Dressed to Kill (19 page)

“This one’s got somebody in it, at least.”

Peter looked at it. It was a photograph of a young man coming out of the office. After that there was another sequence of uninteresting ones.

Three of the door.

One that showed a mailman moving out of shot.

Then a lady with a dog.

Then, tantalizingly, one of the door half open—but with no figure visible.

There were a couple of blurred shots of people just passing.

“Hey, these are great,” Gunther said. “You could really make yourself a name, man. Some new kind of avant-garde photography. Pictures that don’t mean anything, you know?”

“Just keep developing,” Peter said.

Gunther shrugged and went back to work.

Two of the door.

A drunk, apparently, swaying past with a brown paper bag in his hand.

The edge of somebody’s leg, blurred.

Peter had a sense of futility, of having wasted his time.

Then there was one of Elliott, beautifully clear. He was standing in the doorway, one hand raised, as if he were seeing somebody out; there wasn’t anybody else in the picture, though. There was a dark spot at the edge, which might have been a shadow.

Two more of the door, darker now as the shadows deepened.

“Terrific stuff,” Gunther was saying, whistling in mock appreciation. “I mean, real terrific.”

A teenage girl.

Two more of the door.

Half of a cop passing—or at least somebody in uniform.

“You know what?” Gunther said. “You could exhibit these, man. There’s always some loony prepared to pay a fortune for stuff he doesn’t understand. You could call the exhibition The Edges of Things. You like that?”

“I hate it,” Peter said.

Gunther hung up a few more. They were darker.

And then there was a curious one, one so strange that Peter felt something become tight in his chest. It was blurry and indistinct, and the shadows were darker still, but it showed a blonde woman apparently passing the steps . . .

A blonde with black glasses
. . .

Hadn’t Marino said something like that?

But then Peter’s brief excitement passed. This blonde had no dark glasses, nor was it obvious that she was leaving Elliott’s office. Christ, she could be anybody, anybody just passing by in the street. Don’t get your hopes up. In any case, the picture was so dark that it was hard to make anything out. What the hell, it was as bad as the other pictures. He clenched his hands in frustration.

Then there were a couple more of the door, now almost totally dark.

“That’s it, man. I think you’ve thrown ten bucks down the tubes,” Gunther said.

“Yeah. Looks that way.”

“You want them anyhow?”

Peter nodded. “I might as well. I paid for them, didn’t I?”

Gunther giggled. “Anytime you need fast work done, Peter, you know I’m your man.”

When he left Gunther’s Peter cycled to a drugstore. He bought another roll of film, dropped it inside the camera, and rode back to the NO PARKING sign outside Elliott’s office. He adjusted the time-lapse control of the small electric motor so that the shutter would start operating just after dawn of the following day, then take a shot every fifteen minutes. Maybe he’d have better luck this time, but it was hard to avoid the feeling he’d begun to entertain that the whole thing was a wild exercise in futility.

He padlocked the bike to the sign, then made sure that the metal box was fastened securely to the rack.

He looked across the street at Elliott’s door.

Then he locked the other padlock, the one attached to the box.

When he’d finished, he stared once more across the street.

It was hard to tell—the light was bad, the streetlamps feeble, the exhaust from a passing bus suddenly dense—it was hard to tell anything, but he felt all his pulses leap abruptly; and it was as if something impossibly bright had lit up in the dark of his head.

SIX

1

H
e was a man in his late thirties, slightly overweight, and he wore bifocal glasses that continually slipped down the bone of his nose, so that he had to keep pushing them back upwards again with a thick index finger. He did this so frequently that it was like a nervous mannerism, a tic he could do nothing to prevent. His clothes were expensively cut, the vest tailored to disguise the plumpness of his belly. He occupied a suite of rooms on the top floor of the Parkway: a large living room with a view of the darkness that was Central Park, a bedroom through whose open door Liz could see a king-size bed. He spoke with the kind of accent that has been processed through good Eastern schools. Across the front of his vest there was a gold watch chain.

When he asked Liz to come in he said, “I assume you’re from the escort service—”

“That’s right,” she said. She went at once to the window and looked out at the blackness of the park far below.

He said, “You’re very pretty.”

“What did you expect? Quasimodo?”

He laughed. “Hardly that. It’s just that sometimes . . . sometimes one’s expectations aren’t exactly met.”

She turned around to look at him, noticing an ice bucket on a table, a bottle of champagne. She was conscious of how he was staring at her, scrutinizing her, as if some set of inner calculations were rushing through his head. He took the bottle of champagne from the bucket and, straining, managed to uncork it. He poured two glasses and handed her one. She sipped it slowly, watching him over the rim of her glass.

“Nice place,” she said.

“It costs an arm and a leg,” he answered. “Company money.”

“What kind of company?”

“Consultancy. The placement of upper echelon personnel. You know, executives, vice-presidents, those kind of people.”

“And that’s what you do?”

The man smiled. “It’s
my
company,” he said.

“So you’re the company president?”

“President and owner and anything else you’d care to name.” He sat down on a sofa. He patted the cushion next to him and Liz walked across the floor, sat beside him, crossed her legs so that her skirt slid upwards, the slit revealing a pale surface of thigh.

“Where do you come from?” he said. “I’ve been trying to place your accent. Usually I’m quite good at that.”

“Chicago, originally,” she said.

“Chicago is such a vital place,” he said. “I get there a lot.”

He paused, twisted the stem of his glass between his fingers, smiled at her. His other hand touched the faint scratch marks on the back of her fingers.

“An accident?” he said.

“A bad-tempered cat,” she answered.

“Pity. You have such nice hands.” He finished his drink and reached for the bottle again. When he offered it to Liz, she shook her head.

“Were you in the same line of business in Chicago?” he asked.

“I taught remedial reading,” Liz said.

“Remedial reading?” He tilted his head back, smiled in an absentminded way. “Forgive the question—how do you get from remedial reading to becoming . . .”

“A hooker?”

“Yes.”

“The pay is better.”

“Ah, the mercenary motive. I understand that.”

Liz put her glass down on the table. “I’ll make more money tonight than I’d make in a month of teaching kids. I also tried a little secretarial work before I went into teaching, but I had this boss who wanted to pay me two hundred a week
and
fuck me in the bargain. So I didn’t fuck him, which meant I got fired. After a while, you begin to realize you’ve got your priorities confused . . .”

The man touched her wrist “How long have you been in this business?”

She stared at him. “We don’t have to talk, you know.”

“I’m enjoying it” he said.

“It’s your bread.” She looked at her watch. “And I hate to mention it, but your meter is running.”

“Company money,” the man said. “My name’s Sam, by the way.”

Liz leaned her head back against the sofa.
A talker.
Why did so many of them want to talk? Speech was the lowest form of aphrodisiac. She’d had people in the past who bought her time out of some terrible loneliness, people who had no intention of screwing: the lonely conventioneers, businessmen, sad salesmen. Some of them even dragged out photographs of wife and family for your perusal, and you made suitably impressed noises. Now he was filling his glass again.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“Eight years.”

“Have you cheated on your wife before?”

“Cheated?” He looked a little perplexed. “This doesn’t really count as cheating, does it?”

“Why not?”

“Well . . . I mean, you’re a professional.”

“Which means I’m not a woman—”

“Hey, I didn’t mean anything like that—”

“You’re a little mixed-up, Sam, I think. No matter how you cut it this is cheating.”

“Yeah, but it’s not cheating in a classical sense.”

Liz turned her face away from him. There was something slightly delectable in springing a little morality where it was least expected. Call girl with portable pulpit.
All ye that cheat and are heavy-laden, give yourselves to me
. . . She looked back at him seeing how flustered he appeared now, as if his uneasiness were yielding to guilt. Carry on like this, Liz, she thought, and you’ll be out of business in a flash. She reached over and took his hand, which was cold and heavy, like some hairless paw. Then she stood up and walked inside the bedroom, where she started to undress. She could hear him pour another glass of champagne and gulp it down hastily. Naked, she lay down on the bed and waited. After a moment he appeared in the doorway, undoing the buttons of his vest and removing the gold watch chain, which he draped, rather carelessly, over the back of a chair. He slipped out of his jacket and shirt, undid the suspenders of his pants, and stood there—like some white whale taught to remain erect on its tail, a zoo trick—in his boxer shorts, which were polka-dotted and too tight round his midriff. Close your eyes, she thought. Close your eyes and smile and open your arms in welcome.

She heard him pad towards the bed. The mattress sagged as he slumped beside her. She felt his wet lips upon the side of her neck and she wondered, as she’d wondered before too many times, whether the price was worth it after all, whether the memory of this encounter and of all similar ones would finally fade from her mind at some later point.

“You’re very beautiful,” he was saying.

His entrance was something short of dramatic. She made a brief gasping sound and threw her arms around his neck, the tips of her fingers tracing the ridged outline of his spine.

2

When she left the hotel the night had become chilly, a dark wind blowing across the great wasteland of the park, rustling dying leaves and shaking branches. She turned up the collar of her coat and shivered on the sidewalk. A cab—where was a cab when you needed one? She looked at the uniformed doorman of the hotel: He was staring at her with the kind of suspicion you’d expect on a cop’s face, as if in his mind he were accusing her of unspeakable transgressions. Flunkey, she thought, wondering if she looked like a hooker, if there was something about her that made the antennae of such people as doormen quiver. Then she saw a cab cruising down the other side of the street and she hailed it, watching it swing in a leisurely arc to the sidewalk. The driver was young, fresh-faced, probably a college kid working nights.

As she reached forward to the door, something made her glance across the street.

A dark car. A movement, the reflection of light as the car door was opened. Quick, blinding, like some visual hallucination.

A dark car and a blonde woman getting inside it.

She stepped inside the taxi, slamming the door, leaning forward to the driver. For a moment she didn’t say anything; when she turned her face she saw the dark car’s headlights go on, the car itself pulling away slowly from the sidewalk.

The driver turned his face, looking puzzled. “Where to, lady?”

Liz couldn’t think. Blankness. A total emptiness of mind.

“I don’t have all night,” the driver said.

Liz watched the car, then looked at the driver. “I know how this is going to sound, and I’m sorry if you think you just picked up a loony, but somebody is following me.”

“Huh?”

“That car. Just there.”

The driver twisted his neck round, then shook his head.
“That
car?”

“Yeah. The black one.”

“I believe you. Don’t ask me why—”

“Don’t ask anything. Just lose it, huh?”

The driver pulled the cab away from the sidewalk so abruptly that Liz fell backwards in her seat. When she turned to look again through the rear window she could see the car a little way behind, following at a steady pace. She swung round and leaned forward towards the driver, speaking to him through the glass partition.

“Can’t you go a little faster?”

“I can try,” the kid said, wheeling the cab suddenly around a corner, wheeling it so hard that the tires screamed against the concrete. Liz held on, trying to think. It doesn’t matter how she found me, it doesn’t matter how she knew where to look, the only important thing now is to lose her. But when she turned around once again the dark car was still there, doggedly, still the same short distance behind.

“And screw the red lights,” Liz said.

“Anything you say,” the driver said.

Now they were in the middle of some heavy uptown traffic, the cab weaving around a bus at such a sharp angle that Liz slipped from her seat to the floor.

“You okay?” the kid asked.

“Apart from a couple of fractures, sure . . .”

“How am I doing?”

“You’re doing just great. But that car’s doing just as great.”

“Fuck it,” the driver said. He swung the wheel hard, the cab made a breakneck left turn, the rear tires climbing the edge of the sidewalk then bumping back down again. “Sorry about that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Liz said.

“What kinda trouble you got anyhow?”

“That would take too long to explain,” Liz said, turning again, watching the other car stream through traffic to keep the yellow cab in sight.