His face and beard were sticky with blood. His shin was stuck to his sock with blood. He felt like he might need a transfusion at any moment. He couldn’t seem to bend his left wrist. He leaned against the wall, watching the lights going out in all the apartment windows rising around him as one o’clock came. He wondered in this moment of quiet how he’d come to such an absurd place, and the answer wasn’t long in coming.
Zoe Bassinetti.
He was not a violent man, but at the thought of her, his hands began shaking. It was all her fault. How could he possibly have known when he’d first seen her at the Algonquin that she was the Princess of Fucking Darkness?
He looked at the French door and considered how he might get in.
He didn’t know yet that Celia Blandings had never locked that door in all the years she’d lived in the brownstone.
Then it began to rain.
Hard.
Chapter Fourteen
AT FIRST SHE THOUGHT it was a dream. One of those nightmares you suffer through but are simultaneously able to identify as just a bad dream. It was raining and she could hear the steady metronomic beat of breathing. She turned in the bed, kicked at the comforter, trying to free a leg. It was her own breathing, obviously. She switched onto her back, felt her eyelids fluttering on the edge of consciousness, hearing the rain dripping and the breathing. Panting. More like panting. All she had to do was hold her breath and prove it was the sound of her own breathing filtered through her dreams.
She held her breath.
The panting went on, harder if anything.
Then she felt a large wet drop of water land on her forehead.
She came awake, eyes wide, and saw the hulk above her, a shape almost shrouding her in the glow from the streetlamp outside her bedroom window. It was dripping on her.
Adrenaline began squirting like blood from a severed artery. She turned like a dervish, spinning across the bed, tangling herself more thoroughly in the sheets and comforter. She tried to scream but there wasn’t much result. She fell out of the bed, kicked out of the mummy casing, grabbed at the lamp on the bedside table, knocking it off and turning it on simultaneously.
The light from the floor wasn’t all that flattering, but no amount of light could have improved what was standing on the other side of the bed.
It was soaking wet.
It wore a beard, and the face and hair were covered, matted, with blood that looked pink because it was diluted by rain.
It was holding a butcher knife high in the air.
It looked at her and said: “Hey! Relax!”
Which was when she realized she was naked.
It said: “Look … I’m Charlie Cunningham…”
“Oh, my God—”
“Ah …” He looked up at the knife as if he hadn’t noticed it before. “Ah … this is your letter opener…”
She wanted to say something but nothing seemed quite appropriate and her mouth was too dry anyway. She wanted to run, but being naked made her wonder where she wanted to go. She made a feint, and like a mirror image he tilted with her, the bed still between them.
“Give me the goddamn stuff,” he growled, coughing. He waved the letter opener. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I’m telling you, lady, I’m right on the goddamn edge! I’m about to stop giving a shit whether you get hurt or not! Say something!”
She made another darting motion, felt so horribly vulnerable in her nakedness, and stopped, holding her breasts to her with a forearm.
“I’m wet and I’m bleeding and I’ve broken half the bones in my body and … aw, shit! Have a little consideration for chrissake! I haven’t done anything to you—it’s my stuff, just give it back!”
“Why didn’t you meet me, like you said you would—”
“I tried but there were some other guys following you. They got out of a car and followed you—who the hell were they?” Rain was dripping from him, like something dredged from the sea.
“What are you talking about?” She was quite suddenly colder than she’d ever been. Thunder rumbled softly. The rain drummed on the windows.
“You brought reinforcements—”
“I did not!”
“Look, it doesn’t matter.” He was trying to be patient. His nose had begun bleeding again. He wiped the hand with the letter opener in it across his nose, smearing blood. “Give me the book and the paper and I’ll get the hell out of here—”
“No you won’t, you’ll kill me once I give—”
“I will not!”
“Yes, you will—”
“This is nuts!”
He leaped onto the bed and came at her.
She made a dash to get around the bed and felt his cold wet hand on her ankle as he slipped in the bedclothes and sprawled facedown. He held tight. She turned and hit him in the head, dragged her nails across his scalp. He shrieked and she yanked away, made a run for the hallway.
He’d recovered with an alacrity born of desperation and was right behind her, panting like a locomotive. She reached for the door into the hallway but the locks were too complicated. She slipped away from his grasping fingers again and plunged into the darkness of the living room. She got the pool table between them again and stood gasping, almost unable to breathe at all.
He stood silhouetted in the hallway entrance. The only sounds were both of them trying to breathe and the rain splattering on her narrow balcony. She heard a faint clicking noise behind her, almost drowned out by the wheezing and panting.
“Please,” he gasped, “please just give me the—”
“You must think I’m crazy!” She felt for the telephone. Then she knocked it off the table. It made a hell of a noise.
“Okay, that’s it! That’s really it this time!”
He charged across the room in the dark, managed to skirt the end of the couch. The corner of the pool table slowed him down. Celia backed up, tripped over the telephone cord, fell down, scrambled forward in an attempt to get back over the couch and into the bedroom, where she might be able to barricade the door. Instead she ran afoul of Linda Thurston’s cardboard boxes and scraped some skin from her left wrist and forearm.
The situation didn’t look good.
He was standing over her sniffling. He wanted the stuff. He couldn’t kill her until he had the stuff…
She hit him as hard as she could with a packet of file cards, catching him in the shin.
He howled.
And in the howl she heard the ominous fluttering of the old winged avenger.
Ed-the-Mean, doubtless overcome by yet another chance to exercise his badass attitude, this time stemming from being rousted from a sound sleep, took his best shot at an unsuspecting Charlie Cunningham.
The scream was unearthly.
She’d never heard anything like it. She clapped her hands over her ears. She felt herself splattered with something.
Charlie Cunningham crashed over her, over the couch, onto the floor, where he landed with a considerable thud. The letter opener banged off the wall, bounced somewhere. Cunningham was babbling incoherently, staggered to his feet, struggled to get to the door. He kept ducking, waving his arms, shouting things that weren’t words, wrenching wildly at the locks on the door.
Ed swept through again. Cunningham fell down in the hallway, clutching the side of his face.
The door swung open.
He crawled through.
She heard him falling down the front stairs, heard the door to the street open and shut.
He was making terribly pitiful sounds.
She sat on the floor waiting for her heart to stop pounding. Finally, after being very glad at the thought that the Clemons family downstairs was in Europe, after wondering just who had been following her to Bradley’s, Celia got up and slowly padded around the edge of the couch.
Barefoot, she stepped on something soft and slippery, like a tongue. She leaped back, turned on the lamp, and looked down. Ed had joined her, perched belligerently on the back of the couch.
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Part of Charlie Cunningham lay on the floor.
Slippery with blood.
An earlobe.
Celia got to the bathroom in the nick of time.
And then she called Peter Greco.
Greco listened while the Yankees swept both games from the White Sox. Just as the final out was recorded, the large soft raindrops began spotting the Le Baron’s window. It was thundering very softly off to the southwest, moving toward the city. He yawned. Maybe this had been a dumb idea, after all. The evening on Sutton Place had been almost supernaturally quiet. Nothing had happened at the Bassinetti place. He looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty. He yawned again. It had been a long day. When he’d gotten up in the morning, he’d never heard of Celia Blandings and was thinking about the money he’d won the night before and the fun he’d had keeping it from the bozos. Now he was knee deep in something that might be murder. A long day. He hoped Celia had put it all out of her mind and gone to bed. Then he began thinking about Celia in bed and realized he liked the thought. She was a little taller than he was, but what the hell, he’d make allowances…
A car pulled up about twenty yards behind him and its lights went out. At night in the rain its color was indistinguishable. It looked like a Chevy. He watched in the rearview mirror. A man in a raincoat got out and dashed through the rain, down the shiny sidewalk, hands clutched in the pockets. He knew where he was going. He rang the bell at the Bassinetti house and stood shifting from one foot to another, waiting in the steady rain. The door opened, a few words were exchanged, and he went inside.
Greco didn’t think it was Charlie Cunningham, though it was hard to tell for sure. So Mrs. Bassinetti had a visitor, though he hadn’t actually glimpsed her. On the radio the post-game scoreboard show had ended and a talk show had begun. It would keep him awake. He listened while a caller wanted to talk about old-time railroad trains. Greco didn’t care about old trains. He was trying to find something else on the radio when he heard something that could have been a gunshot. He flicked the radio off and listened. He heard a similar sound come again, a muffled crack. He’d heard enough in his life to recognize a gunshot when he got two quick chances.
The street stayed as quiet as ever, rain drenched, no pedestrians. He sat waiting, expecting someone to come out the front door. He didn’t want to commit himself to getting in any deeper. Mrs. Bassinetti was all trouble, the kind of woman the farther away you are, the happier life you’ll lead. She was also the kind of woman it was hard to stay away from.
Ten minutes crept wetly past.
He sighed, got out of the car, ran across the street and up the walk, splashing in the puddles. The door stood ajar.
He pushed it open and stepped inside, stood still, listening. Music was playing softly on a radio somewhere. The lights were low. Mainly he heard the rain. He closed the door to within a couple of inches of shutting, leaving himself a fast exit route if needed.
The house seemed deserted, but he smelled the gunshots, hanging in the air like bad memories.
He moved down the hallway into the living room. It was unchanged from the day’s earlier visit, with one exception. A woman’s bathrobe lay across the couch.
Something moved and he looked up.
Mrs. Bassinetti stood in the doorway to the deck where she’d received them that afternoon. She wore a nightgown that clung to her, rain soaked. The black mane was dripping. Cradled in her arms was a bundle of bedraggled fur. Her nightgown was smeared with blood. She was crying, her face running with tears and rain.
“My dog, he killed my dog …”
Greco went to her, saw indeed that the dog was dead, its head lolling, tongue out.
“He tried to save me…”
She stared at Greco, her eyes fixed on his eye patch. Slowly she turned toward the deck. She hugged the dog to her breasts.
Sitting with his back to one of the potted palms was a man with a great big mess where his chest had been. He was staring at Greco. A nine-millimeter pistol lay beside him. The rain was hitting him hard, but he was long past complaining.
Greco took the dog gently from Mrs. Bassinetti and laid the body on the floor. When he stood up he saw that underneath the dog she’d been holding a .45 automatic, which accounted for the inert gentleman on the deck. Slowly she let the hand drop to her side.
“What happened?”
She shook her head. “He came in, began threatening me … Pepper was barking, nipping at his ankles … he kicked her out of the way … took out his gun … Pepper didn’t know how to be afraid, she kept at him … he shot her, and I took the gun from the silverware drawer in the dining room … when I saw Pepper all bloody I shot him…”
“You’d better sit down,” Greco said, leading her back to the living room. “I’ll take a look at this guy.”
He left her alone and went back to the deck, knelt beside the corpse.
There was a wallet in the inside jacket pocket. He had to yank it to dislodge it. There was a driver’s license, some credit cards, a check-cashing card on a bank in Washington. He went through them and somewhere behind him heard a sound on his blind side. “Well, Mrs. Bassinetti, it looks like you’ve killed a man by the name of Irwin Friborg—”
He heard her hiss: “Hit him!”
There was a shock, a sharp pain exploding in the back of Greco’s head, the pain rippling through his neck and down along his spine, and just like Philip Marlowe in the old days, he took a nosedive into a bottomless black pool…
Chapter Fifteen
CHARLIE CUNNINGHAM WAS IN the grip of one of the oldest of mankind’s notion, atavistically alive even in the grip of the plastic cynicism of the twentieth century.
He wanted to die at home.
He was sure he was going to die. There was so damn much blood … all his. He was going to die, and it didn’t even seem like such an unattractive idea. Death. The big sleep. The long good-bye. Dying was fine by him. Save a lot of trouble.
It was dying on the street he wanted to avoid. It would be like dying in the desert with the vultures circling lazily overhead. Only here in the city the vultures would be human, at least barely human, and they’d be thorough. He couldn’t bear that. They’d take everything. His Phi Beta Kappa key … Damn, he’d always thought he’d be buried with the stupid key.
It was impossible to calibrate the pain in the different parts of the body. As he hobbled along in the rain, his blazer soaked, his pants clinging, his shin on fire, his ankle swelling, one finger probably dislocated, holding a dirty old handkerchief to what was left of his ear … as he staggered along, his whole body was crying out for the blessed relief of death. His nose was probably broken, first from the fall over the fence, then in the fall down the stairs from her apartment. His ear throbbed like the kidney stone he’d never had.
He’d never be able to look another bird in the eye!
Christ, it had been like something born in the fevered mind of Stephen King in a vengeful mood. A creature from the stench and fire of the Bottomless Pit.
He hobbled onward, homing in on Perry Street.
Thunder crashed. Sheets of rain hung in the glow of the streetlamps. The streets were slippery with oil and water, lights reflecting like comets.
He stopped and vomited into a trash can near St. Vincent’s Hospital, and the violent cleansing of his guts seemed to clear his head. It wasn’t far now. He could make it.
He slipped and fell on his knee going up the stairs to the front door, but in the symphony of pain, his knee added only another random note. It was late, and he was stranded in the anteroom of Hell, knowing that he’d overreached himself and had been brought low in this insane attempt to … to … well, whatever he’d thought he was accomplishing. Fuck it, he had to do something about his ear…
He got the door to his apartment open and fled to the bathroom, turned on the light and almost fainted when he saw himself in the mirror. He dabbed at the sheared edge of his earlobe and it didn’t feel so hot. He took four aspirin and wiped t
he blood and rain off his face. He ran a comb through his beard, then went back to inspecting the ear. The bird’s beak seemed to have cauterized the wound to some extent. If he didn’t look at it too closely, he might be able to keep from vomiting again. He made a bandage of gauze from the medicine cabinet and taped it on with adhesive. It took a lot of tape, and he wound up with a bigger bandage than Van Gogh. He took two more aspirin because the first four had had a vaguely pleasant effect. Then he washed his other wounds and limped to his closet for clean slacks, shirt, underwear. He changed in the bathroom. Maybe he would live. But now he had to start thinking about the unholy mess he was in. He needed a drink for that. There was no way things could get worse.
He went into the living room and turned on the light.
He made a funny little noise. He’d made a good many that evening. But this was the funniest.
He was staring directly into the eyes of a man—middle-aged, short gray hair, wearing a suit—who was sitting on a love seat with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
Charlie Cunningham sagged onto a chair and bit his sleeve to keep from crying out loud.
There was no point in spending the night staring at somebody who just stared back. For fifteen minutes, or forty-five minutes, whatever it was, Charlie Cunningham sat and thought. Everywhere he looked he felt utterly out of his depth, yet his basic plan seemed secure still. He could still do what he’d set out to do.
But what was all this razzmatazz around the edges?
It all started with this damn Blandings woman…
Now he was missing a piece of his own personal ear, the murder plan was no longer a secret, he felt like a man headed for a body cast and traction, Celia Blandings was bound to go to the police with his earlobe as evidence, and there was a dead man sitting in his favorite chair.
And who were the two men who’d been following Blandings?
The Woman Who Knew Too Much Page 10
