God lived here. Screw the cowboy lore of the western Big Sky Country. Mere stars could not compete with this.
CHAPTER 3
Emma sue Hollaran had awakened on a bed of pain. Now she lay nude under the four-poster’s canopy of red velvet, which matched the flocked red-on-gold wallpaper. The carpets and curtains were deep purple, the sheets were shocking-pink satin, and every red lampshade was rimmed with black tassels. A player piano was all that was needed to complete the cliche of an antebellum brothel.
As the plastic surgeon examined Emma Sue’s swollen thighs, her maid of the week paced the length of the bedroom, eyes cast up to heaven and muttering prayers or curses in a language her employer had not yet been able to identify. The succession of maids had all been illegal aliens, the cheapest labor to be found. Some had done only a single day in hell, and others, like this one, had lasted an entire fortnight in Emma Sue’s employ. She could not remember the maids’ names from day to day, week to week, and so had taken to calling all of them Alien.
“Alien, stop that damn pacing!” she screamed.
This week’s Alien stepped quickly to the bed, having recognized only her own new name in the spate of words. She looked down at Emma Sue’s bare body and turned away in disgust to resume her pacing and muttering.
Emma Sue was a mass of red splotches from hips to knees. The swelling made her legs twice as big as they had been before the fat was suctioned out. She stared down at the offensive limbs.
“Drain that crap out!” she screamed, more outraged than pained.
“I warned you,” said the surgeon. “This was entirely too much to-”
“Make it go away!”
“Don’t you remember when we did your abs and buttocks? You were swollen then, too.”
“Don’t you remember? My stomach and butt were swollen because you nearly killed me, you idiot! You drained me then. Do it now.”
“I drained an infection. This is just the normal post-op swelling.” He was writing on his prescription pad. “I want you to take these pills. The swelling will go down in two to three weeks. Try to-”
“Weeks? You moron, I haven’t got two to three days. The ball is tonight!”
“You can’t possibly go anywhere.”
“Watch me.”
Within the hour she was attached to the medical apparatus. She did not seem to mind the sight of fluid draining into her veins from a plastic bag attached to a long pole, nor the other fluid coming out through the series of drains plugged into her legs. The maid fled the room, as the doctor monitored the cortisone IV. The air was foul. The doctor’s face was going to that pale vomit shade of green, and then he too left the room in search of a toilet.
The bad drawings of body parts had been taken down, and gone was the babble and the crush of television people and tourists who had wandered in off the street. The last cable for the camera equipment was pulled out of the wall and rolled up by a crew grip.
His back turned on the door, Sergeant Riker stood alone in the quiet emptiness of the high white walls. The room was all too familiar, a long rectangle, coffinlike in the convergence of parallels toward the end of the room. Though this space was vast, there was the feeling of walls closing in, the coffin lid coming down on him. Koozeman’s new location was upscale, high-rent SoHo, but it was only a larger version of the old gallery in the East Village, the site of a crime so brutal, the photographs had never been published.
Twelve years ago, in the blood and butchery of a double homicide, Riker had come close to understanding art. Never had he seen anything so compelling. The image of the bodies would never leave him.
On that long-ago night, he had reported to the crime scene, pressed through the crowd and past the guards at the door. Two rookie officers had been standing in the room with the bodies. The young cops were statues, struck silent and still by shock. Flashbulbs had gone off from every angle, and everyone was blinded by the light. The dark shadowy bodies were the stuff of bad dreams, but they took on a terrible clarity with each blast of light, intermittently real and illusory.
The forensic technicians had gone about the night’s work with only the exchange of necessary words. Orders were issued in the low tones of talking in church. There had been no black humor that night. The youngest officer had looked on the bloody face of the dancer and cried. Riker had gently wiped the boy’s face and sent him away.
Now his reverie was broken. He was aware of Mallory standing beside him, waiting.
“The room in Koozeman’s old East Village gallery was smaller,” said Riker. “But it’s the same layout. The killer didn’t do them at the same time. Peter Ariel died first. Markowitz figured the perp laid in wait for Aubry.”
Mallory moved to the center of the room. She was reading from a yellowed sheet of paper. “Quinn had blood on his shoes.”
“Yeah, we all did,” said Riker, pulling out a cigarette to kill the phantom smell of blood and spoiled meat, urine and feces. “You had to be there. You can’t tell what that scene was like from the paperwork and the shots. Then Aubry’s father shows up. He’d been waiting for her in a coffeehouse three blocks west of here. Aubry was hours late. Her father called everyone she knew to track her down. She was supposed to meet Quinn at the gallery earlier that night.”
The sudden appearance of Gregor Gilette had been the last heartbreak of the night. The artist, Peter Ariel, had been bagged and placed in the meatwagon. They had put the parts of the dancer into another bag and were loading her onto the gurney. Turning away from the ambulance, Riker had seen the damnedest thing, a man running toward him, stumble-running, strewing red roses everywhere. They were lifting the gurney into the ambulance. The doors were closing as Gregor Gilette reached the vehicle, and he was pounding on the doors even as they closed, pounding to be let in, yelling, “Aubry, Aubry!” Markowitz had pulled the man away from the ambulance doors, pinning his arms and holding him close. And then Edward Slope had tried his hand on a living patient with a merciful hypodermic to kill the father’s pain.
Mallory was only a little older than the rookie officer who had cried for Aubry Gilette. What would Markowitz think if he knew his kid was going into this black hole to finish what he had begun?
“I still want to talk to Andrew Bliss,” said Mallory. “What about fire code violations? He botched the roof staircase-that’s a legal fire exit.”
“I already thought of that. Somebody with influence got the commissioner of the fire department to look the other way. A lawyer from the Public Works Committee has a restraining order to prevent any interference with his free speech, so we can’t bring him down. And we can’t go up to the roof with a copter either. Blakely would find out you’re working the old case.”
“Well, there’s ways and ways.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got that damn press conference in an hour. Did you make any progress on Sabra? Any idea where she might be?”
The woman was lying under a blanket of newspapers in an abandoned building on Essex Street. She had crawled through a basement window the night before and now lay dreaming late into the morning. It might as well have been night, for no daylight penetrated the window after she had replaced the boards, fitting nails to holes. A candle sat dark in a dish, burned to the end of its wick.
In dreams, her child stood on point in satin toe shoes, reaching up to a soft golden glow just above her straining fingertips. Suddenly, her soft red mouth formed the oval of a scream as the ghouls came dancing by her. Greedy mouths with yellow teeth sucked the wind from her throat. Clutching at the poisoned air, hand to her mouth, the child went reeling and running. And as she ran, she heard the sounds behind her of feet slapping floor, and sickly mucus noises. Phlegmy voices sang to her in a hellish choir. To her side the ghouls came dancing, eyes sewn shut, hands locked in prayer and grown together, skin merging into skin. Their mouths moved as one, making foul wind and words, weaving chains of obscenities. Then the child had lost her shoes, and through her tears, she could see her legs were gone.