Impersonal Attractions (23 page)

But the white was blotched with red. Was she on her period?

No, he’d cut her. Just a little too deep with his knife.

He carefully slipped out of his jeans and T-shirt, holding them in his rubber-gloved hand. He didn’t want to get them stained. Much easier to wash the blood off his body in her shower before he left.

He propped her knees up, her feet flat on the kitchen tiles, as he pushed himself into her. Her legs fell apart and her unconscious body flailed loosely from side to side.

She was wet. He knew she would be. They all were. They all wanted it, just pretended that they didn’t. It never occurred to him that blood is just as wet as passion.

He began to laugh as he pumped, and then he could feel the tingling beginning. He moaned aloud. But she was groaning, too, under him.

He pumped faster, faster, watching her face. He wanted to see her smile. Her eyes opened. And then she started to scream.

She was going to ruin it. Bitch. He slapped her hard. Once. Twice. Again. She couldn’t stop him now, not now. Blood began to trickle from her nose.

The tingling grew and concentrated and grew, and there it was. There. There. There. He spurted, staring into her open, screaming mouth.

Why was she still screaming? It was over. Didn’t she understand? She had to stop screaming now.

The knife stopped her. It took fifteen or twenty times, but finally she was quiet. The knife made little red roses all over her gauzy white blouse. They were almost pretty, strewn across her breast.

But then, when he slit her blouse open, her chest was a mess. There was no white space left at all.

He would have to turn her over and use her backside.

Carefully this time, so as not to spoil her, he slit her blouse and jeans down the back and peeled them open to her snowy-white flesh.

The Buck knife was very, very sharp. It did good work.

*

He pulled a comb out of his pants pocket and combed his hair, damp from his shower. Then he checked to make sure he had everything. The gloves. His knife. All of his clothes were back on.

He looked back into the kitchen before he opened the apartment door.

It was a nice job. You could read the letters from here, the letters he had carved so neatly across her back.

He smiled and closed the door behind him.

*

Fifteen minutes later Brad pushed the downstairs buzzer for the third time. Maybe she was still in the shower.

The possibility that she had stood him up crossed his mind, but he rejected it. He was crazy about her and he knew she liked him too. This was going to be the night.

He clutched the bouquet he had brought Paula tighter in his left hand as he rang the buzzer once more.

Maybe it was broken.

He walked to the corner grocery store to find a pay phone to call her.

The call rang and rang and rang through the silent apartment, where a duck overcooked and grew dry in an unwatched oven.

THIRTY-SIX

Sean called the next morning. “Annie, I just spoke to Samantha.” The words were clipped. Uh-oh. She knew he was angry. “Didn’t you both promise to stay out of this?”

Annie mumbled an affirmative.

“I don’t understand it. Sam should have better sense. And I don’t know what
you
think you’re doing.”

“We told you before. Lola was a friend.”

“I don’t care if she was your mother!” he exploded. “I just won’t have you butting into police business.”

Annie decided to ignore that. “Did she tell you we think Sharder’s harmless?”

“Harmless, huh?” His voice reeked of sarcasm. “I love your methodology, Annie. I really do. Very scientific police work. Is that how you think we solve crimes, with intuition, on hunches?”

“Maybe…sometimes.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Annie could hear him sucking on his pipe.

“Well,” he admitted, “there
is
some intuition involved. But it’s informed intuition, goddammit, on the part of professionals. Not amateurs muddying the waters, taking chances on getting themselves killed.”

“Sean…we just…”

“You just thought you’d help, right? We don’t need your help.” Then his voice softened. He sighed heavily. “Well, I hate to even tell you this. It’s just going to encourage you. But your seeing Sharder last night did accomplish one thing.”

“What?”

“It proved he’s not our man.”

“See…”

“But,” he hastened to interrupt her, “not in the way you think—unfortunately. While you were with him in Port Costa, the killer claimed his fifth victim here in the city.”

“Oh, God!” The news hit Annie like a slug in the stomach.

“Good news, bad news joke, isn’t it? Good news, Sharder couldn’t have done it. Bad news, we don’t know who the fuck did. And he’s still out there.” He heard himself. “Excuse my language, Annie. This is really eating at me.”

She knew that was a gross understatement of how he really felt about the murders he couldn’t stop. But what a gentlemanly homicide detective he was. She used much worse language than that herself on occasion.

Sean continued. This killing was definitely the handiwork of the same maniac. For what it was worth, they were able to pinpoint the time very closely. A neighbor had heard her come in from shopping and then had heard her let somebody in. She hadn’t heard him leave. Her boyfriend had arrived about an hour later and had called the police when she didn’t answer.

He wouldn’t tell her anymore. “You don’t want to know. This guy’s very sick, a vicious SOB. One of my men tossed his lunch when he saw the body. He really is a maniac. I want you to stay away from this, do you understand? You don’t want to find this man.”

Annie digested what he was saying. Then she asked, “Sean, did you find letters in her apartment? You know, letters from men from the ads, like at Lola’s?”

Sean whistled in exasperation. “You’re a terrier, aren’t you?”

“Well?”

“No, we haven’t, not yet. It certainly did occur to us. But we’re still examining the apartment. It’ll be days before the reports are all in.”

“But it won’t be that long before you know if there are letters or not. Will you tell me if there are?”

“No.”

“But, look, maybe there’s a connection. I still have all my letters, and you have Lola’s. What if you took all of them and crosschecked them? They all fall within the same period of time, I mean, since the murders have been happening. If Paula has letters, too, maybe he’s there. What about the other three? Did they do the personals?”

“Annie, I’m not discussing this with you.”

She was silent, waiting him out.

“Look, even if all of the victims and you got a letter from the same man, so what? Haven’t you answered more than one ad at a time? There’s no law against that. And he didn’t, thank God, come after you.”

“Yes, but that’s because I’m not black.” She knew as she spoke that it didn’t compute.

“What do you mean? Do you think Paula Eisenberg was black? Or Marcia Cohen or Sondra Weinberg?”

“Oh, my God.”

“I thought you would have gotten that before, smart
lady. There’s a pattern here, all right, but you’ve just focused on Lola.” He didn’t tell her about the swastikas and the letter
K
repeated three times that he’d carved on his victims’ bodies. No one knew outside the department. And they hadn’t found letters in the other apartments. But then, they hadn’t especially been looking for them. You didn’t know what the hell to look for with a crazy.

“Listen, I would like to see your letters. Bring them down and I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Does that mean…”

“It means nothing. But if we find some matches with yours and Lola’s, I’ll let you know. And then we can talk about them.”

“Are you sure you’ll want to? You won’t think I’m just butting in?”

“Will she never stop busting my chops?” he asked under his breath. “Why don’t you act like a schoolteacher?” he asked her. “Twist your hair up on your head, wear Dr. Scholl’s, and keep your nose out of my business.”

“Because I’m a writer,” she answered him crisply. “Besides, you don’t even know what a schoolteacher looks like. You think they all wear habits and are named Sister Rosalie.”

Writer. Some writer. She’d better get to it, she thought. The deadline for the outline and first three chapters of the book was growing uncomfortably near. And the stories increasingly crazier. The problem with truth was that it was indeed stranger than fiction and she wasn’t sure if her editor was going to buy some of these tales.

Who would believe Powell, for example, the bisexual painter who’d answered her query ad? Who’d had his honeymoon with his lesbian girl friend ruined by a red-tick hound named Harold who was afraid of linoleum.

Annie tossed Powell’s interview notes aside. She’d never get away with this one; her editor had never been to San Francisco.

*

Nothing was making her happy today. She was worried about the book. Sean was bitching at her about minding her own business. And Lola’s murderer was still out there. It was that awful week between Christmas and New Year’s when nothing got done and everyone was tentative. And it was raining.

She felt antsy. She hadn’t talked with David in months, by choice, but sometimes she wondered if half a loaf wasn’t what her hunger needed. The thought of Harry still ached sometimes like a bad tooth. She’d called Tom Albano to say hello, and he’d told her about a nurse he’d met who’d invited him to a New Year’s Eve party. He sounded happy and excited. She didn’t want to hear it.

What was wrong with her? Just the holiday blahs? Then she tuned into the dull throb in her forehead that was growing sharper and the pain behind her knees. That was the giveaway. It was more than cranky; it was the flu. A reason to retreat.

She checked her cupboard for soup and tea. Ice cream in the freezer. Lemons, tissues. She’d call Sam to bring her a pile of fashion magazines and she’d be set. She could tuck in and take care of herself and let New Year’s Eve just slide on by.

*

A week later she and Sam were celebrating the return of her good health and appetite at the Little Italy with a dinner of spiedini, linguine with fresh clams, and veal and peppers.

“And I had Dungeness crab with Sean at lunch today. I should be ashamed,” Annie said.

Sam just stared at her. She had never known Annie to be regretful of a forkful in her entire life.

“So what did my darling have to say?”

“First, he reminded me to mind my own business, but he always does that. I don’t take it personally. He said there were no personals letters in Paula Eisenberg’s apartment.

“But they did find some correlations between mine and Lola’s. Remember the crazy therapist who went on and on about love and food?”

“Right! The hungry one.”

“He wrote to Lola too. But he’s safely tucked away in Napa State Hospital, where’s he’s been crazy for all these years.

“The other was Stan Levine, the man who looks like Gene Wilder.”

“The one who wanted to take you to the hot tubs?”

“Yes. He has alibis for the nights of all five murders.”

“Did Sean say they inquired about all of Lola’s letters?”

“Yes. All twelve. Four were from prisoners. That leaves eight. Levine and the Napa loony leave six. The rest all check out, except one who’s away on a cruise, which lets him out. And none of them was David. So I guess that’s that with our ad theory. No connection.”

“So we’re back at ground zero. Did Sean say
anything
else?”

“No fingerprints. He must wear gloves. A partial bloody shoeprint from Lola’s that matches one from Sondra Weinberg’s. They’re questioning all the neighbors over and over in hopes that someone will remember something.”

“Jesus H. Christ! I can’t believe you got all that out of him. What’d you ply him with, eight-year-old cognac at lunch?”

“Nope.” Annie grinned. “I promised I’d buy you a copy of the
Kama Sutra
.”

Sam laughed at Annie’s joke, but later she worried about it. She knew Annie well enough to know that she joked when things were bothering her, and the absence of a man in her life was giving those jokes a hard edge that made Sam feel a little uncomfortable and a little guilty about her happiness with Sean. Something had to break soon.

THIRTY-SEVEN

A
nnie watched Samantha hurrying away to meet Sean at his apartment.

Annie was going home alone.

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, she thought.

You’re feeling sorry for yourself, Annie. You were too a bride. And you will be again. Someday.

In the meantime, she had tomorrow night to look forward to with her friend Tom, who was always fun.

But maybe not this time. She wondered what was on his mind. They’d planned to try yet another new Chinese place out near Quan’s, but he had called and asked if she would mind cooking if he brought wine and dessert.