Looker

by Michael Kilian

  Belinda was so still, so silent. Gabriel stared at the bottoms of her bare feet, at the twin curves of her buttocks. It was the least attractive view of the human body there was, but he was still held by the sense of her beauty.

  She’d been very much like him, from the same kind of neighborhood and the same kind of family. If she’d grown up in his part of Queens instead of Bridgeport, Connecticut, she might never have met Vincent Perotta or been on a fashion runway with Molly Wickham. This might never have happened. Tony Gabriel might be a married man—as much married as he ever could be, as she could be.

  Gabriel had been falling hard for her. He wouldn’t realize how much for days. It would be the worst part of all of this, the worst part of his life. As soon as they were through with him, he was going to get very drunk that night.

  Ashes from his cigarette had fallen onto the carpet. He swore, then rose and ground it out in the ashtray on the night table. After glancing nervously at the window, he got dressed.

  He could just walk out. He was a pro. He knew what the evidence technicians would be looking for, what he’d have to do to remove the traces of his presence. He could get it done in fifteen minutes.

  Belinda’s arm had twisted and her hand lay palm up. Tony leaned and touched it gently. He made a vow. He wasn’t going to give this perp a single second more than he already had. His last official act as a police officer was going to be blameless.

  He stepped to the phone, and called the cops.

  They reached Lanham in his car. He and Petrowicz had been interviewing friends of the Central Park victim, getting names of other friends, people who might have known the man she’d left the bar with.

  When they told him about Belinda St. Johns, he put the Central Park case out of his mind. They wanted him back at the division. He had taken out his notebook but wrote nothing in it. What could he write? “Tony fucked up.” Petrowicz noticed his distress. He ran red lights all the way back to headquarters.

  The squad room was crowded, but Taranto wasn’t in his office. Caputo said he was still at the crime scene, as were a lot of heavy brass from downtown.

  “What a shot,” said Caputo. “Right through—”

  “Shut up, Charley,” Petrowicz said.

  Caputo went to get a cup of coffee. Lanham looked through his phone messages, finding one from a detective sergeant he knew at a precinct in Greenwich Village.

  “Hey, Ray,” said the detective, after Lanham had gotten him on the phone. “We got a double homicide down here. Fag job. Got ’em both ID’d and one of them I think is a witness of yours. In the Wickham case?”

  It couldn’t be A.C. James. The doorman? A cab driver?

  “Arbree,” said the detective, reading from something and mispronouncing the name. “Philippe Arbree.”

  “You said a double homicide. Do you mean murder-suicide?”

  “No. They were both clocked by a perp. Strangulation. Well, there’s mutilation involved, too, but it wasn’t cause of death.”

  “How do you strangle two people at the same time? Were there two perps?”

  “I don’t know. The bodies were found in separate rooms. It’s a weird one.”

  “What’s the ID on the other victim?”

  “Woody. James Woody.”

  Lanham drummed his fingers on his desk.

  “Hey, Ray, I gotta get going. You wanna come down?”

  “Have the bodies been removed?”

  “Crime scene unit’s almost finished. I can put a hold on.”

  “No. We’ve got a lot going on up here.”

  “Yeah, I heard. Real sorry for Tony.”

  “Right.”

  “She was a witness, too. That Belinda St. Johns.”

  A witness, and what else?

  “Right. Except we more or less closed the Wickham case.”

  “You oughta check this out, Ray.”

  “Yes. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  “Okay. Good luck.”

  Lanham gently set the receiver on its cradle. He tapped the desktop again. One of the skin books he’d looked through was still on his desk, half buried by some files and a newspaper. Lanham stood up. He took his weapon out of his shoulder holster and checked to see that the cylinder was fully loaded. Janice was still barely speaking to him.

  “Come on,” he said to Petrowicz.

  “Where we going?”

  “The West Side.”

  Lanham had had an itch—a bad one. He’d half expected to find police cars already outside Peter Gorky’s studio. He’d given no thought to fire engines.

  Petrowicz pulled the car up on the sidewalk to get as close as he could without interfering with the fire equipment. As they came up to the still smoking building, stepping over hoses and oily puddles, Lanham studied the grimy brick façade. The tall windows on the second floor were marked by huge dark water stains around the sills and darker smears left by searing flame and smoke above them. The fire had been fast and hot.

  Lanham showed his shield to a fire captain in a white helmet.

  “Any victims?” he said.

  The fireman turned to bark an order at two men pulling on a hose, then wiped some soot off his face with the back of his hand.

  “Victims?” he said. “Yeah, one victim. What’re you guys doing here so fast? We haven’t even struck the fire yet.”

  “You found him on the second floor? Gorky Productions?”

  “Yeah. He’s still there. It was a bad burn. No need for the paramedics.”

  “Thanks.” Lanham started for the building’s entrance, Petrowicz, a little reluctantly, following.

  “Hey!” said the captain. “You guys can’t go in there yet!”

  Lanham kept going, holding his shield before him as he mounted the stairs, his shoes slipping in the slushy, ashy muck. The smoke was hanging so thickly it seemed to have replaced the air. Lanham held his handkerchief over his mouth, though it made little difference. He was coughing loudly by the time he reached the second floor. It was hard to believe there were cops who griped about how easy the firefighters had it.

  A couple of firemen were in the back, breaking out more windows to increase ventilation. Others were moving about the interior, ripping out paneling with pike poles and crowbars to make certain no remaining flames were still flickering within the walls. One of the firemen studied the intruders warily, but then turned away, assuming they had permission.

  “Homicide,” said Lanham, coughing again. “Where’s the victim?”

  “In the big room. Through there.”

  All fire scenes had one thing in common. They were monochromatic. Everything—walls, floors, furniture, glassware—was colored the same black and gray char.

  Including human beings. The blackened, charbroiled, skeletal remains of what Lanham presumed had once been Peter Gorky were in the burned-out frame of a swivel chair, the hands still on the arms of the chair, the ashy skull tilted grotesquely over the back. His clothes were gone except for his belt and heavy leather boots, but what made him seem naked was that his beard was missing.

  “Is this where you found him?” Lanham said to another firefighter who’d come up.

  “What do you think, we sat him there?”

  “He was tied in that chair,” said Petrowicz.

  “What kind of bonds? There’s no trace of a rope, unless it was all burned up.”

  “Wasn’t rope,” said the firefighter. “Probably used what fed the fire.”

  “What’s that?”

  The fireman gestured at the floor all around them. “Film,” he said.

  As Lanham had not noticed, there were opened film cans and loose, melted tape cartridges everywhere. The storage cabinets had all been opened, their shelves emptied. Portions of some of the reels had not burned. Lanham picked up one coil. The film was brittle, and broke. The frames were all black.

  “I gotta get some air,” Petrowicz said.

  When they returned to division, the squad room was as crowded as a subway
car, as filled with uniformed force as with detectives. Taranto was in his office, talking volubly with angry gestures to two other men in suits, one of them their captain. Phones were ringing as fast as they were hung up. A reporter, an old veteran known, to all the men in the division, had apparently called up enough old favors to get in, and was standing in a corner, taking notes as inconspicuously as possible as he talked to a detective from one of the other teams.

  Another detective was using Gabriel’s desk and phone. Tony was sitting on one of the wooden chairs along the wall by the entrance, smoking and holding a cup of coffee, staring bleakly at the floor.

  Lanham nodded to Petrowicz to go on, then dropped into the empty chair next to Gabriel’s. He put his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder.

  “Don’t know what to say, Tony.”

  Gabriel dropped his cigarette butt on the floor, and crushed it out with the toe of his narrow, highly polished shoe. His eyes were very red, and he badly needed a shave.

  “Perotta was in Miami,” Gabriel said quietly. “They got him on the phone. He acted like we were fucking taking up his time.”

  His coffee smelled strongly of whiskey. He’d likely sought recourse to one of the half-pint bottles Pat Cassidy had kept stashed in places they all knew about. Lanham supposed it wouldn’t make much difference if he were drinking it straight out of the bottle for all to see.

  “There were three other homicides last night,” Lanham said. “The designer Philippe Arbre, a male model named Jimmy Woody, and a photographer named Peter Gorky. Would Perotta want to take them out, too?”

  “He’s a fucking animal.”

  “No one ever called Vince Perotta a nice guy.”

  “I’m not talking about Vince. I’m talking about this cocksucker perp. The one that whacked Wickham.”

  “We’ll get him, Tony. But I don’t think he’s the one who hit Belinda. All these homicides tonight, the time of occurrence was roughly the same. It’s not just one guy.”

  “You won’t get this perp. He’s got no fucking rules, Ray. We’ve got rules. I’m going to lose my shield because of our fucking rules. The whole world’s got rules. Vince Perotta’s got rules. He breaks ours but he keeps his own. But this son of a bitch, this perp, the cocksucker just does what he wants. We don’t matter. Nothing fucking matters. He wants somebody dead, they die.”

  “I don’t think he hit Belinda, Tony.”

  “And you’re never going to find out. I’m the only one who’s going to pay for this.”

  “We’ll get him.” Him? Them? He sounded so foolishly sure.

  Gabriel sipped his laced coffee. “Yeah, right,” he said, his voice as tired as his eyes.

  There was a bustle of movement as a new group of detectives came in. They were heavies—grim-faced, self-important. Taranto had called in the mob crimes unit. Closed or not, the Molly Wickham case had become a small detail in a very big deal.

  CHAPTER 13

  The hotel desk clerk told A.C. what he already had guessed—that Camilla, registered under the name of Miss Anne Claire, had checked out. The clerk had no other information, but people at the airport were more helpful. Camilla had been wearing sunglasses when she boarded her plane, but several airport workers were able to recognize her from the picture A.C. carried in his wallet.

  She had not gone back to New York. According to an airline gate agent, she had taken a flight to Baltimore–Washington International.

  She had gone after Pierre.

  A.C. could not follow—not yet. He had left a wretched mess back in New York—marriage, job, Bailey Hazeltine and her self-destructive problems. He was not the sort of man to walk away from any of that. He’d attend to what duty demanded; then he’d figure out where Camilla Santee belonged in his life.

  But she was in nearly his every thought during the flight back. At Kennedy, he ignored the newspapers and bought a fashion magazine instead in hopes of another look at her face. On the cab ride to Manhattan, he went through it carefully, page by page, but there was nothing. Merely models, looking very much alike.

  His first stop was the Globe. He dropped his bag at the guard’s desk by the elevators, then went straight into the Globe’s busy city room. No one spoke to him or looked at him, until he reached the center newsdesk.

  “I smell cologne,” Pasternak said. “Fruitcake cologne.”

  “I was away for a few days,” A.C. said. “Is there anything new on the Wickham case?”

  Pasternak smiled, not amicably. There was considerable activity in the newsroom, and a palpable excitement. A.C. saw a copy clerk actually running. Pasternak looked very weary. His shirt was stained with sweat.

  “‘Is there anything new?’” mimicked Pasternak. “And this guy thinks he’s a fucking newspaperman.”

  “We got a big story, A.C.,” said one of the assistant news editors at the desk. “More murders. Another model.”

  He pulled a fresh edition of the Globe off a stack set at the side of the big desk. Proffering it as he might some rare or important document, he laid it gently in front of A.C.

  The headline was a scream in print: NUDE MODEL SLAIN!

  Beneath it was a fashion shot of a smiling Belinda St. Johns in a bikini. The rest of the front page was given to smaller headlines and jump heads: “With Cop in Love Nest,” “Fashion Sex Ring,” “Gays Among Victims,” “Mob Moll’s Cheating Heart,” “Sugar Daddy Is Ex-White House Aide.”

  A.C. sagged back against a nearby desk, turning to the story about Pierre. Its information was skimpy, identifying Pierre as Molly Wickham’s boyfriend and quoting police as saying he attended sex parties with both Wickham and St. Johns. Whatever career hopes the man still harbored for Washington had been ended by the Globe, and probably the other papers as well.

  There was no mention of Camilla, no reference to her being Pierre’s cousin and Molly’s landlord.

  For now.

  Another jump story was a profile of Philippe Arbre, identifying him as a designer for European royalty, meaning that some royal cousin might have bought one of his dresses once.

  “You have everything in here but UFOs,” A.C. said.

  “Where were you?” Pasternak barked.

  Reflexively, A.C. told the truth. “In Bermuda.”

  “Bermuda.” Pasternak spoke the word as though it were an obscenity. “And did you by any chance leave a phone number where you could be reached, which is standard fucking procedure on this newspaper, procedure followed by everyone from Bill Shannon on down?”

  “You didn’t need me,” A.C. said. “I wrote two columns before I left.”

  “The hell you did.”

  “I wrote them, damn it! They were in the system.”

  Pasternak’s voice fell to a very low register. “We found no such columns.”

  “Then some son of a bitch purged them. They were there. I do my job.”

  Now Pasternak leaned back and grinned. He might have been Robespierre watching Louis XVI ascend to the guillotine.

  “You’re right about one thing, Mr. James. We didn’t need you. We don’t need you. Get out of here. Go to your office.”

  “A.C.,” said the assistant news editor, a friend from the old days, as Pasternak used to be. “Do as he says. Please.”

  A.C. read the message in the man’s eyes. He nodded and, with exaggerated dignity, turned and walked away, pointedly picking up a New York Times from the copy desk. Holding back his anger, he smiled at a woman reporter as he passed her, another longtime friend. She nervously looked elsewhere.

  The message in the older man’s eyes hadn’t said enough. What he found at his office said all there was to say. The glass door was locked. Peering inside, he saw that the walls were bare, the desktop clean. The framed photographs from the wall and elsewhere, along with what appeared to be all of his other office possessions, were piled in two cardboard cartons that had been shoved in a corner.

  Unable to control himself, he hit the glass door with the side of his fist as hard as he could. A sharp pa
in stung his hand and ran back up his arm from his wrist. The glass remained intact.

  Vanessa was at his side. “Welcome back, A.C.,” she said, taking his arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’ll kill that son of a bitch,” he said.

  “You’re not killing anyone.” She held up a large manila envelope that seemed very full. “I have your mail. Your check’s in here, too. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink. This is one time; sweetheart, when I think you really ought to have one.”

  They went to the bar downstairs. It didn’t matter who saw them. The table he took had a view of the street. Bill Shannon’s limousine was as usual parked at the curb, the driver reading a newspaper behind the wheel.

  He ordered martinis for them both. Vanessa opened the big envelope and poured its contents out on the table, handing him a smaller white envelope bearing the Globe’s logo and A.C.’s name, neatly typed.

  “It’s your severance,” she said. “Six months’ pay. I checked it, to make sure they weren’t doing you dirty.”

  He started to tear the envelope in half, but she caught his hand in both of hers and then gently took the envelope from his fingers and slid it into the breast pocket of his coat.

  “A grand gesture, sweetie,” she said, “but it’s wasted on me. You’re going to need every cent of that. And you’ve earned every cent of that.”

  “I can’t believe she’d be that vindictive.”

  “I don’t think Kitty had anything to do with it. I think it was dear brother Bill. In any event, they’re saying it’s for cause. The official story is that you obstructed them on a major story, apparently to protect friends. They also say you were hitting the bottle and shacked up with a woman other than your wife. And you didn’t file any columns this week.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “That’s what they’re saying.”

  “Someone’s put a knife in my back.”

  “Welcome to New York. We have quaint customs like that.”

  Their drinks came. The cold gin dampened his rage.

  “I filed two columns. I put them into the system before I left.”

  “They say they couldn’t find them. Did you save copies in your computer queue?”