Cry Baby (5 page)

11.48 PM

He wouldn’t allow her to shower.

It would have meant removing the brooch and surveillance equipment, and he wouldn’t permit that. Instead, she had to wash in the hand-basin, doing what she could to clean the vomit from her hair, and then re-apply her makeup.

‘Very nice, Erin. Very pretty.’

His voice sickens her. She doesn’t want to be told how she looks. Not by this monster. She doesn’t feel attractive. She thinks she still looks like shit.

‘What now?’ she asks.

‘Now? Now we go out.’

‘Out where? I still don’t know where you want me to go. Is it somebody’s home?’

A chuckle again.
‘Could be.’

‘I don’t understand. How am I supposed to know where to go if you don’t tell me?’

‘You mean you haven’t figured it out yet?’

Figured what out? What’s there to figure out? He wants me to kill someone, and he won’t tell me who. What am I supposed to deduce from that?

‘No. Tell me.’

‘It’s perfectly simple,
Erin. I’m leaving it up to you.’

‘Leaving what up to me?’

He laughs.
‘The choice, stupid. The choice of victim.’

She stands there in shock, staring at her own open-mouthed reflection. How many times is this man going to surprise her?

‘W-what?’

‘You heard me, Erin. You can decide. Should be easier that way.’

Easier? How is it easier? If he tells me who to kill, then I go and do it. But this? Deciding who should die at my hands?

‘No. Please. Don’t ask me to do that. I can’t pick someone to die. Killing someone is going to be hard enough, but I can’t decide who that will be. You have to do that.’

‘What’s the problem? This way you can choose someone you hate. Someone you always wanted out of your life. A boss who made your life hell, maybe. A boyfriend who cheated on you. A school bully. There must be lots of people you wouldn’t mind getting a little revenge on.’

‘NO! We’re not talking about putting a laxative in someone’s drink, for God’s sake. This is about killing them. I don’t want anyone to die. Nobody has hurt me badly enough for me to want them dead.’

‘Well, then, you’ll have to pick someone at random. Frankly, Erin, I don’t give a fuck. Pick who you like. As long as you kill them, that’s all that matters.’

‘Why? What do you get from me reducing the human race by one? Because that’s what it amounts to. I could understand if you wanted me to kill your worst enemy, or you were trying to make some kind of statement by taking out a politician or a religious leader, but it’s not even that considered. So why? For kicks? Is it just to experience the power of controlling another human being so completely? Is that all this is to you?’

When it comes, the response gives her no answers:
‘You’re wasting time, Erin. We need to get moving. Your baby needs you.’

Georgia
again. Always he is there with the reminders about Georgia, and with them, the underlying threat to her existence. Not that she needs reminding. Georgia is her everything – always at the epicenter of her thoughts. He knows this, and he will continue to use it against her.

But now she’s having second thoughts again. How in Christ’s name can I select a victim? What gives me the right to do this? Who would I choose? Where would I find them at this time of night?

‘Erin. Get your ass into gear. Let’s go.’

The voice startles her into action. She leaves the bathroom. Back into the living room. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do or how she’s going to do it. The only thing she does know is that she cannot defy this man any longer. She will have to wing it. Go along with his plans for as long as she can, hoping that something will crop up, something will go her way for once, because God knows everything’s been against her so far. Talk about victims – well, yeah, here’s one, the biggest victim of them all, and when are you are gonna give me a fucking helping hand here? Please, somebody, help me.

She moves toward the apartment door. Goes to open it.

‘Uhm, Erin. You planning to use your hands?’

She pauses, perplexed. How else would she open the damned door?

‘Duh! To kill,
Erin? Are you going to strangle them to death, or do you think maybe you should take a weapon of some kind?’

A weapon. It hadn’t crossed her mind. Generally, the idea of using weapons never crosses her mind. Why would it? Her life now consists of looking after her baby. What connection could that possibly have to implements of pain and death?

Unless, of course, your baby is snatched violently from you and hurt. Hurt so bad it screams for you to intervene.

Oh, yes, she thinks. Put me in a room with that guy, and give me a weapon. In fact, no weapon needed. I will tear him apart with my bare hands. I will gouge out his eyes and bite off his ears and stamp my heels into his—

‘ERIN! Get with the program. Are you signed up for this or not?’

‘Yes. Yes. A weapon. Uhm…’ She looks helplessly around her.

‘The kitchen,’
he says in despair.
‘Something sharp maybe?’

She goes where she is told. Slides a huge carving knife out of the wood block on the counter.

‘That’s a bad-ass knife, all right. But a little impractical, don’t you think? What are you going to do, walk around the city looking like you’re Norman Bates’s mother?’

She returns the knife to the block. Takes out a smaller one. Black plastic handle, five inch blade, sharp serrated edge.

‘That’s fine. Don’t worry, it’s more than capable of doing the job. Now put it in your pocket and let’s get out of here.’

Again she’s slow to respond. She stares down at the knife. The last time she held it, she was cutting into tomatoes. It’s hard to imagine herself thrusting it into the flesh of a human being. And is thrusting best, or do you slash? Or chop? How much force is required for such an act? Do you have to be strong? Or does it part flesh easily, like slicing through a soft peach? Do you hold the knife in the usual way, with its blade upward, or do you hold it the other way round, ready to plunge it downward into your victim, again
à la
Norman Bates’s mother?

‘
ERIN!’

She jumps. ‘All right, all right.’ She’s nowhere near ready for this. She doesn’t know how to kill, has no inclination to kill.

She hurries to the door. Hurries because she senses she has pushed her baby’s kidnapper to his limit, and not because she is eager to carry out his bidding.

She slips the knife into her pocket. Pulls open the door to her apartment.

She lets out a small cry when she sees the man standing in the hallway, staring right at her.

Wednesday, January 5

12.05 AM

Says Doyle, ‘You eaten recently? You want something to eat? A drink, maybe? You want a soda?’

‘Do you have Seven-Up?’ says the man.

‘Uhm, I’m not sure. I could go take a look if you like.’

‘I like Seven-Up. Especially from the Seven-Eleven. Seven is prime. Eleven is also prime.’

‘They are, huh?’ says Doyle, trying to hold the attention of this man by feigning interest on a topic he knows nothing about.

‘Yeah. Seven is also a lucky number. Thirteen is unlucky, but it’s also prime. Thirteen is made up from four plus nine, both unlucky in
Japan. In Japanese, the word for four sounds like the word for death, and the word for nine sounds like the word for pain. Very unlucky. Very bad numbers.’

‘And let me guess,’ says Doyle with mock enthusiasm. ‘Four and nine are both prime, right?’

Doyle thinks he’s hit on something when the man actually lets his eyes alight on Doyle’s face for more than one second. At last, he thinks, I’ve made a connection.

But then the man turns his head aside, as if turning to an invisible companion next to him. He jerks a thumb in Doyle’s direction and says to his imaginary friend, ‘You hear that? He thinks four and nine are primes. You believe that? Ha!’

Doyle feels instantly ridiculed. Jesus, how am I letting a guy like this make me feel two inches tall?

He says, ‘So … they’re not primes?’

‘Ha! Not primes. Of course not. They’re squares. No number can be both a square and a prime, but it can be a square of a prime. Four and nine are squares of primes.’

Doyle’s head is whirling now, and he’s starting to feel like this is going really off-topic. That in addition to making him feel like the class dunce.

‘Tell you what,’ he says. ‘I’ll make you a deal. You tell me your name, and I’ll go fetch you that Seven-Up. Whaddya say?’

What he says is nothing, and Doyle’s frustration level climbs ever higher.

‘I gotta call you something,’ he says. ‘If you won’t give me your real name, I’ll have to give you a nickname of some kind. Is that okay with you?’

The man’s not interested. Doesn’t appear to be listening. Doesn’t appear to be in this room, mentally.

‘How about Rainman?’

This from Schneider, languishing at his desk across the squadroom. He is a large, square-framed man with an equally square head topped by close-cropped steel-gray hair. Schneider looks like the type of cop who would crush a suspect first and ask questions later. He takes no prisoners with Doyle either, and makes no secret of the fact. The animosity has been present ever since Doyle joined the Eighth squad, and Doyle long ago abandoned any hope of extinguishing it.

Schneider presses on: ‘You should take him to Atlantic City. Get him counting cards in the casinos. What with his proficiency with numbers and your luck in getting away with things, you’d clean ’em out.’

This is nothing new to Doyle, Schneider not being one to waste an opportunity to cast a shadow on his past. It is Doyle’s hope that, even if Schneider never tires of it, others will, and someone will eventually tell
him to shut the fuck up. All Doyle needs to do in the meantime is to keep his nose clean – something that, unfortunately, doesn’t always come naturally to him.

He does now what he has found works best with Schneider, which is to ignore his jibes. Doyle’s suspect, on the other hand, has already formed an opinion and is less reticent in keeping it under wraps. He leans conspiratorially toward Doyle.

‘I don’t like him. He’s mean. And he looks like Spongebob Squarepants.’

Doyle can’t prevent himself from laughing out loud, and as he does so he looks over at Schneider, who seems to sense that he is the butt of a joke and is muttering angrily to himself.

Doyle returns his attention to the stranger on the other side of his desk. He is starting to warm to this guy.

Which is probably not the best attitude to have toward someone who may have just disemboweled his own mother.

12.06 AM

She wasn’t expecting to meet anyone in the hallway at this time of night. She certainly wasn’t expecting someone to be right in front of her apartment door. As if he’d been about to knock.

Or as if he’d been listening.

She wonders how long he’s been standing there. How much he’s heard.

‘Who the hell is that?’

The voice sounds so loud in her ear that it makes her wonder if her visitor can hear it too. She reaches a hand to her hair to make sure that it’s hiding the earpiece.

‘Mr Wiseman!’ she exclaims in surprise, but also answering the question.

Mr Wiseman is in his sixties. Short, slim and slightly stooped over. As if in apology for the absence of hair on his head, his eyebrows have bloomed to form a shelf of thick, lustrous gray. He lives in the adjoining apartment, apparently with his son Leonard, although she has never seen or heard the latter. According to the elder Mr Wiseman – and here she’s a little fuzzy on the detail because she never listens to his stories properly –  his son was hit by a car about twenty years ago and broke his spine. Wheelchair-bound ever since, he refuses to leave the apartment, relying on his father to do everything for him.

When
Erin moved here just a month or so ago, Mr Wiseman was the first to knock on her door and say hello. Since then she has chatted to him several times in the hallway. Mostly mundane stuff, but in spite of his own family burdens he has always seemed peculiarly concerned for her welfare.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to alarm you. It’s just that… I heard noises.’

His voice is gentle and filled with concern, which does not go unnoticed as it carries over the microphone.

‘Great. A do-gooder. Tell the
Jew bastard to fuck off.’

She feels the urge to snap. She wants to bring the brooch to her face and yell into it. What stops her is the realization of how crazy she’d look.

‘Noises?’ she says, because she has no better answer at the ready. She racks her brain for even the feeblest of explanations.

Wiseman cranes his neck to look past her and into her apartment. She tries to act casual in the way she steps toward him and pulls the door almost closed behind her.

‘Yes,’ says Wiseman. ‘Noises. Crying. And yelling.’

‘Tell him to keep his
huge prying schnozz out of your business.’

‘Maybe it was the TV? I did have it on a little loud tonight. I’m sorry if—’

‘No. Not the TV. It was your voice, Erin. You were shouting, and you were really upset. I just wanted to check if everything was all right.’

‘Sure, Samuel. Everything’s fine. No problems.’

‘Samuel? You’re on first name terms with this Hebe? Christ. Like I said, Erin, you need to tell the kike to take a hike.’

The venom of this racist sickens her. She hates him even more than she did before, if that’s possible. She guesses he’s probably homophobic too. Guesses he’s probably anti-everything. She doubts that a more detestable creature has ever walked this earth.

Wiseman continues to look at her for answers. ‘So… the yelling?’

She struggles for an answer. The voice in her ear makes it even more difficult to concentrate.

‘I just thought of something, Erin. Yeah! This guy! He could be your victim.’

‘What?’

The shock of the suggestion forces the word from her mouth. Wiseman blinks at her, obviously wondering how it’s possible that she didn’t hear his question. Then he narrows his eyes, which almost disappear as his bushy eyebrows collapse in on themselves.

‘Are you all right,
Erin? Is there someone…’ He nods at the door behind her, then lowers his voice. ‘Are you in some kind of trouble?’

Trouble? Am I in trouble? Other than my baby being snatched and me about to commit murder, what kind of diffi
culties could I possibly be in?

‘He’s on to us, Erin. Waste him. You don’t even need to step out of the building. You could get this over with right here and now.’

She tries to laugh. Tries to make light of the scenarios being thrown at her from all directions. But what comes out of her mouth is a humorless bark.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Nothing like that. Look, if you must know, I was having an argument with my ex. Over the phone. Things got a little… heated.’

Wiseman stares, and his stare is filled with suspicion.

‘He doesn’t believe you, Erin. What are you waiting for? Kill the
Jew bastard.’

‘Heated?’ says Wiseman. ‘More like a raging inferno, I’d say.’

She gives a little shrug and an attempt at a smile. ‘What can I say? I picked the wrong guy.’

Wiseman nods sagely. ‘It happens. I was fortunate. My Esther was with me for forty years before she died. Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘Yeah. Get ready to join your dead bitch in hell, Samuel.’

Shut up, she thinks. Shut the fuck up, you loathsome piece of crap.

‘No. Thank you, but I just need some space, you know?’

Wiseman nods, but she can tell he’s not wholly convinced. He continues to stand there, awaiting her next move. And she’s not sure what that should be.

He says, ‘Going out somewhere?’

‘Out?’ she says, but how can she deny it? She’s coming out of her apartment with her coat on, for Christ’s sake. ‘Uhm, yeah. For a short while.’

‘He’s too fucking nosy, Erin. Whack him now.’

‘At this time of night?’ says Wiseman. He tries to look over her shoulder again. ‘Are you sure…’

She reaches behind and grabs the door handle. Pulls the door firmly shut behind her. Wiseman stares at her again, eyes saying,
Tell me the truth now, Erin. If you’re in trouble, I can help you.

But you can’t help me, Samuel. Nobody can help me. I have no choice in what I’m about to do.

She puts her hands into her pockets. Recoils slightly as the fingers of her right hand encounter the knife.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m meeting up with some friends. They just got into the city.’

‘Erin, do you know what time it is? It’s after midnight.’

Another shrug. Saying,
What’s the big deal? Why shouldn’t a woman go out after midnight?

‘I was supposed to meet them earlier. For a meal. But then … well, that’s whe
n it all blew up with my ex. So… so I’m catching up with them at a club.’

‘A club,’ he repeats, but in a much flatter tone. He looks her up and down, and she knows he’s thinking that she’s hardly dressed for partying.

‘I didn’t have much time to get ready,’ she explains. ‘And if I don’t go now, I won’t see them again for a long time. So if you’ll excuse me…’

She starts to move past Wiseman, heading for the staircase.

‘Erin,’ says Wiseman. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’

She halts. Why do people keep asking me if I’ve forgotten something? What the hell can it be this time?

She turns to Wiseman. Questions him with her eyes.

‘Your baby?’ he says. There is an earnestness to his voice now.

‘Uh-oh. I told you, Erin. This Hebe won’t give up. Do yourself a favor. Do Georgia a favor. Why make it any harder than it already is?’

She tries not to listen, but she finds her fingers closing around the handle of the knife.

‘What?’ she says. ‘Oh!’ She laughs. ‘No, it’s okay. She’s with a babysitter.’

Wiseman takes a step closer. Her grip on the knife tightens. Would it be so hard? Couldn’t I just whip this knife out now and stick it in him? All these questions of his, all this suspicion. I could end it with one swift move. I could get my
Georgia back.

Wiseman points at her door. ‘A sitter? In your apartment?’

She tries to think. Every time she comes up with an answer, Wiseman finds something else to query. The lies are growing. He’s going to catch me out. I’ll say something inconsistent with what I said before, and he’ll latch onto it. Please don’t do that, Samuel. Please don’t make me kill you.

‘Do it, do it, do it!’

It’s like he knows what I’m thinking. As well as seeing and hearing what I see and hear, he can read my mind. He knows I’m crumbling.

‘Uhm, no,’ she says. ‘Another friend. She’s looking after
Georgia at her place.’

‘She’s staying with her? Overnight?’

She hears his incredulity. And why wouldn’t he be surprised? Georgia is six months old. Who the hell lets their six-month old baby do a sleepover? What kind of fucking stupid tale are you weaving here, Erin?

‘I know,’ she says. ‘Sounds crazy, huh? But Lois is a real close friend, with young kids of her own.
Georgia will be fine. I wouldn’t do this normally, but like I say, this is my only chance to see my friends.’ Another thought occurs to her – a way of allowing her to bring some of the threads together: ‘Of course, my ex doesn’t see it that way. That’s what the argument was all about. He seems to think I should spend twenty-four/seven with Georgia, even though he’s out of her life for good, the prick.’

She’s pleased with that. She’s especially proud of the way she has included a subtext that warns,
Only a complete asshole would accuse me of being a bad mother
.

But Wiseman seems to have other thoughts on his mind. He moves even closer to
Erin. Dangerously close. Less than an arm’s length away. A dagger thrust away.

‘Who’s Lois? You’ve never mentioned her. In fact, I thought you said you had no real friends in
New York.’

Please, Samuel. Don’t do this. Don’t push me like this. Don’t give me an excuse.

She can feel her arm muscles tensing. Ready to bring out the knife. Ready to drive it home. One brief jab. That’s all it will take to bring Georgia back again.

‘Do it!’

‘I, uhm … did I say that? Oh, yes. I meant Manhattan. Lois lives on Staten Island. That’s what I meant.’

Everything seems to freeze then. Wiseman and Erin staring at each other, not moving, hardly even breathing.

He knows, she thinks. He can sense there’s something badly wrong here. He’s going to do something about it. He’s planning to go back to his apartment and call the cops. I can’t let him do that. I can’t let him jeopardize Georgia’s life.

Her right arm starts to move, seemingly of its own accord. She can’t prevent it. It’s bending at the elbow. Her hand is coming out of the pocket, still clutching the knife. The knife with the five inch blade and the serrated edge. The knife that means the difference between having
Georgia and not having her. It’s coming, it’s coming…

‘Now, Erin! Now!’

And then it stops coming. It stops because Wiseman has reached out and grabbed her forearm. Not in any attempt to defend himself – he has no idea what imminent danger he’s in – but in a warm, benevolent way. It’s a touch of friendship.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘that I’m always here, don’t you? If ever you want me to look after
Georgia for a couple hours. I’m pretty good with kids.’

‘Ha! I’ll bet he is, the
old pervert.’

Erin
drops her gaze to the floor. She cannot look Wiseman in the face any longer. Oh my good God, she thinks. What am I doing? Was I really about to take the life of this innocent selfless man?

She wants to answer. She wants to tell Wiseman everything. She wants to cry and to let him know of the trouble she’s in and to plead for his help.

And the only way she can prevent herself from doing all that is to get the hell out of here.

‘I gotta go,’ she mutters, still looking at the floor.

She turns and pulls away. Scurries to the stairs and descends as quickly as she can, never looking back. She doesn’t want to see the expression on Wiseman’s face. Cannot bring herself to look again into the eyes of the charitable neighbor who so nearly became her sacrificial lamb.

If I could do that to Samuel, she thinks, if I could contemplate hurting a gentle soul like him…

… then what could I do to a complete stranger?