The Man Who Loved Women to Death (33 page)

“There wouldn’t be,” Feldman said, going into his lecture mode. “Serials typically experience a sense of exhilaration after they do their victims. When Cash sat down to write that, he was on a temporary high. But then that euphoria wore off, and up popped his demons all over again.”

“I understand that, Inspector,” I said. “It’s just that he was so obsessed about making a big splash. All he talked about in his letters was the publicity, the money. Who was going to play him in the movie, who was going to play me, you—”

“I forget, darling,” Merilee said. “Who was he talking about for the role of me?”

“He wasn’t. He didn’t mention you.”

She drew herself up at this, outraged. “What?”

“Okay, I lied. He wanted Anna Nicole Smith.”

“How
dare
he write me out of the picture? That son of a sea cook
never
liked me.”

“You never liked him, Merilee.”

“Harrumph.”

“You were saying, Hoagy?” Feldman said.

“I just find it hard to accept that Tuttle would end it like he did without putting that part down on paper, too. I mean, he went out with a kaboom. Literally. But in terms of his final chapter, he went out with a whimper. Do you gentlemen understand what I’m saying?”

They didn’t. They were both staring at me blankly across the coffee table.

Very cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You been close to this since day one, dude. Closer than any of us. Maybe you ought to do some serious chillin’. Try to remember what life was like when it was normal.”

“My memory doesn’t go back that far, Lieutenant.”

Merilee took my hand. “I’ll do what I can to jog it for you, darling.”

Very grinned at her. “I’m down to that.”

Pamela started making discreet noises at the dining table.

“Will you gentlemen stay for dinner?” Merilee offered. “I’m sure we can throw another potato in the stew.”

Feldman let out a guffaw. “Christ, I haven’t heard that expression in thirty years.”

I said, “Stick around, Inspector. She’s just getting warmed up.”

For which I got a swift, hard elbow in the ribs.

“Thanks, but we have to be going.” Feldman got wearily to his feet and stuck his hand out to me. We shook. “Sorry it had to end the way it did. You finding your friend dead.”

“I found two friends dead, Inspector.”

“They never make it easy for us, do they?”

“No, Inspector. They do not.”

“But it’s over. That’s the bottom line, Hoagy. You just stick to the bottom line, that’s my advice. Sometimes we lose sight of the bottom line when we’re trying to get over something like this. It’s happened to me. It’s happened to all of us.” He managed a grim, sympathetic smile. The effort seemed to pain him. “You’re still not my kind of guy, you know. You’re not a team player. But I’ll tell you one thing—you made one helluva choice in a wife.”

“Ex-wife,” Merilee and I both said.

“Whatever,” he said. “You got lucky, my friend.”

“It’s true, Inspector. I’m a lucky man.”

“Ride easy, dude,” said Very.

Then they said their good-byes to Merilee and were gone.

We had asparagus with our pork tenderloin, also Pam’s world-renowned macaroni and cheese. She uses just under one metric ton of two different grated cheeses, Italian fontina and Pecorino Romano. Pam’s macaroni and cheese is ordinarily a major event in my life. But I barely touched it or the moist, fragrant slices of pork. I just sat there at the table, listening to the tall clock tick in the entry hall.

“What is it, darling?” Merilee asked fretfully, her green eyes shimmering at me in the candlelight.

“I have no idea, Merilee.”

“Well, I have. You’ve gotten less than two hours of sleep in the past four days. Why don’t you pop into bed with Lulu and a good book? I’ll join you as soon as I’ve helped Pam with the dinner things.”

“You know, I think that’s exactly what I’ll do.”

So I undressed and climbed into bed with B. Traven and Lulu, who climbed right up onto my chest, her paws on my shoulders, and started whimpering at me woefully. She truly was not herself. I felt her large black nose. Cold and wet. She wasn’t sick. But something was definitely bothering her. I scrunched her chin, wishing she could tell me what it was. I lay there under the down comforter with the lights of the city sparkling outside the window.

Romaine Very was right, of course. I was too close to it. Too full of hurt and loss and confusion. But chillin’ was no answer. Because the hows and whens still wouldn’t add up. How and when Tuttle wrote that final chapter. How and when he got the typewriter into his woodshed. How and when he chose to die. They didn’t add up. No one could make them add up.

And there was something else. Something that had bothered me several days ago about one of those chapters. An odd feeling I couldn’t put my finger on. It was in the third chapter, “the answer man takes a plunge.” The Bridget Healey murder.

I climbed out from under my glum chum and fetched my copy and got back into bed with it. I read the pages over again carefully. Read all about him finding her there in the pool, swimming laps …
She had on a string bikini, the kind they wear when they’re advertising …
Joining her in the whirlpool. Hearing her story. Walking her to her dark, cramped apartment. Performing his random act of kindness …
She just sort of went away, snap, like some bug on the kitchen floor …
That empty feeling he was left with. I read it all over again. And I re-read it.

And then I found it. It wasn’t much. It was just a word. One word. But it was wrong. And now the pieces started to fit together. Almost. One piece was missing. I needed the missing piece.

I looked at the clock on the nightstand. It wasn’t yet ten. I pulled out the Manhattan phone book and started working the phone, seated there on the edge of the bed. Merilee came in after awhile. When she saw me there, saw the look on my face, she went into the living room to read. I had no luck in Manhattan, so I tried calling information. I worked my way through Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island. Then I started in on Long Island, working my way outward from the city, town by town. Luckily, I had to go only as far as Mineola. It was after midnight by then. But I got what I needed. I got the missing piece.

And then I knew. I knew why it didn’t add up. Oh, yeah, I knew all right.

T
HOSE TWO WACKY LOVEBIRDS,
Pam and Vic, went chugging off to Lyme in the Land Rover shortly after dawn. The morning weather forecast called for snow changing to sleet, followed by high winds, hailstones and lemmings. They wanted to beat the worst of it out there, get the kitchen stocked, the firewood chopped, the hurricane lamps filled. Pam served us our breakfast in bed before they left, which happens to be one of Merilee’s two or three favorite things in the whole world, right up there with shopping for clothes in Milan and boycotting the Oscars. I don’t hate it myself. There was fresh-squeezed orange juice. There were waffles, sausages, poached eggs.

Tracy joined us in the big bed, chock full of giggles and gurgles. She wasn’t old enough yet to wake up in a shitty mood. How nice that must be, I thought. Lulu just lay there on my feet, sulky and morose. Still wouldn’t so much as sniff at her kippers and eggs. During the night I had even heard her prowling the apartment restlessly, which she almost never does. I was really getting worried about her.

After breakfast, Merilee climbed into her gray silk lounging pajamas and went around closing her blackout curtains and turning off all the lights in the apartment. Time for a little blindness practice, bless her. Tracy got a one-way ticket back to her crib in the nursery. Me, I put in a call to Very. Came up empty—the lieutenant was in court that morning. I left word for him to call me as soon as he could. I went in the bathroom and showered and shaved and doused myself with Floris. When I came out Lulu was standing in the bedroom doorway barking at me. Her way of informing me she was ready for her morning constitutional in Central Park. I told her to hold her horses. She started barking louder. I told her to shut up. She wouldn’t shut up. And then a heavy thud came from the direction of the living room. Shook the whole apartment. A definite 6.3 on the Richter scale.

“What did you bump into this time, Merilee?”

She didn’t answer me. More barking from Lulu.

“Was that you, Merilee?” I called out, louder this time. “Are you all right?”

Still no response. She was, possibly, out cold. Actresses. Stay away from them if you can help it. And if you can’t, make sure you have good health insurance. I threw on my dressing gown and went searching for her, stopping first in the nursery just to make absolutely sure that Tracy hadn’t somehow managed to tumble out of her crib and hit the deck. She hadn’t. She was in there, all right, inspecting her toes. Lulu elected to hang there with her, commandeering the rocker. Not one of her usual haunts, but I didn’t press it. I was just happy she’d stopped barking.

“Merilee?” I started down the hallway toward the dining room, plunging headlong into the complete and total blackness she had created. “Merilee, are you all right? Hellooo?”

“Psst, in here, Hoagy,” she whispered at me from the dark, her strong hand grabbing mine, tugging at me urgently.

It was to be the powder room again, near as I could tell.

“Merilee, I have this really kinky idea. There’s a large, soft bed in the master bedroom. Just for the sake of variety why don’t we—?”

“Shhh!”

And then we were in there with the door closed and her breath hot on my face and her lips on mine. Hands flinging my dressing gown open. Legs wrapping around me tightly.

“Oh, God, Hoagy,” she moaned. “This is so
right.”

Only it wasn’t right. Not the lips. Not the legs. Not the voice. I pushed her away, violently. I groped for the light and flicked it on.

It was Tansy Smollet who was in there with me. It was Tansy Smollet who was up on that bathroom sink with her bare white legs clutching me, her shapeless designer smock flung half off her, her eyes bright and cunning as a wild animal’s in the firelight.

It was Tansy Smollet who had a Smith & Wesson Ladysmith pointed directly at my stomach.

It was Tansy.

“What have you done with Merilee?” I gasped, my chest heaving.

“Tied her up to a dining chair,” she replied, her voice incredibly calm. Eerily calm. “Stuffed a sock in her mouth so she couldn’t scream. I’m very good at doing that sort of thing in the dark. I’ve had a lot of experience, you know. The doorman let me up. I told him I was Merilee’s long lost sister and it was a surprise and would he please not spoil it. When she opened the door—”

“She got a surprise.” That explained why Lulu had started barking. To alert me. And that was why she had stayed behind in the nursery. To guard her baby sister. Protecting Tracy was her job.

“We’re almost there now, Hoagy,” Tansy said softly, letting the gun fall casually to her side. “She’s all that’s stopping us now.
He’s
not here anymore. We made sure of that.”

“We did?”

She nodded her head slowly, like a good, obedient child. “Now we just have to take care of Merilee. Once she’s gone we’ll have what we’ve always wanted.” Her hand reached inside my dressing gown, playing with what she found in there.

I grabbed her hand and held it. “Which is what, Tansy?”

Her eyes widened. “Why, to be together, of course. We’ve been pretending for too long, Hoagy. We won’t have to pretend any longer. Oh, God, this is going to be so good. And I swear I’ll be a good mother to Tracy. You’ll see.”

My eyes were on the gun. The Ladysmith has a slimmer grip than the standard issue. Not that she needed one. The hand that gripped mine was big and strong.
Someone with strong hands.
That’s what Mrs. Adelman had said about the typing sample. She never said a
man
with strong hands. Just
someone.

I thought about lunging for it, wrestling with her for it. But there was no telling what might happen. She might shoot me. And there was my family to think of. Merilee, who was tied to a chair out there in the dark somewhere. Tracy …

“We’ll make it look like a break-in, Hoagy. Before we go we’ll make it look like she was the tragic victim of a random break-in.”

“We’re not going anywhere, Tansy. You’ve killed five women. You’ve driven Tuttle to suicide. You’re sick, Tansy. You’re very, very sick.”

She shrugged this off, her smock falling to her waist. I looked at her small, firm breasts, the nipples rosy and taut. There was a time when the sight of Tansy Smollet’s naked breasts would have stirred me to a frenzy. There was a time. Now there was no time. She looked at me looking at her. “Listen to you,” she said. “You make it sound like I did all of this for no reason. I did it for
us.”

“Lulu knew it was you,” I said. “It was your hand cream. She smelled your hand cream at Cassandra’s apartment. That’s why she was howling—not because Cassandra was dead, but because she realized that you were her killer. She adores you, and this meant she’d be losing you.”

Tansy let out a laugh. “Losing me? She’ll be
gaining
me.” She glanced down at the gun in her hand. “All we have to do is finish what we started.”

I said, “Feldman was so wrong. He insisted serial killers are never women. He had all the statistics and the facts and the case studies. He had everything but the exception to the rule—
you.
And it all makes so much more sense this way, too. How the answer man was able to pick up bright, attractive single women so easily. How he was able to convince them to take him home—even in the midst of a citywide scare. How come no one ever spotted any of the victims with a man shortly before they died. How come he didn’t sexually assault them. Because the answer man
wasn’t
a man. He was
you.
No reason for a woman to be worried about
you. You
with your concentration-camp haircut, the better to leave no samples behind.
You
with your short, unpainted nails, the better to leave no scratches or traces of polish behind.… Madelyn Horowitz, the sales clerk at Bergdorf, spotted you, you know. She saw a woman ask Cassandra for her autograph. Madelyn lives in Mineola. I spoke to her late last night. She described the autograph seeker as a tall, leggy Amazon type wearing a Zoran.” I smiled at Tansy. “That’s what Cassandra was trying to tell me on the phone when she was dying. She wasn’t saying, ‘It’s raining.’ She was saying, ‘Zoranian.’ You told her you knew something about the answer man’s identity, I suppose. That’s how you convinced her to take you home.”