"Waiting in lines doesn't turn me on. But I'll do anything to see Marilyn again. You two had something in common, ya know?"
"Oh, sure. I want to list all the things that Marilyn Monroe and I have in common. I'll list them in alphabetical order, okay? We're both women. She spoke English and I speak English. When she was still alive her body temperature was about ninety-eight point six and by coincidence so is mine. Well, that's pretty much the end of the list. We do have a world in common, don't we?"
"I could work on the body-temperature part if you've got a minute."
"You want me to call a cop, mister?"
"The worst thing about being close to you is that you don't get to look at you from a distance. I wish you could be with me and across the street at the same time, so I could watch you walk. If I could see you walking down the street right now on those lovely, long legs of yours . . . . " His black eyes were sparkling at her and he was speaking very softly in her ear.
"Well, kindly try to NOT jump on my bones here in the line. Dad is retired, and I'm not at all certain we can count on Winston bailing us out if we were arrested," she whispered, "for creating a public spectacle. After all, this is St. Louis, almost the Bible Belt."
"Is that right?" he whispered back, hotly.
"Also," she said, the tip of her tongue touching his ear for emphasis as she whispered, "if you keep nuzzling me like this we may not get to watch The Asphalt Jungle again, which you've probably only seen roughly twenty-seven times. I don't think I could stand something like this on my conscience."
"If you really don't want to see Marilyn and the gang we can bop on over to East St. Louis right now. There's a little neighborhood art house showing Dick Powell in Cry Danger."
"Oh, my God! Really? Can this be true?" He nodded affirmatively. "Be still, my beating heart. This is too exciting. And who is the leading lady in that one, Lillian Gish? No. Don't tell me. Just say this much. Is it a talkie?"
"Yes. Of course. It's the ultimate trailer-court movie. Seedy and sleazy just the way you like 'em."
"Good." She shook her red mane as if in pain at the thought. "Do we know each other well enough I could ask one small favor?"
"You got it, shweetheart," Bogie said. "Just whishtle."
"After we've been together for a few more months — you know, when we really start to know each other — there's something I'd like to ask you to do for me. It's kind of wild and crazy. And perhaps it isn't something you'd want to do on your own, it's so kinky. But please, keep an open mind about this. Sometime — if I'm good — could we go see a NEW movie? You know, one that's in color? With living actors?"
A long pause while Eichord considered this.
"No. Sorry." He shook his head. "You ask too much."
"Sorry! Oh, my!" She mock-winced to herself. "Bite my tongue."
"I'll take care of that," he said as the line inched forward in the direction of the stale-popcorn smell.
Hell, you never know where you'll find a clue, right?
Spain tried to remember when he'd gone to a doctor for any kind of a checkup. He was getting a feeling that he didn't like. Not every day but quite frequently he'd get this sort of dizzy sensation, this feeling like he was falling. Just the way he felt when he was about to come down with a bad cold. His sinuses were killing him for some reason. The new bed he'd bought for the house didn't feel right. Something was wrong with the mattress. He had a painful ingrown toenail he couldn't seem to do anything about. He went to the bathroom and was reluctant to look at his stool.
It was when he was in back of the small funeral home that he had that odd feeling again. The desire to kill the next person he came in contact with. He correctly analyzed it for the insanity that it was and pushed it back. He wanted a large cardboard box like coffins and refrigerators and things come in, and that is why he was there. It was for the soundproof room he'd built.
Frank Spain had experimented with convex polygons, rhomboidal parallelograms, every imaginable shape. A trapezoidal quadrilateral of two short, matching sides and a slightly longer back seemed ideal. The front of the roof would be for interrogation. The trapezoidal shape played off the weird roofline, allowing him to create a set of plausible fake walls that appeared to butt against one another. He built them as double walls, eight walls, not four, the hidden inner room — not much more than a walk-in closet — being a double-walled soundproof chamber.
The back of each wall in the office, his L-shaped storage room, and master bedroom were covered in acoustical soundpoofing tiles, which he'd cleared with the landlord long before he made a deal to rent the place.
The small space between each pair of walls was filled with egg crates, or would be as soon as he found his large sheets of cardboard to hold them just so. Then the inner walls were covered in carpet remnants. There are few more effective sound baffles.
There was no cardboard in back of Lane-Freeman's, a small, middle-class funeral establishment. He walked up and tried the back door. Unlocked. He walked in. It was an empty anteroom of some kind. He walked in, turned to the left, and went through a door marked PRIVATE. It was a preparation room. Spain smiled. The feeling was very strong. What if someone who looked a little like Gaetano Ciprioni would suddenly show his ugly face in the door.
Spain quickly went over to a metal table next to a sink and picked up a sharp instrument which he held by his side as he walked out of the building. No one had seen him. The feeling passed and he went on to another establishment and found his sheets of cardboard, which he could barely squeeze into the back seat of the large vehicle.
Back in his special home he finished the egg-crate sound block and walled off the make-do baffles with the cardboard, creating both a double dead-chamber and an effective sound-stopper. The center of the small, concealed room was over a deep, drainage ditch that had been the deciding factor in the choice of rentals. What the landlord didn't know was that his new tenant had enclosed a small section of this ditch, now a pit of lye, and sawed through the floor of the home, making the pit accessible from inside the house.
In the past weeks Spain had been collecting makeshift torture tools as the spirit moved him. And in a corner of the small "interrogation room" was a box of shackles, pliers, knives, razors, hooks, picks, pincers, things made to pierce and rip and torment and mutilate and eviscerate. On the back wall there was a shelf of deadly chemicals and in the corner some saws and an oxyacetylene torch.
It was just a very nice, middle-to-upper-middle-class brick three bedroom from the front. Unusual only for the isolated location and the busy roofline. And now Spain's custom interior work. He left the house, flipping on his security system — can't have burglars breaking in — and got in the car.
He dialed his cutout from a pay phone and heard some good news. "Glad you called," she told him. "A Mr. Hitter called twice for you. He said he'd be at this number at the designated time. Just touch base as soon as you could. He wanted me to say it just like that. At the designated time. Just touch base as soon as you could."
"Okay." Spain chuckled warmly. "You make that sound like a code." They both laughed. "He's a character."
"Well, he was explicit about the message. He wanted it just like that, so .... "
"Fine. You did good. He's just an oddball. Thinks his way is the only way, you know." She mmmmed and he ended the call but with the nagging feeling of paranoia he was starting to get careless. The idiot didn't have to make a big production about the fucking time. All that had been prearranged to avoid just that sort of suspicious-sounding bullshit. He'd have to cut his secretary loose soon, or better yet give her more routine, normal work. These weird calls, sending her across to say things to a stranger in a car . . . these were things she might remember. Five thousand dollars cash and the son of a bitch couldn't handle a simple phone message. He dialed a pay telephone impatiently.