Urge to Kill fq-4

by John Lutz

  Berty’s employer, the Home Away Agency, specialized in selling small New York apartments to individuals as well as corporate buyers. Much of their business stemmed from Wall Street, and if the stock market was in decline and brokerage houses were laying off, Home Away’s business was also in decline. The next step wasn’t hard to figure out.

  That was why Berty Wrenner hadn’t made his sales quota this month. Or last. The other salespeople were making theirs, or at least coming close. The demanding Farr didn’t consider close anywhere near good enough. Things were tight at Home Away. Like stomachs and jaw muscles. Lots of antacid tablets were being consumed. Daily lunchtime martinis were gaining on a few of the men and on Marlee Case, the only female agent not yet driven away by Farr. Lack of sleep accompanied by pressure from on high was a relentless destroyer of health, happiness, and sobriety.

  The chesty, perpetually grinning Farr had held a sales conference at the beginning of the month and informed his six-agent team that it was crunch time (Farr was prone to cliches) so they’d better pull out all the stops, because, as Farr put it, “you gentlemen are in a goddamned fight for your lives, so you’d better not be gentlemen.”

  Berty, a middle-aged man who’d been a lot of things before he’d become a real estate agent, had a problem with that. He was, God help him, a gentleman in a cutthroat game. When he lied, his face turned a mottled red, and he couldn’t look the target of his lie in the eye. His wasn’t the face of a salesman or poker player, anyway. Berty looked as if one of his parents might have been a mole. Even Berty thought he looked like a balding, myopic mole, especially when he wore his glasses, which was all the time. Only Alec Farr didn’t think Berty looked like a mole; he thought Berty looked like a rat, and often told him so.

  The other five salesmen had made their quotas. Jeevers, the corporate client specialist, had barely made his by surrendering part of his commission to a major buyer. The stress of the contentious transaction showed on him. He appeared as though he hadn’t slept the last three nights. His long, equine features were actually twitching. His thin body wouldn’t be still where he sat poised on the edge of his desk, trying to maintain a relaxed posture; he was a man made to run who was forced to sit. Berty wondered sometimes if Jeevers was a reincarnated racehorse.

  They were all lounging in postures of mock comfort in the outer office, waiting for Farr to react to the monthly sales figures he’d just received.

  Marlee, a thickset, gray-haired woman with eyes like oversized blue marbles, glanced at her watch. “I wish he’d hurry up. I gotta get the hell outta here.”

  “You close that deal yet on West Twenty-fifth Street?” Joe Keller, the newest, youngest agent asked. He might have passed for twelve years old if it weren’t for his shadowy beard that made him look perpetually a couple of shaves behind.

  “Like I’m gonna tell you, you pathetic walking embryo.”

  Keller looked hurt, or he might have been putting them on. He would look boyish all his life, with a face difficult to read. A salesman’s dream. Or a spy’s. No one completely trusted Keller.

  Jeevers flicked lint from his sleeve, though Berty hadn’t seen any lint. “Keller wouldn’t dream of yanking a deal out from under you,” he said to Marlee. He gave her a horsy grin to show he was kidding.

  “We’d all dream it, or we wouldn’t be wasting our lives in this cutthroat business. Ask Farr.”

  “I wish he’d hurry up,” Keller said. “I need to scoot my ass outta here, too.”

  “Got a girlfriend waiting?” asked Berty, who was long divorced and single. He hoped no one had noticed the note of envy in his voice.

  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 attache 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. “Th
at 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 choose 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 re actions 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 fa
ce, 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.