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Gray Matter

Page 16

by Shirley Kennett


  “Now you know the other reason why I didn’t want to talk to a man,” Sheila said. “I can just imagine telling a male cop that.”

  “You might be surprised.” PJ didn’t elaborate. She was thinking of Schultz. There was a depth to him that she had not explored, would not be permitted to explore. When he got that look on his face, staring off, seeing nothing but inner scenarios, she felt that something mystical was going on in him. She sensed that he was trying to reach out and connect himself to the killer, not physically, but psychically. Not that she would dream of broaching the subject with him.

  “I turned around to look,” Sheila continued, “which was probably not the brightest thing I’ve ever done. I saw a shadowy figure, definitely a man, about thirty feet or so behind me. He seemed startled that I had turned around. Then he started acting drunk, you know, staggering around on the sidewalk. He lurched over to a fire hydrant, unzipped, and pissed on it.”

  PJ said nothing. She didn’t want to break Sheila’s concentration. Sheila took a sip of her coffee, and PJ noticed that her hand trembled slightly.

  “I know he wasn’t drunk. He only started acting that way when he knew I had seen him.”

  “OK, so somebody might or might not have been following you. What makes you think it was the killer?”

  “Because I’m an artist. You might not be aware of it, but in the art scene I’m hot. I’ve been in the newspapers, on talk shows. There was a lot of publicity from the gallery. He wasn’t just following some juicy piece of tail down the street. He was following me, specifically.” She leaned forward earnestly. “Don’t you get it? Musician, dancer, artist. I’m going to be his next victim.”

  Even though she knew that Sheila was waiting anxiously for her reaction, PJ took the time to weigh the woman’s credibility. The scale didn’t tip either way.

  “What did the man look like?”

  Sheila sighed. “I knew we’d get around to that. I don’t have much to offer. It was dark, he wasn’t standing under a street light. Average height, lean build, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. I didn’t see his face because he was wearing a baseball cap, and the bill of the cap hid his face.”

  “Anything else at all? Color of the cap?”

  Sheila shook her head.

  “What happened after that?”

  “He kind of grunted while he was pissing, a strange sound, maybe more like a growl. Before he finished, I turned around and ran home. As far as I know, he didn’t follow.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police right then, when you got home?”

  “I don’t know. I was really spooked. When I get scared, I can’t talk about it right away. My throat closes up. It took me all this time to work up the nerve to make that phone call.”

  PJ began making notes on her pad while everything was fresh in her mind. Sheila sat in silence as PJ’s pen scratched across the paper. Finally, PJ put the pen down and looked up.

  “What’re you going to do?” Sheila asked. She nervously outlined her lips with one delicate finger tip.

  In that moment, the scales tipped for PJ: this brash woman had revealed a hidden vulnerability at considerable cost to herself. Why would she do it if it was meaningless? There had to be something there.

  Sheila had said that she felt an evil presence. In PJ’s work, she was supposed to be nonjudgmental. Actions were adaptive or nonadaptive, destructive or constructive. But not evil, because that implied a moral judgment. Yet as soon as Sheila had said it, PJ knew that she thought of the killer that way, too. An evil let loose on the world, and she had to play her part in stopping it.

  “The first thing I’m going to do is talk to my partner about this.” Amazing how that word partner rolls off the tongue. “Then I’m going to get a protective watch started. Right away. Tonight.” PJ hoped she wasn’t blowing smoke; this woman was hanging on her every word.

  “I want you to go home and stay there,” PJ said. “Can you take a few days off work?”

  “My studio is in my home. Once I get there I won’t have to go out.”

  “What’s your address and phone number?”

  PJ took down the information, and Sheila stood up to leave. At the door, she pivoted. “You get this guy,” she said, with a low feline ferocity in her voice. “He’s evil. I know he’s evil.”

  And she was gone.

  CHAPTER 16

  SCHULTZ WAS SITTING AT his desk, trying to ignore the conversation Barnesworth was having at the next desk over. Early on, just as a game, he decided to count the number of times Barnesworth used the word “fuck” on the phone. He lost count after five minutes and sixty-three times. He was trying to block out the distractions and let his thoughts and feelings about the killer come into that quiet place inside his head, the place where connections were made, were intuition lived. Now that he had a couple of assistants, he had sent them back over territory he had already covered to get their take on things. He was going over their written reports, absorbing their impressions, and seeing how they fit with his own. Just as the background sounds were beginning to fade, he saw PJ coming into the room. Sure enough, she made a beeline for his desk.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said.

  “Shrinks say the damnedest things.” He was annoyed at the interruption, and she wasn’t going to get off easy. Besides, he had little patience with those who stated the obvious.

  She did a mock recoil, a comic expression on her face and her arms raised to ward off continued criticism. He felt his mood tighten. A little.

  “I tried to call you earlier. You must have been away from your desk,” she said.

  “Is that what they call taking a piss these days?”

  She sighed. “I can see you’re in a rotten mood. I’d come back later, but I really need to talk with you about a visitor I just had.”

  “The Terminex guy finally get around to your office? He was in here yesterday.”

  This time all he got was silence and a glare.

  “You really ought to work on that sense of humor, Doc. Don’t they say humor is food for the soul?”

  “That’s good for the soul, not food. The state of my soul is my business, not yours.”

  “This is starting to sound like your first day on the job. I thought we’d come a long way since then.”

  “You just don’t know when to drop it, do you? Could you please come to my office?” She glanced at Barnesworth, still cursing on the phone. “It’s quieter there.”

  “Hey, Barnesworth, you hear that? Doc says shut up.”

  Barnesworth covered the receiver with his hand. “Go fuck yourself, Schultz.”

  Schultz shrugged. “Pleasant guy,” he said to PJ, in a voice loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “Good attitude. Must come from jacking off in the stall in the men’s room every morning.” That got him a rude gesture from Barnesworth. “Yeah, everybody knows what you’re doing in there, you prick.”

  PJ grabbed Schultz’s arm, pulled him out of the room, and propelled him down the hall.

  “Shithead,” he tossed back in Barnesworth’s direction.

  The rest of the short trip down the hall passed in sullen silence. PJ took her seat behind her desk as Schultz sat down heavily in one of the two folding chairs she was still using. He wondered if she knew that her requisition for actual chairs would never make it past Wall’s desk. He picked up a rubber band and fired it at the ceiling. It rebounded and landed in PJ’s hair, but she was unaware of it.

  “Hostility,” she said.

  “Yeah. Ain’t it wonderful?”

  She was trying to keep a straight face, but her eyes were twinkling. “It does have its uses. I’d have to agree with you about Barnesworth. He’s an asshole.”

  “A true B & P,” Schultz nodded happily.

  “What’s that? Or do I even want to know?”

  “Brown and puckered.”

  “Now that we’ve settled that, can we get some business done?”

  “Sure. What’s up, Doc?”

 
PJ groaned in mock exasperation. “A woman came to see me right after lunch. Her name was Sheila Armor. She’s an artist. Have you ever heard of her?”

  “Nope.”

  “I hadn’t either. But she said that she’s big news in the art world. Last night she was followed on the street by a man she thinks is our killer.”

  “I had one a couple days ago who thought the Ballet Butcher lived in the apartment downstairs because the jerk had weird taste in music.”

  Schultz watched PJ’s face fall like a chocolate mousse that’s just had the oven door slammed.

  “I assume you’re not taking these reports seriously,” she said.

  “That’s not exactly true. You just have to be selective. For instance, the old lady who turned in the guy downstairs because he played loud music might have been well-intentioned, but she was dead wrong.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s hard to explain. Experience. Street sense. What separates you and me.”

  “There’s that hostility again, Detective. The woman who was here seemed very credible to me.”

  Schultz backed off. “Give me the particulars. Facts. Impressions.”

  “Well,” PJ hesitated, “first of all, she’s a lesbian. But that’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “Then why are you telling me that first thing?”

  “Because you told me to give you impressions, and that’s what I noticed first. In fact, I knew that before I even saw her.”

  “Doc, you’re rambling. Take a deep breath and start at the beginning.”

  “All right. When I got back from lunch I got a phone call from a woman. She asked for you. I was about to transfer her when she asked, practically pleaded, to talk to me instead. Because I’m a woman.” PJ seemed to be waiting for some smart remark, so Schultz didn’t oblige. He liked to keep ’em guessing.

  “She came in to talk. Last night she was walking home alone—”

  “Time?”

  “Nearly midnight. From her lover’s townhouse. She sensed someone behind her and turned around.”

  “Stupid shit.”

  “Yes, she felt that way also. There was a man there, and as soon as he was seen he began to act drunk. Pissed in the street.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t acting. Maybe he was just doing what drunks do.”

  “But when she first saw him, he seemed startled, and not drunk at all.”

  Schultz leaped ahead. “So she thinks it’s the Ballet Butcher stalking his next victim: an artist.”

  “Exactly,” PJ said, nodding. “She ran home and was too scared to talk about it last night, just blocked it out until today.”

  “What did the freak look like?”

  “She didn’t get a good look. Too dark.” PJ checked her notes. “Average height, lean build, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap.”

  “What team?”

  “She didn’t…Detective, are you making a joke of this?”

  Schultz plastered a “Who, me?” look on his face.

  “Look, Doc,” he said, “let’s take a look at what we’ve got here. A woman walks alone late at night, maybe a little nervous, a high-strung artist type. A drunk ambles down the same piece of sidewalk, answers a call of nature. She gets spooked, high-tails it home, drops into bed in a tizzy. Reads the newspapers, sees an article about a guy offing people in the arts. Puts one and one together and gets three.”

  “If you had been here, you would have seen that there was more to it than that.”

  “Why wasn’t I here? Doesn’t this fall in the area of field work? She didn’t come in here to play games on your computer.”

  “I told you, she didn’t want to talk to a man.”

  “What, I got balls, makes me insensitive?”

  “In this case, yes.”

  “OK,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “you wore me down. Did you get the broad’s address? I’ll stop by and have a talk with her. Maybe I’ll send Anita. At least she’s got tits.”

  PJ hesitated, tapping her pencil on the desk.

  “Out with it, Doc. Reticence isn’t your style.”

  “I promised her a protective watch.”

  That shut Schultz up for a full minute.

  “You planning on parking your ass in a car doing surveillance?”

  “I would think that falls in your area.”

  The look he gave PJ should have withered her on the spot, but she took it pretty well.

  “All right, here’s the deal,” he said. “I’ll try to get tonight covered. Notice I said try. I’ll do it myself, or get Anita or Dave. Tomorrow you go to Lieutenant Wall and explain to him you want a surveillance team assigned to you. Based on your finely-honed detective skills.”

  “Fair enough. I understand your resentment.”

  “Bullshit shrink-talk.”

  “What do you want me to say?” PJ flared. “That I’m so glad we see eye-to-eye on this?”

  “Are we done here? I’ve got some actual police work to do at my desk.”

  “I’ve had about enough of this, Detective.” She stood up, agitated, and put both hands on the desk. The rubber band in her hair slid off, momentarily distracting her as it landed on the desktop. “Are we going to work together or not? I need a decision right now.”

  Schultz abruptly stood up and faced her. She drew herself up to her full height, which came to about the middle of his chest. There were a lot of things he could have said, but he knew only one thing mattered.

  “I want to catch this bastard. I want to hang him up by his thumbs and cut his balls off. That clear enough for you? Yes, damn it, we’re working together.”

  She slammed her fist down on the table. Her voice was low and hot, like a tomcat answering a challenge.

  “Then let’s catch the bastard, before he kills again.”

  Schultz stopped in the men’s room on his way back to his desk. He splashed some cold water on his face and dried with paper towels. There was a rage in him today, and it came from his lack of progress in the investigation. He knew he had tossed some of that rage in PJ’s direction, but what the hell. She was a big girl. She could handle it.

  He could almost hear the seconds ticking away, knowing that another murder would come soon. How exactly he knew that, he couldn’t say. The golden thread that bound him to the killer, that would eventually connect them heart to heart and mind to mind, was growing stronger, taking shape and extending out into the darkness. But not fast enough.

  At his desk he tried once again to find that place inside where thoughts came and went and left behind shadows of truth. The “Star-Spangled Banner” that the killer was humming in the video tape from Vanitzky’s place kept popping into his head, and along with it something that PJ had mentioned: the man following Sheila Armor was wearing a baseball cap.

  He was reluctant to admit it, but that slim prospect was about the only thing he had going at the moment. Although still skeptical, he decided that surveillance wouldn’t do any harm. Schultz debated calling Anita or Dave, remembered that Dave had a birthday party for his daughter tonight, and that Anita was deep into a summer flu but was trying not to show it. He decided to take tonight himself and approach the lieutenant about personnel tomorrow. He would get over to Armor’s apartment about seven pm, when it was still daylight. The first murder had occurred around nine pm, the second about one am. Obviously, the killer did his nasty work in the dark.

  At about five-thirty, Schultz was clearing his desk to leave when his phone rang.

  “Schultz.”

  “Yo, Schultz. This is Cortman, Narcotics.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thought you might appreciate knowing about a bust we made this afternoon. Thought you should hear it from a friend, you know?”

  “What is it?” Schultz was tense. He thought he already knew what the man was going to say.

  “Your son, Rick. He was picked up for selling marijuana outside a junior high.”

  “Christ. No shit?”

 
“No shit. He was observed making a couple of sales before he was collared. You could maybe talk to the arresting officer. That’s Ricardo, Jesus Ricardo. Know him?”

  “Yeah. Tall dude, lots of gold rings, knife scar on his left cheek.”

  “That’s the guy. Since this is a first drug-related arrest…well, you could talk to Ricardo, see if you and he and the DA’s office can work something out.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I will. Thanks for letting me know.”

  Schultz hung up the phone and sat, staring at his desk calendar which was still showing April. His thoughts were disjointed. The boy’s birth, Julia crying out, Schultz whisked into the waiting room, pacing and sweating. Three candles on a birthday cake. Rick’s first bicycle ride. A young teenager, going around with bandages on his face to make others think he had nicked himself shaving. His driver’s license, first night out on his own in the family car. Then the troubling times: suspended for vandalism at school, brought home drunk a few times by understanding fellow cops. Mood changes, shoplifting once, quarrels over staying out late. Rick giving them the news that he was dropping out of college, couldn’t hack it. Moving back in, sleeping late, jobless. Moving in with a friend after a big argument with Schultz.

  Lazy. Insolent.

  He and Julia were at opposite poles on how to deal with Rick, had been for many years. But Schultz deferred to her, left the decisions to her because he was out of the house so much, by necessity in the early years, by choice later on.

  Now his son, a cop’s son, had chosen to embarrass good old Dad by selling drugs to twelve-year-olds.

  He wasn’t in any hurry to spring Rick from the grasp of the Department. He knew he could, if he wanted to. He could collect some favors. But first, he was going to go home and talk to Julia about it. Really talk, for a change. He wasn’t going to let her defend the boy and then clam up, refusing to discuss it.

  He was going to shove this in her face, by God.

  Angry and deeply ashamed, Schultz left to confront his wife at home and later, he figured, his son in jail. He was going to get a late start on his surveillance at the Armor place, but his blood was up, and it was such a long shot anyway.

 

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