Looker

by Michael Kilian

  “But they’re businessmen, not movie stars.”

  “It’s a peculiar business.”

  “Are they all Jewish?” Petrowicz asked. It occurred to A.C. that the man was probably Polish, though he had thought him Jewish when he heard his name.

  “No. Not particularly. They’re all kinds. Just like policemen.”

  “Alexandra Zuck,” Lanham said. He was smiling slightly. It occurred to A.C. that Belinda St. Johns might well be right.

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s what Sandra Dee’s real name is,” Lanham said. “Alexandra Zuck.”

  “Sandra Dee?”

  “Never mind,” said Lanham, rising. “Thanks for your help. We’ll be talking to you again, if you don’t mind. Probably tomorrow.”

  “Don’t go anywhere where we can’t find you,” Petrowicz said.

  A.C. had been brought up according to Oscar Wilde’s maxim: A gentleman never insults—except on purpose. Petrowicz was no gentleman. He couldn’t help his rudeness. A.C. accepted that. He had been taught to do that, too.

  A.C. rejoined Vanessa, feeling like a man released from prison.

  “They want us to come in and help with the story,” Vanessa said, gathering up her things as Camilla Santee took her turn to enter the interrogation room. “Pasternak said something about an eyewitness account. Double byline. All very grand.”

  “I’m a columnist.”

  “Not today.”

  “The deadline’s not until six o’clock. I want to get a drink.”

  “I thought you were on Perrier this week.”

  “I need one. I feel a little rattled.”

  “I feel like throwing up. Maybe a stiff scotch will help.”

  “Let’s wait.”

  “Wait?” Vanessa glanced toward the closed door of the interrogation room. “Oh no, A.C. You’re not going to use this wretched occasion to try to pick up a girl?”

  “If you want to go on ahead, fine. I’m going to wait.”

  “This is not wise, A.C.”

  “Don’t worry. Miss Santee will probably say no.”

  But to his great astonishment, she accepted, perhaps because the invitation came from Vanessa. The blonde seemed to have been badly unnerved by the questioning, though in her case it had been fairly brief. It struck A.C. that there were tears in her eyes.

  He was also struck by her voice when she spoke. He hadn’t known what to expect, perhaps a breathless sort of whisper like Jacqueline Onassis’s, or the affected tone used by the Upper East Side women who patronized places like Mortimer’s. Instead, Santee’s was low, gentle, and well modulated, her speech quite formal. But she had an odd accent, not British, but something almost as alien. He sensed it was Southern, but not the magnolia and honeysuckle “ah do declare” Southern accent of the stereotype. Something rarer, and far more aristocratic. Old Virginia perhaps.

  “You are very kind,” she said, her eyes on Vanessa, after a quick glance at him. “I, I’m at a loss what to do just now. I need to collect myself. Yes. Thank you. I would very much appreciate having a drink.”

  As they descended the interior stairs of the precinct station, A.C. reached to support her arm, but she moved away.

  The nearest bar was the lounge of a Japanese restaurant just down the street.

  A stiff drink for her proved to be a slender glass of Galliano. Vanessa, who artfully managed to seat Camilla between them in a circular booth, ordered a double scotch and water. A.C. asked for a martini. He hadn’t had a drink since the night he and his wife had had their last fight.

  The lunch hour was long over and the restaurant was deserted, with nothing to distract them except the Asian waiter and a cook’s helper mopping up in the rear. Vanessa tried saying something cheerful, but when this drew no response, lapsed into flippant commentary on the general fecklessness of policemen, recounting a time when her apartment had been burgled and it had taken the detectives more than an hour to respond.

  Camilla wasn’t listening. When their drinks came, she left hers untouched for a moment, staring at the tabletop, her mind in some other place. At length she spoke, as though to herself, her voice barely audible.

  “Toujours les nègres.”

  “Sorry?” said A.C.

  His query startled her. She looked up, flustered. She tried to compose herself, but he could see in her eyes that she was very upset.

  Vanessa studied her, gave A.C. a quick look, then downed most of her scotch with several hurried sips, setting the glass aside. She reached for her purse.

  “You may have clout at the paper, A.C.,” she said, “but I’m just a poor working girl. I’ll give Pasternak the great exclusive he’s panting for. I’ll tell him you were delayed at the police station.”

  Looking confused, Camilla started to get up with her.

  “No, no,” said Vanessa, putting her hand on Camilla’s arm. “You stay right here and have your drink. I think you really do need it. A.C.’s a good man to have around at a time like this. New York’s last gentleman.”

  With a hasty smile and much bustle, she departed. A.C. caught a glimpse of her through the window, hurrying down the sunlit street.

  “I—I know how you must feel,” he said, turning back to Santee.

  He found himself suddenly afraid, utterly unsure of how she might react to anything he said. She was so nervous. When she lifted her drink to her lips, some spilled. She set down the glass sharply, trembling all over. Then she began to sob.

  A.C. handed her a blue silk handkerchief from his pocket. She took it clumsily and pressed it to her eyes, but her crying was uncontrollable. She let the handkerchief drop and put her hand down flat on the table, as though to steady herself.

  With a sudden certainty of what to do, A.C. put his hand over hers, curling his fingers around its softness. She returned his grip tightly. With tears pouring down her cheeks, she sagged and leaned close against him. His heart was racing. He put his other arm around her, holding her gently. Her hair was against his cheek, as soft and fragrant as he had imagined.

  There were no words to say. Finally, he began murmuring her name over and over, but as he did so, he felt her stiffen. All at once she sat up. The sobbing ceased. A good model has the same exact control over her body and expression as any athlete or actor, perhaps more so. Camilla began to call upon this ability, upon her inner strength, restoring herself. The cold, icy, almost hostile expression returned. She slid away from him, rising from the booth.

  “This was very kind of you, sir,” she said with studied correctness. “Please pardon my outburst. I really must go.”

  A.C. pulled a twenty-dollar bill from the wallet in his breast pocket, dropping it quickly on the table. He shoved himself out of his seat. She was already heading for the door.

  “Please,” he said. “Let me get you into a cab.”

  “No. I’m fine. I’m very late.”

  He followed her outside, moving with great haste, catching up to her rapid stride.

  “Miss Santee, I …”

  Her pace quickened further. She walked with her head down, holding her small handbag in front of her. She seemed to be concentrating very hard on something.

  “Please, Miss Santee, I only want to—”

  Abruptly, her long golden hair swinging wildly around her head, she stopped and turned, standing squarely in front of him.

  “Please,” she said. “Please leave me alone.”

  Her hair whirled again as she spun on her heel and stalked away, rounding the corner at the intersection, vanishing.

  Common sense dictated that he let her vanish. In a city like New York, people were forever coming in and out of each other’s lives this way—briefly together, and then forever gone. Having Camilla Santee in his life would be of little help in his troubles with Kitty. She wasn’t offering much prospect of his seeing her again, anyway. With the rejection implicit in her abrupt departure, she had made something of a mess of his pride and dignity. He felt hurt and foolish, and was glad Vanessa h
ad left when she did.

  But he was far from feeling sensible. The violence and stress of the afternoon had shaken him terribly, and then having this magnificent woman in his presence—for a brief moment in his arms—had completely unsettled him. In the most intoxicating and addictive and besotting way.

  A.C.’s life had been full of women, many of them beautiful. Kitty was considered one of the great beauties of New York society. To say that Camilla was the most beautiful of all was only marginally correct and a pointless measure. Hers was a beauty of perfection, the beauty of a sculpture or painting that somehow lost nothing in being brought to life. It had overwhelmed him. He’d found it difficult to talk to her while looking at her face.

  What so irresistibly fascinated him, though, was what sort of woman lay behind those extraordinary blue-gray eyes. Vanessa had rightly warned him that such a lovely face could mask a truly awful person, or a person who wasn’t much of anything at all.

  But Vanessa didn’t know Camilla Santee, not in any meaningful way, and neither did he. He now wanted to, fervently, almost desperately. He had a compelling sense that she was not all illusion, that the mind and heart and spirit of the woman within might be all caught up in the quality of that perfect skin and golden hair. He wanted to find out. And he wanted very much to know what it was that had made her so frightened.

  Lanham and the other detectives on his team gathered around Lieutenant Taranto, the head of their homicide division, at Lanham’s cluttered desk. It would be many hours before they’d be free to go home, and they were already weary. Pushing back his chair, Lanham stood. The lieutenant sat uneasily on a corner of the desk in what little space he could find. All except Lanham smoked. They had refilled their coffee cups.

  “Okay, Ray,” Taranto said to Lanham. “You caught the case. What do we got?”

  The lieutenant was a few years from the twenty needed for retirement. The time showed.

  “We got shit,” Petrowicz said.

  “No one was able to make the perp,” said Lanham. “The guy had his visor down. I was going to get an artist to make up a composite, but the result would only look like a man from Mars. We’re pretty sure the bike was Japanese. A pedestrian caught a couple of numbers from the plate. One-four-seven. Or maybe one-four-Z. And it may have been out of state.”

  “You’re through interrogating all of the eyewitnesses?”

  Lanham nodded, blinking behind his glasses. “Plus the doorman and some of the horse-carriage drivers. They couldn’t give us much. The models were no help. The brunette called us names and the blonde said she couldn’t remember anything. The designer wasn’t much better. He said he had only begun using Wickham a few months ago. Said she got her start doing lingerie ads for cheap outfits in the garment district. Mail-order stuff. The newspaper people were better. Gave us a lead on a movie producer she worked for. And where she came from—Paterson, New Jersey. She may even come from some kind of money. Her address checks out to a new high-rise on Sutton Place, the kind you’d expect one of the Trumps to live in.”

  “There’s only one way a broad like that gets to live on Sutton Place,” said Detective Tony Gabriel. He had eyes as dark and suspicious as Taranto’s, but was very good-looking in a smooth, well-oiled way, while the lieutenant was flaccid, balding, and overweight. Gabriel was wearing a double-breasted suit that must have cost two weeks’ salary, along with gold cufflinks and a Rolex watch. It was rumored they were gifts from ladies he had “assisted” in the line of duty. The division’s jurisdiction was known as a “Gold Coast” beat. Its residents could afford to be generous in their gifts.

  “We don’t know that yet,” Lanham said carefully.

  “So what do you think, Ray?” Taranto said. His deference was due to more than Lanham’s having caught the case. In the New York Police Department, detectives were either promoted along civil service lines—becoming sergeants, lieutenants, and, if they were well connected, captains—or they remained detectives and were promoted through the grades of third, second, and first. As a detective first grade, one of not so many NYPD blacks to hold that position, Lanham earned as much money as the lieutenant and was one of the elite of the department. But without the civil service protection of a lieutenant’s or sergeant’s rank, a detective-first could be busted back to patrolman without much administrative review. To survive, a detective-first had to perform. And most did. Lanham had one of the highest conviction rates per arrest in the entire police department.

  He tapped his pen against the desk top. The paperwork from the Wickham case was already beginning to pile up. “I think we have a professional hit,” Lanham said. “I don’t think this was some racist crackpot or rejected boyfriend.”

  “He got her right through the face,” Detective Caputo said. “One fuckin’ shot.” Charley Caputo was Gabriel’s partner. He was shorter than most of the detectives, resplendent in a gray silk suit, black shirt, and black tie.

  “What bothers me most, boss,” Lanham said to Taranto, “is that the perpetrator’s M.O. is like one of those terrorist hits over in Italy or El Salvador or someplace. An assassination. I mean, this was a highly public murder, in front of the whole world. I think the perp was trying to make some statement. If he just wanted to kill her, he could have hit her outside her apartment. That’s about as quiet a neighborhood as there is in Manhattan.”

  “Was she involved in radical politics?” Taranto said.

  “She wasn’t a hippie,” said Lanham.

  “What about race?” Taranto said. What he didn’t need to say was that white on black murders were continuing to be very big news in New York. A dark Puerto Rican girl had been raped and murdered by still unapprehended white gang members in Brooklyn four months earlier, and the story still kept turning up in the papers. The Howard Beach and Bensonhurst murders of blacks by white youths were now very old cases, but still much remembered. Such cases gave the mayor fits.

  “Nothing definite on the race of the perp,” Lanham said. “But I sure as hell don’t think this was a racial killing.”

  Pat Cassidy, the swing member of the team, joined them. A skinny, nervous, chain-smoking Irishman, he had eyes with rims as red as his curly hair. He hadn’t been drinking—that day, at least. He’d been in court at the time of the shooting. Lanham handed him a copy of his initial report, the one that would go downtown. The “fives,” the blue flimsies containing witness statements and other pertinent information, remained with the division. So did the “unusuals,” reports of anything that might have seemed out of place or that indicated an inconsistency. Lanham planned to take a briefcase full of all these things home. It would be another night in which sleep was of no concern.

  “Okay, let’s get our shit together,” Taranto said. “I put out a citywide on the motorcycle. And a stop at all the bridges and tunnels.”

  The other detectives let this pass. They all knew they’d never recover the motorcycle with the perpetrator still on it.

  “We’ll keep the canvass going on the general area,” Taranto continued. “What else? Call some shots, Ray.”

  Lanham looked to Petrowicz. “I’d like you to check out her background,” he said. “And find her family if we can. There’s this movie guy she worked for, Gorky. But we can get him tomorrow.” He turned to Gabriel, anticipating his happy reaction. “Tony, why don’t you go talk to the other models in the show, including that Belinda St. Johns. Maybe you can get more than we did.”

  A hint of a smirk came over Gabriel’s face.

  “Don’t mess with the blonde, though, that Camilla Santee. She’s real spooked. I want to let her calm down.”

  “I can calm her down,” Gabriel said.

  “No,” said Lanham. “I mean it, Tony.”

  “Let’s not have any horizontal interviews,” Taranto said, and not in jest. They’d lost a big case the year before to mistrial when Gabriel was found to have screwed a woman who was subsequently called as a key witness. Gabriel had been suspended for thirty days. He’d been lucky.


  “I’d like a canvass of Wickham’s apartment building,” Lanham said. “Leaning especially hard on the doormen. I want to know about all the men in her life.”

  “Are you going to need me?” said Pat Cassidy, looking at his watch. “I’ve got to testify in court tomorrow.”

  “So do I,” said Caputo.

  “You bet your ass we’re going to need you,” said Taranto. “I’m putting the whole division on double shift. Downtown’s jumping up and down on this one. Murders aren’t supposed to happen in front of the Plaza Hotel.”

  “Check vehicle registration,” Lanham said. “A black motorcycle, probably Japanese. License including a one-four-seven or one-four-Z. Possibly out of state. Check out limos, too. A white or light blue stretch. One of the witnesses said a limousine like that pulled away from the curb right after the shooting.”

  Lanham looked over at his wooden “active” box, which was heaped with files of other pending cases. One was a murder-suicide in an expensive town house in the East Sixties. Another was a cab driver who’d been found shot dead in his vehicle near the Central Park boathouse. Another involved a naked corpse of a man found in an alley. The head had been neatly severed from the body, rendering the case a “cuppy”—a department acronym meaning “circumstances undetermined pending police investigation.” It meant there’d been no way of immediately establishing whether the victim had met with foul play. Technically, the head could have been severed after death from natural causes. Before the “git-go” on the Wickham murder, Taranto had been after him to move on these cases. Uniformed force had been alerted to look for the decapitation victim’s missing head.

  “What do you have in mind for yourself, Ray?” the lieutenant asked.

  “The M.E.’s going to do the autopsy at eight tonight. And I’m waiting for the forensics report.”

  “Downtown wants something for the eleven o’clock news. They’re screaming for it. The mayor wants to go on TV.”

  “Tell them we’ve got a citywide out.”

  “Shit,” said Taranto. “It would be big fucking news if we didn’t. We’ll hope for a better tomorrow.”