But between Mandy Devere and Agnes Funsel lay another five years—another five years of sounding like Mata Hari while she talked to jerks over the phone, of teaching would-be Broadway stage stars to use underarm deodorant and to always make the guy use a rubber, even for a fifty-dollar blow job, of ministering to the vanity and the flagging libido of Sal Grazzi.
It was a tough life, but not as tough as being one of the girls. Mandy Devere, after failing as a singer, had started out fifteen years ago in the “escort” business, so she knew all about what that was like. At least she was out of that—she had had the sense to get into management before her looks disappeared. At least she wouldn’t die broke and with God’s knows what funny diseases.
Portsmouth, New Hampshire in five years. She would keep her sights on that.
The phone rang and, from long practice, she took one deep breath before picking up the receiver.
“Personal Services,” she murmured, in her very best husky, come-hither voice. “This is Mandy—how may I help you?”
“I got your number from a friend of a friend,” the man at the other end said. “My name is Charlie, and I’m looking for a good time.”
“Well, just what did you have in mind, Sir?” Mandy asked, putting just a hint of seductive laughter into the first syllable. The whole conversation was going on tape, something her lawyer insisted upon, and she had to get the guy to spell out what he wanted before she could give him the address. That way, if he was a cop and came up with a warrant, it was possible to plead entrapment.
But this one had all the right answers. He wanted to get laid—nothing kinky, just a little straight sex. He didn’t try to keep her talking, so he wasn’t a phone freak, and he didn’t sound nervous. Probably he had done this before, so there was at least a fair chance he really meant it.
The phone would be busy all night, but only about one caller in ten actually showed up to transact a little cash business. This guy, she felt sure, would be that one.
Mandy went into the back, where the apartment’s originally spacious living/dining area had been converted into a series of tiny bedrooms, each hardly big enough to accommodate one double bed and a single night table. She knocked briskly but quietly on the third of five doors.
“Get out of there, Sal—you can finish later. We have a paying customer on the way.”
Oh, how she had enjoyed that! She went back to the front desk to wait for Rudolph Valentino to put his pants back on.
“We were just gettin’ to the fun part,” he said, as he came out, still tucking in his electric blue disco shirt and carrying his shoes. He put on his white silk sport coat with the padded shoulders, threw himself into one of the lobby’s chrome and magenta plush chairs—Personal Services liked to make a good initial impression—and started to pull his socks up.
“The fun part can wait,” Mandy answered, without a trace of sympathy. “As long as you’re here, you might as well be useful. I like to have a man on display when the Johns first come in. It keeps them quiet.”
It was the sort of thing Sal enjoyed hearing, so he squared himself in the chair and got on with the task of wriggling into his white patent leather shoes. He liked to throw his weight around, but he wasn’t very hard to manipulate. His stupidity, she had to think, was all that made him tolerable.
The apartment was right next to the elevator shaft, so she always knew when a customer was coming up to the seventh floor. The slight hum of the cables, which you could both hear and feel, would begin to slow, and then the elevator car would come to rest with a distinct snap and the mechanical door would clatter open. When the bell rang, Mandy got up from her chair to have a look through the peephole.
He looked quite presentable, dressed in a sharp brown suit that looked like it was right off the hanger and carrying an attaché case and a tan raincoat slung under one arm. He wasn’t Paul Newman, but he wasn’t fat or middle-aged or bald or afflicted with any obvious skin conditions. He looked like he took a bath every day and he didn’t look like either a cop or some sort of pervert. He might even have money in his pocket. A guy like this could walk into any one of the dozen singles bars within a four-block radius and pick up all the girls he wanted. So what was he doing here?
Well, maybe he had just decided it was some little whore’s lucky day. Mandy threw the bolt and opened the door, stepping aside to let this paragon in.
“I’m Charlie,” he said, without a hint of the customary tension in his voice. “I phoned, remember?”
“Certainly, Charlie,” she answered, smiling her Mother Superior smile. “We’ve been expecting you, although you’ve a little early. Please sit down, and your date will be ready in just a few minutes.
“Charlie,” if that was his real name—and she guessed that it probably was, gave Sal an appraising, slightly contemptuous glance, as if the roles were reversed and he was the bouncer looking over a John to make sure he minded his manners. He set down his attaché case on the floor and laid his raincoat across the arm of a chair, but he made no move to take a seat himself.
How could she have been so dumb? Mandy knew at once there was going to be trouble.
“You’re Sal Grazzi—am I right?” he said, smiling, as if at his own cleverness. “Of course I’m right.”
And then the smile broke into a malicious, frightening grin.
“What the fuck, I can smell a limp-dick Wop tinhorn in the next room, even if he’s under the shower.”
Sal’s thick, unintelligent face creased with rage. He started to stand up and his hand went into the pocket of his sport coat, but whatever he had in there he never had a chance to use it.
Because Charlie was all over him. One well placed kick to the pit of the stomach and Sal dropped to his knees, his lips going purple as he tried to remember how to breathe.
With the honed instinct of a survivor, Mandy didn’t have to guess that this was for keeps—somebody was going to die tonight, and she didn’t want to be nominated. She slid open her desk drawer, where she kept a small, nickel-plated .32 caliber automatic for just such an emergency, but she was just an instant too late. Charlie sat down on the edge of the desk, reached across and slammed the drawer on her hands. WHAM!
Oh Jesus Christ! Shit! Nothing, nothing in her whole life, not even the abortion she had when she was fifteen, not any of it hurt like this hurt. She just slid to the floor, where she curled herself into a tight little ball, pressing her fists into her belly and sobbing like a frightened child.
After a while she was able to crawl back up into her chair, which seemed the safest place to wait for whatever was going to happen next. Lying on the desk was her automatic, with the clip taken out and all eight cartridges lined up in a little row so nobody would get the wrong idea. Next to the gun was a switchblade knife, predictably Sal’s, with the blade snapped off neatly at the hilt.
Sal was still down on his knees, clutching his injured gut. He was sweating, although the apartment was fully air conditioned, and his eyes were filled with the starkest terror.
Because Charlie was standing over him, resting the muzzle of a cut down pump shotgun against his forehead.
Where had that come from? Charlie’s attaché case was lying open in the floor, which answered that stupid question.
And Charlie? Well, Charlie was a changed man—literally. He was just different. The same man, the same features, but different. It was as if the first face was just a rough draft.
And there was blood trickling down from his ear. Only the blood was not red, not like any fresh blood she had ever seen, but a dull black, as if it had long since spilled out and dried.
“You’re bleeding,” Mandy said stupidly, in the gravelly whisper that was all the voice she had left.
Charlie turned toward her and grinned. God! He could have been the devil.
“Am I? Maybe I cut myself shaving.”
Perhaps half a minute had passed, and Mandy’s hands were beginning to swell. It hurt like hell if she tried to move her fingers, and she co
uld feel every beat of her heart like a vice tightening rhythmically. She was sure they were broken.
The line of blood from Charlie’s ear was all the way down his neck and had begun soaking into his shirt collar.
He went over to throw the bolt on the front door to the apartment and then came back.
“How many girls have you got in tonight?” he asked.
“Just two.”
“Well, you better give them a shout—unless you want me to go looking for them.”
He only had to glance at her to make her understand what that would mean. She pressed the button on the house intercom, the one she had had installed just in case the police raided them—hah, hah, hah.
“Sandra, Gail, get out here!”
After about fifteen seconds the two girls came shuffling out. Sandra wasn’t all that attractive, but she had red hair, which the customers seemed to love. She was wearing a blue cotton babydoll nightie and her feet were bare, showing off bright red toenails. Gail was a brunette with a terrific figure, something hard to miss in nothing but a black bra and a pair of red bikini panties. Both girls stared uncuriously around the room, at Sal on his knees, at Charlie and his cut down shotgun, as if they were on something. They probably were.
“What the fuck?” Sandra said at last.
“Go have a seat over there,” Charlie said, indicating with the muzzle of his shotgun a couple of chairs on the far side of the room. “And don’t neither one of you open your mouths again. You got that?”
They both nodded and did as they were told, scurrying to climb into their chairs, because it had finally occurred to them that they had walked into something very scary.
Then Charlie himself took a seat. He threw one leg over the other, laid the shotgun across his lap, and reached into his shirt pocket to get himself a cigarette. He was perfectly calm, even relaxed. His hand didn’t even shake as he held the match. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
He took two or three long drags on the cigarette, holding it in his right hand and letting the smoke curl slowly upward until it hit the current from the air conditioning vent and was hurried away, looking around the room as if he might be interesting in buying it.
Then he fixed the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and picked up the shotgun again.
“Take your clothes off, Sport. Let’s see what you got.”
Sal just stared at him, as if he couldn’t understand the words. And maybe he couldn’t, he looked that scared.
“I said strip—unless, of course, you’d rather die right now.”
Charlie lined the muzzle up with Sal’s head, and after a few seconds, in little shudders of movement, Sal began slowly to get to his feet.
When he was all the way up, he took off the sportcoat and let it drop. But he couldn’t seem to manage his hands well enough to undo the buttons on his shirt, and so finally, with a little cry of despair, he simply tore it off.
He stood there in the middle of the floor, naked from the waist up, his body pathetically white under his sparse, curling chest hair, mutely inquiring what else might be demanded of him.
For absolutely the first time, Mandy experienced a twinge of sympathy for the man. She could see it in his face—he was as good as dead.
But Charlie just laughed. He had no sympathy for anyone.
“Now the pants, Tough Guy. Come on, don’t be bashful. I’m sure the ladies ’ve all seen it before.”
Poor Sal almost fell over trying to get out of his pants, but finally he managed. Naked except for his argyle socks, his doughlike gut rising and falling with each shallow, frightened breath, he stood before his tormenter, waiting with dread for whatever might come next.
Leaning back in his chair, Charlie dropped his cigarette into an ashtray on the table beside him and lit another. He hardly seemed to notice Sal. He turned to Mandy with a speculative expression on his face—a face that even now seemed to be changing before her eyes.
“Are you the one I talked to on the phone?” he asked, as if it had just occurred to wonder.
Mandy felt a thrill of horror at the thought that she too might be required to strip.
“Yes.” Her throat, as he spoke, felt like sandpaper.
“You have a nice voice.” He smiled. The black blood was welling out of his ear now, and his skin seemed almost gray. He looked like a corpse. “Would you like to hear a story?”
With just the top joint of her neck, she was finally able to nod. She didn’t know which was more terrifying, what was going to happen or this guy.
“Good.” he said, looking pleased. If a corpse can look pleased. “It’s a great story—you’ll like it. It even has a happy ending.”
He turned to Sal, who was hunched slightly, as if trying somehow to shield his pathetic little dick, and he laughed.
“You like family stories, Sal? This is a family story—the Grazzi saga, you could call it.
“You see, once there was this guy, Grandpa Grazzi, only he wasn’t a grandpa then. He was just plain Eduardo Grazzi, and he did a very bad thing. But he died before he could be made to pay, and then his son died. You remember Dad, don’t you, Sal? Killed in a traffic accident when you were seventeen. Pity. Because that just leaves the grandson, little Sal, to pay the bill for the bad thing grandpa did. And that, Sal Baby, is why I’m gonna blow your cock off.”
With a movement so sudden you couldn’t even be sure you saw it, he wheeled the shotgun around and fired.
The noise was deafening. For an instant it seemed to obliterate everything else. And then there was a howling sound like nothing human and then a woman’s high-pitched scream—it might even have been her own, Mandy couldn’t be sure—and then it stopped. And then there was nothing except Sal’s quiet, abject sobbing as he lay on his side on the floor, clutching at his groin with both hands.
Except he didn’t seem to have a groin anymore, just a ragged tear across his lower body. The blood was pouring out over his hands.
“Get up, Sal.”
As if, even now, in the extremity of his pain, he had no will to resist, Sal struggled painfully to get to his knees.
“Look at me, Sal. Now say goodbye.”
There was another roar from the shotgun as Sal’s head, suddenly a blood mess, just came off at the neck. He collapsed to the floor, his arms and legs jerking convulsively.
“And so endeth the saga.”
Charlie stood up and stretched, like a man who has just finished a long nap. He reached down, took hold of Sal’s arm, and turned the lifeless, blood-smeared body over on its back.
“Yeah, I think now he’s really dead.”
The girls were whimpering with fear, their faces streaked by mascara-tainted tears.
“What about you? You don’t want to live to be an old woman, now do you?”
One step brought him to the desk. He reached out with the shotgun, which was like an extension of his arm, and pressed the muzzle into Mandy’s throat.
She could see his finger tightening on the trigger.
Click!
She wasn’t able to stop it. The muscles in her neck were twitching as if with some will of their own. She could hear herself moaning softly, but it sounded like someone else. It wasn’t her. She knew the shotgun had been empty, yet still she kept waiting for the explosion.
“How about that—you get to live.”
He lifted the shotgun up to about shoulder height and then dropped it. It hit the desk with a bang, almost as loud as if it had gone off.
Mandy began sobbing, soundlessly. She was trembling all over. She had no will. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even take her eyes off the shotgun.
“I’ll see you around, ladies.”
He laughed again—that terrible, inhuman sound—and then the bolt on the front door snapped open. He turned to look at them, and she could see that the whole side if his face was soaked in black, lifeless blood. The door opened, and he disappeared through it.
Mandy could hear the elevator open. When it started its descen
t, she began to scream.
Chapter 17
The first purchase Phil made with his recently acquired wealth was a new suit. After a late breakfast Saturday morning, he and Beth had driven down to a poshy men’s store on Greenley Avenue and he had picked it out. It had to be brown, he decided. In his whole life he had never owned a brown suit, but this one had to be brown. The one he finally settled on was rather rakish in cut and fit perfectly—all that needed doing were the trouser cuffs.
“I’d like you to have it ready by this afternoon,” he told the clerk, and tipped him twenty bucks. He rather enjoyed the way Beth’s eyes widened.
There was no problem, Sir. It would be ready anytime after three, Sir. He would take it right back to the tailor, Sir.
Then they took the ferry out to an island in the Sound, about a mile off shore, and spend about two hours chasing each other around in the surf. They picked up the suit precisely at three and went straight home, because Beth had to get ready for work.
“Do you like the suit?” he asked her.
“It’s fine.”
“But do you like it?”
She cocked her head a little to one side, as if annoyed at his persistence, and said, “It’s okay. Jimmy Cagney would have loved it.”
“If you don’t like it, why didn’t you say something in the store?”
“Because it’s your suit. It’s enough if you like it. It’s fine.”
And then she kissed him and told him to shut up about the suit.
He drove her to work and then got on the freeway to Stamford. The rest of the day was a blank until a quarter to eleven, when it was time to pick up Beth.
There were a lot of blank spots these days and he had learned to accept them as part of the new order of things, to which he found it easier simply to surrender himself. His hands ached slightly, as if he had been working with tools, and he wondered what he had been doing. He wasn’t really very curious, however, no more than it he were inquiring into how some stranger spent his time—it seemed to him almost as if the blank spots in his memory did belong to someone else. It just wasn’t any of his business. When he checked his wallet before going to bed, he noticed there were around four hundred dollars missing but he didn’t question that either. It wasn’t really his money.
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