Dressed to Kill (14 page)

And then it happened.

She saw him get up quickly from the table, his expression one of anger, his hand uplifted as if he meant to strike her. The fist hovered in the air, menacing and yet not, threatening and somehow absurd. He lowered his hand after a moment and, with a gesture of hopeless annoyance, swept her purse off the table. She reached down, fumbling for the damn thing, trying to pick up whatever had fallen out on the dark floor. She gathered it up quickly and rose and rushed towards the door and then the cold street outside.

She felt humiliated, pained, betrayed by herself.

And angry.

It was the anger that was the worst part.

She moved along the sidewalk, not thinking, not wanting to think. Wanting to hide, scream, cry, wishing a crack would develop in the universe, one goddamn hole into which she could disappear.

But the anger wouldn’t go away.

It burned inside her with the intensity of molten metal.

Somehow she found a cab, got inside, told the driver just to cruise around for a time.

Touched me, she thought. He touched me.

(The air was filled with the screaming of kids, sunlight burned the grass, there were elongated shadows of trees, flattened outlines of branches etched in the grass, from somewhere the smell of a bonfire of dead leaves crackling in the long autumnal afternoon . . .

She gazed out of the window.

Anger, hatred. Oh, Jesus.

Then she was remembering the face of the woman who’d reached inside the elevator. A pretty face. A face somebody like Jackson Irving wouldn’t want to hurt, wouldn’t raise his fist against. She took a Kleenex from her purse and raised it to her mouth. She was shaking. She hated herself for being so . . . so what?

Weak?

So angry?

She looked through the window at the street. It comes back, forever, to Elliott. It always comes back to him. It stops there, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. Street signs floated past like they weren’t anchored to the ground, storefronts with their gridlike patterns of metal against the windows, people moving furtively through the night. The razor, she thought. But she didn’t have it now.

That other woman had picked it up.

That other woman who
saw
. . .

The pretty one.

Anger is close to fear, she thought. Like two countries with a common border, a frontier you could easily pass over. Damn, that was something of
his,
something
he’d
said once, and now she was remembering in such a way that it seemed like her own thoughts.
You’re angry, you’re also afraid, Bobbi. When you’ve got a passport for one, never forget you have a visa for the other.
A visa, a passport—that was just so goddamn stupid, so goddamn banal the way he talked, the images he formed, the look on his face that made you think: He’s astonished by his cleverness, the prick.

Oh Christ.

She tried to force her mind to something else, away from Elliott. It was the young woman’s face she saw, floating into her thoughts with the consistency of a nightmare.

Try to remember.

Try to remember where . . .

Outside the window the city floated past, hewn out of the darkness like a shapeless sculpting, hacked out of the night as if some careless artist had worked out his own nightmare in concrete. She shivered, afraid now. Afraid of herself, of what she would do next.

She leaned forward and tapped the glass that separated her from the driver.

2

“I saw a
fucking murder!”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Yeah, I’m kidding. I’m kidding so hard that the best part I’ve saved to the last, Norma. The cops have this weird notion I did it.”

“Now I know you’re joking.”

“You can hear it in my voice, right?”

A pause. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Tell me you’re not.”

“I’ve never been so goddamn serious.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I’m not sure
he
can help, Norma.”

“Listen. You want me to come over?”

“I think I’d like that.”

“Give me about thirty minutes.”

Liz put the telephone down and walked around her bedroom. She folded her arms under her breasts. Some things, she thought, you just don’t want to remember. Some things you relegate to oblivion. She went to the window and parted the curtains, looking down into the black street below. Some things you just can’t put away like that, because it isn’t easy. As long as you live, kid, you aren’t going to forget what you saw, you aren’t going to forget the blood, the sight of two faces—the victim and the assassin. No way.

She stepped out of the bedroom into her living room.

She lit a cigarette. She was cold suddenly, as if some invisible draft had rushed through the apartment. Maybe what you could do was make it seem like a dream . . . The hell you could. Dreams had fuzzy edges sometimes, but this picture was outlined in black, sharp around the margins. That face behind those black glasses. She couldn’t think which was worse: looking at the dying woman or staring straight at the killer.

She gazed at the scratch marks on the back of her hand.

The dead woman’s last testament.

Liz strolled idly into the kitchen. She felt strangely alone in the apartment—not the sense of solitude she so often looked forward to, but something deeper and more forlorn than that. She sat down at the kitchen table. She put her hands inside the pockets of her dressing gown. Why hadn’t that guy Ted come with her as far as the elevator? A simple courtesy, that was all: I’ll walk you to the elevator, honey. Then she would have had a witness. But Ted, after the act, seemed only interested in her departure; like a lot of guys, a vague sense of shame accompanied detumescence. It was as if they suddenly started to remember their wives, their kids, as if they half-expected to be caught in the act. Big guilt trips. If only he’d walked to the elevator . . .

But no deal.

Okay, she thought. About this time I should be going into a state of shock. Instead, she felt numb and tired. She yawned, stubbed her cigarette, lit a fresh one. What kind of world was it when the employees of a so-called escort service needed to be escorted themselves? She got up and walked around the kitchen, switched on the garbage disposal, listened to the violence of the blades, switched it off again, looked inside the refrigerator, then closed the slats of the blind.

The sound of her phone ringing was startling, like the needle of some vicious dentist baring a nerve. She picked it up. It clicked, went dead.

She held the receiver, set it down, and thought: Out there in the naked city there were loonies who made these pointless calls. They wanted to irritate you. I should get an unlisted number, she said to herself. How many times had the telephone rung in the past and there wasn’t anybody on the line?

A few times, she thought.

Not all that often.

Okay, so some weirdo decided to spook you with a call. Maybe a burglar checking out possible clientele . . . Somehow this didn’t convince her. She wanted to talk herself into believing it.

She picked up the receiver and dialled a number with the area code 312. She could see her mother getting up from her late-night show; she had this strange fondness for Randolph Scott movies.

“Ma,” Liz said. “Did I wake you?”

“Liz? No, of course not, I was watching the box—”

“Ma, did you call me a moment ago?”

“It’s funny you should ask. I was thinking of doing just that.”

Telephonic telepathy. “But you didn’t actually dial, did you?”

“No. Why? Somebody call you?”

Liz was silent for a second. “I guess it was nothing. How are you anyhow?”

“I’m fine. Arganbright put me on some new medication, it seems to help. At least, I don’t feel quite so stiff, and the pain is less than it was.”

Arganbright, the old family physician. Liz tried to picture his weary face; it was the kind of face you could imagine presiding over the deliveries of a million babies, knotting a million umbilical cords. Arganbright had even delivered her.

“Is something wrong, Liz?”

Ah. The mother’s intuition. It was as eerie as radar. “Nothing,” Liz said.

“You’re still coming at Christmas?”

“Sure I am. Looking forward to it.” Like hell. The family gathering, turkey stuffing and cranberry sauce and assorted relatives, none of whom had much in common with one another, all of whom had travelled great distances for the dubious privilege of unwrapping some tinselly items and getting indigestion.

“Uncle Frank is coming,” Liz’s mother said.

“I’m glad to hear it.” Uncle Frank, Liz thought. You could look at some old guys and just imagine them dandling seven-year-old girls lasciviously on their knees. Like Uncle Frank.

“Well, he’s coming all the way from Albuquerque.”

“Yeah, that’s quite a trip—”

“At his age it is.”

Her mother paused and Liz thought she heard the moist clicking of dentures slipping from gums.

“Your brother will be here, of course.”

She thought of Ronald and his dumpy little wife. She thought of the box they called home, located in a street of underdeveloped tract houses in Phoenix. Ronald was in electronics. His little wife, Rhonda—Rhonda yet—was a part-time nurse in a local old-age home. She couldn’t stand the thought of talking to Ronald, the way they chatted around the edges of threadbare memories, items from the past that Liz sometimes couldn’t recall. And Rhonda would sit there with a heap of embroidery on her thick legs. My flesh and blood, Liz thought; you could work up quite a nice guilt for yourself like this, wondering why you had so little in common with your family. She entertained a supreme fantasy of sitting down to Christmas dinner and, immediately after grace, announcing the true nature of her profession. Trauma. Shock. Incredulity.
Yeah, really, I fuck for a living. It’s only on a short-term basis, you understand.

“Liz, are you sure nothing is wrong?”

“Absolutely.”

“I mean, if anything
was
wrong, you’d say—wouldn’t you?”

Liz recognized the tone; it was getting close to the
I-wish-your-father-was-still-alive
trip. “Ma, of course I’d tell you. But nothing is. Everything’s just dandy.” Dandy, she thought. That was a word you could throw in for your mother. “Look, I just wanted to call, say hello. I’ll write in the next few days. Do you . . . I mean, do you need anything?”

She never did; or if she did, she was too self-sufficient to ask. “All I need from you, Liz Blake, is a long letter now and again.”

“You’ve got it”

“Take care, you hear?”

“I promise. Good night, Ma.”

Liz put the receiver down.

Everything’s just dandy—like being suspected of a murder.

She walked back inside the living room. She lay down on the sofa. The important thing, she told herself, is to believe in your innocence, in the fact you had nothing to do with the whole damn mess, so if they wired you up to a lie detector along the way, you’d come through with flying colors. I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, she said to herself. The hell with Marino and what he might assume.

She closed her eyes. Sleepy. Weary.

She wondered about the telephone ringing. The click on the end of the line. You’re safe, Liz. The killer can’t touch you. You’re sitting pretty.

It doesn’t cut it, she thought. She sat upright. How come, if you’re so safe, you feel so goddamn on edge? Norma would be here soon; some company would help, maybe even a glass of wine and a shot at sleeping. She suddenly thought of her father; it was weird and unpleasant, but she had the curious feeling at times that he was watching her, from a point beyond the grave, from someplace on the other side of death, he was watching what she was doing. And he was sick with disapproval.
Not my girl, not my little girl . . .
She supposed this spiritualist fantasy had its roots in some guilt. She wished guilt, like dust, could be swept beneath a rug. But sometimes she felt he was up there, drifting through the clouds, shaking his bald head in sorrow.

You’re being ridiculous now, she thought.

All you really remember of him is the smell of tobacco in his clothes, the way light reflected from his hairless scalp, the fact he was never short of a dollar when you badly needed anything.
There you go,
her mother would say,
always running to Daddy, Daddy’s little girl . . .
Inexplicably she felt sad; the last time she’d seen him was the day he died in the hospital, wired up to some terrible machine, his cancerous breathing coming in broken wheezes and his eyes filled with the humiliation of pain. She’d overheard one of the interns say:
That guy’s got more cancer than a lab rat. You name a place, he’s got it there.

Life and love: to a ten-year-old girl these things seemed so fragile, so tenuous. When he died she remembered feeling glad he wasn’t in pain any more. A sense of relief, like sunlight bursting into a room that has been shuttered way too long.

She rose from the sofa. She picked her watch up from the coffee table. It was exactly one o’clock in the morning.

3

When she got out of the cab she walked a couple of blocks, passing shuttered stores whose windows were cluttered with cameras and calculators and electronic games, passing a jazz club from whose open doors the sound of a solo saxophone drifted out in a discordant manner, a pawnshop where a dark figure lay sleeping in the doorway. She reached a corner, paused, watched a cop car cruising past in a stream of taxis; she was reminded of a dark tropical fish caught in a school of yellow ones, an outsider, one who did not belong to the fraternity. She crossed against a DON’T WALK sign, reached the other side, moved past a couple of guys arguing outside a telephone booth. Then the next block was empty, desolate, apart from herself; you might imagine the city as some void, a place of absences.

At the end of the block there was a sudden flood of light. It came from the window of a clothes store. She stopped outside and looked at the mannequins that, frozen under a blinding stream of light, suggested the newly dead. It was a bridal scene. The female stood in a cascade of white, clutching plastic flowers. The groom wore a velvet tuxedo and a red cummerbund and a shirt with lace frills. A bride and groom, she thought. A marriage of mannequins. Something about the scene reminded her—of what, for God’s sake? She couldn’t think. She stared into the blind eyes of the bride. Passionless, frigid. The quality of lifelessness frightened her. She tried to imagine some lewd window dresser taking their clothes off after the display had run its course, undressing them and carefully laying the man on top of the woman in a back room of the store, a dead honeymoon played out amongst the cartons and cardboard boxes of a stockroom.