“Well, he’s coming all the way from Albuquerque.”
“Yeah, that’s quite a trip—”
“At his age it is.”
Her mother paused and Liz thought she heard the moist clicking of dentures slipping from gums.
“Your brother will be here, of course.”
She thought of Ronald and his dumpy little wife. She thought of the box they called home, located in a street of underdeveloped tract houses in Phoenix. Ronald was in electronics. His little wife, Rhonda—Rhonda yet—was a part-time nurse in a local old-age home. She couldn’t stand the thought of talking to Ronald, the way they chatted around the edges of threadbare memories, items from the past that Liz sometimes couldn’t recall. And Rhonda would sit there with a heap of embroidery on her thick legs. My flesh and blood, Liz thought; you could work up quite a nice guilt for yourself like this, wondering why you had so little in common with your family. She entertained a supreme fantasy of sitting down to Christmas dinner and, immediately after grace, announcing the true nature of her profession. Trauma. Shock. Incredulity. Yeah, really, I fuck for a living. It’s only on a short-term basis, you understand.
“Liz, are you sure nothing is wrong?”
“Absolutely.”
“I mean, if anything was wrong, you’d say—wouldn’t you?”
Liz recognized the tone; it was getting close to the I-wish-your-father-was-still-alive trip. “Ma, of course I’d tell you. But nothing is. Everything’s just dandy.” Dandy, she thought. That was a word you could throw in for your mother. “Look, I just wanted to call, say hello. I’ll write in the next few days. Do you . . . I mean, do you need anything?”
She never did; or if she did, she was too self-sufficient to ask. “All I need from you, Liz Blake, is a long letter now and again.”
“You’ve got it”
“Take care, you hear?”
“I promise. Good night, Ma.”
Liz put the receiver down.
Everything’s just dandy—like being suspected of a murder.
She walked back inside the living room. She lay down on the sofa. The important thing, she told herself, is to believe in your innocence, in the fact you had nothing to do with the whole damn mess, so if they wired you up to a lie detector along the way, you’d come through with flying colors. I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, she said to herself. The hell with Marino and what he might assume.
She closed her eyes. Sleepy. Weary.
She wondered about the telephone ringing. The click on the end of the line. You’re safe, Liz. The killer can’t touch you. You’re sitting pretty.
It doesn’t cut it, she thought. She sat upright. How come, if you’re so safe, you feel so goddamn on edge? Norma would be here soon; some company would help, maybe even a glass of wine and a shot at sleeping. She suddenly thought of her father; it was weird and unpleasant, but she had the curious feeling at times that he was watching her, from a point beyond the grave, from someplace on the other side of death, he was watching what she was doing. And he was sick with disapproval. Not my girl, not my little girl . . . She supposed this spiritualist fantasy had its roots in some guilt. She wished guilt, like dust, could be swept beneath a rug. But sometimes she felt he was up there, drifting through the clouds, shaking his bald head in sorrow.
You’re being ridiculous now, she thought.
All you really remember of him is the smell of tobacco in his clothes, the way light reflected from his hairless scalp, the fact he was never short of a dollar when you badly needed anything. There you go, her mother would say, always running to Daddy, Daddy’s little girl . . . Inexplicably she felt sad; the last time she’d seen him was the day he died in the hospital, wired up to some terrible machine, his cancerous breathing coming in broken wheezes and his eyes filled with the humiliation of pain. She’d overheard one of the interns say: That guy’s got more cancer than a lab rat. You name a place, he’s got it there.
Life and love: to a ten-year-old girl these things seemed so fragile, so tenuous. When he died she remembered feeling glad he wasn’t in pain any more. A sense of relief, like sunlight bursting into a room that has been shuttered way too long.
She rose from the sofa. She picked her watch up from the coffee table. It was exactly one o’clock in the morning.
3
When she got out of the cab she walked a couple of blocks, passing shuttered stores whose windows were cluttered with cameras and calculators and electronic games, passing a jazz club from whose open doors the sound of a solo saxophone drifted out in a discordant manner, a pawnshop where a dark figure lay sleeping in the doorway. She reached a corner, paused, watched a cop car cruising past in a stream of taxis; she was reminded of a dark tropical fish caught in a school of yellow ones, an outsider, one who did not belong to the fraternity. She crossed against a DON’T WALK sign, reached the other side, moved past a couple of guys arguing outside a telephone booth. Then the next block was empty, desolate, apart from herself; you might imagine the city as some void, a place of absences.
At the end of the block there was a sudden flood of light. It came from the window of a clothes store. She stopped outside and looked at the mannequins that, frozen under a blinding stream of light, suggested the newly dead. It was a bridal scene. The female stood in a cascade of white, clutching plastic flowers. The groom wore a velvet tuxedo and a red cummerbund and a shirt with lace frills. A bride and groom, she thought. A marriage of mannequins. Something about the scene reminded her—of what, for God’s sake? She couldn’t think. She stared into the blind eyes of the bride. Passionless, frigid. The quality of lifelessness frightened her. She tried to imagine some lewd window dresser taking their clothes off after the display had run its course, undressing them and carefully laying the man on top of the woman in a back room of the store, a dead honeymoon played out amongst the cartons and cardboard boxes of a stockroom.
She turned away, moving faster now.
The darkness around her was a chill thing. She turned up the collar of her coat. She listened to the flat echoes of her own steps as she hurried. The cold seemed to pierce the fabric of her clothing, getting down through the layers of her skin, through her nerve ends, to the surface of bone. When she reached the apartment building, she was looking for she went inside quickly, finding herself in an overheated entranceway, a floor of black and white tiles underfoot, like a vast chessboard stretching endlessly under the subdued lights.
Ahead she saw the doors of elevators.
She hesitated. She felt disoriented suddenly, lost in this place. She stopped, leaned against the wall, stared at the rows of locked mailboxes in front of her. A name, an apartment number. It doesn’t matter, does it? Why does it matter?
Sixty-three. Apartment sixty-three.
She walked towards the elevators. As she did so the doors of the building swung open behind her and she turned to see a young black woman come inside—sharply dressed in a long coat with a fur trim, long brown boots, her hair braided into thin strands through which you could see the purple of her skull. She was moving towards the elevators, the heels of the boots clicking on the tiles.
The black glasses. She wanted to put on the black glasses.
She fumbled inside her purse, couldn’t find them, couldn’t find her protection, her camouflage. You don’t need them now, she told herself. She watched the elevator doors open and she stepped inside, then she heard the black woman call out. “Hold that, will you?”
Before she could press the button for the sixth floor the black woman rushed inside the car, laughed, slumped against the wall out of breath.
“Thanks,” she was saying.
Bobbi looked down at the floor, averting her face, half-smiling from some habit of politeness.
“These are the slowest elevators,” the woman said.
Bobbi said nothing. She could feel the vibration of the car as it shuddered upwards, as if it were fighting an impossible battle with gravity. The black woman was looking inside her purse for something. She took out
a Kleenex, wiped the tip of her nose, sniffed.
She hadn’t pressed a button, Bobbi thought.
She was going to the sixth floor too.
If she wasn’t, why hadn’t she pressed a button?
She glanced at the black woman, watching the strands of hair shine, the gloss of pink lipstick. Then she was conscious of being assessed in some way, the other woman’s eyes seemingly scrutinizing her. It was a quick thing, a brief look, but Bobbi caught it and wondered: Is something wrong with me? Do I look strange somehow? You imagine it, that’s all. There’s nothing out of place. Not a damn thing.
The car stopped and the doors slid open. She let the black woman get out in front of her. She hesitated next, watching the woman go quickly along the carpeted corridor—soundless, moving as if she weren’t touching the floor. Bobbi opened her purse, pretended to be searching for something. She was aware, without looking, of the other woman stopping along the corridor and turning her face round, like she was checking to see what Bobbi was doing. But that was stupid—why should she be checking? Bobbi walked forward. Pretty soon she’ll disappear, she thought. Pretty soon she’ll go inside her apartment and then I won’t have anything to fear . . .
There isn’t anything to fear anyway, is there?
She felt her muscles tighten, her hands stiffen around her purse. She wished she hadn’t dropped the razor. She wished she had it now. She could use it . . .
She saw the other woman pause along the corridor, ring a bell, wait. Bobbi stepped close to the wall. She saw a door open. She watched the woman go inside, then the door was closed.
The corridor was empty.
She experienced a strange falling sensation, something like panic, like the sinking of her blood, a weight dropping through her body.
No—
Quickly, she moved along the corridor.
No.
It was true. True. Bobbi put her hand up to the small wooden numbers nailed to the door of the apartment.
Sixty-three.
Why had the black woman gone inside that apartment?
She stepped back, staring at the two numbers as if they were accusing her of something. She closed her eyes tightly and bit her lip, tasting lipstick, not sure if it wasn’t the taste of her own blood, if she’d punctured the surface of the lip with her teeth.
Why? For Christ’s sake, why?
She turned away, filled with a sensation that was confusing, vague, as if disappointment and relief were present at one and the same time. She went back towards the elevator, pressed a button for the car, got inside when it came.
As it sank towards the lobby she wondered: How would I have killed her anyway? With what? My bare hands?
When she got out of the elevator, when she left the building and felt the cold of the night air rush through her, she realized her chance would come again. It would have to.
4
Norma had a joint in her purse which she lit as soon as she entered the apartment, taking a drag on it and offering it to Liz, who shook her head.
“Hey, it’ll help you relax,” Norma said.
“It’s okay,” Liz said. She looked at her friend for a moment. It was a godawful realization that although she had a number of acquaintances, only Norma could be counted as a real friend. “Listen, thanks for coming over.”
“No sweat,” Norma said. She took off her coat and sat down on the sofa. She smoked some more of the joint, then she stubbed it neatly in the ashtray. “So you really saw this killing?”
“Yeah, I really saw it.”
“That’s heavy.”
“It’s more than heavy,” Liz said. “I mean, when you expect an elevator you don’t expect a bloody assassination.”
Norma nodded. She tilted her head back against the sofa, crossing her long legs. “What did the killer look like?”
“It’s damn hard to say. Tall. Blonde. Black glasses—she had these shades that made it impossible to really see her face.”
Norma sat forward. The whites of her eyes were faintly bloodshot now. “You want to hear something funny?”
“I’m dying to—”
“I just rode up in the elevator with a tall blonde lady—”
Liz stared at her friend a moment.
“Hey, relax. She didn’t have no black glasses, though.”
“What floor did she get off at? Did you see?”
“You’re really uptight, honey. She got off at this floor.”
“This floor?”
“Yeah.”
Liz walked around the room, her hands in the pockets of her dressing gown. “You’re kidding me,” she said.
“No way. You don’t think it’s the same lady, do you?”
Liz shrugged. “No, I don’t think it could be.”
“Damn right it couldn’t be. Like how could she find you? How could she know where you’re at?”
“She couldn’t,” Liz said. It sounded unconvincing, even to her. You happen on to an event in a random way—a terrible event, but random, accidental—and there was no way the killer could know her, know where she lived. Just the same, she felt uneasy. “Can you sleep here tonight?” she asked.
“I can sleep anywhere,” Norma said. “I’d like a drink. What can you offer?”
“Some wine. I think maybe there’s scotch. Help yourself.”
Norma went out into the kitchen. Alone, Liz stepped towards the window, reached for the drape to pull it back—but she didn’t want to look out into the street. She thought: I’ve never seen anybody getting off at this floor that looked anything like the woman Norma described. But that didn’t mean much, not in an anonymous apartment building, not in a place where tenants came and went with restless frequency. I’m safe, she thought. I’m perfectly safe.
Norma came back with a glass of red wine. She put her hand lightly on Liz’s shoulder as she went towards the sofa.
“Nothing’s gonna happen, Liz—”
“Then there’s the cops—”
“Listen to old Norma, huh? Them cops got nothing on you. They’re playing games. Like they always play games. You know that.”
“Yeah. I guess you’re right.”
“Sure I’m right.”
There was a silence between them for a time, then Norma said, “I can sleep right here. On this sofa.”
“You sure you don’t mind?”
Norma shook her head. “For you, I don’t mind.”
Liz sat down in an armchair facing the other woman. She had a sudden flash of the scene in the elevator. It came at her, in all its terrible detail, and she tried to force it out of her mind. A thing like that, she thought, it stays with you forever.
She went over to the sofa and she hugged Norma briefly.
“Thanks. I appreciate this,” she said.
“You’re trembling,” Norma said.
“I’m trying not to.”
“You got any sleeping pills or downers?”
“Yeah.”
“Take one.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Doctor’s orders,” Norma said.
Liz went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. She removed a bottle of Placidyl, swallowed one of the capsules with some water, and then she returned to the living room to wait for sleep.
She hoped it would be dense and black and dreamless when it came.
5
Peter rubbed his eyes. He looked up from his worktable and glanced at the clock beside the bed. Normally, he paid no attention to time but now he had a feeling or urgency, an awareness of minutes passing. 3:22. How could it be that late? He looked at the darkened window, half-expecting to see the first light of dawn in the sky, but it hadn’t happened yet. He stopped what he was doing, left his room, went inside the kitchen where he drank a glass of water—cold, tasting of moss. Through the kitchen doorway he could see Mike sitting in the living room, staring blankly at a test card on the TV. It was strange, soundless, just this spooky series of rainbow colors. Mike had been still and silent
ever since they’d come back from the precinct house, and the depth of his quiet emphasized the emptiness of the apartment, the fact that she wasn’t there any more, that she would never be coming back . . .
Never was an odd word, Peter thought. When he’d come home he’d taken out an old scrapbook of pictures, looking at snapshots of his mother and father, his real father, thinking how dated their clothes were, how their smiles in all that sunlight seemed doomed, destined to death, and it struck him that never again, never in the history of the world, would his parents be together again. Unless there was something after death, a thought he balked at because in his heart he was a scientist, he understood the disciplines of science, the quantifications and the formulae and the experiments that sometimes gave you results. What experiment could ever prove there was something beyond the grave? There wasn’t one. If there was anything out there, it was shrouded and silent and locked in a dark privacy. When he’d closed the book, he’d gone inside the bathroom and shut the door and cried, realizing the uselessness of tears, the waste of energy involved, and time passing, time he could put to more practical use.
Now he looked at his stepfather for a moment, wanting to cross the floor, touch him, maybe put his arms around the man, as if that might ease their sense of loss.
He said, “Can I get you something? A glass of water maybe?”
Mike turned his head slowly. The test card flickered. When he spoke his voice was hoarse. “Nothing. But thanks.”
“I thought . . .” Peter faltered, not knowing what he meant to say.
Mike was staring at him.
“Thanks anyhow,” he said again.
Peter went back to his room and closed the door. Christ, it was hard not to feel sorry for Mike. He sat down at his worktable, staring at the assorted devices lying in front of him. Maybe it was a harebrained idea, this gadget; maybe it was going to prove nothing in the end but a waste of time. Sometimes an idea for a project came into his mind out of nowhere, like some magic thing conjured up out of the unconscious; at other times a project was imposed upon him by classroom demands. But this was the first time he’d ever felt such an urgent necessity to do something, even if as he worked at it he had recurring feelings that it wasn’t going to do any good. He couldn’t afford to believe that. He couldn’t afford to be pessimistic.
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