John Lutz Bundle (146 page)

Berty nodded wordlessly.

“Nothing wrong with that, I say,” the man continued, “especially with that last guy got popped, Rhodes. A
banker.
They found a gun on him that was used to kill one of the earlier Twenty-five-Caliber victims. Looks like the two of them were going after each other even up. Fair fight, I say. Not murder. A duel. People’d sure as hell be more polite, nicer to each other, if they knew they might be challenged to a duel.”

Thinking Berty might still be having trouble hearing him, the man raised his hand and made a shooting gesture with thumb and forefinger.

Berty nodded and grinned.

A duel. Wouldn’t that be something?

Pearl felt better, almost exhilarated. Finally she’d taken some action and stopped being a verbal punching bag for her mother, not to mention the target of harassment by Mrs. Kahn and her damned nephew Milton.

Unable to get a morning appointment with a new dermatologist, recommended by the phone book, Pearl had been pleasantly surprised when a Dr. Eichmann’s assistant told her there’d been a cancellation and the doctor could see her late this afternoon if possible about the growth behind her ear.

Quinn, working hard at his desk, had been sympathetic (“Go. Then maybe you’ll shut up about the damned thing.”), and she’d left the West Seventy-ninth Street office early.

Dr. Eichmann, an affable older man with tousled gray hair, examined the subject of concern with thoroughness and care. He poked and probed and observed and told Pearl that what she was so worried about appeared to be a simple nevus, or mole.

“Has it changed shape or color recently,” he asked. “Or grown larger?”

“I don’t know for sure. I look at it in the mirror sometimes and think it has.”

“Where it is, I’m surprised you can see it in the mirror.”

“It isn’t easy.”

“Uh-huh.” He gave her a nice bedside-manner smile. “Melanocytes sometimes cluster and create moles,” he explained, while Pearl stared at him blankly. “Some appear dysplastic and potentially dangerous.” He patted her arm. “But this one is probably benign.”

Probably?
“So it’s nothing to lose sleep over?” Pearl asked.

“Not unless you choose to. It shouldn’t be a cause for concern. But since it obviously has been, I’ll remove it and send it away for biopsy and you can know for sure and put any fears you might have to rest.”

“I hope you don’t think I’m a hypochondriac.”

“You’re a woman with a mole,” he said.

He advised her that what he was going to do would hurt a little, and it did.

“Soon as the results of the biopsy are in, I’ll contact you,” he assured her. “Meanwhile, not to worry.”

She thanked the doctor and paid at the front desk on her way out.

How simple it had all been. Now she had a square, flesh-colored bandage where the mole used to be, and she felt good about it. Felt good about herself. It was almost as if, somehow, she’d had Dr. Milton Kahn surgically removed from her life.

But on the sweltering subway ride to the stop near her apartment, squeezed into a seat next to a man who smelled as if he’d vomited on himself, Pearl began to worry.

Dr. Eichmann had said
probably.
No way was that the same as
definitely.

And if the mole was so obviously harmless, why had he removed it and sent it away for a biopsy? Why had she chosen from the dozens of dermatologists in the phone directory one named Eichmann, the same name as that of the infamous Nazi who’d been executed for World War II concentration camp horrors? What might her mother think about that? What might Quinn’s shrink friend, Dr. Zoe Manders, think about it? Why should Pearl care?

What she should do, she told herself, as the smelly man next to her deliberately shifted his weight so his arm rested against her breast, what she should do is take Dr. Eichmann’s advice and not worry about the results of the biopsy.

As the subway train growled and squealed to a halt at her stop, she freed herself from entanglement with the vomity-smelling man and elbowed her way off the train and onto the crowded platform. She joined the other sheep, herded by painted yellow arrows and habit, in their trudge toward the exit stairs ascending to dying sunlight and lengthening shadows.

It was amazing, she thought, how positive she’d felt when she’d left Dr. Eichmann’s office and how depressed she felt now. What had caused such deterioration in her feeling of well being?

But she knew the cause. It wasn’t the sweltering subway ride or the man who smelled of vomit, though surely he’d played a small role.

Though she might blame other people, the real cause of her depression of the last several weeks had been herself. Her
re
actions to their actions.

I did it to myself.

It wasn’t them; it was me. I did it to myself.

They made me do it to myself.

Quinn and his detectives reinterviewed everyone connected to the Becker and Rhodes murders. They could find no connections between the two men, no connection between any two people who knew both men.
Had
the Becker and Rhodes murders both been hunts? Duels?

“Now we’ve got something,” Fedderman finally said at the end of a dreary, unproductive day.

“What would that be?” Quinn asked.

“Whole bunch of questions,” Fedderman said.

“Ballistics wasn’t certain,” Pearl said. “Maybe the gun found on Rhodes didn’t kill Becker.”

“The maid at the Antonian Hotel,” Fedderman said. “Rosa Pajaro. She might know more than she’s telling. She’s scared. Maybe of something worse than losing her job or being deported.”

“Think she’s still working there?” Pearl asked.

“It’s questionable,” Fedderman said.

A phone call answered the question. Rosa Pajaro had collected her paycheck and disappeared from the Antonian without giving notice two days ago. A follow-up phone call revealed that she’d also left her basement apartment without bothering to notify the landlord.

“Scared, all right,” Pearl said. “Probably all the way back to Puerto Rico.”

“Mexico,” Fedderman said.

“Probably happened when she saw Thomas Rhodes’s photo on TV news or in the paper,” Quinn said, “and she realized she was a key witness in a murder case.”

“Can’t blame her,” Fedderman said.

“We don’t know enough to blame anyone for anything,” Pearl said.

Chain lightning danced in the darkening sky.

Lavern stood in the heat outside the Broken Wing Women’s Shelter and felt a few droplets of moisture on her face, one on her eyelash, another on the bridge of her nose. Maybe it was going to rain and bring relief from the heat. Maybe not. The city might be once again toying with its people. The way Hobbs sometimes toyed with her.

She unconsciously raised a hand and felt the new bruises on her left cheekbone, another farther down on the side of her jaw. Hobbs hadn’t broken her skin. He was good at what he did and didn’t want to draw suspicion. Her makeup did a fair enough job of covering these latest of Lavern’s facial bruises, from a distance.

Her left side hurt badly enough that she favored it and walked with a slight limp. When she’d left the apartment, she hadn’t known where that limp would take her. Now, standing and staring at the shelter, she realized Broken Wing had been her destination from the beginning.

The sturdy brick building with its line of dormers seemed to call to her more strongly every time she passed it. It was like a fortress with a pale concrete stoop and solid wood double doors. Each door had a large brass knocker beneath a small leaded glass window. There was black iron grillwork over the ground-floor windows. The building didn’t look as if it could be easily broken into. A person might feel safe there.

Lavern leaned against a
NO PARKING
sign and sighed. She knew that a person couldn’t stay inside Broken Wing forever. That was the problem. She’d heard about women who’d found refuge there and stayed for months, and then left only to be reclaimed by their patiently waiting abusers.

Lavern knew Hobbs was patient.

He would wait.

She took a final glance at the thick wooden doors that would provide protection for only so long; then she limped away along the sidewalk. Lightning still flickered and charged patches of purple sky between the tall buildings, but whatever breath of air there’d been had now ceased. No more tentative raindrops found their way to earth. It wasn’t going to rain this evening. It had been a trick. Life was a damned trick, a painful practical joke.

As she walked, Lavern tried to think of lots of things, but found her mind focusing on the shotgun at home in the hall closet. The sharp pain in her left side whenever she took a step kept bringing her back to the gun. It was a twelve gauge, like the one her father had let her fire once in some woods behind a rented cabin. She remembered the deafening bark of the gun, the heavy recoil against her right shoulder. She’d fired at a paper target he’d nailed to a tree, and she’d hit it.

She’d hit it.

A pretty damned good shot.

I could do it again.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the shotgun. It was unhealthy, a fixation like this, but she couldn’t seem to control it. She guessed that was why they called them fixations. It was all Hobbs’s fault.

Hobbs’s damned fault.

He’d blocked every avenue of escape, made her into something that would have no choice other than to do to him what he might secretly want but not have the courage to do himself.

Suicide by wife.

I could do it again.

The pain in her side became more intense, and she wondered if Hobbs had cracked one of her ribs,

Traffic was backing up because the signal at the next intersection was red. A young couple, a tall man and a blond woman, climbed nimbly out of a stopped cab and disappeared into one of the buildings. They ran hunched over with their arms linked and their heads down, as if they were trying to get in out of the nonexistent rain or escape the paparazzi.

Their own dreamworld. Do they know, or even care, what’s real?

Lavern felt a pang of envy so sharp it made her break stride.

She knew that inside the building the couple had entered was a small fusion restaurant with a bar, where she could get a drink. Alcohol would moderate her rage and dull the pain.

Every step was agony, but she began to walk faster. The shotgun remained on the edge of her thoughts.

I could do it again.

He would need a few things from a hardware store: a steel bicycle hook, a length of strong nylon rope, a roll of wide duct tape, a plastic drop cloth, some rubbing alcohol to clean flesh so it would dry fast and completely and the tape would be well bonded. He already had the rest of what he’d need—a portable electric drill to create a starting hole, so he could make sure he was fastening the hook in a solid wood joist capable of supporting body weight.

As always when collecting his materials, he acted circumspectly.

A short subway ride got him within walking distance of a big-box chain store in Queens, where he bought the required items. It might raise suspicion if he made his purchases in Manhattan, especially the steel hook, after all the publicity about Terri Gaddis.

Along with the hook he bought a bicycle tire pump, a diversionary item just in case the dazed-looking teenager behind the checkout counter was more alert than she appeared. On the way home, he stopped in at a Duane Reade and bought the bottle of rubbing alcohol. No danger there of arousing suspicion.

In a luggage shop on Third Avenue he purchased a cheap blue canvas carry-on to put everything in so that people glancing at him wouldn’t fix him in their memories. He’d be merely a man in a hotel lobby carrying unexceptional luggage. One of hundreds of such men on hundreds of hours of security tape.

Once back in his room he’d phone Mitzi and tell her he’d reserved a table at Mephisto’s for them tomorrow night. She was expecting that. It was her birthday. After drinks and dinner, he’d suggest they go to her apartment. He’d hint that he had a gift for her. She’d see the blue canvas bag and assume it contained her gift, and in a way it did.

He had something rare indeed to give her on her birthday—the perfect symmetry of time. Enter and exit screaming on the same date, though thanks to the duct tape, exit would be much quieter than entry.

Check the birth and death dates on a lot of tombstones, he mused, and you’d seldom see such ideal closure.

He was sure that Mitzi, if she could, would instantly come up with a joke about it.

Quinn was sure the reason why Renz had chosen the corner of Forty-third and Broadway for their meeting was so he could eat one of the knishes sold by the street vender there.

They had to move down the block and back into the display-glassed doorway of an electronics shop in order not to be buffeted by the tourists and various Times Square area characters streaming past. Renz’s driver followed unobtrusively in Renz’s long black limo, gliding from one illegal parking space to another.

Renz shifted the knish to his right hand. “This guy comes into the two-one precinct yesterday and complains he found a package on his doormat. It was wrapped in brown paper and taped tight. His name was printed on it. Seems somebody left it there, rang the bell, and ran. Inside the package was a revolver.”

“A twenty-five Springbok?” Quinn asked hopefully, watching Renz take a bite of knish while holding his free hand cupped beneath his chin as a crumb catcher.

“I wish it wash sho,” Renz said around the knish.

Quinn knew something must have come of the man’s complaint, or Renz wouldn’t even have learned about it.

“Shmith an’ Weshon,” Renz said, and swallowed. “But the meaning here was clear, so the guy was told what all these poor schmucks are being told. There’s no way to know who put the gun there, and yes, he was probably being challenged to what the media and public are calling a duel, and could he list any enemies who might have left the gun.”

“Let me guess,” Quinn said. “He didn’t have any enemies.”

“No! The guy listed over twenty people he thinks might like to shoot him. He’s sales manager at a real estate agency, and apparently that makes for a lot of enemies.”

“If you do it the wrong way, I guess.”

“Oh, he even struck the detectives taking the complaint as a prick. I’m sure he’s a real bully. That’s what everyone’s saying now, including Berty Wrenner.” Renz took another bite of knish. Half of it broke off and fell into his waiting palm, and he flicked it away. Some of it got on the pants cuff of a man in a suit walking past, and he glared at Renz.

Quinn waited until Renz had chewed and swallowed, so as not to be sprayed by knish. “Who’s Berty Wrenner?”

“The guy that shot the complainant,” Renz said.

Quinn looked at him. “The guy who came into the precinct house with the package and gun got shot?”

“Once, in the middle of the forehead,” Renz said. “It did the job, even though it was a twenty-two-caliber slug.”

“Who’s—who was the guy that got shot?”

“Name of Alec Farr. He was Wrenner’s boss, and apparently rode the hell out of him, drove him nutty enough to kill. The other salespeople at the agency confirmed this. They didn’t disguise the fact they were glad Farr was dead, said Wrenner was his favorite whipping boy.”

“So you have Wrenner in custody.”

“Yep. He was found sitting next to the body, sobbing.”

“He’s not our serial killer,” Quinn said.

“Not a chance. Our problem, though. The mayor himself was on the phone this morning telling me these murders are out of control.”

“He’s just catching on to that?”

“He’s had other things on his mind. But now we’re on his mind.”

“Why didn’t Farr get out of town, if he took the threat seriously enough to go to the police?”

“Said he couldn’t. He had a job, work to do here. He’d get fired if he left town just because some asshole threatened him. Besides, he was the stubborn sort.”

Quinn thought that should be engraved on the tombstones of a lot of people he’d known:
He was the stubborn sort.
Maybe on his own tombstone.

“I’m getting pressure from on high you wouldn’t believe,” Renz said.

“Am I supposed to be feeling pressure here?” Quinn asked.

“That’s the purpose of this conversation. Mayor told me to light a fire under you.”

“Isn’t that arson?”

“Unless you’re protesting something. Like lack of progress. I know there’s already a fire under you, Quinn, but that’s because I know you, and the mayor doesn’t. I’m simply delivering the message.”

Quinn said nothing while Renz finished his knish, then produced a white handkerchief from a pocket and fastidiously wiped his hands finger by finger.

After stuffing the handkerchief back in his pants pocket, Renz reached into an inside pocket of his suit coat and brought out a folded
City Beat
and held it out to Quinn. “Sellers has got the exclusive on this; that’s why it wasn’t in the big papers this morning. It’s on their Web sites, though, and radio and TV news is on the story heavy. Sellers painted Wrenner as a victim, said he shot Farr for the same reason women kill their abusive husbands. Wrenner was too dependent on Farr and his job to go out and get another job, just like wifey’s too dependent to get another hubby and goes for the knife or gun instead.”

Accepting the newspaper, Quinn said, “There’s enough truth in it that in some quarters it might wash.”

“That’s what worries me, Quinn. The rest of the media’s already spouting the same nonsense. They’re making it look like murder’s okay in certain circumstances. There are too many damned people in this city who think they’re in those circumstances.”

“Copycats with guns,” Quinn said.

“Only nobody’s got nine lives.”

Quinn looked at a display of miniature digital cameras behind Renz. With all the electronic crap taking over the world, for all they knew they were being video streamed right now. Not that they had anything to hide, but neither one would want…say, the mayor, to see or hear their conversation.

Tucking the
City Beat
beneath his arm, Quinn said, “What would you have me do about all this, Harley?”

“Catch the bastard,” Renz said, as if the answer was obvious and Quinn had somehow missed it.

“Uh-huh. Gonna have another knish?”

“One’s enough. Moderation in all things. What I’m gonna have next is a cigar.”

“Tell the mayor I’m on fire,” Quinn said.

Renz smiled and motioned to his driver.

“Mission accomplished,” he said, and got into the limo.

“Catch the bastard,” Renz said again, and pulled the door shut so that all Quinn saw in the limo’s tinted window was a bent-nosed, tough-looking guy with a thatch of unruly straight hair. Quinn.