Richard stood in front of me, his eyes wild. He had a firm grip on Effie’s upper arm. She looked terrified. He pushed her away, down the hall. “Get out of here. Now.”
Rocky, caught up in the excitement of unexpected visitors, bounded back and forth on his hind legs, front paws on our kneecaps, looking for his own bit of attention in the melee. His barking was lost in the white noise of the apartment and the sound of fear ringing in my ears. Richard kicked at him and pushed me against the bookcase.
“Where is it? Madison, where did you hide it?” His fingers bit into my biceps and he shook me. “He’s going to kill me if he doesn’t get it. You started this whole thing, you have to finish it. I can’t hide anymore.”
“Richard? What’s going on? What are you doing here?” I tried to stall.
Effie had come back too soon. She hadn’t had a chance to deliver the note to Tex. And I’d seen the look on her face before she ran to her apartment, and it was one of fear. Not of fighting, or standing up to a bully, or taking control of the situation. If I was lucky, she would call 911 and Tex would get alerted by way of dispatch.
Richard pushed me out of the way, against a wall, and kicked the front door shut.
My feet sought footing and I wished I was wearing my shoes instead of being barefoot. I felt something under my heel, crushed glass from the bulb of the lamp Rocky had broken earlier. Small shards stuck into my foot. Richard pushed me to the side and looked at my bookcase. Like a crazy man his eyes scanned the shelves, until he tipped the whole thing over, scattering volumes of decorating magazines and reference material across the floor. Even if someone did show up and try to come in, the door would be blocked.
The lights were on and if I could get Richard into the bedroom, Tex might see his shadow backlit from the light in the room. He’d know I wasn’t home alone. He wouldn’t know who was with me, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting help.
“What are you looking for?”
“Don’t play stupid with me, Madison. The film? The stolen reel? You think I don’t know you have it now? He tracked it to you and he’s after me to get it back. After all these years, it’s come down to this. You couldn’t leave well enough alone. You wouldn’t get scared, and now he’s going to kill us both. I don’t even know how you ended up with it, but I’ve already gone through too much to lose it all.” His eyes darted around the apartment.
He wasn’t making any sense, but he wasn’t acting like a killer. He was acting like a very, very scared man who had a very real threat pressing down around him.
“Richard, are you Russian?” I asked.
He glared at me for a second before he opened my hall closet and started pulling down large rubber tubs of personal belongings that had been packed away. Stale mildew-laced air wafted from storage bins. Blankets and dolls and vintage clothes that needed mending spilled into the hallway. He shook his foot to get a green tweed dress off the toe of his heavy black shoe.
“It’s not because I’m Russian. It’s because of the application. He would have found me whether I had Russian parents or not. I changed my name so I could disappear and start over. And you’ve ruined that for me. Killing me won’t bother him, he’s already killed four people!”
“Richard! What are you talking about?”
He looked into my eyes with an intensity that scared me more than anything else that I had seen. He kicked the clothes between us.
I took a step backward.
He advanced until I was pressed up against the wall in the hallway. His face was inches from my own. His hands pushed against the wall on either side of my head, creating a cage of limbs.
“The film reel. I need the film reel.” The lights had solved the biggest problem that Richard had, which was being able to clearly see what I owned and where I kept it. “Where did you hide it?”
“I don’t have any film reel!”
There was a knock on the door.
Richard clamped a hand over my open mouth, black wool fingers jutting between my lips, triggering a gag reflex.
“Quiet,” he hissed. “It’s him.”
I couldn’t speak or yell if I wanted to and I really, really wanted to. I wanted to throw something at the window to make it break, to shower the parking lot with a glass shard cry for help. I wanted Rocky to create the biggest ruckus he’d ever made.
Rocky.
Where was Rocky?
He’d gotten out. When Richard had forced himself in, Rocky had taken off. He was a dog, a little dog, a little defenseless dog who liked people and attention and cars and didn’t know any better when it came to traffic when he wasn’t on his leash. And despite the threat against me, tears stung my face as I thought about little furry Rocky outside, alone, in the dark, in the night.
The knocking continued. Come in come in come in hammered against my brain, willing any of my neighbors to show up at my door. From the hallway where Richard was pressed against me, I could see the shadow of two feet by the front door. Come in come in come in, I thought again. This is no time for politeness. Come in. You heard something or you know something, or you found my dog, but just come in. Try the knob and come in.
“Madison? Are you in there?” asked a male voice. “Madison, I found Rocky running down Gaston. His address is on the tag on his collar.” There was another knock on the door. “Are you in there? I thought I heard you.”
It took me a second to place the voice.
I looked at Richard and shook my head rapidly to get his hand away from my mouth. “It’s okay, I know who it is. He’s from the pool where I swim. Be human, Richard. I’ll help you find whatever you need but let me answer the door and get my dog back.”
Richard pulled away from me and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. It was still hot, too hot to be wearing a sweatshirt. He pulled it over his head, exposing a black T-shirt with a picture of Klaus Kinski on the front.
“Thank you,” I said, and stepped over the mounds of clothes to the front door. The knob turned before I got to it and the door hit the resistance of the books on the floor.
“Hold on just a second, Mr. Popov, I mean Andy,” I said and kicked the books away from the door.
Mr. Popov.
With a force I didn’t know he had, he shoved a foot in the opening and pushed against the door, crushing magazines behind it. He did not hold my dog.
“Volpa jenshiva, you stupid little girl,” he said. His face twisted, his wrinkles etched deep into angry lines on his forehead, by his eyes, and on either side of his down-turned mouth. “You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?”
He walked toward me and again I found myself retreating.
I looked around but didn’t see Richard anywhere.
“That reel of film cost me my career. I thought I took care of it, but I didn’t count on Thelma Johnson or her daughter. That kid was no good, she caught me searching her mom’s house and tried to blackmail me. She wouldn’t let it go. I had to shut her up, for good. And your friend the good Samaritan came along and made it all perfect. I convinced her mom he was the killer and she never once suspected me.
“But I couldn’t find the reel. I thought I’d bide my time, wait until I found it and get her to give it to me. It wasn’t until she said she sold a bunch of stuff at a yard sale that I realized it might be gone. I freaked and she realized the truth. And even after I took care of both of them I didn’t count on you.”
His face twisted into an angry knot. His words were laced with an accent normally kept under wraps at the pool.
“Where is it, girly?” he demanded.
“Where’s my dog?” I demanded back. I couldn’t stop to think about the danger I was in because I still couldn’t wrap my brain around what was going on. But Rocky’s life depended on every move I made.
“Stupid little mutt, just like you. I took care of him. He’s in the dumpster.” A maniacal sound erupted from his throat and triggered a volcano of rage inside me. I stepped forward and brought m
y knee up to his groin, hoping to catch him by surprise.
He anticipated the move and caught my knee. With his bare hands he twisted my shin far enough to the left to let me know he’d been paying attention all of those mornings at the pool where I’d favored my left leg. The pain grew steadily stronger, until I was all but incapacitated.
I heard the snap before I felt the pain. As a kaleidoscope of colors burst in my head, blotting out my vision and my common sense, I lost both balance and the ability to fight back. I collapsed onto the floor.
THIRTY-FOUR
When I came to, I was on the sofa. Richard pressed a bag of ice against my kneecap. I pulled away, on alert. I couldn’t feel my leg. I was scared, more scared than I’d ever been. And the pain rivaled the pain of the skiing accident still fresh in my memory.
“Madison, I’m sorry I scared you. Andreev’s been after me for a while. He thinks I have a reel of a Doris Day movie he stole from AFFER. But it’s not Pillow Talk, it’s something else. Something he hid decades ago.”
“Richard?” I uttered.
His voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “Where is it, Madison? Where did you hide it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Any of it.”
“He knows you have it. If you just tell him where it is, he might go away and not hurt us.”
Sounds of someone tossing my kitchen like a Waldorf salad filled the background. Richard was more gullible than I took him for. Four murders, countless attacks, threats, breaking and entering? Popov wasn’t going to let us go no matter what he found in my cabinets, and I still didn’t understand exactly what he thought I had.
“Richard, listen to me. There’s a cop, out back, sitting in a Jeep next to the dumpster.”
“No there’s not, Madison. I saw him on my way in. I knew he would stick around if I couldn’t get rid of him.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him Hudson James was at The Elbow Room getting drunk. He thanked me and took off. That’s how Popov got past him.”
I stared at the ceiling, not wanting to believe Richard. Catching Hudson was the one thing more important to Tex than my safety. Tears stung my eyes, and I fought to sit up.
“Listen to me, Richard. That man is not going to let us go. We have to get out of here and I can’t walk.”
“Please, Madison, tell him where you hid the film reel.”
“I don’t have a film reel. I didn’t hide anything. I don’t know what you think I have, but I don’t have anything you don’t see.”
“Think. Thelma Johnson had it and you are the only person to take anything from her house. You must have taken it, even if you don’t know that you took it.”
Pans crashed against the linoleum floor. My downstairs neighbor would hear that if anyone was home. Where were the rest of my tenants? Why wasn’t anyone coming to check on the noise coming from my apartment?
Popov came out of the kitchen. “Are you sure you don’t want to save me the trouble of searching the apartment, missy? If you just give it to me, I’ll get out of here. Get in my car and get to the airport and on the next flight back to Russia. I could have been home years ago but first them, then you. You were more stubborn than everybody else. The rest of them got scared. You lived like you had nothing to lose.”
“What is so important that you were willing to kill four people?”
“My reputation in my country. My Russian citizenship. My life. Here I’m an old man. There, I was an astronaut. A legend. I stole the evidence they had of my infidelity to my country. Thelma Johnson—she screwed everything up, she thought it really was Pillow Talk, thought it had a scene with her in the background. When she found out the truth, that the only interest I had in her was in the film reel, that I had killed her daughter over it, she came after me with a knife. I should have destroyed the film when I had the chance. But that woman hid it. She knew its value to me and how dangerous I was. A man without a country. Because of the mission to Mars, because of what I knew, because of what I told. It’s the only evidence that I sold secrets of our space program, that I sacrificed the Soviet strategy for money. They’ll have no proof I’m a spy and they’ll have to let me back into my country, to formally apologize, to celebrate me as a hero once more.”
Andreev Popov was crazy. He was not going to allow either one of us to walk out of there alive, even if I had been able to walk at the moment.
“I’ll tell you where it is if you let Richard go,” I said boldly.
“Madison, no!”
“That’s the arrangement you made with him, years ago, when you approved his application to film school, right? When you first saw the letter campaigning to destroy all Doris Day movies? You knew somehow you could use him. You thought you’d create an ally, even an unwitting one. You sent his letter to AFFER. You even mailed it with his name on the envelope, so he’d be under suspicion if anything happened to Pillow Talk.”
“He wanted to cooperate at first.”
I looked at Richard. The bravado had left him and all that was left was the shell of a man in a grimy, sweaty, rumpled T-shirt. Even Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu looked less threatening than he had earlier.
“It was a highly competitive program and I wanted an edge,” Richard said. “That’s why I wrote the letter in the first place. And when Mr. Popov taught my class on documentaries he asked for volunteers to help with a project. I wanted a good grade. I thought it would make a difference, you know, have a solid reference on my resume. He was supposed to be teaching us how to get good footage, how to get past the people that try to keep you away from the truth. How to get inside, you know?”
“The kid did good, too. I gave him an A,” the Russian said with a laugh. “I could have assembled an army on the power of a grade in those days.”
I still didn’t know where this supposed film reel would be, and I’d just offered to give it up to save Richard. Running through my head, along with the fear and the pulsating rush of blood, were snippets of conversation Hudson and Tex had shared with me independently. It was in her wardrobe. But I’d seen the wardrobe. It had been destroyed. The table leg, sitting off to the side, told me Hudson had been there. Hudson needed to find the film reel, too, to show there was a clear motive for murder between someone else and Sheila Murphy, between someone else and Thelma Johnson.
But the fact remained that Popov thought I had it. And what if I did? What if the best items I’d taken from Thelma Johnson’s wardrobe included whatever we were looking for? That whatever we were all looking for was now in my wardrobe? Was it possible that between polyester pant suits and vintage cotton dresses hung proof of a Soviet espionage ring, secrets that people would kill for?
I tried to stand, but pain shot through my leg. I collapsed back onto the sofa. I was dizzy and nauseous. And then I remembered Mortiboy.
“Popov, it’s in the closet. On the top shelf.”
“Madison!” cried Richard.
Popov moved like a mountain lion stalking prey in the wild. His shoulders hunched and his sleeves, pushed up to expose the hair on his forearms, tensed with muscles that had never atrophied under his eighty-year old skin. I realized he’d been at the pool so many times but had never been in a bathing suit. I’d never seen his physique, never knew he was a solid and menacing mass of muscle, now coated in the stink of desperation.
I pushed at Richard. “Get out of here. Now!”
“I can’t leave you with him.”
“Get help. Fast.” I could only speak in short words, the pain interrupting my ability to breathe. Richard stood up and looked in the bedroom. Popov was bent over, moving the piles of shredded laundry that Mortiboy had left on the floor after yesterday’s climbing session. He would soon turn his attention to the closet. Mortiboy had been trapped in the closet for almost a day. He would be one pissed off cat. At least, that’s what I was counting on.
Popov didn’t notice Richard move toward the front door. He flung the sliding closet doors aside in a grand gesture.
Mortiboy jumped out of the closet at him, clawing his face, his neck, his arms. Popov screamed.
I pulled the bandana off my head and wound it around my knee. While Popov wrestled with Mortiboy, I pulled the metal rod of the broken pink and brass lamp from under the sofa and angled it like a cane.
And then I heard the crash.
I looked in the bedroom. Popov was on his knees, holding his face. Streaks of blood on his cheeks indicated Mortiboy’s damage. But as he knelt on a pile of clothes, with blood-covered hands pressed against the wounds on his face, a stack of hatboxes settled into a pile on the floor in front of him.
And it wasn’t the turquoise felt trilby that caught my attention. It wasn’t the brown and white rabbit fur cap that buttoned under the chin. I hadn’t looked at either since buying them years ago and tucking them away on the top shelf of my closet, where I’d stacked the hat boxes I’d brought home from Thelma Johnson’s house.
It was a reel of film that fell out of the bottom box and landed by Popov’s knees. A reel of film that Thelma Johnson had hidden in a hatbox years ago.
Popov grabbed the reel with bloody fingertips. I stood, balanced on one foot, and stared at him. I had to get out of there while I had the chance, but I couldn’t walk. Popov tore a pillowcase from its case and threw the reel into it, then held it shut the way a miser would clutch at a bag of gold coins.
“You stupid girl. You had it all along. So many people dead. So much wasted time.”
He moved toward me, a sharp kitchen knife in his hand, his eyes bloodshot with fury. His hair, a comb-over, stood on end and fell down longer on one side than the other. I put the weight of my bad knee on the pole of the lamp and mustered up the strength to fight him, yet even if I had two good knees I couldn’t win this battle. I couldn’t run away, could barely stand. Mortiboy had been my ace in the hole and he’d done his best, but now, like so much of my life, I was on my own. I was about to become victim number five.
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