He looked at her, surprised. Pizzaz was the way the cops in this city pronounced PSAS, which initials stood for the department's Psychological Services and Aid Section. Calling it Pizzaz gave it a trendy sound. Made it sound like the In thing to do. Took the curse off psychiatric assistance, which no cop liked to admit he needed. Psychiatric assistance often led to a cop losing his gun, something he dreaded. Take away a cop's gun, you were putting him out to pasture. The Tom-Tom Squad. Indians with bows and arrows, no guns.
'Uh-huh,' Kling said.
'Saw a woman named Karin Lefkowitz.'
'Uh-huh.'
'She's a psychologist. There's a pecking order, you know.'
'Yes.'
'I'll be seeing her twice a week. Whenever she can fit me in.'
'Okay.'
'Which is why I thought you and I . . .'
'No.'
'Just until I get my act together again.'
'Did she suggest this?'
He was already beginning to hate Karin Lefkowitz.
'No. It's entirely my idea.'
'Well, it's a lousy idea.'
'I don't think so.'
'I do.'
Eileen sighed.
'I wish somebody would pick up that fucking baby,' Kling said.
'So,' Eileen said, and reached into her bag for her key. He could see the butt of her revolver in the bag. Still a cop. But she didn't think so.
'So what I'd like to do,' she said, 'if it's okay with you . . .'
'No, it's not okay with me.'
'Well, I'm really sorry about that, Bert, but this is my life we're talking about here.'
'It's my life, too.'
'You're not drowning,' she said.
She put her key into the latch.
'So ... let me call you when I'm ready, okay?' she said.
'Eileen . . .'
She turned the key.
'Good night, Bert,' she said, and went into the apartment. And closed the door behind her. He heard the lock being turned, the tumblers falling with a small oiled click. He stood in the hallway for several moments, looking at the closed door and the numerals 304 on it. A screw in the 4 was loose. It hung slightly askew.
He went downstairs.
The night was very cold.
He looked at his watch. Ten minutes to ten. He wasn't due at the squadroom until a quarter to twelve.
* * * *
"What I think you should do,' Lorraine said, 'is go to the police.'
'No,' he said.
'Before they come to you.'
'No.'
'Because, Scott, it looks very bad this way. It really does.'
Lorraine Greer was twenty seven years old. She had long black hair and a complexion as pale as moonstone. She claimed she had violet-colored eyes like Elizabeth Taylor's, but she knew they were really only a sort of bluish-gray. She affected very dark lipstick that looked like dried blood on her lips. She had good breasts and good legs, and she wore funky clothes that revealed them to good advantage. The colors she favored were red and yellow and green. She dressed like a tree just starting to turn in the fall. She figured this leggy, busty, somewhat tatterdemalion look would immediately identify her once she became a rock star.
Her father, who was an accountant, told her there were thousands of busty, leggy girls in this country. Millions of them all over the world. All of them dressed in rags. All of them thinking they could be rock stars if only they got a break. Her father told her to become a legal secretary. Legal secretaries made good money, he said. Lorraine told him she was going to be a rock star. She'd never had any formal musical training, that was true, but he had to admit she had a good singing voice and besides she'd written hundreds of songs. The lyrics to them, anyway. Usually she worked with a partner who put music to her words. She was writing songs all the time, with this or that partner. She knew the songs were good. Even her father thought some of the songs were pretty good, maybe.
Years ago, she'd been Scott Handler's baby-sitter.
She'd been fifteen, he'd been six. That was the age difference between them. Nine years. She used to sing him to sleep with lullabies she herself wrote. The lyrics, anyway. At that time her partner used to be a girl she knew from high school. Sylvia Antonelli, who when she was nineteen years old married a man who owned a plumbing supply house. Sylvia now had three children and two fur coats and she lived in a big Tudor-style house. She never wrote songs anymore.
Lorraine's partner nowadays was a woman who'd been in Chorus Line. On Broadway, not one of the road companies. She'd played the Puerto Rican girl, whatever her name was, the one who sang about the teacher at Music and Art. Be a snowflake, remember? Gonzalez? Something like that. She wrote beautiful music. She wasn't Puerto Rican, she was in fact Jewish. Very dark. Black hair, brown eyes, she could pass easily for Puerto Rican, Lorraine could visualize her in the part. She had also played one of Tevye's daughters in a dinner-theater production of Fiddler. In Florida someplace. But her heart was in writing songs, not in singing or dancing. She was the one who'd told Lorraine she was robbing the cradle here. Starting up with a kid nine years younger than she was. Lorraine had merely shrugged. This was only last week.
He'd come to her a few days after Christmas.
She was living in an apartment downtown in the Quarter. Her father paid the rent, but he kept warning her that pretty soon he'd turn off the money tap. She knew he didn't mean it; she was the apple of his eye. She'd once written a song, in fact, called 'Apple of My Eye,' which she'd dedicated to her father. Rebecca - that was her new partner's name, Rebecca Simms, nee Saperstein - had written a beautiful tune to go with Lorraine's lyrics.
Apple of my eye . . .
Lovely child of yesterday . . .
Little sleepy eye.
Hear my lullaby . . .
Sleepy girl as bright as May . . .
Little lullaby.
And so on.
The song brought tears to Lorraine's eyes whenever she sang it. Rebecca thought it was one of their better efforts, though her personal favorite was a feminist song they'd written called 'Burn,' in which Joan of Arc was the central metaphor. Rebecca wore her dark hair in a whiffle cut. Sometimes, Lorraine wondered if she was gay. She'd seemed inordinately angry about Scott moving in.
Lorraine hadn't expected to go to bed with Scott.
He'd just shown up on her doorstep, his eyes all red, his face white, she'd thought at first it was from the cold outside. He told her he'd got her address from her father, who'd remembered when she used to babysit for him, and she'd said Oh sure, that's okay, come on in, how are you? She hadn't seen him now in it must have been three, four years. Since he'd gone off to school in Maine. He'd looked like a kid then. Pimply-head, lanky, you know. Now he looked like . . . well ... a man. She was really surprised by how handsome he'd turned out. But of course he was still a kid.
He told her he remembered how he used to tell her everything when she used to sit for him, how he used to trust her more than he had his own parents.
She said, 'Well, that's very nice of you, Scott.'
'I mean it,' he said.
'Thank you, that's very nice of you.'
She was wearing a short red skirt with red tights and yellow leg warmers. Short, soft, black leather boots. She was wearing a green blouse, no bra. She was sitting on the couch, long legs tucked under her. She had offered him a drink, which he'd accepted. Apple brandy. Which was all she had in the house. He was on his third snifterful. The snifters were a birthday gift from Rebecca. This was the twenty-eighth day of December. It was very cold outside. Wind rattled the windows in the small apartment. She was remembering how she used to take him to the toilet in his Dr Denton's. Hold his little penis while he peed. Sometimes he had a little hard-on. Six years old, he'd have a little hard-on, he'd piss all over the toilet tank, sometimes the wall. She was remembering this fondly.