Dressed to Kill (18 page)

It crossed her mind that he might be looking for a freebie, but she dismissed that. He had “family man” stamped all over him, like it was a suit of armor he wore. She watched him yawn again. Then he said, “Anyhow, glad to see you haven’t skipped. Keep your nose clean.”

“I will.”

“You better,” he said, rising. He went to the door where he turned around and smiled. “You either use too much coffee or you’re buying a real cheap brand. Try some French Roast next time. Or espresso. You’ll get great results.”

“Thanks for the hint.”

“Just one of Marino’s Many Household Tips, Liz. Be good. And beware.”

She didn’t move. She heard the outer door close.

Beware.

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

She listened to the hollow silence of the apartment for a time, wishing the telephone would ring or the refrigerator motor kick on or a faucet suddenly start to drip—anything to whip the profound quiet that had settled like a web throughout the rooms. She got up and went to the window and looked out. She saw Marino, diminutive from this height, cross the street and get inside a parked car. The car pulled away from the sidewalk.

In another car, parked some distance away from the one Marino had just entered, a blonde woman sat with her head tilted back against the seat. She watched the street, yawning now and again, covering her mouth with her hands. Once, she glanced at the apartment building entrance; then she looked at herself in the mirror, tilting it towards her for a good view, noticing how glazed her eyes were and how dark the circles under the lower lashes.

4

The patient was a young man who had recently attempted to kill himself; he had done so by slashing his underarms with a butcher’s knife—an attempt, Elliott realized, that was some form of revenge against his mother. In strictly Freudian terms, it was classically simple. He had been coming to Elliott now for several weeks, each session producing more and more vehement statements about his mother. Elliott, sitting back in his chair with the tips of his fingers pressed together beneath his chin, had developed the habit of hearing only key phrases, which was what he did now, occasionally nodding his head, making a small gesture, or leaning forward to touch the onyx paperweight. He had moments sometimes when he wanted to say:
You think you have problems; would you like to hear some of mine?
But he understood that unless he were perceived as being somehow infallible, his worth to his patients was drastically diminished. Now, half-closing his eyes, he heard the young man’s drone. “Wanted a daughter, not a son . . .” My wife just told me she’s divorcing me, Elliott thought. Would you care to hear that? Elliott nodded. “One time, I remember, she put a ribbon in my hair . . . You got to understand, like, I was about six at the time, yeah, six, maybe seven, and she’d let my hair grow in these long fucking curls. I didn’t know if I was a girl or a boy or what . . .” Elliott smiled sympathetically. “The big trauma was like when I went off to school . . . I mean, you can dig what they called me there, huh?” Divorce, Elliott thought. How empty the word sounded. How dreadfully final. He stared at the young man, who was straightening out a paper clip, twisting it this way and that, then trying to roll it flat between his palms. Finally, he gave up and dropped the twisted metal in an ashtray.
“They said I was a goddamn sissy, couldn’t do this right, couldn’t do that, and because of this fucking woman who wouldn’t let me be what I wanted to be, which was male, which was the goddamn sex I was born with
. . .”

“When did your father die?” Elliott asked.

“Before I was born,” the young man said. He was sweating heavily his forehead glistening.

“What did your mother tell you about your father?”

“You want it verbatim?”

Elliott nodded.

“She said he was a prick. Couldn’t keep from screwing anything that moved. Said she had to make sure I didn’t grow up like him.”

“But you feel certain about your sex now, don’t you?” Elliott asked.

The young man shrugged. “Sometimes, I don’t know. I get this horrible thought, though. I’m not going to feel right until
she’s
dead.”

“Do you want to kill her?”

“It’s crossed my mind. But I wouldn’t.”

Elliott leaned forward. “In trying to kill yourself, would you say you were
really
trying to kill your mother?”

“Uh—it’s possible.”

“You didn’t really want to destroy
yourself,
did you?”

The young man looked blank.

Elliott said, “You wanted to kill her. In the emotional sense anyhow. If you’d succeeded, she’d have been filled with remorse, am I right?” He thought of Anne, wondered if Anne had such a suicidal tendency, wondered if she were capable of killing herself so that he would feel like the murderer.

“Yeah, maybe. I wanted to hurt her, real bad.”

Elliott was silent. He stared past the young man at the framed pictures on the walls. In the direct sunlight of the early afternoon one could only see the glass shining, not the prints beneath.

“Do you still want to hurt her?” Elliott asked.

“I don’t know,” the young man said.

“Do you think I should talk with her?”

“I don’t think
she’d
talk with
you
—” The young man, brushing a curl from his forehead, smiled. It was a bleak smile. “She thinks head-doctors are poison.”

“Poison,” Elliott said, and laughed. “We get called all kinds of names.” He paused, picked up his letter opener. “You’re not living at home now, are you?”

“I rented a room. It’s not much.”

“Does she know where to find you?”

“She’ll find out. She always finds out.”

Elliott heard his telephone.

“Excuse me,” he said to the young man as he picked up the receiver.

The voice on the other end of the line said, “Dr. Elliott? This is George Levy. I understand you left a message about wanting to see me.”

“That’s right,” Elliott said.

“Can you give me some idea of what you want?”

Elliott paused. Then he said, “It concerns a patient of mine. A former patient, I should say. It’s imperative that I see you as soon as I can. I’m in a consultation at the moment—can I call you back?”

“I’m a little mystified,” Levy said. “Why the urgency?”

“I’d prefer to talk to you in person, Dr. Levy.”

There was a silence; Elliott could hear the other man flick the pages of a book.

“I don’t know when it would be convenient,” Levy said after a while. “Why don’t you ring me when you’re free?”

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

Elliott put the receiver down. He looked at his young patient, then glanced at his watch.

“We’re just about out of time, I’m afraid.”

The young man nodded. “Same time next week?”

“Certainly.” Elliott got up. He thought: I could talk to Anne, ask her to think things over, see if it can be made good again. Had it ever been any good? He walked out into the reception room with the young man.

“I’ll see you next week, Arthur. If anything comes up in the meantime, you can always reach me.”

The young man smiled, then he was gone.

Elliott looked round the empty waiting room, then returned to his office where—after hesitating, after wondering how he was going to approach the subject of Bobbi with another psychiatrist—he picked up his telephone and dialled Levy’s number.

Even before it was answered in Levy’s office, he put the receiver down. Think, he told himself. Think it through carefully before you talk with Levy. The problem was still the same: the idea that you were protecting a killer. He rubbed his jaw and looked at the telephone, wishing that Bobbi would ring back. Wishing he could just talk with her, locate her, then he’d know what to do for sure.

But she hadn’t called and he had no idea where she was now.

He dialled Levy’s number.

5

It was one of those old-fashioned stores that pretend to cater to a diminishing species—the gentleman. There were racks of tweed sportscoats, shelves of toilet requisites, expensive imported lotions and after-shaves, handcrafted leather boots and equestrian accoutrements, saddles and riding crops and jodhpurs; there were shotguns, pith helmets, assorted decoy ducks, a multitude of fishing poles and brightly-colored flies. More than anything else, it suggested the paraphernalia of an empire that the United States had never possessed in the first place. The clerks were hushed and reverential, moving around in a manner that indicated they were gliding on smooth rollers. Here was a counterfeit history, a sense of antiquity stolen from another culture, and everybody spoke, it seemed, with English accents.

She felt out of place; a discordant element.

When the clerk approached her in his dark jacket and pinstripe pants she wanted to back out of the store, make an excuse, claim she’d come to the wrong place. But she didn’t. When she explained what she wanted—“a gift for an old friend, of course”—the clerk simply nodded and disappeared behind a counter, returning a moment later with a tray of objects, which he held in front of her as if he were a waiter in a gourmet restaurant tempting a customer with a lavish assortment of desserts.

She stared at the array of objects. The clerk, waiting, said nothing. Finally, she chose one with a pearl handle. The clerk said it was an excellent choice and made some comment lamenting the passing of such instruments. “We live, madam, in a disposable society,” he remarked. “I trust the day will not come when we eventually dispose of ourselves.”

She smiled. She watched him place the pearl-handled thing inside a leather case. She saw him drop it inside a bag discreetly embossed with the name of the store. She paid, imagining for a moment that the sight of cash distressed the clerk. But he apparently recovered. “I’m sure your friend will find that to his liking,” he said.

She stepped outside into the sunlight of the afternoon, dropping the paper bag inside her purse. She took out her black glasses and put them on because the sudden harshness of the sun had made her blink.

It was close to five when Peter went to get his bicycle from its place opposite Elliott’s office. He was relieved to find nobody had tampered with it. He looked inside the metal box, made sure everything was in its place, then unlocked the padlock that bound the bike to the NO PARKING sign. He pedalled quickly away; he could hardly wait to have the photographs printed.

She watched the entranceway.

Nothing much happened.

A florist’s delivery man went inside with a bouquet of flowers.

A brown van from United Parcels drew up, then pulled away without making a delivery.

A beat cop strolled past, then disappeared round the corner.

She looked up at the windows of the building. They were flattened, like beaten gold, by the failing sun.

Sooner or later the woman would come out. Sooner or later she would have to.

Peter parked his bicycle in the parking lot behind an apartment building, padlocking it to the bars provided for bikes. He removed the metal box from the rack and went inside the building. He couldn’t wait for the elevator, so he rushed the stairs to the third floor, then he searched the doors for number three five four. When he found it he pressed the doorbell, waited, and then the door was opened by a small dark-haired woman in her early fifties.

“Is Gunther home?” Peter asked, clutching the box hard to his side.

The woman said something in German, then turned her face along the corridor and called out Gunther’s name. After a moment, Peter could make out the shape of his friend at the end of the dark lobby of the apartment—unmistakable, with that strange Afro he wore and the way he stooped to detract from his height.

“Didn’t think you were coming,” Gunther said. “Wanna come in?”

Peter stepped inside, the woman closed the door, muttered something else in German, and then Peter followed Gunther into a side room.

“You said you’d pay,” Gunther said. “I wouldn’t ask, you being a friend, but I’m pretty short of bread right now.”

“I brought the bucks,” Peter said. He took two crumpled five dollar bills from his jacket and handed them to Gunther. The other kid stared at them, as if he suspected counterfeits. Then, seemingly satisfied, he stuffed them in his jeans.

“Here’s the film,” Peter said.

Gunther took the roll. “I don’t see the urgency, man.”

“Just develop the film, okay?”

Gunther shrugged. He closed the door of what was obviously his bedroom—a messy room, whose walls were covered with posters of an hallucinogenic nature; mushrooms and patterns created out of surrealistic marijuana leaves and circles of smoke. Then he opened the door of a large closet, which Peter saw was his darkroom.

“I prefer to work alone,” Gunther said. “But if you keep quiet and don’t get in my way, you can come inside. Okay?”

“You won’t hear anything from me,” Peter said.

They went inside the darkroom. Gunther turned on the red light. Peter surveyed the rows of trays, the bottles of chemicals. He watched as Gunther opened the film and bent over the trays. The red light cast a weird glow over everything. Gunther put the film into a developing tank, then worked at something Peter couldn’t see because the kid had his back to him.

“How long does this take?” Peter asked.

“You said you’d be quiet, man,” Gunther answered.

“Okay, okay. I’m a little impatient, that’s all.”

“A
little?”

Peter stared at the shelves on the walls. There were bottles fixed with abbreviated words like DEV and FIX and STOP. For a moment he wished he were interested enough to have a darkroom of his own, but it was too late to worry about that now. Around him there were wires from which clothespins hung suspended. Peter whistled quietly through his teeth, then Gunther looked at him in a chilly way. So he was quiet. It all seemed to be taking such a goddamn long time. He tried to relax.

After a while, Gunther said, “What kinda pictures are these, man?”

“What do you mean?”

Gunther hung a few up by the pins. “They’re like the door of a house or something.”

Peter stared at the first few shots. He felt a terrible sense of disappointment. They showed only the door of Elliott’s office. Gunther produced another one.