Slaughter - Lutz John - Страница 45
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The cop motioned again, this time to indicate the building entrance. Quinn thought he might know the cop, but he wasn’t sure. The guy had one of those average-this, average-that faces. They might simply have glimpsed each other along the way. Be a cop long enough and faces were indelible once seen, stored somewhere along with identifying marks and bloody crime scenes and the indignities of death. A cop’s mind . . .
“This way, Captain,” the cop said. That was when Quinn recognized him. Vincent Royston, from Homicide South. It had been a couple of years.
“How you doing, Vince?”
Royston’s face lit up. He was pleased to be recognized by Quinn, whom he saw as someone reasonably famous. At least in cop circles.
It was a rhetorical question, but Royston said he was doing the best he could.
“Aren’t we all?” Quinn said.
But sometimes he wondered.
“Third floor,” Royston said, realizing he wasn’t going to be engaged in a lengthy conversation. “Left off the elevator.”
Quinn went through a narrow, unmarked doorway he would never have guessed was an entrance. He found himself in a fairly large foyer that had been created when several other spaces were taken down. It was the kind of place that ordinarily would have a doorman, if it weren’t for all the remodeling. Eight or ten people were coming and going through the maze of iron pipes supporting the scaffolding in the lobby. Almost everyone wore work clothes, and some had on hard hats. A sign was nailed crookedly to a vertical support beam reading EXCUSE OUR DUST.
The elevator looked purely functional on the outside, but when Quinn stepped inside and the door closed, everything looked finished, mostly in oak and brushed metal. Quinn’s mind went back to the elevator in the Blenheim Building, to what must have gone on among the passengers during the five or six seconds it took to reach the basement once they realized what must be happening. His mind recoiled.
The elevator stopped smoothly and the door opened on the third-floor hall. Quinn stepped out, turned left, and saw that on this floor everything looked as finished and usable as in the elevator. Oak wainscoting and brushed metal was the theme here, too. It appeared that interior rehabbing had begun in the upper floors and was working its way down. Probably a money thing, Quinn thought. Rents collected on the high-priced upper-floor apartments would help to finance the lobby’s modern curved marble registration area, and what might someday become a fashionable bar and restaurant.
A stalwart uniformed cop stood next to an open apartment door about fifty feet down the hall from the elevator. Quinn was sure he hadn’t seen the man before, who looked capable but about twenty pounds overweight. Gained recently, Quinn suspected, noting the cop’s youth, and the taut material stretched over a stomach paunch.
When Quinn flashed his ID the uniform stepped aside so he could enter.
Quinn was directed to the apartment’s one bedroom. Techs and the dance of the white gloves were everywhere except the bedroom. They’d finished in there, interpreting the bloodstains and gathering possibly minute evidence to be examined later. Trying to recreate what was.
Nift, the atrocious little medical examiner, was kneeling beside this victim in the way Quinn had often seen him, more intensely curious than somber. His lips were moving slightly and silently. It was almost as if he and the corpse were getting to know each other on the most intimate terms, which in a way was half true.
As he saw Quinn, Nift said hello, removing from the torso of the dead woman what looked like an indicator to probe for liver temperature, a valuable part of the calculus that would provide time of death.
The victim, Dora Palm, was on the floor, lying in an awkward position that needed a second look to be sure she was real. The observer would see that her arms, legs, and head were about a quarter of an inch from where they should have been attached.
“Skillfully done, isn’t it?” Nift said.
“Strange skill, though. And why in this cramped little room did he put her on the floor instead of the bed?”
Nift looked thoughtful. “Could be he wanted her in the lowest position possible. A measure of her importance compared to his. Gremlin the conqueror, his conquest lying on the floor like a detached and broken doll.”
“Or it could be that it’s difficult to pose a dead woman on a soft mattress, especially with her limbs and head severed.”
“I could think of more interesting poses,” Nift said, looking beyond Quinn.
“I’m sure you could,” said a woman’s voice.
Pearl had walked in. Nift looked instantly interested. Pearl had on a light tan raincoat over a gray pants suit and a white blouse open at the neck. The neckline was low enough to show the swell of her more than ample breasts. Why would she unfasten that top button on her blouse, knowing Nift might be here?
Or had the blouse come unbuttoned and she hadn’t noticed?
The things women did that made men think. But then, he was the one doing that kind of thinking.
“Hello to all three of you,” Nift said.
Quinn considered saying something to Nift, then decided Pearl could speak for herself. She had once punched out an over-amorous police captain when she was in the NYPD. Promotion was difficult for her after that, if not impossible.
Nift began packing his instruments in a container that would keep them separate from the sterile ones. He straightened up slowly, as if his back hurt. Pearl hoped it did.
It occurred to Quinn that Nift was getting up in years to be acting like a nasty lothario who might have a strain of necrophilia in his horror-house mind.
“Unless you have some reason for her not to,” Nift said, “it’s okay now for Dora Palm to leave for our rendezvous in the morgue. I’ll phone you later and give you facts and figures, among them a more accurate time of death.” He glanced around to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything.
“By the way,” he said, “there’s a uniformed officer downstairs, a big cop named Vincent something. He can give you the name of the guy who found the body. Lives in Brooklyn and works for the company that’s doing the work now on rehabbing this area.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Quinn said.
“His name’s Stan Gorshin. You’ll recognize him. He’s the only hard hat out there in a suit.”
Quinn said, “Did he have on the hard hat before all the unscheduled demolition?”
Nift thought for longer than a minute. “Yeah. I think so. But I can’t be certain.”
“Seems nothing in life is certain.”
“Or in death,” Nift said.
There Quinn disagreed with him.
52
St. Louis, Missouri, 1999
Fran came in early the morning of a doubleheader that was going to be played because of an earlier rainout. Downtown St. Louis was still snoozing, as were most of the suburbs. But Fran knew that within a few hours, parking space would become a rare commodity, and expensive when you parked anywhere near the stadium.
She’d left the car near the double-wide where she and Willie lived and taken the Metro downtown.
By the time she was walking the short distance from the Metro-link stop to Busch Stadium, the slight drizzle had ceased, as the weather wonders on every TV channel had predicted, and the low gray sky had become blue. Probably, Fran thought, the temperature would reach ninety-five degrees, as predicted, and the sun would be blasting away most of the day. Baseball fans approaching and leaving the stadium would want bratwurst, which would make them want beer or soda, which would make them want bratwurst. A vicious, profitable circle.
Fran picked up her pace and smiled. It was going to be a good day; she could feel it. She could take the register, spelled now and then by Willie or Henry. The new kid, Pablo, could work the kitchen. The Happy Brat was the kind of restaurant where no table service was expected. Alcoholic beverages could be ordered at the counter and would be brought tableside, but customers served everything else to themselves. To eat here or to get food to go. It always impressed Fran to see how many people liked to eat and drink while they walked.
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