Mister X fq-5

by John Lutz

Her bracelets.

  Her son!

  She opened the door and climbed out of the car without thinking, barely aware of the movements of her body. The gentle rain was cool on her face.

  Jerry had turned around and was staggering back toward the club’s entrance on his high heels, toward his friends, who were staring at him with puzzled and amused expressions.

  “Jerry!” Miriam heard her voice call.

  He tried to walk faster and stumbled, almost fell.

  “Jerry! Goddamn you!” Miriam began to run. She knew what she was doing now, had her wits about her, and she was furious. That her own son should do this to her was unthinkable. It couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t be true. Yet there was the proof right in front of her, in a blond wig and high heels. Her heart was like an engine pumping rage through her blood.

  She caught up with Jerry right outside the door, beneath the brown canopy. The people who were clustered there-some of them women, others up close obviously not women-moved back in stunned silence.

  Miriam grabbed the back of her cocktail dress and ripped it as she yanked Jerry back. He tottered on the high heels and fell. Lying on the wet sidewalk, he stared up at Miriam with made-up eyes, lipsticked mouth. His blond wig had slipped sideways and appeared about to fall off. His mascara was running.

  Miriam spat at him, then kicked him hard in the side.

  Jerry scrambled to his feet, wearing only one shoe. Miriam shoved him hard toward the car. He opened his mouth to complain, and she shoved him again.

  “Mom-”

  “Fucking pervert!” She struck at him with her fists. Pushed! Hit! Pushed! Hit! Moving him toward the car. Pushed! Hit! The other shoe had fallen off, and he held his hands over his head and the blond wig, his body bent so low to avoid the blows that he was almost duckwalking.

  Miriam opened the passenger-side door and shoved him inside the car. He shut the door himself. Anything to stop the rain of blows her clenched fists and tired arms continued to launch with the force of her disgust and desperation.

  After stomping around to the driver’s side of the car, Miriam screamed at the people near the club entrance. “Fucking perverts!” It was all she could think of to shout. The objects of her insult merely stared at her, as if there were something wrong with her. A few of them laughed.

  The car’s engine had died, and it took three tries to get it started. Finally Miriam crammed the shift lever into drive and spun the tires on the wet pavement.

  As the Taurus sped past the club entrance, Miriam saw almost all laughing faces now. One of the women shouted at her and raised her skirt high with both hands. She, or he, was wearing nothing underneath but black net pantyhose. Miriam had pantyhose like it at home in her dresser drawer. She glanced over at Jerry’s drawn-up legs. They were clad in black net pantyhose.

  “Why?” Jerry’s mother asked him, driving automatically and retracing her route out of town. “For God’s sake, why?”

  Jerry didn’t answer.

  “Your father,” she said. “Where was your goddamned father? This is his fault!”

  Neither Jerry nor his mother exchanged another word all the way back to Holifield.

  They managed to get inside the house without anyone seeing them. Miriam hoped. There were some nosy people in this neighborhood. People who peeked through windows.

  Miriam made Jerry remove his-most of them her-clothes, and then climb onto his bed on his hands and knees. He was so embarrassed, so demolished by what had happened, that he couldn’t offer even token resistance. He was a little boy again.

  She got a thick leather belt that had been her husband’s from the closet and whipped Jerry’s buttocks and the backs of his thighs until she was exhausted. Neither of them said anything while this was transpiring. Jerry did not so much as whimper.

  Afterward Jerry’s mother sat in front of the TV in the living room and began to drink gin. Before her on the television screen was an old black-and-white movie, Humphrey Bogart kissing Ingrid Bergman. Jerry’s mother seemed more interested in her bottle.

  Jerry waited until she was sleeping soundly on the sofa before he packed a suitcase and crept from the house.

  He didn’t leave a note.

  He never returned to Holifield.

  60

  New York, the present

  Norton Nyler was the computer nerd from the NYPD. He’d brought his laptop to the office on West Seventy-ninth to demonstrate the program he’d developed to narrow the list of C and C clients who might have met with Lilly Branston and then killed her.

  He was a short, chubby guy in his twenties, with a scraggly little mustache and an errant lock of dark hair that made him look like an obese actor portraying young Adolf Hitler.

  “I’ll download all this to your computers when I’m done demonstrating it,” he said. His voice was surprisingly screechy. Quinn and his detectives gathered round and exchanged uneasy glances. Pearl was the only one of them who possessed better than basic computer skills. Of course, she wasn’t in the same league as young Hitler.

  “You do have your computers networked, don’t you?” Nyler asked.

  Quinn shrugged. “I, uh-”

  “We don’t think so,” Pearl said.

  Nyler looked at her strangely, then must have seen something in her eyes and looked away. “No matter. I can check after I’m done here and we can deal with it.” He grinned hugely, and Hitler disappeared. “Whatever issues you might have, we can deal with them.”

  Quinn wondered if anyone had problems anymore instead of issues.

  With what looked like a surgeon’s pale fingers, Nyler worked his laptop’s cursor and keyboard, and up popped thumbnail shots of about twenty male C and C clients. “I used certain protocols to zero in on the clients most likely to get in touch with the victim; then I further honed the list by pinpointing those clients the victim herself might have initially contacted in hopes of a prospective romance.”

  Pearl thought, You little old matchmaker.

  “To hone the list even more, we factored in geography,” Nyler said. “Then came the hard part. It was tedious and time consuming, but we obtained most of the remaining clients’ addresses. Sometimes we had to rely on Homeland Security; sometimes the names and addresses were simply in the phone book.”

  “You should have been a detective,” Fedderman said.

  Nyler glanced over at him. “I am.”

  My God, Pearl thought, the new breed.

  Nyler brushed back his fuehrer lock of dark hair from his forehead and got back to business. “I overlaid a city map marked with the addresses and sites where the murders occurred.” He right-clicked his computer’s mouse, and a detailed map of Manhattan came on screen. The image grew larger as he zoomed in to Midtown and South Manhattan.

  “There are seven suspect C and C clients living in near juxtaposition to the murder sites,” he said. The cursor danced and blinked over one flagged address after another, and information, names, and addresses of seven men came on the screen.

  “Are you saying one of these men is probably the Carver?” Quinn asked.

  “No. I’m saying that of the C and C clients on the final list, the circumstances of personality, compatibility with the victim, appearance, age, and geography make these men the most logical for you to contact first.”

  “Does it make sense that they’d kill close to home?” Pearl asked.

  “Close, no. But it also doesn’t make sense that they’d kill farther from home than necessary. Everyone, even serial killers, tends to fall into patterns. Even a cautious killer will leave their house or apartment and turn either right or left most often, take a subway or cab or bus or not. Eat and shop at some of the same places. If they’re driving, they’ll avoid certain one-way or narrow streets, heavy traffic, or predictable long-term construction delays. In short, we all unconsciously choose the easiest route to wherever we’re going. We seldom unnecessarily go out of our way, even while going somewhere to commit murder.” He looked at each of his listene
rs in turn. “Remember, we’re only discussing probabilities here.”

  “Possibilities,” Pearl said.

  “Okay,” Nyler said. Again the un-Hitler smile that made him look like a mischievous child. Had the real Hitler smiled like that? “Odds,” he said.

  “We don’t even know for sure it was a C and C client who killed Branston,” Quinn said.

  “Well, it’s an imperfect world,” Nyler said. “And difficult to predict. I’m just trying to chart you the easiest possible way to get where you want to be.”

  “Like the killer choosing a victim,” Fedderman said.

  “Or the victim moving toward her killer. Starting at any of those seven addresses, and the victim’s address, my computerized victim and killer should think and act somewhat in conjunction, whether they know it or not.”

  “And you came to this conclusion by starting at the crime scenes and working backward,” Pearl said.

  “Er, not exactly. But yes, that’s pretty much how it works.”

  “That’s how we work,” Quinn said.

  “There you go,” Nyler said.

  “Whaddya think?” Pearl asked when Nyler had gone.

  “I think it’s mostly bullshit,” Quinn said, “but we oughta go to those seven addresses and talk to those seven guys.”

  “Funny if they turn out to be seven brothers looking for brides,” Fedderman said. “Or three feet tall, like in Snow White. Hey, maybe I’ll get Dopey.”

  “I get him all the time,” Pearl said.

  Quinn gave her his warning look.

  “If they have something else in common,” Pearl said, “it’ll give me more confidence in Nyler and his computer program.” She gave Quinn a look to let him know she was dubious about this turn in the case. “It seems to me this is a good job for Vitali and Mishkin.”

  “No,” Quinn said, “I’d rather have them looking for the real Chrissie Keller. Besides, you’re the closest thing we’ve got to Snow White.”

  61

  Pearl drew a guy named Fred Levin who lived on Fifth Avenue near the park. It was an impressive address. Everything in the lobby was drastically oversized, as if to make smaller and intimidate anyone who happened in uninvited. She showed the six-foot-plus doorman one of the badges given out by Renz, and he called up and explained to Levin that she was a detective.

  Levin told the doorman to send Pearl up, and after signing in to the building she rode the big elevator to the big seventeenth floor.

  The hall was carpeted in rich brown that felt a foot thick under Pearl’s feet. The apartment doors were cream colored and gilded, with gleaming curled brass handles rather than knobs. One of the doors down the hall was open, and a medium-height, slender, dark-haired guy was standing just outside it smiling at Pearl. He was wearing tight designer jeans and a white golf shirt with a turned-up collar. From this distance, he appeared quite handsome.

  Fred Levin wasn’t a disappointment close up. He had chiseled features with full lips for a man, and a head of wavy black hair. His dark eyes took in Pearl with obvious interest. She saw that he was wearing leather deck shoes without socks. He was thirty-five, according to Pearl’s information, but he might have passed for twenty-five. Pearl thought smoldering would describe him pretty well. Maybe there was something to this C and C operation.

  She introduced herself, and they shook hands.

  “You’re a detective?” he asked, as she approached. “Like on Law and Order?”

  “Uh-huh. Just like.”

  Levin stepped aside so she could enter, then closed the door and motioned for her to sit on a light tan leather sofa. There were matching chairs and a low coffee table the size of a small airport. Works of modern art hung on the walls. They were mostly prints, but a few were definitely oils, and something about them suggested they’d been carefully chosen.

  Pearl sat. “Nice apartment.”

  “I hired a decorator,” Levin said. “A few years ago, when things were going well.”

  “Things aren’t going well now?” Pearl asked.

  Levin shrugged. “You know, Wall Street. I worked for Lehman Brothers, and then a smaller firm after Lehman went under. Five months ago the smaller firm went under.”

  “So you’re unemployed?”

  He smiled. “‘Fraid so. But the smaller firm ran hedge funds and I walked away with scads of money, so unemployment doesn’t stop me from offering you something to drink.”

  “These hedge funds were legal?”

  “Barely. Coffee? Something stronger?”

  “Water would be good,” Pearl said.

  She watched him walk into the kitchen. So slender and athletic. On a tall bookcase near a window was what looked like a skiing trophy.

  “You ski competitively?” she asked, when he returned with a tumbler of water with crushed ice in it.

  “Used to,” Levin said. “Downhill slalom. Till I tore up one of my knees a few years ago.”

  “That’s too bad.” Pearl sipped her ice water. She remained on the sofa. Levin remained standing. “Do you recognize this woman?” she asked, and stretched out an arm to hand him a photograph of Lilly Branston.

  She watched his handsome face as he studied the photo. If he did recognize Branston, there was no sign of it.

  He handed the photo back to Pearl. “She looks vaguely familiar, but I don’t think I know her.”

  “Her name’s Lilly Branston.”

  He looked a little less blank.

  “She’s the Carver’s latest murder victim.”

  He looked genuinely surprised and then smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Jesus! Yes. Of course. I think I might have seen that photo-or one like it. There’s a bulletin board in the subway stop. It’s got her name and photo on it. Said something about her being missing, I thought.”

  “No,” Pearl said, “must be another woman on the subway wall. Lilly Branston isn’t missing. We know right where she is-in the morgue.”

  Levin made an ineffective pass at looking appropriately grieved, and then he appeared puzzled.

  “What?” he asked. “I should care more than I do?”

  “I don’t know how much you care.”

  “Not much, tell you the truth. Of course I feel sorry for the victim, but I don’t get overemotional about that kind of thing. I mean, about a woman I never met. Is there some connection with me? Did she live around here?”

  “Not far away.” Pearl placed her water glass on a cork coaster, part of a stack placed for convenience on the coffee table. The table was oak and gave the impression that it might be antique and expensive. “Have you ever used the services of an Internet matchmaking company called Coffee and Conversation?”

  She watched the changes in his eyes. He was thinking furiously. Wondering how he might possibly be involved. Or wondering how to lie so he’d seem uninvolved.

  “That Lilly Branston!” he said.

  “The dead one,” Pearl said.

  “She was next on a list of women I was going to get in touch with.” Levin began to pace, three steps this way, three back, swiveling neatly on the plush carpet. The leather soles of his deck shoes looked as if they’d never been outside. “I didn’t mean to lie to you. It came to me gradually who she is. Was. Lately I’ve looked at a lot of photos of a lot of women.”

  “So you’ve met a number of women through Coffee and Conversation.”

  “No, only two. I’m very selective. I’ve been divorced for three years. I’ve learned to be careful about my relationships. Maybe too careful.” He made a sweeping motion with an arm to take in the vast, well-furnished living room. “As you can see, I’m what you’d call more than reasonably wealthy.”

  “You’re concerned that women might be after your money instead of you?”

  “Yes. But only insofar as they might turn out to be a waste of my time. Fact is, I wouldn’t want a woman who didn’t at least take my wealth into consideration. I like very smart, very aggressive women. When I saw that Lilly Branston was a real est
ate agent with the Willman Group, I knew she had to be both those things.” Levin tried a smile. “Have you ever noticed how aggressive female real estate agents are?”

  “Like female cops,” Pearl said.

  He gave her a speculative up-and-down look. “I do read the papers. It’s interesting that a cop who’s the serial killer’s type-and quite beautiful, I will add-is searching for the monster. Kind of like the baitfish seeking the shark.”

  “We won’t go to that part of the ocean,” Pearl said. “We were talking about your search for a soul mate.”

  “Yes. Anyway, what I liked about Coffee and Conversation was that, if things didn’t work out after your first meeting, there were no loose ends. I mean, nobody had anybody’s address or phone number. Maybe not even their real name. They had only rudimentary information, and maybe the photo that was on the C and C website, and that was it. Nobody was going to���”

  “Stalk you?”

  “Not so much that. More cling to me. I’ve found women to be clingy.”

  “You’re not short on ego.”

  “No, I am not. But I do attract women on the hunt. That’s why the C and C concept appealed to me. You contact C and C, and if the other party is willing, they set up a time and date for coffee and a get-acquainted meeting. You are literally strangers when you meet. If either of you so chooses, you can keep it that way.”

  “Did your meetings with the first two women on your list go any further than caffeine and conversation?”

  “No. I think I was way too aggressive for them.”

  “You didn’t mention their names.”

  He gave Pearl two names that she jotted in her notepad. She would check later and make sure they were C and C clients.

  Pearl placed her notepad and pencil in her lap. “When you say you were ‘too aggressive,’ do you mean sexually? In your sexual practices?”

  Levin stopped pacing and appeared genuinely shocked. “No, no, nothing like that. What I mean is that I don’t apologize for wanting to make even more money, for wanting even more prestige and power. More of everything. It’s part of Darwinism, part of being human. Too many people don’t accept that. You’d be surprised how many women out there want to turn the world green, or spray paint people wearing fur coats, or eat nothing but arugula lettuce and beans-and all to the exclusion of everything else.” He looked sincerely at Pearl. “Detective, I don’t give a flying flip if the world is two degrees hotter in twenty years or if the ocean rises six inches. I want to be the guy who gets rich building dikes.”