Mister X (4 page)

“This is crazy,” Pearl said, as they crossed West Forty-fourth Street toward the Sherman Hotel.

Quinn silently agreed with her. But sometimes it was a crazy world with its own kind of whatever passed for logic.

“We’re interrupting looking for a killer so we can search for our client,” Pearl said.

“I told you, her check cleared,” Quinn said. He hastened his pace to get across the heated concrete street before a white pickup truck leading a convoy of yellow cabs reached them. “That means we’re still working for her.” The line of vehicles hummed and rattled past behind them, stirring a warm breeze around their ankles.

“A cashier’s check,” Pearl said, when they were safely up on the sidewalk. “Which means we have no way to trace her through her checking account.”

“If you’re suggesting we should have been suspicious of her from the get-go,” Quinn said, “you’re right. I don’t know how it happened, Pearl, but we’ve both become too trusting.”

Pearl knew sarcasm when she heard it, so she bit her lip and held her silence.

It wasn’t smart to cross Quinn when he was being sarcastic. It could mean he was getting angry with himself, which was when he was his most difficult with other people. So Pearl simply followed him silently through a heavily tinted glass revolving door into the welcome coolness of the Sherman Hotel’s marble and oak lobby.

The Sherman was an old hotel in a difficult phase of renovation while remaining open. That brought the rates down, so there was no dearth of business despite the cordoned-off areas of the lobby where the floor was torn up, or the closed restaurant necessitating eating at the diner on the corner. The Sherman was small but had a shabby elegance about it that was being resurrected to something like its original state. Besides all the oak wainscoting and the veined marble floor and columns, there was a lot of fancy crown molding, and what looked like the original long, curved oak registration desk. Some of the black leather furniture and the potted palms placed about the lobby appeared to be new. Pearl couldn’t help looking for price tags on the plants.

When Quinn and Pearl approached the desk they were greeted by a tall, elderly man in a gray sport jacket with what must be the Sherman’s crest over its left breast pocket. He had thick white hair and a long, lean face with a patrician nose that was made for him to look down over. The sort of chap who would have seemed right at home in a venerable British men’s club.

“Yous got a reservation?” he inquired in a Brooklyn accent.

“Wees don’t,” Pearl said.

Quinn gave her a warning look. Sometimes that had an effect on Pearl. Usually not.

“We’re inquiring about one of your guests,” he said to the clerk, and showed him identification.

The clerk gazed at the ID, then made good use of his nose. “A private detective service? Not the real cops?”

“Not yet,” Quinn said. “We were hoping you’d be cooperative.”

The man gazed down his long nose at Quinn for another few seconds and then shrugged. “So who’s the guest?”

“Chrissie Keller,” Pearl said. “I phoned about her earlier.”

“Ah, yeah. You don’t look nuttin’ like you sounded on the phone. You sounded taller. I told you, didn’t I, that she’d checked out?”

“What we were wondering,” Quinn said, “is if the maid’s gotten around to cleaning her room.”

The desk clerk turned his back on them and punched some keys on a computer keyboard. “Keller, Chrissie. She was in room five-twelve, checked out at ten-thirty a.m. yesterday. Maid service woulda taken care of five-twelve by now.”

“Do you recall if she had a lot of luggage?” Quinn asked.

“Couldn’t say. But Buddy the bellhop could. He’s got a photographic mind. He remembers everything.”

Quinn and Pearl looked around the otherwise deserted lobby. “Do you remember where Buddy is?” Quinn asked.

The desk clerk gave him a Brooklyn-British kind of look and then went to a phone at the other end of the registration desk.

Buddy the bellhop appeared within seconds, as if he’d been waiting for his cue. He was a short, middle-aged man with a stomach paunch that ruined the effect of a blue and red uniform that made him look like an officer in Napoleon’s army. It even had epaulets. He glanced from Quinn to Pearl and smiled broadly. When he reached them, he looked about in mild confusion for suitcases to be carried.

The desk clerk explained to Buddy that only information was wanted. Quinn described Chrissie Keller.

“I remember her,” Buddy said. “Nice lady, tipped okay.”

“Luggage?” Quinn asked.

“Big red Samsonite hard shell with wheels. Also a black nylon carry-on, looked like the kinda thing that might hold a notebook computer. She was wearin’ jeans and a yellow silk blouse.”

“What color eyes?” Pearl asked.

“One brown, one blue.” Buddy grinned hugely. “Naw, I’m funnin’ you there. I don’t remember her eyes. The rest of it, though, you can count on it bein’ right. I got a—”

“Yeah, we know.”

“The suitcase was heavy. She was plannin’ on bein’ around for a while.”

“You help her with the suitcase when she checked out?” Quinn asked.

“Naw, she just wheeled the thing out to the curb an’ piled into a cab. The carry-on was slung over her arm with her purse. The purse was brown leather. Kinda scuffed. That was the last I seen of her.”

Quinn thanked Buddy and turned back to the desk clerk. “Anybody been in five-twelve since Chrissie Keller?”

“Only the maid.”

“Mind if we have a look?”

“At the maid?”

Pearl dead-eyed the desk clerk, which seemed to scare him.

“Don’t mind at all,” he said. “Yous see our rooms, you’ll maybe wanna stay here sometime. But yous won’t find nuttin’—not the way our maids clean up after a guest.”

“Still,” Quinn said with a smile, “you never know.”

“I guess not,” the desk clerk said. “Yous might find lint or a hair or somethin’.”

“You’d be surprised,” Quinn said.

“No, I wouldn’t. I watch all those forensic crime-scene shows on TV, read mysteries about how crimes are solved.” He appeared thoughtful. “There a crime been committed here?”

“We’re trying to find out,” Quinn said.

Buddy accompanied them in the elevator and led them to 512, where he opened the door and then hung around as if expecting a tip. Habit, Quinn supposed.

“The bathroom’s in there,” Buddy said, motioning toward a closed door. “There’s your television. There’s a refrigerator right there stocked with—”

Quinn gave him a look that shut him up. Buddy grinned, shrugged, and left the room.

Quinn and Pearl looked around. The room was neatly arranged; it had to be, since most of the furniture was fastened to the walls. The maid had indeed been thorough. The scent of Lemon Pledge still hung in the air, and there wasn’t the slightest trace of dust.

Pearl checked the tiny bathroom and found it smelling of bleach and gleaming and spotless. Even the grout between the blue tiles looked clean. She wished she had a bathroom like it. Hers was about the same size but was comparatively cruddy.

Quinn was impressed. “The maid emptied the waste-baskets, and it looks like she polished their insides,” he said.

“Waste of time,” Pearl said.

Quinn wasn’t sure if she meant the wastebasket polishing or the room search.

They went over the room thoroughly, but not with much enthusiasm, deftly staying out of each other’s way because they’d done this dozens of times in dozens of rooms.

The desk clerk was right: the maid’s thoroughness had neutered the room when it came to anything like a clue. There was nothing that might be of help. Not lint, not a hair. Nothing.

“Chrissie’s away clean,” Pearl said. “She did a number on us.”

Quinn knew she was right. But what kind of number?

And why?

Two blocks away from where Quinn and Fedderman stood, a man was standing staring in the window of a luggage shop.

A trip to someplace interesting, where I’ve never been before. That’s what I should do, take a trip. Pack a bag and get out of this city, at least for a while. Someplace in Europe. Or the Caribbean, if I can find an island that—

Air brakes hissed, drawing his attention.

He watched the young woman step down from the bus that had stopped near the corner. She was in her thirties, with dark eyes and luxurious shoulder-length dark hair that bounced with her generous breasts as she took the long, lurching step down to the pavement. Her dress was pale green, made of some kind of thin material that clung to her body in the light summer breeze.

How gracefully she moved. So like a cat. Her high heels flashed as she extended her long legs with each stride, her calf muscles working like silk.

Dancer’s legs,
he thought. Maybe she was a dancer. Maybe she was—

He realized he’d begun following the woman without even thinking about it. As if some part of him had already made the decision that their lives and her death should converge.

No, goddamn it!

He stopped walking, using all his willpower to avert his eyes from the woman.

I don’t do that anymore.

I don’t even have a hard-on.

He turned around and started walking in the opposite direction the woman was going. He didn’t even glance back at her for one last look. One additional memory of her he could recall in detail at least for a while. He walked faster, lengthening his stride, pounding his heels down hard as if testing the resiliency of the sidewalk.

I don’t do that anymore.

I don’t have to do that anymore.

But he found himself recalling the way her hair and her breasts had bounced as she’d stepped down out of the bus.

He smiled. Even though that part of his life was over and he was somebody else now, it did no harm to remember. To think about how things were, or even how they might have been. Even how they might be. After all, he wasn’t the one who’d stirred up the past and started the thoughts playing like movie scenes in his mind. Scenes that he was in or was simply observing, looking at them usually from above, as if he’d been a spirit in the room.

Thoughts…

Thoughts never hurt anyone. How could they? They weren’t real. You couldn’t even touch them.

And sometimes you couldn’t stop them.

But he did stop thinking about leaving the city.

Even though she’d brushed her teeth, the aftertaste of last night’s scotch that she’d used to relax and make herself tired remained. Pearl didn’t mind. She knew she was having trouble sleeping because she was on the hunt with the pack she knew and in strange ways loved. Or was it the hunt that she loved? Either way, she liked it that her internal engine was running like a separate heart.

The engine had awakened her early from her disturbed slumber, which was why she was the first one in the office this morning.

Pearl sat down at her gray steel desk and booted up her computer. She’d done some research at home on her laptop, so she copied files from her flash drive to her desk computer. That completed, she replaced the flash drive in her purse and set to work running Internet searches for information pertaining to Chrissie Keller.

When that failed she got up and went over and poured coffee from the brewer’s glass pot into her personalized ceramic mug, then added powdered cream and stirred until not much of it floated on top. Her second coffee of the morning. Cop pop.

She glanced at her watch. Almost nine o’clock, and she was still alone in the office.
What the hell?

Then she remembered that, instead of meeting at the office this morning, Quinn and Fedderman were going to the East Side to interview some witnesses. Pearl might be alone a while longer.

She sat down again at her computer and sipped her coffee while she idly typed “the carver, serial killer” into her browser and began another Internet search.

Most of what came up she’d already seen, but there were a few unfamiliar sites. She sighed, sipped coffee, and visited the first one. It had to do with a butcher’s theft of Christmas turkeys from a halfway house for ex-convicts in 1997 in Miami.

Off to a good start.

The next link took her to a site that sold exotic wood carvings of birds. As she continued to link from one site to another, they became more and more remote from her subject. Still, she kept on. Sometimes doggedness turned the trick. Give Pearl the right haystack and she’d find the needle.

The word “carver” alone eventually linked her to “Initials Carved in Trees,” which linked her to “Initials of the Famous,” which linked her to “Initial Reports,” categorized by city, which linked her to “Crimes against persons reports, Detroit PD,” which linked her to an amateur crime site called “Initial Attempts” that featured cases where inept beginner criminals had been interrupted during their attempted crimes. It featured photographs of an astounded would-be teenage burglar blinded by floodlights, one leg draped over a window ledge, a sack of loot in his hand; and a security camera shot of a would-be robber fleeing a convenience store empty-handed while a large dog snapped at his heels.

And there was something else.

Pearl sat forward. There was a blurry photo of what appeared to be a slender young woman. Her face wasn’t clearly visible. There was a brief accompanying news item that made no reference to the photograph but reported that a woman named Geraldine Knott, twenty-two years old, had been attacked by a masked assailant in the parking structure of her apartment. He’d struck her, straddled her, then drawn a knife and begun telling her exactly what he was going to do with it, including severing her nipples.

Something had caused the assailant to break off his attack and flee. Possibly it had been the coincidence of sirens, as police arrived at the building across the street after being called on another matter. Ms. Knott was discovered when a woman who also lived in the building entered the parking structure and noticed her slumped and dazed on the concrete floor. The news report said the victim had a broken collarbone, was suffering from extreme stress, and was hospitalized in stable condition. An artist’s sketch of the attacker, based on Geraldine Knott’s description, would be in the paper soon. The date of the news item was April 7, eight years ago. Shortly before the Carver began his horrific string of murders in New York.

Pearl ran a search of the Detroit paper archives and easily found another item about the Geraldine Knott assault, accompanied by the sketch artist’s rendering of her attacker. He was wearing a balaclava that covered his head and all of his face but his eyes. There didn’t seem to be anything special about the eyes. Geraldine Knott couldn’t recall their color.

All in all, Pearl thought, the sketch was useless. Nevertheless, she printed out what she had, three copies, for Quinn, Fedderman, and herself.

Ten minutes later, Quinn and Fedderman came into the office. The sultry summer air came with them, thick as syrup. Both men were damp. Quinn’s hair stuck out every which way and was glistening with rainwater, and his blue tie was spotted. Fedderman’s customary wrinkled brown suit looked even more rumpled than usual. When he walked past Pearl’s desk she noticed he smelled like a wet dog. Maybe the suit, maybe Fedderman.

“Raining again out there?” Pearl asked, knowing the answer was obvious but wanting to rub it in.

Quinn and Fedderman ignored her. Quinn nodded toward the computer.

“What are you doing?” he asked, walking over to remove his rain-spotted suit coat and drape it over a brass hook on the wall near his desk.

“Running a computer check on one Geraldine Knott,” Pearl said. Not telling them everything up front, letting the geniuses work for it.

“Why?” Fedderman asked, shambling over like a curious hound and staring at Pearl’s computer monitor.

Pearl didn’t answer but pointed to the paper-clipped printouts on her desk corner.

“Read those,” she said.

Fedderman and Quinn both read silently, then looked at each other.

“Holy Jesus!” Fedderman said.

“Not Him,” Pearl said. “Me. This came up on an Internet search for the Carver while you two were frolicking in the rain.”

“Holed up eating doughnuts,” Fedderman said. “And we brought one for you.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Fedderman ate it,” Quinn said. “Just as we turned the corner and pulled in to park out front.”

Fedderman shrugged.

Quinn laid his copy of the printout back on Pearl’s desk. “Great work, Pearl. Stay on it. Find out everything you can about Geraldine Knott.”

Fedderman grinned and pulled a greasy white paper sack from where it was jammed in his suit coat pocket. He placed it on Pearl’s desk.

“For you,” he said. “Chocolate icing. A cake doughnut, so in case you want to dunk, it won’t come apart in your coffee. Don’t believe everything you hear. We’re always thinking of you.”

“Yeah,” Pearl said.

But thinking what?

She thanked Fedderman, opened the grease-stained sack, and removed the sticky doughnut that had been in Fedderman’s pocket.

It smelled like a wet dog.