by John Lutz
The elevator jounced to a stop, and Allie dizzily placed her hands flat against the wall to keep her balance.
Hedra was quiet now. Unmoving.
When the elevator doors opened on the lobby, two plainclothes detectives and two uniformed officers were waiting. In the background hovered the mesmerized pale faces of onlookers, silent, watching intently, their expressions unreadable, their thoughts and fears too deep to reach the surface.
Kennedy appeared, breathing hard and looking angry and concerned. He must have ridden down in the other elevator. He’d lost his cigar, and black ash was peppered over his white shirt front. “You okay?” he asked Allie.
“Okay,” she said, pressing her trembling palm to her ear, aware of a trickle of blood snaking down her arm.
One of the plainclothes detectives, a tall handsome man with neatly parted dark hair, entered the elevator and helped Hedra to her feet.
She glared at him, an accusation of unspeakable betrayal in her eyes. Her lips quivered. Parted. “You’re not Andy. You pretended.”
He gave her a fading, lazy smile as he gripped her elbow and ushered her from the elevator, almost as if escorting her onto a dance floor.
He said, “What’s in a name?”
Epilogue
Allie moved out of the Cody Arms the next month. Out of the city. She’d been offered a job in the actuarial department of a large insurance company in Rockport, Illinois. The company’s real-estate division found her an affordable place to live, a small house on an acre of wooded land just outside of town.
It was always quiet there. Her mail was delivered to a rural box on a cedar post at the end of her driveway. Her nearest neighbors, a retired carpenter and his wife, waved to her whenever they saw her in her yard. Cars passed only occasionally.
Her old apartment in the Cody Arms was leased and occupied within days after she’d gone. To a pair of single women who said they were sisters.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Where does a writer get ideas? This is one of the few times this writer can pinpoint the time and place the book was conceived. I was in a restaurant with my wife, Barbara, and overheard two women in the adjoining booth talking about placing personal ads in a small local paper to get dates. It struck me that they were taking chances going out with men about whom they knew absolutely nothing. Then one of the women mentioned a roommate, and it occurred to me that women placed personal ads for roommates—people who will abruptly move in and become part of their home and personal lives—knowing about as much about them as they might from an ad resulting in nothing more than a single lunch date or conversation over a cup of coffee.
Their personal lives . . . A threat from a stranger inside the walls. Surely good material for a novel.
A publisher agreed.
Then, before publication of the novel, a major film company agreed.
This one had a different feel to it. I had sold film options on books before, and usually what followed was a check and then silence. These people seemed serious from the beginning. Columbia executive Michael Besman contacted me with assurances that the studio would keep me informed of progress on the project. And the studio did. At one point early in the process, Michael even called to bring me up to date on the construction of the sets. Talented new screenwriter Don Roos was going to do the screenplay. Barbet Schroeder was to direct. Casting was soon under way. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bridget Fonda—two of my favorites—would be the costars. (I was told later that they decided between them which roles to play.) This was beginning to feel like a major film that would actually be made.
Unlike my writer friends’ descriptions about their experiences with the film industry, the pieces for this movie fell into place like dominoes in a row. I could read on their faces that gloom was what I should be feeling. So I was waiting for the usual to happen—something to undo this deal.
Shooting began.
My wife and I were invited to the shoot in New York. My writer friends said, “Don’t go. You won’t leave town without crying.”
Not so. One of the first things I saw when walking onto the set was a director’s chair with my name on it. Cast and crew couldn’t have been nicer or more accommodating. I was impressed by the dedication and professionalism of everyone involved. Not to mention the money that was spent. I recall a lineup of parked trailers on a block in Harlem, each a dressing room for a star, but each with the name not of the star but of the character he or she played in the movie. I found that kind of exhilarating and . . . well, creepy. People I had invented, who were made alive and recognizable by the artistry of the film industry, might be right behind those doors.
As I saw it, my job on the set was to avoid knocking over anything or anyone valuable. Introductions were made to cast and crew. I was duly impressed and intimidated, especially by Bridget Fonda, who had a bloody and serious looking arm injury inflicted by the beautiful and intense woman seated on a stool at the edge of the set—the remarkable Jennifer Jason Leigh. She didn’t look in the least sorry, and was well on her way to becoming MTV’s villain of the year.
So we watched the pros work: Schroeder in total control, actors with complete command of their roles, enhanced by creative lighting, costume, camera work . . . And later, a perfect score by Howard Shore. Watching it all brought to life piece by piece. It became evident that films are team efforts. There are a lot of phases in production where the wheels might come off; some very talented people prevent that.
Sometimes even they can’t prevent it, and a film simply doesn’t work. Single White Female does work. It remains a top-notch thriller, has spawned offspring, including the 2011 remake The Roommate, and even become part of the language. When a woman is imitated too closely, or her clothes are secretly borrowed, or her boyfriend is stolen by a friend, she’s been Single White Femaled. I still get a kick occasionally hearing people use that phrase. In a different way altogether, I’ve been Single White Femaled. It was terrific.
Sarasota, Florida, 2011
Don’t miss John Lutz’s next exciting thriller,
PULSE
coming from Pinnacle in July 2012.
Highway 72, Central Florida, 2002
It gave Garvey the creeps, transferring somebody like Daniel Danielle. The sick bastard had been convicted of killing three women, but some estimates had his total at more than a hundred.
They were the women who lived alone and let their guards down because the sicko could be a charmer as a man or a woman. Single women who disappeared and were missed by no one. Those were the kinds of women Daniel Danielle sought and tortured and destroyed.
Nicholson was seated next to Garvey. Like Garvey, he was a big man in a brown uniform. Their job was to transfer Daniel Danielle to a new, and so far secret, maximum-security state prison near Belle Glade, on the other side of the state from Sarasota. It was in Sarasota where Danielle Daniel (he had been dressed as a woman then) had been arrested while crouched over the body of one of his victims, and later convicted. The evidence was overwhelming. As a “calling card” and a taunt, he had put his previous victim’s panties on his present victim, panties he had apparently worn to the murder. He was damned by his DNA.
Daniel was all the more dangerous because he was smart as hell. Degrees from Vassar and Harvard, and a fellowship at Oxford. Getting away with murder should have been a piece of cake, like the rest of his life. But it hadn’t been. When his appeals were exhausted, he would be executed.
No one was visible on State Highway 72. This part of Florida was flat and undeveloped, mostly green vistas streaked with brown. Cattle country, though cattle were seldom glimpsed from the road except off in the distance. Wind and dust country for sure. Dust devils could be seen taking shape and dissipating on both sides of the road. Miles away, larger wannabe tornados threatened and whirled but didn’t quite take form.
The latest weather report said the jet stream had shifted. Hurricane Sophia, closing in on Florida’s east coast, now had a predicted path to the south, th
ough not as far south as the dusty white van rocketing along the highway. Taking time to replace a broken fan belt ten miles beyond Arcadia had slowed them down. They were still okay, if the hurricane stayed north. If it didn’t, they might be driving right into it.
Now and then a car passed going the other way, with a Doppler change of pitch as the boxy van rocked in the vehicle’s wake. Off to the east there were more dust devils, more swirling cloud formations. The insistent internal voice Garvey often heard when some part of his mind knew something bad was about to happen wouldn’t shut up.
Suddenly it began to rain. Hard. Garvey switched on the headlights. Hail the size of marbles started smacking and bouncing off the van’s windshield and stubby hood.
“Maybe we oughta go back,” Nicholson said. “See if we can outrun whatever’s headed our way.”
“Orders are to deliver the prisoners.” Garvey drove faster. The hail slammed harder against the windshield, as if hurled by a giant hand.
The prisoner chained in the back of the van with Daniel Danielle was a young man with lots of muscles and tattoos under his orange prison jumpsuit. He was scarred with old acne and had a face like chipped stone, with a crooked nose and narrow, mean eyes. He was easy to take for a hardened ex-con, but he was actually an undercover cop named Chad Bingham, there for insurance if something weird happened and Daniel Danielle made trouble.
Bingham would rather have been someplace else. He had a wife and two kids. And a job.
The easy part of the job was just sitting there sulking and pretending he was someone else. But the way things were going, he was afraid the hard part was on its way.
The hail kept coming. Nicholson was on the edge of being downright scared. Even if it didn’t make landfall nearby, Sophia might spawn tornados. Hurricanes also sometimes unexpectedly changed course. He reached out and turned on the radio, but got nothing but static this far out in the flatlands, away from most civilization.
Garvey could see his partner was getting antsy so he tried to raise Sarasota on the police band. The result was more static. He tried Belle Glade and got the same response.
“Storm’s interfering with reception,” he said, looking into Nicholson’s wide blue eyes. He had never seen the man this rattled.
“Try your cell phone,” Nicholson said in a tight voice.
“You kidding?”
Nicholson tried his own cell phone but didn’t get a signal.
Both men jumped as a violent thumping began under the van.
“We ran over a branch or something that blew onto the road,” Garvey said.
“Pull over and let’s drag it out.”
“Not in this weather,” Garvey said. “That hail will beat us to death.”
“What the hell was that?” Nicholson asked, as a huge, many-armed form crossed the road ahead of them, like an image in a dream.
“Looked like a tree,” Garvey said.
“There aren’t many trees around here.”
“It’s not around here anymore,” Garvey said, as the wind rocked the van.
The van suddenly became easy to steer. Garvey realized that was because he was no longer steering it. The wind had lifted it off the road.
They were sideways now, plowing up dirt and grass. Then the van bounced and they were airborne again.
“What the shit are you doing?” Nicholson screamed.
“Sitting here just like you.”
The van leaned left, leaned right, and Garvey knew they were going to turn over.
“Hold tight,” he yelled, checking to make sure both of them had their seat belts fastened.
The wind howled. Steel screamed. They were upside down. Garvey could hear Nicholson shouting beside him, but couldn’t make out what he was saying because of the din.
The van skidded a long way on its roof and then began to spin. Garvey felt his head bouncing against the side window.
Bulletproof glass came off in sharp-edged, milky strips, and he was staring at the ground. With a violent lurch, the van was upright again, then back on its roof. Garvey realized that as addled as his brain had become, his right foot was still jammed hard against the brake pedal.
The van stopped. Hanging upside down, Garvey looked out the glassless window and saw that they were wedged against one of the rare trees Nicholson had mentioned. He looked over and saw that Nicholson was dazed and wild-eyed. And beyond Nicholson, out the window . . .
“Looks like a kind of low ridge over there,” he shouted at Nicholson. “We gotta get outta the van, see if we can burrow down outta the wind.”
“Everywhere!” Nicholson yelled. “Wind’s everywhere!”
Garvey unhitched both safety belts, causing the weight of his body to compress onto his internal injuries. Ignoring the pain, he leaned hard to his right, against Nicholson, and kicked at the bent and battered door. It opened a few inches. The next time it opened, the wind helped it by wrenching it off one of its hinges and flattening it against the side of the van.
“Wind’s dying down a little,” he lied to Nicholson, and then was astounded to notice that it was true. The roaring had gone from sounding like a freight train to sounding like a thousand lonely and desperate wolves. A hurricane-spawned tornado, Garvey guessed. Moving away, he hoped.
He wormed and wriggled out of the van. The hail had stopped, but rain was still driven sideways by the wind. Garvey was sore all over. Later he’d have to take inventory to see if he was badly injured. With great effort he could stand, leaning into the wind. Nicholson was near him, on hands and knees, his head bowed to Sophia’s ferocity.
The overturned van’s rear doors were still closed, though the roof was crushed and the wire-reinforced glass was gone from the back windows. A pair of orange-clad legs and black prison shoes extended from one of the windows, and a voice was screaming.
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Copyright © 1990 John Lutz
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