Darker Than Night. John Lutz
her lingerie drawer, there was a small, flowered box of chocolates. It was lying on top of her folded panties. No note. No card. No explanation.
She picked up the box and examined it more closely. The plastic encasing it hadn’t been disturbed, and it was an expensive brand.
A gift from Ron?
Not likely. She remembered the dustup over the coat.
Yet the chocolates had to be from Ron. Who else had access to the apartment, to her dresser drawers? And, in truth, the leather jacket that caused all that trouble had to have come from Ron. Unless she bought into the weird idea that Ira, the salesclerk at Tambien’s, had a way into the apartment and harbored a compelling crush on her. But the truth was, there wasn’t any way Ira could even know where she lived.
Ron. It must have been Ron. But what was going on? Did he have some kind of mental glitch? He’d been under strain with the new position. Marcy knew people weren’t always logical. They did do inexplicable things and then sometimes denied them even to themselves—like that girl where she used to work who sent people to various addresses for deals on clothes and jewelry. Only the addresses weren’t real, and the shops and people she referred to didn’t exist except in her mind. Ron’s little eccentricity wasn’t as serious as that.
So, if he had a kind of mental hitch in his thinking, leaving her gifts and not remembering, what was the harm? It was probably only temporary. So why should she—
Marcy heard the door from the hall open and close. Ron. He was home!
It took her only a second to decide not to mention the chocolates. It sure hadn’t helped to show him the coat.
She shoved the box beneath her folded panties and closed the dresser drawer.
Just in time. His shadow rippled over the carpet as he approached the bedroom doorway.
“There you are,” he said, smiling when he saw she was nude, in the middle of changing clothes. “I bought you something.”
He tossed her a glittering object and she caught it. Almost weightless. A thin gold bracelet with a tiny diamond in a plain setting.
“Don’t think it’s real. Some guy on the street was selling them, and I couldn’t resist.”
“It’s beautiful.” She slipped it on her wrist, then rotated it before her as if she were on the Home Shopping Network. Fully clothed, of course.
He watched her, obviously enjoying her pleasure. “It’s a pretty well-made knockoff. Either that or it was a hell of a sale.”
Marcy went to him and kissed him on the lips, and after a few seconds felt him return the kiss. His arm slipped around, behind her bare back. He truly did love her. So maybe he did have this strange compulsion to buy her gifts, sometimes anonymously.
She could live with that.
15
Quinn finished the last of his spaghetti and used his half-eaten roll to sop up sauce from his plate. He was in his sister Michelle’s dining room. She had a spacious—by New York standards—apartment on the West Side with a river view. Never having seen a floater gaffed like a fish and hauled to shore, she obviously didn’t think about what Quinn did when she looked at the river.
About once a month she’d invite Quinn over for dinner and prepare spaghetti using an old family recipe for the sauce. Quinn had become tired of the recipe, which called for too much garlic, but he always made it a point to eat all that was served. His sister had been his lifeline to a world where he could hold his head up, and he didn’t want to insult her. Besides, the apartment, furnished in expensive modern, was a welcome change from his usual surroundings, and Michelle always served a good red wine with her meals.
Though she ate out most of the time, Quinn knew she enjoyed cooking. Michelle had lived in a lesbian relationship with a woman named Marti in Vermont until six years ago. She’d told Quinn about it after their parents were both dead, not long after the passing of their father. Both their father and mother would have been horrified if they’d known the truth about her, or so Michelle assumed. Quinn, who’d seen the full range of the human spectrum as a New York cop, didn’t give it much thought. As far as he was concerned, Michelle’s sex life was none of his business.
When Marti had been struck by a car and killed only months later, Michelle returned to New York and put her formidable mathematical ability and her Harvard M.B.A. to work. She was deeply involved now with her job and her computer. Quinn didn’t know anything about her love life and didn’t ask. Anyway, he was in more of a position to be stoned than to cast the first one.
Michelle poured them both another glass of the excellent Australian red she’d found, probably on the Internet, and surveyed Quinn over the dirty dishes and what was left of the salad and hard-crusted rolls. Four years older than Quinn, she’d put on weight and was a big woman now, but still more large-boned than fat. Though she looked more like their mother, she shared Quinn’s square jaw and green eyes. Also his unruly brown hair, which she wore almost as short as his but in a considerably neater style.
“You going to take me into your confidence?” she asked.
“Are you kidding?”
He filled her in on his thinking about the Elzner case.
She stared at him for a moment, then asked, “What about your partners? What sort of people are they?”
She’d met Fedderman years ago and liked him. Quinn told her about Pearl.
“Sounds like the type who thinks outside the box,” she said.
He knew she wasn’t talking about Fedderman, the good, stolid cop. “There are some who’d like to put her in a box. I think she’s a damned fine detective, but she’s got a temper and a political tin ear.”
Michelle grinned. “And doesn’t that sound familiar?”
“Also,” Quinn said, “I’m still not completely sure I can trust her.”
“Oh? How so?”
“Only because Renz assigned her to me, and I know I can’t trust Renz. It’s possible that part of her job is to keep him informed about me.”
“Spy on you?” Michelle was never one to equivocate.
“Yeah, you could use that word.”
“I suppose it’s something to keep in mind.”
“On the other hand, Renz might simply have assigned her to me because she’s—”
“A fuckup.”
“Well, she might seem so to him, but she really isn’t that. She has…maybe too much character.”
“Ah. You like her.”
“Sure. You can’t help but like her. But lots of people liked Hitler before he became Hitler.”
“Hitler, huh?” Michelle leaned back in her chair and sipped wine, regarding him over the crystal rim.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Figuring the odds.”
“Like always,” Quinn said. He didn’t have to ask her about the object of her figuring.
He finished his wine, then stood up to clear the table.
It was past nine when Quinn got back to his apartment and found his phone ringing.
He shut the door behind him, crossed the living room in three long strides, and scooped up the receiver.
“It’s Harley,” Renz said after Quinn’s hello. So now they were on a first-name basis. “I got some info for you, Quinn.” Almost first-name basis.
“Will I like it?”
“Doesn’t matter. Info’s info. And does it matter what you like?”
“I