Frenzy

by John Lutz

  “Did you hear the sound?” Quinn asked.

  “No.”

  “Could it have been a woman who was gagged and screaming?” Harold asked.

  “I suppose. Looking back on it, that’s what he mighta heard. Anyway, it gave Duke the creeps, and he didn’t want to play anymore.” She raised a shoulder in an elegant shrug that made Quinn think of art deco nudes. “Can’t say I blame him. Unless you go in for that kinda thing.”

  “And you didn’t see the man who might have forced his way into the room across the hall?”

  “That’s right. I was on the bed, still tending to my ankle.” She wagged a shoe, making her calf muscle flex. Half smiling. Knowing they were looking. “I’d damn near turned an ankle in these heels when Duke answered my knock and hustled me into his room. I was like, what’s this all about?”

  “He say he was sorry?” Harold asked. One of his seemingly inane questions that sometimes later proved of value. But only sometimes.

  “No.” Wanda smiled. “They get eager.”

  Harold just bet they did.

  Bonnie the Barista wandered over to see if Quinn wanted a drink. Quinn moved her back out of earshot with a glance whose meaning was unmistakable. Back off. Bonnie retreated all the way to the other end of the bar. She managed to look offended and defiant. She, not this cop, ran the place during work hours.

  “What did you and Duke do after he heard the first noise?” Quinn asked Wanda.

  “The mood had changed.”

  Quinn could understand that.

  “He got dressed and I got out of uniform,” Wanda said.

  “Uniform?” Harold asked.

  Quinn gave him the same look he’d given Bonnie, and Harold scooted back a few inches and was silent.

  “Then Duke stuffed his clothes and Dopp kit in a suitcase,” Wanda said, “and we went down to the lobby. He went over to the desk and he asked to be moved to another room. More like demanded. Didn’t say why, and nobody asked him. The desk clerk just gave him a different key card and room number, and had a bellhop take his suitcase up.”

  “Then what?” Quinn asked, almost casually. He needed to prime the pump now and then, keep Wanda talking.

  “Then I came in here and had some drinks.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I’m not sure. Sometime around seven thirty. I was already here, and had been for a little while, before Duke came back down from moving things into his new room. He was with some convention friends.”

  So around seven o’clock Duke had heard the torture and multiple murder in progress.

  There was a pause in the conversation while everyone sipped his or her drink, maybe thinking about three hotel rooms, one unoccupied, one where murder had happened, and one that had contained a prostitute and her customer, worrying about what people would think and say and do if they were found out.

  Something about that infuriated Quinn.

  Harold gazed at Wanda and said, “Do you have a business card?”

  Wanda looked at him as if he’d grown another head. Then she got a wrinkled scrap of paper from her purse and jotted down her address and phone number. She handed it to Quinn rather than to Harold or Sal. Alpha woman to alpha male. Quinn shot a glance at it and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

  “You gonna stay around town?” he asked Wanda.

  “Around the hotel, if you guys don’t mind.”

  They didn’t.

  “None of us heard that,” Quinn told her. Let the wheels of sexual commerce keep going ’round. They will anyway.

  Wanda smiled.

  “One thing,” she said, “so you don’t get confused when you talk to people. I was a redhead last night, not a brunette. I see some of the same clients, pass them in the lobby or halls, and changing my look kinda minimizes men doing double takes.”

  “You mean triple takes,” Harold said. “One take because you look familiar, a second to make sure you’re really who they think you are, and a third because there’s something different about you.”

  “You know, that’s right!”

  Quinn mentally shook his head. It was just like Harold to think of that.

  Wanda Woman smiled at Sal and Harold and touched Quinn lightly on the cheek as she left.

  Quinn had to admit, it had an effect.

  As they were leaving the hotel, Harold said, “Hide the key. How do you suppose—”

  Sal said, “Forget it, Harold.”

  PART TWO

  I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.

  —T. S. ELIOT, “The Love Song of

  J. Alfred Prufrock”

  15

  England, 1940

  In small ships and large, the evacuees kept arriving from Dunkirk. They staggered or were carried onto shore from ships tied up at docks along the coast, and sometimes where there were no docks.

  Some of the evacuees were physically whole, but with hollow features and vacant stares, and memories that would haunt them forever. They were defeated men. Overjoyed to be home, but beaten. Some of them were French, but most were from the British Expeditionary Force, which, according to gossip that Betsy Douglass picked up from the other nurses, had almost ceased to exist on the continent. Where the Germans were.

  Many of the men were physically wounded, some in ways fatal that wouldn’t claim their lives for weeks, but nonetheless would take them.

  Betsy Douglass found herself holding a compress to a head injury to a man in a BEF uniform. He would have been soaked in blood were it not for the work of the Channel waves.

  He looked up at her, smiled, and said what some nurses were accustomed to hearing. “Am I in heaven?”

  “I’m afraid not,” she said, returning the smile.

  “Tucker,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “My name is Henry Tucker, and you are my angel of salvation.”

  “I think you’re a little woozy, Henry Tucker.”

  “I won’t be always,” he said.

  She squeezed his hand with her free one, and watched the blood seep from his head. “That’s the spirit!”

  He laughed, almost choking to death before regaining control. “The spirit? What that would be, darling, is Churchill and Hitler having at each other in a boxing ring, where nobody would get killed.”

  “That,” she agreed, “would be the proper spirit.”

  He grew serious and squeezed her hand back. “We’ll get the bastards back.”

  “Yes, we will, Henry Tucker.”

  He stared up at her. “Says on your name tag you’re Betsy.”

  “Betsy Douglass,” she said. “I don’t want most people to know my last name so I marked it out on the tag.”

  “But you told me.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “You’re different, Henry Tucker.” Let him feel special. He’s earned it.

  “Are you married, Betsy?”

  “Not hardly. What about you?” She knew she was playing into his hands, being stupid. But there was something about him. Maybe because he might possibly be dead within a few days.

  “My wife died three months ago.”

  “I’m sorry. Truly. In a bombing?”

  “Struck by a lorry while she was riding her bicycle. Dead is dead, be it by bomb or lorry. Sometimes I still hear her calling my name. I turn and look, but she isn’t there.”

  “It was probably me you heard earlier, assuring you that you weren’t yet in heaven.”

  He turned away, and she had to adjust the compress. He winced in pain. “Seems like the whole world’s turned against us, doesn’t it?”

  “Seems that way right now, Henry Tucker.”

  “Douglass! Nurse Douglass!”

  The icy hard voice of the head nurse, aptly named Nora Dreadwater, cut through the chatter and clatter of the transportation staging area.

  Betsy straightened up, but continued her pressure evenly on the compress.

  “Get that gurney into an ambulance!” Nurse Dreadwater commanded.
/>   “Yes, ma’am. Should I ride with the patient?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Nurse Dreadwater said. She was used to her young nurses falling in and out of love. The new ones, anyway. Before the protective calluses on their hearts had formed.

  It was a blow but not a shock when Betsy Douglass went into work at her nurse’s station and heard that Henry Tucker had come down with a staph inspection. Worn down to almost a catatonic state, she’d been given two days off. Now, already, she was feeling guilty for those two days. She should have been here, where people needed her desperately. Where people were dying.

  She’d sat with Henry Tucker most of the first day off, and was chased away by Nurse Dreadwater, ordered to rest. Dreadwater had even given her pills to take to help her sleep. Betsy hadn’t taken them.

  She could tell by the other nurses’ faces that they understood that in the past two weeks Betsy and Tucker had fallen in love. Love, in fact, was what was supposed to save Henry Tucker. It conquered all, surely it could conquer a head injury, even one serious enough to merit a steel plate inserted in the skull.

  Betsy walked swiftly through the ward to Henry Tucker’s bed, made semiprivate with an iron frame and pull curtains.

  Betsy knew immediately that he was dying. She’d seen so many of them die in the past fortnight, since they’d stopped coming in from Dunkirk, and what should have been the healing had begun.

  “I was gone two whole days,” Betsy said. “I shouldn’t have taken two days off.”

  “You were here most of the first day,” Dreadwater reminded her. “And you needed at least three days to regenerate yourself. You were almost passed out, talking gibberish, a danger to the patients.”

  “The other nurses do the same.”

  “Yes,” Dreadwater agreed. For a second or two she seemed about to cry. Then her features rearranged themselves in their usual stony expression.

  Henry Tucker moaned and said something. Nurse Dreadwater leaned in close and he repeated it. She looked at Betsy.

  “What did he say?” Betsy asked.

  “He said to quit wasting his time.”

  “What does he mean?”

  “He wants me to leave you two alone,” Dreadwater said. She started to say something else, then cast aside one of the curtains and was gone.

  Henry used a forefinger to summon Betsy closer. She moved to be right next to him, then leaned over him and hugged him lightly. His body seemed almost weightless as she embraced him.

  He exerted an effort and shifted position until his mouth was near her ear.

  Then he seemed to become delirious, hugging her harder and harder with what waning strength he could muster. He began to babble. She couldn’t understand much of what he said. Something about his “things.” His backpack.

  “You’ll get everything back when you leave,” she told him.

  He smiled up at her, humoring her.

  Where does he find the strength?

  He pulled her closer, and began to whisper to her about what was in the backpack. What she was supposed to do with it.

  He became quiet then, with her head resting on his breast.

  Too quiet.

  The clock by the side of the bed ticked, ticked . . . The only sound in the world.

  Betsy was afraid to move. Terrified of the reality.

  He had died in her arms.

  Betsy began to cry, which made her furious. She needed to reestablish her detachment and professionalism, and here she was sobbing for a man who in truth she barely knew.

  But they would have gotten to know each other better. Much better. If Henry Tucker had survived.

  “His head wound seemed to be healing,” she said. “He might have survived.”

  “We thought he had a chance.”

  Betsy bowed her head and Dreadwater stood hugging her. The curtain was open. People walked past them, staring, then hurried on about their business.

  “You have to gain control, dear,” Dreadwater said. “These are trying times. We need you. Need you badly.”

  Betsy stepped away from her and stood up straight. She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand.

  She drew a deep breath and nodded. “You’re right, of course. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Dreadwater said. “We will simply have to cope.”

  Betsy moved to walk away, toward her assigned ward, when Dreadwater’s firm grip on her elbow stopped her.

  “Henry—Corporal Tucker—had a few hours of consciousness and clear mental function before the infection and medications altered his thinking,” Dreadwater said. “No one had told him, but I’m sure, toward the end, he knew he was dying. He left you this.” She handed Betsy a sealed white envelope.

  Betsy stared at it, then tucked it deep in her uniform pocket. Two patients were rolled past on gurneys.

  “I’ll read this later,” she said. “Work to do now.”

  “Of course,” Dreadwater said, with a thin smile. “I’ll let you get to your task.” Her shoes’ gum soles made a curious squishing sound on the recently mopped floor as she walked away. Betsy would hear that sound in her dreams.

  Betsy worked with almost demonic intensity, well into the evening. She tended to an artilleryman who’d lost his right arm to a sniper’s bullet. A French officer with a machine gun bullet lodged in his hip. A ship’s captain with half his face missing after a bomb blast. An RAF pilot with a head wound not so unlike Henry Tucker’s. The pilot asked her if he was going to recover, and she reassured him that he would.

  “Gotta get back up top,” he said with a smile.

  Her sadness, her pity, her emotions threatened to overwhelm her—but she successfully forced them away to the edges of her mind.

  She realized that many of the other nurses, and doubtless the doctors, whom she’d thought so dispassionate, had learned emotional detachment before she had. That was the only difference between them and her. The violence and blood and futility was scarring them internally, and had been all along, even though it couldn’t be seen. None of them, not the nurses, patients, doctors, none of them would come through this unscathed. If they were lucky enough to survive physically, still they would bear scars.

  Betsy couldn’t imagine a day when the memories would no longer sting and bring tears to her eyes.

  That evening, before nightfall and the blackouts, she sat alone on a park bench and in the dying light read what Henry Tucker had written in his failing hand.

  It wasn’t exactly what she expected.

  It was a thank you and a plea, and a set of instructions.

  16

  New York, the present

  Jeanine Carson had pedaled nine miles and gone exactly nowhere.

  She was on her usual stationary bicycle in Sweat it Out, the neighborhood gym where she was a member, and where she spent every other evening. The heavy, stationary bicycle was set at an angle to the large window looking out on the sidewalk. Now and then passersby would glance in at Jeanine. Some of the men would smile.

  Not that she was dressed to attract attention, in her baggy knee-length red shorts, oversized black T-shirt, and red elastic headband that kept her blond curled hair away from her perspiring face. Mostly away. Now and then her hair dangled in a curtain down one side of her face. Even so attired, and with her hair in what she considered a mess, Jeanine was still an attractive woman of forty.

  Forty! God! How did that happen?

  Well, it had happened. She decided she should be thankful that in the right light she could pass for thirty. Or so she’d been told.

  She pedaled harder, as if trying to outdistance her troubles.

  A guy in a gray business suit, lugging an attaché case, bustled past outside the window. He glanced her way and grinned.

  Jeanine couldn’t help herself. She grinned back. Mostly out of appreciation. He was about her age and still handsome. In the game—maybe. Or maybe he had a wife and six kids out in Teaneck. What would it be like to be ma
rried to a man like that, to come home to him and six kids?

  Jeanine let her mind roam, keeping her legs pumping on the pedals. Narrowing her focus as well as her waist.

  What would it be like to come home to a man in an Upper West Side apartment, with no kids involved? Now that was more in the realm of possibility.

  Her thighs were beginning to ache, and she tightened her grip on the handlebars and concentrated on her exercise, forcing the embodiment of her dreams from her thoughts.

  Back to the drudgery of a regular exercise regimen. Reality and self-recrimination. If she was overweight, it was simply because she ate too much. She was the one to blame. The one in control of her fork.

  Personal responsibility.

  That thing about pain and gain.

  Those were the sorts of thoughts that ran through Jeanine’s mind now, as her body performed its repetitive assault on itself: My fault. I don’t see anyone else around here to blame. Too fat, too fat, too fat ... though she was only a hundred and twenty pounds, at five foot six. But it was a fat one-twenty.

  The stationary bike continued its whirring clacking accompaniment: Too fat, too fat, too fat . . .

  Such were the musings of an unemployed financial consultant, some of whose problems might be easily solved if she weren’t . . . too fat in some places.

  She pedaled on, going nowhere, sweat rolling down her face, down her neck, tickling her—

  The short clacking sound of a coin tapping on glass made her raise her head and look outside.

  There he was, out on the sidewalk, grinning and staring at her through the gym window. Mr. Executive with the gray suit and attaché case. He was back.

  I’m the reason why.

  He made a motion as if he held a knife and fork, an obvious invitation to dinner. She deliberately looked away from him, allowing herself to smile slightly, as if she couldn’t help herself under the onslaught of his charm.