“ I'm Detective Sincebaugh and this is Detective deYampert, ma'am, ahh, sir…Mister… ahh…”
“ Dominique, Michael Emanuel Dominique, and don't mention being sorry around me, sweet cakes. So, you're two big strong strapping cops here just to see me? Really now…” He opened the door wide to reveal that he was in a tie-dyed, rainbow-colored terry robe, his hair in a towel as if just washed.
“ Freshly dyed,” he said, pointing to the towel atop his head, his eyes following Alex's. “Must keep up appearances, you know.”
“ We're here… well, we've been investigating the Queen of Hearts killings from the beginning, and-”
“ Oh, dear, how tragic… how terribly, horribly tragic it all is, but what has it to do with me?” Mr. Dominique looked truly perplexed.
“ Well, we'd like to ask you a few questions about the apartment.”
“ The apartment?'' He was now clearly confused, turning to stare inward at the place. It wasn't a bad place. Lots of room and closet space as Alex had recalled, the bedroom, living area and kitchen three separate rooms, a full bath rounding it off. Most of the older apartments in the area, you had to share a bath at the end of the hall. The furnishings were Surette's or belonged to the super, exactly as they'd last seen the place, a hodgepodge of styles from a steel-and-glass Scandinavian coffee table to an Early American couch with flowers and turkeys as a pattern.
“ Yes, well, one of the victims once lived here,” Alex said. “His name was Victor, Victor Surette.”
The young man turned away and stepped to the couch, asking them to come in before he sat, crossing his cleanly shaved legs, displaying his manicured nails, the fingers long and delicate, his feet covered in bunny-eared slippers. “I wouldn't know. No one's ever told me about that.” Alex thought him extremely composed at learning such information. For all this guy knew, Surette's body might have been found right here in this room, on the very couch where Dominique now sat.
“ Well, it has been a long time,” Alex volunteered, “but my partner and I would like to ask you if at any time during your stay here…”
“ Yes?”
“ If you've gotten mail for Surette, or a phone call asking about him, or just anything about the previous tenant. Or if you'd found anything lying about that might've belonged to Mr. Surette.”
“ Well, no… I'm sorry, but I haven't.”
“ You didn't know him?”
“ Well, no… I didn't.”
“ But you knew of him?”
“ Of him?” He shook his head.
“ Well, he had something of a reputation. He was an entertainer, a cross-dressing entertainer, so I assumed you might have met others in the area who knew of him.” Alex had calculated the number of potential victims for the maniac who preferred cross-dressing gays, and realized that he could well be speaking to a future victim of the killer at this moment.
“ Well, if there's nothing else, gentlemen,” said the young man whom Sincebaugh placed at around twenty-three or twenty-four, a couple of years older than Surette would have been. Looking around and seeing no photos or loose papers lying around, no books or magazines or even a newspaper, made Alex flash again on the sameness of the room. Mr. Dominique or whatever his name was had not put any individual stamp on the place, at least not on this room.
“ Yeah, Sincy, we'd best be on our way,” said deYampert, regaining his feet.
“ Would you mind terribly if we looked around, Mr. Dominique?”
“ For what?” he asked, surprised by the question.
“ Well, for any loose boards or bricks, anything below or behind which Mr. Surette may have placed papers.”
“ What precisely are you looking for?”
“ Frankly, we don't know.”
“ You don't know?”
“ We won't know until we see it.”
“ I see… I think. Well… feel free in here, but as I've said, I have an engagement and must finish dressing. I'll do so in the other room.”
“ Very nice of you to allow us to search,” said Ben, who began to do so in haste-anxious to leave, it appeared. “We'd like to search all the rooms, if that's okay with you, Mr. Dominique,” said Alex. “Your cooperation in this matter would be most appreciated.” Dominique frowned and made a feeble joke. “Guess I'll have to check with my lawyer first.” Then, laughing, he said, “Sure, why not. But, if you should find something useful, and it actually leads you to this maniac, maybe I'll see some-you know…” He seductively blinked his fake lashes at Alex. “Some sort of… reward?”
Ben stifled a laugh.
Alex simply replied, “Your reward might just be in saving your own life in the bargain, Mr. Dominique.”
“ Please, call me Dom or Dommie for short. Everyone does.”
“ All right, Dom.”
Dom then twittered and started on his way into the next room. But he stopped at the door to add, “Just as soon as I'm dressed, you two boys can sniff around my bedroom all you like for all you want.” Now the coyness and the flirtation were overt, challenging.
Alex and Ben exchanged a putrid look as Dominique left the room. When he'd shut the door behind him, the two detectives fell out laughing, each shushing the other. In a moment, they returned to the business at hand, searching every corner of the room, Ben still filled with a disgruntled disbelief that they were even here and a powerful, preconceived notion that they'd find absolutely nothing as before.
“ We're drawing at straws here, pard,” Ben was saying when his eyes fell upon something. His sudden silence made Alex wheel and look down at the hardwood floor below the couch where a strange-looking, white-laced doily with a queen of hearts playing card stitched into it lay half in, half out of the darkness. Dominique had first been sitting and then standing there, possibly trying to conceal the thing earlier. At the same instant, the door to the bedroom burst open and Dominique, in full feminine dress, attacked Ben, who was closest to the door, the huge blade plunging into the big man's chest even as he fended him off.
Alex snatched out his gun, but Ben's enormous form was between them, and with successive strikes of the knife, the big man fell into Alex, knocking him to the floor, Alex's head striking hard against the edge of a bureau.
His vision blurred, with no idea how long he'd been out, Alex's eyes opened on the horrid sight of Dominique in women's clothing, forcing his hand into the cavernous wound he'd opened up in deYampert's chest. Alex saw him come away with his best friend's heart and he cried out, his hands frantically searching for his weapon, which had skittered across the room.
But he was trapped under Ben's dead weight, and now he as she was coming for Alex, prepared to open him up with an enormous, serrated knife that looked like something out of an operating room.
When the killer leaned in over Alex, he saw clearly that Dominique's dress had been ripped and the carefully created breasts were real. The madman had all along been a madwoman. The knife loomed larger and larger as she approached with Ben's blood-soaked heart in her left hand. Alex fought a useless battle to struggle free of his best friend's dead weight, but being pinned beneath Ben deYampert was little different from being pinned below a dead horse. Only Alex's arms had worked free, but they were no match against the cutting machine she would become once she began wielding the knife. He had a second gun strapped to his ankle, but there was no way to get at it.
She enjoyed his complete helplessness.
“ You loved Vicki, too, didn't you? Everybody loved sweet, little Vicki,” she said in a cooing voice. “Ring around the rosy, pocket full of hearts, not posies… a heart is a terrible thing to waste, isn't it? Well, isn't it!”
“ What have you done with the hearts?”
“ Same as I'll do with yours and your friend's. You all have a place waiting at Raveneaux, just like little Vicki.”