The Extinction Event (3 page)

“The boss sure liked the ladies,” Robert said.

“Robert…,” Jack started.

“One night, Frank took me to Angie Carmen's house,” Robert said. “We were having a cocktail, chatting to the girls—Frank was waiting for his favorite kid to come back to the line-up—and there was this salesman there from down south, Pittsburgh, Detroit—”

“Detroit's not south,” Jack said.

“—who kept asking one of the girls to do a somersault.” Robert ignored Jack. “The girl says,
A somersault
? The guy from down south says,
You know, you put your head between your knees
. And she says,
Mister, if I could put my head between my knees, I wouldn't have gotten married four times
.”

The waiter delivered the rye and bitters, which Robert slugged back.

“I assume the cops are going through Frank's files,” Jack said. “For leads.”

“You mean who'd want to kill a lawyer?” Robert asked. “Who wouldn't?”

“I wish you weren't leaving the firm,” Jack said. “With both of us gone—” Jack shrugged. “Until I get back, Five Spot needs all the help she can get.”

“If you get back,” Robert said. “Why do you call Caroline Five Spot?”

Ignoring the question, Jack said, “The ink on her diploma isn't dry. She's never had a case on her own.”

“You had most of the interesting work,” Robert said. “Most of what I was doing were little
fix-me
cases. Someone's brother gets busted, drunken driving, someone's kid gets a speeding ticket…”

“You won't reconsider?”

“As my daddy says,
only the captain goes down with the ship
. Frank was the captain. He's gone. You were first mate. I'm in the lifeboat. Jack, the mess you're in, you'll be lucky if they let you into court for your own trial.”

3

Caroline stood in the high double doors of her uncle's Hudson River mansion, Tabletops, her eyes closed, her face raised to the mild breeze. Up the river, the Rip Van Winkle Bridge lights looked like a leftover Christmas decoration strung across the Hudson. The lights of Mycenae, half a mile downriver, cast a sulfurous glow in the sky. Clouds were massing over the Catskills. A storm was brewing. Caroline remembered the stories about how thunder was caused by the ghosts of Hendrick Hudson's men bowling in the mountains.

Behind her, the parlor was filled with Empire furniture. In front of her, the French doors led to a colonnaded gallery with an ironwork balcony. Beyond the gallery was a formal garden. The statuary in the garden, satyrs and nymphs, voluptuous goddesses and priapic gods, was pocked and chipped. The immortals had seen better days.

Caroline said, “Hibiscus.” She took one last deep breath before turning back into the room. “That smell always makes me feel sixteen years old. My first dance. Willie Jerome sent me a hibiscus corsage. A big red blossom. He was so nervous when he put it on, he stabbed me with the pin and stained the dress, that beautiful organdy dress, with blood.”

Caroline's uncle, Devitt Wonder, called Dixie, was mixing a drink at a wicker bar cart. Dixie was a healthy eighty-six. Tall, thin, vigorous, although deceptively fragile looking, in his white linen suit, he had an almost ghostly appearance, a specter from the Gilded Age.

Dixie said, “The secret of a Ramos gin fizz is—”

“—
cold
egg whites,” Caroline said. “Dixie, every time you whip up one of those concoctions, you say the same thing.”

“And every time I say it, Sweetpea, you tell me I've said it before.”

Caroline's sister, Nicole, swept in. She was a darker, more sultry version of Caroline. The folded inner canthus of her eyes gave her face an oriental cast. Her hair hung below her waist.

“Come on, you two,” Nicole said, “dinner's waiting.”

“Wait on us a moment, Nicole. I have to quiz your sister on something.”

Nicole glanced from Caroline to Dixie.

“She's not going to quit her job and go to work for you, Uncle Dee.”

“One of our ancestors must have married a witchy woman,” Dixie said. “You two girls are always reading my mind.”

“It doesn't take magic to guess what you're thinking, Dixie,” Caroline said.

“Caroline,” Dixie said, “the firm you're in, word around town is a storm's coming and no one's taped the windows.”

“You're the one who taught me not to be a quitter, Dixie,” Caroline said.

“I hope,” Dixie said, “I also taught you not to be foolish. I can offer you a good job.”

“I already have a job, Dixie,” Caroline said. “And I'm going to make a go of it, even if I have to run the place alone.”

CHAPTER THREE

1

Jack walked into Samaritan Hospital with a detective, Al Sciortino, a childhood friend. Even in the air-conditioned lobby, Sciortino had sweat stains under his arms and on his collar. He had a Marine haircut the color of iron filings, eyes that registered so little emotion they looked like pinpoint cameras, and fingers so stubby they seemed to be missing a joint. As usual, he smelled of cigars and Bay Rum.

“Coke laced with cyanide?” Jack asked.

“If the glass didn't crack,” Sciortino said, “if they'd cooked it up into a rock, most of the poison would have precipitated out.”

“And smoking it?”

“There wouldn't have been enough cyanide in the vapor to kill him.”

“But Frank got impatient, huh?”

Sciortino nodded. “Snorting the coke.”

“If someone wanted to kill him.” Jack said, “how could he be sure Frank wouldn't wait?”

“Lucky for the girl,” Sciortino said, “as far as drugs go, Frank wasn't a gentleman:
No ladies first
.”

2

In the hospital intensive care ward, Jack and Sciortino stood by Gaynor's bed, looking at her, unconscious, her face a mass of bruises the blue-black of eggplant. The fluorescent ceiling lights reflected off the tubes going into and out of her body. Monitors chirped.

The attending doctor, Peter Rodaheaver, unhooked a clipboard from the foot of the bed.

“Mr. Slidell, your boss was dead before he had a chance to say
hallelujah
!”

“He must have had time to tell the girl to call Jack,” Sciortino said.

“So he knew he was in trouble,” Jack said.

“You snort cyanide, I think you
know
you're in trouble,” Rodaheaver said. “For a second. Before trouble don't matter anymore. You figure beaten like that the girl knew she was in trouble, too.”

“If Frank took off on her,” Sciortino asked, “why would she call Jack for help?”

“Frank wouldn't have hit the lady,” Jack said, “let alone whale on her.”

“So,” Sciortino asked, “you got any idea who played her like a snare?”

“You find anything in his files?” Jack asked.

“Yeah,” Sciortino said, “just like on tee-vee, we got six people looking at every single memo he ever wrote.”

“You think anyone would mind—”

“If you went snooping? Aside from the department, the troopers, and the DA?”

Jack nodded at a floral arrangement, a cluster of white blossoms with fringed petals.

“The blooms for her?” Jack asked.

“They came a couple of hours ago,” Rodaheaver said.

“Any note?” Sciortino asked.

Rodaheaver shook his head
no
.

“An order form?” Jack asked. “The florist's name?”

“Nothing,” Rodaheaver said. “They were left at the desk.”

“We'll check it out,” Sciortino said.

“Is she going to make it?” Jack asked Rodaheaver.

“You better hope so,” Sciortino said to Jack. “She dies, there's no one to say you didn't kill her.”

3

Caroline and Nicole strolled through Mycenae's Court Square, past the cottages with their Dutch-style second-floor front doors and double front stairs. From an open window came a recording of Sidney Bichet's “Preachin' Blues.” Caroline swung a wide-brimmed straw hat from its pink ribbon. Too colorful to be wearing under the gusty, lead sky.

“I can't believe you won't take Uncle Dee's job,” Nicole said.

Caroline didn't answer.

“If you want to prove yourself,” Nicole said, “do it in a business that's not going out of business.”

Caroline still didn't answer.

“Caroline,” Nicole said, “sometimes I think you're as crazy as a chameleon on plaid.”

Caroline turned onto Roscoe Conkling Street, nicknamed in the late-1880s Skunk Alley by a disgruntled Democrat. Nicole gestured in the opposite direction.

“Where are you going?” Nicole asked.

“The bus stop,” Caroline said.

“You know what they used to say:
Good girls don't take the bus
.”

“They also used to say:
A lady doesn't wear panties in the summer. It's bad for the hygiene
.”

“Caroline, ever since you were a girl you've made things hard for yourself.”

“A guy at the office thinks I had the job handed to me. Because of Dixie.”

“So you're going to ruin your career because of a guy, what a guy said?”

Caroline didn't answer.

“Who is this guy?” Nicole asked.

“No one,” Caroline said. “No one special.”

Nicole studied her sister. Caroline stood in the humid night, backlit by a streetlamp, her body showing through the thin fabric of her dress, as she thought of Jack.

“Yeah?” Nicole said. “He must be something to get to you that much.”

“What are you talking about, Nicole?”

The bus, maroon with gold trim, designed to look like a trolley, ground up, stopped. Caroline stepped on it.

“He didn't get to me,” Caroline said.

The bus moved off.

“I can see that,” Nicole said to herself. “Didn't get to you at all.”

CHAPTER FOUR

1

The clerk at the Dutch Village Motel stood behind the counter, a stack of paid bills in front of him. He glanced at one, then impaled it on the old-fashioned iron desk spike. Near his elbow was the button that rang a buzzer in the back of the house. When the door opened, he looked up. A man wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat entered, the turned-up collar of his blue nylon windbreaker muffling his voice.

“Last night,” the man asked, “you were on duty?”

The clerk nodded, trying to get a look at the man's face.

“An older man with a young woman,” the man asked. “He checked in?”

“Yeah,” the clerk said, “then checked out. Permanent.”

“Someone visited them?” the man asked.

The clerk nodded, this time wary.

“Would you recognize him,” the man asked, “this other fellow?”

The clerk hesitated, looking a little too hard at the man.

“What's the matter, boy?” the man asked.

The clerk went to hit the buzzer button with his palm, but the man grabbed his wrist, stopping him.

“Who you going to call?”

“I … I wasn't.”

“You were going to hit the button.”

“No, I…”

“Only one other thing you could've been reaching for.”

Holding the clerk's wrist, the man lifted the clerk's hand over the desk spike.

“This,” the man said.

And he slammed the clerk's hand onto the spike, impaling it.

2

Jack leaned on a fence in the city's waterfront park, watching a barge move up the Hudson River. The water smelled fetid. Rotting vegetation and spilled oil. The wind rippled the water's surface, making it look like crumpled tin foil. Sciortino sauntered up and leaned on the fence next to Jack.

“The clerk at the motel, the one Frank died in last night,” Sciortino said. “'Bout an hour ago, he was murdered, stabbed half a dozen times with his desk spindle.”

“If the man used an accordion file,” Jack said, “maybe he'd still be alive.”

“Jack,” Sciortino said, heaving himself back from the fence, “we never met. I never told you any of this.” He took a step away. “I couldn't have,” he added. “After all, you're a suspect.”

3

Jack parked his blue Mustang convertible in front of a condominium near the Marina, a renovated boarding house, which from the 1920s to the early-1960s had doubled as cat-house and which in the late 1990s was gutted and rebuilt. The vapor lights cast a sulfurous glow on the half-empty parking lot. On the Hudson, shadowy boats rode at anchor.

Jack got out of his car, the door slam sounding hollow in the dark. Across the parking lot, a torn page from
The Racing Form
chased itself in circles; the wind ruffled the cuffs of Jack's slacks. His jacket over his shoulder, Jack headed toward the door of his condominium.

From the water, mist rose in strands, like a beaded curtain, which, opened, revealed other mists, elongated ghostly figures, like alien Tall Grays, drifting onto shore.

Jack felt droplets on his face.

The spectral mists passed Jack in endless procession. Muffled footsteps seemed to be hurrying by. Warning whispers seemed to swirl out of the air. And soft, dreamy music, singing? Jack couldn't make out the words.

Jack felt a tickle on his cheek. He turned and saw a cadaverous face vanishing into the mists behind him.

“What do you want?” Jack asked.

Whoever it was laughed, and the laugh sounded like ripping canvas.

“Who are you?” Jack asked.

Whoever it was began singing again. Minor strains. Words still indistinct.

Jack shivered.

“Don't start something you can't finish,” the specter whispered.

When Jack was twelve years old, on the way home from a school chorus trip to a state competition, he had shared a row in the bus with a girl two years older than he was. She was already well developed. Her nipples, the size of egg yolks, pressed against her tight white ribbed pullover. What was her name? Jack couldn't recall. In the dim blue light flickering from passing streetlamps, Jack had fumbled under her top, the first time he had ever touched a woman's breasts. Daintily, she plucked up the hem of her skirt, inviting Jack to touch her nylon-covered crotch, which Jack did, finding a surprising moistness. She moaned and told Jack, “Don't start something you can't finish.”