Dressed to Kill

by Campbell Black

  She swayed her head slightly in time to the music from the jukebox. From the corner of her eye she was conscious of a man moving across the floor towards her, but she was mistaken, because as soon as he’d come level with her he went right past. She turned, seeing him go through the door to the street, trailing behind him some kind of scent, an after-shave, a cologne. She sipped the scotch, marvelling at the easy confidence the drink gave you.

  It still bothered her, though. She thought: Don’t let it.

  It doesn’t matter, whatever it is.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the singer’s voice. She liked the tune, the clear quality of the voice. It seemed to wrap itself around her, a certain optimism, a clarity that suggested you could hope, that hope had some meaning. She wanted to lose herself in the song, wanted to feel the atoms of herself dissolve in the notes, the tiny beats between the words of the lyric.

  Don’t let the other thing touch you now. It shouldn’t trouble you.

  She opened her eyes, seeing a reflection of herself in the mirror behind the bar. She looked, in that flattering glass, almost beautiful. And then another image moved directly behind her, the shape of a tall man, a heavy shadow. She watched his thick fingers come down on the bar beside her glass and she was reminded of the flight of a bird, a graceless bird.

  “Need that freshened up?” he asked.

  It was a long time before she turned around to look at him; the record changed, another took its place, and still she didn’t say anything, didn’t move. You have this confidence now, she thought. You have this sense of yourself soaring in some way. She leaned back slowly from her stool.

  “Are you buying?” she asked.

  “Sure,” the man said. “If you want me to.”

  “Thanks.”

  She watched another scotch being placed in front of her by the barman. “Jackson Irving,” the man said.

  “Bobbi.”

  “Good to meet you, Bobbi.”

  She smiled at him, lowering her eyes a little. She wanted to taste the clichés in her mouth, run them through her head as if they were minuscule drops of sparkling water. Do you come here often? What kind of work do you do? Do you live alone? She wanted to enjoy these things, even if she knew they were banal, mundane, like the questions in some absurdly simple crossword.

  “Live round here?” he asked. He had a moustache that reminded her of a zoo animal; she couldn’t think which one. A walrus? He had glasses with thick lenses and he wore a dark suit, a handkerchief tucked in the breast pocket. He seemed strangely stiff to her, as if the clothes he wore were a starched uniform.

  She nodded. “Close,” she said.

  She reached out and touched his handkerchief, wrecking its triangular shape. “Let me guess,” she said, throwing her head back slightly, running her tongue over her lipstick, astonished by the quickening of her own confidence and how easy it was to drift into it. “You’re a salesman from Greensboro.”

  He laughed and said, “Hell, no.”

  “Raleigh then.”

  “No.”

  “You mean I’m wrong?” Wide-eyed.

  “I fix computers,” he said.

  “Is that what you’re doing in New York? Fixing somebody’s computer?”

  He shook his head. “The company has this course every so often for its technicians. Like a refresher course. Things change so fast in the field.”

  She sipped her drink. Floating out, floating away; why couldn’t it always feel like this? This place where there weren’t any misgivings, where the uneasiness ceased to exist? A high cloud and you’re strolling through it and it’s light as the feather of a goose . . .

  “I’m from Watertown. Upstate New York.”

  “They have computers in Watertown?”

  “Sure they do.”

  She laughed, leaning forward so that her face came in contact with his shoulder. Jackson Irving from Watertown was just as silly as Walter Pidgeon from Pocatello, just as silly, as charming. What did this bar have—a monopoly on hicks? He reached for his drink, a yellowy concoction on the surface of which, like a drunk’s eye, there floated a cherry.

  “I’ve never been in this bar before,” he said.

  “I come all the time, all the time.” She was conscious of her own raised voice, wondering if she were talking too loudly, the sound too shrill. But Jackson Irving didn’t seem to notice or care. She turned away from him for a moment, looking around the room. Near the jukebox a few couples were shuffling around in a desultory way, creating the illusion of immobility, as if what they were doing was less a dance than a process of sleepwalking. They seemed bonded together by an adhesive that couldn’t be worked loose.

  “Do you want to dance?” he was asking.

  “I don’t think . . .” She turned her face towards him. He looked so solemn, so nervous somehow, that she wanted to laugh.

  “I don’t dance well,” he said. “I’m pretty clumsy.”

  “I’ll risk it,” she said. Why not? What was there to lose?

  She got down from the stool and walked across the floor. She felt his arms go round her waist and she closed her eyes tightly. Sometimes she could feel his breath upon her skin, against the side of her neck or upon the surface of her eyelids. Let this go on, she thought. Why should the music have to stop anyhow? Why should night turn into blistering day and light rip through the fabric of everything? She shifted against him, her hip to his. She realized with some slight thrill that he was hard, the hardness pressed to her outer thigh. She opened her eyes and looked at him but he had his shut, and she was reminded of a schoolboy holding off the last stroke of masturbation, sustaining the moment. She thought: I want to be promiscuous, I want to fuck all men . . .

  Then it moved in her mind again.

  The elevator. The razor dropping. That other woman reaching down and picking the razor up as the doors closed. It moved the way a dream will, disintegrating even as you think about it.

  She didn’t want it now. Close that door. But she remembered running, her feet clattering along a corridor, a back entrance and then an alley and then another street. It was vague and misty, an old recollection, and she didn’t want it now. She pressed her face close to the man’s neck. She was thinking of Levy next, trying to remember something Levy had said to her, words of comfort, promising words: I think we can work this problem out between us.

  Suddenly she realized it was ambiguous.

  We can work this problem out between us.

  What was that supposed to mean?

  She clasped the man tighter against her. She had to hold on to him because all at once there was an abrupt sense of slipping, as though something were breaking inside her, a euphoria yielding to a perilous dizziness, a height from which she didn’t want to fall. (There were boys in the boarding school and games of rugby and the open showers after that, the boys screaming and whistling and making masturbatory gestures under soapsuds, those boys, those boys with their pale buttocks and outgrowths of pubic hair . . . Why did she think of that now? It was somebody else’s thought, a disembodied perception, unrelated to her.)

  The music stopped. Jackson Irving led her to an empty booth in the far corner of the room, a dim corner where no light fell. I don’t want to be here, she thought. Not now.

  He sat very close to her, his hand upon the back of her wrist. He was opening and closing his mouth, words falling out like chips of sound, but she didn’t understand them. She felt his fingertips slide up her bare arm and, then beneath the table, his knuckles rest upon her knee-bone. She felt curiously tiny, distanced from herself, a speck floating through the dark space and back towards the light.

  “What’s the matter, Bobbi?”

  A pulse in her throat. Something trapped there. Something trapped and dying. She wanted to cry.

  “Hey, hey . . .”

  She laid her head back against the leather surface of the booth. She shut her eyes. The jukebox changed. She could hear the slow dancers shuffle still. The scraping of feet,
the noise of a singer: they became one screaming sound in her head. His knuckles weren’t there any more. He had turned his hand over. His palm was stroking the inside of her thigh. She opened her eyes and she thought: Everybody in this bar is watching, staring at me, at this scene going on, laughing about the hand under the table . . .

  No, nobody is. Nobody can see. Only me.

  She tried to change the position of her leg but the grip against her thigh had become firm.

  “Relax, relax, relax.”

  She stared at him. His face reminded her now of some puffy moon, the lenses of his glasses like dark craters gouged from the surface.

  Cocktease is that it?

  She shook her head. The grip of his hand seemed to her like the nerve center, the heart, of her sense of panic. She tried to pull herself away, but he was laughing and holding on.

  And then it happened.

  She saw him get up quickly from the table, his expression one of anger, his hand uplifted as if he meant to strike her. The fist hovered in the air, menacing and yet not, threatening and somehow absurd. He lowered his hand after a moment and, with a gesture of hopeless annoyance, swept her purse off the table. She reached down, fumbling for the damn thing, trying to pick up whatever had fallen out on the dark floor. She gathered it up quickly and rose and rushed towards the door and then the cold street outside.

  She felt humiliated, pained, betrayed by herself.

  And angry.

  It was the anger that was the worst part.

  She moved along the sidewalk, not thinking, not wanting to think. Wanting to hide, scream, cry, wishing a crack would develop in the universe, one goddamn hole into which she could disappear.

  But the anger wouldn’t go away.

  It burned inside her with the intensity of molten metal.

  Somehow she found a cab, got inside, told the driver just to cruise around for a time.

  Touched me, she thought. He touched me.

  (The air was filled with the screaming of kids, sunlight burned the grass, there were elongated shadows of trees, flattened outlines of branches etched in the grass, from somewhere the smell of a bonfire of dead leaves crackling in the long autumnal afternoon . . .

  She gazed out of the window.

  Anger, hatred. Oh, Jesus.

  Then she was remembering the face of the woman who’d reached inside the elevator. A pretty face. A face somebody like Jackson Irving wouldn’t want to hurt, wouldn’t raise his fist against. She took a Kleenex from her purse and raised it to her mouth. She was shaking. She hated herself for being so . . . so what?

  Weak?

  So angry?

  She looked through the window at the street. It comes back, forever, to Elliott. It always comes back to him. It stops there, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. Street signs floated past like they weren’t anchored to the ground, storefronts with their gridlike patterns of metal against the windows, people moving furtively through the night. The razor, she thought. But she didn’t have it now.

  That other woman had picked it up.

  That other woman who saw . . .

  The pretty one.

  Anger is close to fear, she thought. Like two countries with a common border, a frontier you could easily pass over. Damn, that was something of his, something he’d said once, and now she was remembering in such a way that it seemed like her own thoughts. You’re angry, you’re also afraid, Bobbi. When you’ve got a passport for one, never forget you have a visa for the other. A visa, a passport—that was just so goddamn stupid, so goddamn banal the way he talked, the images he formed, the look on his face that made you think: He’s astonished by his cleverness, the prick.

  Oh Christ.

  She tried to force her mind to something else, away from Elliott. It was the young woman’s face she saw, floating into her thoughts with the consistency of a nightmare.

  Try to remember.

  Try to remember where . . .

  Outside the window the city floated past, hewn out of the darkness like a shapeless sculpting, hacked out of the night as if some careless artist had worked out his own nightmare in concrete. She shivered, afraid now. Afraid of herself, of what she would do next.

  She leaned forward and tapped the glass that separated her from the driver.

  2

  “I saw a fucking murder!”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Yeah, I’m kidding. I’m kidding so hard that the best part I’ve saved to the last, Norma. The cops have this weird notion I did it.”

  “Now I know you’re joking.”

  “You can hear it in my voice, right?”

  A pause. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Tell me you’re not.”

  “I’ve never been so goddamn serious.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I’m not sure he can help, Norma.”

  “Listen. You want me to come over?”

  “I think I’d like that.”

  “Give me about thirty minutes.”

  Liz put the telephone down and walked around her bedroom. She folded her arms under her breasts. Some things, she thought, you just don’t want to remember. Some things you relegate to oblivion. She went to the window and parted the curtains, looking down into the black street below. Some things you just can’t put away like that, because it isn’t easy. As long as you live, kid, you aren’t going to forget what you saw, you aren’t going to forget the blood, the sight of two faces—the victim and the assassin. No way.

  She stepped out of the bedroom into her living room.

  She lit a cigarette. She was cold suddenly, as if some invisible draft had rushed through the apartment. Maybe what you could do was make it seem like a dream . . . The hell you could. Dreams had fuzzy edges sometimes, but this picture was outlined in black, sharp around the margins. That face behind those black glasses. She couldn’t think which was worse: looking at the dying woman or staring straight at the killer.

  She gazed at the scratch marks on the back of her hand.

  The dead woman’s last testament.

  Liz strolled idly into the kitchen. She felt strangely alone in the apartment—not the sense of solitude she so often looked forward to, but something deeper and more forlorn than that. She sat down at the kitchen table. She put her hands inside the pockets of her dressing gown. Why hadn’t that guy Ted come with her as far as the elevator? A simple courtesy, that was all: I’ll walk you to the elevator, honey. Then she would have had a witness. But Ted, after the act, seemed only interested in her departure; like a lot of guys, a vague sense of shame accompanied detumescence. It was as if they suddenly started to remember their wives, their kids, as if they half-expected to be caught in the act. Big guilt trips. If only he’d walked to the elevator . . .

  But no deal.

  Okay, she thought. About this time I should be going into a state of shock. Instead, she felt numb and tired. She yawned, stubbed her cigarette, lit a fresh one. What kind of world was it when the employees of a so-called escort service needed to be escorted themselves? She got up and walked around the kitchen, switched on the garbage disposal, listened to the violence of the blades, switched it off again, looked inside the refrigerator, then closed the slats of the blind.

  The sound of her phone ringing was startling, like the needle of some vicious dentist baring a nerve. She picked it up. It clicked, went dead.

  She held the receiver, set it down, and thought: Out there in the naked city there were loonies who made these pointless calls. They wanted to irritate you. I should get an unlisted number, she said to herself. How many times had the telephone rung in the past and there wasn’t anybody on the line?

  A few times, she thought.

  Not all that often.

  Okay, so some weirdo decided to spook you with a call. Maybe a burglar checking out possible clientele . . . Somehow this didn’t convince her. She wanted to talk herself into believing it.

  She picked up the receiver and dialled a number with the area code
312. She could see her mother getting up from her late-night show; she had this strange fondness for Randolph Scott movies.

  “Ma,” Liz said. “Did I wake you?”

  “Liz? No, of course not, I was watching the box—”

  “Ma, did you call me a moment ago?”

  “It’s funny you should ask. I was thinking of doing just that.”

  Telephonic telepathy. “But you didn’t actually dial, did you?”

  “No. Why? Somebody call you?”

  Liz was silent for a second. “I guess it was nothing. How are you anyhow?”

  “I’m fine. Arganbright put me on some new medication, it seems to help. At least, I don’t feel quite so stiff, and the pain is less than it was.”

  Arganbright, the old family physician. Liz tried to picture his weary face; it was the kind of face you could imagine presiding over the deliveries of a million babies, knotting a million umbilical cords. Arganbright had even delivered her.

  “Is something wrong, Liz?”

  Ah. The mother’s intuition. It was as eerie as radar. “Nothing,” Liz said.

  “You’re still coming at Christmas?”

  “Sure I am. Looking forward to it.” Like hell. The family gathering, turkey stuffing and cranberry sauce and assorted relatives, none of whom had much in common with one another, all of whom had travelled great distances for the dubious privilege of unwrapping some tinselly items and getting indigestion.

  “Uncle Frank is coming,” Liz’s mother said.

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Uncle Frank, Liz thought. You could look at some old guys and just imagine them dandling seven-year-old girls lasciviously on their knees. Like Uncle Frank.