Single White Female

by John Lutz

  He said, “Miss . . . ?”

  Allie leaned with both hands on the desk, her head bowed. She gave the desk clerk a from-down-under look and said, “Room Ten twenty-seven. Dead.” Didn’t sound like her voice. Someone high, floating, imitating her.

  The switchboard operator had stood up and was crowding the desk clerk, as if she might want to hide behind him. Didn’t seem much taller standing. She said, “What? What’d you say, hon?”

  Allie tried to speak again but couldn’t. Her throat was constricted. She heard herself croak unintelligibly.

  “Somebody dead in Ten twenty-seven?” the desk clerk asked in a distant, amazingly calm voice. As if dead guests were part of hotel-biz; one or two every night.

  Allie nodded.

  “You sure?”

  She could manage only another nod.

  He stared at her like a stern, impossible father about to ask an important question, warning her in advance that he wanted the truth but he didn’t want to hear anything unpleasant. “You mean he died of a heart attack? Something like that? Right?”

  “Murdered,” Allie made herself say. “Cut up in pieces.”

  The switchboard operator said, “Madre de Dios!”

  The desk clerk straightened up so he was standing as tall as possible and, still with his calm gaze fixed on Allie, called, “Will!”

  An elderly black bellhop appeared. The old desk clerk casually reached into a side pocket and tossed him a key. It must have been a passkey. Its metal tag clinked against it as the bellhop caught it with one gnarled hand.

  “Run on up to Ten twenty-seven,” the desk clerk said. “See what there is to see and then phone down.”

  The bellhop glanced at Allie. He had sad, very kind eyes. He said, “Got somethin’ all over your shoes.”

  Allie heard herself say, “Huh? Oh, that’s blood.”

  The bellhop’s face got hard with fear and a kind of resolve. Or was it resignation? “Seen that before,” he said, and walked over and got in the elevator she’d just ridden down. “Seen you before, too,” he said as the door slid shut.

  But he hadn’t, she was sure.

  It took Allie a few seconds to realize what he’d meant. And its significance.

  It was Hedra he’d seen. Hedra wearing her Allie wig. Wearing her Allie clothes. Inside Allie’s blue coat. Walking her Allie walk.

  Not Allie! Hedra!

  Within a couple of minutes the switchboard buzzed urgently and a tiny red light began blinking. An insistent code: Murder! Murder! Murder!

  The Hispanic woman drifted toward it. Her eyes were brown pools of fear. The desk clerk shuffled over to stand by her. He leaned over with his gray hair near her dark hair, as if he wanted to hear firsthand what was being said on the receiver pressed to the woman’s ear.

  While they were standing facing away from her, Allie fled from the lobby and into the street.

  27

  She didn’t realize until she was inside and had shut the apartment door that this wasn’t shelter. She’d been stupid to come here. Sam might have something on him that would tell the police where she lived. Hedra might have seen to that.

  Hedra! Would Hedra have returned here?

  A few feet inside the door, Allie stood in darkness, listening. The apartment was silent.

  Even if the police learned her identity and address, she was sure she had some time. She walked into the living room and switched on a lamp.

  There was her empty cup where she’d left it on the folded Village Voice on the table. The remote control for the TV rested where she remembered, on the arm of the sofa. The phone sat on the floor next to the wing chair. Where she’d left it.

  Everything seemed to be exactly as it was when she’d hurried out of the apartment.

  She switched on more lights and moved toward the hall to the bedrooms. In the glow cast from so many sources, a dozen dim shadows moved with her. Her legs felt rubbery but she wasn’t tired. There was an engine in her chest; she was running on adrenaline.

  She glanced in the bathroom and felt a sudden nausea, remembering the bathroom at the Atherton Hotel.

  At the door to Hedra’s old bedroom she stopped. She reached around the doorjamb, into the room, and groped across rough plaster for the plastic wall switch, found it, and flicked it upward.

  The overhead fixture winked on.

  Allie almost expected to find something hideous inside. Some further manifestation of Hedra’s madness. But this room, too, was as she’d left it. There was, in fact, a special kind of blankness about it, as if, like Hedra, it yearned to be imprinted with personality.

  Knowing her time inside the apartment was limited, Allie decided to pack some of her clothes in her carry-on and then get out fast. She’d fetch her red-and-white TWA bag down from her closet shelf and quickly stuff it with whatever seemed appropriate. She wanted only to get clear of the Cody Arms before the police arrived, to run and hide somewhere so she could take time and try to think this nightmare through, figure a way out.

  Allie was having difficulty breathing, as if she were being crushed in a vise. She knew there was nothing of Hedra anywhere in the apartment. She felt like screaming, but she covered her mouth with her hand and willed herself to be silent. Slumped on the mattress, she sat with her elbows on her knees, meshing her fingers so tightly they ached. She sat paralyzed, still trying to fully comprehend what had happened, what it meant. On the opposite wall she saw a spider racing diagonally toward the molding up near the ceiling, seeking shelter in shadow.

  Then something deep in her stirred to life. A quiet rage and a primal determination to survive. Ancient voices speaking.

  She got up and located the canvas carry-on, crumpled and shoved to the back of her closet shelf, behind her folded sweaters. She grabbed a few clothes from the closet and stuffed them inside, ignoring the hangers that dropped to the floor. Zipped the bag closed, tearing a fingernail. She’d tend to that later.

  Careful not to get Sam’s blood on her hands, she untied her jogging shoes and worked them off her feet. The blood, russet-colored now, hadn’t soaked through; her socks weren’t stained. She put on her pair of almost new Nikes, then she slung her purse and the carry-on by their straps over her right shoulder.

  After a brief detour to the kitchen to poke several granola bars into the carry-on, she hurried to the front door and let herself out into the hall. She kept straining to hear approaching sirens, but there were only the normal sounds of traffic. Once, sparking a moment of panic, she heard a distant siren that was obviously moving away and quickly faded.

  She was ten feet from the elevator doors when she heard the thrum of cables and the oiled metallic grinding of an elevator arriving. Fear grabbed her again.

  Hoping none of her neighbors would open an apartment door and see her, she ran down the hall toward the rear fire stairs, staying up on the balls of her feet so she’d make as little noise as possible.

  As she was rounding the corner, she paused despite herself and glanced back, saw the elevator doors slide open. Four men filed out of the elevator. Two of them wore drab gray suits. The other two wore the old-fashioned blue uniforms of the New York City Police Department. None of them was smiling; they had somber, anxious expressions and moved almost with the precision of a drill team. They turned right, away from Allie, and didn’t see her.

  She decided against the fire stairs and rode the service elevator down instead. Didn’t the police always have someone watching fire escapes? Waiting in the shadows?

  The lobby was deserted, but she could see a patrol car parked directly in front of the building. A uniformed officer was sitting behind the steering wheel, and a pulsating haze of exhaust rose from beneath the rear bumper, like life escaping.

  Allie’s heart was double-pumping and her mouth was dry. Back way! Back way! Keeping an eye on the police car, she sidestepped to the oversized freight door, about twenty feet from the service elevator. She rotated the knob and pushed on the heavy door.

  It o
pened only a few inches. She could see a glint of steel, a heavy hasp and padlock on the outside. No escape that way.

  She stood there for a moment, light-headed, then ran down the hall to a room where she knew cleaning equipment was stored.

  She’d intended to hide there until the police left, but as soon as she was inside she saw a small, high window with steel mesh over it.

  Standing on a square can of cleaning fluid that popped and twanged under her weight, she forced the old wooden window open. The steel mesh was ancient and rusted, but it looked strong. Allie inserted her fingers through it, gripped hard, and worked it back and forth, at first very slightly, then an inch or two each way.

  It was installed to resist pressure from the outside, not designed to keep people in. The top of it gave. Then one side. Ignoring the pain in her fingers, she bent the mesh back against the window frame, then forward in wider and wider arcs.

  And suddenly it broke free and dropped into the gangway alongside the building.

  Allie got down from the can she’d been standing on and placed it on top of an upside-down metal bucket. Stood on the can again, carefully balancing herself, and managed to squeeze her head and shoulders through the window into cool outside air. Freedom.

  She thrashed around with her right leg, found leverage with her foot, and pushed herself through the window to drop and lie on the concrete pavement. Ouch! Her elbow was on the sharp steel mesh she’d broken from the frame. There was a clanging noise as the bucket and can tipped over inside the storage room.

  She struggled to her feet in a hurry, brushed rust and dirt off her clothes, and made her way along the gangway to West 74th. She emerged at the corner of the building, behind the parked police car with its motor idling.

  Unless the cop behind the steering wheel happened to be looking in his rearview mirror, he wouldn’t see her.

  When he seemed to move his head to glance in the opposite direction, she put on a casual air, did a sharp turn out of the gangway, and walked quickly away.

  Realizing she’d left her purse and the carry-on in the storage room.

  28

  Allie had no idea what she might do. Where she might go. There was no one to ask for help. None of this seemed real to her. Even she was beginning to doubt Hedra had ever existed. She had to keep reminding herself that her world had changed. She was a fugitive. Wanted for Sam’s murder. Sam! Poor Sam. The fool she’d loved and still loved, still needed. They had both been seduced and victimized. Irony twisted her inside; now, after his death, she could better understand and forgive him.

  She spent the next several hours wandering aimlessly around the Upper West Side, then walked down Central Park West and over to Fifth Avenue. A fine mist formed in the air; hardly enough to get her wet. Then the mist changed to flecks of snow that fell and disappeared magically on the wet sidewalk in front of her. She seemed to be walking toward a void that would eventually consume her, as if she were ephemeral as a snowflake. And maybe she was.

  It finally occurred to her that she was cold and shivering. She stopped walking and was about to enter a small Chinese restaurant, then realized she hadn’t any money. Through the steamed-over window she could glimpse people eating in a booth. Two men and a woman, well-dressed, talking animatedly between bites. The woman, young and with a swirl of dark hair piled high on her head, smiled and broke open a fortune cookie. Allie had intended going into the restaurant to get warm; now she realized she was hungry as well as cold. There was nothing she could do about hunger. Not right now.

  For a moment she considered going down into a subway stop to keep warm, but there was danger there for a woman alone. She’d read in the newspapers about robbery, rape, and killing in the subways, seen tragic tape on TV news. And all the time she’d been living with the woman who’d . . . done those things to Sam.

  The woman who wore her clothes.

  Who had become her.

  Allie realized she was near Grand Central Station. It would be warmer there. But would the police be watching for her, expecting her to try to catch a train out of the city? Scenes from a hundred movie and TV shows tumbled through her mind, bureaucratic authority figures instructing their underlings to “cover the airport and train station!”

  But she knew there were too many murders in New York for the police to be constantly on the alert in all the stations, terminals, and airports that provided means of escape. Besides, they still might not even know what she looked like, and almost certainly hadn’t had time to circulate her photograph. She should be safe at Grand Central for at least tonight.

  Jamming her fists deep into the pockets of her blazer, she hunched her shoulders and started walking. The flecks of snow were getting larger. Heavier. She felt one settle and melt on her eyelash, another dissolve coldly on her lower lip.

  She entered Grand Central from 42nd Street and took the ramp down into the cavernous main area. The place was busy but looked oddly deserted because of its vastness.

  Allie ignored the stares of people who passed her. They seemed to be staring at her, anyway, as if there were something about her that marked her as different and desperate. Could they sense her terror? See it on her?

  She found a clean spot on the floor, sat down, and leaned back against the wall. Letting out a long breath, she waited for the warmth to penetrate her clothes.

  Nearby, a shabbily dressed woman with a torn Bloomingdale’s bag sat and stared at her. A street person, Allie was sure, with no address, no hope, no perceived future beyond the hour. The woman seemed disturbed that she couldn’t categorize Allie, who obviously was not waiting for a train, but was dressed rather well to be one of the army that walked the streets of Manhattan and sought places like this for shelter.

  After a few minutes the woman seemed to lose interest. She settled back with her chin tucked into the folds of flesh at the base of her neck, lowered her puffy eyelids and appeared to nod off to sleep. One of her withered hands slid from her lap onto the floor, where it lay palm-up.

  Like Sam’s hands.

  Allie looked away. Shook the vision. She’d read about people who virtually lived in Grand Central, moving around so the police never got a fix on them as vagrants. She decided she should be able to spend the night here, getting up and changing locations once or twice. She’d have to doze sitting up, like the old woman across from her, but that would be better than roaming the cold and dangerous streets.

  A bearded man in a scuffed leather jacket hurried past, late for his train. He was munching a hamburger in a McDonald’s wrapper. Allie caught the savory scent of the fried beef and onion. About twenty feet beyond her, he absently wadded the wrapper around the hamburger and dropped it into a trash receptacle. He picked up his pace and began to run, licking his fingers as if they were just-discovered popsicles.

  Allie sat staring at the refuse can. No one seemed to be paying attention to her. The old woman with the Bloomingdale’s bag was still asleep. The scent of the hamburger lingered, or might Allie only be imagining that? Hunger could make the mind play pranks.

  Allie thought, Oh, Jesus! I’m really going to do this. She slowly stood up and ambled over to the trash container, as if she were going to throw something away.

  Instead she reached inside, as if it were the sort of thing she and everyone else did every day, and her exploring hand sought the crumpled paper wrapper with the still-warm hamburger inside. It was like a live thing hiding from her, but at last her fingers closed on its vital warmth. She drew the aromatic prize out quickly, unable to keep her eyes from darting around to make sure what she’d done had gone unnoticed. But there was no way to be positive. Walking too fast, she returned to her spot on the floor.

  She sat for a moment with her heart pounding. Then she told herself that for all anyone passing her knew, she’d bought the hamburger and was finishing eating it. She might be sitting here waiting for a train departure, or for a friend coming into the city to visit her. Might live on goddamn Park Avenue, for all anyone could guess.
Not that it was any of their business, was it?

  Bastards! she said to herself, hating them because she did care what they thought.

  With exaggerated casualness, she peeled the wrapper away from the hamburger. She started to tear off the portion of bun marred by the man’s tooth marks, then thought better of it.

  Took a deep breath and bit into the hamburger.

  There was cheese on it, along with onion and pickles. She’d never tasted anything that brought such sensation to the taste buds. She could almost see and feel the word “delicious.”

  Too soon, she finished the hamburger and was licking her fingers, as the man who’d thrown it away had licked his, only with more obvious greed and enjoyment. When she glanced to the side, the old woman still had her chin resting in the folds of her neck, but her slanted, rheumy eyes were open. A look passed between her and Allie, for only a second, a spark of understanding that was like a lightning bolt to Allie. The woman had placed her at last in the hierarchy of humanity. They were one and the same, the look said. Outcasts and comrades in agony.

  Allie quickly averted her eyes and wiped her hands on her jeans.

  Hunger still clawed at her.

  She’d never been so lonely.

  In the morning she awoke to the shuffle and humming of the busy station. A godlike, echoing voice was making unintelligible pronouncements over the PA system: “NOWREEING PRESSTO STAMFOR ONTRAREEESAAAN!” No one was paying the slightest attention to Allie where she lay curled on the floor. Now and then an eye would glance her way and then quickly be averted, as if denying her existence. There was some charity in the world, however; a crumpled dollar bill and some change lay on the floor near her hand. Only the thousands of passing potential witnesses had prevented it from being stolen.