Murder is a Girl's Best Friend (29 page)

But I had to make sure, right? So I grabbed the first weapon of self protection I could lay my hands on—the bottle of bleach I kept under the kitchen sink—and dashed upstairs. (I know, I know! I should have grabbed a
knife,
for God’s sake. Every kitchen has one. Better yet, I should have run next door and gotten Abby and Terry to come help me. But I wasn’t thinking very clearly at the time, and the only plan my poor brain could come up with was to flush the intruder out into the open and throw bleach in his face. It wouldn’t kill him, but it might
blind
him, and maybe that would be all the protection I’d need.)

But there was nobody upstairs either. Not a single murderer in sight. Not in either of the clothes closets, or under the bed, or hiding behind the shower curtain. Finally certain that I was alone, I went back downstairs, set the Clorox on the counter, and closed and relocked both my back and front doors. I picked up the stuff I’d dropped on the floor when I first entered the apartment, and put it all down on a kitchen chair. Then, emptying and flattening a small Duz detergent box, I covered the broken pane with the double-thick cardboard container, securing it to the door frame and sealing it on all sides with numerous strips of masking tape. Then I began sweeping up the broken glass. I was moving around in slow motion, like a retarded robot, hardly aware of what I was doing.

Until the phone rang.

Jumping so high I almost conked my head on the ceiling, I dropped the dustpan and the broom on the floor and lunged into the living room, praying to all the deities in all the heavenly kingdoms of all the world’s religions that the caller would be Dan. I just wanted to hear Dan’s voice. I really
needed
to hear Dan’s voice.

“Hello?” I croaked, holding the receiver so tight and so close it almost fused with my ear. “Hello, Dan? Is that you?”

There was no reply. I could hear breathing, though, so I knew somebody was there.

“Hello? Who is this please?”

Still no response. There was more harsh breathing, a few snuffling noises, and then some sounds I couldn’t identify.

I stayed quiet for a few seconds, listening intently to the noises on the other end, trying to decipher their causes. At first I thought the caller was chewing on something—a piece of gum or maybe a sandwich—and then I heard something that sounded like licking.

“Who’s there?” I asked again, skin crawling, head spinning with sinister possibilities. Was it Roscoe Swift, breathing fire and gnashing his little brown teeth? Jimmy Birmingham and his snuffling, face-licking (perhaps bone-gnawing) dog, Otto? Elsie Londergan slurping tea? Or was it Gregory Smythe, giving his wet lips and wandering tongue a warm-up, letting me know—without words—that he was looking forward to our next tasty tête-à-tête?

None of my questions were answered. Even the chewing and licking sounds stopped. All I heard was a raspy intake of air, a faint, menacing chuckle, a sharp click, and then silence—dead silence. Whoever it was had hung up.

I slammed down the receiver and stomped around the living room a couple of times, cursing my fool head off. Then, still ranting, I marched back into the kitchen to finish cleaning up the broken glass. I wasn’t scared anymore. Now I was just mad. Fighting mad. Having failed to kill me, and failing to find the diamonds in either the lunchbox or my apartment, the murderer had obviously decided to terrorize me—try to frighten me into dropping my defenses and revealing the location of the jewelry. And I just wasn’t in the mood for that! I was tired and exhausted. My apartment was freezing cold. My legs hurt. I had had a
really
bad day.

I had just tossed the broken glass in the trash and was heading upstairs for a hot bath when the telephone rang again. Steeling myself for another run-in with the killer, I stomped back into the living room and yanked the receiver up to my mouth.

“Listen, you unmitigated creep,” I growled, “you might as well ditch the stupid silent treatment right now. You think you’re scaring me, but you’re not. And I’ve got a lot better things to do with my time than sit around waiting for you to say ‘boo.’ ”

“Hey!” Dan sputtered. “What’s eating you? Maybe I should have called earlier, but I was in the middle of an interrogation, and I didn’t think I should stop a homicidal butcher from admitting to three murders just so I could give my crabby girlfriend a buzz.”

Oops.

How the heck was I going to explain this one? I couldn’t tell Dan that I had thought I was talking so somebody else. He’d want to know
who,
and how could I answer that? I certainly couldn’t tell him the truth. And I couldn’t think of any good lies to tell him either. “Oh, uh . . . I, um . . . I’m sorry, baby,” I stammered, squirming around in my deceitful skin, madly searching for a logical explanation, finally deciding my only way out was to use the oldest, most reliable and effective excuse known to woman: FEMALE TROUBLE. “I’m just not myself today, Dan,” I said. “It’s . . . well, it’s that time of the month, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, I know what you mean, all right,” he said, “but that won’t earn you a pardon. I’ve never been called an ‘unmitigated creep’ before, and I don’t think I like it.” He sounded really annoyed. “And what’s this ‘you think you’re scaring me, but you’re not’ business? When have I ever tried to scare you?”

“You haven’t!” I cried. “I don’t know why I said that! I just feel so depressed and on edge today. I was dying to talk to you, and when you took so long to call, I thought you were still angry at me for the way I acted the other night—that you were punishing me.”

“Even if that were true,” he seethed, “—even if I
were
punishing you, which I most definitely
wasn’t
—would that be reason enough to call me an unmitigated creep?”

“I didn’t mean it, Dan. I really didn’t!”

“But you
said
it.”

“I know! I’m sorry! I hate myself!”

“I can’t believe you called me that.”

“Well, you called me
crabby,
” I whined.

Dan was quiet for a few seconds and then, all of a sudden, he broke out laughing. And it was
real
laughter, not the sarcastic, mocking kind. “Yes, I called you crabby,” he said between chortles, “but you deserved it. Actually, you deserved much worse, but I’m too nice a guy to use
that
word.”

“And I’m eternally grateful for your gallant self-censorship,” I said, grinning, elated that our argument seemed to be over and that Dan had accepted my false confession. “I may be a bitch, but at least I’m beholden.”

Dan laughed again, and the way his deep voice rolled around in his throat turned my cold skin warm as toast. “Can you come see me tonight?” I asked him. “I’d like to make my apologies in person.”

“Can’t do it, baby,” he said, with a loud sigh of regret. “Too much paperwork. And it’s getting pretty late.”

As much as I wanted Dan to come over, I was relieved when he declined. Though I could easily have hidden my wounded knees and shins under a pair of winter slacks, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hide the Duz detergent box patchwork on my busted back door. Dan would insist on knowing how and why the pane of glass had come to be broken, and—as skillful a liar as I had discovered myself to be—I felt I’d already exceeded my cock-and-bull story limit for the day.

“I can’t make it tomorrow, either,” Dan added. “I’m on duty all day, and I promised my daughter I’d spend Christmas Eve with her. And since Veronica is going out on a date to a big party, it’ll be a very late night.” (Veronica! Is that the perfect name for a noxious, narcissistic ex-wife, or what?)

I felt another spurt of relief. I had a big Christmas Eve party to go to myself, if you recall, and I was glad I wouldn’t have to create another complicated fable to cover up
that
event.

“Will I see you on Saturday?” I asked, crossing my fingers, praying that his answer would be yes. I’d already decided to shelve all my murderer-hunting activities for that day—Christmas day—and I was longing to spend some fib-free time with my fine, upstanding boyfriend.

“You can count on it,” he said. “I don’t have to go in to work at all. I’ll spend Christmas morning with Katy, and the rest of the day with you. How’s that?”

“It’s great,” I said. “I can’t wait to see you. I need somebody to make me merry.”

“Hey, that’s what unmitigated creeps are for.”

 

 

BEFORE GOING UPSTAIRS FOR MY BATH, I took a tour of my living room and kitchen, checking all the shelves and the drawers and the cabinets, rifling through books and papers and soup cans, trying to trace the intruder’s movements around my apartment. Though everything looked normal on the surface, closer inspection proved otherwise.

All the small items in the drawer of the living room table had been displaced, shoved to one side in a sloppy jumble. Everything in the kitchen cabinets had been pushed from one place to another (including the oatmeal box!), and all the gadgets in the utensil drawers looked as if they’d been kicked around by a pack of feral toddlers. The hangers in the coat closet were askew—likewise my coats and jackets. And the now-empty Thom McAn shoebox that had once contained every scrap of evidence Terry had given me about his sister’s murder—the names, addresses, photos,
and
the diamonds—was lying upside down on the closet floor.

None of this derangement surprised me too much; it seemed par for the breaking and entering (and diamond-hunting) course. What did surprise me, however, was the fact that all twenty-three pages of my story notes were still sitting in a neat pile next to my typewriter, weighted down by a glass ashtray, exactly the way I’d left them.

As far as I could tell, the notes hadn’t been touched—or even
looked
at—which was a darn lucky thing for me, since if the killer had taken the trouble to read any of the pages, he would have seen that they were full of clues about the murder, and he certainly would have destroyed them. (Which would have had quite a destructive effect on me!) All I could figure was that the unmitigated creep had been so focused on looking for the diamonds he literally couldn’t see anything else.

Realizing the intruder could return at any point, and that he might not be so shortsighted the next time, I scooped up my story notes and folded them in half. Then I rolled them up into a squat little cylinder, stuffed them down into the oatmeal left in Judy Catcher’s Quaker box, and put the closed box back on the top shelf of the cabinet over the kitchen sink. If it worked for Judy’s jewels, it could work for mine.

 

 

 

Suddenly feeling as weak and aimless as a sedated baby, I turned off the downstairs lights and dragged my tired, cold self upstairs. Lacking energy for even the simplest efforts, I skipped the hot bath and crawled into bed with my clothes on (minus the skirt and snowboots). Hugging my wounded knees up close to my chest and pulling the blanket up over my head, I fell asleep in an instant. I didn’t have one single dream. I know that for a fact. How could my troubled subconscious concoct any capricious dreams when it was trapped in a continuous nightmare?

Chapter 23

MAYBE IT WAS THE BRIGHT STREAK OF winter sun shooting through the edge of my bedroom window shade. Or maybe it was the sickening smell of mackerel wafting up from the fish store downstairs (Luigi’s refrigerators had probably gone on the blink again). Most likely it was the fact that somebody was banging on my front door with a baseball bat. (At least that’s what it sounded like.) But whatever the cause, I woke up with a jolt and leapt out of bed like a startled grasshopper. Then I hurdled into the hall and dashed down the stairs in my stocking feet to see who was at the door.

(Yes, I was still wearing my stockings. My garter belt, too. And my bra and my slip and my sweater set and the red chiffon scarf around my neck.)

“Paige!” Bang bang. “Paige! Are you there?” Bang bang. “Open up!”

It was Abby and she sounded hysterical.

I unlocked the door and pulled it wide open. “What’s the matter?” I cried. “Are you okay? Did something happen to Terry? Or the diamonds?” The way she was banging and shouting, I figured all hell had broken loose.

“No way, Doris Day!” she said, sauntering into my apartment with a satisfied smile on her composed and made-up face. “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to wake you up. It’s late, and if we don’t get our tushies on track, we’ll fall behind in our schedule.”

I wanted to strangle her. Any more wake-up calls like that, and I’d die of a heart attack before the killer ever got near me again.

“But hey bobba ree bop!” Abby chirped, studying my appearance with surprise. “I see I shouldn’t have worried. You’re almost dressed already! All you need are shoes and a skirt. You’d better spend some time on your face, though, and do something about your hair. It looks like a chicken roost.”

That did it. “Some detective
you
are,” I growled. “If you had been paying attention, you’d know these are the same clothes I was wearing yesterday. And if you took more than a cursory look at my face and hair, you’d realize that—up until just a few moments ago—both of these cranial appendages were buried in my pillow.”