If Looks Could Kill (3 page)

“This is how she gets in and out of the main part of the house?” I asked.

“Yes, mostly—though if she’s coming in from the outside, she might use our front door rather than go through her apartment.”

“Who opened the bookcase part?” I asked.

“I did, to knock on her door,” she said.

“When you open this door, are you right in her apartment?”

“Sort of. There’s a little corridor first. Then there’s her room. There’s no bedroom. It’s just a sitting room with a pull-out
couch.”

I crossed the room and leaned my left ear against the door. From the other side I could hear, ever so faintly, the sound of
music. My heart reared up, like a horse that’s just smelled smoke wafting into its stall. It was one thing to leave a light
on if you were going out, but why would you leave music on, too?

I lifted my arm and pounded four times on the door.

“Heidi,” I called. “Heidi, are you there?”

I waited for half a minute, though I was awfully sure that no one was going to open the door.

“Give me the key,” I said, stepping back toward Cat.

She let out a nervous sigh as she passed the ring to me with the key stuck out like a little gun.

“It turns to the right,” she said.

I put the key in the lock and tried to turn it, but it resisted. I wiggled the key back and forth a few times and finally
tripped the cylinder. I pushed open the door, calling out Heidi’s name one more time.

The smell walloped me right away, and it was god-awful. It was the sour smell of vomit and the stink of feces and maybe other
bad stuff. Fighting the urge to gag, I took two steps back from the half-open door and turned toward Cat.

“Not good,” I said. “She’s been sick—or she’s dead.”

Her hand flew to her mouth and fluttered there like a sparrow. “Oh, God,” she moaned.

I took off my cardigan and wrapped it around my face to prevent the smell from making me do a dry heave. Pushing the door
all the way, I took a step into the corridor. As a reporter I’d seen dead bodies before, mostly in car wrecks, but I didn’t
know what was waiting for me in Heidi’s room, and frankly, I felt scared out of my wits.

The corridor was longer than I’d imagined, with a small Pullman kitchen to the left and a bathroom to my right. The bathroom
was empty, though the light was on, and I spotted a pile of sea foam green towels on the floor, covered with dried vomit.
I kept walking, with little baby steps, toward the main room. It was a square space, with a door on the far left leading to
a hallway, which obviously led to the front door. The couch was in the middle of the room, positioned so that it faced the
street and the windows, its back to me. There was only one light on, a stand-up lamp next to the couch, but I could see all
the corners in the room with just a glance, and there was no Heidi pausing midroom in her pj’s, looking indignant because
I’d barged in. The music, some kind of jazz piece, was coming from a radio on a bookshelf against the left wall. And logic
told me that the smell from hell was emanating from the other side of the couch.

I moved closer, and halfway around the couch I saw her. She was lying on the floor between the couch and a little trunk used
as a coffee table, face up, arms stiffly at her side, almost as if she’d slipped off the couch while lying on it. And she
was dead. The skin on her face was waxy pale and her khaki green eyes, open, were cloudy and tannish, as if they’d begun to
discolor from being left open so long. She’d gotten sick from something, that was clear. There was vomit crusted on her lips,
through strands of her long blond hair, on the front of the white tank top she wore above her jeans. I glanced toward the
coffee table, looking instinctively for booze or drugs. There was nothing like that—just an empty bottle of Poland Spring
water, a gold box of Godiva chocolates, and a wet sea foam green towel snaking over a copy of
People
magazine.

My eyes found their way to Heidi’s body again. I noticed that the skin along the entire sides of both arms was purplish red.
It looked like bruising, but I knew that it was where the blood had begun to pool after death. She had probably died sometime
last night. I glanced toward the little corridor. Cat wasn’t in view.

“Cat,” I yelled, pulling the sweater down from my face. “Where are you?”

She leaned her head into the doorway.

“I’m right here. Is Heidi in there?”

“Yes, she’s dead. We need to get help right away.”

I backed away from the couch almost on tiptoes, careful not to touch anything, not even turn off the radio, and then down
the hallway. Cat was moaning, “Oh, no,” over and over again.

“We have to call 911,” I said.

“What happened? How did she die?” she wailed.

“I’m not sure. It looks as if she was sick or something—she’s puked all over the place. Let’s just get upstairs.”

I guided her back through the library and up the wrought-iron staircase into the living room. As I hurried behind her, I felt
an irrational panic, as if I were being chased. I looked back once over my shoulder to be absolutely sure no one was following
me.

A
S SOON AS
we got upstairs to the living room, Cat collapsed on one of the creamy white couches. She looked as if she wanted to cry
but didn’t know how to start. I felt oddly detached, as if I’d been switched on to automatic pilot.

“Cat, I’m sorry,” I said, standing in front of her. “This must be terrible for you.”

“I can’t believe it,” she exclaimed, the heels of both hands pressed hard against her forehead. “I mean, I was worried something
terrible might have happened, but now that it has, I can’t even believe it.”

“Do you want me to call 911—or do you want to do it?”

“Please, will you?” she pleaded.

There was a phone right next to her on the end table, a sleek cordless model sitting beside a black lacquered bowl filled
with potpourri. It took four rings, and when the operator answered she sounded no-nonsense, almost curt, as if I’d caught
her at a bad time.

“Did you try to take her pulse?” she asked after I’d explained what had happened and a few basic details about Heidi.

“No,” I told her. “I didn’t want to touch the body.”

She said she would send an ambulance. I knew she would also send the police from the nearest precinct.

After setting down the receiver, I filled Cat in on the brief exchange.

“What do you think happened to her?” she implored. “You said she was sick. How would that
kill
her?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Alcohol, drugs, they’re both a good possibility, I guess. She might have taken too much of something
that first made her sick—and then killed her. Or she could have choked on her own vomit. I didn’t see signs of anything like
that, though. The police and ME will figure it out. They’ll look at everything down there. They’ll treat it like a crime scene.”

“Oh, great,” Cat said sarcastically. She picked up one of the leopard throw pillows from the end of the couch and hugged it
to her chest. “But if it’s
not
drugs, what could it be?”

“I really don’t know. Maybe she got ill from something she ate. I doubt it’s any kind of a food allergy. I’m allergic to peanuts,
and when you have an allergic reaction your throat swells up and you start to suffocate. Botulism? That supposedly makes you
sick as hell. But if she was ill through the night, you think she would have called someone. Did she say anything on the phone
about not feeling well?”

“No,” Cat said, and then thought for a second. “I think what she said was, ‘I don’t feel up to going out tonight.’ ”

“Like she was sick?”

“Shit—I don’t know.”

“What kinds of things would she eat for dinner?”

She made a face. “It would depend on whether someone was watching.”

“Meaning?” I asked.

“If she was eating with us, she’d have tiny portions. But I think she binged sometimes when she was alone.”

“You mean she was
bulimic
?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s just that she’d play Miss Low-Fat Food Lover around a crowd of people, but later in her room she’d
wolf down something big and gooey. I know she stole food sometimes from the fridge.”

“You’re kidding?”

“I’m making it sound worse than it was. She did live with us, and so technically it was her food, too. She was just sneaky
about it, which drove Carlotta nuts. She’d take the last piece of Tyler’s dessert from the fridge or the leftover chicken—and
she’d do it without asking or admitting it.”

“And maybe even a box of Godiva chocolates?”

“What do you mean?”

“There was a box of candy on her table.”

“Well, if it’s Godiva, it’s probably the box someone brought me Thursday night at the party. When I went to look for it later
that night, it was gone. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

She tossed the pillow over to the far end of the couch and stood up.

“How long will it take the damn ambulance?” she asked. “I can’t stand thinking of her down there like that.”

“Look, Cat,” I said, “we’re going to have to call her family. This would be a good time to do it, before the ambulance—”

“She doesn’t have any family,” she said. “I mean, she did, but they’re dead. Her father ran off when she was born, and her
mother died when she was fourteen or something. She went to live with an aunt after that.”

“You have a number for her?”

“Somewhere, I guess. It’s upstairs in my office, I think.”

“Why don’t you see if you can find it, okay?”

After she left the room, I just sat there trying to get a handle on what I was feeling. My emotions, I could tell, were on
some kind of delayed reaction, and I knew I wasn’t going to be knocked over by any grief or sadness or horror until everything
had a chance to sink in. What I
was
experiencing was a certain amount of confusion. I had lots more questions for Cat about Heidi, but I would obviously have
to wait until later to ask them. My brain was also having a hard time catching up with the reality of the situation. An hour
ago I’d been lying in my bed about to be ravished by my wild Irish rogue, and now here I was, sitting with a dead body, crusted
in vomit, one floor below.

I got up and headed to the kitchen to look for caffeine. The morning was going to be crazy and depressing, and I needed something
to help me compensate for having had only five hours of sleep the night before. There was a Mr. Coffee on the counter, and
after rummaging around in the cupboards, I turned up a filter and a bag of Starbucks special blend. I filled the machine with
ten cups of water and hit the start button. As the water began to plop into the pitcher, I walked back to the front of the
house, to the dining room, and pushed aside the silk curtains on one of the windows. A family of four strolled by, he in a
navy jacket, she in a sleek lavender suit, the two little boys all jacketed up, too, and I wondered where they could be headed
dressed to the nines at this hour, and then I remembered: Sunday, church. All of a sudden the ambulance came down the street,
with its siren making a kind of funny staccato whooping sound. It overshot the house by a few yards, lurched to a stop, and
then backed up. I raced to the hallway and flung open the front door.

Three EMS workers sprang out almost simultaneously, from the driver’s seat a fiftyish guy, and from the back a young Hispanic
woman and a twentysomething white guy with a shaved head. The young guy had an in-charge look, and as he strode toward me,
the other two began unloading something from the back of the truck.

“She’s in there,” I said, pointing toward the apartment. “But she’s dead. I mean, I didn’t take her pulse, but I know she’s
dead.”

“We can get in this way?” he asked, cocking his head toward Heidi’s door.

I noticed the iron gate and realized I was going to have to open it up.

“I’m going to have to find keys. Do you want to come in through the house first and see the body?”

“Show me the way.”

As he’d been speaking to me, the two other paramedics had pulled out their equipment. One had a folded stretcher and the other
had what appeared to be a portable defibrillator. They looked like people who had overpacked for a weekend out of town. The
young guy put up his hand like a stop sign.

“Let me check it out. Stay on the radio, okay?”

He and I hurried up the stoop steps together, and as we stepped inside the house, Cat was descending the front hall stairs.

“The ambulance is here,” I told her. “We’re going to have to open the outside entrance to the apartment. You need a key for
the iron gate, right?”

“Right.”

“Do you have it?”

“You do.”

“What?”

“
You
do, on the key ring.”

I felt in my pocket where I’d stuffed the keys earlier and pulled them out, getting her to show me the one for the gate. She
said it also unlocked the front door of the apartment.

“Is there a chain on the front door?” I asked.

She looked at me in bewilderment and then, realizing what I meant, nodded her head.

“I’ll show you the body,” I said, turning to the paramedic, “and then we can unlock the door and the gate.” I led him through
the house and down the stairs into the library. He asked me a couple of questions as we scurried along—Heidi’s age, when I’d
found her, what made me think she was dead and not just unconscious.

“It’s through that door,” I told him, pointing. I’d pulled it closed as I left the room.

“Okay, just stay here, then,” he said. “Where’s the body?”

“In front of the couch.”

He opened the door and the gagadelic smell burst into the library, accompanied by the sound of jazz. I fought the urge to
retch, but he seemed unfazed. I watched as he made his way down the little corridor and stepped around toward the front of
the couch. He lowered himself gingerly on one knee and examined the body for less than a minute.

“She’s dead,” he said as he walked back down the corridor to me. “I’m pronouncing her dead”—he glanced at his watch—“at nine-thirty-two
A.M.” At this point, that seemed like the oldest news in the world.