SWF Seeks Same (19 page)

When he seemed to move his head to glance in the opposite direction, she put on a casual air, did a sharp turn out of the gangway, and walked quickly away.

Realizing she’d left her purse and the carry-on in the storage room.

ALLIE had no idea what she might do. Where she might go. There was no one to ask for help. None of this seemed real to her. Even she was beginning to doubt Hedra had ever existed. She had to keep reminding herself that her world had changed. She was a fugitive. Wanted for Sam’s murder. Sam! Poor Sam. The fool she’d loved and still loved, still needed. They had both been seduced and victimized. Irony twisted her inside; now, after his death, she could better understand and forgive him.

She spent the next several hours wandering aimlessly around the Upper West Side, then walked down Central Park West and over to Fifth Avenue. A fine mist formed in the air; hardly enough to get her wet. Then the mist changed to flecks of snow that fell and disappeared magically on the wet sidewalk in front of her. She seemed to be walking toward a void that would eventually consume her, as if she were ephemeral as a snowflake. And maybe she was.

It finally occurred to her that she was cold and shivering. She stopped walking and was about to enter a small Chinese restaurant, then realized she hadn’t any money. Through the steamed-over window she could glimpse people eating in a booth. Two men and a woman, well-dressed, talking animatedly between bites. The woman, young and with a swirl of dark hair piled high on her head, smiled and broke open a fortune cookie. Allie had intended going into the restaurant to get warm; now she realized she was hungry as well as cold. There was nothing she could do about hunger. Not right now.

For a moment she considered going down into a subway stop to keep warm, but there was danger there for a woman alone. She’d read in the newspapers about robbery, rape, and killing in the subways, seen tragic tape on TV news. And all the time she’d been living with the woman who’d … done those things to Sam.

The woman who wore her clothes.

Who had become her.

Allie realized she was near Grand Central Station. It would be warmer there. But would the police be watching for her, expecting her to try to catch a train out of the city? Scenes from a hundred movie and TV shows tumbled through her mind, bureaucratic authority figures instructing their underlings to “cover the airport and train station!”

But she knew there were too many murders in New York for the police to be constantly on the alert in all the stations, terminals, and airports that provided means of escape. Besides, they still might not even know what she looked like, and almost certainly hadn’t had time to circulate her photograph. She should be safe at Grand Central for at least tonight.

Jamming her fists deep into the pockets of her blazer, she hunched her shoulders and started walking. The flecks of snow were getting larger. Heavier. She felt one settle and melt on her eyelash, another dissolve coldly on her lower lip.

She entered Grand Central from 42nd Street and took the ramp down into the cavernous main area. The place was busy but looked oddly deserted because of its vastness.

Allie ignored the stares of people who passed her. They
seemed
to be staring at her, anyway, as if there were something about her that marked her as different and desperate. Could they sense her terror? See it on her?

She found a clean spot on the floor, sat down, and leaned back against the wall. Letting out a long breath, she waited for the warmth to penetrate her clothes.

Nearby, a shabbily dressed woman with a torn Bloomingdale’s bag sat and stared at her. A street person, Allie was sure, with no address, no hope, no perceived future beyond the hour. The woman seemed disturbed that she couldn’t categorize Allie, who obviously was not waiting for a train, but was dressed rather well to be one of the army that walked the streets of Manhattan and sought places like this for shelter.

After a few minutes the woman seemed to lose interest. She settled back with her chin tucked into the folds of flesh at the base of her neck, lowered her puffy eyelids and appeared to nod off to sleep. One of her withered hands slid from her lap onto the floor, where it lay palm-up.

Like Sam’s hands.

Allie looked away. Shook the vision. She’d read about people who virtually lived in Grand Central, moving around so the police never got a fix on them as vagrants. She decided she should be able to spend the night here, getting up and changing locations once or twice. She’d have to doze sitting up, like the old woman across from her, but that would be better than roaming the cold and dangerous streets.

A bearded man in a scuffed leather jacket hurried past, late for his train. He was munching a hamburger in a McDonald’s wrapper. Allie caught the savory scent of the fried beef and onion. About twenty feet beyond her, he absently wadded the wrapper around the hamburger and dropped it into a trash receptacle. He picked up his pace and began to run, licking his fingers as if they were just-discovered popsicles.

Allie sat staring at the refuse can. No one seemed to be paying attention to her. The old woman with the Bloomingdale’s bag was still asleep. The scent of the hamburger lingered, or might Allie only be imagining that? Hunger could make the mind play pranks.

Allie thought, Oh, Jesus! I’m really going to do this. She slowly stood up and ambled over to the trash container, as if she were going to throw something away.

Instead she reached inside, as if it were the sort of thing she and everyone else did every day, and her exploring hand sought the crumpled paper wrapper with the still-warm hamburger inside. It was like a live thing hiding from her, but at last her fingers closed on its vital warmth. She drew the aromatic prize out quickly, unable to keep her eyes from darting around to make sure what she’d done had gone unnoticed. But there was no way to be positive. Walking too fast, she returned to her spot on the floor.

She sat for a moment with her heart pounding. Then she told herself that for all anyone passing her knew, she’d bought the hamburger and was finishing eating it. She might be sitting here waiting for a train departure, or for a friend coming into the city to visit her. Might live on goddamn Park Avenue, for all anyone could guess. Not that it was any of their business, was it?

Bastards! she said to herself, hating them because she
did
care what they thought.

With exaggerated casualness, she peeled the wrapper away from the hamburger. She started to tear off the portion of bun marred by the man’s tooth marks, then thought better of it.

Took a deep breath and bit into the hamburger.

There was cheese on it, along with onion and pickles. She’d never tasted anything that brought such sensation to the taste buds. She could almost see and feel the word “delicious.”

Too soon, she finished the hamburger and was licking her fingers, as the man who’d thrown it away had licked his, only with more obvious greed and enjoyment. When she glanced to the side, the old woman still had her chin resting in the folds of her neck, but her slanted, rheumy eyes were open. A look passed between her and Allie, for only a second, a spark of understanding that was like a lightning bolt to Allie. The woman had placed her at last in the hierarchy of humanity. They were one and the same, the look said. Outcasts and comrades in agony.

Allie quickly averted her eyes and wiped her hands on her jeans.

Hunger still clawed at her.

She’d never been so lonely.

In the morning she awoke to the shuffle and humming of the busy station. A Godlike, echoing voice was making unintelligible pronouncements over the PA system: “
NOWREEING PRESSTO STAMFOR ONTRAREEE-SAAAN
!” No one was paying the slightest attention to Allie where she lay curled on the floor. Now and then an eye would glance her way and then quickly be averted, as if denying her existence. There was some charity in the world, however; a crumpled dollar bill and some change lay on the floor near her hand. Only the thousands of passing potential witnesses had prevented it from being stolen.

Allie sat up and tucked the money into a pocket. She worked her mouth to remove some of the sour taste that had accumulated during the night. A hint of onion from the hamburger still lingered. She was thinking more clearly now. Graham! He was someone—the only one now—who could corroborate Allie’s claim that Hedra had shared the apartment.

If the police would listen to Graham and believe him. Allie had read about how the law hated and resisted evidence to the contrary in what, to them, was a murder with a known perpetrator. The prosecuting attorney was probably salivating while waiting for Allie to be arrested.

She braced her back against the smooth wall and used numbed legs to lever herself to her feet. Then she glanced around and saw a bank of public phones. Gripping the coins she’d scooped from the floor, she walked stiffly toward them.

Graham didn’t answer his phone.

Allie called Goya’s next, and was told that he wasn’t working today, they had no idea where he might be reached.

Her heart fell as she hung up. She couldn’t risk going back to the Cody Arms, or to Goya’s. She’d have to wait and try to get in touch with Graham later.

She found that it was warmer outside. There was no accumulation of snow but the streets were still wet. People wearing raincoats and carrying folded umbrellas scurried along the sidewalks, on their way to work. Exhaust fumes hovered thick and noxious in the air. Stalled traffic on East 42nd was like a freeze-frame on TV, but with shouted curses and the frantic blaring of horns. Allie wondered why New Yorkers seemed to think that leaning on a horn might help clear a traffic jam. Many of them thrived on noise, she supposed. Maybe some people adapted to noise and then craved it.

Near the sidewalk a cabbie was leaning with his head and bare arm out his taxi window, chewing out a bicycle rider who’d gotten too close and scraped the cab with a handlebar. The cyclist was wearing a shirt that had KING MESSENGER SERVICE lettered across the back. “Both wheels up your ass… !” the driver was yelling, so angry he was spraying spittle. The messenger, a scrawny kid who looked about fourteen, was chomping a huge wad of gum or tobacco. He looked blissfully unconcerned.

Allie walked on. A few seconds later the messenger flashed past on his bike, whipping the vehicle from side to side between his legs, wove with breathtaking elegance between a car and a bus, and disappeared. Nonchalant survivor.

Allie knew where she was going now. She’d thought of it last night, slumped on the hard floor in Grand Central Station. Sleep had come to her only in snatches until almost three A.M. Seconds after closing her eyes, the dream would begin. Sam lying on his back with the stumps of his wrists at his sides. Sam staring at his hotel room ceiling with those wide and terrified eyes. Sam and the blood. Hedra and the blood. Sam, already dead, gazing at Hedra. Saying, “Allie …” The blood, blood, blood.

When she finally did fall asleep, it was into a red ocean where dead things swam.

A floor was a poor substitute for a bed. She still had an incredibly stiff neck. And she’d been mortified to find the money near her on the floor. Mortified but grateful to the stranger who’d mistaken her for one of the dispossessed and homeless.

Mistaken, hell! She was one of the homeless.

She’d conserved her change for the phone and used the dollar to buy a doughnut in a coffee shop in Grand Central. She’d made herself eat it methodically, so the counterman wouldn’t realize she was starving, then washed it down with a glass of water. Half a hamburger for supper and a doughnut and water for breakfast. Surprisingly, as she’d hurried out of the station she felt satisfied. And she walked now with a sense of purpose.

She knew where Mike Mayfair lived, all by himself in his loft apartment in SoHo. He’d be in his office at Fortune Fashions by now, leaning back behind his desk and making life hell for his secretary. Or sitting in his car in stalled traffic. Either way, there’d be no one in his apartment.

Allie had become a beggar. Now it was time to be a thief.

MAYFAIR’S apartment building was a drab gray structure that housed a flower shop and a book shop in its ground floor. Allie walked around to the side of the building, where there was a narrow gangway that smelled of garbage and stale urine. She glanced up and down the street, then sidled around the corner and walked to the black iron fire escape that stair-stepped jaggedly down the side of the building.

She leaped up and grabbed at the gravity ladder that would lever down to street level, but her grasping fingers missed it by six inches. “Damn!” she said, so loudly she was shocked by the volume. But there were only a few low, dirt-caked windows on the sides of the buildings that flanked her; no one had heard.

Allie moved down the side of the building to a steel dumpster overflowing with trash. She stood on her toes and peered inside, hoping to find a piece of rope or twine she might weight and toss up to snag the gravity ladder and pull it down. The sweet garbage stench of the dumpster nauseated her, and all she saw were stained cardboard boxes, empty cans and bottles, and black and green plastic trash bags.

Backing away from the horrid smell, she noticed that the dumpster rested on small steel wheels. She studied it. Though it had to be heavy, especially laden as it was with trash, she told herself it wasn’t all that large.
Only about the size of a Volkswagen
.

Holding her breath against the sickening stench, she got behind the dumpster. She turned and rested her back against hard steel, and pushed with her legs.

The wheels squealed and the dumpster moved a few inches over the rough pavement.

She took a deep breath, smell or no smell, and pushed harder, felt the steel at her back move again. More than a foot this time.

And she knew she could do it.

Slowly, so the wheels would make as little noise as possible, she shoved the dumpster beneath the fire escape. Then she closed its steel lid and climbed up on it.