The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [122]
“He’s still here,” was Detective Sergeant Lucius’s reaction to all the noise coming out of Mulberry Street. “You mark my words, Stevie, the man never left and never will leave this city.” Only time, again, would tell; but I wasn’t betting against the detective sergeant, that was for sure.
Friday brought word from Kat, saying that she’d secured one of Libby Hatch’s jackets and was ready to turn it over; but she had a feeling that maybe Ding Dong knew that she was up to something, so she wanted to make the delivery somewhere other than at the Seventeenth Street house: apparently the Dusters knew I lived and worked there. I told her to bring the jacket that night to Number 808 Broadway, where the detective sergeants had set up their equipment and were ready to perform their tests—tests what would tell us, once and for all, whether Nurse Hunter had taken Ana Linares and was holding her in some deep recess of Number 39 Bethune Street.
CHAPTER 22
Kat showed up just after nightfall, and I went down in the big elevator to fetch her. She was shuffling from foot to foot on the marble floor of the building’s lobby, humming a little tune and jerking her body around in time to it. At the elevator’s approach she spun to face me, and even from that distance I could tell that she’d been at the burny again.
“Stevie!” she called, with a big, disturbing sort of smile. “I got the goods!” She held up a medium-sized parcel, plain brown paper tied with some twine.
As I dragged the grate open, she jumped inside and threw herself against me, laughing out loud at nothing at all. “Kat,” I said, trying not to sound as disappointed—even angry—as I felt, “get a grip on yourself, okay? This is serious.”
She frowned, mocking me. “Oh. Sorry, Inspector.” Then I closed the grate, and as we started up in the near darkness she threw her arms around me, moving her lips close to my ear. “Want to have another go, Stevie? Right here in the elevator? Been a long time …”
I slammed the control handle of the machine into the STOP position, so hard that Kat was jerked away from me. She gave out a little squeal as she fell backward.
“Kat!” I said, still trying to control myself. “Why the hell did you have to show up in this kind of condition?”
The blue eyes turned mean, a meanness made all the worse by the cocaine. “Don’t you take that tone with me, Stevie Taggert! Ain’t I spent the whole week risking my neck to get you and your friends what you wanted? If I allow myself to celebrate a little, now that it’s over, then I hope I can be forgiven by your high-minded self!”
Letting out a frustrated burst of air, I nodded at the package. “Maybe you should just let me take it,” I said. “I’ll meet you later, bring you the money and the ticket.”
“Oh, no,” Kat shot back, holding the package away from me. “I know that deal! I’m gettin’ paid now, and I’m gettin’ paid in person! If you’re so damned embarrassed by me, don’t worry, I won’t stick around long! Who’d want to? Bunch of mighty strange types, is what you all are, and I mean to celebrate my good fortune tonight with them what knows how!”
I grabbed the elevator handle and threw the thing back into motion. “All right,” I said, “if that’s how you want it.”
“How I want it? That’s what you want, ain’t it?” She faced the elevator grate and tried to fix her hair. “Damn me … the airs some people take on, just because they find themselves on the other side of the tracks …”
The rest of Kat’s visit didn’t go much better. Her anger made her keep her words to a minimum, but it was still obvious to me—and, I’m sure, to everybody else—that she was loaded with burny and that hers was no chippy (which is to say, irregular) habit. Oh, she had the goods she’d promised, all right: we opened the parcel up on the billiard table next