The Lure by Felice Picano Read Free Book Online Page B

you were demoted. You’re working for some special group, correct?”
    “Close enough.”
    “That’s all the questions I have,” Noel said, and got up to cut another bagel. “You, too?”
    “I’m overweight already. Mr. Cummings, I came to tell you something about what you stumbled into that morning.”
    Noel didn’t completely believe him.
    “I don’t blame you for wanting to forget it. It was very unpleasant. But not the first unpleasant matter we’ve dealt with. And, not the worst. There has been a series of such murders. All of them related. Do you know who that man was you tried to help?”
    “One of your men called him Kansas.”
    “Kansas. A code name. Operative number five. A police detective. Twenty-six years old. Just promoted. A wife. A child. A promising career in the department.”
    “I’m sorry to hear it. But isn’t death an occupational hazard in your work?” Exactly what was he driving at?
    “It is. It is. Not like that, though—blinded, bleeding, butchered in a rotting warehouse.”
    “I agree,” Noel said. “I was there. Remember?”
    “I remember. But as I was saying, Mr. Cummings, he was not the first of my operatives to be murdered. About a month ago another was found facedown in a snowbank, not four blocks away. His hands were bound, his throat cut, his body mutilated. And it isn’t only policemen who are being killed.”
    “Are you trying to tell me there’s a crime wave in the city? I do read the papers, Mr. Loomis.”
    “This isn’t any general outbreak of crime. This is one group or one man. We don’t know who. We aren’t even sure why. But we can guess.”
    “Maybe they’re ritual slayings,” Noel suggested, recalling what Boyle had told him. “Don’t homosexuals consort in that area?”
    “Exactly. See, I said you were an intelliegent man. From below Christopher Street all the way up to the twenties, there are dozens of bars and clubs.”
    “Well, that’s who’s doing it. Some homosexual-hating psychopath who took your men for what they were decoyed to be.”
    “So it would appear,” Loomis said. Then, with a penetrating glance: “Or maybe that’s what we’re supposed to believe.”
    “You don’t?”
    “Do you recall, Mr. Cummings, about a year and a half ago when a man named Robby Landau was found murdered in his apartment? He owned a large and popular discotheque. He’d been stabbed many times, a hundred, more. His underwear was slashed off, the apartment ransacked—things broken, paintings ripped. It appeared to be the work of the type of man you just described.”
    Loomis went on: “What the newspapers didn’t say was that Landau was to testify before a grand jury the next day about the South American drug trade. He was a large purchaser of cocaine. If he hadn’t agreed to talk, he would have been indicted.
    “While you’re absorbing that,” Loomis said, “try to recall a similar incident a few months later involving Albert Wills, a socially prominent, wealthy, playboy type. Except Wills played with boys, not girls. He was found badly beaten, strangled, stabbed: the works. The assumption was he had picked up a rough hustler, and they had disagreed about money. Except that in Landau’s preliminary brief, he had mentioned Wills as another large purchaser of cocaine. Wills was subpoenaed, too.
    “Two other men were found dead in their apartment. One knew Wills. Both were pals of Landau. Neither was mentioned in his brief or known to the grand jury. No drugs were found. But the method of death was the same. Only this time the killer was looking for something and, failing to find it, had set fire to the place. A sharp-nosed neighbor smelled the smoke. Only a few files were found charred next to the bodies. Some of the papers pertained to Landau’s club. Soon after his death, Landau’s parents sold the discotheque to a corporation from Connecticut.
    “Others at Landau’s club got threatening phone calls. Other clubs catering to