Urge to Kill

39

Later that day, Terri and Richard were eating lunch at Kazinski’s on the Upper West Side. Terri was picking daintily at a romaine and walnut salad while Richard wolfed down his goulash.

She hadn’t mentioned the hook in the bathroom ceiling. Hadn’t thought it worth mentioning. When she saw the super she’d ask what it was for. Maybe to hang a bicycle by one of its wheels, get it out of the way for when guests came over. Not a bad idea for a tiny Manhattan apartment. Close the shower curtain and no one would ever guess they were sharing a bathroom with a Schwinn.

“I love to order goulash,” Richard Crane said. “You never know what you’re going to get.”

Terri grinned and took a sip of her Chianti. “You obviously approve of that version.”

“Yes. It’s delicious. But maybe that’s because I’m with you.”

How can he always know exactly the right thing to say?

Terri had called Office Tech that morning and told them she wasn’t feeling well. She was out of sick days, so the store manager allowed her to use one of her vacation days and said he hoped she’d feel better.

She’d felt like telling him she’d never felt better in her life, but instead politely closed the lid of her cell phone and continued her walk through the park with Richard Crane.

They’d played all morning, enjoying each other like lovers who’d been separated by life and somehow found each other. Maybe that’s what they were, Terri thought. Maybe Richard was right in saying some things were predestined. Wasn’t the study of genetics making that more and more obvious?

Human beings were so mysterious, Terri thought. So unpredictable. Didn’t that make life wonderful?

Lavern winced as her friend Bess touched a damp washrag to the cut near her left eye. Bess held the washrag out and glanced at the blood, shook her head.

“This is happening more often,” she said. There was anger in her voice.

Lavern could only nod. One of Hobbs’s glancing blows had caught her in her throat, and it was still sore.

“You gotta do something,” Bess said. “Make some kinda move.”

Lavern began to cry. Bess touched the cool washrag to her injured eye again, and both women sat motionless for a while.

“Men,” Bess said, finally. “They’re never what we expect.”

“Neither are we what they expect,” Lavern said hoarsely.

“So everything’s our fault?”

“Only most of the time,” Lavern said.

Bess looked at her. “So you’re goin’ back to that piece of shit again?”

“Yeah. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call him that.”

“Ah, Lavern…”

“Really,” Lavern said, and coughed, choking.

Now Bess began to cry.

Richard forked in some more goulash. “Would you like more bread?” he asked, while pouring her more wine.

She looked up from the topped-off wineglass and smiled. “Are you trying to get me drunk so you can take me home and have wild sex with me?”

“More like relaxed sex.”

“No,” she said.

He frowned.

“On the bread, I mean.”

He grinned and somehow managed to add even more wine to her glass.

After lunch Terri went to the ladies’ room and was surprised when she returned to find Richard holding a brown paper sack. He’d gone to the bar section of Kazinski’s and bought a bottle of wine.

“Chardonnay this time,” he said. “A particularly good vintage.”

“Are you a wine expert?” Terri asked, as they left the restaurant and began walking through the warm afternoon toward a subway stop where a train would carry them south.

“Like everybody else,” Richard said. He was joking, but Terri got the idea that he did know about wine. She suspected that Richard knew quite a lot about a number of things but was too polite to parade his knowledge.

“Every now and then,” she said, “your good breeding shows.”

“You object?”

“No. I like it. To most of the single men in Manhattan ‘good breeding’ signifies something else altogether.”

He laughed. “Well, I like to think I know something about that, too.”

“You should write a book,” she said.

“I’d title it Terri.”

Once inside her apartment, they drank to that.

“Around the time of the shooting,” Fedderman said to Rosa Pajaro, “you loaded a cart with some clean laundry in the basement and brought it up in an elevator to lobby level.”

“Sí. Yes. There is a storage room on this level where extra linens and other supplies are kept.”

“It’s near where Mr. Becker was shot.”

He stared at her expectantly, even though he hadn’t actually asked a question.

She returned his gaze for only a few seconds and then dropped her eyes to stare at the maroon carpet of the Antonian Hotel lobby. They were sitting and talking in what the management called a conversation nook. The maid was a terribly unskilled liar. Fedderman found himself liking her, and thought she must have been extremely attractive a few years and pounds ago. Rosa Pajaro was a woman who showed hard wear.

“Is right,” she said, finally.

“When you rolled your cart toward the storage room, did you notice anyone or anything suspicious in the corridor?”

She shook her head no. “Solitario. I was alone with my job.”

He had the impression she might speak English better than she was letting on. But that was a common ploy for illegal aliens, which Rosa Pajaro might very well be. In order to get her job here at the Antonian, she had to have papers, but papers could be forged.

“According to your records,” Fedderman said, “you’ve been working here at the hotel for six years.”

“Yes, that is so. I work hard.”

“So it says here.” The papers Fedderman consulted mentioned nothing of the sort, being a computer printout of directions and a restaurant menu. “You’re rated as an excellent employee. One who would tell the truth.”

“I am saying what is true. There is nothing to tell.” Again she couldn’t meet his eyes. “When this terrible thing happened, I must have been in the storage room.”

“Or it might have happened before you arrived.”

“Si. Or even after I left.”

“Did you notice any blood on the carpet near the door to outside?”

“No. Nothing.”

“You’re saying there was no blood?”

“I say only that I didn’t notice any.”

“Was the door to outside closed all the way and locked?”

“I couldn’t say. I didn’t pay attention to the door, only to my work.”

Fedderman stared at her. He knew she was lying, but probably not about anything pertinent. Maybe she’d seen Becker’s body before it was moved and then hightailed away. Or maybe she had seen the bloodstain, though on the maroon carpet it wouldn’t have been very noticeable. He could take Rosa Pajaro in and lean on her, make her afraid, even suggest she was a suspect. But she couldn’t be held, and when she got the opportunity she might run. If she was an illegal, so what? Fedderman didn’t want to make trouble for her. There was really no reason to push her, he thought, unless she might be the killer, which was too unlikely to consider.

“I am in trouble?” she asked, alarmed by his thoughtful silence.

Fedderman smiled at her. “Not as long as you’ve told the truth.”

“That’s what I’ve done, I swear.” She crossed herself. Fedderman wasn’t sure, but he thought she might have done it backward.