Dressed to Kill (21 page)

Shaking, she stopped at the door of the next car down, feeling the train sway again, feeling it vibrate underneath her. She hauled on the handle. The damn thing was hard to twist. She strained, sweating, trying to get it open.

“Hey cunt! Where you think you going?”

She opened the door and stepped into space, into darkness, poised between the two cars, feeling the dank wind tear through her hair, flash through her clothes, feeling it climb up through the slit in her skirt. Dear Christ, where now? The next car. You can’t go back. You can’t stay here. She looked down, seeing streamers of track reflected dully in the lights from the cars. When they reach you they’ll throw you down on the track. Story ended.
Finis.
She shut her eyes as the wind sucked at her, ripped at her, as though it were determined to draw her off the train and down into the wheels.

She opened the door of the next car down, vaguely conscious of the bright graffiti that decorated the interior of the car like paint sprayed by madmen. The car was empty. Jesus Christ. Why wasn’t there somebody around? Why wasn’t there somebody who could help her? She rushed down the length of the car, losing a shoe, turning once to see them coming through the door, still chasing after her.

“You can’t run much further, cunt!”

She reached the door of the next car down, pulled it open, and found herself back in that same black space as before, the dark wind howling against her, her skirt blown up around her waist, the wind blistering her eyes.

And then she slipped.

She slipped, stumbled, blown off balance, hanging for a terrifying moment just above the track, the wheels grating so loud the sound seemed to be inside her. The savage grinding that appeared to originate inside her head. She clawed herself back upright, fumbled with the catch of the connecting door, stepped inside the car and stood for a moment with her back against the door. Her heart, her pulses—they were things about to explode. She shut her eyes, tried to catch her breath, tried to reassemble her senses. But there was no time. There was no time to stop. In a moment they would come through the door into this car and she’d have to run again and she wondered how much further she could go, when she would reach the last car.

And after that—

She opened her eyes.

The car was empty except for the blonde.

The blonde.

For a moment Liz couldn’t move. Caught. Stuck. Paralyzed. She wanted to scream aloud but whatever sound she might have made froze inside her, congealed in a silent lump at the back of her throat. The blonde was grinning behind the huge dark glasses. The elevator, the blood, the dead woman’s fingers scratching the back of her hand . . . She turned, looked back at the connecting door, saw the five black guys come slowly through. It was a place beyond fear now, as if whatever sensations she might have felt had gone to a point where language was useless. She had a feeling of something coming to an end, a curtain falling, a sense of nothingness. A person drowning, she thought, is said to go through stages, the first struggle, then the futile acceptance, then the final transcendental moment of death . . .

A person drowning.

She stared at the blonde. Then she looked at the black guys as they came slowly down the car. She moved, so that she had her back to the double doors, thinking in a panic of an emergency exit, of clawing those automatic doors open, falling out into the darkness of the tracks, maybe hurting herself bad, but not dying, maybe having a chance. Then she thought about saying to the guys:
That woman, she’s the one I told you about, she’s the killer, she wants to kill me
. . .

They’d laugh.

They’d just goddamn laugh.

Fight, she thought. With what? What have you got to fight with?

She glanced at the blonde. That same manic grin. That dreadful expression. The elevator . . .

Then she felt the train slowing, she felt the pressure of brakes being applied, and she was conscious of the lights of a platform beginning to slice through the dark of the tunnel. She turned her head towards the five guys. Then she looked around for the blonde.

But the woman was gone.

Where?

“Grab that cocksucker!”

She felt the doors pop open behind her, but she couldn’t get herself to move, couldn’t get herself to step backwards off the train and on to the platform. This goddamn fear, this paralysis—

She shut her eyes.

When she opened them she saw, as in a dream, the five guys backing slowly away, turning, moving as if they’d seen something they didn’t want to see, something they didn’t want to be involved in. For a moment, Liz didn’t understand. And then she turned her head.

From behind, from the platform, the razor was falling.

It fell in a blinding rainbow of steel.

She could hear it slash the air as it dropped, slicing, whistling, carving space.

She turned her head to the side, eyes shut, one hand raised to ward off the blow—

It didn’t come. It didn’t happen.

Instead, she heard the blonde woman gasp. And when she opened her eyes she saw the woman cover her face with her hands, the face itself a mess of foam, of white froth, a coating that looked like lather.

Liz backed on to the platform.

She watched the blonde woman rush along the platform, her hands pressed to her face still, and then she was conscious of a kid, a boy of about fifteen, standing alongside her with an aerosol can in his hand. She stared at him, puzzled, then her strength went, whatever muscle control she had disintegrated, and she had to lean against a pillar, watching the kid stuff the can inside the satchel he carried.

She closed her eyes, wanting to cry from relief, vaguely conscious of the train doors closing and the wheels beginning to roll out of the station.

Dear God, she thought. That razor falling . . .

The kid said, “The stuff won’t kill her. Just enough to blind her for a time, that’s all. Just enough to sting her.”

Liz opened her eyes. “Start at the beginning, kid. Start at the beginning and give it to me slowly in a way I can understand.”

The boy swung his satchel over his shoulder and grinned at her. “My mother was Kate Myers. And that woman killed her.”

4

They sat in a diner, Peter toying with a large sundae, Liz sipping tasteless coffee and smoking a cigarette. She couldn’t keep her hands from shaking, couldn’t still the sense of inner turmoil she felt. Even when she raised the coffee cup to her lips, slicks of the brown liquid overflowed into the saucer. She watched the boy spoon a heap of vanilla ice cream into his mouth, casually, almost as if nothing had happened.

“So you rigged up this camera thing?” Liz said.

Peter nodded. “Yeah. But the results were pretty bad. I’ll show you them in a minute. Anyhow, I was setting the camera up again when I saw her across the street. She was coming down the steps from Elliott’s office, and I remembered that cop, what’s his name . . . ?

“Marino?”

“Marino. I remembered him describing the woman you saw in the elevator. He described her to Elliott, but Elliott didn’t seem to know her.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means he’s protecting a patient—” Peter looked a little exasperated, as if the woman’s slowness were inexcusable.

“Why would he do something like that?” Liz asked. She stared at the kid, liking him, amused by the little glint of intensity in the dark eyes behind the glasses.

Peter shrugged. “They’re, like priests, shrinks. I mean, they don’t just go round giving confidential stuff away, do they?”

Liz stubbed her cigarette. She looked for a moment round the diner. Two waitresses were standing at the cash register, giggling conspiratorially over something.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “But what if it comes down to a killer? I mean, is he going to save a killer’s ass?”

“It looks that way,” Peter said. He dug his straw into the remains of the sundae, making a slurping sound. “The next step is to find out that blonde’s name. Which shouldn’t be too hard, if I can get a look at Elliott’s appointments book—”

“Hey, kid. You ever hear about the cops? I mean, that’s something they should be doing, not you.”

“They don’t act fast enough for me,” Peter said.

Liz was quiet for a moment. “Forgive the observation, Peter, but you’re just a kid—”

“A kid that happened to save your life!”

“Point taken,” Liz said. “So what are you going to do? Burst into the guy’s office? Steal his precious appointments book?”

Peter stared inside his empty sundae glass. “I’m not sure yet. I’ll think of something.”

Liz smiled at him and leaned forward, lightly touching the back of his hand. The gesture seemed to embarrass him and he blushed.

“I saw you at the precinct house,” he said. “I watched you go through the mug shots.”

“You’re quite a little spy, aren’t you?”

“I get around,” Peter said. “When she left Elliott’s office, I trailed her. She led me straight to you . . .”

Liz lit another cigarette. She was thinking about the woman she’d lost at Columbus Circle, she was remembering the relief she felt, the relief that crumbled when the blonde emerged from the telephone booth. How could the goddamn woman have found her so quickly? But that question was eclipsed by another one, a more important one. And she looked at Peter, asking, “The thing that troubles me is how did she know where to find me? How does she know where I live, for God’s sake?”

“I don’t know,” Peter said.

“I don’t know either, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that my apartment isn’t exactly the safest place in the world right now.”

“So where will you go?”

“I’ll check into a hotel or something, just for tonight. Then I’ll call Marino first thing in the morning—”

“Do it now,” Peter said.

“All I want to do now is sleep, kid.”

“Sleep. Sleep’s a real waste of time . . .”

“When you reach my advanced years, you begin to realize its tonic effects, Peter. Believe me.” She patted the back of his hand again, and this time, smiling shyly, he looked around the diner to see if anybody had noticed the touch. Then he took his hand away and reached inside his satchel. He took out the blurry photograph of the blonde woman and slid it across the table to Liz. She picked it up, studied it, shuddered.

“If I had to put money on it, I’d say that was our lady,” she said. “It’s not exactly clear, but it’s good enough.”

She handed the picture back.

She was quiet for a time, then she said, “You’re a pretty smart kid, Peter. I didn’t see you on the train. All I can say is thank Christ you were there at the right moment. With that spray stuff of yours—”

“Oh, that. I made it myself. I’m too young to carry a gun around even if I wanted to, but I feel pretty safe with the aerosol.”

“You made it
yourself?”

“Sure. It’s a derivative of orthochlorobenzalmalononitrile—”

“If I tried to say that I’d choke to death on the first couple of syllables. Whatever it is, it saved my little ass. I owe you one.”

“You don’t owe me anything. But you
could
go to the cops tonight. You could call Marino right now—”

“Hey, a little patience goes a long way. And the funny thing about fear, as I’m beginning to find out, is when the adrenaline fades, you feel totally hollowed out, wasted. You know what I mean?”

Peter, looking disappointed, nodded.

“Cheer up, kid,” she said. “I’ll try the cops first thing in the morning, and if that doesn’t pan out, we’ll dream up something else—just you and me.” She pushed her empty coffee cup away, crushed her cigarette out. “You want to share a taxi with me? I can drop you off.”

Peter looked hesitant. “Well . . .”

“Well what?”

“The thing is, I told my stepfather I was staying the night with a friend, because we were supposed to be working on a science project together . . .”

“And you want me to cover for you, right?”

Peter smiled. “Right.”

“You want to share a hotel room with me? Right?”

“Right.” The kid fidgeted with the edge of the ashtray. “It would also help me a whole lot if you didn’t mention my name to the cops when you talk with them. Mike would find out that I’d lied to him . . . and I don’t think the results would be pleasant. At least, not the way he is now.”

“Okay,” she said, rising, reaching out to ruffle his hair.

He thought: My mother used to do that, she used to do that in the same way.

“I’ll keep your name out of it, kid. Don’t worry.”

They went towards the door, which Peter held open for her.

“I’ve checked into hotels with some strange people in my time,” she said, stepping past him, shivering in the dark city wind. “But this is a first for me—a fifteen-year-old kid.”

She went to the edge of the sidewalk and hailed a passing cab, half-expecting the door to open and the grinning blonde woman to be sitting, razor raised, inside.

5

Elliott had gone out to dinner, eating alone in a nearby restaurant. When he returned to his office he switched on his answering machine, listening to Bobbi’s voice, listening only to a fraction of the message before he turned the thing off . . .
Say, Doc, how are you going to put a stop to me . . . ?
He wanted to break the machine, destroy it, so he wouldn’t have to listen to that ghastly voice any more.

He felt scared. It wasn’t an emotion to which he was accustomed. He didn’t know how to deal with it, and it was accentuated in some way by the curious loneliness he felt, the riveting emptiness of his office, the strangely flat appearance of the objects within the room, as if half-lost in shadows they had shed a dimension. He rubbed his eyes. He sat for a time on the sofa, his hands pressed flat against his face.

Then he got up and walked to the telephone, dialled his home number, and waited for Anne to answer. This loneliness, he thought. This cutting fear . . . Why couldn’t he fight it back?

He heard her voice. She sounded slightly drunk, or maybe it was the effect of her sleeping pills.

“It’s late,” she said. “Why are you calling so late?”

“I’d like to come home,” he said. He glanced at the half-open door of his bathroom. Something inside, something vague and indistinct, caught his attention. He wasn’t sure what.