by Ed McBain
But I—
“There’s nothing in the refrigerator either,” she heard her mother say. “Just a carton of scummy old milk.”
The roller-coaster plummeted into a pit of darkness. Valerie turned. Her mother was leaning in the kitchen doorway. The familiar sneer. Ida had compromised the ardor of numerous men (including Valerie’s daddy), methodically breaking them on the wheel of her scorn. Now her once-lush body sagged; her potent beauty had turned, glistering like the scales of a dead fish.
“Hopeless. You’re just hopeless, Valerie.”
Valerie swallowed hurt feelings, knowing it was pointless to try to defend herself. She closed her eyes. The thunder of the roller-coaster had reached her heart. When she looked up again her mother was still hanging around with her wicked lip and punishing sarcasm. Giving it to little Val for possessing the beauty Ida had lost forever. Valerie could go deaf when she absolutely needed to. Now should she take a peek into the refrigerator? But she knew her mother had been right. Good intentions aside, Val accepted that she’d drifted off somewhere when she was supposed to be preparing a feast.
Okay, embarrassing. Skip all that.
Valerie returned to the dining nook where the table was set, the wine decanted, candles lit. Beautiful. At least she’d done that right. She was thirsty. She thought it would be okay if she had a glass of wine before John arrived.
No, wait—could he really be coming to see her after all this time? She glanced fearfully at her veiled reflection in the dark of the window behind the table. Then she picked up the carafe in both hands and managed to pour a glass nearly full without spilling a drop. As she drank the roller-coaster stopped its jolting spree, swooping from brains to heart and back again.
Her mother said, “You can’t be in any more pageants if you’re going to wet yourself onstage. We’re all fed up, just fed up and disgusted with you, Val.”
Valerie looked guiltily at the carpet between her feet where she was dripping urine. The roller-coaster gave a start-up lurch, pitching her sideways. And she wasn’t securely locked in this time. She felt panic.
Her mother said, “For once have the guts to take what’s coming to you.”
Valerie said, “You’re an evil bitch and I’ve always hated you.”
Her mother said, “Fuck that. You hate yourself.”
No use arguing with her when Ida was in high dander and fine acidic fettle. When she was death by a thousand tiny cuts.
Valerie felt the slow, heavy, ratcheting-up of the coaster toward the pinnacle that no longer seemed unobtainable to her. Her throat had swelled nearly closed from unshed tears.
She set her glass down and filled it again. Walked a little unsteadily with the motion of the roller-coaster inside her providing impetus through the furnished apartment that was bizarrely decorated with old putrid flowers she picked up for nickels and dimes at the wholesale market. She unlocked the door and walked out, leaving the door standing open.
When the elevator came she wasn’t at all surprised to see John Ransome inside.
“Where’re you going?” he asked her. “To the top this time?”
“Of course.”
He pushed the button for the twentieth floor. Valerie sipped her wine and stared at him. He looked the same. The smile that went down like cream and had you purring in no time. But that was then.
“You did love me, didn’t you?” she asked timidly, barely hearing herself for the racket the roller-coaster was making, all the screaming souls aboard.
“Don’t make me deal with that now,” he said, a hint of vexation souring his smile.
Valerie pushed the veil she’d been holding away from her face to the crown of her head, where it became tangled in her hair.
“You were always an insensitive selfish son of a bitch.”
“Good for you, Valerie,” her mother said. Coming from Ida it was like a benediction.
John Ransome acknowledged her human failings and with a ghostly nod forgave her.
“I believe this is your floor.”
Valerie got off the elevator, kicked her shoes from her feet (no good for walking on walls) and proceeded to the steel door that led to the roof of her building. There she quailed.
“Isn’t anyone coming with me?” she said.
When she turned around she saw that the elevator was empty, the doors silently closing.
Oh, well, Valerie thought. Skip it.
Peter arrived at four-fifteen West Churchill thirty seconds behind the fire department—a pumper truck and a paramedic bus—which had passed him on the way. Two police cars were just pulling up from different directions. Two couples with dogs on leashes were looking up at the roof of the high-rise building. The doorman apparently had just finished throwing up in shrubbery.
The night was windless. Snow fell straight down, thick as a theatre scrim. The dogs were agitated in the presence of death. The body lay on the walk about twenty feet outside the canopy at the building’s entrance. Red dress contrasting with an icy, broken-off wing of an arbor vitae. Peter knew who it was, had to be, before he got out of the car.
He checked his watch automatically. Eight minutes to nine o’clock. His stomach churned from shock and rage as he walked across the street and stepped over a low snowbank, shield in hand.
One of the cops was taking a tarp and body bag out of the trunk of his unit. The other one was talking to the severely shaken doorman.
“She just missed me.” He looked at the front of his coat as if afraid of finding traces of spattered gore. “Hit that tree first and bounced.” He looked around, face white as snails. “Aw Jesus.”
“Any idea who she is?”
“Well, the veil. She always wore veils, you know, she was in an accident, went head-first through the windshield. Valerie Angelus. Used to be a model. Big-time, I mean.”
Peter kneeled beside Valerie’s body, lying all wrong in its heaped brokenness. Twenty-one stories including the roof, a minimum of two hundred twenty feet. Her blood black on the recently cleared walk, absorbing snowflakes. The cop put his light on Valerie’s head for a few seconds; fortunately not much of her face was showing. Peter told him to turn the flashlight off. He crossed himself and stood.
“Want I should check the roof?” the uniform asked him. “Before CSI gets here?”
Peter nodded. He was a couple of states outside of his jurisdiction and still on autopilot, trying to deal with another dead end of a long-running tragedy.
The paramedics had come over. Peter didn’t want to explain his presence or interest in Valerie to the detectives who would be showing up along with CSI. Time to go.
When Peter turned away he saw a familiar face through the fall of snow. She was about a hundred feet away. She had stepped out of a Cadillac Escalade on the driver’s side that was idling at an intersection. He knew her, but he couldn’t place her.
She was tall, a black woman, well-dressed. Even at the distance an expression of horror was vivid on her face. He wondered how long she’d been there. He stared at her, but nothing clicked right away. Nevertheless he began walking briskly toward the woman.
His interest startled her. She slipped back into the Escalade.
Glimpsing her from a different angle, he remembered. She had been John Ransome’s model before Echo. And as far as he could tell, although the snow obscured his vision, there was nothing wrong with her face.
Then she had to be Silkie, Valerie’s friend. Who, Valerie had claimed, was afraid—very afraid—of John Ransome.
He began running toward the Escalade, shield in hand. But Silkie, after staring at him for a couple of moments through the windshield, looked back and threw the SUV into reverse. Hell-bent to get out of there. As if the shock of Valerie’s death had been replaced by fear of being detained by cops and questioned.
Of all the Ransome women, she just might be the one who could help him nail John Ransome’s ass. He ran. She couldn’t drive backwards forever, even though she was pulling away from him.
; At the next intersection she swerved around a car that had jammed on its brakes and slid to the curb. Obviously the Escalade was in four-wheel drive; no handling problems. She straightened out the SUV and gunned it. But Peter got a break as the headlights of the car she had nearly run up on the sidewalk shone on the license plate. Long enough for him to pick up most of the plate number. He stopped running and watched the SUV disappear down a divided street. He took out his ballpoint pen and jotted down the number of the Escalade. Missing a digit, probably, but that wouldn’t be a problem.
He had Silkie. Unless, of course, the SUV was stolen.
The wind was high. Echo dreamed uneasily. She was naked in the cottage in Bedford. Going from room to room, desperate to talk to Peter. He wasn’t there. None of the phones she tried were working. Forget about e-mail; her laptop was still down.
John Ransome was calling her. Angry that she’d left him before she finished posing. But she didn’t want to be with him. His studio was filled with ugly birds. She’d never liked birds since a pigeon pecked her once while she was sitting on a bench at the Central Park Zoo. These were all black, like the Woman in Black. They screeched at her from their perches in the cage John had put her in. He painted her from outside the cage, using a long brush with a sable tip that stroked over her body like waves. She wasn’t afraid of these waves, but she felt guilty because she liked it so much, trembling at the onset of that great rogue wave that was rolling erotically through her body. She tried to twist and turn away from the insidious strokes of his brush.
“No! What are you trying to do to us? You’re not going anywhere!”
Echo sat straight up in bed, breathing hard at the crest of her sex dream. Then she sagged to one side, weak from vertigo. All but helpless. Her mouth and throat were dry. She lay quietly for a minute or so until her heartbeat subsided and strength crept back into her hands. Her reading lamp was on. She’d fallen asleep while reading Villette.
The wind outside moaned and that shutter was loose again. When she moved her body beneath the covers she could tell her sap had been running at the climax of her dream. She sighed and yawned, still spikey with nerves, turned to reach for a bottle of water on the night table and discovered John Ransome standing in the doorway of her bedroom.
He was unsteady on his feet, head nodding a little, eyes glass. Dead drunk, she thought, with a jolt of fear.
“John—”
His lips moved but he didn’t make a sound.
“You can’t be here,” she said. “Please go away.”
He leaned against the jamb momentarily, then walked as if he were wearing dungeon irons toward the bed.
“No, John,” she said. Prepared to fight him off.
He gestured as if waving away her objection. “Couldn’t stop her,” he mumbled. “Hit me. Gone. This is—”
Three feet from Echo he lost what little control he had of his body, pitched forward onto the bed, held onto the comforter for a few moments, eyes rolling up meekly in his head; then he slowly crumpled to the floor.
Echo jumped off the bed to kneel beside him. She saw the swelling lump as large as her fist through the hair on the left side of his head. There was a little blood—in his hair, sprinkled on his shirt collar. Not a gusher. She didn’t mind the sight of blood but she knew she might have lost it if he was critically injured. Didn’t look so bad on the outside but the fragile brain had taken a beating. That was her biggest worry. There was no doctor on the island. Three men and a woman were certified as EMTs, but Echo didn’t know who they were or where they lived.
She was able to lift him up onto the bed. Deja vu all again, without the threat of hypothermia this time. He wasn’t unconscious. She rolled him onto his stomach and turned his head aside so he would be less likely to aspirate his own vomit if he became nauseous. Ciera, she knew, sometimes got the vapors over a hot stove and kept ammonium carbonate on hand. Echo fled downstairs to the kitchen, found the smelling salts, twisted ice in a towel and ran back to her room.
She heard him snoring gently. It had to be a good sign. She carefully packed the swelling in ice.
What a crack on the head. Let him sleep or keep him awake? She wiped at tears that wouldn’t stop. Go down the road and knock on doors until she found an EMT? But she was afraid to go out into freezing wind and dark, afraid of Taja.
Taja, she thought, as the shutter slammed and her backbone iced up to the roots of her hair. Couldn’t stop her, John had said. Gone. But why had she done this to him, what were they fighting about?
Echo slid the hammer from under the bed. She went to the door. There was no lock. She put a straight-back chair against it, jammed under the doorknob, then climbed back onto her bed beside John Ransome.
She counted his pulse, wrote it down, noted the time. Every fifteen minutes. Keep doing it, all night. While watching over him. Until he woke up, or—but she refused to think about the alternative.
At dawn he stirred and opened his eyes. Looked at her without comprehension.
“Brigid?”
“I’m Ec—Mary Catherine, John.”
“Oh.” His eyes cleared a little. “Happened to me?”
“I think Taja hit you with something. No, don’t touch that lump.” She had him by the wrist.
“Wha? Never did that before.” An expression close to terror crossed his face. “Where she?”
“I don’t know, John.”
“Bathroom.”
“You’re going to throw up?”
“No. Don’t think so. Pee.”
She helped him to her bathroom and waited outside in case he lost consciousness again and fell. She heard him splash water in his face, moaning softly. When he came out again he was steadier on his feet. He glanced at her.
“Did I call you Brigid?”
“Yes.”
“Would’ve been like you, if she’d lived.”
“Lie down again, John.”
“Have to—”
“Do what?”
He shook his head, and regretted it. She guided him to her bed and he stretched out on his back, eyes closing.
“Stay with me?”
“I will, John.” She touched her lips to his dry lips. Not exactly a kiss. And lay down beside him, staring at the first flush of sun through the window with the broken shutter. She felt anxious, a little demoralized, but immensely grateful that he seemed to be okay.
As for Taja, when he was ready they were going to have a serious talk. Because she understood now just how deeply afraid John Ransome was of the Woman in Black.
And his fear had become hers.
THIRTEEN
The SUV Silkie had been driving belonged to a thirty-two-year-old architect named Milgren who lived a few blocks from MIT in Cambridge. Peter called Milgren’s firm and was told he was attending a friend’s wedding in the Bahamas and would be away for a few days. Was there a Mrs. Milgren? No.
Eight inches of fresh snow had fallen overnight; the street in front of the building where Milgren lived was being plowed. Peter had a late breakfast, then returned. The address was a recently renovated older building with a gated drive on one side and tenant parking behind it. He left his rental car in the street behind a painter’s van. The day was sharply blue, with a lot of ice-sparkle in the leafless trees. The snow had moved west.
The gate of the parking drive was opening for a Volvo wagon. He went in that way and around to the parking lot, found the Cadillac Escalade in its assigned space. Apartment 4-C.
Four apartments on the fourth floor, two at each end of a wide well-lit marble-floored hallway. There was a skylight above the central foyer: elevator on one side, staircase on the other.
The painter or painters had been working on the floor, but the scaffold that had been erected to make it easier to get at the fifteen-foot-high tray ceiling was unoccupied. On the scaffold a five-gallon can of paint was overturned. A pool of it like melted pistachio ice cream was spreading along the marble floor. The can still dripped.
Peter looked
from the spilled paint to the door of 4-C, which stood open a couple of feet. There was a TV on inside, loudly showing a rerun of Hollywood Squares.
He walked to the door and looked in. An egg-crate set filled with decommissioned celebrities was on the LCD television screen at one end of a long living room. Peter edged the door half open. A man wearing a painter’s cap occupied a recliner twenty feet from the TV. All Peter could see of him was the cap, and one hand gripping an arm of the chair as if he were about to be catapulted into space.
Peter rapped softly and spoke to him but the man didn’t look around. There was a lull in the hilarity on TV as they went to commercials. Peter could hear the man breathing. Shallow, distressed breaths. Peter walked in and across the short hall, to the living room. Plantation-style shutters were closed. Only a couple of low-wattage bulbs glowed in widely separated wall sconces. All of the apartment was quite dark in contrast to the brilliant day outside.
“I’m looking for Silkie,” he said to the man. “She’s staying here, isn’t she?”
No response. Peter paused a few feet to the left of the man in the leather recliner. His feet were up. His paint-stained coveralls had the look of impressionistic masterpieces. By TV light his jowly face looked sweaty. His chest rose and fell as he tried to drag more air into his lungs.
“You okay?”
The man rolled his eyes at Peter. The fingers of his left hand had left raw scratch marks all over the red leather armrest. His other hand was nearly buried in the pulpy mass above his belt. Peter smelled the blood.
“She—made me do it—talk to the lady—get her to—unlock the door. Help me. Can’t move. Guts are—falling out. My daughter’s coming home—for the holidays. Now I won’t be here.”
Peter’s gun was in his hand before the man had said ten words. “Where are they?”
The painter had run out of time. He sagged a little as his life ebbed away. His eyes remained open. There was a burst of laughter from the TV.
“Jesus and Mary,” Peter whispered, then raised his voice to a shout. “Silkie, you okay? It’s the police!”