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“Yeah.”
“ . . . And the cashier remembers the blond part, and says she—he—was driving an old Volkswagen. He remembers because it looked like it was in pretty good shape and he wondered if Bekker was an artist or something. He thinks it was dark green or dark blue. We’re ru
“You said three people . . . .”
“The third’s a maybe, but pretty definite. The night clerk in a bookstore down in the Village says he remembers the face very clearly, says it was Bekker. He says he was buying some weird book about torture.”
“Huh.”
“We’re getting close,” Carter said. “We’ll have him in two or three days, at the outside.”
“I hope,” Lucas said. “Any returns on that stun-gun business?”
“Three. Nothing.”
“Phones?”
“Nope. Goddamn rat’s nest.”
“Okay . . .”
Lucas started to turn away, and Carter said, “You’ve seen the papers?”
“With Bekker? Yeah . . .”
“No, that was this morning; the afternoon paper . . .” Huerta picked up the paper they’d been looking at, closed it, and handed it to Lucas. On the cover was a woman’s face, eyes staring; before the headlines reached the brain, the terror of the face came through, then the words: “Kill #8—Bekker Death Pix.”
“This legit?” Lucas asked.
“That’s Carson,” Carter said grimly. “He sent notes and photos to three newspapers and two TV stations. They’re using them.”
“Jesus . . .”
From down the hall, he heard a woman’s voice.
Lily.
He walked down to the corner, found the room in semidarkness, the door open. He knocked, standing back, and Ke
Lucas stuck his head in. “Davenport,” he said.
“Come on in. We were just talking about you,” Ke
“Fuckin’ photographs,” Lucas said.
“The shit is hitting the fan,” Ke
Lucas dragged a third chair around, bumped Ke
“And me with a fuckin’ bad heart,” Ke
“You told Fell about the transvestite thing,” Lily said. She pushed the phone books out of the way, picked up the necktie.
Lucas shrugged, sat down, put his feet up. “We talked it over and decided it was likely.”
“That came at a good time. We told everybody that Carson’ll probably be the last, that we’ve pretty much got him pi
“Should have thought of it sooner, the cross-dressing,” Ke
“Hell, you did everything right . . .” Lily began.
Ke
“He’s pi
“We fuckin’ hope,” Ke
Lily had been rolling the tie in her fingers, and now she looked down at the bare-breasted Polynesian woman, shook her head and said, “This is the craziest tie.”
“Don’t knocker it,” said Ke
“You were jerking me around, Gauguin and Christian Dior,” Lucas said to Ke
Lily laughed again, and Ke
“Looked him up,” Lucas said. “He died in 1903. He was associated with the symbolists.”
“Now if you knew what a symbolist was, you’d be in fat city,” Lily said.
“It was the use of color specifically for its symbolic impact, the emotional and intellectual impact,” Lucas said. “Which makes sense. Some holding cells are painted bubble-gum pink for the same reason. The color cools people out.”
Ke
“Carter tells me you’ll have Bekker in three days at the outside,” Lucas said.
“That fuckhead. That’s the kind of talk that gets us in trouble,” Ke
“Still . . .”
“I figure no more than a week,” Ke
“People think cops . . .” Lucas started.
But Lily was shaking her head. “It’s not the people, it’s the politicians. People understand you can’t always catch a guy immediately; most of them do, anyway. But the politicians think they’ve got to do something, so what they do is run around and scream and threaten to fire people.”
“Mmmm. A week,” Lucas said. “That’s a long time, in ward-heeler years.”
“Anxious to get home?” Ke
“Nah. I’m enjoying myself. I want to be there for the bust.”
“Or the kill,” said Ke
“Whatever . . .”
Lily pushed herself out of the chair, stretched, and tousled Ke
“Jesus Christ, the woman’s indefatigable, and me with this heart,” Ke
Lucas, vaguely embarrassed, stood and drifted toward the door. “See you guys tomorrow . . . .”
A message from Fell was waiting at the hotel: “Call when you get in, until one o’clock.” He held the slip in his hand as he rode the elevator to his floor, dropped it on the bedstand, went into the bathroom, doused his face with hot water, and looked up in the mirror, the water trickling down his face.
He’d had a long relationship with a woman, the mother of his daughter, that now, when he looked back, seemed to have been based on a shared cynicism. Je
He’d had a shorter, intense relationship with Lily, who had been struggling with the end of her own marriage; that might have been something, if they’d been in the same town, from the same emotional places. But they hadn’t been, and some of the guilt of their affair still stuck to their relationship.
He’d had any number of other relationships, long and short, happy and unhappy. Most of the women he’d gone with still liked him well enough, in a wary, once-burned way; but he tended to think of them as others, not Je
Fell was one of the others. A wistful, lovely, finally lonely woman. In a permanent relationship, they would drive each other crazy. He wiped his face with one of the rough hotel towels and wandered back to the bed. He sat down, picked up the phone, looked at the receiver for a moment, then smiled. He’d felt for a year as though he were under water: quiet, placid, out of it. The New York cops were bringing him up, and Fell was fixing him in other ways. He tapped out her number. She picked it up on the second ring.
“This is Lucas,” he said.
“Ke
“I saw it . . . .”
“I’d like to find a way to thank you. Oral sex comes to mind, if I get my share,” Fell said.
“Women are so forward these days,” Lucas said. “How quick can you get here?”