Come Out Tonight Read online

  I told him I was sorry to hear that, but of course that didn’t satisfy him. He wanted to know about my leads. I said I couldn’t give any info out on cases that didn’t have anything to do with him but told him whatever we had on his girlfriend’s case. Meanwhile, he was still going on about a connection between the two – maybe a serial killer. The guy’s watched too much TV.

  “Do you know how many crimes are reported on any one night in this precinct alone?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Four,” I told him. “Do you think that all the crimes committed in this jurisdiction over a three month period are committed by the same individual?”

  “I just thought the modus vivendi was the same,” he answered.

  Can you believe it? By this time I just wanted to get rid of him, by murder if necessary. “Modus operandi,” I corrected. “Anyway, your girl friend wasn’t strangled. She wasn’t killed. How can you even begin to say that this is the same modus operandi?”

  Just at that moment, O’Malley cracked the door open to tell me that they were bringing in a suspect I’d be interested in. A man answering to the description of the “Bouquet Bandit” was found in a relative’s home on West End and 105th. Officers Anderson and Koslowski were currently on their way back to the station house with the suspect. They were sure I’d want to interrogate him.

  I shook Jackman’s hand and pushed him out the door before he could waste any more of my time. I knew this wasn’t going to be the end of him, but I had to get downstairs.

  The Bouquet Bandit! We’d been searching for this guy for two weeks. The story was in all the tabloids, along with some surveillance photos we released of a man walking into the bank last Thursday with a bouquet of flowers. We got a flurry of tips after that, and, well, obviously someone spotted him.

  Here, by the way, was a guy with a unique modus operandi. Twice before, both on upper Broadway, this bandit had robbed banks, each time holding flowers to which a bank-heist note had been attached. The last one was a bouquet, with a spray of flowers and baby’s breath in a pink cellophane wrapper. He got about $400 in that job, even though the surveillance photo showed no evidence of his being armed. A week before, in a Capitol One branch at 92th, he was holding an unidentified potted plant. Anyway, he got away with a couple of thou in that one. Again, not armed other than with a plant.

  O’Malley filled me in on his background as we walked downstairs. The suspect had once worked in Manhattan’s flower district, something that certainly seemed to fit the pattern. He’d been arrested fourteen times in the past, mostly on drug possession. The guy had even been arrested on Friday on a fare-beating charge, held over the weekend and released on Monday.

  “Why wasn’t I apprised of this?” I asked.

  O’Malley shrugged. “Who knew then that he was connected to the bouquet heists?”

  I figured I wouldn’t make a big deal about the inadequacies of our own department. After all, it was an open and shut case. The moment I cracked open the door to the interrogation room, I could see he was the man in the surveillance photo. I confronted him with the evidence, and he didn’t even bother to deny it. Said he needed the money, and, well, putting the note on a bouquet of flowers was the first thing that came to mind.

  * * *

  I got back around nine that night. I could have managed it earlier, but I was still ambivalent about spending time with Julian. Sure, the sex was rapturous. But the sooner he learned that things were not going to be the way they used to be – that I was not going to give in to his every impulse – the better off we would both be.

  There was a taste in the air: some potpourri of garlic and onion, cumin, cilantro and hot peppers that brought me back Proust-like to Julian and me slurping chicken chili out of crockery bowls at my kitchen table. In the tiny L off the living room, a table for two had been decked out with a red-checked tablecloth, a baguette and a green salad. Julian appeared at the kitchen threshold like a maitre d’, a dish towel over his arm and a bottle of red wine in his hand. “I waited for you,” he said.

  Julian had always been more of a cook than I was. Truth be told, I was never a cook at all. I had other talents to be sure, but cooking wasn’t one of them. Or fashion, for that matter. I had a few outfits that worked, and that was good enough for me. Now, my mother never went out of the house unless she was totally coordinated: e.g., pink jacket, pink skirt, pink pillbox hat. Hair perfectly cut and coifed; hand bag matching her shoes; perfectly feminine and turned out. I still shiver at the memory. Naturally, I did the opposite and decided to be a cop.

  I dropped my beat-up canvas tote off by the front door and entered, sniffing deeply. Ahhhh. I hadn’t even realized I was craving chicken chili until the whiff of it hijacked my senses.

  That spicy aroma, the picnic ambience and Julian with the dish towel over his arm, and, now that I noticed, a swell of Gypsy violins in the background: it all washed over me, leaving the requisite warm glow. It was just like him to set the stage with style.

  Hey, Julian made no apologies about wanting to live well. He appreciated good food and wine and music and never saw anything wrong with spending most of his income on them. And mine. It’s one of the things we never could come to terms on. Me, I liked to have money in the bank. A ritzy place in lower Manhattan would have been nice, but a rent-stabilized apartment on the East Side of New York – well, it doesn’t get much better than that. I tended not to spend much on extras. Sure they’re nice, but once you’ve eaten, drunk, watched or worn them, they’re gone. On the other hand, the fruits of hard work and persistence, like putting away a murderer for the rest of his natural life - that’s forever.

  Well, I wasn’t going to complain. I kicked off my shoes, sloughed off my jacket and sat down at the table. “We finally caught the Bouquet Bandit,” I called out.

  “Congratulations,” Julian said, as he came in from the kitchen carrying my Calphalon casserole, aromatic steam seeping from the lid.

  “Thanks for this,” I said.

  “Least I can do,” he replied, sitting down.

  We gorged ourselves on chicken chili over talk of the Bouquet Bandit and the juvenile vs. the Korean deli owner: two cases closed. Four to go, but I didn’t want to talk about the open ones. We finished the bottle of wine and opened another one. We talked about old times, new jobs, the state of the economy. I’d missed having someone to talk to, I guess. We drank some more; I lost my inhibitions. We laughed ourselves silly about nothing at all. Julian scooted his chair around to my side and started to kiss my neck. I went with the moment, until, all of a sudden, I didn’t.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think we should be doing this.”

  “Why not?” Julian asked from behind my right ear.

  I turned my head so he would have to stop.

  “What’s the matter?” Julian asked, his expression somewhere between humor and surprise.

  You come on strong with looks, style, charm, I thought, but you lied, not once but over and over, and I can never trust you again. I looked up into his dark eyes, still crinkled from laughing. For the first time I noticed a spray of laugh lines at the outside corners. He’s older, I told myself. Maybe he’s changed. Maybe not.

  “You’re not good for me,” I said.

  “I just cooked you dinner,” he said, going back to my neck.

  I let him nibble for a moment or two. “You’re a temptation,” I said, moving my neck out of reach.

  “You want it as much as I do,” he said, going to unbutton my blouse.

  I did. Oh, I did, I did, I did. I let him unbutton the top two buttons and stick his face inside. I heard him sigh from the depths of my cleavage.

  “No…,” I said as I abandoned all resistance.

  * * *

  A few days later Ricardo finally got back to me about the small plane registries. There was no mention of the Pollacks chartering a plane on the night of May 2nd, but he had taken the liberty of checking out flights several days back – both for small planes
and commercial flights. Dr. and Mrs. Phillip Pollack were listed on the manifest of Delta Airlines Flight # 2560, departing Los Angeles at 8:30 a.m. and arriving JFK at 4:57 p.m. - on April 30.

  So, they had lied to me. No surprise there. They were both in New York City on the night of April 30, just as Henry Jackman had told me they were. Why, I wondered? What were they covering up by saying they had just come in May 3?

  I got out my phone, checked the email message Ricardo had sent me with the four phone numbers, and dialed Rhonda Pollack’s cell phone. Calling Rhonda first, I figured, was my best chance of obtaining the unadulterated truth.

  She answered after the first ring. I gave her my name and reminded her who I was. The silence on the line was so long I began to think she had hung up. But then she spoke. “Is there something wrong, Detective?”

  Funny she would begin that way. She might have asked how her daughter was.

  “Only that I have evidence that you and your husband did not come in on the morning of May third as you claimed, but came into New York three days earlier to take your daughter out to a birthday dinner.”

  A protracted pause. “Yes, that’s true, Detective. We did come in earlier.”

  Nothing followed, so I guessed I’d have to pull it out of her. “Why did you lie, then?” I asked.

  A deep sigh. “I don’t know why myself. My husband felt that if you knew we were in New York, we’d be detained for questioning; there would be publicity and suspicion and who knows what. My husband is a very private man.”

  “Did you take your daughter out to dinner the night she was attacked?”

  A pause, punctuated with what might have been a sniffle. “Yes.”

  She was going to make me work for every bit of information. “What happened at that dinner?”

  Long, long pause, and then the dam broke. “Phil was always so hard on Sherry. Whatever she did was not enough or not what he would have done. Sherry told us about that Somnolux drug she had helped to discover: about the people who were running amok, as she called it – doing crazy things in their sleep. She was worried, that’s all. She needed to confide in someone.

  “But Phil, well Phil just lit into her – how Vandenberg hadn’t fully tested the drug, how she should have taken responsibility and done it right in the first place. Then Sherry said that that couldn’t be helped, that there were millions of patients and sometimes you can’t tell what will happen from a small-sized test. The thing, she said, was that Vandenberg was doing their best to hush the whole thing up.

  “Then Phil told her she was a screw up – that the very fact that she couldn’t see what it was she had to do testified to her lack of character. Sherry told him she knew he never had thought much of her. That she had tried and tried to make him proud of her, but it didn’t matter what she accomplished, something was always wrong. She ran off into the dark, and that…that was the last we saw of her. Phil went after her, but he came back half an hour later saying he had lost her in the dark…” Rhonda quavered. She stopped to regain control before going on.

  “If this is too much for you,” I began, but Rhonda interrupted me to say no, no, she wanted to tell me everything.

  “We went back to our hotel,” she went on. “I tried to get her the next day on her cell phone, but it wouldn’t go through. I figured she had put some kind of block on our number. Even Phil felt terrible. We decided not to fly back home the next day as we had planned. We went to her apartment, but she wasn’t there. We were going to wait one more day, hoping that she’d come back home and find us there, camped in front of her front door. But it didn’t happen. And then you called.”

  “So you didn’t know she had been attacked,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “We didn’t know,” the quaver in her voice overcoming the words.

  Then she began to sob uncontrollably, and I waited on the line, making little noises of comfort every once in awhile, hoping that she would calm down enough to answer a question or two more. Most of what she said didn’t surprise me, but all this about the Somnolux was new. I hadn’t known about the side effects or the fact that Vandenberg ostensibly knew about them and was prepared to hush it up.

  But Rhonda never did calm down this time. She cried for so long that at last I gave up, saying I’d call back when she was feeling better.

  HENRY

  I walked west on 96th, punching in a few numbers on my cell phone. “Detective Sirken, please.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Henry Jackman.

  “One minute please.”

  I rounded the corner onto Broadway, heading uptown. It was half past seven in the evening, but the sidewalk traffic was brutal. Three guys walked side by side, blocking my path. I just managed to dodge them when an old woman in a winter coat pushed a shopping cart right into my leg. “Excuse ME,” I yelled, but she just muttered something, pushing the cart on past.

  “Mr. Jackman?” the phone said. “I can’t get a hold of her. She must be gone for the day.”

  “Sure she is. Just tell her I’ve got new, pertinent information for both of the cases we were talking about.”

  “Your number please?”

  “She was just there an hour ago.”

  “Well, she’s not there now.”

  “Give me her cell, then.”

  “Sir, we don’t give out that information. If you give me your number, I’ll page her.”

  “Oh, okay. 212-362-3974. Tell her it’s an emergency. Henry Jackman. I gotta talk to her.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  I hung up and kept walking. At 111th, I found a Starbucks and decided to chill a bit, waiting for Sirken’s call. I walked in, ordered a venti iced latte, and plunked down on a stool at the front window. I sat there, sucking latte through a straw and watching lone customers pecking on their laptops. The place was quiet as a tomb, the only sounds the click-clack-click of keys against a background hiss of espresso machine. Not a word of social chitchat, except, maybe, “Here’s your white chocolate mocha Frappuccino,” or “skinny cinnamon dolce latte, Miss” or “Ya see I’m busy? I’ll getcha when I’m ready.”

  No flirting. “No, “Hi, how are you?” Not even, “Pass the sugar, please.” Each customer cocooned in his own invisible world: so plugged in and clued out, they might as well be vegetative patients in Parkhill Nursing Home. Looking for a little action, I spun my stool around to face the window. There, at least was the usual New York hubbub: nannies pushing double strollers; dog walkers launched behind teams of mixed dogs; the odd person with a suit and briefcase.

  That got old fast. Soon the smell of espresso brewing brought me back to Sherry, as it always did. Boy, did Sherry love Starbucks. Frappuccinos, tall lattes, double espressos: anything you could buy in a paper cup. For that matter, anything you could buy in a paper take-out container. Come to think of it, anything you could order from a restaurant. Sherry couldn’t toast a piece of bread to save her life, but take in or eat out, she sure could order.

  No fancy restaurants, though. Sherry loved the greasy spoons with the plastic tablecloths, the dives with chipped dishes and unmatched chairs, the hole-in-the-walls with cheap good food and no atmosphere. Why pay for marketing? she’d say. I can’t tell you how many evenings we must have spent at joints with linoleum floors, Formica counters, two rickety tables in the back and a menu scribbled on the wall. Talking and eating: that’s what Sherry loved.

  Like the time we met at the NewChinaPalace, and she told me what had happened over dumplings and double-cooked pork. Or rather, Sherry talked and I ate. She said she was too upset to eat. She was still angry about Vandenberg’s refusal to undertake large-scale testing of the Somnolux anomalies, as Ryan called them. And now this.

  “They just shot down my theory about why it’s happening,” she said, banging the tea cup down on the table, tea sloshing over onto the clear plastic table liner. I pushed over my napkin, and she absentmindedly mopped it up. She continued mopping at the spot, lost in thought, even though the
puddle was no longer there.

  “You were saying,” I said.

  She looked up. “Oh, yeah.” She poured a slow stream of tea into her little cup, and sighed. “Well, the mind is emergent. It arises from the parts of the brain, which connect and compete in such complex ways, that what emerges is some other thing altogether.”

  “The whole is more than the sum of its parts,” I offered.

  “Yeah. Trite but true,” she said, picking up the cup.

  Sometimes Sherry treated me like an idiot. She didn’t really mean it to hurt me; she was just a little too wrapped up in herself, I think. I tried not to let it bother me. “Go on,” I said.

  “The brain is very complex. The three pound universe, they call it. So complex, it’s still a bit of a black box. I mean the brain isn’t a big monolithic lump, and it’s not a series of independent modules. We’re still trying to figure out what parts do what and how the mind emerges from the brain.”

  “Emerges?” I asked.

  “Yeah, emerges. Through some transformation we can’t yet imagine, one arises from the other. Like energy from matter. Probably through the connections of the parts. There’s this massive reverberating circuit that ties the cortex to the sensory and motor centers. Sensory information flows in, it’s modified; motor commands are generated, they’re modified; sensory feedback from the motor responses is fed in...on and on, feeding forward, feeding back. The whole thing is so complex and interactive...but without beginning or end. Then at some critical point, something totally unexpected arises. Like Life from dirt.”

  The waitress came with a vegetable dish, setting it down between the other two half-eaten dishes. “Not good?” she asked, indicating the three plates.

  “Good,” I assured her, picking up a wad of pea greens with my chopsticks, half of it falling on the table on the way to my mouth.