Authors: John Lutz
January 2002
Raymond Masters was easy enough to find. He lived in his mother’s house in a run-down neighborhood in Astoria.
Rica stood to the side on the wooden porch while Stack knocked on the door. She thought this was better than the neighborhood where she’d grown up, and wondered what it would have been like to have a room of her own in a house like this, have girlfriends who lived on the block, maybe walked to school without worrying about—
“Rica?”
She started at the sound of Stack softly calling her name. This wasn’t the time to be daydreaming. What seemed routine could any second turn deadly. Cops who forgot that part of their training could die suddenly or cause it to happen to others.
Without thinking about it, she moved her hand closer to the 9mm in its shoulder holster beneath her coat.
“Yes?” a woman was saying warily.
Judging from what they could see of her deeply etched features, and her one visible faded eye as she peered from behind a door open only a few inches, she was hardly the lover of a desperado. Probably Masters’s mother.
“We’d like to talk to Raymond,” Stack said amiably. They might have been old friends of her son.
“Who should I say is calling?” Formal and wary.
“We’re with the police,” Stack said, “but please don’t be alarmed. I assure you we’re not here because Raymond’s in any trouble.”
Yet, Rica thought.
“We only want to talk to him for a few minutes, to reaffirm some things he told us earlier.”
Mom—if she was Mom—wasn’t that dumb. She put on a smile. “When he gets home, I’ll sure tell him you were here.”
Stack tuned to her wavelength; now they were older and worldly types, the sort of people who might say
thou.
“Between us…Mrs. Masters, is it?”
She nodded. Nothing in the faded eye changed.
“We both know we’re going to talk to your son one way or the other. I do pledge to you that there are no active warrants on him, nothing left over from his last problem. When we leave here, he’ll stay. Talk is all we want to do. And since we both know that conversation is going to take place sooner or later, why not now, in your own comfortable home, instead of the more unfriendly atmosphere of a Manhattan precinct house?”
“If he was here, I’d tell—”
“You don’t believe or trust me,” Stack said. He sounded crushed. “Well, I guess I can understand that. But ask yourself, dear, did what I just tell you make sense?”
Still no change in the bleary eye. But the door closed, the rattle of a chain lock being taken off sounded from inside; then the door opened and Mrs. Masters stepped back to admit them.
She was probably only in her fifties but might have passed for seventy, wearing a stained blue robe and huge fuzzy slippers though it was past noon. The place was a mess, with newspapers and magazines spread around, half a sandwich on the coffee table next to a bottle of bargain beer that was leaving a ring on the wood, a couple of roaches feeding on crumbs scattered over the cushions of the worn sofa. Stack and Rica remained standing.
Stack was still being reasonable. “Would you come with us to make the introductions? So as not to scare the boy unnecessarily.”
Raymond’s mother stared at him, still thrown off balance by this strange combination of officialness and kindliness, then shrugged. “It’s this way.” She preceded them to a hall leading past the door to the kitchen, then on toward the rear of the house. She must have been cooking. The scent of frying onions was in the air, almost strong enough to make Rica’s eyes water.
There was no sound as they walked down the hall. Rica’s gut told her something was wrong. Raymond might be scrambling out a window about now. Or loading the clip of a gun. Too damned quiet. Or maybe it was those fuzzy slippers the size of sheep.
Mrs. Masters waved a hand for them to stop, then walked ahead and knocked on a closed door. After a few seconds, she opened it and looked inside. “Raymond?
Raymond!”
She turned to stare at Stack, her eyes wide now and glittering with fear. “I think there’s something wrong with him!”
Stack pushed forward and moved the woman out of the way.
Be careful!
Rica almost shouted.
And he was careful. As Rica nudged the woman farther out of possible trouble, then removed her 9mm from its holster, Stack shoved the door all the way open with his foot and peered around the door frame over the barrel of his Police Special, keeping most of his body out of sight and a slight target.
Then he lowered the gun and stepped through the doorway.
Rica followed.
The air in the bedroom was stale and suffocating. A gaunt blond man wearing only stained Jockey shorts was curled in the fetal position on the bed. His scrawny arms were tucked in close to his body, encompassing drug paraphernalia as if he had gathered it near him because it might save instead of kill him.
Mrs. Masters screamed,
“Raymond!”
Once. It might have been heard all over the neighborhood. Then she bolted from the scene, which seemed an odd thing for a mother to do.
As Rica hurried to the phone in the living room, putting on a show for the woman even though her son was obviously dead, she caught a glimpse of Mrs. Masters in the kitchen, pouring gin from a bottle into a glass with trembling hands.
“The deal is,” said Stack to acting MR Squad Commander O’Reilly, “we’ve pretty much come to the wall on this case.”
O’Reilly, who was standing with his hands clasped behind his back and pretending to gaze out his office window, shook his head in denial and turned around. “Doesn’t sound right to me, Stack. We got Mr. Prominent Citizen burned like a log in his kitchen, and we’re gonna let it slide?”
“If we’ve got no choice,” Stack said. “We have no logical suspect and we’re out of moves. Raymond Masters might have helped us, or even been involved, but he’s dead and not talking.”
Rica, standing off to the side and behind Stack, thought she’d better come to his rescue before he got into it heavy with O’Reilly. “We’ve followed all the leads, sir,” she said in a reasonable tone. “Danner’s friends, coworkers, girlfriend, neighbors…Nobody has a clue or can give us a clue as to why he was murdered.”
“And the truth is,” Stack said, “Danner wasn’t that much of a prominent citizen. A well-paid attorney with a middlin’-size midtown firm.”
“What about the twenty thou you found in his safe?”
“It isn’t
that
much money.”
“But has it been explained?”
Rica thought she could imagine a thou explanations.
“No” Stack admitted.
“Maybe he bet a winner at the track,” Rica suggested. Stack glared at her.
O’Reilly seemed not to have heard her. He was back at the window, posing and gazing at some imagined horizon. “The girlfriend,” he said, then turned around and slid down into his desk chair—Vandervoort’s chair. He looked up at them as if he’d said something profound. “Helen whazzer-name.”
“Sampson,” Rica said.
“Stay on the girlfriend,” O’Reilly said. “You tie up some poor bastard and light him on fire, then stand over him with an umbrella so he don’t go out, I’d say that’s a crime of passion. Check the girlfriend, see if she’s going out with some other guy now and was maybe two-timing Danner.”
“The way we read the relationship,” Stack said, “it was between two people who’d been around and wouldn’t get their underwear all twisted up if one or the other happened to see someone else. Maybe they’d argue and split, but hardly set each other on fire.”
“Who told you about the relationship?”
“Helen Sampson,” Rica chimed in, not wanting Stack to have to say it.
O’Reilly smiled broadly, his pockmarked face creasing in the morning light. “So stay on the girlfriend.” He motioned with a sweeping motion of his arm at his cluttered desk. “Now I got goddamn paperwork, if you’ll excuse me. I don’t know how the hell Vandervoort kept up with this shit.”
“Part of the job, I guess,” Stack said noncommittally. But it seemed to aggravate O’Reilly.
“Stay on the girlfriend,” he said again, as Stack and Rica left the office, “even if it takes weeks.”
“The girlfriend,” Rica said, when they were out in the hall.
Stack didn’t answer her. She knew he was pissed off, and it amused her.
She knew it shouldn’t, but it did.
February 2002
Where the hell was Sharon?
She’d gone out over an hour ago to get a pedicure in Shear Ecstasy, the salon just off the lobby of the Bennick Tower, where the Lucettes lived in a fortieth-floor apartment. She should have been back before now, even waddling in her open sandals, balls of cotton tucked between her toes to keep them from rubbing together and smearing wet nail polish.
The heat was running behind today, and the luxury apartment was uncomfortably cool. For some reason sound was penetrating more than usual, the blasting of car and truck horns, the occasional roar of a bus at the stop near the corner. A police or fire department siren was screaming shrilly nearby, as if the vehicle was unable to move and protesting vociferously, adding to Dr. Ronald Lucette’s aggravation, and his anger. Had Sharon opened a window and forgotten to close it? It had happened before.
But the doctor wasn’t really upset with his wife Sharon. The object of his anger was one of his patients, Lillian Tuchman. So the woman’s navel was a few centimeters off to the left. What did she expect, after he’d performed liposuction and a tummy tuck on a 250-pound woman? It wasn’t as if he’d messed up Gwyneth Paltrow. What were Lillian Tuchman’s postoperation plans, anyway, to enter a bikini contest?
But he knew what her postoperation plans were: she was suing Dr. Lucette and New Beginnings Cosmetic Surgery Center for two million dollars. New Beginnings had a law firm on retainer, but as Dr. Lucette’s partners pointed out, the new, almost slim Lillian Tuchman was a woman not in a mood to compromise. She had already refused a nuisance settlement offer of $100,000, and her lawyers were hinting that there were intimations of sexual misconduct while she was under anesthetic.
Thinking about that last absurd charge made Dr. Lucette more than simply angry—he was outraged. Never had he touched a patient improperly under any circumstances, much less in a brightly lighted OR full of assistants. The charge would never stick!
But he knew better than to be so certain of such matters. Any charge might stick in court. Juries were more and more unpredictable, and if you were rich, as Dr. Lucette had to admit he was, jurors considered you fair game, one of the enemy caught in the sights of the common man. The jurors would be much like Lillian Tuchman herself, rather than Dr. Lucette. In the minds of people like Lillian Tuchman, the rich existed only to be envied, cursed, and plucked—unless of course they could be joined.
Dr. Lucette got up from where he was sitting in his soft green leather armchair and went into the bathroom. He stood at the basin and washed his hands in a way so practiced that he thought little about his actions as he studied his haggard face in the mirror. He was sixty-two now and looked fifty, meaning he was almost ready for another eye operation and forehead lift. There wasn’t much more he could do about his thinning gray hair. Growth stimulants didn’t seem to work for him, and within another few years he’d be one of those men who plastered strands of hair sideways over the tops of their skulls so they looked like lines drawn with a felt-tip pen. Well, perhaps there would be advances in the field of toupees.
He suddenly realized several minutes had passed and he was still soaping and scrubbing his hands. He’d been doing too much of that kind of thing lately. Nerves? Or a developing compulsive disorder? Obsessive compulsion ran in the Lucette family on his mother’s side. He’d had a cousin, Herbie, who had actually scrubbed all the hair from the backs of his hands with a coarse brush.
He grimaced and turned off the water, then dried his hands roughly on a nearby towel. Not obsessive compulsion! he assured himself. Nerves! He sure as hell had plenty to be nervous about. His daughter, Minerva, about to flunk out of Wellesley. His son, Bob, probably hooked on cocaine.
And now goddamn Lillian Tuchman and her off-center navel. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so potentially costly!
The doctor went back into the living room and sank again into the leather armchair. Always he warned patients not to expect too much from cosmetic surgery. If done correctly, once the healing was complete they would look much as their usual selves, only younger or well rested. But for some of them that wasn’t enough; they wanted to look like someone else because they wanted to
be
someone else. He sighed. They were seeing the wrong kind of doctor, he felt like telling them. They should—
He heard the apartment door open and close. Sharon—finally! Already he felt better. They could talk things over. She would sympathize with him. Then, after her toenails dried, they could go out and get some dinner at a nice restaurant. Maybe that new place on Amsterdam that served a tasty Caesar salad and genuinely medium-rare steak with garlic potatoes—comfort food. A drink, a good meal, another drink, and the world might seem habitable again.
Dr. Lucette waited, but Sharon didn’t emerge from the entry hall. Maybe she was waddling carefully, not wanting to get any nail polish on the carpet fibers.
She was taking her damned time, feeding his irritation.
At last he noticed a slight change of light and sensed her presence behind him and off to the side. He turned to look up and greet her but instead gasped.
Someone was standing silently staring down at him, but it wasn’t Sharon.
Outside the window, a cruel winter wind blew icy rain almost horizontally along the narrow avenue. The small patch of sky visible between the buildings across the street was gray as a bullet. Who was it who said weather needn’t affect mood?
Myra sat at her wide, custom-built cherry-wood desk in her Myra Raven Group office and tried to reason on the phone with Web Thomas without sounding desperate. “I managed to rearrange schedules here at the office so I could be away for the weekend, Web.” Making him feel guilty.
Not Web. He probably couldn’t even spell
guilty.
“I wish we could make it, Myra. I talked to somebody on the phone this afternoon, and the place is snowed in tight. She said it’s still snowing upstate.”
What did this guy want? Did he forget that he was the one who worked to talk her into this? They’d had three dates and he’d pushed her for three days—and nights—at what he called his “cottage” in upstate New York. Then suddenly, like so many before him, he’d changed his mind. Maybe because of something she’d done or said, some way she’d glanced at him. Whatever the reason, she knew he’d come to see her differently. Even through the phone connection she could feel him pushing her away.
Myra had been very much looking forward to this weekend. She knew that to somebody as rich as Web, a cottage could be somebody else’s idea of a mansion. She also knew from a conversation she’d overheard that he’d recently bought a new all-wheel-drive BMW that could probably cut through snow like an Olympic skier.
So maybe he didn’t want to risk a new car on icy country roads. “Our company car is a Lexus SUV,” she told him.
“That would be great except for the bridge.”
“Bridge?”
“Yeah, you have to drive across an old covered bridge to get to the cottage, and the weight of the snow caused the thing to collapse.”
He hadn’t missed a beat; maybe his excuse was genuine. Maybe he was going to suggest someplace other than his cottage. Dinner, a show, a hotel here in town. Or her place, her bed. She was ready to offer her bed if he hinted.
But he didn’t suggest something else. “Maybe it’s just as well, Myra. I’ve got a load of reports to go over, anyway.”
That was a laugh. If anyone had a make-work job, it was Web. Worthless Web.
“Maybe if—” She stopped herself. She had pride—maybe too much of it.
“Myra? You still there?”
“Not anymore,” she said, with more bitterness than she’d intended.
He laughed. “You’re taking this a bit too seriously.”
She didn’t like his laughter, or his remark. Because she
was
beginning to take him seriously.
“Here’s an idea, Myra. Why don’t we just meet at the Royalton about eight, have something to drink, then go on up to a room? The snow is all upstate, not here where we can still get together.”
Too late. And not even dinner and a show.
“A weekend at the Royalton?’
“Not a weekend. Just tonight. I wouldn’t try to talk you into an entire weekend.”
“No, thanks, Web.”
I don’t want to be your casual fuck.
“It isn’t as if we don’t know each other well enough, Myra.”
She didn’t like that last remark, either.
He didn’t misinterpret her silence. “Why don’t you think about it and call back in an hour or so?” he asked in a forced conciliatory tone.
“No need for that, Web. I already have my weekend appointments set up, including this evening and tomorrow morning.”
“I thought you rearranged your schedule.”
“I was going to,” she snapped.
“C’mon. You’re a group, Myra—all your advertising says so. You have salespeople to do that sort of work.”
“I have salespeople because I’ve got a successful agency. And I have a successful agency because I still do myself what I ask my people to do.”
“Your
people. Jesus, Myra! The world won’t stop spinning if you take a weekend off and enjoy yourself. Your people should be able to get along for a short while without you, maybe even sell a few condos and co-ops.”
She knew he wouldn’t understand. He’d been born to money, gone to excellent schools, then gone to work in the family business—yacht parts or something—and that was the extent of his experience and the limits of his horizons. He hadn’t come from where she came from. Hadn’t even visited. They were good together in bed, but not in the rest of the world. “If you don’t understand,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
“Now you’re pissed at me.”
“No, I’m just frustrating you and you’re misinterpreting it as my being pissed. That’s because you’re used to getting what you want.”
“My, my…coldhearted bitch.” He said it as a joke, but it had steel in it.
What did he expect? Of course she was angry. Fighting mad, in fact. He had left her no escape route from her embarrassment at being stood up, no way to save face, to maintain her facade. So she became combative. Even a sparrow would fight to the death when cornered. He didn’t think of her as a sparrow. She lowered her voice. “I thought you liked it that way, Web.”
“Myra, play above the belt. This kind of confrontation makes no sense. Why don’t you think things over, then call me back in about an hour and give me a definite answer?”
“I’ve got a better idea, Web. Why don’t
you
call
me
back—when you have a piece of property to sell?”
She hung up crisply but without banging the receiver.
She knew he’d call back. If not today, tomorrow. Or maybe he’d find somebody else for his hotel tryst tonight, start another surface relationship. Myra didn’t care.
Couldn’t care.
Standing up behind her desk, she smoothed the wrinkles in the slacks of her business suit, then walked from her office to the sales cubicles where her agents were seated at their desks when they weren’t showing property. The large, blue-carpeted area was brightly lighted by overhead fluorescent fixtures. A door in the far wall led to a reception area with genuine Chippendale chairs and a Sheraton pie crust table. Tasteful oil reproductions were mounted on the cream-colored walls. The reception room was lighted softly with glass-shaded lamps and a Tiffany ceiling fixture. Adjoining that expensively decorated room was a conference room similarly furnished in an eclectic mixture of modern reproductions and valuable antiques.
In the more Spartan sales floor area, half a dozen of the steel wood-tone desks were occupied this afternoon. A few of Myra’s people glanced up and nodded respectfully to her as she strode past. At the end cubicle she stopped and addressed the woman seated inside studying listings on a computer screen. Darlene, whose duty it was to keep the Myra Raven Group Web site up to date. More and more listings were attracting buyers over the Internet.
“Is the new Central Park South listing on-site yet?” she asked Darlene.
The neatly dressed elderly woman at the computer waved her into the cubicle. “I was just polishing it, editing the virtual tour.”
Myra stepped a few feet into the cubicle and watched as Darlene worked the mouse, and a video camera swept through the spacious luxury apartment. “Did we get the summer park view, as I asked?” Myra knew how desirable a park view was in the concrete world of Manhattan, which was why her office and her own apartment had one.
“Did we ever!” Darlene said. “I patched it in from a property we listed last July.” She maneuvered the mouse so a view out the apartment’s wide living room window filled the screen; then she zoomed in on what appeared to be a lush rectangle of green below.
“Marvelous!” Myra said.
Harold, one of her best salespeople, was behind her off to the side. “Myra, can I talk to you about the McCallister closing?”
Myra nodded and left Darlene to her task.
Eleanor, last month’s sales champion, was approaching Myra, head down, steps choppy, jaw set and determined. Myra knew what she wanted. She could read her people’s minds. “I’ll get with you on the closing after I talk to Eleanor about one of her listings,” Myra said to Harold.
As Harold backed away a few steps, Myra said to a young woman passing by, “Amy, get me the file on 458K West Fifty-seventh.”
“Myra,” the intrepid Eleanor was saying, “I have some serious issues on that West Fifty-seventh property.”
“Amy’s getting the file,” Myra said. To Harold: “I’m sorry, Harold, but I know what Eleanor wants and it’ll only take a minute. When you see her leave my office, come on in and we’ll get together on your closing.”
“Fine, Myra.”
Myra strode to her office, aware of Eleanor hurrying to keep pace behind her. She felt grand. The Myra Raven Group was humming.
She’d forgotten all about Web Thomas.
An hour later, still at her desk, she picked up the phone and made sure she had an outside line before pecking out the number of Prestige Available Escort.
“I need a male escort for this evening, dinner and drinks afterward,” she said to the woman who answered the phone.
“Yes, ma’am. Have you used our service—”
“I’m in your computer,” Myra said, telling the woman her PIN. “And see if Billy Watkins is available.”
Rica figured the hell with it. She’d been sitting behind the steering wheel of a parked unmarked across the street from Helen Sampson’s West Side apartment for the last two hours. There was no need to start the car’s engine; she’d had it idling so the heater could be on. Which made the windows fog up. Which made it harder to see if the lights stayed on in Helen Sampson’s apartment windows, or if Helen herself left the building. At least the rain had stopped before changing to sleet or snow. Rica was hungry, thirsty, and had to go to the bathroom.
Screw this!
She put the car in drive and pulled out of her parking slot, ignoring the blast of a horn behind her. A taxi pulled up next to her at the next stoplight and out of the corner of her vision she saw the driver working his gums and giving her hell for pulling out in front of him. She guessed he had a right, but she thought,
keep it up, asshole, and I’ll put the cherry light on the roof and give you a bad time.
This whole waste of yet another evening, she thought, was because O’Reilly was an idiot. Helen Sampson was as innocent as O’Reilly himself of Hugh Danner’s murder. The woman was grief-stricken and despondent. You could feel it when you were close to her, hear it in her voice, see it in her facial expressions and body language when she didn’t know she was being observed. O’Reilly seemed not to mind diverting people on the off chance that Helen Sampson might provide some kind of lead, meet with a known arsonist or something, or maybe start a fire when she didn’t think anyone was looking. Department politics! That was the one thing about the NYPD that had surprised Rica when she finally figured out how things worked. Too much was done for purely political reasons. Made Rica want to puke. Say what you want about Stack; he was a hardhead and would never make captain, but it was because he was honest and he respected the Job. Everyone knew and said freely that he was one hell of a cop.
Rica and Stack and some uniforms from the Two-oh had been keeping a loose tail on Helen Sampson, which meant she wasn’t being watched every minute, but was being observed intermittently in the hope she’d bust some kind of move that would mean something. Rica had tailed her most of the evening, watched her leave her bookshop, ride a bus, get some takeout at a deli, buy some magazines—some kind of fashion shit—then go home to her apartment and not come out. It was damn near bedtime now, at least for Rica. She was going home.
The cab driver blasted his horn at her so she’d look over at him, then made a violent twisting motion in the air with his middle finger. The guy wouldn’t let it alone, so it was gonna be his problem.
When the light went green and traffic pulled away, Rica let the taxi zoom out ahead of her. Then she got on its rear bumper, rolled down the window, and placed the flasher on the unmarked’s roof. She motioned with her left hand for the cabbie to pull to the curb.
She was going to ask him about that business with the finger.
Rica had given the cabbie a rough time, playing the game he’d started, liking the surprise on his face when he’d found out she was a cop. The fear when she threatened to have the bastard’s job. The whole thing should have been a pleasure, a relief. So why was she crying here in her bed?
Her former husband, Rudy. The smart-ass cabbie. Stack….
Men!
She knew why she was crying. It was because Stack still loved his wife Laura. That was how it went: cops’ wives got fed up with the life first and walked out. The cops, the wives, blamed the Job, and usually they were right. Eventually, both parties learned there was no going back.
The
eventually
was the problem.
There were more tears, over an hour’s worth, before she fell asleep.
The next morning was cold but bright, with air so brittle it seemed if you sneezed you might shatter it. Rica and Stack drove the unmarked to the deli where Helen Sampson had bought last night’s takeout. Before driving on to park outside Helen’s apartment, Stack got them each a coffee and a danish and carried them out to the car.
Rica watched how his breath fogged and trailed behind him as he stepped down off the curb to cross the street, a big man ambling along with the gait he probably used years ago on his beat, wearing a long, dark coat of indeterminate color that, like the walk, might date back to those days. It was a simple, square-shouldered coat. Not what you’d call a topcoat, or a romantic trench coat with a belt and all those pockets. A sensible warm overcoat, was Stack’s winter garment of choice. No zip-out lining for this boy. Old-fashioned kind of coat. Old-fashioned Stack. Fixed object in a shifting world.
When they pried the plastic lids off the cups, the steam made the unmarked’s windows fog up, just as they had last night. Cozy, Rica thought. Nice and private. Stack peeled back a little plastic triangle from his cup’s lid, then replaced the lid to keep the steam down so he could see better what was going on outside. Rica left the lid off her cup.
Stack, behind the steering wheel this morning, made no move to start the car.