Pink Balloons and Other Deadly Things (Mystery Series - Book One) (11 page)

Meg glanced at me inquiringly as I flipped my phone closed. “Well?”

“Not home.”

“You still determined to go?”

“You don’t have to come.”

“Oh, shut up.” She hit the accelerator and we turned on to River Road.

DOT’S APARTMENT COMPLEX was located south of us in Edgewater, a town where high-rise buildings have sprung up like giant trees amid the weeds of commercial flotsam adjacent to the river. The town’s proximity to New York City and its panoramic view of the Hudson had enticed developers out to make a quick buck to erect buildings wherever they could purchase land. Little if any thought was given to architectural harmony or to the original character of the town. The result was, the town had no character at all.

Dot’s building, lacking a swimming pool and a health club, fell just short of being labeled luxurious. It did, however, have a doorman plus a security guard, who roamed the parking lot checking bumpers and windshields for tenants’ and visitors’ stickers.

Meg pulled over half a block from the entrance.

“How’re we going to get past the M.P.?”

A dilemma.

“If we park here,” I said, “and walk along the river to the entrance, I think we can bypass him. We’ll only have to deal with the doorman.”

Meg flipped open her purse, applied some lipstick, and fluffed up her hair. “No problem,” she replied, opening her door.

I didn't question her. I’d seen men preen like peacocks doing a courtship dance over Meg.

We jogged along a dirt road toward the river, residents out for our daily constitutional.

“You'll have to go up by yourself,” Meg said.

“Wouldn’t it be quicker if we both--?”

“I’ve got to keep the doorman’s eyes off the elevator TV. Don’t make me do it for longer than fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“That won’t give me enough time.”

“Make it enough. We don’t know where Dot’s gone. She could come home any minute. Know her apartment number?”

I did. Fourteen K. I’d been there only once, when Dot first moved in several years ago. She threw a party for herself celebrating her tenth year with the company. Rich groused and grumbled all the way over in the car, but once there, he was charm personified.

The doorman was a dark-skinned, Middle Eastern guy wearing a snappy blue uniform with gold buttons and a mustache that took up half his face.

I loitered among the rhododendron bushes watching in awe as Meg spun her web.

“Hi,” I heard her say in a tone I hardly recognized. Would you know if there are any apartments coming available in this building?”

“You must call real estate agency,” the man replied. “I cannot give out this information.”

“Oh.” Meg looked forlorn, Cinderella barred from the ball. “It’s just I’m in such a mess.” Tears rolled out of those gorgeous eyes and trickled down her cheeks.

I was fascinated.
How does she do that on cue?

“I just broke up with my boyfriend,” Meg sniffled. “It’s his apartment, and he’s got a new girlfriend. She’s moving in next week. I’ve got to find something right away.”

“I give you number to call.” The man started towards his little office with Meg following.

“Not supposed to give out information, but seven N told me they find bigger place. Maybe you able to sublet.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your going to all this trouble for somebody you don’t even know.” Meg’s smile would have defrosted Putin.

The doorman's answering smile became a leer. “Must be very strange man, your boyfriend, not want a beautiful lady like you.”

I didn’t hear how Meg dealt with that; they had moved out of earshot

Good goin’, Meggie,
I thought as I made my way to the elevator bank.

My next thought, as I wiped my sweaty hands on my pants, was how I’d hate to have to do this for a living. Pressing fourteen, my finger almost slipped off the button. Suddenly my nervousness went to my bladder. I jiggled from one foot to the other as the elevator stopped at the eighth floor. A woman with pure white hair and a disagreeable expression, pushing a loaded laundry cart, got on and frowned at me as we continued our ascent.

“Isn't this going down?”

“No,” I mumbled, averting my face. “Up. Sorry.”

The door opened, and I slipped past her. I didn't move toward Dot’s apartment until I heard the elevator door shut behind me. She could be someone Dot knew. If they ever got to talking...

Paranoid. There was no way Dot could ever find out I’d been here.

Responding to a faint wisp of memory, I turned left down the hallway, glanced at the letters on the doors. H, I, J, K. K for kept woman...

I rang the bell just to be sure. Waited. Rang again, the key ring clutched so tightly in my hand it left an imprint. What if Dot asked who was there and how I’d gotten up without the doorman ringing her? I hadn’t prepared a script. What if she called Security? Seconds that seemed like hours passed. Meg had advised me to stay no more than fifteen minutes, and I’d already used up at least a third of my allotment.

The first key I tried slid into the lock, but the door swung inward before I’d turned the knob. Trembling, I located a light switch by the hall mirror and flipped it on. What could have been the sitting area of a motel suite sprang into focus.

Off-white walls, matching walnut veneer tables, mattress-ticking-striped couch and lounge chair covered in plastic, arranged in an L. Pathologically neat, impersonal, unimaginative. I had no memory of the decor from the party, except that the couch looked familiar. I’d probably spent the entire evening stuck to the plastic.

I walked around, searching for something to search. No bookshelves, no desk, no chest of drawers, no buffet, nothing to open. I glanced into the kitchen, was about to look in the cabinets, when I was again seized with an undeniable urge.

I remembered that the only bathroom was off Dot’s bedroom. I made a dash for it, tripped over something lying in the entranceway, cursed as I fell, and felt a stinging in my hand. Scrambling to my feet, I stumbled into the bedroom, stopped. Not neat. Chaos. Dresser drawers open, contents scattered. Closet doors ajar. Clothing strewn everywhere. Sheets and blankets jerked from the bed, lying in rumpled heaps amid splinters of glass.

My first impulse was to turn and run. The second was to call the police. No. How would I explain my presence?

The crunching sound under my shoes focused my attention on the hundreds of glass shards littering the rug. It was as though a tornado had flown in through the window and randomly trashed every picture in the place, leaving untouched the large-screen television and the bookshelf filled with paperback novels, as if they lay outside the storm’s path.

Picture hooks indicated that the room had been wall-to-wall pictures, framed photographs now lying smashed on the carpet.

This was no normal break-in.

I bent down and picked up a broken frame. And froze. Rich looked back at me from a blowup of a photo I remembered as having been taken for the company’s annual report. Knife slashes mutilated his face.

I saw blood on the picture! Panic swept over me as, for one moment of dementia, I thought the picture was bleeding. Then I realized the blood must be coming from my own hand.

Another picture. Rich again, this one an enlargement of a snapshot taken at a company Christmas party. Slashed. Rich and me at Dot’s party. I’d been cut out of this photo before the mutilation took place. Another enlarged snap of Rich, standing by the building next to his logo. Cut to ribbons.

Was this Dot’s handiwork? A woman gone over the brink, so consumed with jealousy, she had desecrated her own home?

Heedless now of the debris that tore at my knees, I crawled over to get a closer look at a stack of photos lying by an open bureau drawer, all of which seemed to be professional headshots of young beautiful women. The photographs separated in my hands, leaving me clutching torn half-faces. Familiar faces.

There was more blood on these. I looked at my hand. The blood had congealed. The bleeding had stopped. The blood on the pictures wasn’t coming from me!

I was trapped in a horror movie. Run! Get out! Get downstairs to Meg!

I was shaking like a cornered animal when I reached the door, but something—-maybe it was that urge most of us have to gawk at disaster scenes, compelled me to take a last look. And I saw, coming from under the bathroom door, a tiny trickle. Barely aware I was moving in the wrong direction, I propelled myself back through the sea of glass, my feet pulverizing it, the sound augmented like a drum roll in my ears. Dazed, I pushed open the door.

Water dripped over the tub rim, puddling on the gray tile floor, berry juice canals winding across the room to the door.

I thought she was alive. Injured but alive. Naked, she lay half in, half out of the bathtub, eyes wide open. She moved! Suppressing a scream, I started forward. Much later I would be told the draft created when I opened the door had probably disturbed the water causing her body to sway.

A hand, gashed as though attacked by a vicious animal, hung over the side of the tub, a mottled purplish look to the fingers. Her hair had come unpinned, was hanging disheveled around her shoulders, bleached by the fluorescent lighting to a mustard yellow. Her face, the color of wax, had taken on its texture. Congealed blood streaking from her nose, food protruding from her mouth...no! God, no, not food! Her tongue!

Then I saw the stab wounds on her chest.

And felt myself falling...

I WAS CURLED UP on the jail-striped couch. The room was teeming with strangers babbling incomprehensible things in loud voices that hurt my head. I forced my eyes to open. Meg was sitting next to me holding my hand, murmuring comforting noises. Someone was standing in a doorway to my right, taking photographs of another room. Someone else seemed to be dusting things. I turned my head and saw a uniformed doorman. He was wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve and he kept glancing in Meg’s direction as he talked to a cop. I was trying to remember where I was and why the doorman seemed familiar when a glowering Ted Brodsky, jacket off, shirt collar open, walked around the photographer and over to the doorman.

It all came back! I sat bolt upright. “Oh God,” I moaned. “Oh, God, oh, God! Meg, Meggie, Dot’s dead! Dot’s—-someone—-oh, God!”

Meg wrapped her arms around me and rocked me. “I know, honey, I know.”

The hostile look Brodsky cast my way when he heard my voice made me squeeze my eyes shut again, and pray to Goddess who had clearly deserted me, that I might keep them closed forever.

I couldn’t. I could feel Brodsky’s stare boring right through my eyelids, willing them to open.

“Take it easy, Carrie,” Meg said, gently pushing me back down. “Don't try to talk.”

A wave of nausea began its upward journey. I fought it, and it passed. I had an overwhelming urge to feign amnesia and wail “Where am I?” in my best Sarah Bernhardt voice, but the expression on Brodsky's face made it clear histrionics wouldn't fly.

“Well, Ms. Carlin,” he said, taking two giant steps that landed him beside the couch. “You sure have a penchant for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He wasn’t calling me Carrie anymore.

“Your friend filled me in on what brought you here. What happened after you broke into the apartment?”

“I didn't break in!”

“Cut the crap.”

“I had a key.”

His eyes raked me. “The lock's been forced.”

“It was open when I got here.” I was trying desperately to piece together the events of the last hour. One thing, however, was depressingly apparent. It was happening again. I was involved in another murder. My heart started hammering, doing its best to break out of my chest.

What had happened after I found Dot? How had Meg gotten here? Who had called the police? Meg saw my confusion.

“I panicked when you didn't come down after half an hour. And I was having a bitch of a time keeping Ali Baba there at bay. I made him bring me up and we-—we found you and...her-—in the bathroom. Damn you, Carrie--” her voice broke--“for a minute I thought you were dead too.” She took a breath and her voice steadied. “Doorman called 911.”

Brodsky pulled a chair next to the couch and sat. “I want to know step by step what you did after you got in this apartment,” he said coldly. “Did you and Ms. Shea have an argument?”

I stared at him blankly. “An argument? How could I? She was dead! At first I thought-—but then I saw-—she was dead!”

“I don’t think you should question her now,” Meg said, giving my shoulder a warning squeeze. “Anyone can see she’s not---”

Brodsky swung on her angrily. “Back off.”

Meg stood her ground. “If you're going to accuse her of anything, she should be read her rights, she should have a lawyer present.”

Accuse me! I know how a rabbit gone to ground feels when he sees the fox’s nose at the only exit. I started to shake.

“Goddammit, you want to talk charges?” I’d never seen Brodsky so furious. “Let's put Murder One aside for now. Let’s start with breaking and entering. A crime, lady, to which you were an accessory.”

“Oh, for godssake, she’d just found out that pig of a husband of hers had been making it with Dot Shea for years. We thought maybe there’d be something here to prove---”

Meg stopped midsentence, suddenly aware she was providing the police with a perfect motive for my killing Dot.

Brodsky ignored it. “You thought!” he exploded. “Well, you were wrong, weren't you? Why can’t you and your lunatic friend here leave the detective work to the detectives? We’re paid to put our asses on the line.”

“We weren't wrong!” I cried out. It was all coming back. I remembered the broken glass, the torn pictures-—the words came tumbling out.

“I mean, we were wrong about Dot being the killer, but we weren’t wrong about finding something here. She’s turned that bedroom into a...a temple. A shrine to Rich. She had pictures of him all over the place. Snapshots she’d had enlarged and framed.” I paused for breath. “And I think whoever killed her might go after him next because all of the pictures were smashed and they all had knife slashes through his face.”