John Lutz - Serial

“They were career women,” Mishkin said. “A dancer and a designer.”

“Wannabe dancer.”

“Same thing. Just a matter of timing.” Harold the optimist.

“Everybody’s got a career, Harold. Even if they just call them jobs.”

“I mean more than a job, Sal. More like a calling. That’s why both victims led such busy lives.”

Sal shoved his way out of Nora N.’s storage room. Or oversized closet. He wasn’t sure what to call it. Whatever, it was sure full of lint. He sneezed as he entered the other bedroom, where Mishkin toiled.

“God bless,” Mishkin said. He was holding up a black thong. “This isn’t part of a swimming suit, Sal. It’s too fragile.”

“Those thong things are popular as underwear, too, Harold. Which is what that one is. Probably most women under seventy have got at least one in their wardrobe.”

“How do you know that, Sal?”

“I just do. Like I know red buttons often turn things on.”

Mishkin found something else interesting in Nora’s dresser drawer. “What are these things that look like halves of hollowed-out cantaloupes with foam in them.”

“That’s a bra, Harold. It’s used when women wear a gown that doesn’t have straps.”

Mishkin held the attached shallow foam cups out at arm’s length and studied them. “They don’t look as if they’d support anything.”

“They do, though, Harold. And they make it possible to have bare chest, back, and shoulders above the dress without a brassiere strap showing.”

“Got it,” Mishkin said. “They work on the principle of the cantilever. Like those houses on the hills in California, where half the place hangs out over a long drop to the valley below.”

“Harold.”

“Yeah?”

“Put the damned thing back in the drawer and let’s get out of here.”

Mishkin did that, and was shutting the drawer when he noticed something on the floor. A slip of lined paper that looked as if it had been torn from a small spiral notebook. He picked it up and looked at it.

“Here’s something, Sal. It must have dropped on the floor when I was pulling stuff from the drawers. There’s writing on it. A man’s name and a phone number.” He beamed at Vitali. “I think it was in the same drawer as the thong and cantilever bra. Maybe we got something big here, Sal.”

“If he isn’t an insurance salesman or plumber,” Vitali said.

He liked to keep Mishkin’s expectations low. Harold could be crushed and depressed for days when something this promising didn’t pan out. A real pain in the ass, given to brooding.

Vitali slipped the folded piece of paper into his shirt pocket so Mishkin wouldn’t think too much about it.

Things had changed. Candice Culligan could afford to take a cab home from the office now. She’d recently been made a managing partner in Kraft, Holmes, and Deloitte, a law firm specializing in corporate research and litigation.

Candice (never Candy) might look like a showgirl, with her tall frame and hourglass figure, not to mention generous lips that looked like but weren’t the product of collagen. Her long hair was lush and red, her eyes large and blue. And there was something in those eyes that kept people at bay, especially all but the most adventurous men on the make. Like there was a certain pride in her chin-up, long-strided walk. But Candice wasn’t only for show, despite the fact that she was a show wherever she went. Candice was smart.

It hadn’t taken Marty Deloitte long to figure out how smart, because Marty was no dummy himself. Soon after Candice joined the firm four years ago, Marty had made her his protege. Both of them ignored the snickers. Marty, sixtyish and too bowlegged even to look good in his four-thousand-dollar suits, was happily married and had four teenage sons who were constantly in trouble because he ignored them so he could work long hours. Margie, his wife, didn’t question or complain about his dedication to his work. Not even after she’d met Candice. It wasn’t so much that Margie was trusting (though she was). Their rambunctious sons kept her busy visiting neighbors, schools, and sometimes police precinct houses and courtrooms, setting things in order to shrink the fines and prevent incarcerations. She didn’t have time to worry about whether Marty was screwing somebody else. If he was, she’d eventually find out, and then she’d castrate him.

Kraft, Holmes, and Deloitte was one of the most successful and wealthy firms in the city. They could afford to pay well, and they did. They could also be slave drivers, mercilessly pushing their employees for more and more billable hours. Within a month at the firm, Candice had gotten sick of the term billable hours.

As a managing partner, Candice was now beyond all that. She’d gotten the commensurate big raise and bonus. And the caseload. She’d usually worked her cases with Marty Deloitte at her side, sometimes proffering his advice. And the right cases, like that well-publicized child-abuse custody battle, had come her way. Everything had broken just right for her.

She’d recently moved into a new condo in SoHo. Also, she’d begun dating Riley Carter. He was single, handsome, and the co-producer of the new cable TV quiz show Fingers and Toes. The idea was that contestants had to type their answers, and each time they were wrong one of their fingers was taped to the finger next to it. This impeded their typing, so those with the most wrong answers wound up slapping at the typewriter with what might as well have been mittens, which allowed slower-thinking contestants to catch up. That made for some tight contests. Toes had nothing to do with anything except, as the unctuous host endlessly proclaimed, making it easier to count your winnings. Candice thought the whole thing was stupid and unwatchable, but she never told Riley. Why should she? Fingers and Toes was one of the highest-rated shows on cable television.

Her cab zoomed and veered and did everything but fly as it made its seemingly reckless way down Broadway toward her new condo. Confident that there would be no collision, that she was lucky in all things, Candice leaned her head against the cab’s seat back and smiled.

Half a block away from her condo, the rush-hour traffic finally clogged the avenues and came to a stop. Or maybe there was an accident or construction up ahead. Her cabbie, a young guy with a beard and turban, twitched behind the steering wheel and drummed his palms on the dashboard, impatient to fly some more. Candy knew exactly how he felt. She used to feel that way when things weren’t moving fast enough for her.

When vehicles had finished inching up on one another, getting as close as possible to gain precious pavement, it was obvious that traffic wasn’t going to move. Not for a while, anyway.

Candice paid her cabbie, tipping generously, and climbed out of the cab. Walking would get her home faster than staying in the vehicle. Other taxi passengers were following the same plan. They were familiar with traffic this time of evening. The subways would be packed, too. And it wasn’t a bad evening for walking, even if still on the warm side. People emerged from at least half a dozen cabs lining Broadway and joined the throngs on the sidewalks. The forward motion, at last, was exhilarating.

Along the avenue Candice strode, now and then catching a glimpse of herself reflected in a show window. She couldn’t help but smile wider at the woman smiling back at her. She had a great job, an interesting love life, a new condo unit that was everything she’d dreamed it to be, plenty of money. And a future almost too brilliant to comprehend.

Candice understood and fully appreciated her luck. She had everything she could possibly want, and in the greatest city in the world.