A wisp of black hair curled recklessly from under the lace-edged leg of the sheer panties.
He was suddenly and outrageously erect. Her eyes moved to the bulge inside his trousers, and the smile she flashed him was as knowing as the one the black whore in Panama had given him when she’d opened the backstreet door of her narrow crib to his timorous knocking. Fiona, her name had been. Fiona of the two short hours and thousand lingering nights.
He moved toward her, suffocating on a musk he imagined or actually breathed.
“No, don’t,” she said.
He stopped.
He had the terrible feeling that this was going to be like that time in Los Angeles when he’d gone out there to extradite an armed robber, and a twenty-three-year-old television starlet had performed an elaborate striptease for him before packing him off with a peck on the cheek. “But that white streak in your hair is really very cute, honey,” she’d told him as she closed the door behind him. Back at his sleazy hotel in downtown L.A. that night, he had actually considered tinting the streak red, like the rest of his hair. He’d had a good time with the robber on the plane back, though; the guy had a wonderful sense of humor, even in handcuffs.
“Now you,” Annie whispered.
She helped him out of his jacket. She undid the knot on his tie, and then she snapped the tie out from under his collar as though she were cracking a whip. She unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. She unbuttoned all the buttons on his shirt. She kissed his chest, and then eased the shirt from his trousers. She unbuttoned the cuffs. She helped him out of the shirt, and then she tossed it across the room, where it landed on her blue dress. She took his belt out of his trouser loops. She undid the button on his pants. She lowered his zipper. She reached into his trousers and said, “Oh, my.”
Five minutes later, they were in bed together.
Hawes was naked. Annie was wearing nothing but the gold chain and pendant. He would have to ask her, sometime, why she refused to take off the pendant and chain. For now, he was content to know that he was making contact with another human being, and for the rest of the night he would not have to think about anything but loving her. The fact that she was a screamer unsettled him a bit. The last screamer he’d had was a court stenographer who also happened to wear eyeglasses. She’d worn her glasses to bed. But she’d screamed loud enough to wake the dead every time she achieved orgasm. Annie screamed almost as loud and equally as often. She told him not to worry about it; everybody in the building knew she was a cop. He had completely forgotten she was a cop.
And he had also completely forgotten that the person hanging young girls from lampposts up there in the Eight-Seven might just possibly be the Deaf Man.
Arthur Brown had already forgotten the passing thought that their lamppost murderer might be the Deaf Man. Brown had as much respect for the Deaf Man as anybody on the squad, but the way Brown figured it, a killer was a killer, and they were all the same to him; they were all bad guys, and he was the good guy, and besides he wanted to get his wife in bed.
Brown’s daughter Connie was asleep already. Brown’s wife Lucy was in the den, watching television, Brown was in the bathroom, toweling himself after a long hot shower. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and saw the same handsome Arthur Brown staring back at him. He smiled at his mirror reflection. He was feeling good tonight. Tonight, he would take Lucy to the stars and the moon and back again. Still smiling, he walked naked into the bedroom. He draped the damp towel over the back of the chair, spotted the morning newspaper on the floor where Lucy had left it, and immediately reached down to pick it up. He folded two pages of the newspaper open, tore out a hole in the center of the now-single large page, and grinned from ear to ear.
When Brown walked into the den, he was wearing only the morning newspaper. His penis stuck out through the hole he had torn in the page. Lucy looked up.
“Well, well,” she said.
In an exaggerated watermelon dialect, Brown said, “You s’pose it true what de white folk say ’bout de size o’ de black man’s organ?”
“Not on the evidence,” Lucy said.
“Will you settle anyhow?” Brown said.
Lucy went to him and tore the newspaper to shreds.
7
From where he sat in the stands watching Darcy Welles, he knew at once that she had the right stuff. Even more so than the other two. He could tell just by the way she moved during the warmup.
It was another clear bright October day, and the sky over the university track was virtually cloudless and as piercingly blue as heat lightning. Beyond the track, he could see the huge bulk of the football stadium, and still beyond that the stone tower that dominated the school quadrangle. It was not a bad campus for a city as large as this one, where you couldn’t really expect wide areas of lawn or tree-shaded quadrangles. He had walked through it on Saturday, getting the feel of the place, making himself at home here, wanting to feel entirely at ease when he approached the girl later on. He always felt comfortable with women, anyway. Women took to him. They thought he was very offbeat, perhaps a little eccentric, but they were fond of him. Men gave him trouble. Men wouldn’t put up with his little idiosyncracies. Abruptly walking out of a restaurant when he’d had enough to eat and was feeling tired. Frequently breaking appointments. Refusing to share in ridiculous innuendoes about their sexual exploits. Men gave him a pain in the ass. He liked women.
He watched the girl.
The season was still several months away — January if she’d be competing in any indoor events, March for the beginning of the major outdoor races — but of course a runner trained all year round, had to if he or she hoped to stay in condition. Just as important for a woman as for a man, maybe more so. She had already taken three laps around the track — wearing the school’s track suit, maroon with a dark blue “C” over the left breast and the university name across the back of the jacket — taking the first lap very slowly (he’d timed her at three minutes), gradually increasing her speed until she’d done the third lap in two minutes. She was on the fourth lap now, jogging the first fifty yards, running the next fifty, coming all the way around and doing the last fifty at top speed. She rested for several moments, sucking in great gulps of air, and then she began doing arm swings, thirty seconds for each arm, rotating the arm from her shoulder in a full circle, her fist clenched. Trunk bends now — she knew the warm-up routine, this girl — and now hand bounces and hula hoops, a minute of wood choppers, another minute of side winders. She lay on the grass beside the track, on her back, put her hands under her hips and did thirty seconds or so of air-bicycling, and then leg overs and leg lifts and leg spreads, making the simple exercises seem somehow graceful. She was going to be one hell of a sprinter, this girl.
Another girl was coming over to her now. Possibly a member of the team, possibly just a friend who had come to watch her work out. The other girl wasn’t wearing a track suit. Plaid skirt and kneesocks, blue cardigan sweater. He hoped she would not hang around when he approached Darcy. Today was a Wednesday, the third day of a normal workout week. On Monday, she’d undoubtedly practiced short sprints from the blocks, sixty yards, a hundred and twenty yards, something like that, it varied in different training programs. Yesterday, she’d probably done nine runs halfway around the track, walking back for recovery after each of the first two 220-yard sprints, walking the full length of the track after the third, sixth, and ninth runs. In most programs, the training got more exacting as you moved deeper into the week, peaking on Friday, tapering off on Saturday with weight lifting, and then allowing a day of rest on Sunday (even God rested on Sunday) before the cycle resumed again on Monday. None of the pre-season training was as severe or as concentrated as when the competitive season began, of course. Darcy Welles was just getting back into running trim again after a summer and early fall of off-season training. He visualized her running along country roads back in Ohio, where she made her home. The newspaper accounts of her ability had been very encouraging. Her best high school time for the hundred-yard dash had been twelve-three, which wasn’t at all bad when you considered that Evelyn Ashford’s recent record was ten seventy-nine. “I wasn’t thinking about anything, I just ran,” Ashford said at Colorado Springs. “I didn’t seem to wake up until the last twenty meters. When I crossed the line, I thought ‘That was nothing special. Maybe eleven-one.’” Ten seventy-nine! When they told her the time, she said, “I’m stunned. Just stunned. Stunned.” Well, your Evelyn Ashfords were few and far between. Even someone like Jeanette Bolden, when she was in high school her personal best was eleven sixty-eight, whittled that down to eleven-eighteen when she ran second to Ashford at Pepsi. That eleven-second barrier, that was the thing. You could thank Wilma Rudolph for that. But Darcy Welles was still young, a freshman here at Converse, and she had the right stuff. Olympics caliber, Darcy Welles was. It was a shame he had to kill her.