Death in a Funhouse Mirror (35 page)

"So what if the killer was one of her other men? Wouldn't one of them have been able to get close to her?"

She waved a hand dismissively. "They were never that important. Helene was very clear with them that the relationship was only about sex. She never let things get out of hand. Never let them get close. Never let them interfere in her everyday life. You have to understand. She was a very practical woman. Controlled and rational. Qualities that are admired in a man and disparaged in a woman. I suppose many men would describe her as a cold-hearted bitch. She knew what she wanted, she took it, and that was that."

"But what if one of them wanted more, was frustrated that he couldn't have it, and killed her so no one could have what he couldn't have?"

"Don't be silly. I told you. She knew how to manage them."

"Now who is being naive? You, of all people, ought to know about obsessions and people who lack impulse control."

"Of course I do. And the person who was obsessed and lacked impulse control was her husband, Cliff. Who wanted to be able to have his little affair, but wanted her to stop having hers. He was afraid she'd embarrass both of them. She could have, too. She had rather indiscriminate taste."

"In how she chose her lovers? Where did she find them?"

"Under every rock. Firemen, store clerks, taxi drivers. I wouldn't be surprised if she had a few cops, too, though they'd never admit it. She kind of liked men in uniform." She studied my face and nodded decisively. "You're shocked, aren't you? I don't see why you should be. When a man tomcats around and has a vigorous appetite for sex, he may come in for some superficial criticism, but secretly he's admired. When a woman does the same thing, she's a slut. So Helene was a slut. So what? She enjoyed herself. You know the line... I think they used it to sell athletic shoes... work hard, play hard. Well, that's what Helene did. She had strong appetites, and she indulged them."

She shrugged. "Her work, you know, was emotionally demanding. Draining. After a day of listening to those pathetic stories, she needed an outlet. A physical outlet. She couldn't sleep with Cliff. Not after what he'd been doing. It wasn't safe. So Helene took lovers. So what?"

I thought the lady was protesting too much. Lenora Stern might have thought she was Helene's friend, and she might have admired Helene's style and bravado, but she'd also been extremely jealous. I could understand it. Like me, Lenora was tall. She was also big boned, carried a lot of weight, and her face, which must once have been quite attractive, was handsome but worn-out. Close-up, she looked old and hard. Distinguished, maybe, but not the face that could pick up a cop, or a fireman, or a store clerk in a two-minute encounter. Helene had been small boned, naturally elegant, and beautiful. Also respected in her field, with a successful private practice, a beautiful home and an apparently adoring husband. There'd been a lot there to resent, and Lenora Stern, however she might protest to the contrary, had resented it.

"Why are you so sure it was Cliff, when there are so many possibilities?"

"Because he wanted a divorce, and she wouldn't give him one."

"That's nonsense. No one can imprison someone else in a marriage. He could have gotten a divorce even if she didn't agree."

"Not without a bitter fight and significant financial losses. And his position at Bartlett Hill is sensitive. The place is paranoid that something might affect the bottom line. They would have frowned on messy publicity."

"That wouldn't have been necessary."

"You think she would have passed up an opportunity to broadcast the fact that he was cheating on her with another man?"

"But then she'd risk her own private life coming out. What about the husband of one of her patients? You said she was afraid a patient's husband was following her. The families and friends of battered women are killed all the time."

"No," she said. "No. It wasn't one of them. She recognized that risk so she was very careful. She never gave out her home number—she used a service. She was unlisted. She never saw patients at home...."

"She could have been followed. Stalked."

Lenora shook her head vehemently. "I'm telling you. It was Cliff. Unless it was Rowan...."

"She didn't like Rowan," I interrupted. "Why would she let him walk up to her on a dark street?"

But Lenora was on send, not receive. "Cliff was like all men," she said angrily. "He wanted the freedom to explore his own sexuality but resented the idea that Helene wanted to explore hers. He demanded that she stop and she refused, so he killed her."

"How do you know he asked her to stop?" I said, thinking this was distinctly at odds with Martha Coffey's description of a tender Cliff carrying his straying wife inside after a hard night.

She ignored my question. "I want him punished for what he did."

"What about Eve?" I said, so aggravated that I wanted to provoke her. "She could have gotten close to her mother."

"That's a sick idea," she snorted. "Eve was devoted to her mother." Suddenly she stood up. "I'm afraid you'll have to leave now. I have someone coming in a few minutes and I need time to compose myself. This interview has been rather upsetting." She squinted her eyes and peered into my face. "I don't think you're really a friend of Eve's at all. I think you're just another one of those silly, impressionable girls who are always falling for Cliff. Poor Eve. She was always bringing friends home and having them go gaga over her father. Naturally he wouldn't do anything to prevent it. He thrived on their adulation. It's frightful to think he could do such a terrible thing and simply go on as though nothing had happened. I passed him yesterday in the hallway and he was humming to himself. Singing. Happier than I've seen him in years. Can you believe it, with Helene hardly cold?" She hurried me to the door, opened it, and practically shoved me through it.

The encounter left me feeling so good I decided to go stick my head in another lion's mouth. I was nothing if not a glutton for punishment. With Helene it might have been work hard, play hard. With me it was work hard, work hard. Play didn't enter into it. First I'd had an intense round with Dom. Then I'd let Lenora Stern abuse and patronize me. Now I had two more exciting choices. I could go confront Cliff and get his reaction to the whole mess, or I could go see Eve and tell her I'd talked to everyone on the planet and the whole thing was now as clear as mud. Since I was going to see Cliff in the morning anyway, I decided to try Eve. The alternative was to go home and brood about Andre.

I found her on the sidewalk in front of her building, doing something complicated to her bicycle. "Be done with this in a sec," she said. Waldemar, as silent as ever, was farther down the sidewalk, long legs straddling his bike, swaying slowly to whatever his headphones were piping into his head. He nodded and waved, but made no effort to disconnect. I repressed my annoyance and composed a letter to Miss Manners in my head, the gist of which was to ask why people felt that being plugged into mindless electronic devices exempted them from even the most rudimentary show of manners. More and more, people plugged themselves into machines, thought they'd been removed from contact with others, and no longer bothered to say "excuse me" when they bumped into people, didn't hold doors for those coming behind them, and no longer returned greetings. Mr. Sony and his cohorts had turned us into a nation of zombies, and they hadn't even needed to use voodoo.

Eve gave the wrench a final turn, stuck it into a pouch at her waist, and straightened up, wiping her hands on her black shorts. "Convinced yet?" she asked.

I shook my head. "It gets more complicated, not simpler. But remember, you promised to listen...."

"Can't right now," she said, "we're supposed to meet some people for a ten-mile ride and we're already late. We'll be back around six if you'd like to come by then."

"Can't. I've got work to do."

She looked up at the beautiful blue sky. "You should get a life, you know. It's too beautiful to be inside."

"I've been working for you," I reminded her.

She shrugged and bent down over the spokes. "Well, I guess that's something. I'll call you tonight."

"Would you mind if I used your bathroom?" I said, an idea suddenly brewing.

She sighed, then shrugged. "Why not. I'll come up with you and unlock the door. You can close it behind you when you leave. You don't mind if I don't stick around, do you? I really need this bike ride. Today is the first day I've felt even half human." Oh no, I thought, just because I was spending hours of my time on her, that was no reason she should waste any of hers staying to keep me company.

Quite the contrary. I'd expected that response. But I didn't tell her that. I couldn't tell her that I wanted to be alone in her apartment, and if a giant conscience had dropped out of a tree beside me and demanded in a deep and compelling voice to know why I was doing what I was doing, I wouldn't have had an answer, because I didn't know myself. They, the collective they who were driving me these days, had made me do it. That was all I could say. Don't blame me. I'm just a helpless victim, driven to do irrational things by forces beyond my control. Or by forces I wasn't controlling.

I pictured two angels, the good angel and the bad angel, sitting on a tree branch, looking down at me, discussing my behavior and giggling. Phooey on them. I was a detective, wasn't I? And detectives followed hunches. My hunch was that Eve knew something she wasn't telling me. That she was testing me to see if I could find it. Eve liked to test people.

Or maybe I was here because of my talk with Florio, trying to get inside Eve's head. The conversation had focused me again, clarified the fact that, like it or not, I was involved. Before, I'd put my right foot in and put my right foot out so many times I could have been doing the hokey pokey.

The apartment smelled like baking bread, a mystery I solved in true gumshoe fashion by going into the kitchen and discovering one of those handy-dandy do-it-all bread machines. Too hightech for me. If I can't get half a pound of dough gummed under my fingernails and all over my hands while I knead the bread, I don't feel like I've baked. I pulled on the gloves Eve used to do dishes—a detective can't be too careful—and started searching through her bedroom.

It's maddening to search for something when you don't know what you're looking for. After an hour of prowling I hadn't located anything suspicious or helpful. Sure there were catalogues of hunting gear, but they also had kayaks, tents, sportswear and all sorts of things that I knew Eve was interested in. Then I experienced an aha! moment when I found a crumpled black jumpsuit in the bottom of her closet, but the dark spots on it smelled and looked like grease or oil. She probably wore it when she tuned her bike or worked on her car.

In the medicine cabinet were more drugs than you'd find in a pharmacy. Several different painkillers, mood elevators and tranquilizers, some prescribed by Cliff. Still trying to protect his baby from the cruel world. I wondered if he knew what the others had prescribed? Looking at the stuff made me uncomfortably aware that my head was aching and my burned hand felt hot and sore. I took a couple of my own painkillers and went to search the living room. I found a lot of dust, even more bad music, and several pairs of very stinky socks. But no diaries recording secret plans, no revealing letters, no photographs of Cliff stabbing Helene or Rowan Ansel in the bushes or Waldemar Becker with a knife clenched between his many teeth, nothing more incriminating than a grocery list.

The whole place was hot and stuffy. Despite her love of the outdoors, Eve hadn't bothered to open a window and let some fresh air in. My head was pounding and the pills didn't seem to be doing me any good at all. I tried to recall the instructions from my head injury aftercare sheet, wondering if I should be worried, but I was too tired to think. I went back into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. I'd meant to rest only until my head felt well enough to drive, but I dropped almost instantly into a catatonic sleep. Just like Goldilocks. And I didn't care what the three bears thought when they came back. My last conscious act was to strip off the gloves, roll them up, and stick them in my pocket. Once a detective, always a detective, even when you're running on empty.

What woke me was the eerie sense that someone was in the apartment. It must have been that primal instinct Lenora had talked about. I lay very still, keeping my eyes shut, and listened. Someone in the bathroom, moving around. I rolled off the bed and padded quietly to the door. I could see a man's back, bent over the bathroom sink, going through the medicine cabinet. A man too short to be Waldemar. I felt a prickle of fear lift the hair on the back of my neck. As he shut the door, the mirror gave me a quick glimpse of his face. It was Cliff.

There was no way I could leave without being seen. I tiptoed back to the bed and played possum. I heard him come into the room and lean down, breathing on my neck. As though I were asleep, I flung out one arm, groaned, and turned over. He jumped back, startled, and knocked the alarm clock off the nightstand. It crashed to the floor and began jangling crazily. I sat up, opened my eyes, and screamed. Cliff Paris dropped the clock again and jumped about a foot in the air.

"Jesus, Cliff. You scared me!" Hand to chest in my best Margaret Dumont imitation.

"Scared you? I just lost a year off my life. What are you doing here?"

The appropriate scripted response, I suppose, as to ask him what he was doing there, but I hate being a cliché. "I came to see Eve but I got here just as they were setting off on their bikes. I thought I'd laze around and wait until they came back, and then I fell asleep. It's been kind of a rough weekend."

I watched him slip from startled intruder to caring friend, relieved that I didn't ask the obvious question. Boy was I getting cynical. Pretty soon I was going to have to take a vacation away from the rest of the human race to get my perspective back. "I see you've hurt your hand," he said. "What happened?"

"It's a burn. When I got home on Friday night there was someone in my apartment who knocked me out and set the place on fire."