked it or not. No one could discuss the murder without the picture enlarging.

  After a few minutes the plane’s drone became much louder, then softer again. Schueller saw the small twin-engine craft lift above the trees to the north.

  It made a graceful, sweeping turn as it climbed, as if the pilot were considering starting an orbit around the sun. Still climbing, it disappeared in the east. The distant drone of its engines faded.

  The chancellor wished again that he was on board.

  He removed his sunglasses and turned toward the French doors leading back into the house. As he slipped the glasses into their soft leather case, and then his shirt pocket, he noticed that the lenses were rose-colored. Or maybe they were picking up sunlight reflecting off the bricks.

  Rose-colored glasses. God sending a sly message?

  The chancellor smiled. Could happen.

  It didn’t occur to him that the message might be from someone else entirely.

  Jerry Lido blew his nose into a white handkerchief, wadded the square of cloth, and stuffed it into his pocket. “Whatever dark secret there is in the little universe of subjects that you gave me to research, I didn’t learn it.”

  He was at his sometimes desk at Q&A, slumped sideways in the chair. His thin body looked as if it might snake down onto the floor any second. His hair was a tangle, his shirt was only half tucked in, and he’d slipped out of his shoes and was in his stocking feet. There was a hole in one sock. There were bags under his eyes. Quinn figured he’d been drinking.

  “I worked all night without a break,” Lido added.

  “You look as if you worked all week,” Quinn said. He walked over and poured himself a mug of coffee. “Want some?” he asked Lido, holding up his steaming mug.

  “I already had ten or twelve,” Lido said. “Stuff ’s beginning to taste like cow piss.”

  Quinn went back to where the computer whiz was sitting and stood looking down at him. “So what went wrong, Jerry?”

  “Nothing other’n that there’s protection at Enders and Coil, and at Waycliffe, like I never saw. Sophisticated stuff, and a lot of it.” Lido smiled slightly. “So much protection that there’s gotta be something there. We did learn that much. Friggin’ something exists. We know by its wake that there’s a big ship out there in the night.”

  “And it’s damned important to somebody with the technical expertise to protect it,” Quinn said. “Who has that kind of expertise?”

  “I can’t think of anyone but me,” Lido said. “That’s what’s bothersome.”

  “I admire your grandiosity.”

  “I got a right.” Lido sniffed and wiped his sleeve across his nose.

  Quinn sipped his coffee, even though it was the dregs left by Lido. The grounds made his teeth feel gritty. “You think these are the same people who hacked into our system ?”

  “I do,” Lido said, “I admit I was bragging, but not by much. Sure there are places like major-league law firms and colleges with high-tech stuff that can stymie me, but the truth is there aren’t many people who can put up barriers I can’t get around.”

  “And there aren’t many who can get around barriers you put up.”

  “We both know what that means,” Lido said. “Same big ship.”

  Jody knew she shouldn’t be at the hospital, but after giving yesterday’s lunch with Sarah a lot of thought, she decided to come anyway. Probably no one would know the difference. Even if Meeding Properties had someone keeping tabs on who came and went to visit Mildred Dash, it wouldn’t seem odd to them that a member of Enders and Coil would turn up at the hospital. So Jody told herself.

  She was given Mildred’s floor and room number at the information desk; then she made her way to the elevators.

  The temperature was a few degrees too cool for comfort, as it was in most hospitals. As the crowded elevator’s door opened on each floor, the familiar mingled scents of the hospital made their way in. It smelled as if everyone was chewing Juicy Fruit gum, and there was an underlying astringent scent like Lysol. Jody tried to block out this olfactory assault, but without much success. She wasn’t crazy about hospitals.

  Four people were left in the elevator when it reached the Cardiac floor containing Mildred Dash’s room. Jody was the only one who got out on that floor.

  She was facing a nurse’s center that was a rectangle defined by a wooden counter. Inside the rectangle there was a lot of activity involving people in white coats or pale blue nurses’ uniforms. A couple of doctors wearing green scrubs. Half a dozen people were leaning or standing at Jody’s side of the counter. There were computers on the counter, facing the interior of the rectangle. There were phones, pens and pencils, and racks with slick and colorful informational brochures.

  Jody checked a sign with an arrow on it, indicating room numbers. Mildred Dash’s was among them. She nodded a friendly hello to a nurse who was smiling inquiringly at her, then made her way down the tiled hall in the direction the arrow pointed.

  There were rooms to her left, most of them with their doors open to reveal patients lying beneath sheets. Sometimes there were pull curtains providing privacy. Several TVs were on, but with muted volume. On her right, Jody was approaching what appeared to be a spacious waiting area with chairs, sofas, and a couple of vending machines. There was a big TV there, too, mounted up near the ceiling and on mute. Somebody was playing a baseball game somewhere, but the uniforms didn’t look familiar.

  The waiting room contained over a dozen people. About half of them were sitting. The other half were at the vending machines or milling around.

  Jody broke stride in surprise.

  Among those milling around was a familiar figure in a chalk-stripe gray suit, white shirt, yellow silk tie.

  Jack Enders.

  And he was looking right at Jody.

  “What are you doing here?” Enders asked. He seemed not to know whether to smile or frown. Some of the others in the waiting room seemed to have stopped what they were doing and were staring at Jody. Waiting.

  “I got this idea I might be able to do the firm some good if I dropped by here and talked to Mildred Dash.”

  “Do the firm some good?”

  Jody shrugged. “I guess it sounds crazy.”

  Enders looked dumbfounded and tentatively angry, as if someone had unexpectedly punched him on the arm and then run away. He didn’t quite have this sorted out yet. “Jesus, does it ever sound crazy! You’re an intern, Jody.”

  “I’m trying hard to use my initiative and become something more than that. I thought that was one of the purposes of the internship.”

  Jody was working intently at this line of bullshit, but it didn’t seem to be impressing Enders.

  “To begin with,” Enders said, “you wouldn’t be able to see Mildred Dash anyway because this part of the hospital is the intensive care unit. Almost everything is kept sterile beyond this point. You can’t even leave flowers.”

  “I tried to buy some downstairs,” Jody lied.

  Enders blew out a long breath and shook his head. What, oh what, were they going to do with Jody?

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “Mildred Dash is no longer in Intensive Care.”

  Jody felt a stirring of cautious hope. “She’s been released ?”

  “She left the hospital two hours ago at the request of her family and under supervision of Hospice. I hadn’t known that when, like you, I came here to visit her.”

  Jody knew her bullshit was now drawing bullshit in return. She cocked her head to the side and fixed Enders with a stare. “And?”

  He put on a long face. “I got a call ten minutes ago saying she died shortly after returning home.”

  77

  Renz had his assistant send in Jim Tennyson immediately.

  News of Olivia’s death weighed heavily on Renz’s overworked heart. And alongside it, anger.

  Tennyson was in undercover garb and looked
like a dope peddler. He had a two-day growth of beard, greasy unkempt hair, and was wearing grimy jeans and a black T-shirt. He also had on one of those vests with a couple of dozen pockets. Everything looked as if it had just been bought at Goodwill. He was wearing a long face that didn’t fool Renz.

  “I figured you’d want to see me,” he said to Renz, “after I heard.”

  “Where’d you hear?” Renz asked.

  “Word gets around on the street. ’Specially about somebody like Olivia. She was one of Harry Primo’s stable.” Tennyson shrugged in his many-pocketed vest, as if to say, These things happen. It made Renz mad, this blasé attitude toward someone he ... something that had been his.

  “Why would you think Primo had her killed?”

  “Christ, I didn’t say I thought that. Did somebody have her killed, you think?”

  “We both know she was killed,” Renz said.

  “In a legal sense? As in homicide?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  Renz had given it some thought. Olivia had been sleeping with the police commissioner, which had been good for Olivia. And in fact good for Tennyson, who was holding the information over Renz’s head so he could convince Renz to use his influence to Tennyson’s advantage. Olivia—Renz had finally come to accept—had gone deeper and deeper into heroin and had been getting mouthy and untrustworthy. She’d become an increasing danger to the status quo. Tennyson had known that. So had Olivia’s employer, Harry Primo. Love being blind, Renz hadn’t.

  The way Olivia had died made Tennyson’s information even more potentially damaging to Renz, who could easily fall into the category of suspect. And of course Primo might have killed her to silence her.

  Renz knew he hadn’t killed Olivia, so almost surely it was one of the other two men. Or, unlikely as it seemed, her overdose really had been accidental.

  So here Renz sat, uncertain.

  One thing was for sure. It was in all three men’s interest that Olivia’s affair with Renz should fade into the past with Olivia.

  “It’s a damned shame, what happened to her,” Tennyson said. Pushing already, as if he was clean and without motive in Olivia’s death. He’d catch on soon enough that the game was mutually assured destruction. That’s what would tamp down the danger of the dead woman in the hotel room.

  Renz understood that Olivia’s death would remain a mystery. Everyone involved had to understand that. Everyone but her killer.

  “Her death should go down as accidental,” he said, not looking directly at Tennyson.

  “Wasn’t that what happened? Women like that, sometimes they just get enough of the business, and there’s no other way for them to quit. Shit bums like Primo see to that.”

  “That’s God’s truth,” Renz said. “What’s Harry Primo think of all this?”

  “Not much one way or the other. Primo loses an Olivia or two every year.”

  Renz suppressed a surge of grief and anger. “I suppose.” It was amazing, he thought, the way the truth could be bent and the past revised.

  “I was thinking it’d be nice to work plainclothes.” Tennyson smiled. “I’m getting tired of dressing like a bum and not showering. Of course, nobody’s ever completely clean.”

  “Nobody’s ever out of danger.”

  “That’s not quite the same thing.”

  “I’ll see about the plainclothes assignment,” Renz said. “Over in Queens. Plenty of white-collar investigations there.”

  “That’d be fine. Maybe you could replace me with Weaver. I been seeing her around lately, out of uniform, almost like she was tailing me. She’d make a great decoy, playing the whore. If you could keep her from actually screwing the suspects.”

  “It’s a thought.”

  “I was onto her from the beginning and she knows nothing,” Tennyson said. “I guarantee that.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “For all of us.” Tennyson hitched his thumbs into his vest and moved toward the door. Before going out, he turned. “Sorry again about Olivia.”

  Renz didn’t move for a while, thinking about Tennyson. His suggestion about Weaver was worth considering. Weaver as a decoy hooker. Like typecasting.

  78

  In the offices of Enders and Coil was what Jody could only think of as a subdued celebration.

  Mildred Dash’s death solved a lot of problems.

  Jack Enders, holding what looked like a scotch on the rocks, leaned toward Jody in passing and whispered, “Deus ex machina.” He grinned. “Know what that means?”

  “I think it’s Latin for ‘We didn’t have to kill her,’ ” Jody said.

  Enders moved away, holding the grin for her benefit.

  Joseph Coil edged up to Jody and beamed down at her. “You feeling okay? You look a little pale.”

  “My stomach’s a bit upset,” Jody said.

  “The excitement, maybe.” He took a sip of whatever he was drinking. It looked like water. “Listen, Jody, I know this case was of particular interest to you. That you even had a special sympathy for Mildred Dash. You might find it difficult to believe, but we all felt that way about her. At least most of us.”

  “The law is the law,” Jody said.

  Coil looked at her seriously. “No, Jody, it isn’t.”

  Dollie the receptionist squeezed past them, bumping Coil’s elbow so some of his drink spilled on Jody’s arm. Unaware that she’d caused the problem, Dollie continued on her way.

  Coil took the napkin he’d been using to hold his glass and patted Jody’s arm dry.

  “You do look rather peaked,” he said. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? Rest up. Give it a new start tomorrow.”

  Jody smiled at him and nodded. There was no way to dislike this man on a personal level, even if he was a highway robber.

  “I think I will,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Take in a show tonight,” Coil suggested. “Forget about this.”

  “Maybe I will. Something with a happy ending.”

  “It all depends what kind of ticket you buy,” Coil said, raising his glass to her and showing her his back.

  Meaning my future is my choice.

  Everything everybody said in this place seemed to have at least a double meaning. As if life were a courtroom and their words would be reviewed on appeal, and God help them if they were too honest and plainspoken.

  Jody was getting tired of that delicate verbal dance and the alertness and dexterity it demanded.

  What the hell aren’t they telling me?

  She didn’t go out to a play or swoon into a faint after leaving the firm’s ghoulish celebration. Where Jody went after leaving Enders and Coil was to the Meeding Properties demolition site.

  Meeding had obviously been prepared and wasted no time. Mildred Dash’s possessions had been removed from her apartment and put in storage, in case an heir chose to claim them. Where her apartment had stood was nothing but a cracked concrete slab.

  The development company seemed to have sprung to work only moments after Mildred’s death. No doubt on the advice of Enders and Coil, they’d made sure the deed was done before any possible sort of stay could be issued.

  The block-long wound in the landscape was now unbroken by anything higher than three feet. Yellow bulldozers were scooping up dirt and debris and dropping it into the beds of sturdy-looking trucks. The trucks bounced and shuddered as each mass of weight suddenly crashed down with the metallic clang of the dozer blades. Then they emitted much roaring and clouds of dark exhaust and drove away. Workers in hard hats stood off to the side, leaning on shovels and conferring like wise men witnessing some solemn event.

  Well, they were right about that. The end of Mildred Dash’s long struggle, everything she’d fought for being devoured by yellow monsters, was indeed somber. Unfair and final and debasing. As far as the eye could see was the mud of defeat.

  A short, heavy woman with a round, seamed face like a withered apple approached Jody. She was wearing joggers, je
ans, and a T-shirt. At first Jody assumed she was one of the workers and was too careless to wear her hard hat. She looked familiar, but Jody couldn’t place her.

  “The hospital waiting room this morning,” the woman said, seeing that Jody was searching her memory. “We weren’t introduced. I’m Iva Dunn, Mildred Dash’s niece.”

  “Jody Jason.”

  “I know who you are,” Iva Dunn said. “And I know of your concern about Mildred losing her apartment.”

  “I thought she had a legal right to live there. Or at least to slow down the process of eviction so she had some kind of leverage.”

  “She did slow it down,” Iva said, with a glance at open space where the apartment building had stood.

  “But not enough.” Jody pointed. “Look at them, like voracious monsters eating up the past and the future.”

  “I just see machinery,” Iva said.

  Jody shook her head. “I see defeat.”

  “I thought you might. That’s why when I saw you I came over here. Not just to thank you for your efforts, but because you really should believe that Mildred won her battle.”

  Jody looked at her, confused. Iva Dunn seemed serious. Joseph Coil was so right about the truth being complicated. “How so?” she asked. “The building is gone, along with her apartment. Let’s face it; the developer got lucky and Mildred died instead of hanging on for weeks or months. It no longer remains necessary to physically remove her from where she lived for over twenty years, or to stop the demolition.”

  Iva gave her that knowing smile again. “It was never Mildred’s intention to actually stop the demolition. Or even to delay it all that much.”

  “I understand that. But still and all ...”

  “Mildred knew she’d be gone within weeks. If she had to die soon, she wanted to die here. And she got her wish. Believe me, Jody, she won.”

  Jody looked again at the yellow dozers scooping up the debris of a life, of so many lives, claimed not by corporate progress but by time. Simple and inexorable time.