by Ed Gorman
He kept the cold steel of the blade angled at her nipple. He could slice it away any time he wanted. He enjoyed that feeling.
'You know what I just did?' she said, crying even harder now.
'What?'
'I wet my pants. Just now. Because I'm so scared.'
'You really didn't tell anybody about seeing me that night in the office?'
'No. Honest, I didn't.'
'Good,' he said.
He grabbed her hair, threw her head back and slashed the knife across her throat in a single efficient motion.
She was a long time dying, gasping, choking, pleading for reprieveand he enjoyed every moment of it.
CHAPTER 58
All her life, Doris' mother Evelyn had suffered from fits. There was no other way to describe them. She would awaken with a sense of dread virtually paralyzing her, certain that some terrible fate was about to take one or both of her children again.
Whoever could have predicted that a rattlesnake would climb into the playpen of her firstborn?
On these days, no matter what the season, no matter how much her children might want to play outside, Evelyn Daye Tappley made both Peter and Doris stay indoors. And she ordered the servants to keep all doors and windows bolted tight. And she herself looked in on her children every twenty minutes or so. You could never be sure…
Doris thought of this as she peered into the den and looked at her mother in the wingback chair. Evelyn had gotten smaller with the yearsstill formidable to be sure, especially when she was blustering aboutbut smaller nonetheless. She sat now reading the newspaper in a pair of black silk day pajamas, a small blanket thrown across her legs as her black slippered feet stretched to reach the ottoman.
Doris knew what she was reading: the latest installment of Jill Coffey's travails.
Doris also knew who had caused those travails… a man named Rick Corday… and her own mother.
Doris had already made up her mind about calling Jill this afternoon. She just wanted to make sure that her mother was safely ensconced in one place for a while. She didn't want Evelyn walking in on her phone call.
She stepped into the den and said, 'How're you feeling this morning, Mother?'
Evelyn glanced up from the newspaper. 'Feeling?'
'You said last night you had a scratchy throat.' That was another thing about her mother latelyshe was forgetful.
'Oh, I'm fine.' Evelyn glanced at the front page with Jill's photo on it and said, 'She must be going through hell.'
'Yes, and I'm sure you feel terrible for her, don't you?'
'If I'd ever taken that tone with my mother, she would have sent me to my room.'
It worked, Evelyn's little attempt to shame Doris. It shouldn't have worked. But it did. Even after all these years. Even after all these times.
Doris walked over to her mother. 'I'm sorry, Mother.'
'I admit I don't care for Jill, of course, but I certainly wouldn't wish this on her.'
'Of course not. I shouldn't have said it.'
Doris bent and kissed her mother on the cheek. The flesh was so loose now. There was a sad mortal feel to it. She hated this woman and yet loved her; cursed her for what she'd done to poor Jill and yet had at least an inkling of why she'd done it.
'I think I'll go lie down, Mother.'
Evelyn patted her daughter's hand. 'A nap? Maybe you're coming down with something. You never take naps.'
Doris tried not to look at Jill's photograph on the front page. She hated to think her ex-sister-in-law was having to deal with the nightmare of publicity all over again. It was easy to sit in your living room and gloat over the grief of others. It was another matter to endure those griefs.
'I'll probably be down in an hour or so.'
'Maybe you should take an aspirin or something.'
'I'll be fine,' Doris said, glancing out the mullioned window at the snowy pines and the white hills beyond them. She could see herself and Peter sliding down those hills on their sleds many, many years ago.
Her mother always went with them, of course, petrified they'd break their necks.
Poor Mother, she thought, loving and hating her, hating and loving her, as she had all her life.
'See you in a while.'
'Yes, dear,' Evelyn said.
***
Mr Corday lived in a hip-roofed ranch house that had no neighbors close by. Despite the sun and the blue sky, the wind was whipping up the snow into duststorms of sparkling diamonds.
Marcy drove by once and noticed that there was a two-stall garage to the right of the house. The overhead door was open and she could see the tail end of a blue Volvo. Then she got a glimpse of a tall man in a dark topcoat and a merry red scarf emerging from the house and walking to the garage. The man had white hair and looked like James Coburn. He was the man in Jill's photograph.
Just as she reached the corner, Marcy turned right and drove down half a block. She turned into a driveway and then backed out quickly. At the head of the block she pulled into the curb.
A few minutes later, Corday drove by. He was headed east. He gave no sign that he'd noticed her.
She gave him a full five minutes, just in case he had noticed her and was going to try something fancy.
She then took a left and drove back past his house. She continued a quarter mile down the road. The snow was a whirling dervish, blinding her momentarily.
She found a DX station, one of those that likely got abandoned during the last recession when all the big oil companies were finding direct sales unprofitable, parked on the snow-covered drive and started her trek back to Corday's house.
The headwinds were a bitch. She kept her head down. Her cheeks froze into numbness almost immediately. The Midwestern countryside was diabolically pretty on a day like this. It could kill you through exposure, but at least you'd die looking at beautiful scenery.
She hoped that she wouldn't find anybody home at Corday's place. That was the first universal rule of the private eye: Never illegally enter a house that is occupied.
It's a fast way to get yourself killed.
***
Jill had just gotten back from her lawyer'swas just unwinding her scarf and slipping off her western bootswhen the phone rang.
She hobbled across the floor with a single boot on.
'Hello?'
'Jill, it's Doris.'
'It's nice to hear your voice.'
'Nice to hear yours, too. But right now' She was silent a moment, and spoke in a much lower voice when she resumed speaking. 'I thought I heard somebody at the door.'
'Are you at home?'
'Yes. And I'm sure you remember how Mother is.' She tried to sound sardonic but a certain bitterness was there, too. 'I'd like to set up a lunch for tomorrow.'
'I'd like that.'
'Then you're free?'
'Even if I wasn't, I'd make time.'
The pause again. 'Jill, I'm sorry for what you've been going through.'
Jill thought of what her lawyer Deborah had suggested during many of their conversations. Couldn't a bitter old woman with millions and millions of dollars have engineered this murderand made it look as if Jill were guilty?
'I appreciate you saying that.'
'Well, I have my reasons, believe me. That's why I want to have lunch. Just a minute.'
Silence.
Much lower speaking voice when she came back. 'Now I'm sure I heard somebody in the hall. I'd better go.' She named a place for lunch. 'Around noon?'
'That'd be great. It's so good hearing from you, Doris. It really is.'
'We'll have a lot of things to discuss tomorrow.'
'See you then.'
As she hung up the telephone, Jill replayed Doris' whispers. The poor woman. Still having to sneak around so her mother didn't know what she was up to. Jill even felt an errant wisp of pity for Evelyn. Her infant had been killed in one of the most unlikely ways anybody had ever heard of. Easy to understand why Evelyn had turned into a paranoid, over-controlling
old witch. But she couldn't be forgiven for what she'd done to Peter and Doris. Not ever.
Jill had just gotten her second boot off when the phone rang again.
This time it was Kate.
Jill, exuberantly, told her all about Mitch tracking down Cini.
***
The lock took less than five minutes to pick.
Six months ago, Marcy had tailed an unfaithful wife for a husband who didn't have much money. But what he did have, as a graduate of Illinois State Prison, was a nice new set of burglar tools, the kind you just couldn't find at Sears.
Marcy swapped him pictures of his wife entering a place that said M TEL where she was trysting that afternoon with this kind of dorky-looking white guy who sold appliances out to Best Buys.
The client, black, had gotten very angry. 'He's white? She's makin' it with some white guy? White people don't know shit about sex! Nothin' personal, you understand.'
'Right. Now how about those burglary tools?'
This was Marcy's first opportunity to use them, standing in the wind-whipped side door of Rick Corday's house, her face a frozen mask from the biting snow dervishes, her hands a chafed red though they'd been gloveless less than a minute.
The first three picks were wrong.
The fourth one got the lock tumblers to move a millionth of an inch or so.
The fifth one opened the door instantly.
The smell. That was the first thing she noticed, even though she wasn't all the way inside yet. The smell. She wasn't sure she knew what it was. She wasn't sure she wanted to know.
She went in, closed the door.
Appliances thrummed; a grandfather clock tocked out eternity. A built-in dishwasher had reached rinse cycle.
The smell wasn't as acrid here as it had been on the landing leading to the basement. Spicescinnamon, paprika, oreganoscented the kitchen pleasantly. The room was done in contrasting yellows. The cabinets new built-ins, the refrigerator a mammoth sunny yellow machine that had an ice-maker set into one of the two front doors.
As soon as she left the kitchen, she picked up the odor again. What was it, anyway?
The living room was a modern blend of natural fabrics and decorative accentsvery feminine but not effeminatea stylish cream-colored button-arm sofa with button-arm chairs in a dark brown and a glass-top coffee table in the center of the ensemble.
Nice. Comfortable. Homey.
Except for the smell.
'Gag me with a spoon,' as she used to say back in the misty days of eight years ago when she'd been in high school.
To the left was a hallway. She took it. The smell faded considerably back here. Wind caught in the chimney and let out a mournful whistle. She felt weird being here. She would be glad to get out. But what kind of self-respecting private investigator would go to all the trouble of breaking into somebody's house and then not go searching through his secret stuff?
The first bedroom was curious indeed for a man, with its rice carved bed with flowery spread. A highboy sat next to the bed, which was supported on a huge platform that lifted it several feet into the air. There was a trellis chainstitch rug and a cheval mirror and a massive burgundy lamp on the night-stand. It was all a little too decorative for her; a little too cloying.
The bureau was pushed against the back wall, next to a bookcase snug with bestsellers that ran to books intent on building your self-esteem. From what Marcy could gather about these books, the only people whose self-esteem they helped was the authors'. They felt just dandy about taking all that money from idiots.
Inside the bureau drawer, she found a tidy array of socks, underwear and T-shirts. Rick Corday was a neat freak. Everything was lined up just so, displayed just so. She hated neat freaks. Life was too short for all that anal-retentive stuff.
She tried the second drawer.
You might call this one The Wonderful World of Sweaters. V-necks, turtle-necks, crew-necks. Red, yellow, blue, green.
She was just opening the third drawer when somebody behind her said, 'Walk away from the bureau and put your hands up. And then turn around and face me. Just like TV.'
She put her hands up.
And turned around real nice and slow as if she were back in ballet class working on her pirouette.
And then she gazed up at the James Coburn-like countenance of Rick Corday standing in the doorway.
He had a.45 straight out of a Bogart movie in his right hand.
He smiled. 'I knew I faked you out.'
'Huh?'
'When you were parked down at the corner there, waiting for me to drive past. I knew I faked you out.'
'You knew I was there?'
'Sure. I got curious the second time you drove by my house. We don't get a lot of that out here.'
'You're Rick Corday.'
'Right.'
'I can explain this, Mr Corday.'
'Sure you can.'
'What're you going to do to me?'
He didn't hesitate. 'Jeeze, kid, you should've figured that out by now. I'm going to kill you.'
***
'Ma'am.'
One thing servants in the Tappley house learned immediately: You were to report any suspicious activity to Mrs Tappley or risk losing your job. To keep her happy was to keep her informed, and so the maids tended to eavesdrop on any conversations that the children hadwhen they were growing upor that Doris had now.
The upstairs maid had listened at the door as Doris spoke to Jill.
She went downstairs, saw Mrs Tappley in the cozy warmth of the den, and said, 'Excuse me, ma'am.'
Mrs Tappley sighed. She was at a particularly exciting place in her Barbara Cartland novel. 'What is it, Jess?'
'I'm sorry to interrupt.'
'I didn't ask you to grovel. I asked you to tell me what you wanted.'
'Yes'm.'
'Well?'
'Doris was on the phone.'
Interest flickered in Evelyn's eyes. 'Oh?'
'Yes'm. For almost ten minutes.'
'I see.'
'And she was talking to your former daughter-in-law.'
Evelyn sat up in her wingchair and put the book face down on her lap. 'She was talking to Jill?'
'Yes'm.'
'You're positive? Jill?'
'She said her name two or three times. That's what I thought was so funny, ma'am, her talking to her.'
'I appreciate you telling me this, Jess.'
'Yes'm.'
'I'll speak with you later.'
Jess nodded and left.
Evelyn didn't go back to her Barbara Cartland. Instead, she began thinking of her medicine cabinet, and something Dr Steiner had given her for when she felt a nervous attack coming on…
***
Mitch spent the early afternoon forcing himself to smile and pretend that he really enjoyed being called a moron.
The man doing the calling was a dapper yuppie from the DA's office named Fitzsimmons. Twice in the conversation he managed to sneak in the fact that he was a Yale alumnus, and three times he mentioned that he'd been on a Barbara Walters Special about crime prevention in the United States.
Nobody on the planet was half as cool as Robert D. Fitzsimmons imagined himself to be.
'I belong to the same club,' he said toward the end of the conversation.
'Club?' Mitch said.
'Country club.'
'Ah.'
Fitzsimmons studied him a moment, looking for any signs of irony in Mitch's face. He then glanced at Lieutenant Sievers as if he expected Sievers to reprimand Mitch in some way. They were in Sievers' office and had been for better than an hour.
'What I'm saying,' Fitzsimmons said, hooking his thumbs in the pockets of his vest and strutting around the office as if he were presenting a case to a jury, 'is that this should be your one and only case, Mitch. No other cases until this one is solved. I thought we had an understanding.'
'I'm not working on any other cases.'
'Of course you are.' He shook his head. 'I have my spies
in the department, Mitch. I know what's going on. You're concerned about your lady friend.'
'I don't know why I would be,' Mitch said, letting a nasty edge come into his voice. 'She's only being charged with murder.'
Fitzsimmons of the seventy-five-dollar haircut addressed Sievers directly. 'I see two things wrong with Mitch working on his lady friend's case.'
'I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't call her my ''lady friend." Her name is Jill.'
Fitzsimmons paused a moment and pursed his lips, as if pondering a vast and deep philosophical issue.
'All right, then. Jill it is.'
He still looked directly at Sievers. 'There are two things wrong with Mitch working on Jill's case. One, it takes him away from the case we want him working on; and two, it's hardly professional for a detective to work on a case involving somebody he's in love with.'
Sievers said, 'He isn't spending much time on it, Bob. Just an odd hour here and there. Most of the time he's working on your case.'
Fitzsimmons burst into rage, slamming his fist on the desk and spearing a long finger in Sievers' face. 'I told you I don't want him working on anything except my case! Do we understand each other!'
He had shouted so loudly that the cops outside the glass-walled office looked in.
Sievers sat there, eyes downcast, humiliated.
Mitch wanted to grab this candy-ass by the throat and throw him out the fourth-floor window.
'We understand each other,' Sievers said meekly. 'Mitch works on your case.'
'And I'm holding you personally responsible, Lieutenant, to see that he does.'
He was still angry. His neck was red behind his white collar. Spittle covered his lower lip. His parents had perhaps given him a little too much self-esteem.
He picked up his topcoat, which he'd laid neatly across the back of a chair, and his briefcase, which appeared to have cost about as much as Sievers made in a week.
'I don't like pulling rank but sometimes it's necessary,' he said.
Mitch wondered if this was a clumsy attempt at apologizing. Not that it would change his opinion of this jerk, even if it were.