Dorothy pushed herself away from the bar. The out-of-town paper went flying. Her bar stool tipped over backwards and the guy on the next stool half-reached, half-dived for it and caught it before it crashed to the floor.
Dorothy covered the distance to the table where Carter and the bimbo were carrying on in a few angry strides. She had her Lemon Drop glass in her hand.
Carter stood up. He held his hand toward Dorothy. The hand that he’d just withdrawn from under the bimbo’s skirt. He was sweating. He was wearing a classy gray suit and a white shirt with a button-down collar and a tie striped in quiet colors. He said, “Dorothy—”
She said, “You fucker!”
He said, “Dorothy.” He turned to the bimbo, looking down at her. He said, “Marianne.” He looked back at Dorothy. He said, “Dorothy, this is my friend Mari—”
She smelled something, a combination of some flowery, young girl perfume and harsh female musk. She felt sick.
She threw what was left of her third Lemon Drop, half a Lemon Drop, in his face. She felt like a fool, a character in some stupid melodrama, some amateur community theater production of a cheap melodrama.
Her drink was dripping off Carter’s face, mostly landing on his suit, some of it splashing on the table, none of it hitting Marianne the bimbo.
Carter raised his hand, a gesture halfway between the sign that a traffic cop would make to stop cars and the gesture that a kid in a stupid game of Cowboys and Indians would make when he was stuck being an Indian.
Dorothy heard a sound that was somewhere between a roar and a shriek and smashed her Lemon Drop glass on the table top and thrust it at Carter and raked it down his cheek leaving a trail that turned red and spurted blood.
Marianne the bimbo screamed and jumped up and grabbed Carter.
Dorothy thrust the broken glass at Carter’s chest. It hit the lapel of his suit and Dorothy’s hand hit the suit. The jagged edge of the glass sliced into her wrist and more blood spurted. She dropped the glass and it landed on the table and bounced and fell on the floor.
Don’t be a naughty papa, come to baby, come to baby, do.
There were a couple of napkins on the table and she grabbed a couple of them and held them against her wrist to stop the bleeding. Her purse was hanging from her arm and she swung it at Marianne the bimbo and missed. She turned around and ran from Mildred’s.
The door was heavy, padded to keep street sounds out. Dorothy had to lean on it with her shoulder and shove to get it open. The cold air and noise hit her like a fist. She turned around and looked back inside. There was a small window in the middle of the door, round like a ship’s porthole, the glass thick and heavy. Through the window she could see confusion. Carter was standing where he had been, holding a napkin against his face. It was too dark inside Mildred’s for Dorothy to tell whether the napkin was showing blood or not. Marianne the bimbo was dancing around Carter as if she didn’t know what to do, her hands fluttering in confusion, first here then there. Cissie had come around the bar. Dorothy saw her cast one quick glance at the door but they didn’t make eye contact. Instead Cissie turned and ran toward Carter and Marianne the bimbo.
There were a couple of other patrons in the place. They were milling around in confusion. The guy who’d told Dorothy she could keep his newspaper was still sitting on his bar stool as if he didn’t know what to do. A classic poster of Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce was the only decoration in the place.
Dorothy shoved her hand inside the pocket of the heavy, dark coat she’d been wearing. She still had the napkins wrapped around her wrist. She didn’t think she was bleeding any more.
The sidewalk was crowded with workers who’d stayed past quitting time and were on their way home, and with people headed out for the evening.
Dorothy had been walking as fast as the crowd would permit. Now she slowed down. She was short of breath. Each time she let out a lungful of air it turned to mist in front of her. The air she took back in felt good. It tasted good.
She reached the corner and turned to the right and kept on walking. This was a mixed neighborhood of shops, offices and high rise apartment buildings. She reached the next corner and turned again, kept going again, reached another corner. Eventually she realized that she was about to head back to Mildred’s.
She turned and headed in the opposite direction. She walked through the cold night until she came to a movie theater. She bought a ticket and went in and sat through part of some movie. She had no idea what she was watching.
She got up and made her way to the rest room. She turned on the cold water and let it run over the cut on her wrist. The skin turned fish-belly white around the cut. It wasn’t much more than a scratch. She threw the napkins she’d brought from Mildred’s in a waste container. She blotted the wound with a paper towel. A couple of drops of blood oozed from it.
She looked at her wristwatch. It was getting late. She felt sick to her stomach.
She left the theater and walked some more. She walked until she stood in front of her building. She went inside and took the self-service elevator up to her floor. She used her key and went inside her apartment. She smelled something.
She dropped her coat on the sofa and headed for her bedroom. It was down a short hallway from the living room. She pushed the door open and saw something on her bed. The comforter was drawn over the bed and all she could see was a lump the size of a man with an extra rise in it. It made her think of what a man’s body would look like as he lay on his back with an erection but the rise was at the wrong place.
She pulled back the comforter and looked at the man lying on her bed. It was Carter. Carter Hanson. The jagged cut on his cheek had stopped bleeding but blood had run down his cheek and onto Dorothy’s best bedding.
He was nude except for a pair of lace-edged, bright red panties and matching brassiere. The panties had been pulled up to cover his hips and pubes, their elastic top stretched and squeezing his belly. The ends of the brassiere, designed to hook between the wearer’s breasts, lay open. Dorothy recognized the garments as her own. Carter had bought them for her from a website and asked her to dance for him, wearing them and then removing them.
The tent in the comforter had been made by the handle of a heavy kitchen knife, Dorothy’s best knife. It was covered with blood. She reached for it and tried to pull it from Carter’s chest. It must have been plunged in with great force, probably stuck in bone, maybe his sternum, maybe caught between two ribs.
In order to get the knife out Dorothy had to kneel on the bed next to Carter and grab the knife with both hands and lean backwards with all her weight while she tugged with both hands. When the knife came loose it did so suddenly and Dorothy tumbled backwards, landing on her back on the carpet next to the bed. The knife flew out of her hands and bounced off the drapes and fell to the floor.
She pulled herself to her feet. Her hands were smeared with blood. She went to the bathroom and rinsed her hands off, washing them with hot water and soap. That made her cut start to bleed again and she blotted it dry, found a box of adhesive bandages in the medicine cabinet and bandaged the cut. She dropped the now-bloody towel in the laundry hamper.
She took a deep breath. She stood looking at herself in the mirror. Her hair was a mess.
She went back into the bedroom, walked past the bed with a quick glance at Carter Hanson lying dead, still half-covered with her expensive comforter.
Back in the living room she picked up the telephone and called the emergency number. She got a recorded message that made her laugh until she realized she was verging on hysterics so she sat down and worked her way through a telephone maze until she got a live human being and said, “I just got home and there’s a man in my bed and he’s dead. Somebody stabbed him and he’s dead.”
Suddenly the person on the other end of the line started to sound interested.
She laughed again when the police arrived and she had to buzz them up because her building didn’t have a doorman and there was nobod
y in the lobby to let them in. They hit the buzzer for her apartment and she buzzed them in and in a couple of minutes they were at her door and she was letting them in and they were milling around, mainly looking at the scene in her bedroom.
One of the police was a female officer. She said she was a detective and told Dorothy her name but it whizzed past Dorothy’s ear. She couldn’t have told you the woman’s name five seconds after she’d heard it. But she told the officer her name, Dorothy Doe, and extended her hand.
The female officer looked startled but she accepted Dorothy’s hand and shook it.
“Dorothy Doe,” the female officer said, “as in John Doe?”
Dorothy said, “Yes.”
Another officer, male, came out of the bedroom and leaned over the female officer. They engaged in a brief, whispered conversation. They took turns looking at Dorothy and at each other and casting glances toward the bedroom.
The male officer said, “Miss Doe?”
Dorothy said, “Miz.”
“Of course. Will you come with us, please?”
They led her, the male officer at one elbow and the female officer at the other, into the bedroom.
Carter Hanson was still lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, the same ceiling that Dorothy had seen many times, looking upward over Carter Hanson’s shoulder.
Dorothy said, “He’s dead.” It was twenty-five per cent question, seventy-five per cent statement.
The two officers ignored that. The male officer said, “Do you know this man?”
Dorothy said, “It’s my birthday, you know.”
The officers ignored that. “Do you know this man?”
“Is he dead?”
“Yes ma’am,” the male officer said. “We’ll have to wait for the medical examiner to certify as much, but it’s pretty obvious. He’s dead.”
The female officer took Dorothy’s hands in her own. She said, “Do you know who he is?”
“Carter Hanson.”
“You knew him.”
Dorothy smiled. “I knew him.”
“Did he have a key to your apartment?”
“We both did. He had mine, I had his.”
She heard a commotion from the living room. She turned to see what was going on. She ought to see what was happening. She didn’t want strangers wandering into her apartment. The two officers, male and female, held her. The female officer still had Dorothy’s two hands in her own hands. The male officer closed strong fingers around her biceps.
More people came into the bedroom. The two officers took Dorothy back to the living room. They let her sit on the sofa. The female officer sat beside her. The male officer stood a few feet away. He paced nervously. He was a big man. He wore a brown suit and a yellow shirt and a tie with little footballs all over it. He kept buttoning and unbuttoning his suit jacket. When he buttoned it, it pulled. Then he would unbutton it again for a minute.
He must have gained weight since he bought the suit. Dorothy figured that his wife wanted him either to lose some weight or to take the suit to a tailor and have it let out so the button wouldn’t tug that way.
There was a bright flash of light from the bedroom, then another. Dorothy blinked, then decided that a police technician was using a flash camera to record the situation in the bedroom. There was even a term for it. She thought about it, then it came to her. Crime scene photos. That was it. Crime scene photos.
Another man in a suit walked out of the bedroom. He squatted on the carpet in front of the sofa. Dorothy felt oddly comforted. The female detective was beside her. The male in the too-tight brown suit had seated himself heavily on her other side. He had exhaled loudly as he landed on the couch. Really, his wife would have to work on him.
The newcomer wore a dark blue suit, solid in color. White shirt. Dark red tie, some semi-glossy material, more likely silk than an artificial fiber. Good haircut. Air of authority.
He squatted on the gray wall-to-wall carpet in front of Dorothy, reached into a jacket pocket and produced a pair of metal-framed eyeglasses. Rectangular lenses. He started to speak but Dorothy got there first.
“Please, you’ll be uncomfortable. There are plenty of chairs.”
The man smiled. He leaned toward the brown-suited man and said a few words, then made a gesture with his head.
The brown-suited man got up and walked back into the bedroom. In a minute he returned carrying a small device. He sat down beside Dorothy and studied the device, touched it a few times, then nodded to the blue-suited man.
The blue-suited man had accepted Dorothy’s invitation, drawn up a chair from the dining table and seated himself.
“I’m Detective Inspector Edward Goodman, City Police Department. The time is—” he looked at his wristwatch—“twenty-two twenty-five hours.” He added the date and the address of Dorothy’s building and the apartment number. He said, “I am talking with—” and then he stopped and asked Dorothy to identify herself.
She gave her full name. Her voice sounded calm and matter-of-fact. She was surprised to hear herself sounding like a woman in control of herself. She knew that a reaction to the sight in her bedroom would surely come, but up to this moment it had not.
Inspector Goodman said, “This will be a very brief interview. It is conducted in the presence of two police officers, one male and one female.” He gave their names.
“Dorothy—may I call you Dorothy?”
She nodded.
“This is an informal interview. You understand that you are not arrested or detained. We are merely trying to gather some information. Do you understand that?”
Dorothy nodded.
Inspector Goodman indicated the recording device. He said, “Please.”
Dorothy took his meaning. She said, “Yes.”
Goodman nodded again, waited.
Dorothy said, “Yes, I understand.”
“A man is lying on the bed in this apartment. He appears to be deceased. The examiner is making a determination now.” He nodded as if he’d asked himself a question and answered affirmatively.
“Do you know who that man is, Dorothy?”
She nodded, then remembered about the recording device and said, “Yes.” She was surprised to find that she had trouble getting the word out. Again she said, “Yes, I know him.”
She began to cry. She looked around frantically, her hands waving as if they had minds of their own, looking for a handkerchief, tears suddenly running down her face.
The female police officer produced a handkerchief and handed it to her. She held it to her face, felt her body jerk in a sob, another, then drew a deep breath and offered the handkerchief back to the officer who declined to accept it.
Inspector Goodman said, “Who is the man in the other room?”
“Carter Hanson.”
“You know him personally?”
She smiled and a harsh giggle escaped her throat, hurting as it did so, like an involuntary cough when you’re just getting over a nasty sore throat. She looked toward a nearby window. There were drapes, dark floral-patterned drapes, but they were drawn back to provide a view of the city. It was very dark outside but the city lights provided a glittering backdrop for falling snowflakes.
“Dorothy?” Inspector Goodman prompted.
“I knew him,” Dorothy said. She felt herself nodding, actually bobbing her head up and down in a short, quick arc. She stopped that. “I knew him. And he knew me.”
“You’re sure of his identity.” It was half a question, half a statement. “Would you—I know this will be difficult, Dorothy, but Officer McKibbon will stay with you.” He indicated the female officer seated beside Dorothy. “This may be just a formality but we need you to take a look at the deceased and confirm the identification you’ve given us.”
Dorothy managed an ironic smile. How smoothly Goodman had slid into that nice, impersonal language. The deceased. Not the corpse. Not the body. Not the stiff. Not the departed. No, that would be funeral director talk. The departed. How t
o talk about death without mentioning death. Oh, better even than the departed, Inspector Goodman, how about the dear departed.
Quiet organ music in the background, soft lighting, stained glass windows, tasteful floral displays, maybe just a touch of incense in the air. Maybe she was wasting her time working at Dog Lover’s Digest. And she didn’t even own a dog. She ought to be doing photo layouts for some funeral directors’ trade journal. She—
“Miss Doe?”
She blinked.
It was the funeral director, no, the detective, Inspector Goodman, what a lovely name for a cop.
“Miss Doe? Are you all right?”
She blinked.
“Would you like a glass of water? Galloway, get Miss Doe a glass of water.”
The cop in the too-tight brown suit stood up and headed for the kitchen. He must have scoped out the apartment while Dorothy wasn’t looking. Otherwise, how did he know where the kitchen was?
He came back with one of Dorothy’s kitchen glasses and held it for her. She took a sip and nodded gratefully. He stood there looking uncertain of what to do, holding the glass of water.
Inspector Goodman said, “Please. If you think you can handle this.”
Dorothy nodded affirmatively. She stood up. She felt the female cop, McKibbon, holding her by the elbow, helping her to stand, steering her back toward the bedroom.
The room was still bustling with strangers. A couple of uniformed cops, a man and a woman in medical whites. Another civilian-in-a-suit, Dorothy figured him for a medical examiner.
Inspector Goodman stood next to the bed, Dorothy beside him, Officer McKibbon beside her. Goodman asked again, “Do you know this person?”
“Yes.”
“Please identify him.”
“His name is Carter Hanson.”
“Do you know where he lives? Lived,” Goodman corrected himself.
Dorothy nodded, gave Carter’s address.
“What was your relationship with Carter Hanson?”
“We were…” She stopped, gathered herself. “He used to stay over some nights, or I would stay at his place. We talked about moving in, sharing an apartment.”
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Volume 16 Page 4