Dressed to Kill (22 page)

“This isn’t your home any more, my dear,” she said. “I thought I’d made that clear—”

“Wait,” he said. “I think we could talk this thing over, don’t you? I think we could work something out.”

“There are times, love, when I really believe you live in a dream. What you’re suggesting is quite impossible. Don’t you know that? We’re through. Finished. It’s
done.”

The loneliness was oceanic, tidal, pressing in on him now. The walls of his office smothered him.

“Listen, Anne,” he said. “I could come home now. I could be there in an hour or so. I think we have one or two things to talk over—”

“Damn you, damn you. We haven’t got anything to talk over!”

He was silent, staring again at the bathroom door, sensing the edge of some presence, something that shouldn’t have been there.

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Besides, I have company.”

“Company?”

“You heard me.”

“Who?” He could hardly force the question out. There was a thickness at the back of his throat. And he wondered if what he felt was the quickening of some odd jealousy. How could that be?

“It doesn’t matter who—”

“A man?”

“A man, yes.”

Elliott, holding the receiver still, stretching the cord, moved around his desk and pushed the bathroom door open with his foot.
Something.
He couldn’t reach the light switch.

“Somebody you sleep with?” he asked.

“Somebody I’m about to sleep with, my dear.”

“God.”

“I hope your sofa is comfortable, darling.”

Click. Dead. Hung up.

He slammed the receiver down and stood in the threshhold of the darkened bathroom. He didn’t know why he was afraid to turn the light on.

And then he caught it.

A faint scent. A lingering perfume that was familiar to him.

He fumbled for the light switch.

He found himself staring at the mirror.

Then he closed his eyes and leaned against the door jamb.

How had she got in? How had she managed to enter the office when he was out? A stolen key?

He looked at the mirror again, seeing the lipsticked words spread across his own pallid reflection.

SORRY I MISSED YOU DOC
BUT I’LL BE SEEING YOU SOON
LOVE FROM BOBBI

He ripped several squares of toilet tissue from the roll and began feverishly to wipe at the words. But the more he worked the more the writing smeared so that the whole mirror was soon a mass of red streaks. He crumpled the tissue and dropped it in the toilet, then stepped back. She was here when I was out, he thought. Here.

He slammed the bathroom door and went to the sofa, where he lay down with his eyes shut. Tomorrow, he thought, he would see Levy. After that, he couldn’t go on protecting Bobbi.

How could he?

SEVEN

1

T
he weather changed. The clear skies became muddy, storm clouds hung across the city with the inevitability of some unnameable doom, shrouding the peaks of high-rise buildings in a dark mist. Marino, stepping out of his parked car, looked up at the sky. This wasn’t his kind of weather. He reacted to it in a personal way, disliking it as he might detest an enemy. It brought on dull headaches and caused his sinuses to ache. He walked across the parking lot and went inside the precinct house. He’d slept badly last night, dreaming distorted dreams, haunted by unidentifiable shapes. Once, when he’d woken up sweating, his skin adhering to the bedsheets, Mary had propped herself up on an elbow and stroked his forehead.
You’re coming down with something, Joseph. You really need to take better care of yourself.
But now he wasn’t sure if he’d dreamed that up either; and when he’d left the house that morning she was still asleep, so he couldn’t ask her to be sure. Funny that—how you sometimes had to check reality out, confirming events with other people.

He went inside his office and hung his coat up on the wall. He sat behind his desk and reached for the tickets to the ball game. Shit, he thought. I can’t break that promise. He stuck the tickets inside his jacket pocket, then he thought about the Myers killing. It was like a surface of hard ice without a crack in sight. What did he have except for Liz Blake? And that didn’t amount to a big score. He could hardly drag her in and book her without something a little more solid to go on, and besides, he couldn’t think of a motive that would explain Liz Blake killing Kate Myers. So what did he have? A great fucking blind alley. Okay, what about the shrink? What about one of the shrink’s patients? Straws in the wild wind. Sometimes, though, you had to clutch what you could. He stared, deep in thought, at the surface of his desk.

Messages, messages.

At three
A.M.
that morning a body had been fished out of the river up around 125th Street. Marino read the report, skimming it.
Female caucasian. Dead for roughly three days. Multiple stab wounds.
Multiple stab wounds, for Christ’s sake.

At four thirty-seven
A.M.
a corpse had been found in a derelict tenement.
Black male, age approximately forty, gunshot wounds to the face and neck.

He put the reports aside and stood up, strolled to the window, looked out. What was it about the human race that made it want to self-destruct? What kind of mad genetic factor was it that caused people to kill? He pressed his face against the glass. The city doesn’t pay you to be a philosopher, he thought. It pays you to solve these fucking murders, and when you don’t, the taxpayers have a tendency to become irate. Somebody like Kate Myers lies in a bath of her own blood—shit, the taxpayer wants to be sure that he isn’t going to be the next goddamn victim.

The door of his office opened.

He turned to see a uniformed cop standing there. A new guy, fresh uniform, a look of eagerness about the eyes. After a while, that kind of light was extinguished, and what you saw instead was a glazed weariness.

“Yeah?” Marino said.

“There’s somebody to see you, sir,” the young cop said.

“Who?”

“A Miss Blake.”

Marino raised his eyebrows, then nervously touched the edge of his moustache. “I’ll see her,” he said.

The young cop went out. Then Liz Blake came in.

Marino indicated she should sit, but she didn’t. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her coat, her face pale and tired. A hard night’s work, Marino thought. It had to be a hell of a way to make a few bucks.

“You come down to confess?” he asked.

“How did you guess?” she said.

“Call it a cop’s instinct.”

She was silent for a time, chewing lightly on her lower lip, her eyes turned towards the window.

“Shitty weather,” Marino said.

She nodded. Then she sat down, took a Kleenex from her pocket, and lightly touched the tip of her nose with it. “Something bad happened last night,” she said.

“Oh yeah?”

“She tried to kill me.”

Marino leaned against the edge of his desk. “Who tried to kill you?”

“The same woman . . . the same woman I saw in the elevator.”

“Where did this happen?”

“In the subway—”

“The subway, huh?”

“Do I detect disbelief in your voice, Lieutenant?”

“You imagine too much, Liz.”

“You think I imagined I was almost killed? Jesus Christ! She came at me with this razor—”

“Another razor, huh? She must have quite a supply—”

“You don’t believe me, is that it?”

“Let’s see. A subway. A public place. It stands to reason there must have been a witness, right? It’s common enough to find people in subways, as I understand it . . .”

She looked at him with irritation. “Look, she followed me, I thought I’d lost her, but then she was waiting for me when I got back to my apartment . . .”

Marino clasped his hands together, moving his arms as if he were swinging an imaginary baseball bat. “I was asking about witnesses. Were there any?”

She paused a moment. “No,” she said.

“Terrific, Liz. All kinds of things seem to happen to you when there’s nobody else around to see them.”

“I didn’t come here to listen to your wiseass comments, Marino.”

“Marino now. We’re getting pretty familiar. Next thing you know we’ll be having cocktails in some quiet little bar of an evening.”

“Goddamnit, somebody is trying to kill me, Marino—”

“I know a neat little cell where you’ll be perfectly safe.”

She paused, rose from her chair, went to the window.

Marino watched her. A pretty thing, he thought. What makes a pretty thing like her become a hooker?

Rain was beginning to slither down the window now.

“I’m going to tell you something, Marino. I’m going to tell you how to find this killer.”

“I’m all ears,” Marino said.

She turned to look at him. “The woman who killed Kate Myers, the same woman who tried to kill me, is a patient of a certain Dr. Elliott.”

“So how do you figure that one?”

“She came out of his office.”

“You saw her, did you? You just happened to be passing the guy’s office when, lo and fucking behold, there she was?”

“I’m getting pretty pissed off with your attitude, Marino.”

He shrugged. “Did you see her or didn’t you?”

“Not personally, no. But I know she’s one of his patients. And all you’ve got to do is take a look at his appointments book for yesterday and find a name, the rest shouldn’t be too hard. Even for you.”

“The vote of confidence is appreciated,” he said, bowing his head in a mocking way. “Tell you a funny thing, though. I beat you to the punch, sweetheart. I already thought about the good doctor’s book, but I just can’t walk into his office and pilfer the goddamn thing, because I need a warrant and sometimes a warrant is a slow process because judges have to be wakened from their beauty sleep, which often they don’t appreciate. Understand? A cop can’t go snooping round a shrink’s office without a certain piece of paper.”

“That’s just wonderful,” Liz said. “So while you’re wasting your time thinking about this shitty piece of paper, there’s a maniac running around—”

“According to you there is,” he said.

Liz sighed, irritated. “You don’t believe me even yet, do you?”

“Let’s just say I’m having this difficulty, Liz. Let’s just say there’s a credibility gap the size of the Grand Canyon—”

She put her hands firmly on her hips and stared at him. “You know what I think, Marino? I think you’re a goddamn incompetent sonofabitch. I think you’re what is called a waste of the taxpayer’s money, you know that? I’m laying this thing dead in your lap and you’re acting like you don’t even hear me . . .”

Marino smiled at her. “Compliments you can save, sweetheart. Right now I’m speculating on how long you’ll get. A good lawyer could maybe get you off with twenty—”

“Eat it.”

“Or you could be looking at something longer. Life? Hard to tell. Courts work in funny ways, you know.” He picked up some papers from his desk, shuffled them, sighed. Then he stared at her again, still smiling in that irksome way. “You’re pretty. You’re a real good-looking woman. You wouldn’t have any trouble finding company in the slammer. I mean, they’d be fighting over proprietorial rights to you, you know that?”

“Marino . . .”

“Naturally, you’d lose some of that bloom you have right now. You’d lose your looks after a time. You’d find yourself walking up and down your thirty-six square feet night after night. And when that old moon comes up through the bars, well . . . Jesus, it’d drive you crazy. Then you’d grow old before your name even came up before the parole board. You’d grow old and hard and pale and you wouldn’t be the pretty thing you are now. Tough shit. But sometimes you have to play the cards you’re dealt, you know?”

“Spare me the sermons, Marino. You can’t book me—”

“Can you stop me, Liz?” He sighed, an actor in an amateur production. He threw his hands up in a play at despair. “You’re my main man. You’re my numero uno, kid. You’re the only ace in my deck, so you better believe I can book you.”

She folded her arms and tried to look defiant; but there was something in his eyes, a hard light, a warning, that made her feel small inside, small and frightened.

“Lady, you’d hate jail, believe me. You’d hate the guards, the lack of sunlight, the food that makes you want to gag. I’d hazard a guess you’d even hate the only kind of screwing that’d be available to you.” He got up from his desk, stuck his hands in the pockets of his pants, the smile still on his face. He shook his head from side to side. “What a goddamn waste it would be, Liz. Makes my heart break.”

She was silent. A bluff, that was all. But how could she know with a guy like Marino? “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead. Book me. Why don’t you do that?”

“I intend to.”

It was like the sound of a heavy metal door slamming. She could hear it echo, rattling, in her mind.

“The jury’s going to go for your guts, sweetheart. Such a violent crime.” He watched her, drumming his desk with his fingertips. “Very nasty. They don’t like that. An open razor. No, they won’t like that at all . . .”

She wanted to challenge him again. She wanted to say:
Book me.
But she didn’t have the heart to say it a second time.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Unless something turns up between now and then, I’ll book you tomorrow.”

“Unless what turns up?” she said.

“Oh . . .” He paused. He touched his moustache, stroking it lightly. “I don’t know. A certain appointments book, maybe.”

“Hold it. Just hold it a moment.”

“I mean,” Marino said. “You’re a paranoid murder suspect. You’re not expected to behave rationally, not with your head on the chopping block. A certain appointments book might just
happen
to come your way.”

“No—”

“Stir crazy. They tell me that’s the worst thing that can happen to a person in the slammer.”

“Marino—are you asking me to get inside Elliott’s office and steal that goddamn book for you? Is that what you’re asking me?”

“I didn’t say that, did I?”

“The hell you didn’t—”

He sat down, looked at some papers again, straightened them out.