Never Too Rich (15 page)

That transaction woke Shirley up to reality. The
pimp, sensing that she was ducking back out of the car, twisted
around and made a grab for her wrist.

She was too quick for him. Dropping her garbage
bags, she took off across Ninth Avenue, straight into the oncoming
traffic.

Cursing, the pimp jerked open the driver’s door and
jumped out to catch her.

Shirley, momentarily blinded by four lanes of
headlights, heard the raucous blare of car horns and froze in
mid-street. She was certain that the end had come. She squeezed her
eyes shut.

Miraculously, the stream of swiftly moving yellow
cabs parted and passed, missing her by mere inches, and all she
could feel were the windy blasts of their slipstreams.

The pimp caught up with her and grabbed her upper
arm in a viselike grip. “You, come with me, lil’ mama.” His eyes
shone like coals and his fingers dug cruelly through her
sleeve.

“
Let me go!” Shirley said through
her teeth, struggling to wrench her arm loose. “I don’t want to go
with you!”

“
It’d be a pity to have to slice up
that pretty white face o’ yours.” Abruptly a knife seemed to leap
into his other hand, and he held the point of the blade to her
throat, forcing her head way back. “You gonna come quietly, or you
gonna make it hard on yourself?”

It was then that the thundering roar of a motorcycle
engine filled the air and a single bright headlight bore down on
them. The big customized Harley screeched to a stop with bare
inches to spare. “You need help, babe?” the hulk astride the bike
called out above the throbbing idle of the engine.

Shirley tried to nod without impaling her throat.
The pimp looked over at the rider and his lips drew back across his
teeth. “Get lost, muh’fucker,” he spat venomously. “This ain’t none
o’ your business.”

“
Let her go,” the biker growled,
“or your black ass’ll be smeared all over the street.”

“
Yeah? The big white muh’fucker
wanna fight?” The pimp lowered the knife from Shirley’s throat and
pushed her out of the way.

Then, smiling hideously, he hunched over and danced
around the motorcycle, the knife blade flashing and hissing as it
slashed through the air.

The biker raised his arm negligibly. Almost in slow
motion a length of thick chain whipped snakelike through the air
and sent the pimp sprawling. The knife flew out of his hand and
clattered to the asphalt.

“
C’mon, babe,” the biker told
Shirley. There was no mistaking the authority in his voice. “Let’s
get outta here before that son-of-a-bitch gets back up.” Then he
reached out and pulled her up behind him on the vibrating rear
seat. “You all right?” he called back over his shoulder.

And before she could reply, he had put the bike into
gear and they took off down Ninth Avenue.

That had been nearly three years ago, and Shirley
had been with Snake ever since. After Brother Dan and the run-in
with the pimp, the life he and the Satan’s Warriors offered her
seemed almost charmed. Rowdy, cruel, and chauvinistic as the gang
was, she nevertheless felt safe with Snake. He was big and brutish
and fearless, and she felt protected around him. From the start,
he’d made it understood that she was his “ole lady,” not just some
“mama” to be passed around among his dope-smoking, beer-guzzling,
hard-riding “bros.” And if he had a violent temper and beat her
every now and then—well, it was still a better life than that which
she’d known.

Never once in all that time had it occurred to
Shirley that any other kind of life might be possible—not until
this morning, when Olympia Arpel had literally flown out of a cab
and caught up with her in the middle of St. Mark’s Place, promising
the sun, the moon, and the stars.

Olympia, standing off to the side, chain-smoked in
silence as she watched Alfredo fussing around Shirley. “That was
fabulosa, baby!” he was crowing. “Simply fab-u-lo-sa!” He glanced
at the watch on his wrist. “I’ve still got half an hour. What do
you say we take some happy shots? Think you can laugh and smile
half as well as you can look haunted?”

Olympia puffed her cigarette angrily. Christ
Almighty! she thought irritably. The way Alfredo was behaving, you
would have thought
he
had discovered Shirley. Well, she’d
make certain he didn’t get any ideas about that.

“
Miss Arpel!” Olympia was
distracted by someone calling her name.

She turned in the direction of the voice. One of
Alfredo’s many assistants was hurrying toward her, waving a
sherbet-pink cordless telephone. “It’s your secretary,” he said
when he reached her. “She say it’s an emergency.”

Olympia waved him away. “Later,” she said shortly as
she lit another cigarette from the butt of the old one. “Tell Dolly
I’ll call back in half an hour.”

The young man didn’t move. “You’d better take it,
Miss Arpel,” he advised softly. “Vienna Farrow’s been
murdered.”

Chapter 15

When Olympia arrived at Vienna Farrow’s block, she
felt as though she had wandered onto the midway of some macabre
carnival. Cops swarmed all over the block, and news-media spies,
listening in on the police-band radio, had alerted the local
networks and newspapers. Crews from every local TV station had
already set up their equipment on the sidewalk, and crime reporters
were speaking earnestly into microphones while Minicams zoomed in.
The usual bloodthirsty spectators, drawn by the activity like
vultures to carrion, milled about in droves. Nor was the party
atmosphere dampened by the neighbors glued to their windows or by
the enterprising chestnut and hot-pretzel vendor who was doing
sellout business.

Olympia fought her way to the front of the crowd.
Hampered from getting to the building by the yellow crime-scene
tape that roped it off, she simply ducked under it.

Instantly a hand gripped her firmly by the arm. “You
get out, ma’am, and stay out,” the uniformed police officer warned
her in no uncertain terms. “And don’t try to sneak back in, or else
we’re gonna have to arrest you.”

“
Vienna . . .” Planting her feet
immovably in a wide-legged stance, Olympia twisted her head around
and looked up at the gray facade of the building. She could not
bring herself to believe that what her secretary had told her over
the phone had really happened. She was capable, barely, of
accepting that
someone
had been murdered, but not Vienna. It
must be someone they’d
mistaken
for her scintillating
million-dollar butterfly of a cover girl.

Yes, that had to be it.

“
Lady, you’ll have to move it,” the
cop growled.

“
I ... I got a call that . . . that
Vienna had been murdered . . .” she murmured.

“
Ma’am?” The steely fingers of
authority loosened their grip just a hair.

She drew a deep breath and turned to look up at him.
Saw a youthful, honest-looking face ruddy from the chill wind. His
visored cap was almost a size too large for his head, and his
breath was vapor in the cold.

“
My name is Olympia Arpel,” she
said. “I was told to come and identify the . . . body.”

Not to identify it as Vienna Farrow’s, of course.
She just had to make certain that it wasn’t Vienna.

The young policeman looked down at Olympia, seeing a
small tweedy figure, all merciless angles and sharp, curveless
planes. She looked ageless despite a wrinkled crepe face surrounded
by a pageboy of sliced gray bangs. Determination burned in her
startling sea-green eyes. Determination and . . . hope.

“
All right, lemme check it out.”
Still gripping her by the arm, but with far less force, he took her
to consult two other patrolmen.

“
Yeah, they’re expectin’ her,” one
of them said, nodding and flapping a hand. “Let her go on
up.”

“
Sorry, ma’am,” the young patrolman
apologized. His hand came off her arm at once. “You wouldn’t
believe the crazies who try to slip into crime scenes.”

Nodding to let him know that it was all right, she
turned and, tucking her head down, headed briskly into the
building. She had to identify herself twice more, once right
outside and then again at Vienna’s front door, where her name and
the time of her arrival was entered into a log, as would be her
departure.

“
What happened?” she demanded as
she marched into the apartment. Glancing about the living room, she
noticed at once that most of the action was concentrated in the
bedroom. Before anyone could stop her, she blundered right
in.

Which was a terrible mistake.

She halted abruptly in mid-step, her hand scrabbling
spiderlike near her throat, and she let out a mewling little cry.
She could not believe her eyes.

There was dried blood all over the ghastly,
contorted body on the bed.

There was dried blood splashed all over the
room.

A great gout of arterial blood had even slashed a
swath across the ceiling.

There were blood trajectories everywhere.

It was an abattoir.

And then the horror of the corpse’s condition sank
in, and her mind screeched out of orbit.

What did you do to her? everything inside her
screamed soundlessly. Killing her wasn’t enough, was it? You had to
chop her and grind her and slice her!

She felt a surge of immense heat, and the hellish
room swirled around her like a demented merry-go-round. Then the
merry-go-round ground to a stop, and the slaughterhouse bedroom
reasserted itself as the stark reality of a living nightmare.

Olympia pressed the back of a hand against her
forehead. Then her narrow shoulders heaved sporadically and the
sound of her gasp turned into heaving. “Oh, Christ,” she moaned,
whirling around, her eyes searching desperately for the bathroom.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”

After she came out of the bathroom, the detectives
sat her down in the living room, positioning her on one of the
modular sofa units so that she faced away from the open bedroom
door. Detective Koscina, with the red W. C. Fields proboscis and
white brush flat-top, sat directly opposite her; Carmen Toledo
paced restlessly by the windows, telephone in one hand, receiver in
the other. “Dig out all the files on slashers,” she was telling
somebody. “That’s right.
Slashers.”
She slammed the receiver
down in disgust.
“Christ!
Some people need everything
spelled out twice.”

Despite the open windows, the apartment was
suffocating. Koscina kept dabbing his forehead and neck with a
filthy handkerchief.

Olympia felt as if she’d stepped into some kind of
sick parallel universe. Although some of the color had returned to
her cheeks, she still hadn’t regained her composure. No human being
can do such terrible things to another human being, she kept
telling herself. It just isn’t possible.

But it was.

She reached for her cigarettes, but her hands were
still shaking so badly she broke two before she could dig one out
of the pack. And then she couldn’t hold the damned lighter still
enough. The big detective had to lean forward over the coffee table
and light it for her.

Olympia nodded gratefully. She sat hunched forward
on the edge of her seat, quick-puffing, the jerky movements of her
elbow spilling ash down the front of her suit.

She didn’t notice.

“
Do you have any idea who could
have killed her, ma’am?” Koscina asked unemotionally.

She looked over at him vaguely, still too sick to
speak. Forensics specialists were sliding in and out of her
peripheral vision as they went over every square inch of the
apartment in their relentless search for clues. Teams of them
sifted through Vienna’s personal effects. Underwear. Address books.
Boxes of tampons. Kitchen garbage. Vienna’s horrible death had
opened her life to minute inspection.

“
Please, ma’am,” Koscina persisted
politely. “You’ll have to pull yourself together. You do want us to
find her killer, don’t you?”

“
Yes.” Olympia puffed shakily on
her cigarette.

“
Good. Then we have something in
common.” Sitting back, he flipped open a pocket-size ring-bound
black notebook and pulled the cap off a ball-point pen without
flourish.

The questions came.

For the next hour and a half she answered them
tonelessly, with weary resignation.

No, she did not have any idea who had killed Vienna
Farrow.

Yes, Vienna had dated.

No, as far as she knew Vienna did not have a steady
boyfriend. She’d been seeing some distillery heir, but that had
fizzled out.

No, she did not think Vienna had had any boyfriend
troubles.

Yes, Vienna had been very popular.

No, to the best of her knowledge, Vienna had not
received any threats against her life.

Yes, Vienna had been listed exclusively with Olympia
Models for just a little over two years now.

As she murmured the answers, he logged her replies
carefully in his little black notebook.

He sprang the nasty one on her out of the clear
blue. “Did Vienna Farrow at any time threaten to leave Olympia
Models to sign up with another agency?”

That knocked Olympia’s automatic pilot out of
commission, all right. Her head jerked up and she looked at him
sharply, her gray razor bangs swaying, as her outraged brain kicked
back in. “Are you implying, detective, that I’m a suspect?” she
asked incredulously.

He stroked his lips with an index finger. “Murders
have been committed for far less,” he said with equanimity. “But so
far, all indications are that the perp is a man.”

Despite her innocence, she felt relief flooding
through her, as though tons of weight had been lifted off her
shoulders. “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” she said acerbically.