do…
'My God,' Bekker said, reaching out to the coffin. A wave of exultation rose through his body. He was rid of her.
He'd hated her for so long, watching her with her furniture and her rugs, her old paintings in the heavy carved frames, the inkwells and cruets and compotes and Quimper pots, the lopsided bottles dug from long-gone outhouses. She'd touch it, stroke it, polish it, move it, sell it. Caress it with her little piggy eyes… Talk about it, endlessly, with her limp-wristed antiquarian friends, all of them perched on rickety chairs with teacups, rattling on endlessly, Mahogany with reeded legs, gilt tooled leather, but you almost couldn't tell under the horrible polish she'd absolutely poured on the piece, well, she obviously didn't know what she had, or didn't care. I was there to look at a Georgian tea table that she'd described as gorgeous, but it turned out to be really very tatty, if I do say so…
And now she was dead.
He frowned. Hard to believe that she had had a lover. One of those soft, heavy pale men who talked of teapots and wing chairs… unbelievable. What did they do in bed? Talk?
'Sir, I really think…' The undertaker's hand on his arm, steadying him, not understanding.
'I'm okay,' Bekker said, accepting the comforting arm with a delicious sense of deception. He stood there for another minute, the undertaker behind him, ignored. This was not something he'd want to forget…
Michael Bekker was beautiful. His head was large, his blond hair thick and carefully cut, feathering back over small, perfect ears. His forehead was broad and unlined, his eyebrows light, near-white commas over his startlingly blue deep-set eyes. The only wrinkles on his face were barely noticeable crow's-feet: they enhanced his beauty, rather than detracted from it, adding an ineffable touch of masculinity.
Below his eyes, his nose was a narrow wedge, his nostrils small, almost dainty. His chin was square, with a cleft, his complexion pale but healthy. His lips were wide and mobile over even white teeth.
If Bekker's face was nearly perfect, a cinema face, he had been born with a body no better than average. Shoulders a bit too narrow, hips a little too wide. And he was, perhaps, short in the leg.
The faults gave him something to work for. He was so close…
Bekker exercised four nights a week, spending a half-hour on the Nautilus machines, another hour with the free weights. Legs and trunk one night, arms and shoulders the next. Then a rest day, then repeat, then two rest days at the end of the week.
And the pills, of course, the anabolic steroids. Bekker wasn't interested in strength; strength was a bonus. He was interested in shape. The work broadened his apparent shoulder width and deepened his chest. There wasn't anything he could do about the wide hips, but the larger shoulders had the effect of narrowing them.
His legs… legs can't be stretched. But in New York, just off Madison Avenue, up in the Seventies, he had found a small shop that made the most beautiful calfskin half-boots. The leather was so soft that he sometimes held the boots against his face before he put them on…
Each boot was individually fitted with the most subtle of lifts, which gave him an inch and made him as near to perfect as God would come with Nordic man.
Bekker sighed and found himself looking into the bathroom mirror, the bathroom down the hall from his bedroom, the cold hexagonal tiles pressing into his feet. Staring at his beautiful face.
He'd been gone again. How long? He looked at his watch with a touch of panic. Five after one. Fifteen minutes gone. He had to control this. He'd taken a couple of methobarbitals to flatten out the nervous tension, and they'd thrown him outside himself. They shouldn't do that, but they had, and it was happening more and more often…
He forced himself into the shower, turned on the cold water and gasped as it hit his chest. He kept his eyes closed, turned his back, lathered himself, rinsed and stepped out.
Did he have time? Of course: he always had time for this. He rubbed emollients into his face, dabbed after- shave along his jawline, cologne on his chest, behind his ears and under his balls, sprinkled powder across his chest, under his arms, between his buttocks.
When he was done, he looked into the mirror again. His nose seemed raw. He considered just a touch of makeup but decided against it. He really shouldn't look his best. He was burying Stephanie, and the police would be there. The police investigators were touchy: Stephanie's goddamned father and her cop cousin were whispering in their ears.
An investigation didn't much worry him. He'd hated Stephanie, and some of her friends would know that. But he'd been in San Francisco.
He smiled at himself in the mirror, was dissatisfied with the smile, wiped it away. Tried a half-dozen new expressions, more appropriate for the funeral. Scowl as he might, none of them detracted from his beauty.
He cocked his head at himself and let the smile return. All done? Not quite. He added a hair dressing with a light odor of spring lilacs and touched his hair with a brush. Satisfied, he went to the closet and looked at his suits. The blue one, he thought. • • • Quentin Daniel looked like a butcher in good clothes.
A good German butcher at a First Communion. With his lined red face and incipient jowls, the stark white collar pinching into his throat, the folds of flesh on the back of his neck, he would look fine behind a stainless-steel meat scale, one thumb on the tray, the other on your lambchops…
Until you saw his eyes.
He had the eyes of an Irish Jesuit, pale blue, imperious. He was a cop, if he was one at all, with his brain: he'd stopped carrying a gun years before, when he'd bought his first tailored suits. Instead, he had spectacles. He wore simple military-style gold-rimmed bifocals for dealing with the troops, tortoise-shell single-vision glasses for reading his computer screen, and blue-tinted contact lenses for television appearances.
No gun.
Lucas pushed through the heavy oak door and slouched into Daniel's office. He was wearing the leather bomber jacket from the night before but had shaved and changed into a fresh houndstooth shirt, khaki slacks and loafers.
'You called?'
Daniel was wearing his computer glasses. He looked up, squinted as though he didn't recognize his visitor, took the computer glasses off, put on the gold-rimmed glasses and waved Lucas toward a chair. His face, Lucas thought, was redder than usual.
'Do you know Marty McKenzie?' Daniel asked quietly, his hands flat, palms down, on his green baize blotter.
'Yeah.' Lucas nodded as he sat down. He crossed his legs. 'He's got a practice in the Claymore Building. A sleaze.'
'A sleaze,' Daniel agreed. He folded his hands over his stomach and peered up at the ceiling. 'The very first thing this morning, I sat here smiling for half an hour while the sleaze lectured me. Can you guess why?'
'Randy…'
'… Because the sleaze had a client over in the locked ward at Hennepin General who had the shit beat out of him last night by one of my cops. After the sleaze left, I called the hospital and talked to a doc.' Daniel pulled open a desk drawer and took out a notepad. 'Broken ribs. Broken nose. Broken teeth. Possible cracked sternum. Monitored for blunt trauma.' He slapped the pad on the desktop with a crack like a.22 short. 'Jesus Christ, Davenport…'
'Pulled a knife on me,' Lucas said. 'Tried to cut me. Like this.' He turned the front panel of the jacket, showed the deep slice in the leather.
'Don't bullshit me,' Daniel said, ignoring the coat. 'The Intelligence guys knew a week ago that you were looking for him. You and your pals. You've been looking for him ever since that hooker got cut. You found him last night and you kicked the shit out of him.'
'I don't think…'
'Shut up,' Daniel snapped. 'Any explanation would be stupid. You know it, I know it, so why do it?'
Lucas shrugged. 'All right…'
'The police department is not a fuckin' street gang,' Daniel said. 'You can't do this shit. We've got trouble and it could be serious…'
'Like what?'
'McKenzie went to Internal Affairs before he came here, so they're in it and there's no way I can get them out.
