John Lutz - Serial

“Pot roast,” her mother said. “You know how, when you too seldom visit here at the nursing home-”

“Assisted living.”

“-you coordinate it with pot-roast night? Well, many others have and do and would like to continue. Traditions are much underrated and important, even life-sustaining, like in that song in Fiddler on the Roof… ”

“What’s happened, Mom?”

“Pot-roast night. They have moved pot-roast night.”

Pearl was bewildered. “Can’t you… adjust?”

“They have moved it from Tuesday evening to Thursday evening. People like yourself come to visit on pot-roast night because-and here you will agree-the pot roast is the only digestible food they serve. And to make things worse, not in the gastronomical sense, Thursday evening is SKIP-BO night. The choice for the inmates-”

“Residents.”

“-will be either conversation with their visitors, or SKIP-BO. ”

SKIP-BO was a card game Pearl didn’t understand and didn’t want to learn. Or talk about. “Damn it!” Pearl said.

“Don’t curse, dear.”

“My phone’s blinking, Mom. Battery’s going dead. I forgot to charge it last night.”

“A string tied around the finger…”

Pearl held the phone well away from her.

“… not so tight as to leave an unattractive indentation in the skin…”

“Fading and breaking up,” Pearl said.

Pearl snapped her phone closed, breaking the connection.

“Quinn says hello,” she murmured, and finished her coffee before it was too cool to drink.

Quinn was seated behind his desk, clearing away yesterday’s mail, when Pearl walked into the Quinn and Associates office on West Seventy-ninth Street. The office was still warm, even though the air conditioner had been running awhile. There was a trickle of rust-stained condensation zigzagging down the wall beneath the window housing the unit. Pearl was wearing the expression she usually wore after a phone conversation with her mother. Quinn could understand Pearl’s aggravation, but he rather liked her mother.

Sal Vitali and Harold Mishkin were already there. Vitali was seated at his desk, making a tent with his fingers. Mishkin was standing over by the coffee machine, gazing down at it with his fists propped on his hips, as if to hurry it along. Vitali was short but with a bearlike build, swarthy complexion, and thick black hair going gray. He had a voice like a chain saw.

“Harold brought doughnuts,” he grated.

Over by Mr. Coffee, Mishkin smiled and nodded. He was slight, and with the beginning of a stoop. His brown hair was thinning and arranged in a comb-over, his chin receded beneath a narrow mouth and enormously bushy graying mustache. Mishkin was everybody’s idea of a milquetoast. Everybody would be mostly right, except for when Mishkin knew he had to do something extremely difficult. Then, hands quaking, mustache twitching, stomach knotting, Mishkin would do it. “True courage,” Vitali often growled, defending his longtime partner.

“I’m coming from a big breakfast,” Pearl said. “You’ve gotta let us know the day before if you’re gonna bring doughnuts, Harold.”

“They’re the kind you like,” Mishkin said. “Cream-filled with chocolate icing.”

“You trying to talk me into one to soothe your conscience, Harold?”

“You read too much into it, Pearl,” Vitali said. “He’s just trying to make you fatter.”

Pearl picked up a silver letter opener and held it so morning sunlight glinted into Mishkin’s sensitive eyes. Mishkin took off his glasses and turned away.

“He’s being nice to you, Pearl,” Vitali growled. “He figures you can eat breakfast and have a doughnut for dessert. It’s not against the law.”

“If I wanted a doughnut-”

“For God’s sake!” Quinn said, thinking it was amazing how Pearl could walk into a room and change the mood, even the temperature. “Has anybody looked up the killer in the phone book?”

Vitali appeared surprised. “Huh?”

“Philip Wharkin. The guy who wrote on the victim’s mirror with her blood.”

“We don’t know he’s the killer,” Pearl pointed out.

“Do we know he isn’t? Do we know he’s not some psycho with an irresistible urge to leave his name at murder scenes?”

“I guess not,” Mishkin said, and sampled his coffee. He made a face as if it was too hot.

“Then let’s find out. I know it’s unlikely somebody named Philip Wharkin is actually the killer, but there’s some reason that the killer left a name behind, even if it’s only so we waste our time. Only it’s not a waste of time.” He walked over and stood in front of his desk, facing everyone but Mishkin, who was off to the side. “Sal, you and Harold find all the Philip Wharkins in the New York-area directories. Talk to them and find out where they were when Millie Graff’s murder was committed. Pearl will use the computer to help you locate them. For all we know, the killer’s got a website where he brags about what he’s done. When Fedderman comes in, he and I are gonna drive over to Millie’s neighborhood and interview anybody who might have seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelled anything that might possibly be connected with what happened to the victim.”

Vitali stood up and began stuffing pens and papers into his pockets. Mishkin worked a plastic lid onto his coffee cup so he could take it with him. Pearl was sliding into her desk chair, ready to boot up her computer.

Quinn and Associates’ office was set up a lot like a precinct squad room, a large space without dividers between the desks. Everybody working for the agency was a former NYPD detective, so they felt right at home and fell to work immediately when they were given assignments. Old habits died hard, especially if they were perpetuated by Quinn.

Quinn, Pearl, and Fedderman had always been in one of those thorny relationships where they regularly inflicted minor pain on each other. When things went too far, Quinn usually played the role of peacekeeper. He didn’t mind. The verbal jousting between Pearl and Fedderman kept them sharp and contributed to their efficiency. The funny thing was, since Vitali and Mishkin had joined the team, they’d fallen into the same kind of verbal bickering with the others, but not so much with each other. As they had in the NYPD, they acted as a team, with Vitali sometimes protective of the sensitive Mishkin. Whatever acidic chemistry existed at Quinn and Associates, it worked. It seethed and bubbled sometimes, but it worked.

Quinn glanced over at Pearl. She was intently tracing her computer’s mouse over its pad, staring at the monitor almost in a trance. A new day. Time to get busy. Morning, murder, and marching orders from Quinn. Another day on the hunt. Despite the fact that she and Quinn were once contentious lovers, Pearl responded exactly like the others.

Argumentative though she might be, in ways that were essential, she could become an efficient, integral part of an investigative team, responding to orders instantly and without question. Pearl could be counted on.

The door opened and Larry Fedderman came shambling in. There were spots and crumbs all over his dark tie, and he was gripping a grease-stained white paper sack.

“I got us some doughnuts,” he said.

Pearl glared at him. “Take your doughnuts and-”

Quinn stepped in front of her and showed her the palm of his hand, like a traffic cop signaling stop. She did stop, in midsentence.

Quinn walked over to where Fedderman stood by the door. Fedderman, looking bemused, clutching his perpetually wrinkled brown suit coat wadded in his right hand. There were crescents of perspiration stains beneath his arms.

“Let’s go, Feds,” Quinn said. “We’re gonna drive over to where Millie Graff was killed, find out if any of her neighbors remembered anything important, now that they’ve slept on it.”