by John Lutz
What they saw was a city they loved. Nineteenth-century buildings a short walk from glass and stone and poured concrete climbing toward an indecisive summer sky. Quinn appreciated the sights and smells and sounds around them. Twist-tied plastic trash bags huddled bursting at the curb, low-lying exhaust fumes from stalled traffic, a distant urgent siren, two people arguing about who had hailed a cab first, violin music—hesitant and distant. Quinn and Pearl exchanged a glance, each knowing what the other was thinking.
The inside of the brownstone was quiet until Pearl walked across the living room and switched on the window-unit air conditioner. There was no sound from upstairs. Maybe the workers had gone to lunch early.
Pearl and Quinn decided they’d have lunch first, thinking maybe the workers would return by the time they were finished. Pearl put a frozen pizza with sausage and mushrooms into the oven, then got a bag of pre-cut washed vegetables out of the refrigerator, along with a tomato, some green onions, and vinaigrette dressing. While she put together a salad, Quinn got out silverware, plates, and napkins and set the table.
He sat in one of the wooden chairs and watched Pearl fidget around the kitchen, opening and closing the oven door as if that would hurry the pizza, tossing the salad for a second and third time. Sprinkling ground pepper on the salad, adding bits of cheddar cheese she tore from slices that were meant for sandwiches. Even a pinch of salt. Not a born cook, Pearl.
The phone on the kitchen wall rang, breaking the silence and domestic mood. Quinn scooted his chair a few feet to the side and reached for the receiver.
He saw on the tiny caller-ID screen that the caller was Sal Vitali, from the morgue. He mouthed Vitali’s name silently to Pearl, who was staring at him curiously.
“You weren’t at the office,” Vitali said, “and you had your cell turned off, so I figured you might be there.”
“What’ve you got?” Quinn asked, eyeing the oven timer that was closing in on pizza time and a flurry of activity by Pearl.
“They got a print match on the Ben’s for Men’s victim, Quinn. She’s—she was Verna Pound, thirty-six years old, picked up for shoplifting two years ago.”
“She on our list?”
“Yeah. Back in 2005 she accused a guy named Tyrone Ringo of raping her. Got a conviction. Tyrone spent his time behind the walls and was exonerated and released from prison two years ago.”
“Not that long ago,” Quinn said. “Might seem like yesterday to Tyrone.”
“No,” Vitali said. “He died nine months ago of tuberculosis he contracted in prison.”
“Anything else notable about the postmortem?”
“Nothing other than that she was tortured for over an hour by somebody truly screwed up. Sick bastard with his trick knife made her death even more of a hell than her life was. You wanna read it, the whole report’s been faxed to the office.”
“Actual cause of death?” Quinn asked, not wanting to go back to the office just yet.
“Loss of blood from all the carving he did on her. Damn, Quinn, imagine it, with the cigarette burns and the knife, the bastard taking his time and enjoying himself.”
“At least we got her prints,” Quinn said. “Maybe she’s got family.”
“I doubt she has any family that gives a shit,” Vitali said, “the way she was barely staying alive on the street. Kind of person that made one wrong move after another because she had lousy luck. Tried to steal a coat and was unlucky enough to choose one with a mink collar. Expensive enough to make it a grand larceny charge. Put on probation, disappeared. Now here she is again, in the morgue, after a layover at Ben’s for Men’s. Hell of a life.”
“She tried to lift a coat,” Quinn said.
“Yeah. In January in New York. To survive.”
“Hell of a life,” Quinn agreed. He hung up.
“What were you talking about?” Pearl asked.
“Death.”
The oven timer started its annoying chiming, and Pearl sprang into pizza mode.
After pizza and cold Heineken beers, Quinn and Pearl trudged up the brownstone’s steep wooden steps to the floor above.
The workmen were up there. They’d finished lunch and were back on the job. About half of the carpet was laid. It was light beige. Seeing so much of it down made the space seem surprisingly vast. And sound carried differently. Quinn could understand why the work hadn’t been audible down in the kitchen.
“Think we got the color right?” Quinn asked.
“I’m sure we did,” Pearl said, though she didn’t give a shit one way or the other. She knew it made Quinn happy when she went domestic on him and displayed interest in colors and furnishings. In truth she could barely remember the carpet color in her old apartment where she’d lived for years. She knew it had some kind of spatter design on it, but she wasn’t positive that wasn’t accidental and hadn’t accumulated over time.
“Then I’m sure,” he said.
“Sounds like closure,” she said.
He looked at her. She shrugged.
“Okay to step on it?” Quinn asked one of the workmen, a guy named Cliff who seemed always surly.
“That’s what it’s made for,” Cliff said, and continued crouched on the floor and banging a padded device with his knee to stretch the carpet.
Quinn wandered over to where the job supervisor, Wallace, was down on his hands and knees working the carpet to fit around the door to the next room.
Wallace glanced up and nodded to Quinn. “It’s going great,” he said, before Quinn could ask. He continued cutting the carpet before working it beneath the recently painted white baseboard.
Quinn felt a sudden chill. “What kind of knife is that you’re using?”
Something in Quinn’s voice made Wallace stop what he was doing and straighten up to a kneeling position. He held up the knife. It had a blunt wooden handle that looked something like the knob of a bedpost, and a sharply curved blade about five inches long.
“This is a carpet-tucking knife,” he said. “Looks somethin’ like a linoleum knife, only it’s not. It’s for fine work around baseboards and thresholds, anyplace that’s tricky and requires a touch.”
Pearl had seen what was going on and came over, her footfalls silent on the new carpet. “That looks sharp,” she said, pointing at the knife.
Wallace grinned. “Gotta be sharp. Carpet, and carpet pad, don’t cut easy, ’specially where you’re doin’ delicate work and can’t get a lotta muscle into it.”
Pearl said, “Jesus, Quinn.”
Wallace stared at her.
“Where would you buy a knife like that?” Quinn asked.
Wallace, still on his knees, shrugged. “Hardware store, I guess. Or commercial tool supplier. I bought this one years ago in New Jersey from some place that was goin’ outta business.”
“What’s a knife like that cost, Wallace?”
Wallace managed another kneeling shrug. “A good one, about fifty, sixty bucks. Thereabout.”
“I’ll give you seventy-five for that one.”
Wallace squinted one eye. What the hell was going on here? What was special about his carpet-tucking knife? “That’s too much, Mr. Quinn.”
Quinn smiled. “Okay. We can make it twenty-five.”
Wallace gave him a sly smile.
“Fifty,” Quinn said.
“I ain’t one to dicker,” Wallace said.
Quinn peeled the bills from his wallet and handed them to Wallace in exchange for the knife. Pearl watched Quinn’s jaw muscles work as he hefted the small but lethal instrument in his huge right hand.
“I can finish the job without it,” Wallace said. “Cliff’s got another one in his tool box.”
“Cheaper’n that one, too,” Cliff said. He kicked again with his knee at his padded carpet stretcher and gave Quinn a conspiratorial wink. “You can buy mine for twenty bucks.”
“Shoulda spoken up sooner,” Quinn said. He nodded to Wallace and moved toward the stairs. Pearl gave Cliff a hard look and followed
.
Back in the kitchen, Quinn knocked back what was left of his warm beer and called Sal Vitali on Sal’s cell phone.
“Got a job for you and Harold,” Quinn said, when Sal had answered. “I want you to check on commercial and retail places that handle tools, building supplies.”
“What are we building?” Vitali asked in his gravelly voice.
“A case,” Quinn said. “Airtight.”
62
On the walk back to the office with Quinn, Pearl’s cell phone emitted its Dragnet theme alert. Still thinking about the carpet-tucking knife, which was wrapped in a paper towel and stuck in one of Quinn’s pockets, she flipped up the phone’s lid and answered without first checking caller ID.
When she saw that the call’s origin was Golden Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey, it was too late. She was connected to her mother.
“Pearl, I was thinking about you, so I thought I should call.”
“I’m kind of busy, Mom. You know, this murderer . . .”
“Busy, shmizzy, when I heard about an offer that would change your world—and such a dangerous world—I knew it was a mother’s duty to make sure her loving daughter heard about it and might—”
“What sort of offer, Mom?”
“A job, dear.”
“I’ve got a job, Mom. In fact, right now I’m trying to do it.”
Quinn coughed. He would.
“Are you with the mensch Captain Quinn?”
“Matter of fact, yes. But he’s no longer a—”
“Longer shmonger. You could do much worse, Pearl. In fact you have.”
Pearl thought if her mother mentioned Yancy by name she’d hang up on her. Or break the connection. Whatever you did with cell phones.
“But that’s neither here nor anywhere, Pearl. The thing is, this is an interesting and well-paying position you are being offered that allows you to be out and about like you say you like to be as a policewoman.”
“Detective, Mom.”
“Deschmective.”
“Is that your mother?” Quinn asked, glancing over at Pearl.
Pearl nodded.
“Tell her I said hello.”
Hello, schmello, Pearl thought.
“I overheard,” Pearl’s mother’s voice said on the phone. “Tell the big mensch to marry my daughter. Stop this shacking up together that in God’s eyes, and the world’s, will shame you both as long as it continues. What are you two afraid of? Making a commitment to each other like your father and I made and the result—God bless—was you, Pearl?”
Quinn was grinning at Pearl. She wondered how he’d look with the phone in his mouth.
“Women your age, Pearl,” her mother said, “women still bursting with vitality, are not too old to bear children. But there is a natural order of things, Pearl, and shacking up is not an accepted part of it. However, grandchildren are.”
“For God’s sake, Mom! You know I still have my own apartment.”
“Where you are not often, considering how seldom the phone is answered. Maybe, God willing, Captain Quinn will gladly be part of a marriage with two wage earners in two separate jobs, both or neither of which would become nonexistent in a worsening economy. Add to this, of course, a small dependent.”
“I keep telling you, he’s no longer ‘Captain Quinn,’ Mom. You make him sound like a breakfast cereal.”
“He’s not a cereal, dear. He’s a property owner. Which, the moment of marriage to you, you yourself would become. Now this job that might be yours for the asking was told about to me by Mrs. Katzman, here at the nursing home—”
“Assisted living.”
“—but in the strictest confidence. The inside track would be yours because you would be working for Mrs. Katzman’s lovely son Aaron, who is a big producer.”
“Big how? Obese?”
“Pearl!”
“Sorry. What does he produce?”
“Plays, is what.”
“Broadway plays?”
“Close to Broadway. And he is in no way fat, but very trim and manly, except for the ponytail, and close to your age. He said to his mother, Ida Katzman, when I was showing them both your photograph—that one where you’re just climbing out of the swimming pool in a T-shirt and look just like Sophia Loren in—”
“I was eighteen when that was taken, Mom.”
“Nevertheless, what Aaron Katzman said when he saw that photo—and he said it as if he meant it—”
“I don’t care, Mom.”
“—was that he could guarantee you a job as assistant stage manager. At first it would just be—”
Pearl knew what it would be later on. She decided to take the quickest route back to reality.
“I’ll think about it, Mom. Honestly. You can tell Mrs. Katzman I’ll consider it, and thank her for me for telling you about it. And thank Alan.”
“Aaron. Of Aaron Katzman Productions.”
“Okay. Aaron.”
“I sense, Pearl, an eagerness in you to end our conversation.”
“Mom, I don’t—”
“I understand, Pearl. You have a life to live while mine dwindles away here at this stopover on the way to hell.”
“You don’t believe in hell, Mom.”
“I didn’t, Pearl, until I found myself in its anteroom.”
“Mom, I’ve really gotta—”
“I understand, I said. And I still do. Say good-bye for me to Captain Quinn.”
“He’s not—”
But Pearl’s mother had terminated the conversation. This didn’t happen often. Usually Pearl had to force the issue and hang up first.
Pearl was pissed off, and at the same time felt bruised. She had hurt her mother and felt guilty as hell, and she knew she would call back, probably tomorrow. Or the next day.
“How is your mother?” Quinn asked, seeing Pearl flip her phone lid closed and work the instrument back into her pocket.
“Hurt and in hell,” Pearl said. “So am I.”
Quinn nodded. “Aren’t we all?”
“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” Pearl said, thinking about it.
Fedderman had sat in or just outside of Weaver’s room for the past six hours. Weaver remained drugged up and didn’t make sense when she attempted to talk. Fedderman felt sorry for her, but he was getting tired of sitting or standing guard. It happened a lot in books and movies, but in real life not many people were assaulted in hospital rooms except by doctors who graduated last in their class in medical school.
At the end of the hall, the uniformed cop the precinct had sent over to spell Fedderman stepped out of the elevator and trudged toward where Fedderman sat outside the door to Weaver’s room.
Fedderman had known him right away: Jesse Jones, a capable and light-hearted black man with a pencil mustache. Jones was slight of build, but Fedderman knew he was whipcord strong. He’d worked with Jones for a while in Burglary and had been impressed by the man.
Fedderman watched him approach. Within fifty feet of Fedderman’s chair, Jones switched his gleaming white smile on like a spotlight.
“You can turn it over to me now, sir, and I’ll fill the breach here,” Jones said.
Fedderman liked the “sir.” Jones wasn’t one of the new wiseass guys. He was a little older and had been around and respected his elders. And being retired from the NYPD made Fedderman his elder, even though there wasn’t that much difference in the men’s ages. At least, that was how Fedderman saw it.
He got up slowly from the chair and stretched until he heard his back pop and become less stiff. “I’m ready to be relieved,” he said, looking beyond Jones at the long corridor lined with identical doors. The killer would have to know his way around hospitals in order to find and take out Weaver. Fedderman thought there was no place more confusing than a hospital.
Stretching his back, Fedderman realized how tired he was. He shot a glance at his watch to make sure he hadn’t been imagining that it was time for him to be relieved.
Yep. Jo
nes was five minutes early. “Let’s take a last look at her before I log out,” he said.
Fedderman opened the door to Weaver’s room and let Jones enter first.
The only sound in the quiet room was the soft in-and-out breathing of Weaver, who lay on her back in bed with her eyes closed. She was hooked up to an IV and to several monitoring machines. Normally tan and vital, she looked like a pale representation of herself, with the taut white sheets pulled up to her neck.
“She any better?” Jones asked.
“You see what I’ve been seeing most of the day,” Fedderman said.
“Bastard musta beat the crap outta her,” Jones said in a whisper, as if there was some danger of waking Weaver. “Broke her spirit as well as her bones.”
“Not her,” Fedderman said. “She’ll have plenty left.”
Jones smiled. “So she’s a game one.”
“Yeah. She’ll shake this. What we don’t want is whoever attacked her coming in here and adding to the damage.”
“He won’t this day,” Jones said. “I can guarantee it.”
Both men left the room. Out in the hall, Jones sat down in the chair Fedderman had spent hours in today. He settled in like an airline passenger prepared for a long flight. Glancing down, he dangled a long arm and picked up a magazine from a small stack on the floor, a well-worn People.
“You want something else to read before I leave?” Fedderman asked.
Jones shook his head and held up the People. “Don’t need anything else. This has got it all. Go on home and forget this place for a while, sir.”
Fedderman nodded and left to walk to the elevator. Most of the people in People, he didn’t recognize. Besides that, they all looked like kids.
Outside the hospital, he breathed in air that didn’t smell faintly of menthol; then he walked to a small jewelry store that had been in the next block for years. There he stood in front of the display window and studied the array of rings. The engagement rings were set off by themselves in a maroon velvet display case that made the gold or silver in them look like it had just been polished.
They were all expensive, except for two at the bottom of the display.