Rose Madder (58 page)

“Thanks again, Gert,” she said.

“No problem.” Gert gave her a brief, hard hug, then leaned forward and put a healthy smack on Bill's cheek. A police car came around the corner and stopped, idling. “Take care of her, guy.”

“I will.”

Gert went to her ride, then stopped to point at Bill's Harley, heeled over on its kickstand in one of the parking spaces stencilled
POLICE BUSINESS ONLY
. “And don't dump that thing in the goddam fog.”

“I'll take it easy, Ma, I promise.”

She drew back one big fist, mock-scowling, and Bill stuck out his chin with half-closed eyes and a longsuffering expression that made Rosie laugh hard. She had never expected to be laughing on the steps of a police station, but a lot of things she'd never expected had happened this year.

A
lot.

I
n spite of all that had happened, Rosie enjoyed the ride back to Trenton Street almost as much as the one out to the country that morning. She clung to Bill as they cut across the city on the surface streets, the big Harley-Davidson slicing smoothly through the thickening fog. The last three blocks were like riding through a dream lined with cotton. The Harley's headlight was a brilliant, cloudy cylinder, boring into the air like the beam of a flashlight cutting across a smoky room. When Bill finally turned onto Trenton Street, the buildings were little more than ghosts and Bryant Park was a vast white blank.

The black-and-white Hale had promised was parked in front of 897. The words
To Serve and Protect
were written on the side. The space in front of the car was empty. Bill swung his motorcycle into it, kicked the gearshift up into neutral with his foot, and killed the engine. “You're shivering,” he said as he helped her off.

She nodded and found she had to make a conscious effort to keep her teeth from chattering when she spoke. “It's more the damp than the cold.” And yet, even then, she supposed she knew it was really neither; knew on some deep level that things were not as they should be.

“Well, let's get you into something dry and warm.” He stowed their helmets, locked the Harley's ignition, and dropped the key into his pocket.

“Sounds like the idea of the century to me.”

He took her hand and walked her down the sidewalk to the apartment building steps. As they passed the radio-car, Bill raised his hand to the cop behind the wheel. The cop lifted his own hand out the window in a lazy return salute, and the streetlight gleamed on the ring he wore. His partner appeared to be sleeping.

Rosie opened her purse, got out the key she would need to open the front door at this advanced hour, and turned it in the lock. She had only the faintest idea of what she was doing; her good feelings were gone and her earlier terror had crashed back in on her like some huge dead iron object falling through floor after floor of an old building, an object
destined to drop all the way to the basement. Her stomach was suddenly freezing, her head was throbbing,
and she didn't know why.

She had seen something,
something,
and she was so focused on her effort to think what it might have been that she did not hear the driver's door of the police car open and then chunk softly shut. She did not hear the faintly gritting footsteps on the sidewalk behind them, either.

“Rosie?”

Bill's voice, coming out of darkness. They were in the vestibule now, but she could barely see the picture of the old geezer (she thought maybe it was Calvin Coolidge) hanging on the wall to her right, or the scrawny shape of the coat-tree, with its brass feet and its bristle of brass hooks, standing by the stairs. Why was it so damned
dark
in here?

Because the overhead light-fixture was out, of course; that was simple. She knew a harder question, though: Why had the cop on the passenger side of the black-and-white been sleeping in such an uncomfortable position, with his chin way down on his chest and his cap pulled so low over his eyes that he looked like a thug in a gangster movie from the thirties? Why was he sleeping at all, for that matter, when the subject he was detailed to watch was due at any moment?
Hale would be angry if he knew that,
she thought distractedly.
He'd want to talk to that bluesuit. He'd want to talk to him right up close.

“Rosie? What's wrong?”

The footsteps behind them were hurrying now.

She rolled mental footage backward like a videotape. Saw Bill raising his hand to the bluesuit behind the wheel of the cruiser, saying hi there, good to see you, without even opening his mouth. She saw the cop raise his own hand in return; she saw the gleam of the streetlamp on the ring he wore. She hadn't been close enough to read the words on it, but all at once she knew what they were. She'd seen them printed backward on her own flesh many times, like an FDA stamp on a cut of meat.

Service, Loyalty, Community.

Footsteps hurried eagerly up the steps behind them. The door slammed violently shut. Someone was panting low and fast in the dark, and Rosie could smell English Leather.

N
orman's mind took another of those big skips while he was standing at the sink in the Daughters and Sisters kitchen with his shirt off, washing fresh blood from his face and chest. The sun had been low on the horizon, glaring orange into his eyes when he raised his head and reached for the towel. He touched it, and then, without a single break that he was aware of, not so much as an eyeblink, he was outside and it was dark. He was wearing the White Sox ballcap again. He was also wearing a London Fog topcoat. God knew where he'd picked it up, but it was very appropriate, since a rapidly thickening fog had settled over the city. He rubbed one hand over the expensive waterproofed fabric of the coat, liking the feel. An elegant item. He tried again to think of how he'd come by it and couldn't. Had he killed someone else? Might have, friends and neighbors, might have; anything was possible when you were on vacation.

He looked up Trenton Street and saw a city police-car—what they called a Charlie-David car back in Norman's bailiwick—parked hubcap-deep in the mist about three-quarters of the way to the next intersection. He reached into the deep left pocket of the coat—a really
nice
coat, somebody certainly had good taste—and touched something rubbery and crumpled. He smiled happily, like a man shaking hands with an old friend. “Ze bool,” he whispered. “El toro grande.” He reached into the other pocket, not sure what he was going to find, only sure that there was something in there he would want.

He stabbed the tip of his middle finger into it, winced, and brought it carefully out. It was the chromed letter-opener from his pal Maude's desk.

How she screamed,
he thought, and smiled as he turned the letter-opener over in his hands, letting the light from the streetlamps run off its blade like white liquid. Yes, she had screamed . . . but then she had stopped. In the end the gals
always
stopped screaming, and what a relief that was.

Meantime, he had a formidable problem to solve. There would be two—count em, two—motor-patrolmen in the car parked up there; they'd be armed with guns while he was
armed only with a chrome-plated letter-opener. He had to take them out, and as silently as possible. A pretty problem, and one he didn't have the slightest idea of how to solve.

“Norm,” a voice whispered. It came from his left pocket.

He reached in and pulled out the mask. Its empty eyeholes gazed up at him with blank rapt attention, and the smile once more looked like a knowing sneer. In this light, the garlands of flowers decking the horns might have been clots of blood.

“What?” He spoke in a low, conspiratorial whisper. “What is it?”

“Have a heart attack,” ze bool whispered, so that was what he did. He plodded slowly up the sidewalk toward where the cruiser was parked, plodding slower and slower as he got closer and closer. He was careful to keep his eyes down and look at the car only with his peripheral vision. They would have seen him by now, even if they were inept—they'd have to, he was the only thing moving out here—and what he wanted them to see was a man looking at his own feet, a man who was working for every step. A man who was either drunk or in trouble.

His right hand was now inside his coat, massaging the left side of his chest. He could feel the blade of the letter-opener, which he was holding in that hand, making little digs in his shirt. As he drew close to his objective he staggered—just one moderate-to-heavy stagger—and then stopped. He stood perfectly still with his head down for a slow five-count, not allowing his body to sway so much as a quarter-inch to one side or the other. By now their first assumption—that this was Mr. Ginhead making his slow way home after a few hours at the Dew Drop Inn—should be giving way to other possibilities. But he wanted them to come to him. He'd go to them if he absolutely had to, but if he had to do that, they would probably take him down.

He took another three steps, not toward the cruiser now but toward the nearest stoop. He grabbed the cold, fog-beaded iron railing which ran up its side and stood there panting, head still down, hoping he looked like a man who was having a heart attack and not one with a lethal instrument hidden inside his coat.

Just when he was beginning to think he had made a serious error here, the doors of the police car swung open. He heard this rather than saw it, and then he heard an even
happier sound: feet hurrying toward him.
Cheezit, Rocky, da cops,
he thought, and then risked a small look. He
had
to risk it, had to know where they were in relation to each other. If they weren't close together, he would have to stage a collapse . . . and that held its own ironic danger. In such a case one of them would very likely run back to the cruiser in order to radio for an ambulance.

They were a typical Charlie-David team, one vet and one kid still wet behind the ears. To Norman, the rookie looked weirdly familiar, like someone he might have seen on TV. That didn't matter, though. They were close together, almost shoulder to shoulder, and that
did
matter. That was very nice. Cozy.

“Sir?” the one on the left—the older one—asked. “Sir, do you have a problem?”

“Hurts like a bastard,” Norman wheezed.

“What hurts?” Still the older one. This was a crucial moment, not quite crunch-time, but almost. The older cop could order his partner to radio for EMT backup at any moment and he would be hung, but he couldn't strike just yet; they were just a tiny bit too far away.

At this moment he felt more like his old self than he had since starting on this expedition: cold and clear and totally
here,
aware of everything, from the droplets of fog on the iron railing to a dirty-gray pigeon feather lying in the gutter next to a crumpled potato chip bag. He could hear the soft, steady susurrus of the cops' breathing.

“It's in here,” Norman gasped, rubbing under his coat with his right hand. The blade of the letter-opener poked through his shirt and pricked his skin, but he hardly felt it. “It's like having a gallbladder attack, only in my chest.”

“Maybe I better call an ambulance,” the younger cop said, and suddenly Norman knew who the young cop reminded him of: Jerry Mathers, the kid who'd played Beaver on
Leave It to Beaver.
He'd watched all those shows in reruns on Channel 11, some of them five and six times.

The older cop didn't look a bit like the Beav's brother Wally, though.

“Hang on a sec,” the older cop said, and then, incredibly, gave away the store. “Let me take a look. I was a medic in the army.”

“Coat . . . buttons . . .” Norman said, keeping an eye on the Beav from the corner of his eye.

The older cop took another step forward. He was now standing right in front of Norman. The Beav also took a step forward. The older cop undid the top button of Norman's newfound London Fog. Then the second one. When he undid the third one, Norman pulled the letter-opener out and plunged it into the man's throat. Blood burst out in a torrent, gushing down his uniform. In the foggy darkness it looked like steak sauce.

The Beav turned out not to be a problem. He stood, paralyzed with horror, as his partner raised his hands and beat weakly at the handle of the thing in his throat. He looked like a man trying to rid himself of some exotic leech.
“Bluh!”
he choked.
“Ahk! Bluh!”

The Beav turned to Norman. In his shock he seemed totally unaware that Norman had had anything to do with what had just befallen his partner, and this didn't surprise Norman at all. It was a reaction he had seen before. In his shock and surprise, the cop looked about ten years old, now not just something
like
the Beav, but a dead ringer.

“Something happened to Al!” the Beav said. Norman knew something else about this young man who was about to join the city's Roll of Honor: inside his head he thought he was shouting, he really did, when what was actually coming out was only a little bitty whisper. “Something happened to Al!”

“I know,” Norman said, and delivered an uppercut to the kid's chin, a dangerous punch if your opponent is dangerous, but a sixth-grader could have dealt with the Beav as he was now. The blow connected squarely, knocking the young cop back into the iron railing Norman had been clutching not thirty seconds ago. The Beav wasn't as out as Norman had hoped, but his eyes had gone cloudy and vague; there was going to be no trouble here. His hat had tumbled off. The hair beneath was short, but not too short to grab. Norman got a handful and yanked the kid's head sharply down as he brought his knee up. The sound was muffled but terrific; the sound of a man with a mallet whacking a padded bag full of china.