awaiting his attention.
He stopped drumming his fingers. He'd probably never hear from the new Madeline again.
That, after all, was the whole idea.
He smiled and set to work, determined not to worry about what he couldn't change. He regarded that as another valuable component of his business skill set.
Victor and Gloria entered Victor's Sutton Place apartment at three A.M. They both looked tired and their clothes were rumpled.
As soon as they closed the door, Victor walked to the other side of the tastefully furnished living room and got a bottle of twenty-year-aged scotch from an antique mahogany credenza. He poured about two fingers of the scotch in crystal on-the-rocks glasses, straight up. Gloria had followed him halfway to the credenza. He handed her one of the glasses, and they both raised them in brief and silent toast, then sipped.
Gloria yawned.
Victor felt like yawning but didn't. 'Want to sleep over?'
She shook her head no. 'Things to do tomorrow morning.' She looked down at her gray blouse and black skirt. Then she gave Victor a head-to-toe glance. 'Not a drop of anything on us.'
'Because we're professionals.'
'Thank the good Lord for plastic,' she said, smiling.
Earlier that evening they'd disposed of a male E-Bliss.org client. One of the same-sex clients who comprised a minority but growing part of the company's business.
Because the client was gay, they hadn't followed their usual procedure of luring the man into Gloria's car. Nevertheless, Gloria had been in a position to effect the man's death, and then drive him to the East Side garage where she and Victor did the dissection.
Victor's smile turned nasty, and curious. 'I was surprised when we opened the car's trunk and I saw a broomstick.'
Gloria shrugged. 'We need to stay consistent.'
'I just couldn't see you doing it,' Victor said. 'And to a man. And of course, you didn't wait for me.'
'Since I handled the other preliminaries, I thought I'd handle that one.'
Victor waited for her to say something more, but she didn't.
Instead she tilted back her head and swallowed the rest of her scotch, then began to move idly about, looking at the furniture, the art mounted on the walls.
This wasn't the apartment her brother actually lived in. That apartment, the one the clients saw, was owned by E-Bliss.org. and wasn't nearly so sumptuous-which was why Victor had taken to spending most of his time here, moving in most of his clothes and even his modest library.
Gloria paused near a bookshelf. Something new had been added to Victor's collection of nineteenth-century novels and contemporary mystery fiction and biographies. Two glossy hardcovers. She pulled one out and looked at the cover. ''Vlad the Impaler'?' The other book also appeared to be about the famous fifteenth-century Transylvanian despot who was the inspiration for the book and movie Dracula. Despite myth and movie, there was no proof that he'd actually drunk blood, though, at least not straight from the vein. His twisted pleasure was impaling enemies and sometimes friends on tall stakes. Sometimes by the hundreds or thousands. When one of his minions complained about the stench, the man was himself impaled on a taller than usual stake so he'd be up high where the air was better. Vlad had a sense of humor.
'Most of your biographies are of statesmen, military or literary giants,' Gloria said.
Victor sipped his scotch. He was always a slower drinker than Gloria. 'Vlad's not exactly my hero,' Victor said, 'but he was an interesting man. The more you learn about him, the more impressed you become.'
'If you say so.' Gloria returned the book to the shelf.
'Since we've decided to do this, we might as well learn technique. And we should do it together.'
Gloria stared at him, then walked over and placed her glass on the slate inlay of the credenza. 'We've had a long night. I'm going home, say my prayers, and go to bed.'
'I got a call from Palmer Stone,' Victor said. 'He told me Maria Sanchez called him.'
'Called Palmer?' Gloria looked irritated. 'What the hell for?'
Victor recounted the phone conversation as Palmer Stone had told it to him.
'She should have known better,' Gloria said.
'I wouldn't get too worked up yet. She's probably just nervous. That's what Palmer told her, and my guess is he's right.'
'It didn't sound as if she thought so. Off-the-wall bitch!'
'She'll calm down. We'll probably never hear from her again. She got what she paid for, so she has no complaint.'
'She sure won't have any trouble with Madeline Scott.'
'Since she is Madeline Scott,' Victor said. He finished his scotch, walked across the room, and placed his empty glass on the credenza next to Gloria's. He gave her a nervous grin. 'This really is something, what we've gotten ourselves involved in, sis.'
'Something extremely profitable.' She waved a languid hand. 'Here you are on Sutton Place. La-di-da.'
'You're not living so bad yourself.'
'Let's do what we must to keep it that way.'
'Another scotch?'
Gloria yawned. 'No thanks. I'm tired enough already.' She moved again toward the door, this time with more resolution.
'The broomstick, Gloria.'
She paused with her hand on the knob, posing, he thought. 'What about it?'
'When you inserted it, was he alive?'
'Go to bed, Victor. Read yourself to sleep.'
She slid out the door into the plushly carpeted hall that absorbed the sound of her leaving.
Victor poured another two fingers of scotch into his glass, wondering if he knew Gloria as well as he thought he did.
Or knew himself.
29
'A man,' Quinn said, staring down at the bare torso wedged in with a cluster of black plastic trash bags and cardboard boxes of refuse.
'Obviously,' Pearl said.
It was a warm night, and the cloying stench of corruption hung in the still air. It might simply have been from the garbage, but there was more than garbage before them.
They watched the CSU techs working around the torso inside a taped-off area alongside a pizza joint on the Lower West Side. The partial corpse had been discovered earlier that evening when one of the cooks carried out some garbage from the kitchen. A nearby neon sign advertising the best pizza in New York cast a greenish glare over the scene, making the torso seem more like a stage prop than what was left of a real human being.
'Our guy swings both ways,' Fedderman said, pointing with a long finger protruding from his oversized sleeve. 'Notice the broomstick?'
'Hard not to notice,' Quinn said. 'There's also a lot of blood on the stick. Not like the others.'
Pearl understood at once what he meant. 'Sweet Jesus! He was alive when it went in.'
'Looks that way.'
Fedderman moved in to take a closer look. 'Not much doubt about it. And it wasn't gentle.' He straightened up and moved away, wiping his sleeve across his mouth. 'I hope to hell we don't have a copycat.'
'Hard to imagine,' Pearl said.
'This whole goddamned thing is hard to imagine.'
'Whole world,' Pearl said.
