Throughout the maneuver, da Vinci had braced himself with his feet against the floor and his hands on the dashboard.
“Somebody oughta call a cop!” an elderly woman pushing a wire basket cart full of grocery bags yelled over at them from across the street.
“Somebody oughta tell her people call us things all the time,” da Vinci said, completely unrattled.
Bev overslept. That was okay; her and Floyd’s West Side apartment was only a few blocks from Light and Shade. Even if she couldn’t hail a cab, she could walk it in no time. Breakfast she could make up later, maybe send one of the employees out to pick up Danish and coffee at Starbucks.
She was alone in the king-size bed. Floyd was still in Connecticut on a golfing outing with his buddies. Bev had slept so soundly the covers were only slightly disheveled. She slid both bare legs out from beneath the sheets, then stood up and removed her nightgown, which had somehow bunched its way up around her hips.
In the morning light she examined herself briefly in the mirror. She and Lenny had played rough and she had a few bruises, but nothing Floyd was likely to notice. Not that she cared that much if he did notice; she just didn’t want a scene. She was tired of scenes.
The apartment was large by New York standards, furnished with a hodgepodge of furniture and decorated without much style. Except for the lamps. Lamps they had, and good ones. And ceiling fixtures. Bev was proud of the massive crystal chandelier dangling above the dining room table that they hardly used.
She padded nude into the bathroom and took a quick shower, managing not to get her hair wet. She’d dropped by Tina’s Beauty Shop and had it done yesterday afternoon after taking off work early. After the wreck Lenny had made of it.
The shower had fully awakened and refreshed her. Yesterday had been a hell of a day, and today she’d better concentrate on work. She knew her business and got the job done, but her attendance record was abysmal. No one from the company had said anything to her, but they might. You could push them only so far. Besides, her job was the one thing in her life she liked. Her job and Lenny.
Bev was fully dressed in her new mauve outfit, seated before a teakwood vanity she’d bought in Mexico and had shipped home, leaning forward and applying just the right shade of lipstick to complement the dress-red, but with the slightest touch of purple-when her heart almost stopped.
She managed to start breathing again and turned to gaze back and up at the figure she’d glimpsed in the mirror. At the hand that held the object that was indeed what she’d first feared. A gun, a small one with some kind of bulky cylinder fitted to its barrel. She’d seen enough TV and movies to know what the object was-a silencer.
Seated on the padded vanity chair, staring up at the intruder, she was aware of her insides melting away, heard a slight trickle, felt a warmth, and knew she’d wet herself. She began to cry, tightening her grip on the chair back with one hand, on the lipstick tube with the other. She begged with her eyes. It was unmistakable, her silent pleading. He did nothing, drawing out the moment. She managed to speak, but her voice caught in her throat and the words came out as a sob.
“What’d I do? For God’s sake, what’d I do?”
Then she knew. Floyd! Floyd must have hired someone to pretend-
The silencer spat and a bullet thunked! through the thinly padded wooden chair back and clipped her spine before smashing through her heart.
The way she dropped and her chin hit the edge of the vanity on the way down, it would have hurt like hell if she’d been alive.
The killer gently pried the lipstick tube from her dead right hand.
8
Beam silently watched the NYPD computer genius da Vinci had sent.
He looked about fourteen and seemed to know everything. It was obvious from the way the kid-actually in his twenties-had handled Beam’s five-year-old notebook computer that he knew his stuff. Soon there’d been talk of RAM and giga and mega and pixels while Beam looked on in gray mystification as his computer was upgraded and brought into the present world of tech.
By the time the kid was finished, Beam was patched into the NYPD system and had gone wireless so he could use his computer anywhere in the apartment, or-the computer kid had assured him-various places outdoors, or in certain restaurants and entire areas that were set up for wireless.
“That’s damned amazing,” Beam told the kid.
“I don’t understand why anybody’d ever use a typewriter,” the kid replied. “Or how they ever got that complicated machinery to work at all.”
“I don’t type, either,” Beam said.
With a pitying shake of his head, the kid gathered up his bits and bytes and left. Beam watched him out and down the hall to the elevator.
Beam closed the door and looked at his watch. Almost four o’clock, when da Vinci had told him by phone that detectives Nell Corey and Fred Looper were coming to the apartment to meet Beam to get acquainted and have a strategy session.
Moving out to the middle of the living room, Beam looked around. It was a pleasant room with a hardwood floor, throw rugs, a comfortable overstuffed cream-colored sofa, a tan leather armchair, smaller, rose-colored upholstered chair, green marble-top coffee table, some oil paintings on the walls, bought more as decorative pieces than as art. Lani’s touch. For that reason, maybe, Beam didn’t want to settle down in the room with Corey and Looper.
He used both hands to lift the rose-colored chair-Lani’s chair-and carried it down the hall and into his den.
The chair didn’t go with the den’s decor, but that was okay. Three of the den’s walls were oak paneled, the fourth painted off-white and covered with framed photos or department commendations. A baseball trophy sat on a table with some other framed photos. Some of the photos were of Beam and Lani, sometimes with their son Bud, who’d played All American minor league ball in the Cincinnati farm system in Florida and been struck in the head by a pitched ball. He’d died the next day of massive subdural hematoma. Only nineteen years old, and his death had killed something in Beam and Lani, in their marriage. The pitcher who’d hit Bud, a retread player named Rowdy Logan, had also aimed for his head on the previous pitch, so it was a deliberate beaning. Logan had been demoted from the majors for similar headhunting, and this time charges were brought against him. Charges that were going nowhere. Murder on the baseball diamond was a difficult thing to prove.
That was something Beam owed da Vinci. Da Vinci said he had connections in Florida and could help to actually prosecute Logan. As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary, as Logan was found a few days later full of barbiturates that had given him the courage to shoot himself in the head. The bullet had struck with the same effect that the ninety-mile-per-hour fastball had on young Bud Beam.
Justice, delivered not by the legal system but by the killer himself. Beam’s faith in the system he served had been severely shaken. As had his faith in everything.
Seven years ago. First Bud gone, now Lani.
Beam placed the rose-colored chair at an angle facing his large mahogany desk. There was already a brown leather chair in a similar position at the other corner of the desk. Beam would have the two detectives sit in the chairs, facing him across the desk. They would talk. They would plan. They would take the first step in finding and stopping the maniac who was killing people in his city.
At first, hesitant to take on the case, Beam now was beginning to feel the old eagerness take hold. He was on the job again. He was a cop. He was a hunter set to stalk his prey.
Exactly what da Vinci wants.