Don't Look Now (11 page)

The petroleum smell of the latex glove filled her nostrils and Ellie saw in an instant that the reflection she had seen danced off the blade of a straight razor – long, highly polished, pearl-handled. Muscular arms dragged her back into the brightness of the bathroom and tossed her against the wall, pummeling the air from her lungs.

The woman who called herself Earline Pender held Ellie tightly against the cool blue tile. Her breath was hot and sweet with cinnamon mouthwash.

Ellie glanced down and saw that the woman had changed her shoes. She now wore white stiletto heels. Through the opening in her coat, Ellie also saw that the woman was nude.

‘I know who you’re talking to out there,’ the woman said. She lifted a finger from Ellie’s mouth, daring her to make a sound.

Ellie remained silent.

The woman increased the pressure, the razor now lying up against the fleshy well at the base of Ellie’s throat.

‘Don’t
fuck
with me, kitty-cat,’ the woman said. She tapped the razor once with her forefinger, drawing a trickle of blood. ‘I know who he is. He’s a cop.’

Ellie could see that the woman was younger than she had originally thought. The lines on her face seemed to have been drawn in, the gray streaks in her hair sprayed on. The beauty mark was real. ‘Yes.’

The woman looked at the floor for a moment, thinking. She brought herself to within an inch or two of Ellie’s face. ‘Where does he think you are right now?’

‘Having a cigarette.’

‘And what were you going to tell him when you got back?’

Eleanor Burchfield said nothing.

‘Were you going to tell him all about last night?’

The tears began to flow freely now.

‘Were you going to tell him about how you’re a fucking whore?’ The woman ran her hand around the back of Ellie’s neck, grabbing a fistful of hair, pulling her down to her knees. The woman threw her leg over Ellie’s head and sat down on the toilet behind her in one perfect, fluid motion.

‘I saw you, you know,’ the woman said. ‘I saw what you did with him.’ She extended her legs and gathered Ellie closer to her, locking her ankles around Ellie’s chest. ‘Just tell me that you realize you made a mistake, and I won’t hurt you.’ The woman eased the pressure on the razor. ‘Tell me you’re sorry.’

‘I—’ Ellie began, fully prepared to say anything that this woman wanted. But the woman interrupted.

‘Because, you know what we do to scheming little cunts?’ She brought the razor to rest at a ninety-degree angle to Ellie’s throat and reached into her overnight bag. She pulled out a digital camera, turned the screen to face them, began flipping through the pictures. She stopped at a medium shot of the man Ellie had gone to the Solon Motel with. He was standing in the very same motel room, near the foot of the bed. Even considering the horror of her situation, Ellie was still taken with the man’s physical beauty: the marble hardness of his chest and abdomen, the aristocratic line of his jaw.

He was naked and fully erect.

‘Look familiar?’ the woman asked. Playful now.
Girlfriends
. She flipped to another picture of the man, this one a side view. ‘Rather impressive, isn’t it?’

The woman then flipped through three more photographs. The first picture was a close-up of a woman with a thin red scarf draped loosely around her shoulders. The woman was nude from the waist up and was lying across a bed, staring vacantly at the ceiling. ‘How about these?’ the woman asked. ‘You recognize these gals, don’t you? Sure you do. You read the papers.’

The picture of Maryann Milius that Ellie had seen in the
Plain Dealer
had been cropped from what might have been an Olan Mills type portrait. Ellie had thought the young woman pretty at the time.

But the image of Maryann Milius in front of her now – the likeness that soon told Ellie it was not a scarf at all but rather a broad swirl of blood from the gaping wound in her neck – was hideous beyond belief. She opened her mouth to scream, but the sound that came forth instead was small and thin.

A doll’s scream.

Earline Pender wrapped one leg around the base of the toilet for leverage and bore down with all her strength.

At the moment the steel slid silently across Ellie’s throat, exposing her trachea to the cornflower-blue bathroom in room 118 at the Radisson East, Eleanor Burchfield looked at her shoes and thought about the day she had bought them.

Funny, Ellie thought, to think such a thing at such a moment as this.

Soon she thought nothing at all.

SAILA GOT BACK
into the car and I knew immediately that she had been bad. Her lips were slicked with saliva, her breast heaved, her eyes were rimmed with red and full of fire. Before I could shift into reverse and pull out of the space, she placed her hand on my forearm, and from the strength of her grip, I could tell she was wired. She pulled the release on the side of her seat and slid back, falling into a reclining position, unbuttoning her coat, spreading her legs. Her thighs were perfect in the light that drifted in from the parking-lot. I shut off the engine as Saila ran her left index finger slowly down her thigh, back up.

She told me the details of what she had done.

When she was finished, I moved closer. Saila placed her right foot on the dashboard and, with the draining hull of a woman she had cut with a razor lying no more than a hundred feet from where we sat, she took my head in her hands and directed it down between her legs.

She stroked my hair as I did her bidding.

Hers. Again.

Within moments she began to hum a tune, one to which she had been a slave all evening.

An old song by Peaches and Herb.

PARIS ASKED THE
first person he saw. Black woman, well dressed, early fifties.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if you could help me. My cousin Eleanor left the bar about a half-hour ago, and I thought perhaps you could pop into the ladies’ room here and see if she might be in there, see if she’s all right.’

‘Sure,’ the woman said, pushing open the door. ‘You say her name’s Eleanor?’

‘Yes. Ellie, actually. About this tall, blondish, wearing a light brown cardigan.’

‘Hang on,’ the woman said, and disappeared into the ladies’ room.

Paris leaned up against the wall and looked both ways down the hallway. Empty. The front-desk clerk had told him that Eleanor Burchfield had walked across the lobby, and around the corner toward the ballrooms and convenience lobby. The small alcove, which contained a Coke machine, an ice machine, and a candy machine, along with a tiny gift shop, was empty when Paris glanced in. Whoever had worked behind the counter had closed and shuttered the shop for the evening. His heart had leapt when he saw the deep-red stain on the carpeting, but when he knelt down, he saw that someone had spilled some wine. No bogeyman, no razors, no blood.

But no Eleanor Burchfield either.

The door to the ladies’ room opened and the woman came out, shrugging her shoulders. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s empty. I even looked in the stalls.’

‘Okay. Thanks very much.’

‘You’re quite welcome,’ the woman said, and walked toward the lobby.

Paris made a once-around the first floor, listening at the doors of some of the guest rooms, looking into the pool room and the arcade. She was gone.

She had seen a real-life cop with a badge and a gun and a notebook and realized that the whole thing just wasn’t worth it.

Fuck
the next victim, right?

Right, Paris thought as he sauntered back into the lounge, which was now reduced to a handful of only the most desperate of holdouts. There were two women in their forties sitting in one of the booths by the dance-floor. One of them kept looking over at Paris every time she used her hands to make a point to her girlfriend.

Rita waved Paris over to the bar.

‘I remembered something else,’ Rita said.

Paris said nothing, retrieving his notebook.

‘I seem to recall this guy talking to another woman. Over there.’ She gestured to a darkened corner to the right of the dance-floor. ‘Not for long, but I’m pretty sure it was before he and your friend got together.’

‘Did they look like they were a couple?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Can you describe her?’

‘Young and pretty. Like everyone else. Kind of on the tall side, I think. Although, when you’re five two, everyone’s on the tall side.’ Rita curled a fingerful of hair. ‘But that’s about all I remember. It’s dark in here. Couldn’t even tell you her hair color, which for me is pretty rare.’ She poured coffee into Paris’s cup. ‘Let me think about it. I don’t know why, but I seem to think he may have even come in with this woman.’

‘Okay,’ Paris answered, absently tapping his index finger on the edge of the cup. Rita grabbed a bottle of Crown Royal, slid a California shot in the side door of his coffee.

‘You know,’ Paris said, tilting the coffee cup to his lips, ‘you are damn good at what you do, you know that?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Tips don’t always show it though.’

Paris dropped a twenty and his card on the bar. ‘If you think of anything, give me a call. Or just stop down at the station when you have time and we’ll hook you up with the police artist.’

‘Okay, captain,’ Rita said, saluting. ‘Be careful out there.’

Paris pulled out onto the boulevard, functioning on autopilot. All he wanted was a good night’s sleep and a big, fat lead.

When he turned right, onto Lee Road, he didn’t notice the white BMW that made the turn behind him.

Paris got to the office at just after eight am. He dialed Eleanor Burchfield’s number at eight forty-five, but there was no answer. Nor was there voicemail.

The storefront window at 1190 East 185th Street held an intricate web of neon lighting which, from the other side of the street, could be deciphered as the slogan for the Ultimate Line Tattoo Company, Inc. ‘From Roses to Dragons!’ it exclaimed in pink and blue tubing.

Inside, the counter area was small, crammed even tighter with wobbly plastic chairs and charity gumball machines. The man who stepped through the soiled red curtains separating the reception area from the parlors was forty, bearded, wearing a sleeveless denim jacket and well-travelled Levi’s.

‘My name is Detective Raposo. This is Detective Paris. We’re with the Cleveland Police Homicide Unit,’ Tommy said, flashing his shield.

‘Homicide,’ the man said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘And
your
name?’ Tommy asked.

‘Chuck Vasko.’

‘Mr Vasko,’ Tommy continued, ‘we’d like to ask you a few questions in regard to a homicide we’re investigating.’ He placed the suspect sketch on the counter-top. ‘Do you recognize this man?’

Vasko looked at the sketch. ‘That’s the guy from the newspaper,’ he said. ‘This is the guy who’s killing those women, right?’

Paris saw a thin, paste-white woman peer out from between the curtains. She was mid-twenties, holding an infant in her arms.

‘Do you
recognize
him, Mr Vasko?’

‘Only from the newspaper. I mean, he’s not a customer, if that’s what you’re asking. Does he have a tattoo?’

Paris stepped forward. ‘If you don’t mind, could you let Detective Raposo ask the questions for the time being?’

‘No problem, boss man.’

He
’s done some time, Paris thought. ‘Thank you.’

‘Do you do a lot of rose tattooing, Mr Vasko?’ Tommy asked.

‘Oh yeah. Very popular,’ Vasko said. ‘In fact, our motto is—’

‘Yeah, we caught it on the way in,’ Tommy said. ‘Mr Vasko, what kind of people get rose tattoos?’

‘Well, women, of course.’

‘Young women?’

‘Absolutely. Teenagers too. Then of course, there’s your occasional, you know,
freak
.’

‘Freak?’

‘Yeah, you know, guy comes in, a little pervy-lookin’, wants a tattoo of a rose on his dick, his ass, his balls. I do ’em. Can’t say I enjoy ’em, but I do ’em. On the other hand, I sure as hell ain’t gonna let my wife handle it.’ Chuck Vasko let out a loud snort of laughter and uncovered a thick row of uneven yellow teeth.

‘Do you keep records of everyone who gets a tattoo here?’ Tommy asked, once the man had composed himself.

‘Some,’ Vasko said. ‘But this is mostly a cash business, as you might imagine. Tattoos are a strange thing, gentlemen. People get ’em, but then they don’t want anyone to know they have ’em.’

‘Who has access to your customer list?’

‘Just me and my wife,’ Vasko said. ‘Me ’n’ Dottie.’

Paris looked at the skinny woman and the fat baby in the doorway and tugged once on Tommy’s coatsleeve.

They were wasting their time with the Vaskos.

The two detectives spent the remainder of the morning talking to Karen Schallert’s mother, Delores, in the woman’s two-bedroom ranch in Parma Heights. They learned that Karen had had a long relationship with a man named Joseph Turek, an airline mechanic, but the affair had ended nearly two years earlier over a slight difference of opinion regarding Mr Turek’s avocation of hydroponic pot growing. A quick check revealed that Joseph Turek had died in an automobile crash in January.

Karen, Delores Schallert told them, had been a lot more involved in community work in recent days than she had been with men. But Delores also said that once in a while, maybe four or five times a year, Karen would let her hair down and go out to bars with one of her girlfriends. Or sometimes, over the strenuous objections of her widowed mother, on her own.

Delores Schallert gave them a recent photograph of Karen, the same one that had run in the
Plain Dealer
, and as they rose to leave, Paris scanned the collage of framed pictures on the wall over the couch. There, above the cream and brown afghan, were photographs of the toothless baby Karen Schallert, the high-school Karen, the college Karen, the career-girl Karen, all grown up now, handing an oversized check to a grayhaired man in front of the United Way building.

As he stepped into the bright sunlight and raised his sunglasses to the assault, Paris thought of the pictures over his own couch.