Ladykiller (22 page)

The first person Dave encountered at work was Blake.The skin of the
lieutenant’s face was tight and his mouth was a grim crease. “Come
into my office.”

Dave nodded and followed him. Jamie stood at the coffee urn,
talking quietly with Safir and Wise. She first sensed Dave’s passing
presence, and stared at him, her open mouth a small oval. Safir and
Wise watched Dave walk past in Blake’s wake with a morbid raptness.
Unblinking, Dave met their gaze.

Blake closed the office door behind them. He didn’t bid Dave to
sit and didn’t sit himself. “Dave, I’m sorry as hell about Jimmy but —”
“Hear what I have to say,” Dave said.
“Jesus Christ, Dave, Mancuso called me last night and twice
already this morning, demanding — and I mean, demanding —”
“Hear what I have to say.”
Blake shook his head. “After all I’ve done for you, how could you
go to the media like that? How could you try to assault Mancuso like
you did? My sweet Lord, how could you, Dave?”
“Hear me out,” Dave shouted.
Blake stopped.“What? What can you possibly say?”
“Listen,” Dave said, “I still can’t tell you who the Ladykiller is.
And I don’t give a damn about Mancuso’s feelings or what I told the
media. It’s irrelevant.”
Blake emitted an exasperated gasp. “Irrelevant? He’s got you off
the task force.And pending an investigation, I have to take your badge.”
“Today is Wednesday,” Dave said. “Give me until Friday.What difference does it make? The task force is going away, and I am too. No
matter what. But I can see now how to catch this fucker.”
Blake shook his head and gave a small chuckle of disbelief. “You
tell me how, Dave. You tell me how, after all the time we’ve put in,
after all the false starts, how we can collar this bastard by Friday.” This
taunting tone was new to Blake. “You tell me, Dave. Come on.Tell me.”
“The key is the West Side Crisis Center.”
“You keep on harping about that,” Blake said. “And what have we
got to show for it? We got shit, my friend.”
“Listen,” Dave said, “Ace linked each of the victims with the crisis center.We were able to corroborate that with others.”
“Oh, please.Where has that gotten us?”
“Listen,” Dave said, “Reuben Silver and Jimmy Conlon also died
because of their association with the crisis center. And I think Billy
Ray Battle did, as well. He and Ace were friends. I think Billy Ray
stumbled onto something.”
“You think, do you? Your buddy Conlon was a robbery victim.
His wallet was gone. He wasn’t shot in the right eye.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Dave said. “His notebook suggests he was
lured outside to his death. He must have known something. Must have
had enough for the killer to move on him.”
“Dave, you listen to me for a moment,” Blake said. “Your theories
and suspicions don’t get us anywhere.There’s not a chance we can win
a court fight to interview the loonies at the crisis center. Not with
Mancuso on our ass. And not by Friday.”
“Listen,” Dave said, “The phone is the way in.”
“The phone?”
“The West Side Crisis Center hotline. A lot of their clients use it
when they get too weirded out. Reuben Silver was on the hotline
the night he was killed. I bet the killer called him and made him go
outside, where he got shot. Billy Ray Battle had the hotline number
written on his palm.”
Blake sat down heavily on the edge of his desk. “What do you
want, Dave?”
“Tap their phones,” Dave said. “It’s our last chance. But why not?
What do we have to lose? We can get a court order, without the crisis
center learning about it.They can’t stop us in court if they don’t know.”
“We’re so deep on Mancuso’s bad side that he wouldn’t piss on us
if our guts were on fire,” Blake said skeptically. “We need to go
through him for any court order.”
Jamie knocked on Blake’s door and poked her head in. She tried
not to look at Dave. “Chief Mancuso’s here.”
Dave looked at Blake, waiting to be asked for his badge again.
“Stay out of sight,” he told Dave.
Dave disappeared down a hallway seconds before Mancuso and
his procession stomped into Blake’s office.
Jamie found him and took his hands. “Oh, Dave,” she said.
They stood mutely in the hallway, holding hands. The yelling
from Blake’s office carried down the corridor with the force of a
spring squall. Safir and Wise wandered by. They both patted Dave
slowly on the back.
At last, Blake appeared at the head of the hallway with an odd
grin. “Let’s get that court order.”
“What happened?” a bewildered Jamie blurted.
“We’re going ahead with the wiretap on the crisis center,” Blake
said. “I told Mancuso I’d bring him up on charges. He regularly made
ethnically insensitive remarks. Not smart in a multicultural urban environment. I bought us till Friday.”
“What happens then?”Wise asked. Blake’s grin faded.
“What happens, Loo?” asked Saffir.
“If we don’t deliver by Friday, Mancuso’s gonna hang us,” Blake
said. “No, before, he was gonna hang us. Now, he’s gonna hang us,
draw us, and quarter us. So this had better work.”
“Big Dick Mancuso,”Wise said.
“Before he dicks us,” Saffir said darkly.
“We better be successful, Dave,” Blake said quietly, back to his
old self.
“We will be,” Dave said.

Nita, usually fastidious, caused a stir when she showed up for work
that morning. Her hair was barely brushed. She had on a wrinkled
blouse with a tear at the shoulder seam. Her eyes were a roadmap of
red capillaries with dark bags under them.

Nita didn’t answer. She sat at her desk and pretended to sort
through her in-box.
“Can I get you some coffee?” Tim suggested.
Nita shook her head without glancing up.
Control. She was losing control. The scene with Conlon had
been chaos. She almost had lost everything. What if he had escaped?
Now Dillon was trying to make him into a martyr on television. And
Ace remained on the loose. There were too many unpredictable factors. Most frightening was her reaction to the melee with Condon.
Her head had been in the toilet the entire night. When not throwing
up, she lay on the bathroom floor and shook. In the past, the removals
had been clean and efficient.That had to be restored. Control.
Tim met Megan at the top of the stairs and whispered to her.
Megan gingerly approached Nita’s desk.
“Good morning, Nita,” she said. “How about I feed your fish for
you?” She had an odd wistfulness about her.
Nita shrugged.
After Megan sprinkled the fish food into the tank, she came up to
Nita’s desk again. “May I have a word with you?”
“Not now,” Nita said shortly. “I’m tied up.”
“It’s important,” Megan said.
Mouth twisted in a pained expression, Nita looked up at her.
“It’s about Dave.”
“Dave? Detective Dave?”
Megan leaned over the desk and lowered her voice so the others
wouldn’t overhear. “I can’t help myself. I love him. He’s what I want.
He’s smart and strong. He’s good and caring. He loves me.”
Nita sneered. “He’s an idiot. Get together with him and you
throw your life away.”
“I don’t agree,” Megan said, striving to stay calm despite an intrusive quaver. “You don’t know him. You have some distorted, unreal
view of him.”
“Unreal?” Nita thundered. She leapt to her feet. “How dare you
say that to me?”
Everyone in the large room watched Nita as she stalked around
her desk and, with a stiff finger, jabbed Megan on the breastbone.
“How dare you challenge me,” Nita cried. She jabbed Megan
once more, forcing her to retreat a step backward. “I have made you
what you are. I’ve given you a life. I’ve given you a purpose. Of all the
people I could have chosen, I chose
you
.And you want to defy me? You
want to fritter your gift away because you want this Keystone Kop in
your bed?” She jabbed Megan again.
“Stop,” Megan whispered. “You’re hurting me.” She moved back
another step.
“Do you have any inkling of the cause you serve?” Nita roared.
“You’re a traitor.That’s what you are. A traitor.”
Another jab bounced off Megan’s chest. “Nita, please,” she
sobbed. “Don’t.”
Nita turned to the fish tank.With both hands, she pulled it off the
table. It smashed to the floor in a vast explosion of glass.Water sluiced
across the tiles. Fish flopped about, dying. Nita, arms akimbo, stood
over the ruin, panting.Then she whirled on Megan and pointed at her.
“You’re a disgrace.You selfish child. I hope you rot in mediocrity.”
Hands to face, crying wildly, Megan ran from the room and
down the stairs.
A terrible silence followed. The only sounds were the pockpock-pocking of rain on the windowpanes, and the tiny slapping of
the fish in their last spasms.
Dr. Solomon wandered in, filled with dithering anxiety. “Oh, my.
Nita? Oh, my. Are you all right? Would you like to go home?”
“Home?” Nita yelled. She burst out into a short staccato riff of
hysterical laughter. “This is my home. I have work to do here. I’m on
the hotline for the next two nights. And I’m going to do my job. So
help me.”

Ace sat alone on a rock inside the railroad culvert, where he used to
hang as a kid, and listened to the rain batter the world. A cold wind
began to howl through the tunnel.

He remembered a whore who hung at the pool hall.Working girls
weren’t as plentiful in Rahway as on the Deuce, but if you looked long
enough you could find them. He ventured back to the pool hall and
managed to find the number written on the wall next to the pay phone.

“Fifty bucks,” the girl at the other end of the phone said.
“Twenty-five for a blow job. I should charge more, but you sound like
a nice kid.” She laughed mirthlessly.

Ace fingered his dwindling billfold. “Okay.”
He went to the girl’s tiny room above the hairdresser’s, across
the street from the pool hall. She was a little chubby and had broken
teeth.Yet the mole on her cheek reminded him of Madonna.
He told her so as he watched her undress.
She lay back, naked, on the stained mattress. “Yeah, lover, I’m a
real Material Girl. Say, you could use a shower.”
“I don’t want a shower,” he said, removing his shirt.
“Uh-huh.Well, then, I get hardship pay.That’ll be seventy for the
trip, lover.”
“Okay,” Ace said glumly. He slid out of his pants and wondered if
he could afford dinner.
She gestured at his crotch. “What’s the matter, hon? Don’t like
what you see?” She jiggled her breasts and smiled.
He sat on the edge of the bed, not touching her. “I got a lot on my
mind. Sorry.”
“Shit. I get paid anyway, you know. You pay up whether or not
you get interested, okay?”
“I got nobody to talk to,” Ace whined.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She pulled a stick of gum out of her bag but
didn’t offer him any.
“Only one person in the world I can talk to. I love her. She wants
to kill me, though.”
“I know how she feels,” the whore said matter-of-factly.
Ace watched a roach climbing the filthy wall. “I can’t live without
her. She’s a goddess.What the fuck can I do?” A tear started down his
face.
“Oh, Jesus. So she’s a goddess? She any good in bed?”
“She’s crazy,”Ace said. “I thought I was out there on the edge. She
scares the shit out of me.”
The door splintered open and crashed against the wall. Jackie
Why stood in the threshold.Water dripped from the brim of his white
Borsolino.The ember at the end of his cigarette glowed furnace red.
“What, what, what?” Ace spluttered.
The whore screamed and covered her breasts.
“Hey, shit-for-brains,” Jackie Why said. “You owe me four bills.
It’s collection time.”
Ace and the whore scrambled into their clothes as Jackie Why
laughed at them. She eased past Jackie Why and ran down the stairs.
“You come all the way from the city to get a lousy four hundred?”
Ace said, his mind whirring to come up with a peace plan. “That’s
chump change for you, Jackie.”
“I had nothing better to do,” Jackie Why said. “Give me the
money, and maybe I won’t kill your sorry ass.”
“I don’t got it,” Ace said. “I mean, I got maybe seventy-five. But I
ain’t got no four hundred.”
Jackie Why took a huge drag on his cigarette. “You been spending
your money — which is
my
money — in the wrong places, my man.
How much did it cost you to fuck that little butterball?”
“Nothing,” Ace said. “I didn’t fuck her yet. Hey, I can pay you
back. Honest. I need a little time.”
“You don’t got no more time,” Jackie Why said. He unbuttoned
his leather jacket. He wore his gun in a holster on his left hip.The butt
pointed frontward.
Ace started to hyperventilate. “Please, Jackie. Please give me a
chance.”
Jackie Why pulled the cigarette from his lips and, grinning
widely, jammed it against Ace’s forehead.
Ace hollered as his flesh sizzled.
Then Big John suddenly appeared behind Jackie. He grabbed his
shoulder and turned him around. Ace scuttled backward behind the
bed. He thought he saw Big John reach for Jackie’s gun. He ducked his
head and could only hear the scuffle until the gun went off.
Torn between hiding his face and desperately wanting to know
the outcome, Ace burrowed down for another full minute of silence
and then gingerly peered over the edge of the bed. He saw Big John
standing over Jackie. Ace couldn’t tell if Jackie was alive or dead, but
as he watched, Big John shoved the gun up against the pimp’s chin and
pulled the trigger.The pimp’s Borsolino blew off his head in a fountain
of blood and brains.
Ace, stunned, watched in silence. Eventually, Big John looked at
him. Numbly, Ace clambered to his feet and staggered toward the
door, skirting Jackie Why’s sprawled body in awe and wonder. A
crimson lake was growing around the pimp’s mangled skull.
Big John tossed the gun at him and Ace caught it awkwardly. “You
stupid little turd. Christ almighty.”
“I’m sorry,” Ace babbled inanely. “I didn’t mean to.”
“You’re dead fucking meat, is what you are,” Big John said. “Now
get the fuck out of here. I’ll clean this here up.” He rummaged in his
pocket and shoved a fistful of bills at Ace. “Go on. Get back to the city.
Where you belong.”
A light seemed to go on again in Ace’s eyes. “Where I belong,” he
tittered excitedly, thinking of Nita.

As she ran past, her face wild with rain and tears, Dave sprang
from the car and grabbed her. He crushed her to him.
She fought his arms for a minute until she realized it was him.
Then she sobbed against his shoulder.
“We’re getting wet,” he said as he held her. “Let’s get in the car.”
He led her, like a child, into the car. Inside, with the storm
pounding on the roof, she cried harder.
“Nita?” Dave asked gently.
Megan nodded, just once.
“What happened?”
Megan shook her head, took out a Kleenex, and blew her nose.
“Was it about me, by any chance?”
“Yes,” Megan said, hiccupping against her sobs.
“Did she ask you to choose between us?”
“Can we do something? Drive around?”
“Sure.” Dave fired up the engine, called in on the radio that he
was changing locations, and eased through the cascading downpour.
“Anywhere in particular?”
“No,” Megan almost whispered.
By its own instinct, the car found itself rolling over the bridge
into Queens. The Dillon house, identical to all those to either side,
had a damp bleakness.
“Come on in,” Dave said. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
He smiled encouragement.
“Oh, God. I look terrible,” Megan said. “My make-up —”
“You look beautiful,” Dave said. “You’re the most beautiful
woman in the world today. Or any other day.”
He took her hand, and led her into the house.
His mother sat beneath a shawl, a trashy paperback on her lap.
She didn’t smile or move.
“This is Megan Morrison,” Dave said. “I told you about her. I
decided that, well, you two should meet.”
Megan summoned up a smile and shook the old lady’s reluctant
and brittle hand. “I’m so pleased to meet you, Mrs. Dillon. Dave has
told me a lot about his childhood and this house and you and everything, that, I . . . uh . . . am delighted to be here.” Aware she was babbling, Megan subsided nervously.
“Good to have you,” his mother said shortly with a saccharine
smile. Then to Dave, “I’m getting tired. Could you help me into the
bedroom before you make your friend some tea?”
As he eased his mother to her feet, the old woman said, “The
Conlon wake is tomorrow night. So quick.”
“I know,” Dave agreed. “I got them to release Jimmy’s body early
from the medical examiner’s. Usually, in a homicide — Well.” He
didn’t want to talk about that.
Dave shrugged at Megan apologetically and escorted his mother
slowly along a creaking passage to the bedroom.
In the bedroom, his mother regained her strength suddenly. She
held his arm and shook her head. “Get rid of that one. She’s no good.
I know a bad girl when I see one.”
“Ma, that’s silly. Megan’s a sweet girl.” Dave was caught totally off
balance.
“Your father went wrong because of a bad woman. I can sniff
them.”
“Ma, I’m not going to discuss this with you,” Dave said, beginning to be angry. “I’ll take you to the wake tomorrow. Goodbye.”
“I can sniff them,” she said with a hiss. He practically had to pry
her hand off his arm.
Running out to the car, Megan said mournfully, “Your mother
hates me.”
“She’s just hard to warm up to. It takes a while. She’ll be okay.”
As the row houses slid past the car windows, Megan said, “Nita
went off the deep end when I told her about us. She smashed her fish
tank. She loved those fish.”
They rode in silence into Manhattan. Megan asked to be dropped
off at the crisis center.They made plans to meet that night.
She kissed him briefly but with the promise of passion, and
he watched her hurry into the building.The rain seemed to be letting
up.
Before Dave could pull away, he noticed Nita go past, wearing no
raincoat, carrying no umbrella, soaked. She had been someplace else
and was headed for the crisis center, as well.
On an impulse, Dave leaned out the window and called her
name. At the sight of him, Nita’s lip curled. “The great lover himself,”
she said. “Enjoying your latest conquest, Dillon?”
“You don’t need to talk like that to me.”
“Why not?” Nita taunted. “Is there a law against it? Are you going
to arrest me? Take me back to the precinct and book me, so I can
listen to you brag to your buddies what a great lover you are.”
“What do you know about love?”
“That it’s a foolish illusion.” The rain made Nita’s hair hang in
ropes about her face. She laughed without mirth and a little too long.
“You’re trying to make me lose control, aren’t you, Detective Dillon?
Aren’t you?”
“Control of what? Of Megan?”
“You’re not going to do it, Detective Dillon. Oh, no. I swear that
to you.”
“Lady,” Dave snapped, “the only things you control are your fish.
Or should that be past tense?”
Nita opened her mouth to reply but didn’t. She was clearly
stunned by Dave’s remark. She turned and walked into the building.