Death's Savage Passion (8 page)

“What I do, it’s a lot like what a cop does. Except cops can’t afford a night out at the Hudson Bay Inn.” He coughed into his hand. “You like the Hudson Bay Inn?”

“Um,” I said.

“You like Oriental sexual positions? That’s my hobby, Oriental sexual positions.”

I had let my eyes close again. Now I opened them—for a good look at Radd Stassen. He was starring in his own movie. His part was being played by Burt Reynolds.

“What I am, you know, I’m one of these guys who like to get around.”

“Right,” I said.

“I like to get a lot of experience. Try new things. Blow off a little steam.”

“Right,” I said again.

“I see a lot of interesting stuff in my work. I stay in shape. I run in the park every morning. I get out every night. I figure, if you don’t burn the candle at both ends, what’s the candle got two ends
for?”

It was time to put a stop to this. “Actually,” I said. “I’m not so fond of the Hudson Bay Inn. I sort of prefer the Four Seasons.”

The Four Seasons is one of those restaurants where dinner for two can run two hundred dollars without wine. Radd Stassen went
white.

He was saved by Dana, bustling through the door with a pile of folders in her hands and a little too much color in her cheeks.

“Idiots,” she was saying. “Ask them for projections and you get—” She noticed Radd Stassen. “Oh,” she said. “You’re still here.”

Radd Stassen started pawing through his pile of papers. “I’ve got some documents,” he said.

I got out of my chair. I might be “the blonde,” but that could mean anything. Radd Stassen had no right to keep me in Dana’s office. With any luck, Dana wouldn’t want to keep me in her office either.

“I’m very tired,” I said. “I think I’ll cancel my appointment at AST and go home to sleep.”

Dana frowned. “Don’t cancel any appointments,” she said. “Especially any appointments about promotion.”

“You want I should faint while trying to make up my mind between poster proposals?”

“I
want,”
Dana started.

Radd Stassen interrupted her. “I want to talk to you about this Englishwoman,” he said. “Was he leaving this redhead for this Englishwoman? What’s her name?”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

Radd Stassen waved his papers in triumph. “We’ve got pictures,” he said. “Last night. He was all over her.”

I
GOT OUT OF
there. It took a pretense of idiocy. It took putting out my cigarette before I was finished with it. I didn’t care. I was glad to know Radd Stassen wasn’t much of a private detective (an
Englishwoman,
for God’s sake) and glad to be making my escape.

Radd Stassen had given me a motive for the murder of Verna Train, if Verna had been murdered. In fact, he had almost given me two. Almost but not quite. I tried to envision Jane Minetti Brady following Max through a succession of jazz bars and campy pickup joints and finally pushing Verna off a subway platform in frustration. It didn’t work. It was Jane Minetti Brady’s hired detectives who were following Max. She might have been along for the ride, but I couldn’t imagine even Radd Stassen putting up with murder. Also, according to Mr. Stassen, Max had been annoying
Sarah.
Sarah being in the mood she was in, she probably hadn’t been much annoyed, but that didn’t change the fact that Jane watching Max hit on Sarah had no reason to push Verna into the path of a Lexington Avenue local.

Also, Verna had not been pushed. That much Phoebe had told anyone willing to listen.

I returned my suspicions to Max. Max-kills-Verna-for-threatening-his-secret-income had a sensible ring to it.

There was a dish of Halloween candy on a desk in the hallway on the way out of Dana’s office. I took a handful and headed for reception. Tired had become exhausted had become catatonic. I had not been joking when I asked Dana if she wanted me to pass out while preparing posters. I was ready to pass out eating pumpkins.

From the general direction of reception a thin, shrill, exasperated voice said, “You
can’t
throw up on the
carpet.
There’s a
ladies’
room down the
hall.”

There was no answering voice. I gulped the rest of the pumpkins I’d picked up—grown people always look ridiculous eating Halloween candy—and wandered, hands in pockets, toward the sound of the shrill voice. I was surprised how quiet the office was otherwise. Dana and Radd Stassen at one end of the hall, the shrieker in reception at the other—nobody else was on the twenty-sixth floor.

“Oh my God,” the shrill voice was saying. “You can’t do this.” I turned the corner and stopped in the archway. On the other side was a grimacing, panicked Marilou Saunders, holding the doubled, wretching body of Sarah English in her arms.

It was like looking at a Judy Chicago sculpture—Marilou in black silk, rhinestone buttons, and Max Factor Hot Promise red; Sarah in brown Woolworth slacks and long red double-knit sweater vest; Marilou’s face distorted under terrified eyes; Sarah bent over at the waist and heaving.

“Dear Jesus,” Marilou said. “I just walked in here.”

I walked slowly to the blue plastic Dripmaster, poured myself a cup of coffee, and downed it. It seemed very, very important to be calm, and deliberate, and decisive. It seemed necessary to be awake, too, but there was nothing I could do about that. There were spangles like Christmas lights in front of my eyes. My head was buzzing. I had gone beyond the need for sleep and entered a world of waking dreams.

Otherwise known as sleep deprivation, hallucinatory state.

If I didn’t get some sleep soon, I was going to start hearing things.

I threw the coffee cup into the wastebasket beside the Dripmaster. It bounced off the green metal rim and into the corner, staining the carpet. I retrieved it and placed it carefully in the trash.

Sarah was still doubled over at the waist, still writhing, still straining against Marilou’s hands. Her pain got through to me, moving across my stomach lining in what I thought were sympathy spasms. Emergency lights were going off in my head, but I didn’t seem capable of doing anything about them. I was swimming through molasses.

“The thing to do here,” I said, “is call 911.”

“You call 911,” Marilou said. “I can’t just
drop
her.”

“Put her on the couch,” I said. “Lay her down.”

Sarah gave another heave, then a shudder, than a moan. Vomit was coming out of her in a thin brown stream, much too little of it for the violence of the convulsions that ripped through her every few seconds. Marilou, frail and shaky and probably on something, could barely hold her up, never mind move her. She braced her feet against the carpet and dragged.

I went to the desk, punched buttons until I figured out how to get an outside line, and dialed. I felt almost as nauseated as Sarah looked. The sight of her terrified me. I reached for my cigarettes and tried to think of a way to explain what was happening while still making sense. It couldn’t be done.

I told 911 I had a matter of life and death—poisoning—and needed an ambulance. I told them I didn’t know what caused the poisoning. I told them time was of the essence. I hinted at foul play. I told truth and lies with equal conviction. Nine-one-one had no reaction. Nine-one-one is a computer.

I hung up and sat down on the receptionist’s desk. I found matches and lit my cigarette.

“Food poisoning,” I told Marilou, trying to sound confident. “Salmonella. She must have had lunch someplace interesting.”

“That’s what I thought.” Marilou had managed to get Sarah close enough to the couch to drop her. She brushed off her hands and shook out her dress. “It was the oddest thing. I come through the door and there she is, leaning over her shoes—”

“Standing up?”

“Yeah. On her feet and leaning over her shoes. You’d figure she’d have sat down. Or headed for the ladies’ room, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe it came over her suddenly.” I sounded like my grandmother.

“It must have.” Marilou threw herself into a chair and started pawing through her purse. “Quaaludes,” she said. “The only thing for a time like this is Quaaludes.”

I shook my head. The little white Christmas lights had become strobe flashes. Incipient nausea was becoming actual. Every muscle in my face ached. I considered Marilou’s hot pink ultrasuede handbag.

“You got any speed?” I asked her.

“You take speed?”

“I was thinking of something like caffeine pills,” I said. “I—”

On the couch, Sarah had stopped wretching. She was lying rigid, twitching under the ungraceful folds of her clothes. My exhaustion nausea was joined by an eerie, sick feeling. I knew what was happening to Sarah. In a moment the twitching would stop and the rigidity would melt and the moaning would become a rattle. It would take longer and cause more pain than something simple like a knife.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“What’s the matter?” Marilou said.

I turned my head and tried to look at her, to concentrate on the emphasized makeup around her wide blue eyes and the thin strand of silver chain around her neck. The chain was under her dress, so as not to clash with the rhinestone buttons. The silver bangle on her wrist was a study in the non-Euclidean geometry of welded metal. The Quaalude was between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. She was not holding a glass of water. She must have been intending to chew the thing.

“What’s the matter?” she said again.

I pointed to the couch. The rattle had started. It was very low in Sarah’s throat. It sounded like wood scraping against wood.

“What
is
that?” Marilou said.

The room was fluid and uncertain. Walls bulged and sucked as if they were breathing. The carpet made waves.

I thought of Sarah in Grand Central Station, eyes shining, hands tugging nervously against the strap of her shoulder bag, arrived in Mecca at last.

“I haven’t had any sleep,” I said.

“I don’t care if you haven’t had any sleep,” Marilou said. She was shrieking, but it was very far away and I didn’t mind. “Tell me what’s going on,” she said.

She grabbed me by the front of my sweater and shook me. I saw her shaking me but was unable to feel it. I saw the room and the waves and Sarah on the couch.

Somewhere on Mars, Marilou Saunders was contorting into the Platonic ideal of rage and frustration and fear. Her face was red. Her eyes were wild. Her Goldie Hawn hair was spiraling into Bride of Frankenstein static electric chic.

“Listen to me,” she screeched. “None of this is my fault and I’m not going to get caught up in it, I’m not, so you’d better—”

“I’d better what?” I sounded drunk.

“What’s
wrong
with her, McKenna?”

I made a last, valiant effort to get control of myself. I managed to stand up and straighten my back.

I thought of Sarah at Bogie’s, Sarah in my apartment, Sarah kissing the taxi driver on the nose.

Sarah who had finally,
finally
won.

I tried to tell myself I could be wrong. I was sick. I was tired. I could be overreacting. I knew I wasn’t. I knew because I could feel the hard scrape on my stomach lining that told me the same thing that had Sarah was about to get me.

I turned to Marilou Saunders, tried to focus, failed.

“Oh, hell,” I said. “She’s
dead.”

Then I passed out.

S
OUND AND LIGHT: CEMENT-BLOCK
echoes in a wind tunnel; flashbulbs and strobe lights and metallic fluorescent glare.

Give me a clamp give me a clamp give me a tube give me a clamp.

Squeak in one of the wheels. No sense of direction.
Get it out of her hand.
Somebody dropped the knife on the tiles.

It’ll be all right if we hurry.

Get it out of her hand.

I need a wash I need a wash give me a clamp I need a wash blew the tube.

She’s going to cut herself.

Give me a tube give me a
clean
tube.

Free fall roll. Tear in the throat.

It’s home it’s home give me a
clamp.

I
can’t
get it out of her hand.

You can’t pump a goddamned empty stomach.

Red on white. Landscape of the earth after the explosion of the sun.

It’s gonna work. It’s gonna work anyway. Give me a clamp.

Nearly cut her goddamned finger off.

We’re home we’re home you can’t pump a goddamned empty stomach but we’re home give me a screwing clamp.

Tony Marsh said, “My face. That’s the problem, my face. They take one look at me and think I’m a goddamned choirboy, not the Joseph Wambaugh type choirboy, the kind sings ten o’clock at St. Bernie’s and then—”

There were no cigarettes on my bedside table. I felt the slick white metal, probing. Water glass (plastic), water pitcher (plastic), tissue box. No cigarettes. I opened my eyes to look at the tissue box. Kleenex.

On the other side of the room, Tony Marsh was saying, “That was the problem. I’d be on the street in uniform and this face and they’d pick fights. I mean, it
infuriated
them. The contrast, you know. And then I got the promotion and went into plainclothes and—”

I tried to sit up. There was a tube through my nose and down my throat and an IV in my arm. I felt feverish and achy and oddly disembodied. Except for the tube. There was nothing disembodied about the tube. I tried to say “Tony” and nearly strangled.

I must have made some kind of noise. Tony stopped mid-sentence. There was shuffling on his side of the room.

“Even if she is awake,” a female voice said, “you can’t talk to her.”

“Not with that thing in her throat,” Tony Marsh said.

“If she’s awake, I can remove the tube,” the female voice said. “But you still can’t talk to her.”

I gave it my best effort. I said, “I’m awake.” It came out “Icomrska.”

There was more shuffling on that side of the room, then footsteps, then two hulking figures coming through the light. The nurse was a nun with trigeminal neuralgia and a corrected harelip, dressed in something white and stretchy and a short veil. Tony Marsh was Tony Marsh. He looked as much like a homicide detective as Elmer Fudd looks like a brain surgeon.