Mister X (25 page)

Seated in a way that made him almost curled up on the hall bench, Stephen Elsinger looked distraught. Up close, he had bad skin and an overactive Adam’s apple.

Quinn posed the questions.

“I already—” Stephen began with a weary impatience.

“I know,” Quinn said. “But you know how it is. You must watch
Law and Order
.”

Stephen smiled. “You kidding? I’m like an addict.”

Quinn gave him the beatific smile that was a surprise on such a rough face. More like a priest’s smile than a cop’s. “I think you’d be more comfortable in your own apartment, Stephen. It’s a short walk, is it?”

“A block down and around the corner,” Stephen said. He uncoiled his skinny legs and stood up from the bench. His Adam’s apple bobbed. These men were making him nervous. No, more than that—they were downright scary. “I got some beer, if you guys—”

“We appreciate the hospitality, Stephen, but we’re on duty.”

The Italian-looking cop, Vitali, who had already questioned Stephen, and the one who looked like a meek accountant were staring at Stephen in a way that made him uneasy. The lanky potbellied cop with the bad suit smiled at him and shrugged, as if to say he would have liked a beer.

The big, tough-looking one who was their leader stepped away and made a sweeping motion with his arm. “Lead the way,” he said

It took them about ten minutes to walk to Stephen’s apartment building, a stark redbrick tower with a moldy green canopy over its entrance. Not the sort of place to have a doorman. The entrance was flanked by identical potted yews that had been trimmed into round balls of leaf. The lobby was so spare as to look like the reception area of some bureaucratic horror from Eastern Europe.

Stephen’s nineteenth-floor unit wasn’t in a class with the victim’s condo, but in this part of town it had to be expensive. The apartment was also, Quinn noted, almost on a level with Lilly Branston’s eighteenth-floor apartment. The furniture was utilitarian and mismatched. There was a poster of Albert Einstein next to one of the Three Stooges on the wall behind the sofa. The light had been left on in the kitchen, and an open takeout pizza box was visible on the table.

“We gotta go into the bedroom so I can show you how it was,” Stephen said.

They all went into the bedroom behind Stephen. It was dim, and nobody switched on a light. Flimsy drapes were stirring in the breeze where a glass sliding door leading out to a balcony had been left open. There was a faint rancid odor in the air, as if Stephen had left his dirty socks lying about.

Quinn didn’t wait for Stephen’s invitation to step out onto the balcony.

There was a nice breeze out there, and a telescope, one of the big ones with a smaller finder scope, set on a tripod. It was made for serious study of the stars, only it wasn’t elevated to look up at the night sky. It was a few degrees south of horizontal and aimed diagonally at a wall of windows a block away on Park Avenue.

“You an amateur astronomer?” Quinn asked Stephen, who had followed him out onto the balcony. Fedderman, Vitali, and Mishkin came out, too. Quinn hoped the small balcony would support all the weight.

“Yes, sir,” Stephen said. “I like the stars. But with the lights in the city, this isn’t the best place to view the heavens.”

“So you’ve been viewing the windows in that building in the next block.”

“Well…yes. People in New York do that all the time, right? I mean, it’s not like I’m a peeping Tom or something.”

“No, no,” Quinn said. “Using a telescope to scan windows is a New York tradition. Take it from us, we see it all the time. Usually, though, the watcher settles on a select few windows. You settled on Lilly Branston’s windows, and who could blame you?”

Stephen’s Adam’s apple worked furiously. “Yeah. Yes, sir. She’s—she was beautiful.”

“You watched her get undressed?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“Who could blame you?” Quinn said again. “So describe exactly what you saw earlier tonight.”

“She—Ms. Branston—came home around ten-thirty with some guy.”

“You see what he looked like?”

“No, sir. I just caught like a glimpse of them, and then for a while I followed their shadows on the closed drapes. I know they were drinking, and I think they kissed. And she…”

“What did she do, son?”

“Got at least part way undressed in the living room. I mean, it looked that way.”

“Like a shadow box show,” Quinn said.

“That’s right. Only not as clear. Then they went into the bedroom, where the drapes were open, and I could see right in.”

“You can see the bed?”

“In a way, yes.” He went to the telescope and aligned it using the finder scope, adjusted focus. “Look. I don’t have a good angle, but I can see the bed in the dresser mirror.”

Quinn looked. The window, over a block away, was brought up as if he were right in front of it. The drapes were open, and there was the reflection of about half the mattress where the corpse had lain. The bloodstained sheets had been taken for evidence, but Quinn could see the red stains on the mattress.

“I never got a look at the guy because—Ms. Branston—undressed standing in front of the window.”

“She always do that?”

“Like most of the time.”

“You think she knew you were watching?”

“Yes, sir. I think she suspected
somebody
might be watching.” There went the Adam’s apple. “One thing you learn with a telescope is that women—a lot of them—like to show off.”

“So you watched her undress and get into bed.”

“Yes, sir. Usually she slept wearing a kind of skimpy nightgown. But tonight she didn’t put on anything. She just went over and stretched out on the bed, right on top of the covers. She put her hands behind her head and was smiling. I never saw her smile like that before.”

“Like she was posing for somebody?”

“Yes, sir, like that. But not for me. More like for the guy in her room.”

“Then what happened?”

“I saw the guy come over to the window, just his arms and hands, and he closed the drapes.”

“You saw his arms. Did you get any idea of what he was wearing? A shirt, a suit coat?”

“I got the impression he wasn’t wearing anything, like Ms. Branston wasn’t.” Stephen moved back and leaned against the balcony’s iron railing. Fedderman stood close to him. You never knew what people were going to do, and it was a long drop to the sidewalk. “It all went so fast,” Stephen said. “It was impossible to make out exactly what was happening.”

“Did you continue to watch?”

“No, sir. After the guy closed the drapes, there was nothing to see. Then after about an hour, I went back to take another look. And the drapes were open again. The window was open, too, like the guy was trying to air out the room.” Sal looked over at Quinn without expression.

“The window hadn’t been opened before?” Quinn asked.

“No, sir. I’m sure it wasn’t. Is that important?”

“Who knows?” Quinn said, thinking the killer might not have wanted the body found right away, might have wanted fresh air in the room so the neighbors wouldn’t smell the stench of putrefaction or feces so soon. If so, he’d gotten crossed up. He’d lost a measure of control.

Stephen swallowed several times and continued. “Ms. Branston was still in bed. But something didn’t look right, even from this distance. Her face was like…distorted. And I thought she was wearing something red that didn’t look right, either. So I really worked at focusing in, and”—Adam’s apple time again—“I saw she wasn’t wearing something red, that what I was looking at was blood. And her throat…” Stephen’s voice became hoarse and cracked. He looked as if he might start to cry.

Quinn could understand why. With the powerful telescope, it must have been as if Stephen was right there in the room with the corpse.

“There, there, son,” Quinn said, and gently patted his shoulder.

“That was when I called nine-one-one,” Stephen said in a choked voice. Quinn could
hear
his Adam’s apple working.

“Of course you did,” Quinn said.

“When I saw the police cars start to arrive, I left here and walked over there, to where she lived. The police asked me who I was, if I was the one who’d called nine-one-one. When I told them I was, they sat me on a bench. That’s where I stayed till Detective Vitali came and got my statement. Then you guys came and got me.”

“A rough experience,” Quinn said. “You did the right thing.”

“You really think so, sir?”

“Of course. Say, Stephen, you ever take any photographs through that telescope of yours?”

“No, sir. Why would I do such a thing?”

“I don’t know. I just wondered.” Quinn smiled. “That’s what I do a lot of in my job, Stephen. I wonder.”

“I guess you do,” Stephen said.

He agreed to come into the precinct house the next morning and sign a statement. Vitali and Mishkin would conduct the interview, and of course furnish transcripts to Quinn and company. It occurred to Quinn that this hybrid investigation was something like the government being in banking. Not always as efficient as it might be. But still in business.

It was raining lightly from a starless night sky when they stepped outside Stephen Elsinger’s apartment building. The wet sidewalks shot back reflected light, and the street lamps were low stars in the mist. Sal and Mishkin had a city car. Quinn felt moisture cool on the back of his neck as he and Fedderman moved toward Quinn’s Lincoln.

Then Quinn realized there was another reason for the chill he felt. Across the street stood the shadow woman in her usual hip-shot fashion, with her elbows out and her hands propped at her waist. She was in a doorway but up close to the sidewalk, and seemed surprised she’d been noticed. Her body gave a slight jerk, and she turned calmly and started to walk, then run.

All four detectives had seen her, and all realized that by the time they got into a car and got it started, she’d be long gone where a vehicle couldn’t follow.

They all began running after her, starting slowly, as she had started, in for the long haul. If this was to be an endurance contest, the law would win it.

She was running downtown on Park, about a hundred yards ahead of them, and they were keeping pace. Everyone on the side of the law was already breathing hard, and this appeared to be a fairly young woman they were pursuing. Quinn heard a leather sole slip on wet concrete, and someone—maybe Vitali—curse. The odds were slim that any of them would be able to catch her. Quinn heard Mishkin use his two-way to ask for help from any radio car in the vicinity. He was difficult to understand between rasping breaths.

Male ego. Quinn wondered if that was what had caused them to begin this pursuit with such high hopes. Cops and ex-cops, no longer young. Flatfeet. For all they knew, the woman ahead of them was an Olympic contender.

There was only sparse traffic at this late hour, and no one driving past paid much attention to the footrace that was going on along Park Avenue. Now and then the participants encountered a pedestrian, usually carrying an umbrella, who stood staring in surprise and curiosity as they plodded past, rooster tails of rain at their heels.

Quinn knew that if the woman managed to flag down a cab, and climb in with enough time and bullshit, she’d soon be out of reach. Bunch of middle-aged creeps chasing her, maybe drunk. Damsel in distress. The cabbie would buy into whatever tale she told him and spirit her blocks away in no time.

She crossed half of the street diagonally and was running now alongside the grass median, staying on pavement where the footing was better. Maybe hoping to be noticed easier by a cab.

Quinn felt his legs weakening, and the familiar throbbing pain in the one that had taken the bullet and was now supposedly healed. His ribs were beginning to ache. Mishkin pulled even with him, as if they were competing with each other, elbows pumping rhythmically as pistons. His droopy wet mustache and the look of determination on his usually mild features made Quinn think of a western gunslinger headed for a showdown.

A showdown
, Quinn thought.
That’s what we need.
But he knew the four of them were fading.

Posse of old bastards…

Then he heard a grunt, not so much of pain as of determination, and Fedderman was pulling away, his lanky, mismatched frame suddenly and amazingly graceful at high speed.

Quinn watched with astonishment, forgetting for a moment how difficult it was for him simply to keep running.

Fedderman was loping like a wolf, gaining on the woman, who glanced back in surprise and ran harder.

Fedderman ran harder, too. He was inspired.

Go, Feds!

Damn it!
Here came a cab, its service light glowing. The shadow woman was waving an arm desperately as she ran, trading a little speed if she could just catch the cabby’s attention.

Quinn watched the cab cross two lanes of traffic and head toward her.

Gonna lose her again!

Gonna lose her!

A siren yodeled, and a radio car turned the corner, roof bar lights flashing in the mist.

The shadow woman saw the police car and changed direction, trying to cross the grass median. She stumbled and fell to her hands and knees. Got up. Ran back out into the street, but away from the police car.

Toward the cab.

Damn it!
She was going to make it.

Don’t let her get in!

Don’t—

She was suddenly on her hands and knees again, staring up at the fast-approaching cab. Its brake lights flared, and its wheels locked. The pavement was too wet for the tires to screech. They made a loud scraping sound, like fingernails clawing over cardboard, as the vehicle slid toward the immobile woman.

Its front bumper struck her hard enough to toss her body forward into an awkward cartwheel. She landed almost completely on the grass median, but not quite. Her head struck the curb, and she lay motionless with arms and legs splayed.

The driver was out of the cab and kneeling alongside her within seconds. He crossed himself, stood up, and moved hunched over onto the grass and vomited.

Fedderman was next on the scene, sliding to a stop and standing with his long arms dangling at his sides, gulping air and staring down at the woman’s face.

Quinn ran faster as he got closer, even though pain sliced through his legs and burned like molten lead in his lungs. In his heart. All his attention was concentrated on the woman sprawled at the edge of the median.

Who are you?

Who are you?