Martin nearly collapsed on top of her. In a haze, he felt her cool fingers removing his soiled underpants and then she was removing her clothing and he was being used, but he barely felt it because in his mind there was nothing but his penis and the lips and the lipstick.
He asked her twice more to retouch her lips, still not knowing her name, and she did while he watched. At one point she held the canister out to him and he helped, drawing carefully around her lips as if worried that someone would take his coloring book away if he went outside the lines. She massaged him with lips and fingers until he was hard again, then she drank from him as if he were a faucet, until he sank down and licked his semen from her lips and the inside of her mouth, the thick and aromatic lipstick smearing both their lips. The heady smell of cosmetics twirled in his nostrils, and he reveled in its cloying sweetness.
When they went again, it seemed to Martin that she was suspending him from her lips, his penis the only connection that sustained him and kept him from falling. The slick coloring changed in his eyes like a kaleidoscope as he whirled through the air dangling from her mouth, until she was licking his semen from the corners and sides of her lips again.
Now he felt some of the memories of daddy’s game slip away, while others still ate at the edges of his consciousness. He licked at her lips and she laughed, wiping his face, and for a while he was just Martin, not a fake writer in a restaurant, or someone who had played with his daddy and liked it. Just Martin, not Martin the murderer.
Later, when she slept and he could have easily killed her with one well-placed hand, he found himself looking at her with a strange fondness.
He dressed, left what he thought was an appropriate sum, and walked into the night, where the drizzle had turned to a downpour that rustled through the trees. His diner was open, and he ordered coffee from a weary graveyard shift waitress he had never seen.
She had nice lips, he thought as she brought him his mug, but she wasn’t playing them up as well as she could have.
Martin smiled. Today. Today was the day he would tighten the pressure on Lupo. He had just the way, and he was eager to get on with it.
He gazed across the street from his usual booth. Lupo’s lights were still off.
Sleep well, my friend. He drank some coffee. Sleep while you can.
A sense of power surged through him.
He reached into his pocket and felt the two metal canisters clink together. His fingers gently traced their outlines and he shivered with joy.
One was the woman’s red lipstick, a memento for his collection. The other was a silver-jacketed .44 Magnum cartridge.
Chapter Thirteen
Lupo
Lupo shuffled the report into a pile of indeterminate file folders again and rubbed his eyes.
“I’ll look at it later,” he said. “I know what he did to her. I saw her, remember?”
“Look now, Nick.” Ben used his right hand to sweep off some space on his desk. “You were supposed to look at it yesterday.”
Lupo made no move toward the folder.
“Dammit, you’re just as stubborn as your old man. Okay, I’ll tell you the part you should know about. She’d had sex before he, uh, committed the crime.”
“No shit.” Lupo couldn’t stop himself from being flip. “The pictures told us that. He got his jollies, then he killed her.”
“You should read the damn report. She also had sex before the guy in the pictures. Twice, both vaginal and anal. Lab says the semen tests out differently for both of those, so there were two different guys within half a day before time of death.”
“One of those might have followed her into the bathroom after she left the guy in the photo booth, right?”
“You’d think it’s possible. Our male model’s semen tests out differently from the other two. Based on scrapings from the inside of her cheeks and palate, he only had oral sex with her.”
Lupo ran a clawlike hand through his hair. “So there’s less chance our perp’s the first or second guy.”
“Right, but one of them coulda hung around waiting…On the other hand, why would Number One or Number Two leave behind pictures of her with a stranger, our Number Three? They weren’t just missed, they were left intentionally.”
“Got me. Same goes for Number Three. If this was the guy, the same guy in the pictures, why leave them like that? Why leave something that might be traceable?”
“Good point,” Ben conceded. “But there they were. Maybe they appealed to his sense of humor.”
Lupo winced.
“Sorry, Nick,” Ben said. “Keep forgettin’ you knew her, is all.”
“I know. It wasn’t like we—I mean…we really were just friends. But she was better than the streets, man. She was better than, than that.” He gestured at the report folder.
Ben nodded. “Either way, I say we look for two guys now. I’d eliminate the guy in the pictures just because they’re too obvious.”
“Three,” Lupo said. “Don’t eliminate him at all. He’s our best bet. Ben, an innocent guy would’ve taken the pictures. As a souvenir. A trophy. Something to flash the guys on poker night. Look at what I did the last time I went to the mall!”
Ben nodded. “Point again. But he wouldn’t have been so innocent, our innocent guy.”
“No.”
Lupo leafed aimlessly through another folder, without seeing any of its contents. He realized he wasn’t really handling Corinne’s death very well, but he couldn’t help feeling useless and way too late to do anything.
Anything except catch the son of a bitch responsible.
“There’s one more thing I can’t make any sense of,” Ben said. His voice was clearly hesitant, the volume down to a mumble. “May be nothing at all, but it’s a little weird.”
Lupo cocked his head. He felt the blood pumping in his veins as clearly as he could hear the squad room clatter. Something about Corinne and him? Something about him, or perhaps his unique condition? Ben was usually less circumspect than this, and Lupo couldn’t help wonder why the hesitation—what could be so strange that it would make Ben uncomfortable?
“Okay, it’s a lot weird. According to the report, there were traces of certain chemicals, animal oils and dyes in her, you know, in her genitals.”
“Dyes? What the fuck?”
“The lab says they’re all ingredients of lipstick. There were traces of lipstick in her mouth and in her genitals. Her anus, too.” Ben shook his head and looked down. “Sorry, Nicky, had to tell you.”
“Another woman? We’re looking for a woman?”
“Don’t forget the semen traces.”
Lupo pondered a moment. “One of three men…and a woman? How likely is that? And in a photo booth? Come on, Ben, get real.”
“The booth pictures only show oral sex, and there ain’t enough room for anything else there, I don’t think. That might mean they started their little party elsewhere. I got uniforms canvassing all the nearest hotels, swanky and fleabag both. You never know, might get lucky.”
Lupo stared out the window. The day had turned gray after a hint of sunlight, taking his mood with it. He had slept little, felt watched all night, and jumped at every sound his old flat conjured up for his entertainment. So when he had come into the squad room and seen Ben’s rested face, he had started barking at his partner and anyone else unfortunate enough to get within range.
“Did you check out the rest of the girlfriend’s statement?” Ben said from right behind him.
Lupo shook his head. He hadn’t even heard the big guy approach. This was ridiculous—Corinne barely gone and he was losing his perspective already.
Had she meant this much to him? And if she had, why the hell hadn’t he realized it long ago and gotten her off the street?
Lupo shook his head again. “No,” he sighed. “I missed a chunk of it.”
“Upshot is, she wasn’t just doing her usual gig with the service.”
“Oh, yeah?” Lupo perked up. Was Ben leading him s
omewhere with subtlety? It wasn’t Ben’s style, feeding him bits and pieces and stringing him along. What was wrong now? Was Ben walking on proverbial eggshells around him? Was anyone else? Suddenly Lupo felt very uncomfortable in the big room, and wished he could duck out. Actually, he wished he could just climb into his car and drive due north—only there could he find total peace, and it beckoned him with a siren song no one else could hear.
He shook his head. He wanted to shake the thought away. “So, what else was she into?” He would just have to forget she was his friend—concentrate on her as a victim and do his job to locate the murderer. Still, a big part of him just wanted to block all the details before they reached him.
“According to the friend, Corinne was doing some pro-amateur porn out of an office studio south of downtown. I might have the address.”
“Might have it?”
Ben grimaced. “It was on a list we saw just a couple weeks ago, a list of new ventures. Remember it?”
“Nah. But I’ll take your word for it. What the hell’s pro-amateur porn?
“Well, the real amateur stuff’s just your basic ma and pa—they get bored, buy a camcorder, suddenly they’re hotshot porn-mongers.”
Lupo snorted. “Who’d buy that stuff?”
Ben pointed a stubby finger at Lupo’s face. “You’d be surprised.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot you’re ma and pa’s age. And you got a camcorder.” He winked.
“Leave my private life, such as it is, outta this. So anyway, real amateur stuff is just that. Then there’s the pro-amateur stuff. Real tricky deal. Pro-am’s a small-budget pro production shot to look like amateur and marketed that way for people who want ma and pa in theory, but for real they’d rather look at someone beautiful.”
Lupo whistled. “How the hell did you get so wise to this?”
“Went to a vice seminar last month. Hey, a seminar on vices, that was just what I needed.”
“Like a second head.” Lupo smoothed some piles of paperwork before him, still avoiding the lab report. “So, Corinne was moonlighting, huh?” He was half whispering, and only half aware of it.
“She ever mention it, Nick?”
“Nope. Pretty sure. I’d remember an explanation like you just gave me.” Damn it, why hadn’t he noticed?
“Yeah. Anyway, the girlfriend laid a studio address on me and it’s the same place. After I get a cup of that crap they call coffee around here, we’re gonna go check it out.” He headed for the coffeepot and swished the liquid around with a frown before pouring.
Lupo felt certain the guy in the photographs was the one they wanted, as certain as he’d ever been of anything. A sort of alternate sense had told him this right from the beginning. It was too cool, too calm and calculated, the way the guy had just stood in the photo booth a few feet away from a crowd and the way he took measure of his victim. Oh, no, it was the guy in the photographs. Lupo would have staked his miserable life on it. Where the other possible suspects—and a woman—fit into this, he wasn’t sure yet. But he had learned to heed that alternate sense when it tingled, and now it told him that the first two guys were like decoys. Maybe she’d been on a movie set until early that morning?
“Ready?” Ben held a travel mug full of watery brown liquid.
Lupo grabbed his coat and followed Ben out the door. He would read the lab report as soon as they returned. He’d be ready then.
In the many years since becoming accustomed to what he thought of as his condition, Lupo had spent time researching what all the books had to say. None of the sources, serious or otherwise, ever mentioned his alternate sense, the innate knowledge that struck at him from out of nowhere, often with physical force, but that did not make it any less real. In fact, finding aspects that hadn’t been dealt with in some low-budget horror flick was a positive, because then he could attempt to convince himself that he was no monster.
Regardless of Caroline Stewart, and what he had done to her when she had tried to help him.
How could he not be a monster, when the one he had loved deeply and completely—long before Corinne—had suffered terrible pain at his hands and died, a sacrifice to the beast that could never be renounced? The thought stung every hour of every day.
Lupo let Ben lead him out onto the dim sidewalk, on their way to visit ma and pa and their camcorder.
The address led them to a converted warehouse in the trendy Third Ward, an area that had seen much urban renewal in the last decade.
Restaurants and clubs, high-ticket shops, chic vintage boutiques, and numerous residential buildings offering New York-style lofts at inflated but still Midwestern prices had been carved out of an area that had seen the city’s long and colorful labor movement struggles. Largely abandoned for several decades, the area had lost its railway lines and, with those, its relevance in today’s suburban-oriented society That is, until someone had noticed that under the sloppy tile and drywall lay the beautiful Cream City brick, the tan bricks that characterized a whole generation of Milwaukee architecture. Newer generations had simply and condescendingly covered the bricks with the cheap and inelegant, perhaps hoping to erase the blue-collar past.
Then renewal had struck full force, and the Third Ward was reborn as a high-priced southern extension of the lower East Side—it was adjacent to the old Port of Milwaukee, and just minutes from the downtown bustle.
This building near the corner of Buffalo and Milwaukee Streets was one of a dozen in which relatively recent refurbishing had not yet been completed. Indeed, several contractors’ vans lined the sidewalk along one side, and painting activity seemed to be taking place in one of the street-level shops.
A phone call had netted Ben further information he had been reluctant to share with his partner. Now he led them to an anonymous side entrance, the inside of which was a tiny lobby that smelled of fresh paint and wood varnish.
“This is one of the shoots going on right now,” Ben explained in a whisper. “I dropped your friend’s name and my source confirmed this operation—we’ll see if it’s any good.”
They flashed their badges at the bored muscleman whose seated bulk guarded the inside door. He waved them in and returned to his weightlifter’s magazine. They trod the narrow staircase up to a dingy second floor that had not yet seen much refurbishing, went through an unpainted door, and then through a doorway blocked by a black curtain.
“You studied up on this stuff, huh?”
“Hey, it was a seminar,” Ben said. “Got to see movies.”
“You made contacts.”
“And learned a lot.”
“Let’s do it—I want to learn too.”
When they walked into the shoot, a slick-haired cameraman stood in one corner fooling with his camera while a blonde with dark roots crouched on a bed in front of a naked man, her head bobbing quickly.
Ben nudged Lupo. “It’s never too late to learn.”
A sound guy was wiring a mike under the bed—to capture spring action, Lupo guessed—and another blonde was diddling herself on the bed, a bored expression on her face. Umbrellas hovered over her, giving off heat and white light.
The outside window was blocked off, and a short man stood in front of it studying a thin dog-eared script. His hair was tied in a straggly ponytail he seemed to caress constantly with one hand.
“Anybody know where Tara Lace went?” he shouted in a nasal voice.
No one answered.
As Lupo and Ben approached the bed, the actor moaned and rapidly patted the fake blonde’s head with both hands.
“Hey, cool it,” the ponytail man said, running up and pulling the fluffer off the actor, causing her glittery-pink lips to smack as he came loose.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, letting a line of drool slip down her chin. Her eyes were glazed and bloodshot, and her lids drooped.
“Ashlyn, darling,” he said, patting her cheek, “the point is to get him ready for the money shot, not to eat it yourself. Remember?”
“Yeah, Vic. I just
got carried away. When can I screw on camera, huh? You said soon.”
“I did, babe, and soon it’ll be. Now go fix your lipstick and stay ready. Okay?”
“‘Kay, Vic.” She shambled off in search of a mirror.
Vic looked down at his leading stud, whose penis still stood at attention. “Where’s Tara? Where the fuck is she?”
“How the hell should I know?” the actor whined. “But if she don’t show soon, well, I’m gonna—”
“Just put the squeeze on it until we find her, got it?”
Muscles rippled as the stud reached for himself and held on.
“Sal, I’m gonna lose my shirt on this if we fuck up,” Vic said.
Sal found that funny, or the coke made it seem funny, and he giggled like a kid. He held on to his crotch for dear life.
Vic became aware of his visitors just then.
“Yes? Do you have a pass? This is a closed set.”
“I bet it is,” said Lupo.
“Will this do?” Ben showed his badge. “Milwaukee Police, homicide squad. We’re Detectives Lupo and Sabatini. We got a few questions. Take a minute.”
Vic pursed his lips. “Sure, what the fuck.” To Sal, he said, “Would you please find your costar; get her problem taken care of, and get her back here in five?”
“Sure, Vic.” Sal strutted off, still holding himself, totally unself-conscious. The muscles in his buttocks rippled with each step.
“I remember you,” Vic was already saying to Ben. “That informational program for the cops—you set it up.”
“Yeah. It was helpful and informative, Vic. I had a hard-on for a week.”
Vic smiled. “Then my work was done. What now? You in need of another hard-on?”
Ben’s eyes narrowed and his frown was ugly. Vic seemed to get the message, closing his mouth with an audible snap.
“See, Vic, what I got is a hard-on for somebody who just offed a local girl. You mighta read about it, if you can read.”
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