The Suspense Is Killing Me Read online

  “I think so.”

  “The judicious approach. Not exactly timid. I make people timid sometimes. Well, I’ve enjoyed it, too. You’re a good listener—I like that in a man. You won’t believe me, but I very seldom want to talk about myself. Today was the day, I guess. Maybe it has something to do with my period. Would it be nice to meet again and then maybe you could decide for sure if you enjoy my company? What about dinner tomorrow?”

  “Shouldn’t you check your Filofax? It might be your body-waxing night.”

  “I already have. Give me your number and I’ll call you with time and place. My treat. You have a machine?”

  “A car? A plane? A lawn mower?” I scribbled my number on a napkin.

  “That’s pitiful, and—”

  “Don’t say it. You like that in a man.”

  “An answering machine.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m hip.”

  “That I doubt.” She pushed her chair back and stood up before I could move. “Mr. Tripper, you’re easy, very easy, and …” She waited.

  “You like that in a man.”

  She patted my arm. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Don’t get up. Finish your lunch. You look like a member of the Clean Plate Club.”

  She was gone. A very cute meet.

  I began to wonder. Had I picked her up? Or had it been the other way around?

  Two

  THE TEMPERATURE HIT NINETY-SIX later that afternoon. Even on the shady side of Fifth it was too hot to live, let alone walk around, but the chances of getting an air-conditioned cab were too low to make the effort. So I walked and tried to catch every breeze. I walked down through Washington Square where the arch baked in the direct sunlight and gave off heat waves you could actually feel. It was like watching one of those scary movies of an atomic explosion. A one-man steel band was clanging away, tolling the end of civilization as we knew it, and a few roller skaters moseyed listlessly around the basin. That was it. Everybody else had lost consciousness.

  The radiator cap had blown off a T-bird on Houston and gone halfway through the hood, where it remained looking like a groundhog checking for its shadow. I saw it happen. Thwang—bang-thunk. The driver just pulled over to the curb, slid to a stop by a young entrepreneur engaged in purveying crack to the masses, and slumped slowly across his steering wheel. A broken man who might never see his split-level rambler in Jersey again. I had my jacket slung over my shoulder by then and my shoes were doing that unhealthy thing where they stick to the streets and sidewalk. It was a struggle. The nice thing, what kept me going, was the knowledge that Sally kept two industrial-strength air conditioners going in her Prince Street loft. I liked that in a woman.

  I was still thinking about Heidi Dillinger. She’d told me more about herself than would have seemed likely, given her type, but as she’d said, she’d felt like talking and maybe it was, after all, her period. Still, her face—particularly those pale, coffee-with-cream eyes—was one that gave nothing away, continually insisted on tabulating a running score and calculated each and every angle. She wasn’t the sort of creature who would allow herself to get picked up. Unless, of course, that was the point.

  She couldn’t have been less like Sally Feinman, who was Brooklyn-born and raised, who was the daughter of respectable fellow travelers destroyed in the Red Scare of the fifties, who’d been a teenager in the sixties and never got over it. Her consciousness had been raised on cut-rate campus grass, the assassinations, the Beatles and the Stones, Vietnam body counts, burning bras and draft cards, Mayor Daley and Chicago in the summer of 1968, civil rights marches in Alabama, police brutality, sexual intercourse as the basic grammar of your communication. Sally always looked intense and committed and funny and ironic and serious. She saw two Establishment politicians together and she saw yet another lethal conspiracy. She looked as if she’d gotten a frizzy permanent in the sixties and never been able to wash it out. She was short and stocky and sexy, and though we’d never had what anyone might call an affair, we’d certainly had a great deal of what any right-thinker would call sex. Sally was at home with sex. Comfortable with it, confident, sure that everybody was going to wind up wearing a smile. The first day we knew each other we did indeed go to sleep with smiles on our faces. But it wasn’t an affair and we weren’t in love. I wasn’t committed enough to anything, didn’t take anything seriously enough for her. I told her how I felt about the Yankees and she said baseball didn’t count. But we loved each other. It was all very sixties. We couldn’t help it. It was in our genes.

  Heidi Dillinger wouldn’t have understood. She’d have thought we were morons who weren’t maximizing our various potentials. But we were all products of our times, Heidi in her cool remote-distancing just as much as laid-back, ex-druggy me and weight-of-the-world-on-her-shoulders Sally. We were what we were. And the gulf between me on one side and Heidi on the other seemed wider and more unbridgeable than ever. Perhaps I was about to learn whether or not we could make sense of one another. Some things never changed, not even for the Heidi Dillingers of this world.

  I had to get her out of my mind. I was already thinking about her too much. That’s a cute meet for you. Everything is suddenly out of proportion, all because it was cute. A Heidi Dillinger got hold of you with her cute little personality, all decked out with alluring contradictions, and the real people, like Sal, got bumped from the next flight.

  Well, not tonight.

  I knew who my friends were.

  The street-level door was a half-assed affair of chipped green paint, protective wire mesh over a glass panel, iron bars bolted on top of the mesh. As usual, it stood open about an inch, so much for space-age security. Any random homicidal maniac could enter unannounced and work off his frustrations about the cost of condos with a meat cleaver. The stairway was dark, lit only by a smudged, begrimed skylight five stories above. The freight elevator was padlocked. The building housed a couple of painters, a sculptor who worked in neon tubing, a couple who operated a jewelry-making concern, and Sally. Sally often carried a flashlight in her bag for illuminating the stairway at night, along with Mace and a brass whistle and a spring-loaded knife big enough to geld a water buffalo. And this was SoHo, not a slum, not Alphabet City, not Bed-Stuy. This was a loft for which she’d paid several hundred thousand dollars. And so it goes.

  I was halfway up the second flight of stairs when I heard something in the gloom above me. I looked up just in time to catch the full impact of a man’s shoulder in my chest. He’d come hurtling around the landing, head down, a blur of motion, I thought a dark suit maybe or a blazer, a necktie flapping, then the shoulder and the grunting sound—me or him—and I was slammed to my right against the blistered wall where I hit hard, the blows to front and back knocking the wind out of me and shooting a rocket through my kidneys. He stumbled going past me, reached out with a fist or elbow and clipped my knee. I heard him hit the landing below me, turn without looking back and head down the steps sounding like a man and a piano in the middle of a bad mistake. I was collapsing from the dig to my knee, skidding forward, hands out trying to grab the banister, failing, jamming my wrist against a step, then pitching six or seven more steps down to the landing, where I lay on my side, doubled up, wondering whether my forehead, wrist, knee, chest, or kidney needed attention first. My one clear thought was that—since people were stacked up in New York City emergency rooms for twenty-four to thirty-six hours waiting to see doctors—the hospital was clearly the last place I wanted to go. Better to die where I was. All this in four or five seconds. I’d been reduced to a bedraggled bag of blood and pain and bruises, a hit-and-run victim with a tear in his linen Paul Stuart suit pants, a split seam in the coat which I’d put on before entering the building, a bloody nose from cleverly using it to break my fall. I strained to see the judges’ scorecards. 2-2-1-2-1-1-1 …

  My breathing apparatus slowly returned to the fray; I could stop gagging and gasping and rely primarily on moaning. I held on to the wall like a drunk grappling with a lamppost
and gingerly drew myself into a sagging upright squat. I reminded myself of one of the schoolroom posters depicting the evolution of the species. From the looks of things I’d just crawled out of the slime and didn’t quite know what to make of dry land. I held my handkerchief to my nose. My suit, shirt, tie, and sense of irony were in ruins. Five seconds without the blow of a fist. God help me if I ever found myself in a fight. I wished I had a steering wheel across which I could slump. But instead I dragged myself the rest of the way up and climbed, panting, bleeding, trying to rearrange my kidneys, until I stood outside Sally’s door. It too stood slightly ajar.

  I pushed it open and shouted her name, deciding I should prepare her for the spectacle she was about to confront.

  “Sally, I am a wounded man, a thing of shreds and patches! I have become a statistic!”

  At the very least I could retain my good humor and make a New York story out of my disaster. Left for dead by speeding man in blazer. “Sally?”

  There was no answer.

  And there was something very wrong with this picture. But what?

  Everything seemed in order. Her huge desk was relatively neat. The computer sat ready to go, the couches and chairs and palm trees and paintings and throw rugs were all as they always were.

  I stood still, sweating like Doc Gooden in a ninth-inning jam with Kirk Gibson coming to bat. I let my eyes roam slowly across the huge space. It was like being the Pillsbury Doughboy in the oven, the heat finishing me off.

  That was what was wrong.

  The air conditioners weren’t running.

  The windows were closed tight. The loft was still and humid and quiet. It must have been 120 degrees in that room and Sally was the sort of person who ran the air conditioners even when she wasn’t home. She couldn’t stand the heat, refused to deal with it. But the air conditioners were silent.

  My nose had stopped bleeding. I pushed the stained handkerchief up my sleeve. I went to the desk and flipped the switch on the long-necked black lamp. Nothing. I turned the computer on. Nothing. There was no power. Something had blown the fuses and Sally had gone in search of the super. Logical.

  I went to the bathroom to wash the blood from my face and hands.

  Sally was in the bathroom.

  She was in the tub. One leg up over the edge of the white porcelain, the foot dangling awkwardly. Her toenails were painted orange. The stench in the bathroom was ghastly. There was vomit down the side of the tub and puddled on the floor. There was an unidentifiable smell, as if something had been scorched. And I smelled a strong scent of cherries, like certain kinds of cough syrup. I leaned over the toilet just in time. My knees buckled from the smell. Reflexively I lost my lunch. I wasn’t thinking about Heidi Dillinger anymore.

  I made myself go back to the bathtub and look at her.

  Terrible things had been done to Sally Feinman. I looked at the scars and I felt skewered, as if I’d been caught in the worst kind of rock and roll nightmare. For an instant, longer, I felt as if I’d stumbled into a ritual killing by some gory band of Satanists who’d feasted on Sally.

  Her eyes were open and fixed on the ceiling. Her face was contorted in a rictus of pain and agony and surprise and pleading. Her eyes had just glimpsed evil and then death had protected her, taken her. Her hands were trussed tight before her, bound with wire that had split the skin. Her wrists had bled profusely. The water in the tub was pink. Her body bore a dozen raw and blistered burns. Stuck in one of the wounds was a curler from an electric hot-curler set. At the bottom of the tub, wavering through the water like lost treasure, an apparition, was the rest of the hot-curler set, box, electrodes, the works. It was still plugged into the wall socket just below the medicine cabinet and above the sink. She was badly burned and I couldn’t look anymore. There wasn’t any more to see anyway.

  It didn’t take a genius to pose some questions, contemplate some conclusions. It was involuntary.

  Having been tortured, she’d been killed, electrocuted, when the curler set had been dropped or thrown into the tub. Dropped or thrown: that was somehow relevant, the way my mind was working. The only reason you torture someone—if you write off the madman who does it for the simple joy it gives him, or the revenge, or the expiation of guilt, whatever—is to force them to tell you something. Torture was invented and has been improved on with alarming regularity and determination to elicit a desired response. I wondered if she’d told her killer what he wanted to know. If she had, he might have casually dropped the curler set into the tub to put her out of her misery. If she’d withheld the information, he could have hurled it into the water in frustration, hatred, punishing her. Or—my mind was racing ahead—maybe she’d still be alive if she’d held out … Or maybe she’d have survived if she’d told … What? Told what? What did she know that she had to die for? What did it matter to me? All that mattered to me was that Sally was horribly dead, as if a monster had wanted to prove a point.

  I went back to the other room and sat down at her desk. My stomach felt as if it were about to do another half-gainer. The smell, the sight of her eyes … I closed mine tight, squeezing them against the image of death and agony in the face of someone I loved … But the tighter I shut them, the clearer another image became: I saw my brother stretched out dead as a carp on a dock, mouth gaping, eyes empty and lonely in Tangier …

  My nose had begun bleeding again. It was dripping onto her desk, big red circles. I held my handkerchief against the flow and thought about the man who had flattened me on the stairway. I had smelled the cherry cough syrup or the cough drops in the collision, the sweet sickly smell—had he killed Sally? It seemed like the logical place to start.

  A man who smelled like that would be capable of anything.

  I opened the windows above Prince Street. The curler set hitting the water must have blown out the fuses. The moment the windows were open, the city attacked: horns honking, people yelling, sirens screeching. There wasn’t any new air out there. It was all used air and hot out there, but it moved, which was better than the air in the loft. I called the police. I’d been in the loft for ten or twelve minutes. I was still dripping with sweat. I was aching and bruised and my mouth was full of the metallic taste of blood. I seemed to be able to smell the mess in the bathroom no matter where I went in the loft.

  I wondered if I was afraid.

  But afraid of what?

  It had nothing to do with me.

  When the police arrived, a smallish detective with a smallish mustache fringing a small, puckered mouth listened while I told him the story. William Powell would have liked the mustache and looked good in it. On the detective it was iffy. He smoked Camels and nodded sympathetically and was interested in the man on the stairway. He was the least threatening man imaginable. He told me he understood how I didn’t have too much in the way of a description, not with that dark a stairwell. I told him about Sally, what she did for a living, how we’d met and why I’d come on down on such an ungodly hot day. He was fascinated by my relationship to JC Tripper. He wanted to know if JC had really died in Tangier …

  I left the loft in the faded light of early evening. It looked cooler even if the appearance was an illusion. I ignored the rips and tears and bloodstains for a couple of blocks, but the onset of aches and pains—look, I’m not a fellow who knocks himself out with heavy exercise—wore me down at the corner of Houston. The T-bird was still there, but the driver was nowhere to be seen.

  I hailed a cab. It might have been simpler just to let him run me down. The driver had apparently just arrived on Earth, and to him Central Park West was terra incognita and then some. I thought of him as Abdul Abulbul Amir, and the ride with the windows open wasn’t bad at all. When I got home I took six Advils and a shower, sat on my terrace alone watching the Yankees on television, trying to work up some enthusiasm for a tuna-salad sandwich.

  But I felt tears on my face. A good person had died like someone in a concentration camp.

  I hated it. I hated her dying and I hat
ed my pathetic impotence in doing anything about it. A smallish man with a smallish mustache was handling all that.

  All I’d done was find her body.

  Now I was out of it, alone with my memories of a particularly loving and lively friend.

  And the day had begun so well.

  Three

  HEIDI DILLINGER’S CALL WOKE ME up at nine o’clock and I let the machine take it. I was faintly surprised that she’d called at all. Our meeting seemed an unlikely part of an altogether unreal day, the promise to call the sort of thing that seems a less good idea once slept on. But there she was, 9 A.M. and sounding as if she’d been up for hours. She left an address on Fifth Avenue across the Park, a little south of the Metropolitan. A very pricey line of country. She hadn’t been kidding when she said she was well compensated by her novelist boss. The appointed hour was eight o’clock.

  I took a shower while my mind came to grips with the full horror of what I’d stumbled into the day before. It seemed even crazier in the morning light, like something you remember from a disreputable movie, but of course it was real. I was standing out on the terrace, having felt the morning’s heat hammer me like a fist, listening to Gershwin, when the telephone rang again. It was the homicide detective from the night before. He wondered if he could stop by around noon and run through a couple more questions with me. I said sure and called The Ginger Man for a lunch reservation in case I had a hungry cop on my hands. Then Tony Fleming called to tell me that Sally Feinman’s murder was on the front page of the Post.

  HOT WRITER GETS BURNED!