Текст книги "Frenzy"

Автор книги: John Lutz

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

22

Nift, the obnoxious little ME, was on the job, bent so low that Quinn could see a bald spot on the top of his head. He looked as if he wanted to climb inside the dead woman on the bed.

Quinn, with Pearl at his side, looked beyond Nift to where Harley Renz stood with his fists on his broad hips, watching. He looked pissed off, as if he knew the dead woman, but Quinn figured the real source of Renz’s anger was that the D.O.A. killer had taken another victim in his city. With Renz, that was personal, as was everything that posed a threat to his political life.

Quinn stepped closer to the bed and saw the familiar initials carved neatly into the victim’s forehead. Nift had removed the wadded gag from her mouth, and her jaws gaped wide. Even with such a grotesque expression, it was obvious that the woman had been attractive.

“Hi, Pearl,” Nift said, without seeming to notice Quinn.

Pearl didn’t seem to notice Nift.

“Play well with others,” Renz said.

All three of them ignored Renz.

Quinn moved forward, giving Nift a look he hoped would be a warning. He looked at the cuts, punctures, and burn marks on the naked corpse, heard in his heart the terrible silent scream of her gaping mouth.

“Same kind of injuries as with the Fairchild Hotel victims,” Nift said. “No doubt we’ve got a D.O.A. victim here.”

“Sure it’s not the work of a copycat?” Renz asked.

The little ME seemed to swell. “I know my business, Commissioner.”

Renz looked as if he might be about to lean into Nift. This wasn’t the way an ME talked to a commissioner, especially one who had definite if distant ideas about the office of mayor.

Quinn shook his head slightly when Renz looked at him. There was no point in getting angry with Nift. That’s how the little bastard got his jollies, getting under people’s skin.

“What’s with the catalogs?” Quinn asked, seeing colorful art catalogs spread all over the floor. Some of them had blood on their pages.

“The victim was an art restorer,” Renz said. “Worked at museums and galleries. Doing restoration work at the Kadner Gallery down in SoHo. Looks like she was also an art connoisseur.”

“Or our killer’s the connoisseur. He seems partial to museums and the women who frequent them.”

Quinn leaned low and read one of the subscription labels on the magazines. “Jeanine Carson?”

“That’s her,” Renz said.

“Was, anyway,” Pearl said.

“They could have both been,” Quinn said.

“What,” Renz said.

“Art connoisseurs.”

Renz said, “There’s a question mark in blood on the bathroom mirror.”

“No surprise there,” Quinn said. “He’s taunting. Saying, ‘come on, play harder!’ He’s pretending to be bored.”

In the corner of his vision, he saw Nift’s hand run gently over one of the dead woman’s breasts, pausing at the nipple. It made Quinn think of all those whispered stories about necrophilia that were considered NYPD myth. Nift didn’t look so mythical to Quinn.

“Shame to kill a woman with a rack like this,” Nift said, glancing at Pearl.

“Shame not to kill an asshole with a mind like yours,” Pearl said.

Quinn sighed. He was relieved to see Renz smiling rather than angry.

“Let’s talk out in the hall,” he said. “Let the ME do his job.”

“If we can trust leaving the victim alone with him,” Pearl said.

“Enough of that kinda talk,” Renz said. “It’s nasty.”

“What if it’s true?”

“Even nastier.” He led the way out of the bedroom, down the hall, through the living room crowded with CSU techs, and out into the hall.

They moved down about fifty feet so the uniform guarding the apartment door wouldn’t overhear them.

“Who found the body?” Quinn asked.

“Super, name of Fred Charleston. He had an appointment to repair a dripping shower head. When he knocked and didn’t get an answer, he figured the tenant had left for work. He let himself in with his key, found what you saw, and said he backed out of there and called the police. Uniforms got his statement, if you want to see it and talk to him.”

“I’ll read it and get to him later.”

“He’s no good for this,” Renz said. “Was up arguing with his wife until late into the night, well past when the victim died. Got up early and went to the diner down the street for breakfast, stayed there until after the time of death.”

“It happens at that diner,” Quinn said.

Renz didn’t get the joke. That was okay with Quinn. It bothered him when the commissioner came across as having a sense of humor.

“I’ll go talk to Fred the super if you want,” Pearl said.

Quinn nodded. “Good idea.”

“Keep an eye on Jeanine with Nift,” Pearl said.

Renz said, “Jesus, Pearl! The man’s an employee of the city, just like I am. Let up on him.”

“Nift will soon have her all to himself in the morgue, anyway,” Quinn said. “She’s beyond caring about anything he can do to her.”

That seemed to mollify Pearl, in a smoldering-fuse kind of way.

23

London, 1940

She would ship it by sea, to a place Henry Tucker would think suitable.

Betsy Douglass had spent much of the early morning locating a sturdy wooden shipping box that would contain Tucker’s backpack. Finally she found one in the basement, where she had stored some blankets. She emptied the wooden crate and placed the backpack snugly inside.

She held the definite impression that the object it contained was real and valuable. Why else would it be the center of so much danger and concern? Whatever it was, it deserved her care. She owed that to Henry, whom she missed more every day.

She had assumed that when someone you loved died—and she realized she did love Henry—that the ache of parting would gradually become more dulled. Hers had sharpened by the hour and sometimes felt as if it cleaved her heart.

Inside the box containing the backpack, she laid the addressed instructional letter Henry had left. It was undeliverable, and probably its intended recipient, M. Gundelheimer, was dead. Most of the people on that heavily bombed block had died or were still missing, buried beneath the rubble.

Alongside the letter that had come in the backpack was another letter, this one written by Betsy to her sister, Willa Kingdom, and Willa’s husband, Mark.

Mark had lost an arm when the merchant ship he was serving on had been torpedoed by a German submarine and sank in the Atlantic. He’d been one of only a few lucky survivors. Now he and his wife, Willa, were leaving England to settle in Ohio in the USA. Betsy wanted the box shipped to America so it would be waiting for them at their Ohio address when they arrived.

She found hammer and nails in the basement and nailed the box tightly shut so it would make its Atlantic journey without breaking open. Of course, there was always the chance of yet another U-boat attack. Betsy sighed, making a sound like a hushed breeze in the dim, silent basement. Life of late had become dangerous at every corner.

It wouldn’t feel so perilous if Henry had lived. If only he and she had . . .

She turned away from that kind of speculation. From torturing herself. She wasn’t the only one suffering because of the war. Now and again, like so many others, she had to remind herself of that fact.

Betsy found the two-wheeled wire cart she used to transport groceries, took it up to sidewalk level, then dragged the wooden box up after it.

She was breathing hard from the effort, and her legs were trembling. Barrage blimps that sagged and looked partly deflated were visible beyond the end of the block, trailing what from this distance looked like slender cables.

The morning was quiet except for the steady, distant hum of traffic. A siren wailed forlornly from the direction of the hospital, where she would soon be helping to tend to the wounded, and comforting the dying.

She managed to lay the rectangular wooden box sideways across the top of the wire basket. Avoiding pits and cracks in the paved sidewalk, she began rolling the cart with surprising ease.

Here was something, at least, that was easier than she’d anticipated.

There was a fine morning mist in the air that smelled vaguely of charred wood, and something Betsy didn’t want to dwell on.

She opened her mouth slightly and pulled in deep breaths of the air for whatever clean oxygen it contained. Now and then someone on the street—usually a man—would pause and look and seem to contemplate helping her. She shook her head to refuse them, and they went on about their business. A few of them gave her approving smiles. She continued on her way to ship her wooden box, knowing that Henry Tucker, if he were alive, would appreciate her faith and tenacity.

And love.

Only a few hours later Betsy reported for duty at the hospital. The shipping of the backpack and its contents seemed in a sad way to have severed all of her ties with Henry Tucker. At the same time, it freed her from some of her grief. If he could rest easy in his grave, then, when the time came, so would she.

How very often she thought about death in this war.

What had being so close to it, day after day, done to her?

It was almost 1:00 A.M. when Betsy stumbled, exhausted, up to her apartment and undressed for bed. She removed her nurse’s uniform and put it in the washstand in cold water with soap. Tomorrow morning, before leaving for the hospital, she would hand wring the uniform, then hang it up to dry.

She took off her slip, then her garter belt and white cloth stockings. Her knickers and the stockings she wadded and tossed so they landed near the washstand. She would retrieve them tomorrow and let them soak while she was on duty at the hospital in her second uniform.

Wearing only her nightgown and padded slippers, she ran enough water from the tap to capture in her palm and used it to wash down one of several white pills she’d brought home from the hospital. She didn’t so much need the pills to help her get to sleep, but they aided sometimes in preventing the dreams from invading her slumber. Without them, she might experience some of the horrors of the day again, and wake up sweating and shivering. Afraid. So afraid . . .

The physical effort of what she had done today, starting so early in the morning, had taken its toll. As had being with men in various stages of their dying. She had tried desperately to be offhand and make them smile. Sometimes she’d been successful. But all the time she knew they would be leaving her as had Henry Tucker, changing for their survivors the world in which they’d lived.

For too long Betsy had suffered a lonely and miserable existence without Henry. Without understanding. Without love.

England was fighting for its survival, and there was no time for romance, but that’s when the most irresistible kind of romance found a way.

To be on the safe side, Betsy swallowed a second pill.

After making sure the blackout curtains were secure, she dropped backward onto the bed as if launching herself sightless into a dark abyss.

She so welcomed the escape of sleep.

Only a few minutes after lying down, she heard air raid sirens. The raids were occurring more and more often, almost becoming routine. Unless you happened to be in the target zone. Then nothing routine might happen ever again.

Fate. That was all it was about. Good luck or bad.

Betsy knew she should wake up all the way. Go to the building’s lower level, or to the underground stop a block away. But she didn’t want to be in the crowded train tunnel, or alone in the musty basement, or share her terror with old Colonel Tattersilk from upstairs who, when they were sheltered, seemed to be hoping for loud near misses so he had an excuse to hug her close in the night.

She didn’t want to get up. She was so, so tired . . . Exhaustion was an antidote for fear. That and the mind-numbing regularity and frequency of the air raids. The waves of German bombers, with smaller fighter planes sometimes flying escort. More and more often they were engaged by RAF fighters, leaving twisting, turning white contrails hanging like indecipherable messages in the sky.

Betsy lay motionless in the darkness, waiting for tonight’s crisis to pass. Maybe the Luftwaffe wouldn’t visit England tonight. Even Germans had to rest.

After a while the air raid sirens seemed to be fading. Sleep was about to claim her, and she was willing.

Betsy might have been dreaming the throbbing hum of the marauding German aircraft. Dreams and reality were becoming almost interchangeable.

It sounded as if there were a lot of planes, but they were well off in the distance, to the south, perhaps still out over the channel.

Too far away to care about. So spent was Betsy that she decided to ignore the German bombers. Britain was winning the war in the air. Churchill had said so just yesterday. The raids were becoming less frequent, and the odds that bombs would fall where she was were slim.

She slipped back into sleep, and didn’t awaken even when aircraft engines pounded directly overhead.

She never woke up.

24

New York, the present

Building super Fred Charleston and his wife, Serri, sat side by side on the sofa, trying not to look frightened. That wasn’t easy, with the big cop and the busty beauty with the intense dark eyes sitting in chairs opposite them.

They were in the super’s cramped apartment on the first floor. The big cop, Frank Quinn, was slouched in the chair where Serri usually sat, reading her papers or watching TV and bitching about how badly the world was being run. The Middle East, especially, concerned her.

Charleston was a stocky, fidgety man in his forties, with unruly black hair and a face made to look pinched by an oversized nose that left him little upper lip. He wore a gray outfit that was more or less his super’s uniform. His wife, Serri, was also in her forties. She had blond hair that was lighter than her eyebrows. She would have been attractive were it not for an air about her, as if she minute by minute detected a different suspicious odor.

“So you figure you and Serri began this big argument about seven thirty?” Quinn said to Fred Charleston. Cops’ eyes, neutral yet at the same time unnerving, bore into Charleston.

“I know it was around seven thirty,” the super said. “Serri was upset about poison gas in the Middle East, and it got so I couldn’t finish my dinner, which we always start to eat at seven on the dot.”

“Why is that?” Pearl asked.

“So the tenants know,” Serri said. “That way they won’t be pestering Fred and me during our dinner. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit they pull.”

“But last night, you pestered him. Or so he says.”

“No, I can become a pest, I know. And a loud one. But sometimes you gotta stand up for yourself.”

“That’s for sure,” Pearl said, flashing looks at Quinn and Fred, becoming Serri’s friend and ally in the war of the sexes.

“It ain’t like you’re an expert on the Middle East,” Fred Charleston said to his wife. He glanced toward the kitchen. “Now, poison gas, maybe.”

“See the crap I gotta put up with?”

“Yes,” Pearl said.

Fred gave Pearl a surprised look. The big cop wasn’t going to get involved. He looked neutral as the Supreme Court. Fred was being ganged up on here. He said, “We’ll be helpful as we can.”

“You don’t have to be an expert to see what’s wrong over there,” Serri said, looking at Quinn, then at Pearl. “And I figure what Fred and I say to each other’s private anyway. None of the neighbors’ business.”

“True enough,” Quinn said, “but you can count yourself lucky some of those neighbors were eavesdropping last night, and you two were giving them a show at the same time Jeanine Carson was being killed. Of course, the time’s not nailed down. Stories change. The investigation is fluid.”

“Fluid? You mean just because I found Jeanine’s body means I might have murdered the poor woman?” Charleston asked. He seemed astounded. Serri didn’t.

“Might, sure,” Quinn said. “Going into an investigation, we suspect everybody. Starting with the last person to see the victim alive, and the first to see her dead.”

“Like on TV.”

“We like it when it ends like on TV, too,” Quinn said. “All wrapped up tight and tidy for a commercial.”

“Seems to me the first person to see a victim dead would be the killer,” Fred said. He had a nasty, almost invisible little grin. Quinn was beginning to dislike him a lot.

He wasn’t the only one. Pearl looked peeved.

“Don’t get all smart with us,” Pearl said. “Alibis were made to be broken.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Serri asked.

Wrong way to go, Pearl thought, remembering how, in domestic cases, the partners often wound up siding with each other against the investigating officer.

“It’s just something we say.”

“Fact is,” Quinn said, “most of the tenants don’t recall hearing the fracas between you and your wife.” He didn’t mention that the tenants on either side of the super’s apartment did hear it. Quinn fishing.

Fred rose like a gullible guppy to the bait. His features reddened—a man with a temper. “These old walls are about two feet thick. That’s one of the reasons folks rent here. Neighbors don’t tend to overhear each other’s conversations in this building.”

“There’s always the vents to carry sound,” Serri said. Nipping at her husband. She leaned slightly forward when she spoke, and projected a tireless tenacity.

Quinn was beginning to side with Fred, even though he disliked the man. Maybe because he disliked the wife more. Pearl was secretly grinning at him.

“Wouldn’t know about vents,” Fred said, in control of himself now, if not his wife. “I work mostly on the plumbing.”

“Which is how you discovered the body,” Pearl said.

“Roy Culver, who lives in the apartment above Jeanine Carson’s, had a leaky toilet where the bowl went into the stack and needed it looked at. He knew I was gonna go into his apartment this morning—you can ask him.”

“Did,” Pearl said.

“Looked like water from the bowl was gonna run down into Jeanine’s bathroom, right underneath, and it had to be stopped right away or there’d have been a lotta damage.”

“Culver called you last night, but you waited till this morning to tend to the plumbing.”

“Had no idea as to the seriousness of it until I actually looked at it and learned the stack was involved. That’s when I knew I had to talk to Jeanine, and fast. Get her permission to do some work in her apartment. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t let myself into her place on my own, nor anybody else’s, but you know how much destruction water can do.”

“We do,” Quinn said. “And the neighbors did hear you arguing almost nonstop till about midnight.”

“That’s when the wife got tired,” Fred said.

Pearl glanced at the seething energy that was the wife. It was hard to believe she was ever tired.

“Is it possible,” Quinn said, “that the neighbors heard the victim and killer arguing and assumed it was you and your wife?”

The super was silent for a long time. “I guess it is,” he finally said. “But truthfully, it ain’t in the least likely.”

“Hmph,” Quinn said, nodding thoughtfully.

All of a sudden nobody had anything to say.

“I’ve gotta agree that the Middle East is a bitch,” Pearl put in, looking at Serri. It was odd how, even with her blond hair and blue eyes, Serri Charleston possessed a vaguely Middle Eastern countenance. Or maybe Mayan. Strange . . . Like two components that didn’t mix. “Your maiden name—” Pearl began to ask.

“O’Reilly,” Serri said.

“She might be half Irish, but she’s knowledgeable on the Middle East,” Fred said. “Television, newspapers and all. Serri thinks all those explosives used on innocent people is a crime.”

“I guess she’s right,” Quinn said.

“Acts of war,” Serri said. “All that military hardware being used over there.”

“You’re not an expert on munitions,” her husband told her.

“I know a war when I see one. And don’t tell me I don’t know munitions.”

Quinn was beginning to get weary of the problem with the Charlestons’ marriage. It was a dogfight not to join. He and Pearl didn’t want to get embroiled in a politically charged discussion.

“I guess war is war,” Pearl added. Nothing like a little overarching, meaningless philosophy to throw a blanket on things.

“It’s what happened in Jeanine Carson’s apartment last night that interests us,” Quinn said.

“The neighbors would recognize our voices,” Fred said, having given the overheard argument scenario more thought. “We both have real distinctive voices.”

Which was true.

Serri Charleston said, “We’re alibied up,” “Hmph,” Quinn said. “You do watch a lot of television.”

“Including the military channel.” Serri, not letting up.

“That might be what the neighbors were hearing coming from your apartment last night.”

“They were hearing the real thing,” Serri said. “And it don’t look like me or Fred shot at each other. And I never noticed any tank tread marks on the carpet.”

“But then you weren’t looking for them,” Quinn said.

“Actually,” Pearl said to both Fred and Serri, “we’re more curious about what you might have seen or heard than about whether you have alibis.”

“We told the cops in uniform about where we were and what we done and how it came to pass that I found poor Jeanine Carson’s dead body,” Fred said. He swallowed hard and seemed suddenly in danger of vomiting. Then he appeared to have fought back the impulse. “All that blood and . . . the rest of it. That ain’t a sight I’ll soon forget.”

“We know how it is,” Quinn said softly.

“I don’t see how the two of you stand it,” Fred said. “The business you’re in.”

Quinn ignored the comment. “There’s a lot of art on the victim’s apartment walls,” Quinn said. “She ever talk to you about it?”

“No. She was into art. Some kind of art repairer for the museums is what I gathered.”

“An artsy type,” Serri said. “Liked to think so, anyway. Had a thing about French painters. At least that was my impression.”

Quinn stared steadily at her. Her expression was blank. Being with Serri was something like being with Harold.

Fred Charleston had turned pale and was making a visible effort to breathe evenly. Concentrating. Trying to get his memory out of that bloody apartment, away from the dead woman. Not paying the slightest attention to what his wife was saying. He’d pay for his lack of attention later.

Quinn decided the super couldn’t be faking it. Vomiting would certainly add to his credibility, but Quinn had learned how to read people like Fred, and figured the henpecked super had never killed anyone. Quinn didn’t need to see any real regurgitation to be convinced.

The queasy super’s story seemed simple and honest enough. Quinn thanked him and his wife and stood up, letting them know the interview was over. Pearl left a card on the coffee table, snapping it down as if it were a high card out of a deck, and said, “Call us anytime.”

Fred stayed seated, still obviously upset by walking in on a butchered woman who had been a tenant and at least something of a friend. An artsy friend at that.

“Thanks both of you for your help,” Quinn said. He meant it; he had seen a lot of what it was like when someone’s life intersected suddenly and bloodily with the dead.

Serri stood, tucked the card in a pocket, and escorted them to the door.

“It’s jarring to discover a dead body,” Pearl said. “Especially when it’s a murder victim. Sometimes a session with a professional counselor can help. Jeanine Carson’s death seems to have hit your husband hard.”

“Like a rocket-propelled grenade,” Serri Charleston said. Still in the Middle East.

“Those things make a lot of noise, cover up a lot of other noises,” Quinn said.

Leaving her to wonder.