Dressed to Kill

by Campbell Black

  “You’ll sleep in your office?” she asked, and there was a sad resignation in her question.

  “Probably,” he answered.

  “I’m sorry about your patient. Really I am.”

  “I know.” He blinked into the bulb of the lamp. He looked down at his desk. He read a part of a letter beginning, Dear Professor Samuelson, I shall be very happy to join your symposium . . . “Look, if it isn’t too late, I’ll try to get back tonight.”

  She was yawning again. He imagined the great house, the empty rooms, the orderly nature of everything, the curious sense he sometimes had of an absence of life in that house—or was that an absence of love? Love, he thought. Love was a perishable commodity. It became as habitual as the act of shaving in the mornings. The thought irritated him because it stirred some odd longing inside him, as if what he hungered after more than anything was the return to some former condition when the heart was easy, the passion strong . . .

  She said, “You won’t be back tonight, will you?”

  “I can’t promise. I’ll try.”

  “It doesn’t make much difference, does it?”

  He didn’t answer. He heard her light a cigarette. Then he thought of how the smell of tobacco hung in her hair, adhered to the folds of her clothing, seemed to sink into the depths of her skin. He wasn’t sure why smoking repelled him the way it did. If he’d asked why, if he’d delved into the nature of the thing, it would have been like a bad joke—the analyst analyzing himself. He understood that he didn’t want to be near her, he didn’t want the feel of her against him, the odor of tobacco, the surface of skin against skin. Love gives way, he thought. It dies. It dies and somehow you miss the funeral, the wake, the smell of smoke from the crematorium. It dies unmourned, a hobo in a pauper’s grave.

  “I’ll see you when I see you,” she said. Click.

  He held the receiver a moment longer, then he set it down; he got up from his desk and went inside the bathroom that adjoined his office. He turned on the light, looked at himself in the mirror, then washed his hands at the sink. He opened the medicine cabinet. He somehow thought the razor might be there, the theft of it some act of his imagination, but of course it wasn’t there.

  And Kate Myers was dead.

  Momentarily he felt a wave of nausea, a warmth in the pit of his stomach. He made a cup of his hands and splashed his face with cold water. Kate Myers dead. It was senseless. Meaningless. He turned to the window and, with a flick of his wrist, pulled open the slats of the pale blue Venetian blind; the city lay in front of him, like something that wasn’t rooted in concrete but afloat in the night sky in a mad explosion of lights. He stared at the lights. A lunatic city. He found himself thinking of home—not the mausoleum of a house in White Plains, but the place he considered home—England, the Sussex Downs that swelled above Brighton, remembering long walks on wonderful summer nights, remembering how he and his wife would take one of the double-decker buses up to the Downs and then, arm-in-arm, go strolling over the soft land. That wasn’t me, he thought. Someone else. Not me. He let the slats slip back into place, wanting the memories to stop, but there were faint echoes still, strains of disintegrating conversations.

  Do you really want to try America? Anne asked.

  It’s the land of opportunity, he’d said.

  I don’t know if I want to be one of the huddled masses.

  Huddled masses. Land of opportunity. It had been good to him too; the way had been easy, too easy. But why was there this strange emptiness? He remembered the past too vividly, those lanes that ran down to the promenade and the sight of the English Channel chopping the skyline beyond the weathered rows of white-fronted hotels, the upstairs gallery in a bar called The King and Queen where he’d sat often with Anne, the drive from Brighton to Lewes, where they’d park the car and just walk (it was always summer in his memory, always leafy, the land verdant), how they’d stop at The Swan in Falmer on the way back.

  The huddled masses, he thought. Dear God. It hadn’t been like that at all. He switched off the bathroom light. He took his coat down from a hook and put it on. In the outer reception room he paused, standing there in a manner that suggested he’d forgotten something. But he hadn’t. There wasn’t anything.

  He patted the pockets of his coat, heard his keys rattle, and then he went out into the lobby. He wondered where Bobbi was now, what she was doing, and why she hated him so much.

  I made a certain decision, he thought. I made a certain decision that I knew was the right one. And he dismissed from his mind the creeping possibility that he might have been wrong.

  He might have been mistaken.

  As he closed the front door behind him, as he walked toward the street, he thought: Kate Myers is dead.

  3

  The boy watched the overhead lights. He thought that if he kept staring at them he wouldn’t have to really think, he could hide away from his innermost feelings, somehow disguise himself, create a retreat from his own sense of turmoil. But it wasn’t working, it just wasn’t working, because other things kept intruding and when they did he felt he wanted to cry.

  But crying isn’t any good, he thought. Crying doesn’t help. So he squinted his eyes and looked upwards . . .

  There must have been terrible pain . . .

  No. Don’t think that way.

  Somebody in a uniform stopped beside him and asked if he wanted a drink. He shook his head. His throat was dry but he didn’t want anything to drink. The cop went away. The boy looked across the room. There was a pretty woman of about twenty-one in an office on the other side. She was leafing through a book of some kind. A book of photographs.

  Pain, she must have felt . . .

  He forced his mind elsewhere. Think of anything but her, the way she died. Anything. There are three main types of fluorescent light. Preheat. Rapid-start. What was the other one? It had slipped his mind.

  He took his glasses off, rubbed the corner of an eye, put the glasses back. Preheat and rapid-start and something else? But what? At each end of the tube there’s an electrode, a coil of tungsten coated with chemicals; the chemicals are known as rare earth oxides. A device called the ballast provides voltage to start the lamp and regulate the flow of current in the—

  Somebody was sitting down beside him, a man with a leather jacket and a dark moustache that he kept touching. A cop, the boy thought: the guy in charge of finding the killer.

  Terrible pain and fear . . .

  The cop touched him lightly on the back of the wrist. “I’m Lieutenant Marino,” he said. “You’re Peter, right?”

  Peter nodded. The third type was called—

  “This is a nightmare,” Marino said. “If there’s something I can do, kid.”

  “Catch the killer,” the boy said, surprised by the venom in his own voice.

  Marino smiled in a slow sad way. “I’m trying.”

  Peter stared down at his satchel. From some place far inside him came a devastation, a biting chill of loss, regret, a sorrow that was irreducible to language. It came up so hard and so fast he could taste it in the back of his throat. He thought: I could have gone with her this morning. I could have gone to the museum. Then to lunch.

  And none of this would have happened and I wouldn’t be sitting here, sitting here trying to think of anything else in the world except that one godawful fact, her death, the way she died . . .

  “I’m really going to try,” Marino said.

  The boy caught a scent of some kind of deodorant mingled with sweat. He rubbed his forehead. It was so damned hot in this precinct office. Maybe somebody could open a window, turn the thermostat down, something. A current flows through the gas from electrode to electrode, forming an arc. He shut his eyes a moment against the overhead lights. Thinking electrodes won’t bring her back. Thinking tungsten and argon atoms won’t bring her back from wherever she is.

  Both of them are dead.

  It hadn’t occurred to him before, and now it did with something of a start. Bo
th of his parents were dead, which meant there was only Mike. Mike. But Mike didn’t like him and he didn’t like Mike. That equality, like a well-grounded formula, pleased him for a second. Then he thought what Mike would be going through at the morgue and he felt sorry for the guy.

  He stared at Marino. “You got any leads?”

  The cop hesitated, then shrugged. “We’ve got a witness, I think.”

  I think, Peter wondered, what was that supposed to mean?

  “Who?” he asked.

  “That young lady over there.” Marino pointed across the desks of the central office. “She claims she saw the killer.”

  Peter looked over the room. The young woman was still leafing through the books, laboriously turning pages. She appeared pale, nervous, finishing one cigarette only to light another. He watched her for a time. The third kind is called instant-start. Right. He had it. He remembered it. But then the other thing intruded again, assailed him, and he had to turn his face away from the cop and shut his eyes and grit his jaw. The cop touched the sleeve of his jacket.

  “Listen, I can get somebody to take you home, Peter. You don’t need to wait around here.”

  “I’ll wait,” Peter said.

  “Yeah. I guess your father won’t be much longer.”

  “He’s not my father,” Peter said. Tears formed in his eyes. He tried to blink them away, wondering why he was betrayed by his own physical responses. “He isn’t my father.”

  “No?” Marino looked puzzled a moment.

  “He’s my mother’s husband. There’s a difference.”

  “Your stepfather, then.”

  Peter said nothing. Stepfather seemed like a dirty word to him, like something out of a fairy tale, something soaked in a terrible cruelty. But Mike wasn’t cruel, just uncaring. Just cold and distant and numb.

  “You sure you don’t want a Coke?” Marino asked awkwardly. “We got this ancient machine that still dispenses Cokes in bottles. You hardly ever see them like that these days. Cans, always in cans. It doesn’t taste the same to me unless it comes in a bottle.”

  Peter understood. The cop was trying to make him feel easy, trying to divert his mind from the fact of the murder. It was a gesture, a kind one, but meaningless anyhow. Peter shook his head and said, “I’m not thirsty.”

  Marino got up from the bench. He patted Peter on the shoulder. Cheer up, that was what the touch meant. Oh, Christ, the boy thought. Sweet suffering Christ, why did this have to happen? And then the pain came up from below again, a black thing moving through him like a cancer shadow. Absently, he looked across the room, watching Marino wander from one desk to another, talking with some cops. One of them was laughing at something, a gesture, a sound, that struck Peter as being all wrong, out of place. He stared back towards the girl. She was sitting with her head in her hands now, a cigarette burning on her lips, her purse hanging from the back of her chair. No more pain, he thought. Being sad is useless.

  She’d told him that once and he remembered it now. The day they knew his father had been killed in Vietnam. She’d said something like: Try to remember him the way he was, try to remember only the good things and the terrific fun we all had; try, and you’ll see that being sad is useless . . . He banged his hands together angrily. She’s gone—and that seemed to him ludicrous somehow; in an age of interplanetary spacecraft, high-intensity lasers, computer chips with the capacity of storing 15,000 bits, requiring a density of 3.3 million bits per square centimeter, in an age like this they hadn’t devised a way of bringing people back from the dead.

  He opened his satchel, looked inside, closed it again. Then he sat back with his eyes shut, trying desperately not to think of anything at all, not to remember, dream, fantasize. There was just this enormous space inside himself, like a gash, a terrible wound, one you couldn’t smear with first aid cream and put a plaster over, one that only time and justice could heal.

  Justice. Catch a killer. He wondered how long it would take them to do that. Somewhere at the back of his mind he remembered reading about the number of unsolved homicides in the city of New York in a single year, and although he couldn’t recollect it with any exactness, he remembered it was high, too high. And it nagged him to think that maybe his mother would become one of those unsolved cases, another statistic in a ledger of failure.

  He gazed back at the fluorescent lights again. An electron in the arc strikes a mercury atom, raising the energy level of another electron in the atom, then you’ve got invisible ultraviolet rays. Invisible, he thought. Death does that too, doesn’t it? It makes people invisible. He wondered remotely if there might be a spiritual life, existence on some other plane, but he wasn’t willing to put any bets on it. Maybe you died and that was the end. Blackness. Nullification. Then life was pointless, wasn’t it?

  He wondered what his mother had believed at the very last, if she’d had the time to believe anything at all. He clasped his hands in his lap. He wanted to get up and talk to the young woman and find out what she really saw, whether she was actually a witness. But he felt some terrible lethargy now, a sensation that immobilized him. The stuffy heat of the room had something to do with it, like he was melting inside. He got up and walked to the water fountain, inclined his head, let the jet strike his skin. Then, when he looked across the room, he saw Marino talking with a man in a dark coat, a fair-haired man who had about him a kind of distinguished air, who carried himself as if he were important.

  He heard Marino say, “Take a seat over there, Dr. Elliott. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  The fair-haired man moved towards the bench. Elliott, Peter thought. His mother’s shrink. He went back to the bench just before Elliott reached it and he sat down. Elliott pulled up the legs of his pants as he sat. Peter folded his arms and leaned back, closing his eyes. Again, he tried not to think of his mother, but it was even more difficult now with Elliott sitting alongside him, because the man was a direct connection with his mother. He wondered what they’d talked about together during her appointment, what secrets she’d divulged to the psychiatrist, and this made him uncomfortable, imagining that Elliott knew all kinds of things about his mother, things he’d keep locked away, old secrets.

  “Are you Kate Myers’s son?”

  Peter opened his eyes. He turned to look at the psychiatrist. There was an expression of concern, of pity, in the man’s eyes.

  “Are you?” Elliott asked.

  “Yeah,” Peter said.

  “I think I know what you’re going through . . .” Elliott became silent for a time. Then he said, “I’m your mother’s doctor. Doctor Elliott. If it would help, you can talk to me any time. Any time you like . . .”

  Peter stared at the man. “Do you know who killed her?”

  “No.”

  “Then how can you help?”

  Elliott smiled. “Death is a difficult thing to deal with, Peter. Especially something like . . .” He paused, turned his hands over, gazed at his fingers. “Later, you might need somebody to talk to, that’s all.”

  A difficult thing to deal with, Peter thought. For a moment he imagined this to be some dream, the kind of weird out-of-shape dream you wake from covered with sweat, puzzled, astonished by your own night visions. But it wasn’t. She isn’t going to come through the door right now, walk over to me, smile. Not now. Not ever.

  “Your mother once showed me a photograph of you,” Elliott said. “You and she were very close, I understand.”

  He handed Peter a small white card.

  He said, “Feel free to call me whenever you like.”

  Without looking at it, Peter stuffed the card inside his jacket. Then he watched Elliott get up as Marino came across the floor. The two men went inside an office and the door was shut. Peter realized he had never been so alone before.

  4

  Marino had ambivalent feelings about head doctors; they were the same kind of feelings he entertained about dentists and lawyers and general practitioners of medicine—costly evils of the kind
that weren’t always necessary. His wife had once gone to a psychologist at the time when she’d been pregnant with their first kid; a counsellor, she called him. For some reason she’d had the feeling that the baby wasn’t going to make it, or that she was too small to carry it the full term. Normal fears, Marino had told her. Which, in a roundabout expensive way, was the same thing her counsellor had told her after a half dozen sessions or so. He wondered why it took so long to wrench a platitude from some people.

  Now he looked across his desk at Elliott, who sat facing him with his hands in his lap. Soft hands, Marino thought. They were the color of cream stationery. You couldn’t see this guy doing manual labor of any kind, not even something simple like tending a vegetable garden.

  Elliott asked, “How did she die?”

  Marino told him. He looked for some expression on the psychiatrist’s face, some change, but there was nothing, as if a lifetime of listening to the sorrows of other human beings had made him impassive, immune to the violences and treacheries of the species.

  “Do you know who did it?” Elliott asked.

  “We’ve got a witness,” Marino said. He stared at the glass wall of the office. He could see the shape of the kid’s head, the dark hair just beyond the pane. He thought: I shouldn’t have talked to him. It hurt just to look at the boy.

  “What did the witness see?” Elliott asked.

  “The blonde with the razor,” Marino said. “She says.”

  “You sound as if you don’t believe her,” Elliott said.

  “I didn’t say that. Miss Blake claims she didn’t get a real look because of the blonde’s black glasses.”

  Black glasses. Blonde. A razor.

  Marino leaned back in his chair, wondering for a moment if something slight, something so vague as to be imperceptible, had moved across Elliott’s face. Trouble is, he thought, you read too much sometimes into an expression. A habit.

  “When she left your office was she alone?” Marino asked.