by John Lutz
He’d heard or read somewhere that Eastwood bought his cigars in a shop in Beverly Hills and cut them in half for his movie scenes. So much in life was an act.
Ignoring the TV, he removed a cleaning kit and some gun oil from the metal lockbox, along with a soft white cotton cloth.
He was about to clean and oil the gun when his cell phone, on top of the rolltop desk, played the first few bars of “Get Me to the Church on Time.”
He glanced at the Caller ID before answering the phone. “I was hoping you’d call,” he said, smiling.
A pause.
“Yes,” he said, still smiling. “Of course. Of course. Yes. Yes. You know I do. Yes.”
He put down the gun and wandered the room as he talked, as if motion would lend import to his words. Whoever was on the other end of the connection was receiving his full attention.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll see you there. You can’t know how much I’m looking forward to it.” He idly picked up the broomstick and observed its sharpened point as he listened to the caller.
“See you there,” he said again. “Love you.”
6
Death had drawn them together again. They met at Quinn’s first-floor apartment on West Seventy-fifth off Columbus in the room he’d converted into a den. Quinn sat behind his big cherrywood desk, his rough-hewn features sidelighted by the shaded lamp, making his oft-broken nose seem even more crooked. One of the Cuban cigars he had illegally supplied to him was propped at a sharp angle in a glass ashtray. The cigar wasn’t burning. It was pointless to start things off with Pearl already bitching.
She was seated cross-legged in an armchair to the left of the desk, facing Quinn, wearing faded jeans, a blue Mets T-shirt, gray socks. The loafers she’d slipped off lay askew on the floor near the chair. Her raven-black hair was pulled back and wound in a knot. She wore her usual dark eyeliner, which made her almost black eyes appear even darker. Quinn thought she looked fabulous.
Fedderman, perched on the less comfortable wood and leather casual chair, looked his usual discombobulated self. Though his face had gotten thinner, it still had its expectant, hangdog look, as if he’d just committed some transgression and now needed forgiveness. He’d lost a bit more of his graying hair since Quinn had last seen him and was now almost bald on top. Quinn was sure he recognized the baggy brown suit Fedderman was wearing, and noticed that his right white shirt cuff was unbuttoned and hanging out of his coat sleeve. For some reason that often happened to Fedderman’s cuffs when he used a pen or pencil for any length of time. Quinn almost smiled, seeing the frayed, loose cuff peeking out of the coat sleeve at him. Old times.
Fedderman looked over at Pearl. “I heard you had some trouble at the bank.”
“Screw you,” she said, dismissing Fedderman. She turned her attention to Quinn. “Lauri’s no longer living with you?”
Lauri was Quinn’s daughter, now almost twenty. “She and Wormy are living in California, trying to promote his music career.” Lauri’s lover, Wormy, so called because he was tall and painfully thin and kind of undulated when he walked, was front man for his band, The Defendants. Lauri’s last letter said the group was close to a record contract. Her next-to-last letter had said that, too.
“I thought the boy had talent,” Fedderman said.
“But what about his music?” Pearl asked.
“What about these murders?” Quinn said, reminding them why they were here. He picked up four green binders, then moved out from behind his desk and handed two to each of his detectives. “Renz supplied copies of the murder books. I made copies for you two.”
“You must already have looked yours over,” Fedderman said. “Any conclusions?”
Quinn sat back down behind his desk, automatically reached for his cigar, then drew his hand back when he noticed Pearl giving him a look. “I already told you some of the basics: two torsos, female Caucasian, each shot through the heart, no prints on file, and no way to identify them. Twenty-two-caliber hollow-point bullets. Both of them separated when they entered the victims, but the pieces stayed in the bodies and the lab managed to reconstruct them enough to be sure they were fired by the same gun. Both victims were sexually penetrated by what seems to have been a long, sharp stake of some kind that left a residue of oil.”
“A sexual lubricant?” Pearl asked.
“Furniture oil,” Quinn said.
“He polished them off,” Fedderman said. He seemed obviously pleased by his humor.
“Shut up with that kind of stuff,” Pearl said.
Fedderman noticed his shirt cuff was unbuttoned and fastened it. “Where were they found?” Mr. Serious now.
“The first in a Dumpster behind a restaurant on the Upper West Side. The second in a vacant building in lower Manhattan.”
“Vacant why?” Pearl asked.
“Being renovated.”
“Actively?”
“Yeah. A condo conversion.” Quinn knew where she was going with this and was pleased.
“Found on a Monday?” Pearl asked.
“You guessed it.”
“The workmen would be bound to find it, then. And the torso in the Dumpster would be found next trash pickup.”
“Which was scheduled for the morning after it was placed there,” Quinn said. “Restaurant employees said they would have seen it during working hours, so it must have been put in the Dumpster the night before.”
Pearl uncrossed her legs and placed her stockinged feet on the floor, wriggling her toes. “The killer wanted the torsos found soon after they were dumped. Any idea why?”
“Not as yet,” Quinn said.
“I take it there’s been a missing persons check on the two victims,” Fedderman said.
“Sure. No women their sizes, ages, or ethnicity have been reported missing lately in and around New York. Both were in their early thirties.” Quinn leaned back slightly in his desk chair and began swiveling gently an inch or so each way. He’d oiled the chair recently and it didn’t make a sound. “Another thing. A journalist, Cindy Sellers of City Beat, knows everything I just told you and is sitting on the story as a favor to Renz.”
“I remember her,” Pearl said. “She’s an asshole.”
“No more so than the other media wolves,” Quinn said, thinking Pearl would have made a good investigative reporter.
“Pearl’s right,” Fedderman said. “The Cindy Sellers I remember won’t sit on the story for long. Not unless Renz has got something on her.”
“If he does,” Quinn said, “it isn’t enough to keep the lid on very long. That’s why he activated us. He wants to be out in front of the story.”
“Wants to be mayor,” Pearl said.
Still astute, Quinn thought.
Pearl suddenly wondered what she was doing here. Why had she chosen this option? She seemed unable to escape Quinn’s presence and influence. Another appeal from Renz to Quinn, another critical case, another psychopath, the call to her from Quinn, and here she was again. This held the repetition of madness. It was as if she were on a masochistic treadmill that she couldn’t get off because some part of her didn’t want to leave. This case…she felt in her bones it was something special. She had to be in on it.
“Go over the files on both killings,” Quinn said, “and we’ll meet back here tomorrow and brainstorm.”
“We gonna keep meeting here?” Pearl asked. She had lived here with Quinn and wasn’t comfortable with the idea. Their bedroom had been right across the hall.
“Renz has promised to get us office space, as usual. He won’t want us in a precinct house. The idea is we can be NYPD, but at the same time more independent than ordinary homicide detectives. We’ll be reporting only to him.”
“It’ll be a roach-infested dump, as usual,” Pearl said. “But anyplace is better ’an here.” Maybe not. She remembered the last office space Renz had found for them, and the shrill scream of the drill from the dental clinic on the other side of the wall.
Quinn looked at his watc
h. It was almost midnight. Fedderman’s flight out of Florida had been delayed, so the meeting had started late. “Nine o’clock tomorrow morning okay?”
Both detectives agreed to the hour, then stood up. Quinn got up to show them out.
As they passed the bedroom, Pearl couldn’t help herself and glanced in at the bed. It was made, but not very neatly. A book lay on the table by the reading lamp on what she still thought of as Quinn’s side, but she couldn’t make out the title. Nothing seemed to have changed since she’d moved out two years ago. Quinn caught her looking and she glared at him.
She knew he was still in love with her, and it was a damned inconvenience. They’d tried to live together and found it impossible. Pearl didn’t want to repeat the experience. It was obvious what the trouble was. Quinn was self-controlled, deliberate, and quietly obsessive. Pearl was impulsive, combative, and volatile. They clashed. Another difference was that Pearl knew when to give up on their relationship and Quinn didn’t. He didn’t know when to give up on anything.
At the street door, Fedderman said, “I’ve still got my rental. I’ll drive you home, Pearl.”
“Okay. Better than a subway.”
“Better company, too,” Fedderman said.
“If you don’t count dress, manners, and intelligence.”
Quinn was glad to hear them bickering. That was how it worked when they were a team, questioning and challenging each other, wearing away what wasn’t solid or didn’t fit, until only the truth remained.
Even if they might not like the truth.
Compared to most of the other New York papers, large and small, City Beat didn’t have much of a circulation. But Deputy Chief Wes Nobbler always picked up a copy, because he knew of the relationship between Commissioner Renz and Cindy Sellers. More than once Sellers had been Renz’s conduit to the larger media.
Nobbler, a large, portly man with squinty blue eyes and a complexion that made him always appear to have been out in the sun too long, was thinking about City Beat now. His bedroom was still dark, but he couldn’t sleep, and the red numerals on the clock by his bed glowed the time to him: 5:02 A.M. Too early to get up, and too late to bother going back to sleep. And his bladder was swollen, though not to the point of urgency. Why get up, switch on the light, relieve himself in the bathroom, and then go back to bed?
He couldn’t think of a good reason.
Ten minutes passed. Now getting up or not wasn’t the question. He had to take a leak.
With City Beat still on the periphery of his thoughts, he struggled to a sitting position on the squeaking bed, turned on the lamp, and plodded into the bathroom.
Might as well stay up now. He put on his wrinkled uniform pants from yesterday, knowing a freshly pressed uniform just back from the dry cleaners hung in the closet. He’d change into the clean uniform later, after he’d showered and shaved. He slipped bare feet into his shoes and left on the gray T-shirt he’d slept in. He went back into the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, and used wet fingers to slick back red hair that hadn’t a trace of gray in it.
Awake all the way now, he went into the kitchen and set up his Mr. Coffee to brew. Then he took a look out the window to make sure it wasn’t raining and left the apartment to walk to the end of the block and get a Times and City Beat from their respective vending machines.
By the time he got back it was starting to get light out and traffic was just beginning to pick up. The apartment smelled of freshly brewed coffee, and he felt hungry and wished he’d found someplace open and bought some doughnuts. Not that he needed the calories.
He poured a cup of coffee, added a dash of cream from the refrigerator, and sat down at the kitchen table.
Nobbler glanced at the Times first. There was rioting in France, Congress was calling for an investigation into something Nobbler didn’t understand, and beneath the paper’s fold there was great consternation over the Yankees’s seven-game losing streak.
The usual, Nobbler thought. All the money the Yankees had, you’d think they could buy some pitchers who didn’t have arms ready to fall off. He put the Times aside, took a sip of coffee, and looked at City Beat.
Holy Christ!
Nobbler forgot all about his appetite, the Yankees, and his coffee as he read.
He’d known about the first female torso being found, and the second dead woman. He hadn’t known that, like the first victim, only the torso of the second victim was at the morgue. And he hadn’t yet seen the results of the ballistics tests. Commissioner Renz had certainly thrown a blanket of secrecy over the second woman, so it wouldn’t be obvious right away that a serial killer was at work. And the thing with the pointed stake or whatever it was—Nobbler hadn’t known about that, only that the first woman had been sexually penetrated. He had to admit he admired the way Renz had been able to maintain even partial secrecy over matters like this. Renz wasn’t shy about working the levers of power.
Well, neither was Nobbler. And Renz had done something that really pissed him off. Frank Quinn was back on the scene, and on the Torso Murders case, along with his two detectives Kasner and Fedderman. Nobbler wasn’t crazy about the three of them, and in his mind they were no longer NYPD. Especially Quinn, who shouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the department. They gave him a ton of money and cut him loose, so what the hell else did he want? Nobbler didn’t so much resent Quinn because he was bent, more because he was bent in the wrong direction. He turned his thoughts to Kasner and Fedderman, but only briefly. Couple of losers.
What power did Renz have, to call these three retreads in as his private detective squad to solve a case that would benefit him politically?
But Nobbler knew what power—that of position and popularity. No one in or out of city government wanted to cross Renz, and strictly speaking, it wasn’t illegal for the NYPD to hire outside contractors or temporarily reactivate former cops. Especially if they were acting under the auspices of the commissioner.
Right now Renz was on a roll and wanted to stay that way. Ambitious bastard. Not that Nobbler could hold that against him.
Disgusted, he tossed the paper on top of the Times and sat back and sipped at his coffee, which was now almost too cool to drink. The information in the City Beat article was probably all over TV and radio news, and late-edition papers would pick it up. Nobbler knew how it would go, now that the media had a hand to play, and he knew how he’d deal with them if he were in charge.
But he wasn’t in charge. He didn’t like having what he considered his turf trespassed upon. And that was exactly what was happening. He was sure as hell going to do something about it.
For a long time he sat sipping cool coffee and thought about just what it was that he could or would do. There were possibilities, always possibilities. And future opportunities to be seized.
Whatever it took, he’d figure out something so that Renz and company would find themselves in a quagmire.
No, not a quagmire. Quicksand.
“It seems to have hit the fan,” Fedderman said, as he claimed the chair he’d sat in last night in Quinn’s den. The room was brighter today, with yellow sunlight spilling in between the opened drapes. There were a lot of dust motes swirling softly in the sunlight. Just looking at them made Pearl feel as if she had to sneeze. She figured Quinn didn’t clean very often.
Pearl sat in the armchair again but didn’t draw up and cross her legs this time. Her sensible black shoes were planted firmly on the floor, her hands resting lightly on her thighs. She was dressed in dark slacks, a white blouse, and a gray blazer with black buttons. She looked like a cop.
Like Fedderman, she was carrying this morning’s edition of City Beat. “It’ll be all over the TV news, too,” she said. “Some of those talking heads read things other than their prompters.” She twisted her newspaper into a roll and wielded it as if she wanted to hit someone.
She was right. Quinn had checked New York One TV before going out and walking to the Lotus Diner for an early breakfast. They were a
lready broadcasting from the places where the two torsos had been found. Then, when he’d returned to his apartment, he’d looked in on CNN and Fox News. The story had already gone national. He wasn’t surprised that news of the murders had hit so soon and with such impact. It was a sensational story, like one of those TV cop shows, only real. That was why political-and media-savvy Renz had been so desperate to hire them.
“Had time to go over the murder books?” Quinn asked, settling down behind his desk. The unlit Cuban cigar was still in the ashtray. He was smoking less and less these days, like other New Yorkers, being systematically backed into a physical and psychological corner by the mayor and his minions. Quinn reminded himself that the mayor had his health and well-being in mind. It kept him from disliking the mayor.
“Last night and this morning,” Fedderman said.
Pearl simply nodded. Quinn thought she looked beautiful in the bright morning light that would expose other women’s flaws.
She noticed the way he was looking at her and stared at him until he averted his gaze.
“Nothing jumped out at me that’d crack the case and make me a hero,” Fedderman said. “I’m sure the police profiler will have plenty to say about the victims being dismembered. And that impaling business. Phallic symbolism. They’re always quick to find that.”
“There’s a lot of it going around,” Pearl said. “Maybe our guy is impotent.”
Fedderman shrugged. “Just because some guy shoves something other ’an his dong up some broad doesn’t mean he can’t get it up.”
“How would you know that, Feds?”
“I’m a detective, Pearl.”
Quinn was looking at Pearl. “Something bothering you?”
“A niggling doubt.” she said. “These two murders were obviously committed by the same psycho, but still there were only two of them. It’s possible both women did something that set this guy off, maybe even together, and he doesn’t have a grudge against other women, or some kind of fixation and compulsion to kill more. Maybe the two victims and the killer shared some kind of past that led to violence. I mean, do two victims make a serial killer?”