Stuart Kaminsky - Deluge

Flack sat patiently, sympathetically across from Gladys Mycrant in her apartment. He had taken off his raincoat. She had hung it on a hanger in the bathroom after shaking it out.

He had his notebook and a pen in his lap. Until recently, members of the New York Police Department took notes in pencil. Pencil notes could be erased, altered. The district attorney's office did not like pencil notes.

Flack felt himself wince. Two, three, five times a day a shock of pain shot through him and he had to resist putting his hand to his chest to reassure himself that he wasn't bleeding, that his heart wasn't exposed and beating madly.

He had pills in his pocket, pills for the pain. He took them as seldom as possible. They dulled not only the pain but his senses.

Mac had saved his life in the rubble of a bombed-out office building in which they had been trapped. Flack had come very close to death. Sometimes he felt that life had not fully returned.

Gladys offered coffee. He had accepted both because he could use a cup of coffee and because it created a slightly less clinical atmosphere. The coffee was instant, not very hot, served in delicate, ornate, too small china cups. Flack usually took his coffee black. This time he took it with milk and sugar.

"She got a phone call, Patricia did," she said.

Gladys was sixty-eight, thin, wearing a robe that might have been authentic Chinese silk. Her hair was pulled back and her face made up. She was a professionally handsome woman. She was also remarkably calm for someone who had just been informed that her daughter had been murdered on the roof.

"Who called?" Flack asked.

"Don't know," she said, starting to lift her cup of coffee and changing her mind.

"The call came on that phone?" Flack asked, looking at the phone on the table between them.

"Yes."

"What did she say when she got the call?"

"She said she'd be right back, but she was wrong, wasn't she?"

"Yes," said Flack.

"She knew it was raining but she went out without an umbrella. She looked angry and frightened and in a hurry."

"You have any idea of who might want to hurt her?"

Gladys Mycrant smiled and shook her head.

"I can't think of a single person who would want to hurt Patricia."

"Anyone she's had an argument with? Boyfriend?"

"No boyfriend," said Gladys. "Not Patricia."

"Who were her friends?"

"None."

"None?"

"She was a lonely, bitter woman," said Gladys.

"Bitter?"

"Unlucky in love many years ago, more than once."

"Any names?"

"Lost in antiquity, Detective. Another lifetime. A decade ago."

Flack forced himself to drink some coffee. Maybe he and Mac could pick up a real cup in the deli downstairs.

"Did she have a job?"

"My daughter managed this building and the one right next door."

"Who owns the buildings?"

"I do. I should have offered you some Rugers. I'm fond of them but I ration my allotment. The carbs."

"Yes," said Flack.

"I own the buildings but I also work," she said. "Sales at Found Again on Ninth Avenue, the charity resale shop. We deal only in donated items from celebrities. People vie to give their clothes and costume jewelry to us, and customers love the idea of wearing a skirt that was recently worn by Britney Spears or a pair of Antonio Banderas's discarded shoes."

"Sounds interesting," said Flack.

"Fascinating," said Gladys with a sad smile. "This gown I'm wearing belonged to Cher."

"You don't seem…?"

"Devastated by the gruesome murder of my daughter? We all suffer in different ways. I've learned to suffer in increments, not explosions, to expect disappointment. I'll grieve in my own way and not the way the world expects me to. Does that answer your question?"

"It does," said Flack. "Anything else you can think of that might help?"

"No, but I'm sure you will give me a card with your name and phone number on it should something come to me."

"I will," he said. "May I look at your daughter's room?"

"You may not," she said.

He put away his notebook. "You have some reason?"

"I need none. My daughter just died. I dislike the image of you rustling around through her underclothes, her privacy."

"I can get a search warrant," he said gently. "This is a murder investigation."

"I'm sure you can and will, but on this issue you will not have my cooperation."

"There may be something in her room that can lead us to whoever killed her," Flack pressed. "The faster we move, the more likely we are to find him."

"Or her," Gladys Mycrant added. "Your plea would suggest that I have a vested interest in finding out who murdered my daughter. I have none. She is dead and not returning. Punishing the guilty party strikes me as irrelevant. It is your concern and business, not mine."

Flack knew that by the time he got a warrant, Gladys would be able to hide or dispose of anything in her daughter's room or the apartment that she didn't want the police to see. It wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with the murder, but it might.

"If the rain lets up, I'll be going to work this afternoon," she said, rising from her seat along with Flack. "It will take my mind off of what has happened. Good-bye, Detective."

"I'm very sorry for your loss," he said, moving to the door.

"Why?" she asked. "You barely know me and you did not know Patricia."

"I'm sorry for anyone who loses a child," he said.

"Patricia was forty-six years old, hardly a child."

Flack gave up. He had been doing interviews of suspects, victims and their families for more than ten years. He had met crazies who would confess to anything, killers who were sure they could get around the evidence, religious fanatics who didn't know the difference between real and unreal, but he had never met anyone like Gladys Mycrant. All he could be sure of about her was that she was both lying and hiding something. He wanted to find out what her secrets were. Those secrets might lead to a murderer.

Flack went to find Mac. Before calling to arrange for a search warrant, he was determined to have a real cup of coffee and maybe, just maybe, one of the pills in his pocket.

Earlier that morning, before his execution of Patricia Mycrant, the limping man paused in the hall-way of an office building twenty-one blocks away. He had pulled the waterproof hood of his raincoat back so he could drink the tall Starbucks coffee he had purchased minutes before. The latex gloves made it slightly awkward, but only slightly.

The rain, deep, dark, protective, beat noisily, a dull tom-tom beat, a million drums, relentlessly uncaring, which was just what he wanted, why he had chosen this day, why he now stood in the hallway outside of Strutts, McClean & Berg on the eighth floor of the Stanwick Oil Building.

The limping man hadn't needed to follow James Feldt. He knew where Feldt would be. He was certain that Feldt would not be stopped by the rain. He knew enough about the man to know that staying in his studio apartment alone for even one full day would be intolerable. The limping man had counted on it.

James Feldt had no friends. His relatives had little to do with him and what contact they had was by snail mail, never face-to-face. James Feldt was fifty-two, pink baby face; luxuriant, fine, short white hair neatly combed at all times. The limping man had never seen James Feldt when he wasn't wearing a suit, and Feldt seemed to have an endless supply of suits, or at least sartorial variations.

Feldt wore granny glasses and thought he looked like John Lennon, which he decidedly did not.

James Feldt was an auditor, a good one judging by the number of clients he had throughout Manhattan. All of his work came by way of referrals. Most of his income was spent on books he kept in shelves in his apartment. Hundreds of books. Classics, ancient, old and modern. The books were all purchased used so they would look as if he had read them. He had not. James Feldt spent his free time on the Internet, in therapy sessions and working. His solace, his meditation was in numbers, not words. He clung to his laptop like a novitiate might cling to his Bible.