Looker

by Michael Kilian

  In the silence that followed, A.C. wondered if she had hung up. Then she spoke again.

  “I used to love you so,” she said. “No, I don’t want to hear what you’re going to do. You do what you think you must. You find Pierre and you deal with him. I don’t care how. I called you because I wanted you to know that it doesn’t matter to me, that I don’t care what happens to him. I don’t care what happens to you. Just leave me and Momma alone. Don’t ever bother us again.”

  There was one more pause, and she spoke again, her voice very low and husky.

  “No more. Rien. This is the last time I will ever speak to you. Goodbye.”

  A.C. reached for the door handle, then froze. She would never forgive his intrusion now, never forgive him his listening. He moved away, back to the path, and started up the hill, as sad as he had been happy, unsure of many things. Behind him, he heard her crying, but the sound became lost in the rustle of the trees in the sea breeze.

  He telephoned her immediately upon awakening in the morning, hoping she might have time to join him for breakfast, but there was no answer. After showering and dressing, he tried again, with the same result.

  The Canadians were not in the dining room. He paused only for coffee and juice, then went down to her room, finding it locked and empty, though he was reassured to see her suitcase still in place next to the dresser.

  At the beach, he stood on the parapet of the veranda, his eyes sweeping the sands but seeing only tourists. He sat on the railing, waiting, then became impatient and set off on a walk west along the beach, coming at length to a high pile of coral rock and climbing it. The further view yielded no sign of them. Finally, deflated and depressed, he returned to his room. He resisted the impulse to call New York.

  He would only be reaching out to trouble, inviting its intrusion. He took a postcard from his desk drawer and wrote a short message to his son, then tore it up. It would be just the same as telephoning Kitty and telling her where he was and what he had done.

  Lying back on his bed, he closed his eyes and relived in memory the special moments of the night before as he might examine, one by one, the treasures of a jewel box. He put them back and took them out all over again. Kitty’s threats of divorce had left him contemplating a future bleak and empty. It was no longer so.

  He resolved not to ask Camilla about her mysterious late-night telephone call. If they could put that behind them, they could put it all behind them.

  Camilla was where she had promised she’d be, waiting for him at the beach club at the appointed hour, reading a book at a table near the railing, a tall drink in front of her. She wore a pink blouse and skirt and her espadrilles. There was a supportive bandage wound around her knee. He noticed a mottled bruise on her leg and scratches on her arm. She was reading seriously, unaware of his presence until he touched her shoulder. He was grateful that she smiled, though it was weakly.

  “Dear God,” he said. “I had no idea you were so badly hurt.”

  She set down her book. It was in French, a novel by Marguerite Duras.

  “I’m all right,” she said, in a sad, childlike voice. “My knee’s a little swollen. The hotel found me a doctor. It’s nothing serious.”

  “How were you able to work?”

  “I didn’t. They paid me anyway. I daresay they got their money’s worth. I didn’t charge them my usual fee.”

  He pulled out a chair and sat down, crossing his legs. “Your friend Eddie must be furious.”

  She made a face, bringing unexpected wrinkles to the corners of her eyes. “He’ll survive.”

  “I hope I haven’t ended your modeling career.”

  “I don’t think there’s much left of my modeling career.”

  “When are you going back?” he asked.

  “I haven’t thought much about that yet.”

  “We have the afternoon then.”

  “The afternoon, the evening. The night.” She shrugged.

  “What would you like to do?”

  “I’m afraid I have a terrible hangover. I’d like another drink. And then something to eat, and then let’s do whatever you want.”

  “I’d love to go sailing.”

  “Then we shall go sailing.”

  After lunch, he rented a stout day sailor and took them out into the Great Sound, showing off as he tacked and darted around the big yachts and ships. Circling a few of the islands, he then headed out through the mouth of the Sound to the Granaway Deep, sailing on until the immensity of the open sea began to frighten her.

  Returning, they caught a bus to Hamilton and went shopping, afterwards visiting an art gallery. When her knee began to hurt, he took her to a tea room. At first, it was very romantic. They held hands. But she turned abruptly cold and withdrawn, and the mood lingered. Once she left him to use the telephone, returning shortly afterward. A second time, she returned almost as quickly, looking quite distraught and asking to go back to their hotel.

  She went to her room, commanding him not to follow but agreeing to meet him for dinner. The hour she chose was barely in time for the dining room’s last seating. What little conversation they had was strained and superficial. His attempts at comfort and reassurance produced no effect.

  They sat for a long while on the hotel terrace, holding hands again but not talking. Finally, after considerable prodding on his part, she agreed to pass the rest of the evening at the hotel’s fancy nightclub listening to the steel-drum music, but instead of improving her disposition, it only provided more opportunity for her to drink.

  They drank a lot at the club and more at the little table outside her room. When at length the floodlights were turned off at the beach, he suggested they go for a swim.

  “No, A.C. Not that.”

  She put her face in her hands. He began gently rubbing her back.

  “I did something terrible last night,” she said.

  He dared not speak. He feared what he might blurt out about her telephone conversation.

  “Because of what I’ve done, I think Pierre is going to be murdered. I’ve felt sick about it all day. This afternoon, I tried to undo it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t get through. I feel so damned rotten. I …”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked.

  She reached and took his hand, stroking it. “Yes, I do. I’d love to tell you everything, A.C., and have you go off and take care of it all for me, as I’m sure you’d try to do. But I can’t. It wouldn’t do any good. I’ve made too much of a mess of things. There are no valiant knights, are there? Not even you. There are no happy endings, no happily ever afters.”

  She lifted his hand to her face.

  “The lovely day is over,” she said. “Such a lovely day. Such a lovely day. ‘Beauty is the scent of roses, and the death of roses.’”

  “F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that,” A.C. said.

  “It was a sad thing to say. He was a very sad man.”

  She finished her drink, somewhat clumsily, then reached for the bottle.

  He intervened. “Let’s go to bed,” he said.

  Camilla left the bottle alone, but did not stir. “I can’t make love to you, A.C. Not now.”

  “We’ll just lie together. I’ll hold you.”

  “All right. We’ll hold each other. I’d like that.”

  He led her to the warmth of her bed. They lay together, face to face, their nakedness a bond. At length, he kissed her, and then again. Finally, they did make love, quickly and gently—and a little sadly. Fulfillment brought relief.

  “I love you so,” he said.

  “A.C. I wish I had known you in another time. In another life.”

  “We could make another life, a new life.”

  For a long time, she didn’t respond.

  “A.C.,” she said finally. “I don’t want you to go back to New York. Not for a few days. Promise me.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s dangerous for you. I’ve told you.”

  “I’ll be all right.”


  “Promise me!”

  “I have to get out of my room. It’s booked for someone else.”

  “There’s this room.”

  “This wonderful room.”

  She kissed him, and then lay back. In a few soft moments, they went to sleep. Later, at some indeterminate hour, he heard her get up and go into the bathroom. When she did not return after a very long time, he tired of waiting and slipped back into his deep and comforting slumber.

  When he awoke again, stirred from a dream, it was to the sound of a strange voice, and a noise at the door. A maid’s black face was apparent in the harsh glare of sunlight.

  “I am sorry, sir,” she said. The door closed.

  Camilla’s side of the bed was empty. She was not in the room. The bathroom door stood open and its lights were out. Her suitcase was gone. There was nothing in the closet. There was no note.

  CHAPTER 12

  Jacques Delasante hated the dark. He had grown up in a grand Southern house that had always been kept ablaze with light well into the night. He had followed the custom with his own house in Virginia, keeping a lamp on in his bedroom until morning—sometimes through the entire day in gloomy winter. The darkness of A.C. James’s East Side apartment oppressed him powerfully, but he endured it, as he had endured so much. The night had become his ally in the task he had undertaken. It was one of many strange and inexplicable things that had happened to him.

  He was seated stiffly in a leather chair that faced the small entrance hall of the apartment, allowing him a clear field of fire when James entered, whatever hour that would be. The man kept late nights in his work, but Jacques intended to wait for him no matter how long it took, even if it meant sitting in this chair all the next day.

  He had gained access to the apartment with encouraging ease, going first to the roof of the building next door, dropping the one story to James’s small terrace, and then quietly breaking the glass of the door nearest the brass lock. He was wearing a pair of the transparent latex gloves all dentists now used as a protection against dangerous diseases, and had been able to move about the flat without fear of leaving fingerprints.

  Jacques had turned on lights only twice; once to use James’s bathroom and another time turning on the kitchen lights to find the man’s liquor and pour himself some whiskey in a cup he’d found. He’d sat sipping it very slowly as the minutes and hours crept by, drinking with his left hand. In his right, he held his pistol, resting the barrel with its long silencer on his thigh. The hammer was cocked. It would take but a second to get off a round.

  James was as good as dead. Whatever he was doing—and given the depravity of this New York society, it could be absolutely anything—he would now be consuming the last moments of his life, blissfully unaware of how few they were. Camilla’s new flame was a corpse.

  James was a snoop, an intruder, a paid violator of others’ privacy, a Northern upstart. Jacques could only wonder at his background, this man of consequence in a rabble-ridden city run by Negroes and Jews and Catholics. Back home, such a man could never hope to gain any kind of acceptance—would never dare press a claim to the affections of a woman of Camilla’s standing, would never dare kiss her and touch her as Jacques had seen James do in Camilla’s little flat.

  Jacques’s gun hand was trembling. Relaxing his grip slightly, he took a gulp of his drink. Then he set down the cup. He didn’t dare fall asleep.

  He turned to the French doors at his back. Jacques hated the big, licentious, menacing city that stared back at him through the windows—hated everything it stood for, everything it allowed. New York was the antithesis of his birthplace—of his birthright. He wanted desperately to be on the move, to be hot after Pierre, to return to the South. But he could not leave behind the smoldering danger his damned foolish sister had created with her dalliance with this prying, trouble-making newspaperman. He could not leave this man alive. She would despise him forever for doing this, but that no longer mattered. She no longer understood what mattered. He saw it clearly. As always, he would do what had to be done.

  He drank again. When the click of the front door lock finally came, he was on the edge of drowsiness, but the sound snapped him awake as it might a dozing hunting dog. He could see clearly enough in the dimness, but he was too good a shot to need to aim. His hand came up with the gun trained on the archway.

  A slash of light from the outside hallway flared against the wall of the foyer, then vanished as the person entering slammed shut the door. It sounded as though James were drunk and fumbling with the light switch. There was a muffled thud as he tripped and fell against the wall, pushing himself away and stepping into the archway.

  Jacques fired an instant after, the vague flash from the muffled barrel piercing the darkness. He saw his mistake—and heard the womanly cry—but it was too late to stay the second shot. There was a crash of fallen furniture and breaking glass, then sudden silence. The smell of gun smoke was strong.

  Shaking, cursing the perversity of his luck, Jacques rose and went toward his victim, pausing to turn on a table lamp, blinking at the brightness. A beautiful woman lay on her back, her arm caught in the frame of an overturned glass-top table. Her face was contorted; her eyes were staring upward, and were very still.

  He swore again, smacking the warm silencer of his pistol against his hand. He’d killed another woman. In the sacred cause of upholding a woman’s honor, he’d done it again.

  Gun still in hand, he knelt beside her, and lifted her wrist, feeling for a pulse. Beautiful she was, and quite dead, blood soaking the front of her blouse.

  The old nana had lived longer than most people had a right to expect. The nigger prostitute was no loss to anyone. But this was a white woman—a lady, from the look of her. There was something familiar about her. Jacques was certain he had never met her, but in some way he knew her. James moved among famous people. This woman might be one of them.

  It was Camilla’s fault this had happened. She had brought this stranger into their affairs. While getting his drink in the kitchen. Jacques had found a picture of Camilla on the table cut out from a magazine. He’d torn it into little bits.

  Jacques’s bad luck could become much worse. Standing, he quickly switched off the light. He was no coward. There was nothing he would not brave. There were few things he hadn’t. But he had to flee this place—flee this city, flee the North.

  He went the way he had come. It was difficult—it took two attempts to regain the rooftop next door. But he succeeded. Within a few minutes, he was speeding through the night-empty streets. As before, no one followed.

  The bullet that ended Detective Second Grade Tony Gabriel’s police career never struck him. Had it been fired two or three seconds earlier, it might have. He’d be as thoroughly dead as the beautiful but unlucky woman it had hit, her remains now sprawled with grotesque indignity on the bloody mattress.

  Belinda had become so scared she’d gone a little crazy. She’d been doing cocaine before Tony had gotten to her apartment and snorted a couple more lines while he was there, drinking all the while. She asked for sex as though it were another drug, demanding that he make love to her in animal fashion, mounting from behind—screaming at him throughout the act as though it were bringing her pain instead of pleasure. When he could provide her nothing more and withdrew, standing aside to catch his breath, the bullet came through the window with a crack of glass, striking Belinda at the base of the spine and traveling the length of her body, digging a channel that brought violence to every vital organ and exiting near her throat. She looked like a child’s beautiful doll that had been dropped from some great height, except for the blood spreading across the white satin.

  Shaken, more sick and terrified than he had ever been even in his worst moments as a policeman, Gabriel stood uncomprehending, then leapt back, going to the window and crouching at the side, peering up at the rooftop of the building across the street. The upper ledge was several stories above the level of Belinda’s apartment, but the
line of sight was perfect for the shot, the trajectory direct from vantage point to the once lovely sculpture of Belinda’s naked back.

  In reflex, Gabriel’s mind began working like a cop’s. Nothing moved along the ledge. No one peered from the windows opposite. This was New York, and it was only a gun shot. The windows Gabriel could see that were lighted had drapes drawn across them. If Belinda had not been such a careless exhibitionist, and had drawn her own, she might still be alive.

  The perp could have been a weirdo, an E.D.P., some sneakcreep who’d turned from voyeurism to bigger kicks as a sniper. They caught cases like that every year.

  Yet it had been such a perfect hit, a one-shot collect. Professional shooters like that did a lot of work for people like Vince Perotta. He and Belinda had given Perotta a lot of reason to make such a hire. She’d been a lunatic to do it. So had he. Every policeman cherishes the hope that no criminal wants the trouble that comes with killing a cop. If it hadn’t been for that, Gabriel might have made himself think a little longer and better about romancing Belinda St. Johns. She was just too much to stay away from. He’d never had a woman like that. Life was short, shorter than anyone thought.

  The perp could have whacked him along with her. A single twofer shot, or another right after hers. The perp had had plenty of time for either.

  Gabriel had gotten off the bed all hot and sweaty. Now he was cold and shaking, but the perspiration kept coming. He crept to the chair that held his clothing and searched for his cigarettes. Lighting one, he sat back on the floor against the wall next to the violated window, feeling for a moment protected.

  Maybe Perotta had nothing to do with it. Maybe Perotta was going to be as shocked and angry—and scared—as he was. There was another perp who could have managed this whack, one perp so good, whoever he was, that he had dropped Molly Wickham through the head with a handgun from a motorcycle. The perp who wasn’t Bad Biker Bobby.