John Abbott - Scimitar

“... the coincidence and all,” Hawkins was saying.

“It’s no coincidence, Hawk,” Gibson said.

He pronounced it coincidence, the way people from the South pronounced um brella or po lice. Santorini figured he hadn’t been up North too long. Either that or he’d picked up his speech patterns from a mother who’d been born in Mississippi or Georgia.

“I hate these buildings got no elevators,” Hawkins said.

“No doorman, either,” Gibson said.

“No doorman, she gets a coupl’a bullets in the head,” Hawkins said.

Santorini wished he had a nickel for all the homicide victims he’d seen who had doormen and a couple of bullets in the head. They were on the fourth floor now. One more to go. They turned and walked across the landing to the next flight of stairs. As they began climbing again, he could see a pair of blue uniformed trouser legs at the top of the stairwell. Puffing, he followed the two detectives onto the landing. The uniformed cop was standing outside the door to apartment 5A. The A, some kind of metallic shit that wasn’t real brass, hung crookedly from one screw.

“How you doing?” Hawkins said to the cop outside the door.

“Okay,” he answered.

“Everybody still here?”

“Yes, sir. Except the M.E., he just left.”

“They didn’t take away the stiff, did they?”

“No, sir. Lieutenant gave strict orders Homicide had to see it first.”

“Well, this here’s Detective Santorini from Homicide, we’re gonna go in now, show him the body.”

“Yes, sir.”

Santorini wondered what all the fuckin’ fuss was about. Dragging him all the way down here to look at some dame got shot in the head ’cause she didn’t have a doorman? Why couldn’t he have viewed the corpse at the morgue? A stiff was a stiff no matter where or how you looked at it. They went into the apartment. At least it smelled better than the morgue. Big burly guy in a grey tropical suit and wearing a greyish straw fedora came over with his hand extended.

“Lieutenant Costanza,” he said, “we got something good for you.”

“I wonder what it could be,” Santorini said, thinking he was making a joke about calling Homicide in to see yet another dead body. But everybody here was looking so serious and solemn, like they just found the latest victim of Buffalo Bill; the trouble with too many cops nowadays was they saw too many fuckin’ movies.

“Over here,” the lieutenant said.

The dead woman was surrounded by what had to be a dozen cats, all of them looking confused. One of them, a white cat with yellow eyes, was sitting closest to the woman and meowing incessantly.

“Goddamn cats,” the lieutenant said.

The woman herself was half-seated, half-lying on a sofa with floral-patterned slip covers. There were two overlapping bullet holes between her eyes. The slugs had torn out the back of her skull and splashed the wall behind her with blood the color of the slipcover flowers. Her hair was clipped short, a sort of reddish color, but not as bright as the blood. She was wearing a grey sweater. The M.E. must’ve unbuttoned it a bit to slip his stethoscope onto her chest; she had good firm breasts. Santorini figured she was fifty, fifty-five years old, a woman who might have been good-looking when she was younger. There were cat hairs all over the grey sweater.

“Her name’s Angela Cartwright,” Hawkins said. “We found a passport with her name and picture in it.”

“A British subject,” Gibson said.

So that’s the coincidence, Santorini thought. Two fuckin’ Brits get killed in the same week, right away they run to Homicide.

“You know...” he started to say.

“M.E. noticed this while he was examining her,” Costanza said, and unbuttoned the dead woman’s sweater to reveal her white brassiere. Gently, almost tenderly, he eased her left breast out of its restraining cup. Just beneath the nipple, Santorini saw:

“We figured it tied in with the one in your alert,” Costanza said. “Two Brits, both of them with swords tattooed on their chests.”

“Guy kills ’em and tattoos ’em,” Hawkins said, and shrugged at the simplicity of it all.

Santorini knew this wasn’t the case; the coroner’s report had indicated that the tattoo on the last victim had not been a fresh one at all.

“Anyway,” Costanza said, “we figured we’d turn it over to you right away.”

Terrific, Santorini thought. Now I’ll get to talk to that dumb fuck at the Consulate again.

Arthur Scopes had chosen the venue himself; his private office at SeaCoast Limited had been swept for listening devices and further equipped with a babbler to confound long-distance ears. On the telephone, he told Sonny that he knew the place was completely sanitary. The words private office conjured for Sonny a wood-paneled area offering both space and solitude, with windows overlooking on one side Seventy-second Street and on the other Columbus Avenue. But as the ancient elevator in the soot-stained building creaked and whined its way up to the third floor, he began to realize that his expectations may have been a trifle ambitious.

SeaCoast was at the end of a narrow hallway that contained two other offices, one an accountant’s, the other a firm that repaired electric shavers. The door to the shaver-repair firm was standing wide open. An electric fan swept back and forth over a counter opposite the entrance, wafting cool air into the hallway as Sonny walked past. At eight-thirty this morning, just before he’d left the hotel, a television forecaster was predicting temperatures in the high nineties.

The words SeaCoast Limited were lettered in black on the upper, frosted-glass panel of the company’s entrance door. Sonny grasped the brass doorknob, turned it, opened the door, and found himself in a smallish room where two people — one an Asian girl, the other a white male — sat at desks with telephone receivers to their ears.

A pair of windows at the far end of the room admitted mid-morning sunlight. The room was noisily air-conditioned by a single window unit in the window on the left, a virtual babbler in itself. The Asian girl was speaking in what Sonny assumed to be Chinese. The white male was saying “... three-ninety-nine a pound for the chicken lobsters, six and a quarter for the jumbos. May I take your order, sir?”

An organizational cover beyond reproach. A legitimate business that could withstand even close scrutiny. Sonny was impressed. The Chinese girl — she was in her twenties, Sonny guessed — finished her conversation, turned from the phone, and asked, “May I help you, sir?” Her speech was entirely accent-free. She was wearing a white blouse and a blue mini-skirt that rode high on her upper thighs. Sandals with white leather thongs. Good Chinese-girl legs. Long black hair fastened with a blue plastic barrette. Sonny had recently read that Chinese women were undergoing cosmetic surgery to remove the folds in their eyelids and make their eyes look rounder. He figured the women in China were going crazy.

“I have an appointment with Martin Hackett,” he said.

His everyday cover name.

“And your name, sir?”

“Scott Hamilton.”

“One moment, please.”

She rose in a single fluid motion, smiled briefly, and went to a closed door Sonny assumed was Hackett’s private office. She knocked...

“Yes, come in.”

... opened the door, entered, and closed it behind her. Sonny waited. The white male on the phone was still giving prices to whoever was on the other end of the line. He did not so much as glance at Sonny. The Asian girl came out, said, “Mr. Hackett will see you now,” and stood aside for him to enter.