Cold Shoulder

by Lynda La Plante

  “I couldn’t walk, could I? And my face, Jesus Christ, look at my face. Forget being able to score anything looking like this.”

  “You’ll be fine. I’ll cover those bruises and your foot’ll go down. I remember once I had a John punched me straight in the nose. I thought I was gonna die, two black eyes, but I got a nicer nose afterward. Wonder why she never had that scar fixed?”

  Didi stared at her as if she were crazed and then eased the ice pack over her face. She started to cry but Nula said nothing. She put Didi’s discarded clothes in the wardrobe with distaste. They were stained and would have to be laundered. Suddenly she saw the car keys on the dressing table and whipped around. She began to panic. Why had she brought the car keys back?

  “Where’s the car?” she asked and Didi slowly removed the ice pack. “What did you do with the car?”

  “I just had to leave it outside, I couldn’t walk back.”

  Nula swore. She could have slapped Didi, but instead she snatched up the keys and walked out slamming the door. Didi flopped back onto the pillows. Sometimes Nula really freaked her—she had no feelings. She cuddled down under the sheets, feeling sorry for herself. Then she felt beneath the pillow for the big topaz ring and slipped it on her finger. It made her feel better, more secure. At least she’d kept that safe, and now she’d gotten it she was going to keep it; it was hers.

  The morning was bright and clear with the sun bringing a deep low orange glow that seemed to pinpoint the beige, highly polished metal of the Lincoln. A police car drew alongside it. The two officers noticed it because it was in a no-parking zone. That was the only reason they stopped. One officer got out and looked at the front of the car: he noted down the license plate and returned to his car. He glanced back, which was when he noticed the pink material sticking out from the trunk.

  The car had not been reported stolen, but both officers walked over to it. One tried the doors. They were unlocked. He peered inside as the second officer pressed open the trunk.

  She lay curled up on her side. One glance was enough. Her face was grotesque, beaten so badly that hardly a feature remained intact, and there was a gaping wound at the back of her skull. No one could have recognized her easily, but the tiny anklet she wore with a name engraved in gold letters made them think she was probably called Holly.

  4

  Lorraine was up and cleaning the apartment before Rosie was awake. She put some coffee on to brew while she stacked and folded her sheets and bed linen. She had a plastic bag full of laundry ready to take to the laundromat, and was mentally compiling a list of groceries.

  Rosie eventually surfaced, glowered, and established her usual early-morning gloom. Lorraine’s hyperactivity served only to increase it.

  “You want any laundry done?”

  “Jesus! I don’t know at this hour, do I?” Rosie banged open the cupboards as Lorraine started up the vacuum.

  “Can you just leave that until I’ve had my breakfast?”

  Lorraine picked up the laundry and walked out. When it had hit spin she took off for the nearest big grocery store. Everything was at a convenient walking distance from Rosie’s place, she supposed that was the biggest plus. She could even walk to the art gallery if she felt like using up that much energy.

  It had been a very long time since Lorraine had shopped or bothered to choose food. She wandered up and down the avenues of goods, and the effort of concentrating on what she wanted to buy became more and more difficult as the Muzak attacked her in one ear while a bubblegum voice belted out “sales of the day” in the other, enhanced by the high-pitched ping of computer cash registers, a clicking she couldn’t identify, bells ringing from checkout people to floor manager as prices were asked, checkout girls screaming conversations, and the peep-peeping of each article as it was passed over the automatic price scanner.

  It seemed to Lorraine that she was the only person aware of the sounds. She noticed all the other shoppers were moving like lightning—it seemed that their sole intention was to get from point A to point B at the fastest possible rate. Carts collided; there was heavy breathing from a customer if she took too long weighing food. Not until she got to the freezer section did it occur to her that maybe the customers were moving so fast in the grocery section because they had just suffered frostbite in the arctic temperatures of the frozen-food department. Nothing was familiar; had it really been that long since she had done something as ordinary as going to a grocery store?

  No matter how hard she tried, Lorraine could not get the plastic bag open. Her tomatoes were still on the scale as she battled with the bag that, she felt sure, was only a single strip of plastic. “Excuse me, could you show me how to get this open?”

  The pink-gingham-clad shelf stocker didn’t look up from her task of stamping the canned peas, with what looked like a small machine gun. Now Lorraine knew what the click-click-click noise was and she waited until the gun had ceased firing before she wafted her unopened bag. “Is there a trick to this?”

  The assistant stuffed her gun into her pocket, and without uttering a word took the bag, licked her forefinger and thumb, rubbed them over the serrated edge, shook it open, and returned it to Lorraine.

  “Very hygienic. Thank you!” Lorraine turned back to her scales with the waiting pound of tomatoes only to discover someone else had tipped them out.

  She bought salad, yogurt, fresh fruit, oranges for juice, some whole-wheat bread, cereal, and nuts. She was picking up some cherries when it started. She steadied herself, and pushed her cart over to the freezer section. Her whole body began to shake and she could feel perspiration breaking out all over. As she opened the ice-cream freezer, the gust of chilled air reminded her of the morgue and the first time she had had to take prints from a corpse. She had not shown any disgust, or emotion, but had clung to the fingerprint card and the black ink roller.

  “Get the prints, Page, and bring ’em up to records.”

  Lorraine had lifted the stiffened hand. She was a black woman, about fifty. Lorraine didn’t look at her face, but forced herself to concentrate on taking the prints. No sooner had she uncurled one dead finger than it recurled, the woman’s hands tightening into fists. Lorraine was unaware that all the team was watching her, giggling like schoolboys as they saw her struggle. Eventually she had forced the woman’s hand to lie flat, palm upward, but just as she began to roll on the black ink, it had taken on a life of its own, curling so tightly around Lorraine’s fingers that she could not release them. The watching men broke up, and only one of them had the decency to feel sorry for her. He was not much older than she was, but the team had shown him the ropes—unlike Rookie Page: she was to be their entertainment. She watched as he hit the elbow of the deceased, which opened up the fist long enough for prints to be taken. She had laughed, treating it all as a big joke. But she’d had nightmares for weeks of being trapped by the dead in that hideous cold, viselike grip.

  “Please shut the freezer doors,” snapped a gingham-garbed floor manager as she marched past. Lorraine rested her head against the fridge door, as the sweating subsided, but her hands were shaking. She didn’t understand why she had suddenly remembered that incident.

  When Lorraine got home, Rosie was looking through the help-wanted ads, checking the possibles. By midafternoon, she had made a few calls, but found no work. She sat watching television and eating the nuts Lorraine had brought home. She paid scant attention to the announcement that a seventeen-year-old girl, Angela Hollow, nicknamed Holly, had been found brutally murdered.

  Lorraine blew her hair dry, then rubbed moisturizer over her face and neck, and into her hands. She was sitting on Rosie’s bed, smoothing cream into her fingertips when Rookie Lorraine Page appeared again. The rubber gloves she wore to examine a corpse always made her hands dry, and she kept lotion in her locker. The others teased her about it, but it wasn’t just the dryness—it was the stench. No matter how fresh the corpse, there was a sickly sweet smell to it. Lorraine never wore perfume, so the moi
sturizer not only felt good, but smelled clean and fresh. As she massaged her hands, it started again. She was powerless to stop the memories.

  They say your first homicide is the one you remember most clearly. Lorraine had been summoned to a domestic and her car had been first on the scene. The small house had looked so neat from the outside, so normal, so quiet that she and her partner had radioed back to base to double-check the address. A neighbor had called to say they had heard screaming and gunfire.

  Lorraine tried the front door. It was open. The woman’s throat had been slashed, as had her arms and chest. She was wearing a cotton shift, nothing else, and there was so much blood that the material was a bright vermilion. They found her husband in the front bedroom with his head blown apart, the gun still in his hand. Blood had sprayed over the walls and soaked into the blanket on the bed where he was lying. The third body, that of a twelve-year-old girl, was in the back bedroom. She had been killed by a single knife wound to the heart. She was tucked up in the bed, the covers up to her chin, one arm around a doll, as if peacefully asleep. Subsequently, they discovered pornographic material and videos of the child and the dead man. Lorraine never forgot viewing those wretched homemade films, just as she never forgot how innocent the little girl had looked with her doll. She learned from that incident never to judge by appearances: the family with no previous criminal record, the suburban couple with their respectable jobs, played out in secret a despicable game of perversion on their own child. It was a hard and brutal lesson for a twenty-year-old rookie cop. Worse followed, but sitting in front of Rosie’s dressing table, the memory of that first suicide/murder came vividly back. Lorraine felt icy cold, as if she were standing in the morgue, as if the child’s murder had just happened, as if the little girl was calling out to her.

  Rooney stared at the body, moving around the stretcher, pulling at his nose. The hammer blows to her face had broken both cheeks, her nose, and the right side of her jaw. The wound to the back of her head would have killed her, as it had cracked open her skull. She had no other body scars, no new skin abrasions or bruising, and her fingernails were intact, but there was evidence of previous beatings. At seventeen years of age, Angela Hollow, blond, about five feet seven, with a good figure, had three previous arrests for prostitution.

  Rooney thanked the morgue attendant and returned to his office. Bean was waiting. He had interviewed Holly’s pimp and four other girls who had seen her on the evening of her death. No one had seen the man who had picked her up, but one witness remembered the metallic beige car. They had not glimpsed the driver as he had been on the far side of the road. All they remembered was seeing Holly cross the road at about nine-thirty. She had not been seen since. Holly was picked up on Sunset but the car had been left over an hour’s drive away, not far from Rooney’s Japanese restaurant. He mused her name was Holly and they’d found her on Holly; he wondered if there was a connection, but doubted it.

  Rooney looked through the statements and tossed over the file he had been given by his friend Cohn Sparks. “Have a look at that, Josh. I want the blood group checked out against that girl we got and on the Hastings guy.”

  Bean left the office, but returned immediately with a lengthy internal fax. “You better look this over, it just came in.”

  Rooney nodded. “Angela Hollow. It’s a fucking hammer again.”

  As he went out, Bean heard Rooney swearing. The fax sheets were the result of his previous evening’s calls. Three more girls, in different areas over a period of seven years, had all been killed by hammer blows to the back of the head, and suffered severe facial injuries. All were hookers of different ages, their bodies left in the trunk of a stolen vehicle. No witnesses. Each case left open on file. Three murders, Angela Hollow made it four and Maria Valez five, the woman from the Paradise Apartments, still unidentified, six, and if the killer had also murdered Norman Hastings it was now seven. If they had all been killed by the same man, as Rooney began to suspect, he had better start gathering the evidence to link them together. He was now about to launch a multiple-murder inquiry. He pulled his pants up over his belly and peered at the street map on his wall. A few were obviously in and around the same area, his fucking territory, but others were not. He glared at the map and began to draw circles with a red felt-tipped pen.

  Later that afternoon he got the first verification. The blood found inside the stolen Hastings car matched the retained blood sample from the murder case handed to him by Sparks. The killer of Maria Valez had left no other incriminating evidence behind, but Rooney made a note that she had, like the woman in Hastings’s car, put up a struggle. According to the autopsy reports, she had clawed and scratched her assailant: blood samples had been taken from beneath her fingernails. None of the other women had had a chance to struggle: they had been efficiently killed by the blow to the back of their heads.

  Rooney summoned Mr. and Mrs. Summers again, hoping they would not identify the corpse from the Paradise Apartments as the woman they had seen in the mall parking lot. If it were not her, then what they had witnessed in the Glendale shopping mall, the woman struggling in Norman Hastings’s car, was a failed murder attempt, possibly by the same killer. It also meant that Cinderella was still alive and could be a vital witness—or accomplice.

  As they had been throughout, Mr. and Mrs. Summers were eager to give every assistance. They had never been to a morgue before or played a part in any criminal investigation, let alone a murder inquiry. Rooney decided they should see the body together, and he accompanied them into the viewing room.

  “Okay, she’s behind the curtain. We can turn her around, get any side you want to see, right or left. You just take your time …” He pressed the buzzer for the curtain to be moved away from the window.

  The dead woman had been cleaned up, her hair washed and combed, and they had also had her face repaired, covered and filled in by a qualified cosmetic mortician. A little trace of makeup served only to enhance the deathly pallor and her eyes were closed.

  Mrs. Summers let out a gasp. She stepped closer, but her husband remained where he was, staring through the window. It was the husband Rooney concentrated on; he had been close to the woman for longer and had spoken to her.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Summers.

  “I don’t know …” said her husband.

  “It’s her—look at her hair, it’s the same hair.”

  “Maybe.”

  Mrs. Summers turned to Rooney. “I’m sure it’s her.”

  Rooney nodded, then looked at Mr. Summers. “What do you think? We can turn her around if you like?”

  “No, no, I think my wife is right. She’s the woman I saw.”

  Rooney asked if he was positive that it was the woman he had tried to help in the parking lot the afternoon of May 17.

  “Yes,” Mr. Summers said firmly.

  Rooney returned to his office. Bean was waiting for him: he had received confirmation via police records, and they now had an ID of the victim. The dead woman Mr. and Mrs. Summers had just identified was Helen Murphy, age thirty-nine, a prostitute, mother of three children, all in foster care. Murphy had been reported missing three weeks before she was found.

  The Summerses’ misidentification meant that Rooney and his team were no longer looking for Lorraine. Instead, they focused on trying to find a link between the dead women and Norman Hastings.

  But Rooney was still not satisfied. He looked over the report and asked if dental records were available, remembering that the cabdriver had said the woman had a front tooth missing. Helen Murphy had false teeth. Rooney was anxious to bring the cabdriver in to view the body. He was not as positive as the Summerses: she was similar and had the same coloring, he said. Eventually, he agreed that it was probably the woman he had picked up. Rooney conceded that Helen Murphy was the woman from the Glendale shopping mall parking lot, which meant there would be no further visits to Rosie’s address. That line of inquiry was now closed.

  It was five o’clock when Rooney fa
ced his team. He had requested extra officers and an incident room. They waited patiently as he shuffled his papers. “Okay, this is Helen Murphy,” he began. “Prostitute, blond, age thirty-nine, body found in the grounds of the derelict Paradise Apartments. She had been dumped in the trunk of a wrecked car and had been there for approximately two to three days. A kid lifted her body out of the trunk of the car, he said, wanting to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which he’d been learnin’ at swimming lessons! But we found nothin’ on the kid, so if he did steal from her body we’ll never know.”

  The men stared at the blown-up pictures. Next to appear were Angela Hollow and the stolen vehicle, then Maria Valez, and three more unidentified females. Lastly, there was a photograph of Norman Hastings and his car.

  Rooney paused as the men murmured and made notes. “Okay. Obviously the Norman Hastings killing is different because he’s male. Maybe the car was stolen and Hastings managed to see or catch the thief. Either way, he was killed with a similar weapon to that used on each of the others: a claw hammer. We know it’s not the same weapon—some of the impressions taken from the women are of different dimensions, but all of them have been hammered in the face, and the claw section used for one blow at the back of the skull, near the base. When the victim is face downward, the claw hammer strikes and gets drawn upward, leaving, as you can see, one hell of an open wound.”

  Rooney waited as they took it all in, then began again. “The women are all prostitutes, all with records, obviously all blond. Never any witnesses. Nobody has ever come forward with any motive, and so far we haven’t found a link between the women, apart from their line of business and the fact they were tall, blond, and—apart from the last girl, Angela Hollow, nicknamed Holly—all dogs.”

  Rooney continued for another hour, explaining the Summerses’ part in the inquiry and Hastings’s missing wallet. He concluded with the description of the man driving Hastings’s stolen car. The man they were hunting, he pointed out, would have a bad bite mark on his neck, close to the jugular, according to Helen Murphy. He tapped the dead woman’s face, presuming now that she was the woman to make the anonymous call to the station.