by John Lutz
Careful not even to glance at the good-looking guy, she walked over and laid the check on his table.
He’ll call. He’s got my number.
30
The entire team, including Vitali and Mishkin, were in the office. They were sipping coffee, passing around Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts, and talking over the appearance—then disappearance—of the shadow woman in Mary Bakehouse’s old apartment building yesterday.
“I can’t quarrel with your tactics,” Quinn said, “one of you giving chase on foot on the stairs, and the other taking the elevator down to the lobby, so you have her trapped in a squeeze.”
“Couple of things might explain why the tactic didn’t work,” Fedderman said. He was half sitting on his desk, trying not to dribble more coffee on his tie as he dipped a doughnut. The journey from cup to mouth was perilous, and he wasn’t having much luck. “The elevator was too slow, and it’s possible our shadow woman is young and spry, or Sal has lost a step in his advancing age.”
“Screw you,” Vitali said in his gravel-pan voice.
Quinn raised a hand for silence and motioned for Fedderman to continue.
Fedderman dribbled more coffee, just before hastily fitting the last bite of a soggy doughnut into his mouth. He chewed, gulped, and continued. “Another possibility is she ducked into one of the apartments on the way down and managed to stay hidden while the building was searched.”
“Or became somebody else,” Pearl said, bringing everyone up short. Doughnuts froze in midair.
“Whaddya mean?” Vitali asked. “She got into an apartment where nobody was home and posed as a tenant?”
“Might even be a tenant, for all we know,” Pearl said.
Pearl thinking outside the universe. Quinn almost smiled.
“I see what she means,” Mishkin said. He was seated in Fedderman’s chair. “Since we don’t have the slightest idea who this woman is, she might be anybody. Very illuminating angle, Pearl.”
“It’s like she reads minds sometimes,” Fedderman said.
“The shadow woman, or Pearl?” Mishkin asked, looking slightly confused.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Pearl said. “You haven’t been around Fedderman long enough to realize he’s full of shit.”
“You have been around Sal a long time, though,” Quinn said to Mishkin. “You think he mighta been slow enough coming down those stairs that the shadow woman made it out of the building before either Sal or you reached the lobby?”
Mishkin looked at Sal, obviously torn. Sal had some gray in his hair now, and he’d developed a slight stomach paunch. The truth demanded that Mishkin dis his partner.
“Yeah, that could be,” he said. Then: “Sorry, Sal.”
“Maybe it was the brownies,” Vitali said.
“Brownies?” Pearl asked.
Vitali shrugged. “Never mind.”
“Brownies and doughnuts, Sal. You’re not gonna be any faster on stairs next year.”
“Give him a break,” Fedderman told Pearl. “You don’t fit so well anymore into your—”
“Enough, Feds,” Quinn said.
Pearl was glowering at Fedderman. “I’ll show you a whole new way to eat that doughnut.”
“Let’s wrap this up,” Quinn said. He knew the uneasy truce between Pearl and Fedderman, while conducive to progress, could sometimes become genuinely hostile. The trick was to prevent spark from becoming fire—or explosion. “Anybody got any theories on the shadow woman’s identity?”
“You mean if we had to guess?” Mishkin asked.
“Sure,” Quinn said. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll all guess the same person.”
“My guess is Chrissie,” Fedderman said. “She hasn’t played straight with us yet.”
“The woman in Bakehouse’s building coulda been Chrissie,” Vitali said.
“My guess is Cindy Sellers,” Pearl said.
“Or somebody we haven’t met yet,” Mishkin said. “Like a relative of one of the other victims. Or maybe she’s Tiffany’s ghost.”
Pearl looked curiously at Quinn. “So what’s your guess?”
“I’m not in the guessing business,” Quinn said. “This isn’t some kind of party game.”
“You’re in the double-crossing pain-in-the-ass business,” Pearl said.
Vitali said, “What if we’d all guessed the same woman?”
“Then we’d try to figure out why,” Quinn said. “And maybe we’d have something.”
“Like Tiffany’s ghost,” Pearl said.
She jumped at the first four notes of the immortal Dragnet theme. They were coming from her purse where it rested on the corner of her desk. She scooped up the purse and fished the phone out, peered at it to see who was calling.
Somebody at Golden Sunset Assisted Living.
Her mother. Just what she needed while she was in a murder investigation brainstorming session.
“Jesus!” Pearl said.
“Better pick up then,” Fedderman said.
Pearl made the connection, put the phone to her ear, and said hello, all the time moving toward the door.
“Pearl?”
Her mother, all right.
“Reception’s better outside,” she said to the dead-eyed stares she was getting.
“Did you say something, Pearl?” her mother asked.
Fedderman grinned. The others simply looked at her. Pearl went out the door.
Outside in the morning heat, she said, “I’m pretty busy, Mom.”
“It’s never busy here in nursing home hell, Pearl.”
Her mother insisted on referring to Golden Sunset Assisted Living as a nursing home. Pearl had become tired of contradicting her. Absently wandering along the sidewalk toward Amsterdam, it occurred to her that cell phone reception outside the office really was noticeably better.
“Pearl?”
“I’m here, Mom, but I can’t talk long. I’m interrogating a suspect. You’re breaking up some anyway.”
“Can’t talk long? Is one of the criminal element more important to you than your own mother, dear?”
“You know better than that.”
“But do you, dear?”
“Did you call for a—”
“Yes, for a reason. His name is Yancy Taggart.”
Huh? How could her mother know anything about Yancy? Know Yancy even existed?
“I speak, as you know,” her mother said, “of the fancy shmancy Yancy. The man, so called, you’ve been wasting your time with instead of spending it with a fine man like Doctor Milton Kahn, or even your mensch policeman Captain Quinn, who is—”
“He’s not a captain any longer, Mom. He’s not with the NYPD.”
“Not exactly and precisely, but still—”
“How did you find out I was seeing Yancy?”
“Not from a little bird, dear. Mrs. Kahn, Milton’s aunt here at the nursing home, as you know, has a sister who has a half sister who has a daughter who frequents a lounge where the Yancy lizard does his womanizing. She saw your photograph during one of her visits here at the nursing home and recognized you from when she saw you at another lounge with the Yancy lizard.”
Pearl was furious. “It’s nobody’s business where I was or who I was with, especially not the business of this niece twice removed or whatever the hell she is.”
“No, dear. Mrs. Kahn’s sister’s half sister’s—”
“I don’t give a damn, Mom!”
“Don’t use abusive language, dear. Did it make you feel better? Did it?”
No, it didn’t. “Yancy’s not a lizard. He’s a lobbyist!”
“Well, dear, if you would look in the dictionary—”
“If Mrs. Kahn would look in the dictionary, she’d find the definition of busybody!”
“But facts are facts, dear, whatever their source, and it seems to me that it’s my motherly duty to at least make you aware that the Yancy lizard you’re going out with sees other women.”
“I see other men, Mom.”
“By ‘speculation’ you mean guessing,” Pearl said. “I’m not in the guessing business.” Quinn’s words. Quinn, damn you! She hated it when men got inside her mind, especially Quinn.
“I’m in no way accusing anyone of anything in any way improper, Pearl, but a mother knows things because a mother knows, and there is a motherly duty to make a daughter aware, and to—and I’ll come right out and say it—warn a daughter when a ship, figuratively speaking, is about to smash apart on the rocks of romance in a sea so rough—”
Pearl broke the connection and turned off her cell phone.
Couldn’t help it.
Pearl had walked faster and faster while talking and wandered far. When she returned to the office, Vitali and Mishkin were gone. Quinn and Fedderman were at their desks.
“Your mom doing okay?” Quinn asked.
Like you care!
“You look angry, Pearl,” Fedderman said.
Pearl didn’t bother to answer. She was angry, at her mother, at Mrs. Kahn, at Mrs. Kahn’s…whatever she was. At Fedderman, at Quinn, at all men.
At all men!
What did she really know about Yancy?
She stalked over to the Mr. Coffee and poured herself a mug of the steaming brew, muttering to herself.
“Say what?” Fedderman asked, overhearing but not understanding.
“I said there’s nothing wrong with lobbyists,” Pearl said, adding powdered cream and stirring violently enough to slosh coffee over the cup’s rim.
Quinn and Fedderman looked at each other, puzzled.
“We’re all God’s creatures,” Fedderman said.
Pearl fixed him with a look, and he smiled slightly.
Saving his life.
31
They’d had sex. Pearl stood at the window in Yancy’s apartment that overlooked the park across the wide avenue. The bedroom was cool, but she could feel the sun’s heat radiating from the windowpane. The sun was about to set, and the park was gilded. She watched foreshortened people walking on the sidewalks almost directly below, some of them couples. In the park, two kids on skateboards were terrorizing pedestrians on the winding path.
Pearl had the white linen sheet from the bed draped around her toga style. Behind her, Yancy still lay in bed. Something in the Times had caught his interest, and he was staring at it raptly, not paying much attention to Pearl at the moment. Nothing like the attention he’d paid her until ten minutes ago.
She turned away from the window and looked at Yancy and his nude, tanned body. He appeared younger than his supposed age, still lean and muscular. And God knew he had the endurance of a young man. Still, he displayed the experience of an older man. She smiled. Yancy was a man full of contradictions, but they made for quite a lover.
How could she trust a man like this?
You took the leap, now live with it. Stop being a cop all the time.
He folded down a flap of newspaper and glanced over at her. No reading glasses. Young eyes. Or maybe Lasik.
Pearl being observant, a cop.
What’s he so avidly reading?
“You look inquisitive,” he said. “Anybody ever tell you that you resemble a little terrier when you look inquisitive?”
As a matter of fact they had, but Pearl didn’t see it as something Yancy had to know.
“I was just wondering what interested you so in the paper.”
He laid the Times open over his lower body as if he were modest, which he wasn’t. “This Carver character,” he said. “A guy stops killing years ago then suddenly starts up again. Is that normal for serial killers?”
“Not much is normal with people who sequentially kill other people.” Sequentially, dear. Sequentially. “Or with obsessive people who have more than one sex partner at a time.”
He looked at her oddly. “We both agree on that, Pearl. But you’re a cop, difficult as I find that to believe, and I thought you might have some insight into the criminal mind. Killers’ minds.”
“I’m not a cop anymore, Yancy. Private investigator.”
“You don’t look like a private dick, sweetheart. C’mon over here.” He beckoned with his right hand, sunlight glinting off his gold ring.
“Think about wind power, Yancy.”
“I’ll take that for a yes.”
She had to laugh, but she moved no closer to the bed.
“I couldn’t help noticing something about you,” she said.
“That would be my third testicle?”
“No, your hair.”
“You mean the way it never seems to get messed up? It’s trained that way. Took years. I’ve been combing it the same way since I was twelve and wanted to get in Amy Dingle’s pants.”
“I bet you were a terror at twelve.”
“Amy Dingle would say so.”
“But that’s not what I meant about your hair. I noticed it’s naturally black and you dye it white.”
“Oh, sure. That’s so I look older. Lobbyists who are gray eminences get taken a lot more seriously. Gotta play the role, Pearl.”
“Live a lie, you mean?”
“No. Live a version, is all. But you could call it a lie. Play your lie well; that’s where the honored roll.”
“I don’t think that’s the exact quotation.”
“It is if you’re golfing, Pearl.”
“Which I am not.”
“It’s an inexact world.”
“Yancy, you are the most nimble liar I have ever met.”
“You make me blush.”
“Not so anyone would notice.”
“Make me bulge, I mean.”
“That I notice.”
Still she moved no closer to the bed.
“Do you happen to know anybody named Kahn?” she asked.
“Sure, Dr. Milton Kahn.”
That rocked her back a step. “Where do you know him from?”
“Met him yesterday. He sat down next to me at a bar and struck up a conversation. Introduced himself. Warned me about you.”
Huh?
Peal felt anger rising in her like hot lava. “Warned you?”
“Said you had serious personality problems and you were trouble. Didn’t go into detail. Winked at me. We had a tacit understanding, being men of the world.”
“Didn’t you ask him what he meant?”
“Didn’t care what he meant. Still don’t.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“No.”
“What did you do?”
“I considered punching him in the nose.”
Pearl felt mildly excited by the prospect of men fighting over her, then was angry at herself. She wasn’t some cuddly teddy bear carnival prize.
Still…
“Did you punch him?” she asked.
“No. I talked him into buying me a drink and tactfully sent him on his way. Teach him a lesson.”
Pearl figured that wasn’t exactly a duel fought for her honor. But it was something.
Yancy smiled at her. “You look lovely as a Roman concubine.”
Pearl moved closer to the bed.
There went the toga.
32
Mick would have a cow if he knew what she was doing.
Joyce House had started work at six that morning, and she was tired. She knew Loren was waiting for her across the street and around the corner. That way he wouldn’t be visible from the diner.
Mick and his rules, she thought. The guy had his good points, but he was a diner dictator.
She yelled a good-bye to Sheila, who would take her shift for the dinner customers. They were always less numerous than the breakfast and lunch crowd. That would be true even this evening—corned beef and cabbage night.
/> Tired as she was, when Joyce crossed with the light and Loren stepped from the doorway of a men’s clothing store, the sight of him charged her with energy.
They came together with a fierce hug. He kissed her forehead and then her lips.
She ran her fingers through his dark hair, then smiled and pushed away from him, turning her head. “Let’s get farther away from the diner before any of that, Loren.”
He laughed. “Why? You think someone followed you?”
“It’s possible. Maybe your ex-wife hired detectives.”
Still grinning, he kissed her again on her forehead. “She and I are beyond that point,” he said.
“The point of no return?” She’d heard the phrase earlier that day on CNN and it had stuck in her mind. There was something haunting and scary about it. Perhaps because she knew she had passed it.
“Exactly,” he said.
“If I were her, I’d fight to hold on to you.”
He looked more serious, his blue eyes downcast. “There was a time she might have tried, but not now. And since I met you, there’s been no doubt in my mind that my marriage is over.”
Without either of them making a conscious decision, they began walking together along the crowded sidewalk.
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said, and held something out in his right hand.
“Theater tickets!” she exclaimed.
“You mentioned you like the theater, so I thought I’d surprise you. We’re on tomorrow night for Manhattan Nocturne.”
She squeezed his arm. “That’s supposed to be great!”
He patted her hand. “Orchestra seats, sixth row.”
“You shouldn’t have, Loren. They must have cost a fortune.”
“You’re the fortune,” he told her.
She walked beside him in the hum and bustle of the city, thinking it was amazing how he always knew what to say to her. As if he could read her thoughts. He must feel as she did, that the more time they spent together, the more they belonged together, belonged to each other. Sixth-row orchestra Broadway tickets. They certainly hadn’t been cheap. It pleased her immensely that he’d invested so much in her.