LITMIR.BIZ

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knocking him to the ground again, then he bent his knee on the guy’s chest. He leaned slowly on Youngblood’s turkey gobbler with his other knee. A crowd started forming.

      “Lily told me she wanted a little boy and girl, so that’s two other people you killed.” He smacked the old guy in the face. At that point I heard someone in the crowd mutter, “police brutality.”

      “Come on Bernie, we’ve got an audience,” I nudged.

      “Take a fucking look at a killer,” Bernie yelled to me, but really to the surrounding crowd. “he used to beat up on innocent white girls for a living.”

      “The AIDS would’ve killed her by now anyway.” Old Youngblood mumbled, squeezing out from under him and struggling to his feet. “It got them all in the end.”

      Bernie made a pained expression, then smacked the former pimp upside his skull, knocking a small flesh-colored wedge out of the old man’s head.

      “I know what you did in Bushwick,” the ex-con squealed. “You wasted Tyrone saying it was a holdup, but we both know he never woulda drawn on you!”

      When a pair of Port Authority cops came out of the bus station, I showed them my badge and explained that a drunk and disorderly situation had turned into resisting arrest. Bernie backed off, and the ex-con spat bloody saliva on the icy sidewalk. With the PA cops and the crowd watching, we couldn’t just let the guy walk, so I pushed Youngblood against a wall and read him his rights.

      As I cuffed him, I saw Bernie pick up the thing that had fallen out of Youngblood’s head.

      “Give it here,” I said, before he could stomp on it. He tossed me a waxy hearing aid.

      Somehow I sensed that I was now doing his old partner’s job—reining Bernie in. After a minute, when most of the people had dispersed, I uncuffed Youngblood and handed him the hearing aid. The former pimp grabbed the one shopping bag that wasn’t ripped apart and scooped up a handful of the bagged socks. Several packages had disappeared into the black slush in the gutter. Then he hurried off down the block.

      “Isn’t this the kind of shit that got you assigned to desk duty in the first place?” I said to Bernie.

      Silently he led us back to the car. As we were heading downtown, his cell phone rang and he answered it, even though he was driving. From the awkwardness of his tone, I figured he was talking with his estranged wife. In a clear, somber tone, he started talking about his failures as a husband. I quickly pulled out my cell and called my brother.

      Seeing my name on his display, without even letting me say hello, Carl began: “I know that sometimes I get a little manic, and you’re always the first to warn me, but this time it’s you. You went from one extreme to the other with this scorpion guy.”

      “Stop calling him that, asshole!” I shouted. Bernie looked over and abruptly ended his conversation.

      “All right, I’m sorry,” my brother replied. “I just worry about you. Are you still in that weird cult?”

      When I’d told Carl about Kundalini and its alleged psychic properties, he insisted that it was dangerous and said I should stop attending immediately.

      “It’s just yoga,” I said, and told him I had to go.

      “Annie discovered our Jane Doe is one Nelly Linquist,” Bernie said. Apparently it wasn’t his wife but his fellow detective he’d been talking on the phone with. After establishing the vic’s identity, Annie and Alex had called escort houses until they located the one our victim had worked for. Annie had just given him the address, so Bernie and I drove to a luxury high rise in Gramercy Park to break the news.

      The madam was a big-breasted Southern magnolia with a head of stiff dyed red hair. When Bernie showed his badge at the door, she gasped.

      “Relax,” Bernie said, “We’re homicide. We’ve found Nelly Linquist.” He showed the sketch of her face.

      “Damn! Nelly was such a special gal, you know?” she eulogized. “A lot of fellas will really miss her.”

      Using a rolled-up Kleenex, she dabbed her tears before they could erode the dried layers of mascara. It looked as if they had been plastered on her face one over the other for years.

      Bernie cut to the chase.” Who was Nelly’s last customer?”

      The poinsettia-haired office manager went to a little card catalog box, rummaged in it, and exclaimed, “Oh, yes! I remember now. This guy couldn’t spell his own gosh darn name—Dhaka.”

      “Couldn’t spell his own name?” Bernie echoed, glaring at her.

      “Yeah, he had to do it a couple times till it came out right for the credit card.”

      “You’re a fucking moron,” Bernie spat ferociously. “I should arrest you as an accomplice.”

      She gave him a sour look.

      “I don’t care that you run a whorehouse, but at very least you should protect your girls! Which means if a guy calls up and can’t spell his own fucking name, I’d expect you to be a little suspicious.” I could see the madam looking puzzled.

      “How would this guy have found out about your place?” I asked softly, since Bernie had immediately alienated her.

      “We advertise on cable TV, and in the back pages of newspapers. We’re trying to run a business.”

      “Why did you send Nelly?” Bernie asked.

      “He asked for a big blonde.”

      Bernie reached into his pocket and located a photo of the crime scene, something he hadn’t shown to anyone else because it was so disturbing and handed it to her. “First he strangled her slowly, then he cut her up like a piece of meat.”

      “I don’t see her . . . face.”

      “That’s because he chopped her head off,” Bernie said bluntly. Pointing within the photo, he added, “See! That’s where he stuck it.”

      She covered her mouth in horror then started weeping painfully. Bernie snatched the photo back.

      “There’s no possibility he saw any of your other girls?” I asked.

      “I don’t know. I don’t know who he was,” she said as she staggered into a seat.

      “Do you recognize that?” Bernie asked, handing her a close-up photograph of Nelly’s wrist that showed her blood splattered bracelet.

      “No.”

      “No, it’s not hers? Or no, you don’t recognize it?” he pushed.

      “I don’t recognize it. It could be hers. I just don’t know.”

      “And you didn’t recognize the client’s voice?”

      “No, I don’t remember anything unusual about it.”

      “Did he sound educated, foreign? Regional?” Bernie asked.

      Looking grim, she stiffly nodded no.

      Bernie handed her his business card, and said she should call him if anything relevant came to mind.

      As we headed back to the car, Bernie called Annie who contacted VISA headquarters and tracked down one Mr. Ahmed Dhaka. Though he had used his credit card about a dozen times in the past week, the only place he’d used it recently, prior to paying for the vic, was at a porn arcade across from Penn Station. It turned out Mr. Dhaka worked for an investment firm on Times Square, Dunleavy Money Management. Bernie got the address: 3 Times Square. He thought it would be a good idea to pop in unannounced, just in case the guy really was a crazed murderer. Since our killer had already established a clear MO of stealing credit cards, he agreed this was a long shot. Still, Bernie pointed out that this was the first guy who hadn’t bothered to report his card missing, and it seemed odd that the two sex-related expenses were back to back. The killer had never used a stolen card more

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