Chill of Night n-6 Page 3

  Feeling a relief that surprised him, he saw that his hand, that had so recently held the gun and was now wet from the rain, was trembling. He crossed the street to a diner and had a tuna melt and french fries for supper.

  The next day, he checked out of the hotel and returned home to St. Louis to watch his wife continue her ever deepening spiral into depression.

  6

  The present, New York

  Bev Baker was forty-eight but looked thirty-eight. She stood nude before the steam-fogged full-length mirror in the bathroom and watched the exhaust fan clear the reflecting glass to reveal a woman still wet from her shower. Her breasts were lower than a girl’s but still full, and what Lenny Rodman, in that way of his, had just called bouncily bountiful. Her long legs were still curvaceous, her hips and thighs slim, her abdominal muscles taut from daily workouts. Her auburn hair was wet and tousled. Her smile was wicked.

  Aging nicely and not a bad package, she decided, and one Lenny certainly appreciated, which is what made her appreciate Lenny.

  Lenny was in the bedroom on the other side of the door. Bev figured he was still lying back in bed, smoking a cigarette, even though it was a no-smoking room. Lenny didn’t like obeying rules, which was part of what had led him to the midtown Manhattan hotel room for sex in the afternoon with Bev. The other part was Bev.

  It wasn’t the first time they’d enjoyed an afternoon assignation. Three months ago Lenny, thirtyish and handsome as a soap actor, had come into Light and Shade Lamp and Fixture Emporium and asked to see the buyer, who was Bev, who was also head of the sales department. She’d had an argument with her husband, Floyd, that morning, and was still smarting from some of the insults he’d sent her way. In retrospect, she knew that was what had made her vulnerable to Lenny, who could spot a broken wing like a hawk.

  Floyd was almost fifteen years older than she was, and his increasing absence from home and her bed, his constant whining about his heart condition, were symptoms of what Bev knew was a failing marriage. It was why she insisted on continuing working, though Floyd was retired now, with a decent pension and Social Security, and they could get by comfortably if she stayed home. But Bev didn’t want to stay home, cooped up in a one-bedroom New York apartment-not with Floyd. They both understood that was the reason she continued to work. Floyd had become disinterested except for when he wanted to be verbally abusive. But he wasn’t dumb. He knew as well as she did that their marriage was headed for a train wreck.

  Bev could be insulted only so much, and ignored only so long. What happened with Lenny seemed so natural, she wasn’t sure if he’d seduced her or vice versa. She’d listened carefully to what he had to sell that day, in her office right off the display floor. He was handsome in a smooth way, with lazy eyes and an easy smile, and full of bullshit from the get-go. It seemed he’d made a deal to purchase hundreds of obsolete fire extinguishers, which he’d had made into “novelty lamps.” He was now trying to market them discount because of increasing demand and decreasing storage space, due to a rental dispute.

  Bev could be a charmer herself. Never bullshit a bullshitter, she told Lenny, but in a nice way, not using those exact terms. He got the message, and with his sexy grin admitted he was stuck with a warehouse full of fire extinguisher lamps and needed to sell them cheap or he’d have to give them away.

  “Have you always been in the lamp business?” Bev asked.

  He settled back in his chair and crossed his legs real cool-like, the drape of his gray slacks saying they were well tailored. Lenny knew how to dress the part. Something Bev liked in a man. Some of the stuff Floyd had been wearing lately looked like it came from a retirement home fire sale. And if she told him about it…well, never mind.

  “Before this I was in the coffee table business,” Lenny said. “I made this deal with a cemetery near the Hudson that was being moved. They weren’t going to reuse the damaged marble slabs that rested on top of the coffins.”

  “Why on top?” Bev asked.

  “That’s to keep the coffins from rising to the surface when the water table gets higher during the wet seasons. Good, beautifully veined marble. So I bought them, ground and polished them, and put some fancy legs on them for coffee tables.”

  “How’d they sell?”

  Lenny smiled. “What would look good on them would be those fire extinguisher lamps.”

  “The ones I’m going to buy?”

  “You serious?”

  She glanced at her watch. “You want to go to lunch, we’ll talk price.”

  His hooded gaze traveled over her body, lingering on her breasts. She was sitting behind her desk, and she knew he was wondering what her legs were like. He wouldn’t be disappointed. Legs, I got.

  “I’m picking up the check,” she said. “Company business.”

  “Then I can’t say no.”

  “I know the feeling,” she said.

  That fateful lunch had been three months ago. The fire extinguisher lamps still sat in the showroom, unsold. If anyone else had been head of sales, they would have been priced down and out or junked.

  “You die in there?” Lenny called, from the other side of the bathroom door.

  “No, out there, with you.”

  Bev didn’t bother with a towel as she opened the door and went into the bedroom to let Lenny see what she’d been looking at in the mirror. She got the result she expected.

  “C’mon back to bed with me,” Lenny said, snuffing out his cigarette in a room service glass he was using as an ashtray.

  “It’s almost two o’clock, Lenny. I’ve gotta get back to work.” Bev moved toward where her clothes were folded on the chair near the bed. Too near. His hand closed gently but firmly around her wrist. She pretended to struggle but didn’t really pull away. “I just took a shower, Lenny.”

  “You took one, you can take another in no time. You’re already undressed for one.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think a shower’s what you have in mind.”

  He pulled her toward the bed. “Mind reader, you.”

  At twenty after three they left the hotel together. It was one of the big chain hotels, the lobby was crowded, and it was midday in Midtown. No one paid much attention to them.

  Out on the sidewalk, after the dim room with its closed drapes, it seemed unusually bright and sunny. While the doorman was standing with one foot on the curb and the other in the street, trying to hail a cab, Lenny kissed Bev on the cheek. “Gonna ride back to work?”

  “No. It’s a nice day. I’ll walk.” A cab veered toward the curb and the doorman stepped out of the way, then opened a back door.

  “I thought you were late.”

  “I am. I’m also sales manager.”

  Lenny grinned as he lowered himself into the cab, simultaneously tipping the doorman. “Must be nice being boss,” he said.

  “It sure is some days, around noon.”

  She watched the cab pull out into heavy Midtown traffic. Lenny lifted a hand, so a wave went with his grin.

  Bev began striding along Fifty-first Street, a tall, attractive woman, well dressed but with her hair, fluffy from the hotel drier, mussed by the breeze as soon as she crossed the intersection. She drew appreciative stares, even a honking horn that might have been for her. She might be married to Floyd, but she wasn’t a fossil like Floyd. Not yet by a long shot.

  Halfway back to Light and Shade, she got the feeling she’d been getting too often lately. It was a prickly uneasiness, like a slight pressure on the back of her neck, and sometimes when she turned around it was as if there might have been someone there if she’d only turned faster. Once, when Floyd was out of town with his golf buddies, and she’d come home from work exhausted and kicked off her high heels and fallen into a leather armchair, she could have sworn the cushion was still warm, as if somebody had been sitting there and left only minutes before she arrived. It was creepy, and she had an idea what it might be.

  Floyd suspected something and had hired someone to investigate h
er. A detective.

  Bev almost grinned at the thought. If Floyd wanted a divorce, he could have one. They had an iron-clad pre-nup, so there was no logical reason he should hire a detective other than to satisfy his curiosity. No monetary reason, anyway.

  Of course, there were other reasons and other kinds of satisfaction. Floyd didn’t get it up very often these days, but he still had an active mind.

  Hell with it.

  Bev crossed the intersection against the light, taking her time even though traffic up the block was bearing down on her. If anyone honked she’d give him the finger. That was the kind of mood she was in.

  But no one honked.

  7

  Even though he’d taken a pill, Beam didn’t sleep well.

  His dreams were a jumble of images. Lani leaping without hesitation from a balcony high in the night, da Vinci smiling at him and holding out a badge, swastikas, pale stone buildings with columns, people lying dead with red letter Js on them, da Vinci again, still smiling, pointing at something on the sidewalk, something that had fallen.

  He awoke after a dream of waking and finding someone had taped red ribbons all over the room. Ribbons in bows, in loops, simple strands of ribbons.

  When he sat up and switched on the lamp, he almost expected to find them.

  But it was his bedroom as usual. Their bedroom. He remained sitting up in bed, wondering what dark specter of the mind had plucked his wife from the balcony. Witnesses had said she’d put down her drink at the charity function cocktail party she was attending, then walked calmly and resolutely out to the twenty-fourth-floor balcony. She’d been alone out there, and apparently she’d simply let herself fall over the railing into space. The railing had been higher than her waist, so it couldn’t have been an accident. Something like that, something so…monstrous and profound, what had moved her to do it?

  Beam had been sure things had changed between them, but was that true? Had it been more that things had finally come to a head? Had it been the death of their only child, so long ago? Had all the years of doubt and wondering that any cop’s wife endures finally taken its toll?

  The fact was, when people committed suicide without leaving notes, they left agonizing, unfinished business behind. Questions that would never be answered. Guilt that might never be firmly affixed. Their survivors had to learn to live with uncertainty, and get used to being haunted.

  Uncertainty was something that had always bothered Beam. Lani had known that about him, yet she’d chosen her anonymous and eternally mysterious death.

  Or might it have been an accident? Somehow…

  He knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Light brighter than the lamp was beginning to show around the edges of the closed drapes. Glancing at the clock radio by the bed, he saw that it was quarter to five. Morning enough, he thought, swiveling on the mattress so he could stand up. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, still lean and strong but with undeniably more fat collecting around his waist, musculature still there, but now that of a fifty-three-year-old man. There on his right thigh was the scar where the bullet had been removed, a pink-edged pucker about two inches in diameter. He ran a hand through his mussed gray hair and looked away from his image. Getting older fast.

  Well, at the same speed as everyone else. Some solace.

  Usually he showered and shaved, then walked to the diner where he had breakfast. The walk was part of his physical therapy to regain at least some of the wind and endurance he’d lost to his injury. He experienced normal stiffness and joint aches at first when he climbed out of bed-he hadn’t been easy on his body over the years-but nothing connected to the gunshot wound actually hurt anymore. And he knew he should be pleased; his endurance had improved considerably. But it was only months since Lani’s death, and to Beam she was still beside him, still in his dreams and his life awake. He knew she would be for some time to come.

  Retirement might have been a good thing if Lani were still alive, but now retirement was like a disease. That was one of the main reasons Beam had accepted da Vinci’s offer to take over the serial killer investigation. Beam desperately, desperately, needed something to do, needed to be useful, needed something to displace his grief, at least temporarily.

  When he was showered and dressed, he looked out the window and saw that a light rain was falling.

  Instead of walking, he decided to elevator to the building’s garage and take his car.

  The rain had stopped by the time Beam finished breakfast. He was paying at the register, when he glanced out the Chow Down’s window and saw da Vinci standing with his arms crossed and staring at Beam’s parked, gracefully aging black Lincoln.

  “How come you drive a behemoth like that in New York?” he asked, when Beam emerged from the diner.

  “I drove it this morning to keep the rain off me.”

  “You managed to find a space right in front. I half expected to see an NYPD placard on your dash.”

  The air smelled fresh from the recent rain. The street and sidewalks were still wet. A few of the cars and cabs swishing past still had their wipers working.

  “I figured you’d come around again,” Beam said.

  “Of course. Want to go back in for some coffee and conversation?”

  “Let’s drive and talk,” Beam said, and stepped off the curb to get behind the wheel of the Lincoln. He and Lani had bought the car new ten years ago, with money she’d inherited from her wealthy family in Philadelphia. Lani had been rich with her own money when Beam married her. That bothered a few of his fellow cops, but the circles her wealth allowed them to travel in had been useful to Beam. He could talk to people otherwise inaccessible without a warrant.

  As soon as he pressed the button on his key fob, the doors unlocked and da Vinci was climbing into the other side of the car. Beam settled into the plush leather seat and fastened his safety belt. As he started the engine, the car began to chime, and he noticed da Vinci wasn’t using his seat belt.

  “You forgot to buckle up,” Beam said.

  “Never do.”

  “Shame on you.” Beam pulled out into traffic. The warning chime finally stopped. “We making progress?”

  “Computer guy will be at your place tomorrow afternoon. He’ll make sure you’re plugged into the department network,” da Vinci said.

  “He didn’t say ‘plugged into’ I bet.”

  “I didn’t talk to him personally, but you’re probably right. They think in terms of ports. The thing is, we don’t want there to be any glitches.”

  “We don’t,” Beam agreed, swooping the big car around a corner to beat a traffic signal.

  “This old boat’s amazing,” da Vinci said. “You don’t even feel the potholes.”

  “It’s like new. We didn’t drive it much. I mostly drive it now to keep up the battery.”

  “Anybody ever mistake it for a limo?”

  “Sometimes. When I tailed or staked out suspects, I wore my eight-point uniform cap and they thought I was a chauffeur.”

  “I never asked you,” da Vinci said, “do you happen to be Jewish?”

  “My father was. My mother wasn’t.”

  “Was your father of the faith? Wear a yarmulke, all that stuff?”

  “He went to synagogue for a while, then he drifted away from religion. I asked him why once, and he said he’d lost his faith in Korea, and it took him a while to realize it.”

  “He was a cop, wasn’t he?”

  “Sergeant, Brooklyn South.”

  “Didn’t he-”

  “He ate his gun,” Beam said. Didn’t leave a note.

  “Shit deal. Korea? The job?”

  Beam knew what da Vinci was thinking, that people close to Beam tended to commit suicide, as if he carried an infection.

  “That when you joined the department?” da Vinci asked.

  “You know all these answers,” Beam said.

  Da Vinci smiled. “I guess I know most of them.”

  “I dropped out of college an
d joined the Army, became an MP, then applied at the NYPD when I got out.”

  “Because of your father?”

  “I’m not sure. It seemed the natural thing to do.”

  They drove without talking for a while, the big sedan seeming to levitate over bumps.

  “I’m giving you Corey and Looper,” da Vinci said.

  “What’s a Corey and Looper?”

  “Detectives, and good ones. Looper’s early fifties, gone far as he’s gonna get in the department and knows it. He’s a good cop, but he’s burned his bridges behind him, far as promotion’s concerned.”

  “What’s his flaw?”

  “Too honest. Nobody trusts him.”

  “And Corey?”

  “Nell Corey. Coming off a nasty divorce. Hubby used to bounce her around. Woman’s got her faults.”

  “She’s a foul-up?”

  “More a don’t-give-a-damn type. Mind of her own. But only sometimes. Then there was that business with the knife?”

  “She stabbed her husband?”

  “Not that I know of. A security tape outside a convenience store in Queens caught her beating up a suspect with unnecessary force. What the tape didn’t catch was that during the struggle the suspect pulled a knife, which was later picked up by one of several onlookers.”

  “It’s happened before,” Beam said.

  “Probably happened that time, too. But since the knife never turned up, it doesn’t officially exist. At base, Corey’s a solid cop, and a talented detective. Trouble is, without that knife, she’s permanently screwed. And knows it.”

  Beam neatly swerved left and squeezed the Lincoln through a space between a van being unloaded and some trash piled at the curb. It was tight enough to make da Vinci wince.

  “Andy,” Beam said, “is there somebody in the department who doesn’t want this endeavor to succeed?”