Dressed to Kill (23 page)

She said, “There’s a word for this, Marino. A nasty word.”

“Yeah?”

“Fucking blackmail.”

“Me? Blackmail you? I’m a cop, lady. I don’t break laws. I uphold them. It’s my sworn duty.”

“Like hell.”

He started to write something, ignoring her. Without looking up, he said, “Tomorrow.”

She hesitated a moment, then she went quickly to the door.

When she’d gone out he sat back smiling.

2

It was shortly after midday when she met Peter at a cafeteria on West Fifty-seventh Street. He was sitting in a far corner of the place, smothering a hamburger with ketchup. As she approached him he looked up smiling, and she thought: What an unlikely alliance this is. A hooker and a kid, sharing a common purpose. She slid into the seat facing him.

“You always use that much ketchup?” she asked.

“It takes the taste away,” he said. “What happened?”

“With Marino?”

He nodded, biting into the hamburger. A slick of ketchup fell on to his plate.

“He’s given me what you might call an ultimatum, kid.”

“Like how?”

“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He wants me to get inside Elliott’s office and take a look at his appointments book.”

“How are you going to do that?”

Liz took a cigarette from her purse. “I had a bright idea. At least it seemed bright when I thought about it. It seemed even brighter still when I considered the alternative—the slammer.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

She hesitated. “I don’t think I like the idea, but I can’t think of anything better . . .”

Peter put down his half-eaten hamburger and leaned forward across the table to listen.

3

George Levy’s office was located in a building on Forty-second Street. As he rode up in the elevator Elliott tried to suppress the nervousness he felt. It had been a restless night, moments of light sleep punctuated with thoughts of his wife, with thoughts of Bobbi too—the idea that somehow she’d been able to get inside the office when he was out. And once, when he’d dreamed, he imagined her standing over him with an open razor, her face grim, her words sounding as if they were spoken in an echo chamber:
Your time is coming too, Elliott. Make no mistake . . .

He got out of the elevator and followed the signs to Levy’s office. The reception room was Naugahyde and rubber plants and piped Muzak; the girl behind the desk was attractive in a plastic way, as if Levy had selected her from a Sears catalogue—the kind of girl you might see modelling the latest in bikinis. He announced himself at the desk. The girl smiled, rose, and showed him into an inner office. Levy rose, his hand extended, Elliott shook it; the girl withdrew.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t see you before,” Levy said. “You know how it is—busy schedule, et cetera. Sit down.”

Elliott sat, facing the desk. He gazed at George Levy a moment. He was a plump little man with a mass of unruly gray hair. He had the sort of expression that suggested he was forever scrutinizing, forever analyzing; it was a look under which Elliott felt distinctly uncomfortable. There was something else too, something Elliott felt only in a vague way—that Levy was familiar to him. Maybe they’d met at some convention, or at a symposium.

Levy smiled. “I’m at a loss to understand what it is you want to see me about, I’m afraid. I hope you can enlighten me.”

“I think I can,” Elliott said. “It concerns a former patient of mine, someone I understand you’re treating now.”

Levy glanced at his watch, then raised his face to look at Elliott. There was an expression on Levy’s face, an expression that might have been one of uncertainty, of bewilderment, but it passed quickly.

“I understand the need for confidentiality,” Elliott said, smiling in a weak way. “But there are special circumstances involved here . . .”

“It would help if you named the patient involved—”

“Bobbi—”

“Ah, yes, Bobbi.” Levy took out his pipe and lit it, stuffing it from a cracked leather pouch. He spent several matches before he had the pipe lit.

“I have no doubt in my mind,” Elliott said, “that she’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous?”

Elliott paused. “She’s threatened to cause me trouble because I refused to approve a sex change operation.”

“Why did you refuse?”

“It was my opinion—and it still is—that she isn’t a true transsexual.”

“Perhaps you can explain that to me, Dr. Elliott.”

“A true transsexual has an unalterable belief that she is one sex trapped, so to speak, in the body of the other. In the case of Bobbi, however, she is not aware of her
other
self—and it was my diagnosis that she’s really a dangerous schizophrenic personality. That her treatment should not involve a sex change operation but instead drug and behavioral therapy in a confined environment.”

“Such as a mental institution?”

“Exactly.”

Levy stared at him. Elliott looked away—why was the stare so damnably unnerving?

“What kind of trouble has she caused you?” Levy asked.

Elliott paused again. The edge, the darkness below, but how could he go on protecting Bobbi?

He said, “There have been telephone calls of a troublesome nature. If it were only that, of course, I don’t think I should be so worried as I am. However . . .”

Levy looked at him questioningly.

“She also stole my razor from my office.”

“Why?”

“Did you read about the woman who was slashed to death in an elevator?”

“The news was hard to miss—”

“The dead woman was a patient of mine, Dr. Levy—”

“And you think Bobbi killed her with your razor?”

“The conclusion is hard to avoid.” Elliott cleared his throat, the roof of his mouth was dry. “And I have every reason to believe that she’ll kill again. She said as much.”

“You haven’t informed the police?”

Elliott shook his head. “Not yet. I wanted to talk with her. I wanted to be absolutely sure it was her. But I can’t locate her. So I came to you.”

Levy was silent for a long time, knocking sparks from his pipe into an ashtray. “I’ll talk with her,” he said eventually. “If I concur with your prognosis, we’ll get in touch with the police.”

Elliott began to rise. “Please let me know what happens.”

“Of course,” Levy said. “Before you go, do you want to know why she came to see me in the first place?”

“I assume it was because she imagined you would approve her operation, after I’d refused—”

Levy got up from his chair, went to a cabinet, unlocked it. He took out a small casette and placed it inside a tape player.

“I want you to listen to this, Dr. Elliott. Since we both know the same patient, and the specific problems, I don’t feel I’m breaking a confidence.”

Elliott watched as Levy pushed the PLAY button.

There was a hissing sound, then he heard Bobbi’s voice, interrupted only occasionally by a question from Levy.

“I went to a boarding school for a time . . .”

“Did something specific happen there? Something you remember?”

“The games . . . I remember the games . . . I wasn’t very good at them . . . But that isn’t really what I remember most. Just this sense of being different. Being different from the other kids there. I felt alone. I felt miserably alone. I find it . . . hard to explain how bad I felt, how dark inside . . .”

“What about the other kids?”

“They knew. They noticed. I know they noticed I was different.”

Elliott closed his eyes, listening. That familiar voice. How cold it sounded.

“Tell me about the difference you felt?”

“What can I tell you about unhappiness?”

“Well, can you tell me about something that made you
happy?”

A pause. A crackling sound, like paper being ripped. “Once, when I went home during a vacation, I . . .” Another pause.

“What did you do, Bobbi?”

“I put on my sister’s clothes. I was found out.”

“What happened then?”

“I was scolded . . . But it didn’t matter, you see. It didn’t matter then. Because for the first time I understood who I was, I understood what I was, what I wanted to be . . . And there was this thing between my legs, this cock, and I remember thinking how much I had to get rid of it . . . I never stopped thinking about how badly I had to get rid of it.”

“This idea persisted—”

“Persisted! I never stopped thinking about it, not once, not during all the time I was growing up . . . and when I started to go out in female clothes, I knew then I had to get the operation . . . But Elliott, you see, Elliott wouldn’t sign. He wouldn’t let me do it . . .”

Elliott leaned forward, his eyes still shut, listening intently.

“So that’s when you tried it yourself?”

“I took a razor, right. I took this really sharp razor and I tried . . .”

Levy pushed the STOP button.

“She tried to hack off her genitals,” he said.

Elliott said nothing.

“That’s when she was sent to me.”

“When was this? When did this happen?”

“About two months ago.”

Elliott shook his said: “God. I didn’t know she’d gone that far. I just didn’t realize . . .”

He looked at Levy. Levy was rubbing his chin, watching him as if he were blaming him for failing Bobbi.

“If you like, I’ll try and talk with her this afternoon,” Levy said. “I’ll get back to you. Will you be in your office?”

Elliott nodded. He said, “Thanks for your time, Dr. Levy.”

“I’ll be in touch,” Levy said.

4

It was just after three and raining violently when Marino picked up his two kids from school. They had expressions of incredulity, as if after a series of broken engagements and disappointments they had come to expect the worst—a telephoned excuse, a last-minute change of plans. It gave Marino a warm feeling not to let them down for once; it gave him a sense of belonging once again to a family unit—a unit he had come to realize, over the years, that was fragile at best. They clambered into the back of the car, dripping rainwater over his seats. What the hell, he didn’t have the heart to point out this mess to them. He wasn’t especially fond of basketball even but he liked the idea of the kids having a good time. He liked even more the prospect of getting out of the office for a while, out of that world of violence and mayhem, and back to something that was basically innocent.

As he drove through the heavy traffic, watching his windshield wipers whip back and forth across the glass, he glanced at the kids in his rearview mirror. “Cut the noise down, guys, huh? In this kind of crap weather, I really need to concentrate, you know?”

They smiled at him with the expressions of tolerance reserved by kids for their parents.

“Solved any crimes lately?” the younger one asked.

“Yeah, solve them every day,” Marino said.

They were nudging each other in the backseat, like some private joke was going on.

“Hey, I’m good at my job, you guys. What do you think—I never catch a killer, huh?”

“I bet you catch them all the time,” the younger one said.

The older one smirked and covered his mouth with the palm of his hand.

“What’s the big joke?” Marino said.

They exchanged conspiratorial looks, then they started to laugh.

“I’ll tell you something,” Marino said. “It ain’t the easiest thing in the world being a cop.”

He looked again in the rearview mirror.

“Colombo always gets his man,” the older kid said.

“Fairy tales,” Marino said.

“Maybe. But he always traps the killer.”

“Me and Colombo,” Marino said. “All we’ve got in common is the raincoat.”

“You brush your hair, though. Colombo doesn’t.”

“Listen. In my precinct, that guy wouldn’t last a minute.”

He pulled up at a stop sign. He was thinking all at once of Liz Blake. Put her out of your mind, he told himself. You owe yourself a couple of hours without pondering homicide. Don’t you?

Liz stepped out of the phone booth. Peter was standing in the doorway of a store, watching her. She rushed across the sidewalk, the collar of her coat turned up, the wind blowing rain through her hair. When she reached the doorway she ran her fingers through her wet hair.

Peter looked at her questioningly.

“It’s set,” she said. “All systems go.”

He shook his head; his expression was one of worry.

“I don’t like the idea, really.”

“Can you think of a better one?”

“No,” he answered after a time.

Liz stared bleakly through the rain. “Hey, let’s go get something to eat. We can pass some time that way.”

“I’m not hungry,” Peter said.

“Me neither.”

They stood in silence, watching the rain, watching the city darken as night began to fall—the early dark dragged in its wake by the storm.

George Levy had a bad attack of indigestion, a feeling he usually only managed to alleviate with music. It was presumably a psychosomatic thing, and Vivaldi’s
Concerto Grosso in B Minor
always seemed to settle his stomach. There was a growling noise somewhere in the center of his belly as he took the tape of Bobbi out of the casette player and dropped in the Vivaldi. Then he sat down, hands clasped across his stomach.

As he listened to the music, to the largo movement, he thought about Bobbi, then about Elliott. And it occurred to him that there was only thing to do, only one way to clarify matters. He picked up his telephone, hesitated a moment before punching out a number, then he dialled the police.

5

Liz pushed the door open, stepped inside the lobby. The reception room, which was to her right, was empty. She entered, looked around, stared at the dust-covered typewriter on the desk, the magazines neatly piled on a table, the sofas. Okay, she thought, you need to settle these nerves. You’re a troubled woman, don’t forget. You’ve got problems. Real problems. And they’re urgent ones . . .

She sat down on one of the sofas, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette. From outside she could hear a roar of thunder, the wind sweeping the rain against the window. Her hand shook as she raised the cigarette to her mouth. The smoke tasted bitter against her tongue.