“This is the investigative agency?” she said.
He smiled. “You’re in the right place.”
“Whew! Haven’t been there for a while.” She gave him a narrow look. “You should be Captain Frank Quinn.”
“I am. Not a captain any longer, though.”
“Wow. Right place, right person.” She advanced closer to his desk and he motioned toward a chair. Something told him he shouldn’t stand up and loom over her. She might take flight like an exotic bird.
She rolled the chair closer to the desk and sat down, assuming a prim posture. Nearer to him now, the fear in her was even more evident. As was a sadness.
“First of all,” she said, “let’s get it on the table that I’m crazy, but not all the time.”
“Noted,” Quinn said.
She waved her slender arms. “Schizophrenic is the diagnosis. Voices, hallucinations, the whole bag of agony.”
“We can work around that,” Quinn said.
She grinned. “You sound like my analyst.”
He was glad to hear she was in treatment.
“My name is Linda Brooks,” she said, “and I’m being followed.” She leaned slightly forward as if to give the words more impact. “Not just today, right now, but for about a week. It’s like I have a shadow, only it’s not a shadow. A shadow doesn’t keep its distance. Or disappear suddenly even though no light has been switched on. No shadow I’ve seen, anyway.”
“Okay, Linda. Have you gotten a good look at him?”
“How did you know it was a him?”
“I surmised. I do that a lot.”
“Yeah, you would. He’s about five ten or so, thin and fit looking. He wears a blue and gray sweat suit some of the time. Other times jeans and joggers. Some of the time a suit and tie. If I saw him in a photograph, I’d probably recognize him.”
Quinn raised a forefinger, motioning for her to wait a moment, then rummaged through one of his desk drawers. He drew out a copy of an old photo of Daniel Danielle from a Miami Herald news item and laid it on the desk.
Linda edged closer and peered at it. “That’s him.”
Quinn got another photo, this one a shot of Jerry Lido taken for Q amp;A files.
“I told you, that’s him,” Linda said, glancing at the photo.
“Okay,” Quinn said. The two men weren’t completely dissimilar. They were about the same size and each had dark hair. Daniel was wearing what looked like a prison shirt, the booze-emaciated Lido a blue shirt with a loosened tie.
“They’re not the same man,” Quinn pointed out.
“I know that. But they could be at different times.”
It took Quinn a few seconds to understand what she meant. “You mean following you at different times?”
“Of course. I’m not stupid. I don’t think they change identities, just that the same man can look different in different photographs. I mean, I’m not crazy all the time.”
“You said that.” He suspected it was her mantra.
“Now you sound like my analyst.”
Time to get off this track. “I won’t be analyzing you, just helping if I can. By the way, who is your analyst?”
Without hesitating, she gave him the name and address of a psychoanalyst he’d never heard of but who had a respectable address.
“I have good medical insurance,” she said, while Quinn was still jotting down the information. “My mother saw to that before she died. My father died the year before she did.”
“Natural deaths, I assume.”
“Sure. None of that forty-whacks stuff.”
“Other relatives?”
“None who’ll have anything to do with me. I stole from all of them.”
“How long have you been seeing Dr. Moore?” Quinn asked.
“Years and years. I’m not crazy twenty-four-seven. When I take my meds I’m perfectly normal for a while.”
“Is this the first time you’ve been followed?”
“By someone who wasn’t from the OSS, yes. You know who they are?”
“A long time ago, they became the CIA,” Quinn said.
“That’s if you accept the lie that they were ever completely disbanded.”
“I’ve often wondered,” Quinn said.
“I know you’re not the cops. You’ll want money. I can’t pay you.”
“We’ll do it pro bono.” Because the city is paying me, and because you resemble Pearl.
“It would be best if you could catch him in my bed.”
“He sleeps in your bed?”
“Naps, maybe. I can see that somebody’s been lying in it. When I’m not there, of course. He stays in my apartment sometimes when I’m not home.”
“How does he get in?”
“Windows sometimes, if they’re unlocked. And he probably has a key that opens all doors.”
“Have you and he ever been there at the same time?”
“Once, when I saw him leaving through a window. But time and place always intersect someplace, don’t they?”
“They do,” Quinn said.
“So here’s my place.” She dug in her purse for a paper and pencil and wrote down a West Side address a few blocks off Broadway, uptown from where they sat. Beneath the address was a phone number. “I know how you work,” she said, pushing the paper toward him over the desktop. “I’ve read the literature. I won’t know you’re around, but you’ll be there. If he comes around again, whoever’s watching over me will tackle him. Bend his arm behind his back and he’ll talk. You can make him tell you who he is. We both know who he is. The wind told me who he is.”
“Is that where you hear voices, in the wind?”
“Not always. But pretty often, actually. If the wind is blowing on stone.”
Quinn thought that would be almost all the time, in New York. “What have the voices been telling you?”
“To be careful. For God’s sake, be careful.” She stared at Quinn with those eyes that had seen way too much that wasn’t there, but in her view had to be somewhere. Whatever happened in her world became twisted and sharp before she could get a proper grasp of it. Her mortal enemy roamed the interior of her skull. Probably the pressure never ceased.
Quinn understood that he couldn’t imagine her pain.
58
T he killer watched Linda leave Q amp;A. Linda looked up and down the block but didn’t notice him. Perhaps she’d seen him but didn’t want to admit he was there, and so let her gaze slide past.
It was wonderful that she’d come here. She understood, and without knowing who or what was stalking her. And on some level Quinn would know what Linda knew, that he was meeting the woman whose violent death he’d soon be investigating. Of course, probably neither of them had talked about it. Not directly, anyway.
The elephant in the room was no less invisible and unmentioned because it was preparing to charge.
