Mister X fq-5 Page 2

  Like Pearl, he’d been ripe for Quinn’s call.

  Fedderman smiled in the direction Pearl had gone and then walked away, his right shirt cuff unbuttoned and flapping like a white surrender flag with every stride. If he knew about the cuff, he didn’t seem to mind.

  He did kind of mind that there would be no more free drinks and appetizers at Sammy’s.

  3

  The next morning they were sitting in the arrangement of desks that made up Quinn and Associates’ office. Quinn was seated behind his desk, Pearl and Fedderman in chairs facing him. Low-angled sunlight invaded through the iron-grilled window and warmed the office. The Mr. Coffee over on the table in the corner was chuggling away, filling the air with the rich scent of fresh-brewed beans.

  Fedderman had his suit coat off and was slouched sideways, taking notes. His right shirt cuff was already unbuttoned. That usually happened because of the way he cocked and dragged his wrist over paper as he wrote. A sunbeam alive with dust motes had found Pearl and made her more vividly beautiful than ever. Quinn wished, as he often did, that what they’d shared together hadn’t ended. He liked to think that maybe it hadn’t. He knew Pearl liked to think that it definitely had, for her, anyway. Could be she was right.

  Quinn had made copies of the clippings Chrissie Keller had given him, and he explained the situation. Pearl and Fedderman listened carefully. This was the sort of investigation they all liked-multiple murder rather than credit card pilfering. In the world of catching the bad guys and setting things as right as possible, solving this one could make a person feel useful. If only the case weren’t more than five years old. They all knew the odds of rekindling the past and nailing the Carver were long.

  “I’ve read a lot about the mystical link between twins,” Pearl said, when Quinn was finished talking. “I’d like to say it’s bullshit, but I’m not so sure.”

  “I don’t see how the mystery of twins is in any way relevant to this,” Fedderman said. “Other than motivating our client.”

  “That’s enough relevance,” Quinn said, “considering we’re no longer paid by the city.” He looked at Pearl. “Or by a bank.”

  They had all stuck their necks out to create this investigative agency, and they knew it.

  Three people, working without a net. No one said anything for a while.

  “That was a pregnant pause if ever I didn’t hear one,” Pearl finally said.

  Fedderman, who’d been adding tooth marks to his dented yellow pencil, glanced over at her. “Does that mean we can expect another, smaller pause?”

  “Point is,” Quinn said, “however a client’s motivated, if it’s legal and ethical, we’ll gladly accept payment.”

  “One out of two would be okay,” Pearl said.

  She was ignored.

  “You mentioned our client had won some sorta jackpot,” Fedderman said to Quinn.

  “Slot machine thing. She hit a kind of tri-state trifecta and got temporarily rich. This is how she feels compelled to spend her money.”

  “That mysterious twins business,” Pearl said. She’d also been taking notes. She tapped her pencil’s eraser on a front tooth in tiny bounces. “I remember the Carver murders, how they confounded the hell out of everyone. You looked through this stuff already, Quinn. Do you think we’ve really got a chance of finding the killer?”

  “A chance, sure.”

  “It’d help if we could get the murder books outta the NYPD cold-case files,” Fedderman said.

  “Right now,” Quinn said, “I don’t think the NYPD would be very cooperative. Understandably, they don’t want us stirring up something they failed to solve.”

  “Maybe you could talk to Renz,” Pearl said.

  Harley Renz was the city’s popular police commissioner, and a longtime acquaintance of them all. He was an unashamed, ambitious, and corrupt bureaucratic climber. “Renz would have the most to lose if we came along after five years and solved a serial killer case,” Quinn said. “In Harley’s eyes, that’d be making the NYPD look like dopes.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Fedderman said. “So what would he lose?”

  “Political capital. To Renz, that’s like losing his own blood. In fact, it is his blood.” Quinn laced his fingers behind his neck and leaned back in his chair. Maybe too far back. Pearl was watching him, waiting to see if this time he’d topple backward. Maybe hoping. “We need to have something solid before we go to Renz,” Quinn said. “And some way for him to gain by us solving the case.”

  “Meanwhile,” Pearl said, “we do our jobs, and never mind if our efforts are hopeless.”

  “I’ll miss the free drinks and food at Sammy’s,” Fedderman said. “But to tell you the truth, I was getting tired of playing the alcoholic businessman. And Pearl was putting on weight.”

  “I’ll come over there and put some weight on your goddamned head,” Pearl said.

  Quinn thought about settling them down so they could all get to work familiarizing themselves with the five-year-old murder investigation; then he decided against it. He knew Pearl, and she wasn’t yet at the point where she would physically attack Fedderman. And experience had taught Fedderman how to tread around Pearl just out of range while sticking her with his barbs. So let them agitate each other, Quinn thought.

  It was how they worked best.

  4

  It had been a grueling series of hot and dusty bus rides from Bennett, South Dakota, to New York City. You could measure the distance in more than miles. Mary Bakehouse didn’t want to make the return trip. Ever.

  She’d spent the weekend moving in to her new apartment in the East Village. Mary had enough money that she could afford the place for a while. In the meantime she’d be job hunting.

  The apartment was the third-floor east unit of a six-story building. The previous tenant had been a smoker, and the scent of stale tobacco smoke made itself known at unexpected times, when closet doors were opened or summer breezes worked their way in through the window and played across the floor. The window was stuck only two inches open and wouldn’t budge, so usually the living room was stale and stuffy. Mary would buy some kind of aerosol air freshener when she got a chance. Or maybe one of those things you plugged into an electrical socket and it hissed every fifteen minutes or so and deodorized the air. Something was needed. She didn’t like tobacco smoke and could smell it for what seemed like blocks. She had a nose like a beagle, a boyfriend had told her once, not quite grasping what he’d said. She hadn’t gone out with him again, figuring him to be mentally inferior.

  A few people had warned Mary about living in this part of the Village. It could be dangerous. Mary didn’t take those warnings seriously. She’d dealt with thugs before, in Bennett. They were just like New York thugs, only they wore cowboy hats.

  The way she dealt with them was by showing a complete absence of fear. Mary had a sweet, heart-shaped face, a frail body, and rather sad brown eyes. A frail person who looked as if her photo belonged in an old locket. But there was something about her that strongly suggested she would hold her ground. Anything done to her would be at a cost. People with the wrong kind of thing in mind usually backed off.

  Something else about Mary was that she had a gun. A.32-caliber Taurus revolver with a checked wood grip. She’d shot targets and plunked varmints with it for years on her parents’ ranch. Brought it with her in her suitcase on the bus. The security people didn’t check bus luggage the way they checked suitcases for airline travel. Or if they had checked her suitcase, they hadn’t found the gun, rolled up in an old pair of Levi’s.

  The apartment was partially furnished, so moving in had been easy. She’d simply opened her suitcase and transferred her clothes to the dresser drawers in the tiny bedroom.

  The bedroom smelled better than the living room, so maybe the previous tenant hadn’t smoked in bed. The bed itself was a twin size, and the mattress was pretty saggy. She did always allow herself a good bed, so she would buy a better mattress and put this one in
the basement storage area that went with the apartment. Her mother had advised her that a good mattress and good shoes were of prime importance. She had a new pair of Nike joggers. The mattress and a few more pieces of furniture-a table, a lamp-were all she should need. Things she’d pick out and that would make the place uniquely hers.

  She slid her empty suitcase under the bed and then turned her attention to her big vinyl portfolio that held samples of her work. Mary was a graphic designer with a degree from Happer Design College in South Dakota. Her instructors had told her she was the most talented student they’d ever taught. They said as much in letters of recommendation. She realized that wouldn’t make getting a job in New York easy, but surely it should make it possible. She wasn’t looking for an easy time here. A chance was all she wanted.

  Back in the living room, she stood with her fists propped on her slender hips and looked around.

  What have you done, Mary Bakehouse?

  The walls were painted a mottled off-white, and the gray carpet was stained and frayed. What furniture there was appeared to be a flea market hodgepodge, but some of it, like the sturdy old matching bookcases that stood side by side against a living room wall, looked to be of pretty good quality. The bookcases held a small TV, an odd assortment of vases, and even a few old books without dust jackets. Mary thought she’d put some flowers in those vases, and maybe even read some of the books.

  This will work. It has to work!

  She switched the air conditioner in the living room window on low, thinking it would partially cool that room and the bedroom while she was away running errands. There were black ornamental iron bars on some of the windows, along with a U-shaped iron horizontal bar that held the air conditioner fast in its window so it couldn’t be removed except from inside the apartment. The windows that looked out over the small courtyard outside her bedroom didn’t have bars on them, probably because that was the way to the fire escape. Still, there were bars on enough of the windows that from the inside at least, the apartment had the aspect of a prison.

  Okay, Mary thought, the real estate people who’d warned her were probably right; it was a dangerous part of town in a dangerous city. But she wasn’t the shrinking innocent they seemed to assume. Mary figured her accent made her seem more naive than she was. She was twenty-five and had been away to college. She’d been around some.

  Right now, she needed some groceries, and a few things for the bathroom, such as toothpaste, soap, and shampoo. And that air freshener. When she was finished with shopping for those items and had put them away, she’d go out and see if she could find a place to buy an easel and some art supplies. That shouldn’t be hard to do in the Village. It was an artsy place.

  An artsy place with bars on the windows.

  Mary went into the L-shaped kitchen, gazed into the empty refrigerator, and decided to make a list.

  As she was turning around to go get her purse in the bedroom, she noticed the large blue ceramic canisters on the sink counter near the stove. They were lettered FLOUR, COFFEE, SUGAR, and so on. Mary liked them and might have chosen them herself.

  She was a tea drinker, so when she returned from the bedroom with her purse, she put her gun in the empty coffee canister.

  As she was going out the door, Mary glanced back and smiled. The apartment was nothing like the ones in those old Doris Day white-telephone movies. More like the apartments in Seinfeld, only shabbier. But it was already beginning to feel like home.

  This was going to work, Mary assured herself again, making sure the door was closed tight and locked behind her.

  Everything was going to be okay.

  5

  “You’re tearing open old wounds,” Rhonda Nathan’s mother said.

  Pearl thought the elderly woman might begin to cry, but the unblinking gray eyes remained calm behind what looked like cheap drugstore eyeglasses.

  The Nathans hadn’t been difficult to trace, but the effort had been time-consuming. When their twenty-five-year-old daughter, Rhonda, had been killed by the Carver seven years ago, they’d lived in a spacious condo in the East Fifties. Rhonda’s father, who’d been struck and killed by a bus three years ago, had been the family breadwinner with a partnership in a Wall Street firm. His widow, Edith Nathan, had fallen a long way to this cramped apartment on the Lower East Side.

  Pearl did feel sorry for the woman. Her thinning gray hair was unkempt, her complexion sallow. The flesh beneath her chin dangled in wattles, and her figure, if she’d ever had one, had become plump in a way that reminded Pearl of infants still in the crib. Breasts seemed nonexistent beneath her stained blue robe with its mismatched white sash.

  The woman’s eyes were fixed straight ahead. Her soul seemed to have wandered.

  “Edith?” Pearl said softly.

  The unnaturally calm gray eyes trained themselves on Pearl.

  “We don’t mean to cause pain,” Pearl said.

  “But you do cause pain,” Edith said. “Like a scab being ripped from a wounded heart that will never completely heal.”

  Pearl glanced around the humble apartment. Geraniums in plastic pots on a windowsill were obviously dead, as were roses in a cracked vase on top of the television. Live flowers in another pot in the middle of the kitchen table, barely visible to Pearl, saved the apartment’s plant life from being a sad metaphor. On a shelf that ran along a wall near a cabinet full of glass curios, a color photograph of a young dark-haired woman with a bright smile was propped in a silver frame. Pearl recognized Rhonda Nathan from her photos in the newspaper clippings of seven years ago that had been delivered by Chrissie Keller.

  “Like most of the families of the monster’s victims,” Edith said, “I long ago accepted the reality that my daughter and only child was gone from the world. Nothing will bring her back. Not fate or a prayer or a deal with God or the devil. Not you reopening the investigation. Would I trade my life for the monster’s death? Yes. Would I gladly kill him slowly in the most dreadful way? Yes. But not in the heat of vengeance. More in the balancing of scales.” Edith sighed and leaned back into the flowered sofa cushions. “There is a numbness in me, Detective Kasner. Has been for years. Not a depression. A numbness because something is missing.”

  Edith hadn’t looked closely at Pearl’s ID when Pearl had identified herself as a detective. It wasn’t ethical for Pearl to let the woman go on assuming she was with the NYPD, but Pearl was afraid the interview might not be granted otherwise.

  Seven years ago in June, Rhonda Nathan had worked late at the advertising agency where she wrote copy, alone in her office cubicle. Her body had been found there by the office cleaning service just before daylight the next morning. She was slouched dead in her desk chair, nude, her nipples removed, the grotesque and bloody X carved deeply into her torso beneath her breasts. Her panties had been removed and knotted into a gag, stuffed deeply in her mouth in such a way that leftover material allowed for a leg hole to be looped around her neck and knotted to hold the gag firm. It was a method that had to be the result of planning and practice. A pencil had been placed between the victim’s fingers, doubtless after death, as if she’d been taking notes throughout her torture and demise. A small thing, but it carried a jolting incongruity. It was one of several examples of a gruesome sense of humor that the Carver sometimes exhibited to the police at his crime scenes. A taunter, was the Carver. Not unusual in a serial killer who assumed he was much brighter than his pursuers.

  Pearl decided not to go into the details of Rhonda’s murder.

  “In the intervening years since���it happened,” she said, “have any new thoughts come to you, any recollections that might be of help? Even those that you might not think important?”

  “Such as?” Edith asked softly.

  “Anything that became clearer to you, or that you remembered about the week or so before the tragedy.”

  “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing. And I think about that time every night, and sometimes I dream.”

  “Do you
recall your daughter acting strangely-or simply out of character-in the time leading up to her death? Is there someone you can think of who could have had some disagreement with her? Someone who might have had a motive?”

  “Motive?” Edith seemed mystified and slightly angry. “My daughter was a girl well liked. I would say very well liked. Rhonda was slain by a deranged monster, Detective Kasner. It’s as simple and horrible as that.”

  “I think you’re right,” Pearl said, “but the monster doesn’t necessarily seem like one when he’s not being���himself. It’s possible you knew him at the time, or at least had met him.”

  “Rhonda had recently broken up with her boyfriend, Charles Correnwell. It would be difficult to see Charles as a killer. Anyway, he moved to live with his mother in California weeks before Rhonda was killed, and has an alibi.”

  Pearl knew that to be true. Charles Correnwell, on the other side of a continent, had attended a college lecture and was later drinking with friends at the approximate time of Rhonda’s murder.

  “Your husband���” Pearl began.

  Edith stared at her sharply. “He’s dead.”

  “I know, ma’am. I know the circumstances.”

  “We were both shattered by the loss of our daughter,” Edith said, “but I’m sure Aaron’s death was an accident. He wouldn’t leave me, leave the world, that way.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” Pearl said. “I was wondering if there might have been someone with an irrational motive to get at your husband by murdering his daughter.”

  “I’m sure there was no one that sick among our social or business acquaintances.”

  Pearl said nothing, and she and Edith exchanged glances. They’d established that monsters didn’t always seem like monsters.

  “Someone with protective coloring, you mean?” Edith said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Edith shrugged beneath the blue robe. “I’d have no way of knowing, would I?”