by John Lutz
She knew that some men became fixated on certain women with merely a glance. For them it was like obsessive love.
She knew that some men killed the thing they loved.
10
Quinn was finishing his tuna melt and fries supper at the Lotus Diner when Thel, the waitress, approached him without her glass coffeepot.
“Your friend Pearl’s on the phone,” Thel said.
“Can you bring it to the table?”
“I can yank it outta the wall and bring it to you—then what you do with it is your business.”
Thel took kidding okay, but she always shot back. She was a middle-aged, dumpy woman in a dead-end job. Her forehead was folded into a permanent frown, and the deep etching around her mouth wasn’t laugh lines. Her teeth were yellowed and needed braces she’d never be able to afford. Being a smart-ass was what got her by in the world. It was what she had, and she worked it hard, sometimes making customers angry. The diner owner liked Thel, so she got by with her attitude act, especially after he’d learned that in some perverse way it actually attracted customers. And it didn’t hurt that the owner was at least slightly afraid of Thel.
Quinn wasn’t afraid of her. He pretended not to have heard her, dabbed at his lips with his white paper napkin, and then slid out of the booth. His cell was turned off so he could eat in peace. Pearl and Fedderman had known where to find him, but they wouldn’t have bothered him unless the call was at least somewhat important.
He knew where the phone was mounted on the wall near the doorway to the kitchen, at the end of the counter. As he approached it he saw that the receiver was unhooked and lying on the floor. He gripped the cord and hand-over-hand pulled up the receiver like a fish he’d caught and held it to his ear.
“That you, Quinn?” Pearl’s voice.
“Me,” Quinn said. “Straight from my tuna melt and coffee. Tell me this is important?”
“As your sandwich, you mean?”
“I’m getting enough crap from Thel, so don’t push it. What’s going on?”
“Thel? You mean that woman hasn’t been fired by now? With her attitude and that mouth?”
“You hang on—why not her? Why’d you call, Pearl?”
“Harley Renz phoned here. He wants you to get back at him at his office like yesterday or sooner.”
“Get back at him?”
“To him. You know what I meant, Quinn.”
Thel has infected us all. “Renz say what it is he wanted?”
“You, to call him.” Pearl sighed her loud telephone sigh, as if dealing with a teenage obscene caller. “He is the police commissioner, Quinn. Maybe you should deign to return his call.”
“You got a point,” Quinn said, and hung up.
He depressed the old wall phone’s cradle button, then let it bounce up before he punched out Harley Renz’s direct line at 1 Police Plaza. This was no time to goof around with Pearl. Harley was police commissioner, so maybe he did have something important to say.
Or ask.
Or demand.
As he listened to the phone chirp on the other end of the connection, Quinn glanced over and saw that Thel had gone from where she’d been wiping down the counter and eavesdropping on his conversation. Now she was standing by his table, which she’d completely cleared, and was ignoring him while scribbling on her order pad, figuring his total.
And her tip.
The chirping in Quinn’s right ear was replaced by Harley Renz’s impatient growl.
“’Bout time you returned my call.”
“What’s this about, Harley?”
“Your investigation,” Renz said. “I want you to stop it. Refund your fee. Tell your client it’s over.”
“Can’t.”
“Why is that?”
“Can’t find my client.”
“You mean she’s lost? Like missing keys?”
“Like a missing client.”
After a long silence, Renz said in a soft but strained voice. “Just stop your investigation, Quinn. As of now, this phone call. I don’t care if you never find your client. Never, never, never. Do I make myself clear?”
“Never,” Quinn said, and hung up.
Mary Bakehouse had gotten over most of the uneasiness about the time she’d come home and found her computer on. She simply must have left it on that morning and not realized it. There was no point in looking for things to make herself afraid.
On the surface, her situation was getting better. A couple of job interviews had left her with the impression the human resource directors might actually call her. And the tobacco smoke smell was finally out of her apartment. Or was she simply getting used to it?
She couldn’t be sure sometimes that after being away for a while and entering the apartment, she didn’t for just a second catch a whiff of the awful scent. Mary hated smoking. Her favorite teacher in primary school, a heavy smoker, had died of lung cancer when Mary was ten. It had left quite an impression on her, as well as a loathing for the tobacco industry and smoking in general. Maybe that was all she was smelling, her hate.
The city itself seemed harder for her now, more dangerous. She hadn’t felt that way until she’d been accosted last week by a homeless man who’d politely asked for any loose change she might have. Mary hadn’t had any change, but the man wouldn’t take no for an answer. His attitude quickly changed, and he’d grabbed the sleeve of her raincoat and yanked her back toward him when she tried to walk away.
She couldn’t forget the look in his faded blue eyes. There was raw hatred there, and when he began raving incomprehensibly about her “selfishness,” spraying her face with spittle, she felt herself returning that hatred. How could she not?
That day the city became in her mind a more menacing place. Dark doorways suggested danger. As did heavy traffic, street vendors of questionable goods, panhandlers, men who stared vaguely but knowingly at her in the subway train as it raced rocking and squealing toward its destination.
In the subway, it was one man in particular. She saw him almost every time she rode, as if they were on the same timetable, though Mary had no particular schedule. She supposed he might be one of the homeless who virtually lived belowground in the subway system. He was unshaven, and his clothes were threadbare. He wore a gray baseball hat with its bill pulled low, so that he observed her from shadow and with half-eyes that never blinked. Once—quite deliberately, she was sure—he slowly licked his lips and then smiled at her. It was a message she loathed and feared. He seemed to feed on her fear, as if he were drawing it across the swaying subway car to his inner evil self. He was hungry for her fear.
She’d tried not to work herself into a dither. After all, wearing beard stubble was the current style among male movie and TV stars, and some new clothes were doctored to look faded and threadbare. Even unwashed. This was an era when celebrities looked like bums.
But this man smelled like one of the dispossessed. A rank odor of stale perspiration and urine emanated from him. The stench of the desperate and dangerous.
Mary almost collapsed with relief when the man remained seated and unmoving and didn’t get off at her stop.
Thank God! Let him pick on some other woman now. Let some other woman feel her carefully nurtured armor drop to her feet with her heart.
After the unsteadiness of the subway car, the concrete platform felt firm and safe beneath her feet.
She glanced back and saw that the man was watching her through the train’s smeared and scratched window as she joined the crowd moving along the platform toward the steps to the street. She’d tried to show no reaction, but she knew she had, and he’d seen it.
That was what infuriated her, that they could do this to her and enjoy her fear.
Mary was a strong woman—she knew she was. Yet lately she’d been afraid almost all the time, even unconsciously. Sitting in warm sunlight she’d become aware that she had her shoulders hunched and feel chilled, and she’d realize it was because of her fear.
In the
beginning she was certain she’d never return to South Dakota except to visit, but now she wasn’t so sure. There was nothing to be afraid of in South Dakota. No buildings crowded together and blocking the light; no teeming sea of uninterested faces; no daily news accounts of unspeakable horrors; no brick corners she was afraid to turn.
That was what, if anything, might drive her from the city. Her fear.
She would never have believed it of herself.
11
After entering her apartment, Mary Bakehouse engaged the dead-bolt lock and fastened the chain. She draped the gray blazer she’d been wearing (an essential part of her interview outfit) over a hanger in the closet, then stepped out of her high-heeled pumps.
Mary was returning from three fruitless job interviews. She’d been told after each that they might call her, but she knew better. She had received no callbacks. Nothing had panned out. The economy. That was her problem, she was assured by well-fed men and annoyingly lean, suited women. The bad economy was making jobs scarce and competition for those jobs fierce. “You almost have to sleep with someone,” a greyhound of a woman who’d been waiting with Mary to be interviewed had confided to her in a whisper.
Not that, Mary thought. She’d return to small-town life and small ambitions before engaging in thinly disguised prostitution.
She changed into jeans and a loose-fitting blue T-shirt lettered DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE, advertising one of the group’s concerts from two years ago in Tulsa. She’d bought it cheap and on impulse from a street vendor, figuring it matched her mood.
Mary poured herself a glass of iced tea from the plastic pitcher she kept in the refrigerator. She carried the glass into the living room and slumped on the sofa, automatically reaching for the remote.
She watched cable news for a while and didn’t in the slightest feel buoyed by it. Switched it off.
Misery doesn’t really love company.
After staring at the opposite wall for a few minutes, she got up and went back into the kitchen and placed her half-empty glass on the sink counter. Her thirst was slaked, but now she was hungry. Lunch had been a street vendor’s pretzel and diet soda, so an early supper was in order.
There’s nothing in the fridge.
The deli again.
A glance out the window told her that dusk had moved in, and the drizzle that had started just as she’d arrived at her apartment building had stopped. Playing it safe, she got an umbrella with a telescoping handle from the closet and carried it as she left the apartment. It had rained once today; it could rain again.
The deli was only two blocks away and around the corner. As she walked she decided to have the orange chicken again. It was the best thing they had for takeout, so why not eat it two evenings in a row?
She picked up her pace. She could almost smell the narrow takeout buffet that ran down the center of the diner.
Nose like a beagle.
When she was in the brightly lit deli she felt better. She spooned some of the orange chicken from its heated metal pot into a white foam takeout container, then some white rice. She thought about buying a Daily News when she checked out at the register, then decided she shouldn’t spend the money and left the newspaper lying in its rack. Next to it was the last City Beat, one of several smaller New York papers that competed in a city hooked on information. It was a giveaway that made money from advertising space, including personal ads. Mary scanned the personals sometimes and let her imagination roam, but she was a long way from calling any of the numbers.
She picked up the tabloid-style paper and slid it into the bag with the takeout container and unopened bottle of soda.
Something didn’t feel right to Mary as she was walking home from the deli. She wasn’t sure why she was uneasy, but she picked up her pace.
It didn’t take her long to reach her building. Or to ride the elevator up to her floor and lock herself inside her apartment.
She leaned with her back against the door and felt better. She was home. Safe from whatever was out there.
She drew a deep breath and picked up a peculiar odor. Not of tobacco smoke. Something else. Faint but persistent, and definitely not the orange chicken
More like stale perspiration.
Urine.
The man from the subway!
She reined in her fear and made herself think. What was she going to do? Go back outside where there was more danger? Then what? Go to the police? Tell them she thought someone was in her apartment because she’d smelled an unfamiliar odor?
Sure, they’d believe her and send all units.
She sniffed the air again and detected no odor other than the food from the foam takeout container.
My imagination?
Surely. Must have been. Must!
She shut her mind to the faint odor that she might have smelled and moved away from the door and deeper into the living room.
She drew a deep breath and felt better.
Fear had to be faced. And, damn it, she could face it!
Mary placed the foam container on the coffee table and willed her fear-numbed legs to take her where she wanted to go. Where she knew she must go.
She made herself look everywhere in the small apartment. Under the bed, in the closets, behind the closed shower curtain. As she flung the plastic curtain aside, the murder score from the movie Psycho screeched through her mind, almost making her smile. She let the curtain fall back into place. Not so afraid now.
There’s no one here. Just me and my overactive imagination. Picture this viewed from above, like in a Hitchcock movie—a foreshortened, fearful woman scurrying about in a maze of cubicles, peeking here, peering there. It’s almost laughable.
There were a few more places to look. Extremely unlikely hiding places. Mary decided not to explore them. She told herself she was no longer so afraid that she had to look everywhere in the apartment.
I’ve made enough of a fool of myself.
He was in the living room.
12
Quinn figured he’d better call Renz back. If this investigation was going to stop, and it turned out it shouldn’t have, he wanted to make it clear that it was going to be the albatross around Renz’s neck.
“Which investigation do you want me to stop?” Quinn asked Renz, on the phone in the Lotus Diner. He turned his body in toward the wall, in case Thel, still over by his booth, might be eavesdropping as she figured up his check. “The one with the dog that ran away with the clues?”
“That one sounds interesting,” Renz said, “but I think we both know I’m talking about the Carver murders.”
“Carver murders…is that the one with the guy who raped and sliced up his victims?”
“See, you do know.”
“Was a long time ago.”
“It’d seem like yesterday if you were one of the victims. If they’d had any tomorrows.”
“Why would you want us to back away from that one, Harley? It must be in the NYPD cold-case files.”
But Quinn knew why. The politically attuned Renz, who at the time of the Carver murders had been a police captain overseeing the investigation, didn’t want one of his notable unsolved cases dredged up from the past to bedevil him in the present and future.
“There’s been enough human suffering over those murders,” Renz said. “The families should be left alone.”
“My impression is that the families would still like to see the killer found and brought to trial.”
“Yeah, yeah. Closure and all that.” Sensitive Harley. “We both know what the families really want is for us to kill the bastard.”
“That, too,” Quinn said. “What you really don’t want is for somebody to break this case, after you and the rest of the NYPD and your political hacks worked the publicity pump and made it bigger than Son of Sam and then failed to get anywhere with it.”
“How cruel and direct,” Renz said. “And accurate. Right now I’m especially vulnerable, with the wolves after my job. My political enemies within the depar
tment are breathing hot air down my neck. That prick Nobbler would love to have a big unsolved case that happened during my tenure as police captain to use against me. He’d use it to nail me to the cross.” Nobbler was Captain Wes Nobbler, an NYPD bureaucratic climber with apparatchiks throughout the department. Nobbler was almost as cynical and ambitious as Renz.
“Always political reasons,” Quinn said. Political infighting was one of the main reasons he was no longer with the NYPD.
“Everything’s political.”
Like having a maniac sit on your chest and slice off your nipples.
“Not everything, Harley.”
“Don’t stand on principle here, Quinn. There are plenty of people in and out of the NYPD who don’t want the Carver case reactivated and will do whatever’s necessary to keep it where it belongs—in the past. I’m talking powerful people, Quinn.”
“Like you?”
“Like me. Be glad I’m your friend. Listen to me on this one.”
“How did you know I was on this case, Harley?”
“Get serious. I’m the goddamned police commissioner, and I didn’t inherit the position. I came up out of the streets just like you did, only I rose higher because I was more realistic. I understood the realities of the job. I’ve got eyes and ears everywhere in this city.”
“I owe something to my client,” Quinn said.
“You owe your client jack shit. You owe something to yourself. The idea is to stop this train before it builds up steam and the media notice the smoke. If you don’t help do that you might wind up under the wheels.”
“Along with you.”
“Naw, I know the engineer. I might even become the engineer.”
“These railroad metaphors are getting on my nerves. Can we try the airlines?”
“No. Let’s keep the airlines grounded and speak plainly: Drop the Carver investigation or you’ll regret it. Whether I regret it too shouldn’t make any difference to you. Think about yourself instead of your dreamland ethics. Give your client her money back, if that’s what’s bothering you.”