Serial

by John Lutz

  Quinn squinted at the clock by the bed. He was wide awake now. Eight o’clock seemed an eternity away.

  Over breakfast at the Lotus Diner—veggie omelet for Pearl, scrambled eggs and sausages for Quinn—Pearl said, “How are we going to play it today?”

  “I’ll send Sal and Harold to meet with the liaison cop Renz is giving us. They can pick up whatever information the NYPD has. It’s still early for there to be much of that. Millie’s body’s barely cold.”

  Pearl took a bite of egg-sheathed broccoli and chewed thoughtfully. She sipped her coffee, also thoughtfully. “Maybe this whole thing will be easier than we think. Could be Millie was having an affair with Philip Wharkin and he turned out to be a nutcase. They had an argument. Then everything went all pear shaped, as the British say. It was a one-off thing.”

  Quinn looked at her. “You’ve been to England?”

  “Been to the BBC.”

  “Would it be that simple on the BBC?”

  “Never. The inspector would have nothing to do.”

  “There we are,” Quinn said.

  “Where?”

  “Pear shaped.”

  They were finishing their second cups of coffee when Pearl’s cell phone sounded its four opening notes of the old Dragnet theme. She pulled the instrument from her purse and automatically flipped up the lid, completing the connection without thinking to check to see who was calling.

  “Pearl? Are you there, dear? It’s important.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Pearl said. She moved the phone well away from her, beneath the table. “It’s my mother, out at Golden Sunset,” she said to Quinn. “This is gonna take a while. Why don’t you go ahead without me and I’ll see you at the office.”

  Pearl’s mother lived at Golden Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey, only she didn’t quite see it as living.

  “Tell her I said hello,” Quinn said, and took a last sip of coffee.

  Pearl watched him pay at the cash register and wave at her as he walked from the diner.

  “I’m back, Mom,” Pearl said. “Now what’s so important?”

  “Did I hear that nice Captain Quinn, dear?”

  “You did. He was just leaving. And he’s no longer a captain. What’s so—”

  “Pot roast,” her mother said. “You know how, when you too seldom visit here at the nursing home—”

  “Assisted living.”

  “—you coordinate it with pot-roast night? Well, many others have and do and would like to continue. Traditions are much underrated and important, even life-sustaining, like in that song in Fiddler on the Roof. . . .”

  “What’s happened, Mom?”

  “Pot-roast night. They have moved pot-roast night.”

  Pearl was bewildered. “Can’t you . . . adjust?”

  “They have moved it from Tuesday evening to Thursday evening. People like yourself come to visit on pot-roast night because—and here you will agree—the pot roast is the only digestible food they serve. And to make things worse, not in the gastronomical sense, Thursday evening is SKIP-BO night. The choice for the inmates—”

  “Residents.”

  “—will be either conversation with their visitors, or SKIP-BO.”

  SKIP-BO was a card game Pearl didn’t understand and didn’t want to learn. Or talk about. “Damn it!” Pearl said.

  “Don’t curse, dear.”

  “My phone’s blinking, Mom. Battery’s going dead. I forgot to charge it last night.”

  “A string tied around the finger . . .”

  Pearl held the phone well away from her.

  “. . . not so tight as to leave an unattractive indentation in the skin . . .”

  “Fading and breaking up,” Pearl said.

  Pearl snapped her phone closed, breaking the connection.

  “Quinn says hello,” she murmured, and finished her coffee before it was too cool to drink.

  6

  Quinn was seated behind his desk, clearing away yesterday’s mail, when Pearl walked into the Quinn and Associates office on West Seventy-ninth Street. The office was still warm, even though the air conditioner had been running awhile. There was a trickle of rust-stained condensation zigzagging down the wall beneath the window housing the unit. Pearl was wearing the expression she usually wore after a phone conversation with her mother. Quinn could understand Pearl’s aggravation, but he rather liked her mother.

  Sal Vitali and Harold Mishkin were already there. Vitali was seated at his desk, making a tent with his fingers. Mishkin was standing over by the coffee machine, gazing down at it with his fists propped on his hips, as if to hurry it along. Vitali was short but with a bearlike build, swarthy complexion, and thick black hair going gray. He had a voice like a chain saw.

  “Harold brought doughnuts,” he grated.

  Over by Mr. Coffee, Mishkin smiled and nodded. He was slight, and with the beginning of a stoop. His brown hair was thinning and arranged in a comb-over, his chin receded beneath a narrow mouth and enormously bushy graying mustache. Mishkin was everybody’s idea of a milquetoast. Everybody would be mostly right, except for when Mishkin knew he had to do something extremely difficult. Then, hands quaking, mustache twitching, stomach knotting, Mishkin would do it. “True courage,” Vitali often growled, defending his longtime partner.

  “I’m coming from a big breakfast,” Pearl said. “You’ve gotta let us know the day before if you’re gonna bring doughnuts, Harold.”

  “They’re the kind you like,” Mishkin said. “Cream-filled with chocolate icing.”

  “You trying to talk me into one to soothe your conscience, Harold?”

  “You read too much into it, Pearl,” Vitali said. “He’s just trying to make you fatter.”

  Pearl picked up a silver letter opener and held it so morning sunlight glinted into Mishkin’s sensitive eyes. Mishkin took off his glasses and turned away.

  “He’s being nice to you, Pearl,” Vitali growled. “He figures you can eat breakfast and have a doughnut for dessert. It’s not against the law.”

  “If I wanted a doughnut—”

  “For God’s sake!” Quinn said, thinking it was amazing how Pearl could walk into a room and change the mood, even the temperature. “Has anybody looked up the killer in the phone book?”

  Vitali appeared surprised. “Huh?”

  “Philip Wharkin. The guy who wrote on the victim’s mirror with her blood.”

  “We don’t know he’s the killer,” Pearl pointed out.

  “Do we know he isn’t? Do we know he’s not some psycho with an irresistible urge to leave his name at murder scenes?”

  “I guess not,” Mishkin said, and sampled his coffee. He made a face as if it was too hot.

  “Then let’s find out. I know it’s unlikely somebody named Philip Wharkin is actually the killer, but there’s some reason that the killer left a name behind, even if it’s only so we waste our time. Only it’s not a waste of time.” He walked over and stood in front of his desk, facing everyone but Mishkin, who was off to the side. “Sal, you and Harold find all the Philip Wharkins in the New York–area directories. Talk to them and find out where they were when Millie Graff’s murder was committed. Pearl will use the computer to help you locate them. For all we know, the killer’s got a website where he brags about what he’s done. When Fedderman comes in, he and I are gonna drive over to Millie’s neighborhood and interview anybody who might have seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelled anything that might possibly be connected with what happened to the victim.”

  Vitali stood up and began stuffing pens and papers into his pockets. Mishkin worked a plastic lid onto his coffee cup so he could take it with him. Pearl was sliding into her desk chair, ready to boot up her computer.

  Quinn and Associates’ office was set up a lot like a precinct squad room, a large space without dividers between the desks. Everybody working for the agency was a former NYPD detective, so they felt right at home and fell to work immediately when they were given assignments. Old h
abits died hard, especially if they were perpetuated by Quinn.

  Quinn, Pearl, and Fedderman had always been in one of those thorny relationships where they regularly inflicted minor pain on each other. When things went too far, Quinn usually played the role of peacekeeper. He didn’t mind. The verbal jousting between Pearl and Fedderman kept them sharp and contributed to their efficiency. The funny thing was, since Vitali and Mishkin had joined the team, they’d fallen into the same kind of verbal bickering with the others, but not so much with each other. As they had in the NYPD, they acted as a team, with Vitali sometimes protective of the sensitive Mishkin. Whatever acidic chemistry existed at Quinn and Associates, it worked. It seethed and bubbled sometimes, but it worked.

  Quinn glanced over at Pearl. She was intently tracing her computer’s mouse over its pad, staring at the monitor almost in a trance. A new day. Time to get busy. Morning, murder, and marching orders from Quinn. Another day on the hunt. Despite the fact that she and Quinn were once contentious lovers, Pearl responded exactly like the others.

  Argumentative though she might be, in ways that were essential, she could become an efficient, integral part of an investigative team, responding to orders instantly and without question. Pearl could be counted on.

  The door opened and Larry Fedderman came shambling in. There were spots and crumbs all over his dark tie, and he was gripping a grease-stained white paper sack.

  “I got us some doughnuts,” he said.

  Pearl glared at him. “Take your doughnuts and—”

  Quinn stepped in front of her and showed her the palm of his hand, like a traffic cop signaling stop. She did stop, in midsentence.

  Quinn walked over to where Fedderman stood by the door. Fedderman, looking bemused, clutching his perpetually wrinkled brown suit coat wadded in his right hand. There were crescents of perspiration stains beneath his arms.

  “Let’s go, Feds,” Quinn said. “We’re gonna drive over to where Millie Graff was killed, find out if any of her neighbors remembered anything important, now that they’ve slept on it.”

  As he was hustled toward the door, Fedderman tossed the white paper sack. “The doughnuts are right here on my desk. Anybody can help themselves.”

  The sound of the car doors slamming on Quinn’s big Lincoln filtered in from outside. He left the Renz-supplied unmarked Ford for Vitali and Mishkin to use when they had enough Philip Wharkins to interview.

  With Quinn and Fedderman gone, the office seemed suddenly and unnaturally hushed, as if there were no air in it to sustain sound.

  Pearl, Vitali, and Mishkin looked at each other.

  Pearl made sure her computer was still signing on, then got up from behind her desk and walked over to Fedderman’s. She rummaged delicately through the grease-stained white bag and found a chocolate-iced doughnut with cream filling.

  She carried the bag over and placed it where Vitali and Mishkin could reach it, along with their cache of doughnuts.

  Time for teamwork.

  And time to wonder if, this time, teamwork would be enough.

  7

  Quinn and Fedderman split up. Quinn knocked on the door of the apartment adjoining Millie Graff’s, while Fedderman went upstairs. Millie’s apartment was a corner unit, so there was no one on the other side of her. The apartment directly beneath her was vacant.

  The woman who lived next to Millie was in her sixties, dressed as if she were young and living in the sixties. She had on faded jeans with the knees fashionably ripped, a red, blue, and green tie-dyed T-shirt, and rings of every kind on every finger. No makeup. No shoes, either. Her thinning gray hair was straight and hung almost to her waist. Her toenails were painted white with intricate red designs on each one. Quinn considered giving her the peace sign and then decided against it.

  He explained why he was there and then double-checked his notes. “Margaret Freeman, is it?”

  “My friends call me Free,” she said, with a Mary Travers kind of smile.

  “Okay, Free,” Quinn said, thinking, Oh, wow.

  She stood aside so he could enter, and he was surprised. The apartment was furnished traditionally, even with a sofa and chairs that matched. The floor was polished wood, with woven throw rugs scattered about. A flat-screen TV reposed placidly in a corner like a god. No beaded room dividers, no rock-star posters, no whiff of incense, no sign or sound of high-tech stereo equipment.

  She motioned for Quinn to sit on the sofa, which he did. Free asked him if he’d like anything to drink, and he declined. She settled across from him in one of the matching gray chairs. “I’ve already talked—”

  “Yes,” Quinn said. “I read your statement.”

  “Then you know I use my largest bedroom for an office, so Millie’s bedroom is right on the other side of the wall.”

  She sat back and knitted her fingers over one bare knee, as if waiting for him to ask questions.

  “Why don’t you tell me what, if anything, you saw or heard?”

  Free drew a deep breath. Her breasts were surprisingly bulky beneath her kaleidoscope shirt. “Around ten o’clock, when I was working late, I came in here to lock up and thought I heard someone knocking on Millie’s door. Then I heard male and female voices, like when she answered the door and they talked, and then nothing. It seemed to me she let in whoever it was.”

  “Why would you assume that?”

  “I would have heard him walking away in the hall if she hadn’t let him in. That’s just the way this building is.”

  “Did it sound as if they were arguing?” Quinn asked.

  “No, nothing like that. I went back to my office but didn’t go back to work. Instead I stretched out in my recliner to read. I wasn’t too surprised to hear the same voices, at lower volume, coming from her bedroom on the other side of the wall.”

  Quinn wondered if she’d stayed in the office hoping to overhear pillow talk.

  “Still friendly voices?” he asked.

  “I really couldn’t say, they were so faint.” She looked off and up to the right, the way people do when they’re trying to remember. “I sat there reading my Sara Paretsky novel, only halfway aware of the voices, and after about twenty minutes I heard something I recalled after I gave my original statement to the police.”

  Quinn looked up sharply and felt his blood quicken. But probably this would be something inane and of no help at all. They weren’t in a mystery novel.

  Free reined in her gaze to include Quinn. “There were no voices, and no other sounds for about twenty minutes. No—more than that. Then, just past ten-thirty, the man said something loud enough that I heard. His voice seemed raised, but not necessarily because he was mad. More like he was trying to make a point. It wasn’t until this morning that I went over again in my mind what I’d heard and it became intelligible.”

  “And what did he say?” Quinn asked, realizing Free was drawing this out for dramatic effect.

  “He said quite clearly, now that I recall it vividly: ‘You deserve it.’ ”

  “But he didn’t seem angry?”

  “No, not even upset. It was as if Millie had asked a question and he was answering her.”

  Quinn knew Millie would have had to ask the question with her eyes. The wadded panties would have been in her mouth.

  “And then?” he asked.

  Free shrugged. “No more voices. No sound of any kind. I carried my book into my bedroom and went to bed and read myself to sleep.”

  “You weren’t curious or concerned about what you’d heard?”

  “Not at the time. Like I said, the man didn’t seem angry. He might even have been telling Millie she deserved something good that had happened to her.”

  Quinn doubted that.

  “Can you show me your office?”

  “Of course.” Free unwove her meshed fingers from her knee and stood up. Quinn followed her down a short hall and into a room about ten by twelve. The word organized sprang to mind. A computer was set up on a wooden stand. Broad wooden shelves su
pported a printer/copier/fax machine, and neat stacks of books and magazines. Most of the books were mysteries, and some were on forensics and blood analysis. Several were on firearms. On a wall was a framed paper target with six bullet holes clustered around the bull’s-eye.

  “That’s my score from the police target range out on Rodman’s Neck.”

  “You’re a gun enthusiast?” Quinn asked, somewhat surprised.

  “I’m a gun writer and editor of Firearms Today magazine and blog. I’ve given expert testimony in court.”

  Quinn didn’t know quite what to say, and it showed.

  “That’s okay,” Free said. “It often takes people a while to process that.”

  Quinn grinned. “Yeah. To be honest, I was more prepared to see a gun with a violet sticking out of the barrel.”

  “Oh, that’s not a bad idea, either,” Free said.

  “Are you the renowned sixties liberal who got mugged?”

  “No, I grew up on a farm in Iowa. My dad hunted and plinked and got me interested in guns when I was a kid. I stayed interested. Simple as that.”

  Quinn walked over and laid his hand on the back of a leather recliner set precisely in a corner. “Is this where you were when you heard the voices between ten and ten-fortyfive?”

  Free nodded.

  He glanced at the apartments’ common wall. There was a small louvered vent near the baseboard, painted the same light beige as the wall.

  “Were you picking up sound through that vent?” he asked.

  “Mostly.”

  Quinn gave a final glance around.

  “Anything else you recall?” he asked. “Sometimes talking about one thing triggers another.”

  “I’m afraid not this time.”

  Quinn wandered back into the living room and Free followed. He thanked her for her time.

  At the door, he paused and turned. “You’re sure of his words.”

  “Yes. ‘You deserve it.’”

  “Anything else?” he asked again. You never knew.

  Free smiled. “Wanna share a joint?”

  Quinn’s face gave him away. She had him.

  “Just kidding,” she said.