Murder is a Girl's Best Friend (42 page)

So you can imagine my breathless, joyful, heart-soaring delight when Abby started squirming . . . and groaning . . . and then suddenly opened her eyes! And you must know how happy I was when she pushed herself up to a sitting position, shook her hair down her back, looked over at Terry, and said, “Hey, what the hell happened?”

“Oh, Abby!” Terry sobbed, so overcome with relief I thought he’d start bawling again. “Are you okay? Have you been hurt?”

“My head’s killing me.” She touched the egg-sized lump on her forehead. “Oh, now I remember!” she said, giving Terry a poke in the ribs. “When we busted into Paige’s apartment, you turned around and shoved me down to the floor. I think my head hit the wall when I fell. What did you
do
that for?”

“Elsie had a gun and she was aiming it at us. I had to push you out of the way.”

“Elsie?!” she shrieked. “I
knew
it! I
told
you that old bat was involved! Where is she? Locked in the closet? And where is Paige? Is she okay?” Abby shot her eyes around the apartment, looking for Elsie and me. “Oh, my God!” she cried, when she saw me lying on the bloody floor. “Paige has been shot!” She pushed herself to her hands and knees and crawled toward me—fast!—across the glass-littered linoleum.

Terry jumped up and lunged into the living room to the phone. “I’ll call for an ambulance!”

When Abby reached my side and saw the shape I was in, she broke down in tears. “Oh, Paige! This is so horrible!” she howled, slobbering all over herself. “And it’s all my fault! I never should have let you stay here alone!”

“Don’t worry,” I said, allowing my head to fall back on the floor. “I’m going to be fine. I’m not losing any more blood, and I’m still conscious. The doctors will fix me up in no time.” I didn’t believe a word I was saying. The pain was profound, and I was growing weaker by the second. Staring up at Abby’s frantic face, I realized my vision was getting blurry.

So when Abby’s face vanished and two tall, shadowy figures suddenly appeared above me, I couldn’t see who it was right away. It took me several seconds of squinting and straining and forcing my eyes to focus before I realized that one of the apparitions was Dan, and that the other one—get this!—was Elsie. Her broken jaw was hanging open and her wrists were in handcuffs.

“What the devil?” I sputtered, feeling a stab of new energy. I pushed myself up to my good elbow again. “What’s going on? How did you . . . ?”

“Don’t talk now, Paige,” Dan sternly interrupted. “You’ve got to save your strength. The ambulance will be here soon.”

“But I don’t understand what’s happening!” I whimpered.

“You and me both, babe,” Dan grumbled. His blurry face was plastered with a blurry scowl. He dropped into a squat, brushed his fingers down my cheek, and stared into my eyes with fierce concern. “But now’s not the time to discuss it. You’re too weak. We’ll talk later, after the docs get you patched up.”

 

As I lowered my heavy head back down to the floor, a gust of wind blew over my freezing cold body. “Could somebody please close the back door?” I whimpered, teeth chattering, consciousness waning fast.

 

Then Elsie started singing the National Anthem, and Abby and Terry started dancing “Ring around the Rosy,” and Dan wrapped me up in Bob’s old Army blanket, and Judy Catcher’s face appeared on the ceiling, gazing down at me with the warmest imaginable smile. And then the ceiling started spinning, and Judy’s face began to swirl, and I was five years old again, wearing my horse slippers and my plastic turban, riding the merry-go-round so fast and so furiously I thought I’d be dizzy forever.

Epilogue

HAVE YOU EVER WOKEN UP FROM A CRAZY dream believing that all the wild and scary things you dreamt about had actually taken place? Well, that’s what happened to me when I came to that night in the hospital. Except it happened in reverse. I woke up believing that all the wild and scary things that had actually taken place were nothing but a crazy dream.

It took a few minutes for my sense of reality to return—for me to realize that the bed I was lying in was not my own; that my body was all bandaged up for a reason. And when I turned my head to the side and saw Dan sitting in a chair right next to the bed, staring at me intently (and oh-so-seriously) with his searing black eyes, I had all the proof I needed that the ghastly scenes swirling around like smoke in my head had really occurred.

“I don’t know whether to kiss you or kick you,” Dan said, making his conflicting emotions conspicuously clear. “But since you look like a Martian with that silly thing on your head, I’ve got to kiss you. A girl in a space suit drives me crazy.” With that, he raised himself out of his chair, leaned over the bed railing, cupped my face in his big warm hands, and planted the world’s steamiest kiss on my startled but delighted mouth. (And I had thought black silk underwear would turn Dan on! Apparently hair dryer hoods and hospital gowns were more to his liking.)

As soon as he pried his luscious lips away and my heartbeat returned to normal, I sputtered, “Why did they leave me like this? They could have removed the cap and take the curlers out!”

“The docs and nurses had a few more important things to take care of,” Dan said. “In the Emergency Room, believe it or not, gunshot wounds take precedence over hairdos.”

I didn’t want to be reminded of the gun, or the shots, or the wounds. “What time is it?” I asked, quickly changing the uncomfortable topic.

He looked at his watch. “Four-thirty in the morning.”

“Oh, shoot!” (As soon as those words were out of my mouth, I wished I’d thought of a better—i.e., less ballistic—way to express my disappointment.)

“What’s the matter, babe?” Dan gave me one of his cocky, sexy, melt-your-bones-to-molasses smiles. “Past your bedtime?”

“No, it’s past Christmas!” I exclaimed. “And I never got to give you your present, or even wish you a happy holiday!”

Dan chuckled for a second, then turned serious. “Just knowing you’re alive makes all my days happy.”

Joy to the world!
I sang to myself.
A girl could get used to this. I should get almost killed more often.

But these jubilant feelings didn’t last long. Because before I knew it, Dan’s whole demeanor had changed. One minute he was lovey-dovey and all smiles, and the next he was busting a gasket, ranting and raving like Joe McCarthy himself, telling me off for risking my precious life just so I could play detective in yet another unsolved murder case.

Terry and Abby had told him the whole story, he said, and he didn’t care how many times Bob had saved Terry’s life in Korea, or how hard Terry had begged me to help him find his little sister’s killer, or how much I wanted to write a story about the murder, I should never, ever, ever have gotten involved the way I did. It was an outrageous, unheard-of, unconscionable thing for me to do, and I should have my head examined for even thinking that I could solve another homicide.

(At this particular point in time—while I was lying there immobile on my back and bandaged up like a mummy—I was inclined to agree with him. But I didn’t tell him that, of course.)

Dan was really, really angry that I hadn’t told him about the case and asked
him
to look into Judy’s murder. Why the hell did I keep it a secret from him? Did I actually believe that I was so much smarter than he was? Did I really think I could conduct a better murder investigation than the whole darn NYPD? And how
dare
I put myself in so goddamn much danger?! Did I ever stop to think how horrible it would be for him if I were killed and he had to head up a search for
m y
murderer?

I had to admit (to myself and to Dan) that that particular thought hadn’t once crossed my mind. And then I had to apologize—profusely—for my lack of consideration. And my lack of trust. And my reckless self-endangerment. And my “idiotically inflated head.” (Dan’s words, not mine.)

But nothing I said would soothe the savage beast—not even my emotional protestations about the laziness and inef fectualness of Detective Hugo Sweeny, or my sworn testimony that I thought he (Dan) would
never
interfere in another precinct’s homicide investigation.

He most certainly
would
have interfered, Dan claimed (more vociferously than I care to remember). Especially since he already knew what a shiftless sonofabitch Sweeny was, and how incompetent he’d been in the past, and how he’d begun closing cases prematurely because his retirement was coming up soon and he wanted to leave the job with a clean slate. And even if he
didn’t
know all that stuff about Sweeny, Dan insisted, he would have seen to it that the Catcher case was reopened. With so much glaring evidence in hand, that’s what any good cop would do.

Okay, okay! So I was a stupid fool. And everything Dan said to me in the hospital that night (I mean morning) was totally legitimate. I really
should
have told him about Judy’s murder. And about the diamonds. And I should have revealed everything at the very beginning—the same day Terry met me at the automat and asked me to help him find the creep who had killed his sister.

But
you
understand why I didn’t, don’t you? You know how overwhelmed I was by Terry’s pain and sorrow, and by his desperate plea for help, and by the fact that he had been so close to my late husband in his final days. And you also know how crazy Dan would have gone if I had even
tried
to discuss the details of the Judy Catcher murder case with him, right? No matter what Dan says, all hell would have broken loose! And he would have banished me from the investigation. He would have forced me to give up my search . . . and give up my story . . . and, well, give up my natural (though most would say
un
natural) career goals.

So what was a girl supposed to do? Be true to her late husband . . . or to her new boyfriend . . . or to herself? Finding that question impossible to answer, I chose to dodge the truth altogether. I heaved a heavy sigh, closed my weary eyes, and fell into a sleep so deep it was deadly.

 

 

I WAS IN THE HOSPITAL FOR A WEEK, AND Dan came to visit every day. He was still mad at me, but he was also still pretty crazy about me (I could tell by the way his strong, craggy face turned all mushy when he thought I wasn’t looking). And, as much as he didn’t want to rehash—or give credence to—my involvement in the Judy Catcher case, he couldn’t curb his professional curiosity, or stop himself from picking up the investigation where I’d left off.

It wasn’t enough that he’d apprehended the murderer himself; that he’d been sharp and alert enough to chase Elsie down when he saw her burst out of my building and start running away like a thief; that he’d had the sense (and the instinct) to ignore all the rules and handcuff her right there and then, in the middle of Bleecker Street on Christmas Day, and march her—jawbone wagging like a broken gate—back up the stairs to my apartment. And it wasn’t enough that Elsie had, just a few days later, in light of all the irrefutable evidence against her, and in the presence of her lawyer and several prison officials, written up and signed a full confession (the prison docs had wired her busted jaw together, but she still couldn’t talk).

Nope! That wasn’t enough for our man Dan! There were still a few loose ends in the case, and he wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d tied them all together. And
I
was the only one who could help him do that. (This fact tickled me pink, but seemed to give Dan a humongous headache.)

Elsie had admitted to killing Roscoe as well as Judy, but her written confession didn’t fully explain how Roscoe had become involved. So Dan had to come to me for the answers—which I painstakingly (okay,
proudly
) supplied. I told Dan everything Elsie had said about Roscoe—how he had let himself into Judy’s apartment the night of the murder, found Elsie searching for the diamonds, made himself a partner, etcetera, etcetera, and then pushed me in front of a train when he thought I was carting said diamonds around in a lunchbox.

I should have kept that last bit to myself. To say that Dan was upset is like calling an earthquake unsettling. I thought his skull would explode! I guess it should have made me feel good that he was so devastated by my close call in the subway, but the truth is it made me feel awful to cause him such pain. So I changed the subject as fast as I could and told him about Lillian Smythe.

After explaining that Judy’s aging sugar daddy was Lillian’s
real
daddy, I told Dan about the Christmas Eve party at the Smythe’s penthouse, relating the particulars of my chat with Augusta and describing how Lillian had reacted to seeing her mother’s antique diamond necklace clasped around
my
neck. Then I told Dan about the phone conversation I’d overheard at the Chelsea Realty office—when Roscoe was yelling his head off at somebody named Lily—and disclosed my belief that Roscoe and Lillian had been in cahoots for some time, scheming to steal back the Smythe family diamonds long
before
Judy was murdered.