"They don't pay me to count stab wounds."
"I hate these wet ones."
"Seen a lot of wets, have you?"
"Usually with me it's the female that does the stabbing. I don't know how many times I walk in and there's some woman sitting on the sofa, looking a little sleepy, you know, and there's the common-law husband on the kitchen floor with about skeighty-eight stab wounds. And the woman's just about nodding off. Maybe they get tired. All that stabbing makes them tired. You want to put a blanket over them and turn off the radio."
"I think I hear them outside," Del Bravo said.
"I don't know what it is but with me the body's in the kitchen. Always the kitchen."
"Poor people like to be close to the food."
"What do you think, seriously here, one entry?"
"They don't like to stray from the food, even in the middle of a knife fight."
"If it's one entry, they penetrated something vital."
"That's safe. I'd go with that."
"All this blood," Gannett said.
"And it's royal."
"Royal?"
"Don't touch, G.G."
"Right," Gannett said. "A queen."
About half an hour later Del Bravo stood on the sidewalk blowing into his cupped hands. He wore the yellow hard hat that usually sat in the back seat of the car. An ambulance, two unmarked cars and two squad cars were nearby. Fingerprint men and photographers came and went. An emergency service vehicle pulled up. Seconds later a uniformed sergeant spotted Del Bravo and came over.
"Move it, buddy, crime area."
"What?"
"This area's sealed."
With a weary sigh Del Bravo took out his shield and pinned it to his jacket.
"These days, what is it? Everybody's in disguise."
"I know, sergeant."
"Tell me how in the hell people are supposed to know who's the police. All this dressing up. The police don't know each other. Junkies, car boosters, beards, hats. Blind man with a dog, he could turn around and shoot you. It used to be you could go by the clothes. But you can't go by the clothes anymore."
"You go by the sex organs," Del Bravo told him.
Gannett joined them, breathing steam, his arms crossed on his chest.
"We missed the stairway," he said.
"What are you talking about, stairway?"
"Place used to be a restaurant. West side of the building there's an outside service stairway going up to the kitchen. Didn't you go around the west side of the building?"
"I went around the east side of the building," Del Bravo said.
"Anyway that's how they got the victim up there. We're climbing scaffolds. They walked him up the stairs and in the door. There's a door at the top of the stairs, Robby. It wasn't locked."
"I checked the back. I checked the east side, the front and the back."
"Three out of four," the sergeant said.
Arms still crossed, Gannett wedged a hand in each armpit.
"Wouldn't I like to be in Florida right now."
"Go coop some more. Maybe you'll dream about it."
"That's right, the beach."
"He dreams about rocks," Del Bravo told the sergeant.
"Rocks on a beach."
The sergeant waited for more.
"I'm there but I'm not there," Gannett said.
1 Cosmic Erotics
1
Lightborne, at sixty-six, took to using a walking stick on his frequent strolls down West Broadway and through the SoHo gallery district. This one spring evening the sole of his right shoe-he wore penny loafers-began flapping soon after he started out. This somewhat undermined the effect he'd sought to create with his walking stick.
He headed back, gingerly, walking on his right heel. Entering a cast-iron building, he rode to the fourth floor in a selfservice freight elevator, a drafty contrivance he feared and hated. The vast metal door to his loft bore the legend in red paint:
COSMIC EROTICS
THE LIGHTBORNE GALLERY
He walked through the gallery and stepped past a partition into the area of the loft he used as living quarters. The furniture was dark and heavy, embellished with scroll motifs. An end table leaned a little. The front legs of a desk rested on matchbooks for balance. From a drawer in this desk Lightborne took a small bottle of Elmer's Glue-All and tried to ref asten the sole of his right shoe.
About twenty people would be arriving at eight-thirty. They were the core of his clientele and he had some new things to show. Only one fresh face likely to appear. This would be Moll Robbins, a journalist planning a series of articles on sex as big business.
The others were collectors, a couple of people who represented collectors, and the inevitable self-conscious dabblers who were captivated by the novelty of it all. Lightborne didn't mind the latter group. They tended to regard him as an eccentric scholar, a font of erotic lore, and were always inviting him places and giving him things.
Finished with the shoe, he took a pair of grooming scissors and snipped at his sideburns. Then he commenced brushing his hair into a near-ducktail arrangement. Lightborne's hair was silvery gray tinged with a kind of yellowish discoloration, and he liked wearing it long. Finally he put on a string tie and belted corduroy jacket. Not that there was any reason to concern himself with appearance. These get-togethers at the gallery were always informal. The collectors preferred it that way. He served them Wink in paper cups.
Moll Robbins, as it happened, arrived before the others. She wore jeans and a bulky sweater, a tall lean woman who walked in a sort of lazy prowl. Hanging from a strap over her right shoulder was a large leather case.
Lightborne showed her around the gallery, which wasn't the usual clinical space of right angles and clever little ramps. It resembled instead an antique shop in serious decline. There were small tables filled with bronze and porcelain pieces, with stacks of drawings and prints, with books and woodcarvings, vases and cups. There were several pedestals to hold the more interesting pieces, and on the wall were a number of oil paintings as well as enlarged photographs of Hindu temple façades and the lucky phalluses of Pompeii. Along the walls were bins of drawings, more prints, more photographs, and several glass cases full of rings, bracelets, necklaces.
Moll Robbins roved a bit uncertainly through all of this, fingering the lid of a porcelain teapot (Chinese emperor with concubine, apparently), peering at a coin under glass (Greeks, male, dallying).
"Innocent, somehow, isn't it?"
"It doesn't move," Lightborne said.
"Doesn't move?"
"Movement, action, frames per second. This is the era we're in, for better or worse. It seems a little ineffectual, what's here. It just sits. It's all mass and body weight."
"Pure gravity."
"Sure, a thing isn't fully erotic unless it has the capacity to move. A woman crossing her legs drives men mad. She moves, understand. Motion, activity, change of position. You need this today for eroticism to be total."
"Something to that, I suppose."
When everyone had arrived, Lightborne closed the huge doors and began to circulate. Moll took off her sweater and draped it over the erect member of a plaster vicar, noting that Lightborne was spending most of his time at the side of a wellgroomed and neatly dressed man, early thirties, seemingly a business type, the kind of junior tycoon who delights in giving crisp directives to his subordinates.
She spoke with several people, finding them subtly evasive, not exactly reluctant to discuss their interest in erotica but unable to focus their attention on the subject. They seemed rushed somehow, distracted by some private vision, high-type horseplayers, secretly frenzied at the edges.
Lightborne introduced her to the man he'd been talking to. Glen Selvy. Then was led away by several other people.
"What got you interested, Mr. Selvy?"
"What gets anyone interested in sex?"