“I’m really scared.”
I held her hand. “Your husband killed Elliot, didn’t he?”
“No.”
“There’s no point in lying now, Lucy.”
“I’m — not — lying.”
“But he was blackmailing everybody—”
“Yes — blackmail — but— He — killed — David — the — others—”
A terrible revelation came over me. I’d assumed the man we were looking for was David Baxter because of his financial problems. But now—
I started to ask her another question, but she tugged on my hand again.
“I need to say a prayer,” she said. Then, “Touch my stomach.”
“What?”
“Please. Touch my stomach.”
I put my hand down there. He had shot her just below the sternum. There was a hole you could drop fifty-cent pieces into. I wanted to hold her back from death, like a tug-of-war, but I knew it would be no use. The coldness from the other side started to chill me too.
I touched her stomach, the burgeoning roundness of it.
She started to cry.
“I finally get pregnant, we waited so long, I finally get pregnant and look what happens.”
The refrigerator started to thrum and the dishwater cranked into a new cycle.
There amid all the electrical appliances, she died. She and her baby.
I stopped only long enough to call Edelman and tell him where to meet me.
Then I ran from the house, suspecting I was already too late, dreading that the footsteps I’d heard running out the back door of the Baxter place had already claimed their next victim.
There was only a piece of her torn coat lying on the seat when I flung the car door open.
He had taken her.
32
The police had cornered off the dead-end street where Eve Evanier lived under the name of Helen Dodson.
Neighbors were out in pajamas and robes, pointing to the Dodson house through the fog, as if a Japanese movie monster were about to come looming up out of the darkness.
I got out of the car so quickly I banged my knee. I hobbled over to the nearest policeman and showed him my license. He waved me through. Edelman was waiting for me.
Two steps across the threshold, I thought of the Rutledge woman’s parlor. Despite the modern house outside, the interior here was an anachronism. The furniture was bulky, and sculpted walnut. Doilies were on every available surface. Floor lamps with intricately patterned shades threw soft shadows against the wall.
In front of a fireplace, sitting primly on a divan, was a beautiful, white-haired woman. It was impossible to guess how lovely she’d been earlier in life.
Next to her was a tall, severe man dressed in livery. It was a three-piece suit, but it was also the uniform elected by some domestics. He held a hypodermic needle up to the firelight and squeezed a drop or two of liquid out.
Edelman stood watching him. When he saw me he put a finger up to his lips and nodded to the man.
“Just relax, Eve,” the man said.
She hadn’t noticed me before. She looked up, smiled. In her high, old-fashioned lace collar she might have been posing for a cameo brooch. “Why, aren’t you Stephen’s friend?” she said to me.
Embarrassed, I moved my head in a way she apparently took to be a nod.
“Did you bring him home with you? He’s always staying out late. Then he has to get on my good side by getting me the penthouse at the hotel.” She laughed with a lover’s secret enjoyment.
She sounded friendly and happy. Then the needle was pushed into her arm.
I watched her features look — just for that moment of pain — their real age there in the firelight and the decades-old glow of this museum-like room.
But I couldn’t wait any longer. I crossed to Edelman. “Have you seen him?”
He shook his head. “Her man there, Farrady, says he was here earlier tonight. He had a gun and he got what he came for.” Edelman nodded to Eve Evanier. “Farrady had to give her a sedative. She’s got a heart condition. Apparently she hasn’t been able to deal with Elliot’s death at all, and Farrady’s afraid she’s going to die.”
I grabbed him. “You coming with me?”
“Where?”
“There’s only one place left to look. Come on.”
You might imagine that riding beneath a siren gives you a lot of power. It doesn’t. It just makes you a potential victim. Many people, you see, don’t move over to the curb for you. They try to beat you or race you. Or they’ve got their stereos up so loud they don’t even hear you.
I hadn’t been in a patrol car in several years. I rode shotgun while Edelman drove. The siren sprayed blood into the night — it was a day and night filled with blood — first the thugs — then the Baxters.
By now what had happened and who the killer was no longer mattered. Now I had to find Donna. I tried not to think of what might have happened to her, what, in his psychosis, he might have done to her.
“You sonofabitch,” Edelman said.
“What?” I said, coming out of my reverie.
“Not you. That motherfucker in the middle of the intersection. Won’t move.”
So we went around him. Dangerously. Just like in the movies. Only Edelman was no stunt driver, believe me. And I was no stunt passenger.
The parking lot held two cars when we got there. A garbage truck was eating a dumpster.
The elevator took us swiftly and silently up seventeen floors. Edelman had his piece out. It shone with oil. It was ready. So, apparently, was Edelman. “You like her, huh?” he said, trying to cool me down.
“Yeah.”
“Well, hell, good for you.”
“I hope she’s not dead.” I was starting to lose it. He threw an arm around me.
“Trust your Uncle Edelman, okay rookie?”
“Yeah.”
“And blow your fucking nose.”
When the elevator doors opened I recalled the night when I’d come up here with the porno photos and met Phil Davies. And the absolute sense I’d had that somebody was watching me from the shadows.
I put a hand out, stopping Edelman.
“What?” he said in his normal voice.
“Sssh.”
Both of us peered into the darkness.
I heard her before I saw her. A moan somewhere in the gloom.
I froze. Sweat bloomed on me. Edelman put an avuncular hand on my arm. I let him lead the way over to her.
It wasn’t Donna. It was Carla Travers. Or what was passing for her these days. Moonlight sliced by the blinds fell across her tubular body as she tried to crawl away from us. She was no trouble to stop. Edelman just walked around her and stood with his long legs together. She looked up and moaned again, a fat, soon-to-be-old lady with her media-rep hair sprayed hard as a helmet and a sick gleam in her eye.
Edelman reached down and helped her up. He didn’t bother to hide his distaste. There was no time for pleasantries. That was the first good look I got at her bruised and cut face and the wrist bone that jutted through her flesh like a piece of decorative glass. Apparently he’d beaten her for quite a while. This kind of punishment took time.
A few moments later my eyes dropped to the square metal box she’d crawled away from. The strongbox so many people had been looking for. That so many people had died for.
I bent down and picked it up. I walked a few steps closer to the blinds, where the moonlight waited.
The whole thing had been alphabetized. Sometimes there were photographs, sometimes there were note cards. I went to the Ts, pulled Carla’s. The notation was surprisingly formaclass="underline" “Carla Travers is receiving kickbacks from two ad agencies with whom she’s working a con regarding billing.” Then there were two additional names, presumably the agency people Carla worked the scam with.