by John Lutz
She motioned with her head at the egg. “Hard enough?”
“Sure.”
“Fedderman left a message on my machine at home this morning. He said since I didn’t pick up, he assumes I left and took the subway here and we can meet later. He won’t be here for another hour. I’ll go out after breakfast and find something else to wear.” She transferred his egg from skillet to plate and grinned at him. “Not that Fedderman will be fooled.”
Quinn knew she was right, but he still wanted to maintain deniability. If it was important to presidents, why not to Quinn? “It’s possible that someday he might have to testify about our relationship under oath.”
“You have a point there,” Pearl said, but she seemed amused by the idea. Toast sprang to attention from the old toaster with a sound like a sledgehammer striking a sack full of steel springs, startling Quinn. Pearl plopped each slice of hot toast on a saucer and placed the saucers on the table, then sat down to eat.
Quinn sat across from her, watching her carefully butter a piece of toast. He sprinkled salt and pepper on his egg. What the hell am I doing here? How did this happen? “Pearl—”
She passed him the butter. “You rather have jelly?”
“Butter’ll do.”
“What about last night, Quinn?” Pearl taking the offensive.
“It was fantastic,” Quinn said, and meant it. He found it wonderful watching her smile from across the table.
Easy…don’t fish for an answer you don’t want…. “I need to know if it was a onetime thing.”
“I don’t see how it can be, Pearl. You’re already an addiction.”
She stood up and walked around the table, swallowing a bite of toast, then leaned down and planted a buttery kiss on his cheek.
“This…us…it won’t interfere with the job. I promise.” She sat back down.
“I won’t let it,” Quinn told her.
After breakfast he fished in his wallet and gave her a hundred-dollar bill from the money Renz had paid him.
“Quinn—”
“Jesus, Pearl, it’s for clothes! A change of clothes was my idea, so at least let me buy them for you.”
“Why should you?”
“Because I’m the one worried about Fedderman.”
She was quiet for a while, still not liking even the faintest notion that he was treating her like a hooker. Last night must not be tainted.
“I’ve got my own money,” she said.
Quinn gave up. He cleaned up the kitchen while she went shopping.
She came back half an hour later carrying a single paper sack, then went into the bedroom to change.
She emerged in the same wrinkled slacks but with a new black T-shirt lettered GIANTS across her oversize breasts.
“There aren’t any decent places to shop around here; this was all I could find. It’s a boy’s medium.”
The T-shirt fit fine everywhere other than the chest. A boy, medium, wouldn’t have put that kind of strain on the material. The dark blue blazer she’d worn yesterday had been draped over the back of a chair and wasn’t so wrinkled. When she put it on over the T-shirt, GIANTS was still visible in convex yellow lettering.
“Best I could do on short notice,” she said.
“Was that the only team they had?”
She started to answer, but the intercom interrupted her. Quinn walked over and buzzed Fedderman up.
As soon as Fedderman stepped into the apartment, he stood still and looked at Pearl, then at Quinn. “Pathetic.” Back at Pearl. “Couldn’t you find a Yankees shirt?”
“Why Yankees?”
“You know…. ‘Whatever Lola wants…’”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a song from a Broadway play. Damn Yankees.”
“I can’t afford Broadway plays on a cop’s salary.”
“I know. I’m rubbing it in.”
“You are such a prick, Fedderman.”
Quinn held out an arm to stop Pearl in case she decided to advance on Fedderman. This was going to be a big problem. He’d really screwed up last night. Complicated things. “Okay, okay! It’s time for us to get to work.”
Pearl was glaring at Fedderman, who was smirking.
“Everybody pretend,” Quinn said, and strapped on his shoulder holster. “Please.”
“The whole world pretends,” Pearl muttered as they were walking toward the elevator.
“Keeps us employed,” Fedderman said.
Quinn wondered for how long.
36
“You seem relaxed today,” Rita Maxwell said to David Blank.
Blank sat back in the recliner’s soft leather and closed his eyes. “You seem surprised. Even your most troubled patients must have a good day now and then.”
Rita decided to work with what he’d given her. “What in particular is making you feel good today?”
“Fit and finish.”
“Can you be more specific, or are you talking about your car?”
“I’m talking about the cosmos. Today everything seems to fit together precisely in its proper place.”
“And the finish?”
“The colors are perfect.”
“You refer to colors often.”
“That’s because I paint. Landscapes, mostly. Though sometimes figures. Nudes. The different hues on a human body are amazing in their number and subtlety.”
“You mean eyes, hair…?”
“That too. Human flesh, though, if you look closely, if you listen…”
Listen? Color and sound mingled. Cross-sensory perception. Not unusual in a talented artist, though not to such a degree. “What do you hear if you listen, David?”
“Sometimes beautiful sounds. On bad days, when the colors fade or run together, a gray buzzing. Not today, though. I hear a humming like soft music, different with every woman.”
“Only women?”
“I’m not sure. Are you suggesting I’m a repressed homosexual?”
Huh? “No, I’m not.” Blank didn’t seem angry. More as if he were amused. “Do you have issues concerning your sexuality?”
He opened his eyes and laughed loudly. “Issues…I love that! Isn’t that a term for what you’ve given birth to?”
“It can be.” Rita put a touch of amusement in her voice so he’d know she wasn’t serious. He was loose today, all right. In a good enough mood to joke with, and where might that lead? “I think we can assume you haven’t given birth.”
“No, not to anything.” He laced his fingers together. “Not in the conventional sense, anyway.”
She was puzzled. “You mean your art?”
“Of course. There was a woman who posed nude for me, a model named Carol. So beautiful. I worked so hard to capture her tension and all her hues.”
“Tension?”
“In a physical sense. Angle and muscle tension. Not everyone can be a good artist’s model.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“An artist and his model are usually in a strictly business relationship. And that’s how we started out. Then one day, in my apartment studio in the Village, she fainted. I thought I’d demanded too much of her, trying to use every second of the rare and perfect light…. It was golden; you could hear and touch it.”
He gave Rita a sideways glance to make sure she was paying attention. She nodded and wriggled her pencil.
“I felt guilty,” Blank continued. “I was sorry for her. So I picked her up and carried her to my bed, where she could rest, and as I laid her down, she opened her eyes, and the way she looked at me and smiled, I knew….”
He continued his tale of seduction and sexual adventure while Rita pretended to take notes.
“Two people were never closer than we were,” Blank was saying. “We hardly ever went outside the apartment for the next month, only sending out for…”
Rita moved the pencil steadily, noticing that her squiggling, meaningless marks were for some reason beginning to resemble Arabic sc
ript. The session with David Blank had settled into its usual pattern, and she was only half listening to him, thinking lies, lies, lies….
Except for the first ten minutes.
When he’d gone, she would rewind the tape and listen to the first part of the session carefully. It hadn’t been so much what he was talking about, but rather the relieved, buoyant tone of his voice, as if some great pressure were no longer exerting its force on him.
Blank still hadn’t revealed the real reason why he was coming to see her, his actual problem. But his wasn’t the usual game of diversion and deflection that tentative patients played. She understood what he was doing: He was setting the riddle out there for her to unravel. And a part of him wanted desperately for her to succeed, because he understood the terrible pressure would return and he was afraid. Buzzing. Order and color. Fit and finish. The psychosis as car. And David Blank knew he was speeding toward another collision.
The cross-sensory perception, now that was interesting. If true.
He did seem sure that Dr. Rita Maxwell was his answer, that she could and would eventually help him, perhaps save him. But first she had to know what he was concealing. Who was Carol?
Sooner or later, Rita would know. However and why ever he’d found his way to her, David Blank—whoever he was—whoever Carol was—had chosen the right analyst.
Patience was in order. Progress was being made. Rita was slowly learning, always learning, and would find the answer to the riddle of David Blank.
Quinn sat on the hard wood and concrete bench just inside Central Park and watched the joggers and cyclists. An attractive woman in her early twenties pedaled past on a mountain bike, something everyone needed in a city as flat as a Monopoly board. Quinn watched her graceful form recede as she stood high on the pedals to pick up speed, her hips swaying with her effort, her long brown hair catching the sunlight. He wondered about her life. She might be a student at NYU, or a young professional, a wife, a mother, an actress, a musician or artist, a hooker or an off-duty cop. The human mystery.
He decided maybe it was time to use the media.
Dave Everson was a journalist with the Times who had long ago given Quinn his direct-line number at the paper. Everson was a journalist Quinn trusted, and he remembered the number. Quinn drew out his cell phone from the pocket of his sport jacket folded on the bench, and for the first time in years he called it.
“I’ll be damned,” Everson said when Quinn had identified himself. “It’s been a while.”
“Too long,” Quinn said.
Everson was no fool; he knew Quinn had something in mind. “So what do you need?” There was the slightest tremor of excitement in his voice.
“Heat.”
Everson laughed. “You’ve already got that, Quinn.”
“For somebody else,” Quinn said.
“Ah…. With conditions, I assume.”
“You’ll be first in line as things break, Dave.”
“And you want to be an anonymous source.”
“No, I want the bastard to know I’m at his heels.”
“Hey, that’ll be a much better story. Mano a mano. I do like you, Quinn.”
“I can be a likable sort. We dealing?”
“Proceed.”
Claire Briggs frowned and checked again for the chemical reaction.
Blue. Again. No mistake.
She was pregnant. So said her home-testing kit.
She had to tell someone, but not before Jubal. He must be the next to know.
At four o’clock Jubal was back from his two o’clock audition for the role of the sensitive hero in the Lincoln Center production of the Vietnam play Winding Road, which was set to open in three months.
“So how’d it go?” she asked, but she knew from his expression how it had gone.
He wore a light blue sweater like a cape, its arms knotted at his chest, though the weather had been too warm for a sweater when he’d left the apartment. Now he unfastened the loose knot and tossed the sweater onto the sofa in a heap.
“It went like shit!” He flung himself down next to the sweater in a similar heap and sat frowning.
“Jubal…” Claire moved toward him as he hung his head and his shoulders began to quake.
Then he looked up at her, grinning. “I got the part!”
Claire stood still and took a deep breath. “Oh, damn, you had me!”
Jubal shrugged, still with the grin. “Well, I can act!” He jumped up and hugged her, lifting her off the floor and spinning her in a dance across the room.
When he put her down, she was almost too dizzy to make her way to a chair and fall into it, gasping and laughing.
“It’s a day for good news,” she said when she could talk without choking or coughing.
Jubal was pacing, too excited to sit. “Actually, it’s only a callback, but I can be sure of the outcome. Everything fell into place, as if I trained all those years just for the part. I was last to audition. I’m one of three choices and the other two aren’t even close. One’s Victor Valentino.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He was in Back Alley last year. Guy looks like a thug, but he can act. He might wind up playing the tough sergeant.”
“Who’s the other guy?”
“Randy Rallison.”
Claire had acted with Rallison. He had difficulty remembering his lines, and many in the cast suspected he had a drug or drinking problem. “A zombie onstage compared to Jubal Day.”
“I’m positive the producer feels the same way. He gave me the wink as I was leaving. I’m sure he gave me the wink.”
Claire sighed and rested a hand on her stomach. She couldn’t stop smiling.
“We’re going out for dinner and celebrate!” Jubal said.
“We have more than one thing to celebrate.”
“I know we do! The way your career’s going. And this apartment is great! We’re lucky, Claire. Damned lucky!”
“I’m glad you think so, Jubal. But we’re luckier than you know. I’m pregnant.”
He stopped pacing and stood still. His features rearranged themselves into a mask. She had no idea what he was thinking. Doubt flashed through her mind like a lightning bolt.
“I shouldn’t have surprised you like that.” She heard the quaver in her voice and hated it. Her stomach began to ache. She knew then what she needed, what she had to have.
“You know this for sure?”
“I’ve missed two periods and my home test says I’m pregnant. I’m sure. I feel…different. There isn’t any doubt.”
Now he was grinning. “My God! You’re pregnant!”
He came to her, lifted her gently to her feet, and kissed her.
“We can turn the spare room into the baby’s room,” he said. “We can spoon-feed the kid and change his diapers—”
“Or hers.”
“Hers. And push him-her in the park in a stroller.”
“We can watch her-him take her-his first step.”
“Teach him-her how to grip a baseball.”
“And how to say please and thank you.”
“And not spit the spinach.”
“We can get married,” Claire said.
37
“New computers,” said Sergeant Rudd, who was manning the precinct desk when Pearl walked in. He was an aging, broad-shouldered man, with white hair, a whiskey nose, and eyes the color of lead bullets. “We need to keep up with the feds when it comes to technology.”
Pearl looked over to where the clerk sat and saw him wrestling a keyboard out of a box. The computer on his desk did indeed look new, and had a monitor featuring an impressively large flat screen.
“How are they preserving our information?” Pearl asked.
Rudd stared at her.
“I mean, are they transferring all the data from the old computers to the new ones?”
“Oh, sure. I overheard the technicians talking about some kind of ZIP drive thing. Nothing to it, according to them. But far as an ol
d cop like me’s concerned, a computer makes a good boat anchor.”
“Dinosaur,” Pearl said, walking on toward the squad room.
“You too,” Rudd said behind her. “You’re just a smaller, prettier one. ’Specially this morning.” She turned and saw his seamed face split into a grin. “There some kinda reason for that?”
Holy Christ! Was it that obvious to the trained eye? Pearl felt herself blush and pressed on, ignoring Rudd’s chuckle.
The squad room was a mess. Half a dozen technicians who looked like teenagers in pale blue blazers were setting up new computers on the old steel gray desks, or on typing tables beside the desks. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries were colliding here. There were only two detectives around, a smarmy little creep named Weatherington, and a large, potbellied man she knew only as “Big Mike.” They were both undercover vice, which as far as Pearl was concerned was exactly where they belonged.
She stood still for a moment, taking in the electronic carnage. Then she went back to the booking area.
“Looks like some kinda college frat prank goin’ on in there, don’t it?” Rudd said.
“Maybe it is.” Pearl motioned toward the squad room with her thumb. “Which of those desks used to be Quinn’s?”
Rudd returned his attention to the paperwork that occupied him. It was almost as if he expected the question; he’d been day desk sergeant for over five years and had the answers. “Second on the left as you walk in the door.”
He didn’t ask Pearl why she’d asked. She thanked him and returned to the squad room.
She went to the second desk and saw the new computer on it, but there was no old one sitting on the floor to be removed later.
“What happened to the computer that was on this desk?” she asked the young technician who was working at the desk two over.
“Didn’t replace that one,” the young woman said. She weighed about seventy pounds and had glasses the size of CD-ROMs. “It was new enough that we just ramped up the memory. Five-twelve RAM now.”
“Wow,” Pearl said. “How new?”
“Three or four years old is all.”
“Any of the others like that? New enough they were kept?”