John Lutz Bundle (141 page)

The morning sunlight’s warmth on his bare right arm woke Quinn. Something about the way it angled through the window made the flesh it contacted feel as if it might burst into flame. It was almost enough to take his mind off his terrific headache.

He didn’t open his eyes, but right away he knew where he was, on the floor of the Seventy-ninth Street office. He wasn’t exactly sure how he’d gotten there.

He lay motionless, curled on the hard, cool linoleum, or sheet goods, or whatever it was being called these days. Recollection came slowly, and then in a rush. He remembered unlocking and opening the office door late last night—early morning, actually, but a long way from daybreak. As soon as he’d stepped inside, even before he’d had a chance to flip the wall switch, something, some
one
, had slammed into him. There’d been a brief, confused struggle; he’d managed to crawl away from it, and then…

His headache flared as if to remind him that he’d been struck just above his left temple.

Beeker.
He realized he’d been thinking about Dr. Alfred Beeker as he’d lost consciousness, and something about a giant bird.

The stuff dreams are made of.

Quinn gradually opened his eyes to the bright morning light.
Ouch!
His eyelids seemed to be dragging themselves across sandpaper. And the light was blinding.

Almost blinding.

Through the brilliance and swirling dust motes he could make out the form of a woman standing in the office’s half bath with the door open. Washing her hands? No, not that. She was standing at the washbasin though, leaning forward so she could stare at herself in the mirror. In the blinding light and through his aching eyes she might have been an apparition. Like the bird. Was he still unconscious? Still dreaming? Had the blow to his head damaged his brain?

As he watched, the woman raised her hand to her right ear. She jerked her head quickly to the left, almost like a bird when something’s caught its attention, and began toying with the ear, straining as if to examine it or look behind it.

Pearl!

“Pearl?” he said in a hoarse voice.

He heard her sharp inhalation as she jumped and backed away from the mirror. She stepped out of the half-bath and looked around. “Who’s here?”

“Me. Quinn.”

She looked all around her, then down at Quinn lying on the floor near one of the desks.

“You scared the holy hell out of me,” she said.

“Sorry.”

She squinted at him, then came toward him with a kind of broken gait, as if restrained by caution and curiosity. “You okay? What’re you doing on the floor? How come you’re here so early? How’d you get here?”

He found himself grinning. “Lots of questions, Pearl?”

“But you
are
all right?”

“Seem all right. Hell of a headache, though.” He moved to sit up. “And my ribs are a bit sore,” he added.

“Don’t try to get up. I’ll get some help.” She moved toward the nearest desk and a phone.

“No, no.” He raised a hand, stopping her.

Her hand came away from the phone, but she was staring oddly at him.

“I’ll be fine, Pearl. Really. I just need a minute.”

“Don’t try to get up yet.” She rolled a desk chair over to him and sat down in it, leaning forward and fixing him with an assessing stare. “Looks like you hit your head. What happened? You fall?”

“No. Somebody hit me in the head. Rammed his own head or his shoulder into my ribs first.”

“Somebody attacked you in
here
? That’s some nerve. This is a police facility.”

“There’s no sign on the door.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“I didn’t even get a chance to turn on the light,” Quinn said. “We need to look things over, see if anything’s missing.”

Pearl glanced around. “Computers are still here. So’s the coffee brewer. I was just about to make some.” She paused. “Some of the desk drawers aren’t shut all the way. And one of the bottom file cabinet drawers is hanging open.”

Quinn gripped the desk corner and hauled himself to his feet. He was dizzy for a moment, and the headache was stronger.

Pearl stood up and held his arm. “You gonna be okay?”

“Yeah.” He guessed he was. He looked around and saw what Pearl had seen. “I disturbed him. He was looking for something, on a fact-finding mission.”

“Who we talking about?” Pearl asked. But they both knew.

“Tigers do that,” Quinn said.

“Leave drawers open?”

“No. They double back on whoever’s stalking them; then they lie in wait and become their most dangerous.”

“I didn’t know you hunted tigers.”

“I watch the nature channel.”

“Do we really think the intruder was the killer, trying to learn what we know so he can stay ahead of us?”

“It’s a possibility. Let’s look around and see if he was successful.”

Pearl moved closer and put both arms around Quinn, steadying him. Of course that was when Fedderman arrived.

He stood inside the door with a surprised look on his face that needed to be wiped off with a napkin. “I’m interrupting….”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Pearl said. “We were practicing judo.”

Quinn moved away from Pearl and explained to Fedderman what had happened. Then the three of them, still silently absorbing the break-in and assault, examined drawer and file cabinet contents and decided nothing was missing.

“He might not have wanted to steal anything,” Fedderman said, “just read things. Just learn.”

“And we can’t know how much he did learn,” Quinn said.

Pearl went over and perched with her haunches on the edge of her desk. “Damn near everything’s in the papers or TV news anyway.”

“And now he knows that,” Fedderman said.

“If he had time to examine everything.”

Pearl pushed herself away from her desk and went around to her computer. She booted up hers, then the other two computers, and clicked on their histories. None of them showed any activity after yesterday afternoon.

“I don’t think he learned much, if anything,” she said. She sat back again on the edge of her desk and crossed her arms. “Maybe we’re making this too complicated, Quinn. Maybe he just wanted to bash you in the head.”

“And knew I’d be coming in at two in the morning?”

“So you interrupted a burglar, and he bashed you in the head,” Fedderman said.

“Possibly. But he did a lot of snooping around and apparently didn’t steal anything.”

“Could he have gotten away after initially knocking you down?” Pearl asked. “I mean, did he have to also hit you in the head?”

“I’m not sure. It’s still hazy.”

“So maybe he was snooping, like we figure. A tiger.”

“Huh?” Fedderman said.

Pearl gave him a dismissive wave of her hand to shut him up. To Quinn, she said: “And he was glad for the opportunity to bash you in the head.”

“Can you think of anyone who’d wanna do that?” Fedderman asked. “Other than me and Pearl.”

“And the killer,” Pearl added.

“One person,” Quinn said, “and I know where to find him.”

The bottle or the gun?

Lavern Neeson, badly bruised from last night’s beating by Hobbs, had risen at three in the morning in pain and this time had chosen both.

It was eight o’clock now, getting warmer and brighter outside. The bedroom was dim, though, because the shades were drawn and the heavy drapes pulled closed, so no one could have seen last night what Hobbs had done to her. It was an overly furnished, somewhat worn and chintzy room of the sort that held its secrets. On one of the walls was a discount store print of a flock of birds—crows, probably—rising as if startled from a wooded landscape. Lavern had never liked it, but never considered changing it.

She sat in a small chair near the bed, listening to Hobbs snore, holding the shotgun from the closet on her lap and casually aimed at him. He wasn’t scheduled for work today and would sleep until well past ten. But Lavern liked to toy with the notion that he might wake up, and the first thing he’d see would be her and the dark muzzle of the shotgun. He wouldn’t know it wasn’t loaded, but maybe he’d die on his own, of a heart attack.

More likely she’d simply scare the hell out of him, and then he’d beat the crap out of her for frightening and embarrassing him.

Still, just thinking about it afforded her some amusement.

In a little while, she’d get up from her chair, leave the bedroom, and return the shotgun to the back of the hall closet. Another day with Hobbs would begin. Fear would begin.

The faint noises of the city winding up for another busy day wafted in to Lavern, and she thought about all the women out there who weren’t in any way dependent on husbands or lovers like Hobbs, women leading happy, pain-free lives, not afraid of making a wrong move that would lead to severe punishment.

Lavern envied those women, but joining their number seemed almost impossible.

She could think of only one way out of her predicament, and it terrified her.

If she left Hobbs, he’d surely come after her. It had happened once before, three years ago. If she tried to change him, he would beat her. If she changed herself, he would beat her. She knew that her friend Bess, who kept urging her to go to a women’s shelter, was right. Not about the shelter—she couldn’t stay there forever, even if Hobbs didn’t simply come and get her. And restraining orders—she’d read the papers, seen the news, and knew how ineffective they were. What Bess
was
right about was that eventually it was almost certain that Hobbs would kill her.

Unless she killed him first.

Lavern thought she might possibly be acquitted if she did that. Other women had killed their abusive husbands and gotten away with it. But so many others hadn’t. And even if she succeeded in avoiding prison, there would be the horrible publicity, the arrest, the trial. Who knew how a jury might find?

Killing Hobbs wasn’t something Lavern actually saw as an option, at least right now. But it was something she could consider, which she did more and more often. It wasn’t illegal to think about it.

She moved the shotgun’s long barrel slightly, so it was aimed at her husband’s head, then traced an invisible line down along his body to his heart, then to his crotch.

Should I shoot him there?

The idea was intriguing. Just sitting there with Hobbs’s life in her hands, without him knowing about it, intrigued her. At the same time, it scared her enough that she no longer could do it without first going to the bottle. If he ever woke up and caught her like this, or found out in some other way what she was doing, he’d be furious. Maybe murderous. He might actually kill her.

Unless she killed him first.

He was alone in the long, maroon-carpeted corridor as he waited for an elevator. Standing easily but alertly, he kept his head moving, glancing up and down the hall. Far down the hall and in the opposite direction from his own room a maid was parking her linen-laden cart near a door. That was all the activity he saw until the elevator arrived.

It was unoccupied but for an attractive blond woman in her forties who had the look and rolling luggage of an airline attendant. He saw by the illuminated button on the elevator’s control panel that, like him, she was going to the lobby. She glanced at Dunn, smiled and looked up at the LED floor numbers as the elevator descended. Dunn moved back and stood where he could also observe elevator etiquette and gaze at the numerals above the door, but at the same time see the woman in his peripheral vision.

He was 99 percent certain she posed no danger, but he’d been conditioned to assume that everyone posed some danger. That was the kind of perspective that would keep him alive.

Dunn wasn’t nearly as nervous as last time, when he’d left his hotel on the first morning. He’d even enjoyed a room-service breakfast of waffles and bacon, with plenty of maple syrup. He’d downed two cups of strong black coffee to make him even more alert and aware.

When the elevator reached lobby level, the woman favored Dunn with another smile as she maneuvered her wheeled suitcase and garment bag out into the lobby. In another time and place he would have smiled back and assisted her with her luggage.

Concentrate! Be in this time, in this place.

He watched the woman begin to walk away and then exited the elevator himself.

The compact Quest and Quarry revolver was a reassuring weight in Dunn’s blazer pocket as he pushed through the hotel’s revolving glass doors and breathed in the warm morning air. He’d studied the company dossier on his quarry and decided on a more aggressive strategy this time. Walking to the next block, so he wouldn’t be remembered by the uniformed doorman, he hailed a cab on his own and gave the driver an intersection near Thomas Rhodes’s address. Then he settled back into the cab’s upholstery and rode alert and mission-bent through the golden morning.

The game was on, his blood was up, and it occurred to him how much he enjoyed this.

Mitzi was still half asleep when she heard the knocking on her door. She reached over and felt a wide expanse of cool linen, and remembered that Mr. Handsome had left sometime after midnight.

More knocking. Not her imagination.

She made herself scoot over on the mattress and then maneuvered her body so she was sitting. The effort caused her head to ache behind both eyes.

Need more sleep. Definitely.

She groaned, explored with her tongue, and found that her teeth were fuzzy. Ah, well…

After drawing a deep breath, she stood up and lurched toward the living room.

When she opened the door to the hall, a man in a gray delivery uniform was standing there holding a long white box. His gaze took a ride up and down her body, and she realized she was wearing only her thin nightgown.

He smiled. “Flowers for a Mitzi Lewis.”

“I am a Mitzi Lewis,” Mitzi said in a sleep-thickened voice. She accepted the almost-weightless box and set it on a table near the door. Then she raised a forefinger in a signal for the man to wait.

It took her a few minutes to find her purse and wallet, then scare up a couple of dollars for a tip. When she turned around she saw that the deliveryman had minded his manners and was still standing politely on the other side of the threshold.

Mitzi handed him the tip, and he smiled again, making an obvious effort this time not to look at her below neck level. He tapped the bill of a nonexistent cap and turned around and began descending the stairs of her sixth-floor walk-up. It was an easier trek down than up, and Mitzi could hear him pick up speed, his shoes rapping out a machine-gun rhythm on the wooden steps.

She closed her apartment door, then carried the long white box over to the sofa and sat down.

When she opened the box she found a dozen long-stemmed red roses. There was a small, plain white envelope containing a white card with a brief message printed in blue ink:

There was no signature.

Mitzi placed the box next to her on the sofa, then sat slumped forward with her elbows on her knees, her chin resting in her right palm.
No signature…

Christ! I slept with a man and don’t even know his name.

Oh, well, it was an interesting first.