Silent Prey

tousled Kennett’s hair. “Let’s go look at the river,” she said.
    “Jesus Christ, the woman’s indefatigable, and me with this heart,” Kennett complained.
    Lucas, vaguely embarrassed, stood and drifted toward the door. “See you guys tomorrow . . . .”
     
    A message from Fell was waiting at the hotel: “Call when you get in, until one o’clock.” He held the slip in his hand as he rode the elevator to his floor, dropped iton the bedstand, went into the bathroom, doused his face with hot water, and looked up in the mirror, the water trickling down his face.
    He’d had a long relationship with a woman, the mother of his daughter, that now, when he looked back, seemed to have been based on a shared cynicism. Jennifer was a reporter, with too much time on the street, edging toward burnout. A baby, for her, had been a run at salvation.
    He’d had a shorter, intense relationship with Lily, who had been struggling with the end of her own marriage; that might have been something, if they’d been in the same town, from the same emotional places. But they hadn’t been, and some of the guilt of their affair still stuck to their relationship.
    He’d had any number of other relationships, long and short, happy and unhappy. Most of the women he’d gone with still liked him well enough, in a wary, once-burned way; but he tended to think of them as others, not Jennifer, not Lily.
    Fell was one of the others. A wistful, lovely, finally lonely woman. In a permanent relationship, they would drive each other crazy. He wiped his face with one of the rough hotel towels and wandered back to the bed. He sat down, picked up the phone, looked at the receiver for a moment, then smiled. He’d felt for a year as though he were under water: quiet, placid, out of it. The New York cops were bringing him up, and Fell was fixing him in other ways. He tapped out her number. She picked it up on the second ring.
    “This is Lucas,” he said.
    “Kennett knew it was you, but I got good mileage out of the cross-dressing thing,” Fell said, without preamble. “My name was on the TV news, and it’s in the Times and the Post. That never hurts.”
    “I saw it . . . .”
    “I’d like to find a way to thank you. Oral sex comes to mind, if I get my share,” Fell said.
    “Women are so forward these days,” Lucas said. “How quick can you get here?”
     
    Fell brought a change of clothes with her, and they spent the evening laughing and making love. The next morning, when they were dressed, Lucas asked, “How would we find Jackie Smith?”
    “Call his office,” she said.
    “That easy?”
    “He’s a hustler,” Fell said. “Getting found is part of his business.”
    “So call him.”
    Smith called back in five minutes. “Aren’t you guys ever going away? Can’t you find out anything on your own?” he complained. “I’ve done everything you wanted . . . .”
    “All we want to do is talk,” Lucas said.
    “I gave you what you wanted,” Smith said again. He was angry.
    “Jackie . . . ten minutes, please? Have breakfast with us or something. We’ll buy.”
    Smith would meet them at a café outside the St. Moritz hotel, he said. They caught a cab, struggling north through the midmorning traffic, the driver with his arm out the window, whistling. The day would be hot again; already the sky was showing a whitish haze, and when they got out of the cab across from Central Park, Lucas could see the leaves on the park trees were curling against the heat.
    Smith was sitting at a metal table, eating a cream cheese croissant and drinking coffee. He didn’t get up when they arrived.
    “Now what?” he asked, a sullen look on his face.
    “We wanted to thank you—those names you gave us started a chain reaction. We’ve maybe got the asshole pinned down.”
    “No shit?” Smith looked surprised. “When’ll you get him?”
    “Some of the guys are betting a couple-three days. Nobody gives him more than a week,” Lucas said. “But we do have something we need from you. All the small-time fences who buy from the junkies—they need to tell the dopers that Bekker’ll be out looking for angel dust, ecstasy, speed. Maybe acid. And he’ll kill. The guy we got to, with your help, was boosting stuff out of Bellevue, but he was also dealing dope. Bekker killed him. Cold blood. Walked up and bam. Killed him.”
    “I saw that on TV. I wondered . . .”
    “That was him,” said Lucas.
    Smith nodded. “Okay.