A Killer in the Wind Read Free Page B

gone off. It was a fat woman anyway—and who knows, maybe the fat woman I was looking for. “Any better shots of her?”
    “Just this one.”
    Monahan clicked to his last picture. The woman was turned toward us now, toward the camera, nervously scanning the street. But all I could see—all I seemed to see through the window’s darkness and the buildings reflected on the glass—was a bizarrely piebald oval of flesh framed in short, darkish hair.
    “Where the hell’s her face?” I said.
    Monahan’s massive shoulders lifted and fell under the straining shirt. “Beats me.”
    “What, is she wearing a mask?”
    “Maybe. Could be the light. Could be the glass.”
    “I guess. It’s spooky. What about the car? You check the car?”
    “Rental. Phony ID. Dead end.”
    “So that tells us something right there.”
    “Exactly. I’m thinking maybe he gets his expensive thrills inside the building—and his very expensive thrills from her.”
    I didn’t answer, but I was still buzzing, buzzing more in fact, more every second. “It’s a leap. I don’t know. The phony ID is definitely something. Otherwise . . . she’s in the fat half of the female half of the human race.”
    “I got a way in for you if you want it.”
    “Yeah?”
    “One of Emory’s clients is also a john,” Monahan said. “William Russel. Runs a very exclusive private school. I don’t think he’d want to do the perp walk with the Post snapping pictures. If I lean on him, I’m pretty sure he’d give you a referral to Emory.”
    I kept peering into the monitor. Spooky: that featureless, piebald oval where her face should’ve been. Must’ve been the glare on the glass.
    “What do you think?” said Monahan as I hesitated. “You want to make contact with him?”
    I was only pretending to think it over. I already knew what I was going to do.
    “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. I’ll make contact.”
    Which I did, about a week later, posing as a wealthy video game designer. I figured I played video games and read about them and Emory probably didn’t, so it was a good cover. Monahan put the squeeze on his private school perp, Russel, and got me the referral I needed.
    We met on a Wednesday in Emory’s apartment, which doubled as his office. It was a penthouse on East 52nd Street, right above the river. Wraparound windows and a balcony over the water. Polished wood floors and elaborate carpets. A lot of stuffed white chairs and glass furniture. A lot of black-and-white photographs on the wall: famous actresses and athletes, reclining nudes, plus one of a nude woman kissing another woman who was wearing a veil. I recognized some of these photos. I’d seen them before in magazines. But I guessed these were the originals or early prints or something—something expensive. The whole place felt aggressively expensive, an advertisement for Emory’s investing skills, I guess.
    But that wasn’t all. There was an atmosphere about the place, a subtle atmosphere of creepy sexuality. Maybe it was the photographs that did it: the sprawled poses of the actresses and the drooping eyelids of the nudes. Even the rippling six-packs of the boxers and ballplayers might have had something to do with it. Even the furniture: sparse and spare, yet oversoft like rotten fruit. It was the whole place—I don’t know; I couldn’t put my finger on it. Could’ve just been me, my jaded point of view, my cop instincts. But I didn’t think it was me. I thought it was Emory. I already suspected what the guy was under his pink polo shirt and khaki slacks. I thought he meant the place to feel the way it did. I thought it was a kind of subliminal tease built into the décor, his private joke, his private perversion—whatever it was—hidden in plain sight, mocking any visitor who wasn’t in the know. Anyway, all I’m saying is: The place made me queasy.
    His short, bustling Puerto Rican maid let me in. Then Emory turned from the river view at the far wall of windows and