by John Lutz
He realized the doctor would have a medical term for what he was thinking, the priest a religious term, yet they wouldn’t believe, not really. It distressed him sometimes, the failure of imagination in the highly educated.
They’re fools hamstrung by their torrent of facts and fears, their comforting black-and-white delusions. Like…. Well, never mind that now.
Claire!
She tossed her bouquet high into the air, and a girl about twelve who would never be pretty caught it and hugged it to her spindly body as if a prince might spring from it.
Claire laughing…mouth wide, throwing her head back the way she does….
Into the limo…new car smell, slick leather seats…slide, slide…the door shuts; then the chauffeur’s door up front…the smooth vibrant power of the engine, the engine, the faces at the windows, all smiling in, shouting silently…our wedding guests…. The wedding, the engine, the blue-gold day beyond the tinted glass, running figures like the palest of shadows, life, sliding, sliding away outside the window as the limo gains speed….
The kiss to the clean white future! Lips, teeth touch…the cleaving unto the husband…white and flesh…
Happy Wedding Day, Claire!
Yours and mine.
48
They were in the doctor’s antiseptically clean, neatly arranged office in Roosevelt Hospital. Quinn sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair with upholstered arms, facing the desk at an angle. There were no windows, but the room was so bright from fluorescent lighting set behind frosted panels that there was an impression of natural light. On a shelf along with some medical reference books sat a small glass vase with a rose in it, which Quinn was sure was plastic. In the air was a faint scent of peppermint.
The doctor’s name was Liran. He was a small, effeminate man, with dark eyes, thick black hair, and the kind of slender, long-fingered hands Quinn thought a surgeon should possess. On the wall behind him hung an improbable number of framed diplomas and certifications. Before him on his desk were spread various black-and-white images and printed-out results of tests done on Quinn.
Quinn was optimistic. The pain in his chest had receded in the ambulance and was almost gone completely by the time they’d arrived at the hospital’s emergency entrance. He’d wanted to leave, and it was only reluctantly that he agreed to undergo a series of diagnostic procedures and spend the night. When the nurse had asked him who they might contact about his condition, he’d thought about giving them Pearl’s name and phone number, then decided against it. He could imagine Pearl barging in and taking charge, possibly irritating the staff to the extent that they might recommend a transplant.
“We’ll wait to see how I am in the morning before we call anyone,” Quinn told the nurses.
They made it clear they didn’t like that idea, even if they had to go along with it.
He heard them talking about him out in the hall when they left. “So let him die alone,” one of them said. He liked a nurse with a sense of humor.
They left him alone until they returned with a young doctor, who began questioning him about his “event” and eventually recommended what needed to be done to gain further information about his symptoms. Through most of the night Quinn was poked, probed, made to drink foul liquids, scanned, X-rayed, and had his molecules jangled by an MRI machine, until finally he was given a sedative that didn’t work very well.
Morning had been a long time dawning.
“We detect no damage to the heart,” Dr. Liran said with an Indian accent, “but the images show considerable arterial blockage.”
Quinn asked what that meant.
Dr. Liran shrugged behind his desk. “That you’ve lived as long as you have, even though you’ve eaten too much fatty food, and inherited a predisposition for plaque buildup on arterial walls.” He smiled softly. “You’ll be glad to know you’re rather typical in that regard, Mr. Quinn.”
Quinn decided to drive to the point. “Did I have a heart attack?”
“A mild one, perhaps, that left no visible damage.”
“Or it might have been indigestion?”
Dr. Liran laughed merrily. “Oh, only if you’re an incurable optimist. You are only slightly away from being a prime candidate for angioplasty, Mr. Quinn.” The doctor regarded his test results, drumming his manicured nails on an opened file folder. “I see that you are a police officer. Do you get adequate exercise?”
“No.”
“Control your diet?”
“No.”
“Smoke or drink?”
“A cigar or a glass of scotch now and then. Occasionally both at the same time.”
The doctor gave Quinn a look that might have carried mild disdain, then peered down again at the clutter of material on his desk. “You had been running when you were stricken?”
“Yes, I was chasing someone.”
“Uh-hm.” That seemed to satisfy Dr. Liran. He let the subject drop. If he recognized Quinn from newspapers or TV, he gave no indication. Probably he was too busy saving lives to follow the news. He had his own serial killers to deal with.
“So what happened is nothing to worry about?” Quinn asked hopefully.
Dr. Liran looked pained. “I would say it’s definitely something to be concerned about. It was your body demonstrating to you the direction in which you’re going, which is toward a severe heart attack if you don’t take proper and reasonable precautions. I would like to impress upon you that despite lack of detectable damage to the heart, what happened to you is in itself quite serious.”
“A wake-up call,” Quinn said.
“That’s not the medical term, but it will do. I’m going to prescribe some pills to help lower both your blood pressure and your cholesterol count, but they won’t lower them enough by themselves. Much of this is up to you, Mr. Quinn. Here with your prescriptions is a suggested diet. Follow it, and avoid strenuous physical activity until we place you on an exercise program. I want to see you again approximately one month from today. When you know your schedule, call and make an appointment. If you don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
Quinn accepted the papers the doctor was holding out for him, then stood up and thanked him. “Don’t worry, Doctor, I’ll call.”
Dr. Liran smiled. “They all say that. Either way, I suspect we’ll be seeing each other again.”
“Acid reflux,” Pearl said later that morning, after Quinn explained to her—with some modification—why he hadn’t appeared for their meeting last night. “That’s acid bullshit, Quinn, and we both know it.”
They were in the unmarked, Pearl driving, on their way to talk to Abigail Koop. Fedderman was on his way to question Janet Hofer, the other woman who’d had lunch with Lisa Ide shortly before she died. Hofer was still in New York on an extended vacation.
“The important thing is, I almost caught the bastard,” Quinn said. They’d stopped at Krispy Kreme five minutes ago. He opened the paper sack as Pearl jockeyed the car too fast around a corner.
“The important thing is, you had a heart attack.”
“There was no heart attack. I told you, the hospital said I was fine. It could have been simple acid reflux causing chest pains.” He’d heard somewhere of people having acid reflux and thinking it was a heart attack, so why wouldn’t she believe him?
Pearl said nothing and stared straight ahead as she drove, letting Quinn know she was plenty ticked off and not buying what he was selling.
“If I’d been ten years younger, I would have worn him down,” Quinn said. “We almost had him.”
“How can you be so sure it was the Night Prowler?”
“He shot at me.”
“What?”
He told her about the bullet holes appearing in the shop window.
She drove for a while without saying anything.
Then: “He’s stalking you, Quinn.”
“Us, maybe.”
“More likely just you. That macho thing.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right, but we can’
t be sure. The three of us need to be careful.”
“You’re just the guy to talk about being careful.”
“Put it away, Pearl.”
“God! A heart attack.” Afraid again. He’s made me afraid of losing something again. “Did they give you any medicine or instructions?”
“Some pills. Put me on a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. That means low food.”
“Jesus, Quinn! You’re eating a doughnut!”
“I’m a cop, Pearl. I’ve got a right.”
“Don’t you make light of this, Quinn!”
“I’m starving, Pearl. This is breakfast. It’s all I’m going to eat.”
“Believe it,” Pearl said.
Quinn decided to be quiet the rest of the way to Abigail Koop’s apartment.
“Acid reflux, my foot…,” Pearl said under her breath.
Koop was a fleshy but attractive woman with beseeching brown eyes peering out from beneath dark bangs. Quinn wondered where he’d seen such soft eyes before, then remembered a dachshund gazing at him when he was on the ground with his heart…event. Unlike the dachshund, Koop had a slightly crooked nose, an uncertain smile, lots of jewelry, and a manner suggesting she yearned desperately to be liked.
Her West Side apartment was like her, overfurnished and with a tentative decor that didn’t know quite what it wanted to be. A traditional gray sofa squatted on a maroon-and-black Persian carpet and faced an Early American TV hutch on top of which was a lineup of Harry Potter novels anchored by large bookends that were busts of Lincoln. Everything in the room seemed to be of different heights and placed next to everything drastically shorter or taller than itself. A small, bucolic landscape was mounted on one wall, a large, modern museum print on another. Please like something about me, implored the room. Or maybe Quinn thought that because of how he’d sized up Abigail Koop.
“Please call me Abby,” she told them as soon as he’d announced they were the police detectives who’d phoned for an appointment.
They agreed to do that, then sat side by side on the gray sofa while Abby sat down on a delicate little chair that was possibly French Provincial. Abby perched with her thighs pressed tightly together beneath the skirt of her gray business suit. Her hands were folded in her lap. She stole a glance at a clock on a table, then seemed sorry about it. Pearl figured Abby was going in late to work in order to have this conversation.
“We won’t take up much of your time,” Pearl said.
“It was a shock, what happened to Lisa.” Abby began nervously twisting the forefinger of her left hand with the thumb and forefinger of her right, as if testing to see how firmly the finger was screwed into its socket.
“You were good friends?” Quinn asked.
“I suppose you’d say so. We were good friends in college, anyway. But time passed and we lost touch. I moved back to New York from Connecticut last year and didn’t even know Lisa was in town until we ran into each other about a month ago and exchanged phone numbers.”
“The other woman you had lunch with, Janet Hofer, did you know her the same way?”
“Yes, I did. In college. Janet and I kept in touch enough to exchange Christmas cards, photographs, that sort of thing. Then she called and told me she was coming in to the city for a jewelry convention and I suggested we have lunch with Lisa and talk about the old days.”
Quinn and Pearl glanced at each other. Jewelry. Like Leon and Lisa. “What kind of jewelry?” Pearl asked.
“Nothing expensive. Janet sells it part-time, sets up a booth at shows, holds jewelry parties, that kind of thing.”
“Paste?”
Abby looked at him, not understanding at first. “Oh! Yes, I suppose. Nothing with real stones in it, or real gold or silver, unless it’s plated. She and Lisa joked about that at lunch, how they had the high and low ends of the market covered. Not that Janet didn’t carry some very attractive items. I bought some from her.” She held up an arm on which dangled several gold hoops. “These bracelets.”
“Nice,” Pearl said. Pearl, who thought of bracelets as handcuffs.
“Did Lisa tell you anything that suggested she or her husband might be in any kind of danger?” Quinn asked. It was probably only a coincidence that both women dealt in different sorts of jewelry. And it wasn’t as if Janet Hofer had been murdered. Now, if any of the other victims had sold jewelry…
“No,” Abby said. “Lisa talked as if everything in her life was going well. She showed us pictures of her husband, her apartment—showed Janet, anyway, since I’d seen them when we’d run into each other last month. She seemed…oh, I would say, well, normal.” Twist, twist went the finger. Must hurt, Pearl thought.
“You never met Leon?” Quinn asked.
“Never. Just saw his photo. Nice-looking man, but older than Lisa. Not that that isn’t okay…with me. Especially since he seems—seemed—to be something of a romantic.”
“How so?” Quinn asked.
“Lisa said he’d been leaving her presents, but not letting on they were from him. Playing games with her, in fact. Sex, love, were all about games, she said.” Abby was looking away from Quinn and directly at Pearl. Woman to woman.
Pearl nodded. Lisa was right about that. She hadn’t known how right.
“What kinds of gifts?” Quinn asked, not letting on that he felt like grabbing Abby and shaking the information out of her.
“Oh, candy. A blouse she’d admired once when they were shopping together for something else. Caviar real recently. Lisa was wild about caviar. Myself, I just see it as fish eggs.”
Quinn didn’t recall seeing caviar or an empty caviar container in Lisa and Leon’s kitchen.
“Flowers—”
“What?” Pearl asked sharply.
Abby stared at her. “Flowers. Lisa said Leon had given her flowers. Not officially from him, of course. Like he was a secret admirer. Playing his romantic games.”
“What kind of flowers?”
“Roses, I think she said.”
“Yellow ones?” Quinn asked almost lazily, not wanting to lead her.
“They might have been yellow.”
Abby absently twisted her finger harder, then must have hurt herself, the way she looked down and stopped and folded her hands in her lap.
“Yellow. Uh-huh. In fact, I’m pretty sure she said they were yellow.”
Back down in the unmarked, Pearl started the engine and switched on the air conditioner while Quinn used the cell phone.
“I’m busy this morning,” Harley Renz said when Quinn had identified himself. “Everybody’s on my ass from the mayor to the guy who can’t get close enough to kiss the mayor’s ass. Say you got something for me, Quinn.”
“Stomach contents,” Quinn said.
“Jesus, I just ate. Talk plain.”
“Did the ME list the postmortem contents of Lisa Ide’s stomach?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Caviar?”
“Among other things. How’d you know?”
“I’m a detective. It’s my job to find out things. You told me that yourself.”
“About the caviar?”
“About finding out things.”
“Dammit, Quinn!”
Quinn waited.
“All right, all right, maybe I rag you too hard. It’s in me, and you sure as hell deserve it. What does this caviar mean, other than the late Lisa had a hoity-toity dinner before she died?”
“It means she really did love caviar and that she and Leon were definitely done by our guy. He left caviar in their apartment recently, somehow knew Lisa was crazy about it and made it one of his gifts to her. He also gave her yellow roses. This makes three out of four Night Prowler murders where yellow roses were or had been somewhere around.”
“Maybe the husband, Leon, really left her the gifts. He musta known she liked caviar, and he mighta given her the roses.”
“Not the husband.”
“Why not?”
“He and Lisa are dead.”
“Yeah. That might be convincing to a jury.”
Quinn related what else they’d learned from Abby Koop.
“So now we got our solid link,” Renz said, warming to the information and obviously pleased. “Think we should feed the information to the media? It’d take some pressure off me.”
“And put more on the Night Prowler,” Quinn said. He made a mental note to call Everson and give him a heads-up on the information Renz was going to give out. “Make sure the media know about the other anonymous gifts, too. I want this asshole to think we’re pounding at his heels.”
“Like you were last night?”
“How’d you find out about that?”
“I got a connection at the hospital who saw your name on the patient list and did some checking. But don’t worry about it, Quinn, my source won’t say anything if he doesn’t wanna go to prison for drug theft. And I’m not gonna pull you off this case. By the way, we recovered the bullets.”
“What bullets?”
“The ones that were fired at you last night on First Avenue. Thirty-two caliber. I sent somebody around to recover them and had ballistics run a quick, confidential test. In case we might wanna make a match in the future when he tries for you again, or maybe shoots somebody else.”
“But he’s still using a knife on his victims.”
“He won’t try to use one on you. He doesn’t wanna get close enough. And he almost got you last night. You mighta died from a heart attack, even though he missed you. You hear the shots?”
“No, but that’s not surprising. He fired from across the street—maybe even out a window—and there was a lot of traffic noise.”
“So he mighta used a silencer.”
“I suppose.” The silencer again. “But like I said, it was noisy on the street, and I took right after him. The people on the other side of the street might have heard a shot. I didn’t take time to ask.”
“I still say he’s using his silencer. Speaking of which, the only silencer of that model unaccounted for in our neck of the woods was bought three years ago by a Wilhelm Whitmire, eighty-nine years old, who lives on West Eighty-seventh. He said he decided last year he was too old and shaky to have guns around, so he sold all his. Nobody wanted the cheap-ass silencer, so he tossed it in the trash five or six months ago.”