John Lutz - Urge to Kill

“Anxious,” Fedderman said again.

She looked at him, defeated. “Anxious,” she conceded.

Feds had worn her down.

Pearl showed a thin smile when the widow wasn’t looking.

Elated.

Interesting.

Jerry Dunn remembered a time in London when he’d sat in his hotel room awaiting the arrival of a prostitute. It had felt something like this.

It wasn’t morning then, as it was now. And he’d been sitting on the bed then, not in a chair as now. The chair was armless and uncomfortable, before a low wooden desk on which was a phone and a gold-embossed leather folder stuffed with flyers explaining the amenities at the Mayerling Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

The Mayerling was almost plush enough to be called luxurious, with a vast blue-carpeted lobby and marbled steps leading to a long registration desk. Arranged about the lobby were half a dozen conversation groupings of high-quality cracked leather chairs and heavily grained wooden tables. The main elevators were almost invisible in a decorative wall of polished oak and veined marble. Beyond an array of potted plants was a discreet entrance to a lounge. Jerry had noted that the lounge also had a street door, so that you could enter or leave it without passing through the lobby. That was an important fact that Jerry logged in his memory.

Jerry had a good memory. A good mind. And he was damned good at writing advertising copy. He knew he looked like an average kind of guy-mid-forties, dark hair just beginning to thin, pleasant features, nice smile. Always up, was Jerry, at least on the outside. If they were casting him for movies he’d never be the leading man. He’d get the roles Tony Randall used to get, or Gig Young. Clean-cut, handsome guys, but not quite leading men. That was how Jerry figured people saw him, not quite ready for stardom, ever.

He glanced at his gold Rolex watch. It was an imitation Rolex with a quartz movement inside a gold-plated case. It didn’t cost as much as a real Rolex, of course, but unless you examined it carefully it could pass for the real thing.

The real thing.

Is that was this is about? What I have to find out? Am I the real thing?

It was amazing. The heightening anticipation was almost the same as with the London prostitute. Heather had been her name. The name she’d used, anyway. She’d looked something like Sami, Jerry’s wife. That had put Jerry off at first, but only at first.

He gazed out at the morning sunlight blasting through between the tall buildings across the street and making his eyes ache. It was still early. Sami would be back from driving the kids to school. Or maybe not. She might have stopped off somewhere, to pick up some groceries, or maybe to have a coffee at Starbucks with her friend Joan. Sami of suburbia.

Jerry made a soft, snorting sound. He shouldn’t feel that way, he knew. He should like their life out in the burbs. He did like it. And where else were you going to raise kids? Not in this shitpot city. The things that happened here…

He laughed nervously. You should talk.

The room was cool enough, but he realized he was perspiring.

Damn that sun! They oughta tint those windows.

He stood up, walked over, and closed the heavy drapes just enough to block the direct light. Then he sat down again at the desk and thought about Sami, putting her in Starbucks, seated at a table sipping a mocha latte, a medium one, or whatever Starbucks was calling medium these days. Maybe leisurely leafing through a newspaper, browsing for sales.

She thought he was at an advertising convention in Los Angeles. The convenient thing was that there actually was an advertising convention in that city at the time of Jerry’s stay in New York, and his firm of Fleishman and Gilliam was represented. Mathers was there. The Beave would cover for him if Sami did happen to phone L.A. The Beave would tell Sami her husband was on a side trip with some reps, or off to some other place where he couldn’t be reached. Sure, he’d tell Jerry to call her when he saw him. Might not be right away, though, since the convention hotel was overbooked and Jerry was at another hotel a few blocks away.

Jerry smiled. The Beave would think of something, and would know how to elaborate on his lie so it would be believable. Most of the other people from the firm would do the same. The guys, anyway. They were used to covering for ol’ Jer’. They’d figure he was off on another of his sexual escapades and provide a good story for Sami, stay in tight with him. They knew Jerry might be called upon to do the same for them someday. Those advertising conventions were fuck-fests. Some of them, anyway.

He looked again at his watch. It was almost time to leave the hotel.

He began to tremble.

Since he still had a few minutes, he went into the bathroom and emptied his bladder. He should have known better than to drink so much morning coffee.

He zipped up and then washed his hands, looking at his image in the mirror as he dried them. He forced himself to smile and said aloud to his image a line from a song in one of his favorite musicals.

“I believe in you.”

His image tilted up its chin and smiled back.

I believe in you.

When he left the room, the trembling began again.

Pedestrian traffic was heavy and moving fast. Everyone on Manhattan Island seemed to walk fast. It amused Pearl sometimes to think that if everyone just kept walking fast the direction they were going, it wouldn’t take long for all of them to reach the water. Then what would they do? Simply keep going like lemmings and all drown? Or mill about until the mood grew ugly and violence would ensue? The smokers would die first.

Pearl was irritated. Fedderman was supposed to have picked her up this morning in an unmarked and driven her to Quinn’s apartment, where the three of them were to discuss developments and plan the day.

But Fedderman hadn’t shown. Most likely he’d overslept, having drunk himself to sleep last night. Not that Pearl knew or had heard anything about Fedderman being in the bottle, but why wouldn’t he be? Pearl figured that in his place she’d probably become an alky herself, living a solitary life in some ten-by-ten condo in Florida, going outside now and then so the sun could bake your brain.

Different strokes…

She wished she could stroke Fedderman with a baseball bat.

Pearl had taken the subway uptown, and was now walking the remaining few blocks to Quinn’s apartment. It was a hot morning. The sun seemed to burn with an extra fierceness and cast long, stark shadows that emphasized angles. Traffic gleamed like multicolored gems strung along streets. Bagged trash was still piled curbside. Some of the plastic bags had burst or been cut open to get to the contents. New York could smell sweet and rotten on a morning like this.

She was standing with half a dozen other people waiting for a traffic light to change, everyone starting to perspire like her in the building morning heat, when her cell phone played its four solemn notes from the old Dragnet TV show. She fished it from her pocket and answered it a second before checking caller ID to see who was on the other end of the connection.

She was a second too late. She’d expected Quinn, wondering where she was and what was keeping her. Instead she saw letters spelling out Sunset Assisted Living. Pearl’s mother was calling from her modest but specially equipped apartment.

“Milton Kahn says you have something on your neck,” her mother said, without preamble. “Just behind your ear.”

Pearl wasn’t surprised. It was the way her mother often began phone conversations.

“I’ve got Milton Kahn on my back,” Pearl said, about the former lover she was trying to shed.