Looker

by Michael Kilian

  At a hasty conference at the Globe city desk, it was decided that A.C. would do a special column on the murder. Pasternak, the city editor, planned to run it on page one next to the lead story. A headline reading GUNMAN SLAYS BLACK MODEL had already been dummied across the top of the page.

  “Give me some ‘Killer stalks the world of high fashion’ stuff,” Pasternak said. “You know, models screaming in terror, society ladies. Were there any celebrities there? Broadway stars? Barbara Walters?”

  “Not that I know of,” A.C. said, uncomfortably.

  Pasternak stubbed out a cigarette and lit another. “All right,” he said. “But get in ‘the world of high fashion.’ You interviewed this girl a few weeks ago, didn’t you? Put in some stuff about that. Didn’t we have a picture? A nude shot from some movie? Why didn’t I remember that?” He shouted for a copy clerk.

  A.C. walked quickly away, feigning great purpose. He was just as glad they’d asked for a column. He was too confused and upset to attempt a straight news story. He hadn’t written one in years.

  Because so much of its editorial content consisted of columns, the Globe was joked about in the city as having more columnists than reporters, and it was nearly true. There’d been little ill feeling when A.C. had been added to the columnist list. It was assumed he would have eventually become one even if he hadn’t been married to Katherine Anne Shannon.

  Every columnist had his or her own cubicle. A row of them ran along the east wall of the newsroom and A.C. had one of the best, occupying a corner with a view of both the East River and the high-rises to the north. Its walls and table surfaces were covered with framed, autographed pictures of famous people—many of them society ladies and actresses. As he now realized, this hadn’t pleased his wife much, but he had thought the pictures harmless. After all, the sports columnists covered their walls with photos of athletes, and the film critic decorated his cubicle with autographed publicity stills of actors and actresses. One of the critic’s photos was a nude.

  On A.C.’s desk was a silver-framed portrait photograph of his wife, Kitty, standing on the lawn of their riverfront house in Westchester with their two children. When her brother, Bill, who was the Globe’s publisher, came into the cubicle nowadays, he always stared at the photograph, a silent commentary on A.C.’s increasingly painful domestic situation.

  A.C. moved the picture out of view as he began his piece, wanting to concentrate on Molly Wickham and what he could remember of her from the interview he had had. She had been frisky, almost flirtatious, smiling frequently and crossing and uncrossing her legs. He recalled that she had dressed provocatively, and had laced her comments with salacious and sometimes scatological phrases.

  “Molly Wickham was a happy girl,” A.C. wrote, pausing to stare at those six words on the green screen of his computer terminal. He supposed it was true. He resumed typing: “She had reason to be. She had almost overnight become one of the top models in New York, and had recently launched a movie career.”

  This was exaggeration, but it would please Pasternak and the readers of the Globe. She wouldn’t have objected.

  “But all that ended in one sudden, terrible moment at noon yesterday when she was gunned down on one of the most fashionable street corners of Manhattan.”

  He paused again and took a deep breath, then went on to describe the shooting in vivid detail. He followed with what Wickham had told him about having been a suburban cheerleader in New Jersey, and how she hoped someday to be a movie star. He recounted the plot of the film The Last Round, noting the irony of her playing a murder victim.

  It was a good place to end the column, and so he did. With the finality of a musician striking the last note of a composition, he pushed the SEND button on the computer keyboard, instantly transmitting his piece to the news desk and, eventually, the four hundred thousand New Yorkers who would read it in the morning. Then he sagged back in his swivel chair and briefly closed his eyes.

  He had thought of possibly including some reference to Camilla, describing her as a mystery woman. If she read it, he might hear from her again, and quickly.

  He had dismissed the idea. It was unprofessional. It would certainly displease her, and might get her into trouble—and she seemed to be in that already. Worse, it would please Pasternak.

  As though he had been hovering nearby to wait for A.C. to finish, A.C.’s brother-in-law, Bill Shannon walked in, neatly combed and beautifully tailored, looking very much the Princeton graduate he was. His and Kitty’s grandfather had been an Irish immigrant laborer who ultimately had acquired a fortune in real estate. Their father had improved upon it, becoming rich enough to buy the Globe, among other ego indulgences, when it had gone on the market cheap.

  Bill Shannon, a handsome man just past forty, now belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations, and to several of the city’s better clubs.

  “I hear you had an awful time today,” he said.

  “It wasn’t exactly the way I like to start my day.”

  Shannon looked at the photograph of A.C.’s wife and children, and picked it up.

  “You might want to call Kitty,” he said. “She’s probably worried about you.”

  “I doubt it,” A.C. said.

  Shannon put the picture back, not where A.C. had shoved it but in its proper place near the center of A.C.’s desk.

  “Thanks so much for coming in and writing a piece on this,” Shannon said. “It’s more than I’d be able to do in the circumstance.”

  “I’m still a loyal employee.”

  “Yes,” said Shannon, turning. “Well, thanks. It’s greatly appreciated.”

  After Shannon was gone, before A.C. could himself leave, Vanessa entered, smoking and looking tired.

  “So,” she said. “How went the tryst?”

  “Please, Vanessa.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be back here, though perhaps I was.”

  “She left. She was very upset. She even cried.”

  “Actual tears? How sweet.”

  “As you said, you don’t know very much about her.”

  “But you’ll fill me in, won’t you, sweetheart?” She stood up, flicking her ashes in A.C.’s wastebasket. “I do love a summer romance. I can hardly wait until her picture is up here on your wall of fame.”

  “Vanessa, I need a favor. I’d like you to find out her address and phone number for me.”

  “Shall I arrange for a motel room, too?”

  “Please. I just want to talk to her again.”

  “This is dumb, A.C. Very dumb.”

  A.C. lived not far away, on the top floor of an old, small, but very expensive ten-story cooperative in the East Sixties. The apartment was small as well, but suited him and Kitty well enough as a place to stay over for evenings in town. It also suited him as a man living alone.

  When he had first settled in the city after leaving college, this part of Manhattan had seemed a magical, princely land—a place of baronial towers, elegant town houses, canopies, doormen, and sophisticated people leading the most wonderfully glamorous lives.

  Now it was simply his neighborhood. He knew shopkeepers and grocers, newsstand vendors, and a number of people who lived on his street. The community life was really not all that much different from a neighborhood in Flatbush—except there were few doormen in Flatbush.

  The combination doorman—elevator operator who greeted A.C. was as old as the structure. A.C.’s penthouse apartment had just four rooms, but there was a rooftop terrace along most of its length, reached through wide French doors. Kitty had cluttered it with large potted plants, but A.C. often forgot to water them.

  He neglected them again, going instead to the living room’s small bar, where he poured himself a large straight scotch whiskey. He took his drink onto the terrace, and seated himself on one of the wrought iron chairs. It was dusty—his maid came only once a week—but he paid that no mind.

  The view was airy. His street was one of relatively low-rise buildings and he had a spac
ious glimpse of the river to the east and of the prominent midtown structures to the south, most notably the Chrysler Building, his favorite piece of architecture in the city. The apartment house directly across the street was much like his own, complete with a penthouse surrounded by all manner of shrubbery. The rest of the rooftops were quite ordinary, a jumble of skylights, air-conditioning equipment, vents, smokestacks, water tanks, and elevator housing set off only here and there by a garden box.

  There was no one by the penthouse opposite, but on an adjoining building, at a level slightly above A.C.’s, a man was standing. He had on a coat and tie, which seemed peculiar. A.C. had only seen workmen on that roof, though on weekends a woman who lived there sometimes came up to sunbathe. A.C. had seen her frequently enough to feel comfortable waving. Sometimes she waved back.

  The man had been staring at A.C.’s terrace. Noticing A.C., he looked away, toward the river, as though he had come up merely to inspect the skyline. Perhaps he was a new tenant, or someone’s guest.

  A.C. reminded himself to lock the terrace doors when he left. The rooftop of the building next door was just one story shorter than his own. He and Kitty had never been burgled, but no one had ever been shot outside the Plaza Hotel in his memory, either.

  His telephone was ringing. He took a sip of the whiskey and then went to answer it. The sun had passed well over to the west, and his living room was getting gloomy.

  It became cheerier. The voice on the phone was that of his wife.

  “Has anything happened to you?” she asked. “I saw you on the news, at that terrible murder. You were talking to a policeman.”

  She sounded unhappy and irritated, though he could not tell if he was the cause of her ill humor.

  “I’m fine. There was only one gunshot, the one that killed the girl. We weren’t hurt.”

  “You were with Vanessa Meyers, and some blond woman.”

  “We were all witnesses. The police made us stay.”

  “You were at the fashion show?”

  “Yes. With Vanessa.”

  There were a number of silver-framed photographs on the marble-topped table next to the phone. One was a studio portrait of Kitty, a striking woman with perfectly gray hair, dark eyebrows, and heavily lashed gray eyes. She had had gray hair even in her early twenties, when A.C. had first met her. She had been a young feature writer at the Globe, just out of Smith College. Her father, Patrick Shannon, had still been alive then, holding the posts of both editor and publisher. A.C. had been one of his star reporters, and he’d been very pleased by the marriage.

  “A.C.?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I—I want to see you again. I’d like you to come home.”

  He hesitated unhappily. “I want to very much. But it’ll be hard tonight. I have to go out again. With this shooting, my regular work got pushed aside. I’ve got to catch up.”

  He was lying to himself, and to her. It wouldn’t make much difference at all if he walked right out and caught the next train to Westchester. But he wasn’t ready. He’d dreamed about his wife and children every night since their fight, but they weren’t what he needed at this perplexing moment, not yet.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  “Yes, we do. But I’m not in great shape to do that right now. This murder really threw me. I was just sitting here trying to get my thoughts straight. Trying to calm down, actually.”

  She was silent, then spoke, more warmly than before. “Come up this weekend, then. Friday night.”

  “All right. If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I can take Davey sailing. Tell him.”

  “I will. Please don’t make a late night of it tonight. Get some sleep. Take a sedative. And I mean a sedative, not Johnnie Walker Red.”

  “I will. Don’t worry.”

  “I do worry.”

  “We’ll talk. I love you, Kitty.”

  More silence. “Goodbye, A.C. Take care of yourself.”

  She spoke with a distinctive Upper Westchester accent. One would never have known that her grandfather had once slapped mortar against brick. A.C.’s grandfather had talked the way Kitty now did. A.C.’s ancestors had been landowners in the Mohawk Valley two centuries before hers had arrived in America.

  He looked at his crystal glass, and took another sip of whiskey. “Goodbye, Kitty.”

  When he returned to the terrace, the man in the tie and jacket was gone from the rooftop across the street.

  Camilla Santee’s small, cramped apartment was one of several in what had once been a single-family town house on a side street just off Fifth Avenue near the park and the Metropolitan Museum. It was very expensive, but it wasn’t much.

  She fumbled with her keys as she undid the three locks to her door. She had just had two of them installed, and still had trouble finding the right keys.

  The apartment was on the first floor, and there wasn’t much light from the window. She went to her favorite armchair, an antique she had bought years before at Christie’s, and lowered herself wearily into it, leaning her head back. Before her lay the task of removing her model’s makeup. Because she retouched it so often going from booking to booking, it was usually quite thick at the end of a day’s work. Now it was a ruin, smudged and run with tears and cracked around the eyes from her anguish. The face that would look back at her from the mirror would be not a little hideous.

  She would take a long shower. She wanted only to go to bed. There were two invitations on her entrance-hall table—one to a gallery reception and another to a dinner party. She would decline them. She was in no mood for anyone’s company. She had been unspeakably rude to a number of people that afternoon, including the columnist from the Globe, an apparently rather nice man who had only been trying to help. An attractive man, the sort of man she had hoped she might meet and marry when, as a young girl fresh from the South, she had first moved to New York.

  A married man. She was married herself. She had come back here in a desperate effort to protect her marriage. But now everything was coming apart. She was not a cowardly woman. Cowardice had not been tolerated in her family. But she had never been more frightened in her life.

  Her phone began to ring, a harsh, sudden, and insistent sound. Camilla covered her ears and let it continue. She had already called her modeling agency about the next day’s bookings. There was no one else she wanted to talk to; there were some she wanted very much never to talk to again.

  The telephone rang three times, and then the answering machine clicked on. Because she kept the sound off, she couldn’t hear the caller. Whoever it was left only a short message. There was another click when it went off. Then there was silence and gathering darkness.

  She would try music. Rising stiffly and moving to her stereo, she searched among her tapes, locating the one she wanted only after a great deal of trouble. It was of a strange, eerie Vangelis piece, “L’Apocalypse des Animaux.” There was a slow, sweetly somber passage in it that always reminded her of two ghostly people dancing slowly at twilight. A man she had once loved—a man, as she thought upon it, much like A.C. James—had given her the tape. He had made it for her from a recording, saying he found it of help when he was troubled. She put it on, and poured herself a glass of cold chablis from her refrigerator.

  That man was long gone now, like so many she had let slip from her life.

  An old man was walking slowly by just below on the street. There were always people there, at any hour. Never crowds, but always someone. He glanced at her window, or maybe another in her building, but kept on. A young girl, wearing high heels and dancer’s leggings, came by from the opposite direction. A Rolls-Royce followed, and then two taxicabs. She stood at the window, just beside the curtain, watching. Camilla hated being in this small apartment. She now hated being back in New York, though once she had thought living in this city the most wonderful thing that could possibly happen to anyone.

  Again the phone began to ring, the sound more pa
inful. Once more she waited it out, then went into her bedroom, wincing as she turned on the bright lights of her makeup table. The face in the mirror was as dreadful as she had expected, but it seemed almost not to be hers. It occurred to her that she had long ago lost her face, sold it on the market. Her face belonged to whoever paid for it. Her face was whatever the buyer wanted it to be.

  After removing the last of her makeup, she peered closely once into her reddened, bleary eyes, then snapped off the lights. Kicking off her shoes, she slipped out of her blouse and skirt and underwear and walked naked into her bath, closing the door and the world behind her. She turned on the shower tap as strong and hot as she could tolerate, then stepped inside, letting the steamy water embrace her back and shoulders, tilting back her head so that the cascade ran freely over it. She remained like that until her scalp seemed to go numb, then stepped forward from the stream to work scented shampoo into her long golden hair. Rinsing it out finally, she began to lather her body with the soap she always used, an expensive French brand that was half cold cream.

  The feel of it was highly sensual. It had been months since she had slept with a man. She wouldn’t care now if she never did again. Her desire was as dead as Molly Wickham’s shattered body.

  She looked down at her small but perfect breasts, holding them gently. So much beauty, such priceless, expensive beauty, given to her for no purpose.

  What was the purpose of beauty? Nature had decreed only one. To assure new life. Pour la chasse. As her mother had continually put it, beauty is there to attract the strongest and the best. To assure the ascension of the superior. Yet all the ugly things of the world reproduced, in great, vile numbers. And here she was without issue. She was over thirty now. In a recent photograph, one used in a jewelry advertisement in W magazine, she had looked strikingly harsh. It had frightened her so much that she had thrown the magazine away.

  Dully in the thudding rush of water, through the thickness of the old-fashioned oaken door, she heard the telephone sound yet once more, a malevolent summons.