by John Lutz
The place was toxic. The toxicity could be fatal.
68
“A woman named Mitzi Lewis called,” Fedderman said, when he checked in by phone with Quinn. “She does standup comedy and wanted to talk to you about serial killers. She’s got some kind of routine in mind.”
“Comedy? About serial killers?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Jesus, Feds!”
“I know. She sounded nice, though.”
“Call her back and tell her I’m too busy now, but I’ll give her an interview when all this is over.”
“Seems the thing to do,” Fedderman said.
“And Feds, tell her it’ll be over soon.”
“We hope.”
“Leave that part out,” Quinn said, and broke the connection.
Mitzi said it aloud to see how it would sound: “There is a smoking section, but it’s not exactly in the plane.”
No, that one wasn’t funny, and it reminded passengers they were in an aluminum tube six miles up going five hundred miles per hour. No laughs to be mined here.
Her cell sounded the five key notes of Comedy Tonight, and she yanked it from her pocket. Ah! Fedderman was calling. The cop.
She listened to his message from Quinn, then she sighed and thanked him. He said he was really sorry, and she believed him.
Okay, she thought, putting the phone back in her pocket. She’d forget about the married serial killers idea until later, and if it still seemed workable she’d see if she could talk with Quinn.
Meanwhile, time to get back to work.
Mitzi continued strolling in Washington Square, paying little attention to the many pigeons strutting and flapping around her feet. The day was another incineration, and she was wearing baggy shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. Several homeless people were lounging in the park, one of them curled in the fetal position on a bench she was approaching. In the shade of a tree, two heavily bearded men were using an upside-down cardboard box for a table and were deeply involved in playing chess. Tourists were ambling about, as were students, artists with sketch pads, and various Village types. Mitzi, with her Doc Martens boots and spiked white blond hair, guessed she was one of the Village types. She seemed to be attracting no attention whatsoever, and found herself rather grateful for that. It made it easier for her to think. To work.
Which was what she’d been doing when she received Fedderman’s call. She sometimes sold jokes to the airlines. It seemed that all of them were incorporating comedy into their welcome and safety spiels. It was good PR, and the informality of comedy helped to soothe nerves and put passengers at ease. Other than comedians, few people died in the middle of a joke. But with all the passenger traffic and frequent fliers, airborne comedy ate up material in a hurry. The airlines depended on people like Mitzi to provide them with a steady supply of humor. Reassuring takeoff and landing humor in particular was in high demand.
Despite the warm temperature, the direct sunlight on Mitzi’s face made her smile. Her twenty-fifth birthday was today, and she felt good, as long as she stayed away from thoughts of getting older and more wrinkled. Crow’s-feet were beginning to form at the corners of her eyes—she was sure of it. If the light was right and she smiled wide, people must be able to see them. If she dwelled on it too much the truth was undeniable and unbearable: time was marching all over her.
On the plus side there was Rob. They were going out for dinner tonight, and, knowing Rob, he’d have some kind of birthday gift for her.
As she passed the bench with the homeless man curled up on it, he mumbled something she couldn’t understand, then turned his head away, as if she’d impolitely disturbed his sleep. An empty wine bottle was on the ground beneath the bench, along with a used condom. Mitzi guessed the bench had seen a lot of action last night. The man mumbled again in his sleep, something unintelligible about flying or dying.
When she was well past him, Mitzi slowed her pace.
I walk down the aisle to the only empty seat in the plane, and this drunk sitting next to it says…
‘Would it embarrassh you if I shang?’ I say ‘not at all,’ and then I find out that in his language shang means…
The pigeons waddling about on the pavement, pecking at minute bits of whatever, parted way for Mitzi, but never moved more than a few feet. They didn’t seem to sense anything imminent. Mitzi caught a shadowy movement in the corner of her vision, and a large dark bird—a hawk—swooped down, used its fully spread dark wings as brakes, sank its talons into a white and gray pigeon, then regained height, carrying the helpless pigeon away. It had all happened so suddenly and noiselessly that it might have been an illusion. As if she had the Discovery Channel on with the sound off, only it was real.
Mitzi looked around. No one else in the square seemed to have noticed what happened. The pigeons, pecking away at miniscule edibles, went on about their business as if nothing had occurred and one of their number weren’t missing.
Poor pigeon.
You’re shanged, pal.
Mitzi stood staring up at the sky, but the hawk and its prey were nowhere in sight.
Had she imagined it?
She didn’t think so.
A peregrine falcon. That’s what she must have seen. She knew they were in the city, and that they hunted pigeons, but few people had actually seen them in action.
Now Mitzi was one of those few. Seeing it had, in a way, been exhilarating. In another way, disturbing. Whatever it was, it had sure put the cap on comedy.
She picked up her pace and walked toward one of the park exits, unable to shake the image of the large dark bird suddenly appearing and deftly using its powerful wings to entrap the pigeon while it gained a grip and managed to lift off with its stunned prey. She couldn’t get over how it had all happened so abruptly, disturbing nothing around it, and then it was over. It was the way fate sometimes dealt with people.
She understood then what was making her uneasy. The strike of the falcon seemed so incongruous as to be prophetic. She had seen this rare and startling sight. Mustn’t that mean something? Hadn’t she somehow been chosen?
Don’t be so childish and self-absorbed. Everything that happens to you doesn’t have to be infused with hidden meaning and great gravity. God, fate, whoever, whatever doesn’t telegraph his, her, its moves. Prophecy before tragedy? Ask the pigeon.
The oversized leather boots she was wearing were starting to give her a blister. Mitzi concentrated on that. It was a real and imminent problem.
She walked more carefully on the hot pavement, scrunching up her toes and trying to keep the boots from rubbing, as she left the square and made her way toward her subway stop. On the subway she was still trying to put the incident with the pigeon out of her mind.
But she couldn’t.
She knew she’d probably dream about it tonight.
But she wouldn’t.
69
Pearl hadn’t slept more than an hour straight last night. This was insane. She was torturing herself. She knew it had to end, and only she could end it.
Finally she’d worked up the courage to read Dr. Eichmann’s pathology report.
She sat on the sofa with a knife she’d gotten from the kitchen to use as a letter opener. But when she inserted the narrow blade into the corner of the envelope, the flap popped open of its own accord. It had been barely sealed.
How dare they send a document like this in a way that allows anyone to read it!
Had someone read it?
In her anger Pearl imagined some ham-handed postal employee noticing the unsealed flap and checking to see if there might be money in the envelope. Then, disappointed, reading the results of her biopsy. Sharing the information with fellow employees, all of them making a big joke of it.
Calm down, idiot!
Postal employees were no more likely than cops to behave that way. And the envelope was sealed, only lightly. It didn’t appear to have been tampered with, and probably had found its way, like thousands�
��millions—of letters, to its proper recipient unread.
She withdrew the single white sheet of paper from the envelope and unfolded it. Held it in a trembling hand and read…
She couldn’t concentrate. Her eyes skipped from line to line, from checked box to checked box, always focusing on the word benign.
Breathing more easily than she had for weeks, she leaned back in the sofa cushions and looked at the ceiling, saying the word aloud: “Benign.”
She read the pathology report again. And again. Each time liberated her anew. It was actually true that the mole had been benign, had been…a beauty mark.
Yes, a beauty mark!
But something was impinging on her binge of relief, on her new freedom from impending fatal illness, and it didn’t take Pearl long to figure out what it was.
She felt herself getting angry. Those, those, those…she would never be able to forgive her mother, Mrs. Kahn, and most of all that bastard Milton Kahn, for deliberately frightening her about the mole.
About death.
She knew exactly what she would do. She’d make copies of this pathology report, with the word benign underlined wherever it appeared. She would mail copies to her mother, to Mrs. Kahn, and to Milton Kahn.
She would do it immediately.
Then, maybe, she’d feel better.
Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket and made her jump. She pulled it out, flipped it open, and saw that Quinn was calling her.
“Pearl,” he said, when she’d made the connection and said hello, “Feds isn’t coming by for you this morning. He’s going to meet with Vitali and Mishkin alone. I’m on the way to pick you up. Should be there in about five minutes.”
“This a date?” she asked. Why am I always such a wise ass?
“Yeah. We’re gonna double with Renz and Helen the profiler.”
“I’m trying to imagine them as a romantic couple,” Pearl said.
“Don’t. Please. Just be ready.”
“Okay. I’ll be waiting out front.”
“You read the Times this morning?”
“No. I usually get one out of a machine.”
“Well, you can read mine on the way to see Renz.”
Pearl felt her pulse pick up. Her anger, the pathology report, were forgotten. “Something moving?”
“Something’s moving,” Quinn said, and ended the conversation.
Renz, in his overheated, tobacco-scented office, had today’s Times lying on his desk, flipped to the open letter from the .25-Caliber Killer to Quinn.
The reply to Quinn’s letter was short and to the point:
Captain Quinn:
What is happening now in this city isn’t hunting, isn’t dueling, isn’t sport. It is murder. We are both civilized men. We are both, in our own ways, hunters. As it was probably destined to do since the beginning, our contest has developed into a mutual hunt. In the stalking of truly dangerous game, hunter and prey become indistinguishable. You will soon receive a package from me. It contains a .25-caliber Springbok revolver. We both know what it means.
I wish you luck.
The .25-Caliber Killer
Renz passed copies of the page around so that everyone else in the office—Quinn, Pearl, Vitali, Mishkin, and Helen the profiler—could read it, whether for the first time or again.
Helen smiled and said, “It worked.”
Renz looked at Quinn from behind his desk. “Are you ready for this?”
“Of course I am.”
“You shouldn’t do this, Quinn,” Pearl said, ignoring the astounded look Renz gave her.
“We didn’t set this up to waste time,” Renz said. “He has to do it, for his own reasons.”
“He’s right,” Quinn said. “And I have to do it without NYPD protection the killer might spot. This is an opportunity we can’t risk screwing up.”
“You’re playing a game with your life, Quinn!”
“It’s a game I’m forced to play.”
Pearl gave him a dark, probing stare. “This is some kind of honor thing with you, right?”
“Not entirely.”
“Don’t take the honor part of it lightly,” Helen told Pearl.
Pearl ignored her. “Your job is to catch a killer, Quinn, not risk your life in some archaic macho game that you have to play by the rules.”
“It amounts to the same thing, Pearl. If the killer realizes I’m not playing the game honestly, he’ll simply back off and continue what he’s been doing. I have to do this on the up and up with him, and alone.”
“That’s how it is, Pearl,” Renz said.
Pearl looked at Sal Vitali, who shrugged. His partner Mishkin did the same.
“Bullshit! Mano-a-mano bullshit!” Pearl said. She looked at Renz appealingly. “At least give him some protection.”
“I can’t do that,” Renz said. “If protection was spotted this would all be for nothing.”
“He really can’t,” Helen added, defending Renz.
“Listen—”
Quinn rested a big hand on Pearl’s shoulder and gave her a warning look. She was losing this argument and knew it, and fell silent.
“I’ll issue the order,” Renz said. “No one is to talk to the media, or to interfere in the hunt. I mean no one.”
“Male-pattern madness!” Pearl said under her breath.
“Something more than that,” Quinn told her.
After leaving Renz’s office, on the walk back to where the Lincoln was parked in the sun, Quinn said, “Whatever happened with that mole of yours, Pearl?”
“Mole? It turned out to be nothing. No big deal.”
“Good. I figured that’s how it’d go.” Not even breaking stride. Making business-as-usual small talk.
Pearl stepped out and moved around to block Quinn’s path.
She looked him in the eye the way she sometimes regarded suspects.
“You can’t actually do this thing with the killer,” she said.
“I agreed to it.”
“Oh, so what? At least take an extra weapon. Something more than that ancient South African peashooter.”
“Time to drop the subject, Pearl. I mean it.”
She stalked off, bouncing in a way that attracted a lot of male attention.
“Pearl! Get in the goddamned car.”
She stopped and turned. There was a stiffness to her features caused by more than anger. She was almost, but not quite, crying. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
“Where you going, Pearl?” Quinn’s tone was softer now.
“To copy and mail something. I feel I have to do it. No choice. It involves life instead of death.”
Quinn watched her walk away, wondering what she’d meant. Then he opened the Lincoln’s door and felt heat roll out. He got in and sat with the engine running and the air conditioner blasting, watching Pearl through the windshield until she disappeared among a throng of people who’d just crossed with the traffic light.
Pearl talk, he figured, and fastened his safety belt.
70
Quinn sat with Zoe at a corner table in Hammacher’s, a German restaurant on the East Side. It was a place that afforded privacy, with high-backed wooden booths and lots of cloth and green carpeting to mute sound so voices wouldn’t carry. Deals legal and illegal were made here.
Quinn had courted some of his upper-echelon snitches in Hammacher’s, but hadn’t visited the restaurant in over a year. Nothing had changed. Still the hushed ambience, still the elderly waiters who kept their distance unless summoned, and still the indefinable mingled scents of spices, boiled sauerkraut, and something else that almost made the eyes water.
They’d both ordered German draft beers with unpronounceable names and the sauerbraten special and were waiting for their food to arrive, their gigantic frosted mugs of beer in front of them. No one was seated within twenty feet of their booth.
Zoe had on one of her psychoanalyst outfits. A light gray blazer over a white blouse, a blue skirt of modest length. She was
n’t wearing much makeup, which only tended to make her look younger. There was a frankness and receptiveness about her features. Patients might tell her everything.
Quinn explained to her about the plan to lure the killer into the open by agreeing to what he, the killer, regarded as a hunt.
Zoe listened carefully, then took a sip of beer. The foam left a slight mustache, and Quinn resisted the impulse to reach across the table and touch it, touch her lips.
“So the sport is that the two hunters are evenly matched,” she said. “Sometimes one is stalking the other; sometimes it’s vice versa.”
“That’s pretty much it,” Quinn said. “Usually the participants are accustomed to hunting in the wild. I suppose the urban setting is supposed to negate any advantage one might have over the other because of familiarity with certain types of terrain.”
Zoe gave him a slight smile. “At least the prey gets to shoot back. That’s what the anti-hunting movement has always dreamed of.”
“Are you part of that movement?”
“I’m not terribly zealous about either side of the argument,” Zoe said. “But two human beings stalking each other, and then one of them dying—that’s something different from hunting.”
“I’m not so sure it is,” Quinn said.
“This is a male thing. Is that why it appeals to you?”
“I don’t know that it appeals to me,” Quinn said.
Zoe smiled at him. “But it does.”
Quinn regarded his oversized beer mug. “Yeah, I guess on a certain level it does.”
Zoe reached across the table and touched his hand. “I do understand, Quinn.”
“And you approve?”
“If it’s something you feel you have to do, I’m behind your decision.”
“A friend of mine described it as…what did she say…‘mano-a-mano bullshit.’”
Zoe leaned back. “Well, it is in a way. But your friend simply doesn’t have a great enough understanding or appreciation of the compulsion to adhere to the male code. If she knew you at all, she’d know that you have to do this. Not only do you see it as your job, but you see it as your destiny. You are what you are. It’s a challenge between your ego and your id, and you must accept it to retain your manhood.”