by John Lutz
Keller simply looked at him and shook his head.
“He don’t wanna discuss his personal life, Mole,” Marlee said. “How ’bout you, Berty? There a mole girl out there?”
“Somebody for everyone,” Ned Nichols said.
Everyone looked at him in surprise. He very seldom spoke in the office, while in the larger world outside he’d wear his customers down by talking at them until they were numb and incapable of sales resistance.
All of these people knew even the most intricate and devious moves and could sell in any kind of real estate market except for the one they’d had the past six months. The crappy market was the reason why the firm was in trouble, and everyone in the office knew it, with the exception of Farr, who blasted blame around the place as if from the barrel of a shotgun.
The inner-office door opened, and everyone who’d been sitting or slouching stood up straight.
The office suddenly seemed smaller and ten degrees hotter. Alec Farr strutted into the room and filled it with his presence. He was a broad, solid man with a military posture, though he’d never served his country, anything, or anyone other than himself.
He grinned with perfect large teeth overtreated with whitener. It was not a reassuring grin.
“Gentlemen and lady,” he said, “we are in a lifeboat, and it is sinking. I don’t know if we can stop it from going down, but we are sure as hell going to try.” He glared like a hungry lion at Jeevers. “How might we at least slow the vessel in its sinking, so a whimsical God might favor us with a miracle and save us?”
“Plug the leak?” Jeevers ventured nervously.
“Can’t do that,” Farr said. “Leak’s too large, and there’s nothing to plug it with.”
“Bail water?” Marlee suggested.
“We’ve been doing that without a bucket. We’re losing ground.”
“In a boat?” Berty said, before he could stop himself. The words had simply slipped out on their own.
Farr jutted out his chin as if about to use it as a battering ram. His reddish monobrow formed a sharp V. Even the hairs protruding from his flared nostrils bristled. It was a frightening sight, especially to a man who hadn’t made his quota.
“The answer to the question about the boat,” Farr said in a calm yet threatening tone, “is that we throw someone out. Toss him—or her—over the side. The other question is, who’s it gonna be?”
No one chanced an answer. The silence was like concrete hardening around them. Berty found it difficult to breathe.
“Maybe the mole,” Farr said. “Of course, there’s only so much food in the boat. We might want to eat the mole later, or use parts of him for bait. So who’s it gonna be?”
Again the silence thickened around them.
Farr’s terrible grin widened as he adjusted his tie knot and stared at each of them in turn. Then he rolled up the sales report in his hand and aimed the paper tube at them as if it were a gun.
“We’ll all think hard on that,” he said. “And see if individual sales figures improve next week. If they don’t, a certain rat might leave a certain boat the hard way. Or maybe some even more useless piece of jetsam might be fed to the circling sharks. Am I understood?”
Everyone nodded. Marlee managed a strangled, “Yes, sir.”
Farr fixed a burning stare directly on Berty, then turned and strode back into his office. The slam of the door was like a cannon shot.
“Jesus!” Keller said.
A pall of shame descended on everyone in the room.
“Why are we so afraid of that asshole?” Marlee asked.
Jeevers ducked behind his desk and picked up his leather attaché case stuffed with brochures and contract forms.
“Where you headed?” Keller asked. “Wanna stop off for a drink? It’d calm us down.”
“Give you back your balls, you mean,” Marlee said. “Glad I don’t have to worry about that.”
“I gotta make a stop on the way home,” Jeevers said. “See a client.”
“Over on West Twenty-fifth?” Keller asked.
Marlee gave him a look that scared Berty even though he wasn’t the recipient. She was a woman who’d been known to throw a punch. Berty had seen and heard enough impending violence for one day.
“Once the mole goes, that’s when we gotta start worrying,” Nichols said.
Keller looked at Berty. “That the way you read it, Mole?”
Berty didn’t answer. There was no other way to read it; he was a low producer, and in this game you produced or else. It was about time for or else. He draped his suit coat over his arm, picked up his scuffed briefcase, and headed for the door. Nichols and the others were already there, eager to be free of the dreaded office and the ominous Farr. Marlee and Berty were the last ones out.
“Farr,” Marlee said sotto voce, and patted Berty’s shoulder. “What an asshole he is.”
Berty glanced at her and flickered a smile.
Marlee shook her head. “Somebody oughta shoot him.”
All the way home in the hot, clattering subway train, Berty heard her harsh and fearful whisper over and over.
Somebody oughta shoot him.
“Shoot who?” asked the man scrunched in next to him on a plastic seat, and Berty realized he’d spoken aloud.
Berty could only shrug and shake his head, as if he hadn’t clearly heard over the rush and clatter of the train.
“Somebody’s always shooting somebody these days,” the man said. He was a small man, like Berty only with a scraggly mustache, and didn’t look unlike a mole. He held up the folded Times he’d been reading. “Sometimes it ain’t the worst idea. The paper says, what with the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer, it’s like we’ve gone back to the days of fighting duels to settle things.”
Berty nodded wordlessly.
“Nothing wrong with that, I say,” the man continued, “especially with that last guy got popped, Rhodes. A banker. They found a gun on him that was used to kill one of the earlier Twenty-five-Caliber victims. Looks like the two of them were going after each other even up. Fair fight, I say. Not murder. A duel. People’d sure as hell be more polite, nicer to each other, if they knew they might be challenged to a duel.”
Thinking Berty might still be having trouble hearing him, the man raised his hand and made a shooting gesture with thumb and forefinger.
Berty nodded and grinned.
A duel. Wouldn’t that be something?
56
Pearl felt better, almost exhilarated. Finally she’d taken some action and stopped being a verbal punching bag for her mother, not to mention the target of harassment by Mrs. Kahn and her damned nephew Milton.
Unable to get a morning appointment with a new dermatologist, recommended by the phone book, Pearl had been pleasantly surprised when a Dr. Eichmann’s assistant told her there’d been a cancellation and the doctor could see her late this afternoon if possible about the growth behind her ear.
Quinn, working hard at his desk, had been sympathetic (“Go. Then maybe you’ll shut up about the damned thing.”), and she’d left the West Seventy-ninth Street office early.
Dr. Eichmann, an affable older man with tousled gray hair, examined the subject of concern with thoroughness and care. He poked and probed and observed and told Pearl that what she was so worried about appeared to be a simple nevus, or mole.
“Has it changed shape or color recently,” he asked. “Or grown larger?”
“I don’t know for sure. I look at it in the mirror sometimes and think it has.”
“Where it is, I’m surprised you can see it in the mirror.”
“It isn’t easy.”
“Uh-huh.” He gave her a nice bedside-manner smile. “Melanocytes sometimes cluster and create moles,” he explained, while Pearl stared at him blankly. “Some appear dysplastic and potentially dangerous.” He patted her arm. “But this one is probably benign.”
Probably? “So it’s nothing to lose sleep over?” Pearl asked.
“Not unless you c
hoose to. It shouldn’t be a cause for concern. But since it obviously has been, I’ll remove it and send it away for biopsy and you can know for sure and put any fears you might have to rest.”
“I hope you don’t think I’m a hypochondriac.”
“You’re a woman with a mole,” he said.
He advised her that what he was going to do would hurt a little, and it did.
“Soon as the results of the biopsy are in, I’ll contact you,” he assured her. “Meanwhile, not to worry.”
She thanked the doctor and paid at the front desk on her way out.
How simple it had all been. Now she had a square, flesh-colored bandage where the mole used to be, and she felt good about it. Felt good about herself. It was almost as if, somehow, she’d had Dr. Milton Kahn surgically removed from her life.
But on the sweltering subway ride to the stop near her apartment, squeezed into a seat next to a man who smelled as if he’d vomited on himself, Pearl began to worry.
Dr. Eichmann had said probably. No way was that the same as definitely.
And if the mole was so obviously harmless, why had he removed it and sent it away for a biopsy? Why had she chosen from the dozens of dermatologists in the phone directory one named Eichmann, the same name as that of the infamous Nazi who’d been executed for World War II concentration camp horrors? What might her mother think about that? What might Quinn’s shrink friend, Dr. Zoe Manders, think about it? Why should Pearl care?
What she should do, she told herself, as the smelly man next to her deliberately shifted his weight so his arm rested against her breast, what she should do is take Dr. Eichmann’s advice and not worry about the results of the biopsy.
As the subway train growled and squealed to a halt at her stop, she freed herself from entanglement with the vomity-smelling man and elbowed her way off the train and onto the crowded platform. She joined the other sheep, herded by painted yellow arrows and habit, in their trudge toward the exit stairs ascending to dying sunlight and lengthening shadows.
It was amazing, she thought, how positive she’d felt when she’d left Dr. Eichmann’s office and how depressed she felt now. What had caused such deterioration in her feeling of well being?
But she knew the cause. It wasn’t the sweltering subway ride or the man who smelled of vomit, though surely he’d played a small role.
Though she might blame other people, the real cause of her depression of the last several weeks had been herself. Her reactions to their actions.
I did it to myself.
It wasn’t them; it was me. I did it to myself.
They made me do it to myself.
Quinn and his detectives reinterviewed everyone connected to the Becker and Rhodes murders. They could find no connections between the two men, no connection between any two people who knew both men. Had the Becker and Rhodes murders both been hunts? Duels?
“Now we’ve got something,” Fedderman finally said at the end of a dreary, unproductive day.
“What would that be?” Quinn asked.
“Whole bunch of questions,” Fedderman said.
“Ballistics wasn’t certain,” Pearl said. “Maybe the gun found on Rhodes didn’t kill Becker.”
“The maid at the Antonian Hotel,” Fedderman said. “Rosa Pajaro. She might know more than she’s telling. She’s scared. Maybe of something worse than losing her job or being deported.”
“Think she’s still working there?” Pearl asked.
“It’s questionable,” Fedderman said.
A phone call answered the question. Rosa Pajaro had collected her paycheck and disappeared from the Antonian without giving notice two days ago. A follow-up phone call revealed that she’d also left her basement apartment without bothering to notify the landlord.
“Scared, all right,” Pearl said. “Probably all the way back to Puerto Rico.”
“Mexico,” Fedderman said.
“Probably happened when she saw Thomas Rhodes’s photo on TV news or in the paper,” Quinn said, “and she realized she was a key witness in a murder case.”
“Can’t blame her,” Fedderman said.
“We don’t know enough to blame anyone for anything,” Pearl said.
Chain lightning danced in the darkening sky.
Lavern stood in the heat outside the Broken Wing Women’s Shelter and felt a few droplets of moisture on her face, one on her eyelash, another on the bridge of her nose. Maybe it was going to rain and bring relief from the heat. Maybe not. The city might be once again toying with its people. The way Hobbs sometimes toyed with her.
She unconsciously raised a hand and felt the new bruises on her left cheekbone, another farther down on the side of her jaw. Hobbs hadn’t broken her skin. He was good at what he did and didn’t want to draw suspicion. Her makeup did a fair enough job of covering these latest of Lavern’s facial bruises, from a distance.
Her left side hurt badly enough that she favored it and walked with a slight limp. When she’d left the apartment, she hadn’t known where that limp would take her. Now, standing and staring at the shelter, she realized Broken Wing had been her destination from the beginning.
The sturdy brick building with its line of dormers seemed to call to her more strongly every time she passed it. It was like a fortress with a pale concrete stoop and solid wood double doors. Each door had a large brass knocker beneath a small leaded glass window. There was black iron grillwork over the ground-floor windows. The building didn’t look as if it could be easily broken into. A person might feel safe there.
Lavern leaned against a NO PARKING sign and sighed. She knew that a person couldn’t stay inside Broken Wing forever. That was the problem. She’d heard about women who’d found refuge there and stayed for months, and then left only to be reclaimed by their patiently waiting abusers.
Lavern knew Hobbs was patient.
He would wait.
She took a final glance at the thick wooden doors that would provide protection for only so long; then she limped away along the sidewalk. Lightning still flickered and charged patches of purple sky between the tall buildings, but whatever breath of air there’d been had now ceased. No more tentative raindrops found their way to earth. It wasn’t going to rain this evening. It had been a trick. Life was a damned trick, a painful practical joke.
As she walked, Lavern tried to think of lots of things, but found her mind focusing on the shotgun at home in the hall closet. The sharp pain in her left side whenever she took a step kept bringing her back to the gun. It was a twelve gauge, like the one her father had let her fire once in some woods behind a rented cabin. She remembered the deafening bark of the gun, the heavy recoil against her right shoulder. She’d fired at a paper target he’d nailed to a tree, and she’d hit it.
She’d hit it.
A pretty damned good shot.
I could do it again.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the shotgun. It was unhealthy, a fixation like this, but she couldn’t seem to control it. She guessed that was why they called them fixations. It was all Hobbs’s fault.
Hobbs’s damned fault.
He’d blocked every avenue of escape, made her into something that would have no choice other than to do to him what he might secretly want but not have the courage to do himself.
Suicide by wife.
I could do it again.
The pain in her side became more intense, and she wondered if Hobbs had cracked one of her ribs,
Traffic was backing up because the signal at the next intersection was red. A young couple, a tall man and a blond woman, climbed nimbly out of a stopped cab and disappeared into one of the buildings. They ran hunched over with their arms linked and their heads down, as if they were trying to get in out of the nonexistent rain or escape the paparazzi.
Their own dreamworld. Do they know, or even care, what’s real?
Lavern felt a pang of envy so sharp it made her break stride.
She knew that inside the building the couple had entered
was a small fusion restaurant with a bar, where she could get a drink. Alcohol would moderate her rage and dull the pain.
Every step was agony, but she began to walk faster. The shotgun remained on the edge of her thoughts.
I could do it again.
PART III
A few strong instincts, and a few plain rules.
—Wordsworth, “Alas! What Boots
the Long Laborious Quest?”
57
He would need a few things from a hardware store: a steel bicycle hook, a length of strong nylon rope, a roll of wide duct tape, a plastic drop cloth, some rubbing alcohol to clean flesh so it would dry fast and completely and the tape would be well bonded. He already had the rest of what he’d need—a portable electric drill to create a starting hole, so he could make sure he was fastening the hook in a solid wood joist capable of supporting body weight.
As always when collecting his materials, he acted circumspectly.
A short subway ride got him within walking distance of a big-box chain store in Queens, where he bought the required items. It might raise suspicion if he made his purchases in Manhattan, especially the steel hook, after all the publicity about Terri Gaddis.
Along with the hook he bought a bicycle tire pump, a diversionary item just in case the dazed-looking teenager behind the checkout counter was more alert than she appeared. On the way home, he stopped in at a Duane Reade and bought the bottle of rubbing alcohol. No danger there of arousing suspicion.
In a luggage shop on Third Avenue he purchased a cheap blue canvas carry-on to put everything in so that people glancing at him wouldn’t fix him in their memories. He’d be merely a man in a hotel lobby carrying unexceptional luggage. One of hundreds of such men on hundreds of hours of security tape.
Once back in his room he’d phone Mitzi and tell her he’d reserved a table at Mephisto’s for them tomorrow night. She was expecting that. It was her birthday. After drinks and dinner, he’d suggest they go to her apartment. He’d hint that he had a gift for her. She’d see the blue canvas bag and assume it contained her gift, and in a way it did.