All the Flowers Are Dying Page 13

  “Well, it does add a little something.”

  “The old je ne sais quoi, the French call it. I, uh, don’t have any special equipment for it.”

  “I, uh, do.”

  “Well, aren’t you the devil!”

  He fetches the briefcase, opens it. They make a game of it, attaching the silk cuffs to her wrists and ankles, positioning her on the bed with a pillow under her bottom, fastening the cords, also silken, that secure her wrists and ankles to the bed’s four corners. Her eyes widen as he shows her some of the paraphernalia he’s brought. She looks excited, and he touches her, and yes, she’s wet, but then she’s always wet, this one, always ready and willing and able.

  He flicks the riding crop across her abdomen. It hurts a little, he notes, but she likes it.

  So far.

  “My God,” she said, “you must have bought out the Pleasure Chest. You really are a devil.”

  He opens a condom, puts it on.

  “Darling, you don’t need one of those. Why would you use one now? Oh, don’t tell me that’s why you haven’t let yourself come! That’s so sweet, but the last thing you have to worry about is getting me pregnant. I’m afraid those years are over.”

  He’s beginning to tire of listening to her. So why not put an end to her prattling? He tears off a strip of duct tape, pins her head with one hand, tapes her mouth with the other. This is unexpected, and not entirely welcome, and he watches her eyes as she begins to realize the extent of her helplessness.

  But that could be part of the turn-on. She’s not sure yet.

  He gives her a look at the letter opener. Her eyes widen, and she’d gape if her mouth weren’t taped shut.

  He gets on the bed with her, grips her breast, presses firmly with the letter opener until its point breaks the skin at the outer rim of the aureole. A bead of blood flows from the spot, and he takes it on the top of his index finger and shows it to her.

  Oh, my, the look in her eyes…

  “No bloodshed, you said, and I let you believe I agreed. A lie of omission, I’m afraid. You will be shedding some blood tonight after all.”

  He puts his finger in his mouth and tastes her blood, relishing it, relishing too the look on her face as she watches him do it. Did she read Dracula at an impressionable age? Did she find it erotic, as so many girls seem to do?

  He uses the letter opener, enlarges the wound. He puts his mouth to it and sucks blood from her, letting it fill his mouth, letting it flow down his throat. He loves the taste of blood, loves the whole idea of drinking it. The vampire myth is a powerful one, composed largely of nonsense, of course, like all myths. Eternal life, a need to shun daylight, to sleep in a coffin—amusing, certainly, but ridiculous.

  And yet the satisfactions and benefits of blood would seem to transcend myth. What could be more nourishing than this vehicle that carries the very life force of its owner? Of course it rejuvenates the person who swallows it. How could it be otherwise?

  He sucks greedily, careful not to yield to the impulse to bite the soft flesh. Bundy was a biter, he left tooth marks in his victims, and might have dodged Old Sparky if he hadn’t. There will be no tooth marks in this plump titty, toothsome though it unquestionably is.

  She’s struggling against the bonds, trying to cry out against the strip of duct tape. It’s futile, of course. There’s nothing she can do.

  He, on the other hand, may do as he will.

  He props himself up, his face close to hers. “You never should have let me tie you up,” he says, his tone conversational. “But don’t blame yourself. The die was cast the moment you opened the door. If you’d said no, if you’d tried to resist, well, it wouldn’t have done you any good. There would have been a struggle, and you’d have lost, and you’d wind up just as you are now, restrained and helpless.”

  He runs a hand over her flesh. Age may have softened her some, and gravity may have had an effect, but it’s left her with wonderfully soft skin.

  “How many times did you come this evening? I lost count. I hope you had a good time. Because I don’t think you’re going to enjoy the rest of this. I don’t think you’re going to care for it at all.”

  The coup de grace (though it’s not much of a coup, and a little late in the day for grace) is performed with the letter opener, of course, and it’s essentially the same blow he’d wanted to deliver to the woman in the shop, a deliberate thrust from just below the rib cage arcing upward into the heart. He’s inside her at the moment, and he tries to time his climax to coincide with her death, but the body insists on following its own timetable, and perhaps its wisdom is the greater.

  Because this way his attention is fixed entirely upon the blade in his hand and the look in her eyes, and he feels her heart at the tip of the blade, feels it allow itself to be pierced, sees the light die in her eyes, and feels the life go out of her. And surely she’s a part of him now, as are all of them, all the ones he’s taken. Surely her loss is his gain, her pain his pleasure, her death his life.

  And now he finishes, moving slowly now, slowly, tantalizingly, within the envelope of lifeless flesh, until at last there’s no holding back, no choice but surrender, and he cries out in pain or joy as he reaches his goal.

  Fortunately, there’s no hurry. He’s eager to get away, to put distance between himself and the dead woman, but he knows not to rush his departure. He wants to leave no traces, or at least to keep them to a minimum. The police will give his efforts their full attention, and their forensic capability is legendary. It is very much in his interest to provide them with as little to work with as possible.

  He’s had two orgasms, one well before her death, one in its immediate aftermath, and has consequently filled two condoms. Both are knotted now, his DNA secured within. He can flush them down the toilet, surely the plumbing in a New York apartment building will be equal to the task, but suppose one gets caught in a clogged trap? Safer to pop the pair into a Ziploc bag, which can join the wrist and ankle restraints, the silk cords, the riding crop, and the rest of the Pleasure Chest playthings in his briefcase.

  There’s not much blood. Her breast bled some, beyond what he sucked from it, and he has managed to get some of it on his own chest and forearms. The final wound, the piercing and stopping of her heart, never had a chance to bleed, and the letter opener is still buried in her heart.

  First a shower. But, as preparation, he’s brought along a five-inch square of fine-mesh screening, sold to enable a do-it-yourselfer to repair a hole in a window screen. He places this over the drain in the tub and secures it with duct tape. Any head or body hair, any trace evidence that might wind up in the trap, will now be prevented from reaching the drain in the first place.

  He showers thoroughly, using her soap, her shampoo and conditioner. He uses a big blue bath towel, bagging it when he’s finished for removal and safe disposal. He takes up the square of screening and the tape he used to hold it in place, and bags them as well.

  In a closet he finds a vacuum cleaner. Will neighbors hear the vacuum running? Perhaps, and so what if they do? He vacuums the floors throughout the large one-bedroom apartment, then changes attachments and vacuums the bed, body and all.

  Hair is the enemy, hair and sweat and other secretions. He imagines, not for the first time, how absurdly easy it must have been for a criminal a century or more ago, before DNA, before blood types, before ballistics, before forensics was a word, let alone a science. It was a wonder that anyone ever got caught.

  And, really, how many did? Of the bright ones, the planners, the Übermenschen of murder? There must have been a multitude who got away with it, even as he gets away with it, year after year after year.

  He bathed before coming here, bathed and shampooed, but one is forever losing hairs, shedding skin cells. He’s just finishing the vacuuming when he remembers that he was here the previous night, and God knows what hair and skin cells he may have left behind. And she’s changed the sheets since then, hasn’t she?

  He finds y
esterday’s sheets in the hamper, bundles them up, and, for good measure, adds everything else in the clothes hamper. A small detail, probably an unnecessary precaution, but why take a chance?

  She keeps her cash, he discovers, in the drawer with her underclothes. It’s not a fortune, less than a thousand dollars, but he can find a use for it, and she manifestly cannot. He’s had expenses—$200 for the bronze paper knife, as much again for the erotic paraphernalia, plus the cost of the bottle and the bouquet. With her cash in his wallet, the night’s work becomes a self-liquidating enterprise. Except, of course, that hers is the self that’s been liquidated.

  Next he wipes the place down for fingerprints. He hasn’t touched much, tonight or on previous visits. He wipes the bottle of Strega, and both of their glasses. He retrieves from her liquor cabinet the bottle of Glenmorangie Scotch she bought for him, pours and downs a drink, wipes and replaces the bottle. He leaves the vase of flowers on the mantel. He never touched the vase, and flowers won’t hold a print.

  But paper will, and he had his hands all over the paper they were wrapped in. He finds it in the kitchen wastebasket, adds it to one of his bags of trash.

  Throughout this entire process he’s been naked. Now, the job done, he puts on the clothes he’d left on the chair in the bedroom. He gathers everything he means to take away with him and lines it up alongside the apartment’s front door. Is he done? Can he go now?

  One more thing.

  He picks up a manicure scissors from the top of her dresser, uses the wall-mounted magnifying mirror, and clips three hairs from his mustache. He leaves one on the bedsheet, alongside her right arm, and drops the other two into her nest of pubic hair.

  Voilà!

  14

  Mother Blue’s was either half full or half empty, depending I suppose on whether or not you had money in the joint. It’s a rarity these days, a jazz club away from Midtown and SoHo and the Village, and not many out-of-towners find their way to it. Its clientele is an even-up mix of people who come from all over the city for the music, and neighborhood locals who don’t object to the music, and find it a pleasant place to kick back and get a buzz. It was always a pretty even mix of black and white, but lately the mixture’s been liberally spiced with Asians.

  Danny Boy’s there three or four nights a week, giving the rest of his custom to Poogan’s Pub, on West Seventy-second between Columbus and Amsterdam. There’s no music at Poogan’s, except what sneaks out of the jukebox, and if there’s any charm to it beyond a certain raffish straightforwardness, I’ve never spotted it. I only go to Poogan’s if I’m looking for Danny Boy, but I’ll go to Mother Blue’s just for the music.

  Danny Boy was at a table close to the bandstand, and he saw us before we saw him. He was smiling when my eyes picked him up, and beckoning us to his table.

  He said, “Matt and Elaine. Sit down, sit down. This is Jodie. Jodie, Matt and Elaine.”

  Jodie was Chinese, with utterly straight shoulder-length black hair and small perfect features in an oval face. She looked privately amused during the introductions, and indeed throughout the evening. I couldn’t decide if everything amused her or it was just her natural expression.

  “They’re on their break,” Danny said, with a nod at the bandstand. “You’ve heard the rhythm section here.” He named the musicians. “And there’s a tenor player with them, and he’s very current, but I swear there are moments when he reminds me of Ben Webster. He’s a kid, I don’t know if he ever even heard of Ben Webster, and he certainly never caught a live performance, but wait and see if he doesn’t sound just like him.”

  I’ve never known anyone like Danny Boy Bell, but then neither has anybody else. He’s barely five feet tall, small enough to buy his clothes in the boys’ department at Barneys, although for the past twenty years he’s had his suits made by a visiting Hong Kong tailor, which doesn’t cost any more and spares him embarrassment, along with the nuisance of leaving the house before dark. He’s the albino son of black West Indian parents, and strong light is hard on his eyes and bad for his skin. He spends the daylight hours in his apartment, reading or sleeping or on the phone, and his nights at Poogan’s or Mother Blue’s.

  His business is information. Most of his contacts have yellow sheets, but an arrest record doesn’t necessarily make a criminal. They are, I suppose, of the underworld, though Elaine thinks the French word demimonde is more suitable, if only because it’s French. Players and working girls, gamblers and grifters, people working angles or being worked by them, they all tend to turn up at Danny Boy’s table or call him on the phone. Sometimes he pays out money for the information he’s furnished, but this doesn’t happen often, and the sums are generally small. More often he pays his sources in favors, or in other information, if at all, as many people tell him things just to get the word around.

  He was a source of mine on the job, and our relationship continued after I gave back my badge. We’ve become good friends over the forty years I’ve known him, and I think I’ve already said that I met Elaine at his table.

  Elaine told him he was looking well, and he shook his head sadly. “The first time anybody said that to me,” he said, “is the day I first realized I was getting older. You ever hear anybody tell a kid in his twenties he’s looking well? Take Jodie here, she looks positively gorgeous, and I’ll tell her that, but I wouldn’t think of telling her she’s looking well. Look at her, she’s got skin like a China doll, you should pardon the expression. It’ll be twenty years before she has to hear somebody say she’s looking well.”

  “I take it back, Danny.”

  “No, don’t do that, Elaine. I’m an alter kocker, that’s no secret, and at my age it does my heart good to hear I’m looking well. Especially from a beautiful young thing like yourself.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve been looking well for a few years myself.”

  “You’re still a sweet young thing. Ask your husband, if you don’t believe me. Matt, is this just social? I hope so, but if there’s any business we should get it out of the way before the band comes back.”

  “Just social,” I said. “We’re hoping the music will change our mood. We went to a play about the Holocaust, and Elaine left the theater convinced it was just Act One.”

  He took it in, nodded. “I don’t look at the world any more than I have to,” he said, “but what I see I don’t like much.”

  Elaine asked him if he was still keeping his list.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “You know about that?”

  “Matt told me.”

  A few years ago Danny Boy had surgery for colon cancer, and whatever they give you afterward. Chemo, I guess. He was up and about again by the time I heard about it, but it gave him a peek at mortality to which he responded in an interesting fashion: He made a list of everybody he’d known who had died, starting with a kid at his school who’d been hit by a car. By the time I left his table that night it was a struggle to keep from making a mental list of my own.

  Now, years later, both our lists would be longer.

  “I gave it up,” he said, “when enough time passed without a recurrence so that I actually began to believe I might beat the damn thing. But what really did it was the Trade Center. Two days after the towers came down, the guy on the corner, for twenty years now he sells me a newspaper every night on my way home, now he tells me how his kid was in the North Tower on the same fucking floor that the plane hit. If you took a deep breath that day you got some of him in your lungs. I knew the kid, when he was younger he used to spend Saturday nights helping his old man with the Sunday Times, putting all the sections together. Tommy, his name was. I went home, I was gonna put him on my list, and I thought, Danny, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? They’re dying out there faster than you can write them down.”

  “I’m glad we came here,” Elaine said. “I feel a lot better already.”

  He apologized, and she told him not to be silly, and he took his bottle of vodka from the silver ice bucket and filled his
glass, and the waitress finally brought the drinks Elaine and I had ordered an eternity ago, a Coke for me and a Lime Rickey for her, along with another Sea Breeze for Jodie, and the band came out, not a moment too soon, and played “Laura” and “Epistrophy” and “Mood Indigo” and “ ’Round Midnight,” among other things, and Danny Boy was right, the tenor player sounded a whole lot like Ben Webster.

  Right before they took a break, the piano player, a gaunt black man with horn-rimmed glasses and a precisely trimmed goatee, announced that they’d play themselves off with a song about a French girl in England who was famous for her callipygian charms. “Ladies and gentlemen, for your enjoyment, ‘London Derriere.’ ”

  There were chuckles here and there, bafflement everywhere else. He was goofing on “Londonderry Air,” of course, the old name of the tune that most people know as “Danny Boy,” and it’s one of the world’s most beautiful melodies but not often thought of as a good vehicle for jazz. They’d chosen it as a tip of the hat to Danny Boy Bell, who managed to look flattered and put upon at the same time. The tenor man played one chorus absolutely straight, and it was enough to break your heart, and then they took it up-tempo and worked changes on it, and it sounded okay to me, but it was essentially a novelty number. Except for the first tenor solo, which a man could listen to the whole night through, especially if he had a glass in his hand.

  They wrapped it up, acknowledged the applause, and got off the stage. The piano player came over and told Danny Boy he hoped he didn’t mind, and Danny said of course not, and that they should hang on to the tenor man. “I wish,” the pianist said. “He’s here until a week from Thursday and then he’s on a plane to Stockholm.” Danny Boy asked what the hell he was going to do in Stockholm. “Eat blonde pussy,” the pianist said, and then he realized there were two women at our table and got all flustered, apologized profusely, and got out of there as quickly as possible.