The Decoy (3 page)

Frank Durban stares intently at the video monitor as the camera plays over the body. It tracks down, past the wrists, which have been handcuffed to the bedframe, past the grisly mess between the legs, towards the feet.

'There,' he says into his headset. 'Go in on that.'

The camera closes in on a two-inch square of white card at the foot of the bed.

'Take a look.'

The crime search officer takes the white square in surgically gloved hands and flips it over. It's a Polaroid, a close-up of what the video camera has just tracked past.

'Any sign of the camera?' Frank asks.

'No. There's a wallet, though,' the voice in his earpiece says. Frank, along with a small army of waiting technicians, is in the room next door to the murder scene, temporarily banished to prevent pristine evidence getting trampled before it's put on tape.

'Let's take a look.'

The camera focuses on the nightstand beside the bed. A gloved hand enters the frame, flips open the wallet and pulls out the driver's licence.

Even through the grain of the video monitor, Frank can see from the photo that she had been an attractive woman.

'Stella Vogler.
Mrs
Stella Vogler. An apartment on Mercer,' the search officer says.

'Mercer?' Frank thinks hard. A SoHo address, and not a cheap one. 'But the room was booked in her name, right?'

'That's correct, sir,' says the manager, who's still hovering around.

Why book a hotel just a mile or so from her own apartment? Frank wonders.

The disembodied voice of the search officer breaks into his thoughts. 'So she comes here to meet her lover, he brings a few toys, some cuffs, a Polaroid to take some dirty snaps. Meanwhile her husband finds out, follows her, and — wham.'

'And after he's killed her in a jealous rage, he stops and takes a couple of photos himself,' Frank says drily. 'As you do.'

Stung, the crime search officer goes through the contents of the wallet.

'Six hundred bucks. It wasn't a robbery.'

'Well done, Sherlock,' Frank mutters under his breath.

'And what's this?' A note of malicious pleasure has crept into the other officer's voice. He holds a business card up to the camera lens. 'Looks like you've got some competition, detective.'

'What's that?'

'"The Mallory Private Investigation Bureau." Want me to give you the phone number?'

'Wait. What's that on the back?'

The officer turns the card over.

'Here,' he says, holding the card so it fills the monitor's screen.

On the back, someone has written in pencil,

Claire Rodenburg = the decoy.

'Yeah,' Frank says. 'Yeah, give me that number.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Claire and a group of actors from the show go on to the Harley Bar. Even though it's gone midnight the place is packed. Springsteen blasts from the jukebox.

Claire orders a Martini. The barman fills a shot glass to the brim with Jack Daniels and slams it down on the counter.

'I asked for a
Martini,'
she shouts at him over the music and the crowd, pushing it back.

He pushes the glass back at her again. 'That's the way we make Martinis round here,' he yells cheerfully. He's Australian. He grins at her, daring her to complain. The men at the bar whoop and cheer.

He's young and muscular, wearing just a T-shirt despite the cold that surges in every time someone opens the door from the street, and she's already noticed the way his dishcloth, tucked into his belt, whisks round his muscular butt like a tail whenever he turns to the row of bottles behind the bar.

She picks up the glass, drains it and says, 'In that case, give me an Ocean Breeze.'

He pours another measure of Jack Daniels into a glass, then adds another measure of Jack Daniels, then finishes it off with another measure of Jack Daniels.

She tips it down her throat, and some of the guys at the bar break into a spontaneous round of applause.

Applause. Now there's a sound she hasn't heard in a while.

'And line me up a Long Island Iced Tea,' she says. 'With plenty of tea.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

She was never the most beautiful of Henry's women. In her opinion that would be Alana.

Alana has the hair of an urchin, the voice of a little girl and the figure of the model she used to be before she hit twenty-seven and the magazine bookings began to dry up. Alana is neurotic as a thoroughbred, and her habitually bare midriff is as taut as a tennis racquet.

Sometimes, though, there are men oblivious to Alana's cover-girl charms, and these men usually go for Lizzie. Or, more specifically, they go for Lizzie's breasts. Lizzie's breasts are big and creamy, and they undulate like a waterbed when she moves, which isn't very often. Claire especially covets the left one, the one with the scorpion tattoo on its upper slope.

And then there's Lola. While pretty isn't exactly a word you would use to describe Lola, she definitely has her fans. Half-Japanese, half-Jewish, with the unfathomable eyes of a geisha and the filthy mouth of a Brooklyn pimp, Lola used to be a stripper at a table-dancing club. Where her speciality, for an extra fifty bucks, was to lean over the punter's lap and, underneath the curtain of her long black hair, violate the club's no-touching rule for about ten seconds or so. She didn't even bother to undo their zippers, she told Claire once. She didn't need to.

Claire never liked to ask how Henry found Lola.

But though she might not be the prettiest, or the sexiest, or the sassiest, Claire has one quality that, as far as Henry's concerned, makes her unique.

She gets results.

Henry maintains it's because there's something about her that makes her seem more approachable than his other girls. Claire knows that isn't true. It's because, alone amongst his decoys, she can
act.

Paul, who runs the drama class she's joined, likes to say acting is called that because it's all about action. It's not who you pretend to be but who you become, not what you say but what you do.

Claire isn't sure. Maybe this Method stuff she's learning is just Hollywood bullshit.

But she's seen actors go on stage with a streaming cold and have it dry up for three hours, only to start sneezing again when the make-up comes off in the green room.

And she's seen men who would throw away everything they have —
wives,
fianc�es, families, careers — just for the chance of a few minutes with a figment of their imaginations.

With her.

Claire isn't proud of what she does for a living.

But she's proud as hell of the way she does it.

Dr Susan Ling carefully slides a long steel thermometer out of the dead woman's rectum and holds it up to the light. Involuntarily, Frank averts his eyes.

'Forty-eight hours,' the medical examiner pronounces. 'Give or take a few.'

'You sound pretty confident of that,' Frank says.

'Sure.' Dr Ling reaches out to the buttocks and shakes one dispassionately, as one might shake a jelly. 'Rigor has been and gone. It might be forty-four if she put up a struggle.'

The crime scene has been filmed from every angle now. The handcuffs securing the corpse's wrists to the bedframe have been removed so the pathologist can make her examination. The room smells of meat.

Stella Vogler's buttocks and shoulder blades are a dark, angry purple, as if all the blood in her body has slowly pooled and solidified in the lowest part of her. Which, Frank knows, is pretty much what happens.

The bite marks and belt weals patterning her thighs, buttocks and lower back are a less familiar sight.

Dr Ling steps back to the body and signals to her assistant, who helps her turn the corpse back over. The corpse's head shakes from side to side, groggily. The mess between its legs slithers and twists. Frank clears his throat. 'What killed her?'

Like all the other people in the room, apart from the pathologist, he's standing with his hands in his pockets. It gives the scene a deceptively casual air. Only when all the technical people are done will they be allowed to take them out.

'Well, I can't give you a definite answer until we cut her up, but I don't think there's much doubt. See this line around the neck?' Frank had, but he'd known better than to comment before the pathologist. 'It's a ligature mark. Possibly a belt or a strong necklace, but more likely rope or wire. Here.' Dr Ling produces a tiny Maglite from her pen pocket and thumbs open the eyes. The corneas are cloudy now, opaque as cataracts. Frank has been around enough corpses to know they all do that after a while. He also sees that the eye and its lid are dotted with tiny red specks.

'Petechiae,' the doctor says. 'Tiny haemorrhages in the blood vessels. She was strangled, for sure. When we open her up we'll find bloody froth in the lungs.' She makes it sound like getting under the hood of a car.

'What about the other wounds?'

'Approximately twenty-seven superficial haematomas — it's hard to be exact because some are overlaid — consistent with blows from a belt or a stick. All pre-mortem. Eighteen bite marks, some puncturing the skin, possibly post-mortem. Dental identification unlikely, but we'll see what we can do.'

'The whipping, was it sex play? Or an assault?'

The doctor bends down and starts to comb the corpse's hair with a fine metal comb. 'Well, motivation isn't my department. As far as the medical evidence is concerned, it could be either.' Stella Vogler's hair is blond and fine, and the metal teeth of the comb make a rasping sound as the pathologist drags it hard against the scalp. 'I can tell you she was gagged at some point. There are specks of dried blood in the corners of her mouth.'

Frank indicates the pile of guts between her legs. 'And this? What happened here?'

The doctor transfers her combings to an evidence envelope, seals it carefully and writes something on the front. 'I'm not sure. You'll have to wait for the autopsy.' She moves on to the corpse's hands, scraping delicately underneath each nail with a short wooden pick from the evidence box. The fingertips, drained of blood, are as white as candles.

'Sure. But if you've got any initial thoughts … Did he penetrate her with something? A knife, maybe?'

'I can't tell yet,' she repeats. She opens the last envelope in her box and takes out another comb, which she uses to comb the corpse's downy pubic hair. 'I can tell you there's bruising here,' she says. 'Post-mortem, from the look of it.' She parts the hair with the comb to show him. 'After circulation has stopped you don't get the vivid colours you get with pre-mortem bruises. But a tender spot will putrefy quicker than the flesh around it. Like the bruising on an apple.'

'Meaning what, in your opinion?'

'Meaning that whatever he did to her, he did after she was dead.' Dr Ling puts the comb back in the envelope, seals it and annotates the front. 'OK,' she says, 'I'm done here.' She pulls off her gloves and tosses them into a bag. The flaccid, milky balls of latex remind Frank of used rubbers. 'Thanks,' he says.

'I'll see you at the autopsy then, detective.'

Frank nods. He takes his hands out of his pockets. His fingers are stiff where they've been clenched into fists.

Frank Durban sits alone in a bar, nursing a beer. Occasionally the bartender says something to him, to see if he needs company, or conversation, or just another drink, but each time Frank shakes his head.

Even small talk is too much, tonight. Tonight he simply wants to watch the people come and go. The pretty girls, reflected in the mirror above the bar. The ones who are still alive.

Something strange happens at a murder scene. It's not that you are disgusted or repelled by what you see. The strange thing is that it seems perfectly normal. Like the killer himself, you look on the naked, dismembered body of the victim simply as raw material, an opportunity to practise your professional skills.

But occasionally there's something else as well, something more disturbing than dispassion. Something instinctive and uncontrollable and almost savage. Not anger or revulsion, but a kind of fleeting bloodlust.

Like a wild dog chasing another one from its meal, you find yourself standing over the kill with your teeth bared and your hackles raised, while something deep along the blood says,
This is mine, not yours.

Just for a moment, as the doctor held one of Stella Vogler's limp hands in hers and ran her pick under the white, bloodless nail, Frank had felt that tonight.

He puts down his beer and gets to his feet.

He knows he shouldn't take the job home. But the job comes anyway, uninvited.

When he gets to Brooklyn Heights, the mutilated body of Stella Vogler will be there already. Sitting in the unkempt kitchen amidst a mountain of dirty take-out cartons. Propped in front of the flickering TV. Laid out on the pillowless side of the bed.

To tell the truth, he'll be glad of the company.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Two a.m. comes and goes. Bessie has long gone home, and the barman is trying to persuade Claire to come back with him. When the house lights are turned on she waits at the bar for the last customers to stumble out into the snow, some of them still dancing, like an audience exiting from a show. The barman, whose name is Brian, puts a roach bomb in the middle of the floor and sets the security system. He's still only wearing his T-shirt, but he says he isn't cold. They walk through the snow to his apartment, a little drunk. Wet flakes drift down through the murky sky, as if they're underwater and the snow is plankton drifting down towards the sea's bed. Trees have become reefs of fuzzy grey coral. Their breath bubbles up and is lost, like divers', a stream of silver wriggling up to the distant darkness of the surface.

When they reach his apartment it's even more of a dump than he'd said it would be, hardly more than a mattress surrounded by piles of laundry. But suddenly she wants nothing more than to get into his bed, still fully clothed, to be warmed up by that big heat-engine of a body and be undressed piece by piece under the covers until she's warm enough to make love.