Rose Madder (54 page)

“—but he didn't spoil the day, you know.”

Rosie blinked. “What? But how could they just go on? After . . .”

“How could
you
just go on, after all the times he beat you?”

Rosie only shook her head, not comprehending.

“Some of it's endurance,” Gert said. “Some, I guess, is plain old stubbornness. But what it is mostly, Rosie, is showing the world your gameface. Showing that we can't be intimidated. You think this is the first time something like this has happened? Huh-uh. Norman's the worst, but he's not the first. And what you do when a skunk shows up at the picnic and sprays around is you wait for the breeze to blow the worst of it away and then you go on. That's what they're doing at Ettinger's Pier now, and not just because we signed a play-or-pay contract with the Indigo Girls, either. We go on because we have to convince ourselves that we can't be beaten out of our lives . . . our
right
to our lives. Oh, some of them will have left—Lana Kline and her patients are history, I imagine—but the rest will rally 'round. Consuelo and Robin were heading back to Ettinger's as soon as we left the hospital.”

“Good for you guys,” Lieutenant Hale said from the front seat.

“How could you let him get away?” Rosie asked him accusingly. “Jesus, do you even know how he did it?”

“Well, strictly speaking,
we
didn't let him get away,” Hale said mildly. “It was Pier Security's baby; by the time the first metro cops got there, your husband was long gone.”

“We think he stole some kid's mask,” Gustafson said. “One of those whole-head jobs. Put it on, then just boogied. He was lucky, I'll tell you that much.”

“He's
always
been lucky,” Rosie said bitterly. They were turning into the police station parking lot now, Bill still behind them. To Gert she said, “You can let go of my hand now.”

Gert did and Rosie immediately hit the door again. The hurt was worse this time, but some newly aware part of her relished that hurt.

“Why won't he let me
alone?”
she asked again, speaking to no one. And yet she was answered by a sweetly husky voice which spoke from deep in her mind.

You shall be divorced of him,
that voice said.
You shall be divorced of him, Rosie Real.

She looked down at her arms and saw that they had broken out all over in gooseflesh.

H
is mind lifted off again, up up and away, as that foxy bitch Marilyn McCoo had once sung, and when he came back he was easing the Tempo into another parking space. He didn't know where he was for sure, but he thought it was probably the underground parking garage half a block down from the Whitestone, where he'd stowed the Tempo before. He caught sight of the gas gauge as he leaned over to disconnect the ignition wires and saw something interesting: the needle was all the way over to F. He'd stopped for gas at some point during his last blank spot. Why had he done that?

Because gas wasn't really what I wanted,
he answered himself.

He leaned forward again, meaning to look at himself in the rear-view mirror, then remembered it was on the floor. He picked it up and looked at himself closely. His face was bruised, swelling in several places; it was pretty goddam obvious that he'd been in a fight, but the blood was all gone. He had scrubbed it away in some gas-station restroom while a self-serve pump filled the Tempo's tank on slow automatic feed. So he was fit to be seen on the street—as long as he didn't press his luck—and that was good.

As he disconnected the ignition wires he wondered briefly what time it was. No way to tell; he wasn't wearing a watch, the shitbox Tempo didn't have a clock, and he was underground. Did it matter? Did it—

“Nope,” a familiar voice said softly. “Doesn't matter. The time is out of joint.”

He looked down and saw the bullmask staring up at him from its place in the passenger-side footwell: empty eyes, disquieting wrinkled smile, absurd flower-decked horns. All at once he wanted it. It was stupid, he hated the garlands on the horns and hated the stupid happy-to-be-castrated smile even more . . . but it was good luck, maybe. It didn't really talk, of course, all of that was just in his mind, but without the mask he certainly never would have gotten away from Ettinger's Pier. That was for damned sure.

Okay, okay,
he thought,
viva ze bool,
and he leaned over to get the mask.

Then, with seemingly no pause at all, he was leaning forward and clamping his arms around Blondie's waist, squeezing her tight-tight-tight so she couldn't get enough breath to scream. She had just come out of a door marked
HOUSEKEEPING
, pushing her cart in front of her, and he thought he'd probably been waiting out here for her quite awhile, but that didn't matter now because they were going right back into
HOUSKEEPING
, just Pam and her new friend Norman, viva ze bool.

She was kicking at him and some of the blows landed on his shins, but she was wearing sneakers, and he hardly felt the hits. He let go of her waist with one hand, pulled the door closed behind him, and shot the bolt across. A quick look around, just to make sure the place was empty except for the two of them. Late Saturday afternoon, middle of the weekend, it should have been . . . and was. The room long and narrow, with a short row of lockers standing at the far end. There was a wonderful smell—a fragrance of clean, ironed linen that made Norman think of laundry day at their house when he was a kid.

There were big stacks of neatly folded sheets on pallets, Dandux laundry baskets full of fluffy bathtowels, pillowcases piled on shelves. Deep stacks of coverlets lined one wall. Norman shoved Pam into these, watching with no interest at all as the skirt of her uniform flipped up high on her thighs. His sex-drive had gone on vacation, perhaps even into permanent retirement, and maybe that was just as well. The plumbing between his legs had gotten him into a lot of trouble over the years. It was a hell of a note, the sort of thing that might lead you to think that God had more in common with Andrew Dice Clay than you maybe wanted to believe. For twelve years you didn't notice it, and for the next fifty—or even sixty—it dragged you around behind it like some raving baldheaded Tasmanian devil.

“Don't scream,” he said. “Don't scream, Pammy. I'll kill you if you do.” It was an empty threat—for now, at least—but she wouldn't know that.

Pam had drawn in a deep breath; now she let it out in a soundless rush. Norman relaxed slightly.

“Please don't hurt me,” she said, and boy, was
that
original, he'd certainly never heard
that
one before, nope, nope.

“I don't
want
to hurt you,” he said warmly. “I certainly don't.” Something was flopping in his back pocket. He felt for it and touched rubber. The mask. He wasn't exactly surprised. “All you have to do is tell me what I want to know, Pam. Then you go on your happy way and I go on mine.”

“How do you know my name?”

He gave her that evocative interrogation-room shrug, the one that said he knew
lots
of things, that was his job.

She sat in the pile of tumbled dark maroon coverlets just like the one on his bed up on the ninth floor, smoothing her skirt down over her knees. Her eyes were a really extraordinary shade of blue. A tear gathered on the lower lid of the left one, trembled, then slipped down her cheek, leaving a trail of mascara-soot.

“Are you going to rape me?” she asked. She was looking at him with those extraordinary baby blues of hers, great eyes—who needs to pussywhip a man when you've got eyes like those, right, Pammy?—but he didn't see the look in them he wanted to see. That was a look you saw in the interrogation room when a guy you'd been whipsawing with questions all day and half the night was finally getting ready to break: a humble look, a pleading look, a look that said I'll tell you anything, anything at all, just let off me a little. He didn't see that look in Pammy's eyes.

Yet.

“Pam—”

“Please don't rape me, please don't, but if you do, if you have to, please wear a condom, I'm so scared of AIDS.”

He gawped at her, then burst out laughing. It hurt his stomach to laugh, it hurt his diaphragm even worse, and most of all it hurt his face, but for awhile there was just no way he could stop. He told himself he
had
to stop, that some hotel employee, maybe even the house dick, might happen by and hear laughter coming from in here and wonder what it meant, but not even
that
helped; in the end, the throe had to pass on its own.

Blondie watched him with amazement at first, then smiled tentatively herself. Hopefully.

Norman at last managed to get himself under control, although his eyes were streaming with tears by that time. “I'm not going to rape you, Pam,” he said at last—when he was capable of saying anything without laughing it into insincerity.

“How do you know my name?” she asked again. Her voice was a little stronger this time.

He hauled the mask out, stuck his hand inside it, and manipulated it as he had for the asshole accountant in the Camry. “Pam-Pam-bo-Bam, banana-fanna-fo-Fam, fee-fi-mo-Mam,” he made it sing. He bopped it back and forth, like Shari Lewis with fucking Lamb Chop, only this was a bull, not a lamb, a stupid fucking fagbull with flowers on its horns. Not a reason in the world why he should like the fucking thing, but the fact was, he sort of did.

“I sort of like you, too,” Ferd the fagbull said, looking up at Norman with its empty eyes. Then it turned back to Pam, and with Norman to move its lips, it said: “You got a problem with that?”

“N-N-No,” she said, and the look he wanted still wasn't in her eyes, not yet, but they were making progress, she was terrified of him—of
them—
that much was for sure.

Norman squatted down, hands dangling between his thighs, Ferdinand's rubber horns now pointing at the floor. He looked at her sincerely. “Bet you'd like to see me out of this room and out of your life, wouldn't you, Pammy?”

She nodded so vigorously her hair bounced up and down on her shoulders.

“Yeah, I thought so, and that's fine by me. You tell me one thing and I'll be gone like a cool breeze. It's easy, too.” He leaned forward toward her, Ferd's horns dragging on the floor. “All I want to know is where Rose is. Rose Daniels. Where does she live?”

“Oh my God.” What color there still was in Pammy's face—two spots of red high up on her cheekbones—now disappeared, and her eyes widened until it seemed they must tumble from their sockets. “Oh my God, you're him. You're Norman.”

That startled and angered him—he was supposed to know
her
name, that was how it worked, but she wasn't supposed to know his—and everything else followed upon that. She was up and off the coverlets while he was still reacting to his name in her mouth, and she almost got away completely. He sprang after her, reaching out with his right hand, the one that still had the bullmask on it. Faintly he could hear himself saying that she wasn't going anywhere, that he wanted to talk to her and intended to do it right up close.

He grabbed her around the throat. She gave a strangled
cry that wanted to be a scream and lunged forward with surprising, sinewy strength. Still he could have held her, if not for the mask. It slipped on his sweaty hand and she tore away,
fell
away toward the door, arms out to either side, flailing, and at first Norman didn't understand what happened next.

There was a noise, a meaty sound that was almost a pop like a champagne cork, and then Pam began to flail wildly, her hands beating at the door, her head back at a strange stiff angle, like someone staring intently at the flag during a patriotic ceremony.

“Huh?” Norman said, and Ferd rose up in front of his eyes, askew on his hand. Ferdinand looked drunk.

“Ooops,” said the bull.

Norman yanked the mask off his hand and stuffed it in his pocket, now aware of a pattering sound, like rain. He looked down and saw that Pam's left sneaker was no longer white. Now it was red. Blood was pooling around it; it ran down the door in long drips. Her hands were still fluttering. To Norman they looked like small birds.

She looked almost nailed to the door, and as Norman stepped forward he saw that, in a way, she was. There was a coathook on the back of the damned thing. She'd torn free of his hand, plunged forward, and impaled herself. The coathook was buried in her left eye.

“Oh Pam, shit, you fool,” Norman said. He felt both furious and dismayed. He kept seeing the bull's stupid grin, kept hearing it say
Ooops,
like some wiseass character in a Warner Bros. cartoon.

He yanked Pam off the coathook. There was an unspeakable gristly sound as she came. Her one good eye—bluer than ever, it seemed to Norman—stared at him in wordless horror.

Then she opened her mouth and shrieked.

Norman never thought about it; his hands acted on their own, grabbing her face by the cheeks, planting his big palms beneath the delicate angles of her jaw, and then twisting. There was a single sharp crack—the sound of someone stamping on a cedar shingle—and she went limp in his arms. She was gone, and whatever she had known about Rose was gone with her.