Silent Prey ld-4 Page 6

  "Dark-eyed married women?" Lucas suggested, moving closer.

  "Well, that," she said, the tentative smile returning. "But the thing is, he likes to fight… did like to fight. Like you. Now he can't walk two dozen steps without stopping for a breath."

  "Jesus." Lucas ran a hand through his hair. He'd had nightmares of being crippled. "What's the prognosis?"

  "Not so good." Tears glistened at the corners of her dark eyes. At the same moment, she smiled and said, "Shit. I wish I didn't do this." She wiped the tears away with the heel and knuckles of her hand. "This was his third attack. The first one was five years ago. That was bad. The second one was a couple months after the first, and wasn't so bad. Then he was coming back. He'd almost forgotten about them, he was working… Then this third one, this was the worst of all. He's got extensive damage to the heart muscle. And he won't stop working. The doctors tell him to spend a year doing graded exercise, to stay away from work, from the stress. He won't do it. And he's still smoking, I think. He's sneaking them. I can smell them on his clothes… in his hair."

  "So he's going to die," Lucas said.

  "Probably."

  "That's not so bad," Lucas said, leaning back, looking at her, his voice flat. "You just say fuck it. You do what you want, and if you go, you go."

  "That's what you'd do, isn't it?"

  "I hope so," he said.

  "Men are such goddamn assholes," Lily said.

  After another long silence, Lucas asked, "So what are you doing for sex?"

  She started to laugh, but it caught in her throat, and she stood up and picked up her purse. "I better get going. Tell me you'll come to New York."

  "Answer the question," Lucas said. Without thinking about it, he moved closer. She noticed it, felt the pressure.

  "We're… very careful," she said. "He can't get too carried away."

  Lucas' chest felt curiously thick, a combination of anger and expectation. The electricity between them crackled, and his voice was suddenly husky. "You never really liked being careful."

  "Ah, Jesus, Lucas," she said.

  He stepped up to her until he was only inches away. "Push me away," he whispered.

  "Lucas…"

  "Push me away," he said, "I'll go."

  She stepped back, dropped her purse. Outside, the first heavy drops of rain careened off the sidewalk, and a woman with a dog on a leash dashed past the house.

  She rocked back on her heels, looked down at her purse, then grabbed his shirt sleeve to balance herself, lifted one foot, then the other, pulled off her shoes, and stepped into the hallway that led to the bedroom. Lucas, standing in the living room, watched her go, until halfway down the hallway she turned her head, her dark eyes looking at him, and began to unbutton her blouse.

  Their lovemaking, she said later, sometimes resembled a fight, had an edge of violence, a tone of aggression. They might begin with an effort at tenderness, but that would slip and they would be bucking, wrenching, twisting…

  That night, as the last of the storm cells rumbled off into Wisconsin, with the room smelling of sweat and sex, she sat on the edge of the bed. She seemed weary, but there was a smile at the corner of her lips.

  "I'm such a goddamned slut," she said.

  "Oh, God…" He laughed.

  "Well, it's true," she said, "I can't believe it. I was such a nice girl for so long. But I just need. It's not intimacy. You're about as intimate as a fuckin' bear. I need the sex. I need to get jammed. I really can't believe it."

  "Did you know you were going to sleep with me?" Lucas asked. "When you got here?"

  She sat unmoving for a moment, then said, "I thought it might happen. So I went to the hotel first, and checked in. In case anyone called."

  He ran a fingernail down the bumps of her spine, and she shivered. She was going back to the hotel in case "anyone" called…

  "This guy you're sleeping with? 'Anyone'?" Lucas said.

  "Yes?"

  "What are you going to tell him?"

  "Nothing. He doesn't need to know." She turned toward him. "And don't you tell him anything, either, Davenport."

  "Why?" Lucas said. "Why would I ever see him?"

  "His name's Dick Kennett." In the half-light of the bedroom he could see a tiny, rueful smile lift the corner of her mouth again. "He's running the Bekker case," she said.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Early morning.

  Lucas strolled along Thirty-fifth Street, sucking on half of an orange, taking in the city: looking at faces and display windows, at sleeping bums wrapped in blankets like thrown-away cigars, at the men hustling racks of newly made clothing through the streets.

  The citric acid was sharp on his tongue, an antidote for the staleness of a poor night's sleep. Halfway down the block, he stopped in front of a parking garage, stripped out the last of the pulp with his teeth, and dropped the rind into a battered trash barrel.

  Midtown South squatted across the street, looking vaguely like a midwestern schoolhouse from the 1950s: blocky, functional, a little tired. Six squad cars were parked diagonally in front of the building, along with a Cushman scooter. Four more squads were double-parked farther up the street. As Lucas paused at the trash basket, disposing of the orange, a gray Plymouth stopped in the street. A lanky white-haired man climbed out of the passenger side, said something to the driver, laughed and pushed the door shut.

  He didn't slam the door, Lucas noticed: he gave it a careful push. His eyes came up, checked Lucas, checked him again, and then he turned carefully toward the station. The fingers of his left hand slipped under a brilliant-colored tie, and he unconsciously scratched himself over his heart.

  Lucas, dodging traffic, crossed the street and followed the man toward the front doors. Lily had said Kennett was tall and white-haired, and the hand over the heart, the unconscious gesture…

  "Are you Dick Kennett?" Lucas asked.

  The man turned, eyes cool and watchful. "Yes?" He looked more closely. "Davenport? I thought it might be you… Yeah, Kennett," he said, sticking out his hand.

  Kennett was two inches taller than Lucas, but twenty pounds lighter. His hair was slightly long for a cop's, and his beige cotton summer suit fit too well. With his blue eyes, brilliant white teeth against what looked like a lifetime tan, crisp blue-striped oxford-cloth shirt and the outrageous necktie, he looked like a doctor who played scratch golf or good club tennis: thin, intent, serious. But a gray pallor lay beneath the tan, and his eye sockets, normally deep, showed bony knife ridges under paper-thin skin. There were scars below the eyes, the remnants of the short painful cuts a boxer gets in the ring, or a cop picks up in the street-a cop who likes to fight.

  "Lily's been telling me about you," Lucas said, as they shook hands.

  "All lies," Kennett said, grinning.

  "Christ, I hope so," Lucas said. Lucas took in Kennett's tie, a bare-breasted Polynesian woman with another woman in the background. "Nice tie."

  "Gauguin," Kennett said, looking down at it, pleased.

  "What?"

  "Paul Gauguin, the French painter?"

  "I didn't know he did neckties," Lucas said uncertainly.

  "Yeah, him and Christian Dior, they're like brothers," Kennett said, flashing the grin. Lucas nodded and they went on toward the door, Lucas holding it open. "I fuckin' hate this, people holding doors," Kennett grumbled as he went through.

  "Yeah, but when you croak, how'd you like it to say on the stone, 'Died opening a door'?" Lucas asked. Kennett laughed, an easy extroverted laugh, and Lucas liked him for it, and thought: Watch it. Some people could make you like them. It was a talent.

  "I could die pulling the tab on a beer can, if they let me drink beer, which they don't," Kennett was saying, suddenly sober. "Hope the fuck it never happens to you. Eat aspirin. Stop eating steak and eggs. Pray for a brain hemorrhage. This heart shit-it turns you into a coward. You walk around listening to it tick, waiting for it to stop. And you're weak. If some asshole mugged me, I'd
have to take it."

  "I don't want to hear about it," Lucas said.

  "I don't want to talk about it, but I do, all the time," Kennett said. "Ready to meet the group?"

  "Yeah, yeah…"

  Lucas followed Kennett through the entrance lobby, waited with him until the reception sergeant buzzed them through to the back. Kennett led the way to a conference room with a piece of notebook paper Scotch-taped to the door: "Kennett Group." The room had four corkboards hung from the walls, covered with notes and call slips, maps of Manhattan, telephones, a couple of long tables and a dozen plastic chairs. In the center of it, a burly, sunburned cop in a white shirt and a thin dog-faced detective in a sport coat were facing each other, both with Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands, voices raised.

  "… your people'd get off their fuckin' asses, we could get somewhere. That's what's fuckin' us up, nobody wants to go outside because it's too goddamn hot. We know he's using the shit and he's got to get it somewhere."

  "Yeah, well I'm not the asshole who told everybody we'd have him in a week, am I? That was fuckin' crazy, Jack. As far as we know, he's buying whatever shit he's using in Jersey, or down in fuckin' Philly. So don't give me no shit…"

  A half-dozen more plainclothes cops, in thin short-sleeved shirts and wash pants, weapons clipped to their belts, watched the argument from the plastic chairs spread around the institutional carpet. Four of the six held Styrofoam coffee cups, and two or three were smoking cigarettes, snubbing them out in shallow aluminum ashtrays. One unattended cigarette continued to burn, the foul odor like a fingernail scratch on a blackboard.

  "What's going on?" Kennett asked quietly, moving to the front of the room. The argument stopped.

  "Discussing strategy," the sunburned cop said shortly.

  "Any conclusions?" Kennett asked. He was polite, but pushing. Taking over.

  The cop shook his head and turned away. "No."

  Lucas found a seat halfway back, the other cops looking at him, openly, carefully, with some distance.

  "That's Lucas Davenport, the guy from Minneapolis," Kennett said, almost absently, as Lucas sat down. He'd picked up a manila file with his name on it, and was flipping through memos and call slips. "He's gonna talk to the press this morning, then go out on the street this afternoon. With Fell."

  "How come you let this motherfucker Bekker get out?" the sunburned cop asked.

  "Wasn't me," Lucas said mildly.

  "Should of killed him when you could," dog-face said. Dog-face's two top-middle teeth pointed in slightly different directions and were notably orange.

  "I thought about it," Lucas said, staring lazily at dog-face until the other broke his eyes away.

  Somebody laughed, and somebody else said, "Shoulda."

  Kennett said, "You won't remember this, Davenport, but let me introduce Lieutenants Kuhn, Huerta, White, Diaz, Blake, and Carter, and Detectives Annelli and Case, our serial-killer specialists. You can get the first names sorted out later…"

  The cops lifted hands or nodded at him as their names were called out. They looked like Minneapolis cops, Lucas thought. Different names, but the attitude was the same, like a gathering of paranoid shoe salesmen: too little pay, too many years of burgers and fries and Butterfingers, too many people with big feet trying to get into small shoes.

  A red-haired woman walked into the room carrying a stack of files, and Kennett added, "And this is Barb Fell… Barb, that's Lucas Davenport in what appears to be a five-hundred-dollar silk-blend jacket and two-hundred-dollar shoes…"

  Fell was in her mid-thirties, slender, her red hair just touched with gray. An old scar, shaped like a new moon, cupped one side of her long mouth, a dead-white punctuation mark on a pale oval Welsh face. She sat next to him, perching, shook hands quickly and turned back to the front of the room.

  "John O'Dell's coming over, he's going to sit in," one of the cops was telling Kennett. Kennett nodded, dragged a chair around to face the others and said, "Somebody tell me we've got something new."

  After a moment of silence, Diaz, a tall, gaunt detective, one of the lieutenants, said, "About the time Bekker would've got here, a cab disappeared. Three months old. One of them new, round Caprices. Poof. Gone. Stolen while the driver was taking a leak. Supposedly."

  Kennett's eyebrows went up. "Never seen again?"

  "Not as far as we can tell. But, ah…"

  "What?"

  "One of the guys checked around. The driver doesn't know anything from anything. Went into a bar to take a leak, comes out, and it's gone. But the thing had been in two accidents, and the driver says it was a piece of shit. Says the transmission was shot, there was something wrong with the suspension, the front passenger-side door was so tight you could barely open it. I'd bet the sonofabitch is in a river someplace. For the insurance."

  Kennett nodded but said, "Push it. We've got nothing else, right?" He looked around. "Nothing from the Laski surveillance…?"

  "No. Not a thing," said another of the lieutenants.

  "Um…" Lucas lifted a finger, and Kennett nodded at him.

  "Lily told me about the Laski scam, and I've been thinking about it."

  The cops at the front of the room turned in their chairs to look at him. "Like what?" asked Kennett.

  "I don't think Bekker'll go for it. He'd think of Laski as a wrong-headed colleague, not somebody he'd hit. Maybe somebody he'd debate. He's an equal, not a subject."

  "We got nothing else going for us," snapped Carter, the sunburned cop. "And it's cheap."

  "Hey, it's a smart idea," Lucas said. Laski was a Columbia pathologist who had agreed to analyze Bekker's medical papers for the media. He had condemned them, attacked their morality and science, attacked Bekker as a sadist and a psychotic and a scientific moron-all of it calculated to bring Bekker in. Laski, his apartment and his office were covered by a web of plainclothes cops. So far, Bekker hadn't touched any of the trip wires. "That's why I was thinking about it. About variations."

  "Like what?" prompted Kennett.

  "Back in the Cities, Bekker subscribed to the Times, and I bet he reads it here. If we could set somebody up to give a lecture, some kind of professional speech that would pull him in…"

  "Don't tease me, darlin'," Kennett said.

  "We have some guy lecture on the medical experiments done by Dr. Mengele," Lucas said. "You know, the Nazi dude…"

  "We know…"

  "So he lectures on the ethics of using Mengele's studies in research and the ethics of using Bekker's stuff," Lucas said. "And what might come out of their so-called research that's valuable. And we make an announcement in the Times. "

  The cops all looked at each other, and then Huerta said, "Jesus Christ, man, half the fuckin' town is Jewish. They'd go batshit…"

  "Hey, I don't mean any goddamn anti-Semite fruitcake lecture," Lucas said. "I mean some kind of, you know, soft, intellectual, theory thing. I read about this Mengele ethics debate somewhere, so there's something to talk about. I mean, legit. Maybe we get somebody Jewish to front it, so nobody gets pissed off. Somebody with credentials."

  "You think that'd do it?" Kennett said. He was interested.

  "Bekker couldn't resist, if he heard about it. He's nuts about the topic. Maybe we could arrange for this guy, whoever we get, to have a controversy with Laski. Something that would get in the papers."

  Kennett looked at the others. "What do you think?"

  Carter tipped his head, grudgingly nodded. "Could you fix it?"

  Kennett nodded. "Somebody could. O'Dell, maybe. We could get somebody at the New School. We know Bekker's around there."

  "Sounds okay," said Huerta. "But it'll take a while to set up."

  "Two or three days," said Kennett. "A week."

  "We oughta have him by then…"

  "So we cancel. It's like Laski: I don't see any downside, frankly, and it's cheap," Kennett said. He nodded at Lucas. "I'll get it started."

  "Quick."

  "Yeah," Kennett said. He
looked around the room. "All right, so let's go over it. John, what'd we have from Narcotics?"

  "We're hassling everybody, but nothing sounds good," said Blake. "Lotsa bullshit, we're chasing it…"

  As they reviewed the status of the case, and routine assignments, Fell whispered to Lucas, "Your interviews are all set up. A couple of reporters are already here, and three or four more are coming."

  Lucas nodded, but as she was about to add something, her eyes shifted away from him toward the door. A fat man walked in, his body swaying side to side, bumping the door frame, small dark eyes poking into the corners of the room, checking off the detectives, pausing at Lucas, pausing at Fell. He looked like H. L. Mencken in the later years. Spidery veins crisscrossed the gray cheeks; his thinning reddish hair was combed straight back with some kind of oil. His jowls were emphasized by a brooding, liverish underlip that seemed fixed in a permanent pout. He wore a three-piece suit in a color that might have been called oxblood, if anyone made oxblood suits.

  "O'Dell," Fell said under her breath, at his ear. "Deputy commissioner in charge of cutting throats."

  Lily followed O'Dell into the room, picked out Lucas, tipped her head and lifted her eyebrows. She wore a tailored navy-blue suit and a long, mannish red necktie knotted with a loose Windsor. She carried a heavy leather cop's purse over her shoulder, her hand lying casually on the strap at the back of the purse. If she moved her hand four inches, she'd be gripping the butt of a.45. Lucas had seen her use it once, had seen her shove the.45 in a man's face and pull the trigger, the man's face smearing as though he'd been struck with a hammer, all in the space of a tenth of a second…

  Lily touched O'Dell's elbow, guided him toward a chair, then moved around where she could sit next to Lucas. "Get a chance to talk to Dick?" she whispered.

  "Yeah. He seems like a pretty good guy…"

  She looked at him, as though checking to see if he was serious, then nodded and looked away.