On Off (28 page)

Thus after a long soak in a hot bath she dried off well and donned her customary sleeping attire — a pair of flannel men’s pajamas and thick, woolly bedsocks. Not for Desdemona a thermostat producing warm air! In which, had she only known it, she was very like Carmine Delmonico.

She was asleep as soon as she lay down, to dream of nothing she could afterward remember, only that some peculiar noise woke her at a moment her alarm clock said was 4
A.M.
A scrape with a slight screech to it.

Sitting bolt upright, she began to think that it wasn’t the noise wakened her; some primeval sense of impending doom had done that. The bedroom door was open, displaying the small apartment’s living area, plunged into darkness. As indeed was the bedroom. No bogeys demanding night lights haunted Desdemona’s sleep. Yet a sliver of light from the hall outside flickered briefly with a shadow in its midst, man-high, man-shaped. Gone in an instant as the outside door was closed.
I am not alone.
He is here inside, he has come to kill me.

On a chair near the bed lay today’s “smalls” washing she had not gotten around to — panties, bra, stockings, a single pair of knitted woollen gloves. Desdemona was out of the bed without a sound, across to the chair, her fingers scrabbling for the gloves. Once found, she slid one on to each hand and forced herself to edge out of any reflected light to where the balcony sliding door sat locked and barred with a steel rod that lay in its opening track. She bent, removed the rod, undid the latch, and slid the door open just enough to get through it onto the balcony, a shelf of concrete surmounted by a four-foot-high iron affair of pickets and a rail.

Carmine was two floors up on the northeastern side of the Nutmeg Insurance building, almost exactly opposite where she was. That meant that to reach him she had to get herself two floors up with a dozen apartments between them on his or her level. Did she go up two floors first, or along her own floor’s balconies until she stood directly below his? No, up first, Desdemona! Get off this level as soon as possible. Only how?

Each floor occupied ten feet of vertical space: nine-foot ceilings inside, plus a foot of concrete representing the floor of the next storey up, with its inclusions of water and drainage pipes, electricity conduits. Too far to reach up, too far…

The wind was whistling, but once she closed her sliding door that wouldn’t penetrate the double-glazed interior. Bitterly cold, cutting through her pajamas as if they were made of tissue. Only one thing for it. She scissored her long legs and vaulted up on to the balcony rail, paused there teetering ten floors above the street as the wind tore at her, groping past the foot-thick shelf to find the bottom of the balustrade one storey up. There! Only her height and a teenaged propensity for gymnastics made it possible, but she had that height, that propensity. Both hands gripping the bottom of the balustrade upstairs, she took her feet off the rail, twisted in midair until her body was perpendicular, then swung her legs inward to cradle the rail behind her bent knees. A huge lunge, and she stood on the balcony above her own.

One down, one to go. Teeth chattering, her body felt like ice beneath the heat her gymnastics generated; without pausing to rest she mounted that rail and reached for the bottom of the balustrade on Carmine’s level. Do it, Desdemona, do it before you can’t! Up again, safe again on the balcony two floors above her own.

Now all she had to do was travel on the same level from one balcony to the next — easier said than done, as a ten-foot gap lay between the end of one and the beginning of the next. She chose to bridge the gap by balancing her feet on the rail and springing with all her might at the next balustrade. How many such? Twelve. And her feet were turning numb, her hands inside the woolly gloves minus all sensation. But it could be done —
had
to be done, given what was waiting for her downstairs if she tarried. How could she be sure he wasn’t at least as agile as she?

Finally it was done; she stood on Carmine’s balcony, began pounding on the sliding door to his bedroom, at this end.

“Carmine, Carmine, let me in!” she screamed.

The door was yanked open; he stood wearing only boxer shorts, took in her presence in a millisecond, pulled her inside.

The next moment he had stripped the quilted down cover off his bed and was draping it around her.

“He’s in my apartment,” she managed to say.

“Stay here and concentrate on getting warm,” he said, cranked the thermostat up and vanished even as he pulled on his trousers.

“Jesus!” Abe breathed.

“We have a whole new trade to learn,” Carmine said grimly. “If this proves anything, it proves that our ideas of security suck. To keep him out, we’d have had to overlap the metal on the outside of the door, but we didn’t. Oh, he’s gone — gone the minute he found Desdemona gone, I reckon. Flitted out like a ghost.”

“How the hell did she get past him?” Corey asked.

“Went onto her balcony, vaulted two floors up, then came along the intervening apartment balconies between here and where I am. I heard her banging on my balcony door.”

“Then she’s a mess in this weather — metal rails, the wind.”

“Not her!” Carmine said, a hint of pride in his voice. “She put on gloves and she was wearing bedsocks.”

“One hell of a woman,” said Abe reverently.

“I have to get back to her. Set the wheels in motion, guys. Search the place from penthouse to basements. But he’s gone.”

“He was there, all right, though long gone. Cut through the dead bolt with something like a diamond-tipped fretsaw — thin, fine, cut through anything if used by an expert. Therefore we now know he’s an expert. Didn’t try to do it too fast and break his saw. The bastard! He spat on our security.” Carmine knelt to pull off her soaked bedsocks, examine the skin of her feet. “You survived at this end. Now let’s have a look at your hands.” They too had survived. “You’re some woman, Desdemona.”

Thoroughly warmed, she began to glow. “That’s a compliment I’ll treasure, Carmine.” Then she shivered. “Oh, but I was so terrified! All I saw was his shadow as he opened the front door, but I knew he’d come to kill me. Only why? Why me?”

“Maybe to get at me. To get at the cops. To prove that if and when he decides to act, nothing will stop him. Trouble is that we’re used to ordinary criminals, men who wouldn’t have the brains or the patience to try a stunt like sawing through a two-inch dead bolt. Diamond teeth or not, it must have taken him several hours.”

Suddenly he reached for her, pulled her hard against him in an almost frantic hold. “Desdemona, Desdemona, I nearly lost you! You had to save yourself while I snored! Oh, Jesus, woman, I’d have died had I lost you!”

“You are not going to lose me, Carmine,” she said on a sigh, nuzzling her head into his shoulder, her lips busy on his neck. “I was terrified, yes, but I never thought for one moment of going anywhere else than to you. With you, I knew I’d be safe.”

“I love you.”

“I love you back again. But I’d feel ever safer if you took me to bed,” said Desdemona, emerging from his neck. “There are some bits of me that haven’t thawed in years.”

A squad car was parked suspiciously near Forbes’s rather precipitous driveway, its occupants giving him an admiring wave as he leaped past, intent on concluding his run. Sweat rolled off him as he plunged down the bushy slope from the road; three days of downpour had melted the frozen snow, hence the flooding all over the state, and the ground under Forbes’s running shoes was saturated, slippery. Years ago he had planted a row of forsythia at the bottom of the incline — how wonderful it always was when that harbinger of spring burst into yellow blossom!

But in February the forsythia hedge was rigid brown sticks, so when Forbes noticed a jarring patch of lilac on the ground beneath it, he stopped. A split second later he saw the arms and legs emerging from the lilac patch, and his treacherous heart suddenly surged in his ears like a tidal race. He clutched at his chest, opened his parched mouth to yell, could not. Oh, dear Lord, the shock! He was going to have another coronary, this
had
to trigger another coronary! Hanging on to the back of an old park bench Robin had put there for “dreaming on,” he inched around it until he could sit and wait for the pain to clamp down, old and ineradicable instinct causing him to flex his left hand constantly as he waited for the pain to shoot down the arm and into it. Eyes dilated, mouth agape, Addison Forbes sat and waited. I am going to die, I am going to die…

Ten minutes later the pain hadn’t arrived, and he could no longer hear his heart. Its pulse had slowed precisely as it did after all his runs, and he felt no different than he did after all his runs. A huge jerk shot him to his feet, and that didn’t cause pain either; he turned his gaze to the lilac patch with its arms and legs, then took the slope up to the house in long, rhythmic steps, joy welling inside him.

“Her body is down by the water,” he said, coming into the kitchen. “Call the police, Robin.”

She squeaked and fluttered, but made the call, then came to him, her hand seeking his pulse.

“I’m fine,” he said irritably. “Don’t fuss, woman, I’m fine! I have just undergone a colossal shock, but my heart didn’t falter.” A dreamy smile played around his lips. “I’m hungry, I want a good breakfast. Fried eggs and bacon, raisin toast with plenty of butter, and cream in my coffee. Go on, Robin, move!”

“Bullshit it isn’t,” Carmine said positively. “The thaw made it easier, that’s all. If the water had stayed frozen, they would have walked across the ice all the way from a street we’re not patrolling. As it is, they could use a rowboat, bring it in close enough to throw her out. They never set foot on the shore.”

“She’s frozen solid,” Patrick said, coming to join them. “A lilac party dress sewn with pearls, not rhinestones. Some lacy fabric I’ve never seen before — not proper lace. The dress fits better than Margaretta’s, at least for length. I haven’t turned her over yet to see if the back is buttoned up. No ligature marks, and no double cut in the neck. Apart from a few wet leaves, she’s very clean.”

“Since they never set foot on shore, there won’t be anything here. I’ll leave you to it, Patsy. Come on, guys,” he said to Abe and Corey, “we have to ask every householder with water frontage if they saw or heard a thing last night. But Corey, you’re going to cast our net wider. Take the police launch and go around the tankers and freighters moored anywhere in the harbor. Maybe someone came up on deck to suck in fresh air after days of being stuck belowdeck, and saw a rowboat. That’s the kind of thing a seaman would notice.”