Serial (2 page)

Renz tried the coffee again, put the cup back down, and shoved it away. “Camel piss.” He looked hard at Quinn across the diner table. “You and your investigative agency want this one?”

“Can you convince the higher-ups to turn it over to us?”

“I
am
the higher-up,” Renz said. “You might be off the force, along with your retread detectives, but when it comes to serial killers no one can top you. I’ll make it clear to everyone from the mayor on down that nailing this sicko is priority number one and we have to use our best. If we don’t, and there are more murders, there’ll be plenty of blame for all the people who wanted a second-rate investigation. That’s a smelly political albatross to have hanging around your neck in this city.”

So Renz had his own political motives for wanting this killer brought down fast. Well, that was fine, if it put Quinn on the case. “You sure we got a serial killer?”

“You know we do, Quinn. We both know this guy will kill again, and probably soon. The way he… the things that were done to Millie, that kinda asshole is gonna be a repeater.”

“Probably,” Quinn conceded.

“And this case interests you. It needs you like you need it. Like I need you. It’ll be like before. We’re not bypassing the NYPD. The city will employ you and your agency on a work-for-hire basis to aid in the investigation. Of course, you’ll be running it.”

Quinn knew that what Renz needed or wanted, he would get. Renz was the most popular police commissioner the city had ever known. Not to mention that he had something on almost everyone above him in the food chain. In New York, even if it meant going to jail later, a popular police commissioner with that kind of leverage wielded real power.

But Quinn did have some reservations.

“Because of Millie, I’ve got a serious personal interest in this case, Harley. We’ve never done anything like this exactly.”

“Nothing is ever like anything else exactly. Think snowflakes.”

Quinn sat drumming his fingertips on the table. There really was little doubt that Millie’s killer would strike again.

“Don’t give me all that contemplation bullshit,” Renz said. “We both know you’re in. I’ll write up the contract we had before, only for more money. I want this bastard in the worst way, Quinn.”

“I can see that, Harley. But you don’t want him more than I do.”

“So we got a deal?”

Quinn stopped with the fingers. “Yeah.”

“Your coffee’s getting cold.”

“Let it.”

It was almost 2
A.M.
when Quinn let himself into his apartment on West Seventy-fifth Street. The apartment comprised the first floor of a brownstone that was two buildings down from the building where Quinn had lived for a while with his now ex-wife May, and then for a shorter period of time with Pearl.

He was trying to get Pearl to leave her tiny apartment and move into the brownstone with him. She wasn’t high on the idea. She would spend time with him there, and had even slept over a few times on the sofa, when it was late at night and the subway had stopped running. She’d never had sex with him there, or anywhere else, since her fiancé Yancy Taggart had died saving her life.

Quinn was moving slowly and carefully with Pearl. She was still grieving for Yancy, even though almost a year had passed since his death. Quinn understood that, and he took it into account whenever Pearl acted up.

Yancy had been a good man. And he and Pearl might have made a go of their marriage. Quinn had been sorry about what happened to Yancy, too. But time passed, and life continued beyond the point where Yancy had died saving Pearl’s life.

And though it might be bad form and a mistake, the truth was that Quinn wanted Pearl back.

Something rattled upstairs. Then came a metallic ping, and what sounded like a board dropping flat on the floor. Quinn chose to ignore the noise. He’d investigated such things before and found nothing. The old building was prone to make unexpected, unexplainable sounds.

The brownstone had been built in 1885, and it showed its age. Quinn had bought it with some of his settlement from the city. He’d seen it as an investment, and was rehabbing the upstairs, converting it to two spacious apartments that could be rented out to make the mortgage payments. However, if Pearl eventually moved in with him, only the top floor would be rented. The second floor, with its turned oak woodwork and beautiful original crystal chandelier, would be theirs on a daily basis.

Quinn had even from time to time considered offering one of the apartments to Pearl to rent. It would bring her physically closer. Another step toward them moving in together.

Sometimes even Quinn wondered if that eventuality was possible. He didn’t underestimate the obstacles.

He and Pearl were both difficult to live with, because neither could completely overlook the other’s faults.

Or maybe they were characteristics. Even virtues. Quinn was obsessive in his work, a solver of the human puzzle and a dedicated, even merciless hunter. He might have stepped from the pages of the Old Testament, only his religion was Justice. He was controlled and patient and relentless.

Pearl was equally obsessive about her work, but not as controlled, and certainly not as patient.

Quinn might be mistaken for a plodder, until you realized that not one step was wasted or taken in a wrong direction. Then you knew you were watching a deliberate, heat-seeking missile, and God help his target. When whoever he was hunting moved this way or that, Quinn could be fooled only for a short while. He was tireless, he was inexorable, and, ultimately, he could be deadly.

Pearl, on the other hand, seemed to have been born with a burr up every orifice. She was direct and tough, and her moods ranged all the way from irritated to enraged. While Quinn was slathering his phony Irish charm on a suspect, Pearl would be waiting to kick the suspect where it hurt the most. Suspects seemed to sense that.

Quinn went into the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and removed his boxy, size-twelve black shoes. Sometimes, in the faint glow of the nightlight, he would imagine that Pearl was there asleep. Though in her early forties, she looked almost like a child. Her raven black hair spread like a shadow on her pillow. Even in repose her strong features and dark eyebrows, her fleshy red lips, were vivid and gave Quinn moments of breathlessness. She was a small woman, slightly over five feet tall, but beneath the thin white sheet that covered her, the curves of her compact, buxom form were the timeless landscape of love. She was Quinn’s every-woman, yet he knew that in all the world there was no one else like her. She helped him to understand the contradictions and power that women held, though she might not completely understand them herself.

Their relationship, their love, was worth recovering. And once recovered, worth nurturing.

Quinn quietly stripped to his Jockey shorts, and slowly, so as not to wake the imaginary Pearl, moved to the other side of the bed and slipped beneath the sheet.

Am I going crazy? Do I love her this much? To construct her in my imagination when the logical me knows she isn’t here?

The bedroom was hushed but for the constant muted sounds of the city. The distant rush of traffic, punctuated by sirens and sometimes faraway human voices, filtered in from the world on the other side of the window.

There was a click, then a hum that built in volume and command. The window-unit air conditioner cycling on. Quinn felt cool air caress his leg beneath the sheet. He moved a bare foot outside the sheet, taking advantage of the breeze. He didn’t think the hum or sudden circulation of air would awaken Pearl. He remembered that usually she was a deep sleeper.

Pearl, who wasn’t there.

The phone rang at 2
A.M.
Quinn fought his way awake and pressed the receiver to his ear. He hadn’t checked to see who was calling and was almost surprised to hear the real Pearl. But she was in the habit of sometimes calling him at odd hours.

Does she lie in bed and think about me? Does she construct an imaginary Quinn?

But that would mean—

“What’d Renz want?” she asked.

He swallowed the bitter taste along the edges of his tongue. “It’s past two o’clock, Pearl. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“I’m awake ’n so are you,” she said. “I don’t like it when I ask a question and the answer’s hours away.”

Quinn yawned, almost displacing his jaw. “Since we’re both awake, you wanna meet someplace for coffee, maybe go dancing?”

“Now you’re being a smart-ass.”

“Yes, I am. I guess it’s just in me.”

“Talk, Quinn.”

He talked. Knowing he’d never have a more attentive listener. When he was finished, Pearl said, “I don’t like anything about it except for the money.”

Quinn said, “I’m not thinking about the money.”

“Yeah. Renz needs it, and you have a mission, so we’re stuck with it.”

“We are. But it’s not such a bad thing, Pearl. Q and A doesn’t have anything else going at the moment. Because of the economy, maybe.”

“We’re supposed to be a recession-proof business.”

“Well, maybe we are. Maybe that’s why we’ve got poor Millie Graff.”

“Then it is, Quinn.”

“Is what?”

“Such a bad thing.”

“You’re exasperating, Pearl.”

“I guess it’s just in me.”

Quinn wondered if they would ever get to the point where their conversations didn’t turn into competitions.

“We’re gonna need sleep, Pearl. Breakfast at the diner?”

“Eight o’clock,” she said, and hung up.

Quinn squinted at the clock by the bed. He was wide awake now. Eight o’clock seemed an eternity away.

Over breakfast at the Lotus Diner—veggie omelet for Pearl, scrambled eggs and sausages for Quinn—Pearl said, “How are we going to play it today?”

“I’ll send Sal and Harold to meet with the liaison cop Renz is giving us. They can pick up whatever information the NYPD has. It’s still early for there to be much of that. Millie’s body’s barely cold.”

Pearl took a bite of egg-sheathed broccoli and chewed thoughtfully. She sipped her coffee, also thoughtfully. “Maybe this whole thing will be easier than we think. Could be Millie was having an affair with Philip Wharkin and he turned out to be a nutcase. They had an argument. Then everything went all pear shaped, as the British say. It was a one-off thing.”

Quinn looked at her. “You’ve been to England?”

“Been to the BBC.”

“Would it be that simple on the BBC?”

“Never. The inspector would have nothing to do.”

“There we are,” Quinn said.

“Where?”

“Pear shaped.”

They were finishing their second cups of coffee when Pearl’s cell phone sounded its four opening notes of the old
Dragnet
theme. She pulled the instrument from her purse and automatically flipped up the lid, completing the connection without thinking to check to see who was calling.

“Pearl? Are you there, dear? It’s important.”

“Hold on a minute,” Pearl said. She moved the phone well away from her, beneath the table. “It’s my mother, out at Golden Sunset,” she said to Quinn. “This is gonna take a while. Why don’t you go ahead without me and I’ll see you at the office.”

Pearl’s mother lived at Golden Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey, only she didn’t quite see it as living.

“Tell her I said hello,” Quinn said, and took a last sip of coffee.

Pearl watched him pay at the cash register and wave at her as he walked from the diner.

“I’m back, Mom,” Pearl said. “Now what’s so important?”

“Did I hear that nice Captain Quinn, dear?”

“You did. He was just leaving. And he’s no longer a captain. What’s so—”

“Pot roast,” her mother said. “You know how, when you too seldom visit here at the nursing home—”

“Assisted living.”

“—you coordinate it with pot-roast night? Well, many others have and do and would like to continue. Traditions are much underrated and important, even life-sustaining, like in that song in
Fiddler on the Roof….
”

“What’s happened, Mom?”

“Pot-roast night. They have moved pot-roast night.”

Pearl was bewildered. “Can’t you… adjust?”

“They have moved it from Tuesday evening to Thursday evening. People like yourself come to visit on pot-roast night because—and here you will agree—the pot roast is the only digestible food they serve. And to make things worse, not in the gastronomical sense, Thursday evening is SKIP-BO night. The choice for the inmates—”

“Residents.”

“—will be either conversation with their visitors, or SKIP-BO
.
”

SKIP-BO was a card game Pearl didn’t understand and didn’t want to learn. Or talk about. “Damn it!” Pearl said.

“Don’t curse, dear.”

“My phone’s blinking, Mom. Battery’s going dead. I forgot to charge it last night.”

“A string tied around the finger …”

Pearl held the phone well away from her.

“… not so tight as to leave an unattractive indentation in the skin…”

“Fading and breaking up,” Pearl said.

Pearl snapped her phone closed, breaking the connection.

“Quinn says hello,” she murmured, and finished her coffee before it was too cool to drink.

Quinn was seated behind his desk, clearing away yesterday’s mail, when Pearl walked into the Quinn and Associates office on West Seventy-ninth Street. The office was still warm, even though the air conditioner had been running awhile. There was a trickle of rust-stained condensation zigzagging down the wall beneath the window housing the unit. Pearl was wearing the expression she usually wore after a phone conversation with her mother. Quinn could understand Pearl’s aggravation, but he rather liked her mother.

Sal Vitali and Harold Mishkin were already there. Vitali was seated at his desk, making a tent with his fingers. Mishkin was standing over by the coffee machine, gazing down at it with his fists propped on his hips, as if to hurry it along. Vitali was short but with a bearlike build, swarthy complexion, and thick black hair going gray. He had a voice like a chain saw.

“Harold brought doughnuts,” he grated.

Over by Mr. Coffee, Mishkin smiled and nodded. He was slight, and with the beginning of a stoop. His brown hair was thinning and arranged in a comb-over, his chin receded beneath a narrow mouth and enormously bushy graying mustache. Mishkin was everybody’s idea of a milquetoast. Everybody would be mostly right, except for when Mishkin knew he had to do something extremely difficult. Then, hands quaking, mustache twitching, stomach knotting, Mishkin would do it. “True courage,” Vitali often growled, defending his longtime partner.

“I’m coming from a big breakfast,” Pearl said. “You’ve gotta let us know the day before if you’re gonna bring doughnuts, Harold.”

“They’re the kind you like,” Mishkin said. “Cream-filled with chocolate icing.”

“You trying to talk me into one to soothe your conscience, Harold?”

“You read too much into it, Pearl,” Vitali said. “He’s just trying to make you fatter.”

Pearl picked up a silver letter opener and held it so morning sunlight glinted into Mishkin’s sensitive eyes. Mishkin took off his glasses and turned away.

“He’s being nice to you, Pearl,” Vitali growled. “He figures you can eat breakfast and have a doughnut for dessert. It’s not against the law.”

“If I wanted a doughnut—”

“For God’s sake!” Quinn said, thinking it was amazing how Pearl could walk into a room and change the mood, even the temperature. “Has anybody looked up the killer in the phone book?”

Vitali appeared surprised. “Huh?”

“Philip Wharkin. The guy who wrote on the victim’s mirror with her blood.”

“We don’t know he’s the killer,” Pearl pointed out.

“Do we know he isn’t? Do we know he’s not some psycho with an irresistible urge to leave his name at murder scenes?”

“I guess not,” Mishkin said, and sampled his coffee. He made a face as if it was too hot.

“Then let’s find out. I know it’s unlikely somebody named Philip Wharkin is actually the killer, but there’s some reason that the killer left a name behind, even if it’s only so we waste our time. Only it’s not a waste of time.” He walked over and stood in front of his desk, facing everyone but Mishkin, who was off to the side. “Sal, you and Harold find all the Philip Wharkins in the New York–area directories. Talk to them and find out where they were when Millie Graff’s murder was committed. Pearl will use the computer to help you locate them. For all we know, the killer’s got a website where he brags about what he’s done. When Fedderman comes in, he and I are gonna drive over to Millie’s neighborhood and interview anybody who might have seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelled anything that might possibly be connected with what happened to the victim.”

Vitali stood up and began stuffing pens and papers into his pockets. Mishkin worked a plastic lid onto his coffee cup so he could take it with him. Pearl was sliding into her desk chair, ready to boot up her computer.

Quinn and Associates’ office was set up a lot like a precinct squad room, a large space without dividers between the desks. Everybody working for the agency was a former NYPD detective, so they felt right at home and fell to work immediately when they were given assignments. Old habits died hard, especially if they were perpetuated by Quinn.

Quinn, Pearl, and Fedderman had always been in one of those thorny relationships where they regularly inflicted minor pain on each other. When things went too far, Quinn usually played the role of peacekeeper. He didn’t mind. The verbal jousting between Pearl and Fedderman kept them sharp and contributed to their efficiency. The funny thing was, since Vitali and Mishkin had joined the team, they’d fallen into the same kind of verbal bickering with the others, but not so much with each other. As they had in the NYPD, they acted as a team, with Vitali sometimes protective of the sensitive Mishkin. Whatever acidic chemistry existed at Quinn and Associates, it worked. It seethed and bubbled sometimes, but it worked.

Quinn glanced over at Pearl. She was intently tracing her computer’s mouse over its pad, staring at the monitor almost in a trance. A new day. Time to get busy. Morning, murder, and marching orders from Quinn. Another day on the hunt. Despite the fact that she and Quinn were once contentious lovers, Pearl responded exactly like the others.

Argumentative though she might be, in ways that were essential, she could become an efficient, integral part of an investigative team, responding to orders instantly and without question. Pearl could be counted on.

The door opened and Larry Fedderman came shambling in. There were spots and crumbs all over his dark tie, and he was gripping a grease-stained white paper sack.

“I got us some doughnuts,” he said.

Pearl glared at him. “Take your doughnuts and—”

Quinn stepped in front of her and showed her the palm of his hand, like a traffic cop signaling stop. She did stop, in midsentence.

Quinn walked over to where Fedderman stood by the door. Fedderman, looking bemused, clutching his perpetually wrinkled brown suit coat wadded in his right hand. There were crescents of perspiration stains beneath his arms.

“Let’s go, Feds,” Quinn said. “We’re gonna drive over to where Millie Graff was killed, find out if any of her neighbors remembered anything important, now that they’ve slept on it.”

As he was hustled toward the door, Fedderman tossed the white paper sack. “The doughnuts are right here on my desk. Anybody can help themselves.”

The sound of the car doors slamming on Quinn’s big Lincoln filtered in from outside. He left the Renz-supplied unmarked Ford for Vitali and Mishkin to use when they had enough Philip Wharkins to interview.

With Quinn and Fedderman gone, the office seemed suddenly and unnaturally hushed, as if there were no air in it to sustain sound.

Pearl, Vitali, and Mishkin looked at each other.

Pearl made sure her computer was still signing on, then got up from behind her desk and walked over to Fedderman’s. She rummaged delicately through the grease-stained white bag and found a chocolate-iced doughnut with cream filling.

She carried the bag over and placed it where Vitali and Mishkin could reach it, along with their cache of doughnuts.

Time for teamwork.

And time to wonder if, this time, teamwork would be enough.