Murder Without Pity by Steve Haberman Read Free Book Online Page A

and in that instant the studio came to him with clarity. Where was the TV? The radio? The pictures or posters to soften the dreariness?
    “He’s getting out,” Christophe warned.
    And something else. To his left, that bed with its blanket creased back with the care of a hotel maid. “Anyone with him?” he asked.
    “I can’t tell yet.”
    And next to the bed, on that fragment of cloth, cut into a rug, slippers to furnish Pincus a little warmth each morning…before he continued some task that led to Berlin? “Can you describe him?”
    “A hat’s hiding his face.”
    There was a fussiness to the room, a purpose and energy he could sense. A drive not realized here, he guessed. Not in this halfway house of a room. No, Pincus might have focused his life outward. Again the thought of Berlin returned.
    “He’s looking up at this building,” Christophe warned. “And he looks like he’s dialing his cell phone. And getting back into his Safrane.”
    Too late to stop that driver from phoning in his search, if he did report to those who had held him captive, Stanislas knew. And too late to call his own driver or other police. But not too late for them to leave immediately and hope that his fear was wrong and that the man was only a property speculator.
    “Monsieur Judge!” The photographer rushed into the studio, breathless. “I can’t find the guard. He must have wandered off.”
    Stanislas thrust his hand into his trouser pocket for the studio key. “We’re getting out,” he said. Limping toward the door, he sensed a sudden kinship with Pincus. Something that man might have glimpsed from his window might have frightened him just as I’m frightened, he thought. And something might have made him flee just as I’m fleeing. As he locked up, he felt a hunch stronger now than before his visit. Léon Pincus appeared more than the beggar that Boucher claimed, and Louis Boucher, less the innocent than he himself professed.

CHAPTER 8
    PANIC
    Some remains of Monday’s crowd drifted out of the Theater Anjou and into the fog. Louis Boucher glanced to a couple inside the lobby further to his left. He hadn’t focused on them until that moment and vaguely recalled they had seated themselves two rows back before the play had started. What bits of chatter he had overheard sounded harmless. But didn’t you entrap the unwary with the innocuous? he asked himself. Why didn’t they depart like the others?
    He caught dangerous nuances in the lift of their hands. The woman flipped up the collar to her Peabody jacket, a gesture that looked like a signal to a police watcher outside. The man thrust his umbrella forward to a storefront’s blackened window across the street that fired lust in red neon. Visiting there could mean they had finished their assignment and were passing him to others. He should have concentrated on them instead of that suspect beautiful blond, who kept eyeing herself in her compact mirror.
    He hadn’t enjoyed the play because of her. Come to think of it, he reflected, that museum’s Italian pastorals earlier that afternoon hadn’t relaxed him either.
    But at least these activities had provided pretense for anyone who followed, he hoped, while he awaited the hour.
    The marquee’s lights darkened. The lobby lights dimmed twice. Suddenly he stared out to a frightening world of mist and shadows. For an instant he thought, I must elude them. But he knew no matter how many twists he took, in the end he must reach that phone booth where they’d probably pursue him. And if they do? They can’t arrest me for what looks like a friendly call, can they? Unless that judge has that booth also tapped. His lips tightened in alarm at that prospect.
    The woman palmed open the door. The man shook open his umbrella above their heads. They stepped as lovers into the wetness and headed across to the Erotique Boutique.
    The pimply usherette approached him again, this time with arms folded in impatience. Would the monsieur