SWF Seeks Same (21 page)

The police
.

After leaving the shop, Allie found a phone booth on the street. It wasn’t a booth really, but it did have a curved Plexiglas shield to deflect traffic noise. She remembered how in the movies the police often reasoned out where a call had come from by the background sounds. Before dialing, she stood for a moment and listened to make sure there were only the usual Manhattan noises: roar of traffic, rush of thousands of soles on concrete, echoing car horns and distant emergency vehicle sirens, millions of hearts and hopes breaking.

She nestled into the booth as close as possible to the phone and fed coins into the slot, then held her cupped hand next to the receiver’s mouthpiece to make sure she could be heard.

Allie was told by a desk sergeant that Detective Kennedy had been on vacation but was due in this afternoon around three o’clock. He asked her who was calling and could anyone else help her. She hung up.

She stood on the sidewalk in bright sunlight, her fists propped on her hips.

With money in her pocket she felt different. She’d regained her status as a human being, at least in the eyes of those who passed her on the street. She was a little ashamed by how much difference a wad of hundred-dollar bills could make in the way she and the world saw each other. Something was wrong here. How must it be to live month after month penniless on the streets, as so many did? The invisible people of the city, the ones most of us didn’t like to see because the vision and what it suggested made us vaguely uncomfortable. But only vaguely; that was the true horror of it. Allie knew she’d never be blind to the dispossessed again; she’d learned how it felt to be without tooth and fang in the jungle.

She bought a pair of dark-tinted sunglasses from a sidewalk vendor. Not much of a disguise, really, though they did change the way she looked, with their uptilted black frames. She thought they gave her a devilish yet somehow sad expression. Wearing the glasses, she walked idly back up to Washington Park.

The benches and open spaces were lined with winos and the drug-wasted, as well as neighborhood people and tourists. A uniformed cop strolled on a course perpendicular to Allie’s but paid no attention to her, nodding to a couple of kids on bikes who veered onto the grass to avoid him. Her blood beat a drum in her ears and she was ready to run if he even glanced her way.

He paused, stretched his arms, and ambled off toward the street, his nightstick, walkie-talkie, and holstered revolver jouncing on his hips and causing him to swing his arms wide, lending him the swagger of cops everywhere.

Watching him, it struck Allie that there was probably no better city in the country in which to be a fugitive. So ponderous and hectic was the press of people, and so infrequent was eye contact, that the likelihood of someone in New York happening to see and recognize anyone accidentally was extremely slim.

But not impossible, she reminded herself.

Near the pigeon-fouled statue of Garibaldi, she stopped and watched a squirrel take a circuitous route up a tree and disappear among the branches. A yellow Frisbee sailed near her, and a Hispanic girl about twelve ran and retrieved it from where it was lodged like yellow fall fruit in some bushes. The squirrel ventured halfway down the tree to see what was going on, switching its tail in anger or alarm.

Allie was tempted to spend hours in the park, but she knew that would accomplish nothing. And it might not be as safe here as she assumed.

Next, she decided, she’d find a place to stay. She smiled. Why not a plush hotel? One of those bordering Central Park? Maybe the Ritz Carlton. Why not a mint on the pillow, and room-service meals? First class made the most sense for those who didn’t intend to pay.

The idea gave her delicious satisfaction, until she realized that without identification or credit cards, she’d have to pay in advance. Plastic was needed to establish reputableness and pave the way for cash. She hadn’t quite regained her full measure of Manhattan humanity.

She rode the subway to 42nd Street. Then she walked around the Times Square area and theater district until she found a hotel that looked seedy enough to be cheap and anonymous, but was still bearable.

The Willmont, on West Forty-eighth, wasn’t the Ritz Carlton. The entrance was an ancient, wood-framed revolving door, just inside of which the doorman, if that’s what he was, dozed in a metal folding chair with a newspaper in his lap. The lobby was small and dim, with dusty potted palms, peeling floor tile, and two old men slumped in threadbare armchairs and gazing speculatively at Allie. She told herself they probably stared at everyone who came in. On the wall near the desk was a vast, time-darkened print of Custer’s Last Stand. Custer stood tall in the middle of the melee, aiming his pistol at an Indian, like a man about to die. Taped beneath the faded gold-leafed frame was less ambitious artwork, a sign declaring the elevators were out of order. Its corners were curled and it looked as if it had been there a long time.

The desk clerk was a girl about twenty with a purple and orange punk hairdo and a nose that appeared to have been broken one more time than it had been set. She told Allie yes, there was a vacancy, and the rate was forty-six dollars a night. Ridiculously cheap by New York standards. Allie registered as Audrey James from Minneapolis and paid in advance for a week. The girl didn’t even ask if she had luggage or needed a bellhop, merely handed her a brass key on a plastic tag and said, “Two-twenty, up at the top of them stairs.”

Allie accepted the key and walked toward a steep flight of stairs covered with moldy blue carpet. The old men were still staring. An equally old black man with a broom and one of those dustpans with a long handle nodded to her and smiled wide and warm as she went past. There was graffiti on the stairwell walls, but it had been crossed out with black paint and was unintelligible except for where the word FUCK had been crudely altered to read BOOK. BOOK YOU. Fooled no one, Allie thought, trudging up the creaking steps.

Was she fooling anyone?

The hall at the top of the stairs was a littered horror, but the room was better than she’d imagined. The walls were pale green and needed paint. The maple furniture was old but in good shape. Might even support her weight. The drapes were a mottled gray to match the carpet. Near the foot of the bed was a TV bolted to a steel shelf that was bolted to the wall. Allie saw only one roach, but a big one, scurrying for darkness on the wall behind the dresser. The room smelled like Pine Sol disinfectant, which was probably better than the alternative odor.

A toilet flushed somewhere and water gurgled in a pipe buried in the wall. A man was yelling, very faintly, possibly from the room next door or directly above, “Get ’em off, get ’em off!” Allie wasn’t sure what he meant and didn’t want to find out. Thanks to the thick walls, he wasn’t making enough noise to disturb her.

She walked to the bathroom and found that it, too, was clean, though the fixtures were old and yellowed porcelain. The tub had claw feet, and a crack in its side that had somehow been repaired and painted over with white enamel so that it resembled a surgery scar. There was a makeshift shower with a plastic curtain. The curtain was green with a white daisy design, and looked old and brittle enough to break at a touch. Green tile ran from the floor halfway to the ceiling; a few of the squares were missing to reveal ancient gray ridges of cement. There was a single small window, open about three inches and caked with layers of paint so that it would remain open about three inches today and tomorrow and far into eternity. A plank of cool air pushed in through the window, but the pine disinfectant smell was even stronger in the bathroom.

Allie locked the door and lay down on the bed, which was soft enough to aggravate any spine problem. She saw that the ceiling was cracked and waterstained. There was another roach up there, not moving and probably dead. She stared hard at it, thought it might have moved slightly, but she couldn’t be positive. Vision itself wavered. The eyes played games with the mind.

She forgot about the roach and laid her plans.

Wearing her sunglasses, she’d go out and get some lunch, then buy some junk food to bring back to the hotel. Then she’d buy some new clothes—jeans, a blouse, a windbreaker, some socks and underwear—and return to her room and treat herself to a long, hot shower. Maybe take a nap, if she could sleep. She didn’t feel completely secure here at the Willmont, and it wasn’t only the police she feared.

This evening she’d phone Kennedy again from a booth, then go to the Village. To Wild Red’s, and see if anybody there remembered Hedra.

Springs twanged as she got up from the bed. She walked into the bathroom and moaned when she looked at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Her hair was greasy and plastered close to her head. Her face was pale. Her eyes, haunted and wide, stared back at her like those of a creature that had just sensed it was merely a link in the food chain, wild and cornered and resigned to death.

Hedra had done this to her. Turned her into this.

She washed her face and used her fingertips to do what she could with her hair. A comb and makeup; something else she needed to get while she was out.

After about ten minutes she again studied herself in the mirror. She was satisfied. Her reflection looked older, with eyes still haunted, but it wouldn’t frighten children.

Most children.

Though she was exhausted, sleep was impossible. Allie climbed out of bed at six o’clock that evening and discovered she was hungry. After relieving herself in the bathroom that smelled like the Canadian woods, she unwrapped and ate one of the cheese Danishes she’d bought earlier that day, washing it down with a can of fizzy, warm Pepsi. Later, maybe, she’d take time to eat a more traditional supper.

After dressing in her new jeans and blue sweater, she slipped into her black windbreaker and went downstairs. It buoyed her spirit, wearing new clothes, even if the ensemble’s style had turned out to be Paris-punk.

The two old men in the lobby had been joined by a third. They all stopped talking and stared at her as she walked out to the street. What am I doing? she wondered. Swinging my ass? Sending out vibes? Are they expecting me to return with a man? She didn’t much care if they thought she was an innocent prostitute and not someone wanted for murder.

She walked for a while on Seventh Avenue, lost among the thronging tourists taking advantage of a clear night. Then she used a phone in a Brew Burger at 52nd Street to call Kennedy.

“I’m afraid you’re in some trouble, dear,” he said when she’d identified herself and been put through to him.

Allie was soothed by his gentle, amiable voice. She pictured the bulky detective leaning back in his chair with his big feet propped up on his cluttered desk, a row of cigars protruding from his shirt pocket. She searched for words, then said simply, “I didn’t do it.” That sounded hollow even to her.

“ ‘Course not, dear.”

“It was something done to me. Something I let happen. It won’t be easy to believe; I know that.”

“Ah! I’m listening, though.”

And in a rush of words she told him about Hedra and Sam, and about Graham, and what had actually occurred at the Atherton Hotel.

Kennedy waited until she was finished and said, “Your neighbors at the Cody Arms told us you lived alone. They never saw this Hedra.”

“But that was the idea!” Allie said in exasperation. “Her being there was a violation of the lease. I had to
pretend
I lived alone.”

“Well, it’s a big and impersonal kind of place, all right, so what you say’s surely possible. Tell me, dear, is there no one who could verify that you had this roommate?”

“No, there isn’t. The only two people who could are dead. That’s
why
she killed Sam! And maybe she even murdered Graham.”

“So she could impersonate you without interference?”

“Yes. I think she planned to kill me, but then it wasn’t necessary. She just blamed Sam’s murder on me and saved herself the risk and trouble. She thought I’d be arrested and out of her way. I think she’s spent time in a mental hospital. Maybe she’s done it before, killed other women she’s lived with.”

“What makes you think she’s killed other roommates?”

“There are all those newspaper clippings about murders.”

“But didn’t you just tell me you saw only one such clipping, on the back of a recipe?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then you’re not really sure about the others.”

“No. Yes! God, I don’t know. If you’ll look for her we can find out.”

“But why would she want to impersonate you?”

“She didn’t just want to impersonate me—she wanted to
be
me! Psychiatrists probably have a word for it, like they do everything else. It was as if she didn’t have a personality or an identity of her own, so she needed mine to fill the vacuum. She’s mentally ill. Twisted. Do you understand?”

“I’m trying to, dear. Be patient with me. And you really think she killed this Graham Knox, too?”

“I don’t know. I—” Allie suddenly drew in her breath. “You’re trying to keep me talking so this call can be traced.”

“Don’t be so romantic and excitable, dear. That kind of thing happens mostly in movies and mystery novels.”

“Don’t call me ‘dear’ again!”

“All right, if you don’t like it. What would it be, then—Miss Jones? Allie?”

“You! You’re just a cop, like the rest of them.”

“I’m a cop, dear. I never pretended to be otherwise. You must admit that. Some problems are too big to shoulder alone. I think you should come here so we can talk in person. I promise you—”

Allie slammed down the receiver and walked quickly away from the phone, out of the restaurant onto 52nd Street. The cacophony of nighttime Manhattan rushed over her in a deafening wave, intimidating her. She felt like hurling her troubles to the pavement and running as fast as she could away from them.

But she knew that wouldn’t work.

Across the street several cabs were queued up to collect passengers at the Sheraton Centre Hotel. She waved to one of the drivers, and the cab eased out of the line and waited for her, blocking traffic. Horns blared, but the driver, unconcerned, slung his arm over the seat back and waited for Allie.