Gladyss of the Hunt. Arthur Nersesian

him to divorce his wife for her. When he died, she became the big producer. She’s producing Crispin’s latest project.”

      Catching herself, she added, “Be careful, Gladyss, these celebrities use little people like us, then toss us away like pistachio shells.”

      “I really am not interested in him,” I said again.

      “Then why are you going on a date with him?” She was indignant.

      “I know what I’m going to say will sound weird, but, I think I had a Kundalini moment involving him.”

      “What does that have to do with . . .”

      Since she knew so much about the superstar, I just asked her point blank: “I know it sounds weird, but do you think Noel Holden could kill someone?”

      “What!”

      “Twice in a twelve-hour period I saw him in the vicinity of a murder scene, on Forty-second. A crime scene that was not public knowledge at the time.”

      “Forty second Street is hardly the middle of nowhere, is it? And he’s an actor. Just because he happens to be around there, that hardly makes him a murderer.”

      “I’m not picking on him because he’s a big actor. I’m just checking his prints and alibi and that’s the end of it. “

      She sighed deeply, as if to keep from panicking, then she muttered, “My God, are you kidding? What did I do? What did I do!”

      “What did you do?’”

      “Don’t you see? I did this! I wrote those letters to him and put all those messages out there.”

      “Out where?”

      “Out there!” she pointed to the air around her. “And you must’ve been picking them up! Shit!”

      “Look I just want to get his prints,” I said, hoping to calm her. “Then I can eliminate him as a suspect.”

      “Once you get his prints you’ll back off?”

      “I swear.”

      “I’m better than I used to be,” she said, showing that she was aware of her own flaky behavior. “I’ve stopped the letter writing . . .” She paused, because I guess she didn’t want to lie, then amended, “Well, at least I’ve stopped mailing them.”

      I gave her a hug.

      “Oh, look at the time,” she said looking at my Elvis Presley wall clock. “I’m going to miss A Most Singular Man!” Before I could tell her that she was welcome to watch it on my TV, she was out the door.

CHAPTER FOUR

      The next day at roll call, Sergeant McKenner informed me that my prayers had been answered, if only conservatively—my thirty-day reassignment to homicide had just come through.

      “Thirty?” I replied. “It was supposed to be ninety.” That was what I had put out into the universe à la Maggie.

      “No problemo, I’ll just tear this up.”

      I grabbed the reassignment order. It ended on the exact day I was scheduled to have my eye surgery. A coincidence? I thought not.

      O’Ryan had a frozen smile on his face, hovering somewhere between jealousy and envy.

      “If you like I’ll buy you a blonde wig,” I mocked him. He’d been so sure I wouldn’t get the job. He called me a lucky stiff.

      “If I get killed,” I shot back. “I’ll just be a stiff.”

      “Are you still going on your surreptitious date with the lady-killer?”

      “Yeah, and I’ll call you when I get home, just like I promised.”

      I cleared out my locker and headed over to Manhattan South Homicide, at Thirty-fifth Street near Ninth Avenue.

      I checked in with the desk sergeant, who had me fill out a short stack of paperwork. Then I was directed up to Sergeant Farrell’s squad room on the fourth floor. I felt like a child as he introduced me to the other two investigators assigned to the case; I’d seen them briefly at the murder scene two days before. Annabelle Barrera and Alexander Oldfield were both third-grade detectives. Annie, as she liked to be called, was an attractive middle-aged Latina; I would learn that she watched her diet and maintained an exercise routine as best as she could while fighting crime and raising two high school-age boys. Alex, who was African American and lived in Orange County, seemed intent on going the other way. As I witnessed throughout the first day, his large flabby body was constantly being fed from a bottomless drawer filled with extra large bags of cheese puffs. The one uncanny thing about them was that though they were of different races and sexes and had different body types, their faces were weirdly similar.

      Hopping slowly around on his one good foot, Bernie led me into his small corner office, which had the name Herbert Q. Kelly painted on the glass door. It was his old partner’s.

      “Kelly?” I asked, “Herbert wasn’t related to Ray?”

      “He liked to be called Bert, and no, he was not related to our commissioner.”

      “Bert and Bernie?” The pair of them sounded a little Sesame Street.

      “The reason you’re here”—he was done with the chitchat—“is that yesterday we got a call from a downtown madam who said she had a john asking for a tall blonde.”

      “You’re kidding.”

      “Annie pulled on a wig and we went in. The guy took one look at her and said she was too short, and too old.”

      “So you lost him.” I only wished O’Ryan could hear this.

      “No, we brought him in anyway, checked out his prints and his alibi for the three murders. So it wasn’t a complete loss. But Annie agreed that we should find some sexy blond giraffe. So thank her for your assignment.”

      “I will.”

      “So here’s the background. The first murder was reported a little over a year and a half ago, when a maid at the Olympian Arms on Fifty-third Street found the body of Mary Lynn MacArthur.” He slid some gruesome photos over to me. “A few weeks later, a cleaning lady at the Spartan opened another door and discovered the grisly remains of Denise Giantonni.” More horrific photos. Both women had been decapitated, like the one I’d seen at the Templeton, and large, crude numbers had been savagely carved into their limbs. “Both women were drugged,” Bernie continued. “Mary bled to death while Denise was strangled and mutilated afterwards.”

      “I wonder why he only made this cut on the first vic,” I said, pointing to a close-up picture that showed a long V-shaped scar running down MacArthur’s right inner thigh.

      “There are other differences, like Denise has a sock hanging from the toes of her left foot, but at this point we’re focusing on the similarities between all three scenes.”

      I jotted down the dates of the first two murders so I could check and see if Noel Holden was around.

      “Even though the killer was more brutal with the second vic, the crime scene was a lot messier with the first girl,” Bernie said. “He probably strangled the second woman so there was less bleeding.”

      As Bernie flicked through the pages of his notebook, I took the opportunity to scan his dusty office. Above a stack of boxes was a wall full of commendations and pictures. At the center, I spotted a small picture frame holding a photo of a beautiful young Latina girl. Under it a caption read:

      Juanita Lopez Kelly

       Sleep with the Angels

      (1968-1998)

      It had to be a memorial card for his ex-partner’s daughter. Apparently she had died