Free The Man Who Loved Women to Death by David Handler Page B

coloring. Then the inspector pulled up a chair and sat, being careful not to kick Lulu under the table. The waiter brought him a teacup. He filled it and drank, swishing the tea around in his mouth like Listerine. He swallowed it. He sat back. “I would have preferred meeting with you alone.”
    “You can say anything in front of Lulu you would say in front of me, Inspector. She has my complete confidence.”
    “I was referring to Lieutenant Very here.”
    “Oh.”
    “But he insisted on sitting in. He felt I’d need a … what was it you called it, Lieutenant?”
    “Interpreter,” Very said quietly.
    “Actually, what he said was that you have no license to practice but you’d try to operate on my head.”
    “He said that?”
    “I didn’t know what he meant at first, but now I do. You see, I am on to you, my friend,” Feldman informed me with a smug, self-satisfied smile.
    I don’t do well around smug. Never have. “On to me, Inspector?”
    “It has been my experience that most people are one shade or another of gray,” he said. Actually, he didn’t so much speak as deliver weighty, carefully worded proclamations. It was as if he were standing outside on the curb giving a press conference of nationwide import. “You are what I call Kodachrome Brash.”
    I glanced down at Lulu. She didn’t particularly want to touch that one, so I tried Very. “Was I just dissed?”
    Very didn’t reply. He was like a different person around the inspector. Loyal. Obedient. Silent. I had never seen him in toady mode before. I didn’t much care for it.
    “The lieutenant was telling me about how you helped crack the Son of Sam case, Inspector,” I said. What the hell, I was going to have to hear about it eventually. Might as well get it over with.
    Feldman took another gulp of his tea and sat back, his hands gripping the narrow arms of the chair like huge claws, his hooded eyes flicking from one side of the restaurant to the other. He reminded me of a hawk perched there waiting for some unsuspecting prey to come out of its burrow so he could swoop down and snatch it in his powerful jaws and fly off with it, its tiny limbs flailing helplessly in midair. “That was the Omega Task Force,” he recalled, his voice booming. “Largest manhunt in department history. We had seventy-five detectives and two hundred and twenty-five uniforms working around the clock in all five boroughs of the city of New York. Cost the city almost a hundred thousand dollars a day in overtime. Ended up costing over two million. At one point, we were getting as many as four phone-in tips a minute, people who were sure they’d spotted him. We checked them all out. Every single one. We investigated more than three thousand suspects. We consulted shrinks, hypnotists, numerologists, astrologers, biorhythm specialists.…” He paused to swallow more tea. “Dave Berkowitz attacked eight times in fourteen months. Stabbed two, shot six. Six of the eight died. And do you know how we got him in the end? On a parking ticket. The man parked too close to a fire plug.” Abruptly, he turned his penetrating glare back on me. “How do I know you’re not the answer man?” he demanded harshly.
    “You don’t,” I replied. “For that matter, I don’t either. Maybe I have a split personality. Maybe I slip out in the night and kill these women myself. That would certainly explain why I wake up so tired in the morning.”
    He let out a derisive snort, Lulu staring up at him curiously. He took note of her. “What’s she doing?”
    “Trying to make up her mind about you.”
    “What about me?”
    “You’ll have to ask her that. She doesn’t tell me everything.”
    Now Feldman’s eyes flicked over to the pages laid out on the table beside us. “What I want to know is why he picked you.”
    “I have no idea, as I’ve already told the lieutenant.”
    “But he seems to know you.”
    “He knows my work. A lot of people do. There are still plenty of readers