Pantry. No window. The toolbox. His toolbox. It was out there, sitting in the middle of the kitchen. Well, maybe not the middle, but still hard to miss. Too late. The kitchen door was opening. George closed the pantry door, praying that it was well oiled and that the toolbox would be overlooked.
The kitchen door burst open.
“Harvey, Harvey,” the woman wept as George pressed his back against a shelf of cans. “Please.”
Harvey didn’t answer. And the woman sounded weird.
What were they doing home? What the hell were they …?
Something scratched across the tile floor.
“God, no. Please.”
George moved from the wall of cans and pitty-pittied to the pantry door, opening it a crack. Pitty-pitty on frightened little cat Rockports.
The white nightgown of Dana Rozier was bright with blood and open to her stomach. She staggered backward toward the kitchen door. Harvey Rozier strode silently toward her. He wore some kind of white floor-length smock that made him look like a mad scientist George had seen in some English horror movie about zombies on channel 32.
Dana Rozier was going for the door. She had no chance of making it without help, and George was sure that if he stepped out of the pantry he’d be covered in his own blood within a couple of heartbeats. Rozier was too big for him, in better shape, and carrying the biggest fucking knife George Patniks had ever seen.
George pushed the door open a little more, wondering what the hell Rozier was planning to do. That was when Rozier tripped over George’s toolbox. The knife flew out of his hand and spun across the floor. Rozier went sprawling, smock billowing awkwardly.
Dana Rozier went for the door, losing strength. Too many bolts. She reached for the phone as her husband got to his knees and scrambled for the bloody knife.
“No, no, no,” Dana Rozier panted, unwilling, unable to turn her back on her husband.
George, standing in the pantry doorway, watched her hit three numbers, 911 for sure. But she heard nothing as Rozier found the knife. There was nothing she could hear because George had cut the phone wires.
Too late. Too late now. Rozier was on top of her, pulling his wife from the phone, plunging the knife in wherever her flailing arms let him through. Face, eye, scalp, chest, arms. She crumpled, whimpering, and Rozier went on.
George didn’t move, couldn’t move. Rozier knelt over what was left of his dying wife, panting, his white smock splotched like a bloody Rorschach.
George watched the exhausted man’s face and heaving body and knew what was about to happen. Rozier looked back across the room to see what had tripped him. His eyes found the toolbox. He panted heavily, not understanding, and his eyes moved across the room, finding George almost instantly.
Their eyes met. Rozier puzzled, weary, confused. George Patniks in panic. Rozier tried to rise, using the knife to prop himself up like an old man with a cane.
George’s legs were trembling and nausea tickled inside his stomach and went for his throat. A sound came from George and he knew he was running, his feet sliding on the tile floor, knowing that if he went down, Rozier’s knife would get him, that the dead woman’s blood would snare and bind him. His back was turned to Rozier now, and he had no idea how close the man might be. George sucked in air and ran for the window through which he had cut the hole. He tucked his head between his arms and threw his body against glass and wood, hoping it would shatter, but it didn’t, not completely. He tumbled into cool air, rolling on his back, arm cut. He caught a glimpse of Rozier’s shadow at the window, a ghostly, sheeted shadow carrying a bloody knife, panting.
George got to his feet and ran, ran for his car, forgetting about cuts, slashes, and murder, forgetting his tool case, and ignoring the certainty that he had fouled his underwear and legs.
He slid into the driver’s seat of the Toyota, cracking his knee against the steering wheel, and locked the door with one hand as he turned the key with the other. Rozier wasn’t at the door. Not yet. He threw the car in reverse and tried to keep calm, keep from hitting the birdbath or the bushes and slamming into the trees that lined the driveway.
He let his eyes move upward quickly as he screeched backward into the night, and what he saw was as frightening as the murder he had witnessed.
Rozier hadn’t moved from the window. He stood, motionless, looking directly at George Patniks. Their eyes met again as George hit the gas and swirled madly and loudly down the red-brick driveway. George wouldn’t swear, but he was pretty goddamn sure that Harvey Rozier was smiling at him.
In Which Things Go Awry
PITTY-PITTY PATNIKS WAS wrong. Harvey Rozier had not been smiling. His evening had gone even worse than the burglar’s. When he was sure that the madly retreating car of the burglar hadn’t struck a tree, a house, or a pedestrian, Harvey turned back into the room, wiped the handle of the knife on his linen floor-length robe, and threw it in the general direction of his wife’s body. He didn’t want to look at her. It had taken months of fear and anger to go through with the murder, and now he wanted to, had to, convince himself, hypnotize himself as best he could into believing, that the lie he would tell was truth.
Harvey had seen many of his clients lie so convincingly to the press and the Internal Revenue Service that he was sure they had convinced themselves of the lie. Trudeau. Martin Trudeau, millionaire leader of the Evangelical Free Church of Christ, had lied to the IRS. Took a lie detector test. Results were inconclusive. Could Harvey pass a lie detector test? Possibly, he thought, forcing himself to look at Dana’s body once more to be sure she was dead. Possibly.
One thing to plan. Harvey was a great planner. Another thing to execute. He hadn’t planned on Dana running down the stairs. He wanted it to look as if she had been surprised in bed by an intruder. Now he had a trail of blood, bloody footprints, and a goddamn witness.
She was dead.
He tried not to think about the burglar, at least not consciously at first. He had a plan. He had to execute the plan. He would …He had stripped naked except for the sneakers. He washed his bloody, surgically gloved hands, dried them on a relatively clean corner of the robe, and got a plastic Hefty garbage bag from under the sink. He threw in the white linen robe he’d purchased two weeks ago on a business trip to Lexington and carried the bag to the back door, taking care that it picked up no blood. He opened the door, stepped out, and walked to the brick driveway, where he removed the sneakers and surgical gloves and dropped them into the plastic garbage bag. There was a faint trail of partially footprinted blood leading from the house.
If the burglar goes to the police, Harvey thought, hurrying barefoot up the stairs, he runs the risk of being accused of Dana’s murder, but this guy was a burglar, not a murderer. Harvey got in the shower and turned on the hot water, letting it scald his chest. He covered himself with soap—liquid soap—head to toe. Had to be fast. Harvey was shivering, trembling. He heard something and threw open the shower curtains. Had some neighbor heard the damn burglar go through the dining room window and called the police? Nothing, no one, just the blare of music from the stereo speaker downstairs. He closed the curtains but not all the way, pushing back the fantasy of Dana as a blood-drenched zombie coming up the stairs with a knife in her stained hand.
And the burglar, the burglar, goddamn it, the burglar. The burglar might not be very bright. He might not think it through, might not realize that he was in big trouble if he stepped forward. He might go to the police and describe what he had seen, identify Harvey as Dana’s killer. Would he be believed? Would he reemerge when he had calmed down in a week, two, a month, and try to blackmail him?
Harvey turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, reaching for a towel.
Had to hurry. Think on the way.
He was back in his tux and down the stairs, avoiding the trail of Dana’s blood on the carpet. One last quick look around. The door to the kitchen was closed.
“All right,” he said aloud, and the sound of his own voic
e made his hands tremble. “All right,” he demanded, and his hands obeyed. “What have I forgotten? The toolbox.”
He moved back to the kitchen door, opened it with his elbow, avoiding the bloody trail, and went straight to the burglar’s toolbox. He wiped the box with a dish towel and left it sitting in the middle of the room for an instant, an island in a sea of blood. Then he picked up the toolbox, holding it away from his body, went to the sink, washed off the already drying blood, and moved to the door to the garage, glancing at Dana’s deep-red-against-white corpse. She had stopped bleeding. He hid the toolbox in plain sight, beginning to panic, already making up an excuse—loose bowels, nausea—if the concert was over when he got back to the Bismarck. He checked himself for blood stains and found none.
By the time he returned with the Franklins to discover Dana’s body, the doorknob would be a blur of finger and palm prints.
It was the best he could do. It wasn’t quite the way he had planned, but …
He went out the side door and walked barefoot to the head of the driveway. Behind the house, through the trees at the end of the cul-de-sac, Harvey made his way carefully along the narrow path. Not much light, but enough. A thin spring rain tapped against the trees, which were just starting to get a new coat of green leaves, black in the moonless and starless night. He was a dark Santa carrying a dark bag of blood. No one in sight on Kilgore, the next street south, where he had parked the rented Geo Prizm. He opened the trunk, threw in the bag, closed the trunk quietly, and got into the driver’s seat, where he closed the door just hard enough to turn off the “door ajar” light. He put on the socks and shoes he had left on the passenger seat and drove away slowly, watching the dark houses on either side of the street, listening to the rain start to beat harder on the roof.
It wasn’t till he hit Howard Street and was heading for the expressway that he slammed the door firmly.
Check the time. A little over an hour since he had left the men’s room at the Bismarck and walked quickly to the Geo in the Grant Park underground lot. He was way off, but he still had more than an hour, even if the quartet were incompetent and rushed through the Mozart and the Vivaldi.
He pulled the baseball cap over his eyes and drove, Kennedy to Eisenhower, back into the Grant Park underground lot, careful not to break the speed limit. The night attendant didn’t even glance at him.
Still twenty minutes. Should make it easily.
Park in a corner. Car door echoing. Car trunk echoing. No one in sight. No sound of approaching cars. Lot not full but not empty for this hour. He would wait a few days, maybe a week, pick up the car, and return it to Hertz.
Harvey took the garbage bag in his arms and hurried to the garbage can near the escalator. No footsteps behind or in front. Nothing moving in the shadows of the concrete pillars. He shoved the bag into the garbage can and heaped empty bottles and stale food-covered McDonald’s bags over it.
Time left. Time left.
He moved quickly but didn’t run up the escalator and onto the street. The hotel was half a block away. Raining harder. He couldn’t go back wet. He ran down the escalator, which fought him with each step, and searched frantically for something to cover himself with. A cardboard box lay limp behind the garbage can in which he had hidden the plastic bag. He grabbed the carton, ran to the street, shielded himself as the wind off the lake tried to tear his cover from his hands. Down the alley behind the hotel, he found the service entrance door he had propped open. It was still open. He dropped the soggy brown carton and went up the stairs, shoes resounding, the smell of something stale and sweet in the air.
He opened the door carefully and struggled to catch his breath. No one in sight to his left. Down the corridor two old men in tuxedos who had ducked out on the concert stood smoking. He pulled out his comb, used it, and decided he couldn’t wait to fully control his breath.
Harvey eased out of the stairwell and into the men’s room. Empty. He washed his hands, looked at himself in the mirror, brushed back his wisps of hair, splashed his face with cold water, and stepped into the hall near the performance room. Empty except for the two men smoking and whispering, not looking his way.
Harvey slipped into the concert room. Rows of backs were to him. No one seemed to turn. On the raised platform before the several hundred people on cushioned folding chairs, a thin, young Oriental woman attacked a violin, eyes closed to show her intensity and commitment. Harvey eased into the chair he had moved to the rear of the room. Ken and Betty Franklin were in the second row, wedged in.
Harvey picked up the small tape recorder from the floor under the chair, clicked it off, and dropped it into his pocket He would listen to the tape as soon as he could, listen for anything unusual, a slight mistake or miscue, a coughing fit, something he could refer to, to prove he had sat through the performance.
The instruments came to a shrill decision to end. Applause. He had made it back with more than twenty minutes to spare. The two old men who had been smoking in the corridor came in and stood, joining the applause and the bows of the performers.
People filed past Harvey, talking of where they were going to get coffee or a drink, making soft patter about the performance.
The Franklins found him. They were older than the Roziers by almost twenty years, a pair of surrogate parents and much more. She a handsome society joiner. He the senior partner of the law firm of Kyle, Timkin, and O’Doul, with offices on the same floor as Harvey’s in the John Hancock Building. Harvey had left his Lexus in the garage “in case Dana might need it” and had reluctantly agreed to go with the Franklins and let Ken drive. This was shortly after Dana had become nauseated just before they were scheduled to leave. Nothing terrible, but nothing pleasant either. Touch of the flu. It was going around. People had even been hospitalized.
When the Franklins had arrived, Harvey insisted on staying home. Dana insisted that he go and have a good time. The Franklins promised to bring him right home after the concert.
“Did you call Dana?” Betty asked.
“No,” said Harvey.
“Perhaps you should …” Betty continued.
“I don’t want to wake her if she’s managed to get to sleep.”
“Let’s just get you back home and see how she’s doing,” said Ken.
Harvey let himself be driven, forced himself to engage in small talk about brunch on Sunday and whether they should try to get a box together for the opera season. The Lyric was doing two Verdis. Dana loved Verdi.
Thirty minutes after they left the Bismarck, they stepped out of the Franklins’ Lincoln and saw the broken dining room window and bloody footprints in the driveway.
Harvey ran to the door. Unlocked. He opened it and ran in, being sure that Ken was right behind him and Betty a few steps behind, bleating like a goat.
Harvey started for the stairway.
“This way,” Ken shouted and led the way along the trail of blood to the kitchen.
The long night had just begun for Harvey Rozier.
Doctors
THE DOCTOR DID NOT like Chicago.
The doctor, who had been in the city for almost four months now, thought that Chicago was a very dangerous place. Certainly much more dangerous than East Lansing, Michigan, where he had spent almost two years treating and being exposed to AIDS patients.
His name was Berry, Jacob Berry. He was thin, nervous, and wore a starched blue lab shirt with his last name stitched in an even darker blue on the pocket just to the left of his heart. Dr. Berry’s principal source of income was giving annual physicals to Chicago Police Department officers and personnel, a noncontract deal Jacob’s brother had wrangled through a political connection in the Cook County Democratic party.
Jacob turned to the policeman in the chair, hoping he was giving off the aura of an experienced, calm, and all-knowing physician. It was difficult with these policemen and women, nothing like the dead-eyed men and women at the AIDS clinic in East Lansing from which he had escaped 122 days ago. He counted th
e days but he was about to give up counting. East Lansing and the AIDS clinic were not as frightening as Chicago.
“You hate it in Lansing. So come to Chicago,” his brother, also a Dr. Berry, had urged.
“Isaac,” he answered. “I have no hospital affiliation, no patient history, very little saved, a …”
“I’ll find you something,” Isaac Berry said to his younger brother. “A deal here. Nice and simple. I find you something, let you know, and you can say yes or no. Can it hurt?”
“No,” he answered, intrigued by the possibility of escape from the faces of endless agony. Until Isaac’s call he had not admitted how depressed he had become at the AIDS clinic. When Isaac, as good as his word, called back in less than three weeks with a fully equipped suite in Uptown he could rent at a very reasonable rate and the guarantee of an average of twenty-five full physicals and other referrals from the Chicago Police Department, Jacob took it. He had no idea what Uptown was. Now he was finding out.
The Uptown suite had three rooms, all small. The waiting room had five chairs covered in faded orange Naugahyde, a small book rack containing nothing, white walls that needed painting, and two reproductions of paintings by van Gogh, both of flowers. The reception desk was enclosed with a sliding glass door. Jacob Berry had not yet hired a receptionist and the prospect of having a nurse to help him was well into the future. The office/examining room held an old wooden desk with a wooden swivel chair behind it, a row of wooden book racks containing his small supply of the thick and the deadly, an examining table with two chairs, a tiny sink in a corner that was very stingy with hot water, and a white metal cabinet containing a minimum of samples from the drug company detail men who had welcomed him to his new practice. It didn’t seem like much.
Lieberman's Day Page 23