by John Lutz
“Up your ass with your coffee,” she said.
He poured her a cup anyway, then reconsidered, staring at the way it was steaming. It was scalding. She shouldn’t have it right now.
He poured it back in the pot and returned to his desk.
“Let’s go back to where we found the last one, by the Dumpster, and reinterview anyone who might have seen or heard something,” Quinn said.
“In the rain?” Fedderman asked.
Quinn was already putting on his light overcoat.
“In the rain.”
“Most of them will probably be at work,” Fedderman said.
“So will we,” Quinn said.
It wasn’t just that Quinn kept Pearl’s theory in mind the rest of that day; he couldn’t get it out of his mind. Sometimes sitting around drinking coffee, or talking while it was raining outside a precinct house or stakeout car, there’d be a breakthrough in a case.
Maybe today in the office had been one of those times.
20
By early evening the rain had stopped and a cooling breeze wafted in from the east. The city looked and smelled fresh, disconnected from any sordid past or questionable future.
Quinn and Linda Chavesky met again for coffee and then went for a walk. They were on Broadway, near Columbus Circle. Traffic was heavy, mostly with cabs taking people shopping or to early dinners before the theater. Quinn was on Linda’s right, between her and the street. They were strolling casually, taking their time, stringing out the experience of being together. When the lights temporarily stopped traffic on their side of the street, they could hear their footfalls on the damp sidewalk.
“Wanna talk shop?” Quinn asked.
Linda shrugged, bumping her hip against him, maybe accidentally. “You’re always a cop, I’m always an M.E.”
Quinn told her about Pearl’s theory.
“Doesn’t sound likely,” Linda said after listening closely.
“Pearl’s an original thinker.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Quinn hoped he’d detected a note of jealousy.
They both veered left automatically to let a couple of chattering kids in gangsta pants bounce past.
“Not being critical,” Linda said, “just asking, how the hell do they keep those pants up?”
“I dunno. I guess they enjoy the suspense.”
She laughed.
They’d walked another fifty feet before she said, “You run Pearl’s theory past Renz?”
“No. I think we should wait till we have something more.”
“There might not be any more.”
“Might not.”
Another five measured steps. Ten. Quinn could sense that Linda hadn’t let go of what he’d told her. She was toying with it in her mind, like a cat with a ball of yarn. Here was something about her that intrigued him, and for some reason immensely pleased him.
And something else, he realized; they were comfortable in their silence.
“Maybe you should try it on the profiler, Helen Iman,” Linda said.
“According to Pearl, Helen’s the one being conned.”
“Well, she might at least want to be aware of the possibility.”
“Also,” Quinn said, “it might be a mistake to plant the idea in Helen’s head. Might throw her off her game.”
“Uh-huh.” They walked a bit farther. “That’s one for you to decide.”
“I know,” Quinn said. “You just examine what’s left of the victims.”
“Not anymore,” Linda said.
They stopped walking and Quinn looked at her.
“Dr. Nift has taken over all duties connected with the Torso Murders.”
“He give a reason?”
“To maintain continuity, he said.”
“He’s a continual asshole,” Quinn said.
“He’s my boss.”
“Which is why I can say it and you can’t,” Quinn said.
Linda didn’t disagree.
Jill and Tony met at Has Beans again. He’d suggested a genuine night out, dinner at an expensive restaurant, maybe a show. Who could tell what might come after? She wasn’t ready for that. She’d let him know and he’d smoothly backed off.
They were in the same booth where they’d first met. He was sipping a Honduras again. She’d taken a chance and ordered a Nicaragua.
When she sipped the foamy coffee drink, she decided she liked it.
“Yum,” she said, “but do they even grow coffee in Nicaragua?”
“I don’t know,” Tony said. “They grow revolutions.” He sipped and smiled. “On the phone you mentioned there was something you wanted to tell me. Something personal?”
“It’s something that’s got me kind of rattled,” she said. “A little scared.”
“About me?”
She rested her hand on his. “God, no!” She didn’t know quite where to begin, not wanting to sound paranoid. “There’s this woman who seems to be…well, following me.”
He sat forward, interested. She was gratified by his obvious concern for her. “You know who she is?” he asked.
“I’ve never seen her before. I don’t think. She does look familiar, but maybe she has one of those faces. She’s a street woman, Tony. A homeless person. Dirty clothes, stringy blond hair. And she looks as if she could use a bath and a good meal.”
“So maybe she’s just panhandling.”
“No, she’s never asked for anything. It’s just that now and then I turn around or glance to the side, and there she is.”
“Coincidence?”
“I wish. She’s usually staring at me. Once she even started toward me.”
“What do you mean, started toward you? In a way that was threatening?”
“I…well, I’m not sure.”
“So what did you do?”
“I ran. I mean, that sounds worse than it is. I had on my sweat suit and jogging shoes anyway, and I was sort of running in place, so I just…jogged away from her.”
“Good.” With his free hand, he scrunched up his lower lip between thumb and forefinger, looking worried.
“What are you thinking, Tony?”
“I don’t know what to think. If you see her again, just avoid her. Do whatever’s necessary to stay away. She might be dangerous.”
“Whether she is or not, I admit she makes me afraid.”
“Maybe you know something about her you don’t think you know,” Tony said. “If you know what I mean.”
Jill didn’t. “There’s something else.” She hesitated. “I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of nut.”
Tony gave her hand a squeeze. “I don’t and I won’t.”
“I get the feeling sometimes that someone’s been in my apartment while I was gone. No, more than a feeling, actually. I’m sure things aren’t exactly as I’ve left them. There’ve been small changes, barely noticeable, but they’re there. Maybe a lamp shade’s crooked, or a sofa cushion’s propped up at a corner when it wasn’t before, or my clothes aren’t hung in the same order in my closet. Things like that.” She looked at him. He must think she was crazy. “I’m sure about these things, Tony. They’re real and not my imagination.”
“Not necessarily your imagination,” he said. “But maybe your memory. Maybe you’re just spooked and seeing things you hadn’t noticed before.”
She tried a smile. “Sort of the opposite of déjà vu?”
“I guess you could put it that way. If you had a sense of humor. You might simply not recall things exactly as they were. We all do that from time to time.”
“You could be right.” But she wasn’t so sure. These differences in her apartment, however minute, did seem real.
He sat back and seemed suddenly alarmed. “Jill, you don’t think these two things are connected, do you? I mean the homeless woman and the idea that somebody might have been in your apartment?”
The possibility had been on the edge of her consciousness. But she said, “I don’t know. I don’t see how they could be, but who
knows?”
Tony abruptly leaned toward her, giving her hand another squeeze. “You have my cell phone number, Jill. Do me a favor. If you see this woman again, give me a call. Wherever I am, I’ll get right there and confront her.”
“All right. But I could call the police.”
“If you want.”
She didn’t and he knew it. She wanted him and not the police to come to her rescue. Besides, what could she tell the police, arrest the woman for staring at her?
“The trouble is,” Jill said, “you’re out of town so often. Your job.”
“If I’m in town, I’ll come running.”
She placed her hand on top of the one holding hers and aimed a smile across the table. “I know you will, Tony. But all of it, I mean, it’s all probably nothing. Maybe it is my imagination. I mean, the woman’s real, all right, but she probably does simply want a handout. She might see me as a soft touch.”
He grinned at her. “Now, that’s possible.”
They leaned toward each other across the table and kissed lightly.
“But call me anyway,” he said.
Jill assured him that she would, but she’d decided not to. These problems she should handle on her own. She didn’t want Tony to think she was some kind of head case.
One he wouldn’t want to see again.
21
He wasn’t there. He was.
Deputy Chief Nobbler glanced up from what he was reading on his desk, and there stood Greeve. Also standing was the hair on the back of Nobbler’s neck.
Nobbler had just a moment ago told his assistant in the outer office to send Greeve in, but Greeve had somehow opened the heavy door, entered, and closed the door without making a sound. Living up to his “Ghost” nickname. Nobbler wondered if the silent entry had been deliberate. He was sure that from time to time Greeve played with his mind.
“Morning,” Greeve said. He made it sound like mourning. Or maybe Nobbler just thought that because of Greeve’s mortician looks and attitude.
Mourning yourself. “I’ve been thinking about that Quinn and Dr. Chavesky thing,” Nobbler said.
“It bears thinking about.” Greeve methodically unbuttoned the coat of his dark suit. His idea of getting casual.
“Word I get is that he’s porking her on a regular basis,” Nobbler said.
“Quinn’d be an idiot if he wasn’t.”
“We got us a bona fide romance going here,” Nobbler said, with a smile that made his fat cheeks crinkle. “A reformed alky and a pensioned-off cop. Think it has a chance?”
“Love’s strange,” Greeve said. “If it is love.”
Nobbler narrowed his eyes at Greeve. “You think it might be something else? Somebody using somebody?”
“That’s love,” Greeve said.
“Maybe it is at that. There’s jealousy, too. And hell’s fury. They can be part of love. Even part of love’s embers.”
It wasn’t like Nobbler to be poetic. It took Greeve a few beats to figure out where the deputy chief was going. “Pearl?”
“Uh-huh. Even though she and Quinn are no longer a couple, she’s working with Quinn, seeing him every day. She can’t be happy knowing he’s humping the good Dr. Chavesky.”
“I’ll bet she is good.”
“You’re digressing.”
“Pearl knows about Quinn and Chavesky?”
“If she doesn’t already, she will soon,” Nobbler said. “She won’t like it.”
Greeve looked doubtful. “I don’t know, sir. Pearl’s different. Way I got it, she’s the one who broke it off with Quinn. He’s been trying to get back in and she wants none of it.”
“She’ll feel different when she realizes Quinn’s suddenly no longer available to her. Women. What they can’t have is what they want, and why they want it.”
It took Greeve a few seconds to work that one out in his mind. “I’ve seen Pearl Kasner work. She’s not women. She’s different.”
“Yeah. From what I hear, she’s a goddamned alley cat. She’ll fight for any morsel just because it’s hers. Even if it’s Quinn. Then she’ll spit that morsel out.”
Greeve wasn’t so sure. If only from a distance, he knew Pearl. She was a hardhead but smart in a weird way. He chose silence as the wisest course.
“Quinn’s also a problem,” Nobbler said.
“That’s for damned sure.”
“But starting today, I want you to get off Quinn and start shadowing Pearl.”
“Quinn’s the one in charge,” Greeve reminded Nobbler. “And we just agreed he’s a problem.”
“He’s the problem,” Nobbler said, “and Pearl’s his vulnerability.”
Greeve stuck out his lower lip and slowly nodded. Nobbler could, at times, be smart in a weird way, too. “Woman scorned, hell hath no fury, that kinda stuff?”
“Exactly,” Nobbler said.
“Pearl will feel the way you say. Get distracted and screw up some way. Maybe even sabotage Quinn.”
“She will if she’s female,” Nobbler said. “And she’s definitely that.”
He began carefully arranging the papers on his desk, letting Greeve know their meeting was at an end.
“I suppose it makes sense,” Greeve said.
“I’m glad you think so,” Nobbler said, looking up.
But Greeve was gone.
Jill Clark fought her way between a man with a duffel bag and a woman with a purse the size of a house and made her way onto the crowded subway. Getting mobbed and sometimes groped or pinched on the subway wasn’t Jill’s idea of recreation, and she wished she didn’t have to go through the ordeal. But riding the subway was the cheapest way to move around New York other than walking, and the offices of Tucker, Simpson, and King, where she’d filled in for a second vacationing employee, were too far away for her to walk.
When she transferred after two stops to an uptown line, the train wasn’t so crowded. In fact, she was one of about twenty passengers. They were the usual mix, business commuters, solemn readers of books and newspapers, dozing night-shift workers on their way home, a few of the homeless, a few truly dangerous-looking men whose dress and manner suggested aggressive mental derangement.
Jill had entered the end door. Immediately to her left there were facing smaller seats with chipped decals on them saying they were priority seating for persons with disabilities. That didn’t mean Jill couldn’t sit in one and get up if somebody with a disability got on the train. Besides, there were plenty of empty seats. Both of the disability-designated seats accommodated two passengers and were unoccupied. Jill settled into one.
The train accelerated into darkness with a roar and a squeal of steel on steel. Jill sat back and watched her wavering reflection facing her in the dirt-streaked window. A corner of the window was smeared with a gooey substance that might be anything.
She remembered reading about a study concerning germs on subway cars—they were everywhere on everything. She rubbed her fingertips on her slacks.
The roar of the train grew suddenly louder, and cooler air swirled around Jill’s ankles. The sliding door at the end of the car, leading to and from the next car, had opened. Someone was moving from one car to another. Teenagers did that a lot. So did panhandlers, as well as gang members looking for trouble. Jill told herself this was probably just someone looking for someone else and kept her gaze focused on the floor.
She saw movement in the periphery of her vision; then the door swung shut. There was sudden silence, and the air around Jill’s ankles became still. She waited for whoever had entered the car to move past her, possibly toward the door at the opposite end.
Instead she saw a pair of worn-out, scuffed black shoes protruding from wrinkled brown slacks, and a body dropped with a sigh next to hers on the small seat so that their thighs were warmly touching.
Jill saw dirty hands, chipped fingernails, and recoiled at the stench of stale perspiration and perhaps urine.
She turned her head and was looking into the desperate bloodsho
t eyes of the woman who’d been following her.
Jill’s throat constricted with fear.
A viselike grip closed on her right bicep, squeezing so hard that it hurt.
“We’ve gotta talk,” the woman said in a raspy voice. “Whether you want to or not.”
“I don’t want to!” Jill managed to force the words through her tightened throat as she tried to yank her arm away. She couldn’t break the iron grip. “We have nothing to say!”
“What you need to do is listen. I’m warning you.”
“Warning me?” Jill tried harder to escape the fingers digging into her arm. The woman’s grip got even tighter.
“Something bad could happen to you,” the woman said. Her breath was foul enough to turn Jill’s stomach.
“Damn it! Let me go!” Jill began working her arm back and forth, desperate to get away. “Stop following me! Leave me alone!”
“You’d better watch out.”
Jill stood up this time, pulling her arm away and twisting it violently, causing it to flare with pain.
Suddenly she was free.
She took two wobbling steps and bumped into one of the vertical bars for standing riders to grip when the car was crowded. Her forehead hit the hard steel, momentarily disorienting her. She almost fell.
Then she got her balance and started to stagger toward the front of the car. A man was staring at her. He quickly looked away.
No one looked at her other than briefly and with mild and guarded curiosity as she lurched and stumbled the length of the car. The other passengers seemed not to have noticed anything was wrong. They were studiously reading or gazing up at the advertisements running along the sides of the car above the windows. Or they stared at the dirty and littered floor. They didn’t want to get involved with violence, insanity, the unpredictable. The predictable they faced every day was difficult enough.
Jill gripped another vertical bar and looked back to see if the woman was pursuing her.
The other end of the car was unoccupied. The woman was gone.
Jill fell into an empty seat and hugged herself. She began rocking in the seat, exaggerating the motion of the train. This was insane. Maybe she was insane.