Dressed to Kill (9 page)

Right, Kate. So you wait. You try to be patient. You’ll get your ring back. She shut her eyes. When she opened them she looked at the flashing numbers. The brown walls—why did she allow them to press in on her like some terrible weight? The old claustrophobia. She put a hand to her forehead. Clammy. The car stopped. She looked at the indicator and saw that she was on the fifth floor. An old woman, wrapped in an ancient fur with the head of a dead fox appended to it, stepped inside. The doors slid shut again. Kate leaned against the wall, waited, catching the sickening scent of camphor. She peered at the old woman. Then the car stopped again, this time at the lobby. Moving very slowly, sighing to herself, her dentures clicking, the old woman got out. Kate pressed the button marked ten, watched the doors close, then thought: Hurry. Please hurry. The ring. That’s all you want now. Don’t even think of anything else. Don’t think.

She stared at the numbered lights. Eight, nine, ten. Ten is right, she thought. It has to be ten. She felt the car shudder to a stop. The doors opened.

At first she couldn’t understand. She thought: This is all some terrible mistake, it doesn’t make any sense; you must have found the wrong person; my name is Kate, Kate Myers, please . . . Then she was aware of something else, the motion of metal through air, the strange whispering sound, the sight of herself reflected in the dark glasses, the way she raised her hand to fend off the piece of metal, but that must have been later because she felt a sharp pain flash through her wrist and she saw blood rising from her skin. Then the metal was being raised in the air again and the doors were closing, the car was moving, the blonde woman was striking the air and the metal was flashing in the light of the car—

It was a dream, a sick dream, something you dredged up from a deep place inside yourself, your own theater of the absurd, your own auditorium of menace.

But why was the pain so fucking real?

Why did she hear herself scream so loudly?

I was looking for my ring, that was it. The wedding ring. And I couldn’t find it, no matter where I looked.

Blood ran in her eyes. She put a hand up to her face. The blade fell again, slashing across her fingers. She felt herself slide down against the wall, blinded, pain piercing her with the intensity of a laser. She covered her head with her hands but the pain had moved elsewhere. She crossed her legs. She was bleeding down there, bleeding from the crotch. She tried to rise. She tried to push the blade away but she couldn’t, it just kept falling and falling. She tasted her own blood. She tried to wake up, to force herself out of the nightmare—but there was no end to it. She imagined she heard the name “Elliott,” but suddenly there was a great and terrifying distance between herself and the world; it was like some harsh tide that, as it ebbed back to the horizon, carried her away to a dark place, a dark sun, a black sky. And still, fainter now, she could feel the slicing of the blade.

She had the absurd thought: I’m dying.

But that couldn’t be right.

That just couldn’t be right.

Even as the lights faded and the sound of the blade became no more than a breeze blowing in a spider’s web, she knew it couldn’t be right.

5

Liz watched the door close, saw Ted’s hand uplifted in a coy little wave, and then she was alone in the corridor, passing under the lamps to the elevator. He was okay, she thought—what you’d call a nice ineffectual guy, probably house trained and henpecked by a wife and shabbily treated by a boss. You could read the story of his life in his sex act—shyness, reluctance, a certain softness. He’d probably saved up to get laid and his wife was back in a place like Syracuse or Quincey, thinking he was on a business trip. Maybe, she thought, the thing that glues relationships together isn’t love or affection, but some emotional sleight of hand, a trickery of the heart, a collection of tiny deceits and minuscule treacheries. There was something depressing in that.

She stopped at the elevator and pressed the call button. As she waited she looked along the empty corridor at the wall lamps. Sometimes apartment buildings were spooky, like all the inhabitants had upped and left. You could imagine opening all the doors and stepping inside rooms filled with furniture covered over by dust sheets. She listened, hearing the motion of the elevator in the shaft.

She was dogged by tiredness again; she should have taken the day off—but somewhere her internal calendar was telling her about time passing, a message that became increasingly urgent. Two years: would she look back later and say they’d been worth it? The decision back then had been cold and deliberate, reached out of an understanding that the world was a hard place to be without bread and that the most saleable commodity you possessed was your own body. She yawned, leaned against the wall, heard the sound of the elevator growing louder.

The lights on the panel blinked. The elevator came. The doors slid open.

Later she would try to remember what she felt, she would try to remember what she saw, and at the core of the memory there would be confusion, panic, terror, and the strange constricted echo of her own scream.

THREE

1

S
ometimes it seemed to Marino that the world was nothing but the sum of grief, that suffering was the major part of that entity called the human condition. The only answer maybe was to immunize yourself against it, the way some of the older cops had done, going the hard-bitten route, refusing to be surprised by anything, refusing to be disgusted by anything, hiding under a veneer of easy cynicism. It wasn’t his way, even if he had tried it: he couldn’t wear cynicism like it was a badge you got in return for several years of service. He had other, simpler, escapes—like having a quiet dinner with his wife in a place on Mulberry Street or taking his kids to a ball game. They were temporary releases from an aching concern; it was like Mary always said:
You get too wrapped up in all that stuff, Joseph
(always Joseph, never Joe).
Why can’t you just see it as a job?

He wondered why he couldn’t, why the frequent brutalities the city threw up from its darkest places always affected him personally. You put on a front, sure, because you had to; but inside there was the feeling of an emotional meltdown. A corpse—maybe that of a young kid senselessly stabbed or a bum knifed for a half-pint of booze—any corpse always made him feel sick in his gut, always carved some hollow out of his heart. I’m soft is all, he sometimes thought. But the more he thought that the more he tried to hide the softness away, as if the simple human reaction to homicide were a terrible weakness.
Can I help what I feel?
he’d asked Mary once. She hadn’t answered the question, or if she had he couldn’t remember.

Now, sitting behind his desk, he closed his eyes and rubbed his eyelids with the tips of his fingers. He sighed. There was a flash again of the dead woman in the elevator. I don’t need that, he told himself. There had been more blood than you’d expect to find in a slaughterhouse. One of the guys from the medical examiner’s office had counted eighteen different incisions made by the blade of the open razor. Okay, he thought. On the bottom line you can’t even imagine the most vindictive kind of vengeance needing that frenzied killing. Two fingers had been mutilated from the right hand. Between the legs the blade had laid the flesh back to the pubic bone. Three times the blade had sliced the skin around the eye, cutting the eyeball open. If I were going to kill somebody, he thought, it would be one shot from a Magnum in a dark place. But that was a rational murder—here you were dealing with something else altogether. Madness. The specific frenzy of insanity. He wondered what she’d felt when the razor first came down. Surprise? Fear? Whatever, it would boil down to the bleak understanding that your clock had run out, and that you were as alone as you had ever been . . .

He opened his eyes, blinked against the fluorescent light overhead, glanced at the folder on his desk, then stared at the young woman who sat opposite him. Pretty. And scared to death. Watching her, he experienced a wave of weariness rush through him.

He said, “Let’s run it through again.”

The young woman stared at him. “Do we have to?”

Marino nodded. He leaned back in his chair, raising one finger to touch the fringe of his dark moustache. He slid his hands inside his belt and thought: I need to lose some poundage soon. I need to cast off some of this heaviness before I become a total blimp.

“You pressed the button for the elevator,” Marino said.

“I did—”

“Then the car came—”

“Right. The car came.”

He studied her face again. Somehow he couldn’t make the connection between the face, the strange innocence of it, and the stuff he’d learned from the fact sheet that lay in front of him. Butter would have a hard time melting in her mouth, he thought. So much for appearances.

She was silent. She rubbed the palms of her hands together.

“The car came,” she said. “I don’t remember exactly the sequence of events.”

“Try.”

“I’m trying.” She smiled at him. It was a forlorn little expression, a brave front. “You don’t run into a situation like this every day, Lieutenant.”

He leaned forward now. “The door opened.”

“Right. The door opened. It was horrible. It was just so goddamn unspeakably . . .” She turned her hands over and stared at the palms. Lovely long fingers, Marino thought.

“I
know
it was horrible,” he said. “I saw it, remember?” He listened to the sound of telephones ringing in the other offices. A shadow passed in front of the glass door. He watched it a moment. Then he was thinking of the husband that Sergeant Levinski had taken down to the morgue for an ID. You could see it in his eyes, grief struggling with the misplaced hope that it was all some fucked-up mistake, that the corpse in the cold room wasn’t his wife after all, a stranger, somebody he’d never seen before. Poor bastard. And then there was the kid, sitting out there right now like a zombie, waiting for the husband to come back from the ID. One shattered family, for Christ’s sake, and that thought hurt him, because that was the place where you started to identify, you started to say
it could’ve been my wife
. . . He forced his mind away from that direction.

He said, “Okay. The doors opened. You saw a woman lying in her own blood. Then what?”

“I reached inside the elevator—”

“Why?”

“Why? Jesus, I don’t know why. She was moaning. She lifted her hand in the air. Real slow. I just reacted instinctively. I might have screamed. I don’t know.”

“Then what?”

“Then I saw this other woman, a blonde with these black glasses on, and she had this razor in her hand. She must have pressed the button because the doors started to close. Look, I don’t remember the sequence, dammit.”

Marino leaned back again, his chair tilted to the wall.

“Then the woman tried to slash me with the razor—”

“While the doors were closing?”

“I guess. Anyhow, I must have pulled my hand away, then the razor fell to the floor and I picked it up—”

“That’s what I’d like to know about. Why did you pick it up?”

She shook her head from side to side, opened her purse, took out a cigarette. Marino pushed a book of matches across the desk towards her.

“Maybe I thought I should defend myself. I don’t know. A lot of things run through your head fast. Maybe I thought I could help the dying woman, I don’t know.”

“So you pick up the razor. The doors close. The car goes down.”

“Right.”

“And then, still holding the razor, you rush down the stairs to the lobby—”

“But she was gone when I got down. There was only the dead woman in the car, the blonde had gone. I must have been shouting something like—shit, I can’t remember.”

“So you’re left in the lobby, holding the murder weapon, and there’s no sign of the alleged killer.”

“Alleged? What do you mean
alleged?”

Marino put his elbows on the desk. His leather jacket crackled. He smiled at the woman. “You were the only person to see this tall blonde lady with the glasses, right?”

“Hey, hold it—”

“Nobody else saw her.”

“I don’t think I like the direction of this, Lieutenant.”

“The razor has a perfect set of your prints.”

“Obviously,” she said, defensive now. “I picked the goddamned thing up, didn’t I?”

Marino watched her in silence for a moment. “You want to know how I know they’re
your
prints, Miss Blake? Or can I call you Liz?”

She reached for the matches, lit her cigarette. She blew a stream of smoke at him. He stood up, the folder open in his hand. “Arrested January 4, 1979, act of prostitution, Park Avenue Hotel—”

“Okay,” she said. “Big deal. You’ve got my prints on record—”

“March 19, same year, act of prostitution—”

“That was goddamn entrapment,” she said. “That was some vice squad guy who used a certain escort service, and it was a bum deal that didn’t go down—”

Marino closed the folder. He leaned against the wall. “Check one, your prints on the murder weapon. Two, the deceased’s blood on your clothes. Three, a neat set of scratch marks from the deceased’s nails across your hand—”

“Why the hell would I want to kill her? I didn’t even know the woman. You can’t hang this on me. No way.” She stubbed her cigarette underfoot, an impatient stamping gesture. Marino stared at the sparks that fluttered up, then died.

“You’re a hooker, Liz. A pretty expensive hooker, but a hooker just the same. And right now everything points in your direction, doesn’t it?”

She watched him in silence. She fumbled nervously with her purse, snapping the clasp time and again. She’s scared, he thought. You could almost smell the fear upon her.

“I didn’t know this woman. I didn’t kill her. It was pure accident, coincidence, call it what you like, that I was waiting for the elevator at that time . . .”

Marino said, “You were in the building during the course of your business, right?”

“Look, I was visiting a friend—”