by Ed McBain
“I started to turn on my stool,” Eileen said, her voice close to a whisper as she looked up at Peter, lips caressing his captive finger, “and got a cup of H2 SO4 in my face.”
“But you didn’t see—”
“All I saw was a gloved hand, an arm. Then—I was burning in hell.” She bit down on his finger, at the base of the nail, laughed delightedly when he jerked his hand away.
“I can tell you who it was,” Peter said angrily. “Because you’re not the first woman who posed for John Ransome and got a face like yours.”
He wasn’t fully prepared for the ferocity with which she came at him, hissing like a feral cat, hands clawlike to ream out his eyes. He caught her wrists and forced her hands down.
“John Ransome? That’s crazy! John loved me and I loved him!”
“Take it easy, Eileen! Did he come to see you after it happened?”
“No! So what? You think I wanted him to see me like this? Think I want anyone looking at me unless they’re paying for it? Oh how I make them pay!”
“Eileen, I’m sorry.” He had used as much force as he dared; she was strong in her fury and could inadvertantly break a wrist struggling with him. When she was off balance Peter pushed her hard away from him. “I’m sorry, but I’m not wrong.” He moved laterally away from her, not wanting some of his face to wind up under her fingernails. But she had choked on her outrage and was having trouble getting her breath.
“F-Fuck you! What are you cops . . . trying to do to John? Did one of the others say something against him? Tell me, I’ll tear her fucking heart out!”
“Were you that much in love with him?”
“I’m not talking to you any more! Some things are still sacred to me!”
Eileen backed up a few steps and sat down heavily, her body in a bind as if she wore a straitjacket, harrowing sounds of grief in her throat.
“Whatever happened to that Ph.D.?” he asked calmly, though the skin of his forearms was prickling.
“That was someone else. Get out of here, before I have you thrown out. The sheriff and I are old friends. We paint each other’s toenails. The chain-link fence? The goddamn desert? Forget about it. This is my home, no matter what you think. I own the Rooster. John paid for it.”
Saying his name she quaked as if an old, unendurable torment was about to erupt. She leaned forward and, one arm moving jerkily like a string puppet’s, she began smashing teacups on the tray with her fist. Shards flew. When she stopped her hand was bleeding profusely. She put it in her lap and let it bleed.
“On your way, bud,” Eileen said to Peter. “Would you mind asking Lourdes to come in? I think it may be time for my meds.”
While he was waiting at the Las Vegas airport for his flight to Houston, delayed an hour and a half because of a storm out of the Gulf of Mexico, Peter composed a long e-mail to Echo, concluding with:
So far I can’t prove anything. There’s at least two more of them I need to see, so I’m on my way to Texas. But I want you to get off the island now. No good-byes, don’t bother to pack. Go to my Uncle Charlie’s in Brookline. 3074 East Mather. Wait for me there, I’ll only be a couple of days.
By the time he boarded his flight to Houston, there still was no acknowledgment from Echo. It was six thirty-six P.M. in the east.
John Ransome was still working in his aerie studio and Echo was taking a shower when the Woman in Black walked into Echo’s bedroom without a knock and had a look around. Art books heaped on the writing desk. The blouse and skirt and pearls she’d laid out for a leisurely dinner with Ransome. Her silver rosary, her Bible, her laptop. There was an e-mail message on the screen from Rosemay, apparently only half-read. Taja scrolled past it to another e-mail from a girl whom she knew had been Echo’s college roommate. She skipped that one too and came to Peter O’Neill’s most recent message.
This one Taja read carefully. Obviously Echo hadn’t seen it, or she wouldn’t have been humming so contentedly in the slow-running shower. Washing her hair.
Taja deleted the message. But of course if Peter didn’t hear from Echo soon, he’d just send another, more urgent e-mail. The weather was decent for now, the wi-fi signal steady.
She figured she had four or five minutes, at least, to disable the laptop skillfully enough so that Echo wouldn’t catch on that it had been sabotaged.
But Peter O’Neill was the real problem—just as she had suspected and conveyed to John Ransome in the beginning, when Ransome was considering Echo as his next subject.
No matter how he rated as a detective, he wasn’t going to learn anything useful in Texas. Taja could be certain of that.
And she had a good idea of where he would show up during the next forty-eight hours.
TEN
“Eventually they would have reconstructed her face,” the late Nan McLaren’s aunt Elisa said to Peter. “The plastic surgery group is the best in Houston. World-renowned, in fact.”
He was sitting with the aging socialite, who still retained a certain gleam that diet and exercise afforded septuagenerians, in the orangerie of a very large estate home in Sherwood Forest. There was a slow drip of rain from two big magnolias outside that were strung with tiny twinkling holiday lights. The woman had finished a brandy and soda and wanted another; she signaled the black houseboy tending bar. Peter declined another ginger ale.
“Of course Nan would never have looked the same. What was indefinable yet unique about her youthful beauty—gone forever. Her nose demolished; facial bones not just broken but shattered. Such unexpected cruelty, so deadly to the soul, destroyed her optimism, her innocent ecstasy and joie de vivre. If you’re familiar with the portraits that John Ransome painted, you know the Nan I’m speaking of.”
“I saw them on the Internet.”
“I only wish the family owned one. I understand all of his work has increased tremendously in value in the past few years.” Elisa sighed and shifted the weight of the bichon frise dog on her lap. She stared at a recessed gas log fire in one angle of the octagonal garden room. “Who would have thought that a single, unexpected blow from a man’s fist could do such terrible damage?”
“In New York they’re called ‘sly-rappers,’ ” Peter said. “Sometimes they use a brick, or wear brass knuckles. They come up behind their intended victims, usually on a crowded sidewalk, tap them on a shoulder. And when they turn, totally defenseless, to see who’s there—”
“Is it always a woman?”
“In my experience. Young and beautiful, like Nan was.”
“Dreadful.”
“I understand Houston PD didn’t get anywhere trying to find the perp.”
“‘Perp?’ Yes, that’s how they kept referring to him. But it happened so quickly; there were only a couple of witnesses, and he disappeared while Nan was bleeding there on the sidewalk.” She reached up for the drink that the houseboy brought her. “Her skull was fractured when she fell. She didn’t regain consciousness for more than a week.” Elisa looked at Peter while the bichon frise eagerly lapped at the brimming drink she held on one knee. “But you haven’t explained why the New York police department is interested in Nan’s case.”
“I can’t say at this time, I’m sorry. Could you tell me when Nan started doing heroin?”
“Between, I think, her third and fourth surgeries. What she really needed was therapy, but she stopped seeing her psychiatrist when she took up with a rather dubious young man. He, I’m sure, was the one who—what is the expression? Got her hooked.”
“Calvin Cotrona. A few busts, petty stuff. Yeah, he was a user.”
Elisa took her brandy and soda away from the white dog with the large ruff of head; he scolded her with a sharp bark. “Can’t give him any more,” she explained to Peter. “He becomes obstreperous, and pees on the Aubusson. Rather like my third husband, who couldn’t hold his liquor either. Quiet down, Richelieu, or mommy will become deeply annoyed.” She studied Peter again. “You seem to know so much about Nan’s tragedy and how she died. What is
it you hoped to learn from me, Detective?”
Peter rubbed tired eyes. “I wanted to know if Nan saw or heard from John Ransome once she’d finished posing for him.”
“Not to my knowledge. After she returned to Houston she was quite blue and unsociable for many months. I suspected at the time she was infatuated with the man. But I never asked. Is it important?” Elisa raised her glass but didn’t drink; her hand trembled. She looked startled. “But you can’t mean—you can’t be thinking—”
“Mrs. McLaren, I’ve talked to two other of Ransome’s models in the past few weeks. Both were disfigured. A knife in one case, sulphuric acid in the other. In a day or two, with luck, I’ll be talking to another of the Ransome women, Valerie Angelus. And I hope to God that nothing has happened to her face. Because that’s stretching coincidence way too far. And already it’s scaring the hell out of me.”
______
In his room at a Motel Six near Houston’s major airport, named for one of the U.S. presidents who had bloomed and thrived where a stink of corruption was part of the land, Peter called his uncle Charlie in Brookline, Massachusetts. Thirty-six hours had passed since he’d e-mailed her from Vegas, but Echo hadn’t showed up there. He tried Rosemay in New York; she hadn’t heard from Echo either. He sent another e-mail that didn’t go through. In exasperation he tried leaving a message on her pager, but it was turned off.
Frustrated, he stretched out on the bed with a cold washcloth over his eyes. Traveling always gave him a queasy stomach and a headache. He chewed a Pepcid and tried to convince himself he had nothing to seriously worry about. The other Ransome women he knew of or had already interviewed had been attacked months after their commitments to the artist, and, presumably, their love affairs, were over.
Violent psychopaths had consistent profiles. Pete couldn’t see the urbane Mr. Ransome as a part-time stalker and slasher, no matter what the full moon could do to potentially unstable psyches. But there was another breed, and not so rare according to his readings of case studies in psychopathology, who, insulated by wealth and position and perverse beyond human ken, would pay handsomely to have others gratify their sick, secret urges.
There was no label he could pin on John Ransome yet. But the notion that Ransome had spent several weeks already carefully and unhurriedly manipulating Echo, first to seduce and finally to destroy her, detonated the fast-food meal that had been sitting undigested in his stomach like a bomb. He went into the bathroom to throw up, afterward sat on the floor exhausting himself in a helpless rage. Feeling Echo on his skin, allure of a supple body, her creases and small breast buds and tempting, half-awake eyes. Thinking of her desire to make love to him at the cottage in Bedford and his stiff-necked refusal of her. A defining instance of false pride that might have sent his life careening off in a direction he’d never intended it to go.
He wanted Echo now, desperately. But while he was savagely getting himself off what he felt was a whore’s welcome in silk, what he saw was the rancor in Eileen’s dark eyes.
______
John Ransome didn’t show up at the house until a quarter often, still wearing his work clothes that retained the pungency of the studio. Oil paints. To Echo the most intoxicating of odors. She caught a whiff of the oils before she saw him reflected in the glass of one of the bookcases in the first-floor library where she had passed the time with a sketchbook and her Prismacolor pencils, copying an early Ransome seascape. Painting the sea gave her a lot of trouble; it changed with the swiftness of a dream.
“I am so sorry, Mary Catherine.” He had the look of a man wearied but satisfied after a fulfilling day.
“Don’t worry, John. But I don’t know about dinner.”
“Ciera’s used to my lateness. I need twenty minutes. You could select the wine. Chateau Petrus.”
“John?”
Yes?”
“I was looking at your self-portrait again—”
“Oh, that. An exercise in monomania. But I was sick of staring at myself before I finished. I don’t know how Courbet could have done eight self-studies. Needless to say he was better looking than I am. I ought to take that blunder down and shove it in the closet under the stairs.”
“Don’t you dare! John, really, it’s magnificent.”
“Well, then. If you like it so much, Mary Catherine, it’s yours.”
“What? No,” she protested, laughing. “I only wanted to ask you about the girl—the one who’s reflected in the mirror behind your chair? So mysterious. Who is she?”
He came into the library and stood beside her, rubbed a cheekbone where his skin, sensitive to paint-thinner, was inflamed.
“My cousin Brigid. She was the first Ransome girl.”
“No, really?”
“Years before I began to dedicate myself to portraits, I did a nude study of Brigid. After we were both satisfied with the work, we burned it together. In fact, we toasted marshmallows over the fire.”
Echo smiled in patient disbelief.
“If the painting was so good . . .”
“Oh, I think it was. But Brigid wasn’t of age when she posed.”
“And you were?”
“Nineteen.” He shrugged and made a palms-up gesture. “She was very mature for her years. But it would have been a scandal. Very hard on Brigid, although I didn’t care what anyone would think.”
“Did you ever paint her again?”
“No. She died not long after our little bonfire. Contracted septicemia at her boarding school in Davos.” He took a step closer to the portrait as if to examine the mirror-cameo more closely. “She had been dead almost two years when I attempted this painting. I missed Brigid. I included her as a—I suppose your term would be guardian angel. I did feel her spirit around me at the time, her wonderful, free spirit. I was tortured. I suppose even angels can lose hope for those they try to protect.”
“Tortured? Why?”
“I said that she died of septicemia. The results of a classmate’s foolhardy try at aborting Brigid’s four-month-old fetus. And, yes, the child was mine. Does that disgust you?”
After a couple of blinks Echo said, “Nothing human disgusts me.”
“We made love after we ate our marshmallows, shedding little flakes of burnt canvas as we undressed each other. It was a warm summer night.” His eyes had closed, not peacefully. “Warm night, star bright. I remember how sticky our lips were from the marshmallows. And how beautifully composed Brigid seemed to me, kneeling. On that first night of the one brief idyll of our lives.”
“Did you know about the baby?”
“Brigid wrote to me. She sounded almost casual about her pregnancy. She said she would take care of it, I shouldn’t worry.” For an instant his eyes seemed to turn ashen from self-loathing. “Women have always given me the benefit of the doubt, it seems.”
“You’re not convincing either of us that you deserve to suffer. You were immature, that’s all. Pardon me, but shit happens. There’s still hope for all of us, on either side of heaven.”
While she was looking for a bottle of the Chateau Petrus ’82 that Ransome had suggested they have with their dinner, Echo heard Ciera talking to someone. She opened another door between the rock-walled wine storage pantry and the kitchen and saw Taja sitting at the counter with a mug of coffee in her hands. Echo smiled but Taja only stared before deliberately looking away.
“Oh, she comes and goes,” Ransome said of Taja after Ciera had served their bisque and returned to the kitchen.
“Why doesn’t she have dinner with us?” Echo said.
“It’s late. I assume she’s already eaten.”
“Is she staying here tonight?”
“She prefers being aboard the boat if we’re not in for a blow.”
Echo sampled her soup. “She chose me for you—didn’t she? But I don’t think she likes me at all.”
“It isn’t what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking. I get that way sometimes.”
“I’ll have her stay away from the house while you’re—”
“No, please! Then I really am at fault somehow.” Echo sat back in her chair, trailing a finger along the tablecloth crewelwork. “You’ve known her longer than all of the Ransome women. Did you ever paint Taja? Or did you toast marshmallows over those ashes too?”
“It would be like trying to paint a mask within a mask,” Ransome said regretfully. “I can’t paint such a depth of solitude. Sometimes . . . she’s like a dark ghost to me, sealed in a world of night I’m at a loss to imagine. Taja has always known that I can’t paint her.” He had bowed his head, as if to conceal a play of emotion in his eyes. “She understands.”
ELEVEN
The Knowles-Rembar Clinic, an upscale facility for the treatment of well-heeled patients with a variety of addictions or emotional traumas, was located in a Boston suburb not far from the campus of Wellesley College. Knowles-Rembar had its own campus of gracefully rolling lawns, brick-paved walks, great oaks and hollies and cedars and old rhododendrons that would be bountifully ablaze by late spring. In mid December they were crusted with ice and snow. At one-twenty in the afternoon the sun was barely there, a mild buzz of light in layered gray clouds that promised more snow.
The staff psychiatrist Peter had come to see was a height-disadvantaged man who greatly resembled Barney Rubble with thick glasses. His name was Mark Gosden. He liked to eat his lunch outdoors, weather permitting. Peter accommodated him. He drank vending machine coffee and shared one of the oatmeal cookies Gosden’s mother had baked for him. Peter didn’t ask if the psychiatrist still lived with her.
“This is a voluntary facility,” Gosden explained. “Valerie’s most recent stay was for five months. Although I felt it was contrary to her best interests, she left us three weeks ago.”