John Lutz Bundle (145 page)

“Thomas Rhodes was a banker of no small reputation,” Renz said. Quinn knew he’d picked up the phrase from this morning’s
Times
account of Rhodes’s murder at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Renz was leaning back in his leather chair behind his desk. The harsh morning sun highlighted his drooping features and pockmarks from old acne scars. It was already warm in the office, and there was the faint scent of stale tobacco smoke. Quinn thought that if Renz was going to continue his furtive cigar smoking he should buy some sort of deodorizer.

When Quinn didn’t toss back the conversational ball, Renz said, “That puts additional pressure on thee and me, especially thee.”

A bad representation of a Quaker, Quinn thought. “We did get a break, though. The gun.”

Renz made his chair inch from side to side and nodded. “Ballistics make it out to be the same make and model that was used in the other Twenty-five-Caliber Killings.” He leaned forward and extended the ballistics report to Quinn.

Quinn glanced at it, ignoring all the technical jargon about grooves and lands. Even the fact that the gun’s serial number had been effectively removed with acid. What interested him was that the lab made it a dead certainty that Rhodes was carrying exactly the same kind of gun that was used on the previous victims. “A Springbok single-action twenty-five-caliber revolver,” he said. “You have to pull back the hammer before each shot on that kind of gun, which means you have to make each bullet count.” Without getting up, he placed the report back on Renz’s desk. “I never heard of a Springbok.”

“No one had. That’s why the damned things were impossible to identify from their bullets. Springbok was a South African manufacturer that went out of business almost twenty years ago, not long after apartheid ended. The problem is, what with all the political and social turmoil in that part of the world, there are thousands of this cheap but reliable model unaccounted for.”

“So someone could have bought a large lot on the black market.”

“Or even legally, years ago, and simply kept them, and now he’s found a use for them.”

“So it’s possible our killer is of South African origin,” Quinn said.

“Or spent time in Africa.”

“Hunting,” Quinn said.

Which made it all the more likely that they were indeed searching for only one killer. Neither man pointed that out. Renz was still afraid he might be wrong about the politically convenient single-killer theory, and Quinn still had his doubts. The two types of murders—one clean and professional, the other bloody hell on a stick—didn’t make sense. Unless of course Helen, the profiler, was right about one killer with two personalities. Quinn knew that was, in a way, true of most serial killers, though not to this degree. It was more a matter of them being accomplished actors who could present a benign, sometimes charming persona to the world in order to conceal the ugliness inside.

Quinn decided he’d ask Zoe’s opinion. She was a psychoanalyst. Killers weren’t her specialty, but she might well know more than Helen Iman about split personalities.

After all, she’d had experience with Alfred Beeker.

“I caught a snatch of radio news on the way over,” Quinn said. “The media seem to be referring to the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer murders as duels. I take it that’s Cindy Sellers’s work.”

“I’ve kept her up on things, including the Rhodes case and the fact he had a twenty-five-caliber gun,” Renz said. He flashed his canine smile. “A deal’s a deal.”

“Until it isn’t,” Quinn said, knowing Renz.

“I saved the best for last,” Renz said, showing the grin again. “About the gun. Ballistics doesn’t have a perfect match, but they think the gun found on Rhodes is the one that killed Floyd Becker in the Antonian Hotel.”

The real estate market in New York was almost as depressed as Berty Wrenner. He’d missed his sales quota again, and Home Away’s sales manager, the sadistic Alec Farr, was making his life miserable.

Berty’s employer, the Home Away Agency, specialized in selling small New York apartments to individuals as well as corporate buyers. Much of their business stemmed from Wall Street, and if the stock market was in decline and brokerage houses were laying off, Home Away’s business was also in decline. The next step wasn’t hard to figure out.

That was why Berty Wrenner hadn’t made his sales quota this month. Or last. The other salespeople were making theirs, or at least coming close. The demanding Farr didn’t consider close anywhere near good enough. Things were tight at Home Away. Like stomachs and jaw muscles. Lots of antacid tablets were being consumed. Daily lunchtime martinis were gaining on a few of the men and on Marlee Case, the only female agent not yet driven away by Farr. Lack of sleep accompanied by pressure from on high was a relentless destroyer of health, happiness, and sobriety.

The chesty, perpetually grinning Farr had held a sales conference at the beginning of the month and informed his six-agent team that it was crunch time (Farr was prone to clichés) so they’d better pull out all the stops, because, as Farr put it, “you gentlemen are in a goddamned fight for your lives, so you’d better not be gentlemen.”

Berty, a middle-aged man who’d been a lot of things before he’d become a real estate agent, had a problem with that. He was, God help him, a gentleman in a cutthroat game. When he lied, his face turned a mottled red, and he couldn’t look the target of his lie in the eye. His wasn’t the face of a salesman or poker player, anyway. Berty looked as if one of his parents might have been a mole. Even Berty thought he looked like a balding, myopic mole, especially when he wore his glasses, which was all the time. Only Alec Farr didn’t think Berty looked like a mole; he thought Berty looked like a rat, and often told him so.

The other five salesmen had made their quotas. Jeevers, the corporate client specialist, had barely made his by surrendering part of his commission to a major buyer. The stress of the contentious transaction showed on him. He appeared as though he hadn’t slept the last three nights. His long, equine features were actually twitching. His thin body wouldn’t be still where he sat poised on the edge of his desk, trying to maintain a relaxed posture; he was a man made to run who was forced to sit. Berty wondered sometimes if Jeevers was a reincarnated racehorse.

They were all lounging in postures of mock comfort in the outer office, waiting for Farr to react to the monthly sales figures he’d just received.

Marlee, a thickset, gray-haired woman with eyes like oversized blue marbles, glanced at her watch. “I wish he’d hurry up. I gotta get the hell outta here.”

“You close that deal yet on West Twenty-fifth Street?” Joe Keller, the newest, youngest agent asked. He might have passed for twelve years old if it weren’t for his shadowy beard that made him look perpetually a couple of shaves behind.

“Like I’m gonna tell you, you pathetic walking embryo.”

Keller looked hurt, or he might have been putting them on. He would look boyish all his life, with a face difficult to read. A salesman’s dream. Or a spy’s. No one completely trusted Keller.

Jeevers flicked lint from his sleeve, though Berty hadn’t seen any lint. “Keller wouldn’t dream of yanking a deal out from under you,” he said to Marlee. He gave her a horsy grin to show he was kidding.

“We’d all dream it, or we wouldn’t be wasting our lives in this cutthroat business. Ask Farr.”

“I wish he’d hurry up,” Keller said. “I need to scoot my ass outta here, too.”

“Got a girlfriend waiting?” asked Berty, who was long divorced and single. He hoped no one had noticed the note of envy in his voice.

Keller simply looked at him and shook his head.

“He don’t wanna discuss his personal life, Mole,” Marlee said. “How ’bout you, Berty? There a mole girl out there?”

“Somebody for everyone,” Ned Nichols said.

Everyone looked at him in surprise. He very seldom spoke in the office, while in the larger world outside he’d wear his customers down by talking at them until they were numb and incapable of sales resistance.

All of these people knew even the most intricate and devious moves and could sell in any kind of real estate market except for the one they’d had the past six months. The crappy market was the reason why the firm was in trouble, and everyone in the office knew it, with the exception of Farr, who blasted blame around the place as if from the barrel of a shotgun.

The inner-office door opened, and everyone who’d been sitting or slouching stood up straight.

The office suddenly seemed smaller and ten degrees hotter. Alec Farr strutted into the room and filled it with his presence. He was a broad, solid man with a military posture, though he’d never served his country, anything, or anyone other than himself.

He grinned with perfect large teeth overtreated with whitener. It was not a reassuring grin.

“Gentlemen and lady,” he said, “we are in a lifeboat, and it is sinking. I don’t know if we can stop it from going down, but we are sure as hell going to try.” He glared like a hungry lion at Jeevers. “How might we at least slow the vessel in its sinking, so a whimsical God might favor us with a miracle and save us?”

“Plug the leak?” Jeevers ventured nervously.

“Can’t do that,” Farr said. “Leak’s too large, and there’s nothing to plug it with.”

“Bail water?” Marlee suggested.

“We’ve been doing that without a bucket. We’re losing ground.”

“In a boat?” Berty said, before he could stop himself. The words had simply slipped out on their own.

Farr jutted out his chin as if about to use it as a battering ram. His reddish monobrow formed a sharp V. Even the hairs protruding from his flared nostrils bristled. It was a frightening sight, especially to a man who hadn’t made his quota.

“The answer to the question about the boat,” Farr said in a calm yet threatening tone, “is that we throw someone out. Toss him—or her—over the side. The other question is, who’s it gonna be?”

No one chanced an answer. The silence was like concrete hardening around them. Berty found it difficult to breathe.

“Maybe the mole,” Farr said. “Of course, there’s only so much food in the boat. We might want to eat the mole later, or use parts of him for bait. So who’s it gonna be?”

Again the silence thickened around them.

Farr’s terrible grin widened as he adjusted his tie knot and stared at each of them in turn. Then he rolled up the sales report in his hand and aimed the paper tube at them as if it were a gun.

“We’ll all think hard on that,” he said. “And see if individual sales figures improve next week. If they don’t, a certain rat might leave a certain boat the hard way. Or maybe some even more useless piece of jetsam might be fed to the circling sharks. Am I understood?”

Everyone nodded. Marlee managed a strangled, “Yes, sir.”

Farr fixed a burning stare directly on Berty, then turned and strode back into his office. The slam of the door was like a cannon shot.

“Jesus!” Keller said.

A pall of shame descended on everyone in the room.

“Why are we so afraid of that asshole?” Marlee asked.

Jeevers ducked behind his desk and picked up his leather attaché case stuffed with brochures and contract forms.

“Where you headed?” Keller asked. “Wanna stop off for a drink? It’d calm us down.”

“Give you back your balls, you mean,” Marlee said. “Glad I don’t have to worry about that.”

“I gotta make a stop on the way home,” Jeevers said. “See a client.”

“Over on West Twenty-fifth?” Keller asked.

Marlee gave him a look that scared Berty even though he wasn’t the recipient. She was a woman who’d been known to throw a punch. Berty had seen and heard enough impending violence for one day.

“Once the mole goes, that’s when we gotta start worrying,” Nichols said.

Keller looked at Berty. “That the way you read it, Mole?”

Berty didn’t answer. There was no other way to read it; he was a low producer, and in this game you produced or else. It was about time for
or else
. He draped his suit coat over his arm, picked up his scuffed briefcase, and headed for the door. Nichols and the others were already there, eager to be free of the dreaded office and the ominous Farr. Marlee and Berty were the last ones out.

“Farr,” Marlee said
sotto voce,
and patted Berty’s shoulder. “What an asshole he is.”

Berty glanced at her and flickered a smile.

Marlee shook her head. “Somebody oughta shoot him.”

All the way home in the hot, clattering subway train, Berty heard her harsh and fearful whisper over and over.

Somebody oughta shoot him.

“Shoot who?” asked the man scrunched in next to him on a plastic seat, and Berty realized he’d spoken aloud.

Berty could only shrug and shake his head, as if he hadn’t clearly heard over the rush and clatter of the train.

“Somebody’s always shooting somebody these days,” the man said. He was a small man, like Berty only with a scraggly mustache, and didn’t look unlike a mole. He held up the folded
Times
he’d been reading. “Sometimes it ain’t the worst idea. The paper says, what with the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer, it’s like we’ve gone back to the days of fighting duels to settle things.”