by John Lutz
He got down off his stool and walked toward her, moving in the graceful, deliberate manner of someone who’d had social dancing lessons at some snooty prep school.
Great! Just what I need. Some Casanova asshole trying to hit on me when all I want is a peaceful place to drink.
When he got closer she saw with some relief that he wasn’t wearing an ascot; it was simply a generously cut, mostly red paisley tie fastened in what might be a big Windsor knot. He was older than she’d at first thought, maybe sixty, with regular features and a tanned face just beginning to weather in a way that would only make him appear more distinguished. Pearl mentally projected and decided that in a few years he’d look incredibly worldly and handsome. He had angular pale blue eyes that seemed amused. She stared straight ahead, watching him in the back bar mirror, and waited for the pickup line.
“This is it,” he said.
“It?”
She continued looking at him in the mirror, watching him studying her. The two-dimensional reflected scene in the smoky mirror reminded her of how the city had looked in the lowering dusk.
“The pickup line,” he said.
“It didn’t work.”
He smiled, very handsomely. “You haven’t given it a chance to sink in.”
Time to discourage this guy, right now.
“I’m a cop,” she said.
“Great.”
“Vice,” she said.
He slid onto the stool next to her. “Fine. I could use some advice.”
At first she didn’t understand; then she had to discipline herself not to smile. “That’s ‘vice.’”
“Ah! As in human foible.”
“As in if you don’t stop bothering me I’m going to arrest you for haranguing a police officer.”
“You mean I’ve committed a haranguing offense.”
“I mean you’re about to get your ass hauled off to the punitentiary.”
“That’s very good,” he said, brightening. “And fast. Brains and beauty.”
“But not necessarily in that ardor.”
“Wonderful!”
My God, I’m playing this idiot’s game.
But there was something about him. Something suggesting that the smooth banter was on a surface of deeper water and he was���trustworthy? Perhaps he was being amiable only for the sake of amiability, without a hidden agenda.
Pearl was no fool. She had to wonder. Had she encountered an admirable genuineness or a real talent for deceit? She couldn’t help herself. Couldn’t contain a smile that broke through her somber demeanor and gave her away.
Even she had to admit it was a “yes, I am interested” smile.
It’s because he came at me playing a game.
Pearl, always analyzing. A game player herself.
Had he somehow known that?
“I’m Yancy Taggart,” he said, offering his hand.
She gave up, looked into the blue eyes directly, and shook the strong, dry hand. “Pearl.”
He didn’t ask for her last name, but within ten minutes she gave it to him.
Chatting with this guy turned out to be so easy. It was as if they both had scripts and magically knew all their lines. The prep school where he’d had his dance lessons had sanded off all his rough edges. There was no awkwardness about Yancy Taggart, and no one could for long feel awkward in his presence.
They sat for a while at the bar and then carried their drinks over to one of the booths where they wouldn’t be overheard. Taggart was clearly a practiced charmer, but Pearl figured she’d had enough experience with his type that she could handle him. Still, she was amazed by his poise and smooth patter, and how he so casually pried personal information from her. If he wasn’t the world’s greatest salesman, he was a con man.
“You know I’m a cop,” Pearl said, over yet another frosty mug, “but you haven’t told me what you do.”
“So take a guess.”
“You’re a salesman.”
“In a way.”
“I know what way,” Pearl said with a grin.
“I’m a lobbyist,” he said. “For the National Wind Power Coalition. I’ve been assigned to convince people of wealth and influence to commit funds to an effort to convert New York City to wind power.”
“You mean windmills on skyscraper roofs?”
He smiled. “Not exactly. They’d be cowled units computerized always to face the wind. And they could be incorporated into existing architecture to protrude from the walls of buildings and take advantage of the winds that often blow along the avenues. The generated power could be made to supplement the grid and-” He broke off his explanation. “Whoa. You don’t really want to hear the technical details of the concept.”
“Will it really work?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“But you’re lobbying for them.”
“I’m a professional lobbyist. It’s my job to convince people.”
She grinned. “Sort of like a defense attorney who knows his client is guilty.”
“Exactly. Only I don’t know for sure that wind power isn’t the answer. Nobody really knows the answer. I just pretend to.”
“That’s terrible!”
“Only if the wind power project won’t work. And I don’t know that it won’t.”
“The point is, you don’t know that it will.”
“That’s a difficult one to get around,” Yancy admitted. “That’s why the coalition hired a professional lobbyist.”
“That isn’t ethical, Yancy.”
“I’ll grant you that. But being a lobbyist, I lobby. I have a sliding code of ethics.”
She laughed. “Jesus! Those aren’t ethics at all. They’re just-”
Pearl was interrupted by the first four notes of the old Dragnet series.
“My phone,” she explained, digging her cell from her purse, thinking there must be a pun in there someplace, a cop with a cell phone.
She saw that the caller was Quinn.
When she answered, he said, “Pearl, we’ve got a dead woman in the five-hundred block of West Eighteenth Street. You better get down here.”
“Chrissie?” she asked.
“No. But it looks like the Carver might be active again.”
Oh, God! “On my way.”
“Coming from your apartment?”
“Sure am,” she replied, keeping her personal life personal.
“Vitali can have a radio car sent for you.”
“It’ll be faster if I take a cab,” Pearl said, with a glance at Yancy Taggart.
She broke the connection before Quinn could reply.
“Crime beckons?” Yancy asked.
Pearl was already sliding out of the booth. “Yeah. Sorry, I’ve gotta go.”
“You look upset. Not bad news, I hope.”
“Not for me,” Pearl said. And she realized she meant it. Though she had compassion for this latest Carver victim-if it turned out Quinn was right-a part of her was also glad this had happened. It meant the investigation had gotten off the dime. The game was on.
“So you really are a police detective.”
“I really am.”
“Shall we meet here tomorrow evening about this time?”
“We shall,” Pearl said.
Maybe he did have a yacht to go with his sliding ethics. Sometimes that was where sliding ethics led, right to a yacht.
“Bring your handcuffs,” she heard Yancy call behind her, as she was moving toward the door.
That was how it began.
21
While the cab she’d flagged down bounced and jounced over Eighth Avenue potholes, Pearl thought not about the murder scene she was speeding toward, but about Yancy Taggart. She found that odd.
Would he meet her?
Did she care?
Never one to lie to herself, she figured the answers were yes and yes.
Why did this guy appeal to her? He was probably at least fifteen years older than she was, and not her usual t
ype.
Then she realized what might be the basis of the attraction. Taggart was sort of an anti-Quinn. Where Quinn was duty-bound and relentless, Taggart didn’t mind whiling away a morning over coffee and a racing form in a bar. Taggart would gamble his money; Quinn chanced every other kind of gamble but didn’t like the odds of house games. Taggart was slim and graceful-even languid-in posture and attitude; Quinn was lanky but powerfully built, stolid, calm, and intense. Taggart dressed stylishly and was neatly groomed; Quinn always looked like what he was-a cop in a suit-and his hair looked uncombed even when it was combed. While Taggart was elegant and classically handsome, Quinn was somehow homely enough to be attractive.
Maybe, she thought, Yancy Taggart was what she needed to chase Quinn completely out of her thoughts.
In time she might chase them both from her thoughts.
Pearl saw the yellow crime-scene tape, and her thoughts were jolted to where she was, and why. She asked the cabbie to pull to the curb half a block from the tape. She wanted to take the scene in as she walked toward it from a distance. Sometimes it was smart to begin with the long view.
Several radio cars were parked at crazy angles to the curb, as if they were the toys of some giant child who’d tired of them and walked away, leaving their colorful roof bar lights flashing. Beyond the police cars, Pearl could see Quinn’s black Lincoln with two wheels up on the curb to allow the remaining lane of traffic to pass. She noticed for the first time that the old Lincoln had whitewall tires. She hadn’t thought they made those anymore. But Quinn would know where to get them. Like his Cuban cigars.
The Lincoln’s engine was still ticking in the heat as she walked past it. Inside the trapezoid of yellow tape a group of large men huddled over what looked like a bundle of clothes on the sidewalk.
When Pearl got closer, she saw that the bundle was a woman.
One of the men standing over the dead woman was Quinn. He spotted Pearl and motioned her over. A uniform held up the tape so she could duck under it like a boxer entering a ring. He gave her a look, as if he might wink at her. Didn’t the idiot think she’d ever seen a corpse before?
This part of Eighteenth Street was being improved or marred-depending on your point of view-with neo-modern architecture, most of it angular glittering glass and metal, some of it appearing precariously balanced. The building the body was next to was an almost completed condominium project. According to the plywood sign leaning against the wall near the silvered glass door to what would become the lobby, it was The Sabre Arms. The optimistic advertising didn’t mention price.
Quinn nodded to Pearl and moved over to make room for her in the huddle. Pearl nodded back. Quinn’s sport coat collar was twisted in back, and he needed a shave. It struck Pearl again how different he was from Yancy. Yancy the lobbyist with the gift of gab and the sliding ethics. Quinn the taciturn engine of justice with a moral code like Moses that sometimes transcended the laws of man.
Pearl shook off her flash of dubious insight and refocused her mind on her work.
Julius Nift, the obnoxious little medical examiner who looked and acted like Napoleon, was bent over the dead woman. Pearl didn’t bother nodding hello to him.
Her gaze slid past him to the victim, and her stomach lurched. The corpse was wearing ragged clothing. Her face was dirty, her fingernails black, her brown hair a tangle. A homeless woman. Pearl felt pity well up in her as well as horror. What must be the woman’s panties had been knotted and used as a gag, and a slender shaft of silver protruded from the dead woman’s mouth, apparently a handle.
“It’s a spoon,” Nift said. “She died with a silver spoon in her mouth.”
“Might she have choked on it before her throat was cut?”
“We’ll have to wait till later to find out for sure, but I doubt it. There are no other signs of asphyxiation. No cyanosis, petechiae, or distended tongue.” Nift spoke in a tone suggesting Pearl should have noticed this lack of symptoms herself.
The woman’s threadbare dress was torn open in front to reveal her breasts and stomach. Her nipples had been sliced off, and there was the bloody X carved on her midsection, beginning just below a point between her breasts. There was a gaping wound in her throat, like a scarlet necklace. She appeared to have been in her late forties, had a crooked nose, prognathous jaw, and wouldn’t have been attractive even cleaned up and twenty years younger. Odd, Pearl thought; all the other Carver victims had been attractive women.
Nift had been peeking up at Pearl, amused by her discomfort.
“She had a face like a mule,” he said, “but you can see she had a pretty good rack, even with the nipples gone.”
“You’re such an asshole,” Pearl said. “Are the nipples gone from the scene?”
“Unless you’re standing on them,” Nift said.
Pearl doubled up a fist.
“Pearl,” Quinn said, cautioning her. He’d told her before she should let Nift’s remarks roll off her. She shouldn’t give the nasty little M.E. the pleasure of getting under her skin.
She knew Quinn was right. That was Nift’s game, using his gruesome trade to rattle people with his sick sense of humor. All cops used dark humor to help them cope with some of the things they saw in the Job, but Nift pushed it from diversion to something that filled a twisted need.
Pearl’s fist unclenched, and she flexed her fingers. But she still wouldn’t have minded choking Nift until she saw some cyanosis.
Nift smiled.
“How long’s she been dead?” Quinn asked.
“I told you-”
“For Officer Kasner.”
“More than ten hours. I’ll be able to know more when I get her in the morgue where I can play with her.” For Pearl.
“Any identification on her?” Pearl asked Quinn.
But it was Nift who answered. “Are you kidding? No purse or wallet. Every pocket is empty. This little number probably hasn’t slept indoors in weeks, maybe months. She’s been screwed over every which way, and if she did have anything on her person, her killer probably took it.”
“A shitty life,” one of the plainclothes detectives said.
“And a shitty death,” another added.
“You guys homicide?” Quinn asked.
“Vice. We heard the call and were only a few blocks away, so we came over to see what there was to see.”
“And I’ve seen enough,” the other vice guy said, but he made no move to leave. “What’s with the spoon?”
“A bad joke,” Quinn said.
“In bad taste,” the first vice guy said.
Quinn gave him a look that induced both vice detectives to fall silent.
“There isn’t much blood considering her throat’s been slashed,” Pearl said.
“Very good,” Nift said. “That’s because she was killed with a single stab wound to the heart.” As he spoke he absently probed one of the damaged breasts with a pointed steel instrument. The expression on the corpse’s face was one of mild insult.
“Why don’t you close her eyes?” Pearl said.
“Why don’t you ask her some questions? I’ll do my job, you do yours. She can’t see, just like she can’t talk.”
“Her body was stuffed behind the big plywood sign leaning on the building,” Quinn said, before Pearl could reply to Nift. “We figure she was killed late last night or early this morning. Nobody spotted her until half an hour ago.”
Pearl noticed a woman wearing a gray jogging outfit with a hooded sweatshirt standing across the street, staring at them. Her arms hung at her sides, and she didn’t move. Her face was in shadow, but something about her seemed familiar.
“Who found her?” Pearl asked.
“Woman who lives across the street. Her hat blew off, and she chased it and happened to glance behind the sign. She’s in her apartment over there with a uniform keeping her company. She’s still in shock.”
Pearl could understand that. Right in the middle of all this art-gone-mad architecture and expensive renewal
, an ugly reminder of poverty and death might be especially jolting.
When Pearl glanced back across the street, she saw that the woman in the jogging outfit was gone. She’d been simply an onlooker who’d stopped to stare. Yet there was that familiarity. Pearl was certain she’d seen the woman before in the course of this investigation, somewhere standing in the shadows. Shadow woman, she thought.
Fedderman suddenly appeared. His suit coat was wrinkled, and where he might have worn a tie was what looked to be a spaghetti-sauce stain. Behind him were Mishkin and Vitali, looking like a bemused accountant tailed by one of the brothers in The Godfather.
It was going to be crowded inside the crime-scene tape, so the two vice guys nodded their good-byes and left.
The three detectives who’d just arrived took in the scene. Fedderman’s face was a blank. Vitali looked keenly interested. Mishkin, who had a notoriously weak stomach, went chalk white and turned away.
“Bring them up to date, Pearl,” Quinn said.
“Can I have the body?” Nift asked.
“If you want it,” Quinn said. To Pearl: “Make sure there’s nothing interesting under it.”
“Like a nipple or two,” Nift said.
He straightened up to his full Napoleonic stature and motioned for the waiting paramedics to remove the body.
Quinn walked off to the side and punched out a number on his cell phone. He stood at the edge of the crime-scene tape with the phone pressed to his ear.
“Who’s he calling?” Vitali asked. “Everybody’s here except Eliot Ness.”
Pearl shrugged. She didn’t know for sure who was on the other end of Quinn’s phone conversation, but she figured that if she guessed Cindy Sellers, she wouldn’t be far wrong.
The devil getting her due.
22
Quinn’s phone call from Nift the next day at the office shed more light on the dead woman found on Eighteenth Street. She’d had a high alcohol level in her body, along with traces of methamphetamine. Cause of death was the stab wound in her chest. The slicing off of her nipples and the X carved into her abdomen had occurred after death, as had the slit in her throat. Probably the same knife had been used to inflict all the injuries.
