They paid and left. On impulse Marlene swiped a big white chrysanthemum from the large vase in the restaurant’s entranceway.
They waited in Harry’s old Plymouth and watched Rob Pruitt walk down Seventh Street to where he’d parked his blue Dodge. He got in and cranked it up and drove off.
“What do you figure, a quarter mile?” asked Bello.
“Maybe less, but after it happens he’ll probably futz around for a while trying to fix it. Let’s go.”
They left the car and entered a tenement building. Pruitt lived in the front apartment on the third floor. Harry picked the lock in two minutes, and they went in.
The apartment was simply furnished and remarkably clean and neat. Pruitt had obviously patronized several of the many used- and unpainted-furniture stores in the neighborhood. He owned a gold velvet easy chair and a scarred thirteen-inch TV on a battered tin stand, and a table, chairs, and chest of drawers in unpainted pine. He slept on a box spring and mattress, neatly made up with gray military surplus blankets. The closet and drawers held an odd combination of worn work clothes and brand-new dressy casuals, many with the store labels still attached. Like the furniture, these last were clearly purchased from shops in the immediate area: colored silk shirts, stiff leisure suits, and the tan leather jacket Carrie had described, clothing suitable for a visit to one of the local salsa clubs. Pruitt was good at taking on the local coloration.
In the bedroom also, Marlene’s flashlight picked up a corkboard, covering nearly an entire wall, on which was arranged a photographic homage to Carrie Lanin: yellowed and faded clippings from student newspapers, showing her cheerleading and prom queening; some pages neatly cut from the same high school yearbook Marlene had already seen, ditto; a wedding photograph (sans groom); an 8 x 10 glossy high school photo in cap and gown. There were also a dozen or so recent photographs, candids obviously, of Carrie on the street. Pruitt had some skill with a camera.
Harry came up behind her and took in the scene. He shone his light on the top of the chest beneath the corkboard. There were two candles in red glass containers, bought at a local botanica, flanking a little museum of Carrieana. Some keys. A pair of blue lace panties. A lipstick. A receipt from Elaine’s.
“Her place,” said Harry, pointing his penlight at the keys.
“Yeah. He must have taken an impression of her keys during their date. Maybe she went to the ladies’ and he waxed them. Once he had a set, he could visit whenever he wanted, and he took souvenirs. Okay, let’s make a donation to the shrine.”
She removed from her pocket the empty Karo corn syrup bottle whose contents she had poured into Pruitt’s gas tank. The syrup was at this moment (she trusted) turning to hard candy in the cylinders of his car. She placed the bottle on the bureau and stuck the mum from Paglia’s in it. Then, using the bedroom window as a mirror, she applied the lipstick to her mouth, removed one of the photos from the board and planted a red kiss on the back of it. She took a ballpoint from her pocket, wrote a short message in neat block letters, and propped the photo up against the bottle.
“What did you write?” asked Harry when they were back in the Plymouth.
“Forget her! Come to me, my darling. Only I love you as you deserve.”
He gave her a complex look, which from long experience she could read: a blend of doubt and worry. It also meant that Bello had fathomed what she was up to.
“It’ll work, Harry.”
He was silent for a moment and then he said, not as a question, “You’re going to have to take a shot.”
“Yeah, I know,” she agreed. “But I can’t think of another way.”
SIX
Moore’s Bar and Grill is on Lexington Avenue between 119th and 120th streets, right around the corner from the Twenty-fifth Precinct, which occupies a four-story building on 119th. Moore’s is a cop bar, owned by an ex-cop and patronized almost exclusively by cops. There is at least one like it a short walk from each of the City’s station houses. At a quarter of four in the afternoon the place is usually jammed and noisy with the day shift taking off and the swing shift getting up attitude before starting work.
Ariadne Stupenagel chose this time to make her entrance. She was wearing tight red jeans jammed into black and silver cowboy boots with two-inch heels, and a pale gray silk blouse. Over this she wore a Soviet military greatcoat with colonel’s pips and blue KGB flashes on the shoulder boards. She carried a stained khaki haversack that had once held a medical kit. The loud male hubbub in Moore’s diminished perceptibly as she passed through.
“What the fuck is that?” asked the cop standing at the bar next to Roland Hrcany. He was not the only one asking the question either. Hrcany looked up from his scotch and looked away. He rolled his huge shoulders as if shrugging off a burden. Although Hrcany was not a cop, he spent a good time of his spare time in cop bars. He liked cops, and cops liked him, not a usual state of affairs between members of the police force and the prosecutorial bar. The cops liked Hrcany because he treated them like the men they were, because he was a real man himself, because he was a rake of legendary reputation, not averse to sharing his collection of willing girls with favored policemen, and because he was more tolerant than most other prosecutors about the universal and necessary perjury of the police. So tolerant was Hrcany that cops would often reveal to him just where they had violated the rules of evidence and arrest, and Hrcany would go so far as to advise them on how to bring off these fairy tales on the stand. On the other hand, he drew the line at actual fabrication, and knew enough about the ways of the police so that no one but a practicing idiot would try to sell him a total load of manure. The cops respected this. He was a very successful homicide prosecutor.
Hrcany replied, “It’s a reporter. I said I would introduce her to Joe Clancy.”
His companion gave him a cop look. Hrcany caught it and explained, “It’s okay. The bosses cleared it. It’s just some kind of hero story.”
The cop grunted and stared again at the woman, who had by now spotted Hrcany and was approaching. “Christ, you’d need a fucking ladder,” the cop muttered.
“Hello, Roland,” said Ariadne. “What a charming place!” she added in a tone implying the opposite. Stupenagel had, in her colorful career, met any number of men who hated her, but almost invariably it had been for good cause. She hadn’t done anything to Hrcany, however, yet, but he had been rude and uncooperative from the first moment. It surprised her but did not particularly dismay.
“Glad you like it,” replied Hrcany in the same tone.
“Buy you a drink?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
“Well, let’s get started. Where’s Clancy?”
Hrcany got off his bar stool and walked off without a word. Stupenagel followed him across the floor and into a large back room. Like the bar proper, this was full of off-duty cops, but cops much drunker than the ones in the front. They were sitting at a dozen or so round wooden tables or swaying happily among them. Those at the tables were pounding their glasses and bottles to the beat of an amplified Irish band set up on a small stage in the front of the room. It was a retirement party, a racket, as the cops say, for one of the cops in the Two-Five. The air was thick with noise, smoke, and beer fumes. Someone had decorated the walls and ceiling with green and white crepe paper, and shiny paper shamrocks and leprechaun hats.
“He’s over there,” said Hrcany, indicating a tall man leaning against the wall, alone, waving a brown bottle of Schlitz in time with the music.
“Introduce me.”
“You want me to introduce you? Why, you want to date him?”
“That’s the point of this, Roland,” said Stupenagel patiently. “You’re a regular guy-you introduce me to him and then he’ll know I’m a regular guy, too. If I wanted to walk in here cold, I wouldn’t have been on your ass making myself unpleasant all these weeks. It’s nothing personal.”