Inherit the Dead

to pull a brush through his hair—but Perry knew what he had, and he wasn’t shy about using it.
    “She been in tonight?” he asked.
    “Oh, she’s been in all right,” the doorman said. The tag on his uniform read LUCAS . He tapped on it. “You can call me Luke.”
    “So, she’s been in all night, Luke?”
    Luke raised his eyebrows and nodded slowly. Perry saw that there was something dark to him, dark appetites, dark sense of humor, something moving beneath the smooth, practiced surface. Perry suddenly liked him better.
    “Alone?”
    The doorman made a show of organizing his desk—pen in its little mesh cup, papers in a tidy pile. He lifted a logbook and opened it.
    “You must see it all here, huh?” asked Perry. “The rich are different, right?”
    “Oh, no,” Luke said. “They’re not different at all. They’re as dirty and mean as any thug in the projects. They’re just prettier.”
    There were about three different notes of bitterness in the young man’s tone, and Perry planned to play them all if he had to.
    “So who was here tonight?” he asked.
    He saw a battle play out on the guy’s face between what he wanted to say and what he knew he should say. Finally, as though remembering what had gotten him talking in the first place, he leaned in closer to Perry.
    Perry could smell the other man’s cologne. To be honest, their proximity made him a little uncomfortable. But he stayed where he was.
    “There was a man earlier,” he said. Luke leaned back, brought a hand to his throat, and rubbed. It was a self-protective gesture; something about the encounter had left Luke feeling threatened. “I’ve never seen him before. Cute. In a vapid, shallow sort of way.”
    Perry looked down at the leather logbook in Luke’s hand. “Is his name in here?”
    Luke shook his head. “He didn’t give his name,” he said. “He wouldn’t.”
    “And you didn’t insist?”
    Luke gave him a tired look. “Doormen don’t insist, Detective. We do as we’re told.”
    “But Mrs. Drusilla probably wouldn’t want you talking about her visitor, right?”
    Luke shrugged and put his hand to his throat again.
    Something about Mrs. Drusilla made Luke nervous. Perry couldn’t say that he blamed the kid; she was about as warm and cuddly as a python.
    “Good night, Detective,” said Luke.
    Perry slid a card over the marble countertop. “Anything interesting, give me a call.”
    Luke pocketed the card, but he didn’t say anything else, just cast his eyes down to those manicured nails. Perry had been dismissed. By the doorman. At least he knew where he stood on the totem pole.
    The elevator carried the scent of the calla lily arrangement up to the penthouse. The elevator chimed at each passing floor: eleven, twelve, thirteen . . . Perry thought that there weren’t any thirteenth floors in New York City, something about bad luck for the building. The people in this building might have thought they were above all of that. And maybe they were. Maybe rich people didn’t have any bad luck that they couldn’t buy their way out of.
    At the end of the long, carpeted hall, the door to Penthouse A stood ajar. Perry pushed on the gold knob and took in the place for the second time, the towering ceilings, the panoramic view of Manhattan, the black marble floors, the low, white leather couches—it was his ex-wife’s dream apartment. If she died and could create her own little piece of heaven, this would be it. You shouldn’t have married a cop, he’d teased, with dreams like that. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
    Now you tell me, she’d joked. Or had she been joking?
    Maybe it was him, but the place seemed colder as he moved fromthe foyer into the main room. And it wasn’t just the fact that his client kept the air-conditioning going in the dead of winter. There was no place soft or cozy to sit, nothing out of place. It would be hard to be a kid in a place like this. Every spill a disaster. Every trip or fall into some hard edge. He found himself wondering what it was like to be Angel. She hadn’t grown up with her mother, not after the divorce. Of course the beach home in Montauk was no less opulent. And clearly, Daddy Dearest was a lunatic in his own right. Maybe Angel never had a soft place to land.
    He heard his own daughter’s voice. You’re hardly ever here, Daddy. Sometimes I don’t even know who you are. The sting of those words had never faded, mainly because they were all too