‘Gee, I wish you’d told me that before I sent my boys over to the address you gave me,’ Mahoney said.
‘She doesn’t live there, does she?’ Paniatowski asked – but it was not really a question.
‘They’re good, hard-working people on Lurting Avenue – but they’re not the kind of folks who stay in first-class hotels,’ Mahoney told her. ‘There was no Mary Edwards at the address you gave me – it’s the home of a couple from St Louis, who have lived there for ten years – and the name wasn’t familiar to any of the neighbours, either.’
‘I see,’ Paniatowski said.
‘I might as well give you the rest of the bad news,’ Mahoney continued. ‘I sent a couple of guys over to the DMV to check out the driving licences. There are dozens of Mary Edwards in the tri-state area, but none of them looks anything like your stiff.’ He paused. ‘If you want me to, I can go public with it – get the picture in the papers and on the news.’
‘That would be good,’ Paniatowski said, ‘but it’s not that photograph of her I’d like you to use.’
‘You got another one?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Now you’ve got me confused.’
‘It will all make sense when you see the photograph,’ Paniatowski promised. ‘I really do appreciate your help, Fred.’
‘It’s my pleasure,’ Mahoney assured her. ‘Tell me, are you really in one of your olde English pubs right now?’
‘Well, it’s a pub, certainly,’ Paniatowski replied.
‘And does it have a thatched roof, and horse brasses on the wall? Are there yokels in smocks, sipping cider and sucking on straws?’
Paniatowski smiled weakly. ‘Yes, there’s all that. And in the car park, I can see a knight in armour slaying a dragon.’
‘Excellent!’ Mahoney said.
Some of Dr Shastri’s staff claimed (only half-joking) that she only ever left the mortuary when there was a full moon, and while that was patently untrue, she was certainly the first person to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night, so Paniatowski was not the least surprised when it was the doctor herself who answered the phone.
‘You again!’ Shastri said. ‘Can’t you leave a girl and her corpses alone together for even a few hours?’
‘Sorry about that,’ Paniatowski said, grinning.
‘I have completed my report on Mary Edwards,’ Shastri said, ‘and apart from one or two nagging – though probably minor – questions, it is very straightforward, so if you care to drop by the mortuary tomorrow morning—’
‘Who would you say is the best cosmetic technician in Whitebridge?’ Paniatowski interrupted.
‘Bunny Thomas,’ Shastri replied, without any hesitation. ‘The man is a positive genius, and if I ever needed make-up applying to my own face – which, of course, I don’t …’
‘Of course not,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘Why would anyone mess with something which is already perfect?’
‘Just so. But if I did need that kind of artificial aid, I would keep Bunny in constant attendance.’
‘I want Bunny to give Mary Edwards a make-over, as soon as possible – by which I mean tonight,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Money’s no object. I want him to lose the wig and make her look as attractive as he possibly can.’
‘That is a rather bizarre request, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ Shastri told her.
‘Murder tends to be a rather bizarre business,’ Paniatowski replied.
The rest of the team did not need to ask Paniatowski how her conversation with Mahoney had gone – they could read it in her face.
‘I had my doubts when I saw the address,’ Meadows said, ‘but then I figured that maybe things had changed since the last time I visited the Big Apple.
‘If she lied about her name, she could have lied about other things, too,’ said Beresford. ‘She might not be from New York at all. She might not even be an American.’
‘She’s a New Yorker,’ Meadows said confidently.
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I’ve seen the good side of her wardrobe.’
‘OK, so she bought her clothes in New York,’ Beresford conceded, ‘but lots of people from all over America – from all over the world – go to New York to buy clothes.’
‘But they don’t buy them with a New Yorker’s eye,’ Meadows said. ‘Anyone from anywhere could have bought any one of those outfits, but only a native would have bought all of them, and combined them in that particular way.’ She took a sip of her bitter lemon. ‘You’re going to have to trust me on this.’
‘I do,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Me, too,’ Crane agreed.
‘Aw, what the hell do I know about women’s clothes anyway?’ Beresford said.
Paniatowski told the team about her conversation with Shastri.
‘There are two Marys,’ she said, ‘the naturally blonde Mary, who we’ll call Model Mary, and the one who wears a wig and will be known as Mousy Mary. Since she was Mousy Mary in Whitebridge, that’s the picture we’ll be giving to the local newspapers and television stations. The Americans, on the other hand, get the Model Mary pictures, because that’s probably how she would have looked when she was over there.’
‘The question is, why was she wearing a disguise?’ Beresford said. ‘Because a disguise is definitely what it was.’
‘Maybe she’s famous, and didn’t want to be recognised,’ Crane suggested.
‘I’ve thought of that, and I’ve tried to imagine how she would look with her own hair and different make-up, but unless she looks dramatically different after Bunny’s finished working on her, I don’t think I’ll recognise her even when she’s Model Mary,’ Beresford said. ‘Does anybody else think they might recognise her?’
Nobody did.
‘So, as far as we know, she’s not famous,’ Beresford continued.
The others nodded. If none of them – a disparate group of people with widely differing tastes and only their work in common – recognised the woman, then the chances were that her face was not well-known.
‘But if she’s not famous, and she wasn’t running away from someone …’ He paused. ‘We are all agreed she wasn’t running away, aren’t we …?’
‘Yes,’ Paniatowski said. ‘If she’d been running away, she’d have chosen somewhere much less conspicuous to hole up in.’
‘Then why did she bother with a disguise at all?’
‘Perhaps she dressed like that for professional reasons,’ Meadows suggested. ‘Perhaps she was on the game.’
‘You think she might have been a common prostitute?’ Beresford asked, incredulously.
‘Not a common one, no, but it’s certainly a possibility that she was a prostitute of some sort.’
‘But if she was on the game, wouldn’t she have done all she could to make herself look as attractive as possible?’
‘I don’t think so. Not everyone wants to sleep with the latest Hollywood star, you know.’
‘Don’t they?’ Beresford asked.
‘No. There are some men who like to screw women dressed as chickens. There are some who only want to go to bed with amputees. I can give you even more extreme examples, like—’
‘I’d much rather you didn’t,’ Beresford interrupted.
‘And maybe this woman specialised in men who fantasized about having sex with their first primary school teacher – or even their nanny.’
‘It’s a nice theory,’ Crane said, ‘but the numbers don’t add up. Say one man in a thousand wanted to sleep with his dowdy teacher. Given that most of them wouldn’t even dream of going to a prostitute, and quite a number who would couldn’t afford it – because if Mary Edwards was a hooker, she was a high-class hooker – you’re left with a very narrow customer base which could never be economically viable in a place the size of Whitebridge.’
‘Economically viable,’ Meadows said, rolling the words around in her mouth. ‘I love it when you take dirty, Jack.’ She sighed. ‘But you’re right – th
e prostitute theory is a non-starter.’
‘How about this as an explanation of why she wore a disguise,’ Paniatowski said, with a slight hint of excitement in her voice. ‘It wasn’t the person she was when she came to Whitebridge that she was worried about being recognised, it was being recognised later as the person who’d been in Whitebridge.’
‘Clever!’ Meadows said admiringly. ‘Very clever!’
But the two men merely looked baffled.
‘Model Mary has nothing to fear,’ Paniatowski explained. ‘It was Mousy Mary who was supposed to disappear without trace.’
‘You’re saying she came to Whitebridge to do something criminal,’ Beresford said.
‘Exactly.’
‘Like a bank robbery, for example?’
‘No, not a bank robbery. If that had been her intention, she’d have kept a low profile, just as she would have done if she’d been running away. So why did she make herself so conspicuous? She did it because she had to do it – because the suite in the Royal Victoria is as much a part of her disguise as the wig!’
‘What do you mean?’ Crane said.
‘The wig and make-up say she’s dowdy – and probably lonely – and the suite says that she’s a wealthy woman.’
‘You think she was a con artist?’ Crane asked.
‘That would certainly make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it?’ Paniatowski countered.
‘And you think that the con trick went wrong, and whoever she was trying to pull it on killed her.’
‘We certainly can’t dismiss the possibility.’
‘I have a question, boss,’ Meadows said.
‘Yes?’
‘If the point of the suite was to suggest she was rich, as part of the con, then why didn’t her clothes—?’
‘I’ve already explained that,’ Paniatowski interrupted, crossly. ‘For some reason, which was no doubt to do with another part of the con, she wanted to look dowdy.’
‘Yes, but you can look dowdy and rich just as easily as you can look dowdy and poor.’ Meadows grimaced. ‘Sorry, boss – I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I thought I had to say it.’
‘Perhaps it was a much more elaborate con than we’ve realised,’ Paniatowski suggested, with a hint of both exasperation and desperation in her voice. ‘Perhaps the suite was meant to suggest money, while the clothes – which were not only dowdy but cheap – were meant to suggest a lack of self-confidence.’ She groaned. ‘Shit, I don’t know! I’m just babbling, aren’t I?’
Nobody contradicted her.
‘Moving on,’ she said, ‘Mary had this tattoo on her wrist.’ She handed round photographs for them all to examine. ‘Does it suggest anything to anyone?’
‘What you want one of us to say is something like, “This tattoo is only displayed by the inner circle of the Daughters of the American Revolution”?’ Crane suggested.
‘That’s right,’ Paniatowski agreed.
‘Just looks like a butterfly to me,’ Crane said.
It just looked like a butterfly to Beresford and Meadows, too.
‘There must be a butterfly expert at the university,’ Paniatowski said. ‘I want you to take this photograph to him first thing in the morning, Kate, and see if he can identify it.’
‘Any particular reason, boss?’ Meadows asked in the flat tone she employed when she was being asked to do something she didn’t want to do.
‘Yes,’ Paniatowski replied. ‘You say she’s a New Yorker, and I accept that, but isn’t it possible that she became a New Yorker, maybe in her twenties, rather than being born one?’
‘It’s possible,’ Meadows conceded.
‘So maybe she comes from some other state, and maybe this is the official butterfly of that state.’
‘Seems like a bit of a long shot,’ Meadows said dubiously.
‘At the moment, long shots are all we’ve got,’ Paniatowski reminded her. She looked up at the bar clock. ‘Right, that’s it for tonight. Maybe by tomorrow morning we’ll have some more tangible evidence to work with – and we can put all this speculation back in the box.’
‘Maybe we will,’ Beresford said.
But all of them – including Paniatowski – were thinking, And maybe we won’t.
JOURNAL
I wonder if, when time has dulled the memory of writing these notes and I look back on them, I will be expecting to find a well-ordered narrative. If that is what I expect, then I am doomed to disappointment, because I will not be presented with a tightly structured argument, but instead will have to accept a collection of random thoughts which have built up behind the barriers of my mind and then, like a dam which can hold no more water, spilled unchecked out onto the page.
If I believed in omens, I would have taken the incident in the international terminal at JFK as a bad one, and would not be here now. What happened (I am reminding my older self who is reading this who-knows-where-and-when) was that I was recognized.
The man was middle-aged – maybe around forty-three or forty-four. His shoulders sloped – not naturally, but as if they could no longer bear the weight of existence – and his eyes were dull and tired and hopeless.
But those eyes came alive when he saw me.
Oh yes!
He said he knew who I was, and there was no point in me denying it.
His voice was low – almost self-deprecating – at first.
‘Do you know what you’ve done? Can you even imagine the amount of damage you’ve done to innocent people?’
But as he continued to speak – as he laid out for inspection all the crimes against humanity of which he said I was undoubtedly guilty, as he harangued me for all the lives I have allegedly destroyed merely for my own profit – the voice gradually grew louder and more fanatical.
People – busy people, travelling people – stopped rushing around the terminal and formed a loose circle around us.
I tried to get away, but the man grabbed me by the arm and insisted I listened to the rest of his vitriol. I could, of course, have stopped him if I’d really wanted to – could have hurt him quite badly, in fact – but that, I had already decided, would only have made matters worse.
The other voyagers did not know this – as far as they were concerned I was just a helpless woman forced to listen to this barrage of abuse – but none of them tried to help me. Perhaps they felt I deserved what I was being subjected to – or perhaps there is simply a dark seed deep within the human soul which needs to feed on the humiliation of others.
Eventually, three or four uniformed airport officials came and restrained my tormentor (the fact that someone as precise as I am does not know whether it was three or four is indicative of the state I was in by this point). I would like to think they did it to save me more misery, but the truth – I suspect – is that this thing that was happening to me was impeding the smooth running of the airport, and that could simply not be tolerated.
The man was taken away to I know-not-where, and when it became plain to the lingering crowd of emotion vultures that I wasn’t going to put on a show for them by breaking down in tears, they slowly drifted away.
There was a part of me – standing alone in that vast airport – that wished I’d had Brad or Chuck around, because with one of them by my side, the incident would never have been allowed to happen. I almost called them then – almost told them that I’d made a big mistake and I really, really needed them – but forced myself not to, because I knew that if the journey was to be made at all, I had to make it alone.
I told myself it had been a brave decision not to call Brad or Chuck, and that I should be proud.
But I could not be brave twice in one afternoon.
I could not bring myself to walk up to the check-in desk then, and risk a second onslaught from someone else who despises me for what I do.
So instead, I caught a taxi back to the city. It was the most expensive cab ride I’ve ever taken, because it not only cost me what was on the meter, it also cost the price of a fir
st- class ticket to Manchester, England.
Once I was back on home ground, I bought a wig and the sort of make-up I would not normally even think of using. When I looked in the mirror, I hardly recognized myself. It was at that point that I decided to stick to my disguise even when I’d reached my destination, because it was just possible that someone in Whitebridge might recognize me, and if they did, the whole thing would be blown.
I booked another ticket, but this time it was for the person I’d seen in the mirror, so I made it tourist class. And guess what – the seat was cheaper than my excess baggage charges!
And now here I am in England, a tiny country when compared to the USA, a speck on the map that is not even as big as the state of New York.
I do not need to look around to see how different Whitebridge is to the places I am used to. It is only necessary to sniff the air. Here there is none of the crispness that you smell around Lake Tear of the Clouds, nor the aroma of Manhattan – that strange, exotic mixture of Chinese food, diesel fuel and energy.
Here, the air is full of clinging dampness and thick industrial smoke – and history. This town – and a few others like it – kept the world supplied with spun cotton for nearly two hundred years. Whitebridge was more real – and more necessary – to the nineteenth-century planters of Virginia and Alabama than was Chicago or St Louis. My ancestors lived here, smelling almost the same air as I am smelling now – and that is both awesome and frightening.
My project is still in its early stages, but already I have made mistakes. I should have learned from the encounter at the airport and ditched all my baggage. Physical baggage, I mean, not emotional (ha! ha!) – although that could have gone too.
I should not have arrived in such grand style at this little provincial hotel which the natives set such great store by. But I was still thinking in New York terms – in terms of the ‘me’ who lives in Manhattan. I see that now, and have taken steps to correct my errors, because if the project is ever to succeed, I will have to become a completely different person (or, at least, appear to have become a completely different person).
I am not sure what I am any more. In New York, I understood myself – or at least thought I did. And anyway, I was too busy to worry about such matters. But here, on the edge of the bleak moors which the locals describe as vast – but which could be dropped into the Adirondack Park and never found again – there is too much time to think.
Death in Disguise Page 5