Darker Than Night

by John Lutz

  When she opened her lingerie drawer, there was a small, flowered box of chocolates. It was lying on top of her folded panties. No note. No card. No explanation.

  She picked up the box and examined it more closely. The plastic encasing it hadn’t been disturbed, and it was an expensive brand.

  A gift from Ron?

  Not likely. She remembered the dustup over the coat.

  Yet the chocolates had to be from Ron. Who else had access to the apartment, to her dresser drawers? And, in truth, the leather jacket that caused all that trouble had to have come from Ron. Unless she bought into the weird idea that Ira, the salesclerk at Tambien’s, had a way into the apartment and harbored a compelling crush on her. But the truth was, there wasn’t any way Ira could even know where she lived.

  Ron. It must have been Ron. But what was going on? Did he have some kind of mental glitch? He’d been under strain with the new position. Marcy knew people weren’t always logical. They did do inexplicable things and then sometimes denied them even to themselves—like that girl where she used to work who sent people to various addresses for deals on clothes and jewelry. Only the addresses weren’t real, and the shops and people she referred to didn’t exist except in her mind. Ron’s little eccentricity wasn’t as serious as that.

  So, if he had a kind of mental hitch in his thinking, leaving her gifts and not remembering, what was the harm? It was probably only temporary. So why should she—

  Marcy heard the door from the hall open and close. Ron. He was home!

  It took her only a second to decide not to mention the chocolates. It sure hadn’t helped to show him the coat.

  She shoved the box beneath her folded panties and closed the dresser drawer.

  Just in time. His shadow rippled over the carpet as he approached the bedroom doorway.

  “There you are,” he said, smiling when he saw she was nude, in the middle of changing clothes. “I bought you something.”

  He tossed her a glittering object and she caught it. Almost weightless. A thin gold bracelet with a tiny diamond in a plain setting.

  “Don’t think it’s real. Some guy on the street was selling them, and I couldn’t resist.”

  “It’s beautiful.” She slipped it on her wrist, then rotated it before her as if she were on the Home Shopping Network. Fully clothed, of course.

  He watched her, obviously enjoying her pleasure. “It’s a pretty well-made knockoff. Either that or it was a hell of a sale.”

  Marcy went to him and kissed him on the lips, and after a few seconds felt him return the kiss. His arm slipped around, behind her bare back. He truly did love her. So maybe he did have this strange compulsion to buy her gifts, sometimes anonymously.

  She could live with that.

  15

  Quinn finished the last of his spaghetti and used his half-eaten roll to sop up sauce from his plate. He was in his sister Michelle’s dining room. She had a spacious—by New York standards—apartment on the West Side with a river view. Never having seen a floater gaffed like a fish and hauled to shore, she obviously didn’t think about what Quinn did when she looked at the river.

  About once a month she’d invite Quinn over for dinner and prepare spaghetti using an old family recipe for the sauce. Quinn had become tired of the recipe, which called for too much garlic, but he always made it a point to eat all that was served. His sister had been his lifeline to a world where he could hold his head up, and he didn’t want to insult her. Besides, the apartment, furnished in expensive modern, was a welcome change from his usual surroundings, and Michelle always served a good red wine with her meals.

  Though she ate out most of the time, Quinn knew she enjoyed cooking. Michelle had lived in a lesbian relationship with a woman named Marti in Vermont until six years ago. She’d told Quinn about it after their parents were both dead, not long after the passing of their father. Both their father and mother would have been horrified if they’d known the truth about her, or so Michelle assumed. Quinn, who’d seen the full range of the human spectrum as a New York cop, didn’t give it much thought. As far as he was concerned, Michelle’s sex life was none of his business.

  When Marti had been struck by a car and killed only months later, Michelle returned to New York and put her formidable mathematical ability and her Harvard M.B.A. to work. She was deeply involved now with her job and her computer. Quinn didn’t know anything about her love life and didn’t ask. Anyway, he was in more of a position to be stoned than to cast the first one.

  Michelle poured them both another glass of the excellent Australian red she’d found, probably on the Internet, and surveyed Quinn over the dirty dishes and what was left of the salad and hard-crusted rolls. Four years older than Quinn, she’d put on weight and was a big woman now, but still more large-boned than fat. Though she looked more like their mother, she shared Quinn’s square jaw and green eyes. Also his unruly brown hair, which she wore almost as short as his but in a considerably neater style.

  “You going to take me into your confidence?” she asked.

  “Are you kidding?”

  He filled her in on his thinking about the Elzner case.

  She stared at him for a moment, then asked, “What about your partners? What sort of people are they?”

  She’d met Fedderman years ago and liked him. Quinn told her about Pearl.

  “Sounds like the type who thinks outside the box,” she said.

  He knew she wasn’t talking about Fedderman, the good, stolid cop. “There are some who’d like to put her in a box. I think she’s a damned fine detective, but she’s got a temper and a political tin ear.”

  Michelle grinned. “And doesn’t that sound familiar?”

  “Also,” Quinn said, “I’m still not completely sure I can trust her.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “Only because Renz assigned her to me, and I know I can’t trust Renz. It’s possible that part of her job is to keep him informed about me.”

  “Spy on you?” Michelle was never one to equivocate.

  “Yeah, you could use that word.”

  “I suppose it’s something to keep in mind.”

  “On the other hand, Renz might simply have assigned her to me because she’s—”

  “A fuckup.”

  “Well, she might seem so to him, but she really isn’t that. She has…maybe too much character.”

  “Ah. You like her.”

  “Sure. You can’t help but like her. But lots of people liked Hitler before he became Hitler.”

  “Hitler, huh?” Michelle leaned back in her chair and sipped wine, regarding him over the crystal rim.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “Figuring the odds.”

  “Like always,” Quinn said. He didn’t have to ask her about the object of her figuring.

  He finished his wine, then stood up to clear the table.

  It was past nine when Quinn got back to his apartment and found his phone ringing.

  He shut the door behind him, crossed the living room in three long strides, and scooped up the receiver.

  “It’s Harley,” Renz said after Quinn’s hello. So now they were on a first-name basis. “I got some info for you, Quinn.” Almost first-name basis.

  “Will I like it?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Info’s info. And does it matter what you like?”

  “I hope that’s a rhetorical question.”

  “Or what you hope? Anyway, I talked to my source in the lab. Marks on the gun that was in Martin Elzner’s dead hand were definitely made by a sound suppressor attached to the barrel. They’re consistent with a Metzger eight hundred model, a rare sort of one-size-fits-all for semiautomatic handguns.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Neither did I, but then neither of us is a silencer expert. Turns out it’s a cheap unit made in China and marketed mostly mail order. Not a lot of them are sold. They advertise in magazines for gun nuts and guys who see themselves as soldiers of fortune a
nd other kinds of armed romantic figures.”

  “What with the big market in used guns and gun gear, it could be difficult to trace even though it’s not a popular item.”

  “Yep, it mighta changed hands ten times at gun shows, or was sold from car trunks.” Renz seemed almost happy about the odds. That Harley! “On the other hand, we can try. I’ll keep you informed.”

  Quinn thanked Renz and hung up, thinking it was hard enough to find a particular gun in this wide world, much less a silencer.

  But if searching for it helped to silence Renz even a little bit, the Metzger 800 was still doing its job.

  Pearl had a late supper alone in her apartment, a Weight Watchers chicken dinner washed down with scotch and water. My own worst enemy.

  She rinsed out the empy glass and replaced it in the cabinet, and dumped what was left of the dinner into the trash. Dishes done.

  Sometimes she wondered what her life would be like if Vern Shults had lived. They’d been very much in love when they were twenty, or Pearl had thought so. What was left of her family had ostracized her for becoming engaged to a devout Catholic. How devout even Pearl hadn’t guessed. Vern had announced to her one night after sex that he was breaking their engagement; he’d decided to study for the priest-hood.

  A week later, he’d been found dead in his bathtub, drowned after apparently falling and striking his head. Leaving Pearl as alone as a woman could be alone.

  God moving in His mysterious circles. Pearl trapped in the celestial geometry.

  Where she remained trapped.

  She watched TV for a while, then didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, so she got the glass back down from the cabinet.

  Marcy Graham couldn’t sleep, knowing the anonymous gift of a box of Godiva chocolates was only about ten feet away in one of her dresser drawers, not fifteen feet away from her sleeping husband. She remembered how unreasonable he’d been about the leather jacket from Tambien’s, the problems it had caused.

  Even if the chocolates were from Ron, he might not admit it. Or for some reason she couldn’t understand, he might not even remember leaving them for her.

  Marcy waited until her nerve built, then quietly climbed out of bed and opened her dresser drawer. Moving silently, she removed the box of chocolates and carried it into the kitchen.

  She couldn’t resist opening the box and sampling one of the chocolates.

  Delicious! Light caramel with a cream center.

  She ate another before closing the box and sliding it into the trash can beneath the sink. Then she tore off a paper towel and placed it over the box so it wouldn’t be visible to Ron if by chance he decided to throw away something.

  When she returned to the bedroom, she carefully slipped back into bed and lay awake awhile, listening to Ron’s deep, even breathing.

  She was sure he was still asleep.

  She felt safe now.

  16

  He didn’t anger easily. He was beyond that.

  He’d thought.

  He paced silently. This was an insult, a rejection. A thoughtless, callous act. Who wouldn’t anger at the sting? Sting at the slap?

  There was no reason to fear making too much noise as he paced. The steady, reverberating buzzing covered the slight sound of his soft-soled shoes on the tiles.

  The buzzing, in fact, seemed to be growing louder and was getting under his skin. Where’s it coming from? What’s its source? He’d checked outside, but there was nothing in sight that might be making such a relentless sound. And inside the building no one seemed to be cleaning their carpets or running an appliance without cessation.

  The buzzing continued. It was almost as if he were trapped in the confines of a small space and being observed by some gigantic, predatory winged insect that threatened him, that could almost reach him with its painful and paralyzing venom, that would never give up because it knew that eventually it would reach him.

  Black…black…

  The sound became even louder and more piercing, a buzzing that tripped the frequencies of his body and caused a terrifying vibration in every cell. A buzzing like death and dying. The buzzing of ending and becoming. Of the swarming insects of decay and the whirring of buzzards’ wings, of bees and wasps in the damp and dark of the underground. Beelzebub…

  He knew if he didn’t do something it would make him scream. And if he screamed…

  With trembling fingers, he groped in his pocket for the Ziploc plastic bag that contained a folded cloth.

  At first Anna Caruso was pleased to be living her long-sought dream, wandering Juilliard’s Lincoln Center campus, the library, and Alice Tully Hall, where she knew someday she would give a concert or at least play in the Juilliard orchestra or symphony. It could happen. The Meredith Willson Residence center towered over the campus, but Anna’s partial scholarship didn’t include residency. She rode the subway each day to Juilliard, usually lugging her viola in its scuffed black case so she could practice at home, as well as in one of the school’s many practice rooms.

  She’d taken up the viola seriously about six months after the rape. The instrument suited her. It was slightly larger than a violin, tuned a fifth lower, and produced a more sonorous, melancholy tone. While playing it did nothing to cheer her, it was somehow soothing.

  Her bliss at attending Juilliard lasted only a few days. Anna was soon disappointed in the way things were going, her progress with her lessons, her relationship with her instructors, but most of all she was disappointed with herself. Discouraged. She was told that was normal. Suddenly she was among musicians of equal or superior talent. It was natural that she should be overwhelmed at first. And, of course, there was Quinn, in her mind and in her music now. Her hatred for Quinn.

  As soon as she entered the apartment and saw her mother, she knew something was very wrong. Linda Caruso was slumped on a chair by the phone and obviously had been crying. Her eyes were red and she clutched a wadded Kleenex in her clawlike right hand with its overlong red nails.

  “Mom?” Anna went to her, and her mother immediately began sobbing.

  When she gained control of herself, she looked with pain in her eyes at Anna. “Your father died a few hours ago. A heart attack.”

  Anna felt the news like a physical blow to her stomach, and her body assumed the same hunched attitude as her mother’s. At the same time, recalling all the things her mother had said about her father, all the old arguments, she wondered how her mother could be so upset. She staggered backward and sat on the sofa.

  “But he didn’t have a bad heart!”

  “He did,” her mother said. “We just didn’t know it. According to Melba, he didn’t even know it.”

  Melba was Anna’s cousin, a chatty fool Anna couldn’t stand. “Was it…I mean, did he go to the hospital?”

  “No, it was sudden. Melba said he didn’t suffer. At least there’s that.” Her mother ground the wadded tissue into her eyes, as if trying to injure herself and started crying again. Her loud, rolling sobs filled the apartment, transforming it. The very walls seemed to weep.

  “Jesus Christ!” Anna said.

  “Don’t curse, Anna. At a time like this…”

  “All right,” Anna said absently. “Will there be a funeral?”

  “Of course. He’ll be laid out at a mortuary near where he lived. Melba didn’t know exactly when or where the funeral will be.”

  Anna’s father, Raoul, had left her mother only months after the rape, and in a way Anna blamed herself for their divorce. Her father had moved into a home on the edge of Queens, near the auto repair shop where he kept the books. Anna had heard the place was a chop shop, where stolen cars were taken and dismantled to be sold for parts, but she’d never believed it.

  She visited her father less and less frequently in his sad and solitary home, and they’d gone out for breakfast or lunch and struggled for words, but Anna had never quite stopped loving him. His loss was an unexpected force taking root in her, entangling and weighing down her heart.
>
  Unconsciously she crossed herself, surprised by the automatic gesture. How odd, she thought. Religion wasn’t where she’d found any solace. Her music was her religion. Her music that might not be good enough. She felt, just then, like playing the viola.

  Her mother stopped sobbing. “Anna, are you okay?”

  “No,” Anna said.

  Marcy Graham had noticed that morning when she poured the half-and-half for Ron’s coffee that it was thinner than usual and barely cool.

  She opened the refrigerator and laid a hand on jars and shelves as if checking for fever. Not as cold as they should be. When she checked the cubes in the icemaker, she found they’d melted into a solid mass. She wrestled the white plastic container out, chipped away with a table knife, and dumped the ice into the sink.

  “Fridge fucked up?” Ron asked.

  “Looks that way. I’ll call the repairman.”

  “Nothing should be wrong with it. It’s under warranty. Don’t let anybody tell you it isn’t.”

  “I won’t. Don’t worry.”

  “Think it’s safe to use this cream?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Marcy said. She stood back and looked at the refrigerator, less than a year old. Then she opened the door and memorized the phone number on the sticker affixed to its inside edge and went to the phone.

  Which is how she found herself here in her kitchen, home early from work to meet the repairman.

  He was Jerry, according to the name tag above his pocket, a grungy guy in a gray uniform. But he was young and rather handsome, and he kept his shirt tucked in. A pattern of dark moles marred his left cheek just below his eye and he needed a shave, but still he would clean up just fine. Not what Marcy had expected.

  She hoped he wasn’t so young he didn’t know what he was doing. He had the refrigerator pulled out from the wall and had spent the last half hour working behind it. A stiff black cover lined with fluffy blue insulation leaned against the sink cabinets, and whenever Marcy went to the kitchen to see how Jerry was doing, she saw only his lower legs, his brown work boots she hoped wouldn’t leave scuff marks, and an assortment of tools on the tile floor.