Blood Music (10 page)

H
e lay in the bed next to her and his breathing was innocent. There was something wrong, very wrong. Here in the dark, Zelly was forced to recognize that.

The strangling had badly shaken her. She didn't know what to think about what had happened. When he put his hands around her neck she was not surprised. The shock of her unsurprise was deep and numbing, she could not analyze it. Like all women she had been brought up to believe that most men are sometimes violent, and that all men are sometimes cruel. She was more hurt than angry at the virulence of Pat's possession of her body; what she minded most was that he had let the baby cry.

Two days ago Pat had gone with her when she took Mary up to Elysian Park, at Tenth Street. It was a Saturday. Pat had forgotten how badly he'd frightened her, if he ever knew it. He put Mary up at the top of the slide and caught her as she came down, on her back with her feet crazy in the air. Mary laughed and laughed. Zelly wanted to say,
Why did you do that to me?
but she knew he wouldn't know what she was talking about.

“I love spring,” he said, looking around the park, which wasn't even really a park but a cement playground set amid bare dirt for a dog run and a few yew bushes, with a high iron fence over by the water. Mary stood teetering, holding onto two of the bars. (Zelly had once counted every bar of the fence, walking along looking out at the river, to make sure none was missing.)

“Maybe we'll see the Circle Line,” Pat said, but a white boat like a ferry went by, and then an enormous ocean liner, and he picked Mary up and stood with her in one arm with the other around Zelly's waist; he and Zelly pretended to be greatly excited by the ocean liner but the baby had something in her hand—a single palm frond—which she was trying to eat. Zelly felt Pat's arm around her waist and she held on to the cold bar in front of her and looked out at the water.

Zelly couldn't sleep. Who was her husband: the man who had strangled her or the man who held her baby up to look at the
Nordic Queen
as it passed by on its way to the open sea? The man who said, “Women are easy to kill,” or the man who whistled Schubert's
Lieder
to his little daughter to make her laugh?

There had been something in Pat's eyes. Something that disturbed her—but this was her husband. This was the baby's daddy. He had never been abusive. What if he were to become abusive now? Pat moved next to her in the bed. For a little while on Saturday it had seemed as if nothing were different. Lying here she could almost think that nothing
was
different. You are rationalizing, her mind told her; but since she didn't know what it was she could be rationalizing it was easy—almost—just to let it go, just let it go and go to sleep, to sleep, the
Nordic Queen
had been big as a city block, white and gleaming in the sunshine, one bird flying in the sunshine—“I'm sorry,” Pat said next to her. Zelly jolted awake.

“I will,” he said unclearly.

“You killed me too,” he said distinctly. Zelly felt a ripple of cold over her body. His voice was getting louder. “You killed me too,” he screamed suddenly. “You killed me too,” and he reared up and slammed his fist into the wall next to Zelly's head.

E
asy Blackman loved everybody—which was why he was so often hard. He had grown up in the Deep South, in Hazleton, Alabama, an entirely black town where all the houses and trees and the one main street were gray; sometimes people in cars—white people—came off the interstate looking for a rest room or some gasoline and Ezra suffered the indignity of watching their eyes. His mother grew geraniums in a box in the window of her house at the end of the one gray street. Every morning when Sgt. Blackman walked past the geraniums in the planters on either side of the door to the Sixth Precinct precinct house he thought of Hazleton, Alabama. He had learned to love in a desert of hate and neglect; that was, quite simply, why he loved. And why he was hard.

“Hey, Scottie,” Blackman called from across the squad room, “you got Quantico's description of the van plugged into the computer yet?”

“Sure do, boss.”

Blackman walked into Scottie's glassed-in cubicle with two cups of coffee.

“The people who helped Madeleine Levy saw white tape or paint across the right-front-door panel. It could be a coincidence, but it jibes with what the Feds are saying.”

“That report hasn't been released to the public yet.”

“It's not going to be. Listen. I got something a couple of days ago that's been eating me.” He told Scottie about John's call, reading off the notes he'd made in his small, neat, indecipherable handwriting. When he was finished talking he was pretty sure he had remembered all of the conversation. Scottie was certain he had.

“What do you think?”

“You think this guy might have been the Slasher?” Scottie sat down on the edge of Blackman's scarred desk.

“No. But I have an intuition.” Blackman's intuition was legend in the Sixth Precinct. He had an extra eye; he saw connections where there were no connections; more than once other officers had come to Easy with unsolvable conundrums to which Easy had supplied motive, suspect, reasonable cause, all the pieces of the puzzle settled neatly, incontrovertibly in place. It was not only that he was more intelligent than the men around him—although he was—nor was it only the leap of imagination or faith that lets some know what may come ahead, or what has already happened, without firsthand knowledge. It was not only these things: Easy Blackman had made a lifelong study of the human heart.

Scottie knew how much this investigation was costing Easy, was costing them all. Scottie felt as if he ate and drank this case; he dreamed about it at night; he hadn't really thought about anything else for four months, and he knew Easy hadn't either.

All the officers on the Slasher Task Force were paying dearly; even though they liked to think they were hardened to misery they couldn't stop thinking about the women who'd been killed. Some of them turned it into a macho contest; Scottie pretended not to care at all. Easy pretended to care on an intellectual level only. He and Scottie, partners for four years and partners now on the Slasher Task Force, talked the way they'd always talked, about their chances of catching the perp, about their onerous work hours; on a case like this one they wouldn't talk too much about their own families, because thinking about anything other than the case could be painful. They drank a lot of coffee. And they never admitted to fear or adrenaline, although they complained often of boredom. They were New York cops.

“He wasn't a crank.” Easy watched a man being led by outside his glass wall. The fluorescent light made everybody green and old. In every cop movie Blackman had ever seen, in every television show about cops, the open space outside the glassed-in offices was always full of prostitutes, who were almost always shown as beautiful young women wearing short, tight dresses. There were no beautiful young women out there now. The prostitutes of Paris are said to be beautiful. Blackman had never been to Paris so he didn't know.

“And he's definitely not crazy. Did you catch that ‘my—'?” Scottie knew that if he walked away Blackman would keep talking. Sometimes one of the men would come into the room and hear his soft, deep voice talking, and he was never embarrassed or ashamed. “Not a crank,” he said to Scottie or his coffee cup. “That boy was crying. Only two of our girls had husbands, is that right?”

“Linda Swados and Belinda Boston.”

Blackman held his fist up against his mouth, he tapped it unconsciously against his upper lip. “I want you to pull everything we have on those husbands. This boy's voice was pretty young—mid-twenties, I'd say. How about boyfriends?”

“Let's see. Nassent—no. Moscineska, yes. Moscineska had a boyfriend out in Brooklyn.”

“Pull him. This boy wants to get to Madeleine Levy. Why? He damn sure wasn't the press—they all know her name already, and anyway they know better than to try a stunt like that with me. I already told her daddy to get the phone number changed. There's no professional angle going on here. Get me everything you can on that boyfriend.” Blackman's fist tap-tapped absently against his lip.

“You'd better get me files on all the male relatives of the victims,” he added. “I think we have a civilian here who wants to do our job for us.”

M
adeleine's father proposed a meeting between himself, his daughter, and John two nights later, May twenty-fourth, at a restaurant in the West Village that John did not know. John parked the car too far away and walked through the streets and they were haunted. The middle of the Village, Bleecker Street, Sullivan, was a pretty place. Until quite late the streets were full of shoppers and strolling couples and groups of friends and the stores were open late and it was safe there. It was not where Cheryl had died.

John walked away from the safe, tourists' Village and got lost on unfamiliar streets. It was beautiful there on a spring night, Grove Street, Morton, gingko trees seemingly lit from within by yellow-green light, century-old ivy twined around stone balustrades and the ancient, faceless lions that guarded the front stoops of the brownstones. The moon was invisible; it had waned to nothing. Seventh Avenue, big and impersonal, Hudson Street. The West Village proper. Cheryl had been found on the side of the West Side Highway, down by the water. No one knew what streets she had walked to get there, or with whom. No one had seen her, a blond girl of medium height and slight build wearing blue jeans and a black blazer.

The police had come to his house and asked him Cheryl's bra size, her pantie size. Certain articles of clothing had not been recovered with the body. John had understood and wanted to help, but he had hated those policemen. He had gone into his sister's room and read the labels on her panties, on her bras. Thirty-four C. It had felt like incest. After the police left, John sat for a long time in Cheryl's defiled room and then he realized that no matter how long he sat there she would not send a sign of forgiveness.

The restaurant was near the water, a sleek place with glass and hanging plants. John had walked blocks and blocks out of the way. It was so easy to get lost.

He recognized Madeleine and her father immediately, even though neither of them was what he'd been expecting. Mr. Levy was small, much smaller than his voice on the phone, but he sat eyeing the door with bantam belligerence. The woman next to him was small too; John had expected a big girl. Her hair was almost mouse, darker than Cheryl's. She was pretty, heartbreakingly pretty when you knew what had happened to her. John knew it was wrong to think that. Beauty and suffering. As though the plain do not suffer, do not die.

He walked toward their table and felt himself very far away. There was nothing in the world but this woman's eyes, this woman who had been violated and punished for no reason at all. By the same hands that had violated his sister. “Thank you,” he said instead of hello.

It was a tense meal; Madeleine had the free-range chicken, her father had the penne, John had sweetbreads, and nobody ate anything. Now that Madeleine was in front of him John didn't know what he wanted to say. Tell me what he looks like so I can find him and kill him? But Madeleine's father already knew that.

“Just what is it you expect to accomplish by seeing my daughter, young man?”

John looked at the brains on his plate. An odd choice. “I want to know as much as possible about the man who murdered my sister.”

“I didn't really see him,” Madeleine said. Her face was as fine as a pen-line drawing; her eyes were neither green nor blue. Often she reached up one long-fingered hand to push a strand of hair out of her face. She did not smile.

“The police also want to know as much as possible about the man who murdered your sister,” Mr. Levy said. “I feel for you—how could I not? But I don't see what you're going to accomplish this way. You're just hurting yourself.”

“I have to know. Madeleine—Ms. Levy—”

“Madeleine.”

“Madeleine. You must know how sorry I am to be asking you these questions—”

“That's exactly what four police officers said.” John stopped in confusion. “I know you are,” she went on, “and I'll tell you what I told them.” Her father put his hand on her arm but she shook it off. “I've told it so many times it almost seems as if it didn't happen to me. Almost.” She took a sip of wine and smiled an inexplicably kind smile at John, like a parent about to teach a child a particularly painful lesson.

“I was walking home from a friend's house. It was about eleven-thirty. Of course I'd heard about the Slasher, but you've got to live, don't you? Some of the girls I know have dyed their hair. Everybody wears hats. But this isn't even really blond, you know? I used to streak it so people wouldn't keep calling it brown. Anyway, I was walking home, there were people out and everything. West Fourth Street always has people on it, so I walked up West Fourth. There were people on the benches in front of Lattisimore's cappuccino joint, that dog was there I always see around, a Doberman, his master wears a dog collar around his neck. They've got the same nose. The dog's coat is shiny and the master always wears these shiny black pants, I always think the master's name is Spit and he calls his dog Precious.” She started to cry.

Mr. Levy touched her arm without awkwardness; this father and daughter were close. “You don't have to tell me,” John said. “It's none of my business.”

“Oh, but it is. I understand exactly why you want to know. Need to know. It's okay, Daddy, I'm okay.”

“You sure? The young man says you don't have to continue. I personally don't want you to continue. This is our private grief, it's not for strangers.”