LoveMurder

by Saul Black

  “Valerie Hart.”

  “Detective?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Connie Lopez calling from USPS. You spoke to my colleague, Jason Darnell? About the routes for one of our former employees? Raylene Ashe?”

  “Right. What’ve you got?”

  “I’m sorry it’s taken this long, but you might know we’re in the middle of an industrial dispute at the moment and it’s been … Well, anyway, we have some of the information you requested.”

  “You’ve got all the addresses?”

  “Not all of them, no. Problem is a lot of carriers work pivot and we don’t have all the records for that.”

  “What’s ‘pivot’?”

  “That would be when a carrier’s route doesn’t necessarily take the full eight hours, so they get shifted—that’s the ‘pivot’—onto a secondary route to make up the time. I mean it can happen on a daily basis.”

  “At this stage I’m interested in the primary routes. Addresses you know she hit with some regularity.”

  “Right. I can send you a pdf for everything we’ve got. I’m sorry it’s not … I’m sorry it doesn’t cover everything. We’re still waiting on the office in Portland for over there, but they’ve promised it before five this afternoon.”

  “Great. Send through what you have, and the Portland list as soon as you get it. You have my e-mail address?”

  “Yes ma’am, Jason passed it on.”

  “Okay, I’ll be waiting. Thanks for your help.”

  “Make sure everyone what?” Will said, when Valerie had hung up.

  “Make sure everyone gets the dog and fake blood update. Okay. Here’s the list of Raylene’s San Francisco routes. Jesus, this is a lot of addresses.”

  “It’s not worth it, Val. It’s remote.”

  “Tell me what else we’ve got?”

  “Yeah. I know. But fuck.”

  “Why are you in such a bad mood?”

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “Anywhere other than your balls.”

  “Listen. You’re a woman. You don’t know. When your balls are wrong, everything’s wrong. Plus, if your boyfriend beats me one more time at racquetball you’re going to have another fucking homicide on your hands.”

  “He beat whatsisname a couple of weeks back.”

  “Squash Boy? Eugene?”

  “Yeah. I’m name-blind with that guy. Who’s called ‘Eugene’ in the twenty-first century?”

  “You haven’t met him?”

  “I met him once for about five seconds.”

  “Nick’s so gay for him.”

  “I’ll tell him you said that. And that it’s got nothing to do with how much the squash has killed your racquetball.”

  “You should be worried. Eugene’s a bad influence. Tales of sexual liberty. I’m just saying: these things rub off. The grass is greener, et cetera.”

  “Greener than my grass? I think not. Now stop talking to me, please.”

  Valerie started on the list. It established that neither Katherine’s last address nor Elizabeth’s had ever been on any of Raylene’s regular routes—but nothing else. She cross-checked the Bureau’s revamped short list of profile possibles: none of their addresses either. More joyless elimination.

  When Will went to get lunch an hour later she went with him. Not for food, but to smoke three cigarettes and pick up a coffee that was actually drinkable. She was in a phase of eating virtually nothing during the day. Not vanity. Sometimes the work just took you that way. The coffee and cigarettes flew by and before you knew it it was dark out and you hadn’t had a bite for twenty hours. Lately, Nick had been forcing her to eat some sort of breakfast, even if it was just toast, and he gave her a hard time if she didn’t eat when she got home. It had occurred to her that he was (subconsciously, probably) trying to keep her healthy so that she could Carry His Child. About which she couldn’t resolve herself. She wanted it, yes—but every time she conceded she did her inner voice said: Not yet. Not yet. It wasn’t that she couldn’t see a future in which she and Nick had a child. She could. (In fact, the ferocity of her latent motherhood terrified her; she knew she would be a lost cause, dangerous, precarious, crazy with love.) It was just that she couldn’t imagine that future starting right now. But every now was right now, every time she tried to imagine it. Soon, she would run out of right nows. The countdown to infertility went on, no matter how many murderers you caught. And now, dear God, the return of Katherine Glass and the Man in the Mask. Neither she nor Nick had needed to say that this right now was absolutely the wrong right now. In the moment of thinking this clearly for the first time (as Will supervised the building of his enormous sandwich amid the deli’s cheery colors and reassuring products), she knew, in a humble but lucid epiphany, that if she caught the Man in the Mask, if she put him away, if she took that particular ugliness out of the world, she would be ready. She would say to Nick: Now. Let’s do it. It was arbitrary and dangerous and irrational. But she knew the equation was set. Standing there in the sunlight, in that moment of realization, Valerie felt the street, the city, the world, suddenly scintillate, as if with delight that she’d worked it out at long last. The certainty and the risk of it dizzied her. But it was fixed in her now beyond argument. She imagined telling Cassie. You’re fucking insane, her sister would say. When she imagined telling Nick it was immediately apparent that she didn’t need to. He already knew. After this one. After we get him. (After Katherine.)

  “Here,” Will said, handing her the to-go cup. “You got a free cookie the size of your head. I think Ashan’s got a crush on you.”

  “No, he’s just a feeder,” Valerie said. “You should be ashamed of that sandwich.”

  Her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number. A little awkward negotiation with coffee cup and cigarette to get it to her ear. “Valerie Hart.”

  “Detective, it’s Susanna Arden. I have something. Katherine thinks she has a name.”

  Valerie stumbled mentally. Hadn’t McLuhan told his agent the next victim had already been found? It was, she supposed, possible that he hadn’t, occupied with rushing things up in Portland, and in any case convinced that the Katherine Glass line was a waste of time.

  “She cracked the documents? What’s the name?”

  “She’s not a hundred percent,” Arden said. “The sequence of the letters is uncertain because she can’t pin down the number order for the second grid. But what she’s got is ‘Helena Ayres.’”Arden spelled the surname. “Or possibly ‘Helena Sayer,’ although that doesn’t sound a likely surname to either of us.”

  Valerie tossed the cigarette butt and stubbed it out with her toe. To either of us. She wondered what it was like for Arden to be spending so much time with Katherine Glass. She wondered if they felt like a team, two schoolkids working on an intriguing assignment. “Well, tell her thanks for playing,” she said, “but we already have a second victim. Not that name. She get anything else?”

  A slight pause, in which Valerie could sense Arden’s irritation that this news hadn’t reached her. It wasn’t Valerie’s responsibility, but she still felt guilty. “I thought McLuhan would have told you. Sorry. The body was found this morning. Portland. Your boss has had his hands full. He’s probably on his way back here now.”

  “Right,” Arden said. “I see. Well, no, there’s nothing else.”

  “You should get out of there,” Valerie said. “I know it can’t have been any kind of fun.”

  “It’s weird. She was so convinced. So was I.” Arden sounded genuinely deflated. “I’ll call McLuhan. I’ve had just about enough of this place.”

  Back at her desk (woozy from too many smokes crammed into too short a time; if she was going to have a kid, all that would have to stop) Valerie wrote the name “Helena Ayres/Sayer” on the yellow legal pad next to her keyboard and picked up where she left off with the list of addresses.

  She’d only been at it a couple of minutes when she stopped. The legal pad kept insinuating it
self in her peripheral vision. She picked up her pencil. Her hands were sensitive, suddenly. The room noise around her receded.

  Crossword and sudoku specialists will be of little use to you.

  It was as if she could feel his body heat right next to her.

  H E L E N A A Y R E S, she wrote, in capitals.

  Oh.

  Her brain had gone on ahead of her, but she forced herself through the confirmation.

  Underneath, she wrote R A Y L E N E A S H E.

  Then she began striking through the corresponding letters, one by one. She did it twice, just to be absolutely sure.

  She sat back in her chair.

  The sequence of letters is uncertain because she can’t pin down the numbers in the second grid.

  “Will,” Valerie said. “Take a look at this.”

  17

  Valerie met Katherine in the same visitor room as before. Warden Clayton wasn’t available but sent one of the guards to show her in. Valerie recognized her from the previous visit: the narrow-shouldered woman with too much mascara. Her hair was in the same French braid. LOMAX, the name tag said. Small talk en route to A-2 was labored.

  “She been any use to you?” Lomax said.

  “Hard to say just yet,” Valerie replied. “We’ll know more after today.”

  “You did her a big favor. Got her out of her cell.”

  “Well, not for nothing, I hope.”

  After that, they walked in silence. There was a little energy coming off Lomax, as if she were pissed about something. Not a very bright person, Valerie thought. She could imagine how many of Katherine’s velvet-wrapped put-downs had landed here, or passed just over Lomax’s head, leaving her with the knowledge that she’d been mocked without any comprehensible proof of it.

  Two more guards, one male, one female, were on duty outside the open door to A-2. Katherine, in the same fatigues and restraints as before, sat at the Formica table, facing the door, laptop open, surrounded by papers filled with notes and numbers. Other sheets with printouts from Web pages. Agent Susanna Arden sat just out of arm’s reach but with a clear view of the screen. Again, there had been no forewarning to Katherine of Valerie’s visit.

  “Valerie,” Katherine said. Then a smile. “I don’t know if I’m right with the name.”

  “Well, you’re either very close, or it’s an almighty coincidence.”

  Valerie crossed to where Katherine sat and picked up what Katherine had been writing with: a half-blunt wax crayon. Of course: no sharps. She wrote the name “Raylene Ashe” in the margin of one of the printouts (an extract from something called Lives of the Artists, by Giorgio Vasari). She turned it to face Katherine.

  For a couple of seconds Katherine studied it. The same curious psychological nudity of her face, stripped for a moment of its usual look of strategy. Valerie observed her unfolding the anagram.

  “Fuck,” she said. “Right letters, wrong order.” Then, as the realization dawned, she looked up at Valerie. “Wait. You have this name because … Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s dead, obviously.”

  “Found yesterday. Filmed, this time.”

  “What did he leave you?”

  Valerie showed her the note, the postcard. “You know this?”

  “The Fall of Icarus. Yes, I know it. It’s a very famous painting. But it’s not about the painting. It’s for me. It’s a reference. ‘Musée des Beaux Arts.’ A poem by W. H. Auden.”

  “Want to clarify that for me?”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, this woman’s already dead. The poem’s about suffering, and the universe’s indifference to it.”

  “Another of your landmark conversations?”

  “Well, we did have them. Instead of the movies and the walks on the beach, as I said.”

  “I’m going to need you to detail the process,” Valerie said. “How you arrived at the right letters, albeit in the wrong order.”

  “Why would I do that?” Katherine said.

  “Because I don’t doubt we’re going to get more of this shit.”

  “I don’t doubt it either,” Katherine said. “But you’re asking me to render myself redundant.”

  “What?”

  “If I tell you how I did it, you won’t need me when the next shit, as you tellingly put it, comes in, and I’m back to spending all but two hours a day staring at the ceiling and masturbating. Even for me there’s a limit to the diversion value in that. My mental material gets worn, as will a brass doorknob, with enough handling, enough time.”

  They looked at each other. Valerie was aware of Agent Arden’s tiredness. Naturally. She’d spent hours, days with Katherine. The cost was visible. Not just in the dark eyes’ deepened orbits, but in the slightly unraveled composure, an effect similar to a shirt done up with one button in the wrong hole. McLuhan should’ve sent someone older, with circuits already burned out.

  “I hope you’re not trying to dictate terms,” Valerie said, though she couldn’t quite hold Katherine’s eye as she spoke.

  “Don’t look away,” Katherine said. “Looking away betrays weakened resolve. You know I only need an inch for my miles.”

  Valerie’s skin warmed. There was a heat to Katherine that reminded her of an operating room lamp. She forced herself to look back at her, eye to eye.

  “Did you ask Nick?” Katherine said.

  Don’t look at Arden. Don’t say anything. No. Say something.

  “Sure,” Valerie said. “We had an interesting conversation about it. Probably not as erudite as yours with your boyfriend about Adam and Eve or poetry or whatever, but still, definitely worth having.”

  The latent smile that was always on Katherine’s lips burgeoned fully. Years ago, Valerie and Cassie had visited Europe. In the Louvre, the line to see the Mona Lisa had crawled. It had taken them an hour to get themselves in front of the canvas. Behind them were two stoned British girls with loudly dyed hair: electric pink, electric blue. One of them had said to the other: Well, at least now we know what she was smiling about. She had a premonition of all the millions of morons who were going to wait forever in a line to get five seconds to wonder what the fuck she was smiling about.

  “That was a lie, Valerie,” Katherine said. “Good people are terrible at lying. I know. It’s one of the perks of being a bad person. Don’t go down that road. You don’t have what it takes.”

  For the first time in a long time, Valerie wanted to hit her. Not just hit her. Rip her to pieces. She felt both the impulse—and the futility that followed it, immediately.

  “Think what you like,” she said, and via some miracle managed not to look away. But Katherine’s eyes were unbearable. They were full of recognition. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Valerie could sense Agent Arden observing, actually with relief—because it wasn’t just her Katherine managed to mess with. Yeah, Valerie felt like saying, welcome to the fucking Katherine club.

  “I don’t think what I like,” Katherine said. “I think what I can’t not think. As do you. Clarity of consciousness is the curse of the wicked as well as the good.”

  For no reason other than to break what was between them, Valerie moved back around to the other side of the table. There was no chair there, so she leaned against the wall. It was, regrettably, good to take some of the weight off her feet. She felt as if she’d walked all the way up here.

  “The novelty of you wears off, Katherine,” Valerie said. It surprised her. Not just because it had come out unpremeditatedly, but because she couldn’t remember ever addressing Katherine by name before. Was that possible? In all the hours they’d spent in conversation? It was almost obscene, an unwanted feeling of intimacy that spread from her mouth (having spoken the word) through every part of her body. The operating room lamp warming her limbs. With a subtle, true, horrible adjustment, Valerie knew it could be slightly arousing. Katherine. Such an ordinary name. Such an extraordinary person.

  “I keep forgetting how much you’ve c
hanged,” Katherine said. “How much more room you have, how many layers have been stripped away. You wouldn’t have been capable of saying that six years ago. Not convincingly, anyway. And yet here you are, saying it. And, courtesy of the same wretched and infallible talent, I know you’re not lying. Or that you’re only half lying. Either way, it’s impressive. We could have been something, you and I. Imagine if we’d been sisters. We are sisters, in a way. Tied by blood. Shed blood, but still, blood.”

  Sisters. It ruffled Valerie that only moments ago she’d been thinking of her and Cassie in the Louvre. It was, she told herself, just paranoia that made her wonder if Katherine hadn’t somehow picked that up. She imagined her own thoughts coming off her like invisible flames. Invisible to anyone but Katherine. With Katherine you were handicapped as much by what you didn’t say as by what you said.

  “Well, it’s up to you,” Valerie said. “Tell the Feds how you did it—or your involvement’s over and you can go back to staring at the ceiling and masturbating.”

  “Can you afford that?” Katherine asked.

  “What?”

  “Can you afford for it to get out that you had the means—or at least the chance—to prevent the next murder, but didn’t use it?”

  “Yes,” Valerie said. “We can. It’s the same logic as not giving in to terrorists’ demands. The public will understand. In any case, it wouldn’t get out.”

  “There’s directness,” Katherine said, “which you’ve clearly acquired—and then there’s brittle bravado, which doesn’t suit you at all. First, don’t be so sure it wouldn’t get out. I’m in prison, not on Mars. Second, I’m not talking about the public. I’m talking about the loved ones of the woman who ends up dead. Don’t answer that ‘we’ can afford it. I’m not addressing the collective psyche of law enforcement. I’m addressing you, personally. I’m asking if you want it on your conscience.”

  Katherine never raised her voice, and she didn’t now. But the operating room lamp heat went up a little. Valerie was aware of Arden wondering which of the two women in the room with her was crazier.