by John Lutz
Pearl simply stared at Quinn. She made him feel drunk, though he was sure he wasn’t. She could do that.
He shrugged. “I’ll be working,” he said. “At my desk.”
“Don’t try to drive it,” Pearl said.
That afternoon Quinn was alone in the office when a short, stocky man wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt entered and glanced around with his head tilted back, as if orienting himself while making sure the air was safe to breathe. He walked directly to Quinn’s desk. Quinn figured he was in his fifties, a fit fifties. His hair was buzz cut and his chin was thrust outward and upward. His bearing was that of a small person who’d grown up in a tough neighborhood. If his forearms were larger he would have made a great movie Popeye. He stood in front of Quinn’s desk and fixed a calm blue stare on him. Up close like that, Quinn could see the road map of fine wrinkles on his face and upped his estimate of the man’s age to over sixty.
“You’re Quinn,” the man said, in a tone that suggested insult.
Quinn thought it might be a good idea to start locking the street door and requiring people to ring to get in. “And you are?”
“A friend of Bill. You know what that means?”
Quinn nodded. It was the way members of Alcoholics Anonymous identified themselves to each other.
“Another friend of mine’s also a friend of Bill. Jerry Lido.”
“One of Bill’s best friends, I would imagine,” Quinn said, wondering now where this was going, and having some suspicions.
“I’m Jerry’s sponsor in AA, Quinn. The one he goes to for help if he’s having trouble, or if he’s fallen off the wagon.”
“Jerry’s wagon travels a bumpy road,” Quinn said.
“Over the last few years I’ve gotten fond of Jerry.”
“He could use all the friends he can get.”
“Not friends like you.”
Quinn leaned back and held a pencil at both ends in his huge hands with surprising delicacy. “What makes you say that?”
“I went to visit Jerry and he told me what was going on. I know what you’re doing. You know an alcoholic does or learns things when he’s drunk, and sometimes he can only remember them when he’s drunk again.”
“Sobriety’s a different world,” Quinn agreed.
“And you want Jerry to visit his other world so he might get in touch with certain memories.”
“And capabilities. He’s a genius on the computer when he’s drinking,” Quinn said honestly.
“You’re using Jerry for your own ends. Taking advantage of him.”
Has this guy been talking with Pearl?
“Jerry’s involvement in this investigation might save lives,” Quinn said. “He wants to help. In fact, he came here begging to help.”
“And you took him up on his offer.”
“He thinks he can find atonement,” Quinn said.
“He searched for that in a bottle and didn’t find it, and he’s not going to find it by drinking with you and then going online and doing things that could land him in jail.” The stocky little man appeared disgusted. “My guess is you don’t even really drink with him. You probably pour your liquor into a potted plant when he isn’t watching.”
“That only happens in movies,” Quinn said.
“Jerry’s my responsibility, and I’m here to ask you not to be his enabler just so he might ferret out some information that’ll help you.”
“You say I’m using Jerry. Yes, I am. That’s because I know it might be worth it. He knows it, too. That’s why he wants to help.”
“I think it’s simpler than that. I think you’re an obsessive bastard who’ll stop at nothing.”
“To find and stop a serial killer? Yeah, maybe I’m exactly that.”
“Well, I’m obsessive when it comes to saving Jerry from the bottle.”
“Then we’re at cross-purposes. Jerry’s a big boy. He wants to aid in this investigation, and we accept his offer.” Quinn stood up behind his desk. “I’m afraid that’s how it’s going to be, at least until we nail this killer.”
Seemingly without moving a muscle the little man seemed to grow several inches, though he was still looking up at Quinn. “I’m asking you man to man, politely as possible, to leave Jerry Lido alone.”
“I can’t do that. And it seems to me that whatever Jerry’s doing is up to him.”
The man swiped his bare muscular forearm across his lips, making a face, as if he’d taken a bite out of Quinn and didn’t like the aftertaste.
“I can’t say it’s been a pleasure meeting you,” he said, and spun and headed for the door.
“He can, you know,” Quinn said.
The man paused and looked back.
“Can what?”
“Jerry can find atonement in what he’s doing.”
“While killing himself with alcohol. Anyway, it’s saints that find atonement by dying. And Jerry’s no saint.”
“One more thing,” Quinn said, as the man was opening the door.
“What’s that?”
“Your name. You never told me your name.”
“My name is Joe Nethers, and don’t you forget it.”
18
It was 2:00 A. M. when the intercom buzzer grated in the brownstone. Quinn switched on the lamp by his bed, and then struggled into his pants that were folded over the back of a chair. The buzzer sounded again as he staggered toward the intercom in the next room. He leaned on the button.
“Whoozere?”
“It’s Jerry, Quinn. We gotta talk. I found-”
Quinn pushed the button that buzzed Lido in downstairs.
As Quinn moved toward the door, he heard Jerry taking the stairs up from the vestibule. Though Lido had sounded sober, there was something about his footfalls on the steps that suggested he wasn’t navigating steadily.
When Quinn, a sleepy, grouchy-looking man with bloodshot eyes and wild hair, opened the door, he found himself face-to-face with another sleepy-looking man with bloodshot eyes and wild hair, only Lido was ecstatic.
Imagining the scene, all Quinn could think just then was, Couple of booze hounds.
“I hit some databases and found out some shit,” Jerry said, pushing past Quinn and leaving a wake of alcohol fumes.
Son of a bitch smells embalmed.
“It’s two o’clock, Jerry.”
“You’ll love this, Quinn.” Jerry started to pace. Quinn wondered where he got all the damned energy. He’d had a couple of drinks with Lido at O’Keefe’s last night despite Joe Nethers’s implicit warning. Rather, Quinn had downed a couple of drinks. Jerry had guzzled half a dozen. So here was Quinn, exhausted and with a headache. And here was Jerry, ready to leap over the moon.
Quinn let himself fall back on the sofa, stretched out his legs, and crossed his bare ankles. “So what am I going to love?” he asked.
Jerry stopped suddenly and glanced around. “Where’s Pearl?”
“Home in bed.”
“I thought you two were-”
“Not exactly.”
“Simon Luttrell,” Lido said abruptly.
It actually took Quinn a few seconds to remember that was the name scrawled in blood on a mirror at the last murder scene. He realized he wasn’t all the way awake, and possibly the alcohol he’d consumed last night still had his brain addled.
“You found Luttrell?” he asked.
“In a way. He’s connected to Philip Wharkin. Just like Wharkin, he was a member of Socrates’s Cavern. Gold keys, both of them.”
“Gold keys?”
“Sure. You had to join to get into the place. Cost plenty, too. Members were brass, silver, and gold key holders. The golds paid the most to join. Their first drink was always free, and they could go anywhere in the club.”
Lido looked around again, as if still searching for Pearl.
“Listen, Quinn… you got…?”
“Yeah, Jerry.” Quinn stood up from the sofa, trekked into the kitchen, and poured two fingers of scotch into a glass.
He returned to the living room and handed the glass to Jerry, then slumped back on the sofa. Jerry let himself down hard in a wing chair, accidentally sloshing some of the scotch on the carpet, and took a long sip. He seemed to calm down instantly, a trick of the mind.
“Luttrell was a Madison Avenue adman. Responsible for that dancing shirts commercial that used to be all over television. He joined Socrates’s Cavern in 1968, just when the club was getting going. He was a member until June of seventythree.”
Quinn couldn’t remember any dancing shirts commercial. “What then?” he asked. “Luttrell let his membership expire?”
“He expired,” Lido said. “In Del Rico’s restaurant, used to be on Third Avenue. He choked on a piece of steak. I don’t think people knew the Heimlich maneuver back then, or he might have been saved.”
“No point in trying to talk to him, then,” Quinn said. He stretched his body out straighter on the sofa and laced his fingers behind his head. “The names on the mirrors, the letter S necklaces.. . our killer continues establishing a Socrates’s Cavern theme.”
Lido was staring at him like a starving puppy.
“That’s damned good work, Jerry. We’ve established a connection and we’ve got a definite theme. Names of former Socrates’s Cavern members. Now we have to figure out what that theme means.”
“Sick jerks like him always have a regular routine,” Lido said. “Compulsive bastards. You know that better’n anyone.”
“Maybe I do, Jerry.” Quinn watched Lido down the rest of his drink. It wouldn’t be easy to get a cab this time of night-morning. “How you gonna get home, Jerry? You should be in bed, if you’re gonna be worth anything tomorrow.”
“If you don’t mind,” Lido said, “you’re sitting on my bed.”
Quinn stood up and yawned. “I’ll get you a blanket from the closet.”
“Hot night,” Lido said. “I don’t need a blanket. I’ll just take off my shoes and catch some Z’s.”
Quinn hadn’t heard that in a long time, catch some Z’s.
“Okay, Jerry, the couch is all yours. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“So how ’bout a nightcap?”
Quinn thought about it. “Why not?”
He knew Joe Nethers would disapprove.
Pearl would disapprove.
Quinn should disapprove.
In the morning Quinn got up earlier than he should have. He showered, got dressed, then had toast and coffee standing up in the kitchen. He left Lido snoring on the sofa and walked the few blocks to the office to help clear his head.
Pearl was the only one there. Sal and Harold were out searching for Simon Luttrells with Fedderman. Quinn had decided to let them carry out the task for the sake of thoroughness. Renz would insist that every base be touched. And for all anyone knew, they might find the guilty, live Simon Luttrell, or at least a Simon Luttrell who might have some idea of why his name was used by the killer.
“Coffee’s made,” Pearl said. She was sitting at her desk, booting up her computer.
Quinn walked over and poured himself a mug of coffee, then added cream. He came back and perched on the edge of Pearl’s desk, looking down at her.
“Don’t put that down and leave a ring on something,” she said, nodding toward the steaming mug in his hand.
“Jerry Lido paid me a visit during the night,” he said, and described what had happened, what Jerry had learned.
When he was finished, Pearl leaned back in her chair, thinking.
“So our killer continues to establish a Socrates’s Cavern theme,” Quinn said, “maybe for no reason other than to throw us off the scent.”
“Has he succeeded?”
“Sure. We have to interview, or at least check into, any Simon Luttrells in the New York area. And that’s while we’re still looking for Philip Wharkin.”
“He’s forcing us to waste our time,” Pearl said.
“Maybe.”
“You think it’s a double game-making it look too obvious so we abandon that avenue of investigation?”
Quinn shrugged his bulky shoulders. “Been done before.”
“Yeah, but not often. And serial killers are creatures of compulsion. They don’t like straying from their ritual, even in order to lay down false clues.”
“That’s what Helen says.”
“What any profiler would say.”
“But what if we’re not dealing with a serial killer? Not a creature of compulsion at all.”
“Somebody with a logical motive?” Pearl swiveled her chair so she was looking up at Quinn directly.
“Or a different rationalized sick motive not linked to compulsion.”
“It would have to be a strong motive,” Pearl said, “considering the way those women were tortured before he released them to death.”
“Maybe that’s what he wants us to think.”
“A terrible thing to do to human beings, simply to mislead the police. Not many ordinary men would have the stomach, no matter how devoted they were to their cause.”
“The evil that men do…” Quinn said.
Pearl gave Quinn an alarmed look. “You going religious on me now, Quinn?”
“That’s Shakespeare, I believe.” Quinn the avid theatergoer.
“Shakespeare was big on men doing evil.”
Quinn smiled. “What I’m saying is that we can’t rule anything out or in at this point.”
Pearl swiveled back to face her desk and got busy again on her computer. “Where’s Jerry Lido now?”
“Sleeping it off on my couch.”
He didn’t rub it in to Pearl that Lido, while under the influence, had come up with a useful gem of knowledge.
With Pearl, you didn’t rub things in.
“Just in case,” she said, “I’m gonna see if I can run down this Luttrell guy. Make sure of what Jerry found. Narrow it down by eliminating everyone without a heartbeat.”
“That’ll make things easier for Sal and Harold,” Quinn said. It wasn’t a bad idea to double-check. After all, Lido had been drinking.
He watched Pearl work for a few seconds before he walked away, thinking she was probably an inch away from climbing all over him for getting Lido drunk again. Thinking how much he loved her and wondering why.
Wondering if there was a cure.
19
Here they were, meeting again. This time for breakfast.
Fedderman sat across from Penny Noon in the Silver Star Diner on Columbus near West Seventy-eighth Street. They were in a window booth with a clear view of the busy sidewalk on the other side of the sun-heated glass. Fedderman had breakfast there often and knew the food was good, just in case Penny’s request for hot tea or coffee led to a dinner…
A dinner what? A date? That might not be considered ethical.
Well, so what? She just came in to the city to ID a body. She isn’t a suspect. Like when Pearl-
“I think I’ll go with tea,” Penny said, interrupting Fedderman’s misgivings. Well, almost misgivings.
The waiter, a skinny little guy with an impressive black mustache, walked over to their booth and they ordered pancakes and tea for Penny, and scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee for Fedderman.
When the waiter had gone, leaving them alone, Fedderman, not knowing what else to say, nodded toward his coffee cup and said, “I drink too much of the stuff.”
“So why don’t you cut back?”
“We call it cop pop,” Fedderman said. “I’m afraid I’m addicted.”
Why am I boring this woman with this banal crap? What must she think of me?
“Are you a fashion designer, too?” Fedderman the sparkling conversationalist asked, no doubt reminding her of her sister, whom they’d recently seen dead at the morgue. Not to mention that Penny was dressed today in faded jeans and a clean-looking but slightly threadbare sleeveless blouse.
He sighed hopelessly and grinned. Honesty was the best policy. He knew that. He was a cop. “You’ve gotta excuse me for ma
king an ass of myself. I’m not used to talking to attractive women under these circumstances unless it might lead to me putting the cuffs on them.”
No! I didn’t mean it that way.
“Well, there’s a novel approach,” she said.
She stared at him seriously, smiled, and then laughed an abandoned, throaty laugh that he liked a lot.
Their conversation yesterday in a Starbucks a few blocks from the morgue had been strained and not without Penny’s tears. She’d told Fedderman she was surprised by how deeply depressed she felt, since she and the victim hadn’t been all that close.
That was something Fedderman decided to explore, now that Penny was less depressed. And it pertained to the case, lending to his comforting delusion that he was working here.
“You mentioned yesterday that you and Nora weren’t all that close.”
“This gonna be Q and A?” Penny asked.
Fedderman was surprised. Then he said, “That’s what we call our business sometimes, for Quinn and Associates Investigations.” He smiled. “We do Q and A, Penny, but that’s not what I’m doing this morning.”
“You’re taking a break from the case?”
“A short one. With you.”
“Your boss Quinn is an impressive man, but he’s also frightening.”
“He’s on the hunt,” Fedderman said. The last thing he wanted was to talk about Quinn.
The waiter came and Penny added cream to her tea and then stirred in the contents of a pink packet of sweetener.
“I suppose Nora and I weren’t close because we were ten years apart,” she said. “Our father left us a few days after Nora was born. He was an NYU professor who ran off to Mexico with one of his students. A month later they were both killed when a bus they were in ran through a barrier and rolled down a mountainside.”
“Still,” Fedderman said, “Nora was your blood relation. That means something.”
“Apparently it does,” she said. He thought she was near tears again, but this morning she disdained them. “We only saw each other on holidays or other family get-togethers. About five years ago, my mother died of pneumonia, and I doubt if Nora and I saw each other half a dozen times after the funeral.”
He sipped his coffee and watched her over the arc of the cup rim.
