“But you scared me on the phone.” She crossed her legs and clasped her hands tightly in her lap. She had kept her coat on. She couldn’t seem to get warm.
“If that scared you, I suggest you fasten your seatbelt. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
“Stop saying things like that—”
“Now listen to me!” MacPherson leaned forward across the desk and gave her a meat-eating, predatory look. He seemed even more distant than usual and she was startled by the firecracker explosion of his voice. “Somebody’s got to scare you because you sure as hell aren’t taking this thing seriously—you haven’t treated it seriously since the day you saw the guy with that fucking gun!” He swallowed and threw himself back in the chair and scowled at her. “I’ve had to find out everything through other people and I wonder, what’s going on here? Don’t you give a damn or what? Haven’t enough weird things happened to you? Christ, you baffle me. You really do—”
“The situation baffles you,” she corrected him. The impact of his anger left her breathless.
“Why don’t you stop being a smartass and explain to me why this guy visiting you Saturday night wasn’t worth telling me about? Jesus, Natalie, you knew the gun had been used to commit a murder and this guy told you whose gun it was! That makes his goddamn roommate a very likely murder suspect—and you don’t tell me a thing! That’s a crime, for Christ’s sake, do you understand that? Do you understand anything at all?” He shook his head angrily and lit a cigarette from his case.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, watching her hands squirming in her lap. “I have taken it seriously … but I’ve been trying to keep it under control. I didn’t want to become any more frightened than I already was … I didn’t want to lose my ability to function. I’d rather be dead.” She felt as if she were dropping the words like coins into a wishing well, hoping he would understand.
“Well, you may be closer than you think!” Shouting—MacPherson finally sighed down to the bottoms of his Guccis and nodded. “Okay. I won’t send you up the river this time. But you’ve got to pay attention to me—”
“I am, please believe me. But I’ve got to ask you one important question—how do you know anything about the man Saturday night?”
“Look, let me sort of work my way around this one in my own fumbling fashion. And this is not a story you’re going to like much, Natalie, but listen closely. Are you ready?”
She stuck out her lower lip, she felt herself doing it, an involuntary gesture of determination from her childhood. “Yes.”
“The man who was murdered, the thing you saw on television, was Bradley Nichols. TV-time salesman. Nice, quiet guy according to his neighbors. And he had a roommate, a guy named Barry Hughes. Not around much, kind of a night person … well, we’ve found out quite a lot about Barry. I figure it was Barry himself who called us and told us we might find something of interest in the loft—used a funny accent, sort of heavy Viennese, according to the officer who took the call. Real joker, Barry. Anyway, we went to the loft and it wasn’t a pretty sight and I’m going to tell you about it because it’s important that you know, that you get the point. …”
“I saw you on television,” she said. “You said it was rage. …”
“Rage is an understatement. Bradley Nichols looked like the pieces to a jigsaw puzzle—”
“Oh God, no!” It hit her like an electric charge and she jerked away, turning her head. She saw his face in the flash of the hallway, heard his voice with the lights of the Christmas tree beside him, saw him roll over beside her, remembered the heat of her own desire. …
“Bradley was all over that loft. I’ve seen a lot of godawful messes but I’ve never seen anything like this.” His voice droned on insistently. “If the Post gets hold of it they’re gonna scare the shit out of half this city. It was a wildly, insanely sexual crime. Bits and pieces of this guy’s apparatus everywhere, a testicle dropped in a shot glass. Nice homey touches. The tip of his penis in an ashtray … I mean, not nice—”
“Please stop, please, please, just stop—I’m going to be sick—”
“All right. But you do get the point, don’t you, Natalie? This is serious—has that sunk in?”
She nodded.
“Barry Hughes did it, Natalie. We’ve got more bloody handprints and fingerprints than we know what to do with. So, let me tell you a bit about Barry Hughes. He’s an actor—not just a guy who calls himself an actor, but an actor-actor. He’s done some commercials, some soaps, some off-Broadway and off-off. Actors Equity and the Screen Actors Guild provided us with some information. And we’ve spoken with his parents. They live up in Buffalo, they’re on their way down here now—poor people, poor helpless people with a son who’s a homicidal maniac. Barry has been something less than a model citizen, it seems, for quite some time.
“He did two stretches in mental institutions but responded well to treatment. He ‘bothered’ women a few times and got into some small-time trouble, but rape wasn’t involved—he just exposed himself to women in movie theaters, suggested they might like a ride on the old joy stick, suggestions the ladies involved had the good sense to decline. Which brings us to the movies, a very big thing in Barry’s life. A real movie freak. Constantly role playing based on his favorite old movies, used to drive people crazy, he’d stay in character for days, almost completely blurring the line between the movies and reality.” He stubbed out his cigarette and peered warily into the coffee cup with the rainbow. “Jesus, there’s something growing in here. Anyway, we got most of this from the parents.”
He leaned back again, lit another cigarette, and picked up a tiny computer game from the table in front of him. He stared at it, pushing buttons, watching something happen.
“What’s that?”
“Baseball game. Takes a lot of concentration. Quiets my nerves when I’m about to get upset. Trick I learned from my father. He used to be a cop, too. Everything about this case makes me nervous—”
“You still haven’t told me how you knew about Saturday night.”
“We’re coming to that and that’s where it’s going to get a little tricky. You’re going to have to trust me, realize I’m just doing my job. Can you do that?”
“What do you want, me to say? I’ll try? Okay, I’ll try.”
“The late Bradley Nichols kept a diary, Natalie, and we found it. All splattered with blood. A mess. But Bradley was a very determined diarist, he got it all down on paper, his whole life. He treated the diary like a close friend, told it everything that mattered to him, and I suppose that’s what a diary’s for. He confided all his fears about Barry, his getting into the cocaine scene and some of the sleazeballs he dealt with—he even mentions Alicia Quirk, which is good for us. He writes about the sexual stuff Barry found so intriguing. You get a picture of one guy, Bradley, liking another guy, Barry, but finding out so much crud about him that it scares him … and Bradley was scared of Barry. He was scared of Barry’s friends, scared that Barry was into something he shouldn’t know so much about—which made him scared of Barry and scared for Barry. And he writes about how Barry seems to be playing his life like a movie for days at a time. So one day Bradley goes out and follows Barry and it’s the day Barry kills Quirk, only Bradley doesn’t know that. And he’s following Barry when Barry throws the gun away—it’s all in the diary.” MacPherson stood up, went and shook the coffeepot. “If I faint,” he said, “tell them I was drinking coffee reheated for the third time, okay?” He flashed a quick, cold smile, then went to stand beside her, holding his newly filled cup. With his other hand he patted her shoulder.
“Was I in the diary? Is that how you knew?”
“All right, back to the diary,” he said. He went to the single window, stared at it. “Hmmm. They’ve painted over my view of the alley and the garbage cans. I wonder when they did that to my window. Well,” he shrugged, “maybe the paint is better than the view. The diary. Bradley wrote down how Barry and he had read the piece in Garfein’s column.
And how he found one of Barry’s notepads with the name Natalie Rader printed hundreds of times, over and over, the pencil point tearing through the paper. …”
He settled back down behind the desk.
“Then we come to Saturday night. He tells us how he went to your house, how he managed to get inside, how foolish he felt unplugging lamps and playing with the dog. He tells us how sorry he was that he had to frighten you, how kind you were once he got to tell you his story … and he tells us what happened then, how the two of you made love on the floor.” He self-consciously sipped the coffee, set it down, and tapped his fingers on the desktop.
“We didn’t make love. …” She barely heard her own voice.
“That’s none of my business, one way or the other. I’m telling you what’s in the diary. For whatever it’s worth to you, he wrote about you and your body and the way you handled the situation in a very poetic turn of phrase. Almost like a schoolboy with his first mad crush. Maybe it was his fantasy—you’re the only one who knows now. Anyway … it’s all very sad, really.” He caught her eye. “In any case, onward and upward. Sunday he goes on writing about how he’s planning to confront Barry with the whole issue, use ‘shock tactics’ and really scare him back into ‘the real world,’ ‘get him to straighten out and act like a human being tonight.’ ” He picked up the baseball game again, watching the little lights flashing as if the tiny electrical blips were running amok. “Trying to straighten old Barry out was, I think we can all agree, his big mistake. Barry apparently didn’t take kindly to the idea.”
He slid open a desk drawer and for a moment she didn’t realize what he’d taken out. A book, splotched with what looked like coffee stains, pages stuck together. The diary.
He flipped it open. “Listen to this last entry. ‘If Barry thinks life is a movie, I’ll play Cagney and read him the riot act! The doctors have already played Pat O’Brien with him and it sure didn’t work.’ ” He gently closed the bloody book.
“Please believe me, we didn’t make love.”
He shrugged.
“All right,” she flared up, “believe what you want. What happens now?”
“Let me tell you how I see all this. Do you mind?”
“I wish to God you would—”
“Barry has gone all the way over into fantasy now. He’s created some movie that’s just not listed, it’s playing only in his mind. Barry is the star. I think it was reading Bradley’s diary that did it to him, I think he read the diary before Bradley ever got to deliver his get-tough speech—I think the diary dictated what Barry did to Bradley. I’d be willing to bet that Barry was sniffing around you, watching you, maybe even bumping into you on the street or something, trying to get up his nerve to tell you that it was okay, the gun incident didn’t involve you—just a hunch. He had a real reason to kill Quirk—Quirk had probably threatened him over one thing or another. God knows, it doesn’t really matter. Because then Barry read the diary. The problem was, I think he’d been seeing you as his own kind of romantic co-star, a damsel in distress; he was what threatened you and he could also save you—he was creating a relationship between him and you, trying to gird himself up to doing something about it. Like rescuing you by telling you you had nothing to worry about … and then he had to read the damn diary.
“And even then, if Bradley hadn’t described having sex with you … well, he might have gotten out of it alive. But he described it in such lovely, loving detail, that Barry couldn’t take it. … Hell, Natalie, I know the feeling of jealousy it aroused in me, something I just couldn’t help—I mean, this guy writes that he’s been intimate with you and I haven’t and a man thinks, why him? In this case, Barry thought a good deal more than why him? Barry read it, went off the deep end, and wound up turning Bradley’s genitals into chow mein. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for the intensity of the sexual vengeance in the murder. Make any sense to you?”
She huddled on the chair, clasping her arms around herself. “I don’t know. It sounds like we’re caught in Barry’s movie.”
“Precisely. We are. We’ve been locked into his movie ever since he saw you watching him throw the gun away. He’s been doing whatever he’s wanted to do for some time now—but we know we’re in the movie now, which is something. And we’ve got a pretty good idea of the rest of the plot.” He opened a folder on his desk, consulted some notes.
“What happens now?” She felt as if her entire life had passed from her hands. She was helpless. She trembled inside her coat and thought about Bradley, how he’d died.
“We’ve got to believe he’s going to come looking for you. Think of it as one hell of a scary movie. He’s living in it, he’s going to play it out, he’s got to complete the last reel. It’s not so hard to figure it out now—now that we’re finally in the movie, too. What is he bound inevitably to do? He killed Bradley with a carving knife, we’ve got him on that, we could pin Quirk to him as well, and we’re pretty sure he’s slipped over into pure fantasy Natalie, he has in essence become the carving knife, the light shining on the blade as he raises it—it’s Psycho, it’s a scene we’ve all watched a thousand times … and he’s going to come after you. In his mind, you betrayed him on the rug with Bradley He wants you, Natalie—look at his history—and I’d bet the farm he wants you right where his old roommate had you, on your living-room carpet … and then, it’s goodbye Natalie. …”
“The ladies’ room,” she whispered. “I’m going to be sick.”
He waited outside the door so she wouldn’t be interrupted.
Chapter Twenty-one
AN HOUR LATER NATALIE, following MacPherson’s instructions, was back in her own office, having made no attempt to seek cover. “We’ve got to assume that he’s watching you all the time, even now, when you leave my office,” MacPherson had told her. “Go back to your office. We want him to see you go into that building. We want him to feel comfortable, secure, we want him to know that we’re all acting out his script. I’ll be at your office late this afternoon. Just hang on, Natalie. We’re going to get you out of this, no muss, no fuss.”
Now she waited in her office, too distracted to work, snapping at Jay because she didn’t know how much to tell him. The scenario MacPherson had laid on her had certainly worked: after being sick in the bathroom down the hall from his office, she’d emerged pale, shaky, and haunted by the images she’d heard about in his dreary office. Things hadn’t improved as the afternoon lost its light and the city came ablaze. She stood at the window listening to her own shallow breathing, waiting for MacPherson.
He finally arrived at five o’clock. He had Tony Rader with him and he commandeered her office. Danmeier appeared in the doorway wondering what was going on. MacPherson frowned, then told him to come in and close the door. He briefly filled in Danmeier and Tony on the events of the day, stressing the danger he believed was threatening Natalie.
“Now,” he said, “here’s what’s going down, as they say on all my favorite cop shows. Natalie, you’re not going home this evening. We now begin waiting for Barry Hughes to come after you. It won’t take long—he’s a crazy, anxious guy. The bloodlust is up. We had a policewoman go to your home and bring out an overnight bag of your things, toiletries, some underthings, jeans, so on. It’s all in an unmarked police car right now, a block from here—we’re taking you out through the basement, you’re coming out one block north and there’s no way in the world he can spot it. In the meantime a policewoman, Officer Grace Farraday, will be arriving here any moment. When she leaves she will be Natalie Rader—she’s your size, she’ll be wearing your black coat, she’ll have a black wig … and she’ll leave with Mr. Danmeier, just to further declare her identity. She’s going to walk home, which will make it easy for Barry to follow her, she’ll follow your kind of routine, stop at the cheese place, pick up some pasta, and arrive at your apartment. And then she’ll wait. Not alone, however. I’ll be waiting with her—I’m going in over the fence into your courtyard and in the
back door. So far as the watcher goes, he’ll think she’s in there alone.” He’d been ticking off points on his fingers and looked up at last. “Everybody got that?”
“What about me?” Natalie asked.
“That’s where Tony comes in. He says he can’t think of a better place than his aunt’s house out on Staten Island. He’s staying here in town. His aunt is visiting Atlantic City with her girl friends and you’ll have the house to yourself.”
Tony laughed. “You can take care of the cats, tiger. Just make yourself at home. How does that sound?”
She nodded numbly. “God, it sounds wonderful—like a vacation.” She summoned a smile. “Really, it sounds fine. I like that house.”
“All right, then,” MacPherson said. “You can just relax and get some rest. I’ve already alerted the cops on the island. They’ll come by and check on you, make sure everything is all right.”
“How do I get there?”
“We’ll drive you out once we get you to the car.”
“Look, could I go on the ferry? I mean, would that be all right? I’d just like to be alone. …”
“It’s okay with me,” MacPherson said. He was looking at his watch. “Once Farraday is here, we’ll get her decked out as you, wait for her to get settled at your place, then get you on your way.” He was talking mostly to himself. The buzzer sounded on Natalie’s desk.
“There’s an Officer Farraday here, Natalie.”
“Have her come into my office, Lisa.”
Farraday did in fact turn out to be a reasonably good duplicate. Natalie wished her luck and the policewoman laughed. “I’m practically an arsenal,” she said. “I feel sorry for the guy who messes with me. Now, let me get into my new hairdo and get your coat.”
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