by John Lutz
Jill used the remote to switch off the television. She stretched out on the sofa on her back with her forearm over her eyes. She knew she wasn’t going to sleep. She wasn’t tired. Her mind wouldn’t be still.
She removed her arm from across her eyes and sat up, remembering something. Thinking back. Making sure.
There was no reason why she couldn’t do something about Madeline, satisfy her curiosity about the woman. She was certain Madeline had mentioned that her former apartment was on West Seventy-second Street, the apartment where the new Madeline Scott (if by some chance there really was one) would be living.
If the apartment actually existed.
If what she’d heard hadn’t been another of mad Madeline’s flights of imagination.
Jill got up from the sofa and went to where the phone sat, on a table near the door. A stack of borough directories lay on the table legs’ cross braces. She stooped and got the Manhattan directory from the top of the stack and carried it back to the sofa.
She leafed through the pages to the Scott listings. There were quite a few Scotts, but she found it almost immediately: “M. Scott,” with a West Seventy-second Street address.
Jill sat motionless for a few minutes with the open directory on her knees. Seeing the listing had given her a start, even though it was the object of her search. Its existence in the phone book made the rest of Madeline’s story seem much more possible.
Jill shook off that feeling. The listing might be for a different M. Scott, a Mary, Martha, or Margaret Scott. Or maybe a Mathew or Martin Scott. It wasn’t only women who tried to give the impression a man lived in their apartment, by using first initials for their phone number listings and mailboxes.
One way to find out.
Jill gathered her willpower and carried the directory to the phone. She pecked out M. Scott’s number.
And was told the number was no longer in service. It was now unlisted.
Jill hung up the phone and returned to the sofa. She sat down heavily, still clutching the directory.
Great! Now what?
But she knew what.
Her boredom, her curiosity, her fear were driving her.
She tore out the directory page with M. Scott’s listing on it and stuffed it in a back pocket of her jeans, in case she’d forget the address.
She’d seen the weather report three times this morning on TV and knew it was supposed to rain. No matter. She wouldn’t take an umbrella.
She felt lucky.
27
The West Seventy-second Street address listed for M. Scott wasn’t far from Columbus Circle. It was an old building, at least twenty stories tall, with an ornate brick and stone front that was chipped and stained. Maintenance or repair was being done on the building. Blue iron scaffolding nestled tightly against it, across and above the entrance, though at present no one was working. A red plastic cone lettered CAUTION stood to the side of the three shallow stone steps leading to its entrance. Jill thought that was apropos.
It wasn’t the kind of building that featured a doorman. In fact, one of the wide entrance doors was propped open by a crude wooden wedge. Jill stepped inside, where it was a few degrees cooler and dim after the hot brightness of outside.
To her left was a bank of tarnished brass mailboxes. In a card inserted in the narrow slot above the locked box of apartment 16C was the name M. Scott. It was in slightly smeared black ink and appeared to have been there a while. Jill peered through the narrow grille in the box’s door and saw only darkness. There was no mail inside. None that showed, anyway.
Jill moved farther into the lobby. It was large, with mismatched upholstered furniture arranged in two groups around low tables. One of the tables had a left-behind newspaper scattered over it. The other had an arrangement of plastic flowers in a glass vase on its center. Two elevator doors stood at the opposite end of the lobby, across an expanse of gray and white tiled floor. There were ancient stains on the floor that looked like they’d been made by people stepping on cigarettes to put them out. The elevator doors were wood, with fancy brass inserts that were as tarnished as the mailboxes. The lobby obviously hadn’t been redecorated in years, but it looked reasonably clean. A wide wooden stairway to the left of the elevators had rubber treads on the steps and stopped at a landing that turned out of sight.
The lobby was empty, as far as Jill could see. Unless someone was seated in one of the two high-backed upholstered chairs facing away from her. Sounds from outside were faint. The busy sidewalk and street seemed far enough away to be another world, though they were just beyond the propped-open door.
As she glanced back at the door and mailboxes, Jill noticed an intercom system on the wall opposite the brass boxes. She hadn’t seen it before because it was coated with the same beige enamel as the walls.
She went to it and found 16C, then pressed on an enamel-glutted button, which, to her surprise, actually depressed under the pressure of her finger, and waited.
No buzz. No voice. No answer.
Jill gave the paint-coated button another push, thinking the ancient intercom probably hadn’t worked since the fifties.
She gave it up, stood staring at the elevators for a moment, and then strode toward them. She’d come here to learn something, and so far she’d been shut out. She was frustrated.
At least the elevator buttons hadn’t been painted over. She pressed the “up” button.
Nothing lit up. There was no response until the narrow brass arrow on the floor indicator above one of the elevator doors trembled, then started to descend from the number nine.
Jill waited patiently. Finally there was a grinding, clunking sound, and the elevator door slid open.
No one stepped out.
Inside, the elevator was surprisingly small and paneled in dark wood with a heavy grain. Jill saw that the building had twenty-five floors. She pressed the button for sixteen and stood waiting for what seemed a full minute before the door slid closed. When she was completely surrounded by the oppressive paneling, the elevator lurched and began its ascent.
The walls of the hall on the sixteenth floor were paneled halfway up with the same wood as used in the elevator. The upper half of the walls was a much lighter beige than that in the lobby, and it was pinkish.
Jill left the elevator and turned right, then walked down a dimly lit hall toward a small, dirty window and a sign indicating a fire stairs door. Apartment 16C was about halfway there.
Its ancient, six-paneled varnished door looked like all the other doors except for the apartment number. Just beneath the brass numerals was a round peephole.
Jill found that her hand was quaking as she raised it, made a fist, and knocked.
She kept her eyes trained on the peephole, watching for movement or a change of light on the other side.
No answer. No movement. No sound from the other side of the heavy old door.
Jill swallowed, then knocked again, much harder.
The door across the hall opened, startling her.
She turned around and saw a small, Hispanic woman in her forties looking out at her. She had a shabby white robe wrapped around her and tied with a matching sash. Her graying dark hair was mussed. Jill noticed that her feet were bare and her unpainted toenails needed trimming. The woman said nothing, simply stared inquisitively at Jill.
“I’m looking for Madeline,” Jill said.
“You were knocking so loud, I thought it was my door,” the woman said, without a trace of accent.
“I’m sorry. Do you know Madeline?”
“Seen her a few times, is all. I’m not home a lot, and when I am…”
“What?”
“Nothing. People in this building pretty much mind their own business. You woke me up. Made me drag my ass in here and see who was at the door. Who was nobody. I don’t mind telling you that pisses me off. I work nights and try to sleep during the day.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should—”
“I said I was
sorry. Twice.”
The woman stared hard at her. “Apology accepted,” she said abruptly and moved back inside and closed her door.
Jill was angry at first, and then she had to smile. At least the woman’s rudeness had broken the spell of anxiety that had come over her. Or was she the rude one? She’d awakened the woman.
She shook her head and walked back toward the elevator. This little bit of detective work hadn’t yielded a bit of information, but she felt better. At least she’d done something instead of sitting around her apartment letting the questions eat her alive from the inside.
She rode the elevator down to the lobby and waited while the old door took its time sliding open.
And was startled to see silhouetted against the light a woman entering the lobby.
Madeline!
Or someone who looked remarkably like her. She was the same size and shape as Madeline, had the same walk, the same tilt of the head.
Jill was rooted to the elevator floor. Couldn’t budge.
The woman was walking toward the elevator. Toward her.
Jill’s mind worked frantically. She’d been standing staring at the woman. She couldn’t leave the elevator now. She’d stay where she was, as if she’d entered the elevator just before the woman came into the lobby.
Then the woman was ten feet away from her, no longer in silhouette.
She barely glanced at Jill and entered the elevator to stand beside her.
She wasn’t Madeline, yet she was. They were so similar that anyone might mistake one for the other at a glance or from a distance. And after seeing this woman a few times as Madeline, there wouldn’t be the slightest doubt as to her identity. At that point, even standing next to the real Madeline, this one would be chosen as the original.
This woman was perhaps slightly taller, and of course she was well groomed, with her blond hair cut the same as Madeline’s, only clean and combed. Her eyes, her nose, the thrust of her chin, everything about her was like Madeline’s. What wasn’t like Madeline’s—the slope of her forehead, the curve and fullness of her upper lip, the slight cleft in her chin (or did the real Madeline have such a cleft?)—all seemed to achieve a balance so the end result was that she looked like Madeline.
The woman pressed the button for the sixteenth floor, and Jill was afraid the woman might hear the wild hammering of her heart.
The elevator door slid shut.
Jill thanked God the buttons weren’t illuminated. The woman wouldn’t know that none of them had been pressed before she’d entered the elevator.
As the elevator rose, Jill knew what she had to do. She’d come this far, and afraid though she might be, she’d not stop now. Despite her fear, and the chance she was about to take, she’d go further.
But not farther up than the sixteenth floor.
Trying to seem casual, she exited the elevator first and turned left, away from 16C. She walked slowly, and near the opposite end of the long hall she stood before a door and pretended to be fishing in her purse for her key.
From the corner of her eye she watched the woman who looked like Madeline walk the opposite way down the hall, stop, and enter an apartment. She hadn’t glanced back at Jill, hadn’t seemed at all curious about her.
Jill hurriedly walked back down the hall, extending her arm and pressing the “down” button as she passed the elevators, in case she had to get away in a hurry. She had to make sure. To be positive.
With a glance at the numbered door to the apartment the woman had entered, she was sure.
The woman had gone into 16C.
Jill strode swiftly back along the hall, breaking into a jog so she’d be in time to enter the elevator that was waiting, door open, already at floor sixteen level.
It seemed to take forever for the creaking old elevator to descend all the way to the lobby.
Finally, back out in the sun and bright air of Seventy-second Street, Jill made herself walk at a normal pace away from the apartment building toward Columbus Circle. Her breath came fast and uneven, in tiny gusts that she couldn’t control. Her mind danced from one possibility to another, not liking any of them.
Now that she had this information, what was she going to do with it?
She remembered what mad Madeline had told her that day in her apartment: “They’ll learn about what’s going on and see that any investigation stops. And that I’ll be killed. And now that I’ve talked to you, that you’ll be killed.”
“You’re halfway to nothing already.”
28
Palmer Stone’s desk phone played the first seven notes of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” That meant his direct line.
That meant something important. Only certain people possessed that number: his most trusted employees, and a few privileged clients. The clients were supposed to use it only in the direst circumstances. At a certain point, they were to destroy the paper it was written on and then forget it.
Stone was in his midfifties but trim and still handsome. His tailored gray suit was Armani, his tie Hermès, his shoes John Lobb. His full head of dark hair was expensively cut and salt and pepper at the temples. He had features that were craggy yet amiable rather than noble, with a smile that dazzled. If he was an actor, he could play the president of the United States. If he didn’t drool or speak like an idiot, he could become the president of the United States.
Palmer Stone didn’t drool, and he spoke with calm reason in a moderated tone. He was as suave as he looked. But he had no interest in the presidency. It didn’t pay enough.
He picked up his desk phone on the third ring. “Palmer Stone here.”
“This is Maria Sanchez, Stone.”
An angry female voice, one he’d heard only a few times before. He didn’t think he’d ever hear her or speak to Maria Sanchez again. Like his other special clients, she no longer existed except on paper and as electronic pixels.
He didn’t get a chance to ask her why she was calling, what was wrong.
“I thought you told me that Madeline bitch was dead,” she said.
“Maria! It’s good to hear from you.”
“I thought—”
“Please don’t worry, really. Ms. Scott is no longer a problem. I can assure you of that.”
“Funny, I don’t feel assured.”
“There is only one genuine Madeline Scott, and you are she.”
“Sometimes I don’t goddamned feel like it, and that’s creeping me out. I got on the elevator this morning in my building and some bitch was waiting to go up. I had the feeling she’d been standing there a long time, and she had this weird look on her face. Then she got off on my floor, put on a transparent act of going to another apartment at the opposite end of the hall, and watched me enter mine.”
“You’re saying she looked like Madeline?”
“No, no! Listen to me, Stone. She was definitely giving me a close look, like it meant something to her, and I’m sure we never met before.”
“Well, you’re a beautiful woman, Maria. Even more beautiful now.”
“She wasn’t looking at me that way. She was…”
“What?”
“Scared of me. I’m sure of it. I’ve been around fear. I could smell it on her.”
“Why would she be frightened of someone like you?”
“I can think of only one reason.”
“What you describe might have been mostly your imagination, about this woman being so interested in you. It’s natural. We’ve seen it in other clients. You couldn’t look more like…who you are now. It’s not uncommon to have doubts at this stage of the game. Things started out a little unevenly, but we soon got them under control. Believe me, you have nothing to worry about.”
“Maybe you just think they’re under control.”
“Maria—Madeline, listen to me. When I tell you the other Madeline is gone for good, believe me. I can’t give you the details and you don’t want to know them, but you have my sincere promise.”
There was only silence f
rom the phone at his ear.
“Do you feel better, Madeline? Is my promise good enough?”
“I don’t know,” she said and broke the connection.
Stone hung up and sat drumming his manicured fingernails on the arm of his chair. Maria Sanchez had turned out to be a skittish one, which was a surprise. E-Bliss.org had been assured she was the sort who seldom got rattled. Now here she was acting out of character.
Of course, what he’d told her was the truth. It was natural for special clients to be nervous and suspicious immediately after the identity exchange. They soon got over their fears once they settled in as who they had become.
The odds that the woman on the elevator actually suspected anything were long. The odds that someone in Maria Sanchez’s position might think so were short.
There was nothing to worry about if only he could get his client to realize it and feel safe.
While he was at it, Palmer Stone made it a point to stop thinking of her as Maria Sanchez.
“Madeline Scott,” he actually muttered under his breath, as he pushed Maria Sanchez from his consciousness.
Madeline Scott, the first and original, had had E-Bliss.org almost exactly right in her conversation with Jill. The legitimate matchmaking service was a protective shell for an operation that provided something similar to a witness protection program for those who could afford it. Its clients were mostly the wives or lovers of organized crime figures whose own lives and/or considerable fortunes were in danger because of competing mob elements or the law. Occasionally a client was concerned only with disappearing for his or her own sake. These clients, who would eventually take other clients’ identities, were referred to in conversation and in E-Bliss.org files as special clients, to distinguish them from the bulk of legitimate clients, who often did find love, lasting or otherwise.
The special client would make obvious a move out of the country or into deep cover and instead take the place of another E-Bliss.org client who’d been culled with a computer program and carefully researched. Fees included teaching and coaching the special client to move smoothly into the new identity. The old identity would remain at large, while the basis for the new identity was murdered. The special client, who for safety’s sake had severed all ties with E-Bliss.org, would wait patiently in hiding to assume the life of the victim client. News of the torso (useless in identification) being found was the signal that the switch in identities was complete; it was time to move into the client’s apartment. Usually, as a precaution, the new identity would soon move out of the building, leaving a note and making sure the rent was covered. Officially, no one was missing.