You said it was,' Avery reminded him. 'Our job.'
'No. Our job is to keep this story alive. The longer we keep it alive, the longer the Great Unwashed will tune in to Channel Four at six and eleven every night. I don't care if we never find him. The point is, somewhere out there . ..'
Where did I hear that line before? Honey wondered.
'Somewhere out there,' Di Lorenzo repeated, pointing to the seventh-floor windows and the magnificent view of the skyline beyond, 'there's a killer intent on slaying
our own Honey Blair. Let's not let anyone forget that.'
He'd already forgotten the Note that said Honey wasn't the target at all.
THE LAST TIME he'd followed a woman he loved was when he was still married to Augusta. Top fashion model, should have known better than to marry her, a mere cop, should have known it would turn out the way it finally did. He hadn't felt good about following her, and he didn't feel good following Sharyn now.
He had been waiting across the street from her office on Ainsley Avenue since a quarter to five. Her usual routine was to subway over to Rankin Plaza and the Deputy Chief Surgeon's office there, where she'd stay till noon, break for lunch in Majesta, and then bus back to the city and uptown to her private practice. Deputy Chief Surgeon Sharyn Cooke in the morning, Dr. Sharyn Cooke, internist, in the afternoon. He knew he was living with a Deputy Inspector whereas he was a mere Detective/Third. This didn't matter; he loved her. He was white and she was black. This didn't matter, either; he loved her.
What mattered . . .
He'd found Augusta in bed with another man.
Almost killed the son of a bitch.
His eyes had met Augusta's.
Their eyes had said everything there was to say, and all there was to say was nothing.
Across the street, Sharyn was coming out of her office.
He turned away, still watching her in the reflecting plate-glass window of a pharmacy, a trained cop. When she started away from the building, stepping out with that quick, proud stride of hers, he turned and began
trailing her, still on the other side of the street, a hat hiding his telltale blond hair. Black and blond. A doctor and a cop. Should he have known better this time, too?
She swung into a Starbucks up the street, came out five minutes later, carrying a cardboard container. Sipping at the coffee, she strolled along almost jauntily, enjoying the mild weather, walking right past the bus stop where she could have caught a bus that would have taken her crosstown to his apartment. Tonight was his place again; tomorrow night would be hers. They alternated haphazardly; they were in love. Or so he devoutly wished.
The neighborhood in which Sharyn maintained her office had been gentrified ten years ago and was already sliding inexorably back into the morass of a full-time ghetto and slum. What had once been a pool parlor and was later transmogrified to a fitness center was now a seedy cuchifrito joint catering to the area's small Hispanic population, a minority here among the predominant blacks. A similar transformation-retransformation process had taken place when condemned tenements became sleek brick apartment buildings that were already crumbling into decrepitude. Drugs — flourishing when crack was all the rage, virtually vanquished when the Reverend Gabriel Foster launched his famously popular No Shit Now! campaign — were back on the street with a vengeance, the preferred controlled substance now being heroin, seems like old times, don't it, Gert?
In this stretch of all too sadly familiar black turf, blond Bert Kling followed the gorgeous black woman he adored, and hoped against hope that she was not hurrying to meet Dr. James Melvin Hudson.
But she was.
THE NAME OF the cafe was the Edge.
It was called this because it was on the very edge of Diamondback, in a sort of no-man's-land that separated the hood from the rest of the city. Jumping the season somewhat, the Edge had put tables out on the sidewalk, and as Sharyn approached, half a dozen patrons were sitting there in the quickly fading light, sipping coffees or teas, munching on cookies or cakes. One of them got to his feet, and walked toward her, hand outstretched.
Dr. James Melvin Hudson.
Kling hung back.
Ducked into a doorway.
She took his hand, Dr. James Melvin Hudson's hand, reached up, kissed him on the cheek, which Kling thought an odd greeting for a pair of physicians; cops never even shook hands with other cops. She sat opposite him, and he signaled to a waiter. She'd just had a coffee . . .
Kling could imagine her explaining this to him . . .
So if he didn't mind, she'd just sit here . . .
Turning away the waiter's proffered menu . . .
And then leaning into him over the table, Dr. James Melvin Hudson, her elbows on the table, heads close together, talking seriously and intimately as on the sidewalk passersby hurried on along, unknowing, uncaring, this was the big bad city.
Kling watched them for the next half-hour, hidden in his secret doorway, a cop, shoulders hunched as if it were the dead of winter and not the seventh day of June, hat pulled down low on his forehead, hiding his blond hair. The blond guy and the black girl. Had it been a mistake from the start? Was it now a mistake? Would black and white ever be right in America?
He looked at his watch, Dr. James Melvin Hudson
did, and signaled to the waiter. Sharyn watched him as he paid the bill, rose when he did, kissed him on the cheek again when he went off, and then sat again at the table, alone now, seemingly deep in thought as the shadows lengthened and evengloam claimed the distant sky.
GENERO HADN'T BEEN inside a public library since he was twelve years old and checked out John Jakes' Love and War with his new Adult Section card. His current reading ran to the Harry Potter books, but he actually bought those because he felt people should support starving writers who wrote on paper napkins in coffee shops.
The library he went to that Monday night was in his Calm's Point neighborhood and stayed open till ten P.M. He got there around eight, after having dinner with his mother and father in their little one-story house nearby. His mother made penne alia puttanesca, which she told him meant 'whore style,' in front of his father, too. When he asked the librarian if she had a book that had everything Shakespeare ever wrote in it, she looked at him funny for a minute, and then came back with a heavy-looking tome that he took to the reading room, which was as quiet as a funeral parlor.
He didn't plan to read everything Shakespeare ever wrote; he simply planned to count all the stuff he'd written. The numbers he came up with were thirty-seven plays, five long poems, and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets, which up to now he'd thought were also poems, but since they were in a separate section of the book labeled SONNETS, he now guessed otherwise. He also guessed this was a very large body of work. In fact, he could hardly think of anyone else who'd written so many wonderful
things, he supposed, in his or her lifetime.
He didn't know to what use he could put this newfound knowledge, but he considered it very sound detective work. And besides, when he returned the book, the librarian looked at him with renewed respect, he also supposed.
LYING IN BED, waiting for her to come to him, Kling told her they'd probably figured out what weapon — or weapons, actually — the Deaf Man planned to use, but not whom he planned to kill, or even if he planned to kill anyone at all.
'It's darts,' he said. 'Plural. D-A-R-T-S. Probably poisoned. We figured out it's, like, the law of diminishing returns. In his notes, he went from spears to arrows to darts, in descending order. Like backward. So we're pretty sure it's darts, but we don't know who or how — or even when, for that matter.'
'Mmm,' Sharyn said.