by Medora Sale
John Sanders was sitting in the back booth of a small rather grubby restaurant with a cup of cold coffee in front of him. As he glanced irritably at his watch a small dark woman slipped into the seat across from him. She smiled, then turned and gestured at Jerry, the morose proprietor. “What’s fattening, Jer?” she called. “Bring me a Danish if you have one.”
“No more Danish, Dr. Braston. I got a honey bun if you want. No one else likes them.”
“Great. Can you heat it up and put some butter on it?”
Sanders looked incredulously across the table. “Haven’t you ever heard of cholesterol, Melissa?”
“Look, the people I’ve been cutting up recently could have lived on goose fat and brandy and it wouldn’t have made any difference. They all seem to have been scraped up off the highway or bashed in the head by psychos. Besides, I didn’t have any breakfast this morning. They called me in early. Don’t nag, John. You remind me of my husband. Never marry a heart man; they spend all day nagging people and find it hard to turn it off when they get home.” She took the hot, extremely buttery bun from Jerry and began to attack it with vigour.
“What did you want to see me about, anyway? I can guess that this isn’t a pass, is it? No one seems to be turned on by the smell of formaldehyde these days—except my husband. I think he gets a secret thrill, imagining me down in the morgue. You know, a closet necrophiliac.”
Sanders grinned. “Well, I got your reports—”
“I should hope so,” she snapped. “Those damned things were done weeks ago. If you’re trying to tell me you just read them, after I busted a gut to finish them, that’s the last time I ever do a rush job for you, baby.”
“No, no,” he said hastily. “I read each one as soon as it came in. But they didn’t help much, that’s all.”
“What do you want from pathology? A description of the murderer imprinted on the retina or something? I gave you what was there—that’s all there is.” She finished her sticky bun and was trying to clean the sugar and grease from her strong, short-nailed hands.
“I’m not expecting miracles, but you’ve worked on all three of these, haven’t you?”
Melissa nodded, her eyes bright with curiosity and interest.
Sanders looked intently at her. “Well, isn’t there anything you get from the marks or patterns that would tell us something about him? I thought maybe you might have noticed something that didn’t seem to be the kind of thing you’d put in a report.”
Melissa shook her head. “There aren’t things like that in this sort of case. I mean, if I notice something, I put it in. There might be more information in those cadavers, tests we didn’t run because they didn’t seem pertinent—”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I don’t really look hard for slow arsenic poisoning or black widow spider bites when the cause of death is so clear.”
“No, that wasn’t what I was thinking about. I mean, what do we know about him from the way he bashed them around, and from those knife marks—I don’t know. I suppose if I can’t see a pattern that tells us anything useful, there’s no reason why you should be expected to.” He pushed aside his coffee cup and rubbed his hand over his forehead.
“Come on, John,” she said cheerfully. “Don’t look so depressed. I can tell you a few things, but they didn’t come from cutting those girls up. I can tell you I wouldn’t go for a long lonely walk on a weekday between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., especially in the vicinity of a large park.”
“All that tells me is that you’re not as stupid as some women, obviously. But I knew that already.”
Melissa ignored this. “He goes for girls who are rather short and have medium brown hair and are bouncy. All the cadavers were in excellent physical condition—except that they were dead, of course. It was hard to tell whether they were pretty or not. And he obviously doesn’t have a job, or at least, a day job, but probably has a late model car in good condition. So I would be looking for a fairly good-looking guy with light to dark brown hair who got fired around Christmas and is driving an ’83 or ’84 medium-sized car in a rather nondescript colour—light blue, gray, tan, something like that.”
John looked at her with interest. He had come to some of the same conclusions as Melissa had, but wondered whether she had based hers on something other than instinct. “Why?”
“The murders started in January, so before that he worked during the day or didn’t feel like killing women—the first seems likelier. And what kind of a man does a girl instinctively trust? One who’s good looking but not too good looking, with honest brown hair. If he looked like a rapist—whatever that means—wouldn’t you have had a lot of girls reporting attempts? I mean, he would have approached some females who ran or screamed or something. Unless you have had a lot of these?”
“None. This is the first time I can remember when we had a rapist who didn’t have a few unsuccessful attempts to his credit. That’s how we catch them, usually.” Jerry slouched over with the coffee pot and refilled their cups, a look of pain in his eye as he considered the cost of the extra liquid.
“You see, the funny thing,” she said, swishing the coffee around in her cup thoughtfully, “is why any woman is going to trust some strange man enough to let him within ten feet of her when there’s been so much publicity about this. He’s got to be presenting himself as someone who’s absolutely safe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well. Take a kid who’s really—what do they call it?—street-proofed, the kind who wouldn’t go across the street with her Uncle Jimmy to see newborn puppies. You can still put her into situations where she’s vulnerable. Say, she was just asked to sell Girl Guide cookies, so she goes up to every person she sees who looks as if he’d buy cookies—and she feels safe and in control. If one of those guys approached her, instead of her approaching him, she’d scream, but she’d go off cheerfully enough with some friendly looking type who promised to buy six boxes.”
“And where does that get us? None of these ladies was selling cookies, Melissa.”
“No, but maybe we’re looking for someone a woman would approach without any fear. Maybe he’s an off-duty cop still in his uniform who usually works nights, for instance. How does that grab you?”
Sanders looked at her in horror. “Jesus,” he said softly, “I wish you hadn’t said that. But there’s no one that crazy on the force.” As soon as he’d said it a succession of possible candidates tumbled through his brain. He shook his head. “Anyway, what sort of guy kills them over and over again? I mean, that’s what he’s doing, isn’t it? I guess I really should be talking to a psychiatrist about this, not to you.”
“Psychiatrist!” said Melissa dismissively. “You don’t need to be a shrink to recognize when someone’s that loony. I would suspect that he just is never quite sure that they’re all that dead, myself. And, of course, he’s got a point there, hasn’t he? That one who’s in the hospital still wasn’t all that dead when he got finished with her.”
“Okay then, answer me this one. When do we get our next corpse? When is he going to stop?”
“The next one? Pretty soon, I’d say,” she responded cheerfully. “And I don’t suppose he’ll stop until he gets I caught. But it’s been a month now, hasn’t it? That’s the longest interval so far. So either he’s through for some reason or there will be a new one any day now. Anyway, thanks for the coffee and the bun. I have to get back to Forensic. Lots of work to do. Ta, ta.” With a lively grin she gathered up her things and dashed back across the road, leaving Sanders no wiser than before.
Monday afternoon Jane Conway walked down the big front steps of the school and shivered in the cool spring air. The fifteen-minute walk to her apartment was going to feel like a ten-mile forced march. It was already 4:30, and today she had counted on leaving early so that she could collapse for a while before having to consider doing any
thing. Fat chance. As she trudged up to MacNiece Street and turned toward the square yellow-brick building whose fourth floor she shared with five other apartments, the whole neighbourhood began to look drearier and drearier. The left-over dirt of winter made the pathetic attempts of the spring bulbs and the pale sun to cheer up the world even more depressing than gray skies and empty flowerbeds would have been. Parked a few yards to the north of the building was a gray Honda. Jane slowed down and glanced in the window, then stopped and opened the door on the passenger side. She slipped in for a few minutes of apparently earnest conversation before jumping out, slamming the door, and moving on with quickened pace. Without a backward glance she entered the front door of her building and headed for the creaky elevator. The wait was endless, the ride ponderously slow, and just as she was fumbling in her purse for her keys the phone began to ring, persistently and maddeningly. It took forever to locate her key chain, an eternity to find the right key, eons to fit it into the lock and make it turn. Damnation. This time it had to be Paul. She grabbed the phone off the hook and gasped “Hello,” certain that by now he would have hung up.
A familiar, flat, female Toronto voice replied, “Hi, Jane. How come it took you so long? You busy or something? I was just about to hang up. It’s me, Marny. Remember me, kid?”
“Of course, Marny. Hi. No, I wasn’t busy. I just came in, that’s all. Had some trouble getting the door open. How are you? Is anything wrong?”
“Why should anything be wrong? Can’t I call you without something being wrong?” She brayed with meaningless laughter.
“No. But the last time you called something was, remember?”
“Oh, that. Yeah. Well, thanks for your help. It all worked out okay, so everything’s fine now. But no, nothing’s wrong. It’s just that we’re having a party tomorrow night and we thought maybe you’d like to come. For old time’s sake, you know. It’s B.Y.O.B. but there’ll be plenty, so you don’t have to worry about that. And there’ll be lots of food and mix. We decided today that what we all needed was a party. Things are really dead around the office—except Jenny just got a promotion. Did you know that Miriam’s moving to Vancouver because Ken got transferred? So she’s leaving, and Jenny got her job. Anyway, that gives us an excuse.” Once again she exploded into laughter. Jane waited with the phone some distance from her ear for the racket to subside. “It’ll be at my place, tomorrow night at 8:30.” Then she paused, and asked casually, “Do you think you could get hold of some stuff by then? I mean, the guys would take care of it—we’re not asking you to donate it or anything.”
Jane said nothing for a long while. “Well, that’s pretty short notice. I’m not even sure I can make it to the party. I’m working these days, teaching; you can’t just stay up every night and hope no one notices you’re half asleep.”
“Come on, Jane. That’s not like you. We all know about working. But you don’t have to stay long. And do you think—”
“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t stay long. Look, I’ll see what I can do. If you don’t hear from me before the party I’ll be coming, okay? That’s all I can promise.”
“But you’ll try, won’t you?” The discordant voice pleaded in her ear. “All the guys will be there. I promised them you’d come.”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll try.” With a slight twitch of distaste on her lips, she cut off the connection and began to dial. She waited, looked at her watch, and hung up. She took off her raincoat and put it carefully away in the closet, picked up her briefcase and spread the contents on her desk, then looked at her watch again. As she reached once more for the telephone, it pre-empted her by ringing under her hand. She picked it up rapidly.
“Hi. Oh, it’s you.” She paused slightly. “What do you want?” And paused again. “I don’t give a shit if I sound as if I didn’t want to hear from you. I’ve got all kinds of business to get through tonight on the phone. What do you want, Grant?” She listened carefully, picked up a pencil, jotted a few abbreviations down on a pad by the phone, and nodded. “If I can, sure. Are you going to Marny’s tomorrow night? Oh. Well, my car will be outside her place from around nine until maybe eleven.” She shook her head impatiently. “I’ll call you if there’s a hitch. Now get off the phone, will you?”
Once more she dialed and waited, this time with more success. She spoke quickly and concisely, glancing at the jottings on her pad, nodded and hung up. She looked once more at her watch. Five o’clock. She should be able to get to Paul now without too much trouble from his secretary. She’d put Jane’s call through without thinking on her way out the door. But she had to get through before that woman left. He’d never bother answering unless he was expecting a call. She dialed rapidly, jerkily. The phone rang: once, twice, three times. Damn! She’d gone. At six times, a breathless voice hissed into the receiver. Sorry. He was at a meeting. Would she like to leave a message?
You’re damn right she’d like to leave a message, you stupid bitch. “Please. Ask him to call Jane Conway at home. As soon as possible.” And she slammed the phone down, patches of nervous colour burning in her cheeks. At nine o’clock Jane slammed her books shut, scooped up all the papers on her desk, and shoved them into her briefcase. She poured herself a Scotch and took out a small green three-ring binder. She flipped through to the end of the alphabet at the back of the book: Wilcox, Paul. There were three numbers neatly listed: Law office; Parliamentary office; home (unlisted, emergencies only) She took a deep gulp of her drink and dialed.
The phone rang four times before a cool female voice answered. Yes, of course she would call Mr. Wilcox. In the long pause, Jane could hear waves of sound, bursts of laughter punctuating the low murmur of conversation. Her heart throbbed painfully, and her breath seemed to catch in her throat. Finally a hurried voice said, “Paul Wilcox here.”
“Hi, Paul,” she said steadily. “It’s me. When you didn’t call last week I thought maybe something had happened.”
“Look, baby. I can’t discuss it now. There’s a huge crowd of people here—can’t you hear them? This is an impossible phone to discuss anything from anyway. I’ll call you tomorrow after work—no, not tomorrow, better make that Wednesday. I have your number. Now, for God’s sake, get—” Suddenly his voice changed to cool and oily. “Very sorry. I really don’t have that information here. I’ll have to call you tomorrow morning from my office. Yes, I do have your number. In the meantime, don’t worry too much about it. I’m sure that we can resolve the situation without any trouble. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Goodbye.”
A tall, composed-looking woman was walking slowly into the lushly paneled study, carrying a drink in each hand. “Here you are, love,” she said. “I brought you your drink in case you were on the phone for hours. Who was that? She certainly picked a wonderful time to call.”
He smiled affectionately at her as he took the glass. “Just a journalist lady who’s offering some flattering free publicity in exchange for some pull in front of the Municipal Board. We must change this unlisted number. The whole world seems to be on to it. It must be posted up at all the newspaper offices by now. What do you think? Should we get a new number and a little peace and quiet?”
She shook her head firmly. “It would be simply too much trouble to get that new number to everyone. The kids would have a fit. As it is, they complain all the time about it.”
He continued to smile sweetly. “As you wish, sweetheart. Although perhaps we should give this number to the children and get another unlisted number for ourselves. And the kids’ number could go onto the answering service. They’d get a charge out of that, I think.”
She shook her head doubtfully and turned to go back to the party. “No,” she said finally, as they were leaving the room. “You’ll have to put up with these people bothering you. After all, you’re not home that often, and I would find it a terrible nuisance to have to disrupt my own life to save you a bit of trouble.” Her smile was sweet, distant, and final.
Jane stared at her reflection in the mirror critically. Her current state of exhaustion showed in the dark hollows under her eyes, and her face seemed puffy and formless, all the firm gauntness of cheek and chin that she worked so hard to maintain was slipping away no matter what she did. But carefully made up she didn’t look too bad, really. She was just applying her eyeliner when the phone rang; the pencil jumped, making a blur in the clean outline. Damn. It was probably that idiot Mike again. She leaned around the corner from the bathroom and picked up the phone from beside the bed. “Hi. Oh, it’s you.” Her voice became cautious. “I wasn’t really expecting you to call. Now? That’s impossible. I have to turn up at Marny’s party tonight. I said I’d be there half an hour ago.” She looked at her watch. “You can always talk to me there.” There was a mildly explosive noise in the receiver. “Well, I don’t know how you want to spend your time. I know it’s crowded there. Some other time, then.” She flipped open her green notebook as she spoke. “Okay. Tomorrow’s not bad. But remember, I work, and I can’t possibly get home before four at the earliest. No. This is a teaching job I have. You can’t just walk out early and tell some secretary that you’ll be back in an hour or so. Okay. I’ll see you some time after four. ’Bye.” After she had hung up, she smiled in satisfaction, picked up her raincoat and purse, and walked out of the apartment. She left the building by a back door and got into her old VW, parked along with eight other cars in the cramped lot.
Marny’s party was proceeding normally; the noise level and the guests were getting higher in direct proportion to the level of consumption. Tobacco smoke enveloped the room, mixing with a trickle of greeny-sweet dope from several corners. Jane’s cheeks were burning, and her head swam miserably from the smoke and heat. She stared at the rum and Coke she seemed to have acquired by some magic means and raised it to her lips. The smell of it sickened her, but she poured half of it down her throat anyway in a desperate attempt to cool herself off, then she put her hand on the wall to steady herself as waves of nausea whirled through her. She became vaguely aware of a presence beside her, holding her by the arm, and an urgent voice speaking in familiar accents. “Jane. Jane. Are you okay? You look terrible. Come out on the balcony and get some fresh air.” She allowed herself to be led through the door.