Tick, tick, tick…
“What did he say when you brought up the subject of the office break-in?” she asked.
“I didn’t bring it up directly, but he doesn’t have an alibi for its time frame. Says he was home in bed alone.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I told him I didn’t believe anyone about everything.”
“Is that true?”
“It is except for you,” Quinn said, twisting his torso so he could look into her eyes. “You’re different.”
52
Pearl dropped the mail all over the floor but didn’t give a damn. She was too tired.
She closed and locked her door, then stepped over the clutter on the floor.
After another hot and unproductive day on the job, she’d finally found refuge in her apartment. She’d left the window-unit air conditioner on low so the place wouldn’t preheat like an oven, but it still felt almost as hot as outside. Sometimes when she left the unit on like that it would freeze up and put out only brief wafts of neutral air while spitting occasional flecks of ice.
Like this time.
She switched off the struggling unit and turned away from it in disgust.
The bedroom was even warmer than the living room. She turned on that window unit, then went into the kitchen and switched on its smaller and almost useless air conditioner. The apartment’s air conditioners looked about twenty years old. Where did the landlord buy this crap? If it kept up like this, she’d have to curl up in the refrigerator to find any relief from the heat.
She returned to the living room, slipped off her shoes and blouse, and slumped down on the sofa wearing only slacks and her bra, waiting for the bedroom and kitchen to cool down a few degrees. She’d have a snack and a cold beer, then go into the bedroom and stretch out wearing only her panties and try to read the latest New Yorker. For some reason she enjoyed reading about the Broadway plays she couldn’t afford to see.
When she’d lived with Quinn they’d often gone to the theater. He was a Broadway buff and had turned her into one before they’d split up, leaving her with a habit she couldn’t afford. He’d enjoyed Pinter and Stoppard, she The Lion King.
Quinn.
Pearl wasn’t sure if it was the heat or lack of progress on the investigation that was keeping her in such a state of irritation, or if it was the knowledge of Quinn’s affair with the psychoanalyst Zoe.
It wasn’t that she had anything against Zoe Manders, but what the hell was Quinn doing sleeping with a shrink, anyway? If there was one thing their love lives should have taught both Quinn and Pearl it was that cops are best off mated with cops. They were the only ones who understood each other.
Shouldn’t that also be true of psychoanalysts?
What the hell do Quinn and Zoe talk about over breakfast? While riding in cabs? When watching the sun set? After they screw?
Me?
The thought of being the subject of Quinn and Zoe’s pillow talk brought a smoldering ember to flame in Pearl’s stomach. She stood up restlessly and retrieved from the floor the handful of mail she’d brought up from her box down in the lobby.
Pearl carried the mail into the kitchen, where by now it might be a few degrees cooler.
Only it wasn’t.
She went over and slapped the air conditioner, but it reacted pretty much the way Quinn did the few times she’d slapped him. It ignored her. She might as well have slapped a brick wall.
Screw it!
After getting a Budweiser from the refrigerator, she sat down at the small wooden table, took a couple of long pulls on the bottle, then turned her attention to the mail.
Jesus Christ!
Aside from the usual bills and ads, half of her mail—half!—was from doctors or medical clinics. Most of it wasn’t even the kind of mail that required opening. Fanned out on the table was one color flier or brochure after another warning of the dangers of ignoring seemingly harmless growths anywhere on the body, advising routine searches for such growths, explaining the horrors that might evolve from such tiny discolorations or moles.
Moles!
Her mother! Her mother and that goddamned Milton Kahn! They’d prompted these to be sent, and perhaps sent some themselves.
Pearl’s first impulse was to reach for the phone and call her mother, but she caught herself in time. That would only make things infinitely worse. And calling and dressing down Milt would do no good. In truth, he might not even know about her mother’s efforts to frighten Pearl back into his arms. Maybe it was just her mother and Milt’s aunt, Mrs. Kahn, out at the assisted living home in New Jersey, fighting boredom by becoming engrossed in matchmaking and medical terrorism.
Pearl took another long pull of beer and hoped the alcohol would soon calm her nerves. Pearl’s mother, Mrs. Kahn, and Milton Kahn. Most likely all three were in on the sporadic, creepy mailings that had finally erupted into this postal bombardment. This…this…!
Take it easy. Don’t assume. Best to give this some calm thought.
It was probable that Milt at least knew about the assault by mail and condoned it. But if Pearl called him, he’d deny it. And wasn’t that what this was all about, getting her to call him?
She stood up from the table and threw the mail in with the kitchen trash. All of it. Including any bills that might have been hiding between brightly colored images of moles gone amok.
Then she finished her beer and went into the bathroom, where she stood before the mirror and took yet another long, long look at the mole behind her right ear, until the ear ached from being bent drastically forward to reveal the mole. She’d been examining the mole so frequently lately that her right ear appeared swollen and larger than her left.
Pearl splashed cold water over her face, patted it dry with a towel, then leaned on the washbasin with both hands and assessed herself anew in the mirror. The stress she’d been under since joining Quinn’s investigation showed, the stress from worrying about murder and the mole. She leaned closer to the mirror to get a better look at the somber woman staring back at her.
You look like you’ve been run over by a subway.
Damn my mother! Damn Mrs. Kahn! Damn Milton Kahn!
Damn Quinn! And Fedderman, too. And that bitch, Zoe.
Look what they’re doing to me!
“Enough of this bullshit,” Pearl said to the other Pearl.
The other Pearl nodded, gave her a grim smile.
She would make another appointment with another dermatologist who wasn’t Milton Kahn, and she would keep that appointment. She would have the seemingly harmless mole examined by an unbiased physician and put the matter to rest.
She was pretty sure she would.
Rhodes was too quick for him. Jerry Dunn had been following Thomas Rhodes for the last fifteen minutes, staying well back, waiting for Rhodes either to be relatively isolated, or surrounded by so many people that the bark of a shot would only serve to confuse them and the shooter—the hunter—could easily be lost among the milling humanity.
What Dunn liked was that Rhodes was carrying a black leather duffel bag slung from his shoulder by a thick strap. That meant he intended to run rather than try to turn the tables and become hunter rather than prey. Probably, Dunn thought, because Rhodes knew that if he couldn’t successfully go into hiding he’d continue to be hunted no matter how this particular joust with death turned out.