“Gunther… You were the one with him, weren’t you? The one who ended up in the hospital.”
“That’s right.” She flared up again briefly. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that the first time? I might have known what to expect.”
It flashed through my mind that if I told her someone else had killed Frank, she’d probably throw me through the window.
I pretended Ski Mask was the one and only. “I never thought of it. I did warn you, but to be honest, I didn’t think you’d ever set eyes on him. What he did to you was totally out of character.”
“Out of character? What do you know about his character? Katz says the man’s a fucking nut case, and I can swear to it.”
“Katz only knows half of what we know, and we don’t know much. But everything Ski Mask has done has been thought out beforehand, with no visible emotion.”
“My God, he’s killed people. How emotional do you want him to get? And he sure as hell wasn’t cool, calm and collected when I met him.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Considering my prowess to date, any psychological evaluations by me were rightly suspect. “I screwed up. I am sorry.”
She waved her hand at me angrily. “Sorry, sorry. All right, so you’re sorry. I’m sorry I ever set eyes on you, so that makes two of us.” She crossed over to her armchair and sat. “I’ll live.” She reached under the chair for her stash and began filling her tiny pipe. She lit up. “Want a pull?”
I shook my head. “Are you going to be all right?”
She held her smokehel ali for a couple of seconds and exhaled. “You tell me.”
“What did he want?”
She snorted. “Same thing you did. So I told him what he wanted to know-I mean, shit, it was no big secret, right?”
“No.”
“I did what you told me to do, right?”
“Right.”
There was a lull. She smoked some more, stared at the floor, ran her fingers through her hair. When she spoke again, the anger was missing. “He wasn’t just after information. He had something else going, you know? When I told him about some of what Kimberly and I had done together, he kind of flipped out. That’s when the beating started. I mean, I knew I had blown it. I shouldn’t have told him as much as I did. Then he wanted to know everything. I had to tell him positions, whether we’d made it together without a guy in the middle, whether she ever took it up the ass, all kinds of stuff. I mean, he scared the shit out of me. I’m not going to forget him for a long, long time.”
As she talked, her voice as tough as usual, the light from a gap in the curtains caught the tears running down her cheek. “He had real pale eyes, not really blue or anything. They were weird-colorless-and cold. I mean, I knew sure as hell I wasn’t going to live, that he was going to kill me and that it was going to hurt. And he did hurt me bad. Not the face stuff-I’m used to a few punches-but there was other stuff, things he enjoyed. The more it hurt, the more he liked it… Fucking creep.”
She raised her eyes to me, openly crying now, the toughness suddenly gone. She looked like a kid in dirty clothes, her body shaking helplessly. “If you ever catch him, could you blow his balls off for me?”
I knelt and put my arms around her. The embrace was prompted by more than mere sympathy. Through her suffering, Susan Lucey had just illuminated one of the murkier corners of the case. Ski Mask’s reaction to the information she had given him went a long way to connecting him emotionally to Kimberly Harris rather than to Bill Davis. While I still didn’t know specifically what Ski Mask was after, I now felt pretty sure it wasn’t solely to get Davis out of jail. Susan Lucey had paid a large price to get me that information. I was definitely in her debt.
After a short while, she stopped sobbing and pulled back a little. Her hands were clasped in her lap. Her face was flushed and bruised and wet with tears. “Fuck, I probably would have met someone like him sooner or later. I probably will again. It’s the turf.”
She hesitated a moment and then gave me the best-and longest-kiss I’d ever had in my life. It left me misty eyed and breathless. “Thanks for the coffee maker, you creep.” She said it without a smile.
· · ·
Despite the wide scope of our search for Kimberly Harris’s activities during her three-day weekends, none of us really believed we’d hit pay dirt searching train, bus or cut-rate car-rental files, so all of us that morning had taken either travel agencies or the airline. The airline was going to take longer, of course. Its records were not held locally, and we sent one man across New Hn at="0em" ampshire to hunt them down. But in principle, for once we were on the right track.
At the end of a long afternoon plowing through box after box of computer printouts, we found two travel firms that clicked. One of them had handled tickets for a Miss Julie Johnson on seventy percent of the right dates, and another had ticketed a Mr. L. Armstrong for the same dates and destinations.
I found Brandt in his office at about six in the evening. He was sitting in virtual darkness-only his desk lamp on-with his feet on the table and his chair tilted back. His eyes were closed and he was smoking.
“Rough day, huh?”
“Long, yeah.”
“How did the board go?”
“On and on. I gave them more than they had and less than they wanted. They let me know, in their words, that my ‘future hangs in the balance.’ Utter crap, of course; they’re confusing my job with my life. Typical asshole pomposity.”
Unusual words for a usually unflappable man. I was hoping his condemnation wasn’t universal-one of those assholes was a woman for whom I had a particular fondness. “Did they all come down that hard?”
He sighed. “No, not all.” Then he chuckled. “Your own Miss Zigman was her normal levelheaded self, but she was wise enough to lay low in the storm. What have you got?”
“Julie Johnson and Louis Armstrong had a penchant for flying the same airplanes to the same places, at least according to two separate travel agencies.”
“Louis Armstrong?”
“The irreverence of torrid love, I guess. They certainly had an eye for glamour: Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Miami, San Francisco-all the hot spots. We interviewed the agents who booked most of the tickets. It was all done in cash, and it sounds like Kimberly did the arranging for both of them, although she was apparently in disguise-dark glasses, hair hidden, stuff like that. Just enough hocus-pocus to make her impossible to forget. I guess that makes the guy a well-heeled married local, or at least one with access to funds. From what Susan Lucey told me about Kimberly’s taste in men, I would also assume he’s-as they say-mature in years. Either that or a shy-but-precocious fifteen-year-old.” Or, I thought, even Ski Mask himself.
“Good.” He still hadn’t opened his eyes or moved. “Now what?”
“Now I go to Boston. I have a date tonight with a friend at the police department.”
“In search of Pam Stark?”
“Yup.”
“Happy trails. Don’t get mugged.”
I called Gail before I left and congratulated her on surviving the afternoon. She said Brandt had displayed the stoicism of Saint Sebastian and had fared about as well. I apologized for not showing up last night and told her not to expect me tonight either. I had a feeling that what I would find in Boston would keep me out of town for a while. Her reaction was matter-of-fact, with no hint of the emotion she’d shown the day befor thfeeling the. The see-saw was back in balance, thanks to me, and for that, idiotically, I was now sorry.
To me, driving to Boston at night is slipping toward the heart of a gigantic landlocked amoeba, whose thin and ragged outer fringe extends far beyond its inner core. From narrow, unlit New Hampshire farm roads, lights gradually begin to cluster along the sides of the highway. Occasional houses become occasional towns; the towns begin to link first tenuously with filling stations and a restaurant here or there, then with modest “miracle miles”-commercial stretches of small retailers, low-rent discount stores, and fading supermarkets. Finally, still well over an hour from the city, suburbia takes over in an endless chain of lights and malls and parking plazas and increasingly maddened traffic. By the rules known only to these particular urbanites, behavior behind the wheel metamorphoses into animal cunning. Speed limits are ignored, traffic lights are useless; drivers maneuver for room and advantage, speeding and braking, flowing from one side of the road to the other in a ceaseless attempt to get ahead of the other guy. I entered Boston, as always, like a leaf in a torrent, my only thoughts turning on ways to avoid the rocks.