John Lutz Bundle (134 page)

Lavern Neeson made a halfhearted attempt to duck beneath her husband’s slap. The flat of his hand stung her forehead instead of her cheek with a solid
whap!

She put her mind,
herself,
on hold.

Just as well. There wasn’t time to think about defending herself. The second slap was almost instantaneous, to her left cheek and ear, causing a thousand needles of pain, a ringing sound, and the salt taste of blood. The force of the blow whipped her head to the right. Blood escaped her mouth and splattered the dresser mirror. Alongside the blood was her own face staring back at her, a mask of horror that terrified her.

She didn’t even have time to look away. In the mirror she saw Hobbs’s hand clutch a fistful of her blond hair. The horror mask image flashed out of sight as Lavern was slung across the room and onto the bed.

The pillow again!

Bedsprings sang. Hobbs was on top of her, straddling her, pressing one of the pillows—her own—almost flat against her body with one hand. The other hand he balled into a fist, and he began pounding the pillow. Lavern almost cried out with pain, but she knew that would only make it worse. The pillow would prevent bruising while his fists caused agonizing internal injury. Her body, so damaged inside, would appear unmarked.

Not her face, though. Hobbs usually couldn’t resist beginning one of Lavern’s beatings by starting with a slap or two—“to get her attention,” he’d once told her—before concentrating his righteous wrath on her body.

She kept her teeth clenched, her lips clamped, emitting only whimpers, as she heard him breathing harder with each blow. It would stop soon, she was sure. She often counted the blows, and usually somewhere between fifteen and twenty he’d become exhausted in limb or rage and stop pounding the pillow.

Eighteen!

Nineteen!

Finally spent, he gave her a final punch, just below her breasts, and then shifted his weight off her. He’d left her breasts themselves undamaged this time, knowing she was soon due for a mammogram. No point in doing something that might show up on an X-ray and prompt questions.

Lavern felt herself being turned onto her stomach, felt her slacks and panties being wrenched down. Hobbs removed her shoes. Then she heard stitches pop and felt her clothing other than her shirt being worked down over her calves and rigid feet, turning into a tangle and a clump, and yanked away, leaving her terribly exposed and vulnerable. There was a glimpse of something dark, like a great bird soaring across the room, which she knew was her wadded clothing being tossed into a corner.

Hobbs was on her then, lying full length on top of her. His right arm snaked around her neck, yanking her head back. If she tried to scream now he’d tighten his grip so she could only make a harsh rasping sound, like a crow cawing.

Lavern’s mind drew back further away from what was happening, into a quiet dark place of shelter and unknowing. A place of surrender and suspension that prey animals knew so well.

The woman being crushed into the bed felt something cold between her buttocks. Vaginal lubricant, or whatever kind of greasy substance Hobbs happened to come up with. Once it had been cooking oil. Her buttocks separated, and she felt his probing finger, then more fingers.

Wincing silently in pain, the woman understood why Hobbs abused her. In some twisted, debilitating way, while she loathed it, she couldn’t simply walk away from it, couldn’t escape it. The more he abused her, the more she must deserve it, and the more she deserved it, the more he’d abuse her. It was a cycle, like the rest of life. And like the rest of life, it had to be accepted because it simply
was
. Like the rest of life, it was a trap.

The woman knew that Hobbs was as helpless in the cycle as she was. Knowledge was supposed to be power, she thought. It didn’t work that way for her. Knowledge was only more of a conundrum. As the one who understood, it was her responsibility to stop what was happening, yet she didn’t. She couldn’t. That meant, in an oblique but very real way, that she was the one to blame. The one who deserved to be punished.

Hobbs removed his left hand, and she watched from the corner of her eye as he wiped his greasy fingers on the bed-sheet. Then he used the hand to grip himself. She felt his weight bear down harder on her, felt the pressure that was impossible to resist as he guided himself into her.

Hobbs preferred anal sex. It hurt more.

In the morning he’d assure her that he loved her, and she’d believe him because it was true. She knew it was true.

It had been a long time since a man had professed love for Rosa Pajaro, who was fat, forty, and tired. Lifting the stacks of sheets and pillowcases to the top shelves of the hotel storage closet sent a dull pain along the base of her spine.

She wondered sometimes how she’d come to this situation. It seemed that only yesterday she’d been one of the prettiest girls in her village of Tojano in Oaxaca, Mexico. Then had come her affair with the American engineer. A year after the affair had begun, her beautiful daughter Sara was born. Their daughter, though the American never claimed the girl publicly.

Then had come Sara’s illness and the medical bills. The American was by then dead, after an infection from a wound incurred in an auto accident on a winding mountain road. He had been drunk, and on his way back to town after an assignation with a married woman. Rosa could never forgive the woman, but she’d long ago forgiven the American.

Rosa’s mother was now watching and caring for Sara in Tojano. Rosa, her dark eyes dimmed and weary, her olive complexion coarsened and seamed, her black hair lank and graying, had made her way to America to work, having bought forged papers with money the American had left her.

Hard years had passed like cards being shuffled in a deck. Now here she was working as a maid in the Antonian Hotel in Manhattan, having replenished a storage room with freshly laundered linens. Ever the optimist, Rosa rubbed her sore back with both hands and reflected on how wonderful the fresh linens in the small room smelled from the perfumed detergent the hotel laundry used. Rosa liked that part of her job that dealt with the clean linens. The soiled linens were, of course, a different story.

She was about to go back out into the hall, when she heard a sound as if someone had been slapped, only louder.

The storage room was off a corridor that ran the length of the hotel’s east side, where there was a little-used exit out into a passageway between it and the side of the Honeysuckle Restaurant next door. Rosa hesitated in pushing the storage room door open with the cart she’d used to transport the linens, and instead eased the door open about six inches with her hand and peered out into the quiet, carpeted hall.

So little used was this corridor that she expected to see no one. Instead she saw two men. One was on the floor, the other bending over him. As Rosa watched, the man who was standing lowered himself on one knee and removed something from one of the pockets of the man on the floor. She was sure it was a gun, and realized the sound that she’d heard had been a shot. The kneeling man placed the fallen man’s gun in his own pocket. Then he straightened up and looked up and down the corridor.

And saw Rosa.

He didn’t hesitate. He strode toward the storage room.

Rosa thought about screaming, but realized no one would hear her. Instead she decided to shut and lock the door.

But of course there was no lock on the inside of the storage room door.

It opened quickly, the knob yanked from her hand so suddenly and violently that it hurt.

He was tall and fierce looking. She saw that his big hands were empty. He’d left the gun he’d taken from the other man in his pocket. He simply stared at her with cold blue eyes.

Then he smiled. He raised his forefinger to his lips in a signal for her to be quiet, and to remain silent about what she’d seen. Then he turned and walked back toward the man on the hall floor.

As she watched, he again bent over the prone man, gripped him beneath each arm, and pulled him backward, toward the door leading outside. He glanced at Rosa and again raised his forefinger to his lips. Then he dragged the other man out through the doorway and into the night.

The door swung shut. She knew that it automatically locked and couldn’t be opened from outside without a key.

She told herself she was safe, but she didn’t feel safe.

Rosa stood trembling, staring at the empty corridor. It had all been like a dream.
Had
she seen it? Had it actually happened?

She moved backward all the way into the storage room and, without thinking about it, resumed her work. She pushed the empty laundry cart out into the hall, bumping the door open, thinking of her mother and Sara in Mexico, of her forged papers and her job at the Antonian. Rosa was in charge of rooms 570 through 580 on the fifth floor. They were suites, and the tips were more than adequate. They were in dollars that soon became pesos.

She pushed the cart back along the corridor the way she’d come, listening to its squeaking rear wheel, telling herself that what she’d seen hadn’t happened. She couldn’t afford for it to have happened, so it hadn’t.

It hadn’t. She’d seen nothing, and she’d say nothing.

It hadn’t happened.

She silently repeated her daughter’s name to herself to the rhythm of the squeaking wheel,
Sara, Sara, Sara…

It hadn’t.

Sal Vitali knew this was going to be one of his worst days.

“I wanted to look the place over before my company seriously considered leasing it,” Arnold Penington said. He gulped. “That’s when I found it. Her, I mean.”

It,
Vitali thought, as he looked at what was left of the woman. She was hanging upside down from her bound ankles attached by rope to a beam, a long incision made from her pubis to her throat. She was opened up and hollowed out like Hettie Davis, only the long period of time had…Vitali, stared slack-mouthed at the dried, leathery state of her body. He could only think of it as cured meat.

The hardened mass on the concrete floor, beneath and alongside the woman’s upside-down head and gracefully draped arms, was what was left of her internal organs. Her eyes were missing—thanks to the rats that lived in the long-abandoned warehouse—and three of her fingers on the dried hand that lay partly on the concrete floor had been nibbled to bare bone.

Vitali heard the warehouse’s steel overhead door clatter and clank up, then lower. His partner, Harold Mishkin, he of the turbulent stomach, had just entered the warehouse after talking to the uniforms outside who’d secured the scene.

Vitali considered telling Mishkin not to look at the dead woman, then thought better of it. Mishkin took pride in the fact that he could screw his courage tight and look at what homicide detectives too often saw without losing his lunch. Occasionally his stomach had its way.

Arnold Penington had moved well back and stood silently, not looking in the direction of the dangling body. Mishkin continued to advance. He was about twenty feet away, waving at the dirty, narrow windows lining the east wall of the building. “We oughta get more light in here, Sal.”

“Maybe not, Harold,” Vitali said in his gravel-box voice.

Mishkin stopped cold and stared at what was left of the woman dangling upside down from the warehouse beam. His hand floated up to his mustached mouth.

Almost immediately he gained control of himself and pretended he’d raised his hand to stroke his mustache.

He said “Jesus, Sal.”

“Him and his dad,” Vitali, the lapsed Catholic, said. “I don’t see how they could let something like this happen.”

“Just like the other one,” Mishkin said. “Hettie Davis.”

Vitali could smell the menthol cream Mishkin always dabbed beneath his nostrils to help keep his food down at violent crime scenes.

“Gotta be the same guy,” Vitali said. “She’s been gutted and cleaned like some kinda game animal.”

“Yeah, but…what else happened to her? I mean, her eyes and all…”

“Rats,” Vitali said.

Mishkin turned away and bent over. He still didn’t lose it, though. He turned back, straightened up slowly as if in pain, and wiped his forearm across his mouth.

Vitali was proud of him. Mishkin should have been in another business, or riding a desk at some precinct house in a gentler part of town. It was where he’d be if he weren’t so damned good at his job.

Whatever the physical impact of what he saw, Mishkin’s mind was still working, along with his commitment to the job. He paced off a slow circle around the upside-down, dangling body. There was a floor drain nearby, down which most of her blood must have flowed. It was obvious, too, that her throat had been slashed, probably while she was alive and hanging there. The things people did…

“First Hettie Davis, now this one,” Vitali said. “We’ve got a set.”

“Judging by the condition of the body, this one was killed way before Davis,” Mishkin said.

“Yeah, but either way…”

“I know what you mean, Sal. We’ve got us a serial killer.” He finished his slow circle and wound up standing near Vitali. After another glance at the dead woman, he shivered. “What’s wrong with people, Sal?”

“Some people, you mean,” Vitali said.

“Yeah. Thank God only some.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with them, Harold. Maybe that’s why we do what we do, trying to figure it out.”

“That and we like to get paid,” Mishkin said, playing hard.

Sirens sounded outside.

“Reinforcements,” Mishkin said, figuring more radio cars and a crime scene unit. Maybe an ambulance. More than once somebody assumed to be dead turned out to be alive. It wouldn’t happen this time, though.

Neither Vitali nor Mishkin said anything for several minutes. Penington, even farther away now, remained silent. Then the steel overhead door at the other end of the warehouse rattled open again and let in a blast of bright light. Silhouetted against the afternoon brilliance, half a dozen figures entered the warehouse. Among them, Vitali recognized the short, chesty form of Dr. Julius Nift, the obnoxious little medical examiner.

“The little prick’s here,” Mishkin said.

“We’ve seen enough of the victim,” Vitali said. He nodded toward the advancing figures. “She belongs to them now.”

“No,” Mishkin said, “she belongs to us.”