The tech carefully lifted the phone between thumb and middle finger, then lightly squeezed. It began to buzz.
Quinn was just about to tell the tech to let him answer the phone, when the buzzing stopped.
"It's not a phone, sir. Only looks like one. It's a vibrator."
"That's to let you know you got a call when you don't want people to hear it ring," Fedderman said.
"It's not a phone. Really, it's a vibrator."
"Huh?" Fedderman said, finally getting it, interested.
The kid pushed another button and the buzzing got louder. The little cell phone became a blur.
"Whoa!" Fedderman said.
Quinn didn't know what to say.
"It's not the kind of vibrator you'd use on your sore back," the tech said. He was still smiling, but looking thoughtful. "I guess it's so women can carry it around, maybe use it when they travel, and it won't draw attention and embarrass them if security or customs root through their luggage."
"What a great idea," Fedderman said.
The tech turned off the mock phone and placed it back down exactly in its original position. "I think I know whose prints'll be all over this for everyone to see."
"She's beyond embarrassment," Quinn said.
"What are you doing in my bedroom?" demanded a woman's voice.
Startled, all three men turned to look.
Pearl.
"Who's guarding the bank?" Fedderman asked, after Pearl had been filled in and had looked around the apartment. They were outside on West Eighty-second, standing in the shade near the building's concrete stoop.
"Someone else," Pearl said. "I'm on a leave of absence."
Quinn looked closely at her. She was simply Pearl. Compact, buxom, and beautiful. She had on her usual deep red lipstick today, so stark against her pale complexion that her generous mouth seemed to have been painted on by some manic, inspired artist. With her large dark eyes, perfect white teeth, black hair, she was so vivid she often reminded Quinn of some kind of cartoon character. But she was real. Quinn knew she was real.
"Renz call you?" he asked.
"Even before he called you."
"I thought you weren't interested in this case."
"This sick asshole killed somebody in my old apartment. Somebody who might just as easily have been me. That makes it personal."
"Also makes it coincidental," Fedderman said.
"Doesn't it, though?" Pearl said.
A brisk summer breeze kicked up and moved a crumpled white takeout bag along the sidewalk. Quinn stood his ground, merely lifting a foot to let the bag pass and continue along the pavement.
"We need you, Pearl," Fedderman said.
She smiled. "Thanks, Feds."
"You one of us again, Pearl?" Quinn asked.
"The smart one," she said.
They spent the next several hours talking to Ida's neighbors, some of whom remembered Pearl. No one had seen or heard anything unusual. Those who knew Ida Ingrahm said she was quiet, and worked as some kind of artist or graphic designer at a company in midtown. She rode the subway back and forth to work.
All the detective team's time and effort left them right back where they'd started hours ago, standing on the sidewalk just outside the building. Ida Ingrahm's remains had long since been removed, and the crime scene unit had pulled out. A uniform remained in the hall outside the apartment, with its door yellow-taped, and would be relieved in a few hours by another cop who would remain there all night. Sometimes criminals really did return to the scene of the crime. Especially if they forgot something incriminating.
Quinn unwrapped a Cuban cigar and lit it. The butcher shop stench had stayed with him and become taste. The acrid scent of burning tobacco helped. A few people walking past on the sidewalk glared at him as he exhaled a large puff of smoke. So arrest me. Neither Pearl nor Fedderman complained; they'd been upstairs like Quinn. It seemed to them that the entire building smelled like a slaughterhouse, but Ida's neighbors didn't seem to notice. Maybe the death stench had grown on them slowly, and they became accustomed to it.
Or maybe it was mental. The other tenants hadn't been in Ida's apartment to bid her farewell.
Ida nude. A three-dimensional Picasso. In pieces like a disconnected puzzle doll, chalk white and eerily pure in her drained bathtub.
Ida clean.
Her sins washed away?
Quinn knew better, but he wished for Ida that it worked that way. He felt an overbearing sadness not only for her but for himself and the entire human race.
The things we do to each other…
"You cab over here?" he asked Pearl.
Pearl nodded. Did a thing with her lips so she could take in some secondhand smoke.
"That's our unmarked across the street," Quinn said.
"I know," Pearl said. "It's the only car that looks like it should be wearing a fedora."
"Since you're on the case, come with us back to the office and we'll bring you up to speed."
"We have an office?"
"Such as it is," Fedderman said. "And not far from here."
"Has it got a coffee machine?"
"No."
"Then it isn't an office."
"Let's move," Quinn said, already starting to cross the street.
"Vroom! Vroom!" Pearl said behind him.
Smart-mouthing me already, Quinn thought. Hiding behind her wisecracks where no one could touch her soft spots.
Well, who doesn't? At least sometimes?
A car pulled out of a parking space and had to brake hard to keep from hitting the three of them. The driver leaned on the horn. Pearl made an obscene gesture, otherwise ignoring the man.
Quinn thought this wasn't going to be easy.
So why, whenever he looked at Pearl, did he feel like smiling?
7
The office: three gray steel desks (as if Renz had known Pearl would be joining them); four chairs; a file cabinet; and a wooden table with a lamp, computer, and printer on it. The printer was the kind that copied and faxed and scanned and did who knew what-all that Quinn would probably never figure out. The table was directly over one of the outcroppings of wire on the floor, everything mysteriously connected to it via another tangle of wire emanating from computer and printer.
"This thing work?" Pearl asked, walking over to the computer. It was an old Hewlett-Packard, gigantic.
Quinn pulled a cord that opened some blinds, letting natural light in to soften the fluorescent glare. "Yeah. And some computer whiz from the NYPD's gonna set us up with more of them. Update our system. We're coded into the NYPD and various data banks. Codes and passwords are on a piece of paper under the lamp base."
Pearl grinned, the brightest thing in the gloomy office. "Everybody hides their passwords under the lamp base. First place burglars and identity thieves look."
"Nobody's gonna break in here," Fedderman said. "And far as I'm concerned, somebody else is welcome to my identity."
Quinn settled into the chair behind his desk and rocked slightly back and forth. The chair squeaked. The other two chairs at the desks were identical-cheap black vinyl swivel chairs on rollers. The fourth chair was straight-backed and wooden, presumably for an eventual suspect.
Pearl and Fedderman rolled the other two chairs up close and sat down. Quinn's desk was strategically placed directly beneath one of the fluorescent fixtures, so there was plenty of light even if it was ghastly. He slid open one of the rattling steel drawers and handed Pearl the murder books on Janice Queen and Lois Ullman.
"You can look them over now, if you want," he said, "then take them home and study them."
Pearl rested the files on her lap, and opened the top one. Quinn watched her scan each piece of paper or photograph inside, then move on and repeat the process. A tune from Phantom of the Opera was seeping over from the Nothing but the Tooth side of the building. Music to fill molars by? That, the hum and swish of traffic outside, and Pearl leafing through the files, were the only sounds for a long time.