Mister X

2

It had all been so quick, and the eye could be fooled.

Pearl Kasner, acting as hostess, stood off to the side in the dim entrance alcove of Sammy's Steaks, unsure of what she'd just seen.

She'd waited patiently, making sure she was on the periphery of Linda's vision. A slender and tireless young woman with hair that dangled in natural ringlets around her ears, Linda was one of the busier food servers at Sammy's. The customers were crazy about her.

As she ran another diner's credit card, Linda casually drew what looked like a small black box from her pocket, laid it on the counter, and swiped the card a second time.

Back went the box into her apron pocket.

It was all done so quickly and smoothly that you had to be watching for it, looking directly at it, to notice it.

Pearl edged back completely out of sight and smiled.

She'd been right when she'd noticed Linda the first time. Whenever Linda was alone settling a diner's check, she would run the card twice, once legitimately, the second time to record the card's number in the device she carried concealed in her apron pocket. For several days, the customers' names and card numbers could be used safely to purchase merchandise. When finally the diners realized what was happening and notified the credit card company, they wouldn't be likely to connect the stolen number with a not-so-recent steak dinner at Sammy's.

Pearl left the foyer unattended and weaved her way between white-clothed tables and across the restaurant. She was slightly over five feet tall, with vivid dark eyes, red lips, and black, black shoulder-length hair. Pearl drew male attention, and when attention was paid, said males saw a compact, shapely body with a vibrant energy about it. Her ankles were well turned, her waist narrow. She had a bust too large to be fashionable, but only in the world of fashion.

No one who looked at Pearl was disappointed.

She approached a booth where a lanky but potbellied man in a wrinkled brown suit lounged before a stuffed mushroom appetizer and a half-empty martini glass. He was past middle age and balding, and the day Pearl started pretending to be a hostess, he had started pretending to be a slightly inebriated customer who ordered appetizers as an excuse to drink alone. That was better than drinking at the bar, where the mostly under-forty club was watching and discussing baseball. Discussing it loudly and sometimes angrily. They could really get worked up over steroid use.

The solitary drinker was Larry Fedderman, who had long ago been Quinn's partner in an NYPD radio car, and later his fellow Manhattan South homicide detective. Fedderman, retired from the department, had been living in Florida when Quinn founded Quinn and Associates. Pearl had been working as a uniformed guard at Sixth National Bank in Lower Manhattan.

They'd both stopped what they'd been doing and went to work for Quinn as minority partners in Quinn and Associates Investigations. They were the associates.

Restaurateur Sammy Caminatto had hired QAI to discover how his cousin's Visa card number was stolen, when the only place he'd used his new card and new number, before cutting the card into six pieces to keep it out of his new trophy wife's hands, was at Sammy's.

Quinn had assigned Pearl and Fedderman to the case, and they'd slipped into their roles at Sammy's. Now it looked as if they'd found the answer to the riddle of the roaming card numbers. It was in Linda's apron pocket. Which Pearl thought was a shame, because she liked Linda, who was cute as puppies, naive, and probably being used.

"Looks like Linda's it," Pearl said to Fedderman.

He showed no reaction but said, "I'm surprised. She seems like a good kid."

"Maybe she is, but she's going down for this one. Carries a mimic card swiper in her apron pocket."

"I watched for those and missed it," Fedderman said. "She must be smooth."

"You can tell she's done it before."

"Let's not spoil her evening," Fedderman said, sipping some of his martini that he hadn't poured into his water glass. "Let's let her copy some more numbers, build up the evidence against her."

"Watch her keep breaking the law?"

"Sure."

"Doesn't that kind of make us accomplices?" Pearl asked. Since becoming an associate and not having the NYPD to cover legal expenses, she'd become cautious about exposing herself and the agency to potential litigation. Or maybe this was because she'd become fond of Linda and didn't want to compound the mess the young woman was in.

"In a way," Fedderman said, "but nobody'll know but us. And you and me, Pearl, we'd never rat each other out."

"I suspect you're half right," Pearl said.

She waited till an hour before closing time to call the NYPD, and Linda was apprehended with the card recorder in her apron pocket. It contained the names and credit card numbers of five diners who'd paid their checks with plastic that evening. Damning evidence.

As she was being led away, Linda was loudly and tearfully blaming everything on a guy named Bobby. Pearl believed her.

"Men!" Pearl said, with a disdain that dripped.

Fedderman didn't comment, standing there thinking it was Linda who'd illegally recorded the card numbers.

A beaming and impressed Sammy told them his check to QAI would be in the mail, and Pearl and Fedderman left the restaurant about eleven o'clock to go to their respective apartments. They would write up their separate reports tomorrow and present them to Quinn, who would doubtless instruct Pearl to send a bill to Sammy even though it might cross with his check in the mail. Business was business.

Fedderman waited around outside the restaurant with Pearl while she tried to hail a cab. The temperature was still in the eighties, and the air was so sultry it felt as if rain might simply break out instead of fall.

It never took Pearl long to attract the eye of a cabbie, so they'd soon part and Fedderman would walk the opposite direction to his subway stop two blocks away.

Pearl extended one foot off the curb into the street and waved, kind of with her whole body.

Sure enough, a cab's brake lights flared, and it made a U-turn, causing oncoming traffic to weave and honk, and drove half a block the wrong way in the curb lane to come to a halt near Pearl.

"It might have been Bobbie with an 'I-E,'" Fedderman said, as she was climbing into the back of the cab. "A woman."

Pearl glared at him. "Dream on."

She slammed the cab's door before he could reply.

Fedderman watched the cab make another U-turn to get straight with the traffic. He wondered if Pearl had always been the way she was, born with a burr up her ass. She was so damned smart, but always mouthing off and getting into trouble. What a waste. She'd never had a chance to make it any higher in the NYPD than he had. Fedderman was steady, a plodder, a solid detective, unskilled at departmental politics and wise enough to stay out of them. Staying out of things was another of Pearl's problems. She couldn't.

Another problem was that Pearl was a woman, and she had those looks. Her appearance drew unwanted attention, and she'd always been too hotheaded to handle it. She'd punched an NYPD captain once in a Midtown hotel after he'd touched her where he shouldn't have. That alone would have been enough to sink most careers. It hadn't quite sunk Pearl's, but there was always a hole in her boat, and she'd had to bail constantly just to stay afloat. That was why she'd finally drifted out of the NYPD and into the bank guard job. She could be nice to people ten, twenty seconds at a stretch, so it had worked out okay for her. But she'd never been happy at Sixth National. She missed the challenge, the action, the satisfaction of bringing down the bad guys, even the danger.

The way Fedderman had missed that life while chasing after elusive golf balls down in Florida, or fishing in Gulf waters and pulling from the sea creatures he didn't even recognize as fish.

Like Pearl, he'd been ripe for Quinn's call.

Fedderman smiled in the direction Pearl had gone and then walked away, his right shirt cuff unbuttoned and flapping like a white surrender flag with every stride. If he knew about the cuff, he didn't seem to mind.

He did kind of mind that there would be no more free drinks and appetizers at Sammy's.