3
It felt like butter.
Lois Banner stood in front of the bolt of rich fabric and again ran her fingertips over it along the barely discernible warp of the material that was so incredibly soft despite its high wool content. It was dark gray, with a faint black splatter pattern, and would be perfect for some of the fall lines she’d seen at last week’s fashion show. Evening in Paris was the name the supplier had affixed to the material, and Lois thought they had it right. That was what the soft fabric reminded her of, her earlier, not-so-innocent years in the city that lent itself to sin.
Lois herself was a former fashion model, almost forty now, and twenty pounds beyond her working weight. But she would still look good in some of the clothes due in the shops next season. In fact, she would look fantastic. Her features were still sharp, her eyes a brilliant blue, and her dark hair was skinned back to emphasize prominent cheekbones that looked like swept back airplane wings. As a model she’d been considered exotic. She was still that, if she dressed for it. Which happened less and less often.
Lois preferred to spend time tracking fashions and buying the wonderful fabrics that her customers, gained from longtime business contacts, would purchase wholesale to make the most of what was new. And always, in the world of fashion, something-the most important thing-was new.
The main office of Fabrics by Lois was on Seventh Avenue. This fabric warehouse and showroom was on West Forty-sixth Street, in the loft of a building that housed offices below. Though most of the bolts of fabric were stored vertically to maximize space, at five feet, ten inches, Lois was the tallest thing in the unbroken area with its vast plank floor. It was evening and dark outside. The Forty-sixth Street end of the loft was shadowed but for dappled light that filtered through unwashed windows and skylights. The rest of the area was dimly illuminated by original brass fixtures suspended on chains from the high ceiling. Lois would not abide florescent lighting-the cruel tricks it played on colors!
She was dressed simply and casually in black slacks and blouse this evening, and wore white Nikes, no socks. On Lois, the outfit looked even more expensive than it was.
A breeze played across her bare ankles, as if a door had opened. But the loft was accessible by elevator. The only door was to the fire stairs that ran down the south side of the building.
The subtle change of temperature jogged Lois’ memory. She glanced at her Patek Philippe watch, a gift from a long-ago admirer. Almost eight o’clock, and she was due to meet a buyer for drinks at nine. She barely had time to get to her apartment, shower, and change clothes.
Time to lock up. But she couldn’t resist running her fingertips one more time over Evening in Paris.
A slight noise made her glance to her left.
She gave a sharp intake of breath. A shadowy figure stood silently among the tall fabric bolts. Almost like someone standing watching in a corn field. The bucolic image surprised Lois and, through her fear, unpleasantly reminded her of her childhood in Ohio. She belonged here! In New York or Paris or Berlin. She was no longer the early version, the early Lois Banion, who was no more.
“Who-” she began in a strangled voice.
The figure, a man, stepped forward, and she could see in his right hand a bulky object which she recognized as a gun with a silencer attached to its barrel.
Lois forced herself to speak. “If you want money, there isn’t any here.”
The man said something she didn’t understand.
“What?”
“Justice,” he said softly, and raised the gun as if to point it at her like an accusing finger.
“My God,” she said in a small girl’s voice, “what have I done?” What haven’t I done?
Oh, Jesus, what haven’t I done?
The gun jumped in the man’s hand, and she felt a fire and then a numbness in her chest, and she was on the floor. Terrified, she tried to get up and found herself entangled in fabric. Tried to get up. Tried not to die. Tried to get up.
The light was fading. She was staring up at one of the dangling brass fixtures, and it was like a distant star, moving even farther away.
There was no pain, she realized. Incredible! No pain! For that, at least, she was grateful.
If there’s no pain, why should there be fear?
Evening in Paris enfolded and embraced her like a warm, welcoming shroud.
4
To his friends and enemies, Artemis Beam was simply “Beam.” Ella, the waitress at the Chow Down Diner on Amsterdam Avenue, thought of him as “Over hard.” The way he liked his eggs. The way she figured he was.
Beam sat in his usual booth near the window, where he could look out on the street over coffee and his folded Times, at people who had places to go in a hurry. He had no particular place to go, but he thought that if need be, he could still get somewhere in a hurry. Though he walked with a long, limping lope, the truth was that the leg didn’t hurt much anymore, and he was still in pretty good shape and could move fast.
Another truth was that Beam hadn’t been eased out of the NYPD four months ago only because of the gunshot wound. Politics had been involved. Beam had never been in his element within a bureaucracy-which the NYPD was-and had stepped on the wrong toes.
The resultant trouble had been all right with Beam, except that his job was at least partly the cause of his wife Lani’s bouts of depression. Almost a year had passed since Lani’s death leap from the apartment balcony near Lincoln Center.
Beam was still grieving for his wife, still trying to come to terms with the hard fact that she was actually gone, that the dark winds of her tortured mind had finally claimed her, and that in part it had been his fault. Because of who he was, because of not quitting the department sooner, because of all the things he hadn’t done and all the words he hadn’t spoken and she would now never hear. She had left him behind in a cold world that denied him peace and comfort.
Still feeling the effects of the Ambien he’d taken last night to get to sleep, he sipped his coffee and gazed out at the crowded sidewalks and stalled morning traffic on Amsterdam Avenue.
New York. His city, like clustered Towers of Babble, that he used to protect, that he still loved. Where he was born to a Jewish father and Irish mother, and, with Cassie, raised on the Lower East Side. His father, who’d been a cop.
The city still needed protection, needed to be set right again and again because that was its raucous, rowdy, and sometimes deadly nature.
The hell with it! Not his problem anymore.
Beam was getting accustomed to not thinking about his past, but it still scared the hell out of him to contemplate his future. His future alone.
He still didn’t mind stepping on toes. And he didn’t feel like being involved again with the NYPD.
He knew Andy da Vinci was going to ask him to do both those things.
Beam’s eyes narrowed at the invasive morning light beyond the window. There was da Vinci, picking his way like a nifty broken-field runner through the stalled traffic before the signal at the intersection changed, engines roared, horns blared, and he might be run down and over and dragged. He was grinning, obviously relishing the challenge.
Dumb! Beam thought, but he liked da Vinci. It was just that needlessly risking a life wasn’t Beam’s game.
“Topper?”
Ella was standing next to his booth, holding the round glass coffee pot, staring down at him with a questioning look on her long, bovine features.
