by John Lutz
“Listen,” Gloria said, her dark glance darting from one to the other, “why don’t you two come up to my place and have a drink? Afterward, I’ll drive you home. I really do want to get to know you, Shellie. Everything I hear is so positive. Like, finally, you’re the one.”
Shellie felt a warm rush. That was always what she’d wanted to be to some man, what she was now—special, the one. She could hear David saying it to his sister. “She’s the one, Gloria.”
“Maybe some other time,” is what he was saying to Gloria now.
Shellie tugged at his arm. “It’s okay, David. We have time.”
He was shaking his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“What are you, ashamed of me?” Gloria asked. She seemed amused by the idea.
“You know better than that, Gloria.”
“Then don’t be so damned secretive, David. The way you’ve been bragging about this woman to me, I should think you’d want us to get to know one another.” Her dark eyes fixed on Shellie. “I mean it, Shellie. This brother of mine is gaga for you. We really should talk about him for a change.”
“She has a point, David.”
He moved closer and looked down at Shellie. There was a strained expression in his face she hadn’t seen before. The wine, maybe. They’d certainly had enough of it. “You’re sure?”
“It sounds wonderful. Your sister!” Family. “We really should get acquainted.”
After a slight hesitation, he smiled. “Okay. As long as you two don’t gang up on me.”
He opened the big sedan’s rear door and let Shellie enter first. Then he took a seat beside her. There was over a foot of space between them on the seat. It was as if David didn’t want to demonstrate his affection for her in front of his sister by sitting too close.
As Gloria pushed the selector to “drive” and the car pulled away from the curb, Shellie noticed a pungent, brackish smell.
“Do you smoke?” she asked Gloria, without thinking. “Not that I mean to pry.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“I’m afraid so. Unless somebody else who smokes has been in the car recently.”
Shellie saw Gloria’s right cheek change contour in the shadows, maybe a smile.
“I thought you might be asking for a cigarette,” Gloria said.
“No, I don’t smoke. Not that it’s any of my business whether or not you do. I wasn’t meaning to be judgmental.”
Gloria laughed, concentrating on her driving and looking straight ahead. She had the long neck and erect posture of a ballet dancer, as if an invisible string were attached to the top of her head and constantly tugging her upright in case she even thought about slumping. “That’s okay. You caught me. Tobacco’s my only vice. I’ve been trying to quit. David will tell you, I’ve tried off and on for years.”
“Those damned things are going to kill you, Gloria,” David said.
Gloria managed to shrug her narrow, hard shoulders as she spun the steering wheel to make a sharp right turn.
“That’s okay,” she said. “If they don’t, something else surely will.”
10
Life could be so good it almost hurt. It prompted Shellie to nestle close to David as Gloria jockeyed the big Chrysler north on Broadway. The car drove smoothly and seemed to glide over the potholes that dotted the street. The evening had cooled, but the warmth of the car’s interior, and of the wine she’d earlier consumed, made Shellie deliciously drowsy.
The sound of a blaring horn jolted her alert. She opened her eyes and realized Gloria had been the one leaning on the horn.
A cab that had pulled past the Chrysler was swerving in front of it, seemingly inches off its front bumper.
“Jerkoff!” Gloria said softly but vehemently.
“New York cabbies, that’s all,” David said lazily. “You oughta be used to them.”
“Being used to them doesn’t mean I don’t hope they should all come down with the plague.” She raised her voice. “Lord, deliver to them locusts and fire and sickness, and let them drive fareless through eternity.”
David chuckled and held Shellie closer in the softly upholstered backseat. “Did I mention to you Sis has a bit of a temper?”
“I hope it isn’t hereditary,” Shellie said. She saw with relief that the cab had pulled a safe distance ahead.
“David fights a constant battle with his genes,” Gloria said, from the front seat. “Not to mention the devil. Or maybe it’s all the same thing.”
The cab’s brake lights flared and it slowed abruptly, causing Gloria to stand on the brakes and the big Chrysler to cant forward. “Now that this asshole’s ahead of me, he doesn’t wanna go fast,” Gloria said. “The guy’s a great argument for the legalization of hand grenades.”
“Ease up,” David said. “You don’t want to attract attention now.”
Shellie thought that was an odd thing for him to say, but she was too comfortable and drowsy to give it much thought. She decided her life was fully in Gloria’s hands and there wasn’t much she could do about it, so she closed her eyes, rested her head against David’s warm shoulder. There were times when the wisest and easiest course was to be a fatalist.
Shellie came awake when the car stopped. She heard a low rumbling louder than the engine. She’d dozed off, but had no idea how long she’d been sleeping.
David’s arm was around her. He realized she was awake and gave her a comforting squeeze.
They’d reached their destination. Through the wide front windshield Shellie saw a gray steel overhead door rising. Beyond it, headlights illuminated a dark area with some barrels and boxes stacked on one side. About fifty feet beyond them was a brick wall, obviously very old. The wall bulged inward. The bricks were no longer aligned and ledges of broken gray mortar protruded from between them like too much icing between layers of cake. There was an old wooden workbench with what looked like tools stacked on it in the shadows near the wall.
“Apartment’s upstairs,” Gloria explained, nudging the accelerator so the big Chrysler glided inside. “It’s furnished better than the garage.”
“Much better,” David said. “And it doesn’t smell like petroleum products.” He bowed his head and kissed Shellie’s just above the bridge of her nose.
The overhead door descended with a clatter and closed behind them. Gloria turned off the engine, and the garage was suddenly very quiet. The headlights were on time delay and stayed on. They deepened the shadows not directly in their twin beams.
In the dimness of the car’s interior, Gloria glanced over her shoulder. “Be careful getting out and walking. There’s a plastic drop cloth on the floor because the car leaks oil.” The Chrysler’s interior light came on, and before David or Shellie could move, Gloria climbed out of the car and threw a wall switch.
The light from two bare overhead bulbs didn’t cheer up the garage at all. The carelessly stacked fifty-gallon barrels were rusty. The cardboard boxes were taped, unlabeled, and coated with dust. Leaning against them was a tall roll of something opaque, maybe more plastic sheeting. There were no windows.
David got out of the car before Shellie and held the door open for her, like a gentleman. She was still a little drowsy, unsteady, and needed his support.
“Before we go upstairs,” he said, “I have a present for you.”
“Present?” Shellie saw Gloria get an unfolded black umbrella from where it was leaning in the shadows by the boxes and lay it on the car’s hood. The cooling engine began to tick.
“A surprise. Before we go upstairs for our drinks.”
For a wild second Shellie thought he might mean the umbrella, but that didn’t make sense.
The car’s headlights winked off, making the garage even gloomier. Shellie glanced around and didn’t see an elevator. No stairs, either. There must be a door somewhere leading to an elevator or stairwell.
“Let’s go upstairs and get comfortable and you can surprise her,” Gloria said. She was smiling at Shellie, h
er dark eyes intense. Whatever light there was in the garage, they reflected.
“Better right here,” David said, and again he kissed Shellie on the forehead. His lips felt cool.
“Stubborn,” Gloria said, shaking her head. “I guess that’s why you love him.”
“One reason,” Shellie said. She really did love David. More than anyone or anything at any time in her life.
Stepping back, David smiled down at her and reached into a pocket of his suit coat. Beyond him, Shellie noticed Gloria reaching for the umbrella as if to open it.
She didn’t open it. Instead, she withdrew a long, pointed wooden shaft that had been concealed inside it.
“Close your eyes, darling,” David said.
But Shellie didn’t. Even through her wine-induced drowsiness and love and trust for David, the feeling of security she always had in his presence, she realized something was very wrong. A tingle of fear played up her spine.
Foolish. Why should I be frightened? He’s here.
His hand emerged from his pocket not with a piece of jewelry or a gift box, but holding a small gun.
“David?”
He shot her through the heart.
She dropped to a sitting position, her legs straight out, and then toppled backward. He immediately took two steps, leaned down, and shot her again, twice, through the forehead.
Gloria tossed him the pointed shaft so it remained vertical in the air, as if she were a dancer tossing her partner a cane. Matching her stagecraft, he snatched it neatly with one hand. He felt the point with his index finger, testing for sharpness.
Gloria walked around closer to stand next to him over Shellie’s dead body.
“Look at her face,” she said. “She was surprised. You didn’t disappoint her.”
“I never disappoint the ladies,” David said.
He bent low with the sharpened section of broomstick, and then slowly straightened up without it.
Gloria was breathing hard as she stared down at the foot or so of wood protruding from Shellie.
“Don’t you ever wonder, David, how it would be if you didn’t wait until they were—?”
“Grab the other end of this plastic sheet and let’s move her so we can get busy.”
“For everything there is a purpose under the heavens,” Gloria said, still staring at the protruding section of broomstick. “Sometimes more than one purpose.”
“Aside from your cynicism, this is no time to go biblical on me.”
“It’s exactly the time,” she said, grinning. “And you didn’t answer my question.”
11
“Only an arm,” medical examiner Dr. Julius Nift said, kneeling alongside the pale object before him on the wet bricks. “Yet look at the attention it’s attracted. Some show. I wish somebody would give us a hand.”
Pearl despised Nift and his callous sense of humor, but she said nothing, because, sick jokes aside, she agreed with him. A hand would mean fingerprints. She wasn’t sure how much this arm that had been fished from the East River would be able to help them.
Nift continued to probe and examine the arm. He was a short, chesty man inflated by self-importance who dressed more like a banker than a doctor who spent a lot of time with corpses. He wore his black hair combed forward, resulting in sparse bangs that made him look Napoleonic. That was how Pearl thought of him, as a crude, cynical Napoleon. It was lucky the little bastard didn’t have an army.
Quinn, standing a few feet away with Fedderman, gnawed his lower lip as he stared down at the handless severed arm. It had obviously been in the water a long time. He glanced around, squinting in the early afternoon sunlight. They were near Sutton Place, home of some of the most expensive real estate in New York. It wasn’t likely the arm belonged to any of the neighbors. A missing arm in Sutton Place wasn’t the sort of thing to go unreported.
The arm had been spotted by a Mrs. Grace Oliphant, while walking her Yorkshire terrier, Clipper. She’d noticed something pale snagged on some deadwood that had drifted up against the bank and thought at first it was a large, dead fish. She skirted a black iron fence and moved closer. Clipper began barking frantically, and she wasn’t so sure she was looking at a dead fish. It was the forty-five-degree crook in the blanched object that made her peer more intensely and with fearful curiosity. There was something about the thing, something that reminded her of…an elbow.
Mrs. Oliphant straightened up immediately and backed away, nauseated, tugging at the leash to get Clipper away from the dreadful thing. The arm. It was no wonder the dog had been barking so frantically. He must have picked up the terrible scent, realized before she did what they were looking at. Yorkies were so smart.
She gave the leash a firm yank, momentarily choking off Clipper’s shrill barking, then looked him in the eye and shushed him so he’d stay quiet while she used her cell phone to call the police.
The uniforms who’d arrived first knew immediately they were looking at a human arm that had been severed at the elbow. Its hand had been cut off at the wrist. One of the cops picked up a branch and edged the arm closer to the concrete wall where the water lapped, then gingerly inched it up and over and onto the bricks. He didn’t like touching it, even with a branch, but he knew he had to move it before it broke free from where it was snagged and floated away, or maybe sank.
The water had blanched away most of the color, leaving the arm a dull white. The uniforms could see how the woman who’d called thought at first she’d been looking at a dead fish. There was some obvious damage from what lived in the river nibbling at the arm. Gleaming white bone showed beneath flaps of skin at both ends.
Both cops knew about the Torso Murders and recognized the possible significance of the arm. The police investigated weird things found in New York rivers almost every week, and those were only the ones that were reported. Still, human remains…and with the sicko on the loose killing and cutting up his victims…it was a situation that called for diligence.
One of the uniforms had listened to Grace Oliphant’s story and taken notes, while his partner called their lieutenant. Up the bureaucratic chain the information went, but in a way tightly controlled. Within fifteen minutes, Renz had called Quinn.
“Right or left arm?” Quinn asked Nift.
“Does it matter?”
“It matters because I asked you,” Quinn said in a flat voice that had unnerved hundreds if not thousands of suspects.
It didn’t seem to unnerve Nift, armored as he was by ego. Still, he decided it was time to be businesslike. He pressed a forefinger to the side of his chin, striking a thoughtful pose, as he shifted slightly to peer at both ends of the arm. “I’d guess left, but I can’t tell you for sure till we get this to the morgue and examine it more closely.”
“How long’s it been in the water?”
“I can only guess, but I’d say about a month.”
Quinn figured it would belong to the first victim, if it was an arm from one of the mystery torsos. It almost had to be, he figured. Even in New York, it wasn’t every day that the odd severed limb turned up. “Can you match it with either of the torsos we found?”
Nift glanced up at him with a confident, nasty smile. “With my skill, if it matches, I’ll know. There’ll be distinctive marks on the bone from the cleaver or hatchet. And comparable patterns in the way the flesh was cut away. Also, we should be able to match it by age to one of the torsos, if that’s where it came from. And of course there’s always DNA. Takes a while for a full report, but we might be able to hurry through a preliminary yes or no on a simple match.”
A siren grew louder, then yodeled to silence, causing Clipper, held by Mrs. Oliphant, over by a small grouping of ornamental trees with orange berries, to fill the vacuum by emitting an earsplitting series of barks. A boxy vehicle with flashing lights had braked to a halt on the rise beyond steps leading to one of the pocket parks bordering the river at that point. Quinn could see a swing set and monkey bars and was glad some kid hadn’t wandered down t
o the river and found the arm.
A white-uniformed paramedic jogged effortlessly down the concrete steps, then stepped over the low brick wall bordering the park and came toward them. While he was nimble, he was a chubby guy, holding a black rubberized zip case that looked like a portfolio an artist would carry samples in. Quinn figured there was no need for a stretcher here. The arm would fit in the case diagonally with room to spare.
The paramedic had dark hair combed severely sideways and a name patch that said JEFF.
He glanced around, noticed the black leather medical bag, and aimed an expectant smile at Nift. “Ready to remove?” He motioned with his head toward the pale arm on the bricks.
“I’m finished with it for now,” Nift said.
Quinn nodded and stepped back, along with Pearl and Fedderman, and Jeff set to work.
“Careful with that,” Nift told him as Jeff eased the arm into the case and worked the zipper. “It’s part of a set.”
Jeff didn’t crack a smile.
12
Nobody was laughing in the office on Seventy-ninth Street. Quinn and Fedderman were seated at their desks, facing each other across the room. Pearl was perched on the edge of her desk with her legs crossed, sipping coffee. The office smelled strongly of overbrewed coffee, which was an improvement over the usual smell of sawdust and powdered plaster. The workmen doing the rehabbing on the floors above were sawing and hammering, destroying so they could create. The noise wasn’t loud enough to be a bother, but it was almost constant.
Quinn had just hung up his desk phone. He sat staring at it for a long moment before speaking, as if it was a memory aid.
“The M.E. says the arm belonged to a woman in her early thirties, maybe five feet nine or ten. She was average weight. The swelling and loose flesh we saw was from exposure to the water. No distinguishing marks or jewelry.” He leaned backward in his chair and crossed his arms. “Nift says the arm doesn’t match either of the bodies.”