Silent Prey (24 page)

Carter, Huerta and James were huddled together over a tabloid newspaper in the coordinating office, all three of them with Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands. Lucas looked in and James said, “Kennett’s down in the corner office, he wants to see you.”

“Have you seen Barbara Fell?” Lucas asked.

“Gone home.” There was a rapid-fire exchange of glances among the three cops, a vein of thin amusement. They knew he was sleeping with Fell.

“Anything happening?”

“About a thousand sightings on Bekker, including three good ones,” Carter said. “He’s driving a Volkswagen Bug . . . .”

“Jesus, that’s terrific,” Lucas said. “Who saw him? How’d you get the car?”

“Two witnesses last night at the parking ramp. The Carson woman’s girlfriend and the cashier. The girlfriend is a sure thing—she even told us he was wearing too much Poison. That’s a perfume . . .”

“Yeah.”

“ . . . And the cashier remembers the blond part, and says she—he—was driving an old Volkswagen. He remembers because it looked like it was in pretty good shape and he wondered if Bekker was an artist or something. He thinks it was dark green or dark blue. We’re running it through the License Bureau right now, but the Volkswagen part isn’t public yet. If he goes outside now, he’s gonna have to go in a car. And we’re stopping every Bug in Midtown.”

“You said three people . . . .”

“The third’s a maybe, but pretty definite. The night clerk in a bookstore down in the Village says he remembers the face very clearly, says it was Bekker. He says he was buying some weird book about torture.”

“Huh.”

“We’re getting close,” Carter said. “We’ll have him in two or three days, at the outside.”

“I hope,” Lucas said. “Any returns on that stun-gun business?”

“Three. Nothing.”

“Phones?”

“Nope. Goddamn rat’s nest.”

“Okay . . .”

Lucas started to turn away, and Carter said, “You’ve seen the papers?”

“With Bekker? Yeah . . .”

“No, that was this morning; the afternoon paper . . .” Huerta picked up the paper they’d been looking at, closed it, and handed it to Lucas. On the cover was a woman’s face, eyes staring; before the headlines reached the brain, the terror of the face came through, then the words:
“Kill #8—Bekker Death Pix.
”

“This legit?” Lucas asked.

“That’s Carson,” Carter said grimly. “He sent notes
and photos to three newspapers and two TV stations. They’re using them.”

“Jesus . . .”

From down the hall, he heard a woman’s voice.

Lily.

He walked down to the corner, found the room in semidarkness, the door open. He knocked, standing back, and Kennett said, “Yeah?”

Lucas stuck his head in. “Davenport,” he said.

“Come on in. We were just talking about you,” Kennett said. He was sitting in a visitor’s chair in front of a standard-issue metal desk, his feet up. His shirt collar was open, and his bright Polynesian Gauguin tie was draped across a stack of phone books at the front edge of the desk. Lily sat in another chair at the side of the desk, facing him.

“Fuckin’ photographs,” Lucas said.

“The shit is hitting the fan,” Kennett said grimly. “First the New School thing and now the pictures. The mayor had the commissioner on the carpet. You could hear the screaming in Jersey.”

Lucas dragged a third chair around, bumped Kennett. “Move your ass over so I can get my feet up.”

“And me with a fuckin’ bad heart,” Kennett mumbled as he moved.

“You told Fell about the transvestite thing,” Lily said. She pushed the phone books out of the way, picked up the necktie.

Lucas shrugged, sat down, put his feet up. “We talked it over and decided it was likely.”

“That came at a good time. We told everybody that Carson’ll probably be the last, that we’ve pretty much got him pinned down,” she said.

“Should have thought of it sooner, the cross-dressing,” Kennett said glumly. “The one before was a lesbian, we knew that. We should have seen that she wouldn’t let a strange guy get too close, not outside a lesbian bar.”

“Hell, you did everything right . . .” Lily began.

Kennett interrupted: “Everything but catch him . . .”

“He’s pinned.”

“We fuckin’ hope,” Kennett said.

Lily had been rolling the tie in her fingers, and now she looked down at the bare-breasted Polynesian woman, shook her head and said, “This is the craziest tie.”

“Don’t knocker it,” said Kennett, then slapped his leg and laughed at the pun, while Lily rolled her eyes.

“You were jerking me around, Gauguin and Christian Dior,” Lucas said to Kennett. He looked at Lily. “He told me this Gauguin dude was Christian Dior’s necktie partner.”

Lily laughed again, and Kennett said, “How do you know he wasn’t?”

“Looked him up,” Lucas said. “He died in 1903. He was associated with the symbolists.”

“Now if you knew what a symbolist was, you’d be in fat city,” Lily said.

“It was the use of color specifically for its symbolic impact, the emotional and intellectual impact,” Lucas said. “Which makes sense. Some holding cells are painted bubble-gum pink for the same reason. The color cools people out.”

Kennett, staring, said, “I never fuckin’ thought of that.”

“Carter tells me you’ll have Bekker in three days at the outside,” Lucas said.

“That fuckhead. That’s the kind of talk that gets us in
trouble,” Kennett grumbled. “We’ll get him soon, but I wouldn’t bet on the three days. If he’s got food and water, he could hole up.”

“Still . . .”

“I figure no more than a week,” Kennett said. “He’ll break. I just hope I’m still working for the goddamn police department when it happens. I mean, people are
pissed.
These fuckin’ pictures, man: the mess at the New School was nothing, compared to this.”

“People think cops . . .” Lucas started.

But Lily was shaking her head. “It’s not the people, it’s the politicians. People understand you can’t always catch a guy immediately; most of them do, anyway. But the politicians think
they’ve
got to do something, so what they do is run around and scream and threaten to fire people.”

“Mmmm. A week,” Lucas said. “That’s a long time, in ward-heeler years.”

“Anxious to get home?” Kennett asked.

“Nah. I’m enjoying myself. I want to be there for the bust.”

“Or the kill,” said Kennett.

“Whatever . . .”

Lily pushed herself out of the chair, stretched, and tousled Kennett’s hair. “Let’s go look at the river,” she said.

“Jesus Christ, the woman’s indefatigable, and me with this heart,” Kennett complained.

Lucas, vaguely embarrassed, stood and drifted toward the door. “See you guys tomorrow . . . .”

A message from Fell was waiting at the hotel: “Call when you get in, until one o’clock.” He held the slip in his hand as he rode the elevator to his floor, dropped it
on the bedstand, went into the bathroom, doused his face with hot water, and looked up in the mirror, the water trickling down his face.

He’d had a long relationship with a woman, the mother of his daughter, that now, when he looked back, seemed to have been based on a shared cynicism. Jennifer was a reporter, with too much time on the street, edging toward burnout. A baby, for her, had been a run at salvation.

He’d had a shorter, intense relationship with Lily, who had been struggling with the end of her own marriage; that might have been something, if they’d been in the same town, from the same emotional places. But they hadn’t been, and some of the guilt of their affair still stuck to their relationship.

He’d had any number of other relationships, long and short, happy and unhappy. Most of the women he’d gone with still liked him well enough, in a wary, once-burned way; but he tended to think of them as
others,
not Jennifer, not Lily.

Fell was one of the others. A wistful, lovely, finally lonely woman. In a permanent relationship, they would drive each other crazy. He wiped his face with one of the rough hotel towels and wandered back to the bed. He sat down, picked up the phone, looked at the receiver for a moment, then smiled. He’d felt for a year as though he were under water: quiet, placid, out of it. The New York cops were bringing him up, and Fell was fixing him in other ways. He tapped out her number. She picked it up on the second ring.

“This is Lucas,” he said.

“Kennett knew it was you, but I got good mileage out of the cross-dressing thing,” Fell said, without preamble. “My name was on the TV news, and it’s in the
Times
and the
Post.
That never hurts.”

“I saw it . . . .”

“I’d like to find a way to thank you. Oral sex comes to mind, if I get my share,” Fell said.

“Women are so
forward
these days,” Lucas said. “How quick can you get here?”

Fell brought a change of clothes with her, and they spent the evening laughing and making love. The next morning, when they were dressed, Lucas asked, “How would we find Jackie Smith?”

“Call his office,” she said.

“That easy?”

“He’s a hustler,” Fell said. “Getting found is part of his business.”

“So call him.”

Smith called back in five minutes. “Aren’t you guys ever going away? Can’t you find out anything on your own?” he complained. “I’ve done everything you wanted . . . .”

“All we want to do is talk,” Lucas said.

“I gave you what you wanted,” Smith said again. He was angry.

“Jackie . . . ten minutes, please? Have breakfast with us or something. We’ll buy.”

Smith would meet them at a café outside the St. Moritz hotel, he said. They caught a cab, struggling north through the midmorning traffic, the driver with his arm out the window, whistling. The day would be hot again; already the sky was showing a whitish haze, and when they got out of the cab across from Central Park, Lucas could see the leaves on the park trees were curling against the heat.

Smith was sitting at a metal table, eating a cream cheese croissant and drinking coffee. He didn’t get up when they arrived.

“Now what?” he asked, a sullen look on his face.

“We wanted to thank you—those names you gave us started a chain reaction. We’ve maybe got the asshole pinned down.”

“No shit?” Smith looked surprised. “When’ll you get him?”

“Some of the guys are betting a couple-three days. Nobody gives him more than a week,” Lucas said. “But we do have something we need from you. All the small-time fences who buy from the junkies—they need to tell the dopers that Bekker’ll be out looking for angel dust, ecstasy, speed. Maybe acid. And he’ll kill. The guy we got to, with your help, was boosting stuff out of Bellevue, but he was also dealing dope. Bekker killed him. Cold blood. Walked up and
bam.
Killed him.”

“I saw that on TV. I wondered . . .”

“That was him,” said Lucas.

Smith nodded. “Okay. No skin off my butt. I’ll tell everybody I know and ask them to pass the word.”

“He’s probably around the Village, but could be anywhere between the civic center and Central Park. That’s about all we know. That’s where the word’s got to be,” Lucas said.

“That’s my territory,” Smith said. “Is that all?”

Lucas glanced at Fell, then said, “No. I gotta ask you something else. You might not want to talk about it with another witness here.” He tipped his head at Fell. “But if you don’t mind if she stayed . . .”

Fell frowned at him, and Smith said, “What’s the deal?”

“Back when I first got here, I banged up your place. Tried to get your attention . . .”

“Well, that worked,” Smith said ruefully.

“Yeah. A couple of days later, I got the snot beat out
of me when I was coming out of a friend’s place. I need to know if that was you. Off the record. If it was, it’s no problem, I swear it.”

Smith dropped his croissant on the plate and laughed. “Jesus Christ, it wasn’t me. I read about it, though—but it wasn’t me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re the kind of guy that shit happens to, getting beat up,” Smith said.

Lucas looked at Fell. “Could you hike down to the end of the block for a minute?”

“I don’t know,” she said, studying him.

“C’mon,” Lucas said.

“Are you Internal Affairs?”

“Fuck no, I told you,” Lucas said impatiently. “C’mon, take a hike.”

Fell pushed back her chair, picked up her purse and stalked away.

“She’s pissed,” Smith said, looking from Fell to Lucas and back to Fell. “Are you screwing her?”

Lucas ignored the question: “There’s a big-dog shoot-out going on. Inside the department. And I’m tangled up in it. Now. The people who jumped me might be one set of those big dogs. That’s why I really need to know.”

“Listen . . .”

“Just a minute,” Lucas said, putting up a hand. “I want to put it to you as simple as I can. If you tell me no, it wasn’t you, and I find out that it was, I’ll come back and hurt you. All right? I really will, because I’ve gotta know the truth of this. Not knowing the truth could get me killed. On the other hand, if you say yes, it was you, there’s no problem. I’ll take the lumps.”

Smith shook his head in disbelief, a half-smile fixed on
his face. “The answer is still no. I didn’t do it. I wasn’t even particularly happy to see the story in the paper, because I thought you might come back on me.”

Lucas nodded, and Smith spread his hands, lifted his shoulders: “I’m a businessman. I don’t want any shit. I don’t want any muscle around. I hate people with guns. Everybody’s got a fuckin’ gun.” He stared off across Sixth Avenue, the traffic waiting for the light at Central Park South, then looked back at Lucas. “No. Wasn’t me.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “So get the word out to the junkies on Bekker. You might also point out that there’s a twenty-five-thousand-dollar crime-stoppers award for his capture.”

Lucas turned away from Smith and walked down the street to Fell. “I wish I could read lips,” she said. “I’d give a lot to know what you just told him.”

“I told him why I wanted to know if those were his guys who came after me,” Lucas said.