First Thrills

you don’t the man’ll start to feel bad and, yeah, he’s a little shit Nimrod, what ever that is, but we need him.

But Malloy was remembering something. He rose abruptly. “I gotta go.”

“I dint do a good job?” Lucius called, hurt.

But he was speaking to Jimmy Malloy’s back.

Jane Prescott opened the door of the town house in Greenwich Village. Close to five-eleven, she could look directly into Malloy’s eyes.

The widow wore a black dress, closely fitted, and her eyes were red like she’d been crying. Her hair was swept back and faint gray roots showed, though Malloy recalled that she was only in her late thirties. Three de cades younger than her late husband, he also recalled.

“Detective.” Hesitant, of course, looking over his ID. A policeman. She was thinking this was odd-not necessarily reason to panic but odd.

“I recognize you,” Malloy said.

She blinked. “Have we met?”

“In Sharpe Edge. You were Monica.”

She gave a hollow laugh. “People say that, because an older man falls in love with a younger woman in the book. But I’m not a spy and I can’t rappel off cliffs.”

They were both beautiful, however, if Malloy remembered the Prescott novel correctly. But he said nothing about this, she being a new widow. What he said was, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you. Oh, please come inside.”

The apartment was small, typical of the Village, but luxurious as diamonds. Rich antiques, original art. Even statues. Nobody Malloy knew owned statues. A peek into the kitchen revealed intimidating brushed-metal appliances with names Malloy couldn’t pronounce.

They sat and she looked at him with her red-rimmed eyes. An uneasy moment later he asked, “You’re wondering what a cop’s doing here.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Other than just being a fan, wishing to pay condolences.”

“You could’ve written a letter.”

“The fact is, this is sort of personal. I didn’t want to come sooner, out of respect. But there’s something I’d like to ask. Some of us in the department were thinking ’bout putting together a memorial evening in honor of your husband. He wrote about New York a lot and he didn’t make us cops out to be flunkies. One of them, I can’t remember which one, he had this great plotline here in the city. Some NYPD rookie helps out Jacob Sharpe. It was about terrorists going after the train stations.”

“Hallowed Ground.”

“That’s right. That was a good book.”

More silence.

Malloy glanced at a photograph on the desk. It showed a half dozen people, in somber clothing, standing around a gravesite. Jane was in the foreground.

She saw him looking at it. “The funeral.”

“Who’re the other people there?”

“His daughters from his first marriage. That’s Aaron, his co- writer.” She indicated a man standing next to her. Then, in the background another, older man in an ill-fitting suit. She said, “Frank Lester, John’s former agent.”

She said nothing more. Malloy continued, “Well, some folks in the department know I’m one of your husband’s biggest fans, so I got elected to come talk to you, ask if you’d come to the memorial. An appreciation night, you could call it. Maybe say a few words. Wait. ‘Elected’ makes it sound like I didn’t want to come. But I did. I loved his books.”

“I sense you did,” she said, looking at the detective with piercing gray eyes.

“So?”

“I appreciate the offer. I’ll just have to see.”

“Sure. What ever you’d feel comfortable with.”

“You made him feel bad. He nearly got capped on that assignment.”

Malloy said to his partner, “I’ll send him a balloon basket. ‘Sorry I was rude to my favorite snitch.’ But right now I’m on to something.”

“Give me particulars.”

“Okay. Well, she’s hot, Prescott’s wife.”

“That’s not a helpful particular.”

“I think it is. Hot… and thirty years younger than her husband.”

“So she took her bra off and gave him a heart attack. Murder- by-boob isn’t in the penal code.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You mean she wanted somebody younger. So do I. So does everybody. Well, not you, ’cause nobody younger would give you the time of day.”

“And there was this feeling I got at the house. She wasn’t really in mourning. She was in a black dress, yeah, but it was tighter than anything I’d ever let my daughter wear, and her red eyes? It was like she’d been rubbing them. I didn’t buy the grieving widow thing.”

“You ain’t marshalling Boston Legal evidence here, son.”

“There’s more.” Malloy pulled the limp copy of Prescott’s obit out of his pocket. He tapped a portion. “I realized where my feeling came from. See this part about the personal physician?”

“Yeah. So?”

“You read books, DeLeon?”

“Yeah, I can read. I can tie my shoes. I can fieldstrip a Glock in one minute sixteen seconds. Oh, and put it back together, too, without any missing parts. What’s your point?”

“You know how if you read a book and you like it and it’s a good book, it stays with you? Parts of it do? Well, I read a book a few years ago. In it this guy has to kill a terrorist, but if the terrorist is murdered there’d be an international incident, so it has to look like a natural death.”

“How’d they set it up?”

“It was really smart. They shot him in the head three times with a Bushmaster.”

“That’s fairly unnatural.”

“It’s natural because that’s how the victim’s ‘personal physician’ ”-Malloy did the quote things with his fingers “-signed the death certificate: cerebral hemorrhage following a stroke. Your doctor does that, the death doesn’t have to go to the coroner. The police weren’t involved. The body was cremated. The whole thing went away.”

“Hmm. Not bad. All you need is a gun, a shitload of money, and a crooked doctor. I’m starting to like these particular particulars.”

“And what’s particularly interesting is that it was one of Prescott’s books that Aaron Reilly co-wrote. And the wife remembered it. That was why I went to see her.”

“Check out the doctor.”

“I tried. He’s Spanish.”

“So’s half the city, in case you didn’t know. We got translators, hijo.”

“Not Latino. Spanish. From Spain. He’s back home and I can’t track him down.”

The department secretary stuck her head in the doorway. “Jimmy, you got a call from a Frank Lester.”

“Who’d be?…”

“A book agent. Worked with that guy Prescott you were talking about.”

The former agent. “How’d he get my number?”

“I don’t know. He said he heard you were planning some memorial service and he wanted to get together with you to talk about it.”

DeLeon frowned. “Memorial?”

“I had to make up something to get to see the wife.” Malloy took the number, a Manhattan c ell-phone area code, he noticed. Called. It went to voice mail. He didn’t leave a message.

Malloy turned back to his partner. “There’s more. An hour ago I talked with some deputies up in Vermont. They told me that it was a private ambulance took the body away. Not one of the local outfits. The sheriff bought into the