Pulse

43

Q uinn sat at his cherrywood desk in his den, reading Sal and Harold’s respective reports, wishing he could smoke a cigar. His Cubans remained unlit in a small humidor in the desk’s bottom drawer. If he actually lit one anywhere in the brownstone, even near the brownstone, Pearl would smell the tobacco smoke and bitch at him. And now a second nose was in the picture. Jody wouldn’t actually say anything to him about the scent of tobacco smoke, but she would regard him with a sad and disdainful expression that was very much like Pearl’s.

Quinn absently touched his shirt pocket where a cigar wasn’t and reflected that it would be nice if eyewitness accounts were actually as accurate and useful as they were in TV police shows and the movies.

If ifs were skiffs we all would sailors be.

Something his daughter, Lauri, used to say. She lived in California, where she was doing okay, according to her occasional letters or cards. A few times she’d sent some e-mails, with photographs of her and some guy she was dating. Gary, Quinn thought his name was. There were palm trees in the backgrounds of all the photos, as if she was trying to make a point. She’d never return to New York.

Quinn wondered if Lauri and Jody would get along.

Separated by a continent, it was possible that they would never meet.

Made melancholy by such thoughts, Quinn considered phoning Renz and seeing if the NYPD had any new information that might help in the investigation. It could be a good idea to remind Renz that information flowed both ways.

On the other hand, it was always annoying to talk with Renz. If Renz wanted to pass on information to Quinn, he’d call, so why should Quinn subject himself to having to listen to the conniving and ambitious commissioner?

Why would anyone willingly subject themselves to Renz? Such encounters left an odor of corruption and had a lasting effect, like radioactive garbage.

Quinn decided it would be better to feel melancholy.

Renz lay on his back in the hotel room bed, still panting. He knew if he didn’t start losing weight, sex with Olivia would kill him. He grinned. On the other hand, if he kept having sex with Olivia he was bound to lose weight. Hell, Olivia might kill a healthy man.

He could hear Olivia tinkering around in the bathroom, then the faint hiss of the shower. Renz wondered if she had another appointment booked. He knew Olivia was one of the highest-paid call girls in the city, though he never found out exactly how much she charged. That was because she was free for Renz, as long as he kept the vice squad away from the supposedly honest escort service where she was employed. It was odd, Renz sometimes thought, how the fact that no money changed hands made things different. A real relationship had developed. For Renz, anyway. He wasn’t sure about Olivia Dupree, which wasn’t her real name.

He knew her real name, and more than that about her.

Olive Krantz had been raised by strict Baptist parents in St. Louis, where she started getting into trouble with the police when she was fourteen. By the time she was eighteen, marijuana possession and peace disturbance had become breaking and entering and prostitution. Even at fourteen she’d looked more like a beautiful woman than a teenager. By eighteen she’d been devastating. And she’d devastated the lives of two mall security guards who were caught on video exchanging merchandise for sex. The woman in the grainy security camera video hadn’t been identifiable, and Olive Krantz had walked away without being charged.

She apparently liked prostitution, and before she was twenty she was in New York, working for one of the big escort agencies. She was twenty-nine now, and probably rich in her own right, because she’d never been a fool.

Renz knew she was simply doing her job, keeping the police commissioner-a very important client indeed-off her employer’s back.

She and Renz had become something like friends one night, not while they were screwing, but while they lay in bed together afterward, talking.

Renz knew it was all bullshit, pumping him for information. This woman was smart and knew information was power and protection, so she wanted some about him. He didn’t care. He knew what not to tell her while telling her plenty. He realized he would never really possess a woman like Olivia. Not all of her, anyway. No one could.

They talked more and more often, sharing each other’s secrets. Or so it seemed. Most of what Renz told her were lies, and he wondered if she ever checked to see if any of it was true. She seemed so trusting, but he knew she wasn’t.

She emerged from the bathroom nude, still rubbing her short blond hair dry with one of the hotel’s huge white towels. The brisk action with the towel made her breasts jiggle.

“Wanna come back to bed?” Renz asked, wondering if he’d be able to get it up again so soon after the last time.

“You’re insatiable.”

“For that I need inspiration,” Renz said, “and that would be you.”

Olivia smiled.

Still holding the towel, she walked over to the bed and kissed his forehead. He felt her bare nipple brush his arm.

“Really,” he said, “why don’t you hang around for a while? We can talk.”

“I would if I could, baby, but I promised a girlfriend I’d babysit her two kids for her.” She glanced over at the clock on the dresser. “And I’m running late already.”

Renz nodded and smiled. Oh, you beautiful liar.

He watched her finish getting dressed, and they kissed good-bye before she left.

Renz had over an hour before checkout time, so he lay back on the linens that still smelled of sex and rested peacefully, forgetting about the pressure on him from the pols and higher-ups, the sicko Daniel Danielle (Quinn’s problem), the blizzard of paperwork that was his constant annoyance, his plush but lonely penthouse apartment in the Financial District.

He thought only about Olivia and their relationship. About how they gave each other exactly what they both needed and didn’t ask too many questions, knowing the answers would be lies anyway.

What could be better than that?

Renz’s cell phone played a trumpet cavalry charge in his pants pocket. The trouble was, his pants were folded over the back of a chair across the room. He hesitated, then decided the call might be important and reached the phone in three large steps away from the bed, reaching it just before the charge was over. His pants dropped to the floor as he dragged the phone from their left-side pocket. They’d be wrinkled now, which irritated Renz.

He glanced down and saw that the call was from Q amp;A. Quinn.

When the connection was made, Renz said, “We need to make this fast, Quinn. I’m at a meeting.”

“Sure. Sal and Harold widened their canvass in Vess’s neighborhood and came up with a witness that saw a woman who came around the victim’s apartment.”

“You mean when the victim wasn’t home?”

“Could be,” Quinn said. “And her actions were furtive. What I want from you are some uniforms to really cover that neighborhood and see if anyone else has something to add. I’d like to put this woman with Vess, and maybe get a better description.”

“Whaddya need, six officers?”

“That would do it,” Quinn said, surprised by Renz’s generosity.

“Anything else?”

“No, I’ll let you get back to your meeting.”

“It’s over now,” Renz said, glancing down at his flaccid self. “But there’ll be another one pretty soon.”

Hanging up the phone, Quinn thought that was an odd thing for Renz to say. He supposed that as police commissioner, Renz’s life had become one meeting after another.

Renz had stepped out of the shower and was toweling himself dry when he heard his cell phone again. He’d brought the phone into the bathroom with him and rested it on the edge of the washbasin. The trumpet charge was deafening bouncing off all that tile.

He reached the phone with a wet hand and squinted at it to see who was calling. Quinn, maybe. Wanting something more.

But he saw that the caller wasn’t Quinn. It was an aide to the mayor, no doubt calling for a progress report on the Daniel Danielle investigation. Pressure, pressure.

Renz’s puffy cheeks rounded with his slight smile. He knew how to deflect pressure. And where to deflect it.

And who would feel it next.