Slaughter - Lutz John - Страница 19

Renz came in. He’d been out in the hall, talking to one of his detectives. Quinn and Pearl both wondered if Renz was sharing information as generously as they’d agreed. Renz, playing his customary parallel game.

He walked over to Quinn and Pearl, careful not to step near the nude dead woman’s oddly disjointed body on the bedroom floor. “Our guy?” he asked, looking at Nift for confirmation.

“No doubt about it,” Nift said.

Renz went over and looked in at the bathroom without entering. He stayed that way about half a minute, then backed away awkwardly, but without touching the doorframe and obscuring any fingerprints.

“Killed her and let her bleed out in the bathtub,” Renz said, “then dismembered her in the tub, washed most of the blood down the drain, and moved her in here piece by piece, where he more or less put her back together.”

“Naughty Gremlin,” Nift said.

“He was reasonably neat,” Pearl said, noting that there wasn’t much blood on the bedroom carpet.

“Unreasonably neat,” Quinn said.

Pearl was thinking how closely, and horrifyingly, the dead woman resembled a ventriloquist’s dummy.

If I sat her on my knee, would she tell me who killed her?

Renz said, “You might want to talk to the super. Name’s Bud Peltz. His is the apartment right off the foyer. He told one of the uniforms he got a good look at the killer as he was running away.”

Quinn was surprised by this stroke of luck.

“Don’t get too excited,” Renz said. “The uniform—his name is Bill Toth—says Peltz’s story doesn’t ring true.”

“He say why not?”

“It set off an alarm behind his right ear.”

“That should play well in court.”

Fedderman showed up. He looked tired and was wearing a gray suit that appeared clean but was amazingly wrinkled, as if it had been scrubbed and rubbed over rocks. The narrow end of his tie extended half an inch beneath the wide end. It didn’t matter as long as he kept his suit coat buttoned, which he never did.

Everyone glanced at him, but no one said anything as they let him walk around and take in the crime scene.

“Our gremlin,” he said.

“Nasty gremlin,” Nift said.

Pearl said, “Why don’t you shut up? Or at least think of something else to say.”

Nift grinned at having gotten under her skin. “Baaad gremlin.”

Quinn was sure he heard Pearl’s teeth gnash. He thought about her going with him and Fedderman to talk to Peltz the super, then decided it would be better if she talked with Toth, the uniformed cop who’d been one of the first on the scene. They could get together later and see what fit and what didn’t.

Pearl didn’t object to the plan. Anything to get away from Nift.

Bud Peltz was a tall, thin man with a bushy, droopy gray mustache that looked a lot like Harold Mishkin’s. The rest of him looked nothing like Harold. The super had handsome Latin features and a muscular leanness about him. Dark, direct brown eyes, and large, callused hands.

His street-level apartment was small and tidy. It was well furnished, but would have looked larger and more comfortable without such a clash of colors. He invited them to sit on the flower-pattern sofa, which they did. Springs sang softly beneath them. Fedderman had his notepad out and a short yellow pencil tucked behind his right ear. Peltz sat on some kind of woven basket chair that creaked beneath his weight. A large-screen TV sat muted in a corner near what looked like a door to the kitchen. It was showing an old Carole Lombard movie from the forties. Quinn found himself wondering if anyone had actually been watching the TV when he’d knocked on the door. Maybe Lombard was still known and popular in some quarters. Who was famous, who wasn’t . . . it was hard to gauge such things.

A slender, remarkably attractive young woman entered the living room and switched the TV off. She was wearing shorts, and had a ballet dancer’s shapely, muscular legs.

“My wife, Maria,” Peltz said.

Quinn and Fedderman didn’t say anything. Peltz was uneasy, as if he should have to explain his ancestry. He hated that feeling. But a visit from the police . . .

Quinn wondered if these two were not long out of Mexico.

Peltz said, “My mother’s maiden name was Rodriguez.”

“And mine’s was Perez,” Maria Peltz said.

Quinn smiled. He didn’t want to know too much about these two. “The great melting pot. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Peltz.”

When she returned his smile she was even more beautiful. Quinn guessed she was about half the age of Bud Peltz, who looked to be in his late forties.

“We met when I was working for a contractor in Mexico,” Peltz said. He directed his attention to his wife. “They’re here to listen to my account I gave to Officer Toth.”

“Ah, yes, your account.”

A look passed between Peltz and his wife. Something in hot-blooded Maria’s eyes. She seemed angry, but at the same time amused.

“Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?” she asked.

Quinn declined, wondering how many times he’d heard that line in the movies or on crap television.

“Ice water would be good,” Fedderman said.

Quinn relented and seconded Fedderman’s request, and Maria glided gracefully into the kitchen. He noticed that she hadn’t offered her husband a glass of water. People in hell . . .

Toth had a good eye, or ear, for a cop. A good gut, really. That was where cops got their hunches. There was something out of tune between Bud Peltz and his wife. Would his statement contain the same discord?

“I’m going outside to shop,” Maria said. “I slept through everything last night, so I have nothing to relate. Not even dreams. I’ve already talked with Officer Toth. But if you need me . . .”

“No, no,” Quinn said. “Go right ahead. If we need a statement from you we can get it later.”

Fedderman glanced at him, surprised.

Maria said good-bye to them, not including her husband. Quinn might have imagined it, but he thought he heard those shapely thighs brush together as she walked.

“A beautiful woman,” he said, when Maria was gone.

Bud Peltz seemed unmoved by Quinn’s observation. “Everyone says so, and it’s true. But you get used to how your wife looks.”

Is this guy nuts?

Quinn stood up. Peltz started to stand also, but Quinn raised a hand palm out and motioned for him to sit back down in the creaky basket chair.

Peltz sat.

“Your account,” Quinn said, “is a load of bullshit.”

Peltz sat quietly for a few seconds, staring at the floor.

Then he sighed.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

21

The door to Margaret Evans’s second-floor apartment was still unlocked, but there was a roll of yellow crime scene tape leaning against the doorjamb, and an NYPD sticker that had to be peeled off before the door could be opened. Quinn and Fedderman were ready to enter, but Bud Peltz ushered them to the next door, leading to the apartment directly adjacent to the scene of the murder. The detectives were curious about what Peltz had in mind.

The apartment next to Margaret Evans’s was vacant and unfurnished. There were clean rectangles on the otherwise bare off-white walls where picture frames or similar objects had hung. A dead geranium sat in a green plastic pot on the living room windowsill.

Peltz led them toward the hall to the rear of the apartment, then into a bedroom. Their footfalls on the bare wood floor carried a faint echo.

They entered a bedroom with a window overlooking a side street. The room was completely bare except for a stained double mattress leaning against the window. It blocked enough light so that it was dim in the room.

Quinn flipped a wall switch that turned on an overhead fixture. Nothing changed, only became more visible.