by P. N. Elrod
She backed up until she was stopped by the table and stared as though I were a new kind of fashion in unexploded bombs. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Just checking up on things. What about yourself? I thought you were with the others talking to the cops.”
She grabbed at the conversational opening with visible relief. “They finished with me. I got bored and took a cab home.”
“So why are you here instead of home?”
“I’m just getting Kitty’s things together.”
“Uh-huh.” I made no effort to sound like I believed her.
She bit back what promised to be a couple dozen sharp replies and decided to go for sympathy. “All right, if you must know, I’m here because this place feels less like a prison than the main house.”
“Yeah, the poor-little-rich-girl problem. I know, I saw My Man Godfrey:”
She ignored my mouth running off with itself and slid to one side until the table was between us. She tried to make it look like a casual movement and failed. She was a lousy actress.
The muscles in my neck went stiff when she dug into her coat pocket, but she only produced a pack of cigarettes and made a business of shaking one out and lighting it. “Carole Lombard had it easier. She was able to do whatever she liked.”
“And you’re not?”
“Not without everyone knowing about it.”
“Everyone being your father?”
“Don’t you have some secrets from your family?”
More than you could imagine.
She took a long drag on the cigarette and let the smoke flood upward. “You said you were checking up on things. What does that mean?”
“Driving around and thinking.” Or not thinking, as the case had been. “I came up the back way and saw the lights.”
“And found me,” she concluded, with a stunning smile that put my back hairs up. Our last talk had ended on a decidedly sour note, and she wasn’t the sort of person to forgive and forget. “Aren’t you the lucky man?”
“That depends on whether or not you can come clean about you and Stan.” My voice was going thick.
She didn’t blink. She was a very good actress, after all, good enough to give me a serious twinge of doubt when I least needed it. “Stan?”
“You and Stan,” I repeated.
No reaction. My doubt grew and shifted, like a large animal stuck in a small cage.
“Escort and I talked to Harry tonight. He told us everything.”
“What about Harry?” she asked. Her tone held the perfect balance of puzzlement and irritation.
“Only that I had it right earlier. You got him to lie for you.”
“I don’t understand.” Perfect again.
I was wrong and hating it. I needed to blame someone for Doreen, so I picked out a spoiled brat with bad manners instead of…
When I didn’t reply, she broke away with a puzzled shrug. As she moved, her gaze swept past her wrist, checking the time again. Whoever was to meet her was overdue. We could be interrupted any moment.
I noticed her things on the table and gave myself a mental kick. She said nothing when I picked up her purse and turned it over, scattering its feminine clutter. The bag itself was still heavy. There was a pocket in the pale silk lining. From it I drew out a small .22 revolver. In the same pocket was a black velvet pouch. I shook it open. An explosion of red and silver sparks spilled into my hand.
Everything turned and returned. It happened that easily and quickly.
The bracelet felt heavy. One person was dead over it, maybe two, God forbid. The thing weighed a ton. I let it slip softly back into the velvet bag.
She’d almost stopped breathing. Her large eyes darted from it to my face.
I ignored the bracelet and opened the gun’s cylinder. It held five shots. I pushed the rod. Two bullets and three empty shell casings dropped out, rolling a little.
That got a reaction, but not the kind you could see. It was as if a totally different person had dropped in and taken over her body. The change was sudden and complete; what was so frightening about it was that she still looked the same.
The floor seemed to swell under my feet, as though I were on a boat and the sea beneath it were fretful from an oncoming storm.
The doubt in me vanished forever.
I was staring at a killer.
10
“YOU bitch,” I said, my voice low and gentle.
Her chin jerked. “I don’t know—”
“You bitch.” And this time it cracked and cut like a whip.
She whirled and ran from the kitchen, trying to reach the front door. I went right through the table and caught up with her in the entry parlor. When my arm snaked around her waist she began screaming. I smothered it off with one hand. She kicked and scratched. A lamp crashed over, followed by the spindly table that held it.
Lifting her clear of the floor, I swung her around, dropping her hard into a chair. Every time she tried to jump up and run, I pushed her back. She got the idea and stopped fighting.
“Daddy will kill you for this,” she gasped, out of breath from her one-sided fight.
“Forget him. You’re on your own.”
I—
“Can it.”
She did and fell back in the chair to glare at me.
I wasn’t impressed. “You’re going to tell me the truth or I’ll wring your neck. Take your pick.”
Something in my face must have caught her attention, because I saw the first sign of real fear in hers.
“It’s not that hard, Marian. You can start by telling me why you killed Stan.”
“He tried to—”
“Not the crap you told Harry. The truth.”
Fear won out over anger. “He had my bracelet,” she muttered.
“Blackmail?”
“He had photos… of us. He was going to show them to daddy at the Christmas party. He said he’d trade them for the bracelet. So I did.”
“But did he give you the negatives?”
“He said he would.”
“You’re not that dumb.”
“He said so,” she insisted. “I believed him then.”
“Was he going to give them to you last night?”
“Yes, but for cash instead.”
“At the Top Hat Club?”
“Yes.”
“Until you spotted me.”
“He put it off when he thought you were after him. He said to meet him at Kitty’s and we’d trade there.”
“What went wrong?”
She shook her head.
“Tell me.”
“I said I had to have the bracelet back.”
“He must have laughed right in your face.”
“He’d complained before that he couldn’t get as much as he’d expected off the bracelet. I told him he could make more money if I paid him in cash out of my allowance.”
“And he wanted both?”
“Yes. He wouldn’t give it back. I thought if I just knocked him out, I could… so I did. It wasn’t in his pockets. I couldn’t stand it, I—I don’t remember what happened afterward.” Her eyes were all over the place. Her memory was fine, she just didn’t want to talk about it. “I was so angry, I had to have the bracelet back.”
“Why?”
“I can’t—”
“Yes, you can. Why?”
“I owe money to… to…”
“Vaughn Kyler? Is that how he’s connected to all this?”
She nodded fearfully.
“How’d you manage that? More blackmail?”
She swung a fast arm and slapped me. I blocked her next attempt as though waving off a fly. “Come on, Marian.”
“The tables,” she hissed.
“What? Gambling?” So she had another little vice to add to her thrill list. “He let you run up a bill, right?”
“I didn’t think it was that much, but added together …”
“And if you didn’t pay it wasn’t just showing
photos to Daddy, it was things like broken legs and arms.”
“That man with the knife … he said he’d skin my face.”
“So you killed Stan to get the bracelet, only he didn’t have it on him. Did you try his room?”
“I couldn’t get to it. I had to wait, then I saw you talking with that red-haired woman outside the hotel. I remembered seeing her there before. Stan once said that she was a photographer and laughed about it. She looked scared when she left, so I followed her. I thought—”
“You figured right, she was Stan’s personal photographer. What happened after you tore the studio apart? Is that when you called in Kyler?”
“I didn’t. His men had been following me.”
“You must have all made quite a parade.”
“I told them that that woman had the bracelet. They said they’d get it.”
“Except Doreen got away. How’d you find her again?”
“She called me. She said she’d trade the bracelet and the negatives for some cash.”
“And you met in the park.”
“But by then Kitty had come in, the papers were full of the story about… about Stan and the woman knew everything that had happened.”
“Her name is Doreen,” I said, almost to myself.
“I had the money, but sh-she was angry. She knew that I… I’d … (that Stan—”
“Then you shot her.”
“I—”
“No self-defense, no rape stories, you shot her, Marian.”
“It was self-defense! She knew about me! She was going to take the money and tell the police no matter what. I could see that in her face. And the kind of person she was… the things she did… can you blame me? It’s not as if she were… she wasn’t anybody important!”
My hands spasmed into fists. A double dose of rage coursed through me like a jolt of electricity, half-aimed at her and half-turned upon myself. I backed away from her, fast. If I didn’t, she’d be dead in seconds. lb hear her mouth the same idiot’s reason that I’d used to justify my own excess of appetite…
Not everyone likes a mirror; me, least of all.
In a burst of self-loathing I forced myself to stare at mine. Like all mirrors, she was unseeing and oblivious to what she reflected. With a terrible inner lurch, my rage transmuted into cold, sick horror. I looked at my mirror and understood perfectly all that was there.
“Yeah,” I said at last, sounding lost in my own ears. “I guess she really wasn’t, not to you.”
The shift startled her, but she took it as a good sign, and was quick to land on her feet. “You have to help me, Jack. If you help me, I c-can give you anything you want. I mean that. I can give you anything. Tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.”
She’d crawled up from the chair and stood before me, taking my silence for affirmation. I dimly felt the touch of her hands.
“Stop it, Marian.”
“It’s all right. Believe me. It’ll be just fine. I want this, too.”
I caught her hands and held them away from me. The action slowed the soothing flow of her promises. “But I don’t.”
“Maybe not yet, but I can—”
“No, Marian It won’t work this time.”
First bafflement as she tried to understand, and then a flash flood of her own rage when she did. “You can’t.”
“I have to.”
She shook away from me. “You won’t.”
“Get your coat, Marian.”
Her initial response was incoherent, but I got the general idea. “I’m not helping you,” she concluded. “You’ll have to drag me out.”
“If I have to.”
“No one will believe you anyway. I won’t tell them anything.”
“You won’t need to once they match the bullets up with the gun.”
“I’ll fight them and so will Daddy. It won’t happen.”
My head drooped. I felt very tired. “Maybe not, but we’re still going in.”
She backed up a step. “If you touch me again I’ll make sure it shows, and you know what I’ll tell them about it. Daddy will kill you no matter what.”
My gaze fastened onto hers. She broke off and began again, like a record-player needle skipping over a bad groove.
“No matter what…”
I said her name and swept into her mind like a winter wind. Its cold tug pulled me along as well, the blast twining us tightly together.
This wasn’t safe. I had to stop before it took us too far—before I went too far.
Then Doreen’s face seemed to overlay Marian’s. We were standing across from one another in her studio. Time had slipped backward to repair broken equipment, to stitch up the torn floor cushions; everything was in its place again.
Doreen wore a shapeless white hospital gown and walked toward me, arms out and eyes closed. Her lips parted, silently breathing my name, anticipating my next touch—the touch that would kill her. The vision was so strong and clear that once more the red taste of her blood lay like fire upon my tongue.
Her body was solid and warm as she clung to me; I traced the smooth, taut skin of her neck. To be linked to this woman, to any woman, to take until nothing remained of them…The mere sound of the blood in their veins was enough to seduce me—a single scarlet drop of it enough to damn me.
I kissed and kissed deeply, savoring the beautiful taste of that damnation. It flattened and dispersed and ultimately vanished, leaving behind the soaring desire for more.
She was laughing. Harsh and low, it kept time with her heartbeat.
What to do when she died?
What to do later, when the hunger returned?
A single drop was not enough for the hunger
Laughter—silent now.
Heartbeat—fading.
Gone.
A dead weight lay in my arms and upon my soul.
I let her fall and stared at the wreckage. The hunger would return. It would always be there, ready to tear me apart, destroying others as it fed. An ocean of blood could not fulfill that insistent want. It would never be satisfied.
She was the first. She had to be the last.
“No,” I murmured. “No more.”
It could be controlled if I remembered to control myself. To do that, I had to close off this door forever and walk away.
The fire abruptly died and cooled. The ashes were bitter and dry but felt clean. Maybe I was damned myself, but I would drag no others down with me.
Marian’s face jumped back into sharp focus. Her throat was unmarked, her eyes sharp and alert. Nothing had happened, at least not to her. We’d been under for only a few seconds, but time in a dream may be stretched to infinity’s edge. I felt as though I’d been there and back again.
Dreams were not lost to me, after all, nor were the nightmares. They were somehow linked to the hypnosis. I’d driven men insane and all but killed Doreen because of it. But no more The door was shut, and I was walking away.
Marian’s expression changed to a curious mix of fearful hope and suppressed excitement. She was looking not at me, but beyond me. The weight of my own waking dragged heavily; the dream memory of a false past left my mind too sluggish to react to the shifting situations of the present.
When I turned, I turned slowly, which was just as well. A sudden movement would have set him off.
Hodge was in the room and held his gun level with my stomach. Marian’s overdue guest had arrived at last.
“You’re gonna die, you shit,” he told me. His voice shook from sheer joy at the idea.
I said nothing and didn’t move. Marian was behind but well to one side of me, fairly safe. I could trust him to hit a target six feet away. He could kill me if he liked. Others had tried. I felt oddly calm about the whole business; must have been leftover shock from the dream.
“You hear me?”
He’d come for the bracelet. Once Marian had found a little time to herself she’d let Kyler know she was ready to pay off her debt. It was a convenient payme
nt since it also got rid of a telling piece of evidence against her.
“It’s in the kitchen,” I said. “In a black bag on the table” The lawyers could still make a case without it. Once the story hit the papers, though, Kyler might find the thing too hot to even ’break down to individual stones.
But Hodge didn’t know what I was talking about. He was so wound up over me that he wasn’t listening. His face was fever bright and slick with thin sweat. He was probably still feeling the aftereffects of my last punch. Maybe that was what had delayed his arrival.
Marian was moving, but I didn’t look at her. It was best to keep Hodge’s full attention on me.
“The bracelet’s in the kitchen,” I explained.
“You’re dead.”
“Kyler wants the bracelet, not me.”
A chuckle twitched out of him. Kyler had nothing to do with this Hodge was working on his own initiative. He raised the gun a little, just to dispel any doubts.
“He said I had until tomorrow, Hodge. Do you want to cross him on that?”
“Kyler ain’t gonna find out.”
“You don’t want to take that chance.”
Another twitch, this time without any humor behind it. He was thinking hard. I left him to it and wondered about Marian. I couldn’t see her out of the corner of my eye anymore.
Hodge made his decision. He was going to chance things. The hard question for him now was where to put the bullet. A grin split his face up as he picked a target and lowered his aim. Considering that last punch, he was not only going to even the score between us, but permanently top it. I was awake now and ready. The timing involved for my vanishing would be close, but once he pulled the trigger, he was in for the surprise of his life. I’d worry about explanations later.
A crack and my head jerks forward.
Teeth rattle.
Darkness and light mix behind my eyes, canceling one another.
Knees strike the floor.
Arm hits something and twists out.
Face barks against the rough pile of the rug.
A spine-cracking thud.
This was wrong. It wasn’t the quick, sharp pain of a bullet. It was far more deadly.
