Urge to Kill (20 page)

It had been a long time since a man had professed love for Rosa Pajaro, who was fat, forty, and tired. Lifting the stacks of sheets and pillowcases to the top shelves of the hotel storage closet sent a dull pain along the base of her spine.

She wondered sometimes how she’d come to this situation. It seemed that only yesterday she’d been one of the prettiest girls in her village of Tojano in Oaxaca, Mexico. Then had come her affair with the American engineer. A year after the affair had begun, her beautiful daughter Sara was born. Their daughter, though the American never claimed the girl publicly.

Then had come Sara’s illness and the medical bills. The American was by then dead, after an infection from a wound incurred in an auto accident on a winding mountain road. He had been drunk, and on his way back to town after an assignation with a married woman. Rosa could never forgive the woman, but she’d long ago forgiven the American.

Rosa’s mother was now watching and caring for Sara in Tojano. Rosa, her dark eyes dimmed and weary, her olive complexion coarsened and seamed, her black hair lank and graying, had made her way to America to work, having bought forged papers with money the American had left her.

Hard years had passed like cards being shuffled in a deck. Now here she was working as a maid in the Antonian Hotel in Manhattan, having replenished a storage room with freshly laundered linens. Ever the optimist, Rosa rubbed her sore back with both hands and reflected on how wonderful the fresh linens in the small room smelled from the perfumed detergent the hotel laundry used. Rosa liked that part of her job that dealt with the clean linens. The soiled linens were, of course, a different story.

She was about to go back out into the hall, when she heard a sound as if someone had been slapped, only louder.

The storage room was off a corridor that ran the length of the hotel’s east side, where there was a little-used exit out into a passageway between it and the side of the Honeysuckle Restaurant next door. Rosa hesitated in pushing the storage room door open with the cart she’d used to transport the linens, and instead eased the door open about six inches with her hand and peered out into the quiet, carpeted hall.

So little used was this corridor that she expected to see no one. Instead she saw two men. One was on the floor, the other bending over him. As Rosa watched, the man who was standing lowered himself on one knee and removed something from one of the pockets of the man on the floor. She was sure it was a gun, and realized the sound that she’d heard had been a shot. The kneeling man placed the fallen man’s gun in his own pocket. Then he straightened up and looked up and down the corridor.

And saw Rosa.

He didn’t hesitate. He strode toward the storage room.

Rosa thought about screaming, but realized no one would hear her. Instead she decided to shut and lock the door.

But of course there was no lock on the inside of the storage room door.

It opened quickly, the knob yanked from her hand so suddenly and violently that it hurt.

He was tall and fierce looking. She saw that his big hands were empty. He’d left the gun he’d taken from the other man in his pocket. He simply stared at her with cold blue eyes.

Then he smiled. He raised his forefinger to his lips in a signal for her to be quiet, and to remain silent about what she’d seen. Then he turned and walked back toward the man on the hall floor.

As she watched, he again bent over the prone man, gripped him beneath each arm, and pulled him backward, toward the door leading outside. He glanced at Rosa and again raised his forefinger to his lips. Then he dragged the other man out through the doorway and into the night.

The door swung shut. She knew that it automatically locked and couldn’t be opened from outside without a key.

She told herself she was safe, but she didn’t feel safe.

Rosa stood trembling, staring at the empty corridor. It had all been like a dream.
Had
she seen it? Had it actually happened?

She moved backward all the way into the storage room and, without thinking about it, resumed her work. She pushed the empty laundry cart out into the hall, bumping the door open, thinking of her mother and Sara in Mexico, of her forged papers and her job at the Antonian. Rosa was in charge of rooms 570 through 580 on the fifth floor. They were suites, and the tips were more than adequate. They were in dollars that soon became pesos.

She pushed the cart back along the corridor the way she’d come, listening to its squeaking rear wheel, telling herself that what she’d seen hadn’t happened. She couldn’t afford for it to have happened, so it hadn’t.

It hadn’t. She’d seen nothing, and she’d say nothing.

It hadn’t happened.

She silently repeated her daughter’s name to herself to the rhythm of the squeaking wheel,
Sara, Sara, Sara…

It hadn’t.

Sal Vitali knew this was going to be one of his worst days.

“I wanted to look the place over before my company seriously considered leasing it,” Arnold Penington said. He gulped. “That’s when I found it. Her, I mean.”

It,
Vitali thought, as he looked at what was left of the woman. She was hanging upside down from her bound ankles attached by rope to a beam, a long incision made from her pubis to her throat. She was opened up and hollowed out like Hettie Davis, only the long period of time had…Vitali, stared slack-mouthed at the dried, leathery state of her body. He could only think of it as cured meat.

The hardened mass on the concrete floor, beneath and alongside the woman’s upside-down head and gracefully draped arms, was what was left of her internal organs. Her eyes were missing—thanks to the rats that lived in the long-abandoned warehouse—and three of her fingers on the dried hand that lay partly on the concrete floor had been nibbled to bare bone.

Vitali heard the warehouse’s steel overhead door clatter and clank up, then lower. His partner, Harold Mishkin, he of the turbulent stomach, had just entered the warehouse after talking to the uniforms outside who’d secured the scene.

Vitali considered telling Mishkin not to look at the dead woman, then thought better of it. Mishkin took pride in the fact that he could screw his courage tight and look at what homicide detectives too often saw without losing his lunch. Occasionally his stomach had its way.

Arnold Penington had moved well back and stood silently, not looking in the direction of the dangling body. Mishkin continued to advance. He was about twenty feet away, waving at the dirty, narrow windows lining the east wall of the building. “We oughta get more light in here, Sal.”

“Maybe not, Harold,” Vitali said in his gravel-box voice.

Mishkin stopped cold and stared at what was left of the woman dangling upside down from the warehouse beam. His hand floated up to his mustached mouth.

Almost immediately he gained control of himself and pretended he’d raised his hand to stroke his mustache.

He said “Jesus, Sal.”

“Him and his dad,” Vitali, the lapsed Catholic, said. “I don’t see how they could let something like this happen.”

“Just like the other one,” Mishkin said. “Hettie Davis.”

Vitali could smell the menthol cream Mishkin always dabbed beneath his nostrils to help keep his food down at violent crime scenes.

“Gotta be the same guy,” Vitali said. “She’s been gutted and cleaned like some kinda game animal.”

“Yeah, but…what else happened to her? I mean, her eyes and all…”

“Rats,” Vitali said.

Mishkin turned away and bent over. He still didn’t lose it, though. He turned back, straightened up slowly as if in pain, and wiped his forearm across his mouth.

Vitali was proud of him. Mishkin should have been in another business, or riding a desk at some precinct house in a gentler part of town. It was where he’d be if he weren’t so damned good at his job.

Whatever the physical impact of what he saw, Mishkin’s mind was still working, along with his commitment to the job. He paced off a slow circle around the upside-down, dangling body. There was a floor drain nearby, down which most of her blood must have flowed. It was obvious, too, that her throat had been slashed, probably while she was alive and hanging there. The things people did…

“First Hettie Davis, now this one,” Vitali said. “We’ve got a set.”

“Judging by the condition of the body, this one was killed way before Davis,” Mishkin said.

“Yeah, but either way…”

“I know what you mean, Sal. We’ve got us a serial killer.” He finished his slow circle and wound up standing near Vitali. After another glance at the dead woman, he shivered. “What’s wrong with people, Sal?”

“Some people, you mean,” Vitali said.

“Yeah. Thank God only some.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with them, Harold. Maybe that’s why we do what we do, trying to figure it out.”

“That and we like to get paid,” Mishkin said, playing hard.

Sirens sounded outside.

“Reinforcements,” Mishkin said, figuring more radio cars and a crime scene unit. Maybe an ambulance. More than once somebody assumed to be dead turned out to be alive. It wouldn’t happen this time, though.

Neither Vitali nor Mishkin said anything for several minutes. Penington, even farther away now, remained silent. Then the steel overhead door at the other end of the warehouse rattled open again and let in a blast of bright light. Silhouetted against the afternoon brilliance, half a dozen figures entered the warehouse. Among them, Vitali recognized the short, chesty form of Dr. Julius Nift, the obnoxious little medical examiner.

“The little prick’s here,” Mishkin said.

“We’ve seen enough of the victim,” Vitali said. He nodded toward the advancing figures. “She belongs to them now.”

“No,” Mishkin said, “she belongs to us.”

Hobbs would kill her if he knew she was doing this, stopping for a drink at Melody’s on her way home from the doctor. But she felt she had the right to stop, to steady her nerves and to celebrate her relief.

Though Lavern Neeson hadn’t really expected a problem, she was nonetheless relieved. Her mammogram had turned out negative. Dr. Chivas hadn’t seemed to notice any injury to her internally bruised torso, which she had held as stiff and still as possible. She did sense that he’d noticed the makeup covering her facial bruises, but he didn’t say anything. There were all kinds of ways she might have gotten those marks, from a fall down the stairs to a quarrel with a neighbor. Anyway, Dr. Chivas wasn’t the sort who pried. If his patients wanted him to know something, they’d tell him. Then he would act. He would do what he could to heal.

Lavern had left the medical clinic and walked only a few blocks toward her subway stop before spotting Melody’s Lounge. She’d noticed it before, but had never gone inside. This afternoon, with something to drink to, and the city so hot, she did go in.

She was soon situated on a bar stool near the door. The lounge was dim, and there was a blues tune playing so you could barely hear it. Peggy Lee, one of her all-time favorite singers. There was a woman who’d overcome a rough youth, who’d had to cover her bruises with makeup. What a career Peggy Lee had enjoyed. What a life she’d led, after a stumbling start. Listening to her always made Lavern feel better.

Aside from a woman behind the bar, there were only three other people in Melody’s. A couple sat at one of the tables along the wall, lost in the promise of each other’s eyes. Halfway down the bar from Lavern a guy sat staring straight ahead maybe at himself, in the back bar mirror, sipping something amber from an on-the-rocks glass. There were two identical empty glasses in front of him.

Kind of early for that kind of drinking, Lavern thought. Though the way Peggy was slowly meting out the blues, it might have been a gloomy two in the morning. The woman behind the bar, tall and with a top-bun hairdo that upped her to over six feet, approached and smiled a hello. Lavern ordered a Bloody Mary. Almost a health beverage.

Of course Hobbs would still object to it, as he objected to almost everything she did. He’d made her promise him she’d stop drinking, trying to get her to pretend along with him that she was developing a problem.

The tall woman—maybe Melody—had the drink before Lavern within a few minutes, then withdrew to the far end of the bar, where she’d been working on what looked like a crossword puzzle. Peggy Lee launched into a song warning her lover not to smoke in bed. Other than that it was quiet, with only soft traffic noises filtering in from outside.

Pleasant, Lavern thought. The alcohol relaxed her almost immediately, maybe because of the heat outside and the fact that she’d skipped lunch. She felt safe in here, isolated, her cell phone turned off and in the car, Hobbs at work for most of the rest of the day. She took a bite of the celery stalk that had been in her drink, then set it aside on a napkin. The crunching sound of her chewing the celery seemed unusually loud. Maybe it even attracted the attention of the guy down the bar.

He lowered his drink to its coaster and glanced over at her and smiled.
Wham!
This was a handsome one. In his thirties, dark hair and eyes, killer smile, wearing light tan slacks and a black sport coat, a red and black tie against a white shirt. Everything about him looked expensive.

Lavern thought about Hobbs.

He’d kill me.

If he knew.

She decided it wouldn’t hurt anything if she flirted a little. Hobbs would never find out. Anyway, she’d be in enough trouble with Hobbs if he just knew she was here, drinking in the middle of the day. He didn’t like it when he didn’t know exactly where she was, and he especially wouldn’t like it if he knew she was in a bar. Lounge, rather.

If she flirted a little, talked with this dark-haired guy and listened to his patter, it would make her feel better. Make her feel she was desirable as something other than a punching bag. She felt a pang of shame. A pang of anger. She smiled back at the man down the bar.