Kurtz and Barent Mystery Series: Books 1-3, page 5
Kurtz grunted and Farkas peered at him. “Weird, this thing about Sharon Lee. I’m glad they got the guy who did it. You used to go out with her, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Kurtz said carefully, “I did.”
Farkas nodded, and then, amazingly, he said. “Sorry to hear about it. She was okay.” This display of compassion seemed to exhaust Farkas’ store of sensitivity. He immediately took off on a tangent into the realm of Commodities Futures and how Fed policy on interest rates would affect the course of the market.
Kurtz frowned down at his stew, suddenly no longer hungry.
Longo gave a tight little grin and said to Kurtz, “I hear Sanibel Island is pretty nice. We should all go down there and borrow his place for a few weeks. You think he’d mind?”
Kurtz’ secretary had gray hair and narrow shoulders and sat very straight in her chair behind the front desk. Her name was Rose Schapiro. The patients liked her. So did Kurtz. She was always cheerful, she never called in sick, she typed eighty words a minute and she had never lost an insurance form.
He arrived back at his office at one o’clock. Mrs. Schapiro looked up from her computer screen and said, “Have a nice lunch?”
“Not bad. Has Ed shown up yet?”
“He’s in Room Three,” Mrs. Schapiro said, “removing a mole.”
“Good,” Kurtz said. Edward Ornella was one of the Grand Old Men of the surgical staff but he was overdue for retirement and for most of the past year had been easing himself out. He had recently stopped operating and now confined his practice to consults and office work.
Just then, Ornella came out of the back treatment room, drying his hands with a paper towel and smiling. “Richard,” he said. “Nice to see you.”
“Hello, Ed.”
“Well, I’ve made my contribution to the ledger for today.” He threw the paper towel in a wastebasket and waggled a finger at Kurtz. “Now remember,” he said, “time is money.” Still smiling, he put on his coat and walked out of the office.
Mrs. Schapiro watched him go and shook her head sadly. “Ten years ago, he was a great surgeon.”
“He’s still a great surgeon, when he wants to be.”
“I guess that’s what I mean, then. It’s sad.”
“I don’t believe he sees it that way. He’s really looking forward to shucking the rat race.”
“Do you think so?” Mrs. Schapiro laughed softly. “I don’t think anybody looks forward to being old and useless.”
Maybe not, Kurtz thought, maybe not. Not having to work for a living was hard for Kurtz to imagine, much less not wanting to. “Is Mr. Gallinas in yet?” he asked. Gallinas had a lump in his thigh that was probably a benign sebaceous cyst but every once in a while the most innocent appearing lump surprised you. It made sense to take it out.
“He arrived a few minutes ago. He’s in the back.”
“Okay,” Kurtz said. He took off his jacket, hung it in the closet and put on a white doctor’s coat. “Room Two?”
Mrs. Schapiro nodded.
Kurtz smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Lead me to him,” he said. “And don’t ever forget, time is money.”
At four A.M., Herman Delgado climbed up the fire escape in back of a brownstone on the lower West Side of Manhattan. The stars shone overhead but there was no moon out and the night was very dark and very cold. Herman’s breath steamed in front of him.
All good citizens, even the citizens of the city that never sleeps, were dormant at this hour of the morning. Herman Delgado had little fear of being seen as he lay on his stomach on the cold steel grating of the fire escape and cut a triangular patch out of the window with a glasscutter. He had fixed a piece of duct tape to the middle of the patch, and when he gave it a quick tap with his gloved fist, it came loose but did not fall. Gently, Herman Delgado lowered the piece of glass into the apartment inside, reached his hand in and released a clasp on the window. He slid the window up and clambered inside.
The apartment was dark. Delgado carefully closed the blinds and pulled a flash light from his pocket. A cone of light played over a stove, dishwasher and refrigerator. Confidently, as if he knew that nobody would be home, he walked down a narrow corridor and into the living room. The main light switch had a dimmer on it. He set it to low and turned it on. Herman Delgado smiled and rubbed his hands together.
The apartment was decorated with low, white leather couches, white shag rug, solid oak coffee table with a glass top, abstract paintings on the wall whose muted purples and pinks blended unobtrusively into the room’s decor. Delgado moved into the empty bedroom and began to rummage through the dresser drawers. He took his time and did it right, searching thoroughly and carefully and not bothering to put things back where they belonged. In the middle left hand drawer, he found the jewel box. Opening it, he held up a white gold ring set with a single emerald cut diamond, nodded and stuffed it into the inner pocket of the denim jacket that he wore beneath his coat. He shuffled through the rest of the pieces in the box, selecting most of them and discarding only the few that he knew were not worth trying to fence.
When he was done, he walked back into the kitchen, peered out the window, just to make certain that nobody was lurking down below, then clambered back onto the fire escape and vanished into the night.
Chapter 6
“It still bothers you, doesn’t it? Sharon Lee, I mean.”
“What was that?” Kurtz asked.
Kathy smiled at him. “See? You’re so pre-occupied, you hardly hear a word that people say to you.”
Kurtz shifted uncomfortably in his seat and cracked a weak grin. “Did Nolan ask you to talk to me?” “Liebert,” she said.
“Liebert?” Kurtz blinked. “I’ll have to have a little talk with Liebert.”
“Better not. He might complain to the Dean.”
Kurtz nodded but he barely heard her. “Okay, I won’t have a little talk with Liebert.”
Kathy had a two-bedroom place on Bank Street that she shared with a post doc in history named Jennifer Levy. Jennifer was away for the weekend. Kurtz sat on Kathy’s couch and sipped Scotch and soda and tried to act like what Steinberg might have called a “normal human being.”
Kathy sat next to him and held her own glass of white wine with both hands and took a small sip.
“I’m sorry,” Kurtz said. “I really am. I can’t figure out why I feel this way. Sharon and I broke up almost two years ago. I hardly ever thought about her.” He shrugged. “I’ll get over it. I just don’t know when.”
Kathy nodded. “She was important to you at one time. You can’t forget that.”
“No.” He gave a shaky laugh. In reality, while the murder of Sharon Lee was the focus for his current sour mood, Kurtz knew that he had been vaguely unhappy for quite some time. He had a sort of desperate longing for...something. Something he had trouble defining. Certainty, perhaps. Or maybe just significance...Kurtz had been on the staff at Easton for nearly three years. Long enough to get comfortable. Long enough to get bored. A lot of physicians felt this way. The process took these very smart, very hard driving, very competitive people and it tortured them: all the endless, obsessive work to master the enormous reams of material, the agonizing fear that a moment’s ignorance or lack of attention could result in a mistake and the knowledge that even a small mistake could wind up killing someone. The stark reality was that you had to be perfect because nothing less than perfection was allowed—and nobody was perfect.
All that pressure...for years, always climbing the ladder toward the ultimate, elusive goal: four years of college, four years of medical school, five years of surgical training. Two years at least to build a practice. And then you were there: physician and surgeon, respected practitioner of the art. Real life. No more steps on the ladder, no more goals to strive for, nothing to do but do the same things you were doing day after day— operate in the morning, see patients in the afternoon, never let the battery on the beeper run down because a disaster could strike at any instant—always pretending that you were in control, that you were good enough to do the job when only God Himself was good enough to do the job because sooner or later everybody died.
Doctors were freaks about control. You had to know everything. You had to be on top of everything. Nothing happened by chance. And if anything—anything at all—went wrong, you could be absolutely certain that the god damned lawyers would look at the situation just exactly in that light. It was your fault—even if it wasn’t. No excuses allowed.
And then Sharon Lee had been murdered and it seemed like the last straw, because nothing was more out of control than cold-blooded murder.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just the way I feel.”
Kathy sipped her wine and looked at him over the rim of the glass and said, “Nobody can argue with the way that you feel.”
“Yeah.” He gave his head a little shake. “Like I said, I’ll get over it.” He stared into his drink and hoped it would be soon.
“Barent?”
Barent sighed. He knew this voice and he rarely enjoyed hearing it. “Yes?”
“It’s John Costas. At The News.”
“I know,” Barent said.
“Hey, what’s the matter? You don’t sound glad to hear from me.”
“Well, John, you don’t usually make my job any easier. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Come on, Barent. I gave you great press on the Carmody murder.”
“You gave us credit for catching the perpetrator. That was after calling us idiots for three weeks because we didn’t.”
“I was just doing my civic duty, Barent.”
“And selling newspapers. Don’t forget selling newspapers.”
“Well, selling newspapers is my job.”
“Really? Gee, I didn’t realize that. And here I thought your job was journalism. You know: informing the public, telling the truth, exposing corruption—that sort of stuff.”
“Ouch,” the voice said amiably.
“What can I do for you, John?”
“I hear you have positive evidence regarding the suspect in custody, the wacko. I’m talking about the murder at Easton.”
“Where did you hear that?”
The voice was cagey. “I have my sources.”
Barent grunted.
“Well, do you?”
Briefly, Barent considered denying it but decided against it. Costas had no monopoly on inside sources. If Costas had heard it, then every other reporter in Town would be trumpeting the story and he might as well keep the son-of-a-bitch at least minimally friendly. “Yes. But that’s off the record. Anyway, the Commissioner’s called a Press Conference for tomorrow. He’ll announce it officially then.”
“Hey, no problem. Off the record’s my middle name. I prefer it that way. If they can’t check your sources, then they can’t check your quotes. Know what I mean?”
“Yes, John,” Barent said. “I’m afraid that I do.”
Bill Mose was not bored. He woke up in the morning when the nurses told him to and he brushed his teeth and washed his face and then shuffled out to eat breakfast. After breakfast, he wandered into the social room and smoked cigarettes and watched T.V. Tom and Jerry were followed by Porky Pig and Porky Pig was followed by Chip and Dale. Mose lacked the ability to follow the plots but the colors and the action held his rapt attention.
Vaguely, as he watched, Mose became aware of an uncomfortable sensation somewhere in his abdomen. He ignored it. He had had such sensations in the past and they had always gone away.
He smoked his cigarettes, taking deep sucking drags. Ten other men sat on the couches, all of them smoking and staring at the T.V. When one cigarette burned down to the filter Mose would light another. Once, when he had finished a cigarette, he glanced around the little room. The patients stared blankly at the television screen. Two beefy aides sat in the corners. Nobody was looking at him. He smiled to himself and swallowed the filter, then puffed contentedly away.
Herman Delgado sat on the roof of his building and snorted a couple of lines in the frigid cold. Herman didn’t mind the cold. The air was clear and still and the sky was very blue. From up here, the dirty snow down on the street looked clean, white and pure. Sitting out on the roof, he felt like he had the city all to himself. He liked that feeling.
Across the roof, a single pigeon had set up housekeeping in the old pigeon cote that Herman had placed there. When he was sixteen, Herman had seen On the Waterfront, with Marlon Brando. He had loved the scenes with the pigeons on the roof and he had gone out and bought himself a pigeon cote. What he hadn’t figured on was the fact that birds made a lot of birdshit and cleaning up birdshit was not Herman’s idea of a good time. So after a couple of days he had decided to ignore the pigeon cote. He left it where it was, though, and the stupid birds still used it.
His nose and the tips of his ears grew numb, partly from the cold but mostly from cocaine. Herman laughed softly to himself and watched his breath steam away in the frigid air. After a little while, he felt the need to move and he went back inside and climbed down the stairs.
Ten minutes later he was out on the street, feeling good. The money he had gotten for the stolen jewelry would keep him in crack and eager women for a month. He wriggled his toes in his new Bass shoes as he walked down the icy sidewalk.
A black Lincoln Town Car slowed as it passed by him and a window lowered. From the back seat, a grating voice issued. “Herman,” the voice said. “I want to talk to you.”
Herman hesitated, the hair on the back of his neck prickling. He forced himself to smile. “Boss?”
“Get in, Herman.”
Herman shrugged and opened the door and slid into the back seat. The door closed and the limousine pulled away from the curb. Inside the car sat the man Herman had referred to as “Boss.” Next to him sat the driver, a big guy named Tony, plus another man who did not turn around or even move but who Herman recognized with a jolt of sudden fear. In the back seat, smiling at some secret joke, moving his head to music that only he could hear, staring straight ahead, sat a man whose real name was unknown but who was called “Bose”, because his deep voice had reminded the Boss once of the sounds issuing from a stereo speaker.
They traveled for about a mile with the Boss frowning out the window, then he turned to Herman with sad, hooded eyes and shook his head sorrowfully, saying nothing.
Herman stared at him. “Boss?” he said uncertainly.
The Boss drew a deep, resigned sigh. “Herman. Why do you have to be so stupid?”
Herman drew himself up, offended.
“You’ve been warned, Herman. You’re not operating alone any more. You’re part of an organization. You show initiative, that’s fine. But initiative is supposed to contribute to the good of the organization. Simply put, Herman, you do a job and the organization doesn’t get its cut, you become a liability that the organization can no longer afford.”
Herman looked at him, at his set expression and empty eyes, and knew sudden fear. He turned to the man sitting next to the driver. “What’s he mean?” he whispered.
The man said nothing. He gave a tiny, disgusted snort and shook his head.
“No! You gotta help me!”
Bose turned toward Herman, holding a gun. The black opening at the end of the silencer on the barrel seemed to stare at Herman like an accusing eye. The gun went off with a soft pop. A tiny gout of flame came from the muzzle, and Herman felt something cold spread out from the center of his chest. He looked once at the little dribble of red leaking down the front of his jacket, then his eyes glazed over and the world faded. The last thing he heard before death took him was Bose’ deep, beautiful voice saying, “Goodbye, Herman.
Chapter 7
It snowed again on the night before Christmas, covering the potholes and piles of garbage with a soft, white blanket. The sounds of bells ringing and people singing Christmas carols drifted through the air, and the city— or at least the section of it that was Lew Barent’s main concern—seemed to have grown curiously and unusually calm.
Barent spent most of the week following Sharon Lee’s murder on routine matters. In the mornings he sat behind his old wooden desk and did paperwork. On Tuesday afternoon and again on Thursday he went to court to testify in a case involving a prostitute who had stabbed her pimp. The case was unusual in that the girl was an undergraduate at N.Y.U. with no prior record who claimed to be putting herself through college on the proceeds.
“Men?” she sniffed at one point. “I don’t have a very high opinion of men, thank you, but I didn’t stab him because I hate men. I stabbed him because he beat me. He deserved it and I don’t regret it one single bit.”
She was blonde, freckled, pretty and demure and the jury seemed inclined to believe her. So did Barent.
On Wednesday morning Barent reviewed a report on the current activities of Bill Mose, who had done nothing at all out of the ordinary for a schizophrenic—which is to say, he had done nothing at all except eat, sleep, smoke cigarettes, stare at the T.V., go to ‘occupational therapy’ (which meant pasting paper and sticks of wood together with glue in a futile attempt to make ‘art’) and wander around the Unit.
On Friday morning he received a call from Harry Moran. “Lew?”
Barent breathed a sigh. It had been, he thought fleetingly, much too good to last. “What’s up, Harry?”
“I’m down by the Hudson, opposite 23rd Street.” Moran’s voice stopped.
“Yes?” Barent prompted. “You were saying?”
“Oh, sorry. One of the blues was telling me something. It’s a body in a trash bin. Hard to say how long he’s been in there but long enough to be frozen stiff. Shot once in the chest.”
Barent looked at the diminished pile of papers on his desk and sadly shook his head. “I’ll be right there,” he said.
Bill Mose was off his feed. Usually a careful and meticulous eater, he seemed to have lost his appetite. The uncomfortable feeling in his abdomen had grown over the days to a constant, throbbing pain. He looked at his food and felt nauseous. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead. When he sat up suddenly, a wave of dizziness washed over him.
