Color Blind (11 page)
Feeling safe.
Something he had spent a lifetime working on.
Perlmutter peeled a piece of police tape off Suzie White’s door. He handed Kate a pair of plastic gloves, slipped a pair on himself, then turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open.
Suzie White’s apartment was full of odors, one lying on top of the other: sweat, beer, sex, pizza, garbage, death.
No saints or crosses here. The place was basically one room with a small kitchenette at one end, bathroom off the other, one closet, a big bed up against a wall plastered with pictures clipped from fashion magazines along with ones of long-haired rock starsJon Bon Jovi, Steven Tyler, Axl Rose.
The place had been gone over by CSU, and other than the wall of pictures, pretty much stripped. Fingerprint powdersblack, white, and silverdappled the kitchen sink, half-sized refrigerator, the one windowsill, a couple of cheap lamps. The linoleum floor was stained in so many places it was impossible to know which stains were old and what might have been bloodstains.
The bathroom was small and cramped, sink blemished with rust, fingerprint powder on the medicine cabinet giving the mirror a veiled, otherworldly quality. Kate popped it open, found a lipstick, Black Cherry Red, and a cheap mascara brush crusted black.
While she bagged the makeup, Kate had the feeling she was not alone, and turned to see if Perlmutter had followed her in. But there was no one there. It felt like something more than that old cop alarm, something familiar and more recenta buzzing sensation, as if a high-intensity wire had snapped inside her, sending an electric current through her body, sensitizing her nerve endings and fine-tuning her antenna. It was almost as if the killer were in the room with her right now, leaning over her shoulder, pointing things out, whispering:
Look here, and here
.
“Not much to check,” Perlmutter shouted from the other room, and Kate was glad to hear his voice. It was enough to flip the switch and turn off that electric buzz.
“Anything in there?” he asked, as Kate came back into the room.
“No,” she said, and found herself being drawn toward the wall of rock stars and models, a shrine to Suzie White’s prosaic interests. Kate’s eyes floated over Jon Bon Jovi’s curly locks and Steven Tyler’s toothy grimace, the buzzing back in her brain like a laser. Thumbtacked between two fashion-magazine pictures was one of those photo-booth stripsfour consecutive shots of a black man and young white woman crowding together into each small frame, mugging for the camera.
Kate plucked it off the wall. “Could be the boyfriend?” she said, guessing from the man’s dreadlocks. “How did CSU miss this?”
“High-risk victim. Low-priority case.” Perlmutter frowned.
Kate knew he was rightthe murder of a street hooker was never going to be priority.
“Unless she was part of a pattern.”
“But CSU wouldn’t have known that at the time.”
“Right,” said Kate. “Maybe Rosita Martinez can ID the guy from the photos.” Kate thought a moment. “Though he’s probably not our mannot if it’s a serial killer. They almost always hunt their own, and he’s black.” Kate stared at the four laughing faces of Suzie White as she zipped the strip into a plastic bag. There was a sweetness to the girl’s face despite all the makeup, and a joy in her smile that had not been killed by her lifestyle.
Kate took a last look around the room, that buzzing sensation now reduced to a low-level hum.
“The other scene’s only three blocks from here,” said Perlmutter.
I
t just didn’t make sense, thought Kate as she and Perlmutter surveyed the apartment of the second victim, Marsha Stimsona run-down filth hole in a three-story, otherwise uninhabited tenement on a lonely Bronx side street.
A guy kills two women, two prostitutes in the Bronx, and then moves to Midtown, to…Richard. Why?
The pattern seemed totally wrong.
“Not much here,” said Perlmutter, surveying the apartment. “Crime Scene has stripped it pretty well.”
A wooden dresser, drawers open, contents removed, no blankets or sheets on the queen-size bed, the lumpy mattress naked and bloodstained, an altar to the former resident’s sordid life and violent death.
“Were there any witnesses?” Kate asked.
“Nada,” said Perlmutter. “Uniforms canvassed the adjacent buildings and the street. No one heard or saw anything. No one on the block claims to know the vic. Maybe she was squatting. The building’s slated for demo.”
Kate took it all inthe fingerprint powders blanketing objects like dandruff, cracks in the ceiling, dull walls, the almost total lack of adornment in the dim roomand that buzzing sensation started up again. Once again she let it guide her, eyes scanning the walls, landing first on a giveaway-type calendar,
REINHOLDT
’
S FURNITURE STORE
, hanging from a thumbtack beside one of those cheap plastic-framed full-length mirrors. Kate pictured Marsha Stimson primping in front of it, and the buzz became a purr. Kate’s eyes slid across the dull-beige walls to a Gauguin painting from Tahiti, maybe something the deceased had cut out of a magazine or book, an island scene, greens and blues with half-naked women in between the trees and huts, a paradise. Had Marsha Stimson looked at this and dreamed of faraway places, an escape from her dreary, dismal life?
Kate carefully removed the thumbtack and slipped the reproduction into a baggy.
“Why that?” asked Perlmutter.
Kate stared at the print through the plastic. “I’m just thinking that he may have looked at it, been interested. I mean, because he leaves paintings behind, colorful ones.”
“Good point,” said Perlmutter. “And Gauguin was one of the great colorists of all time.”
“You know about art.”
“Nah, not really. But I’m crazy about Gauguin. Sometimes I even dream about running off to the South Seas. But who doesn’t, right?”
At the moment it struck Kate as a damn good idea. “The lab can spray the print with ninhydrin, see if anything develops. I know it’s a long shot, but maybe the psycho was crazy enough to touch it.” Now the buzz almost seemed to purr “umm hmm,” and Kate shivered again.
K
ate was thinking it through, aloud, as they headed back to Perlmutter’s car. “So the guy stakes out the two victims, waits till they’re alone, kills them, and brings along a painting? For what?” She just couldn’t figure it. “Marsha Stimson would have been easy to get tono one else living in that building, but Suzie White was in a big building, her apartment across a wide lobby. There would be lots of possibilities of other people coming and going, of his getting seen or caught. Why would he risk it?”
“Maybe he’d been stalking her, or had a thing for her? It’s possible he’d been with her, had picked her up one time and so knew where to find her.”
Kate plucked a pack of cigarettes off the dashboard, the ones she’d been avoiding the entire trip up to the Bronx. “You mind?”
“Bad idea,” said Perlmutter. “But go ahead. I just keep ’em to give to otherswitnesses, suspects. Wouldn’t touch ’em myself.”
“Uh-oh,” said Kate, pushing in the car’s lighter. “Am I about to get a lecture on the evils of smoking?”
“Not from me,” said Perlmutter. “What I meant was they’re stale.”
Kate lit one up and coughed. “Oh, awful,” she said, but did not put it out. “Damn good thing I don’t smoke anymore.” She pulled the bitter smoke deep into her lungs, thinking,
Richard is going to kill me for starting up again,
and as the thought registered she could not control the tears that gathered in her eyes.
Perlmutter glanced over. “You okay?”
“Yes.” Kate faked a cough. “It’s just this stale piece of crap.”
“Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Kate stared out the car window while she lassoed her emotions. “I’m trying to make sense of it. Two women. Then a man. It’s a change in ritual, unless the crimes are not gender-based. Were the women violated?”
“According to the coroner’s prelims, there was no vaginal bruising or rape.”
Kate did not ask about Richard. She did not want to know. She pulled more tar and nicotine into her lungs. “So what exactly connects the crimes?”
“Umm…Gutting the bodies? The paintings?”
“Do you know if the lab’s finished with the paintings?”
“Probably with the first two,” Perlmutter said. “But the uh, other one, uh”
Kate breathed in and said, “The one from my husband’s crime scene, you mean? It’s okay, Perlmutter.” She swallowed hard. “Really. Just say it, okay. We’re going to have to be honest with each other if this is going to work.”
“Right,” said Perlmutter. “The painting from your husband’s crime scene.”
“Right,” Kate said, hardly breathing. “Thank you.”
“Hey, call me Nicky, please. Perlmutter always makes me think of my father, plus it’s gotta be one of the top-ten worst names, right? I used to beg my parents to change it.”
“So why don’t you?” asked Kate, happy to have the subject changed.
“Nah, too late. I’m used to it. But I’d prefer it if you called me Nicky.”
“And call me Kate.”
He angled a boyish smile at her, eyes still on the road, though Kate had a feeling he’d been trying to size her up for the past few hours, as though he was thinking about asking her somethingor telling her. She wasn’t sure. Maybe he’d heard from the few cops who had known about her back in Astoria when she’d gotten a reputation for being cold as ice because she was able to work the roughest cases, look squarely at the nastiest crime scenes. But it had never been true. She was simply a good actor, and right now she was thankful she could still pull it off. The truth was everything affected her, always had. But Kate knew she could not allow the slightest acknowledgment of feeling get to her, that once she did, she’d be a goner. She mashed the cigarette out in the car’s ashtray.
“Good idea,” Perlmutter said. “Those things will kill you. Sorry. I promised no lectures.”
Kate checked her watch. She’d almost forgotten that she had arranged to meet her editor to work on the Boyd Werther tapes, which absolutely had to be finished if the show was going to air as advertised, next week. Her producer at PBS had called a half dozen times to say it was fine to postpone the show, but Kate wanted to pretend everything was normal, wanted to be working every possible minute.
“Can you do me a favor and drop me in Midtown?”
“No problem,” said Perlmutter.
“Great. Now here’s the hard partin twenty minutes?”
Perlmutter snorted a laugh. “From
here
?”
“I’m going to be late for an editing session. It’s just my silly TV show, but”
“Hey, I love your showand it’s not silly.”
“You watch my show?”
“Where do you think I learned about Gauguin?”
Kate had to smile.
Perlmutter affected a melodramatic voice“Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!”then angled another smile at Kate. “I’ll get you there in fifteen if you can tell me where that line is from.”
“Piece of cake,” said Kate. “
All About Eve.
Bette Davis.”
In one quick move Perlmutter snatched the magnetic beacon off the dashboard, stretched his muscled arm out the window, and plunked the light onto the hood of the car. “You won’t turn me in for using the beacon, will you?”
“What about the siren?”
Perlmutter flipped the switch.
The fact that Rothstein’s body was found with a painting beside it links this vicious murder of the high-profile Manhattan attorney with two recent murders in the Bronx, though the NYPD has neither confirmed this, nor denied it. The painting at this scene was yet another still life, this one of fruit in a blue-striped bowl
L
eonardo Alberto Martini (né Leo Albert), of Staten Island, stopped reading the story in the
New York Post
at exactly the same place he had stopped the last two times.
A blue-striped bowljust like the one Leo was holding right now in his shaking paint-stained fingers.
Leo sagged into a chair, the original color of the cracked leather not only faded but masked beneath a multitude of paint smudges and blobs. He was thoroughly disgustedwith himself, his paintings, and his career, or lack thereof, and now this. He might as well commit suicide, as he had so often threatened over the past three decades.
Thirty years ago he’d been on the doorstep to success, the door itself ajar, waiting for him to pass through its portals into bona fide art star status, his work being shown at a top-notch Fifty-seventh Street art gallery specializing in up-and-comers.
Art News
had called him “an artist to keep your eye on…an abstract painter of rare sensitivity, a true colorist.” Curators were putting his large colorful abstractions in museum exhibitions, and collectors were snatching them up for their living rooms. But then minimal art hit the scene. Decorative color painting was out, and Leo along with it, and after three successive shows failed to sell, the gallery let him go, the curators and collectors stopped visiting his studio, and even fellow artists stayed away, afraid of catching a severe case of failuritis.
He had tried for another gallery, even managed a couple of shows over the next decade, both resounding flops. Nowadays, Leo painted nights and weekends, his weekdays spent at a shitty nine-to-five job feeding Xerox machines.
Leo played with his thinning gray ponytail, weaving wispy hairs in and around his slightly arthritic fingers as he attempted to distract himself with one of the candy-colored abstractions he stubbornly refused to stop making, though his eyes kept drifting away, staring at the impressive stack of hundred-dollar bills he had earned by making that banal little painting. He’d added the blue-striped bowl only because he thought it created a bit of interest, a decorative quality to an otherwise academic picture that he could have produced blindfolded.
Of course, like any artist, he’d painted the still life in his own particular stylehow could he not, after forty-plus years of painting?never using any white paint, allowing instead the unpainted canvas to stand in for the whites, a trick, some said, but he’d gotten the idea from the great French painter Henri Matisse, who often did the same thing. And of course the way he thinned his paint with turpentine and used his variety of foam-tipped brushes or neatly cut squares of sponge so that the paint was sponged-on rather than brushed, which left no brush stroke at all, the watery paint simply absorbed into the canvasthat he liked to claim was his own, even though he knew it had been used by other contemporary painters.
Still, Leo would have (and should have) tossed a painting like that right out the window of the Lower East Side tenement that served as both living quarters and studio, but he needed the money, and no way could he turn down five thousand dollars.
It had sounded like easy money, and, in fact, had been. He’d painted the still life in a couple of hoursan apple, two bananas, in a blue-striped bowldelivered it, paint still wet, in exchange for the wad of hundreds in a plain manila envelope, more money than he made in a couple of months at his lousy job. Though now, with the bills in a heap on his unmade bed, and that newspaper article describing a still life with a blue-striped bowl screaming at him from across the room, he felt as though he was going to jump right out of his skin.
Leo paced the short distance between his cramped kitchenette and the makeshift art studio he’d set up years ago in what was supposed to be the tiny apartment’s living room, back and forth, unable to sit still.
Finally, he slid a crisp hundred off the top of the stack, shoved the rest under his mattress, then tucked the bill into the pocket of his old jean jacket, the one with torn elbows and a couple of missing buttons. He was thinking that maybe he’d stop at the Levi’s store on Broadway and pick up a new one before he decided what to do about this problem.
At the door, just about to leave, he turned back into the room and plucked the blue-striped bowl off his paint table. For a moment he considered smashing it, but quickly reconsidered. Better to take it with him, and dispose of it outside.
But a moment later, as he thought it through, he reconsidered once again. If things got out of hand he might need some sort of leverage, and the bowl was exactly that.
Leo scanned the small apartment looking for a safe place to hide it and recalled the TV show he’d watched just the other night where the man had hidden a stash of stolen jewelry in the tank of his toilet, which was exactly where Leo deposited the blue-striped bowl, which dropped to the bottom of the tank and lay there against the rusted chain and black rubber stopper.
W
as it simply that she was afraid to go home? Is that why she spent nearly six hours editing the Boyd Werther tape for PBS? And after that had rerouted the cab from Central Park West to take her to the brownstone that housed Let There Be a Future and there spent another hour going through e-mail and phone messages? She still needed to review the applications for next year’s program, something she ordinarily loved to do. But she was tired, her mind elsewhere. She would never be able to deal with the foundation, not now, not if she was going to devote her time to police work. She always hated to ask for help, but knew she needed it.
Blair.
She’d call Blair.
Blair Sumner fell easily into the category of the Ladies Who Lunchthough Blair ate only lettuce. A mover and shaker among the Park Avenue set (her husband, a client of Richard’s, was a ruthless arbitrageur worth zillions), Blair supported the New York Public Library, the Botanical Garden, was active on the boards of the Metropolitan Opera and the Landmarks Preservation Committee, and at least a dozen other worthy organizations.
The past few days, Blair had been attempting to hold Kate’s hand, though Kate had refused it.
Now Kate listened to Blair’s answering machine, the almost, but not quite English accent that Blair had certainly affected (she hailed from Schenectady). “I’m out and about, but do leave a message. Ta”
“Blair. It’s me”
“Darling,” said Blair, interrupting the machine message. “Thank God. How are you?”
Kate took a deep breath. She did not want to go into how she was feeling or what she was doing. “Fine. I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
“Fill in for me at Let There Be a Future.”
“Of course, darling. As long as they don’t expect me to show up before noon. What exactly shall I do?”
“Just go through the files of next season’s kids, confer with the director, like that.”
“Will do, darling. Oh, wait”
“Problem?”
“No, no, no. It’s just the knee thing, but I’ll put it off.”
Kate knew what Blair was referring to. The woman had had so much plastic surgery that only last week Kate had kidded her that she was running out of places to fix and Blair had proved her wrong by saying she was having the sagging flesh at her knees tightened. Kate’s question
“How will you walk?”
received the answer,
“Who cares about walking?”
“Your knees. How could I forget?”
“Scoff if you will, darling. But wait until you hit my age.” She cleared her throat. “Not that you are so much younger than me. But you’ll see.”
Blair’s real age was a well-kept secret. Other than a few pale threadlike scars, her face betrayed no telltale signs of her years on the planet.
“Oh, please,” said Kate. “Your knees are better than mine.”
“You’re just saying that to flatter me, which you needn’t. I will gladly pick up the mantle at the foundation. My poor old knees can wait.” Blair’s tone sobered. “Kate, I want to see you, and I won’t take no for an answer. I know you, darling, acting all brave and stoic”
Kate cut her off. “Yes, Blair. Soon. I promise.”
T
he dinner Kate’s housekeeper, Lucille, had prepared was plastic-wrapped, waiting in the fridge, heating instructions on the kitchen counter, but it was way past dinnertime and Kate wasn’t hungry. She didn’t turn on the lights, getting by with the moonlight that slithered in through the penthouse windows, painting everything in silver and shadow. She did not want to see all the thingsbric-a-brac mementos of vacations, photographs, paintingsthat she and Richard had collected and loved. But even with the lights out, the place felt too big. She would have to think about selling the apartment, moving into a smaller place, something more
appropriate
for a single woman. Yes, she would have to get used to that ideaof living by herself.
But how to fill the emptiness now?
Maybe Nola would be moving in with her. The thought warmed her briefly. But would that be fair to Nola? After all, Kate had always encouraged the girl to be independent. If Nola wanted to move in, that would be different, but she was not going to drag her in merely to keep her company. Kate refused to be one of those women who could not be alone.
The phone machine’s light was flashing, a tiny red beacon in the dark. Seventeen messages. Kate stared at the contraption.
No way.
She couldn’t bear the thought of hearing her friends’ voices, all well-meaning, of course, but emotionally exhausting. She’d been doing her best to avoid almost everyone. About the only person Kate had forced herself to call was Richard’s mother, a one-minute conversation, the same every day:
“How are you, darling?”
“Fine, how’s the weather down in Florida, Edie?”
“Good. Why don’t you come for a visit?”
“I will. Soon.”
“Good.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Not a direct word about Richard or their emotions, the two women treading water, their unspoken agreement: To live in a perpetual state of complete denial.
Kate dumped the folders on the first two murder victims onto the desk beside the answering machine and sagged into a chair. Why had she bothered to bring them home? An old habit: she always thought more clearly away from the station house.
Now she flipped one open, spread the crime scene photos across her desk, overlapping one on top of the other: Suzie White’s eviscerated body from every anglea gruesome Cubist montage.
Is this what she wanted? To have her mind filled with more hideous images that she would never forget?
Kate scooped the photos back into the jacket and glanced down at the newspaper on the floor beside her desk, the one she had avoided reading, the one with the story of Richard’s murder.
Why did they have to include her picture? Kate knew these psychos often became obsessed with the newsmen who wrote about them or the cops who chased themthe last thing she wanted to think about right now. She nudged the paper out of view with the tip of her shoe and pushed herself away from the desk.
In the kitchen she grabbed a Diet Coke out of the fridge, popped the top and took a swignot the best idea if she wanted to sleep tonight, though she wasn’t quite ready for the bedroom. She chose the study, flopped into the soft leather armchair, and turned on the TV.
The news. A floater. The Hudson. A young woman, possibly a teen, no ID, the newscaster said, standing in front of a desolate section of the river, uptown somewhere. Had he said the Bronx, or had she imagined it? Probably nothing to do with their case, but now every murder seemed personal.
Kate called the station, got the desk cop. Yes, the Bronx. No, it didn’t fit their unsub’s MOno evisceration, no painting anywhere near the scene. The case would stay in the Bronx. “Have a good night.”
A good night?
Impossible.
Kate exchanged the television for music, aching chords and cry-addled voicesJulia Fordham, Jennifer Warnes, Joan Armatrading, a mix of her favorite female vocalistsfollowing her down the long hallway into her bedroom where she shed her clothes and picked up Richard’s pajamas, holding them first to her face, the soft linen against her cheek, the smell of him growing weaker, just the slightest hint now. It would be gone soon. She knew that.
Richard smiled at her from the photo on her dresser, and somehow she managed to smile back. “Hi, honey,” she said, her hand, on automatic, going for the ring at her throat, fingers tightening around the gold band.
A quick trip to the kitchen, pushing aside canned goods in the pantry until she found what she was looking for.
Back in the bedroom, Kate placed the two votive candles on either side of Richard’s photo, struck a match, breathed in the smell of sulfur as the flames cast golden highlights over the silver frame and Richard’s money clip.
My God, she thought, stepping back, observing herself
Still the Catholic girl from Queens, as superstitious and devout as every one of your Irish aunties.
Kate had stopped going to church after her father’s death, had transferred the little remaining faith she’d had into her work, first as a cop, then her Ph.D., later with the foundation and the kids. Work had become her temple.
But right now she needed a bit more. Something to give herself over to, a force, a spirit, whatever you wanted to call it, and the candles glowing beside Richard’s image tapped into something deep inside her from so long ago, and it soothed her.