Daughter of Darkness (17 page)

    He went downstairs to check the number 3-C on the mailboxes. These were new boxes. Not a chip on them. Nobody as yet had had time to work them open with crowbars.

    The name on 3-C was Linda Fleming. That was the name Detective Ryan had asked him about. Who was Linda Fleming? He went back to the third floor. The carpeting was dusty and made him sneeze. He also had to go to the john. He'd had three Diet Pepsis so far today. He put his ear to 3-C. Listened.

    What he heard mostly were the ghosts that lurk in all domiciles and disguise themselves as the idle noises of appliances and the gurgle of plumbing and the muffled cries of floor creaks and window rattlings.

    He was just about to try the knob and see if it would turn when he heard the sound of labored breathing and heavy steps coming up the staircase at the other end of the hall.

    She was at least sixty, she was scarecrow-skinny, she wore glasses so thick the people at Mt. Palomar would be envious. And she still smoked cigarettes.

    Flowered, faded housedress. Two stained canvas grocery bags with handles. Industrial strength support hose. Floppy brown oxfords. Gray greasy hair worn like a helmet. And a cigarette that appeared to be at least a foot-and-a-half in length dangling from the right corner of her mouth. And the cough, of course. What could be more pleasant to have-or listen to-than a cigarette hack?

    She studied him skeptically with watery blue-green eyes, coughing all the time, and then said, "She probably ain't home."

    She was responding to the fact that Coffey had posed himself so that it appeared he was about to knock on Linda Fleming's door. By now, she was only three doors away. She set her groceries down and dug in the left pocket of her ratty blue cardigan for her apartment key.

    "I just wondered if Linda was home."

    "Uh-huh," she said, "she works all day." Then, "You sellin' something?"

    He smiled. "No."

    "You better not be because we got this place posted, front and back, NO SALESMEN. That gives us the right to call the law on you if you try to sell anybody anything on the premises here."

    "I'm a college friend of hers."

    "Oh, yeah? You went to the University of Illinois, too, huh?" She was hacking as she said this, hacking and dragging on the cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth.

    "Yep. I went there, too."

    Great mischief came into her watery eyes and she smiled with tiny black teeth around her cigarette. "That's funny because she never went to the University of Illinois. She went to a girl's college named Clark over in Iowa."

    She'd had her fun. She inserted her key, the door swung inward, she picked up her canvas grocery bags and she started to go inside. "The University of Illinois, huh?" she said. Then she was gone.

    He stood there feeling tricked, foolish. She was a wily old bag, no doubt about that.

    He went back to doing what he'd been doing, putting his ear to the door and trying to spy on the person or people inside. He was still rankled by the hag. On the other side of the apartment door, the phone rang. It was answered on the third ring. Far back in the apartment-the way he was visualizing it, she was in the bedroom-he could hear a female voice speaking. But it was so muffled, he didn't understand a single word.

    His hand, almost as if it were spirit-guided, found the doorknob. Turned the doorknob. And found the door unlocked.

    He eased the door open and stepped inside, closing the door quietly behind him.

    The furniture was about what he'd expected. Clean, sturdy, unremarkable, dark blue couch, two matching armchairs, gray wall-to-wall carpeting, a kitchenette hidden behind two louvered doors, and three paintings that had been painted by artists who were not only starving but blind as well.

    The bedroom door was open an inch. He could hear her more plainly now. She was saying, "Yes, I understand." Jenny's voice. She said good-bye and hung up. Moments later, Coffey heard a shower door being slid back. Then a blast of water. Then the shower door rattling some more as she stepped into the water stream.

    He sat down and waited for her.

    

    

    He could hear her in there, spritzing on perfume. The sound was oddly loud in the silence of Linda Fleming's apartment. He still wondered who Fleming was. and what her relationship to Jenny Stafford could be.

    The spritzing stopped. A closet door was opened, then closed. And then her cell phone rang. But he noted the oddness of the ring sequence-two quick rings, then two long rings. He'd never heard a cell phone use this pattern before. The ringing stopped, then. He assumed she'd picked up. But she said nothing-or if she did, she whispered it very, very quietly. A strange moment, this. And for some reason he wasn't sure of, he thought of the vans that followed her around. And now, followed him around, too.

    A minute later, the bedroom door opened all the way and she came out.

    It was Jenny, and yet it was
not
Jenny.

    Where Jenny usually dressed in expensive casual clothes, Linda Fleming favored a gaudy lemon-colored suit with a micro-mini skirt. There was a run in her dark stockings. The suit looked at least one size too small. Her makeup was as gaudy as her clothes. Too much blush; too much eyeshadow; too much lipstick. The only thing she wore that Jenny would have approved of was her modest one-inch black pumps.

    It was a testament to the classic angles of her face that despite her best efforts to tart herself up, Linda Fleming remained a beauty.

    "Who the hell are you?" she said, stunned and angry. While the timbre of her voice was Jenny's, there was a faint Southern accent to some of her words. Soft, the way Virginia accents are.

    "C mon Jenny," he said. "What's going on here?"

    She strode across the room to where a white Princess telephone sat on top of a Zenith console model TV set. She picked up the receiver. "I'm calling the police. And my name's not Jenny. It's Linda." She started to punch in phone numbers.

    "That wouldn't be too smart," he said, "since the police are looking for you."

    She looked genuinely surprised. "Why would the police be looking for me?"

    "The Econo-Nite Motel two nights ago," he said. "A dead man in Room 127."

    He watched her face. She seemed to be battling certain memories. Her face showed confusion, then fear, then recognition. Then, "How you'd know about that?"

    "It doesn't matter how I know about it. It matters how the
police
know about it."

    He could see her pale even beneath the layers of her makeup, the weariness and wariness of her eyes.

    She said, "I asked you who the hell you are."

    "My name is Coffey."

    She remained standing in the center of the floor and then she crossed to an overstuffed chair and sat down. She put one hand to her face and let the other one dangle off the side of the chair.

    The silence of the place became overpowering once again. And then the silence was broken with her sharp, aggrieved tears.

    Coffey stayed still. Letting her cry was the best thing he could do. He wanted to scrub her face. He wanted her to be Jenny. His Jenny.

    Several times, her tears sounded as if they were trailing off. But then she'd get upset all over again and her tears would burst into violent new life.

    After a time, he got up and went into the bathroom. He found a box of tissues and brought it out to her. She was at the sniffling stage, trying to shut her tears down. She muttered a tearful thank you.

    He went back and sat across from her and didn't say anything.

    By now, her too-heavy makeup was streaking, especially around the eyes, and her micro-mini skirt had pulled way up on her lovely thighs. He tried not to look. It wasn't easy.

    He said, "I'd like to help you."

    "Oh, right. How many men have I heard
that
from in my life."

    "I'm serious."

    "That's what they said, too." She waved a hand to indicate the apartment. "This is the kind've help they gave me. A dump like this." There was no point arguing with her. He sat back and looked at her. As he watched her, he realized that this was actually Jenny Stafford number two he was looking at. The plastic surgery following her car accident had changed her looks considerably. That was probably why more people hadn't recognized the police sketch of her. Not many people had seen the post-accident Jenny Stafford.

    "Where'd you go to high school?" he said. He wanted to see how deep the Linda Fleming character ran. It was eerie, trying to think of her as both Jenny
and
Linda.

    She looked suspicious. "Why do you want to know that?"

    "I'm just curious."

    "You seem curious about a whole
lot
of things."

    He smiled. "Must be my nature. So where'd you go to school?"

    "Kennedy."

    "Any college?"

    "One year. I dropped out."

    "Where'd you go?"

    She glared at him. "Man, you're really a pain in the ass, you know that?"

    He probably was a pain in the ass. But he was working on a theory and he needed to know some things. "So where'd you go?"

    "Clark College is where I went. God. No more questions."

    "Just one."

    She sighed, greatly put-upon. "All right. One more."

    "How old is your father?"

    "My father? He's dead, why?"

    "When did he die?"

    She shrugged." Who cares? He never did much for me, anyway." Pause. "Eight, nine years ago, he had a heart attack."

    "I see. And where had he worked most of his life?"

    "At Motorola. Driving a delivery truck." She sighed. "I haven't done so good with my life. You know the funny thing? I was considered the smart one. I had two sisters. My folks couldn't really afford more than one, but my mom was a strict Catholic and wouldn't use any birth control. So they had three kids. And I was considered the smartest one. But that isn't the way things turned out. My youngest sister, she married this banker and they live out in Oak Park. And my oldest sister married this doctor and they've got this really beautiful house out in San Diego." Her head was still back, her eyes closed. It was almost like a therapy session.

    "I've got this splitting headache."

    "Why don't I get you a couple of aspirin?"

    "Yeah, actually, that sounds good. You think you can find everything?"

    "Sure."

    Her bed was unmade. Three or four pairs of shoes were scattered across the floor. A bureau drawer was open, a pair of white panties hanging off the drawer edge.

    The bathroom was no better. Myriad forms of makeup were strewn across the top of the toilet and the sink. The soap dish was encrusted with hardened soap residue. She hadn't bothered to put the new roll of toilet paper on the roller. It sat on the floor next to the john. The medicine cabinet above the sink was mirrored and probably hadn't been wiped clean for months. The mirror slid to the right to allow you access to the four rows of toothpaste. Vaseline, cold medications, combs, eyebrow tweezers, and cotton swabs that waited inside.

    But what interested him most was the photo of the girl that had been taped to the far edge of the mirror. It was a society page item, a small story, the headline reading: DEBUTANTE OF YEAR NAMED TO ART MUSEUM BOARD. Four paragraphs detailed how the debutante would not only join the board but spearhead the next fund-raising job.

    But the copy wasn't nearly as interesting as the photograph that accompanied it.

    The photo showed a slightly posed but stunningly beautiful Jenny Stafford.

    He spent the next minute searching through the medicine cabinet for aspirin. The clutter didn't make it easy. Finally, he found a small tin of Bayer. The tin was covered with some kind of sticky goop that had been spilled on it. He took the plastic glass on the sink and washed it out several times, then filled it up with fresh water. He carried this and the aspirin back to the living room.

    She hadn't moved.

    Her eyes were open, and she was staring at the ceiling.

    "Here you go," he said.

    She sat up straight and looked at him. "Well, I guess you're good for
some
thing."

    "You're very kind."

    She laughed. "You're a smart-ass, aren't you?"

    "Sometimes."

    He gave her the water and the aspirin.

    "I'm sorry this place is such a pit."

    "That's all right."

    "I'm for shit as a housekeeper."

    "Take your aspirin."

    "Thanks." Ever mercurial, ever-changing moods, she said, "I probably look like hell."

    "You look fine."

    She looked at him. "How did you get in here? I just realized you never explained that."

    "The door was open. I just walked in."

    "God, I didn't lock it?"

    "Apparently not." Then, "I want to help you, Linda."

    "Help me with what?"

    "With dealing with the police. I want you to see a friend of mine."

    He showed her the police sketch that had been in the
Tribune
this morning.

    "Hey, that looks a lot like me." Looks a lot like me? It clearly was her. At first, he thought she might be kidding. But then he saw she was serious.

    He watched her somberly. The sketch had unnerved her. Anxiety played on her face.

    "What sort of a friend are you talking about?" she said.

    "A shrink."

    She touched a hand to her head. "This headache is killing me."