“And?” Megan gently prompted.
“My Lucy stopped eating the food. She said she was fat. She was not fat. She wanted to be thin. She got too thin. Like bones, my Lucy.”
Her husband stood by mutely.
Gina Cristides brushed at another tear. “We worry.We make her eat. She make herself throw up.We read articles.We sent her to doctors. Nothing worked. She said she would deal with problem herself. Said she was getting help.”
“Who —?” Dave blurted until Megan motioned for him to shut up. He did.
“We afraid she would starve to death,” the girl’s mother said. “No. She shot to death.”
“Whom was she getting help from, Mrs. Cristides?” Megan asked, barely audible.
“She never told us.”
“What did she say about this person, Mrs. Cristides?”
The woman’s lips quivered. “She worshipped this person. This person was like a god to my Lucy. But my Lucy, she wouldn’t tell us anything.”
“I try to get Lucy to tell me,” the father said. “I was worried about who my little girl was seeing. I said to Lucy, I said this person wasn’t doing her any good. Lucy not get rid of the anorexia.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Cristides,” Dave broke in, “does the name Reuben Silver mean something to you?”
“Of course,” the father said. “He the last one to die, right?”
“I mean, did Lucy ever mention him?” Dave asked.
Both parents shook their heads.
As they left, Dave said thoughtfully, “It’s a funny thing. Carla said almost the exact same thing about Lydia. She was seeing someone she worshipped.Was Reuben capable of inspiring worship in his clients?”
“No. Reuben was a plodder. An old-fashioned paint-by-numbers social worker. His lack of inspiration, imagination, and commitment to the clientele drove Nita nuts.The best you can say is that he did his job adequately.”
“What I can’t understand is how Ace knew all the victims were clients of Reuben. We let Ace go before we asked him about that.” Dave opened the car door for her.
“Can’t you bring him back in?”
“I’m going to.” Dave circled around the car and got in on the driver’s side. “We assumed there would be files at the crisis center on the victims. That they were disguised, yet recognizable. Maybe we just didn’t focus on them. So Jamie is going to go through them again. Jamie is very thorough.”
“Is she?” Megan said, eyes straight ahead.
Dave was glad she didn’t look at him because he knew he was blushing.
The Wall Street area, situated between a church graveyard and the river, was quiet on a Sunday. Long, stray shrouds of computer paper bounced in the quiet wind along the narrow streets lined by the discreet gray facades of the financial temples.
“Nobody’s working today,” Megan said. “The markets are closed.” “The people we’re interviewing work today. And every day. Around the clock.”
A bored guard with a gold earring let them into the lobby of a building after Dave flashed his badge. “Mr. Corson of Corson & Worth is expecting us,” Dave told him.
“Give him my regards,” the guard said. “Only don’t give him none of my money. Go to the 14th floor.”
Corson & Worth had a stark, white-on-white reception area. No one sat at the front desk. Dave knocked on the inner door. Then he tried to open it. Locked.
“Why don’t you shoot it open?” Megan said with a laugh.
The door swung back on its hinges. A stout fellow in a gaudy tie and bold suspenders stood inside. The suspenders had a skulland-crossbones insignia. Behind him were rows and rows of men in shirtsleeves, talking on telephones. “Are you the detective?”
Dave introduced himself and Megan. “You’re Mr. Corson?”
“Sammy Corson. Yeah, that’s me. Here, let’s have a seat in the reception area. We don’t exactly like to have outsiders on our floor. Information is money and all that.” He spoke with the orotund assurance of someone keeping the secrets of the universe.
Dave and Megan sank into opposite ends of a chalk-white sofa. Corson leaned his fat butt against the empty receptionist’s desk and fired up a cigar. “Hope nobody minds my smoke,” he said. “Personally hand-rolled for me by the best British tobacconist in New York.”
Megan made a face but said not a word.
“Today’s busy, and I got to get back on the floor,” Corson said. “What can I do for you?”
“Your partner was Kimberly Worth, right?” Dave said.
“Yeah, and did she ever know the market. And fearless. For a woman, she sure had a pair of brass balls.” When Corson laughed, plumes of cigar smoke escaped his mouth like volcanic emissions. He waved the cigar at Megan. “No disrespect intended for your lady friend.”
“Did Ms. Worth ever mention the West Side Crisis Center?” Megan asked.
Corson spread his hands, and a heavy chunk of cigar ash fell to the floor. “Nope. She gave to a bunch of charities. Could be this was one. Beats the hell out of me.”
“Did she ever receive counseling of any kind?”
“From our lawyers? You bet.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Megan said. “I was referring to psychological counseling.”
“Kimberly? Nah. She was a woman, but she wasn’t a pussy. She didn’t need some damn shrink. Oh, we have a lot of stress in this business, all right. The stock market is war. Kimberly could stand on her own two feet, though.”
“What does your firm do, Mr. Corson?” Megan asked.
“We trade common stocks, mostly. Nothing too exotic. No derivatives. No international issues. Just plain old common that the average Joe can understand.”
“Uh-huh,” Megan said. “Mainly blue chip stocks?”
“No, no. Penny stocks, really. From companies too small or young to be listed on a major exchange.” Corson drew a circle in the air with his cigar. “We raise the money to fund the companies that will be the Microsofts of tomorrow.”
“Well, with the exchanges closed today, how much trading could you be doing?”
“Today?” Corson took a savage puff on the cigar, whose tip glowed like the most wicked plutonium. He exhaled and the smoke wreathed his head. “Oh, today we’re servicing accounts. Our staff works very hard. Money’s a garden.You have to tend it constantly or it’ll die.”
As they headed into the elevator, Dave said admiringly, “You’re up on the stock market.”
“My father was a broker. He left me stock in his will. I play the market now and then.”
“What do you make of this operation?”
“It doesn’t smell right,” Megan said. “It smells like a bucket shop. They peddle lousy small stocks to poor suckers they enlist over the phone. If you have any contacts with the Securities and Exchange Commission, I suggest you ask about Corson & Worth.”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Dave said.
Ace and Reuben. Reuben and Ace. Damn, damn, damn.
Fate had a bad effect on over-confidence. Nita realized this now. She hadn’t been able to dupe the cops with Ace. And she hadn’t been able to position Ace so she could dispose of him. Nita had spent the night in her apartment, transfixed by the fish tank, charting her next moves. Panic would be fatal. A well-thought-out strategy, based on logical assumptions, was her best course.
The new blue fish swam slowly about, large-eyed and flat, almost two-dimensional. With transparent feathers of fins, it idly moved the water. Its deliberate motions had a certain majesty.The other fish, unsure of their place or purpose in a glass-bounded universe, darted around like unstable molecules. Nita thought irrelevantly that if the blue fish were a carnivore, it very quickly would be well fed and lonely.
First, Nita drew up the logical assumptions. Ace was very afraid of her— and probably still moonstruck, as well. But he would not go to the police because he hated them and knew they wouldn’t believe him. He also likely had not left the city. From their counseling sessions, Nita was certain that he felt at
home nowhere else and fancied that he was able to hide in the city’s corners and crevices until danger passed. And judging from his delusions and intellectual vacuity, he undoubtedly had forgotten how much of his routine he had told Nita.
Next, Nita turned to the strategy. Ace must die and very soon. Although the cops probably wouldn’t credit any of his stories, there was no sense letting them or anyone else hear about her doings. As a result, she should hunt him down, searching his various haunts. Before their encounter at the playground, she had considered switching weapons, confusing the cops about who Ace’s killer was and giving her time to map out the second phase of her removals. But she planned to stay with the trusty .45: This was her gun, and she worked best with it. Big deal if the cops labeled Ace another Ladykiller homicide.
She wrapped a kerchief around her head, just as Evelyn Hernandez used to do, and popped on a pair of mirrored sunglasses. No one could see her eyes. It was a simple but effective disguise. Most people were very unobservant, and this would serve her well.
The .45 secure in her handbag, Nita set out into the buoyant Sunday. The initial stop was the sleazy rooming house off the Deuce that Ace called home. The entrance was guarded by a desk clerk, a slimy fellow with pockmarked skin and a cigarette dangling from his lips like a spent penis. He regarded her sullenly from behind his bulletproof glass.
“I need the key to Thomas Cronen’s room, please,” she announced confidently.
“Who the fuck is that?”
“Ace.”
“Oh, that hump. What you want in his room, lady? He owe you money, too?” The clerk gave a painfully dry laugh that wagged his cigarette, which seemed glued to his lower lip.
She slipped a fifty dollar bill halfway into the narrow slot at the base of the glass. “Please.”
“Shit,” the clerk said. “You got it, lady.”
“Is he up there?”
“Fucked if I know.” The clerk shoved a key through the opening and snatched the bill.
“If he comes in behind me, please don’t tell him I’m here. I want to surprise him.”
“No sweat. It’s first floor, up that flight of stairs. Number of the room is on the key.”
Ace’s hallway was a tour through one of hell’s grimmer precincts. Only one solitary bulb hung from the ceiling, an obscene appendage that shed meager light.The entire span smelled of the most pungent urine, as though minutes before, a band of extremely ill men had hosed it down. Crude drawings of enormous genitals decorated the walls. Behind one door, someone was laughing hysterically and nonstop. Behind another, two men were arguing in high-pitched voices.
“He’s mine, you faggoty little bitch.”
“Why don’t you lick my lower intestine, like you do your daddy?”
The two men started smashing against furniture and screaming. The laughing person laughed louder. Nita felt her heart pounding.
Ace’s rusty lock gave way with difficulty. He wasn’t inside. His unmade bed was a tangle of gray, yellow-stained sheets. Empty beer and soda cans and fast-food containers littered the floor. Large roaches skittered among the debris.
“I can’t wait for him here,” Nita said aloud. Later, she knew, he could be found at the Foxy Lady, but not yet. She had some time to kill.
Everyone has a place they go to in times of stress. Some retreat to their homes, to bed or a favorite chair. Others head to a park, take a certain walk, sit under a favorite tree.
When Nita emerged from the elevator lobby onto the windswept open platform, she breathed in the brisk, clean, cold air with a sigh of relief. She had never told anyone, even Megan, how often she came here. It was her place and here she could think.
Ignoring the knots of tourists who mostly clustered around the coin-operated viewing machines set at intervals around the deck, Nita climbed a narrow metal ladder set into the wall. It led to another platform above, this one not screened in by chicken wire fencing.
She approached the waist-high railing.The day was clear and she could see for miles across the crowded city from her vantage point atop one of its most famous buildings. She removed her sunglasses and scarf and let her hair blow in the wind. She tipped her face to the late afternoon sun.
She had no need for binoculars. She disdained the fools who came all the way up to the top of the Empire State Building and then squinted through a tiny aperture to get a close-up view of something down below. And, she marveled, they paid for the privilege.
She bent forward to look over the rail.Where she had come up, the platform looked onto the main observation deck. On this side, the drop was vertiginous, all the way to the street, a dizzying distance below.
She straightened and closed her eyes briefly, feeling the sun and the wind. For the first time in days she felt good, the knot of anxiety loosening, confidence in her ability to cope surging back, filling her with peace as she filled her lungs with deep breaths of cold, clean air.
“Show you the sights, lady?”
Nita stiffened and turned.The short, wiry man who had come up behind her had the dark curly hair and swarthy good looks of a young Arab. His dirty suit and stained white shirt, open at the neck to show a cheap gold chain, proclaimed him to be a street hustler. Nita gave him a cold once-over and turned back to the railing.
“Where you from? You speak English? I can show you the city, Broadway, the Bronx, New Jersey.You name it.”
Nita continued to ignore him. They usually went away if you failed to engage.
“No kidding. I show you. Where you from? Europe? France, maybe?”
When he put his nicotine-stained fingers on her arm, Nita turned slowly, looking down at his hand where it touched her. Not taking the hint, he gestured expansively with his other hand.
“No kidding. I show you. Take you shopping. Take you to a club. You like to dance? I show you.”
“No,” said Nita, “I’ll show you.” Grabbing his gesturing arm with one hand she swung it around behind him and reached up with her free hand to grab a handful of his collar. She bent him forward over the railing until she felt his feet go out from under him.
The Arab teetered precariously over the railing which caught him at the waist. His left arm was twisted painfully behind his back and her hold on his wrist and on his collar were all that kept him from plunging to the street hundreds of feet below. Helplessly he rocked forward and back, making small, high-pitched sounds in his throat, his eyes bulging wildly as his view swooped from sky to surrounding buildings to the street with its yellow cabs and blue buses the size of ants.
“Take a good look,” Nita said. “Look at the whole thing. The big picture. How do you like it?”
After a few seconds that seemed like an eternity during which he had forgotten everything, even prayer, Nita released him.
He backed away, suppressing an urge to vomit, wanting only to get out of there, get off this roof, out of this building. He backed away, rubbing his throat where his shirt had nearly strangled him, staggering a little.
Nita did not turn around. She was gazing serenely over the city again. Her city.
Ace looked longingly at Billy Ray’s beer, but lacked the gumption to ask the big man to buy him one. “She’s one crazy bitch, man. I’m telling you.”
“Well, now, crazy is how I like them.They taste better that way,” Billy Ray drawled and rewarded his oratorical effort with a long glug of suds.
“The cops took my piece,” Ace said. “I’m unarmed.”
“Little farthole like you never gonna shoot nobody,” Billy Ray said. He drank again.
“I’m serious. I done them bitches and that Reuben guy, but the cops ain’t smart enough to pin it all on me. So I’m out.” The cold beer in Billy Ray’s mug was amber ambrosia.
“Sure as shit,” Billy Ray said. “You’re one vicious, goddamn motherfucker, is what you is.” He laughed and drank some more. “What’s the bitch’s name?”
“Nita Bergstrom. Billy Ray, I can’t afford to leave town. I got no money.”
“I am totally aware of that fact.You falling in love with my beer? You keep fucking mooning over it.” Billy Ray finished his draft and signaled Tony Topnut for a refill. “She a social worker lady, right?”
Ace nodded vigorously. “West Side Crisis Center. Shit, you saw her. She was shooting at my ass.”
“Well, well. A person of the female persuasion is scaring little you to death.You are one sorry turdball.”
“She may be a woman, but she’s got a gun. And she’s real good at using it. No fucking fooling, Billy Ray.What would you do, if you was me?”
“I’d grab her popgun, rip off her fucking fancy clothes, and fuck the bejesus out of her, is what I’d do.” Billy Ray reached for the mug that Tony Topnut plopped in front of him.
Ace laughed mirthlessly. “Shit. She’d blow you away before you got near her.”
Billy Ray’s big hand grabbed him by the chin and scrunched up his lips and cheeks so Ace resembled a stricken fish. “Watch your mouth around me, boy,” Billy Ray growled. Ace made pained sounds, and Billy Ray released him. “Can’t stand no disrespect.”
Ace rubbed his jaw. “Wasn’t no disrespect, Billy Ray,” he whined. “It’s just that she scares me.”
“Scares you?” Billy Ray said derisively.
Ace saw the woman in the scarf and sunglasses at the other end of the bar. Sunglasses even in the pit-dimness of the bar. “Holy shit,” he breathed. “It’s her.”
“Huh?”
“Christ,” Ace yelped. He shoved off the barstool, which went clattering to the floor. With legs and arms flailing, he raced out the back.
With growing annoyance, Nita strode through the sleazy girlie joint, past the lowlifes lining the bar, into the back with its ladders and buckets and mops. Never taking off the sunglasses. Tripping over a box. Almost falling. Catching the fire door as it closed after Ace.
Ace was hopping and dodging as much as running. But Bergstroms were strong. Her footsteps kept pace with his along the lurid maelstrom of the Deuce. In and out of the gaggles of people. Around their slow-moving clusters. Ace up ahead, all elbows and lurching. Past the peep shows and porno movie palaces.
He skipped twice beneath a marquee advertising its double feature in blood-crimson letters: Pussy Whipped and Hot Hooters from Hell.Ace dodged into the theater’s dank mouth, bolting past the ticket window.
Ladykiller Page 17