Not Safe After Dark (14 page)

A funny business these conventions, he thought as he went into his room. Hours of manic glad-handing, hurried conversations in lobbies and men’s rooms, talking business even with your dick
in your hand, then when you finally got to be alone at the end of the night, all you felt was an incredible loneliness descend. At least Walter did.

So there you are in your strange hotel room alone miles from home after the party. Oh, the guys were setting up all-night poker sessions, planning trips to strip joints and bars, but Walter had
had enough of all that, and of his colleagues. He wanted to
be
alone, but he didn’t want to
feel
alone.

It was the wind, he thought, that goddamn Santa Ana. And the air-conditioner had quit. Just his luck. He lay down on the bed with his hands behind his head and tried to relax. He couldn’t.
He hadn’t drunk much. That was one thing he had under control these days. That was why he couldn’t for the life of him remember closing any bar with Jimmy Lavalli in Baltimore. If those
tanned bastards knew what they looked like after they’d had a few too many . . . anyway, those days were past. As he lay there restless in the heat, feeling the band tighten around his head,
the heartburn start to kick in, the resentment and fear churn inside him, he became aware of one feeling he would never have expected. God dammit, Walter Dimchuk was horny!

Not that it had never happened before, of course, but never with such a keen, urgent edge, not for a long time. He remembered the outing he’d had with Al and Larry yesterday afternoon.
Given a couple of spare hours, they had driven to Santa Monica, walked on the pier, the boardwalk towards Venice. And now as he lay trying to find sleep, all Walter could find were the disturbing
images of those girls in their bikinis, all that smooth, firm, tanned flesh.

He turned over. This was ridiculous. His lust felt so strong it was gripping his heart, making him squirm. The images churned in his mind, spurring him on. It was the damn heat, he knew it.
Maybe if he could get out for a while. Tell someone at the desk to fix his air-conditioning while he took a little drive around town.

He sat up and slid his shoes back on. Yeah, that was the thing to do. Maybe drive to the ocean and cool off a little. That or a cold shower. He looked at his watch. Still only eleven
o’clock. OK, car keys, jacket . . .

•

Such romantic-sounding street names they had: La Cienega, Sepulveda, La Brea. But they weren’t so fucking romantic when you were on them; they were either freeways or
roads running past shitty little Spanish-style stucco houses with graffiti all over the stucco and postage-stamp gardens full of junk.

It was cool in the rental, but Walter still couldn’t shake the horniness. He’d pass a row of stores set back from the road and see a gang of kids there, girls in cut-off jeans and
halter tops drinking Coke from the bottle, breasts jutting out. It was getting worse, as if the Santa Ana somehow slipped in through the air-conditioning and messed with his brain.

He found himself on Hollywood Boulevard. Walter loved old movies, the black and white kind, and the real stars they had back then like Cary Grant, Garbo, Bogie, Gable, Jimmy Stewart. Christ, he
must have seen
It’s a Wonderful Life
about twenty times, and then they went and colourized the motherfucker. But the boulevard, with all those stars in the sidewalk, had gone to porn
theatres, dirty bookstores with barred windows, hookers, pimps, muggers, losers.

He was stopped at a red light when he heard the tap on his window. If it had been a man, he would have burnt rubber driving away, even through a stop light. It wasn’t. Nervously, he rolled
down the window.

‘Wann’ good time, mister? Wann’ have some fun?’

He looked at her. She must have been all of sixteen, going on forty, but she was pretty, a Latino with that honey skin and lustrous black hair. From what he could see of the rest of her, it
looked pretty good too.

Walter hesitated. He had never been with a hooker before. He knew it happened at conventions, and somehow the guys thought it was all right, playing away from home like that. What the old lady
doesn’t know won’t hurt her, hey Wally? But Walter had never done it. Now, though, with this girl hanging in his window practically spilling her tits onto his lap, with the lights
changing, someone blowing a horn behind him and the desire sharp as knife cutting away inside him . . . Well, he opened the door.

The hooker got in and Walter drove off. She was wearing a short black skirt, way up around her thighs, and a tight pink halter made of material so thin he could see her nipples poking through.
Her bare midriff was flat, with an outie belly button.

His mouth was dry. ‘Where?’ he croaked.

She directed him to a rundown hotel off Sunset, and he followed her up the stairs in a daze, aware only of the smell of disinfectant and rotting meat in the dim lobby and of the scuffed, stained
linoleum on the stairs.

In the shaded light, the room didn’t look too bad. What did it matter, anyway? She took his money first, then Walter watched as she wriggled out of the halter and her honey breasts with
the dark hard nipples quivered as they fell free. Grinning at him, the tip of her tongue between her small, white teeth, she unzipped her skirt and let it fall. She was wearing only white panties
now. He could see the dark shadow of her pubic hair, and some of the hairs curled around the edges of the silky material.

‘You no undress?’ she asked. ‘Wann’ me take your clothes off?’

Walter nodded. Deftly, she took off his jacket, shirt, pants.

‘Oh, my, you so big,’ she said, touching his erection. ‘So big and hard. Safe,’ she said, reaching for a condom from her bag. ‘Always safe.’

Walter felt glad of that. AIDS had crossed his mind more than once between Hollywood Boulevard and the hotel, but if she always insisted on a condom she was bound to be clean, he thought. Desire
seared like the sharp, hot desert wind inside him, driving him recklessly and thoughtlessly on.

She put her hands on his chest and pushed him gently down on the bed, then she straddled him, felt for his penis between her legs and thrust down on it slowly. Walter groaned and reached for her
breasts as she moved back and forth on him. Dimly, he was aware of the bed springs creaking, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but this moist, warm tightness all around him, sucking him
in, hooking onto his desire and channelling it, concentrating it. He couldn’t have held back if he’d tried. It seemed like no time at all when everything burst and warmth flooded his
veins. The woman moaned. He knew she was faking, but he didn’t care.

Then it was all over. Walter thanked her and hurried out to his car and his shame. At first, he sat there breathing hard and cranked up the air-conditioner. His stomach clenched, his loins felt
dry and empty, but the steel band was still there, tightening around his skull. Lighting a cigarette, he turned onto the boulevard and headed back to the hotel.

•

They still hadn’t fixed the air-conditioning, he noticed, and when he phoned down to complain, the desk clerk said no one would be able to do it till the morning. Just his
fucking luck. He should have felt better after sating his desire, he knew, but when he lay down and relived what he had just done he was appalled.

It was only midnight. No more than an hour ago he had been an innocent, a virtuous man. Now he had been tainted. How little time it took. And now he was worried, too. Condom or no condom, he
could still get AIDS. That was a fact. The wind had done this to him, the wind and the palm trees and the hooker with the wonderful breasts and the sweet, warm place inside her. He’d been
suckered. Jesus Christ, he wept, how could he face Kate and Maria again, after he’d been corrupted? That hooker hadn’t been much older than his daughter. The goddamn hot wind had made
him fuck his own daughter. Even if they didn’t know,
he
knew. He couldn’t face them. His marriage was over, his family broken, all because of some two-bit whore who had tempted
him and given him a disease. He ground his teeth. The heat seemed to bore into his bones the way the damp cold did in England that time he went with Kate, so many years ago. He was burning up.
Maybe he was already showing symptoms of whatever disease that whore had given him. But that was ridiculous. Maybe he’d got flu. Or maybe it was the Santa Ana.

He turned over and tried to sleep, but the steel band tightened and the guilt hammered away at him, making sleep impossible. His life was ruined. All because of fucking California. He
couldn’t think straight any more. Nothing but images shot through his mind, disjointed images: Kate crying; Maria slipping her panties off and rubbing her hand between her legs; the tanned
assholes with the two-thousand-dollar smiles who were going to have his job. He couldn’t take it any more. He had to do something. Christ, they’d walked over old Walter Dimchuk for long
enough, pushed him around, used him for a doormat, laughed behind his back. Now they’d corrupted his soul. Goddammit, enough was enough. His luck was going to change.

Hardly thinking, he got dressed quickly and picked up his car keys. At the last moment, just before the door shut behind him, he went back and picked up the ice pick from the dish by the
television.

•

This time it was a Caucasian girl: blonde hair, clean-cut looks, but the same style, tight short skirt and halter top. And she wanted to make a quick phone call before she got
into his car and directed him to a different hotel. It was a step up from the last one, he noticed, for Wally was noticing things clearly now, like the old-fashioned bell on the wooden desk, the
discreet damask armchairs in the lobby, the wood-panelling look, the hovering scent of sandalwood. In fact, Walter felt strangely calm and in control now he knew what he was going to do. The steel
band had loosened.

He smiled to himself as she went through her undressing routine, a bit more elaborate and drawn out than the last one, with slow gestures and teasing glances. He felt no desire now; it was all
gone. He let her continue.

Outside, the hot wind huffed and puffed at the windows. The halter revealed white, droopy breasts, the kind that fold over like envelope flaps. Her eyes were unfocused and dull, as if she were
on drugs. She had a large bruise on the outside of her right thigh and a little scar just under her navel. Appendicitis? he wondered. But the appendix was further to the right, wasn’t it? No
matter. She stood naked before him finally, and he still felt no desire, only disgust and hatred. It wasn’t the same one who had ruined him, corrupted him, but they were all the same
underneath. Whores. They all shared the same tainted, rotten soul. She would do. He let her unbutton his shirt, then he moved her gently away and asked her to lie face down on the bed.

‘Wanna come in from behind, hey, honey?’ she said, and grinned lasciviously, lying down and hugging the pillow.

‘No, that’s not it.’ Walter’s voice felt strange – dry and stuck deep in his chest. ‘That’s not it at all.’

‘S’OK by me.’

Walter slipped the ice pick from his jacket pocket and felt its point cool in his dry hand. He was just about to raise it above his head and plunge into the back of her neck when he heard a
sound behind him.

Everything happened so fast. First, the door opened, and Walter saw a huge man blocking the exit, a giant with blond hair hanging over his massive shoulders, a tanned face carved of rock and
veins thick as cables snaking down his thick arms. The man, he also noticed, was wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt and baggy, flowered pants held up by elastic.

Shit, Walter thought, glancing back at the girl for a second, then at his jacket over the back of a chair, they’re going to rip me off, rob me. That’s what the phone call was about.
Just my fucking luck.

But what Walter didn’t really register until it was much too late was that when he turned towards the doorway, he had an ice pick still raised above his head, and the other man had a
gun.

Walter never did get a chance to explain. The giant raised his gun and, without a word, fired two shots right into Walter Dimchuk’s angry, corrupt and unlucky heart.

1

‘I’m not happy
with it, laddie,’ said Dr Glendenning, shaking his head. ‘Not happy at all.’

‘So the super told me,’ said Banks. ‘What’s the problem?’

They sat at a dimpled, copper-topped table in the Queen’s Arms, Glendenning over a glass of Glenmorangie and Banks over a pint of Theakston’s. It was a bitterly cold evening in
February. Banks was anxious to get home and take Sandra out to dinner as he had promised, but Dr Glendenning had asked for help, and a Home Office pathologist was too important to brush off.

‘One of these?’ Glendenning offered Banks a Senior Service.

Banks grimaced. ‘No. No thanks. I’ll stick with tipped. I’m trying to give up.’

‘Aye,’ said Glendenning, lighting up. ‘Me, too.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘She should never have died,’ the doctor said, ‘but that’s by the way. These things happen.’

‘Who shouldn’t have died?’

‘Oh, sorry. Forgot you didn’t know. Anna, Anna Childers is – was – her name. Admitted to the hospital this morning.’

‘Any reason to suspect a crime?’

‘No-o, not on the surface. That’s why I wanted an informal chat first.’ Rain lashed at the window; the buzz of conversation rose and fell around them.

‘What happened?’ Banks asked.

‘Her boyfriend brought her in at about ten o’clock this morning. He said she’d been up half the night vomiting. They thought it was gastric flu. Dr Gibson treated the symptoms
as best he could, but . . .’ Glendenning shrugged.

‘Cause of death?’

‘Respiratory failure. If she hadn’t suffered from asthma, she might have had a chance. Dr Gibson managed at least to get the convulsions under control. But as for the cause of it
all, don’t ask me. I’ve no idea yet. It could have been food poisoning. Or she could have taken something, a suicide attempt. You know how I hate guesswork.’ He looked at his
watch and finished his drink. ‘Anyway, I’m off to do the post-mortem now. Should know a bit more after that.’