Mister X (15 page)

They’d had sex. Pearl stood at the window in Yancy’s apartment that overlooked the park across the wide avenue. The bedroom was cool, but she could feel the sun’s heat radiating from the windowpane. The sun was about to set, and the park was gilded. She watched foreshortened people walking on the sidewalks almost directly below, some of them couples. In the park, two kids on skateboards were terrorizing pedestrians on the winding path.

Pearl had the white linen sheet from the bed draped around her toga style. Behind her, Yancy still lay in bed. Something in the
Times
had caught his interest, and he was staring at it raptly, not paying much attention to Pearl at the moment. Nothing like the attention he’d paid her until ten minutes ago.

She turned away from the window and looked at Yancy and his nude, tanned body. He appeared younger than his supposed age, still lean and muscular. And God knew he had the endurance of a young man. Still, he displayed the experience of an older man. She smiled. Yancy was a man full of contradictions, but they made for quite a lover.

How could she trust a man like this?

You took the leap, now live with it. Stop being a cop all the time.

He folded down a flap of newspaper and glanced over at her. No reading glasses. Young eyes. Or maybe Lasik.

Pearl being observant, a cop.

What’s he so avidly reading?

“You look inquisitive,” he said. “Anybody ever tell you that you resemble a little terrier when you look inquisitive?”

As a matter of fact they had, but Pearl didn’t see it as something Yancy had to know.

“I was just wondering what interested you so in the paper.”

He laid the
Times
open over his lower body as if he were modest, which he wasn’t. “This Carver character,” he said. “A guy stops killing years ago then suddenly starts up again. Is that normal for serial killers?”

“Not much is normal with people who sequentially kill other people.”
Sequentially, dear. Sequentially.
“Or with obsessive people who have more than one sex partner at a time.”

He looked at her oddly. “We both agree on that, Pearl. But you’re a cop, difficult as I find that to believe, and I thought you might have some insight into the criminal mind. Killers’ minds.”

“I’m not a cop anymore, Yancy. Private investigator.”

“You don’t look like a private dick, sweetheart. C’mon over here.” He beckoned with his right hand, sunlight glinting off his gold ring.

“Think about wind power, Yancy.”

“I’ll take that for a yes.”

She had to laugh, but she moved no closer to the bed.

“I couldn’t help noticing something about you,” she said.

“That would be my third testicle?”

“No, your hair.”

“You mean the way it never seems to get messed up? It’s trained that way. Took years. I’ve been combing it the same way since I was twelve and wanted to get in Amy Dingle’s pants.”

“I bet you were a terror at twelve.”

“Amy Dingle would say so.”

“But that’s not what I meant about your hair. I noticed it’s naturally black and you dye it white.”

“Oh, sure. That’s so I look older. Lobbyists who are gray eminences get taken a lot more seriously. Gotta play the role, Pearl.”

“Live a lie, you mean?”

“No. Live a version, is all. But you could call it a lie. Play your lie well; that’s where the honored roll.”

“I don’t think that’s the exact quotation.”

“It is if you’re golfing, Pearl.”

“Which I am not.”

“It’s an inexact world.”

“Yancy, you are the most nimble liar I have ever met.”

“You make me blush.”

“Not so anyone would notice.”

“Make me bulge, I mean.”

“That I notice.”

Still she moved no closer to the bed.

“Do you happen to know anybody named Kahn?” she asked.

“Sure, Dr. Milton Kahn.”

That rocked her back a step. “Where do you know him from?”

“Met him yesterday. He sat down next to me at a bar and struck up a conversation. Introduced himself. Warned me about you.”

Huh?

Peal felt anger rising in her like hot lava. “Warned you?”

“Said you had serious personality problems and you were trouble. Didn’t go into detail. Winked at me. We had a tacit understanding, being men of the world.”

“Didn’t you ask him what he meant?”

“Didn’t care what he meant. Still don’t.”

“Did you tell him that?”

“No.”

“What
did
you do?”

“I considered punching him in the nose.”

Pearl felt mildly excited by the prospect of men fighting over her, then was angry at herself. She wasn’t some cuddly teddy bear carnival prize.

Still…

“
Did
you punch him?” she asked.

“No. I talked him into buying me a drink and tactfully sent him on his way. Teach him a lesson.”

Pearl figured that wasn’t exactly a duel fought for her honor. But it was something.

Yancy smiled at her. “You look lovely as a Roman concubine.”

Pearl moved closer to the bed.

There went the toga.

Mick would have a cow if he knew what she was doing.

Joyce House had started work at six that morning, and she was tired. She knew Loren was waiting for her across the street and around the corner. That way he wouldn’t be visible from the diner.

Mick and his rules
, she thought. The guy had his good points, but he was a diner dictator.

She yelled a good-bye to Sheila, who would take her shift for the dinner customers. They were always less numerous than the breakfast and lunch crowd. That would be true even this evening—corned beef and cabbage night.

Tired as she was, when Joyce crossed with the light and Loren stepped from the doorway of a men’s clothing store, the sight of him charged her with energy.

They came together with a fierce hug. He kissed her forehead and then her lips.

She ran her fingers through his dark hair, then smiled and pushed away from him, turning her head. “Let’s get farther away from the diner before any of that, Loren.”

He laughed. “Why? You think someone followed you?”

“It’s possible. Maybe your ex-wife hired detectives.”

Still grinning, he kissed her again on her forehead. “She and I are beyond that point,” he said.

“The point of no return?” She’d heard the phrase earlier that day on CNN and it had stuck in her mind. There was something haunting and scary about it. Perhaps because she knew she had passed it.

“Exactly,” he said.

“If I were her, I’d fight to hold on to you.”

He looked more serious, his blue eyes downcast. “There was a time she might have tried, but not now. And since I met you, there’s been no doubt in my mind that my marriage is over.”

Without either of them making a conscious decision, they began walking together along the crowded sidewalk.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said, and held something out in his right hand.

“Theater tickets!” she exclaimed.

“You mentioned you like the theater, so I thought I’d surprise you. We’re on tomorrow night for
Manhattan Nocturne.
”

She squeezed his arm. “That’s supposed to be great!”

He patted her hand. “Orchestra seats, sixth row.”

“You shouldn’t have, Loren. They must have cost a fortune.”

“You’re the fortune,” he told her.

She walked beside him in the hum and bustle of the city, thinking it was amazing how he always knew what to say to her. As if he could read her thoughts. He must feel as she did, that the more time they spent together, the more they belonged together, belonged to each other. Sixth-row orchestra Broadway tickets. They certainly hadn’t been cheap. It pleased her immensely that he’d invested so much in her.

Loren was smiling inwardly, sensing the happiness and possessiveness emanating from Joyce. He knew things she didn’t know, and he was enjoying that.

It was power.

It amused him that Joyce was contemplating tomorrow night, and her future beyond then. He knew she’d have no future beyond tomorrow night.

Manhattan Nocturne
would be her last Broadway musical.

Vitali was at the wheel of the unmarked Ford he and Mishkin were returning to the vice squad. The two detectives would be sorry to see the car go. It was five years old, had a mismatched quarter panel painted with primer, and was one of the few unmarked city cars that didn’t scream its police presence.

“We got one more thing to do today, Harold,” Vitali reminded his partner, as he maneuvered the car around one of the city’s long, jointed buses.
Those things are too damned big for this city.

“You’ve got one more thing,” Mishkin said. “Renz never wants to talk with me.”

“What I tell him comes from both of us, Harold.”

“Meaning if things go wrong, I’ll drown in the same soup you do.”

Vitali grinned. “That’s pretty much it, crouton.” He straightened out the car and left the bus behind. “Renz is supposed to have met with Quinn earlier this evening.”

“So Renz might know more than we do.”

“Not the kinds of things he wants to know.”

“You ever feel like a spy or something, Sal? I mean, Quinn’s a straight guy. I don’t like ratting on anybody, but I especially don’t like ratting on him.”

“He knows we’ve got no choice,” Vitali said. “It’s like a game. He knows everything we tell Renz, anyway. So no, I don’t feel like a spy. And you shouldn’t, either. We’re not actually ratting on Quinn. It’s not like he’s Valerie Plame or anything.”

“Who’s that, Sal?”

“No one, Harold. Ancient history.”

“Oh, I know who you mean. Plum, isn’t it? Wasn’t her name Valerie Plum?”

Vitali drove for a while silently.

“Might have been, Harold,” he said at last.

“When you get done talking to Renz,” Mishkin said, “he’s gonna talk to that little media scum, Cindy Sellers. Set her off writing some bullshit about the shadow woman.”

“That’s the deal, Harold. Round and round we go. Like rats in a cage.”

“Hamsters, I think you mean,” Mishkin said.

“Hamsters,” Vitali agreed.

“I feel like a rat sometimes,” Mishkin said.

“She seems to have disappeared,” Fedderman said. He was standing up and putting on his suit coat, preparing to leave the office.

“Our shadow woman?” Quinn asked. He’d just come from meeting with Harley Renz in the Campbell Apartment bar in Grand Central Station, where they’d had some of the best martinis in the city and Quinn had brought the police commissioner up to date on the investigation.

“Our client,” Fedderman said. “I wanted to pump her for some other names. Common acquaintances she and her twin might have had. Been trying to call her all day on her cell.”

Quinn realized Chrissie had never let him know where she was staying. Her cell phone was the only way to contact her, and now it appeared she’d rabbited again.

But why?

“Her cell’s turned off,” Fedderman said.

Quinn nodded and went over and sat behind his desk. “We’ve got a client not to be trusted, Feds.”

“Yeah. Whaddya think her game is?”

“A different one from the one we’re playing.”

“Like chess and checkers.”

“We need to make sure we’re chess,” Quinn said.

“Anything else going for today?” Fedderman asked.

“No. Go on home and get some rest. Or go see a movie or Broadway play.”

Fedderman looked off to the left, as if calling on his memory. “I haven’t seen a Broadway show since
Cats.
”

“What’d you think?”

“One good song, but I can’t remember it.” Fedderman waved a good-bye, his shirt cuff flapping like a flag, and went out onto West Seventy-ninth Street.

Quinn watched him—tall, disjointed, with a head-bowed, lurching kind of walk—pass the window along with the steady stream of pedestrians trudging home from work. Fedderman always seemed to be pondering. Probably he always was.

Quinn settled back in his desk chair and got a Cuban cigar from the humidor in the bottom left drawer.

He fired up the cigar and sat for a while smoking, knowing that tomorrow morning Pearl would probably bitch about the lingering tobacco scent.

He pondered for quite a while himself, searching his memory, but he never was able to recall the one good song.

When Quinn got to his apartment he found that he wasn’t tired. Too much adrenaline in his blood. Too much coffee. And probably the cigars didn’t help.

He stayed away from both as he went to his den, sat behind his desk. He couldn’t help noticing that the apartment was stuffy and smelled like cigar smoke. May would raise hell if she still lived here. So would Pearl. Women didn’t seem to like cigars. Was there some Freudian reason?

Freud would probably say so.

Quinn got his legal pad from the shallow middle drawer.

He read over and thought about what he had so far:

Then there was the notation that Chrissie was not to be trusted. Well, nothing had changed there.

The next entry on the legal pad read:

Quinn noticed as he had the last time he’d used the pad that there were too many question marks.

He picked up a pen from the desk and added on the legal pad:

That was about it, Quinn thought, putting the pad back in the desk drawer. He wasn’t sure whether to call it progress or additional frustration.

He went into the kitchen and poured himself two fingers of Famous Grouse scotch in a water glass, added some ice cubes.

Then he went in to watch television. A French movie was on PBS. Quinn was partial to French movies. You never knew what direction they were going to take. So like life.

“You should move in with me,” Yancy said to Pearl.

“We hardly know each other.”

“We know each other superficially, and that’s the best way.”

They were having breakfast in his kitchen. Pearl had made cheese omelets. She had a lacy but functional apron tied around her waist. Yancy had wanted her to wear it and only it, but she’d demurred and gotten dressed in slacks and a knit pullover before donning the apron. She hadn’t felt so domestic in years.

“I mean,” Yancy continued, “you’re spending your nights and parts of your days here anyway, so why shouldn’t you throw some clothes in a suitcase and stay here with me?” He was showered and fully dressed in shirt and tie, looking at her as if all he saw on her was the apron. Theater of the mind.

She took a bite of omelet and chewed for a while, letting him think she was mulling over his proposition. “It isn’t so simple, Yancy.”

“So bring some furniture.”

“I don’t mean that. It’s the…”

“What? Appearances?”

“No, I don’t give a rat’s ass about appearances. I’m talking about how it’d be between you and me.”

“It’d be the way it is now, only more of it.”

“No, it wouldn’t be exactly the way it is now. We’d soon become…a couple.”

He smiled handsomely at her with his refreshing blankness. “Yeah, I can count.”

“What you’re proposing is something like a marriage. In fact, if we lived that way long enough it’d become a common-law marriage.”

He forked in more omelet, then swallowed and took a sip of coffee. “A legal technicality.”

“I’m not cut out for marriage of any kind.”

“I wouldn’t say that. You’re a hell of a good cook. And you look terrific in that apron.”

“Ugh! See, you’re trying to domesticate me already.”

“Like a wild mare in a corral,” he said.

Horse analogies while I’m wearing an apron like June Cleaver? What the hell does he mean by that?

This was the kind of thing that could be a problem. While Yancy was ostensibly transparent, there were times when he thought in ways that baffled her. Or was that simply a complicated way of saying he was devious and a skilled liar?

Pearl warned herself:
Don’t make a two-sided problem six-sided. For that matter, don’t create a problem where there’s no problem at all.

An amused comprehension glowed in his blue eyes. “Do you think I’m too old for you?”

“No. You don’t seem too old for anybody.”

“Maybe you don’t like the white hair,” he said.

“It’s more the dark roots.”

“I explained why I—”

“Yeah, but it seems dishonest.”

He seemed mildly surprised. “It’s not dishonest. Not even illegal, immoral or fattening. It’s simply me, slightly altered for convenience.”

“But you seem to alter almost everything for your convenience.”

“Why not, if it’s convenient?”

She smiled to temper any insult. “To tell you the truth, darling, everything you say is subject to doubt.”

“That kind of consistency is hard to find in a man. Anyway, truth is an amorphous concept.”

“You do tell the kind of lies I like. Practical lies.”

“So move in with me. We’ll tell the neighbors we’re siblings. Let them think we’re doing unspeakable things to each other.”

Yuk!
Yet Pearl had to admit there was something about such a charade that tickled her perverse side. Not the notion of sibling sex—that was absolutely repugnant. But its very repugnance made it kind of appealing as a pretend way to put one over on the neighbors. Yes, horrifying the neighbors could be fun.

No, no, no!

But for a moment the devil in her mind had considered it. That was the sort of thing that made her uneasy about being so close to Yancy. He seemed to understand her entire spectrum of emotions, and he could play it as if it were a harp. That made her feel vulnerable. Floating a sister-brother illicit relationship rumor as a diversion while simply living together. Quinn would never suggest such a sick thing, even jokingly.

Serious, obsessive Quinn.

It struck her again: Maybe Yancy’s appeal was that he was so unlike Quinn.

So what’s wrong with that?

“If it would make you feel better,” Yancy said, “we could tell people we’ve been married twenty years. Even have families out there from previous marriages. And in-laws. Though I don’t have any of either.”

More lies.

“Do you have any family in the area?” he asked.

Pearl hesitated. But why lie like Yancy?

“Just my mother,” she said. “In New Jersey.”

“No kidding? I’d like to meet her. You know what they say, if you’re going to pretend to be married to a woman, you should meet her mother.”

“No,” Pearl said, “you shouldn’t.”

“So think about my offer,” Yancy said.

“This is me thinking,” Pearl said. She stood up from her chair and began clearing the table, even though there were a few remaining bites of omelet on Yancy’s plate. “I’ve gotta get outta here and go to work.”

Yancy sat back and crossed his arms, watching her and grinning lewdly.

“That apron!” he said. “There’s something about a really sexy woman wearing an apron.”

“Try thinking of something else.”

“Washing the dishes bare-breasted?”

“Don’t ever do that in front of me,” Pearl said.