Urge to Kill

After all, she’d had experience with Alfred Beeker.

“I caught a snatch of radio news on the way over,” Quinn said. “The media seem to be referring to the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer murders as duels. I take it that’s Cindy Sellers’s work.”

“I’ve kept her up on things, including the Rhodes case and the fact he had a twenty-five-caliber gun,” Renz said. He flashed his canine smile. “A deal’s a deal.”

“Until it isn’t,” Quinn said, knowing Renz.

“I saved the best for last,” Renz said, showing the grin again. “About the gun. Ballistics doesn’t have a perfect match, but they think the gun found on Rhodes is the one that killed Floyd Becker in the Antonian Hotel.”

The real estate market in New York was almost as depressed as Berty Wrenner. He’d missed his sales quota again, and Home Away’s sales manager, the sadistic Alec Farr, was making his life miserable.

Berty’s employer, the Home Away Agency, specialized in selling small New York apartments to individuals as well as corporate buyers. Much of their business stemmed from Wall Street, and if the stock market was in decline and brokerage houses were laying off, Home Away’s business was also in decline. The next step wasn’t hard to figure out.

That was why Berty Wrenner hadn’t made his sales quota this month. Or last. The other salespeople were making theirs, or at least coming close. The demanding Farr didn’t consider close anywhere near good enough. Things were tight at Home Away. Like stomachs and jaw muscles. Lots of antacid tablets were being consumed. Daily lunchtime martinis were gaining on a few of the men and on Marlee Case, the only female agent not yet driven away by Farr. Lack of sleep accompanied by pressure from on high was a relentless destroyer of health, happiness, and sobriety.

The chesty, perpetually grinning Farr had held a sales conference at the beginning of the month and informed his six-agent team that it was crunch time (Farr was prone to clichés) so they’d better pull out all the stops, because, as Farr put it, “you gentlemen are in a goddamned fight for your lives, so you’d better not be gentlemen.”

Berty, a middle-aged man who’d been a lot of things before he’d become a real estate agent, had a problem with that. He was, God help him, a gentleman in a cutthroat game. When he lied, his face turned a mottled red, and he couldn’t look the target of his lie in the eye. His wasn’t the face of a salesman or poker player, anyway. Berty looked as if one of his parents might have been a mole. Even Berty thought he looked like a balding, myopic mole, especially when he wore his glasses, which was all the time. Only Alec Farr didn’t think Berty looked like a mole; he thought Berty looked like a rat, and often told him so.

The other five salesmen had made their quotas. Jeevers, the corporate client specialist, had barely made his by surrendering part of his commission to a major buyer. The stress of the contentious transaction showed on him. He appeared as though he hadn’t slept the last three nights. His long, equine features were actually twitching. His thin body wouldn’t be still where he sat poised on the edge of his desk, trying to maintain a relaxed posture; he was a man made to run who was forced to sit. Berty wondered sometimes if Jeevers was a reincarnated racehorse.

They were all lounging in postures of mock comfort in the outer office, waiting for Farr to react to the monthly sales figures he’d just received.

Marlee, a thickset, gray-haired woman with eyes like oversized blue marbles, glanced at her watch. “I wish he’d hurry up. I gotta get the hell outta here.”

“You close that deal yet on West Twenty-fifth Street?” Joe Keller, the newest, youngest agent asked. He might have passed for twelve years old if it weren’t for his shadowy beard that made him look perpetually a couple of shaves behind.

“Like I’m gonna tell you, you pathetic walking embryo.”

Keller looked hurt, or he might have been putting them on. He would look boyish all his life, with a face difficult to read. A salesman’s dream. Or a spy’s. No one completely trusted Keller.

Jeevers flicked lint from his sleeve, though Berty hadn’t seen any lint. “Keller wouldn’t dream of yanking a deal out from under you,” he said to Marlee. He gave her a horsy grin to show he was kidding.

“We’d all dream it, or we wouldn’t be wasting our lives in this cutthroat business. Ask Farr.”

“I wish he’d hurry up,” Keller said. “I need to scoot my ass outta here, too.”

“Got a girlfriend waiting?” asked Berty, who was long divorced and single. He hoped no one had noticed the note of envy in his voice.

Keller simply looked at him and shook his head.

“He don’t wanna discuss his personal life, Mole,” Marlee said. “How ’bout you, Berty? There a mole girl out there?”

“Somebody for everyone,” Ned Nichols said.

Everyone looked at him in surprise. He very seldom spoke in the office, while in the larger world outside he’d wear his customers down by talking at them until they were numb and incapable of sales resistance.