Valentine (26 page)

“Please be careful,” she said.

Jill grinned. “Have a nice time Tuesday night.”

Tara had to think a moment. “Oh, yeah. Doug. I’m sure I will.”

“I’m sure you will, too. I’ll call you. ‘Bye.”

“Good-bye.”

It occurred to Tara again just how bizarre the whole thing was as she watched Jillian Talbot, the renowned author of four bestselling novels, climbing down the back of her own building and sneaking away like a thief in the night. Tara, who had never been particularly religious, closed her eyes and murmured a prayer for her friend.

Jill descended the fire escape to the second floor, then lowered the ladder to the ground and climbed down.

Escape, she thought, over and over as she made her way quickly down the narrow alley between buildings to Hudson Street. She stopped instinctively and peered both ways before stepping out of the dark alley into the bright morning sunlight. There were only three people in sight, two women and a little boy. She walked straight out into the street and held up her hand to the oncoming traffic. Twenty seconds later she was in the backseat of a cab moving swiftly north, away from her apartment. Away from Greenwich Village. Away from her lover and her friends.

Away from Valentine.

She leaned heavily back against the cool leather seat and closed her eyes.

Barney came out of Jill’s building the conventional way and stood for several moments, looking up at the buildings across the street. Yes, he calculated, his gaze moving swiftly along the edifices. Two buildings. The top front rooms of the red brick one, and the top corner apartment of the big gray one. Four windows—eight, if you count the ones directly below them. No, the angle would be too low. He’d noticed from her apartment that the buildings behind these two were several blocks north, too far away. And her side windows were too small. It had to be one of these two buildings, here in front of him. Nothing else would suffice.

Realizing that he might be observed, he turned and walked quickly away, toward his car on Bedford around the corner. But he’d be back, he decided. Within the hour . . .

The cab took Jill to a car rental agency on Thirty-ninth Street. Half an hour later she was at the wheel of a red Chevette, moving north and east toward the Queensboro Bridge. She could feel herself relaxing more and more with every mile she put between herself and her home. By the time she reached the Long Island Expressway, she’d actually begun to sing
softly to herself. She stopped abruptly when she realized what it was she’d been singing.

“My Funny Valentine.”

Andrea Skinner was worried about her mother. Yesterday she’d left two messages, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, but Mom had not called her back. This was odd: she rarely had to wait more than an hour to receive a reply to a phone message, to say nothing of a whole day. As far as Andrea knew, her mother was supposed to be home.

Now she stood at the top of the steps at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, ringing her mother’s buzzer and getting no response. She shook her head, silently cursing her mother’s stubbornness, not to mention her stinginess. Sally’s honeymoon in Hawaii had been planned for months. When Sally’s friend, the replacement receptionist, called in sick, she should have called a temp agency to get someone to handle the phones. But temporary people charged twice as much as regular employees. Dorothy Philbin had always been frugal: she’d rather do without than pay an inflated salary.

So now Andrea had come all the way down to Greenwich Village, simply because her mother didn’t have anyone to answer the phone. What a bore, Andrea thought as she produced her own key to her mother’s house and let herself in.

The living room and the kitchen were empty, so she immediately went up to the second floor. Mom’s bedroom, the bathroom, the guest room: nothing, anywhere. With a little sigh of impatience, she came back downstairs. Of course, it was Saturday, and her mother did not see patients on the weekend. Perhaps she’d gone out somewhere, or she could be working in her office. Nodding to herself, Andrea walked back the way she’d come.

Her first instinctive, almost clairvoyant perception that something was wrong occurred in the kitchen, just before she opened the door to the basement. She paused for a moment, listening, straining her ears for any sound. The house was entirely too still, too quiet.

Then she opened the door to the basement stairway and flicked on the stair light, and she immediately knew her instinct had been right. The strong, sickly sweet odor of decay rushed through the open door, emanating from the darkness below her. For a full ten seconds she was unable to move. Surprised, terrified, and hoping against hope, she slowly descended the stairs. At the bottom she waited a moment, wincing at the vile smell, before reaching over and switching on the office light.

Several minutes later, when she regained consciousness, she discovered that she was lying at the base of the stairs, and that her hands and coat were stuck to the carpet. Her mother lay on the floor five
feet away from her, in front of her desk. She was on her back, clad in her gray suit, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling with dull, glazed eyes. There was a jagged, gaping hole where her throat had been, and small black insects were swarming over her. Roaches, and something gray and furry running from the light, away from the body toward the darker reaches of the room.

When Andrea Skinner looked down and realized that her hands and coat were adhering to a roach-infested pool of her mother’s dried blood, she began to whimper. By the time she had tom herself and her clothes from the carpet and scrabbled furiously up the steps toward the kitchen, she had begun to scream.

Clothes, Jill thought as she drove. I’m going to need clothes, and makeup and toiletries. I forgot my laptop. I’ll have to use a typewriter, or Gwen’s legal pads and a pen, if I actually get over this block and write anything. No big deal: I’ve done it before. I’ll stop somewhere for the other things. After I stop for lunch at the rest home in Port Jefferson. . . .

A quick stab of guilt coursed through her as she realized that she hadn’t visited her mother in more than a month. Oh, well, she decided, that can be amended right now, today. I’ll have lunch with her in that nice dining room, and I’ll bring flowers and
chocolate for her and her new friends, Mrs. Davis and Mrs.—Mrs.—Mrs. whatever-her-name-is.

Oh, God, Jill,
think!
Don’t fall apart.

Not now.

Not yet . . .

The landlady was useless, Barney decided as he followed her up the narrow stairs to the seventh floor. She must be about ninety, and her eyesight was apparently poor, judging from the way she squinted at everything through her thick glasses. She’d only seen the young man once, two weeks ago, and she couldn’t remember his name. Something foreign, she thought. He’d paid her cash for three weeks. No, there hadn’t been any written contract, or anything like that. Unofficial income, she’d murmured proudly, to supplement her meager Social Security benefits. She’d actually winked at Barney when she’d admitted that.

She’d only agreed to take him up to the room after he’d shown her his detective’s license and made up a quick story about a worried wife and kids in Brooklyn, and that he’d traced the errant husband to this street. He just wanted to see her tenant, he assured her. He probably wasn’t the person he was looking for, but . . .

She’d pursed her lips and nodded then, muttering something about the inconstancy of the male gender,
and the sorry lot of wives and children. He could tell, even as he followed her up the stairs, that she was half hoping her tenant
was
the guilty party. She’d give him a piece of her mind, no doubt.

When they reached the landing on the sixth floor, he stopped her. She was fairly gasping for breath by this point, so he turned his need to go to the door alone into an act of kindness.

“You wait here,” he said, smiling. “I’ll just knock on his door. If he doesn’t answer, I’ll have a little peek inside. That’s all.” He grinned as he reached out and gently removed the key ring from her withered hand.

“I don’t know—” she began feebly, but he was already up the last flight of stairs. He glanced briefly down at her as he positioned himself before the door. She was muttering to herself, not even looking up the stairs in his direction. Thank God, he thought as he reached up and removed his weapon from the shoulder holster.

He didn’t knock, of course. He carefully slid the key into the lock and turned it. Then, in one swift, surprisingly graceful move, he pushed the door open, dropped to his knees in the doorway, and aimed directly into the room.

He stared.

Empty.

Then he rose to his feet, slowly lowering the gun.
The old woman was calling up from the flight below, but he paid no attention to her. His gaze moved around the tiny, drab space. There was an old, ratty armchair near the window, a sagging wood table beside it. On the table was a battered ashtray. In the corner were piled two bare, dirty striped mattresses. He went quickly over to the closet door and threw it open. Two or three rusting wire hangers. That was all.

He walked over to the window and looked out. Jill Talbot’s picture window was directly across from him. If her curtains were opened, he’d be able to see most of her apartment perfectly.

Valentine has been here, he told himself.

The landlady’s irritated, irritating cries reached him as he stood in the center of the room and slowly inhaled through his nose.

He nodded to himself.

Cigarette smoke.

The room had been vacated recently. Very recently.

He left the room. Locking the door behind him, he rejoined the woman, who waited at the bottom of the stairs. As they descended, he thought, I’ll pay Escalera a call today. There might be fingerprints in that room. . . .

Then he thought, where are you? Where are you, Valentine?

His next thought stopped him in his tracks. He
stood on the staircase, watching the landlady moving away from him down the stairs.

Where are you, Jill Talbot?

Jill Talbot was on the expressway, heading east.

She reached down and patted the pocket of her coat. She could feel the unreal, bizarre but oddly reassuring bulk through the wool: the solid, comforting weight of the gift Tara had slipped into the pocket when she’d helped her put the coat on. Keeping her left hand firmly on the wheel, she reached down with her right hand and transferred the heavy, loaded Lady Wesson from her pocket to her purse.

A gun, she thought. I’ve never so much as touched a gun in my life. But Mike knows all about them: he’s going to give me a lesson.

A lesson. How to shoot. Maim. Cripple.
Kill
another human being.

Oh, Jill, what have you become?

Please, God, help me get through this. Just get me to Port Jefferson, to Mother. Then a shopping mall, for the things I’ll need, and straight on to Peconic. To Gwen and Mike Feldman.

To safety . . .

Victor Dimorta sat in a little booth at the back of the drab Greek diner, making plans.

His original plan had gone awry, he grudgingly admitted to himself. He’d known all along that there was every chance that Jillian Talbot would take off, but he hadn’t expected her to do it so abruptly. Oh, well, it was the price he’d paid. The price for making this last one so elaborate.

This last one . . .

He remembered what he now thought of as his first one: February 29, sixteen years ago. Mother and Father. But it hadn’t begun there, he knew. He thought of all the events that had led up to it, and of the catalytic event that had immediately preceded it: the prank played on him by the four girls in college. Yes, that night in the house in Mill City had been a long time coming. Eighteen years.

Eighteen years of Joseph (“Big Joe”) Dimorta, the
burly, scowling second-generation American who never tired of telling his skinny, soft son how he’d worked his way up from pulp mixer to lineman to head honcho. Who earned his nickname driving eighteen-wheelers and wielding paper bales that normally took two men to haul. Who never looked at Victor without an expression of naked contempt. Big Joe used his booming voice and mighty fists in a never-ending battle to make the boy a man.

Victor remembered the first time he’d gone to the hospital. His nose, his left arm, and two ribs. His mother told the admitting nurse that he’d fallen down the stairs. The nurse probably didn’t believe her, but she didn’t say anything. Nobody said anything, ever: the doctors, the cops, the teachers at school. And, least of all, Mother.

Mother. She was so small, he remembered. A small, dark-complected Italian woman who had, like her husband, been raised by immigrants who had themselves worked in the paper factory. It was considered a great thing when the quiet, plain, dutifully church-going front-office secretary had attracted the attention of the foreman, the best-paid and most respected man in Mill City.

Glancing around the nearly empty diner, Victor frowned at the memory. No sooner had Big Joe and Angela been married and blessed with their only child than the true reason for everyone’s respectfulness
became evident. The whole town was terrified of him. His temper, especially when drinking in the local tavern, was well known and feared by the people whose employment and only means of livelihood were determined entirely by him. Even his fellow foreman and presumed equal, Bob Wells, who lived two doors down from him on Franklin Street, took pains to stay in his good graces. And rumor had it that Joe’s salary was augmented by under-the-table payoffs from the owners to keep the employees from unionizing—which ultimately involved three men being hospitalized, as Victor had been. All three swore that their attackers were Big Joe Dimorta and Bob Wells, but everyone, even the local sheriff, looked the other way.