The Eye: A Novel of Suspense (13 page)

Hiller’s alert eyes got even narrower. “Corales tell you that too?”

“He did.”

“What else did he tell you about me?”

“Just that you’re employed as a cook at an all-night café.”

“Corales talks too much. He ought to mind his own business. So should you.”

“I was minding my business,” Lorsec said. “That, as I told you, is why I’m here.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like it. You don’t live in this building; you got no right to be in here alone.”

“I’m not bothering anyone, Mr. Hiller.”

“You’re bothering
me
,” Hiller said. “There’s too much crazy shit going on on this block as it is.”

“You mean the homicides?”

“That’s just what I mean. Now suppose you go crawl into the garbage in your own building. And stay there; don’t come back.”

Lorsec managed to curb his temper. He said evenly, “I don’t see that you’re in a position of authority here, Mr. Hiller. Richard Corales is the superintendent of this building—”

“Corales is a half-wit and I don’t care if he gave you permission in writing. You won’t have it again, I’ll see to that.” He took a step closer. “Go on, get out of here. I mean it, Lorsec—move.”

“And if I choose not to?”

Hiller made a threatening gesture with his trash bag. “Try me,” he said. There was no bluff in his voice, only a kind of controlled savagery.

Lorsec shrugged. “All right, Mr. Hiller, I’ll go. But not because I’m afraid of you. Only because I dislike trouble.”

He turned, walked across to the stairs that led up to the alley door. There were dead-bolt locks on the door; he slid them back, went out, and shut the door behind him. Inside, he heard Hiller come over and jam the dead-bolts back into place, then the sound of his footsteps retreating.

He stood for a time in the sticky heat of the alleyway, thinking about Hiller. What was in that bulky trash bag? he wondered. Something interesting, he was certain of that, or Hiller would not have acted as he had. The fact that he didn’t want anyone rummaging through the contents had been written plainly on his face.

Lorsec decided he would have to have a quiet talk with Richard. Whether Hiller liked it or not, he intended to pay another visit to the basement and the waste receptacles. And to learn what was in that trash bag.

Perhaps it would turn out to be something
very
interesting, indeed.

4:10 P.M. — BETH OXMAN

As she walked down the Fifth Avenue sidewalk, Beth could almost feel the evil emanating from the city. The juxtaposition of great wealth and abject poverty in Manhattan always fascinated her. It was the whole world jammed into one seething, fermenting mass. The harried-looking business types who passed her barely glanced in her direction and would step around or over her if suddenly she dropped dead of a heart attack. The tourists were too busy gawking to notice anything but the traditional sights. The cheap hustlers running three-card monte games or hawking inferior clothing with expensive labels sewn in, the street vendors selling their poisonous food, the panhandlers—these were the only individuals in the crowd who actually
saw
Beth, and then only as a potential sucker.

The city was what had made E.L. what he was—though God knew he’d had a choice—and what had ruined their marriage. If only years ago he had listened to her and decided not to go on being a policeman, to study law instead, everything would be different, and so much better.

Beth stopped on the corner of Fifth and Forty-seventh Street and glanced at her watch. More than fifteen minutes remained before her appointment with Dr. Hardin. A man in a blue business suit callously brushed her aside with his shoulder as he hurried to cross the street against the traffic light. A lanky youth lugging a huge blaring radio on a shoulder strap bumped her with his elbow as he turned the corner. She pursed her lips, controlling her annoyance, and began walking again, moving with the masses across Fifth Avenue.

On impulse she decided to stop in a stylish little ice cream parlor for a chocolate sundae before seeing Dr. Hardin. To hell with the calories: This was something she deserved.

It was crowded. Beth walked to the small tables beyond the counter and sat down, prudently placing her purse in the chair next to her where she could watch it from the corner of her eye as she scanned the people in the restaurant. They were like the people on the street, only perhaps generally better dressed. She didn’t like them any better indoors than out.

While she was waiting for the sundae to arrive, one of her headaches flared up. She reached into her purse for the small vial of pills Dr. Hardin had given her, and, contrary to his instructions for the days she was to visit him, shook out one of the capsules and washed it down with a sip of the water the waitress had left on the table.

Her vision wavered with the pain that seemed to pull apart the flesh of her forehead and expose a split and throbbing skull. She lifted the glass to her lips again, sipped, then pressed its chilled roundness to her forehead. That didn’t seem to help; nothing helped, not even the pills. A migraine headache wasn’t like an ordinary headache; it had to do with the swelling of blood vessels in the head, the building of pressure on raw nerves. Only a person who had experienced such a headache could imagine the pain.

E.L. couldn’t, that was certain. More than anything else he was the
cause
of her headaches, her nervous condition. He had never even pretended to consider yielding to her wishes that he take up another profession. During the past nineteen years she had spent most of her nights alone, worrying about who would take care of her if anything happened to him, wishing that she could leave the apartment and go to a nice restaurant, or maybe to the theater, like other men’s wives. But a policeman’s hours, and salary, prevented her from enjoying the pleasures of life that by all reason should have been hers. Too many nights of sitting and moping, a phone call away from widowhood, had done this to her. E.L. had done this to her. Why should she give him pleasure, grant him her body for his use whenever
he
wanted it? No, she obtained her own most intense pleasure another way now, a more subtle way.

The waitress returned with her sundae. And miraculously, with Beth’s first spoonful of ice cream and rich chocolate sauce, her headache disappeared.

E.L. didn’t believe the headaches were of physical origin. She knew that; he’d as much as told her so, trying to get her to see a shrink, as if he thought she was a mental case. Well, let him think it. What did it matter? She was the only one who understood just how physical her headaches were. You could certainly tell the difference between physical and imagined pain if it were occurring in your own body.

Well, she wasn’t
quite
the only person who understood. Dr. Hardin knew her pain was real. He wasn’t like the other physicians who had recommended seeing another sort of doctor. Dr. Hardin was expensive, but that was because he knew his business. Instead of solitude and lies, he prescribed medicine. Wasn’t that what a doctor was for, to heal the sick by administering to the body? The very suggestion that her sick spells were not actually migraine headaches was infuriating as well as false.

Beth realized that she was devouring the sundae as if she were in an eating contest. Already it was three-fourths consumed. She forced herself to place her spoon in the dish between bites, to make her self-indulgent treat last as long as possible. She still had time, and even if she were late, Dr. Hardin would understand. He always did.

Later that evening, when she returned home, E.L. was waiting for her, sitting at the kitchen table eating a roast beef TV dinner—the kind with the watery mashed potatoes and dyed bright green peas. Trying to make her feel guilty for not being there when he got home, no doubt; he was always trying to do that to her, after ruining her life.

“What did Dr. Hardin say?” he asked, feigning interest, hunched like a weary vulture over his dinner.

Beth tossed her light blazer onto a chair near the kitchen door, walked all the way into the kitchen and opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. “He said I was about the same,” she told him. “He gave me some more medicine.”

“What kind of medicine?”

“How should I know?” Beth snapped. “I don’t read Latin.”

“You don’t have to read Latin, Beth; all you have to do is ask what’s in the prescription and what it’s for.”

“It’s for my headaches.”

He put down the roll he was about to tear in half. “Hardin has the reputation of a Doctor Feelgood,” he said.

“And what is that?”

“A doctor more interested in getting you to come back than in making you well.”

“That’s nonsense,” Beth said. “I should know, if anyone does.”

E.L. nodded, which meant that he was refusing to continue the discussion. It was one of his more infuriating traits, leading her into an argument and then abruptly withdrawing after he had angered her. Once she had been tolerant of that in him, but no more.

“I’d have put a dinner in for you,” he said, “only I wasn’t sure what time you’d be home.”

She decided not to answer him. She placed a turkey dinner in the oven, adjusted the thermostat to 350 degrees, and then went into the bedroom to change into slacks and a blouse.

E.L. followed her, stood close behind her and watched in the dresser mirror as she slipped off her skirt and panty hose. “I thought about waking you last night when I got home,” he said.

“I’m glad you didn’t. I wasn’t feeling well.”

He touched his fingertips to the back of her neck, caressed lightly. “How do you feel tonight?”

“I don’t have a headache.” She watched him smile, saw the look she knew too well come into his eyes. “But the medicine I took at Dr. Hardin’s office made me a little sick to my stomach. I think I might have diarrhea.”

“Beth …”

“I don’t want to talk right now,” she said.

He withdrew his hand, nodding. She saw the change in his eyes, the fading of desire. And something else this time, a curious kind of resolve, as if he’d just reached some sort of decision. He left the bedroom, not in anger but with a sort of resigned purpose.

The hell with him
, she thought as she stepped into her slacks and worked them up over her ample hips.
Let him suffer for a change. It’s his turn now
.

11:15 P.M. — CINDY WILSON

She was exhausted when she left the restaurant. Saturday nights were always the busiest and tonight it had been a madhouse, all the tables full from seven o’clock on, customers demanding attention every second. The muscles in her legs felt knotted; it was going to be so good to sit down in a taxi, and even better to crawl into bed. She was too tired to spend another sleepless night worrying about the murders. She’d fall asleep right away tonight.

And she could sleep late in the morning too, stay in bed all day if she felt like it. Sunday was her day off.
Never on Sunday
, she thought, and smiled, and then giggled as she remembered that she had spent most of
this
day in bed with Wally. That Wally, he was insatiable. She had never known a man who liked sex as much as he did. He was really good, much better than Vern, much better than any of the other men she’d been with before and after her marriage. He knew how to arouse a woman, saying fuck all the time, getting her so hot she thought she would burn up sometimes.

She wondered if she really loved Wally. She told him she did when they were in bed, and she felt she did at other times too, but the rest of the time she wasn’t sure. Maybe it was just sex. He was attractive and such a good artist and he treated her well enough, but he had that frump of a wife. It made her a little uneasy to be seeing a married man, particularly because there didn’t seem to be much future in it.

Oh, he talked about leaving his frump and moving in with her, marrying her, but that was just talk. She’d heard that kind of talk before. He didn’t have any money and neither did she, not enough to support both of them. And he was afraid of Vern too. He probably didn’t love her; she couldn’t remember him ever saying he did, not even once. Just sex for him, she supposed, although she was pretty sure he did care for her at least a little bit. That was the way men were.

But it was all right. It was such terrific sex, and they had fun together in other ways, and she was learning all kinds of things about art and the intellectual side of life. So what if he didn’t love her? So what if she decided she didn’t love him? You had to live for the moment, you had to enjoy yourself the best way you could, for as long as you could. It was just all right the way it was.

Getting a cab on Saturday nights could be a problem, but she was lucky tonight. One was just letting off a fare when she came out of the restaurant, and she hurried over and slid inside before anybody else could beat her to it. She let out a sigh as she leaned back against the seat. Boy, she couldn’t remember being this pooped. That Wally. Four times today—four times! No wonder she was so tired. Between Wally and the madhouse tonight, she didn’t have a single ounce of energy left.

She stretched her legs, wiggling to get them into a comfortable position. Last night she’d watched the meter, fretting because of the cost, but tonight she didn’t; she closed her eyes instead. She knew what the ride would cost—two and a half dollars, plus that damned fifty-cent surcharge the city had granted some taxi companies on evening fares. No tip; she couldn’t afford a tip. Well, at least her own tips had been good at the restaurant, better than usual on Saturdays. Anyway, it sure relieved her mind not to have to walk down Ninety-eighth while there was a maniac on the loose shooting people. It made her shiver every time she thought about it.

The ride home took less than ten minutes. Cindy’s eyes were open when the cab drifted around the corner from Riverside Drive, and she sat up on the seat to scan the sidewalks on both sides of Ninety-eighth. They were deserted. That was also a relief; another sigh came out of her as the driver pulled up in front of her building.

She squinted through the sheet of protective plexiglas that bisected the cab, looking at the meter. The amount was the same she had paid last night. She opened her purse, took three dollar bills from her wallet, and put them into the little try in the plexiglas. The driver muttered something when he scooped it out, but she didn’t hear what it was. Probably grousing about the lack of a tip. Well, that was his problem. If it wasn’t for that fifty-cent surcharge, she might have given him a quarter.