Dressed to Kill

by Campbell Black

  “Do you still want to hurt her?” Elliott asked.

  “I don’t know,” the young man said.

  “Do you think I should talk with her?”

  “I don’t think she’d talk with you—” The young man, brushing a curl from his forehead, smiled. It was a bleak smile. “She thinks head-doctors are poison.”

  “Poison,” Elliott said, and laughed. “We get called all kinds of names.” He paused, picked up his letter opener. “You’re not living at home now, are you?”

  “I rented a room. It’s not much.”

  “Does she know where to find you?”

  “She’ll find out. She always finds out.”

  Elliott heard his telephone.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the young man as he picked up the receiver.

  The voice on the other end of the line said, “Dr. Elliott? This is George Levy. I understand you left a message about wanting to see me.”

  “That’s right,” Elliott said.

  “Can you give me some idea of what you want?”

  Elliott paused. Then he said, “It concerns a patient of mine. A former patient, I should say. It’s imperative that I see you as soon as I can. I’m in a consultation at the moment—can I call you back?”

  “I’m a little mystified,” Levy said. “Why the urgency?”

  “I’d prefer to talk to you in person, Dr. Levy.”

  There was a silence; Elliott could hear the other man flick the pages of a book.

  “I don’t know when it would be convenient,” Levy said after a while. “Why don’t you ring me when you’re free?”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  Elliott put the receiver down. He looked at his young patient, then glanced at his watch.

  “We’re just about out of time, I’m afraid.”

  The young man nodded. “Same time next week?”

  “Certainly.” Elliott got up. He thought: I could talk to Anne, ask her to think things over, see if it can be made good again. Had it ever been any good? He walked out into the reception room with the young man.

  “I’ll see you next week, Arthur. If anything comes up in the meantime, you can always reach me.”

  The young man smiled, then he was gone.

  Elliott looked round the empty waiting room, then returned to his office where—after hesitating, after wondering how he was going to approach the subject of Bobbi with another psychiatrist—he picked up his telephone and dialled Levy’s number.

  Even before it was answered in Levy’s office, he put the receiver down. Think, he told himself. Think it through carefully before you talk with Levy. The problem was still the same: the idea that you were protecting a killer. He rubbed his jaw and looked at the telephone, wishing that Bobbi would ring back. Wishing he could just talk with her, locate her, then he’d know what to do for sure.

  But she hadn’t called and he had no idea where she was now.

  He dialled Levy’s number.

  5

  It was one of those old-fashioned stores that pretend to cater to a diminishing species—the gentleman. There were racks of tweed sportscoats, shelves of toilet requisites, expensive imported lotions and after-shaves, handcrafted leather boots and equestrian accoutrements, saddles and riding crops and jodhpurs; there were shotguns, pith helmets, assorted decoy ducks, a multitude of fishing poles and brightly-colored flies. More than anything else, it suggested the paraphernalia of an empire that the United States had never possessed in the first place. The clerks were hushed and reverential, moving around in a manner that indicated they were gliding on smooth rollers. Here was a counterfeit history, a sense of antiquity stolen from another culture, and everybody spoke, it seemed, with English accents.

  She felt out of place; a discordant element.

  When the clerk approached her in his dark jacket and pinstripe pants she wanted to back out of the store, make an excuse, claim she’d come to the wrong place. But she didn’t. When she explained what she wanted—“a gift for an old friend, of course”—the clerk simply nodded and disappeared behind a counter, returning a moment later with a tray of objects, which he held in front of her as if he were a waiter in a gourmet restaurant tempting a customer with a lavish assortment of desserts.

  She stared at the array of objects. The clerk, waiting, said nothing. Finally, she chose one with a pearl handle. The clerk said it was an excellent choice and made some comment lamenting the passing of such instruments. “We live, madam, in a disposable society,” he remarked. “I trust the day will not come when we eventually dispose of ourselves.”

  She smiled. She watched him place the pearl-handled thing inside a leather case. She saw him drop it inside a bag discreetly embossed with the name of the store. She paid, imagining for a moment that the sight of cash distressed the clerk. But he apparently recovered. “I’m sure your friend will find that to his liking,” he said.

  She stepped outside into the sunlight of the afternoon, dropping the paper bag inside her purse. She took out her black glasses and put them on because the sudden harshness of the sun had made her blink.

  It was close to five when Peter went to get his bicycle from its place opposite Elliott’s office. He was relieved to find nobody had tampered with it. He looked inside the metal box, made sure everything was in its place, then unlocked the padlock that bound the bike to the NO PARKING sign. He pedalled quickly away; he could hardly wait to have the photographs printed.

  She watched the entranceway.

  Nothing much happened.

  A florist’s delivery man went inside with a bouquet of flowers.

  A brown van from United Parcels drew up, then pulled away without making a delivery.

  A beat cop strolled past, then disappeared round the corner.

  She looked up at the windows of the building. They were flattened, like beaten gold, by the failing sun.

  Sooner or later the woman would come out. Sooner or later she would have to.

  Peter parked his bicycle in the parking lot behind an apartment building, padlocking it to the bars provided for bikes. He removed the metal box from the rack and went inside the building. He couldn’t wait for the elevator, so he rushed the stairs to the third floor, then he searched the doors for number three five four. When he found it he pressed the doorbell, waited, and then the door was opened by a small dark-haired woman in her early fifties.

  “Is Gunther home?” Peter asked, clutching the box hard to his side.

  The woman said something in German, then turned her face along the corridor and called out Gunther’s name. After a moment, Peter could make out the shape of his friend at the end of the dark lobby of the apartment—unmistakable, with that strange Afro he wore and the way he stooped to detract from his height.

  “Didn’t think you were coming,” Gunther said. “Wanna come in?”

  Peter stepped inside, the woman closed the door, muttered something else in German, and then Peter followed Gunther into a side room.

  “You said you’d pay,” Gunther said. “I wouldn’t ask, you being a friend, but I’m pretty short of bread right now.”

  “I brought the bucks,” Peter said. He took two crumpled five dollar bills from his jacket and handed them to Gunther. The other kid stared at them, as if he suspected counterfeits. Then, seemingly satisfied, he stuffed them in his jeans.

  “Here’s the film,” Peter said.

  Gunther took the roll. “I don’t see the urgency, man.”

  “Just develop the film, okay?”

  Gunther shrugged. He closed the door of what was obviously his bedroom—a messy room, whose walls were covered with posters of an hallucinogenic nature; mushrooms and patterns created out of surrealistic marijuana leaves and circles of smoke. Then he opened the door of a large closet, which Peter saw was his darkroom.

  “I prefer to work alone,” Gunther said. “But if you keep quiet and don’t get in my way, you can come inside. Okay?”

  “You won’t hear anything from me,” Peter sai
d.

  They went inside the darkroom. Gunther turned on the red light. Peter surveyed the rows of trays, the bottles of chemicals. He watched as Gunther opened the film and bent over the trays. The red light cast a weird glow over everything. Gunther put the film into a developing tank, then worked at something Peter couldn’t see because the kid had his back to him.

  “How long does this take?” Peter asked.

  “You said you’d be quiet, man,” Gunther answered.

  “Okay, okay. I’m a little impatient, that’s all.”

  “A little?”

  Peter stared at the shelves on the walls. There were bottles fixed with abbreviated words like DEV and FIX and STOP. For a moment he wished he were interested enough to have a darkroom of his own, but it was too late to worry about that now. Around him there were wires from which clothespins hung suspended. Peter whistled quietly through his teeth, then Gunther looked at him in a chilly way. So he was quiet. It all seemed to be taking such a goddamn long time. He tried to relax.

  After a while, Gunther said, “What kinda pictures are these, man?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Gunther hung a few up by the pins. “They’re like the door of a house or something.”

  Peter stared at the first few shots. He felt a terrible sense of disappointment. They showed only the door of Elliott’s office. Gunther produced another one.

  “This one’s got somebody in it, at least.”

  Peter looked at it. It was a photograph of a young man coming out of the office. After that there was another sequence of uninteresting ones.

  Three of the door.

  One that showed a mailman moving out of shot.

  Then a lady with a dog.

  Then, tantalizingly, one of the door half open—but with no figure visible.

  There were a couple of blurred shots of people just passing.

  “Hey, these are great,” Gunther said. “You could really make yourself a name, man. Some new kind of avant-garde photography. Pictures that don’t mean anything, you know?”

  “Just keep developing,” Peter said.

  Gunther shrugged and went back to work.

  Two of the door.

  A drunk, apparently, swaying past with a brown paper bag in his hand.

  The edge of somebody’s leg, blurred.

  Peter had a sense of futility, of having wasted his time.

  Then there was one of Elliott, beautifully clear. He was standing in the doorway, one hand raised, as if he were seeing somebody out; there wasn’t anybody else in the picture, though. There was a dark spot at the edge, which might have been a shadow.

  Two more of the door, darker now as the shadows deepened.

  “Terrific stuff,” Gunther was saying, whistling in mock appreciation. “I mean, real terrific.”

  A teenage girl.

  Two more of the door.

  Half of a cop passing—or at least somebody in uniform.

  “You know what?” Gunther said. “You could exhibit these, man. There’s always some loony prepared to pay a fortune for stuff he doesn’t understand. You could call the exhibition The Edges of Things. You like that?”

  “I hate it,” Peter said.

  Gunther hung up a few more. They were darker.

  And then there was a curious one, one so strange that Peter felt something become tight in his chest. It was blurry and indistinct, and the shadows were darker still, but it showed a blonde woman apparently passing the steps . . .

  A blonde with black glasses . . .

  Hadn’t Marino said something like that?

  But then Peter’s brief excitement passed. This blonde had no dark glasses, nor was it obvious that she was leaving Elliott’s office. Christ, she could be anybody, anybody just passing by in the street. Don’t get your hopes up. In any case, the picture was so dark that it was hard to make anything out. What the hell, it was as bad as the other pictures. He clenched his hands in frustration.

  Then there were a couple more of the door, now almost totally dark.

  “That’s it, man. I think you’ve thrown ten bucks down the tubes,” Gunther said.

  “Yeah. Looks that way.”

  “You want them anyhow?”

  Peter nodded. “I might as well. I paid for them, didn’t I?”

  Gunther giggled. “Anytime you need fast work done, Peter, you know I’m your man.”

  When he left Gunther’s Peter cycled to a drugstore. He bought another roll of film, dropped it inside the camera, and rode back to the NO PARKING sign outside Elliott’s office. He adjusted the time-lapse control of the small electric motor so that the shutter would start operating just after dawn of the following day, then take a shot every fifteen minutes. Maybe he’d have better luck this time, but it was hard to avoid the feeling he’d begun to entertain that the whole thing was a wild exercise in futility.

  He padlocked the bike to the sign, then made sure that the metal box was fastened securely to the rack.

  He looked across the street at Elliott’s door.

  Then he locked the other padlock, the one attached to the box.

  When he’d finished, he stared once more across the street.

  It was hard to tell—the light was bad, the streetlamps feeble, the exhaust from a passing bus suddenly dense—it was hard to tell anything, but he felt all his pulses leap abruptly; and it was as if something impossibly bright had lit up in the dark of his head.

  SIX

  1

  He was a man in his late thirties, slightly overweight, and he wore bifocal glasses that continually slipped down the bone of his nose, so that he had to keep pushing them back upwards again with a thick index finger. He did this so frequently that it was like a nervous mannerism, a tic he could do nothing to prevent. His clothes were expensively cut, the vest tailored to disguise the plumpness of his belly. He occupied a suite of rooms on the top floor of the Parkway: a large living room with a view of the darkness that was Central Park, a bedroom through whose open door Liz could see a king-size bed. He spoke with the kind of accent that has been processed through good Eastern schools. Across the front of his vest there was a gold watch chain.

  When he asked Liz to come in he said, “I assume you’re from the escort service—”

  “That’s right,” she said. She went at once to the window and looked out at the blackness of the park far below.

  He said, “You’re very pretty.”

  “What did you expect? Quasimodo?”

  He laughed. “Hardly that. It’s just that sometimes . . . sometimes one’s expectations aren’t exactly met.”

  She turned around to look at him, noticing an ice bucket on a table, a bottle of champagne. She was conscious of how he was staring at her, scrutinizing her, as if some set of inner calculations were rushing through his head. He took the bottle of champagne from the bucket and, straining, managed to uncork it. He poured two glasses and handed her one. She sipped it slowly, watching him over the rim of her glass.

  “Nice place,” she said.

  “It costs an arm and a leg,” he answered. “Company money.”

  “What kind of company?”

  “Consultancy. The placement of upper echelon personnel. You know, executives, vice-presidents, those kind of people.”

  “And that’s what you do?”

  The man smiled. “It’s my company,” he said.

  “So you’re the company president?”

  “President and owner and anything else you’d care to name.” He sat down on a sofa. He patted the cushion next to him and Liz walked across the floor, sat beside him, crossed her legs so that her skirt slid upwards, the slit revealing a pale surface of thigh.

  “Where do you come from?” he said. “I’ve been trying to place your accent. Usually I’m quite good at that.”

  “Chicago, originally,” she said.

  “Chicago is such a vital place,” he said. “I get there a lot.”

  He paused, twisted the stem of his glass between his
fingers, smiled at her. His other hand touched the faint scratch marks on the back of her fingers.

  “An accident?” he said.

  “A bad-tempered cat,” she answered.

  “Pity. You have such nice hands.” He finished his drink and reached for the bottle again. When he offered it to Liz, she shook her head.

  “Were you in the same line of business in Chicago?” he asked.

  “I taught remedial reading,” Liz said.

  “Remedial reading?” He tilted his head back, smiled in an absentminded way. “Forgive the question—how do you get from remedial reading to becoming . . .”

  “A hooker?”

  “Yes.”

  “The pay is better.”

  “Ah, the mercenary motive. I understand that.”

  Liz put her glass down on the table. “I’ll make more money tonight than I’d make in a month of teaching kids. I also tried a little secretarial work before I went into teaching, but I had this boss who wanted to pay me two hundred a week and fuck me in the bargain. So I didn’t fuck him, which meant I got fired. After a while, you begin to realize you’ve got your priorities confused . . .”

  The man touched her wrist “How long have you been in this business?”

  She stared at him. “We don’t have to talk, you know.”

  “I’m enjoying it” he said.

  “It’s your bread.” She looked at her watch. “And I hate to mention it, but your meter is running.”

  “Company money,” the man said. “My name’s Sam, by the way.”

  Liz leaned her head back against the sofa. A talker. Why did so many of them want to talk? Speech was the lowest form of aphrodisiac. She’d had people in the past who bought her time out of some terrible loneliness, people who had no intention of screwing: the lonely conventioneers, businessmen, sad salesmen. Some of them even dragged out photographs of wife and family for your perusal, and you made suitably impressed noises. Now he was filling his glass again.

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  “Eight years.”

  “Have you cheated on your wife before?”

  “Cheated?” He looked a little perplexed. “This doesn’t really count as cheating, does it?”