Dressed to Kill (13 page)

No, he thought.

Close your eyes. It goes away. You can make it go away.

Trembling, he picked up his address file. Somewhere there had to be a number for Bobbi. He couldn’t find it. Why couldn’t he find it? Damn. He pushed the file aside.

What are you? On the same level as a priest?

He pinched the skin at the top of his nose tightly.

A headache. Nervous tension.

He went into the bathroom. He found some Equanil in the medicine cabinet, swallowed two, lidded the bottle and put it back. They’d help for a time . . .

Help what? he wondered.

Help ease your feeling that Kate Myers died because of one of your patients? Because you
failed
that patient?

No.

Some other way.

He sat behind his desk. I could call Marino, he thought.

I could tell him I’m holding something back.

You don’t know that for sure, do you?

You’d have to be blind
not
to know.

He leaned back in his chair. The room, the shadowy bookshelves, and the pale light from the lamp and the faint glow of the leather sofa, the room pressed in on him.

He sighed. Kate didn’t die because of me. Didn’t die because I made a bad decision about Bobbi.
Didn’t.

But the accusing inner voice wasn’t going to be silenced easily. Now it seemed like the harsh ticking of some old clock inside him, reverberating in the skull, vibrating along the bone. You didn’t help Bobbi. You should have helped Bobbi. Now Kate is dead.

He stared at the red light on the answering machine, reached forward, pressed the playback button.
Beep.
Doctor Elliott? This is Franklyn Harris, I’m stuck in Chicago, I can’t make our appointment tomorrow . . .
Beep.
This is Anne . . . I didn’t mean to be so abrupt before. Calling to say I’m sorry.
Beep.
But the tape was silent after that. Anne’s English accent stuck in his mind, an accent of the South Coast, the Home Counties, smoothed and polished and precise in its vowel sounds. He reached for the telephone, picked it up, began to punch out his home number. Then he stopped and dropped the receiver back in place.

No message from Bobbi, he thought.

No gloating insane message from her.

Like what I did with your razor, shrink?

He leaned back in his chair, rocking slightly. He knew that she would call, sooner or later she’d come through, sooner or later he’d hear that deranged voice laughing at him. He put his hand up to his forehead. Perspiration. A touch of pain. How could I tell Marino? he wondered. How could I do that?

He rose, walked to the bookshelf, picked up the Manhattan Yellow Pages. He flicked through them to the section he wanted, running his finger down the page . . . There was only one Levy listed as practising psychiatry in Manhattan. He wrote the address down in his notebook, closed the book. Tomorrow morning, he thought. Tomorrow morning he would go and see Levy about Bobbi.

And say what?

Say what exactly?

He wasn’t sure.

He went over to the sofa and sat down. Fatigue coursed through him, a sense of impending dark, but he knew he wouldn’t find sleep an easy thing.

He knew, too, that it would be filled with dreams, dreams as involuntary as muscular spasms. The last thought he was conscious of, the last flicker that went through his mind, was the question of how far and how long you could protect a patient.

He didn’t know the answer.

FOUR

1

S
he had changed her clothes, but somehow she felt that the dead woman’s blood clung to her still, that even as she sat in the bar holding a glass of scotch between her hands other people could see stains on her. But that was stupid, she thought. Nobody saw anything. Nobody could. Even if there were still stains, it was too dark, too dim, for anybody to see anything. She sipped the scotch and smoked a cigarette, trying to relax. She told herself: Don’t spoil things. Don’t even think of Elliott now. He would be in deep trouble soon enough . . .

She turned her head, tossing her hair lightly, and looked around the darkened room. Only last night she’d sat here with Walter, but why did it seem so long ago now? Walter was probably back in Pocatello by this time. She finished her drink, called for the bartender, ordered a second. There was a dryness at the back of her throat, but she wasn’t nervous the way she had been last night. Funny the way things change, she thought.

And yet something bothered her.

It was a small thing; it was like a piece of lint at the back of her mind. Like a faint distortion in a mirror.

She smiled to herself.

How easy it had been, how utterly simple to destroy, how weirdly fascinating to watch the way the razor had slipped through the folds of skin, slashing to bone, to sinew, slicing through the tuft of pubic hair in one wild downward swing. (No underwear. The cunt had no underwear.) A certain look in the eye, one of some inconceivable misunderstanding, one that turned to disbelief, then to pain, fear, and finally emptiness. She thought of that emptiness now. She thought of Elliott missing his razor. What will you tell the cops? she wondered. What will you say to them, shithead? Dipstick asshole. No. She’d promised herself.
No Elliott.

She swayed her head slightly in time to the music from the jukebox. From the corner of her eye she was conscious of a man moving across the floor towards her, but she was mistaken, because as soon as he’d come level with her he went right past. She turned, seeing him go through the door to the street, trailing behind him some kind of scent, an after-shave, a cologne. She sipped the scotch, marvelling at the easy confidence the drink gave you.

It still bothered her, though. She thought: Don’t let it.

It doesn’t matter, whatever it is.

She closed her eyes and listened to the singer’s voice. She liked the tune, the clear quality of the voice. It seemed to wrap itself around her, a certain optimism, a clarity that suggested you could hope, that hope had some meaning. She wanted to lose herself in the song, wanted to feel the atoms of herself dissolve in the notes, the tiny beats between the words of the lyric.

Don’t let the other thing touch you now. It shouldn’t trouble you.

She opened her eyes, seeing a reflection of herself in the mirror behind the bar. She looked, in that flattering glass, almost beautiful. And then another image moved directly behind her, the shape of a tall man, a heavy shadow. She watched his thick fingers come down on the bar beside her glass and she was reminded of the flight of a bird, a graceless bird.

“Need that freshened up?” he asked.

It was a long time before she turned around to look at him; the record changed, another took its place, and still she didn’t say anything, didn’t move. You have this confidence now, she thought. You have this sense of yourself soaring in some way. She leaned back slowly from her stool.

“Are you buying?” she asked.

“Sure,” the man said. “If you want me to.”

“Thanks.”

She watched another scotch being placed in front of her by the barman. “Jackson Irving,” the man said.

“Bobbi.”

“Good to meet you, Bobbi.”

She smiled at him, lowering her eyes a little. She wanted to taste the clichés in her mouth, run them through her head as if they were minuscule drops of sparkling water.
Do you come here often? What kind of work do you do? Do you live alone?
She wanted to enjoy these things, even if she knew they were banal, mundane, like the questions in some absurdly simple crossword.

“Live round here?” he asked. He had a moustache that reminded her of a zoo animal; she couldn’t think which one. A walrus? He had glasses with thick lenses and he wore a dark suit, a handkerchief tucked in the breast pocket. He seemed strangely stiff to her, as if the clothes he wore were a starched uniform.

She nodded. “Close,” she said.

She reached out and touched his handkerchief, wrecking its triangular shape. “Let me guess,” she said, throwing her head back slightly, running her tongue over her lipstick, astonished by the quickening of her own confidence and how easy it was to drift into it. “You’re a salesman from Greensboro.”

He laughed and said, “Hell, no.”

“Raleigh then.”

“No.”

“You mean I’m wrong?” Wide-eyed.

“I fix computers,” he said.

“Is that what you’re doing in New York? Fixing somebody’s computer?”

He shook his head. “The company has this course every so often for its technicians. Like a refresher course. Things change so fast in the field.”

She sipped her drink. Floating out, floating away; why couldn’t it always feel like this? This place where there weren’t any misgivings, where the uneasiness ceased to exist? A high cloud and you’re strolling through it and it’s light as the feather of a goose . . .

“I’m from Watertown. Upstate New York.”

“They have
computers
in Watertown?”

“Sure they do.”

She laughed, leaning forward so that her face came in contact with his shoulder. Jackson Irving from Watertown was just as silly as Walter Pidgeon from Pocatello, just as silly, as charming. What did this bar have—a monopoly on hicks? He reached for his drink, a yellowy concoction on the surface of which, like a drunk’s eye, there floated a cherry.

“I’ve never been in this bar before,” he said.

“I come all the time,
all
the time.” She was conscious of her own raised voice, wondering if she were talking too loudly, the sound too shrill. But Jackson Irving didn’t seem to notice or care. She turned away from him for a moment, looking around the room. Near the jukebox a few couples were shuffling around in a desultory way, creating the illusion of immobility, as if what they were doing was less a dance than a process of sleepwalking. They seemed bonded together by an adhesive that couldn’t be worked loose.

“Do you want to dance?” he was asking.

“I don’t think . . .” She turned her face towards him. He looked so solemn, so nervous somehow, that she wanted to laugh.

“I don’t dance well,” he said. “I’m pretty clumsy.”

“I’ll risk it,” she said. Why not? What was there to lose?

She got down from the stool and walked across the floor. She felt his arms go round her waist and she closed her eyes tightly. Sometimes she could feel his breath upon her skin, against the side of her neck or upon the surface of her eyelids. Let this go on, she thought. Why should the music have to stop anyhow? Why should night turn into blistering day and light rip through the fabric of everything? She shifted against him, her hip to his. She realized with some slight thrill that he was hard, the hardness pressed to her outer thigh. She opened her eyes and looked at him but he had his shut, and she was reminded of a schoolboy holding off the last stroke of masturbation, sustaining the moment. She thought: I want to be promiscuous, I want to fuck all men . . .

Then it moved in her mind again.

The elevator. The razor dropping. That other woman reaching down and picking the razor up as the doors closed. It moved the way a dream will, disintegrating even as you think about it.

She didn’t want it now. Close that door. But she remembered running, her feet clattering along a corridor, a back entrance and then an alley and then another street. It was vague and misty, an old recollection, and she didn’t want it now. She pressed her face close to the man’s neck. She was thinking of Levy next, trying to remember something Levy had said to her, words of comfort, promising words:
I think we can work this problem out between us.

Suddenly she realized it was ambiguous.

We can work this problem out between us.

What was that supposed to mean?

She clasped the man tighter against her. She had to hold on to him because all at once there was an abrupt sense of slipping, as though something were breaking inside her, a euphoria yielding to a perilous dizziness, a height from which she didn’t want to fall. (There were boys in the boarding school and games of rugby and the open showers after that, the boys screaming and whistling and making masturbatory gestures under soapsuds, those boys, those boys with their pale buttocks and outgrowths of pubic hair . . . Why did she think of that now? It was somebody else’s thought, a disembodied perception, unrelated to her.)

The music stopped. Jackson Irving led her to an empty booth in the far corner of the room, a dim corner where no light fell. I don’t want to be here, she thought. Not now.

He sat very close to her, his hand upon the back of her wrist. He was opening and closing his mouth, words falling out like chips of sound, but she didn’t understand them. She felt his fingertips slide up her bare arm and, then beneath the table, his knuckles rest upon her knee-bone. She felt curiously tiny, distanced from herself, a speck floating through the dark space and back towards the light.

“What’s the matter, Bobbi?”

A pulse in her throat. Something trapped there. Something trapped and dying. She wanted to cry.

“Hey, hey . . .”

She laid her head back against the leather surface of the booth. She shut her eyes. The jukebox changed. She could hear the slow dancers shuffle still. The scraping of feet, the noise of a singer: they became one screaming sound in her head. His knuckles weren’t there any more. He had turned his hand over. His palm was stroking the inside of her thigh. She opened her eyes and she thought: Everybody in this bar is watching, staring at me, at this scene going on, laughing about the hand under the table . . .

No, nobody is. Nobody can see. Only me.

She tried to change the position of her leg but the grip against her thigh had become firm.

“Relax, relax, relax.”

She stared at him. His face reminded her now of some puffy moon, the lenses of his glasses like dark craters gouged from the surface.

Cocktease is that it?

She shook her head. The grip of his hand seemed to her like the nerve center, the heart, of her sense of panic. She tried to pull herself away, but he was laughing and holding on.