Dressed to Kill (10 page)

“What friend?”

“Ted. I don’t remember his last name. He was from out of town. The apartment was borrowed.”

“Some friend,” Marino said. “Must be real close, if you don’t know his last name.”

She looked down at the floor for a moment, then raised her face angrily towards him. “Why the hell are you giving me such a hard time? I don’t need this. Why are you putting me through this shit?”

Marino sat down again. He watched her for a while.

Putting her through the shit, he thought. He felt almost sorry for her: a moment of weakness. Try another tack, another direction.

“Maybe you can give me a general description of this . . . alleged blonde?”

Her expression was cold. A face like that shouldn’t look so chilly, he thought. It was the kind of face that might belong to the hostess-wife of some young hotshot attorney angling for a partnership in his firm, giving dinners and gracing parties with her presence, making sure the martinis were just so, the food exactly right. Instead, a goddamn hooker.

“The alleged blonde was maybe five-ten. Pretty tall anyhow. I can’t be exact,” she said.

“Wearing what?”

“I didn’t have time to look. I only remember her face—and not too much of that because of the glasses.”

“Yeah, the glasses—”

She leaned forward in her chair, her face strained. “Look, if you think I did it, why don’t you just go right ahead and arrest me?”

“It’s a temptation,” Marino said.

“I get the feeling you don’t believe a word I’m saying—”

Marino looked down at the surface of his desk. It wasn’t a matter of belief or disbelief; it was all a process of elimination in the long run, striking names off lists, erasing motives, hoping that in the end you came up with the candidate most likely to . . . He watched her now, touching his moustache lightly, wondering if his wife were right:
That strip of hair does nothing for your face, Joseph.
He smiled at her. “I want you to look at some mug shots.”

“Does that mean you believe me?”

Marino shrugged. He picked up the telephone, said something into it, and a few moments later a uniformed cop came into the office.

“Niven, take Miss Blake here and show her some mug shots.”

The uniformed cop looked at Liz, who got up slowly and followed him to the door. Marino stood up.

“Liz,” he said.

She turned round in the doorway.

“One thing,” he said. “Don’t leave town. I’ll be keeping tabs.”

She stared at him, then she left. Alone, Marino picked up a piece of paper from his desk. It was covered with his handwritten notes, scrawled words done in black ballpoint. The itinerary of a dead woman, he thought. A journey into oblivion. A trip to nowhere. The husband had said she’d gone to an appointment with her shrink, a certain Dr. Elliott. (Why a shrink? The husband hadn’t been sure, but then he hadn’t been in the mood to be sure of anything very much.) After that, she’d gone to the Museum of Modern Art, which was where that character Lockman had picked her up. A casual pickup, a slice of midday frivolity, some spice. (Question: Did she do that kind of thing often? Was it a one-shot deal?) He’d talked to Lockman already when he’d gone to the apartment building after the slaying—but the guy didn’t even know the dead woman’s name, for Christ’s sake. Anyhow, he’d come forward during the commotion in the building, he’d volunteered the information about the pickup, about how the afternoon was spent, and Marino had no instinctive reason to distrust the guy. Some apartment building, he thought. Everybody’s getting laid in the afternoon, it seems. He made a small cross against Lockman’s name, then he pushed the paper aside and rose, standing in the doorway of his office, looking out across the collection of desks in the large central office. The sight depressed the hell out of him somehow. Maybe it was the dreary institutional color of the walls or the faded Wanted posters or the endless ringing of telephones.

Across the room, on a bench pressed to the wall, he saw Kate Myers’ son. The sight touched him: he felt a vague pain, like a knot, in his throat. He wanted to go over to the kid and say something, but what the hell could you say? He was just sitting there looking forlorn, confused, empty, struggling with God knows what grief. You don’t have time to bask in pity, he told himself. Who needs it?

He went back to his desk, picked up the telephone, pressed a button. “Send me Betty Luce. Yeah. Right now.” When he put the receiver down he sat for a time staring into empty fluorescent space, wondering about Liz Blake’s blonde with the black glasses, wondering about Kate Myers’ shrink, wondering in that pointless way in which random thoughts turned over and over until they came full circle.

He closed his eyes a moment, trying to drift away from the noise around him, but what he saw was the butchered woman lying in the elevator car, razored to a point that was almost beyond recogniton.

Liz turned the stiff pages of the book of mug shots. She couldn’t stop her hand from shaking—it wasn’t the flat dead eyes of the women who stared out of the photographs that bothered her; it wasn’t even the memory of seeing the elevator doors open, the sound of her scream, the sight of that blood-red car, the reflection of herself in the black glasses, the cold arc of the blade whistling through the air and missing her hand by inches, it wasn’t even the touch of the dying woman and the feel of the fingernails scraping the back of her hand—

It was Marino. It was the idea Marino entertained that she’d done the killing. How the hell could he even
think
that? She turned the pages. Now she was hardly seeing the photographs. They all looked alike, the same grim expressionless faces: they were like the pictures of victims of some ancient war. How can he think I did it? The bastard . . . She lit a cigarette, watched the smoke drift and curl upwards to the dim strip of fluorescent light. She thought: A minute or two earlier, a minute or two later, and I wouldn’t have seen a goddamn thing, I wouldn’t be here now suspected of killing a woman I never even met. She lightly rubbed the side of her head; some tiny ache was starting there, a faint pulse. Maybe he doesn’t really think I did it, maybe he believes me . . . But she couldn’t be sure of that, she couldn’t be sure of anything.

The blood-red car.

The touch of the dying woman.

Those black glasses.

She felt cold even though the room was stuffy, overheated. She remembered rushing down the stairs, the razor in her hand; she remembered shouting something, words, words, indistinct in her recollection. Why did she run like that? Some heroic instinct? Catch the killer coming out of the elevator in the lobby? And then there were doors opening, other people emerging from apartments: a Puerto Rican maintenance man who started screaming in Spanish, an elderly woman who fainted—the total confusion of death. And the sight of that poor woman in the car, surrounded by her own blood, her face slashed so that it resembled some hideous Halloween mask.

She turned another page. The faces stared at her. They were empty faces. They meant nothing to her. She gazed at her hand, trying to still the way it trembled.

She looked up at the grimy window, the darkness of the city pressing upon the glass.

It struck her then.

It came at her like the rush of a wild arrow.

I saw the killer.

Nobody else.

She felt dizzy. She felt a certain tightness in her chest.

I saw the killer.

I would recognize her again.

No, she thought. You wouldn’t. You didn’t get a long look, only a flash, a quick flash.

But the killer didn’t know that.

The killer didn’t know.

She was afraid suddenly, staring at the blackness against the glass, conscious of the overhead light humming, aware of the noises all around her, she was afraid.

Then she tried to relax. Even if the killer was scared that I could identify her, how would she know where to find me? The thought made her feel easy. It was a large city: it was a city where you could easily lose yourself. She couldn’t find me even if she tried. Could she?

She sighed, seeking relaxation, ease, but it wouldn’t come.

2

Elliott picked up his telephone and dialled his home number, imagining the ringing sound echoing in the darkened master bedroom of the house in White Plains, imagining his wife reaching for the receiver—groggy, doped out on one of her sleeping pills, her movements slow and cumbersome. He looked across the surface of his desk as he waited: the pale bulb of the angled lamp threw a thin light down on the neat pile of folders, the flimsy copies of correspondence that hadn’t yet been filed. He picked up a letter opener and turned it around in his fingers, then he found himself looking at the answering machine. He’d listened to the taped messages several times, unwilling to believe at first what he’d heard, then ready to accept it only after it had been repeated, then repeated again. Kate Myers, he thought. It couldn’t be possible. But the voice was so certain, so assured, that he had to dismiss the thought that it was some wretched practical joke.

He laid the letter opener down, touched the ON button of the answering machine, and then he heard his wife answer the telephone. He pressed the OFF button, listening to the dreamy quality of her voice.

“Hello,” she said, drawing it out into three syllables.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Oh.” Then, after a pause, “What time is it?”

Elliott looked at his watch. “It’s almost nine. You must’ve gone to sleep early.”

She was silent for a time. Now he could picture her clearly, her face faintly puffy from the sleeping pills, her body spread across the bed as she held the receiver. He could see her dark hair contrasted against the white pillows, the way she held the receiver with the cord coiled around her fingers, as if she were afraid of the frailty of a telephone connection.

“I was tired,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” He hesitated, looking at the answering machine, remembering the echo of Bobbi’s voice.
I guess you found what I took, didn’t you?
And then the other message, the one from the lieutenant.
One of your patients, Kate Myers, was murdered late this afternoon
. . . Now they ran together in his brain, the two messages playing one against the other, playing in a confused way. For a moment he couldn’t think straight. How could there be a connection between poor Kate and Bobbi? How could there be? He looked at his fingers in the light of the lamp; there were lines of sweat forming like webs between the fingers.
I’d like you to get over to the thirteenth precinct as soon as you can, Doctor.

His wife yawned. He heard the escape of air, only partly stifled by her hand. He thought how ugly she looked when she yawned, her face distorted by the movement of mouth; it was almost as if, for a fraction of time, she had an enormous gaping hole instead of a face.

“Are you coming home tonight?” she asked.

Why? he wondered. Why did he feel a vague sense of dread? It wasn’t possible that there was some connection between Bobbi and Kate. They didn’t know each other. They hadn’t even met, so far as he could tell. Therefore: no relationship, no connection, nothing.

The razor.

He shut his eyes. “Something has happened,” he said. “One of my patients was murdered today—”

“No—”

He waited a a moment before saying, “I don’t have any details yet. I saw her only this morning. I have to talk to the police tonight . . .”

Suddenly it seemed to him that she was no longer there, that she had somehow evaporated at the other end of the line. He had the feeling of talking into an electronic nothingness, his voice whipped away from him, spilled down wires, broken into syllables, then analyzed into the most minute sounds. Then she sighed and the illusion was broken.

“You’ll sleep in your office?” she asked, and there was a sad resignation in her question.

“Probably,” he answered.

“I’m sorry about your patient. Really I am.”

“I know.” He blinked into the bulb of the lamp. He looked down at his desk. He read a part of a letter beginning,
Dear Professor Samuelson, I shall be very happy to join your symposium . . .
“Look, if it isn’t too late, I’ll try to get back tonight.”

She was yawning again. He imagined the great house, the empty rooms, the orderly nature of everything, the curious sense he sometimes had of an absence of life in that house—or was that an absence of love? Love, he thought. Love was a perishable commodity. It became as habitual as the act of shaving in the mornings. The thought irritated him because it stirred some odd longing inside him, as if what he hungered after more than anything was the return to some former condition when the heart was easy, the passion strong . . .

She said, “You won’t be back tonight, will you?”

“I can’t promise. I’ll try.”

“It doesn’t make much difference, does it?”

He didn’t answer. He heard her light a cigarette. Then he thought of how the smell of tobacco hung in her hair, adhered to the folds of her clothing, seemed to sink into the depths of her skin. He wasn’t sure why smoking repelled him the way it did. If he’d asked why, if he’d delved into the nature of the thing, it would have been like a bad joke—the analyst analyzing himself. He understood that he didn’t want to be near her, he didn’t want the feel of her against him, the odor of tobacco, the surface of skin against skin. Love gives way, he thought. It dies. It dies and somehow you miss the funeral, the wake, the smell of smoke from the crematorium. It dies unmourned, a hobo in a pauper’s grave.

“I’ll see you when I see you,” she said. Click.

He held the receiver a moment longer, then he set it down; he got up from his desk and went inside the bathroom that adjoined his office. He turned on the light, looked at himself in the mirror, then washed his hands at the sink. He opened the medicine cabinet. He somehow thought the razor might be there, the theft of it some act of his imagination, but of course it wasn’t there.

And Kate Myers was dead.

Momentarily he felt a wave of nausea, a warmth in the pit of his stomach. He made a cup of his hands and splashed his face with cold water.
Kate Myers dead.
It was senseless. Meaningless. He turned to the window and, with a flick of his wrist, pulled open the slats of the pale blue Venetian blind; the city lay in front of him, like something that wasn’t rooted in concrete but afloat in the night sky in a mad explosion of lights. He stared at the lights. A lunatic city. He found himself thinking of home—not the mausoleum of a house in White Plains, but the place he considered home—England, the Sussex Downs that swelled above Brighton, remembering long walks on wonderful summer nights, remembering how he and his wife would take one of the double-decker buses up to the Downs and then, arm-in-arm, go strolling over the soft land. That wasn’t me, he thought. Someone else. Not me. He let the slats slip back into place, wanting the memories to stop, but there were faint echoes still, strains of disintegrating conversations.