The Nicholas Linnear Novels (49 page)

They began to move now and the limo slid to a stop at the far corner where Wolf’s Delicatessen stood.

“Come on,” Tomkin said. “I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to taste a Number One Combination.”

Behind them, in the limo, the second bug, perfectly hidden under the carpet, remained undetected and undisturbed.

“You’re not impressed?”

“It seems like a lot of space for one person.”

“I’m claustrophobic.”

Croaker laughed. “Yeah, well. I could see where you wouldn’t be in this place.” He came back from the windows overlooking the East River and Queens. His fingers stroked the butter-soft leather of the brown couch.

“Beautiful,” he murmured.

“It gets a lot of attention.” Her topaz eyes regarded him playfully. “Why, Lieutenant, I believe you’re blushing. Don’t tell me you’ve never met anyone of my profession before—that would be too much to swallow.”

He groaned at the deliberate double entendre. “Do you always talk like that?”

“Only when I’m—only occasionally.” He wondered what she had been going to say. “Hey, I’m hungry.” Immediately her face fell. “But, oh, there’s nothing here—”

“That’s okay, I’ve got to—”

“Oh, don’t go. Please. Not yet, anyway.” She crossed the room to the phone. “You deserve some time off—at least to eat. And they know where to reach you if something really hot comes up.”

Yeah, he thought. Like the address of the lady who’ll nail your old man to the bathroom wall. He felt immediately embarrassed and wondered why. He’d never felt that way before.

Gelda had her ear to the receiver, was saying, “I’ll order us up some food. How about Italian? Do you like Italian food? I love it.”

“Okay. Fine.”

She nodded, dialed a number, waited a moment. “Philip,” she said. “It’s G. Yeah, fine. What about you? You sure? You sound a little funny. No? Hey, how’d you like to get me some food. Mario’s, yeah. For two. You know what. Okay. ’Bye.” She turned around.

“Who’s Philip?” he asked. “Not a runner or something stupid like that? You wouldn’t do something like that to me, would you?”

“Don’t worry. No. He’s just a kid who hangs around. Does stuff for some—of us.” She saw the look on his face. “Cut it out. He’s got no family but us. We all love him and he knows it. Is that monstrous?”

He smiled. “Sounds all right.” He moved around to the front of the couch, sat down. “Feels nice.”

She followed him, said when she was very close, standing over him, “You should feel it without clothes on.”

He gave a slightly uncomfortable laugh.

Gelda walked toward the bedroom doorway. She began to take off her silk blouse. Before she had disappeared through the doorway, he had seen the flawless expanse of her naked back. Despite the fullness of her breasts, she wore no bra.

“What are you doing?” He got up from the couch, stood uneasily with his hands in his pockets.

“Just changing.” He heard her voice drift back to him. “Don’t worry, I won’t attack you.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” he said not quite honestly.

“Good.”

He heard the sensuous rustle of silk against firm flesh.

“Do you want to come in,” she said, “so I can see you while we talk?”

“I’m all right out here.” He felt like a schoolboy on his first real date.

“Listen,” she said, “you’ve seen my mind. I can’t imagine what would embarrass you about seeing my body.”

“Nothing,” he said automatically.

“All right, then.”

He stood where he was for a moment, feeling an outsider in this plush yet intimate landscape. In his mind, he tried to summon up clear images of what she did here but he could find nothing. He had an active imagination; at the moment it had shut down entirely.

He walked to the doorway, stood looking in on the threshold, a voyeur at his first peephole.

She stood with one leg up on the bedspread, putting on a stocking. A stocking, he thought, not panty hose. The perfect foot was dark, the flesh shining through the silk mesh so that the black was made pale, an altogether new color. The toes indented the spread as if she had stepped along the crest of a sand dune. Her legs seemed endless.

She wore bikini panties, a garter belt, both flesh-colored, soft and lacy. Otherwise, she was nude. The effect was startling.

She twisted her head over her shoulder to look at him. Her topaz eyes were very light. She smiled ingenuously. “There.” The voice was but a wisp. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“I wish you’d put on some clothes.”

She walked across the room. He tried not to stare at the movement of her breasts at each step but he had given himself an impossible task. When she reached the closet she raised her arms and his temperature at the same time. She drew out a forest-green silk satin robe, came toward him. “Is that better, Lew—I
can
call you Lew? After all, I threw up all over you in the van; I ought to be able to call you by your first name. At the very least.” She brushed by him, went into the living room with the ghost of a smile.

He detached himself from the doorjamb, wondering what he was still doing here; always on the job, that’s me, he thought. But what was really on his mind was his dark apartment crouching as deserted as Wall Street on a weekend, waiting for him to return. Going home to that seemed as out of-the question as when it had been filled with Alison’s scent.

“Should we go to bed now or after the food gets here?” He could not quite keep the anger out of his voice. There was a degree of control he felt had abandoned him sometime when his attention had been elsewhere.

Gelda turned in the middle of the room. Her belted robe opened as if on cue and he saw the gleaming length of one leg. “Is that what you think?” She was still smiling softly, like the gentle glow from a heavily shaded lamp.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” One eyebrow arched. “You know my sexual preference.”

Of course; he had forgotten. Deliberately? He felt an idiot. He put his hands in his pockets again, turned away, too embarrassed to apologize. Mental sets, he thought savagely. Isn’t it odd how the eyes see one thing and the mind—that great complex monstrosity—makes leaps of illogic to form conclusions. He felt, abruptly, just as he had that scorching summer’s day in Hell’s Kitchen when not even the turned-on hydrants helped, when the steaming air hung like layers of blankets your well-meaning but misguided mother had wrapped you in when sick, impossible to take off. Tempers were short and incendiary as if everyone had an itch they couldn’t scratch.

The cry came through the wide-open window and he was racing down the dark narrow stairs and into the baking sunshine. Just two doors away, he lay in the alley, his uniform dark with sweat and blood. Trash cans lay tumbled around him, having divulged their slimy secrets as if in one last paroxysm. The gray eyes were open and already glazing; eyes that had always reminded him of a storm-tossed sky. Gentle eyes.

So this was how it ended for Martin Croaker. After twenty-nine years on the New York City Police Force, lying sprawled in an alley piled high with garbage, surrounded by summer stink, fearful rats and incurious roaches, the wail of sirens forlorn in the distance, closing, shot four times forty feet from his own home.

He stared down at the corpse of his father and the world had spun around, canted dangerously on its axis. He felt that, at any moment, its momentum and crazy angle would combine to throw him off.

That’s what he wanted, of course, to run far far away from this stinking hole; never to return. Never.

But that was the easy way out; the coward’s way. Not Lew Croaker’s way. His father had taught him too well.

So he stayed on. To join the police. Old and gray, his mother had come to his Academy graduation and had cried as he was sworn in.

He had never found the man responsible for his father’s death but, after a time, that pain, too, had been put to rest.

He felt her touch his arm; he hadn’t realized the wound was still sensitive. After all this time.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have teased you. I was just…”

“What? You were just what?”

Her eyes lowered. “Happy to be with you.” She tried to make a half-joke out of it, failed. “You make me feel…”

“What?”

She looked up. “Just feel.”

He felt torn. “I bet you could do that and not feel a thing;”

She nodded. “I could. I’m an actress, of course. Do you distrust me? You couldn’t. Not after what you said to me in the van. You took an enormous chance, telling me what you suspect about my father. It was an idiotic thing to do.”

“That’s me. Always the idiot.”

“Yes.” Her voice was as soft as silk.

“You know, you could sell me anything.” He said it defensively, because she was so close. He wanted her to know he knew. He felt he needed that precaution now.

“No,” she said, “I couldn’t. Not now, anyway.” She put her fingers along his arm; they seemed very warm. “The challenge, for myself, is to be honest with you. It’s what will make me happy.”

There came the sound of muted chimes.

She disengaged herself from him, disappeared into the old-fashioned foyer. Her voice floating, “Hi, darling. Come on in.” Returning with her arm around a rather tall boy, dark-haired, almond-eyed. Philip. Croaker turned his back on the proceedings, stared out at the dazzle of the water. A long barge laden with garbage wallowed slowly upriver, a tug at its side. A man in a red and white track suit was jogging along the promenade. He passed the barge, going the other way, and disappeared from view. He and Gelda in bed—flash of flesh against flesh.

“What happened to you, darling? Your face looks awful.”

Her voice was like the background chatter of a TV left on at low volume. He wanted that call to come in so bad he could taste it: the satisfaction of putting a bastard like Tomkin away for twenty years.

“What in God’s name happened to you, darling? You look like you’ve been in a fight.”

“No fight, G.”

“Well, what then?”

“Nothing. I fell down….”

There was a sailboat out there—can you imagine? In the middle of the goddamned week. The sail white against the patchwork colors of the buildings on the far shore, scudding along as effortlessly as a cloud. No pressure out there on the river, just the wind and the salt spray and a long way until you reach port. Your own master. Her breasts heavy in his hands; her lips parting.

“… in an alley. The garbage cans—”

“Don’t be an idiot, Philip. And don’t lie to me. Darling, you must tell me what happened. Here, let me put some ice on it—do as I say.” A soft clatter. “There.”

There would be time, after Tomkin was put away, to take some time off. Go to the sea as Melville did when he was sick at heart and he felt like screaming at anyone who came too close. Yes, the sea. Not to fish; he hated fishing. But to sail, perhaps. He’d never done that and it might be time now to try it. Try her.

“At Ah Ma’s—I worked there last night.”

“Well, she’d never do that to you.”

“No. A man—”

“A bastard, that’s what. Here, keep the ice on for a little longer. I forbid you to go there again.”

“But the man is coming there again tonight. She wants me to be there—”

“I don’t care
what
Ah Ma wants, you’re not going. She’ll have to learn to do without you.”

“It won’t be any good without me.”

“What do you mean?”

“The man wants me. That’s how he—ejaculates. I said that right, didn’t I?”

“My God—who is this man?”

“I don’t know. A Japanese. A very strange man. Eyes like dead stones—you know, like he was from another world.”

But Croaker was already turning, his face flushed with the adrenalin building in his body. “Talk to me, Philip,” he said slowly and carefully, masking his excitement. “Tell me about the Japanese with eyes like dead stones.”

Croaker was waiting for them at the tower’s Park Avenue side. His big figure was leaning negligently against the side of his unmarked sedan. The detachable red light revolved atop the car, piercing the long twilight’s sapphire haze like a lighthouse beacon’s unerring warning.

Nicholas emerged from the limo as soon as it pulled over to the curb just to the uptown side of Croaker. As he went quickly toward the detective, he was acutely aware of Tomkin’s presence blooming behind him as Tom, the thin chauffeur, held the heavy door open.

He was aware, too, of the city around him, everything shrouded in blue. The sun was just a memory but its heat refused to leave the asphalt under his shoe soles. The atmosphere was thick with exhaust fumes. The strings of dull yellow cabs along both sides of the avenue seemed like streaming caravans entering and leaving the bowels of the gilt-edged Helmsley Building.

“How’s your boss?” Croaker’s voice was flat and hard and unyielding; he stared past Nicholas’ right shoulder.

Nicholas, feeling the live-wire buildup of tension, said, “Leave it alone, Lew. Forget about—”

“Too late for that, buddy.”

He felt the presence directly behind him even before he heard Tomkin’s voice say, “Still patrolling the streets, I see, Lieutenant. Keeping New York safe for us citizens?” The note of sarcasm was unmistakable.

“This city’s still dangerous for some,” Croaker said pointedly.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Figure it out for yourself, Tomkin.”

“I don’t like veiled threats, Lieutenant. Not from anyone. Perhaps I should have another talk with the commissioner and—”

“I knew it was you, you dirty—”

“—we’ll see how long you remain a lieutenant—”

“—reassigned now to this case Nicholas was hired for, so I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”

“What?”

There was a malicious grin on his face now, his skin yellow, alternately lighter and darker with the wash of passing headlights from the traffic flow.

Brake lights turned Tomkin’s face reddish. “My God, I won’t be saddled with you again!”

“Nothing you can do about it now, I’m afraid. The transfer came down directly from the commissioner himself. Even you won’t get him to change that order. He’d look far too foolish, scurrying to rescind a reassignment.”