“She was my cousin,” Del said, closing his eyes. He let his head fall back, as though overcome with exhaustion. “We grew up together, fooling around on the river. Hers were the first bare tits I ever saw, in real life.”
“Your cousin?” Lucas studied the other man. As a matter of self-defense, cops joked about death. The more grotesque the death, the more likely the jokes; you had to watch your tongue when a friend had a family member die.
“We used to go fishing for carp, man, can you believe that?” Del turned so he could lean against the window box. Thinking about yesterdays. His bearded face drawn long and solemn, like an ancient photo of James Longstreet after Gettysburg, Lucas thought. “Down by the Ford dam, just a couple blocks from your place. Tree branches for fishing poles. Braided nylon line, with dough balls for bait. She fell off a rock, slipped on the moss, big splash . . .”
“Gotta be careful . . .”
“She was, like, fifteen, wearing a T-shirt, no bra,” Del said. “It was plastered to her. I said, ‘Well, I can see it all, you might as well take it off.’ I was kidding, but she did. She had nipples the color of wild roses, man, you know? That real light pink. I had a hard-on for two months. Stephanie was her name.”
Lucas didn’t say anything for a moment, watching the other man’s face, then, “You’re not working it?”
“Nah. I’m no good at that shit, figuring stuff out,” Del said. He flipped his hands palm out, a gesture of helplessness. “I spent the day with my aunt and uncle. They’re all fucked up. They don’t understand why I can’t do something.”
“What do they want you to do?” Lucas asked.
“Arrest her husband. He’s a doctor over at the U, a pathologist,” Del said. He took a hit of his beer. “Michael Bekker.”
“Stephanie Bekker?” Lucas asked, his forehead wrinkling. “Sounds familiar.”
“Yeah, she used to run around with the political crowd. You might even have met her—she was on the study group for that civilian review board a couple of years ago. But the thing is, when she was killed, her old man was in San Francisco.”
“So he’s out,” Lucas said.
“Unless he hired it done.” Del leaned forward now, his eyes open again. “That alibi is a little too convenient. I personally think he’s got a loose screw.”
“What’re you telling me?”
“Bekker feels wrong. I’m not sure he killed her, but I think he might’ve,” Del said. A man in a T-shirt dashed to the bar with a handful of bills, slapped them on the bar, said, “Catch us later,” and ran three beers back to the TV set.
“Would he have a motive?” Lucas asked.
Del shrugged. “The usual. Money. He thinks he’s better than anyone else and can’t figure out why he’s poor.”
“Poor? He’s a doctor . . . .”
“You know what I mean. He’s a doctor, he oughta be rich, and here he is working at the U for seventy, eighty grand. He’s a pathologist, and there ain’t no big demand for pathology in the civilian world . . .”
“Hmph.”
Out on the sidewalk, on the other side of the one-way window, a couple shared an umbrella and, assuming privacy, slowed to light a joint. The woman was wearing a short white skirt and a black leather jacket. Lucas’ Porsche was parked next to the curb, and as they walked by it, the man stopped to look, passing the joint to the girl. She took a hit, narrowed her eyes as she choked down the smoke and passed the joint back.
“Gotta get your vitamins,” Del said, watching them. He reached forward and quickly traced a smiley face in the condensation on the window.
“I heard in the office . . . there was a guy with her? With your cousin?”
“We don’t know what that is,” Del admitted, his forehead wrinkling. “Somebody was there with her. They’d had intercourse, we know that from the M.E., and it wasn’t rape. And a guy called in the report . . . .”
“Lover’s quarrel?”
“I don’t think so. The killer apparently came in through the back, killed her and ran out the same way. She was working at the sink, there were still bubbles on the dishwater when the squad got there, and she had soap on her hands. There wasn’t any sign of a fight, there wasn’t any sign that she had a chance to resist. She was washing dishes, and pow.”
“Doesn’t sound like a lover’s quarrel . . .”
“No. And one of the crime-scene guys was wondering how the killer got so close to her, assuming it wasn’t Loverboy who did it—how he could get so close without her hearing him coming. They checked the door and found out the hinges had just been oiled. Like in the past couple of weeks, probably.”
“Ah. Bekker.”
“Yeah, but it’s not much . . . .”
Lucas thought it over again. A gust of rain brought a quick, furious drumming on the window, which just as quickly stopped. A woman with a red golf umbrella went by.
“Listen,” Del said. “I’m not just sitting here bullshitting . . . . I was hoping you’d take a look at it.”
“Ah, man . . . I hate murders. And I haven’t been operating so good . . . .” Lucas gestured helplessly.
“That’s another thing. You need an interesting case,” Del said, poking an index finger at Lucas’ face. “You’re more fucked up than I am, and I’m a goddamned train wreck.”
“Thanks . . .” Lucas opened his mouth to ask another question, but two pedestrians were drifting along the length of the window. One was a very light-skinned black woman, with a tan trench coat and a wide-brimmed cotton hat that matched the coat. The other was a tall, cadaverous white boy wearing a narrow-brimmed alpine hat with a small feather.
Lucas sat up. “Randy.”
Del looked out at the street, then reached across the table and took Lucas’ arm and said, “Take it easy, huh?”
“She was my best snitch, man,” Lucas said, in a voice like a gravel road. “She was almost a friend.”
“Bullfuck. Take it easy.”
“Let him get all the way inside . . . . You go first, cover me, he knows my face . . . .”
Randy came in first, his hands in his coat pockets. He posed for a moment, but nobody noticed. With twelve seconds left in the NBA game, the Celtics were one point down with a man at the line, shooting two. Everybody but the drunk hooker and the bitter old man who was talking into his overcoat was facing the tube.
A woman came in behind Randy and pulled the door shut.
Lucas came out of the booth a step behind Del. She’s beautiful, he thought, looking at the woman past Del’s shoulder; then he put his head down. Why would she hang with a dipshit like Randy?
Randy Whitcomb was seventeen and a fancy man, with a gun and a knife and sometimes a blackthorn walking stick with a gold knob on the end of it. He had a long freckled face, coarse red hair and two middle teeth that pointed in slightly different directions. He shook himself like a dog, flicking water spray off his tweed coat. He was too young for a tweed coat and too thin and too crazy for the quality of it. He walked down the bar toward the drunk hooker, stopped, posed again, waiting to be seen. The hooker didn’t look up until he took a hand out of his coat and slid a church key down the bar, where it knocked a couple of quarters off her stack of change.
“Marie,” Randy crooned. The bartender caught the tone and looked at him. Del and Lucas were closing, but Randy paid them no attention. He was focused on Marie like fire: “Marie, baby,” he warbled. “I hear you been talking to the cops . . . .”
Marie tried to climb off the stool, looking around wildly for Lucas. The stool tipped backward and she reached out to catch herself on the bar, teetering. Randy slid around the corner of the bar, going for her, but Lucas was there, behind him. He put a hand in the middle of the boy’s back and pushed him, hard, into the bar.
The bartender hollered, “Hey,” and Del had his badge out as Marie hit the floor, her glass shattering.
“Police. Everybody sit still,” Del shouted. He slipped a short black revolver out of a hip holster and held it vertically in front of his f
ace, where everybody in the bar could see it.
“Randy Ernest Whitcomb, dickweed,” Lucas began, pushing Randy in the center of his back, looping his foot in front of the boy’s ankles. “You are under . . .”
He had Randy leaning forward, his feet back, one arm held tight, the other going into his pocket for cuffs, when Randy screamed, “No,” and levered himself belly-down onto the bar.
Lucas grabbed for one of his legs, but Randy kicked, thrashed. One foot caught Lucas on the side of the face, a glancing impact, but it hurt and knocked him back.
Randy fell over the bar, scrambled along the floor behind it and up over the end of it, grabbed a bottle of Absolut vodka and backhanded it at Del’s head. Then he was running for the back of the bar, Lucas four steps behind him, knowing the back door was locked. Randy hit it, hit it again, then spun, his eyes wild, flashing a spike. They were all the fashion among the assholes. Clipped to a shirt pocket, they looked like Cross ballpoint pens. With the cap off, they were six-inch steel scalpels, the tip honed to a wicked point.
“Come on, motherfucker cop,” Randy howled, spraying saliva at Lucas. His eyes were the size of half-dollars, his voice high and climbing. “Come on, motherfucker, get cut . . . .”
“Put the fuckin’ knife down,” Del screamed. His gun pointed at Randy’s head. Lucas, glancing at Del, felt the world slowing down. The fat bartender was still behind the bar, his hands on his ears, as though blocking out the noise of the fight would stop it; Marie had gotten to her feet and was staring at a bleeding palm, shrieking; the two shitkickers had taken a step away from the shuffleboard bowling machine, and one of them, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, was fumbling at the sheath on his belt . . . .
“Fuck you, cop, kill me,” Randy shrieked, doing a sidestep shuffle. “I’m a fuckin’ juvenile, assholes . . . .”
“Put the fuckin’ blade down, Randy . . . .” Del screamed again. He glanced sideways at Lucas. “What d’ya wanna do, man?”
“Let me take him, let me take him,” Lucas said, and he pointed. “The shitkicker’s got a knife.” As Del started to turn, Lucas was facing Randy, his eyes wide and black, and he asked, “You like to fuck, Randy?”
“Fuckin’ A, man,” Randy brayed. He was panting, his tongue hanging out. Nuts: “Fuck-in-A.”
“Then I hope you got a good memory, ’cause I’m gonna stick that point right through your testicles, my man. You fucked up Betty with that church key. She was a friend of mine. I been looking for you . . . .”
“Well, you got me, Davenport, motherfucker, come get cut,” Randy shouted. He had one hand down, as he’d been shown in reform school, the knife hand back a bit. Cop rule of thumb: An asshole gets within ten feet of you with a knife, you’re gonna get cut, gun or no gun, shoot or no shoot.
“Easy, man, easy,” Del shouted, looking at the shit-kicker . . . .
“Where’s the woman? Where’s the woman?” Lucas called, still facing Randy, his arms wide in a wrestler’s stance.
“By the door . . .”
“Get her . . . .”
“Man . . .”
“Get her. I’ll take care of this asshole . . . .”
Lucas went straight in, faked with his right, eluded Randy’s probing left hand, and when the knife hand came around, Lucas reached in and caught his right coat sleeve, half threw him and hit him in the face with a roundhouse right. Randy banged against the wall, still trying with the knife, Lucas punching him in the face.
“Lucas . . .” Del screamed at him.
But the air was going blue, slowing, slowing . . . the boy’s head was bouncing off the wall, Lucas’ arms pumping, his knee coming up, his elbow, then both hands pumping, a slow motion, a long, beautiful combination, a whole series of combinations, one-two-three, one-two, one-two-three, like working with a speed bag . . . the knife on the floor, skittering away . . .
Suddenly Lucas was staggering backward; he tried to turn, and couldn’t. Del’s arm was around his throat, dragging him away . . . .
The world sped up again. The people in the bar stared in stunned silence, all of them on their feet now, their faces like postage stamps on a long, unaddressed envelope. The basketball game was going in the background, broadcast cheers echoing tinnily through the bar.
“Jesus,” Del said, gasping for breath. He said, too loudly, “I thought he got you with that knife. Everybody stay away from the knife, we need prints. Anybody touches it, goes to jail.”
He still had a hand on Lucas’ coat collar. Lucas said, “I’m okay, man.”
“You okay?” Del looked at him and silently mouthed, Witnesses. Lucas nodded and Del said loudly, “You didn’t get stabbed?”
“I think I’m okay . . . .”
“Close call,” Del said, still too loud. “The kid was nuts. You see him go nuts with that knife? Never saw anything like that . . .”
Steering the witnesses, Lucas thought. He looked around for Randy. The boy was on the floor, faceup, unmoving, his face a mask of blood.
“Where’s his girlfriend?” Lucas asked.
“Fuck her,” Del said. He stepped over to Randy, keeping one eye on Lucas, then squatted next to the boy and cuffed his hands in front. “I thought you were gonna get stuck, you crazy fuck.”
One of the hookers, up and wrapping a red plastic raincoat around her shoulders, ready to leave, looked down at Randy and into the general silence said, in a long, calm Kansas City drawl, “You better call an ambliance. That motherfucker is hurt.”
CHAPTER
3
Bekker was of two minds.
There was an Everyday Bekker, the man of science, the man in the white lab coat, doing his separations in the high-speed centrifuge, the man with the scalpel.
And then there was Beauty.
Beauty was up. Beauty was light. Beauty was dance . . . .
Beauty was the dextroamphetamines, the orange heart-shaped tablets and the half-black, half-clear capsules. Beauty was the white tabs of methamphetamine hydrochloride, the shiny jet-black caps of amphetamine, and the green-and-black bumblebees of phendimetrazine tartrate. All legal.
Beauty was especially the illegals, the anonymous white tabs of MDMA, called ecstasy, and the perforated squares of blotter, printed with the signs of the Zodiac, each with its drop of sweet acid, and the cocaine.
Beauty was anabolic steroids for the body and synthetic human growth hormone to fight the years . . . .
Everyday Bekker was down and dark.
Bekker was blood-red capsules of codeine, the Dilaudid. The minor benzodiazepines smoothed his anxieties, the Xanax and Librium and Clonopin, Tranxene and Valium, Dalmane and Paxipam, Ativan and Serax. The molindone, for a troubled mind. All legal.
And the illegals.
The white tabs of methaqualone, coming in from Europe.
Most of all, the phencyclidine, the PCP.
The power.
Bekker had once carried an elegant gold pillbox for his medicines, but eventually it no longer sufficed. At a Minneapolis antique store he bought a brass Art Deco cigarette case, which he lined with velvet. It would hold upward of a hundred tablets. Food for them both, Beauty and Bekker . . .
Beauty stared into the cigarette case and relived the morning. As Bekker, he’d gone to the funeral home and demanded to see his wife.
“Mr. Bekker, I really think, the condition . . .” The undertaker was nervous, his face flickering from phony warmth to genuine concern, a light patina of sweat on his forehead. Mrs. Bekker was not one of their better products. He didn’t want her husband sick on the carpet.
“God damn it, I want to see her,” Bekker snapped.
“Sir, I have to warn you . . .” The undertaker’s hands were fluttering.
Bekker fixed him with a cold stare, a ferret’s stare: “I am a pathologist. I know what I will see.”
“Well. I suppose . . .” The undertaker’s lips made an O of distaste.
She was lying on a frilly orange satin pad, inside the bronze coffin. She wa
s smiling, just slightly, with a rosy blush on her cheeks. The top half of her face, from the bridge of the nose up, looked like an airbrushed photograph. All wax, all moldings and makeup and paint, and none of it quite right. The eyes were definitely gone. They’d put her together the best they could, but considering the way she’d died, there wasn’t much they could do . . . .
“My God,” Bekker said, reaching out to the coffin. A wave of exultation rose through his body. He was rid of her.
He’d hated her for so long, watching her with her furniture and her rugs, her old paintings in the heavy carved frames, the inkwells and cruets and compotes and Quimper pots, the lopsided bottles dug from long-gone outhouses. She’d touch it, stroke it, polish it, move it, sell it. Caress it with her little piggy eyes . . . Talk about it, endlessly, with her limp-wristed antiquarian friends, all of them perched on rickety chairs with teacups, rattling on endlessly, Mahogany with reeded legs, gilt tooled leather, but you almost couldn’t tell under the horrible polish she’d absolutely poured on the piece, well, she obviously didn’t know what she had, or didn’t care. I was there to look at a Georgian tea table that she’d described as gorgeous, but it turned out to be really very tatty, if I do say so . . . .
And now she was dead.
He frowned. Hard to believe that she had had a lover. One of those soft, heavy pale men who talked of teapots and wing chairs . . . unbelievable. What did they do in bed? Talk?
“Sir, I really think . . .” The undertaker’s hand on his arm, steadying him, not understanding.
“I’m okay,” Bekker said, accepting the comforting arm with a delicious sense of deception. He stood there for another minute, the undertaker behind him, ignored. This was not something he’d want to forget . . . .
Michael Bekker was beautiful. His head was large, his blond hair thick and carefully cut, feathering back over small, perfect ears. His forehead was broad and unlined, his eyebrows light, near-white commas over his startlingly blue deep-set eyes. The only wrinkles on his face were barely noticeable crow’s-feet: they enhanced his beauty, rather than detracted from it, adding an ineffable touch of masculinity.