After Ana had gone, Lee pulled out his cell phone and hit the CONTACTS button, then selected the second name on the list and pushed the dial button. His party answered on the second ring.
"Butts here." The voice was a thick rumble, like a bulldog with a chest cold.
"Hi-sorry I'm late. I'll be there in five minutes."
"Oh, hiya, Doc. Well, I'll just have to order another beer."
Lee smiled as he put on his coat. He and Detective Leonard Butts were an unlikely pair, but the bond they had formed was a strong one. In the course of their relationship, he and Butts had gone from initial wariness and mistrust to a comfortable familiarity and mutual respect.
They didn't always see eye to eye, perhaps, but Lee had learned that Butts could be relied upon in a crisis. The squat detective's gruffness masked a deeply loyal, even passionate nature. The more Lee worked with the NYPD, the more he came to see beneath the masks that cops wore as protective covering. The city was not a soft place to live, and daily contact with criminals and creeps made it necessary to develop a thick outer shell. Otherwise, he imagined, you could be crushed by the harshness of police work in this town.
Virage, the restaurant where he was meeting Butts, was one long block away from his apartment. The rain had slurred to a steady drizzle, the air thick with a hazy mist. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he strode rapidly east on Seventh Street toward Second Avenue.
Sure enough, Butts sat at a corner table, a tall, thin glass of pilsner in front of him. Pockmarks littered his face like craters on the surface of the moon. A smile spread over the detective's homely face when he saw Lee.
"Hiya, Doc," he said, pulling up a chair for Lee to sit.
Physically they could not have been more different. Lee Campbell was tall and thin (overly so, according to his girlfriend, Kathy Azarian), with the clear, pale complexion and deep-set blue eyes of a true Celt. Butts was short and thick and swarthy, his face a minefield of pockmarks, his thinning sandy hair as straight as Lee's was dark and curly.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," Lee said as he settled into the chair Butts offered him.
"That's okay, Doc-gives me an excuse to have an extra beer. It's Belgian, I think they said-pretty good. You want one?" "Sure."
Butts ordered them both a round and smiled at Lee's inquiring look.
"I'm takin' the train home tonight, so no worries."
"Muriel doesn't mind you being out on a Friday night?"
Butts grunted and downed the rest of his beer, wiping his rutted face with the back of his sleeve.
"Wife's taken up bridge. She belongs to this club-duplicate bridge, they call it. Some kind of a round-robin thingy, where the hands are dealt ahead of time, and each team gets a chance to play them."
"Sounds fun."
"I dunno, Doc-I'm not a card-playing man. All I know is they sit there playin' for hours, and at the end someone wins fifty bucks or somethin'. Seems like a waste of time to me, and they pretty much take over the living room for the evening."
"So you decided to be elsewhere tonight."
Butts threw his arms up in surrender. "I'm just in the way. I can't even go to the kitchen for a beer without havin' to pass by a dozen people or more."
"I understand. I felt that way sometimes when my parents had parties when I was a kid." Lee remembered with a pang what a handsome, glamorous couple they were-his tall, elegant father with his curly black hair and Italian suits, presiding over the arrival of smartly dressed guests, his mother hanging on his arm, her head thrown back, laughing-a hearty, full-throated sound Lee hadn't heard since the day his father walked out.
Butts took a swig of beer, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and set the glass down on the table with a clunk. "Hey, listen, I'm glad the wife has her own thing, really I am. I just don't happen to share her love of cards, is all."
Lee rested one elbow on the white linen tablecloth and looked around the room. Virage had an easygoing East Village charm, elegant and casual at the same time, a relaxed atmosphere with seriously good food. The floor was done in the classic black-and-white Art Deco tiles used in so many building interiors in the twenties, and the decor reflected the French/Moroccan cuisine: comfortable green and white wicker chairs, white tablecloths, with French movie posters on the walls. With the slowly rotating ceiling fan and potted palms, the restaurant could have been a back room at Rick's in Casablanca.
Lee glanced at his watch. Kathy was late, but he knew the rush-hour trains from Philadelphia often ran behind schedule.
"So what is this mysterious case you're working on?" he asked.
Butts licked his lips and took another sip of beer. "It's very weird, you know, Doc-very weird." "How so? Who's the victim?" Butts leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Well, that's the thing. There's more than one." "Yeah? Tell me more."
"Okay, but if they decide to call you in on this one, you didn't hear this from me."
"Really? You think they might call me in?"
"Who knows? Alls I know is that we're not even sure yet these are homicides."
"Is Chuck Morton involved yet?"
"Well, if we decide that these guys are vics and not suicides, he will be."
Besides being the head of Bronx Major Case Unit in the Bronx, where Butts was a homicide detective, Chuck Morton was also Lee's college roommate and best friend-and was largely responsible for his appointment as the only criminal profiler in the NYPD.
Lee took a long swallow of beer. It was very fizzy and a little sweet-it tasted yellow, like honey.
"Okay," he said, leaning forward, "tell me the whole thing from the beginning."