Silent Prey (14 page)

The reporters came and went, the naive ones swallowing Lucas’ story that he had been mugged, others not so sure. A reporter from
Newsday
said flatly that something else was going on: that Bekker had a gang, or that somebody else was trying to stop Lucas’ investigation.

“I don’t know about muggers in Minneapolis, but in New York they don’t work in professional tag teams. Unless you’re lying, you were done by professionals . . . .”

After they were gone, Lucas took a few more Tylenol, wandered down to the bathroom and got back in time to see Lily coming down the hall.

“You look . . . pretty rough,” she said.

“It’s my cheek. My cheek hurts like hell,” he said. He touched a swollen magenta bruise with his middle finger. “At least the headache’s going away. They’re letting me out after lunch.”

“I heard,” Lily said.

“Thanks for sending the jeans over. The other pants . . .”

“Are shot.” Lily said.

“Yeah.”

“O’Dell’s fixed the Mengele speech—there’ll be a notice in all the papers this afternoon, the
Times
tomorrow morning, and we’re asking everybody to do a note about it. TV, too. We found a guy, a legit guy, who already lectures on Mengele.”

“Terrific,” Lucas said. “When?”

“Monday.”

“Jesus, that quick?”

“We gotta do everything quick. Maybe we can get him before he does another one . . . .” Lily backed into a hospital chair, dropped her purse by her foot. “Listen, about last night. Are you absolutely sure they were cops?”

“Fairly sure. They could have been professional bone-breakers, but it didn’t feel that way. They felt like cops. Why?”

“I was thinking about another possibility.”

“Smith?”

“Yeah. After you chopped up his putting green . . .”

Lucas pulled his lip. “Maybe,” he said. “But I doubt it. One thing you learn as a sleazoid businessman is to roll with the punches.”

“Have you talked to Fell this morning?”

“She’s on her way over. We have a line on a couple of people who might know something about Bellevue. She’s been talking to Kennett, to make sure we don’t step on any toes . . . .”

“Okay. I’ve got Bobby Rich coming over. He’s the guy who took the tip about the witness.”

“The witness Petty found . . .”

“Yeah, the day he got killed. And there’s still some more paper to look at.”

“That’s pointless, I think,” Lucas said. “With these
guys, the dead guys, we won’t find anything in their lives that’ll point to the killers. It has to be bureaucratic: who pulled their files, and when . . .”

“That’s impossible.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So we’re stuck?”

“Not quite, but it’s getting sparse. Maybe Rich’ll have something. We’ve still got Fell. I want to take a look at Petty’s apartment, his personal stuff. And I wouldn’t mind seeing the place where he was shot.”

“That’s about a half-mile from my apartment—we could walk. His apartment’s sealed. I’ll get some new seals and take you over. When?”

“Tonight? After we talk to Rich?”

“Fine.”

“What’d you tell Kennett . . . ?”

“About you being at my apartment? I said you came over to visit. I told him that sex was not a consideration, last night or in the future. I told him that you weren’t making any moves on me and I wasn’t making any moves on you, but that we had things to talk about.”

“Sounds pretty awful,” Lucas said, grinning.

“It could have been, but I just came out with it. I also told him O’Dell was there part of the time. John will back that up.”

A few minutes later, Kennett and Fell arrived together, and Lily blew up: “For Christ’s sakes, Dick, what’re you doing here? Did you walk all the way in?” Hands on hips, she turned to Fell, angry. “Barbara, did you let him . . . ?”

“Shut up, Lily,” Kennett said. He touched her cheek with an index finger. To Lucas, he said, “Well, you look like shit.”

“What do you think, Barb?” Lucas asked.

Fell had taken cover behind Kennett, and she peered out and said, “He’s right. You look like shit.”

“Then it’s unanimous,” Lucas said. “That’s what Lily said when she came in. The only one who didn’t was a twenty-four-year-old
Times
reporter with a great ass, who thought I looked pretty good and would probably like to hear more about this case from the hero of it . . . .”

“Gotta be a concussion,” Fell said to Lily.

“He’s always been like this,” Lily said. “I think it’s native stupidity.”

Kennett, shaking his head, said, “Goddamn women, they’re always impressed by a beat-up face. I used to get beat up whenever I needed to get laid. Worked like a charm . . .” He stopped, and frowned at Lucas: “Are you trying to get laid?” and his eyes flicked sideways at Lily.

Fell said, “Not very hard.”

Lucas and Kennett laughed; Lily didn’t.

Kennett said, “Listen, I wanted to tell you. Go ahead with those names you got. Barb’s run them down . . . .”

“One good address and one probable,” Fell said.

“Junkies?”

“Nope. Neither one of them. Not the last anybody heard, anyway.”

“All right.” Lucas eased down from the hospital bed. “Let’s go down to the nursing station. Maybe I can talk my way out before lunch.”

The charge nurse said the attending physician wanted another look at him: she’d send him down as soon as he arrived, which should be within the next few minutes. “We’ll see you first,” she said.

“All right, but pretty quick?”

“Soon as he gets here.”

Lily said, “I’ve gotta go. Take it easy today.”

“Yeah.”

He walked gingerly back to the room with Fell, trying not to move his head too quickly. At the door, he looked back toward the elevators. Kennett and Lily were waiting, looking up at the numbers above the door, then Kennett leaned toward Lily, and she went up on her toes, a kiss that wasn’t taken lightly by either of them. Lucas turned away, and caught Fell watching him watch Lily and Kennett.

“True love,” he said wryly.

The hot, hazy sun left him feeling faintly nauseous, and the headache lurked at the back of his skull.

“You look pale and wan,” Fell said.

“I’m all right.” He looked up at the storefront: Arnold’s TV and Appliance, Parts & Repair. “C’mon, let’s do her.”

A bell tingled when they went through the door; a heavyset woman looked up from a ledger, slapped it shut, and moved ponderously to the counter. “Can I help ya?” She had a cheerfully yellow smile and an improbable West Virginia hills accent. To Lucas: “Whoa, you look like you’ve been in a dustup.”

“We’re police officers,” Fell said. She lifted the flap of her purse, flashed the badge. “Are you Rose Arnold?”

The woman’s smile sagged into a frown. “Yeah. What’d you want?”

“We’re looking for a guy,” Lucas said. “We thought you could help.”

“I ain’t been here all that long . . . .”

Lucas dug in his pocket, took out his money clip, freed his driver’s license and handed it to Arnold. “Barbara here”—he nodded at Fell—“is a New York cop. I’m not. I’m from Minneapolis. They brought me in to help look for this Bekker dude who’s chopping people up.”

“Yeh?” Arnold was giving nothing away, watching him with her small wandering eyes like a pullet who suspects the axe.

“Yeah. He killed my woman out there. Maybe you read about it. I’m gonna catch him and I’m gonna do him.”

Arnold nodded and asked, “So what’s that got to do with me?”

“We think he’s getting stuff—drugs and medical equipment—from Bellevue. We know that you handle stuff out of Bellevue.”

“That’s bullshit, I never touch nothing . . . .”

“You moved five hundred cases of white Hammermill Bond copy paper out of there two weeks ago, paid a dollar a case, and sold it to a computer supply place for three dollars a case,” Fell said. “We could bust you if we wanted to, but we don’t want to. We just want some help.”

She looked at them, quietly, a gleam of strong intelligence in her eyes. Calculating. Lucas had a quick vision of her jerking some crappy piece of hillbilly iron out of a drawer, something like a rusty Iver Johnson .32, and popping him in the chest. But nothing happened, except the sound of flies bumping against the front window.

“Killed your woman?” she asked. She tipped her head, looking at him from the corner of her eyes.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s real personal.”

She mulled it over for another few seconds, then asked, “What do you want?”

“I need the name of a guy who rips stuff out of there on a regular basis.”

“Will this come back on me?”

“No way.”

She thought about it, then mumbled: “Lew Whitechurch.”

“Lew . . .”

“Whitechurch,” she said.

“Who else?”

“He’s the only one, right out of Bellevue . . . .”

“Any chance he might be peddling pills, too?”

“I think he might. I never touch them, but Lew . . . he’s got a problem. He takes a little nose.”

“Thanks,” Lucas said. He took a personal business card from his pocket, turned it over, wrote his hotel phone number on it. “Have you handled, or know anybody who has handled, a load of emergency-room monitoring equipment?”

“No.” Her voice was positive.

“Ask around. If you find somebody, have them call me. It’ll never get past us, I swear it on a Bible. I’m only in this because Bekker cut my woman’s throat.”

“Cut her throat?” The fat woman touched her neck.

“With a bread knife,” Lucas said. He let the bitterness flow into his voice. “Listen: anybody dealing with Bekker is liable to find himself strapped to an operating table, eyelids cut off, getting his heart sliced out while he’s still alive . . . . You read the papers.”

“Watch TV.” She nodded.

“Then you know.”

“Fuckin’ lunatic, is what he is,” Arnold said.

“So ask around. Call me.”

Outside, Fell said, “You’re a scary sonofabitch sometimes. You sorta used your friend . . .”

“My friend’s dead, she doesn’t care,” he said. And he shrugged. “But hillbillies understand that revenge shit.”

“What’s the name?”

“Lew Whitechurch. And she thinks he might deal pills.”

“Let’s get him,” Fell said. As they were flagging the cab, she said, “If I bust Bekker myself, I’ll make detective first before I get out.”

“That’d be nice.” A cab zigged through the traffic toward them.

“More pension. I could probably afford a straight waitress job. I wouldn’t have to dance topless,” Fell said.

“Aw,” he said. “I was planning to come down for your first night.”

“Maybe we could work something out,” she said, and climbed into the cab before he could think of a comeback.

They caught Lewis Whitechurch pushing a tool cart through a basement hallway at Bellevue. His supervisor pointed him out, the hospital’s assistant administrator hovering anxiously in the background. Kennett’s people had been there earlier, had talked to two employees, she said, but not Whitechurch.

“What?” Whitechurch said.

Fell flashed her badge, while Lucas blocked the hall. “We need to talk to you, privately.”

Whitechurch shook his head. “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

“We can talk here or I can call a squad and we can go over to Midtown South.”

“Talk about what?” Whitechurch shot a glance at the supervisor.

“Let’s find a place,” Lucas suggested.

They found a place in the hospital workshop, sitting on battered office chairs, Whitechurch spinning himself in quarter-turns with the heel of one foot. “I honest to God don’t know . . . .”

Five hundred cases of paper, they said.

“I ain’t gonna talk about nothing like that,” he said, his Jersey accent as thick as mayonnaise. “You want to talk about this other guy, Bekker, I’d help you any way I can. But I don’t know nothing about him, or any medical gear. I wouldn’t touch that shit . . . .” He caught himself. “Listen, I don’t take nothing out of here, but if I did, I wouldn’t take that stuff. I mean, people might die because of it.”

“If we catch the guy who’s helping Bekker . . . that guy’s going down as an accessory. Attica, and I’ll tell you what, man: there’d be no fuckin’ parole, not for somebody who helped this asshole . . . .”

“Jesus Christ, I’d tell you,” Whitechurch said. He was sweating. “Listen, I know a couple of people who might know something about this . . . .”

“What do you think?” Fell asked.

“He covered himself pretty well. I don’t know. We got names, anyway. We’ll come back to him. Let him stew . . . .” Whitechurch had given them two more names. Both men were working.

“Jakes is an orderly—he oughta be around,” the assistant administrator said. She was getting into the hunt, falling into Fell’s laconic speech pattern. “Williams—I’ll have to look him up.”

They found Harvey Jakes moving sheets out of the laundry.

“I don’t know about this shit,” he said. He was worried. “Listen, I don’t know why you’d come looking to me. I never been up on anything, never took anything, where’d you get my name . . .”

Williams was worse. Williams worked in the laundry, and was stupid. “Said what?”

“Said you boosted stuff out of here and . . .”

“Said what?”

Lucas looked at him closely, then at Fell, and shook his head. “He’s not faking.”

“What?” Williams looked slowly from one to the other, and they sent him back to his laundry.

“We’re into a black market—pretty casual, hard to pin down, picking up the occasional opportunity,” Fell said as they ambled down the hall. Like the rest of New York, the Bellevue interior was mostly a patch, painted white with black trim. “Doesn’t feel like a real tight ring. Whitechurch might be bigger, if he really organized a truck to haul that paper out of there. Jakes and Williams are small-time, if they’re stealing anything at all.”

“That’s about right,” Lucas said. “Whitechurch might be something, though.”

“Want to go back on him?”

“We should,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “But I fuckin’ hurt . . . .”

“You keep poking at your cheek,” she said. She reached out and touched the bruise, and her light hand didn’t hurt at all. “So what are we doing?”