Looker

by Michael Kilian

  As the answering machine again did its duty, she wondered if the caller might be someone from the police. She hated the thought of that, but the police could mean no harm. Not to her. Not yet.

  Camilla quickly turned off the shower. Toweling off, she turned her thoughts to her makeup table. Bringing herself back to her full beauty once more was at least a task that would occupy her mind. It was a complicated procedure, growing all the more complicated with each passing year.

  She was still naked, though dried and powdered and combed, when the persistent caller tried again. Shaking her head in exasperation, she strode angrily to the telephone and pounced upon the receiver.

  “What do you want!” she said.

  There was a pause, and then the man spoke her name. It was a voice she knew all too well, a voice she had heard all her life.

  “You bastard!” she shouted. The vehemence and volume of her response startled her. “You goddamned monster! You rotten shit! Do you realize what you’ve done!”

  “I did what I had to, what I said I would do.”

  “You didn’t say you would do this! That poor girl is dead. Sacrée mère, she was only twenty-one years old!”

  “She was nothing to you. She was nothing to anyone.”

  “She was alive!”

  Camilla’s breathing was almost frantic. She felt she was suffocating. She wanted to twist the receiver in two, to break it into little pieces, to do the same to him. She slammed it down on its cradle.

  Her hands were still shaking as she sat down to attend to her makeup. In her haste, she used only a little, adding just touches of eyeliner and mascara and finishing with a subdued lipstick. Even this she botched, leaving her face barely passable for the street. If she were to show up for a job this way, she’d be sent back for repairs.

  Dressing quickly, she was almost to her door when the caller struck again. This time she could not even muster fury. She felt weak and beaten, capable only of surrender. Otherwise, he would keep calling and calling, like some merciless fiend.

  She let him speak first, with the frail hope that somehow it might be someone else. But of course it wasn’t. The deep, manly, noble Southern voice that in past years had been such a source of strength and reassurance for her was now back to frighten her once again.

  “Camilla?”

  “Yes.” Her own voice sounded dead, like that of some character in a Greek tragedy—Cassandra in The Trojan Women.

  “What did you tell the police, Camilla?”

  “Please, just leave me alone.”

  “What did they ask you, Camilla? What do they know?”

  “I can’t believe that I’m talking to you.”

  “I have to know, Camilla. I need to know what to do next.”

  “Do next? Go away! Disappear! I never want to talk to you again!”

  “It was necessary, Camilla. He’s frightened now. He’ll stop this.”

  “You don’t know what he’ll do!”

  “I should kill him now. I should have done that long ago.”

  “That won’t do any good! Hasn’t he made that clear enough? If he should die, everything will come out. He’s fixed it that way. What’s wrong with you?”

  There was only his breathing for a long moment.

  “I killed the old nana, Camilla,” he said quietly.

  “You what?”

  She was beginning to feel dizzy. She reached to steady herself. Her arm felt incredibly weak.

  “I killed her. I didn’t mean to. I shook her too roughly, I suppose. She was very old.”

  “You killed that poor old woman, and now the girl?”

  “I didn’t mean to! I wouldn’t have hurt that old nana. It was because of him! I was sure he’d hidden it all down there with her. He’s always going down there, isn’t he? I was certain I’d find it. I looked everywhere. I tore her place apart. I even went through some of those old animal skins. God have mercy.”

  “You didn’t find it?”

  “Nothing. Not a scrap. Not one old picture.”

  Camilla remembered mossy trees and dark faces, warm and gentle seawater against her feet. She had loved that old woman, for all her strangeness.

  “Has Pierre talked to you?” her caller asked.

  “No,” she said, after a long, slow breath. “He’s probably drunk somewhere.”

  “Are you going to talk to him?”

  “I’m going to see his lawyer tonight,” she said. “About the money.”

  “You talk to him. You tell him I’ll do it again.”

  “No you won’t! Do you hear? If it wasn’t for Momma, I’d turn you in to the police. I’d do it in an instant. Do you understand that?”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that, Camilla.”

  “And there’s something else I want you to understand. I think all your talk about family and honor and ‘the chivalry’—”

  “‘The unwritten law.’”

  “I think you’ve disgraced it! I think you’ve turned all that into something vile and terrible and disgusting! I hate you now. You have to know that. I hate you!”

  “I’ll do what must be done.” He spoke with pronounced menace and finality.

  Camilla screamed, a long, primal echoing scream that emptied her of all feeling. Then she slammed down the receiver so hard that the telephone slid off the table. She crouched down beside it, reaching to the outlet and pulling the cord free. Then she hurried through the apartment, snapping the cords out of the kitchen and bedroom jacks. She hurled herself onto her bed, and once more began to cry.

  To Lanham, this was the grimmest part of the murder of Marjean Dorothy Wickham and all murders, the scientific disassembling of the body under the statutory requirements of the city, county, and state of New York to legally establish the exact cause of death and to seek, examine, and analyze samplings of tissue and other evidence that might be admissible in court for the prosecution and conviction of her killer.

  Lanham had signed the requisite forms as the investigating officer. Now his role was one of witness, observing the entire autopsy in accordance with procedure and authorizing any extra steps or analysis he considered necessary. Some pathologists played music while they went about their ghoulish, lonely task. One favored tapes of Mahler at his most somber. Others liked to joke or chat. Dr. Morris Seidman, a soft-spoken, white-haired man near retirement who had the careful manner of a scientist, preferred to work in silence, speaking only in accordance with the prescribed police routine.

  Molly Wickham lay on her back, her remains neatly arranged on the stainless steel table with her arms turned palms up close to her body. Dead, she had the color of a white woman. Her remaining eye was open, staring up at the bright light above as though she were patiently waiting for the postmortem to be over. She retained her beauty even in this ghastly state.

  Dr. Seidman spoke into his tape recorder briefly, then turned to the victim’s head. He had removed Wickham’s expensive clothing and cleaned the flesh. Forensics had recovered the squashed lead slug that had torn through the girl’s left eye and skull, assessing it to be a flat-nosed round from a .357 Magnum. Seidman, probing the hole punctured in the bone behind the eye, confirmed the finding. He examined the remaining eye and then looked over the body for other wounds, finding none.

  “The woman has had breast implants,” he said, pointing to the neat, surgical scar beneath each breast. Lanham nodded.

  The doctor then picked up a scalpel from a tray beside him and made a long incision around the top of the girl’s head. Pulling the skin away from the bone, he reached for a small electrical saw and began to cut. There wasn’t much brain tissue left for him to remove and weigh.

  Lanham took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. He steeled himself to remain where he was standing.

  After speaking again for the tape recorder, Seidman moved to the torso. He made two incisions—one across the chest and another vertically from clavicle to pelvis—then opened Molly Wickham up like a package, a terrible Christmas present. A
s he cut free and removed the organs, setting each aside in orderly inventory, it occurred to Lanham, as it had so many times before, that now the victim was truly dead. With the removal of her functional parts, her humanity was gone, surgically removed. She had been rendered a laboratory specimen.

  Her stomach had been empty, her bladder full. She had had appendicitis, but there had been no surgery to excise the inflamed intestinal appendage, which had simply scarred over. She appeared otherwise to have been in remarkably good health.

  “She had sexual relations sometime not long before death,” Seidman said. “I find no trace of sperm, however.”

  “A condom that worked,” Lanham said.

  “Yes,” said the pathologist. “Presumably.”

  When the procedure was fully complete, Lanham took one last, long look at the medically violated body. Dr. Seidman had taken photographs throughout the autopsy, but Lanham would have no need of them. The details of this scene would be as firmly retained in his mind as on a photographic plate. The images would help him struggle through the long hours of boring, tedious, and frustrating work the case would require. It would help him in the unlikely event he had to shoot someone.

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  “I’ll call you with the lab test results, though I don’t think they’ll add much.”

  “No. Thanks again.”

  Lanham hadn’t eaten before coming over, and wouldn’t eat now until the next morning. He never had dinner the night of an autopsy.

  There was a surprise waiting for Lanham when he returned to the squad room. A middle-aged black couple was sitting in the chairs by the door. They were wearing what were probably their very best clothes—in the man’s case, a rumpled old brown suit with a purple polo shirt buttoned at the neck, yellow socks, and cracked brown leather oxfords. His hair was gray and he was not well shaven. His eyes were weary and sad, like an old dog’s. He smelled a little of beer.

  The woman appeared to have once had beautiful features, but her skin was pockmarked and there was an ugly scar alongside her ear that showed brightly white against her brown flesh. She was heavy, and there was a large roll of fat at the base of her neck. Her black dress might once have been expensive, but it was old and faded and let out at the seams. Her feet were in flat red shoes that might have been slippers. Her eyes were glassy. She had been drinking even more than he.

  “That’s Mr. and Mrs. Harold Wickham,” said Petrowicz quietly. “They came in a few minutes ago. They’re from Jersey City. They said they’ve lived in Jersey City all their lives.”

  Lanham grimaced, then went over to them, introducing himself politely. Noting their clothing again, he wondered if there was some mistake, a similarity of names that had led the couple to think it was their daughter who had been murdered.

  “We seen about Marjean on the TV,” the woman said.

  “On the news,” the man said, almost proudly.

  There was no mistake. Looking past the ravages, Lanham saw Molly Wickham in the mother’s face, saw what Molly would have likely become if fortune had not intervened.

  Paterson had been a lie. Molly Wickham, whatever she had been, had never been a wholesome middle-American cheerleader. The price of the clothes she’d been wearing when killed would have bought this couple a closetful of garments—by their standards, enough to last them the rest of their lives.

  “You’re sure it was her?” Lanham said gently.

  “We sure,” the woman said. “She left us a few years ago, but she ain’t changed none.”

  “They showed a picture of her,” said the man. “She sure pretty.”

  It occurred to Lanham that they might have never seen her fashion photos, or the movie she had appeared in. They knew nothing of the glamorous young woman who had lived on Sutton Place.

  “I’m afraid we have to ask you to make an identification in person,” Lanham said. “It won’t take very long.”

  The woman nodded sadly. There were no tears in her eyes, but Lanham knew there would be keening and wailing soon enough. There was always that.

  A.C. had a date that night. He had regularly had dates with women other than Kitty since he’d taken up his New York duties. He had endless social affairs to attend as a columnist and when Kitty didn’t feel up to it, he’d simply take someone else—if possible, a family friend. Kitty hadn’t minded, or so she had said.

  His date that night was Theresa Allenby, a one-time English aristocrat now married to a wealthy American. She had enjoyed a twenty-year career as a serious actress on Broadway—from teenage ingenue to reigning star. When her success began to diminish, she had retired to simply being a New York rich woman. It suited her. She and A.C. were very close friends.

  That night, she was in spirits as happy as A.C.’s were not. Though she was forty-three, four years older than he, she looked as pretty as she had in her first starring role. She was very much in love with her husband, who owned a large chain of movie theaters in New York and New England, as well as substantial real estate holdings in the Caribbean. When A.C. thought about what it might be like to be married to another woman than Kitty, it was often of Theresa.

  She was wearing a simple but elegant deep blue Givenchy cocktail dress that went well with her short blond hair and twilight-colored eyes. A.C. had changed into one of his somber Brooks Brothers pin-striped suits, which fitted his mood.

  The event they attended was a private preview of an exhibition opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—essentially a dreary stand-and-stare cocktail reception in honor of a garishly rich social climber who had donated several million dollars worth of what Theresa called “grotesque jade thingies.” They had left as soon as it was polite to do so and dined at Petrossian, a Russian restaurant Theresa favored just off Central Park South. Well aware of A.C.’s strained finances—as were too many of his acquaintances—she picked up the check. The embarrassment made him feel even more depressed.

  Now they were at her club—Doubles, in the Sherry-Netherland. There was dancing there at night and it was noisy.

  “The famous boulevardier isn’t living up to his image,” Theresa said, smiling sweetly.

  “The famous boulevardier is barely living,” A.C. said.

  “Was it really that awful, darling?”

  “The murder? Theresa, as these things go, it was the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. As a police reporter, he had once covered the murder of a woman who had enraged her lover to the point where he had thrown her off the terrace of his high-rise apartment. She’d been naked, and the building façade had torn away much of her flesh in her tumbling fall.

  “Let’s dance,” Theresa said. “It always works for me.”

  She was a marvelous dancer. A.C. was not, a fact that was more obvious than usual. After a few turns around the crowded floor, they returned to their table. Several other couples were watching them.

  “Cheer up, darling,” Theresa said. “New York loves you.”

  “New York loves no one.”

  “Well, New York can at least show you a good time. If this won’t do it, we’ll try somewhere else.”

  They sampled three other places, and even made a foray down to Club M.K., an erstwhile “hot spot” on Fifth Avenue near the Flatiron Building which featured rooms decorated with stuffed animal trophies and framed antique pornographic photographs.

  They ended up at Mortimer’s, as they often did. It was crowded, but on the strength of Theresa’s theatrical and social prominence and A.C.’s cachet as a celebrity columnist, they were given one of the better tables the management always kept empty and waiting for its preferred clientele. Princess Stephanie of Monaco, insufficiently disguised in dark glasses, was there with another girl and two or three younger men. Elizabeth Taylor and a young man were eating voraciously at a corner table. Several people in the room waved to Theresa. She cheerily waved back.

  “I’m sorry, Theresa. I’m a rotten date this evening. Perhaps we should have one last drink
and then I’ll take you home.”

  “If you like,” she said, “we can skip the one last drink.”

  Her suggestion suited him, and then all at once it didn’t.

  Camilla Santee was there, seated at a bad table near the kitchen door, her companion an older man with silver hair and a dark, expensive suit. She appeared nervous, constantly brushing her long hair out of her eyes. She appeared not to have noticed Theresa and A.C.

  “I don’t know who that woman is you’re staring at,” Theresa said, “but that’s Cyrus Hall, and he’s one of the most expensive lawyers in the country. Even my husband can’t afford him.”

  “I know. He’s a member of my club. She’s a model who was at the Arbre fur show today. She was at the police station with us.”

  “As I think upon it,” Theresa said, “perhaps I do know her. Is she French?”

  “French? No. I believe she’s lived there for a time, though.”

  “I think it was in Paris. Last year, or the year before.”

  “One of the fashion shows.”

  “No, a party. A very grand party. She seemed to be a friend of the host, but I can’t remember who it was.”

  He glanced around the room. Among the celebrated faces, he saw those of Gloria Vanderbilt and her friend the cabaret pianist Bobby Short, who, noticing A.C., nodded and smiled.

  “Would you excuse me for just a moment?” A.C. said. “There’s something I want to ask Bobby for my column.”

  “Tell him he was marvelous at the Fête de Famille party last week.”

  “I’ll tell him for us both.”

  A.C. chatted briefly with the famous couple. He had known Short since meeting him at a White House state dinner years before and was a regular at the Café Carlyle whenever Short was playing there. Instead of returning directly to his table, A.C. then made a circuit of the room, passing finally by Santee’s table.

  “Why, hello,” he said.

  Startled, she looked up at him as though he had just announced he was going to murder her.

  “I’m A.C. James,” he said, “in case you’ve forgotten.”

  She responded to his friendliness with the merest smile. Cyrus Hall was frostily civil. He disliked A.C.’s newspaper.