by John Lutz
“Stay on her. Be careful.”
“I’ve got both those things going,” Pearl said.
“She must have been visiting her old apartment,” Quinn said. “Maybe she forgot something.”
“Whatever,” Pearl said. “Let’s hope she’s going to where she lives now.”
“She will sooner or later,” Quinn said.
The new Madeline began to slow and gaze into shop windows as she sipped her drink. Pearl swallowed dryly and dropped farther back. She didn’t want to be glimpsed as a reflection in a window.
“Uh-oh,” Pearl said.
“What?” Quinn’s voice.
“She just went into a jewelry shop. Doesn’t look like the kind of place that’d have another exit, but maybe I should get closer.”
“If you—”
“No. Wait. She’s out. She’s moving. I guess she just ducked in to check on the price of something that caught her eye.”
“Just make sure what catches her eye isn’t you,” Quinn said.
Pearl kept the cell phone stuck to her ear, but neither she nor Quinn spoke for the next few minutes.
Then Quinn said, “Feds just called on the landline. He’s got her. Get out of there and go back to being Jewel.”
“’Kay.” Pearl broke the connection and slid the phone back into her pocket. She didn’t see Fedderman anywhere around and didn’t expect to. She turned around and headed back the way she’d come.
Pearl knew that if the new Madeline stayed on the move for any length of time, an undercover cop would take Fedderman’s place as her tail. Or they would tail her in twos. Whenever and wherever the new Madeline finally lighted, someone would be there to watch her.
Pearl decided to walk to a nearby subway stop, return to her apartment in Jill’s building, and resume being Jewel, as Quinn had instructed.
So intent had she been on following the new Madeline, she hadn’t noticed that she herself was being followed.
Ruth Malpass regretted drinking the second whiskey sour with the sandwiches they’d ordered. Vlad seemed unaffected by his drinks, but Ruth knew she was on the verge of slurring her words. She was sure she was thinking okay, and making sensible if somewhat flighty conversation, but she needed another fifteen minutes or so and some strong black coffee before she wanted to get up from her chair and try to walk steadily.
The rain seemed to be finished for the day. The sun brightened the street, but where Ruth and Vlad sat, at one of the metal tables beneath the restaurant’s green awning, they were in shade. A set of steel wind chimes dangled about ten feet away, near where the awning met the brick wall. A slight summer breeze roused the chimes from time to time to gentle notes that sounded almost like the lazy strumming of a harp.
“You mentioned you were on your way home,” Vlad said. “Do you live nearby?”
“No, I was going to take the subway. I came down here to shop at the stalls on Canal Street.”
Victor knew where she was talking about, several blocks of stalls, mostly run by Chinese merchants, that sold knockoffs of famous brand names in clothing, jewelry, and other accessories. It was a teeming cauldron of commerce, where for ten dollars tourists could buy hundred-dollar items worth five.
“I was going to buy a knockoff designer purse there for my cousin in Michigan,” Ruth said. “I never got there because of the rain.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Technically, I guess so. You’re not a cop, are you?”
“No, but I try to stay on the right side of the law.” Vlad flashed her a mischievous grin. “But I’m probably no more legal than you are. You still want to go to Canal Street?”
She smiled. “No. I think I’m out of the mood now.” She came down hard on her consonants, enunciating quite clearly. Few people would guess she was on the verge of having drunk a little too much.
“Shame you came all that way for nothing.”
“It isn’t that far,” Ruth said. “Besides, I like to ride the subway. And I wouldn’t say it was for nothing. You’re hardly that. If I’d happened to buy an umbrella before you showed up with yours, we wouldn’t have met.”
“Destiny in the rain.”
“Sounds like a romantic novel.”
“Maybe it is.”
Ruth felt her heart race. “Might we have some coffee in the rain’s aftermath?”
Now I’m talking like we’re in a romantic novel.
Vlad grinned. “I appreciate the invitation, Ruth. But we won’t have to ride the subway. I can drive us to your place.”
Ruth tried to clear her mind. It was hard to keep ahead of this guy. “I didn’t exactly mean…”
“Oh? Now you’re disinviting me?” He was smiling earnestly. He reached across the table and touched her hand.
She shook her head. “Vlad—”
“I’m joking, of course. I wouldn’t presume. But we can have some coffee, and then I’ll drive you home so you won’t have to take the subway.”
“I didn’t notice you had a car.”
“It’s parked up the street from where we met. I was running some errands, but nothing that can’t wait. I’d rather drive you home anytime.”
Before she could say anything more, he summoned the waiter and ordered two coffees.
“There, it’s settled,” he said when the waiter had gone.
Ruth didn’t really want to argue with him. She debated with herself as to whether she should invite him in when they got to her apartment. The place was a mess, with dirty dishes in the sink and her bed unmade. Better to wait for some other time. Neaten up the place and make a good impression. But it would be nice to ride uptown and not battle the subway. It wasn’t true that she enjoyed the subway. That had been only a convenient lie. She wondered if he’d told her any lies.
She valued honesty in a relationship, and this looked as if it might become a relationship. She hoped.
“Malpass,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“That’s my name. Ruth Malpass.”
He raised his coffee cup in her direction. “My great pleasure, Ruth Malpass.”
When they’d finished their coffees, Ruth was confident she could walk a straight line. In fact, she felt confident about everything right now.
Perhaps sensing some unsteadiness, Vlad took her arm as they left the restaurant. She didn’t in the slightest resist. During the ten-minute walk to where his car was parked, she laughed at something he said and squeezed his arm, letting him know they’d reached the point in their brief relationship where casual touching was okay. Step by step. Something about him. He’d been around. She was sure he knew the ritual, and where it would lead.
He hadn’t mentioned his car was a newer model black Chrysler with darkly tinted windows. Beaded raindrops glistened in the sun like fine crystal on its waxed roof and long hood.
“Very impressive wheels,” she said.
“It’s a company car.”
She decided not to ask him what kind of company, what he did for a living, or where he worked. She’d find out eventually.
He unlocked the car with his key fob and held open the passenger-side door for Ruth. When she was seated, he closed the heavy door and hurried around the front of the car to get in on the driver’s side.
He was already seated behind the steering wheel fastening his seat belt when Ruth heard a soft sound behind her, glanced over her shoulder, and gasped.
Because of the tinted windows, and her attention fixed on Vlad striding around the front of the car, she hadn’t noticed the black-haired woman sitting on the wide backseat. She had a severe hairdo and penetrating dark eyes. She was grinning.
Vlad laughed and patted Ruth’s knee.
“Sorry to startle you,” he said. “I should have said something. This is my sister, Ivana. We have to drop her someplace; then we’ll be on our way.”
44
She was a snap to follow. Fedderman stayed back about half a block behind the new Madeline, sometimes crossing to the other side
of the street in case she might glance behind her. But she never did. It seemed not to have entered her mind that she might be followed. Either that or she was damned good at looking unsuspecting. Fedderman had seen it both ways. He thought she was simply unaware.
It had been twenty minutes since Fedderman had seen Pearl reverse direction and get off the new Madeline’s tail, just after Quinn’s phone call to her after Fedderman had talked to him. Fedderman didn’t think Pearl had spotted him, either. That pleased him. He’d thought Florida might have spoiled him, that he might be out of practice at being invisible, but tailing, once learned, you didn’t forget. It was like riding a bicycle but not like hitting a golf ball.
Fedderman was getting uncomfortably warm in the hot sticky air that followed the rain. Feeling the dampness under his arms, he took off his suit coat and slung it over his shoulder. It wasn’t that he had to work hard to keep up with the woman in the white raincoat. She walked slowly, and she liked to window shop. Every now and then she’d enter one of the shops, but usually she didn’t stay long. Fickle, Fedderman thought.
She turned the corner at West Eighty-fifth and walked a while, then went up the concrete steps of one of a row of three six-story brownstones that were in disrepair. The middle building looked vacant and had scaffolding along its front, but there was no sign of anyone working. The new Madeline entered through the oversized, green-enameled wood door of the third building.
Fedderman thought the way she’d taken the steps, kind of bounding up them, suggested she was a young woman, or in damned good condition.
He waited five minutes, then crossed the street, sidestepped around pigeon shit, and entered the building. He found himself in a small vestibule with yellow-stained green tile walls and a painted gray concrete floor. The place was stifling and smelled strongly of bleach overpowered by the acrid scent of urine. There were bits of tinfoil on the floor. They looked like Hershey’s Kisses wrappers.
Fedderman glanced around and saw no sign of an elevator. The building was a walk-up. A TV was playing loudly in one of the units, tuned to the financial channel. He heard a man’s voice proclaim that the bulls were in charge.
That’ll be the day.
He stepped over to the row of six mailboxes that were painted the same yellowed green as the wall. The slot above one of the end boxes had a card in it on which M. Scott, 6A was printed in pencil. Top floor. Good thing the new Madeline is in shape. Fedderman was glad there was no reason why he should have to ascend the stairs and verify that indeed unit 6A was up there. It was too hot to climb the steep wooden steps. And a bad idea anyway to clomp up them and maybe alert the new Madeline that she might have been followed.
Fedderman pushed open the heavy wood street door and left the building, glad to get away from the heat and the stench of urine.
He walked half a block before he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and called Quinn.
They had the new Madeline’s address. Progress.
Ten minutes after leaving Fedderman to take her place tailing the new Madeline, Pearl realized she was being followed. It was only an uneasy feeling on the edge of her consciousness, but one a longtime cop didn’t ignore.
She began stealing glances behind her and caught just a glimpse of a figure quickly moving away on the periphery of her vision. After another block, she pretended to turn slightly and excuse herself for bumping into a man with a briefcase and saw the same sudden movement. This time whoever it was had ducked into a Duane Reade drugstore. A big one that Pearl knew had a downstairs, so it wouldn’t do to enter it and try to find whoever was tailing her. There might be fifty customers inside. She and her tail would simply be playing cat and mouse up and down the aisles.
She told herself not to get excited. Her shadower might simply be some guy who liked short women with black hair and big boobs. Easy enough to understand. But she was curious.
One way to find out.
She decided first to put him at ease and end any of his suspicions that he might have been spotted. Without once more checking to see if he was there, she abruptly went down the concrete steps to a subway stop. She joined a crowd of people hurrying toward the turnstiles. The air was unnaturally still and heavy, as if an underground thunderstorm were due. Maybe someday New York would have one. As an escalator carried her even deeper belowground, she could hear the mournful, echoing notes of someone playing a harmonica not very well.
Not bothering to look up or down the platform, she waited about five minutes, then boarded a train.
She emerged aboveground from another stop four blocks from Jill’s—and Jewel’s—apartment building and strolled toward it. The sun was bright on the tinted windows of traffic headed past her at a crawl going the opposite direction, painting reflections of the street and sidewalk. When a large truck hissed its air brakes and slowly passed, she angled her stride slightly, moving toward the curb, so the reflection in its big side window gave her a brief but panoramic view of the block behind her.
She glimpsed the reflection she thought she might.
You’re still there.
If some guy was following her simply because he liked her looks and was working up the nerve to approach her, he was going to a lot of trouble.
Not that I’m not worth it.
Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. Great!
Quinn, maybe.
Pearl unobtrusively pulled the buzzing phone from her pocket and saw the number of Golden Sunset. She didn’t want to talk to her mother now. She slid the phone back in her pocket.
It continued to vibrate. Pause. Vibrate.
After eight or ten steps she knew the phone was going to drive her nuts. She was sure her mother would let it vibrate ninety times before giving up and breaking the connection. Pearl could set the phone to kick over to voice mail, but she knew her mother would simply call back, maybe ninety times.
Not breaking stride, she removed the phone from her pocket again and flipped it open.
“Hello, Mom.”
“Pearl?”
“Who else would it be? You just called me.”
“Really? I thought I’d dialed the number of my friend Mrs. Kahn.” Pearl knew this was a lie. Her mother pressed on: “Where were you, on the commode? Never mind. But speaking of Mrs. Kahn, how is your relationship going with her nephew Milton? I should say Doctor Milton Kahn. A girl could do worse—and here I know I get personal but why shouldn’t I with my only daughter—than marry a successful dermatologist. And judging by my conversations with Mrs. Kahn, the aunt, Milton, the nephew, is successful in ways monetary as well as professional. She said he spent his early years in practice doing charitable work—which bespeaks a good heart, though we both know he has that—but now has a thriving practice with patients who pay. Has marriage so much as come up in a conversational manner? I think enough time has passed since your first meeting together that it would at the very least have been at some time a topic of casual conversation.”
“Do I get a turn to talk?” Pearl asked.
“That’s what I’ve been asking you to do, dear. Tell me about the status of your relationship with Doctor Milton Kahn. Since it was I who, you might say, arranged—along with Mrs. Kahn, the aunt, of course—that you two lovebirds meet, I feel I have some right to ask the question. That is, about the status of your relationship in regards to matrimony.”
“I think Milt’s a nice guy. That’s where we’re at.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“Well, it’s still true. Mom, I’m—”
“I’m inquiring about the relationship not so much on a platonic plane. Where has it progressed to on—and here I attempt delicacy—more of a physical plane? In a successful relationship the line between the platonic and the physical isn’t so noticeable as time and love work their—”
“Mom, I’m working.”
“Exactly my point, dear. Is that necessary? I mean, this pertains to my still unanswered question, wouldn’t you agree?”
“No.”
Pearl thought shock therapy might work. “I’m being followed by a man with a gun.”
“Would it be likely in the slightest that the wife of Doctor Milton Kahn, renowned dermatologist, would even in this crazy world be followed by a man with a gun?”
“No,” Pearl had to admit. “But I’m not anyone’s wife, and I’m working, and you must understand that I don’t have time to talk.”
“People are judged by the time they take to—”
Pearl broke the connection and switched off the phone.
Still without a glance behind her, Pearl briskly took the steps of the apartment building’s entrance and pushed through the front door. There was no one in the outer lobby, no one in sight through the windowed door to the inner lobby that would show anyone about to exit the building.
She counted to five slowly, then spun on her heel and burst back out through the door and down the two concrete steps onto the sidewalk.
And came face-to-face with Ed Greeve.
45
Pearl hadn’t seen Greeve in over a year, but recognized him immediately. He hadn’t changed. Same narrow, stooped build; same black suit; same lugubrious expression. A born mortician who’d somehow become a cop. She knew his nickname, “The Ghost,” and felt briefly proud that she’d been able to spot him on her tail.
He was puffing slightly as if he’d been running and had just skidded to a stop. She moved in close to him, catching a whiff of cheap cologne that reminded her of formaldehyde.
“Why are you following me?” She almost snarled the question.
Greeve didn’t change expression, but he backed away a step. “I just happened to see you on the street a few blocks back and wanted to say hello. You’re a fast walker. I tried to catch up without breaking into a run.”
Pearl gave him a vicious grin that made it perfectly clear she knew he was talking bullshit.