“Mimic me.”
“Sorry.”
“And call me by my first name.”
“Gee, sorry.”
“You know I hate that. I’m not Carolyn, I’m your goddamn mother.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“You’re staying here because you’re hoping he’ll call, aren’t you?”
“I told you why I’m staying here.”
“Because you hope Sonny Lipschitz...”
“Goddamn it, Mom!”
“... will call. You’re going to mope around here in the apartment for the next...”
“I am not!”
“... three, four days...”
“I told you I...”
“... waiting for some goddamn Indian you met on a train...”
“He’s half Br...”
“... to call you! Instead of...”
“I’ll come out sometime next week, okay?”
“... instead of for once in your life exhibiting the tiniest bit of pride and self-respect!”
“Mom.” A pause. As lethal as her sudden glare. “I don’t want to go to Westhampton tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay, fuck it.”
“Nice talk,” Elita said.
Carolyn turned away from her and hurled the pearl-buttoned sweater into the suitcase.
The two detectives who’d caught the squeal were pounding up the steps ahead of Santorini. One of them was called Hawk for Hawkins because his first name was Percival and anyone who called him Percival or even Percy would have risked a mouthful of knuckles. He did not look like a hawk at all. He looked, in fact, more like a bear. Two hundred and fifty pounds if he weighed a dime. Wearing a blue polyester suit he’d bought at some discount joint. White shirt and red tie. Beer barrel belly hanging over his belt. Sweating bullets as he climbed the steps.
His partner was black. The strong silent type. Wearing his hair in what they called a hi-top fade, looked like some kind of upside down flower pot sitting on top of his head. Plaid sports jacket, looked like wool, the guy’d never heard of tropical weight fabrics. Tall and slender, maybe a bit over six feet, a hundred sixty-five pounds stepping out of the shower onto a scale. Big knuckled hands of a street fighter. Eyes as black as midnight. Skin the color of a coconut shell. Santorini figured him for the sharper of the two. And the more lethal. Down here, this was the One-Nine. If he ever worked anything down here again, he had to remember to ask for Lyall Gibson, which was the black guy’s name.
Hawkins was doing all the talking. Puffing up the stairs, throwing the words over his shoulder. Santorini was doing a little puffing himself; the victim was in an apartment on the fifth floor of the walkup. There were the usual cooking smells you found in any building in this city, even some of the expensive condominiums. Made you want to puke sometimes, the smells in the hallways. They kept climbing. Hawk kept talking.
“... saw the inter-departmental alert you guys put out, figured this one would really interest you. You’da got it anyway, sooner or later...”
“Not necessarily,” Santorini said.
He was not eager to take on another case. The stiff rightfully belonged to Gibson and Hawkins, they were the fucking cops who’d caught the squeal. So why were they busting Homicide’s balls?
“... the coincidence and all,” Hawkins was saying.
“It’s no coincidence, Hawk,” Gibson said.
He pronounced it coincidence, the way people from the South pronounced umbrella or police. Santorini figured he hadn’t been up North too long. Either that or he’d picked up his speech patterns from a mother who’d been born in Mississippi or Georgia.
“I hate these buildings got no elevators,” Hawkins said.
“No doorman, either,” Gibson said.
“No doorman, she gets a coupl’a bullets in the head,” Hawkins said.
Santorini wished he had a nickel for all the homicide victims he’d seen who had doormen and a couple of bullets in the head. They were on the fourth floor now. One more to go. They turned and walked across the landing to the next flight of stairs. As they began climbing again, he could see a pair of blue uniformed trouser legs at the top of the stairwell. Puffing, he followed the two detectives onto the landing. The uniformed cop was standing outside the door to apartment 5A. The A, some kind of metallic shit that wasn’t real brass, hung crookedly from one screw.
“How you doing?” Hawkins said to the cop outside the door.
“Okay,” he answered.
“Everybody still here?”
“Yes, sir. Except the M.E., he just left.”
“They didn’t take away the stiff, did they?”
“No, sir. Lieutenant gave strict orders Homicide had to see it first.”
“Well, this here’s Detective Santorini from Homicide, we’re gonna go in now, show him the body.”
“Yes, sir.”
Santorini wondered what all the fuckin’ fuss was about. Dragging him all the way down here to look at some dame got shot in the head ’cause she didn’t have a doorman? Why couldn’t he have viewed the corpse at the morgue? A stiff was a stiff no matter where or how you looked at it. They went into the apartment. At least it smelled better than the morgue. Big burly guy in a grey tropical suit and wearing a greyish straw fedora came over with his hand extended.
“Lieutenant Costanza,” he said, “we got something good for you.”
“I wonder what it could be,” Santorini said, thinking he was making a joke about calling Homicide in to see yet another dead body. But everybody here was looking so serious and solemn, like they just found the latest victim of Buffalo Bill; the trouble with too many cops nowadays was they saw too many fuckin’ movies.
“Over here,” the lieutenant said.
The dead woman was surrounded by what had to be a dozen cats, all of them looking confused. One of them, a white cat with yellow eyes, was sitting closest to the woman and meowing incessantly.
“Goddamn cats,” the lieutenant said.
The woman herself was half-seated, half-lying on a sofa with floral-patterned slip covers. There were two overlapping bullet holes between her eyes. The slugs had torn out the back of her skull and splashed the wall behind her with blood the color of the slipcover flowers. Her hair was clipped short, a sort of reddish color, but not as bright as the blood. She was wearing a grey sweater. The M.E. must’ve unbuttoned it a bit to slip his stethoscope onto her chest; she had good firm breasts. Santorini figured she was fifty, fifty-five years old, a woman who might have been good-looking when she was younger. There were cat hairs all over the grey sweater.
“Her name’s Angela Cartwright,” Hawkins said. “We found a passport with her name and picture in it.”
“A British subject,” Gibson said.
So that’s the coincidence, Santorini thought. Two fuckin’ Brits get killed in the same week, right away they run to Homicide.
“You know...” he started to say.
“M.E. noticed this while he was examining her,” Costanza said, and unbuttoned the dead woman’s sweater to reveal her white brassiere. Gently, almost tenderly, he eased her left breast out of its restraining cup. Just beneath the nipple, Santorini saw:
“We figured it tied in with the one in your alert,” Costanza said. “Two Brits, both of them with swords tattooed on their chests.”
“Guy kills ’em and tattoos ’em,” Hawkins said, and shrugged at the simplicity of it all.
Santorini knew this wasn’t the case; the coroner’s report had indicated that the tattoo on the last victim had not been a fresh one at all.