Crimson Joy (2 page)

"Takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," I said.

"Is Quirk making up a kind of special squad of his own?" Susan said.

"Belson called it a posse. Quirk's own posse," I said.

"Because the killer may be someone in his department?"

"And because his department is going to get eaten up by the circus," I said. "Quirk wants an alternative. He wants someone not on the payroll. He wants somebody the mayor can't boss, and the city council can't threaten. Somebody who's not bucking for captain. He wants someplace to go where it's quiet and he can think."

"Will it be that bad?" Susan said.

"Yes, very soon," I said.

"Have you been involved in something like this before?"

"I was around the Strangler case," I said. "We had psychics and movie producers and dancing chickens in every corner."

I sprinkled some rosemary on the flattened chicken thighs and put them in olive oil and lemon juice to marinate.

"Everyone uses it," Susan said.

"Yes," I said. I poured a little of the champagne into my glass. "To get promoted, to get famous, to get rich, to get excited." I drank my champagne and poured some more, and went around the corner to have some caviar.

"How do you afford caviar?" Susan said.

"Low overhead," I said. "I weave my own blackjacks."

"He seems as if he wants to be caught," Susan said.

"The letter. Yeah, probably. But he didn't write it until after the second killing."

"So if he drops clues it may be very slowly," Susan said.

"And a lot of women may die before he drops enough for us to catch him."

I said.

Susan took maybe two sturgeon eggs on the tip of the spoon and ate them slowly.

"While we eat caviar," she said.

"And drink champagne," I said. I poured some for her and added a touch of the Midori.

"Shamelessly," Susan said.

"If we drank Moxie and ate Devil Dogs, they'd still die," I said.

"I know."

We each sipped champagne. The leather pants were smooth over Susan's thighs.

"What we know basically is that it's a white guy killing black women.

Certainly sounds like a racial crime," I said.

"And the semen traces?" Susan said.

"Certainly sounds like a sexual crime," I said.

"A dysfunctional one," Susan said.

"Because there's no penetration," I said.

"Except with a gun," Susan said. "Think how frightened of women he must be, to tie them up and gag them and render them helpless, and still he cannot actually connect. He can only find sexual expression the way he does."

"Expression?"

"In the original sense," Susan said.

I nodded. "Why black women?" I said.

Susan shook her head. "No way to know," she said. "Psychopaths, and we must assume that we've got one here, have their own logic, a logic rooted in their own symbolism."

"In other words, just because he's white and they're black is not enough reason to assume he's killing them for racial reasons," I said.

"That's right. What the women represent to him, why he needs to treat them as he does, may be a function of their blackness, or their status on the social scale. Or it may be that there is some idiosyncratic association for him that no one else can imagine."

"Like he was traumatized as a child while reading Black Beauty?" I said.

Susan smiled, which was always lovely to see. When she smiled her whole self went into it and the tone of her body changed and her coloration livened. "It's usually not that simple, but you have the idea. Given the fear level that must be operating, it could even be that they are so unlike what they symbolize."

"The guy's killed three women; it's hard to sympathize with his fear," I said.

"Yes," Susan said. "But it's worth understanding. Might be worth looking at the bondage. Is it the same in each case? Might it be ritualistic?"

"Is there any way to predict what he'll do next?"

"It's what shrinks do worst," Susan said. "We're pretty good at explaining human behavior but we're an embarrassment at predicting it."

"He'll probably kill another black woman," I said.

"Probably," Susan said. "And he'll probably write more letters and eventually you'll catch him."

"Maybe," I said.

"You will," she said. "You're smart and you're tough and your will is absolutely inexhaustible."

"Well," I said, "that's true."

"And I'm going to help you," Susan said.

The timer rang in my kitchen and I got up and went and took the rice out of the oven. I cracked the cover on the casserole so steam could escape, and shut off the oven and turned toward Susan across the counter.

"We are faced with a decision," I said. "I can have supper on the table in ten minutes and we could eat heartily and then fall into bed. But knowing how, as you age, you are inclined toward torpor after a meal, I was wondering how you wished to deal with the question of me jumping on your bones."

Susan had half a glass of champagne and Midori left. She raised it toward the light and gazed through it for a moment and then she drank half of it and lowered the glass and looked at me thoughtfully. Her eyes were so large and dark that they seemed all pupil, as if the iris had disappeared.

"What's for supper?" she said.

"Grilled lemon and rosemary chicken, brown rice with pignolias, assorted fresh vegetables lightly steamed and dressed with Spenser's famous honey-mustard splash, blue corn bread, and a bottle of Iron Horse Chardonnay."

Susan drank the rest of her champagne and leaned forward and put the glass on the coffee table and stood up. She stepped out of the cowboy boots, and unsnapped the leather pants and wiggled out of them and folded them neatly across the back of the wing chair. Then she turned and looked full at me and smiled with all of her energy and said, "I believe it would be best if you jumped on my bones now."

"I knew you'd say that," I said.

"When did you first suspect?" she said. a "When you took your pants off," I said.

"Yes," Susan murmured, her face against mine, "that would be suggestive."

I put my arms around her. "You know what I miss?" I said. "I miss the old days, before pantyhose, when there were garter belts and the flash of thigh above a stocking top."

"Ah, sweet bird of youth," Susan said with her mouth against mine.

"But I'll manage," I said.

And I did.

Later we ate dinner, Susan in one of my blue oxford shirts and me in a pair of stretch-fabric workout pants, the kind with the drawstring at the top. We looked dashing.

"How about therapy?" I said. "Should I start checking shrinks?"

She shook her head. There was a drop of vegetable dressing on her chin and I leaned over and daubed with my napkin. "He probably wouldn't seek therapy," Susan said. "He wouldn't need to, his needs are being fulfilled by the crime. People seek help when they are frustrated, when the pressure is too great to bear."

"Just like me," I said. "Whenever the pressure of tumescence becomes intolerable, I seek you out."

"How lovely to think of it that way," Susan said.

"Well, I'm also motivated by the fact that I love you more than it is possible to say."

"I know," Susan said. "I feel the same about you."

For a moment we were silent, and the connection between us was shimmering and palpable and more changeless than the universe. I raised my wineglass slightly. "Forever," I said.

Her eyes glistened as she looked at me.

"Probably," she said.

Red Rose did it again on a wet April day, with the snow finally gone and the slim gold of nature's first green beginning to edge out on some of the shrubs. Dolores Taylor had been an exotic dancer. This one was a singer. Her name was Chantelle, and she played piano and sang in the cocktail lounge of a hotel out near the airport. She'd been killed in one of the hotel rooms and found in the morning by a maid, who was still incoherent from shock.

When Quirk and I got there, there was press of every species jammed into the corridor outside what I heard one television reporter call "the death room." Television lights glared. A big-bellied, red-nosed, thick-necked cop in uniform was guarding the door as we went through. He nodded at Quirk's badge and we went past him into the death room. Behind us I heard the cop say to someone, "Put the goddamned piece up her snatch and pulled the trigger."

Quirk heard him too. He stopped, turned, stepped to the door, and gestured the red-nosed cop inside.

A reporter yelled at him, "Lieutenant, Lieutenant."

Quirk ignored him and closed the door.

Speaking softly, he said to the red-nosed cop, "The victim was a young woman who died terrified and alone. If I ever hear you talk about her like she was a piece of meat, I will personally take that fucking badge off your fucking chest and make you fucking eat it."

The veins in the cop's thick neck swelled and he opened his mouth. Quirk stared at him steadily, standing very close, his raincoat open, his hands stuck in his back pockets.

The rest of the room went about its business. No one even heard Quirk except me and the red-nosed cop. If you didn't see Quirk's eyes, you'd have thought they were talking about lunch.

The red-nosed cop closed his mouth and straightened slightly. "Yes, sir," he said.

Quirk opened the room door again and nodded toward it. The red-nosed cop stepped back to his post. Smartly. Quirk turned and began to speak with the ME. I went to look at the body. There was no reason to, really. There wouldn't be a clue. But you sort of had to look at the body if you were investigating the murder. It was part of how you did it, part maybe of the way you understood what murder was, and what this one had been. I hated it, and like always, I forced myself not to squint or look obliquely. If she could suffer it, I could look at it. I did.

Belson was there, by the window, looking at the room. I'd seen him work before. It was how he did it. He stood and took in the room and absorbed it, and after a while he could tell you everything in the room and explain why it was as it was. His thin face was placid, almost dreamy. The thin wisp of blue smoke from his cigar drifted up past his eyes and curled toward the window.

I walked over and stood beside him, watching the ID people dusting and measuring and photographing.

"Anything different?" I said.

He shook his head, still looking at the room.

"How about lab reports from the other cases?"

"What do you think?" Belson said.

"I think the semen analysis shows he's blood type A, and secretes PGM

I," I said.

"Blood type C," Belson said.

"Which means he could be any one of two million males in greater Boston."

Belson still gazed at the room.

"Forty-five percent of all white males are blood type C. Eighty percent of all males secrete PGM when they ejaculate. Fifty-eight percent of them are white. That shit is good for eliminating suspects, but it's useless when you don't have any. He didn't have a vasectomy either."

"Whose room is it?" I said.

"Hers. No booze. No sign the bed had been slept in. No sign the door had been forced."

"I suppose no one heard the shot," I said.

"He probably muffled it with a pillow," Belson said. He inhaled some cigar smoke and let it out slowly. "Her body would have muffled it some."

I nodded.

"We got people checking all the guests. Figure he might have stayed here. Figure it's hard to walk around carrying twenty feet of rope, a roll of duct tape, and a gun without being noticed."

"Could wrap the rope around your waist," I said, "under your shirt, put a small roll of duct tape in your pocket."

"Yep," Belson said. "Or carry it in a briefcase. But we're checking anyway. You never know."

"She tied the same way?"

"I haven't compared the photos and the write-ups," Belson said, "but it looks the same."

"We should check that," I said. Belson nodded. Quirk came to stand with us.

"Hotel staff," Quirk said. "Guests, people drinking in the bar?"

"Dino's collecting all the credit card receipts," Belson said. "Richie's got the staff, O'Donnell and Rourke got the guests."

"Parking?" Quirk said.

"Unattended," Belson said. "We got the registration of everything that's in the lot, but we got no way to know who was there and left."

"Okay. I'll talk with the press," Quirk said. "We got someplace set aside?"

"The ballroom, second floor."

Quirk nodded and moved toward the door. I went with him. "They've heard about you," Quirk said as we went down in the elevator. "You may as well be around while they ask me about you."

There were folding chairs in the ballroom and maybe two dozen reporters.

Most of those in the hallway upstairs had moved down here. Television lights had been set up and aimed at a speaker's lectern at the front of the room. I leaned against the wall near the door with my arms folded across my chest while Quirk walked to the lectern. He still had his raincoat on. The TV sound men moved closer to the lectern, crouching under camera shot, holding forward long, soft microphones with black foam covering. The press photographers began to snap pictures.

"I'm Lieutenant Martin Quirk and I'm in charge of the investigation."

Quirk said. "So far we have no suspects in the killings, which we believe to be related. The commissioner has asked me to assure you that every resource of the department will be placed at my disposal until the killer is apprehended." Quirk said the stuff about the commissioner the way a child recites the pledge to the flag.

"Any questions?" Quirk said. It was like asking a shark if it was hungry.

"Do you expect the killings to continue, Lieutenant?"

"Probably."

"What steps are you taking to apprehend the killer, Lieutenant?"

"All."

"Lieutenant, is the modus operandi the same for this killing as the others?"

"Yes."

"When do you expect to make an arrest, Lieutenant?"

"As soon as we have a suspect with enough evidence to warrant it."