“Please, please, please…”
“You’re going to tell him to stop coming around.”
“Yes, I am. I said I would.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“You’ll keep the promise,” he said flatly.
“Yes, I will. I told you—”
He slapped her suddenly and fiercely, his right hand abruptly leaving his thigh and coming up viciously toward her face. She blinked her eyes an instant before his open palm collided with her cheek. She pulled back rigidly, her neck muscles taut, her eyes wide, her teeth clamped together.
“You’ll keep the promise,” he said, “because this is a sample of what you’ll get if you don’t.”
And then he began beating her.
She did not know where she was at first. She tried to open her eyes, but something was wrong with them, she could not seem to open her eyes. Something rough was against her cheek, her head was twisted at a curious angle. She felt a hundred separate throbbing areas of hurt, but none of them seemed connected with her head or her body, each seemed to pulse with a solitary intensity of its own. Her left eye trembled open. Light knifed into the narrow crack of opening eyelid, she could open it no further. Light flickered into the tentative opening, flashes of light pulsated as the flesh over her eye quivered.
She was lying with her cheek pressed to the rug.
She kept trying to open her left eye, catching fitful glimpses of gray carpet as the eye opened and closed spasmodically, still not knowing where she was, possessing a sure knowledge that something terrible had happened to her, but not remembering what it was as yet. She lay quite still on the floor, feeling each throbbing knot of pain, arms, legs, thighs, breasts, nose, the separate pains combining to form a recognizable mass of flesh that was her body, a whole and unified body that had been severely beaten.
And then, of course, she remembered instantly what had happened.
Her first reaction was one of whimpering terror. She drew up her shoulders, trying to pull her head deeper into them. Her left hand came limply toward her face, the fingers fluttering, as though weakly trying to fend off any further blows.
“Please,” she said.
The word whispered into the room. She waited for him to strike her again, every part of her body tensed for another savage blow, and when none came, she lay trembling lest she was mistaken, fearful that he was only pretending to be gone while silently waiting to attack again.
Her eye kept flickering open and shut.
She rolled over onto her back and tried to open the other eye, but again only a crack of winking light came through the trembling lid. The ceiling seemed so very far away. Sobbing, she brought her hand to her nose, thinking it was running, wiping it with the back of her hand, and then realizing that blood was pouring from her nostrils.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my God.”
She lay on her back, sobbing in anguish. At last, she tried to rise. She made it to her knees, and then fell to the floor again, sprawled on her face. The police, she thought, I must call the police. And then she remembered why he had beaten her. He did not want the police. Get rid of the police, he had said. She got to her knees again. Her gown was torn down the front. Her breasts were splotched with purple bruises. The nipple of her right breast looked as raw as an open wound. Her throat, the torn gown, the sloping tops of her breasts were covered with blood from her nose. She cupped her hand under it, and then tried to stop the flow by holding a torn shred of nylon under the nostrils, struggling to her feet and moving unsteadily toward her dressing table, where she knew she’d left her house keys, Kling had returned her house keys, she had left them on the dresser, she would put them at the back of her neck, they would stop the blood, groping for the dresser top, a severe pain on the side of her chest, had he kicked her the way he’d kicked that policeman, get rid of the police, oh my God, oh God, oh God dear God.
She could not believe what she saw in the mirror.
The image that stared back at her was grotesque and frightening, hideous beyond belief. Her eyes were puffed and swollen, the pupils invisible, only a narrow slit showing on the bursting surface of each discolored bulge. Her face was covered with blood and bruises, a swollen mass of purple lumps, her blonde hair was matted with blood, there were welts on her arms, and thighs, and legs.
She felt suddenly dizzy. She clutched the top of the dressing table to steady herself, taking her hand away from her nose momentarily, watching the falling drops of blood spatter onto the white surface. A wave of nausea came and passed. She stood with her hand pressed to the top of the table, leaning on her extended arm, her head bent, refusing to look into the mirror again. She must not call the police. If she called the police, he would come back and do this to her again. He had told her to get rid of the police, she would call Kling in the morning and tell him everything was all right now, she and her boyfriend had patched it up. In utter helplessness, she began crying again, her shoulders heaving, her nose dripping blood, her knees shaking as she clung to the dressing table for support.
Gasping for breath, she stood suddenly erect and opened her mouth wide, sucking in great gulps of air, her hand widespread over her belly like an open fan. Her fingers touched something wet and sticky, and she looked down sharply, expecting more blood, expecting to find herself soaked in blood that seeped from a hundred secret wounds.
She raised her hand slowly toward her swollen eyes.
She fainted when she realized the wet and sticky substance on her belly was semen.
Bert Kling kicked down the door of her apartment at 10:30 the next morning. He had begun trying to reach her at 9, wanting to work out the details of their day together. He had let the phone ring seven times, and then decided he’d dialed the wrong number. He hung up, and tried it again. This time, he let it ring for a total of ten times, just in case she was a heavy sleeper. There was no answer. At 9:30, hoping she had gone down for breakfast and returned to the apartment by now, he called once again. There was still no answer. He called at five-minute intervals until 10:00, and then clipped on his gun and went down to his car. It took him a half hour to drive from Riverhead to Cindy’s apartment on Glazebrook Street. He climbed the steps to the fourth floor, knocked on her door, called her name, and then kicked it open.
He phoned for an ambulance immediately.
She regained consciousness briefly before the ambulance arrived. When she recognized him, she mumbled, “No, please, get out of here, he’ll know,” and then passed out again.
Outside Cindy’s open bedroom window, Kling discovered a visible heel print on one of the iron slats of the fire escape, just below the sill. And very close to that, wedged between two of the slats, he found a small fragment of something that looked like wadded earth. There was the possibility, however small, that the fragment had been dislodged from the shoe of Cindy’s attacker. He scooped it into a manila envelope and marked it for transportation to Detective-Lieutenant Sam Grossman at the police laboratory.
7
Every time Kling went downtown to the lab on High Street, he felt the way he had when he was eleven years old and his parents gave him a Gilbert Chemistry Set for Christmas. The lab covered almost half the first-floor area of the Headquarters building, and although Kling realized it was undoubtedly a most mundane place to Grossman and his cohorts, to him it was a wonderland of scientific marvel. To him, there was truth and justice in the orderly arrangement of cameras and filters, spotlights and enlargers, condensers and projectors. There was an aura of worlds unknown in the silent array of microscopes, common and stereoscopic, comparison and polarizing. There was magic in the quartz lamp with its ultraviolet light, there was poetry in the beakers and crucibles, the flasks and tripods, the burettes and pipettes, the test tubes and Bunsen burners. The police lab was Mechanics Illustrated come to life, with balance scales and drafting tools, tape measures and micrometers, scalpels and microtomes, emery wheels and vises. And hovering over it all was the aroma of a thousand chemicals, hitting the nostrils like a waft of exotic perfume caught in the single sail of an Arabian bark.