Serial

28

“I don’t like pressuring you,” Harley Renz told Quinn, “but you know how it works, how it gets passed along like stomach gas.”

Quinn thought that was one of Renz’s most memorable analogies.

“So who up near the esophagus is pressuring you?”

“Seems like everybody in the goddamned city who wears a suit and tie.” Renz sat opposite Quinn’s desk, hunched low in one of the client chairs, his pink jowls spilling over his white collar. “Think way up where the food is chewed, Quinn, and that’s where it all starts.” Renz wagged a pudgy, manicured finger. “Nobody, but nobody, wants another Skinner victim.”

“Especially the victim,” Quinn said.

“Don’t be difficult, Quinn. I’m only doing what I’ve always done, prying the monkey loose from my back so it can ride yours for a while.”

“Heavy monkey.”

“That’s the idea. In order to get rid of it, you’ll lean hard on your people.”

“On Pearl?”

“Maybe not on Pearl.”

Quinn thought of things to say, but he reminded himself that the killer’s first victim, Millie Graff, had been someone Harley and a lot of other cops shared a special bond with; and now they shared a special desire for justice.

“We’re doing everything possible,” he said, “following every lead, talking to everyone.”

“Such as?”

“The victims’ friends, colleagues, neighbors, relatives. People who for whatever reason might be able to put victim with killer. William Turner. Remember him?”

“Jog my memory.”

“Whips and orgasms, about thirty years ago.”

“The Socrates’s Cavern guy? That was longer ago than that. Jesus! Black leather. People in cages, or tied up, or both. You’re wasting your time there. Millie didn’t have anything to do with that kinda bullshit.”

“We’ve gotta touch the bases as we make the turns,” Quinn said.

“You gotta hit the ball first. In fact, I gotta convince people above me that you’re friggin’ A-Rod. That you’re returning the investment. I’m telling you, Quinn, for both our sakes, you better come up with something to show.”

Quinn leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Or what? The NYPD’s gonna fire me? Again? Or try to prosecute me? Again? Or they’re not gonna pay me?”

“Ha! You think that’s an idle threat?”

“Which one?”

“You think this city’s actually paid everyone it owes? Read the papers, Quinn. You’re in line somewhere behind Roach Control.”

Quinn sighed and dropped forward in his chair so he was sitting up straight. “What I think, Harley, is you’ve got some pressure, but it’s mainly you where the pressure on me starts.”

Renz stood up and moved to the door. He looked back at Quinn.

“Pressure’s pressure,” he said. “Wherever it comes from. And pressure crushes things. And people.”

Quinn sat silently and watched him go out the door.

Okay, Harley, play the tough guy. Maybe in your place that’s what I’d be doing.

And you’re right about pressure.

Vitali and Mishkin were approaching the door to Andy Drubb’s walk-up apartment building in the Village when they saw a thin, dark-haired guy in his forties bound up the steps toward the entrance. He was moving fast, giving the impression he was racing his shadow neck-and-neck. He was fishing in his pocket as he climbed, as if for a door key. Every smooth and familiar move he made suggested he lived in the building.

“Might we be so blessed, Sal?” Mishkin asked Vitali.

“We deserve to be,” Sal said. “And there are only six units in the building.”

“Five to one,” Mishkin said.

“I’ve bet on horses running at those odds.”

“Have they ever finished in the money, Sal?”

“Never.”

“Then that’s probably Drubb going into the building,” Mishkin said. “You can’t finish out of the money every time at those odds. It’s the law of percentages.”

That was what Vitali liked about Harold. He actually thought there was a law of percentages.

This time, of course, Mishkin was right. The law of percentages asserted itself.

He and Sal simply followed Drubb into the building, waited while he looked in vain to see if he had any mail, then tailed him straight to his door.

He looked frightened when he saw the two of them standing so close to him and realized they hadn’t simply been going in the same direction. They’d been following him.

“If you’re looking for money…” he said, his eyes wide. People were mugged in the city every day. Maybe it was his turn.

They showed him their identification.

“If we’re looking for money, what?” Mishkin asked.

Vitali stared at him.

“Then you came to the wrong place,” Drubb said.

“I figured you’d say that,” Mishkin said. “The law of percentages.”

Vitali gave Mishkin his back-off look. “If you’ll invite us in, Mr. Drubb, we’d like to talk with you for a few minutes.”

Drubb finished unlocking his door and opened it, then stood aside so they could enter first. Vitali led the way, while Mishkin hung back and entered after Drubb.

“It’s about Nora Noon,” Drubb said.

“How’d you know that?” Mishkin asked.

“Law of-”

“Let’s just sit down and get this over with,” Sal interrupted in his gravelly voice. It was an incongruously commanding tone for such a short man, like a truck air horn on a sports car.

Drubb sat in a worn-out wing chair, Vitali on a wooden chair with curlicue arms that looked as if it belonged in a dining room. Drubb sat in a corner of a cream-colored sofa that could use a good cleaning. The place was a mess, with a pile of newspapers on the floor alongside the sofa, a half-full coffee cup on a table where it would leave a ring, one of the wooden slat blinds hanging crookedly. It was reasonably cool in there, though. A new-looking window air conditioner was humming along efficiently. On the floor directly beneath the air conditioner was a pair of well-worn jogging shoes, one of them lying on its side.

“I guess you can see I’m a bachelor,” Drubb said. He was a powerfully built little man with wide-set blue eyes and a jaw that looked as if it could stamp steel. In his late thirties. Somehow not a bad-looking guy. Good head of black hair, combed straight back and held in place by some kind of grease. A straight nose and even teeth.

“We already knew that,” Vitali said. “We checked after we found this.” He held out the slip of paper with Drubb’s name and phone number on it.

Drubb accepted the paper and stared at it, then raised his dark eyebrows questioningly. Mishkin suddenly wondered if Drubb’s eyebrows and hair had been dyed.

“We found that in Nora Noon’s dresser drawer,” Mishkin said. “With a number of other things.”

Drubb got halfway up from the sofa so he could reach forward and return the paper to Vitali. “This must be at least a year old.”

“Why’s that?” Vitali asked.

“It’s been at least that long since I saw Nora.”

“You were friends?”

“More than that.”

“Were you and she in a relationship?”

“Were we screwing? Yeah.”

“Serious about each other? I mean, beyond the in and out?”

“I was serious about her. She was serious about her work.”

“How’d you two meet?” Mishkin asked.

“Through her work. I’m a salesman for a fabric distributor. I sold Nora some bolts of cloth for her fashion design business, and one thing led to another.”

“Who left who?” Vitali asked.

“Nora broke it off. She told me she was no longer emotionally involved the way she had been. Said she couldn’t help how she didn’t feel. I believed her. I’d sensed for about a month she’d been losing interest.”

“Sensed how?”

“Oh, you know… She seemed to be less involved in what I was saying, sometimes looking past me and obviously thinking of something else. She just… seemed not to care about us anymore.” He looked from one of them to the other. “I suppose I’m supplying you with a motive, but you’re going to find out everything anyway. I don’t see that I have much choice other than to tell the truth.”

“So you’d lie to us if you could?” Mishkin said.

Drubb flashed an uneasy smile. “Only if I absolutely positively knew I could get away with it and no one else would be hurt.”

Mishkin looked over at Vitali. “That seems like an honest answer, Sal.”

“I don’t figure I have a very strong motive,” Drubb said. “It’s not as if Nora would leave me, and I’d get jealous and kill her after more than a year.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Mishkin said. “On a percentage basis-”

“We need to ask you some personal questions,” Vitali said hastily, cutting off Mishkin and keeping the interview on track.

Drubb shrugged. “It’s been a long enough time that questions about Nora and me won’t seem personal. Besides, she’s dead. I’d like to help nail the bastard who killed her.”

“When the affair was on the front burner,” Vitali said, “did it involve anything the unenlightened would regard as kinky?”

Drubb gave a short laugh that was almost a snort. “Kinky sex with Nora? Not a chance, Detective. Everything was as straight as if she’d learned it by reading a church manual. Not that she was undersexed. She was a good Catholic girl.”

“Like Mary?”

Drubb knew what Sal meant. “No, she wasn’t a virgin. And I don’t mean to give the impression she was deeply religious. It was more like

… well, as artistic as she was with her fashion designs, her imagination wasn’t all that inventive when it came to lovemaking.”

Sal made a mental note of that word. Lovemaking. It wasn’t the way a man would describe sex with a woman he’d killed.

Mishkin must have been thinking along the same lines. “Are you still in love with her?” he asked.

“No,” Drubb said. “We both knew it was over. I’m in another relationship now.”

“Is this one more imaginative?” Mishkin asked.

“Considerably.”

“I’m assuming you met some of Nora’s friends. Were any of them rumored to be kinky?”

“God, yes! They were all fashion people. Nora was the different one.”

Sal said, “Did Nora give any indication that she’d ever been forced against her will into any sort of kinky sex?”

“Definitely not,” Drubb said. “All Nora seemed to think about was woof and warp.”

Mishkin seemed to consider that, as if it might refer to some sort of sexual practice of which he was unaware.

“That’s the two different directions threads run in material,” Drubb said, seeing his confusion.

“Woof and warp,” Mishkin said, as if digesting the information. “You must know a lot about materials like the ones in Nora Noon’s apartment.”

“Well, I do.”

Vitali sighed and stood up from his uncomfortable little chair. “We’d like you to give us a list of names, Mr. Drubb. The people you remember as Nora’s acquaintances.”

“I’ll do the best I can.”

Drubb stood up and went over to a small desk that appeared to have been beaten with chains to make it look like an antique. It looked like a cheap desk that had been beaten with chains. He moved various detritus out of the way, then opened a drawer and got out an address book and pen and paper. “I’ll give you addresses and phone numbers, too, if I have them.”

“We’d be grateful,” Vitali said.

Drubb set to work while they watched.

“We might need you later as a material witness,” Mishkin said.

Vitali looked at him, wondering.