“You suppose we could talk without the competition?”
“Uh, sure.”
Using the remote to stop the tape and blacken the screen, Cotter dropped into a chair. One leg slung over the armrest, the other stretched out on the floor, his own arms lazing along the back and down one side of the chair. A little too perfect to be anything but a pose.
“You have any idea why I’m here?”
Cotter seemed confused again, the vapid look from his comp card. “Uh, no. Why, should I?”
It might be an act, or he might just be dense as a post. “I’m investigating the death of Mau Tim Dani.”
That broke the pose. I thought I was going to have to deal with the “Kuh-rah-tay” Kid again.
He said, “You find the guy yet?”
“The guy who killed her?”
“Yeah, the guy who killed her. That’s what you do, right? Find the killer when the cops are too stupid.”
Too much time in front of the tube. “Not always. She have any enemies you know of?”
“Enemies? Mau Tim?” He seemed to try to think for a minute. “She got killed by some druggie breaking in, right?”
“We don’t know that.”
The idea seemed to dawn on him all at once. “You mean, like she was really murdered?”
As opposed to sort of murdered. “It’s a possibility.”
“Oh, man. This is too much.”
The head shook, but the hair stayed put. I waited him out.
Cotter looked up at me, suddenly red-eyed. “Man, she was so beautiful, who’d want her dead?”
“Maybe somebody who was jealous of her. Or jealous of her boyfriends.”
The eyes cleared. “You son of a bitch.”
Cotter came out of the chair, but this time I was up at the same count. He whipped the right foot at me in a backhand motion, but not the way you should, not as a feint for another move. Stepping toward him, I parried with my right forearm, catching the leg at the calf and wrapping it tight under my right armpit.
Cotter had just enough sense of balance to stay up on his left leg. He was frustrated, pogo-sticking to maintain equilibrium against the edge of pain at his right knee.
I said, “You know, Quinn, it takes only about twenty pounds of pressure to dislocate a joint.”
“I can hit you … ten times … fuckhead!”
“Yeah, but I don’t see you hopping your way onto TV.”
It finally sank in. “Okay. Okay, let me go.”
I released his leg and stepped away. He did too, posturing until he was ten feet from me. I sat back down, and after flexing, he did too.
I tried to be conversational. “The police talked to you, right?”
“Some cop called me, asked if I saw her that day. I told him no. Then he asked where I was that day. I told him here, watching videos. He said, ‘All day and all night?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I like videos.’ Then he said, ‘Okay, thanks,’ and hung up.”
“That’s it?”
“Huh?”
“That was it, no personal visit?”
“Uh, no. No, just the call.”
I thought about Holt, sitting behind his desk, diverting his people to other cases once he found out Mau Tim Dani was Tina Danucci.
I said, “You ever go to Mau Tim’s apartment building?”
“Sure.”
“How often?”
Cotter looked uncomfortable. “Couple times.”
“You ever in her apartment itself?”
“Uh, no.”
“You were at her—”
“I was over seeing Sinead, okay? I like brought her the spare keys once, but we were just friends.”
I thought about that last flight of the fire escape again. “What spare keys?”
“Lots of us leave a set at the agency, in case something comes up when we’re doing a location shoot somewheres.”
“And the agency had a set of Mau Tim’s keys?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I mean, I don’t know. I’m talking about Sinead’s keys.”
“Sinead’s.”
“Yeah, like to the front door of the house and her apartment. Sinead forgot her keys one day, okay? And she called the agency from a shoot down by the waterfront, and I was at the agency, so George gave me her keys and I met her at her place to let her in.”
“George Yulin gave you Sinead’s keys.”
An exasperated look. “Right.”
“You didn’t make a copy of the front door key?”
“Hell, no. Why’d I do that?”
“And you were never in Mau Tim’s apartment?”
“No.”
“How come?”
Cotter tensed a bit, then tried to look casual. “She didn’t ask me up, okay?”
“You ever ask her out?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I asked her out. I ask a lot of the girls out. They ask me, too. Women’s lib, okay?”
“But Mau Tim—”
“Look, man! Let me save you some time. Mau was a great-looking chick, okay? But she just didn’t dig me. I wasn’t exotic enough for her.”
“Exotic?”
“Right. She went for different people, not the All-American halfback.”
I wondered if other models thought of themselves as being what their business typed them. “But Sinead invited you to the party she was having for Mau Tim’s birthday.”
“She invited me before she found out another guy was coming. Sinead didn’t want to embarrass me, okay, so she called me and said maybe it wouldn’t be such a great idea for me to show up Friday night.”
“And so you stayed home.”
“Right.”
“Watching videos.”
“Right.”
“Alone.”
“Most of the night.”
“Who was with you?”
“None of your business.”
It seemed an odd place to turn turtle. I was about to try a different angle when I heard a heavy door open and close and a familiar voice call out, “Quinn? Quinn, you home?”
A little color drained from Cotter’s face. “In the TV room.”
As footsteps approached down what seemed a long hallway, the voice said, “Whose car is that in the drive?”
Before Cotter could answer, George Yulin appeared in the doorway, a briefcase with shoulder strap like Nancy’s riding on the saddle of a tweed sports jacket today.
“His,” said Cotter.
Yulin didn’t say anything.
I said, “Join us.”
Yulin came into the room slowly. He let the briefcase slide off his shoulder and onto the floor, watching me as he rested his rump and palms against the back of a chair. “What are you doing here?”
“My job.”
“Which is?”
“Still the same. I’d appreciate your explaining to Quinn the importance of cooperating with my investigation.”
Yulin looked at Cotter, who said, “George, you know this asshole?”
Yulin winced at the last word. “Mr. Cuddy is processing a claim we have arising from Mau Tim’s death, Quinn. We have an obligation to cooperate with him.”
Cotter stood up defiantly. “Maybe you do. I’m going for a ride.”
He crossed the room and left. Very athletically.
Yulin looked down at me. “I’m sorry, John, but we’re just Quinn’s agents, not his parents.”
“You’re rooming with him?”
From down the hall came the sound of the heavy door slamming. Yulin went over to a bar. “Drink?”
“I’ll pass.”
He took out a tall glass and an opaque bottle. Yulin splashed liberally from the bottle into the glass, not bothering with ice or mixer. He snuffled over the drink, then downed half of it. “Single malt.”
“Whiskey?”
“Right. Smooth as silk, with a bouquet you can appreciate best with a tall glass. Now, what was your question?”
“I asked you if you’re rooming with Cotter.�
�
“In a manner of speaking. Quinn’s under contract to house-sit this place.”
“He seemed a little reluctant to admit you lived here, too.”
“I believe the real estate company that hired Quinn prefers … single occupancy.”
“Who owns the house?”
“Some wealthy investor who decided to take a sabbatical. Isn’t that a super idea? Just disappear for a while, travel and refresh oneself.”
There was the sound of a cycle revving, just audible through the solid walls of the house. Then a high whining sound that faded quickly.
I said, “So you’re kind of sub-sitting?”
Yulin looked at me, then smiled. “I see. ‘Sub-sitting’ instead of ‘sub-letting.’ Clever, John. But no. I decided to rent out my own place for a while, try living in a different environment. My own quasi-sabbatical, you might say.”
“Or your own quasi-cash-shorts, I might say.”
Yulin pursed his lips. “Close enough.” He downed the rest of the glass and went back to the bottle.
“How tight are things for you, George?”
“Tight.” He splashed the whiskey again. “Ever since the Massachusetts Miracle started turning to clay, things have looked down. Oh, we still have bookings for the campaigns that were already underway. But both Erica and I can see the dark at the end of the tunnel, at least short-term.”
“Which made Mau Tim all the more important to you.”
“Yes.” A cautious sip this time. “Yes, frankly she’d been a savior over the last few months. You see, we service mostly the smaller agencies. Advertising agencies, I mean. The bigger ones, like Hill, Holliday, they do three, four hundred million in billings a year. But the smaller ones, they’re hurt most by the downturn. They’re the ones the jittery clients leave for the safer harbor of the bigger firms. Then come layoffs, and, well, fewer phone calls to modeling agencies like ours.”
“How’s Larry Shinkawa’s firm doing?”
“Quite well, surprisingly. Berry/Ryder is riding the crest of what business there is right now.”
“I understand Quinn was pretty upset about losing out on a job Shinkawa was placing through you?”
Yulin started to take another cautious sip, stopped, then took a gulp. “Who told you that?”
“How upset?”
Yulin clacked his tongue off the roof of his mouth. “Quinn is excitable. It’s sincere if a bit shallow of him. But that’s what comes across so well in his shoots.”
“But not well enough for Shinkawa.”
“John, Larry Shin is …” The last sip. “Larry Shin is a very shrewd man in a very tough business. He likes to make things personal and does it well enough to cover himself. Quinn was perfect for the running-wear shoot. I thought so, and Erica agreed. I’m sure even Larry thought so, but depriving Quinn of the shoot was Larry … tweaking Quinn with his power, tweaking him in a way that Quinn has to swallow, and knows he has to swallow, to continue to prosper in this business. Besides, as I told Quinn, Larry will probably pick him for more shoots now, just to make the point that he was only making a point the first time.”
“That why you forgot to mention Cotter to me when we were in your office?”
“You asked me, I believe, about Mau Tim’s ‘boyfriends.’ I never thought of Quinn that way.”
“Seems to me he was nuts about her.”
“Perhaps. But that didn’t make him her ‘boyfriend’ in my book.” Yulin gestured with the empty glass. “If you’ve already worked your way around to Quinn, you must be nearing the end of your investigation.”
“Not quite. Quinn told me something else I didn’t know.”
“What was that?”
“You had a set of Sinead’s keys at the agency.”
“Probably still do. So?”
“I don’t remember your mentioning that in your office either.”
Yulin set down the glass. “I don’t remember your asking me about keys, John.”
“I was investigating Mau Tim being killed in her apartment. You had a key to the building, but you didn’t tell me that.”
“We’d heard that a burglar broke in. I didn’t—and frankly, I still don’t—see why keys are important. But yes, some of the models like to keep a spare set nearby, so we do have some in a petty-cash box at the agency.”
“Sinead’s, but not Mau Tim’s.”
“Correct.”
There was something wrong about that, but I couldn’t quite touch it. “At your office, George, you said you went home the night Mau Tim died.”
“Also correct. After that ad party and some pub crawling, I came back here.”
“When did you arrive?”
“Oh … ten? I wasn’t paying much attention, and Quinn was watching video, not TV, when I got in, so I can’t even peg it by what was on the screen.”
“Thorough.”
Yulin darkened. “What was that?”
“I said thorough. Very thorough of you to think all that through in answering a simple question.”
“Yes, well, I tend to do a lot of time management, John, both for myself and my models. It’s tough to leave some things at the office, you know?”
“Speaking of leaving, I found something else out this afternoon.”
“I’m glad to hear it’s been a productive day for you.”
“It seems a lot of people think Mau Tim was about to pull the ripcord, George.”
His face darkened again, and he reached for the whiskey bottle. “Ripcord?”
“She was bailing out. Moving to New York and changing agencies.”
The neck of the bottle rattled against his tall glass. “You don’t know that because it isn’t true.”
An article of faith that Yulin couldn’t recant. I stood up. “Give Quinn my regards.”
As I moved to the French doors, Yulin said, “John?”
“Yes?”
“We seem to have … We don’t appear to be on the same wavelength today. My fault—the single malt, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t worry about it, George.”
“No, seriously. If there is anything I can do to … facilitate this process, please let me know.”
I nodded without saying anything more and made my way out.
Seventeen
“JOHN, WHAT HAPPENED?”
“I fell and banged my chin.”
Standing in her living room and still dressed from work, Nancy reached up a hand, turning my face just a little under the light. “Looks more like assault and battery with a shod foot.”
“You’ve got quite an eye, counselor.”
“After a while. What really happened?”
“I’m not sure how much I should tell you.”
Nancy cocked her head, the hair still drawn back by a silver barrette.
“I promise, Nance, I’m not doing anything over the line. It’s just that it has to do with an open homicide.”
“The Suffolk one from Empire?”
“Right.”
Nancy frowned, the corners of her mouth knitting crosslines all the way up to the hairline. Then she nodded. In acceptance rather than agreement. “I’m going to cook us dinner.”
“I was ready to take you out to eat.”
“I’ll be in Dallas restaurants both tomorrow night and Saturday. I’d like a meal in my own home as a send-off.”
I took her chin in my hand. “You shouldn’t try to live by bread alone, counselor.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“Another thing. I’ve been thinking about what you told me on your birthday.”
“The bank robbery? The jury convicted him this morning.”
“No, I meant what you showed me at the Ritz.”
“What I … ?”
“About the sensitive spots. On the palm, the fingertips, the thumb.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve come up with a few more.”
“Really.”
I moved my hand to the back of her open collar. “Ther
e’s this one, stroking the little hairs at the nape of the neck.”
Nancy closed her eyes. “So far, so good.”
I moved my hand again. “Then there’s the earlobe. Just a gentle, milking motion.”
“Would it be rude to moo?”
I moved my hand a third time. “Then the lips. The back of the fingernail’s best here.”
Nancy ran the tip of her tongue along my finger.
“Unfortunately …” I cleared my throat. “Unfortunately, the other spots I thought of aren’t yet … accessible.”
Nancy undid her barrette, the hair tumbling down. “Make them accessible.”
Nancy’s hand snaked from under the sheets, turning her alarm clock so she could see its face. “Damn. I should have put the cutlets on ahead of time.”
“Would have killed the mood.”
She snuggled back against me. “As one of the guys at the office is fond of saying, you couldn’t have killed that mood with a stick.”
“Madam, such vulgarity.”
“Sorry.” Nancy sighed. “I really miss him.”
“Renfield.”
“Who else?”
“Did you check on him today?”
“I called twice. He came through the operation fine, but when I asked if I could visit, they said he was still sleeping from the anesthesia and that it was best not to wake him.”
I thought back on my times in human hospitals, where they didn’t seem to share the same compunction.
Nancy said, “You’ll still be able to pick him up tomorrow?”
“A promise is a promise.”
“They said any time after three-thirty and before six, but I really hate to think of my kitty being there any longer than he has to be.”
“I’ll be scratching at their door by three-thirty-one.”
“Poor little guy. I had them hack off his nuts because he was spraying my furniture and his front toes because he was shredding it. Now what’ll he think?”
“I’m pretty sure cats don’t dwell much on motivation and consequence, Nance.”
She shifted a little off the arm before it fell asleep. “Did I tell you last night that it wasn’t your fault? That he was born with this problem.”
“Among other things.”
“God, I was so drunk.”
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