Death Mask (2 page)
Molly looked confused and unhappy. "Look," she said. "I don't know what to think of this. I'd best get back inside and finish my painting. Why don't you try the cards again? Could be they'll tell you something totally different this time. Something less, you know, brrrrr!"
Sissy shrugged. "Okay, I can have a go. But I promise you, they'll come out the same, or the same message told with different cards. They always do, like the night follows the day."
Molly reached out toward the Mr. Lincoln rose, and for a moment Sissy thought that she was going to pick it, but then she hesitated and drew her hand back, as if picking it would somehow make it more real.
"Might as well leave it," she said. "Probably the only rose I'll ever manage to grow."
She gave Sissy a quick, unconvincing smile and went back into the house. Sissy turned back toward the vine trellis.
"Come on, Mister, let's see if we can make the future look a little more rosy. Or a little less rosy, I should say."
She had just hitched up her dress to sit down when Molly appeared at the back door again. "Sissy?"
Her voice was as colorless as cold water.
"What is it, Molly?"
"Come see for yourself."
Sissy followed her into her study. On her desk lay the gardening book, still open at the photograph of the Mr. Lincoln rose. The oval mirror was still there, too, and so was Molly's box of watercolors. But the sheet of cartridge paper on which she had been painting was completely blank.
Sissy turned toward the window. Outside, in the bright unfocused sunshine, the scarlet rose nodded and nodded, and the yellow ladybug continued to crawl slowly up its stem.
She turned back to Molly. "Paint something else," she told her. "Another rose. A bird, maybe. Anything."
Jimmy jabbed the elevator button yet again, and said, "What the hell are they doing up there? My slider's going cold."
"Some doofus has probably jammed the doors open," said Newton. "They're always doing that when they're moving their furniture from floor to floor. Tough shit if anybody else wants to get back to their office."
Jimmy pressed his finger on the button and kept it there, but the elevator's indicator remained stuck at fifteen. Six or seven other office workers had gathered around the elevator now, carrying box lunches and Styrofoam cups of coffee, as well as a delivery boy from Skyline with a per sis tent sniff and a large bag that smelled strongly of cinnamon chili.
"This is goddamned intolerable," grumbled a shirtsleeved accountant who was trying to balance three La Rosa's pizzas and three cups of soup on top of his briefcase. "Any volunteers to run upstairs and check out what's wrong?"
Jimmy pressed his hand against his chest and wheezed. "Sorry, dude. It's my asthma. Fifteen floors, that'd kill me. Newton, how about you, man? I'll hold your cheeseburger for you."
Three more office workers arrived, all of them carrying takeout lunches.
"Goddamned elevator's jammed again," explained the shirtsleeved accountant, as if it weren't obvious.
There were three elevators in the Giley Building in downtown Cincinnati, but most of the time only one of them was working, and even when it did, its doors shuddered so violently whenever they were closing that Jimmy was always worried that they would refuse to open again, and he would be trapped inside.
The Giley Building had been built in less than eleven months, during the Depression, by hundreds of hands eager for the work. It had been scheduled for demolition more than three years ago, but local conservationists had fought to preserve its brown-brick Italianate facade, as well as its gloomy brown marble lobby, with murals of Cincinnati's history, like the arrival of the first riverboat, and the building of the first suspension bridge over the Ohio River, and the opening of the Procter Gamble soap factory.
Today, the building was less than two-thirds occupied, and many of the floors were deserted, with echoing corridors and tipped-over chairs and notice boards that were still covered with yellowing sales charts.
Newton said, "Oh, man," but handed Jimmy his White Castle burger box all the same. He crossed over to the staircase, and he had already opened the door when there was a bing! and the elevator's indicator light went from fifteen to fourteen, and then to twelve.
"Hallelujah," said the shirtsleeved accountant, and the rest of the office workers gave a cynical cheer.
Newton came back and reclaimed his cheeseburger. "I'm going to change my job, man. I'm going to work in a building with elevators that actually go up and down, and the fricking air-conditioning actually conditions the fricking air, and half of the offices ain't populated by ghosts."
Newton thought that he had heard people walking around the empty floors late in the evening, and echoing voices, and telephones ringing that nobody answered.
"You're crazy, dude," Jimmy told him. "You know there's no such thing as ghosts."
"Oh, yeah? And where do you think that dead people go when they die?"
"They don't go nowhere. When you die it's like someone switches the lights off, that's all, and doesn't never switch them back on again. And even if dead people did go somewhere, they sure as hell wouldn't go to the office."
"I know I darn well wouldn't," put in the shirtsleeved accountant. "When I die, I'm going to Vegas."
The elevator's indicator continued to bing! its way from twelve to eleven and ten and nine, and eventually it reached the lobby. The office workers crowded around it, waiting for the doors to shudder open.
At last, they did-chug-chug-chug-and everybody took a step forward. But as they did so, a figure inside the elevator toppled to the floor, and they immediately took a step back.
"Jesus," said Jimmy.
"Oh my good God," said a woman right behind him.
A young woman was crouched facedown in the middle of the elevator floor, where she had just fallen, and underneath her a middle-aged man was lying on his side with his back to them. The young woman was dressed in a cream-colored pantsuit, and the middle-aged man was wearing a pale blue sport coat, but both of them were covered in blood. The elevator was plastered in blood, too, all the way up to the ceiling. There were sprays and runs and dozens of bloody handprints all over the mirrors.
Most horrific of all, a large kitchen knife was still sticking out of the young woman's right shoulder.
Without any hesitation, the shirtsleeved accountant tossed his cups of soup and his pizzas and his briefcase onto the lobby floor.
"Call nine-one-one!" he shouted. He stepped into the elevator and placed two fingertips against the young woman's neck. "She's still alive! Help me!"
Jimmy pushed his box lunch into Newton's hands and stepped into the elevator, too. The floor was so slippery with blood that he skidded and almost lost his balance.
"What do you want me to do, dude?" he asked the shirtsleeved accountant.
"Let's lift her out of here-gently. Lay her on her side on the floor. Has anybody called nine-one-one? We need coats, blankets-something to keep her warm. And we need to find out where she's been stabbed-keep some pressure on any arterial wounds."
Jimmy said, "Shouldn't we take out the knife?"
"No, leave it there. The paramedics can do that. A lot of stab victims die like that, taking the knife out."
Between them, he and Jimmy dragged the young woman out of the elevator and laid her on the floor. A matronly secretary knelt down beside her and unbuttoned her coat and her blouse, trying to locate her wounds.
The shirtsleeved accountant went back into the elevator and checked the pulse of the middle-aged man.
"How about him?" asked Jimmy, but the shirtsleeved accountant looked up and shook his head.
"Looks like he was stabbed straight in the heart. Couple of times in the lungs, too."
"Unbelievable," said Newton. "Fricking unbelievable."
The matronly secretary said, "This young lady's been lucky, I think. I can only find cuts on her hands and her arms. She must have been fighting for her life."
Jimmy hunkered down beside her. The young woman's hazel-colored eyes were open, although she appeared to be staring at nothing at all. She was mid-twentieish, with light brown hair that was cut in a long bob, but which was now stuck together with drying blood. There were bloody fingerprints all over her forehead and her right cheek.
"Are you okay?" Jimmy asked her. The young woman didn't answer, but she was still breathing, and he could see her lips move slightly.
"You're going to be fine," Jimmy told her. "I promise you, you're going to be fine."
They heard sirens outside as paramedics and police arrived, and the lobby was filled by the kaleidoscopic reflections of red and blue lights.
Jimmy stood up. The shirtsleeved accountant came up to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. "You did good, son. Thanks."
"Hey, I didn't do nothing. You a first-aider?"
"Ex-marine. Served in Iraq. You get plenty of practice out there, I can tell you, patching up people with various kinds of holes in them."
"Shit!" said Newton. "Whoever did this, he's still in the building, right? He didn't come down the stairs, did he? So there's no way he could have gotten out."
"Not unless he jumped from the fifteenth floor," said the shirtsleeved accountant grimly.
Inexplicable
It was evening by the time Detective Kunzel rang the doorbell, and most of the garden was in shadow. But Sissy and Molly were still sitting under the vine trellis, drinking wine and looking at the terra-cotta pots with a mixture of awe and disbelief-but with delight, too, because what had happened was so magical.
During the afternoon, Molly had painted five more roses, of varying colors, from buttery yellow to darkest crimson. She had also painted a purple hollyhock and a sunflower and a ragged white Shasta daisy. And here they were, nodding in the breeze, as real as if she had grown them from cuttings and seeds.
"How do you think it happens?" asked Molly. "Do you think it's some kind of mirage? You know, like an optical illusion, except that you can touch it, too?"
Sissy blew out smoke. "If you ask me, sweetheart, it's more important to find out why it happens, rather than how. Nothing like this ever happens for no reason. Never did in my lengthy experience, anyhow."
They had witnessed the miracle as it happened, right in front of their eyes. After Molly had painted a rose, they had stood back and seen it gradually fade from her sketchbook, as if the paper had been bleached by the sunlight. At the same time, they had looked out of the window and seen the same rose materialize in one of the pots-only the ghost of a rose to begin with, but then more and more solid, until it was real enough to be picked, and its thorns actually pricked their fingers and drew blood.
They had watched it happen with every flower, and a Japanese beetle, too. Molly had been reluctant to paint a bird, though, in case it wasn't anatomically correct and couldn't fly.
Sissy had dealt out the DeVane cards yet again, and asked them to explain the miracle in more detail. This time, however, the cards were unusually obscure, and difficult to interpret. When they behaved like this, Sissy always complained that they were muttering.
The last card was le Sourd-muet, the Deaf-Mute. It showed a young woman wearing nothing but a garland of pink roses around her hips. She had one finger raised to her lips, and one hand cupped to her right ear, as if she were straining to hear. She was standing close to a dark lake on which three mute swans were swimming. On the far side of the lake, there was a grove of trees in which a naked man was hiding. His skin was very white, as if he were made of marble, but both of his hands were scarlet.
"What on God's earth does this mean?" Molly had asked her.
"I don't know. Maybe it means that we shouldn't ask too many questions. Not for a while, anyhow. Swans are a symbol of patience, but they're a symbol of tragic death, too. And look. There's that figure again-like that statue in the sculptor's studio. And more roses. This is all very odd."
"I thought the cards were supposed to explain things, not make them even more confusing than they are already."
"Not always," said Sissy. "Now and then they simply tell you that they can't tell you anything. That usually means that you have six or seven possible futures waiting for you, and the cards can't decide which one of those futures is actually going to happen."
"But I thought my life was all mapped out, every second, right from the moment I was born? You know, like karma."
"Oh, no, not at all! You always have choices! But there are certain critical moments in your life when your entire future can be altered by a single random event-like whether you overslept and missed that bus, or whether it was raining and your shopping bag broke and some really attractive stranger helped you to pick up your shopping. Look at the way you met Trevor at the Chidlaw Gallery. He was only going there to give them a quote on their insurance."
Molly nodded, and smiled. "The first time I talked to him, I thought, 'What a good-looking guy-but what a stuffed shirt.'
But then he looked at my painting and said, 'That's amazing…that really comes alive.' And he didn't even know it was mine."
"Exactly," said Sissy. "At moments like that, the cards seem to be waiting for one more piece of the jig-saw to fall into place before they're ready to tell you what's going to happen to you next."
She finished her glass of wine and said, "The DeVane cards are not just for fortune-telling, though. They're like a key to all of the inexplicable things that happen in life. Why are we born? What are we here for? That red-haired woman I saw in Fountain Square last week-why was she crying? Why did Frank die so young and leave me widowed for so long?"
"How come I can paint roses and they appear for real in my garden?"
Sissy picked up her glass but it was empty. "Ha! I wish I could tell you. But maybe you could paint us another bottle of Zinfandel."
The doorbell rang. "You're not expecting anybody, are you?" asked Sissy.
"It's probably Sheila, bringing my cake ring back. I don't know why she doesn't keep it. I'm worse than you when it comes to baking."
"My dear-nobody is worse than me when it comes to baking. Whenever I used to bake, I got answering smoke signals from the Comanche."
Molly went inside. Sissy took out another cigarette, but Mr. Boots tilted his head on one side in disapproval, so she tucked it back into the pack.
"You don't have the spirit of Frank hiding inside of you, do you?" she asked him. She leaned forward so that her nose was only an inch away from his and said, "If you're in there, Frank, I promise to cut down. I'll even try the nicotine gum."
Molly came back out into the yard, accompanied by two men. One of them was broad shouldered and bulky, with brush-cut salt-and-pepper hair and eyes as deep set as currants in Pillsbury's dough. He wore a tan-colored suit that was far too tight for him under the arms and a green shirt that looked as if it was buttoned up wrong, and his belly bulged over his belt.
Behind him came a thin, snappy-looking individual with deliberately mussed-up hair and the face of a handsome rodent. He wore a black designer shirt and he had a pair of DG sunglasses hooked into his breast pocket.
Molly led the two men down to the arbor. "Sissy…this is Detective Mike Kunzel and this is Detective-What did you say your name was?"
"Bellman, Freddie Bellman."
"You caught me talking to my late husband," said Sissy. "You must think I'm going doolally."
Detective Kunzel looked down at Mr. Boots and said, "Not at all, ma'am. I used to have the worst-tempered Labrador bitch you ever met, and I was one hundred percent sure that she was possessed by the spirit of my late mother-in-law, may she rest in peace."
Molly said, "How have you been, Mike? How's Betty? Still singing for the Footlighters?"
"Betty's great, thanks for asking. They just gave her the part of Milly in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I've had 'Goin' Courtin' stuck on my brain for weeks."
"Jesus-you and me both," said Detective Bellman, but then gave a quick, sly grin to show that he meant no offense.
"So what can I do for you, Mike?" asked Molly. "How about some refreshment? Limeade? Cranberry juice? Ale-8-One?"
"If I wasn't on duty, Crayola, I could do righteous justice to an ice-cold Hud. But I'm good, thanks. I came to ask you if you could come over to the University Hospital and do your forensic artist stuff."
Molly looked across at Sissy, and the expression on her face said, My God, your sculptor card predicted this only hours ago. But she turned back to Detective Kunzel and said, "Thought you were all computerized these days."
"Well, pretty much. But Lieutenant Booker thought you were the right person for this particular job, on account of your interview technique. We have a young woman in the trauma center who was attacked in the Giley Building round about lunchtime today. Some knife-wielding crazy trapped her in an elevator and stabbed her three times in the back. She survived, but there was another guy in the elevator with her who wasn't so lucky.
"She's very shocked, very distressed, but the elevators in the Giley Building don't have CCTV, and obviously we need a composite of the perpetrator as quick as we can get it. That's why Lieutenant Booker wanted somebody with real sensitivity when it comes to asking questions, and there isn't nobody with more real sensitivity than you."
"Nice of you to say so. I'd be glad to do it. Do you want me to go over there right now?"
"Give you a ride, if you like. I can give you all the grisly details on the way."
Sissy said, "Did anybody else see the killer?"
"No, ma'am. The young woman who was stabbed was the only eyewitness. We searched that building top to bottom, all twenty-three floors, and we're still not sure how the perpetrator managed to escape. But over seven hundred seventy-five people still work there, and so it couldn't have been too difficult for him to mingle with the crowds."
"Or her," Sissy corrected him.
"Well, sure. But this is not the type of attack that I would normally associate with a female perpetrator."
"Not unless the young woman and the dead man were having an affair, and she was a jealous wife."
"You sure have some imagination, ma'am," said Detective Kunzel. "But right now I think we'd better stick to the empirical facts."
"Sometimes the facts can be very deceptive," Sissy countered him. "It's insight, that's what you need."
"My mother-in-law tells fortunes," Molly explained. "She's very good… She can practically tell you what you're going to choose for dessert tomorrow."
Detective Kunzel tried to look impressed. "Wow. We could use a talent like that. Maybe I can call on you, ma'am, if this cases reaches any kind of an impasse. Or if I need to find out a surefire winner for the Kentucky Derby."
"You're being sarcastic, Detective. But don't worry, I'm used to it. My late husband was a detective in the Connecticut State Police, and he was a skeptic, too, when it came to fortune-telling. But I would be more than happy to help if you want me to. So long as you say please."
"Please?"
Sissy was quite aware that "Please?" was the distinctively Cincinnati way of saying "Pardon?" or "Excuse me?" but she pretended that she didn't.
"There," she said. "You've managed to choke it out already."
At that moment, Trevor came out into the yard holding Victoria by the hand. Sissy's first and only grand-daughter was nine years old now, very skinny, with huge brown eyes like her mother and long, dark hair that was braided into plaits. She wore a pink sleeveless top, and white shorts, and sparkly pink sneakers.
Trevor was so much like his late father, with a wave of black hair and clear blue eyes, although his face was rounder and not so sharply chiseled as Frank's had been, and he hadn't inherited Frank's quick and infectious grin. He had shown no inclination to join the police force like his father, either. He was much more introspective and cautious, and he believed in calculating risks, rather than taking them. He was wearing a blue checkered Timberland shirt and sharply pressed khakis.
"Hey, Mike!" he said. "What are you doing here, feller?"
Detective Kunzel clapped him on the shoulder. "Hi, Trevor. Sorry about this, but we've come to borrow your talented young wife for an hour or two."
"What is it? Missing person?"
"Homicide. We had a stabbing this afternoon, down at the Giley Building. One dead, one serious."
"I heard about it while I was going to bring Victoria home from her party. Jeez."
Sissy said, "Why don't I take Victoria inside and give her a drink? How was your dance class, Victoria?"
"I was terrible. I kept do-si-doing round the wrong way."
Sissy took her hand and led her into the kitchen. "I used to dance like that, too. Always do-si-doing round the wrong way. In fact I think I've spent my whole life do-si-doing round the wrong way."
Victoria sat down at the large pine table, and Sissy poured her a glass of strawberry milk. "You want cookies?"
"I'm not really allowed, not before supper."
"Well, your mom has to do some work for the police this evening, so I think what I'll do is, I'll take us all out for supper, and when you go out for supper you're allowed cookies to keep your strength up while you're waiting for your order to arrive. How would you like to go to the Blue Ash Chili and have one of those great big chicken sandwiches with all the cheese on it?"
Victoria's eyes widened. "Can we really?"
"Sure we can. It's about time we ate something unhealthy around here."
Sissy was about to go to her room to fetch her wrap when Victoria said, "Grandma-you just dropped one of your cards."
She looked down. One of the DeVane cards had slipped out of the pack-but somehow it had fallen edgewise, and it was standing upright in the crack between two of the wide pine planks that made up the tabletop.
"Well, that's pretty neat, isn't it? I'll bet I couldn't do that again, not in a million years!"
She hesitated for a moment, but then she plucked the card out of the crack and peered at it through her spectacles.
Une Jeune fille tombante, a Young Girl, Falling. It showed a girl in a yellow dress falling down a well. Her arms were upraised as if somebody had just released their hold on her, and her expression was one of absolute terror. Up above her, a man in a strange lopsided beret was grinning down at her as she fell and throwing roses after her, as if her falling were some kind of dramatic performance.
