by John Lutz
“You don’t have a baby, Pen.”
“Being a smart-ass doesn’t make this a less weighty subject, Feds. You tell me I shouldn’t worry about you, and this poor guy wasn’t even on the job a year and he’s dead.”
“He pulled his gun when he didn’t have to,” Fedderman said.
“How could you know that?”
“Word gets around fast. The car thief was cornered and panicked, and had a gun of his own. He was sixteen years old.”
“Are you saying it was this Messerschmitt’s fault?”
“I’m saying he made a mistake I wouldn’t have made. And he wouldn’t have made it after spending more time on the job. And you’re wrong, Pen, in thinking the longer you go as a cop and don’t get hurt or killed, the more the odds turn against you. It’s the other way around; the longer you go, the less likely you are to do something that bites you.”
“Anything can happen,” Penny said.
“Even to people who try to live their lives in a bubble of safety. Like a library.”
“You’re impossible, Feds.”
“I want to show you there’s no reason to be afraid for me.”
Penny looked exasperated. “You carry a gun. The people you deal with carry guns. Enough said.”
“Maybe your sister should have had a gun.” The moment he said it, Fedderman knew he was in trouble.
And he was wrong: Penny’s sister, Nora, probably would have been murdered by the brutal serial killer who’d taken her life, even if she’d owned a gun. The aggressor, the one who moved first, almost always won the struggle. They knew this, the predators of the world. The Sullivan Act made it difficult to own or carry a gun in New York. The predators knew that, too.
“Don’t stand there and give me a lot of Second Amendment bullshit!” Penny said.
“All right. I’m sorry.”
Penny turned around and busied herself shelving books. He knew she was plenty angry, and she’d be thinking again and talking again about how he should consider changing occupations.
“Pen…?”
She wasn’t going to answer. She slammed a book into place so hard the shelves swayed. A man browsing in Biographies gave her a stern look.
Fedderman knew there was nothing to be done until she calmed down. All because Messerschmitt hadn’t kept his gun in its holster.
It was impossible to talk with Penny when she was feeling, and acting, this way. He turned around and trudged toward the library exit, up near the checkout and return counter, silently cursing.
He didn’t like the way this point of contention was going with Penny. Each time they talked about it she seemed to become more and more worried. Madder and madder.
One thing he’d learned about Penny: she usually did something about her anger.
How the hell was this going to end?
He knew how cops’ marriages too often ended.
He reached the tinted glass door, leaned heavily into the metal push bar, and felt the heat from outside.
When he looked back he saw Ms. Culver glaring at him as if he were an e-book.
40
S al said, “I think we need to talk to Pansy Lieberman again.”
“Not a name you often hear,” Mishkin said, “Lieberman.”
Sal looked at him. It was hard to know about Harold.
The two of them were on the street in front of Deena Vess’s apartment building. They’d been canvassing the surrounding buildings, and in the one next door Sal had encountered Pansy Lieberman. Unlike most of Deena’s neighbors, she’d talked. Maybe it had been worthwhile. “She claims she saw a woman who might have been leaving Deena Vess’s apartment unit at around the time of the murder.”
“If she’s from the building next door, how did that happen?” Harold asked.
“I’ll let her tell you, Harold. That way we can see if her stories are the same.”
“If they’re exactly the same-”
“I know, Harold. That suggests she’s memorized the story and she’s lying.”
“I was gonna say we wouldn’t need a second set of notes,” Harold said.
Sal doubted that. “Let’s go talk to Pansy,” he growled.
Pansy’s apartment was on the same floor as Deena’s, with a view of a window in Deena’s building that might be on a landing. Sal wondered if that had anything to do with anything. If Pansy Lieberman was one of those people who wanted to be part of a homicide investigation just for a brush with their idea of celebrity, she would have probably taken advantage of that window to the building next door to embellish her tale. But she hadn’t. The window didn’t figure into it.
“Come on in,” she said with a wide grin. She was one of those beautiful women who seem not to know it. Or maybe they take it for granted. Pansy was in her early thirties, wearing dark slacks and a gray and white striped blouse that made her look like an extremely attractive convict. She had dark hair almost short enough to be called a buzz cut. Beauty that she was, her ears stuck out almost at right angles from her head. The ears, with her wide grin, gave her an elfish, mischievous expression. She was wearing floppy slip-on sandals. Sal noticed that the toenails of only her left foot were painted, with brilliant red enamel. Had they interrupted her?
She noticed him staring at her feet and read his mind. “I don’t paint the nails on that foot when I’m practicing,” she said. “It makes them slippery.”
“I see,” Sal said, but he didn’t.
Harold had been looking past him at the glossy, open New Yorker spread out on the floor by the sofa. “You’ve been turning pages with your foot,” he said.
Pansy smiled brightly. “How astute of you.”
Sal wondered how Harold knew that. Then he noticed the way the magazine’s pages were crumpled, and that there was a scant but definite print of a bare foot on one of them.
“You slipped on your sandals to answer our knock on your door,” he said, realizing with a tinge of dismay that he was trying to keep up with Harold and impress this woman.
“I only had the right sandal off,” she said. She smiled again. “I didn’t want to greet you walking crookedly. You might have insisted on a breathalyzer test.”
Sal found himself wondering what kind of witness she’d be in court if the case went in that direction. “Could you repeat to Detective Mishkin what you told me?” he said, wanting to get back on point.
“I assumed that was why you were here,” she said. She drew a deep breath, as if she might be planning to tell her entire story without inhaling. “Mrs. Metzger, who lives in the building next door, is visiting her daughter in Minneapolis,” she said, “and I went to her apartment to feed Lewis, because that’s our agreement.
“Lewis a cat or dog?” Harold asked.
“Fish.”
“Uh.”
“I look after Lewis,” Pansy continued, “and when I’m gone for any length of time Mrs. Metzger waters my plants.”
Harold looked around and saw some scraggly-looking geraniums, along with flowers he didn’t recognize, in plastic pots and trays.
“Anyway,” Pansy continued, “I was on my way back here and I took the stairs, like I do sometimes for the exercise. When I was on the landing near Deena’s apartment, I glanced down the hall and saw a woman walking away from her door, toward the elevator.”
“Had she just left Deena’s apartment?” Harold asked.
Sal gave him a look that meant No prompting.
“I couldn’t say for sure,” Pansy said. “But she might have.”
“Could you describe her?” Sal was pretending to take notes. It wasn’t necessary. So far, the stories matched up okay.
“Actually, I couldn’t. She was facing away from me both times.”
“ Both times?”
“Yes. I’d seen her once before, on the street, when she hurried to get into a cab at the corner. I recognized her light blue raincoat and umbrella.”
Here was something new. In the corner of his vision, Sal saw Harold jot it down on his
notepad. “Had she come out of Deena Vess’s building that time?”
“I can’t be positive.”
“But you’re sure it was the same woman?”
“Yes. She passed right by me on the sidewalk, but it was fast, and I’d been looking the other way. Besides the coat and umbrella, there was something distinctive about her. Something that didn’t seem right. Maybe it was because for some reason she seemed too old to be one of Deena’s friends. I imagined her as almost middle-aged. And she moved with a kind of confidence.”
“If we showed you photographs…” Harold said.
“I honestly don’t think I could identify her. She might be in her forties. Indeterminate hair color. There was nothing distinctive about her walk. And I never did actually get a good look at her face.”
“But you were close to her for a while.”
“Only for a moment, when she stepped on my toes. And on this foot, as luck would have it.” Pansy held up her bare right foot. “I was in too much pain, and looking at my poor, poor toe instead of noticing what was going on around me. The woman apologized but didn’t slow down and was walking away when I looked up to tell her that was okay, that I walked on that foot all the time.”
“Anything memorable about her voice?” Sal asked.
“Not really. A little deep and throaty. It could be she’s a smoker.”
“What about scents?” Harold asked.
“Pardon?”
“Did she smell any particular way? You know, like perfume, tobacco?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Was this other encounter also the day of the murder?” Sal asked.
“No, I’d say about a week earlier. That’s why I didn’t remember it right away.” She sat down in a beige chair with wooden arms and tucked her trim legs beneath her. Sal wished his legs were still that limber. Well, actually they never had been.
He looked at Harold, who gave an almost imperceptible nod. They had no more questions. That is, about the case.
“Why?” Sal asked.
She appeared puzzled.
“Why were you turning New Yorker magazine pages with your bare toes?”
“To make my toes more dexterous.”
“And to get to the next cartoon,” Harold said.
“That, too.”
“That doesn’t exactly answer my question,” Sal said.
“True.” Pansy smiled. “I’ve gone back to school to major in anthropology. I was wondering what it might be like to learn to use our feet the way our primal ancestors might very well have done. When you get in the habit of using them like hands, you’d be surprised how natural it comes to feel.”
“Our primal ancestors wouldn’t have understood those cartoons,” Sal said. He didn’t understand some of them himself.
“Oh, you might be surprised. Many of the cartoons don’t require language in order to be understood. “
“That they might have understood the cartoons isn’t her point,” Harold said quickly. Kind of testily, Sal thought. How men must love rescuing or defending poor little Pansy. How she must manipulate them.
“And the point is?”
“Empathy,” Pansy said. “I want to experience at least some inkling of how our ancestors must have thought while performing delicate tasks with their feet. What they must have felt.” She smiled and shook her head. “I guess you think that’s crazy.”
“No,” Sal said, wondering how many of their primal ancestors had subscribed to the New Yorker.
“We do that ourselves in our work,” Harold said. “We try to empathize and figure out why some of them killed. Why some are still killing.”
“That could be dangerous,” Pansy said. “We have roots that might be deeper than we know, and set in soil that would terrify us.”
“That’s why empathizing is as far as we go,” Harold said. “That’s the key difference between us and the people we’re trying to find and stop.”
Pansy aimed her warm glow at him, obviously pleased. “You are a very perceptive man.”
“It’s my job,” Harold said. “It makes me that way.”
Sal thought he might retch.
“Can you stay for some tea or coffee?” Pansy asked. “Both of you.” But she was looking at Harold.
“Thanks,” Sal said, “but we’ve got more calls to make.”
“Another time?”
“If you think of something pertaining to the case,” Sal said. “Call me. Leave a message if you have to, and I’ll get back to you. You have my card.”
Pansy followed them to the door and watched them for a while before moving back out of sight and locking herself into her apartment.
On their way down in the elevator, Harold said, “I wonder what else she can do with her toes.”
“That woman might be twenty years younger than you, Harold. Harold?”
“Sorry. I was empathizing.”
Jerry Lido, Q amp;A’s resident computer genius, came over to Quinn’s desk, shaking his head. If it could be traced anywhere on the Internet, Lido could find it. He seemed to possess some kind of innate
GPS
“Whaddya got?” Quinn said, looking up and noticing the expression on Lido’s face. He knew Lido had stayed up most of last night, drinking and communing with his computer. Now he appeared exhausted but triumphant.
“I found a few places where the skate keys could be bought on the net, hacked into their records, and came up empty. It was near six o’clock this morning by then. I took a short nap, then cleaned up some and had breakfast at a place down on Houston.” Lido was grinning.
Quinn was getting impatient. “And?”
Lido dropped a skate key on the desk. It looked identical to the one pressed into the flesh on the forehead of Deena Vess’s corpse.
“I got it at this little bike shop in the Village, also sells skateboards and such. Also roller skates, though not the kind that need keys. But they do have a bunch of those keys in a little bin near the front of the store.” Lido’s smile slipped away. “That’s the problem. Anybody coulda come in and stole one.”
“Did you ask if they’d sold any lately?” Quinn already knew the answer.
“They haven’t sold any in almost a year,” Lido said. “The guy let me have that one for free.”
“A dead end,” Quinn said glumly.
“Yeah. Not the key to the case.”
Quinn returned to his paperwork with the doggedness of a man getting accustomed to frustration, not liking it any more for the familiarity. “Go have some more breakfast, Jerry.”
What was the key to the case?
41
I t was like watching dinosaurs at play, if you overlooked the huge, knobby tires.
The roar had awakened her at eight o’clock sharp and continued steadily for the last three hours, so she never got back to sleep. Mildred Dash stood at her apartment window and watched the earthmoving equipment across the street.
The brick and stone walls of the buildings had come down days ago. Now the dinosaurs were scooting the wreckage around, even moving some of it with cranes (so like a brontosaurus, a crane), so it could be scooped up, loaded into squat and powerful dump trucks, and hauled away.
Mildred was tall and a bit too statuesque to be attractive. Though refined, even regal, in bearing, she was too rough hewn to be feminine. Her gray-tinged black hair was coarse, her features chiseled but not finely. Her nose was slightly too prominent, her chin too pointed. When she was very young, the boys had considered her a knockout. Now those same boys would have found her a little scary, like a dreaded substitute teacher.
Meeding Properties, and Enders and Coil, had learned not to take her lightly.
She was still wearing her robe, and wasn’t planning on going out today. There was no way she could escape the feeling that if she left her apartment, left the building, the neighborhood, even for a short while, the dinosaurs would attack. She would return not to her home but to ruins.
As a former practicing attor
ney, she knew the value of a fait accompli. The destruction of her building wouldn’t harm anyone, if the building was completely unoccupied. Even if she’d had enough legal claim to delay demolition almost indefinitely, her arguments would become moot in the dust of debris. Mildred Dash knew how the law worked-and how it didn’t work.
As matters stood, Jack Enders would continue his attempts to intimidate her, and kindly rattlesnake Joseph Coil would continue his folksy charm assault. They continued in their attempts to assess her, to read her motives and her intentions. It didn’t make sense to them. Of course it wouldn’t-to them. Even if she were to explain it to them, they’d nod their supposed understanding and then offer her money. Or at least try to talk her out of her intransigence. Become her saviors instead of her pursuers.
Mildred understood the puzzle piece that was missing, and whose absence caused all their other assumptions to be off the mark. Meeding Properties, and Enders and Coil, knew about the limited time she had left. They didn’t see why she wanted to spend it here, in the midst of demolition and debris. This had been her life, with her husband, her children, her tragedies and joy. Her meaningful life had been here, was still here.
Still here.
It was so simple, so foreign to them, that they overlooked it, couldn’t see it.
She refused to end her life before she died.
Jody found herself alone in the offices of Enders and Coil. Dollie, the receptionist, was up front in the anteroom minding the phones, but that didn’t count. Dollie didn’t venture back into the main offices unless she had a good reason, and with Jack Enders and the associates in court, and Joseph Coil on his way to Philadelphia to take a deposition, there wouldn’t be a good reason.
Jody took one of the two flash drives she’d bought on credit from an office supply and computer shop on East Fifty-fourth Street, and slipped into Enders’s office.
It was more than merely quiet in there; it was hushed. Jody had been told the offices of Enders and Coil had been specially insulated so they were virtually soundproof. That wasn’t quite true. If she listened closely, Jody could hear the rushing sound of Manhattan traffic.