Darker Than Night

54

Successful decorators were a flighty bunch, flitting all over the city as if in a panic, difficult to catch up to. They were late there, in the wrong place here, ahead of schedule there. Apparently, they could arrange anything but time.

Pearl finally located Victory Wallace at a crumbly red-brick building just off Christopher Street in the Village. It was obvious that the building was being refurbished. A tubular slide ran from a second-floor window down to a rusty Dumpster. The front shop window was covered with graffiti-marred plywood featuring BOOK ’EM ALL in large black letters. The first three letters looked somewhat suspicious, and Pearl could interpret the original message. Sometimes she shared the thought.

Two vans and a pickup truck overloaded with debris—rotted lumber, broken wallboard, splintered lathing, an old door—were parked near the entrance. The building’s front door was not only open but off its hinges. Pearl wondered if it was the door in the truck.

She heard hammering as she stepped inside. Daylight streamed narrowly in through the few unboarded windows, completely missing areas that were illuminated by flood-lights. A fine dust hung in the air. Plaster dust, Pearl assumed. A burly man in jeans and a sleeveless shirt was on a ladder, using a trowel to spread drywall mud over seams in newly applied wallboard. A skinny, shirtless teenage boy, his upper body covered with tattoos, was sanding dried applications of the putty-colored substance—the cause of so much dust. His dark hair had a film of gray over it, making him look prematurely aged. At the far end of the area, whose interior walls had been removed, a man in baggy overalls was using a circular saw on boards laid over a pair of sawhorses. To Pearl’s left, another workman was on a stepladder, wielding a red-handled hammer.

In the middle of all this heavy-duty, purely practical activity stood an improbable figure in tight black leather pants, boots with built-up heels, and a sky blue shirt with puffy sleeves. Pearl wished she had the guy’s waist, not to mention his ass.

“Are you Mr. Wallace?” she asked between passes with the power saw.

He turned toward her, quite a handsome man, with a firm chin and dark lashes, and held up his middle and forefinger in a V gesture. “Victory, my sweet. I’m Victory.” He looked her up and down without being bashful about it. “And you are Detective Kasner. The one who called.”

“Unless there’s another Detective Kasner,” Pearl said. Keeeeeeeyow! went the power saw. B-bam, b-bam! went the hammer. “Can we please talk someplace quiet?”

“The walls!” shouted Victory.

If they have ears, they are surely deaf. “What about the walls?”

“What do you think of a subtle flesh color for the walls?”

Pearl glanced around. “I don’t know. What kind of place is—” keeeeeyow!—“this gonna be?”

“An erotic Internet dessert cafe.”

Pearl cupped a hand to her ear. “Exotic desserts?”

“Erotic!”

B-bam, b-bam!

“Ah,” said Pearl. She pointed to her right ear and shrugged. “Someplace quiet, okay?”

Victory nodded and led her to a back entrance, then through a door to a small, shaded courtyard with dead flowers surrounding a maple tree. The hammering and sawing were barely audible out here.

“Better,” Pearl said. “Now, how do I get a job at an erotic Internet café?”

Victory gave her a dubious look and smiled. He said nothing, still trying to figure out the game. After all, cops, murder, it was all more than unsettling.

“And what is an erotic Internet café?” Pearl asked.

“Like any other Internet café, dear, only we subscribe to the most amazing Web sites, and the confections are of different shapes. Dough can be worked into many forms other than bagels and doughnuts, some of them quite suggestive if not titillating.”

“And you’ve been hired to decorate the place?”

“Indeed I have.”

Good choice. “Flesh-colored walls seem right, then,” Pearl said, “but without a trace of blush.”

“Consider your vote cast.” Victory waved an arm for emphasis. Pearl saw that his shirt had French cuffs with gold-coin cuff links—probably real gold. There was profit in bullshit. “If this is about poor Marcy Graham and her husband, I already talked to one of your fellow officers. To what do I owe this second tête-à-tête? Am I perchance a suspect?”

“Nope. You’re in the clear. So far,” she added, trying to wipe the smarmy smile off his face.

The smile didn’t waver. “I watch Law and Order, dear detective. I know that truth always rises to the top.”

“In real life it takes someone like me to push it up there.”

“And where might we find real life?”

Pearl laughed. “It’d take a better detective than me to tell you that. But Marcy Graham and her husband found real death just months after you decorated their apartment. It says in the file you were given a key by Marcy.”

“Indeed. That isn’t unusual. Most of my clients don’t mind me letting myself in, and they prefer not to be home during remodeling.”

“Did you give the Graham key to any of your subcontractors? The tradesmen who do the physical part of your work.”

“A few times. But I always got it back from them before nightfall. I am not unmindful of security. I mean, these days…” He waved a hand as if to gesture toward particular days all around them. These days.

“Did any of the people you hired have the opportunity to have the key duplicated?”

Victory looked nonplussed, and that was the only word for it. “Oh, my!”

“That a yes?”

“I’m afraid it is. But all the people I use are old acquaintances, each and every one of them totally trustworthy.”

“We both know it’s impossible to be sure of that.”

“True. But this isn’t love or war, dear, it’s interior decorating.” He raised a ringed forefinger. “Strike that. It can be like war sometimes. When the client thinks something doesn’t tie in. Or when it comes time to pay the cost of art, instead of simply talking about it.”

“I’d like a list of all the tradesmen you employ,” Pearl said.

“I hate to cause them a problem.”

“Do I look like a problem?”

Victory grinned lewdly. “Oh, do you ever!”

“That would be a yes on the list?”

Victory shrugged. “I suppose.”

Pearl gave him her pen and notepad.

When he was finished writing, she said, “What are they using for bedroom ceiling fixtures these days?”

“Retro crystal chandeliers, stained-glass Japanese lanterns, brushed aluminum—”

“What about one of those ceiling fans with a light kit?”

“Oh, my God!”

Brushed aluminum, Pearl thought.

As she was leaving, the guy working the power saw glanced over at her and managed a kind of come-hither motion with his tongue. Pearl tried to ignore him but had to admire his dexterity.

Keeeeeeeyow!

Pearl hoped he was cutting off a finger.

Victory watched Pearl through the bright rectangle of the front doorway as she crossed the street to her parked car.

I wish I had her ass.

He liked the lady cop; she had balls. But he certainly didn’t want to see her again. It was unnerving, being so close to an actual murder case. A homicide was déclassé, but nothing compared to an arraignment and trial, not to mention prison, not to overlook…. Well, it could prove squalid and mortifying. Judges, juries, could be so unpredictable in these times. Victory knew innocent people were convicted of murder with alarming regularity. What was that movie…?

It had gotten four stars—he remembered that. It would come to him.

He went over in his mind the names he’d written on the detective’s pad. He needed to be thorough so as not to invite suspicion of some kind, or suggest complicity with a monster.

He’d listed everyone, he was positive. The detective with the delectable derriere had the names of all the tradesmen he’d employed in the past two years.

Satisfied that he could put the entire dreary business out of his mind, Victory returned to contemplating the walls-to-be. It wasn’t only the color that concerned him; he had to coordinate other elements with the carnal and crust motif. The walls were background; something now needed to be on them to pop and provide contrast. Perhaps clear-laquered, risqué lingerie, framed as art. And surely there were baking utensils that suggested erotic usage.

Yes! But possibly he was approaching this backward. First the lingerie and utensil wall hangings, then the color? There was still time to decide. And he knew someone who might perfectly match color with context to combine sex and food, two of the basic human imperatives.

Victory hadn’t for a second considered including Romulus in his list of tradesmen. That was because Romulus wasn’t a tradesman. He didn’t merely glow in the galaxy of simple craft. Romulus was too complex and brilliant for that. He was unique. A bright star rather than a workaday drudge with a talent for hammer, saw, or paintbrush.

He was hardly a slayer of anything other than poor taste.

Romulus was an artist, like Victory himself, a spiritual brother and not part of the mundane world that so often tried to intrude on their own.

A genuine artist. And in this fucked-up, fucked-over city, what was more precious than that?

The Night Prowler watched Claire leave her apartment building and stride with her incredibly graceful walk on the opposite side of the street. How she could move—her hips, her arms, the kick of her legs—in time with some celestial music he could hear and see in elegant kaleidoscopic wonder. Was she also a dancer? So many Broadway stars could dance, as well as sing and act. Many had begun as chorus line dancers and had become actors. Or was it the other way around? He didn’t know, actually, but to him Claire was a dancer.

She was walking with bold purpose.

On her way to meet someone? Someone who should be me?

She turned a corner and the Night Prowler had to jaywalk, jogging across a lane of slowly moving traffic to keep up. An annoyed driver screamed at him that he was an asshole. The Night Prowler ignored him instead of killing him and walked swiftly on.

Ah! There she is! In the shadow of the valley of—

Then she walked into the brilliant pale light cast downward by a theater marquee. She was going to see a movie? Alone?

But she didn’t stop at the glassed-in booth to buy a ticket before entering the lobby.

The Night Prowler slowed and moved sideways to skirt the closed shops.

He watched through glass doors as Claire talked smilingly to the young man taking tickets. Finally he grinned back at her, charmed as he would be, and Claire brushed past him and across the carpeted inner lobby.

The Night Prowler pushed the door open and pretended to study movie posters in the outer lobby while actually keeping an eye on Claire. The theater was having a science fiction retrospect, and the poster was for I Married a Monster from Outer Space. He was pretty sure he’d seen that one years ago; he remembered the luscious brunette with the bangs, screaming on the poster. Four stars.

Claire was at the concession counter, waiting patiently behind a bald man buying popcorn. The Night Prowler moved closer, standing before the poster nearest the main lobby entrance. It advertised the feature for tonight, Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Night Prowler recalled that one, too, and knew it was a classic. Richard Carlson spitting into his scuba mask and swimming around in Florida. Didn’t Carlson also star in I Led 3 Lives? Of course that one was television. Three lives? That was nothing!

After the bald man had sprinkled salt on his popcorn and finally walked away, Claire moved up a step and pointed at something in the display case. The woman behind the counter stooped, straightened, and handed her a large box of candy. The Night Prowler recognized the brand even from this distance—chocolate-covered mints in a green-and-white package. He recalled from an e-mail he’d read on Claire’s computer that they were her favorite candy.

So, she was weaning herself away from the muffins, or suddenly they’d become repulsive to her. Women—

Coming this way!

He turned away so she wouldn’t see his face, and in the reflection of the Black Lagoon poster glass, he watched her walk past, not glancing at him. The creature, some sort of amphibian with a permanent scowl, glowered at him. It knew what he was about.

The Night Prowler waited at least a minute before turning around. Then he went outside and bought a ticket, even though the woman in the booth warned him the movie was well under way.

Inside the theater he went to the concession stand and bought half a dozen boxes of mints before going into the darkened auditorium and finding a seat.

He got comfortable, opened one of the mint boxes, and began eating Claire’s favorite candy. He let the chocolate melt on his tongue while he thought about her. On the screen an attractive scuba diver, with long, beautiful legs, was swimming in dark waters. She was obviously afraid even as she stroked deeper, propelled by the screenplay. Danger, death, could suddenly embrace her from any direction in the murky depths. It was much like life outside the movies.

Someone in the audience tittered. The Night Prowler pressed a fingertip against the back of the unoccupied seat in front of him and thought a sharply pointed knife would penetrate the material easily, then cut through the back of anyone seated there and reach the heart. Bloodred, scarlet blue in the dark. If he acted out what he was thinking, the person, the titterer, would die immediately and the few other patrons in the theater would assume he was simply asleep, while his killer got up and walked out.

It could be done. It was a thought. People who talked in movies, who rudely intruded in other people’s dreams and diversions, deserved death.

The volume of the music rose, and so did the swimmer. Wide-eyed and fearful, she was yanked up, just in time, into the boat, where she was safe.

At least for a while.

Not very realistic, thought the Night Prowler, forgetting about the titterer.

It would have been better in color.