Darker Than Night

by John Lutz

  As they were walking toward the car, she said, “I think you need a real breakfast instead of that jolt of caffeine and sugar you were working on.”

  Pearl taking care of him. Maternal Pearl. Quinn couldn’t help wondering where this might lead.

  “After you get something to eat, you sack out on my sofa and I’ll tell Fedderman and Drucker you’re not feeling well today.”

  “Listen, Pearl…”

  “Don’t thank me, Quinn. And don’t question what I say. It’d be best if you skipped working today and were sharp tomorrow, instead of being a booze zombie two consecutive days.”

  Less than an hour later he sat with his sleeves rolled up at her tiny kitchen table, where she served him a cheese omelette and toast with a glass of orange juice, no coffee.

  When he’d finished breakfast and was ensconced on Pearl’s sofa with his shoes off, she tinkered around in her bedroom a few minutes, then left. He opened a narrowed eye and caught her smiling at him as she went out the door.

  It was a particular kind of smile that Quinn recognized, both affectionate and proprietary.

  Lord, Lord, Lord…, he thought, and dropped into a sleep blacker than black.

  Claire had just finished washing the bedroom windows when there was a knock on the door. That was odd, she thought. Someone had bypassed the intercom and somehow gained entrance to the lobby and elevators.

  On the other hand, not so odd. Probably whoever was knocking had simply entered along with another visitor or one of the tenants. Or maybe for some reason the intercom wasn’t working today.

  Claire’s lover, actor Jubal Day, had lost his role in Metabolism when it folded last week in Kansas City; he was back in New York with Claire. He’d decided to stay with her, even if it meant having to accept roles he didn’t want in off-off-Broadway theaters with folding chairs and leaky ceilings. Though she feigned disappointment about the Kansas City play, Claire was delighted. Handsome, lanky Jubal, with his tousled dark hair and piercing blue eyes, belonged with her. Belonged to her.

  As she entered the living room, still holding the folded rag she’d been using on the bedroom windows, he was standing up from where he’d been dozing on the sofa. She grinned and waved him back down, since he looked too sleepy to be coherent anyway, and continued to the door.

  When she opened it, she needed a few seconds to recognize the man standing in the hall. He was tall, blond, and muscular, wearing a black suit with a black pullover beneath the coat.

  He smiled. “Lars Svenson,” he reminded her.

  “I know. It took me a while.”

  “I’m not always a furniture mover. I have another life.”

  Claire grinned. “Everybody has several.”

  “I thought in this one,” Svenson said with an easy confidence, “I’d come by and see if you wanted to share a little of it.”

  “Uh, Mr. Svenson…”

  He shook his head, widening his smile that was too obviously meant to charm. “Claire, it’s Lars. And I don’t mean any harm. It’s just that for some reason you stuck in my mind. I move furniture for a lot of people, and usually it’s just a job. But—”

  He stopped talking abruptly and his expression changed. The smile was gone as if Claire had Windexed it off with the rag in her hand.

  “Somebody looking for a job?” Jubal asked behind her.

  Svenson recovered nicely and the smile was back. “Already did the job,” he said, his full attention now aimed at Jubal. “I just came by to make sure everything was to the lady’s satisfaction. We do that.”

  “We?”

  “Mr. Svenson was one of the movers who schlepped all our furniture up here,” Claire said.

  “You shittin’ me?” Jubal asked Svenson, nudging Claire a few inches to the side. “You mean you actually get dressed up like a Midwesterner’s idea of a New Yorker and visit all your customers days later to make sure you put the sofa in the right place?”

  “Mostly, we only do that with the pretty ones.” Svenson’s smile was the same, but something had changed in his pale eyes. “I know you’re not Claire’s husband; are you her brother?”

  “Closer than her brother.”

  Svenson’s unblinking gaze didn’t waver, but now he seemed amused rather than angry. “Like maybe her bodyguard?”

  “Among other things,” Jubal said. Claire caught something in his voice; he was afraid, but he wasn’t backing off.

  “Hopefully, bodyguarding isn’t necessary,” Svenson said.

  “Hopefully.”

  Svenson smiled again at Claire, then nodded. “If you decide you want anything rearranged, you know how to get in touch with me.” He backed away, then turned and sauntered to the elevator, not in any rush. Everything in his body language said he was in control and unconcerned.

  Claire made a move to close the door, but Jubal reached out above her and held it open. They both watched until the elevator arrived.

  “Thanks again for the business,” Svenson said to Claire, and gave a little wave as he stepped inside and the elevator door slid closed behind him.

  “Guy’s some creep,” Jubal said as he shut the apartment door and latched it.

  “He does have a nerve,” Claire agreed, “coming back like that.”

  “And he doesn’t look at all Swedish. I doubt his name’s really Lars Svenson.”

  “We can’t hold that against him,” Claire said jokingly. “Your own name’s been changed.”

  “That’s common among actors, but not furniture movers.”

  Jubal slumped down again on the sofa and used the remote to switch on cable news. The screen was split four ways to accommodate two men and two women in severe business garb arguing about the Supreme Court. It reminded Claire of a rerun of Hollywood Squares that had gotten out of hand.

  She went into the kitchen and got a fresh bottle of Windex from beneath the sink to use on the spare bedroom’s windows.

  Whether he was Swedish or not, she couldn’t get Lars Svenson out of her mind, which aggravated her because she knew that was exactly what he wanted.

  Well, not exactly. He was, after all, a man.

  Claire realized she wasn’t really attracted to Svenson. At least not in the usual way.

  She was afraid of him.

  22

  The woman in the mirror hadn’t been rich before, or what she’d describe as poor, and hadn’t been married before. This was quite a change. The woman was smiling.

  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 p
rison 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 café, 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 Café 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.”