She indicated the clock on the wall. “But by four, they usually trail off.” “Even the crazies need their sleep, eh?”
“No one is crazy, detective.” She sat at her desk and watched him. “I’d say it’s crazy to go out wandering at four in the morning.” She didn’t reply.
“Where’s Sweeney?”
“Out getting us something to eat. I asked him to go.” “You like ordering people around, don’t you?”
“What I like is for you to tell me what brings you here at this
hour, detective.”
“I’m out searching for leads on the case.”
“Well, well. So I am getting my tax-money’s worth.The detective
is still on the job. Don’t you ever sleep?”
Dave had begun to pace. He prowled around the desks, circling
Nita as they talked. “Not while a serial killer is out there, Ms.
Bergstrom. Do you think the killer ever sleeps?”
“What did you want to talk to me about, detective?” Even though
Dave was behind her now, Nita did not turn to address him, but spoke
to the place he had occupied before he started to stalk her. “Did you
really want to discuss the nocturnal habits of psychotics? Or are you working off the frustration that comes with drawing a blank during
your visit to the Cristides family?”
“Megan told you that?”
Nita could tell she finally had the better of him. “We’re close, you
know.Very close.”
Dave moved into her field of view, and he changed the subject.
“Dr. Solomon says you are a top-flight sociologist, Ms. Bergstrom.
And a very ambitious one.”
“How kind of him.Yes, I want to make a mark in my profession. I
won’t deny that.”
“Your credentials are impressive. And the number of hours you
spend with your clients is amazing.”
Nita locked her eyes onto his, as if willing him to stand still. But
he kept moving, out of her line of vision.
“You had a good look at my file, it seems, detective.Yes, urban
problems are my specialty.What better place to study them than at the
grassroots level?”
“Exactly.” His tone was ominous.
He moved into her view. “I came over tonight because I want you
to help me.”
She paused before answering. “I already am, detective. Didn’t I
go through the files for you this afternoon?”
“I don’t mean that. You really run this place. I hoped that you
could give me some insights about the people it attracts.” “I doubt you’d understand, detective. I’m sure you mean well,
and I don’t want to sound rude. But I don’t think you understand what
we do here.”
“I’d like to.”
When she didn’t answer, he tried another approach. “You interest me, Nita,” he said from behind her.
She noticed how he had shifted to using her first name. “Do I,
Detective Dillon? And how is that?”
He walked around her, again, and sat down on a desk in front of
her. Then he turned away and looked abstractedly off into the dark
part of the room as he talked. “How is that?”
“Yes, detective. How is that?” She reached for her handbag. “You figure you’re immune somehow.”
“Immune?” Nita opened the bag and slid her hand inside. “You and Megan both.You seem to think that this city is your private laboratory and that urban problems are some kind of game. Like
charades. For you to figure out.”
Nita laughed and pulled a handkerchief out of her purse. She got
up and began to prowl around the office as Dave had done, circling
him. “I assure you that we’re quite aware that the world is a dangerous
place. And that anything can happen. Anything. Look what happened
to Reuben.”
Dave’s eyes followed her as she walked. He shifted position on
the desk, never letting her out of his sight. “Maybe you’re aware.
Careful. Is Megan, though? She’s so —”
“Young, detective? Innocent? Unspoiled? Perhaps you’d like to be
the one to teach her. Show her things.”
“Maybe. Does that bother you, Nita?”
“Yes, it does bother me. I don’t want Megan to get hurt.” “No one’s going to hurt her. Least of all me.”
Nita stood above him, her face hard. “That’s wonderful. Then
we’d better not tell her about your little problem.”
“What ‘little problem’ is that?” Dave already knew the answer,
and an icy finger seemed to run along his spine.
“I think you know.”
It took Dave a few seconds to trust his voice to answer. “I was
cleared.There was an investigation, and I was cleared.”
“Yes.You were cleared.”
He hesitated. He didn’t want to sound defensive. “It’s public
knowledge. I don’t have anything to hide.” He hated the pleading tone
that had crept into his voice.
Nita went back to her desk and sat down.
“It’s all right. It’s just between us. Our secret, detective.What do
you say?”
Dave didn’t have a word to say. A predator’s smile lit Nita’s face. The phone rang, and she didn’t drop the smile as she picked up the
receiver.
“Crisis center. Can I help you?”
Dave walked down the stairs. He didn’t acknowledge Sweeney,
whom he encountered at the front door, Greek salad in hand. Or even
hear his excuses for being away from his post.
Back home, the cat cuddled in his lap and purring, Dave sat transfixed by the bloody photos of the victims on his wall. He tried to picture them in the crisis center. But his thoughts kept returning to Nita and her hard smile — and how she now had a hold on him.
Then he thought about Megan and wondered how she looked sleeping. How she would look sleeping next to him. He stroked the cat like a woman.
He fell into an uneasy sleep where he chased a laughing Megan, her pretty legs flashing as she ran, beyond his grasp.
The cat woke him in the morning with its sandpaper tongue on his cheek. Time to eat. As he scooped cat food out of a can, the cat brushed his legs in gustatory anticipation. He remembered that Jimmy Conlon had to go in early today to work some kind of low-manon-the-totem-pole news shift. So Dave would be running alone in the park this morning.
He was pulling on his running clothes when the phone rang. It was Mrs. Corrigan, his family’s neighbor in Queens.
“I don’t mean to be worrying you, Davey,” said Mrs. Corrigan, who had spent a life worrying about everything.About money (too little of it), the passing years (too many of them), the steady deterioration of the neighborhood, other people’s manners, and her own health.“But your mum’s in the hospital.”
“My God, what happened?”
“Well, the doctors don’t know.The ambulance came last night. I didn’t want to disturb you.You probably were with some girl.A young man like you. But —”
“Where is she? What hospital?”
He tooled the unmarked car over the river to Queens. His blaring siren and flashing dashboard strobe cleared the morning traffic out of the way. He spun between the iron legs of the el along Queens Boulevard and smacked the steering wheel with his palm, as if to make the car go faster through the rush-hour clog of inch-along commuters.
Within the hour, Dave was trotting down the sterile halls of the hospital. He pushed his badge into the nurses’ faces and demanded to know where his mother was.
In a private room, sitting up in bed, wearing the sour expression of someone who had eaten a
lemon.
“Ma, are you okay?” He clasped her bony hand in his.
“Of course I’m okay. I had a few chest pains, and old lady Corrigan dials 911. It’s nothing.They’re letting me out of here in an hour.”
“Mrs. Corrigan had me worried.”
“Well, if this is what it takes to get my son to visit me, I should have chest pains more often.” His mother didn’t smile. In fact, growing up, the only times he could remember having seen her smile was when she was hearing about the misfortunes of others.
“Ma, I’ve been on a case.”
“Two months it’s been since I saw you. I forgot what you looked like.”
“Stop it, Ma. Listen. I’ll take you home.”
The old lady screwed up her mouth and pulled her hand from his. “Not necessary. Mrs. Corrigan is coming for me.You should get back to your case.”
“Come on, Ma.”
She sighed theatrically. “You’re like your father. Police work, police work.That’s all he cared about.That and running around with the wrong kind of woman.”
“Ma, don’t. Let’s not talk about him.”
“When I die, make sure she doesn’t come to my funeral.The way she came to his.The cheap tramp.”
“I don’t have a clue where she is now.And what’s all this nonsense about funerals? Really, Ma.”
His mother licked her dry lips. “That cheap tramp ruined our marriage. And she killed him. If it weren’t for her, he would be alive today.What is it with men?”
Dave didn’t have an answer.
Unable to dissuade her from waiting for Mrs. Corrigan, he got back into the car and joined the slow morning parade into Manhattan. He tried to occupy himself with fantasies about Megan, but his father kept creeping in. Not his father, the teacher of police craft; his father, the strayer.The traffic’s stately rhythms — move three feet, then stop, move three feet, then stop — lent itself to contemplation.The endless red string of brake lights ahead was mesmerizing.
His father was a jovial sort who loved to tell loud jokes and drink heartily and even sing a song or two in his rich Irish tenor down at the corner bar. That’s where he met Cassie, the barmaid. She had teased hair and wore tight toreador pants with blouses that showed off her cleavage. A week after his father moved out of the house, his mother sent Dave to the bar with a message about some financial matter. “If he’s not there, that cheap tramp will be able to find him,” his mother said.
And so the bar was where Dave met Cassie too. His father wasn’t there, but Cassie greeted Dave with an earthy warmth. “You’re a fine-looking boy, just like Brian told me you was,” Cassie said from somewhere above her breasts.
Weeks later, Dave sat on a barstool, a Coke in front of him, his father and a beer beside him, and his father’s friends all around. Cassie had her back to them as she arranged newly cleaned glasses along the shelf. She bent down and the fabric stretched across the enticing globes of her butt. “That is a fine woman,” his father told Dave. “My soul belongs to her,boy.”
Detective Brian Dillon, to the dismay of his more conservative superiors and neighbors like Mrs. Corrigan, began openly living with Cassie. Mrs. Corrigan was the bearer of bad tidings and evil speculation: that Brian had bought that woman a new car, had paid for the new roof on her house, had spirited her off for an expensive vacation in Jamaica.
“Where is he getting all the money for this, do you suppose?” his mother groused to Mrs. Corrigan. “On a policeman’s salary?”
Then the Knapp Commission on police corruption convened. The high spirits left Brian Dillon.When Dave came to see his father in the bar, he was hunched over a drink by himself or talking in a low voice to a somber Cassie.Years later, Dave read the evidence against his father. It was small stuff: petty payoffs from local merchants who were eager to help out local cops anyway. There was no extortion. Brian Dillon hadn’t sold out to the Mob or anything really awful. But the day of his scheduled testimony before the Knapp Commission, Brian Dillon rested his service revolver’s muzzle against the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Lt. Blake, then a sergeant, told Dave at the funeral: “Your father was a good detective. Smart, tough, hard-working. He couldn’t stand being a disgrace to the force.”
Dave thought it was more like he couldn’t stand having his wife gloat over his disgrace.
As Dave’s unmarked car passed over the iron grillwork of the 59th Street Bridge, it hummed an odd tune. And life ground on.
Megan lay on her bed, dressed and ready to go, reading the paper. Or trying to. Her neighbors were going at it above her head, their bed creaking like a freighter in a storm.
Megan had been trying without success to suppress indecent thoughts about Dave. She wondered whether he was noisy in bed. Robin had just blown a few short gusts of air out his nose when he came.
All was quiet upstairs now. Megan folded the paper on her lap. Her buzzer sounded.
“It’s me,” Dave said over the intercom. Familiar, as if they had been going together for ages.
“I’ll be right down.” Megan checked herself in the mirror for the tenth time since she emerged from the bathroom a half hour early, ready to go. She made sure her stockings were straight under her skirt, which was shorter than the one she had worn the day before.
Dave seemed tired, dark smudges hung below his eyes. But he seemed glad to see her, and smiled broadly.When he greeted her, the way he said her name had a pleasing sound. She shivered.
“I’m fine. How have you been? You look tired.”
“I was up late working. And I didn’t get much sleep. My mother went in the hospital last night with chest pains. I raced out to Queens early this morning.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. They’re sending her home in a little while. A few chest pains. Nothing to be alarmed about. She’s a tough, old Irish lady.”They got in the car. “Are you Irish, by any chance?”
“A bit.The name is.We’re mongrels really.”
“Grow up Catholic?” he asked.
It was a prospective-boyfriend-type question. It didn’t displease her. “Presbyterian. If we get married, though, I can convert.”
They both laughed. She had no idea why she had blurted that out, but his evident pleasure over the remark dispelled her embarrassment.
“I’m glad you’re not angry at me,” he said. “Yesterday at the crisis center, it was, well, a little tense toward the end.”
“Yeah. Nita can be like that sometimes. But she is really terrific. You have to get to know her. Everyone worships her.”
Dave sped through a red light. “She have a guy?”
“Nita doesn’t need men.There’s just her work.That’s her life.”
“She’s very attractive.”
“You bet. Men meet her one time and fall madly in love with her. But she has no time for them.” Megan noticed that Dave had been admiring her legs as he dodged in and out of traffic, speeding through red lights; she felt she was in strong, capable hands. “Unlike me.”
He looked over sharply. “You must have a guy. A woman like you.”
“Not at the moment. I’ve got the crisis center, my graduate work, and Nita. No fellas.What about you?”
“I don’t have any fellas, either.” They laughed, but he answered the question.“No. I’m unattached, too.”
“I could have sworn that that detective —”
“No. Never shit where you eat —” He gulped, sorry that he had let the locker room vulgarity escape. “She’s a good detective. And a great chick. But I work with her.”
Megan smiled to herself.They drove in silence for a while.When Dave spoke his tone was darker.
“I was going out with someone for a while, but it ended badly.”
She decided not to pursue it. “Where are we going?”
“The husband of Evelyn Hernandez works at a hotel in Midtown. She was the first victim.”
“I thought Lucy Cristides was the first victim?”
; “Lucy was the first we paid attention to. Maybe, I hate to say this, because she was white.Then we linked her to an earlier, unsolved case, that of Evelyn. The third was Kimberly Worth, the stockbroker. Then Lydia Daniels, the hooker. And of course, Reuben.You can tell from the list that, at least on the surface, they have nothing in common.”
“Yes.” Megan pondered for a moment. “I haven’t seen any of them around the crisis center, but that doesn’t mean much.They could have used aliases or dressed differently. Some people are awkward about coming to visit us.”
“Do you know a client at the crisis center named Thomas Cronen? Goes by Ace.”
Megan nodded. “Sort of. He’s some kind of scam artist, a petty criminal, right? I think I can place him. Maybe.”
“He was a client of Reuben’s. I know him from the precinct. You’re right. He’s not exactly a solid citizen.”
“What was the story on Evelyn Hernandez?”
Dave turned onto Lexington Avenue. “She was the housewife. Had four kids, all of them disabled. She stayed home, in Spanish Harlem, caring for them. Her husband works the desk in a hotel.”
“Where did she die?”
“In a vacant lot beside the SPCA. You can hear the dogs in the pound around the clock. Their howling must have drowned out the gunshot. Someone spotted the body at first light.”
“They were all killed late at night?”
“Yes.”
They parked in front of the Lexington Arms. The doorman started to object that they were blocking the taxi pickup area, but Dave waved him away by flashing his badge. As they climbed the red-carpeted steps to the plush lobby, Dave said, “The Hernandezes didn’t have such a great marriage, according to their neighbors. She had bruises from where he beat her.”
“Maybe it was the pressure from all those handicapped children. The money it costs to support them is one thing. The emotional toll on the parents can be harder.”
“I guess,” Dave said. “When she died, Evelyn was one month pregnant.That was too soon for the autopsy to tell whether this baby would have been handicapped or not.”
“Her husband couldn’t have been happy about another kid coming. Are you sure he didn’t kill her?”
“Very sure. He was working the night shift when she got shot. A dozen witnesses confirmed that.” Dave strode authoritatively up to the desk and displayed his badge. “Felix Hernandez, please.”
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