A Ticket to the Boneyard (4 page)

“New York postmark,” I said.

“I know.”

“So if it was a friend of hers—”

“The friend carried the clipping all the way to New York and put it in the mail.”

I stood up and walked over to the window. I looked through it without seeing anything, then turned to face her. “The alternative,” I said, “is that someone else killed her. And her kids. And her husband.”

“Yes.”

“And faked it to look like murder and suicide. Faked a call to the cops while he was at it. And then waited until the story was printed in the local paper, and clipped it, and brought it back to New York and put it in the mail.”

“Yes.”

“I guess we’re thinking of the same person.”

“He swore he’d kill Connie,” she said. “And me. And you.”

“He did, didn’t he.”

“ ‘You and all your women, Scudder.’ That’s what he said to you.”

“A lot of bad guys say a lot of things over the years. You can’t take all that crap seriously.” I went over and picked up the envelope again, as if I could read its psychic vibrations. If it held any, they were too subtle for me.

I said, “Why now, for God’s sake? What’s it been, twelve years?”

“Just about.”

“You really think it’s him, don’t you?”

“I know it is.”

“Motley.”

“Yes.”

“James Leo Motley,” I said. “Jesus.”

James Leo Motley. I’d first heard the name in that same apartment, but not in the black-and-white living room. I’d called Elaine one afternoon, dropped by shortly thereafter. She fixed bourbon for me and a diet cola for herself, and a few minutes later we were in her bedroom. Afterward I touched the tip of one finger to a discolored area alongside her rib cage and asked her what happened.

“I almost called you,” she said. “I had a visitor yesterday afternoon.”

“Oh?”

“Someone new. He’d called, said he was a friend of Connie’s. That’s Connie Cooperman. You met her, remember?”

“Sure.”

“He said she gave him my number. So we talked, and he sounded all right, and he came over. I didn’t like him.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“I don’t know exactly. There was something weird about him. Something about his eyes.”

“His eyes?”

“The way he looks at you. What is it Superman’s got? X-ray vision? I felt as though he could look at me and see clear through to the bone.”

I ran a hand over her. “You’d miss a lot of nice skin that way,” I said.

“And there was something very cold about it. Reptilian, like a lizard watching flies. Or like a snake. Coiled, ready to strike without warning.”

“What’s he look like?”

“That may have been part of it. He’s kind of strange-looking. A very long narrow face. Mouse-colored hair, and a lousy haircut, one of those soup-bowl jobs. It made him look like a monk. Very pale skin. Unhealthy, or at least that’s how it looked.”

“Sounds charming.”

“His body was strange, too. He was completely hard.”

“Isn’t that something you strive for in your line of work?”

“Not his cock, his whole body. Like every muscle was tense all the time, like he never relaxed. He’s thin, but he’s very muscular. What you call wiry.”

“What happened?”

“We went to bed. I wanted to get him into bed because I wanted to get him out of here as soon as possible. Also, I figured once I got him off he’d be calmer and I wouldn’t be as nervous. I already knew I wasn’t going to see him again. In fact I would have asked him to leave without taking him to bed, but I was afraid of what he might do. He didn’t exactly do anything, but he was an unpleasant trick.”

“Was he rough?”

“Not exactly. It was the way he touched me. You can tell a lot from the way a man touches you. He touched me like he hated me. I mean, who needs that shit, you know?”

“How’d you get the bruise?”

“That was after. He got dressed, he wasn’t interested in taking a shower and I didn’t suggest it because I wanted him O-U-T. And he gave me this look, and he said we’d probably be seeing a lot of each other from now on.
That’s what you think
, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. He was on his way out, and he hadn’t given me any money, or left anything on the dresser.”

“You didn’t get money in front?”

“No, I never do. I don’t discuss it ahead of time, not unless the man brings it up, and most of the time they don’t. A lot of men like to pretend to themselves that the sex is free and the money they give me is a present, and that’s fine. Anyway, he was ready to walk out without giving me anything, and I came this close to letting him go.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, because I was angry, and if I was going to have to trick a shitheel like that I was at least going to get paid for it. So I gave him a smile and said, ‘You know, you’re forgetting something.’

“He said, ‘What am I forgetting?’ ‘I’m a working girl,’ I said. He said he knew that, that he could tell a whore when he saw one.”

“Nice.”

“I didn’t react to it, but I did say I got paid for what I did. Something like that, I forgot how I put it. And he gave me this very cold look, and he said, ‘I don’t pay.’

“And then I was stupid. I could have let it go, but I thought maybe it was just an ego thing, a matter of terms, and I said I didn’t expect him to pay, but maybe he’d like to give me a present.”

“And he hit you.”

“No. He walked toward me, and I backed off, and he kept coming until I was backed up against the wall there. He put his hand on me. I was dressed, I had a blouse on. He put his hand right here and he just pressed with two fingers, and there must be a nerve there or some kind of pressure point, because it hurt like fury. There was no mark then. That didn’t show up until this morning.”

“It’ll probably be worse tomorrow.”

“Great. It’s sore now, but it’s not terrible. While he was doing it, though, the pain was incredibly intense. I went weak in the knees and I swear I couldn’t see. I thought I was going to black out.”

“He did that pressing with two fingers.”

“Yes. Then he let go of me and I was holding on to the wall for support and he fucking grinned at me. ‘We’ll see a lot of each other,’ he said, ‘and you’ll do whatever I tell you to do.’ And then he left.”

“Did you call Connie?”

“I haven’t been able to reach her.”

“If this clown calls again—”

“I’ll tell him to shit in his hat. Don’t worry, Matt, he’s never getting in the door again.”

“You remember his name?”

“Motley. James Leo Motley.”

“He gave you his middle name?”

She nodded. “And he didn’t ask me to call him Jimmy, either. James Leo Motley. What are you doing?”

“Writing it down. Maybe I can find out where he lives.”

“In Central Park, under a flat rock.”

“And I might as well see if we’ve got a sheet on him. From your description, it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“James Leo Motley,” she said. “If you lose your memo book, just call me. It’s a name I’m not likely to forget.”

I couldn’t find an address for him, but I did pull his yellow sheet. He had a string of six or seven arrests, most of them for assaults upon women. In each case the victim withdrew the complaint and charges were dropped. Once he’d been in a traffic accident, a fender-bender on the Van Wyck Expressway, and he’d given the driver of the other vehicle a serious beating. That case got to court, with Motley charged with first-degree assault, but eyewitness testimony suggested that the other driver may have started the fight, and that he’d been armed with a tire iron while Motley had defended himself with his bare hands. If so, he’d been good enough with those hands to put the other man in the hospital.

Six or seven arrests, no convictions. All of the charges involving violence. I didn’t like it, and I was going to call Elaine and let her know what I’d found out, but I didn’t get around to it.

A week or so later she called me. I was in the squad room when she called, so she didn’t have to identify herself as Cousin Frances.

“He was just here,” she said. “He hurt me.”

“I’ll be right over.”

She had reached Connie. Connie had been reluctant to talk at first, finally admitting that she’d been seeing James Leo Motley for the past several weeks. He’d gotten her number from someone, she wasn’t sure who, and his first visit had been not unlike the first visit he paid to Elaine. He told her he wasn’t going to pay her, and that she’d be seeing a lot of him. And he hurt her—not badly, but enough to get her attention.

Since then he’d been turning up a couple of times a week. He’d started asking her for money, and he’d continued to brutalize her, hurting her both during and after the sex act. He told her repeatedly that he knew what she liked, that she was a cheap whore and she needed to be treated like what she was. “I’m your man now,” he told her. “You belong to me. I own you, body and soul.”

The conversation upset Elaine, understandably enough, and she’d been meaning to tell me about it, just as I’d intended to let her know about Motley’s record. She’d let it go, waiting until she saw me, knowing that she wasn’t in any danger because she wasn’t going to see the son of a bitch again. When he did call, the day after her conversation with Connie, she told him that she was busy.

“Make time for me,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to see you again, Mr. Motley.”

“What makes you think you have any choice?”

“You asshole,” she said. “Look, do us both a favor, will you? Lose my number.”

Two days later he called again. “I thought I’d give you a chance to change your mind,” he said. She told him to drop dead and hung up on him.

She told all three doormen not to send anyone up without calling first. That was standard policy anyway, but she impressed them with the need for extra security. She turned down a couple of dates with new clients, wary that they might be fronting for Motley. When she left her apartment she had the feeling that she was being followed, or at least observed. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and she didn’t go out unless she had to.

Then a few days passed and she didn’t hear further from him, and she started to relax. She meant to call me, and she meant to call Connie again, but she didn’t call either of us.

That afternoon she got a call. A man she knew was in town from the Coast, a studio executive she’d see every few months. She got in a cab and spent an easy hour and a half in his suite at the Sherry-Netherland. He told her all sorts of movie-biz gossip, made love to her twice, and gave her a hundred or two hundred dollars, whatever it was. More than enough to cover the cabs.

When she got back to her apartment Motley was sitting on the leather couch, not quite smiling at her. She tried to get out the door but she’d locked it and put the chain on the minute she came in, before she saw him, and he had hold of her before she could get the door open. Even if she hadn’t had to screw around with the locks, she figured he would have caught her. “At the elevator,” she said, “or I’d have tripped on the hall carpet, or something. I wasn’t going to get away. He wasn’t going to let me get away.”

He hauled her into the bedroom, ripped her clothes getting them off of her. He hurt her with his hands. The bruise he’d inflicted the first time was faded now, but his fingers went right to the spot and the pain was like a knife. There was another spot he found, on the inside of her thigh, that produced a pain so intense she honestly thought she was going to die from it.

He went on hurting her with the simple pressure of his fingers until all her will was gone, all her capacity to resist. Then he flung her facedown on the bed, dropped his pants, and forced himself into her anal passage.

“I don’t do that,” she said. “It’s painful, and I think it’s disgusting anyway, and I never liked it. So I don’t do it. I haven’t done it in years. But it actually wasn’t that bad this time because the pain was nothing compared to what he’d been doing to me with his fingertips. And anyway by this time I was sort of detached from it all. I was afraid he was going to kill me, and I was detached from that, too.”

While he sodomized her, he talked to her. He told her she was weak and stupid and filthy. He told her she was only getting what she deserved, and what she secretly wanted. He told her she liked it.

He told her he always gave his women what they wanted. Most of them wanted to be hurt, he told her. Some of them wanted to be killed.

“He said he wouldn’t mind killing me. He said he’d killed a girl a while ago who’d looked a lot like me. He killed her first, he said, and then he fucked her. He said a dead girl was as good a fuck as a living one, maybe even better. If you got her while she was still warm, he said. And before she started to stink.”

Afterward he went through her purse and took all her cash, including the money she’d just earned at the Sherry. She was one of his women now, he told her. She’d have to pull her weight. That meant he expected her to have money for him when he came to see her. And it meant she would never again refuse to see him, and she would certainly never again mouth off at him, or call him bad names. Did she understand that? Yes, she said. She understood. Was she sure she understood? Yes, she said. She was sure.

He half smiled at her, and ran a hand over that funny cap of hair, then stroked his long chin. “I want to make sure you understand,” he said, and he clapped one hand over her mouth and used the other to find the spot on her rib cage. This time she did pass out, and when she came to he was gone.

The first thing I did was take her over to the Eighteenth Precinct. The two of us sat down with a cop named Klaiber and she filed a complaint, charging Motley with assault and battery and forcible sodomy. “There’ll be more charges after he’s picked up,” I said. “He took money from her purse, so that’s robbery or extortion or both. And he got into her apartment in her absence.”

“Any signs of forced entry?”

“Not that I could spot, but it’s still illegal entry.”

“You already got forcible sodomy,” Klaiber said.