Mister X

21

While the cab she'd flagged down bounced and jounced over Eighth Avenue potholes, Pearl thought not about the murder scene she was speeding toward, but about Yancy Taggart. She found that odd.

Would he meet her?

Did she care?

Never one to lie to herself, she figured the answers were yes and yes.

Why did this guy appeal to her? He was probably at least fifteen years older than she was, and not her usual type.

Then she realized what might be the basis of the attraction. Taggart was sort of an anti-Quinn. Where Quinn was duty-bound and relentless, Taggart didn't mind whiling away a morning over coffee and a racing form in a bar. Taggart would gamble his money; Quinn chanced every other kind of gamble but didn't like the odds of house games. Taggart was slim and graceful-even languid-in posture and attitude; Quinn was lanky but powerfully built, stolid, calm, and intense. Taggart dressed stylishly and was neatly groomed; Quinn always looked like what he was-a cop in a suit-and his hair looked uncombed even when it was combed. While Taggart was elegant and classically handsome, Quinn was somehow homely enough to be attractive.

Maybe, she thought, Yancy Taggart was what she needed to chase Quinn completely out of her thoughts.

In time she might chase them both from her thoughts.

Pearl saw the yellow crime-scene tape, and her thoughts were jolted to where she was, and why. She asked the cabbie to pull to the curb half a block from the tape. She wanted to take the scene in as she walked toward it from a distance. Sometimes it was smart to begin with the long view.

Several radio cars were parked at crazy angles to the curb, as if they were the toys of some giant child who'd tired of them and walked away, leaving their colorful roof bar lights flashing. Beyond the police cars, Pearl could see Quinn's black Lincoln with two wheels up on the curb to allow the remaining lane of traffic to pass. She noticed for the first time that the old Lincoln had whitewall tires. She hadn't thought they made those anymore. But Quinn would know where to get them. Like his Cuban cigars.

The Lincoln's engine was still ticking in the heat as she walked past it. Inside the trapezoid of yellow tape a group of large men huddled over what looked like a bundle of clothes on the sidewalk.

When Pearl got closer, she saw that the bundle was a woman.

One of the men standing over the dead woman was Quinn. He spotted Pearl and motioned her over. A uniform held up the tape so she could duck under it like a boxer entering a ring. He gave her a look, as if he might wink at her. Didn't the idiot think she'd ever seen a corpse before?

This part of Eighteenth Street was being improved or marred-depending on your point of view-with neo-modern architecture, most of it angular glittering glass and metal, some of it appearing precariously balanced. The building the body was next to was an almost completed condominium project. According to the plywood sign leaning against the wall near the silvered glass door to what would become the lobby, it was The Sabre Arms. The optimistic advertising didn't mention price.

Quinn nodded to Pearl and moved over to make room for her in the huddle. Pearl nodded back. Quinn's sport coat collar was twisted in back, and he needed a shave. It struck Pearl again how different he was from Yancy. Yancy the lobbyist with the gift of gab and the sliding ethics. Quinn the taciturn engine of justice with a moral code like Moses that sometimes transcended the laws of man.

Pearl shook off her flash of dubious insight and refocused her mind on her work.

Julius Nift, the obnoxious little medical examiner who looked and acted like Napoleon, was bent over the dead woman. Pearl didn't bother nodding hello to him.

Her gaze slid past him to the victim, and her stomach lurched. The corpse was wearing ragged clothing. Her face was dirty, her fingernails black, her brown hair a tangle. A homeless woman. Pearl felt pity well up in her as well as horror. What must be the woman's panties had been knotted and used as a gag, and a slender shaft of silver protruded from the dead woman's mouth, apparently a handle.

"It's a spoon," Nift said. "She died with a silver spoon in her mouth."

"Might she have choked on it before her throat was cut?"

"We'll have to wait till later to find out for sure, but I doubt it. There are no other signs of asphyxiation. No cyanosis, petechiae, or distended tongue." Nift spoke in a tone suggesting Pearl should have noticed this lack of symptoms herself.

The woman's threadbare dress was torn open in front to reveal her breasts and stomach. Her nipples had been sliced off, and there was the bloody X carved on her midsection, beginning just below a point between her breasts. There was a gaping wound in her throat, like a scarlet necklace. She appeared to have been in her late forties, had a crooked nose, prognathous jaw, and wouldn't have been attractive even cleaned up and twenty years younger. Odd, Pearl thought; all the other Carver victims had been attractive women.

Nift had been peeking up at Pearl, amused by her discomfort.

"She had a face like a mule," he said, "but you can see she had a pretty good rack, even with the nipples gone."

"You're such an asshole," Pearl said. "Are the nipples gone from the scene?"

"Unless you're standing on them," Nift said.

Pearl doubled up a fist.

"Pearl," Quinn said, cautioning her. He'd told her before she should let Nift's remarks roll off her. She shouldn't give the nasty little M.E. the pleasure of getting under her skin.

She knew Quinn was right. That was Nift's game, using his gruesome trade to rattle people with his sick sense of humor. All cops used dark humor to help them cope with some of the things they saw in the Job, but Nift pushed it from diversion to something that filled a twisted need.

Pearl's fist unclenched, and she flexed her fingers. But she still wouldn't have minded choking Nift until she saw some cyanosis.

Nift smiled.

"How long's she been dead?" Quinn asked.

"I told you-"

"For Officer Kasner."

"More than ten hours. I'll be able to know more when I get her in the morgue where I can play with her." For Pearl.

"Any identification on her?" Pearl asked Quinn.

But it was Nift who answered. "Are you kidding? No purse or wallet. Every pocket is empty. This little number probably hasn't slept indoors in weeks, maybe months. She's been screwed over every which way, and if she did have anything on her person, her killer probably took it."

"A shitty life," one of the plainclothes detectives said.

"And a shitty death," another added.

"You guys homicide?" Quinn asked.

"Vice. We heard the call and were only a few blocks away, so we came over to see what there was to see."

"And I've seen enough," the other vice guy said, but he made no move to leave. "What's with the spoon?"

"A bad joke," Quinn said.

"In bad taste," the first vice guy said.

Quinn gave him a look that induced both vice detectives to fall silent.

"There isn't much blood considering her throat's been slashed," Pearl said.

"Very good," Nift said. "That's because she was killed with a single stab wound to the heart." As he spoke he absently probed one of the damaged breasts with a pointed steel instrument. The expression on the corpse's face was one of mild insult.

"Why don't you close her eyes?" Pearl said.

"Why don't you ask her some questions? I'll do my job, you do yours. She can't see, just like she can't talk."

"Her body was stuffed behind the big plywood sign leaning on the building," Quinn said, before Pearl could reply to Nift. "We figure she was killed late last night or early this morning. Nobody spotted her until half an hour ago."

Pearl noticed a woman wearing a gray jogging outfit with a hooded sweatshirt standing across the street, staring at them. Her arms hung at her sides, and she didn't move. Her face was in shadow, but something about her seemed familiar.

"Who found her?" Pearl asked.

"Woman who lives across the street. Her hat blew off, and she chased it and happened to glance behind the sign. She's in her apartment over there with a uniform keeping her company. She's still in shock."

Pearl could understand that. Right in the middle of all this art-gone-mad architecture and expensive renewal, an ugly reminder of poverty and death might be especially jolting.

When Pearl glanced back across the street, she saw that the woman in the jogging outfit was gone. She'd been simply an onlooker who'd stopped to stare. Yet there was that familiarity. Pearl was certain she'd seen the woman before in the course of this investigation, somewhere standing in the shadows. Shadow woman, she thought.

Fedderman suddenly appeared. His suit coat was wrinkled, and where he might have worn a tie was what looked to be a spaghetti-sauce stain. Behind him were Mishkin and Vitali, looking like a bemused accountant tailed by one of the brothers in The Godfather.

It was going to be crowded inside the crime-scene tape, so the two vice guys nodded their good-byes and left.

The three detectives who'd just arrived took in the scene. Fedderman's face was a blank. Vitali looked keenly interested. Mishkin, who had a notoriously weak stomach, went chalk white and turned away.

"Bring them up to date, Pearl," Quinn said.

"Can I have the body?" Nift asked.

"If you want it," Quinn said. To Pearl: "Make sure there's nothing interesting under it."

"Like a nipple or two," Nift said.

He straightened up to his full Napoleonic stature and motioned for the waiting paramedics to remove the body.

Quinn walked off to the side and punched out a number on his cell phone. He stood at the edge of the crime-scene tape with the phone pressed to his ear.

"Who's he calling?" Vitali asked. "Everybody's here except Eliot Ness."

Pearl shrugged. She didn't know for sure who was on the other end of Quinn's phone conversation, but she figured that if she guessed Cindy Sellers, she wouldn't be far wrong.

The devil getting her due.