Then he closed his eyes and leaned against the door jamb.
How had she got in? How had she managed to enter the office when he was out? A stolen key?
He looked at the mirror again, seeing the lipsticked words spread across his own pallid reflection.
SORRY I MISSED YOU DOC
BUT I’LL BE SEEING YOU SOON
LOVE FROM BOBBI
He ripped several squares of toilet tissue from the roll and began feverishly to wipe at the words. But the more he worked the more the writing smeared so that the whole mirror was soon a mass of red streaks. He crumpled the tissue and dropped it in the toilet, then stepped back. She was here when I was out, he thought. Here.
He slammed the bathroom door and went to the sofa, where he lay down with his eyes shut. Tomorrow, he thought, he would see Levy. After that, he couldn’t go on protecting Bobbi.
How could he?
SEVEN
1
The weather changed. The clear skies became muddy, storm clouds hung across the city with the inevitability of some unnameable doom, shrouding the peaks of high-rise buildings in a dark mist. Marino, stepping out of his parked car, looked up at the sky. This wasn’t his kind of weather. He reacted to it in a personal way, disliking it as he might detest an enemy. It brought on dull headaches and caused his sinuses to ache. He walked across the parking lot and went inside the precinct house. He’d slept badly last night, dreaming distorted dreams, haunted by unidentifiable shapes. Once, when he’d woken up sweating, his skin adhering to the bedsheets, Mary had propped herself up on an elbow and stroked his forehead. You’re coming down with something, Joseph. You really need to take better care of yourself. But now he wasn’t sure if he’d dreamed that up either; and when he’d left the house that morning she was still asleep, so he couldn’t ask her to be sure. Funny that—how you sometimes had to check reality out, confirming events with other people.
He went inside his office and hung his coat up on the wall. He sat behind his desk and reached for the tickets to the ball game. Shit, he thought. I can’t break that promise. He stuck the tickets inside his jacket pocket, then he thought about the Myers killing. It was like a surface of hard ice without a crack in sight. What did he have except for Liz Blake? And that didn’t amount to a big score. He could hardly drag her in and book her without something a little more solid to go on, and besides, he couldn’t think of a motive that would explain Liz Blake killing Kate Myers. So what did he have? A great fucking blind alley. Okay, what about the shrink? What about one of the shrink’s patients? Straws in the wild wind. Sometimes, though, you had to clutch what you could. He stared, deep in thought, at the surface of his desk.
Messages, messages.
At three A.M. that morning a body had been fished out of the river up around 125th Street. Marino read the report, skimming it. Female caucasian. Dead for roughly three days. Multiple stab wounds. Multiple stab wounds, for Christ’s sake.
At four thirty-seven A.M. a corpse had been found in a derelict tenement. Black male, age approximately forty, gunshot wounds to the face and neck.
He put the reports aside and stood up, strolled to the window, looked out. What was it about the human race that made it want to self-destruct? What kind of mad genetic factor was it that caused people to kill? He pressed his face against the glass. The city doesn’t pay you to be a philosopher, he thought. It pays you to solve these fucking murders, and when you don’t, the taxpayers have a tendency to become irate. Somebody like Kate Myers lies in a bath of her own blood—shit, the taxpayer wants to be sure that he isn’t going to be the next goddamn victim.
The door of his office opened.
He turned to see a uniformed cop standing there. A new guy, fresh uniform, a look of eagerness about the eyes. After a while, that kind of light was extinguished, and what you saw instead was a glazed weariness.
“Yeah?” Marino said.
“There’s somebody to see you, sir,” the young cop said.
“Who?”
“A Miss Blake.”
Marino raised his eyebrows, then nervously touched the edge of his moustache. “I’ll see her,” he said.
The young cop went out. Then Liz Blake came in.
Marino indicated she should sit, but she didn’t. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her coat, her face pale and tired. A hard night’s work, Marino thought. It had to be a hell of a way to make a few bucks.
“You come down to confess?” he asked.
“How did you guess?” she said.
“Call it a cop’s instinct.”
She was silent for a time, chewing lightly on her lower lip, her eyes turned towards the window.
“Shitty weather,” Marino said.
She nodded. Then she sat down, took a Kleenex from her pocket, and lightly touched the tip of her nose with it. “Something bad happened last night,” she said.
“Oh yeah?”
“She tried to kill me.”
Marino leaned against the edge of his desk. “Who tried to kill you?”
“The same woman . . . the same woman I saw in the elevator.”
“Where did this happen?”
“In the subway—”
“The subway, huh?”
“Do I detect disbelief in your voice, Lieutenant?”
“You imagine too much, Liz.”
“You think I imagined I was almost killed? Jesus Christ! She came at me with this razor—”
“Another razor, huh? She must have quite a supply—”
“You don’t believe me, is that it?”
“Let’s see. A subway. A public place. It stands to reason there must have been a witness, right? It’s common enough to find people in subways, as I understand it . . .”
She looked at him with irritation. “Look, she followed me, I thought I’d lost her, but then she was waiting for me when I got back to my apartment . . .”
Marino clasped his hands together, moving his arms as if he were swinging an imaginary baseball bat. “I was asking about witnesses. Were there any?”
She paused a moment. “No,” she said.
“Terrific, Liz. All kinds of things seem to happen to you when there’s nobody else around to see them.”
“I didn’t come here to listen to your wiseass comments, Marino.”
“Marino now. We’re getting pretty familiar. Next thing you know we’ll be having cocktails in some quiet little bar of an evening.”
“Goddamnit, somebody is trying to kill me, Marino—”
“I know a neat little cell where you’ll be perfectly safe.”
She paused, rose from her chair, went to the window.
Marino watched her. A pretty thing, he thought. What makes a pretty thing like her become a hooker?
Rain was beginning to slither down the window now.
“I’m going to tell you something, Marino. I’m going to tell you how to find this killer.”
“I’m all ears,” Marino said.
She turned to look at him. “The woman who killed Kate Myers, the same woman who tried to kill me, is a patient of a certain Dr. Elliott.”
“So how do you figure that one?”
“She came out of his office.”
“You saw her, did you? You just happened to be passing the guy’s office when, lo and fucking behold, there she was?”
“I’m getting pretty pissed off with your attitude, Marino.”
He shrugged. “Did you see her or didn’t you?”
“Not personally, no. But I know she’s one of his patients. And all you’ve got to do is take a look at his appointments book for yesterday and find a name, the rest shouldn’t be too hard. Even for you.”
“The vote of confidence is appreciated,” he said, bowing his head in a mocking way. “Tell you a funny thing, though. I beat you to the punch, sweetheart. I already thought about the good doctor’s book, but I just can’t walk into his office and pilfer the goddamn thing, because I need a warrant and sometimes a warrant is a sl
ow process because judges have to be wakened from their beauty sleep, which often they don’t appreciate. Understand? A cop can’t go snooping round a shrink’s office without a certain piece of paper.”
“That’s just wonderful,” Liz said. “So while you’re wasting your time thinking about this shitty piece of paper, there’s a maniac running around—”
“According to you there is,” he said.
Liz sighed, irritated. “You don’t believe me even yet, do you?”
“Let’s just say I’m having this difficulty, Liz. Let’s just say there’s a credibility gap the size of the Grand Canyon—”
She put her hands firmly on her hips and stared at him. “You know what I think, Marino? I think you’re a goddamn incompetent sonofabitch. I think you’re what is called a waste of the taxpayer’s money, you know that? I’m laying this thing dead in your lap and you’re acting like you don’t even hear me . . .”
Marino smiled at her. “Compliments you can save, sweetheart. Right now I’m speculating on how long you’ll get. A good lawyer could maybe get you off with twenty—”
“Eat it.”
“Or you could be looking at something longer. Life? Hard to tell. Courts work in funny ways, you know.” He picked up some papers from his desk, shuffled them, sighed. Then he stared at her again, still smiling in that irksome way. “You’re pretty. You’re a real good-looking woman. You wouldn’t have any trouble finding company in the slammer. I mean, they’d be fighting over proprietorial rights to you, you know that?”
“Marino . . .”
“Naturally, you’d lose some of that bloom you have right now. You’d lose your looks after a time. You’d find yourself walking up and down your thirty-six square feet night after night. And when that old moon comes up through the bars, well . . . Jesus, it’d drive you crazy. Then you’d grow old before your name even came up before the parole board. You’d grow old and hard and pale and you wouldn’t be the pretty thing you are now. Tough shit. But sometimes you have to play the cards you’re dealt, you know?”
“Spare me the sermons, Marino. You can’t book me—”
“Can you stop me, Liz?” He sighed, an actor in an amateur production. He threw his hands up in a play at despair. “You’re my main man. You’re my numero uno, kid. You’re the only ace in my deck, so you better believe I can book you.”
She folded her arms and tried to look defiant; but there was something in his eyes, a hard light, a warning, that made her feel small inside, small and frightened.
“Lady, you’d hate jail, believe me. You’d hate the guards, the lack of sunlight, the food that makes you want to gag. I’d hazard a guess you’d even hate the only kind of screwing that’d be available to you.” He got up from his desk, stuck his hands in the pockets of his pants, the smile still on his face. He shook his head from side to side. “What a goddamn waste it would be, Liz. Makes my heart break.”
She was silent. A bluff, that was all. But how could she know with a guy like Marino? “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead. Book me. Why don’t you do that?”
“I intend to.”
It was like the sound of a heavy metal door slamming. She could hear it echo, rattling, in her mind.
“The jury’s going to go for your guts, sweetheart. Such a violent crime.” He watched her, drumming his desk with his fingertips. “Very nasty. They don’t like that. An open razor. No, they won’t like that at all . . .”
She wanted to challenge him again. She wanted to say: Book me. But she didn’t have the heart to say it a second time.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Unless something turns up between now and then, I’ll book you tomorrow.”
“Unless what turns up?” she said.
“Oh . . .” He paused. He touched his moustache, stroking it lightly. “I don’t know. A certain appointments book, maybe.”
“Hold it. Just hold it a moment.”
“I mean,” Marino said. “You’re a paranoid murder suspect. You’re not expected to behave rationally, not with your head on the chopping block. A certain appointments book might just happen to come your way.”
“No—”
“Stir crazy. They tell me that’s the worst thing that can happen to a person in the slammer.”
“Marino—are you asking me to get inside Elliott’s office and steal that goddamn book for you? Is that what you’re asking me?”
“I didn’t say that, did I?”
“The hell you didn’t—”
He sat down, looked at some papers again, straightened them out.
She said, “There’s a word for this, Marino. A nasty word.”
“Yeah?”
“Fucking blackmail.”
“Me? Blackmail you? I’m a cop, lady. I don’t break laws. I uphold them. It’s my sworn duty.”
“Like hell.”
He started to write something, ignoring her. Without looking up, he said, “Tomorrow.”
She hesitated a moment, then she went quickly to the door.
When she’d gone out he sat back smiling.
2
It was shortly after midday when she met Peter at a cafeteria on West Fifty-seventh Street. He was sitting in a far corner of the place, smothering a hamburger with ketchup. As she approached him he looked up smiling, and she thought: What an unlikely alliance this is. A hooker and a kid, sharing a common purpose. She slid into the seat facing him.
“You always use that much ketchup?” she asked.
“It takes the taste away,” he said. “What happened?”
“With Marino?”
He nodded, biting into the hamburger. A slick of ketchup fell on to his plate.
“He’s given me what you might call an ultimatum, kid.”
“Like how?”
“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“He wants me to get inside Elliott’s office and take a look at his appointments book.”
“How are you going to do that?”
Liz took a cigarette from her purse. “I had a bright idea. At least it seemed bright when I thought about it. It seemed even brighter still when I considered the alternative—the slammer.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
She hesitated. “I don’t think I like the idea, but I can’t think of anything better . . .”
Peter put down his half-eaten hamburger and leaned forward across the table to listen.
3
George Levy’s office was located in a building on Forty-second Street. As he rode up in the elevator Elliott tried to suppress the nervousness he felt. It had been a restless night, moments of light sleep punctuated with thoughts of his wife, with thoughts of Bobbi too—the idea that somehow she’d been able to get inside the office when he was out. And once, when he’d dreamed, he imagined her standing over him with an open razor, her face grim, her words sounding as if they were spoken in an echo chamber: Your time is coming too, Elliott. Make no mistake . . .
He got out of the elevator and followed the signs to Levy’s office. The reception room was Naugahyde and rubber plants and piped Muzak; the girl behind the desk was attractive in a plastic way, as if Levy had selected her from a Sears catalogue—the kind of girl you might see modelling the latest in bikinis. He announced himself at the desk. The girl smiled, rose, and showed him into an inner office. Levy rose, his hand extended, Elliott shook it; the girl withdrew.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t see you before,” Levy said. “You know how it is—busy schedule, et cetera. Sit down.”
Elliott sat, facing the desk. He gazed at George Levy a moment. He was a plump little man with a mass of unruly gray hair. He had the sort of expression that suggested he was forever scrutinizing, forever analyzing; it was a look under which Elliott felt distinctly uncomfortable. There was something else too, something Elliott felt only in a vague way—that Levy was familiar to him. Maybe they’d met at some convention, or at a symposium.
Levy smiled. “I’m at a
loss to understand what it is you want to see me about, I’m afraid. I hope you can enlighten me.”
“I think I can,” Elliott said. “It concerns a former patient of mine, someone I understand you’re treating now.”
Levy glanced at his watch, then raised his face to look at Elliott. There was an expression on Levy’s face, an expression that might have been one of uncertainty, of bewilderment, but it passed quickly.
“I understand the need for confidentiality,” Elliott said, smiling in a weak way. “But there are special circumstances involved here . . .”
“It would help if you named the patient involved—”
“Bobbi—”
“Ah, yes, Bobbi.” Levy took out his pipe and lit it, stuffing it from a cracked leather pouch. He spent several matches before he had the pipe lit.
“I have no doubt in my mind,” Elliott said, “that she’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
Elliott paused. “She’s threatened to cause me trouble because I refused to approve a sex change operation.”
“Why did you refuse?”
“It was my opinion—and it still is—that she isn’t a true transsexual.”
“Perhaps you can explain that to me, Dr. Elliott.”
“A true transsexual has an unalterable belief that she is one sex trapped, so to speak, in the body of the other. In the case of Bobbi, however, she is not aware of her other self—and it was my diagnosis that she’s really a dangerous schizophrenic personality. That her treatment should not involve a sex change operation but instead drug and behavioral therapy in a confined environment.”
“Such as a mental institution?”
“Exactly.”
Levy stared at him. Elliott looked away—why was the stare so damnably unnerving?
“What kind of trouble has she caused you?” Levy asked.
Elliott paused again. The edge, the darkness below, but how could he go on protecting Bobbi?
He said, “There have been telephone calls of a troublesome nature. If it were only that, of course, I don’t think I should be so worried as I am. However . . .”
Levy looked at him questioningly.
“She also stole my razor from my office.”
“Why?”
Dressed to Kill Page 17
