Darker Than Night fq-1

by John Lutz

  The mirror, bolted to the wall near the door to the hall, was a leftover from the previous tenant. Reflected in it was Mary Navarre, a woman in her twenties, with her mother’s ginger hair and her father’s Spanish eyes, and what he used to call her noble nose. She was of average height and slender, dressed in a light tan Gucci knockoff she’d bought before the inheritance.

  Mary turned away from the mirror and looked around the spacious apartment on West End Avenue. She began mentally placing her furniture, which was still in a rental storage building in New Jersey. She was grateful again for the inheritance, but she would have preferred to wait a few years.

  She missed her mother, who’d drowned while swimming off the coast of Florida five years ago. And she missed her father, who’d died of emphysema six months ago, soon after her marriage to Donald Baines. She and Donald hadn’t thought they could make it on one salary, even though he’d received a raise along with his transfer to the New York office, so Mary assumed she’d have to find some kind of work in or around Manhattan.

  However, they’d been shocked when they learned after her father’s death that Mary, his only living child, would receive almost a $1 million inheritance.

  Mary’s father, Hector, had arrived in the United States in 1980, one of the Marielitos that Castro had allowed to leave in order to empty Cuba’s prisons and mental institutions. Hector Navarre had been imprisoned for killing a man in a machete duel over a woman. The man happened to be a deputy commissioner of the state. It had happened when Hector was still a teenager, but he’d been in prison for almost twenty years.

  When he suddenly found himself free in Southeast Florida, he’d made the most of his situation. He saved his money and within a year had opened a dry-cleaning establishment with a partner who’d supplied most of the cash. Hector’s end of the deal was sweat equity. Within another three years, they’d opened three more dry cleaners in Miami. Hector secured financing, bought out his partner, and further expanded the business, establishing cleaners in Fort Lauderdale and on the other side of the state in Tampa. When he died, he still had much of the money obtained from selling to a franchise operator five years ago, almost immediately after his wife’s death.

  It truly is a great country, Mary thought, and not for the first time. She didn’t plan to waste this opportunity provided by her father’s money. The wealth carried with it an obligation. She would delay having a child and attend New York University in the spring. Eventually she’d obtain a degree, the first in her family. Perhaps she’d go into the dry-cleaning business. Donald had no problem with any of her plans. He wanted her to succeed.

  He wasn’t flawless as a husband, but he did wish her the best.

  Luck in love and money, having the right parents, the right husband, being in the right place at the right time. It was what life was about, and whatever happened, you had to make the most of it, because it could also swing the other way.

  The intercom rasped, startling her. Mary crossed the room to it and pressed the button.

  The decorator was downstairs, precisely on time for their appointment. She buzzed him up.

  They would go over preliminaries and make plans for the apartment. Mary would listen carefully to his advice, then deliberate and tell him what she preferred.

  For the first time in her life, she knew exactly what she wanted.

  The Night Prowler strolled along Broadway at ten that evening and ignored everyone going in the opposite direction. He didn’t like making eye contact with passersby; he wanted no connection, no relationship to take even tenuous hold. He managed his life and his time and chose his relationships carefully. All kinds of relationships. He kept his colors bright.

  He paused and looked across the street to where a glowing red sign sent its brightness shimmering over diners at an outside cafe, lending a glow to the hair of the women and a satanic hue to their features. The women, caught laughing with heads thrown back, daintily dipping spoons into soup, leaning back in their chairs and smiling, raising skewered meat or salad to red lips, talking intently over coffee or dessert. Even at this distance their jewelry glinted like bright taunts attached to the softness of their flesh. The men seated across from the women leaned toward them, close to them, drawn by the timeless thing that had drawn reptilian ancestry and still lived.

  Fools with their fools!

  A waiter emerged from the restaurant, and diners at one of the tables stood up to leave. An oblivious bicyclist pedaled by like a haughty trespasser. The tableau was ruined and became part of past and memory.

  Almost nothing in the world was perfect. For God’s sake, he, among all, understood that. But once concessions were made, choices settled, plans laid and carried out-there could be perfect moments. Imbalances in the cosmos could be shifted, measurements recalibrated, objects and colors brought into sharp focus. Colors could be felt and heard like music. Like music!

  So much better than the gray buzzing, a maelstrom of all colors, a breakdown of order and control.

  The universe would come to bear and press down and in, until finally pressure triggered action. Beneath the smooth flesh, bones, bleached white and beautiful, an absence of color.

  Then the kaleidoscope would lurch and there would be new patterns and colors and hopes and order and design. There would be internal silence, almost. There would be a new mystery even if the same old need survived.

  The need was immortal because love and hate and betrayal never changed. Not of their own accord.

  They had to be changed.

  In the brightness of an intersection, the Night Prowler glanced down at the name he’d scrawled five times in red ball-point ink on the inside of his wrist, where his blood pulsed and coursed visibly in a blue map of destiny.

  Mary Navarre.

  “You okay today?” Fedderman asked the next morning when he approached Quinn and Pearl, who were seated on the park bench off Eighty-sixth Street. He was wearing his usual baggy brown suit and had a folded Newsday tucked beneath his right arm.

  “Still a little shaky,” Quinn said. “You and Drucker learn anything yesterday?”

  “Not really. The usual see no, hear no, tell no. A next-door building in New York can be like another world.” He looked more closely at Quinn. “You sleep in your clothes?”

  “Sort of. Those nighttime cold medicines knock you out.”

  Fedderman looked at Pearl, who’d said nothing since his arrival. Not like Pearl. He sighed, and Quinn watched his eyes and saw his old partner catalog information in his mind.

  Quinn knew it wouldn’t do any good to tell Fedderman he’d spent the night on Pearl’s sofa and nothing happened between them. Feds would believe what he chose, but he’d keep his mouth shut about it.

  Fedderman held out the folded newspaper. “You might wanna look at this.”

  “We take another flogging in the press?”

  “You in particular. There’s an interview in there with Anna Caruso.”

  Quinn unfolded the paper and saw the photograph of a beautiful young woman with dark hair and somber brown eyes. Not a child. No one he remembered.

  But there was her name beneath the photo, and there was the old accusation in her eyes.

  In the interview she recounted her rape by Quinn, then talked about her life now, how she’d put the horrible experience behind her. Or thought she had. Here it was again because Quinn was getting another chance. One he didn’t deserve. No one had served a day in prison for what had happened to her, and that injustice still haunted her. She didn’t like it, but she could live with it, she told the interviewer. Her father died recently, and she was concentrating on coping with that and going ahead with her music. With her life.

  She played the viola and that was therapeutic. She wouldn’t be afraid, or think about Quinn. She would be fine, she said. People shouldn’t worry about her. People had better things to do. She had better things to do.

  Hate burned between the lines.

  23

  Donald was out of town
and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow night. After lunch at the Cafe Un Deux Trois, Mary reminded herself she was moderately wealthy and took a cab instead of a subway to the apartment on West End Avenue. She needed to take a few measurements and reconsider the window treatment for the master bedroom. Nothing must disturb the magnificent view.

  As soon as she opened the apartment door, she saw the bouquet of fresh yellow roses. The flowers were in a clear glass vase, on a metal folding chair that was the only piece of furniture in the room.

  Mary went to the bouquet and saw that there was a card attached by a green ribbon. But when she gingerly reached in among the thorns and maneuvered the card to where she could examine it, she found it blank.

  She looked for some other marking on the flowers or the rounded vase, but there was nothing to indicate who’d sent the flowers or delivered them.

  But Mary knew who’d sent them. Donald. He’d ordered them by phone so she’d find them when she came to the apartment, as he knew she would today and every day until they moved in.

  It was so like him; he was thoughtful that way.

  Still, it was odd that he hadn’t instructed a message be placed on the card. Or maybe he thought the blank card would heighten her interest and surprise.

  He knew her so well.

  Mary loved to be surprised.

  “There doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern to the murders,” Pearl said. They were driving along in the unmarked. She was behind the wheel, with Fedderman beside her, Quinn in the backseat.

  “Other than they took place in the kitchen,” Fedderman said, “and there were items around, food and such, that didn’t seem to belong.”

  “Marcy Graham and her husband were killed in the bedroom,” Pearl reminded him. She made a quick left turn in front of a delivery truck, pissing off the driver and drawing an angry blast of the horn. “Screw you,” she said absently, while smoothly avoiding a pothole. Trash was still piled at the curb, waiting to be picked up, and its cloying smell wafted in through the car’s vents. None of the car’s occupants remarked on the odor; they were used to mornings in New York.

  They were on their way to the Graham apartment to look over the crime scene again and try to find something they’d missed. That was what it had come down to, covering already explored territory, hoping for something like a match-book with a message written inside it, a forgotten receipt for the murder weapon, a hidden safe-deposit box key, like in TV or the movies. Why couldn’t it happen in the play called Real Life?

  “There’s a pattern,” Quinn said, “just not clear yet, even at the edges. It’ll continue to emerge, no matter how hard our Night Prowler tries to disguise it.”

  “I like it you’re so sure of yourself,” Fedderman said.

  “These scuzzballs are all slaves to compulsion, Feds. It’s why they have to kill in the first place.”

  “He’s been a pretty successful slave up to this point,” Pearl said.

  “The kitchens,” Quinn said. “If you think of the apartments as sets in a play, the murders began in the kitchens, even if the Grahams were actually killed in their bedroom. Something drew them from their bed, maybe a sound in the kitchen, where the murder weapon came from, where the extra gourmet cheese was placed in the refrigerator. The killer was probably hiding in their closet, but he’d stopped off first in the kitchen.”

  “Some weird play,” Fedderman said. “Like something by that Mammal guy.”

  “Mamet,” Quinn said. He and May had gone often to live theater. It was their singlemost expensive indulgence. Quinn hadn’t been lately.

  “Isn’t the mamet some kind of little animal?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever get around to seeing The Lion King?”

  “No.”

  “You think something formative happened to our guy in a kitchen and he never let it go?” Pearl asked.

  “Sounds right,” Fedderman said before Quinn could answer. “Assholes like this, they can go on a killing spree if their eggs are runny. I don’t see how that helps us much. The trouble is, our killer’s crazy and we haven’t got inside his mind yet. Maybe there’s no pattern to the killings because he’s a certifiable fruitcake without any pattern to his thinking.”

  “Three things,” Quinn said from the back of the car. “The kitchens, the food items that were out of place, and the fact that the victims were reasonably attractive married couples living in apartments in Manhattan. That’s the pattern.”

  “Except that I got a kitchen,” Fedderman said. “And my wife and I used to live in an apartment in Manhattan. And if you looked in our refrigerator, you’d find things so out of place you’d be afraid to eat them.”

  “He’s got a point,” Pearl said, “even though he left out reasonably attractive.”

  “He usually does have a point,” Quinn told her. “That’s how he’ll keep us honest.”

  Quinn looked out the dirt-streaked car window at the Grahams’ apartment building.

  “We’re here.”

  Wherever here is.

  John Lutz

  Darker Than Night

  24

  Hiram, Missouri, 1989.

  A breeze blew in low off the river, carrying rain that settled as a warm mist. Painting outside became impossible; the colors diluted and ran as soon as they were applied. So Tom Wilde postponed the exterior job, which was his only work at the time, and sent Luther home for the day. He dropped him off in front of the Sand house about two o’clock in the white van with the ladder racks on top, telling him they needed to get an early start tomorrow and they’d have a long day, so Luther should make sure he got a good night’s sleep.

  Luther waved to Wilde and watched the van sway around the corner, its wipers sweeping the wide windshield. He clomped up onto the wood porch to get out of the mist and started to ring the doorbell.

  Then he remembered-he lived here. This was his home. At least for a while.

  He drew back his hand from the doorbell button and tried the door. It was unlocked. He pushed it open and went inside.

  Will I always feel like a trespasser?

  At first he thought the house was completely quiet, maybe unoccupied; then he heard a faint sound.

  Someone was humming.

  He made his way in the direction of the sound, to the kitchen, and there was Cara humming a song he didn’t recognize while she rolled dough for a pie. She was perspiring slightly, so her face glowed, and each time she leaned forward and ran the wooden rolling pin over the dough, her large breasts swayed beneath the thin material of her blouse.

  She stopped flattening the pale ellipse of dough, wiped the back of her wrist across her moist forehead, then picked up a red sifter that looked like a can with a crank and sprinkled more flour on the dough. As she put down the sifter, she saw Luther and stopped humming.

  “You been watching me, Luther?” She was half smiling, not seeming to mind if he’d been quietly observing her. She smelled like sweat and peaches.

  “Just for a few seconds, ma’am. I liked watching. You seem to enjoy your work. Cooking, I mean.”

  Her smile widened. “Baking, you mean.”

  “Well, yeah, sure.” He shifted uncomfortably. It wasn’t like him to be ill at ease in the presence of a woman, after his experiences in Kansas City. But he knew what those women wanted, how to act for them and toward them. This was…well, a lady. There were miles of distance between a woman and a lady.

  “C’mon over,” she said. “Sit and talk with me awhile, Luther.”

  He sidled over to the table, pulled out one of the wooden chairs, and sat, a self-conscious teenage boy not quite sure where to situate his arms and legs.

  “This is gonna be another peach pie,” she said. “Special for you.”

  Luther didn’t know what to say. He mumbled his thanks.

  “How you and Mr. Wilde getting along?” Cara asked, leaning into her rolling again.

  “I like him fine,” Luther said, trying not to look at her breasts. He fou
nd himself wondering about the Sands’ sex life. It couldn’t be much, the way they were so bitter to each other just beneath almost everything they said. And that was when Milford wasn’t flat out ignoring his wife. Luther knew Milford could turn mean with Cara; he’d overheard some of their bedroom spats. Once, he even heard a slapping sound. Maybe Milford had hit her. Then again, maybe that was what she wanted. Luther recalled a woman with a rich husband back in-

  “Luther? You still with me, boy?”

  He grinned. “Still here, ma’am.”

  “You call me Cara, you hear?”

  “I hear, Cara.”

  He was trying to find a word describing how he felt with Cara here in the kitchen. Peaceful was the best he could do. He felt at peace. There hadn’t been much of that in his life. Was this how it was to have a mother?

  He doubted it. There was something different here.

  Cara placed the rolled-out dough in a pie plate, shaped and patted it down, and cut away the excess. Then, very adroitly, she began using her fingers to puff up the crust in little scallops around the plate’s edge.

  The motion brought her face close to Luther’s. He could feel the heat of her breath and smell her perspiration. She turned her face toward him, smiling, her eyes only a few inches from his, her lips only a few inches…

  Then he found himself kissing her.

  Thought hadn’t been involved; there hadn’t been time to think not to do it.

  But now he thought about what he was doing. About what a total idiot he was. What a risk he was taking. Fear cut through him.

  She’ll tell Milford. What will Milford do?

  Worst of all, he liked Cara. A lot. And now look what he was doing!

  Oh, God!

  When he was about to pull away, confused and upset with himself, she leaned forward and began kissing him back, hard, using her tongue. Their lips still locked, she came around the corner of the table to bend at the waist so she could reach him better where he was seated in the chair. Luther felt the chair lean sideways, then topple as its legs slid on the tiles, and he and Mrs. Sand-Cara-were suddenly on the kitchen floor, their bodies pressed close together.