"Is Timmy capable of a move like this?" Janek peered at her. "Is anyone?"
"That's not my question."
Across the avenue two slim young men walked slowly, Arms tossed languidly across each other's shoulders. Janek figured they were returning from one of the fancy gay bars uptown.
He turned to Kit. "If you're asking do I see Timmy sneaking over and wiring my car, the answer's a cold-stone no. I partnered the guy six years. He was drunk this afternoon. If he's the same man I knew, he got even drunker after we split. Another thing, bombing's not his style.
Timmy's a fist-in-your-face type. Finally, he knows me. He knows I don't get intimidated, that a stunt like this would only make me mad."
"Unless it made you dead."
They walked a hundred feet in silence, turned the corner and started east on Eighty-eighth. An elderly man, holding a pooper-scooper, waited patiently for his dachshund to defecate beside the tire of a Toyota.
"From what Stoney tells me, it looks more like a message," Kit said.
"How's he figure that?"
"He's speculating, but the charge was light and your ignition wasn't wired. They slipped a package underneath, then set it off by remote.
Probably from up the block so they could be sure no one'd get hurt."
"Who's this '' you're talking about?"
"Just a turn of phrase."
"Funny, that was my first reaction-that there was some mysterious '' who did this to me."
Kit grinned. "Well, now we'll have to find ',' won't we?"
"Yeah, that's real funny, Kit. Meantime, what do I tell Stoney?"
"Tell him about the hotel homicide you're working on. Then take him through a list of your old enemies-who you sent away, who might have gotten out lately, the usual." :'But not about Mendoza?"
"Up to you. I'm not going to tell you to withhold information."
"I'm sure he knows I went to Cuba. Everyone else does. "
Kit turned to him. "If this is connected to Mendoza, what can Stoney do about it?"
Suddenly she froze. A large brown rat, breaking for cover, scampered across the street, then disappeared into a drain. Janek took Kit's arm to steady her. After a few seconds, he felt her relax.
"Maybe it was someone from the old days," Janek said.
"If Clury hadn't been killed by a car bomb, I'd say, yeah, maybe so."
Kit spoke as if nothing awkward had happened: There hadn't been any rat; she hadn't felt revulsion. "But the connection's too close. Anyway, think about it. Who stands to gain from a failed attempt to blow you away? Is the message ' away' or is it more complex?"
"Like what?"
Kit shrugged., one of the players muddying the waters a little bit."
Having circled the block, they arrived at the barricade on Columbus- Avenue and Eighty-seventh. The officer posted there gave Kit a formal salute. As they approached the wreckage and the aroma of soot and gasoline and burned rubber, Janek saw Stoney, squat and short, staring at them from the center of the street.
"Better go talk to him," Kit urged.
Stoney was methodical. He wouldn't be hurried. His questioning took three full days. He was terse and, despite Janek's best efforts, rarely cracked a smile. He insisted on going over every case Janek had ever handled. Names that hadn't passed through Janek's mind in years conjured up images of old crime scenes and cornered suspects confessing in claustrophobic interrogation rooms.
There was the boy who had killed the two nuns; the '" case in which a man had killed two women on opposite sides of town, decapitated them, then boldly switched their heads; a set of voodoo murders; a roommate homicide; the famous actor who pushed the famous actress out the window; the case called "Wallflower" in which a female shrink had sent out one of her patients to exact homicidal revenge for past offenses.
But even as Janek related these stories, he got the impression that Stoney didn't think they were relevant. He knows about Cuba, Janek kept thinking. He's waiting for me to bring it up. He wouldn't lie if Stoney confronted him, but he'd be damned if he himself would introduce the subject of Mendoza.
In the end, Stoney didn't ask about it. He just stared at Janek as if waiting for him to talk. Janek found himself admiring the short bomb squad investigator, and also feeling uncomfortable in his presence.
As it happened, Stoney turned out to be right about the Saab. The high amount of the deductible, which Janek had chosen casually to save himself a few bucks, far exceeded the Saab's value, which meant he'd have to buy himself a new car. What especially rankled was his knowledge that it would be new only to him, since once again, he knew, he would be buying a used car.
By the time he broke free of Stoney, Sue Burke had located the "bad girl" Stiegel had met two winters before in Roosevelt Hospital. Her name was Kirstin Reese.
Janek met Sue in front of Kirstin's building, a walk-up tenement on Ninth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen. There was a busy fish market on the ground floor; its smell filled the hallway. The stairs were covered with some sort of green industrial carpeting that was badly stained and had been worn through in patches to the wood.
As they made their way up to the fifth floor, Sue filled him in:
"I found her name in the hospital records. She gave an old address.
But with her Social Security number, I was able to track her through Welfare. I talked to her this morning for about half an hour. She's jumpy, Frank-fragile, too. It's like there's something wrong way deep inside. Reminds me of women I interviewed when I worked Sex Crimes.
The broken-sparrow syndrome, we used to call it."
"Still-she talks?"
"About some stuff, at least to me. But there's other stuff she won't talk about. The stuff we're interested in."
"Naturally," Janek said.
By the time they reached the fifth floor he was breathing hard. Also, the fish aroma wasn't fresh up there. It was as if the new smells downstairs were forcing the older ones upward, where they were heated to a condition of pungency by sunlight that poured in through the tent skylight above the stairwell.
"How much you think they get for a studio here?"
"Six-twenty a month, would you believe it?"
They looked at each other and shook their heads. Manhattan was crazy.
There were people in rent-controlled buildings paying that much for six rooms with river views.
Sue rang the buzzer, there was silence, then the sound of rapid footsteps moving in the opposite direction, another silence, steps approaching, then the snap of a security lock.
The door opened a crack and Janek saw a sliver of a woman peering out over a taunt link chain.
"It's Sue Burke. I brought the lieutenant," Sue said. Silence.
"What's the matter, Kirstin? You said I could bring him up."
"I changed my mind." The woman's voice was pitched with strain.
"Hey, come on," Sue coaxed. "You promised. Please."
For a moment Janek was sure the girl was going to shut them out. But then Kirstin unchained the door and stood aside. When Janek entered he saw a tall, young, blond woman with a slim figure and large ice-blue Nordic eyes. She wore jeans and a tanktop and there was a small blue tattoo of a crouching dragon on her right shoulder blade. She was attractive enough to be a model, he thought, except for the way she held herself and the zigzag scars on her cheeks. Her face had been slashed on both sides, and, he observed, not very carefully sewed up.
The studio was dark. The shades were pulled almost to the bottoms of the windows, allowing only narrow strips of light to break through. But the windows were wide open; Janek could hear the roar of the avenue, cars and trucks inching their way toward the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel.
Sue sat beside Kirstin on a brown corduroy couch, the kind that opens up and turns into a bed. Janek took a beaten-up leatherette easy chair.
There was a small wooden table set between the couch and the chair, bearing rings and spots where spilled liquids had eaten through the varnish.
; He sat quietly for the first few minutes while Sue drew Kirstin out.
There was something grim about the girl, bitter and withdrawn, that made him think he'd do better to hold back. He needed her help; she was the only lead Stiegel had developed in two years of tracking the bad-girls ring. If she refused to cooperate, the odds of his finding the redhead would fall, he knew, to nearly zero.
"Things going okay?" Sue asked.
"So-so," Kirstin replied.
"I told you, I can get you some help. Think about it."
"Sure," Kirstin said.
"Kirstin's still got some savings, but Welfare doesn't know that," Sue explained. "I know someone might give her a waitress job, maybe even help her find a better place." "It's okay here," Kirstin said, looking around. She was avoiding eye contact. Then she grinned, embarrassed.
"The fish smell gets pretty bad sometimes."
"I've got an old air conditioner at home," Sue said. "Not too pretty but it works. If you want it I can probably get some of the guys to haul it up here." "That would be nice," Kirstin said.
She was, Janek observed, deeply depressed. Although pale, she didn't look ill, but it was clear she wasn't functioning well.
As Sue and Kirstin continued to talk, Janek glanced around the room.
There was a linoleum-topped table sporting a small TV, and two aluminum-framed porch chairs with green webbed plastic seats. On one wall was an old Pan Am calendar showing a view of the Eiffel Tower. On another wall he spotted a pair of cheaply framed reproductions of large-eyed waifs with cats. Most of the furniture looked like it had been collected off the street. Janek wondered how much Kirstin had tipped the super to carry the corduroy couch-bed up the stairs.
When there was a break in the conversation, he decided to ease himself in. He turned to Sue. "Why don't you show her the sketch?"
Sue nodded, pulled out the sketch of the redhead and handed it to Kirstin. Janek watched her closely. He was certain she recognized the girl. There was a small glimmer of excitement, barely noticeable, followed by a denial that was a little too vehement. After that Kirstin set the sketch facedown. There was no reason for her to do that.
"Are you sure you don't know her?" Sue asked.
Kirstin shook her head, then stared at the floor. Her lie was so transparent, Janek wondered whether she even expected to be believed.
Sue exhaled. "Why don't you tell the lieutenant about what you used to do?"
Kirstin turned and engaged Janek's eyes. It was the first time she'd looked straight at him. Her eyes, he noted again, were a ghostly shade of blue and astonishingly beautiful.
"What do you want to know?"
"Whatever you want to tell me," he said. In the pause that followed he decided not to elicit information. I need to open her somehow. "Did you enjoy the work?" he asked.
She smiled slightly. "Why wouldn't I? I made a lot of money."
"Still living on some of it," Sue added.
Kirstin laughed, a short, cutting private laugh meant only for herself.
Then she turned back to Janek. "Why'd you ask me that?"
"Whether you enjoyed it?" He shrugged. "I imagined there might be a certain amount of pleasure in the work."
"Yeah! Sure! It was really great!" The intensity of her bitterness told him he was getting through.
"You hated it, didn't you?"
"Sure"-she smiled-"that, too."
He could tell he'd awakened her. How long has it been, he wondered, since someone's shown interest in her feelings?
"What was the worst part of it?"
"The risk. I was scared the whole fucking time."
"Anything else?"
She shrugged. "Sometimes I felt sorry for the guys." She paused a moment, then undercut her small display of compassion with a tight, mean smile and a tough-girl remark: "But a girl's gotta make a living, right?"
They stared at her. There was nothing to say. A girl's certainly gotta make a living. But a girl didn't have to do it by drugging and robbing men. It took a special type to choose to make it that way, girls who didn't like men, who had it in for them, who wanted to humiliate them-perhaps to pay them back for violations suffered at their hands.
"Writing on their chests-whose idea was that?" he asked.
"Diana's."
"She was the boss?"
Kirstin nodded.
"How many were you?"
"Four or five. Girls'd come and go." Kirstin shrugged. "You know how it is."
More tough-girl talk, but Janek ignored it. He had roused Kirstin to the extent that she was no longer bothering to play a role. That was all he had wanted to do. It was time now to get some facts.
"Why did Diana want you to write on them?" "To freak them out," Kirstin said. " ' mark him afterward." She said marking made them embarrassed to go to the cops and kept them busy thinking how to hide the writing from their wives."
Janek glanced at Sue. She nodded back, her acknowledgment that Stiegel, mediocre as he was, seemed at least to have gotten that right.
"What's Diana like?" Sue asked. The bitter laugh again. "Not a nice person."
"Why don't you tell us a little about her?" Kirstin shrugged. "Sure, why not?"
Janek sat back.
"She started the business. She used to go after marks herself-in Texas, Houston, places like that. She was good at it, she told us.
Really cleaned up. ' ' all clean down there." She invested her money.
''m rich, girls. You will be, too, if you stick close." She told us there were good livings to be made by girls who knew how to interest men, then put them to sleep. No one got hurt. No one got AIDS. No violence. Everything neat and clean. Oh, she could go on and on about what a neat, clean game it was." Kirstin paused. "Another thing she used to say: ''t give me any excuses. I've been there. I know every wrinkle."
Like anyone would dare give her an excuse! We were all afraid of her.
Terrified."
Listening to her, not just to what she was saying but to the way she was saying it, Janek was struck by an idea. It was nothing he could justify, and he knew that if he brought it up and was wrong, he risked losing Kirstin's confidence. But he also knew that if he was right, he might be able to create a bond.
"Diana was the one who cut you, wasn't she?" he asked softly.
Kirstin's eyes glowed. "How did-!" She brought her fist up to her mouth.
"I never said that. I-" Then she began to cry.
Janek nodded to Sue, who moved closer, offered her a handkerchief.
"Take it easy," Sue said. "We're not going to hurt you. No one's going to hurt you now."
Sue looked up at Janek. He stood and moved over to a window. He wanted to release the shade, flood the dreary little room with light.
But he knew that Kirstin wouldn't like that, that she'd pulled down the shades while they'd been waiting at the door. It was all right, he understood, if they saw her scars, just so long as they didn't see them very well.
After Kirstin recovered she was ready to open up. The information tumbled out.
She spoke with wistful nostalgia of her days as one of Diana's girls.
Nothing, it seemed, was too good for her then. Great clothes. Shopping expeditions to designer boutiques. Haircuts at the top salons. The finest shoes and accessories.
"Catch a cold, Diana had this fancy doctor, Feldstein, to look after you. Get in trouble, she had this smart lawyer, Thatcher, to get you out of it. "
There were cultural-improvement trips to museums and evenings at the ballet, parties, too, usually small corporate gatherings arranged by company publicists. After such affairs there was no requirement to, as she put it, put out. Sex was optional; if a girl was attracted to a man, she was free to date him, and if she wasn't, she could reject his advances. Diana demanded many things, but she never forced her girls to sleep with men for money. Their function at these parties was to glow and decorate. If there was payment for their presence, Kirstin didn't know about it.
When Janek ask
ed how the girls put marks to sleep, Kirstin happily explained. Each one carried what she called a "KO kit" consisting of three small bottles containing triazolam diluted in white wine, vodka and Coke. This made it possible to dose a beverage no matter what the mark might choose to drink.
Janek was impressed by Diana's system of financial control. Kirstin explained how it worked. Each night, the girls would be collected at prearranged points by Diana's lover and chauffeur, a Korean girl named Kim. Kim would take the girls back to Diana's apartment, where they would pool the evening's take. Diana would take 50 percent off the top.
The other 50 percent would be divided equally among the girls, regardless of how much or how little each one happened to bring in.
As for the watches, rings and other jewelry, each item was carefully logged in on a computer. After sale to Diana's fence, the girls would again be handed equal shares of 50 percent.
The purpose behind this equitable division of the spoils was to build camaraderie. It was also an acknowledgment that the gross take from any given hotel-bar encounter had much to do with luck. Some marks were loaded, some were not. Since each girl knew she would receive an equal share, an unsuccessful evening would not have a depressive effect.
Diana insisted she was running a business. "In the end it evens out," she'd say.
But there were exceptions. If a girl's contributions were consistently low, Diana might decide she was a poor producer and cut her loose. Or, if she decided the girl was cheating by holding back on gross receipts, she might order collective punishment. The idea was that if you held back, you weren't cheating just Diana, you were cheating your co-workers, too. Punishment consisted of being slapped around by the group, confiscation of all clothes, jewelry and accessories, and permanent banishment. In her time with Diana, Kirstin saw two girls cashiered out that way.
"Is that why she cut you?" Janek asked, remembering how degraded he'd felt being shoved and kicked by the Seguridad guards.
Kirstin nodded.
"What happened?" Sue asked softly.
Kirstin took a deep breath. "I got lucky. It was at the Hyatt. The mark seemed fairly ordinary at first. I figured him for a businessman sporting a fancy watch. Diana always told us to go for the watch. If it was expensive, like a Rolex, it meant the mark probably liked to flash his cash.
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