by John Lutz
“Quinn?” a woman’s voice said on the phone. Not Pearl’s voice. “Quinn? It’s Linda.”
He suddenly wanted to see Linda. To hold her and feel her holding him.
“Linda,” he said stupidly, still tangled in the cobwebs of sleep. He dropped the receiver but caught it just before it could bang against the desk. “I dozed off in my chair,” he explained.
“You’re working too hard.”
“Not hard enough, though.”
She was silent for a moment.
“I need to see you,” he said.
“That’s why I called. I need to see you.”
Jesus! Quinn thought. Where is this going? So fast. Like being caught in a strong current propelling me toward a sea I know is dangerous.
“Quinn?”
Sharks. Not fire—water. Wake all the way up, numb wit!
“Quinn?” Linda said again, concerned.
“The Lotus Diner in half an hour?”
“I’ll be there.”
He hung up the phone and stood staring mutely at it for several seconds. Then he went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. On his shirt, too. He decided he needed a fresh shirt. Realized he still had a bitter taste in his mouth from the cigar. Brushed his teeth. Went into the bedroom and changed his shirt. Back to the bathroom to comb his hair.
Before leaving the apartment, he picked up the cigar and ashtray and carried them into the kitchen. He ran water on the cigar and threw it away, then wiped the glass ashtray clean and set it on the sink counter.
He found an aerosol can of air freshener and sprayed it around the apartment, especially in the den, where he’d been smoking.
As he left the apartment, he wasn’t thinking about his dreams, about the Torso Murders, about dead women.
Only about Linda, alive.
At first Jill was awkward around Tony when they met for dinner. He seemed not to notice, and by the time they were seated at Scampi, a four-star restaurant near Sixth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, she was much more at ease. Tony was so attentive, so reassuring, so…nonthreatening that Jill’s conversation with Madeline receded in her mind and seemed more and more unreal.
Surely it was unreal, the delusional ranting of a mentally ill street woman. This was reality, sitting here with Tony in the soft light from the candle in the center of the white-clothed table, their half-eaten meals before them, the waiter bringing more wine.
Tony couldn’t—he simply couldn’t—be the kind of monster Madeline had painted. Surely if the story were true Jill would be able to see it in Tony. Not that he’d have horns and his eyes would glow red, but there’d be something. A person simply couldn’t be as Madeline had described and at the same time be like Tony.
Besides, Jill knew this man. They’d had several dates now and were moving toward sleeping together. While making it obvious that was what he expected, Tony hadn’t rushed her in any way while they continued to explore each other, making sure of what they wanted. Making sure of Jill, really. Tony seemed to know he wanted her, and for more than simple sex.
That was what had emerged from their time together, an intimacy that would be cemented by commitment when they were ready. A mutual trust. Their very private conversations had provided insights into each other’s souls.
“You seemed a little unsettled when you got here,” Tony said, as the waiter finished pouring the wine. His grin was beautiful and boyish. Toothpaste-commercial white, yet genuine as Tony himself. “Still worried about someone trespassing in your apartment?”
“Not anymore.” Jill smiled, wondering if she should tell him about Madeline. Mad Madeline.
Actually mad?
Better to say nothing. Tony, handsome and perfectly normal Tony, might think she, Jill, was the one with the overactive imagination. The paranoid tendencies.
Maybe I am the mad one.
But she knew she hadn’t imagined Madeline.
And somewhere deep in her mind she knew she couldn’t entirely dismiss Madeline’s mad tale.
Somewhere.
Far away.
The wine was relaxing her, making her feel warm inside. So warm and safe.
With Tony.
Over coffee at the Lotus Diner, Quinn and Linda made easy small talk. The evening was warm, but it was cool in the diner and unusually quiet.
It hadn’t taken long before Quinn felt totally comfortable talking with Linda, and she seemed comfortable talking with him. Strangely, the coffee cups between them helped. They were similar to other containers of liquid from the hell they’d both visited, reminders of who they’d been, and who they were. The present, where the liquid containers had handles, was infinitely better than the past, and getting better.
Quinn hadn’t taken a sip of his coffee in a long time. He sat toying with the warm cup, enjoying the scent of the coffee and the heat on his fingertips. “It was a good idea, meeting here tonight.”
“I think so,” Linda said. She was wearing a dark blouse, pale Levi’s that she had the figure for, no jewelry except for four or five thin silver loop bracelets that jangled together ever so faintly whenever she lifted her right arm to sip coffee.
There were only a few other people in the diner, and no one was paying them the slightest attention. Outside the streaked window next to their booth, traffic on Amsterdam had slacked off and there weren’t so many pedestrians—the city as relaxed as it ever got. Across the street, a woman waving a folded newspaper lured a cab to the curb. She opened its rear door and climbed in. The white of the newspaper showed behind the cab’s reflecting windows as it drove away.
“My place is within easy walking distance of here,” Quinn said.
Linda smiled. “Seeing that woman hail a cab make you think of that?”
Quinn looked into her eyes, not smiling. “You made me think of that.”
Linda felt a stirring she hadn’t experienced in years. She knew they could both feel their relationship shifting toward the tipping point and wondered if Quinn was as nervous about it as she was. Nervous and a little bit afraid. He couldn’t be as afraid. He’d been the one who’d nudged things in a new and faster direction. Linda’s heart wouldn’t slow down.
Her smile faded and she raised a hand to run her fingertips lightly along the contours of his face, like a blind woman assessing someone’s true self.
“I’ll get the check,” she said.
“Wouldn’t think of it,” Quinn told her.
“No, you wouldn’t.”
She thought that from this point on it wouldn’t matter much which of them paid.
25
“Pearl’s pissed off,” Ed Greeve said to his boss. “Has been ever since we made sure she knew about Linda Chavesky.”
“That’s a good way for her to be,” Nobbler said from behind his desk. He scratched his fleshy neck. “Walking around pissed off and with her mind not on her work.”
Harsh morning light streamed in through the office window, making the brightly illuminated half of Nobbler’s face look red and raw, as if he’d shaved way too close and planed the skin.
“Think we might be able to flip her?” Greeve asked. “Get her to let us know what Quinn’s up to?”
Nobbler thought for a few seconds and shook his head. “Not that one.”
“A woman scorned,” Greeve reminded Nobbler.
Nobbler smiled. “Remember, she’s the one who dumped Quinn.”
“I will say she’s trying to get over him. Got herself a replacement. Guy named Milton Kahn, who’s been humping her heavy.”
“Well, well…” Nobbler drummed the plump fingertips of his right hand on the desk and looked off into the brilliant light, maybe calling up the image of Pearl and whoever this Milton Kahn was.
“Pearl’s probably a sexual dynamo,” Greeve said.
“The type,” Nobbler agreed. “Lucky Milton Kahn.”
He sat back in his chair, made a tent with his fingers, and tapped their soft tips lightly together.
“Pearl�
�s got this mother in a retirement home,” Greeve said. “Way I got it, she and another old broad there set up Pearl with this Kahn guy, and the chemistry was there. Matchmaker moms. Always a pain in the ass.”
“You never had a wife.”
“Other peoples’,” Greeve said.
“Hardly counts.”
“Counts where it counts, depending on who’s counting.”
Nobbler didn’t want to get into that kind of conversation with Greeve. The guy was a mystery anyway, even without going all Zenlike. “This Kahn character, is he a player?”
Greeve knew what Nobbler meant. Might Milton Kahn develop into a problem? “Naw, what he is is a dermatologist.”
“It gets better and better,” Nobbler said.
“I’ll tell you something else I think,” Greeve said. “My feeling is they might be humping like crazy, but they’re not in love.”
“How the hell would you know that?”
“I can just tell. It’s not the real thing.”
Nobbler gave him an incredulous look. “Christ on a stick! What are you, a romance columnist?”
“I’m somebody who knows people.”
“He’s humping her,” Nobbler said. “That’s good enough for me.” He tapped his fingertips together faster and faster, as if to demonstrate.
Greeve might have shaken his head in disapproval as he left the office, or it might have been Nobbler’s imagination.
Jill had never been in the main library. After climbing stone steps to the entrance, she found herself in a vast atrium of richly veined cream-colored marble with tall columns. The floor was also marble. A wide stairway led to upper floors. There was a mezzanine with a railing high above. A girl about ten was leaning over the railing looking down at her. She smiled at Jill, then ducked back out of sight. People walked past, their footsteps and voices echoing in the vastness.
Jill found a spot out of the flow of foot traffic and looked around.
There was no sign of Madeline. Or the woman who called herself Madeline. As far as Jill knew, the woman might be someone other than she said she was, someone so mentally deranged she might be imagining a different identity as well as the bizarre story she’d told.
Or was it so bizarre? When Madeline told it to Jill it seemed to possess a stubborn if frightening truth that kept finding its way to the surface. Jill had believed her enough to be afraid, to need to know more. Which was why Jill was here.
But where was Madeline?
Madeline never did show up. Jill waited fifteen minutes more inside the library, then went outside and stood in the shade near the entrance and waited another ten. People came and went. None of them was Madeline.
Jill rode the subway back toward her apartment half expecting, maybe fearing, that the door at the end of the car would open with a blast of air and noise and in would burst crazy Madeline to slump down next to her again and fill her ears with madness.
But the subway ride was uneventful except for a desperate man who set half a dozen small stuffed animals to bound about on the car’s floor and tried to sell them for five dollars each.
During the next few days, as Jill entered or left her apartment, walked the streets, and rode the subway, she found herself watching for Madeline. Now and then she’d spot a bundle of rags that turned out to be human and her heart would jump, or she’d spot a haggard, lonely homeless woman who only vaguely resembled Madeline when she got up close. No Madeline. She seemed to have left Jill’s life as abruptly and mysteriously as she’d entered it.
Jill couldn’t leave the matter alone. She caught up on the news reports about the Torso Murders, spending much of her time reading daily papers and then more time online searching local newspapers’ archives.
Without Madeline there to make the murders seem connected to E-Bliss.org, Jill began to doubt that either of them was in any real danger. Madeline must simply be one of the many mentally precarious and delusional souls wandering the New York streets. Perhaps Jill could find help for Madeline. If she could find her.
If she truly wanted to find Madeline.
What she wanted to do, really, was forget Madeline, though she didn’t like admitting it to herself.
Each night before Jill slept, and in the dawn just after waking, she found herself thinking about Madeline. There was no way she could keep her mind from working on Madeline’s story. If Madeline was telling the truth and was found and murdered, her killers wouldn’t necessarily leave her torso to be discovered and examined by the police. The fact that she’d escaped for a while might have put her in a different category, someone E-Bliss.org wouldn’t want in any way connected to the other murders.
But what bothered Jill most about Madeline’s story, what snagged her thoughts whenever she let her guard down, was that Madeline, who’d been vibrating with the urgency that they meet and discuss some kind of plan, was nowhere to be found. Not in Jill’s banal, workaday world, anyway.
But Madeline was real. Jill kept reminding herself of that.
Had to be real.
Five days after they were to meet in the library, Jill tuned her TV to NY1 local news and learned that the decomposing body of a woman had been found in the shadows of a subway stop on Fifty-first Street. No one had noticed the body at first because it was just inside the dark tunnel at the very end of the platform, down in the deeper darkness alongside the tracks. Train after train must have traveled alongside the dead woman, barely missing her.
There was no identification on the body.
In the Post the next morning was a police artist’s depiction of what the woman might have looked like when alive. Jill saw it while riding the subway when the man seated across from her opened his newspaper wide to read the inside pages.
Jill sat rocking gently in her seat with the subway’s constant swaying motion staring at the sketch. The woman’s eyes seemed to stare back at her.
The woman looked like Madeline.
Charlotte Lowenstein kissed Dixie on the lips as they were about to leave The Bad Sister and walk the few blocks to Charlotte’s apartment in the Village. Charlotte was slightly drunk and knew it but didn’t care. Dixie would take care of her, make sure she didn’t stumble and fall or walk out in front of a car. Not that there was much traffic this time of night in this part of the Village.
Dixie helped her to stand up from her chair at the tiny table where they’d been sitting. The tabletop was a clutter of empty glasses, wadded paper napkins, miniature plastic swords, and bent swizzle sticks. They’d been sitting and talking, lost in each other, for at least two hours.
The bartender smiled and told them good night as they made their way along the bar, where about a dozen women sat, then past an old-fashioned glowing jukebox near the street door.
Outside, walking wasn’t as much of a problem as Charlotte had assumed. Dixie lent her an arm for support, but it wasn’t necessary. Charlotte could walk a straight line. She pretended anyway that she required Dixie’s assistance. It was so nice, for a change, to have someone taking care of her.
So much better than the loneliness, the emptiness that was becoming vaster and vaster and threatened to leave a hole in her soul.
The dating service had worked the first time. First time for Charlotte, anyway. Its website had boasted about same-sex matchups, and it had been true to its word. Dixie, tall, dark haired, with strong features and a slim, powerful body, was exactly what Charlotte needed. Maybe opposites did attract, up to a point.
Unlike the sleek and sensual Dixie, Charlotte was short and blond, and about fifteen pounds overweight, most of it in her hips. She had a heart-shaped, sweet face, as opposed to Dixie’s chiseled features and sharp vulpine profile. Dixie was undeniably sexy, but in a way that when she got a few years older might prompt people to refer to her as “handsome.” Well, she was handsome to Charlotte right now, tonight.
And tonight was going to get better. Each night during the month since they’d first met by appointment at Starbucks seemed better to Charlotte than
the last. It was tough enough in a new city without being one of the sisters. True, you could hook up easily enough in New York, but there were risks involved. Sometimes serious risks. There were people, male and female, out there who would hurt you in the worst ways.
Charlotte found Dixie to be delightfully perfect. Dixie knew just how far not to go.
The two women leaned toward each other for mutual support, though Charlotte was sure Dixie had downed only one drink, maybe two. Charlotte’s memory was fuzzy. She heard Dixie draw a deep breath.
“Beautiful night.”
“Every night’s beautiful with you,” Charlotte said.
Dixie smiled. Two men, maybe a couple, passed on the other side of the street and glanced over at them. Charlotte knew that one way or another it was probably Dixie who drew their attention. Dixie, with her slicked-back black hair, her dark leather jacket and black tights, her high-heeled black leather boots that made her long legs look even longer. And the red scarf tied loosely at her neck, a splash of brilliance like blood. Man or woman, who wouldn’t stare? Who wouldn’t want?
Charlotte rested her head on the point of Dixie’s shoulder as they strolled. “We gonna put on a CD tonight?”
Dixie smiled. “If you’d like.”
“I like it with music.”
“You like it with or without,” Dixie said. She pinched Charlotte playfully on the cheek. Not that it didn’t hurt a little. Charlotte didn’t mind.
Headlights behind them bathed the street in yellow light, but they didn’t alter stride or stance. This was friendly territory late at night.
But Charlotte’s heartbeat did pick up when the lights got brighter and the car was obviously slowing behind them. She could hear its engine ticking. She didn’t look back, though. Neither did Dixie.
The front of the car came into view beside them. A large black car, shiny and with lots of gleaming chrome. Charlotte couldn’t help but glance over at it. She thought it was a Chrysler.
It pulled right alongside them and a little ahead and stopped at the curb. The driver buzzed down the passenger-side tinted window and leaned across the seat to look out at them.