"Not a hell of a lot of choice," Lucas said. "Keep pushing everywhere. With Whitechurch dead, Bekker's gotta find a new source." • • • An hour later, Lucas lay on his bed at the Lakota and thought about what Huerta had said. That he looked like Steve Martin, with all that white hair…
All right. You're on the street. There's been a killing. A car speeds by and inside is an old white guy. That's what Cornell Reed told Bobby Rich's snitch. An old white guy. How would you know he was old, when he was in a moving car? If he had white hair…
And then there was Mrs. Logan, and what she'd said, in the apartment beneath Petty's…
Kennett fit. He was a longtime intelligence operative. He was high up, with good access to inside information. He was tough but apparently well liked; he had charisma. He had white hair.
Kennett was sleeping with Lily. How did that cut across it? How did she wind up in the sack with a guy who might be a suspect? And the biggest question: with several hundred possible suspects, how did Kennett wind up in Lucas' lap, available for daily inspection?
O'Dell was one answer. Lily was another. Or both together.
He lay on the bed with the Magic Marker and his art pad, trying to put together a list. Finally he came up with:
1. Cornell Reed.
CHAPTER
15
Lucas was flat on his back, half asleep, when Fell called. The room was semidark; he'd turned out all the lights but the one in the bathroom, and then half closed the door.
"I'm downstairs," she said. "If you're awake, let's get something to eat."
"Anything at Bellevue?" Lucas asked.
"I'll tell you about it."
"Ten minutes," he said.
He was fifteen minutes. He shaved, going easy over the bruises, brushed his teeth and took a quick shower, put on a fresh shirt, dabbed on after-shave. When he got down to the lobby, Fell looked him over and said, "Great. You make me feel like a rag."
"You look fine," he said, but she didn't. She looked worn, dirty around the eyes. The dress that had been crisp that morning hung slackly from her shoulders. "There's an Italian place a couple of blocks down that's friendly."
"Good. I couldn't handle anything complicated." As they were going out the door, she said, "I'm sorry about ditching you and going with Kennett, but this case really could mean a lot for me. And Mrs. Bedrick, she was mine… ours… and I wanted to be there to get the credit."
Lucas nodded and said, "No problem." On the sidewalk, he added, "You don't sound happy."
"I'm not. Bellevue's a rat's nest. They have a dial-in paging system, so now we're trying to figure out if we can match up the calls. And we're looking for people who might have been paging doctors who shouldn't have, that somebody else might have noticed. There are about two thousand suspects."
"Can you thin them out?"
"Maybe. We're trying extortion. Kennett worked out a routine with an assistant D.A. Everybody we talk to, we tell them the same thing: if we find out who Whitechurch's phone contact is before she comes forward, we'll charge her as an accomplice in the Bekker murders. If she comes forward and cooperates, we'll give her immunity on Bekker. And she can bring a lawyer and refuse to cooperate on anything else… So there's a chance. If we can scare her enough."
"How do you know it's a her? "
Fell grinned up at him: "That's Kennett. He said, 'Have you ever heard a male voice on a hospital intercom?' We all thought about it, and decided, Not very often. If a male voice kept calling out the names of nonexistent doctors-that's what we think she was doing, whoever she is, calling out code names-he'd be noticed. So we're pretty sure it's a her."
"What if it's just the switchboard?"
"Then we're fucked… although Carter thinks it probably isn't. A switchboard might start recognizing names and voices…" • • • The Whetstone had an old-fashioned knife-grinding wheel in the window, a dozen tables in front, a few booths in back. Between the booths was a wooden floor, worn smooth and soft by a century of sliding feet. A couple turned slowly in the middle of it, dancing to a slow, sleepy jazz tune from an aging jukebox.
"Booth?" asked Lucas.
"Sure," said the waitress. "One left, in the no-smoking area."
Fell smiled ruefully at Lucas, and said, "We'll take it."
They ate spaghetti and garlic bread around a bottle of rose, talking about Bekker. Lucas recounted the Minneapolis killings:
"… started killing them to establish their alibis. They apparently picked out the woman at the shopping mall at random. She was killed to confuse things."
"Like a bug. Stepped on," Fell said.
"Yeah. I once dealt with a sexual psychopath who killed a series of women, and I could understand him, in a way. He was nuts. He was made nuts. If he'd had a choice, I'd bet that he'd have chosen not to be nuts. It was like, it wasn't his fault, his wires were bad. But with Bekker…"
"Still nuts," Fell said. "They might look cold and rational, but to be that cold, you've got to be goofy. And look what he's doing now. If we take him alive, there's a good chance that he'll be sent to a mental hospital, instead of a prison."
"I'd rather go to prison," Lucas said.
"Me, too, but there are people who don't think that way. Like doctors."
A heavyset man in work pants and a gray Charlie Chaplin mustache stepped across to the jukebox and stared into it. The waitress came by and said, "More wine?"
Lucas looked at Fell and then up at the waitress and said, "Mmmm," and the waitress took the glasses.
Behind her, the heavy man in work pants dropped a single quarter in the jukebox, carefully pressed two buttons, went back to his table and bent over the woman he had been sitting with. As she got up, the "Blue Skirt Waltz" began bubbling from the jukebox speakers.
"Jesus. Blue Skirt. And it's Frankie Yankovich, too," Lucas said. "C'mon, let's dance."
"You gotta be kidding…"
"You don't want…?"
"Of course I want," she said. "I just can't believe that you do."
They began turning around the floor, Fell light and delicate, a good dancer, Lucas denser, unskilled. They turned around the heavy man and his partner, the two couples caught by the same rhythm, weaving around the dance floor. The waitress, who'd taken menus to another table, lingered to watch them dance.
"One more time," the heavy man said to Lucas, in a heavy German accent, as the song ended. He bowed, gestured to the jukebox. Lucas dropped a quarter, punched "Blue Skirt," and they started again, turning around the tiny dance floor. Fell fit nicely just below his jaw, and her soft hair stroked his cheek. When the song ended, they both sighed and wandered back to the booth, holding hands.
"Sooner or later, I'd like to spend some time in your shorts, as we say around the Ninth," Fell said across the table as she sat down. "But not tonight. I'm too fuckin' dirty and miserable and tired and I've got too many bad movies in my head."
"Well," he said.
"Well, what? You don't want to?"
"I was thinking, well, I've got a shower."
She cocked her head, looking at him steadily, unsmiling. "You think it'll wash away that woman rolling over this morning, with those eyes?" she asked somberly.
After a moment, he said, "No. I guess not. But listen… you interest me. I think you knew that."
"I didn't really," she said, almost shyly. "I've got no self-confidence."
"Well." He laughed.
"You keep saying that. Well."
"Well. Have some more wine," he said.
Halfway through the second bottle of wine, Fell made Lucas play it again and they turned around the room, close, her face tipped up this time, breathing against his neck, warm, steamy. He began to react and was relieved to get her back to the booth.
She was drunk, laughing, and Lucas asked about the cop she used to date.
"Ah, God," she said, staring up at the ceiling, where a large wooden fan slowly turned its endless circles. "He was so good-looking, and he was such a snake. He used to be like this Pope of Greenwich Village guy with these great suits and great shoes, and he hung out, you know? I mean, he was cool. His socks had clocks on them."