Nightmare in Pink (11 page)

She said she hadn't realized I was so fastidious. She stopped snarling at me when I gave her a hint of what I had in mind and said I would see her in about an hour.

It took a little longer than an hour. A bellhop took over the heavy carton and carried it up to Terry's suite for me. She watched with interest while I unpacked the tape recorder and set it up. It had a two-hour capacity at 33/4 lps, and the operation was very silent. It fit nicely behind the skirts of the sofa, and there was a handy wall plug there for it. I placed it so it was easy to get at the controls from the side of the sofa. I ran the little non-directional microphone up the back of the sofa and pinned it in place just out of sight. I turned it on and we experimented with it, adjusting the gain, talking in different parts of the room, playing the tape back. It would work fine if we could keep the girl in that half of the room. Terry was confident she could get her to sit on the sofa, the ideal place for good pickup.

She had a lot of questions to ask, but not enough time to ask them before a late lunch date. It left me with time to kill. The rain had stopped. I had a sandwich and then I went down to take a look at the Armister layout. It was on a narrow side street in the financial district, a sooty old gray two-story building with ornate stone work around the cornices. There were three stone steps up to a dignified entrance doorway. A brass plate set into the stone at the side of the entrance said "Armister-Hawes" in fragile and ancient script worn thin by many polishings. There was a uniformed porter to keep things swept and polished, and to open the door for the people.

I found a pay phone in an office building a block away and called Nina and told her I might be fairly late, and to get herself fed and be patient.

"I'd hate to start before you get there," she said.

"It's a very old joke and I'm surprised you know it."

"I plan to be a constant source of surprises and consternations, McGee."

"Your record so far is excellent. How about your busted door. Did you phone the man?"

"It's being fixed today. What's so interesting you can't be home when I get there?"

"I've lined up a tall blonde.''

"I don't think I'm keeping you busy enough, dear."

"Go on back to the old drawing board."

"I got my bonus. It's a pretty blue check. And I got pinched in the elevator again. Does that mean anything?"

"I'll tell you what it means when I see you late tonight."

As I hung up I had a tantalizing memory which for a moment I could not identify. Then I remembered the rude, random conversations I'd had on field telephones long ago with Mike Gibson. That memory was like taking an unexpected blow right over the heart. I wondered why Nina and I had not talked more about Mike. Maybe she sensed that it would make me feel strange and guilty. She did not want to be the picture of the twelve-year-old girl in Mike's wallet. I did not see how she could be. They could not be one and the same. No.

But I fed coins into the box and sent Mike a wire, for the nurse to read him. EVERYTHING SHAPING UP BETTER THAN YOU THOUGHT. DETAILS SOON. I felt like a sneak when I sent it. "Shake her up if you have to, Trav," Mike had said. Thanks a lot, buddy.

I roamed back past Armister-Hawes, on the opposite side of the street, wondering if I could chance going in and saying hello to Bonita, wondering what good it would do. After I passed it, I glanced back just in time to see a big black Lincoln pull up in front. A huge, husky chauffeur in a blue-gray uniform got out slowly. I moved into a handy doorway and watched the scene. It was twenty minutes of four. He wandered around the car, stopped and took a handkerchief out and rubbed a place on the window trim. The porter came out and they stood and talked idly. The porter kept glancing back through the glass doors.

Suddenly he turned and hurried up the steps and pulled the door open, half-bowing, smiling, touching his cap. Two men and a woman came out. The woman was Bonita Hersch, in a dark tailored office suit, with a puff of white at her throat. Both men looked tanned and fit, tailored and prosperous. One was tall and lean, with a long face and a long neck and sloping shoulders. He wore no hat. He had white hair, curled tightly and closely to his skull. The other man was shorter and broader. He wore a dark hat and a pale topcoat The chauffeur was holding the rear door of the car open. The taller man walked slowly toward the car. The broader man stopped and said something to the porter. The porter responded. The man threw his head back and laughed. He punched the porter on the shoulder, and then did a little dance step, fists up, in a parody of boxing. Bonita tugged at his arm. The man turned and went with her toward the car, laughing again. They got in and the chauffeur closed the door and hurried around the back of the car and got behind the wheel. The big gleaming car started up smoothly and moved away down the wet street.

I hurried over. The porter was just going back inside. He saw me and held the door for me. He was much older than he had looked from a distance.

"Wasn't that Miss Hersch who just drovn off?"

"Yes, sir, her and Mr. Mulligan and young Mr. Armister. They're gone for the day now sir."

"Young Mr. Armister?"

He looked embarrassed. "It's just a habit. He's the only Mr. Armister nowadays."

"Would Miss Morse still be here?"

"Oh yes sir, she won't be leaving till five or after. You go right straight down this main hall, sir, and turn left at the end and her desk is there right out in the open outside Miss Hersch's office."

I thanked him and went back. Angela Morse was an overweight little sandy blonde with a nervous expression and a bad complexion. As she looked at me apprehensively I told her that I knew I had just missed Miss Hersch, and I would like to leave a personal note for her, if she could give me something to write on. She gave me pad and pen with fumbling haste.

I wrote, "Stopped by to buy you a coffee break only to find out you keep very executive hours. I'm wishing myself better luck next time. Trav."

She gave me an envelope for it, and I put the note in and gave it back, unsealed. She said she would put it on Miss Hersch's desk. She wore a navy-blue something with a white schoolgirl collar.

The offices had a hushed and sepulchral flavor of money. The ceilings were high, the carpeting deep, the paneling dark end glossy and carved. Through an open door I could see into the rigid formality of a small conference room. Angela Morse's desk was set up in sort of an inner foyer, a wide formal central area onto which the other executive offices opened. There was a crystal chandelier, a small fireplace. A small display light shone on an oil painting in an ornate gilt frame. I suddenly realized that it certainly was not a reproduction of Manet haystacks. Perhaps a copy? I moved over and read the little plaque on the frame. Manet. The girl's electric typewriter stopped. It was a brash snickety little sound in that setting. I turned and she was looking at me, apparently wondering why I didn't leave. "This is a handsome room," I said.

"It's kind of spooky, not getting hardly any daylight in here to work by."

"Do they use both floors?"

"No. I mean sort of. It's storage up there for supplies and all, and dead old files that go back a thousand years practically. And a dusty old apartment nobody has used in years."

"I thought it was a lot bigger organization."

"Counting everybody, there's twenty-three now. It used to be about thirty-five last year. But we don't manage as many properties now."

"I imagine Mr. Armister is a nice guy to work for."

She smiled. "Oh, he's real nice. He's kind of jolly and fun and all. He isn't at all stuffy like you'd think."

Jolly Charlie Armister. Just a rich bundle of fun. Fun with Bonita. Fun with the Arts and Talents.

I thanked her again and walked slowly dowri the center corridor, glancing into the offices on either side, at the mild sedate girls running the chuckling electric machinery that recorded the flux of money, at the quiet men making little marks on tabulated reports and talking in bank voices into phones and dictation equipment. It was the world's most dignified horse-room. The basic commodity was the same.

After those offices, my hotel looked like something designed to be thrown away after use. The old city was being filled with these tall tasteless rectangles, bright boxes which diminished the people who had to live and work in them. People kennels. Disposable cubicles for dispensable people.

As I showered I wondered if perhaps these hideous new tax-shelter buildings, with people sealed into the sour roar of manufactured air, didn't play some significant part in creating New York's ever-increasing flavor of surly and savage bitterness-a mocking wise-guy stink of discontent. Ugliness creates more ugliness. So the buildings could contribute, and so could the narrow greed of the truly vicious little trade unions. Screw you, buster, I'm getting mine. Thirty-hour week. Twenty-five-hour week. Grind the last panicky dime out of the golden goose. So it's down to twenty-five hours, which figures to ten bucks an hour, and anybody gets smart-all you do is walk out again and tie up the whole crappy city. But even when you're working, what do you do with all those great raw boring horrible hunks of time? All those hours when if anybody looks at you just a little bit wrong, you want to smash them to pulp. Man, we got a strong union. We got this city right by the balls. But something is going wrong and nobody knows exactly what it is. You can read it in all the eyes you see.

I kept a full drink in front of me, and I kept craning my head around to watch the door. She came in precisely on time, looking for no one, knowing in perfect confidence she would be looked for; tall, but not quite as tall as I had guessed from her face; slender in a dark green-gray wool dress; a mutation mink jacket that matched almost perfectly the taffy pallor of her hair; a hat that would have been hilarious worn by anyone without that look of remote and lovely calm; big lizard purse with silver clasp, lizard shoes.

I went to her quickly. "Rossa, you're right on time."

"Hello!" she said with a smile, with a warmth as subtle as her perfume.

"I'm Trav, and there's one tiny corner over there I've been hoarding."

I took her over. Broad-back had taken my stool. He was turned, facing his companion. "Excuse me," I said. He gave me a totally disinterested glance and went on talking to his friend.

"Excuse me," I said again. This time he did not even glance.

I was getting very tired of this city. I had heard his friend call him Bernie. I put my fingertips on his chin and turned his face around toward me. He clapped his hand on my wrist to pull my arm down. I was braced and he could have chinned himself on it without depressing it a quarter-inch.

"Bernie," I said, "lift it off my stool or I am going to make a rude and terrible scene. I might bite one of your pretty ears right off."

The bartender had moved close and I could sense the management behind me.

"Oh, were you sitting here?" he said. It was his most plausible decision. He got up. He went around and stood on the other side of his friend. He laughed very very heartily. He showed his shiny teeth when he laughed. Rossa slid onto my stool and asked for a sweet vermouth on the rocks. I wedged in beside the stool, arm on the bar, facing toward her.

"I don't really go around stirring up trouble," I said.

"I would have run," she said. "I am a sissy." She had a very slight accent, possibly Danish or Scandinavian. When she had walked, when she had slid onto the stool, she had moved well, in a flowing and limber manner. Her face was angular and distinctive, with the planes and hollows of handsomeness rather than the round look of prettiness. Her brows were darker than her hair, arched highly in an habitual expression of mild query. Her upper lids were so full as to narrow and tilt her eyes, gray and as pale as mine. The skin texture of her face was very fine, and she used a slightly orange shade of lipstick on the full broad mouth.

"It's stuffy in here, Rossa. Should I check your jacket?"

"Do you want to stay very long in a place so crowded, Trav?" She tasted my name as she said it, with a slight hesitation.

"I guess not."

"Then I am fine, thank you. There's a place near for a drink, not so crowded, where we can both sit. Unless you have some other place you would rather go?"

"We'll try your place."

She wrinkled her nose in a small smile. "We will drink quickly and let Bernie have the stool, eh? Then he will be a big man again."

We walked a half block to another place. She had a nice long stride. There was a small blue booth for two along a dark wall. She chatted easily. She told me her name was Rossa Hendit, and she worked in an airlines ticket office on Fifth Avenue. She did not say which one. I could imagine some such name as Swenska or Nordway or Fiordlund, one of those little tiled places with a shiny engine in the window and pieces of ribbon leading to strange names on a map.

I told her I was from Florida. She had been to Miami several times. We talked climate, citrus, beaches and sunburn lotion. She had no whore look or whore manner that I could detect. But there was a curious inadequacy about our easy conversation. We both knew there was an envelope of money in one of my pockets, and it would end up in her purse. This was a situation I had never been in before. It took me a long time to analyze it. Finally I realized that we could generate no particular tension between us because the result was preordained. She was a stately and beautiful girl, fashionable and bright, with shining eyes and a good mouth. But there was no spice of pursuit. A doe which runs up and stares down the gun barrel is not a sporting venture. There is an electric tension in the chase, in searching out the little clues and vulnerabilities, making those little adjustments which favor the hunter. The biggest question had been answered before we met. Mrs. Smith had been the one who said yes. The only remaining question was how the would be in bed. And from the look of her, and from the cost of her, I could be certain she would be smooth-skinned, sensuous, tasty, and just as active or as passive as anybody wanted her to be. She looked as if she had passionate capacity, but one would never know whether her responses would be genuine or faked. I guessed she had begun judging and appraising me from the first moment and was, and would continue to be, trying to react in all ways which would please me. She wished, or had been taught, to give full value.

At one point I glanced up quickly and surprised a different expression in her eyes-an absolute coldness, a bleak and total indifference which was gone the instant I saw it. And that, I thought, was the whore's look and the whore's secret, that monumental unconcern which insulated her. I knew in that moment that this sort of thing could never interest me. I had to have the involvement of the spirit. These tasty goods were for other kinds of men: the ones for whom sex is an uncomplicated physical function one performs with varying degrees of skill with every broad and chick who will hold still for it; the men who are the cigar chompers, gin players, haunch-grabbers; the loud balding jokesters with several deals going for them on the long-distance lines; the broad-bellied expense-account braggards who grab the checks, goose the cocktail waitresses, talk smut, and run-run-run until their kidneys quit or their hearts explode.

And this savory and expensive chick had decorated the night places with them, and had lost track of the number of bald heads, lost track of the number of times she had, with the cigar smouldering on the nightstand, skillfully drained their transient loins.

Into a small silence I said, "Have you been doing this long?"

The answer came so quickly and reasonably it had the ring of policy. "Dear, don't think of such things. You'll make us both unhappy. I work all day. I like to go out. I'm your date."

"It's just a little friendly curiosity Rossa."

"Please, dear, with you I have been feeling that it is really a date. Let me keep pretending."

"You mean we're different, you and I?"

"Don't you feel that way about it too, darling?"

It was very skilled. As standard practice it would inflate the man's ego. Every man could be led to believe he was special. And at the end, with a great faked galloping climax, she would make him believe it forever. Every customer is unique.

"Perhaps. But I want to talk about it."

She pouted in a rather pretty way, and said, "How did a lovely girl like you get into anything like this? Isn't that a very trite question, Trav? Aren't you and I worth better conversation than that?"

"Do you know that old joke, what the lovely girl answers?"

"Surely. Just lucky, I guess. Darling, it is really very adolescent of you to want to pry. Just accept me. As if I was born an hour ago, just for you."

"All clean and fresh and sweet and virginal." She looked down at her hand. She examined the nails. It reminded me of Bonita Hersch's hand, except that the nails were longer. She looked across at me. This time the whore look was frank and apparent.

Under all that tasty trimming was a basic coarseness which would gag a goat. I didn't have to know how she got into the business. It had been invented for her.

"If you can wait here an hour, someone will come who might suit you better. One of the newer ones, I think. Younger and possibly a little nervous about everything."

"I wasn't trying to offend you, Rossa."

"My dear fellow, it would stagger the imagination to think of any way you could possibly offend me. I was merely thinking of making things more agreeable for you."

"You are agreeable."

Suddenly her smile was dazzling. She was a fashion model facing into an imaginary spring breeze in a professional studio. "I will suit you very very well. Never fear. You are an exciting man, Trav. I shouldn't want to give you up at this point. Now we can forget all that and this will be a date for us. You came in to buy a ticket. You asked me to have a drink with you after work. I am a very proper girl and I am wondering if you are going to make me feel too reckless." She reached with a small gold lighter and lit my cigarette and then, as she started to hold the flame to her own, fumbled with it and it dropped into her lap and clattered onto the floor. She laughed and said, "See? You are actually making me a little bit nervous, darling."

I sat on my heels beside our small blue booth and peered under the table for the lighter. I saw the glint of it back against the wall and reached and picked it up, sat back in the booth, lit her cigarette with it and handed it to her.

"Thank you, dear," she said, with a splendid imitation of fondness.

We finished our drinks, ordered another.

I felt incomparably shrewd. I would take her to the Plaza. I would take her up to Terry's suite and suddenly Rossa Hendit would discover that it was not the sort of evening she had anticipated. All we wanted from her was conversation about Charlie, and Terry was set up to pay well for it. The tape would furnish Terry's very good lawyer with enough background to enable him to go after a court order to get Charles McKewn Armister hospitalized for observation, with Joanna Armister signing the commitment papers. After they had taken him off whatever they had him on, Charlie would be able to blow the whole scheme sky high.

My date began to seem slightly absent minded. It was a quiet bar, and thinning out. She went to the ladies' room and seemed to be gone a long time.

Reality is a curious convention. It is the special norm for each of us. Based upon the evidences of our own senses, we have each established our own version of reality. We are constantly rechecking it with all sensory equipment. In the summer of 1958 I was in Acapulco when a major earthquake struck that area. I was awakened by the grating of roof tiles and a thousand dogs howling. I went barefoot to the window. There was a cool tile floor under my bare feet. Suddenly I realized that the tile floor was rippling. There were waves in the solid tile, throwing me off balance. Such a thing could not be. Tile floors were solid. To have such a floor rippling in such a way destroyed the validity of all sensory impressions, and gave me a feeling of black and primitive terror I had never felt before. I could no longer depend upon my evidences of reality.

She came back from the ladies' room. She sat and smiled at me. I said, "Let's get another drink up at the Plaza."

That is what my mind told my mouth to say. But the fit of the words in my mouth felt strange. I heard, like an after-echo, what I had said. "Let's get a down with the ending ever.

She was leaning toward me, with a narrow and curious avidity. "Darling," she said. "Darling, darling." It had an echo-chamber quality. She opened her mouth wide enough so that I could see the pink curl of her tongue as she formed the d.

I saw a tiny mark appear at her hairline, right in the center of her forehead. It moved slowly down her forehead, and as it did so the two flaps of flesh folded away at either side, bloody pink where they were exposed, displaying the hard white shine of ivory bone. The moving line parted her brows, bisected her nose and lips and chin, and the halved damp soft flesh fell away leaving the white skull, the black sockets where the eyes had been. The jaws and teeth were exposed in a white death grin, but the jaw still worked and the pink tongue was still moist within that sepulchral dryness, curling, saying, "Darling, darling."

I closed my eyes tightly, both hands clamped on the edge of the table. Under my hands the table edge turned wet and soft and full of roundnesses. I squinted down, fighting for control, and with vision it turned back into a table edge. But as I closed my eyes again all the softness was under my hands. This was the earthquake terror again, roaring through my mind like a black wind. In some far corner of my mind I was trying to make an appraisal. She had dropped the lighter and kicked it over against the wall. It gave her time enough.

I tried to hang onto a tiny edge of reality. I knew the words. I wanted the whole room to hear the words. Call the police.

I heard the words come out. A wet, brutish howling. "Can Paul bury shit anything." My muscles were knotted. I risked a glance at the skull. She was gone. She seemed gone. I could not be sure she was gone. I could not be sure of anything.

Then the room tilted abruptly, thudding my shoulder against the wall. I tried to see them. They were in a half-circle standing on that steep slant, looking down into the booth, the tallest narrowest people I had ever seen, with tiny little heads no bigger than oranges. One of them was a policeman. "Hadda!" I yelled at him. "Hassa hadda," and began to vomit with fright. A snake looked at me out of a door in the cop's narrow belly.