“That’s already happening.” He glanced toward the front of the library and the distraught Ms. Culver. “She should have learned by now to deal with progress. And libraries aren’t going to simply disappear overnight because all of a sudden some people are reading books on little screens. She needs to lighten up, for her own good.”
“Ms. Culver tends to catastrophize,” Penny said.
“Is that a word?”
“It is now. It might not make much sense for her to build what is a very real problem into some kind of dilemma, but everybody has a pet issue.”
“It can be that way in my work. With Quinn. He doesn’t catastrophize, but he sure gets obsessed with the job. He kind of locks in, not so unlike Ms. Culver.”
“Speaking of your job, I saw in the news that a patrolman was shot to death by a car thief in the Village last night.”
“Young guy named Messerschmitt,” Fedderman said. “Been on the job less than a year.”
“Was he married?”
Fedderman figured Penny already knew the answer to that one. He was getting used to her methodology. “Married and with an infant son,” he said.
“See what I mean about being a cop’s wife?” Penny said. “I don’t even know this woman and I broke out crying when I saw that on TV news. I found myself identifying with her.”
“You don’t have a baby, Pen.”
“Being a smart-ass doesn’t make this a less weighty subject, Feds. You tell me I shouldn’t worry about you, and this poor guy wasn’t even on the job a year and he’s dead.”
“He pulled his gun when he didn’t have to,” Fedderman said.
“How could you know that?”
“Word gets around fast. The car thief was cornered and panicked, and had a gun of his own. He was sixteen years old.”
“Are you saying it was this Messerschmitt’s fault?”
“I’m saying he made a mistake I wouldn’t have made. And he wouldn’t have made it after spending more time on the job. And you’re wrong, Pen, in thinking the longer you go as a cop and don’t get hurt or killed, the more the odds turn against you. It’s the other way around; the longer you go, the less likely you are to do something that bites you.”
“Anything can happen,” Penny said.
“Even to people who try to live their lives in a bubble of safety. Like a library.”
“You’re impossible, Feds.”
“I want to show you there’s no reason to be afraid for me.”
Penny looked exasperated. “You carry a gun. The people you deal with carry guns. Enough said.”
“Maybe your sister should have had a gun.” The moment he said it, Fedderman knew he was in trouble.
And he was wrong: Penny’s sister, Nora, probably would have been murdered by the brutal serial killer who’d taken her life, even if she’d owned a gun. The aggressor, the one who moved first, almost always won the struggle. They knew this, the predators of the world. The Sullivan Act made it difficult to own or carry a gun in New York. The predators knew that, too.
“Don’t stand there and give me a lot of Second Amendment bullshit!” Penny said.
“All right. I’m sorry.”
Penny turned around and busied herself shelving books. He knew she was plenty angry, and she’d be thinking again and talking again about how he should consider changing occupations.
“Pen…?”
She wasn’t going to answer. She slammed a book into place so hard the shelves swayed. A man browsing in Biographies gave her a stern look.
Fedderman knew there was nothing to be done until she calmed down. All because Messerschmitt hadn’t kept his gun in its holster.
It was impossible to talk with Penny when she was feeling, and acting, this way. He turned around and trudged toward the library exit, up near the checkout and return counter, silently cursing.
He didn’t like the way this point of contention was going with Penny. Each time they talked about it she seemed to become more and more worried. Madder and madder.
One thing he’d learned about Penny: she usually did something about her anger.
How the hell was this going to end?
He knew how cops’ marriages too often ended.
He reached the tinted glass door, leaned heavily into the metal push bar, and felt the heat from outside.
When he looked back he saw Ms. Culver glaring at him as if he were an e-book.
40
S al said, “I think we need to talk to Pansy Lieberman again.”
“Not a name you often hear,” Mishkin said, “Lieberman.”
Sal looked at him. It was hard to know about Harold.
The two of them were on the street in front of Deena Vess’s apartment building. They’d been canvassing the surrounding buildings, and in the one next door Sal had encountered Pansy Lieberman. Unlike most of Deena’s neighbors, she’d talked. Maybe it had been worthwhile. “She claims she saw a woman who might have been leaving Deena Vess’s apartment unit at around the time of the murder.”
“If she’s from the building next door, how did that happen?” Harold asked.
“I’ll let her tell you, Harold. That way we can see if her stories are the same.”
“If they’re exactly the same-”
“I know, Harold. That suggests she’s memorized the story and she’s lying.”
“I was gonna say we wouldn’t need a second set of notes,” Harold said.
Sal doubted that. “Let’s go talk to Pansy,” he growled.
Pansy’s apartment was on the same floor as Deena’s, with a view of a window in Deena’s building that might be on a landing. Sal wondered if that had anything to do with anything. If Pansy Lieberman was one of those people who wanted to be part of a homicide investigation just for a brush with their idea of celebrity, she would have probably taken advantage of that window to the building next door to embellish her tale. But she hadn’t. The window didn’t figure into it.
“Come on in,” she said with a wide grin. She was one of those beautiful women who seem not to know it. Or maybe they take it for granted. Pansy was in her early thirties, wearing dark slacks and a gray and white striped blouse that made her look like an extremely attractive convict. She had dark hair almost short enough to be called a buzz cut. Beauty that she was, her ears stuck out almost at right angles from her head. The ears, with her wide grin, gave her an elfish, mischievous expression. She was wearing floppy slip-on sandals. Sal noticed that the toenails of only her left foot were painted, with brilliant red enamel. Had they interrupted her?
She noticed him staring at her feet and read his mind. “I don’t paint the nails on that foot when I’m practicing,” she said. “It makes them slippery.”
“I see,” Sal said, but he didn’t.
Harold had been looking past him at the glossy, open New Yorker spread out on the floor by the sofa. “You’ve been turning pages with your foot,” he said.
Pansy smiled brightly. “How astute of you.”
Sal wondered how Harold knew that. Then he noticed the way the magazine’s pages were crumpled, and that there was a scant but definite print of a bare foot on one of them.
“You slipped on your sandals to answer our knock on your door,” he said, realizing with a tinge of dismay that he was trying to keep up with Harold and impress this woman.
“I only had the right sandal off,” she said. She smiled again. “I didn’t want to greet you walking crookedly. You might have insisted on a breathalyzer test.”
Sal found himself wondering what kind of witness she’d be in court if the case went in that direction. “Could
