by John Lutz
All three people at the desk stopped what they were doing and stared at Fedderman. He was glad to see the glimmer of recognition in Carlie’s eyes. And puzzled to see that all three Bold Designs employees seemed upset.
Fedderman tried a reassuring smile. It seemed to reassure no one. He flashed the shield that the NYPD gave Q&A detectives when they were working for hire.
“You must be here about this,” the man behind the desk said.
“This?” Fedderman asked.
“You are the police?” He had a slight accent, maybe Jamaican.
“He’s the police,” Carlie said. “We’ve met.” She gave Fedderman a smile.
“Good as,” Fedderman said. “Detective Larry Fedderman.”
“You can talk in front of them,” Carlie said to Fedderman. “They know my problem.”
“I’ve been tailing you since you left your apartment this morning,” Fedderman said. “Looking out for you.”
“I know,” Carlie said. “If anyone was stalking me, you probably scared him away.”
“Not a bad thing,” Fedderman said, a little hurt by the fact that she’d noticed him.
“But this is a bad thing,” the woman behind the desk said, pointing again with a tapered, painted fingernail at whatever was on the desk. All of her nails were painted the same bright red color and had a tiny silver star pattern on them. Like many petite women, it was her diminutive size that triggered an assumption of youth. She looked older close up. Maybe even in her fifties.
“What the hell is this?” Fedderman asked, getting a little irritated.
Carlie picked up three eight-by-ten color photographs and handed them to him. One photo was of Carlie leaving her apartment building. Another of her walking along the street near her subway stop. The third photo showed her entering the Mangor Building.
Fedderman looked at Carlie. She was wearing the same clothes she had on in the photographs.
“They had to have been taken this morning,” she said.
“Did they arrive in that?” Fedderman asked, nodding toward a ten-by-twelve yellow envelope.
Carlie nodded.
Fedderman used a fingertip and lifted the envelope partway off the desk. It was blank on the other side, too, except for Carlie in neat blue printed letters.
“A guy came in about ten minutes ago and laid this in front of me on the desk,” the woman with the nails and high hair said. “Then he turned around and walked out.”
Fedderman felt a stirring of hope. “You see his face?”
“For about a half a second, just before he turned around.”
“Would you recognize him?”
“I doubt it. There was a bandage on his face, near his nose. That’s about all I can recall about how he looked.”
“The way he planned it,” Fedderman said. “How was he built? Tall, short?”
“Neither. He was average height and weight.”
“What was he wearing?”
“A gray suit. White shirt. And a pink tie, I think.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Nothing. He seemed to be in a hurry.”
“I’ll bet. Was there anything else in the envelope?”
“Nothing.” The woman automatically reached for the envelope to demonstrate to Fedderman.
“Don’t touch it,” Fedderman said. “Or the photos.”
She drew back a talon-like hand. Fedderman wondered what she did when she had to use a keyboard with those nails.
“He must have taken the photos this morning,” Carlie said, “then printed them and brought them here. There might be copies.”
She was too diplomatic to suggest that Fedderman should have noticed someone taking pictures of her. Fedderman realized that and blushed.
That bastard with his camera! How good he must be at his craft. My craft.
“Copies would be his problem,” Fedderman said.
“Evidence,” Carlie said.
Fedderman winked at her, this young woman with pigtails already looking ahead to her day in court.
He picked up the phone and asked the petite woman with the designer nails for an outside line. She used a knuckle to press the button for him.
He talked briefly with Quinn, describing the events of the morning.
“Make sure nobody touches those photos or envelope again,” Quinn said. “I’ll have Renz send a radio car over and pick them up so they can be handed over to the lab. Not that we’ll find any useful prints. The envelope flap wasn’t licked, right?”
“Right,” Fedderman said. “It’s one of those where you peel a little strip back and the flap has its own adhesive. It won’t yield any DNA.”
“Well,” Quinn said, sighing in a way Fedderman didn’t like, “we’ll do the dance, just like this bastard intended.”
“Nothing else to do,” Fedderman said. He knew Quinn was right: this scene they were playing out had been intended by the killer.
“Stay with the envelope and photos,” Quinn said again, and broke the connection.
“Was that Uncle Frank?” Carlie asked.
“You know it,” Fedderman said.
“How’d he sound?”
“Unhappy. He’ll be even more unhappy if anyone handles the envelope and those photos again.”
As he spoke, Fedderman glanced at the photos, lying fanned out near the bottom of the envelope, where they had slid when he’d peeked at the opposite side and seen Carlie’s penned name. The top photo was the one of Carlie entering the building this morning. It had been taken at a diagonal angle from across the street. In the foreground was a tall man facing away from the camera, his long arms at his sides. He was slightly out of focus but obviously observing Carlie. There was a blur of white near his right hand, barely distinguishable.
Fedderman looked down and buttoned his shirt cuff.
16
The hotel had been proof enough that Brad Wilson (so called) might be average looking, an imperfect and precise five, but he was anything but average when it came to sex. Connie hadn’t realized she had so many erogenous zones, and the variety of things that could be done to them to evoke pleasure.
This was their first date, really. The first time they would have dinner together.
Connie was determined there would be no sex tonight. She wanted to begin this relationship emphasizing just that—a relationship. She doubted that Brad shared her determination. He seemed centered on the purely physical. And there was something oddly fascinating about him. Not on his very normal surface. Know him only a short time, and you realized he was something like a plain family sedan with a powerful engine beneath the hood. While he wasn’t overtly intimidating, he gave the impression that there weren’t many contests he would lose.
Maybe he’d have his way with her, she admitted. Connie was learning the true meaning of the word smitten.
She studied him across her plate of penne pasta in Hall’s, the restaurant he’d taken her to on First Avenue. It was also a corner bar, but the table area in back was remote enough not to pick up any loud conversation from the drinkers or noise from the large TV mounted above the mirrored shelves of bottles.
Connie had arrived first. When he’d entered the restaurant she was surprised to see him carrying a large, scuffed leather briefcase, as if he might have come here straight from work.
He smiled in a way certainly genuine; he was definitely glad to see her again. He didn’t mention the briefcase as he slid it beneath the table and sat down in the chair across from hers. The white-clothed table was round and small. They were very near each other. She could feel the briefcase with the side of her foot.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I need to visit the powder room and not have them clear the table and give it away.”
“Do they still call them that?”
“I do. Watch my purse.”
He was glad to do that. She was gone only a few minutes when he worked the purse’s clasp. Research, research, research.
“You never di
d tell me what you do for a living,” Connie said, when she’d returned and was sipping her glass of Chablis.
Surprisingly, he didn’t hesitate. “I buy and sell antiques.”
“What kind of antiques?”
“Old.”
Connie grinned at his evasiveness. “So you don’t want to tell me.”
“I just did.”
”I mean, do you work for a large company, or an association of antique dealers, or are you one of those mystery buyers at auctions with secret clients on the phone, bidding up prices?”
“Sometimes I’m one of those phone people. I freelance, and my specialty is finding things. If a dealer, to satisfy a customer, is looking for a seventeenth century French wardrobe, I deliver.”
“Would you go to France to get it?”
“I might.”
“But how do you know where to find it?”
He smiled slyly. “I have my sources.”
“That’s interesting,” Connie said, meaning it.
Brad smiled. When he did that, he lost his average looks and became, in Connie’s mind, quite dashing. “And you?” he asked.
“Nothing so romantic as traveling all over the world searching for French wardrobes. I’m a bookkeeper.”
“Whose books?”
“Various businesses around New York. Small ones, usually. Shops, restaurants, diners . . .”
“Restaurants?”
She nodded.
He seemed concerned. “Not this one?”
Connie laughed. “You seem worried that I might embarrass you and say this dinner’s on me.”
“Oh, nothing like that.”
“I don’t keep books for this restaurant, or for any antique stores, either,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t. But I’ll ask around antique outlets. Maybe drum up some business for you, if you’re not too busy already.”
“Are you kidding? An independent accountant in this economy?”
He smiled. “Maybe you can keep my books.”
“Who’s keeping them now?”
“I am.”
“You know accounting?”
“I have a thing with math,” he said. “But I’m more confident assessing the patina on an old firearm.”
“Do you shoot, too?”
He raised both hands, palms out. “Not me. If a gun has to be fired, I find someone else to do it. I’m not interested in any gun newer than the nineteenth century.”
Connie laughed. “I’m relieved.”
When they were finished with dinner, they walked along First Avenue, past shops and diners and blacked-out office buildings. The evening was warm, but there was a slight breeze off the river. Thunder rumbled off in the distance, like the artillery of an army slowly advancing on the city, and occasionally lightning played among the clouds. New Yorkers didn’t ask one another if they thought it was going to rain. They had become used to the distant sound and light shows, knowing that Mother Nature was tantalizing but promising nothing. They’d know when she was serious.
Brad and Connie looked over as they passed the UN Building, on the other side of the street.
“Why can’t we all just get along?” Connie asked jokingly.
“We could go back to the Barrington Hotel and get along nicely,” Brad said, slipping his arm around her.
“Only if the general assembly approves,” Connie said.
A taxi traveling uptown crossed three lanes and pulled to the curb alongside them. Its passenger-side window glided down.
“Need a cab?” the driver asked, leaning sideways across the seat.
Connie looked up at Brad. “Did you arrange this somehow?”
“I’d like to take credit, but that would be my first lie to you.”
He gripped Connie’s elbow gently and guided her into the back of the cab, then climbed in after her and pulled the door shut. Connie could hardly resist. She was still considering it when she found herself already in the taxi.
She was surprised, but didn’t object, when Brad gave the cab driver the cross streets closest to her apartment as their destination. So their relationship had moved beyond secret hotel trysts, into a phase more personal and serious. She was pleased.
Beside her, Dred Gant sat thinking about this morning, the photographs, and about the woman beside him. He knew he had a choice to make.
And that for somebody it would be final.
17
Fedderman met Carlie as she was coming out of Bold Designs after work.
“I thought you might want company on the way home,” he said.
Carlie smiled gratefully. “Wouldn’t at all mind. But mightn’t it be better if you stayed out of sight behind me and caught the killer when he made a try for me?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Damned right,” Carlie said. She stopped walking and looked around. “Shall we take a cab?”
“Is that usually how you go home from work?” Fedderman knew that it wasn’t.
“Nope. I’m a subway girl.”
She must be rattled, if she was considering a cab.
“We can cab it,” Fedderman said.
“No, I’ve reconsidered. If the sick creep is watching us, he’ll think he’s scared me into a taxi. Then his stunt with the photographs will have been a success.”
Fedderman couldn’t argue with that. “Then the subway it is,” he said.
He didn’t try to disguise that fact that he was with Carlie as they walked to the subway stop, down concrete steps to the platform. He waited while she bought a Metro pass from a machine. He already had a paid-up one that would be good for another week.
The subway train was crowded and warm, and smelled like too many people in too small a space. Carlie was lucky enough to plop down in a seat after a woman with shopping bags rose at the last moment to push her way to the door before it closed. Fedderman wedged between two passengers and stood near Carlie, gripping the stainless steel overhead bar and letting his gaze slide.
He decided that everyone looked suspicious. There were three average-man types. One of them was sitting across from Carlie and reading a foreign-language newspaper. Fedderman kept an eye on all three, but they seemed completely unaware of Carlie. Like most people on the subway, they appeared almost trancelike and didn’t make direct eye contact for very long with anyone else. Now and then someone would do a mild double take when they saw Fedderman. He could almost hear them thinking, Cop.
He flexed his legs slightly to maintain balance, and spent his time jouncing and swaying along in the subway car by mentally cataloging passengers—especially the three Joe Averages. If anyone in the car showed up again in Carlie’s life, it wouldn’t be considered a coincidence.
No more than those photographs left with the receptionist at Bold Designs.
Carlie’s stop was next. She struggled to her feet as the train began to slow.
Steel squealed on steel, and the train came to a halt, then did its backward lurch as if rebounding gently off a rubber wall.
Over a dozen passengers filed out, and over a dozen pressed into the car. On the platform, Carlie and Fedderman stayed well away from the drop to the tracks and made their way to the concrete exit steps.
When they surfaced, Fedderman scanned the street and sidewalks and was reasonably sure no one was dogging them. It was one of those times when he was sure he’d feel someone’s presence if they posed a danger.
When they’d walked the few blocks to Carlie’s apartment building, Fedderman accompanied her inside.
They rode the elevator up and he went with her to her apartment, going inside first after she’d unlocked the door. He was glad to see she had a knob lock and two dead bolts, all operated by the same key. Fedderman was glad to see her return the key to her purse. It was surprising how many people, for the sake of convenience, left their door keys under a welcome mat or on top of the door frame. Those obvious hiding places had been a convenience for burglars for as long as Fedderman could
remember.
Though Carlie didn’t seem to require it, he went through the apartment room by room, even checking closets and beneath the bed. He also made sure all the windows were locked.
When he returned to the living room he noticed how much cooler it was and saw that she’d switched on the air conditioner.
“I should have turned on the unit in the bedroom,” he said.
Carlie shrugged. “No matter.”
“You’re locked in tight,” he said. “I’ll hang around outside for a while, just to be sure.”
“Of what?”
“That nobody else is hanging around outside.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Carlie said.
Huh? “Aren’t you the woman who asked for protection?”
“Yes, from a killer. But the way I figure it, whoever took those photographs is a coward.”
“So you don’t think they were taken by the killer?”
“Probably they weren’t. But if they were, he was hiding behind a camera.”
“I know that bullies and people who operate in the shadows are supposed to be cowards,” Fedderman said, “but to tell you the truth, I haven’t found that to be the case.”
“No phony reassurances out of you,” Carlie said.
“It would be just like a serial killer, driven by compulsion and sadism, to try to spook you by letting you know he’s been observing you. This is serious, Carlie. I could show you some other photographs that would assure you of that.”
“I understand that he’s not playing games,” she said.
“No, he is playing games! And now and then it’s time to sacrifice a pawn.”
Carlie cupped her elbows in her hands and gave herself a hug.
Fedderman smiled. “Sorry. I don’t want you badly frightened, but at the same time I want you scared enough to take precautions.”
Carlie seemed to give this some consideration. “I think we’ve achieved just the right balance.”
Fedderman wasn’t so sure.
He went back outside and stood in a doorway across the street, where he could keep an eye on Carlie’s apartment building. He could, in fact, see one of her lighted windows, and her silhouette pass from time to time across the drawn drapes.