“Erotic!”
B-bam, b-bam!
“Ah,” said Pearl. She pointed to her right ear and shrugged. “Someplace quiet, okay?”
Victory nodded and led her to a back entrance, then through a door to a small, shaded courtyard with dead flowers surrounding a maple tree. The hammering and sawing were barely audible out here.
“Better,” Pearl said. “Now, how do I get a job at an erotic Internet cafe?”
Victory gave her a dubious look and smiled. He said nothing, still trying to figure out the game. After all, cops, murder, it was all more than unsettling.
“And what is an erotic Internet cafe?” Pearl asked.
“Like any other Internet cafe, dear, only we subscribe to the most amazing Web sites, and the confections are of different shapes. Dough can be worked into many forms other than bagels and doughnuts, some of them quite suggestive if not titillating.”
“And you’ve been hired to decorate the place?”
“Indeed I have.”
Good choice. “Flesh-colored walls seem right, then,” Pearl said, “but without a trace of blush.”
“Consider your vote cast.” Victory waved an arm for emphasis. Pearl saw that his shirt had French cuffs with gold-coin cuff links-probably real gold. There was profit in bullshit. “If this is about poor Marcy Graham and her husband, I already talked to one of your fellow officers. To what do I owe this second tete-a-tete? Am I perchance a suspect?”
“Nope. You’re in the clear. So far,” she added, trying to wipe the smarmy smile off his face.
The smile didn’t waver. “I watch Law and Order, dear detective. I know that truth always rises to the top.”
“In real life it takes someone like me to push it up there.”
“And where might we find real life?”
Pearl laughed. “It’d take a better detective than me to tell you that. But Marcy Graham and her husband found real death just months after you decorated their apartment. It says in the file you were given a key by Marcy.”
“Indeed. That isn’t unusual. Most of my clients don’t mind me letting myself in, and they prefer not to be home during remodeling.”
“Did you give the Graham key to any of your subcontractors? The tradesmen who do the physical part of your work.”
“A few times. But I always got it back from them before nightfall. I am not unmindful of security. I mean, these days…” He waved a hand as if to gesture toward particular days all around them. These days.
“Did any of the people you hired have the opportunity to have the key duplicated?”
Victory looked nonplussed, and that was the only word for it. “Oh, my!”
“That a yes?”
“I’m afraid it is. But all the people I use are old acquaintances, each and every one of them totally trustworthy.”
“We both know it’s impossible to be sure of that.”
“True. But this isn’t love or war, dear, it’s interior decorating.” He raised a ringed forefinger. “Strike that. It can be like war sometimes. When the client thinks something doesn’t tie in. Or when it comes time to pay the cost of art, instead of simply talking about it.”
“I’d like a list of all the tradesmen you employ,” Pearl said.
“I hate to cause them a problem.”
“Do I look like a problem?”
Victory grinned lewdly. “Oh, do you ever!”
“That would be a yes on the list?”
Victory shrugged. “I suppose.”
Pearl gave him her pen and notepad.
When he was finished writing, she said, “What are they using for bedroom ceiling fixtures these days?”
“Retro crystal chandeliers, stained-glass Japanese lanterns, brushed aluminum-”
“What about one of those ceiling fans with a light kit?”
“Oh, my God!”
Brushed aluminum, Pearl thought.
As she was leaving, the guy working the power saw glanced over at her and managed a kind of come-hither motion with his tongue. Pearl tried to ignore him but had to admire his dexterity.
Keeeeeeeyow!
Pearl hoped he was cutting off a finger.
Victory watched Pearl through the bright rectangle of the front doorway as she crossed the street to her parked car.
I wish I had her ass.
He liked the lady cop; she had balls. But he certainly didn’t want to see her again. It was unnerving, being so close to an actual murder case. A homicide was declasse, but nothing compared to an arraignment and trial, not to mention prison, not to overlook… Well, it could prove squalid and mortifying. Judges, juries, could be so unpredictable in these times. Victory knew innocent people were convicted of murder with alarming regularity. What was that movie…?
It had gotten four stars-he remembered that. It would come to him.
He went over in his mind the names he’d written on the detective’s pad. He needed to be thorough so as not to invite suspicion of some kind, or suggest complicity with a monster.
He’d listed everyone, he was positive. The detective with the delectable derriere had the names of all the tradesmen he’d employed in the past two years.
Satisfied that he could put the entire dreary business out of his mind, Victory returned to contemplating the walls-to-be. It wasn’t only the color that concerned him; he had to coordinate other elements with the carnal and crust motif. The walls were background; something now needed to be on them to pop and provide contrast. Perhaps clear-laquered, risque lingerie, framed as art. And surely there were baking utensils that suggested erotic usage.
Yes! But possibly he was approaching this backward. First the lingerie and utensil wall hangings, then the color? There was still time to decide. And he knew someone who might perfectly match color with context to combine sex and food, two of the basic human imperatives.
Victory hadn’t for a second considered including Romulus in his list of tradesmen. That was because Romulus wasn’t a tradesman. He didn’t merely glow in the galaxy of simple craft. Romulus was too complex and brilliant for that. He was unique. A bright star rather than a workaday drudge with a talent for hammer, saw, or paintbrush.
He was hardly a slayer of anything other than poor taste.
Romulus was an artist, like Victory himself, a spiritual brother and not part of the mundane world that so often tried to intrude on their own.
A genuine artist. And in this fucked-up, fucked-over city, what was more precious than that?
The Night Prowler watched Claire leave her apartment building and stride with her incredibly graceful walk on the opposite side of the street. How she could move-her hips, her arms, the kick of her legs-in time with some celestial music he could hear and see in elegant kaleidoscopic wonder. Was she also a dancer? So many Broadway stars could dance, as well as sing and act. Many had begun as chorus line dancers and had become actors. Or was it the other way around? He didn’t know, actually, but to him Claire was a dancer.
She was walking with bold purpose.
On her way to meet someone? Someone who should be me?
She turned a corner and the Night Prowler had to jaywalk, jogging across a lane of slowly moving traffic to keep up. An annoyed driver screamed at him that he was an asshole. The Night Prowler ignored him instead of killing him and walked swiftly on.
Ah! There she is! In the shadow of the valley of-
Then she walked into the brilliant pale light cast downward by a theater marquee. She was going to see a
