by Lutz, John
“Let’s have the lab pick up the vampire costume,” Oxman said. “See what they find when they go over it.”
Tobin nodded and walked to the phone.
Maybe it really was this simple, Oxman thought, looking around the tiny, fleabag room. The way Lassiter had lived was pathetic. Peeling paint and wallpaper, sagging mattress. Dirty and depressing. It was easy to believe the man had been a candidate for the twitch bin. Easy to believe McGreery’s murder and the threatening notes to Lana Spence had come about the way Tobin had theorized. Easy because it was so logical.
All that tightly constructed logic in such a random world scared the hell out of Oxman.
Jennifer Crane—9:00 P.M.
Wind-driven rain was beating against the living-room window of Jennifer’s apartment. It made a sound like something with huge wings trying to get in. She walked to the window and looked outside. It was raining so hard the lights of the traffic below were barely visible— unreal, moving glimmers of yellow.
Behind her, Oxman said, “It was foolish of you to go see him.”
Jennifer turned away from the night outside. “I can’t explain it any better than to say it was something I felt I needed to do, even though I sure wasn’t looking forward to it. I didn’t like the idea of avoiding thinking about those years with Zach, rough as they were. And my mind was avoiding them the way the tongue avoids a sore inside the mouth: instinctively, but unable to keep from touching now and then. That’s no way to live. I wanted to put Zach Denton to rest with the past.”
Oxman settled deeper into the sofa and sipped his hot chocolate. “And did you?”
“I’m not sure,” Jennifer lied. She was sure she hadn’t buried the memory of Zach with the rest of the past. Ox was right; she’d been foolish to see Zach at Shadowtown Productions. Instead of making the past easier to live with, she’d stirred it up, along with emotions she hadn’t suspected were still attached to Zach Denton. Her conversation with him had sent a subtle but profound shock wave through her.
But the “Shadowtown” case was over, and that was her salvation. She knew she could at least push Zach Denton back to that remote part of her mind where he’d resided all these years, and she could control him there, even if she couldn’t exorcise him. It was his connection with Ox that had sprung him loose, revived the frightening potency of his memory. It was as if he’d always be a part of her. But now Zach and Ox would probably never meet again, and somehow that made getting up each morning easier for Jennifer.
“You should have had the bastard thrown in jail after he beat you,” Oxman said.
“I wasn’t thinking clearly then,” Jennifer said. “About anything.” It was funny, she mused, how a person couldn’t really remember pain. It was the psychological abuse that lingered. And it was the very truth about that abuse that Zach could twist and pull and shape to his selfish design. That was why women so often stayed with men like Zach, even as they were dragged through hell. Somehow the situation got shifted around so they saw themselves in some way to blame for their own victimization. And even though they could see that their perspective was being warped, they were powerless to stop it from happening.
That was the force Jennifer sensed Zach was exerting on her the day she’d seen him at “Shadowtown.” And she’d recognized the familiar lure of it, the temptation to forgive and succumb and to drift beyond all decision-making in her life. Even if that drifting occasionally carried her onto the rocks. He’d long ago engendered in her, more deeply than she’d known, a capacity for punishment and self-deception.
She suddenly felt the need to feel Ox’s arms around her, to press herself tight against the protective warmth of him. He was solid; he was sanity.
But as she moved toward the sofa, the phone rang.
She changed direction and answered it.
A woman’s voice, asking for Ox. An oddly familiar voice.
Jennifer watched Ox’s face as he talked on the phone. She knew that this was business. The fine, parallel lines appeared above the bridge of his nose; his eyes were alert. She’d gone back to stand near the window and couldn’t quite hear what he was saying.
The conversation was a short one, in which the caller had done most of the talking. Ox got his bulky tan raincoat from the entrance-hall closet before returning to the living room.
Jennifer didn’t want him to leave. “You don’t have to go out in this rain, do you?”
“Afraid so,” Ox said. “That was Lana Spence. She wants to see me.”
“About what?”
“She wouldn’t say.” He smiled. “She likes to wring maximum suspense from commonplace situations. It probably isn’t anything, Jennifer, and I’ll be back in an hour. She’s in her apartment over on Lexington.”
“Why didn’t she call the precinct, let them send somebody over?”
Ox came to her and kissed her forehead, holding the bunched material of the folded coat between them. “Because she’s smart like you and wants only me.” He stepped back and worked his arms into the coat, then straightened it and adjusted the collar. “Actually, she’s got me cast as the detective in her personal real-life drama. Just the detective, nothing else.”
Jennifer considered asking him if he was sure about that, then she decided she didn’t need to. Ox would play whatever role he’d chosen.
He walked toward the door, buttoning his coat.
But there was something else Jennifer had to ask. “Ox, before Lassiter was found, did you suspect Zach?”
He turned and stuffed his hands into his coat pockets; she could tell by the material that he’d clenched them into fists. His shoulders were hunched, as if it were raining inside the apartment. “Logically, no more than some of the others.” His steady eyes met hers. “Emotionally, I’m not sure. Maybe I wanted Denton to be guilty.”
She watched him walk to the door and open it. His movements were studied, deliberate. The coat was stretched taut across his wide back.
Before he left, he paused and said, “I would have acted on the facts, Jennifer, on logic and not emotion.”
“I know that,” she told him, and watched him leave.
And she did know it.
She only wished she could be as sure about herself.
E. L. Oxman—10:15 P.M.
Oxman had to awaken the doorman at Lana Spence’s apartment building on Lexington. He was a hatchet-faced old man who’d fallen asleep watching the television monitor mounted above his desk. The screen was glowing but blank. The set was probably closed circuit, trained alternately on strategic points of the building, but Oxman noticed that the elderly doorman had a video recorder hooked up to it; he might have been watching a tape of a show he’d missed earlier and had dozed off.
To shake up the old guy, Oxman identified himself as a detective and said Lana Spence was expecting him.
“You won’t, uh, mention to Miss Spence I was resting my eyes, will you?” the doorman asked, standing up straight and using the backs of his frail knuckles to brush off his tan uniform.
“Don’t worry about it,” Oxman told him. “But try to stay awake, huh?”.
“Yes, sir,” the doorman said. He told Lana over the intercom that Oxman was on his way up and buzzed him through the door from the glitzy lobby.
Oxman took the elevator to the thirtieth floor, wondering why exactly Lana wanted to see him. He knew what Tobin would think, and he decided not to mention this visit, whatever it was all about. Was it possible that this big-time soap-opera star actually had the hots for a New York homicide detective? A middle-aged and not-all-that-handsome one at that?
Oxman dismissed the idea. The stuff of fantasies. A “Shadowtown” slant on life. Things didn’t happen in the real world the way they did on television.
As the elevator slowed and stopped, and its doors glided open, he heard a woman scream.
He was startled, then he realized Lana wasn’t above arranging theatrics for him. He stepped from the elevator and looked down the hall to his left, in the dire
ction of the scream.
A tall figure in a black cape was rounding the corner toward the fire stairs. Moving fast—gone! Like a fleeting hallucination.
The door to Lana Spence’s apartment was hanging open. As he rushed to it, Oxman was relieved to hear Lana scream again, even though the shrill sound made his scalp crawl. She was alive!
Not only was she alive, but she was standing just inside the door in a sheer pink nightgown and gripping a large ceramic vase with her arm drawn back to strike.
As Oxman swung his body in through the door, she hurled the vase at him.
He was barely able to duck out of the way as it exploded against the doorjamb.
“Jesus!” he said.
She held both hands to her gaping mouth when she saw the identity of the man she’d almost brained with the vase.
“I’m sorry … Oh, God! …”
“You all right?” Oxman asked.
She nodded frantically. Mindlessly. “Yes, I scared him. Held him off. Then he heard the elevator door open and he ran.”
“Phone the doorman! Ask him to watch the fire stairs! Then call the police!”
“Won’t you stay with me? …”
Oxman didn’t bother answering. He was already sprinting down the hall toward the fire stairs. They were probably the type with one-way, locking doors, and could be opened only from inside the halls; the dark-caped figure might be trapped in the stairwell and forced to descend all thirty flights of stairs before he could leave the building.
Oxman hunched low as he ran and hit the horizontal brass bar on the fire door with his forearm. As he began taking the steps that angled down the narrow stairwell, the door’s pneumatic closer hissed behind him.
He paused.
From far below might have come the faint clatter of hurried footfalls.
He drew a deep breath and flung his body forward, taking the stairs two, three at a time, maintaining his balance only by playing his grip along the handrail. His palm warmed and squeaked against the smooth steel.
At every landing, the floor numbers were marked in red on the cinder-block wall. By the twenty-fifth floor Oxman was gasping for air, almost stumbling as he hurled himself down the stairs. He heard his shrill, rasping intakes of breath echoing around him.
On twenty-two he glanced down the stairwell and thought he caught a glimpse of black movement, like the wild swirl of a cape, several floors below.
He cursed and pushed himself harder, feeling a deep ache in his thighs. Out of shape. He was too old and too damned out of shape for this kind of thing. There was a stitch in his right side, and his heart was bashing a mad rhythm against his ribs.
On sixteen Oxman had to stop and lean on the handrail. His chest was heaving and his legs trembled weakly.
Rough. God, this was rough!
After a few seconds, when he pushed away from the rail and tried to run again down the stairs, he found he could barely keep from falling. His legs were rubbery, sending him lurching in undesired directions. Someone else’s legs.
On twelve he had to stop again, this time to sit down. His entire chest burned and his heart was hammering at such a rate it was almost like one sustained vibration. He was old enough to be in heart-attack country, he knew, but he tried not to think about that.
Forcing himself to his feet, he took a few awkward steps, stumbled, and fell to a sitting position on the small concrete landing.
He tried to stand, but his vision wavered and he became nauseated. Slumping against the hard wall, he tried to catch his breath and concentrated on not vomiting.
Then he told himself the man in the black cape would be hurting just as badly as he, Oxman, and he rose and lurched on down the stairs. Maybe he was closer to the bastard than he’d thought. He managed to draw his service revolver from its holster, but it dropped from his quaking hand and clattered down the steps ahead of him. He paused to stoop and pick it up, then he staggered on.
It took Oxman as much time to descend the next two floors as it had the previous eighteen.
On the landing at ten, his body finally rebelled. His legs buckled and he felt himself sagging. Closing his eyes to his swimming vision, he groped for the wall to lean against.
Then he doubled over and retched, trying to ride out the ache in his gut as he struggled for breath. The air around him was foul, like thick liquid he had to suck into his lungs. He smelled the vomit he’d dribbled onto his shirt.
Oxman couldn’t remember hurting all over as badly as this, ever, and he welcomed the blackness that claimed him.
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he sensed motion around him and opened his eyes.
Large dark shapes hovered over him. He gasped and tried to sit up, but he was so weak he merely fell back and banged his head against the cinder-block wall. The pain settled behind his eyes.
He calmed down when he realized the dark forms were New York City firemen in slickers.
“Take it easy, hoss,” one of them said.
Something soft was fitted over Oxman’s mouth and nose. He fought it at first, then he realized he was being given oxygen. He relaxed and tried to breathe deeply and evenly.
Eventually he felt revitalized enough to push away the oxygen mask and try to stand up.
He had to lean against the wall, but he made it.
“We get him?” he asked the fireman who’d administered the oxygen.
The firefighter was a stocky guy with blond hair and a friendly pug face. He looked puzzled. “All I know is we answered an alarm that was phoned in by the doorman. Old guy seemed confused when we got here.”
“No, sir,” a voice said to Oxman. A blue uniform appeared behind the fireman. “We didn’t get him. There was a fire door on the twenty-ninth floor wedged open with a child’s building block. It might have been set up that way on purpose.”
Oxman bowed his head and leaned with both palms against the rough, cool wall. He cursed silently. The bastard had figured he might have to escape via the fire stairs and had taken precaution. The footfalls Oxman had thought he heard, the glimpse of shadowy movement far below—all that had been his imagination. None of it real.
From the twenty-ninth floor down, Oxman had been chasing a phantom.
Tobin was with Lana Spence in her apartment when Oxman took the elevator back up to the thirtieth floor.
Lana was sitting on the sofa with her knees primly pressed together. She’d put on a flowered silk robe over the see-through nightgown. Oxman suddenly realized she’d been expecting him when she opened the door in the nightgown and encountered the man in the black cape.
“You recovered yet, Ox?” Tobin asked. He was standing near Lana Spence; he’d been asking her questions.
Oxman nodded. “Got my breath back, anyway.”
“Grume got clear,” Tobin said. “Must have sneaked past the doorman to get up here. And the doorman was watching the fire-door exit after Lana called him. That gave Grume the opportunity to slip out another exit. That old doorman’s about as alert as my twelve-year-old hound.”
“And without the good nose.” Oxman sat on the end cushion of the sofa, away from Lana Spence. His lungs still ached with each breath, as if they’d been seared. He looked up at Tobin. “You said ‘Grume’ got clear.”
“That’s what Miss Spence called him,” Tobin said.
“See his face?” Oxman asked Lana.
“No, not exactly. He held his cloak up over it when I opened the door.”
“The Bela Lugosi act, eh?”
She shook her head. “Nothing theatrical about it; more as if the light from the apartment startled him, scared him. I was going over some publicity photos at the table and had the chandelier on full wattage.”
Oxman remembered how bright the apartment had been. He looked at the dimmer switch controlling the many-bulbed chandelier. Now it was turned down about halfway, casting a restful light over the apartment. There was a pile of bound scripts on the table beneath the chandelier, but no photographs. Lana probab
ly read in the brilliant light rather than admit to herself that she’d reached the age where she needed glasses. Her vanity might have saved her life, allowing Oxman a few seconds’ time to come along and frighten away her weird and dangerous caller.
“Did he say anything to you?” he asked.
“No,” Lana said. “I was so scared—numb—and he just sort of backed up when all the light hit him, then he stopped and raised the knife.”
“Knife?”
She shuddered and massaged her upper arms. “A long one with some kind of bone handle. Then he heard the elevator stop on this floor and he whirled and ran.”
“You recognize him?”
“No. It all happened in such a hurry. I saw Edgar Grume when I looked at him, but maybe that was my nerves, and all the scenes I played opposite Grume—Allan Ames.”
Oxman rubbed his forehead. The case was opening up again, becoming even more complex. For the first time, he found himself wondering if Allan Ames was really dead.
“Did you go to Ames’s funeral?” he asked Lana.
“Of course. The entire cast and company did.”
“Was there a service at a funeral home? With the coffin open?”
“No. Allan was mangled by the subway train. The family requested a closed-coffin ceremony.”
Oxman looked at Tobin, who nodded. Something to be checked out. One of a thousand pieces the department would pick up, examine to see if it fit, and probably put back down. Police work was as painstaking as archeological exploration, only the human folly was more recent, and sometimes what you found when you dug or turned over a rock might kill you.
Oxman glanced out at the blue uniform in the hall. He recognized the cop, a heavyset guy named Colter; sharp and reliable.
“We’re going to assign a detail to watch you,” Oxman told Lana. “This building’s actually pretty tight; no one should be able to get to you up here if the people downstairs are competent.”
“Sammy the doorman—”
