Pretty little Edna, he thought. You’ve got such long and lovely legs.
He smiled.
He pressed the call button for Mr. and Mrs. Yardley on the third floor.
A man’s voice echoed tinnily from the speaker at the top of the mailbox. “Who is it?”
“Is this the Hutchinson apartment?” Bollinger asked, knowing full well that it was not.
“You pressed the wrong button, mister. The Hutchinsons are on the second floor. Their mailbox is next to ours.”
“Sorry,” Bollinger said as Yardley broke the connection.
He rang the Hutchinson apartment.
The Hutchinsons, apparently expecting visitors and less cautious than the Yardleys, buzzed him through the inner door without asking who he was.
The downstairs hall was pleasantly warm. The brown tile floor and tan walls were spotless. Halfway along the corridor, a marble bench stood on the left, and a large beveled mirror hung above it. Both apartment doors, dark wood with brassy fixtures, were on the right.
He stopped in front of the second door and flexed his gloved fingers. He pulled his wallet from an inside coat pocket and took a knife from an overcoat pocket. When he touched the button on the burnished handle, the springhinged blade popped into sight
;
it was seven inches long, thin and nearly as sharp as a razor.
The gleaming blade transfixed Bollinger and caused bright images to flicker behind his eyes.
He was an admirer of William Blake’s poetry
;
indeed, he fancied himself an intimate spiritual student of Blake’s. It was not surprising, then, that a passage from Blake’s work should come to him at that moment, flowing through his mind like blood running down the troughs in an autopsy table.
Then the inhabitants of those cities
Felt their nerves change into marrow,
And the hardening bones began
In swift diseases and torments,
In shootings and throbbings and grindings
Through all the coasts; till, weakened,
The senses inward rushed, shrinking
Beneath the dark net of infection.
I’ll change their bones to marrow, sure as hell, Bollinger thought. I’ll have the inhabitants of this city hiding behind their doors at night. Except that I’m not the infection
;
I’m the cure. I’m the cure for all that’s wrong with this world.
He rang the bell. After a moment he heard her on the other side of the door, and he rang the bell again.
“Who is it?” she asked. She had a pleasant, almost musical voice, marked now with a thin note of apprehension.
“Miss Mowry?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“Police.”
She didn’t reply.
“Miss Mowry? Are you there?”
“What’s it about?”
“Some trouble where you work.”
“I never cause trouble.”
“I didn’t say that. The trouble doesn’t involve you. At least not directly. But you might have seen something important. You might have been a witness.”
“To what?”
“That will take a while to explain.”
“I couldn’t have been a witness. Not me. I wear blinders in that place.”
“Miss Mowry,” he said sternly, “if I must get a warrant in order to question you, I will.”
“How do I know you’re really the police?”
“New York,” Bollinger said with mock exasperation. “Isn’t it just wonderful? Everyone suspects everyone else.”
“They have to.”
He sighed. “Perhaps. Look, Miss Mowry, do you have a security chain on the door?”
“Of course.”
“Of course. Well, leave the chain on and open up. I’ll show you my identification.”
Hesitantly, she slid back a bolt lock. The chain lock allowed the door to open an inch and no farther.
He held up his wallet. “Detective Bollinger,” he said. The knife was in his left hand, pointed at the floor, pressed flat against his overcoat.
She squinted through the narrow crack. She peered for a moment at the badge that was pinned to the inside of his wallet, then carefully studied the photo-identification card in the plastic window below the badge.
When she stopped squinting at the ID and looked up at him, he saw that her eyes were not blue, as he had thought—having seen her no closer than when she was on stage and he was in the shadowed audience—but a deep shade of green. They were truly the most attractive eyes he had ever seen. “Satisfied?” he asked.
Her thick dark hair had fallen across one eye. She pushed it away from her face. Her fingers were long and perfectly formed, the nails painted blood red. When she was on stage, bathed in that intense spotlight, her nails appeared to be black. She said, “What’s this trouble you mentioned?”
“I have quite a number of questions to ask you, Miss Mowry. Must we discuss this through a crack in the door for the next twenty minutes?”
Frowning, she said, “I suppose not. Wait there just a minute while I put on a robe.”
“I can wait. Patience is the key to content.”
She looked at him curiously.
“Mohammed,” he said.
“A cop who quotes Mohammed?”
“Why not?”
“Are you—of that religion?”
“No.” He was amused at the way she phrased the question. “It’s just that I’ve acquired a considerable amount of knowledge for the sole purpose of shocking those people who think all policemen are hopelessly ignorant.”
She winced. “Sorry.” Then she smiled. He had not seen her smile before, not once in the entire week since he had first seen her. She had stood in that spotlight, moving with the music, shedding her clothes, bumping, grinding, caressing her own bare breasts, observing her audience with the cold eyes and almost lipless expression of a snake. Her smile was dazzling.
“Get your robe, Miss Mowry.”
She closed the door.
Bollinger watched the foyer door at the end of the hall, hoping no one would come in or go out while he was standing there, exposed.
He put away his wallet.
He kept the knife in his left hand.
In less than a minute she returned. She removed the security chain, opened the door and said, “Come in.”
He stepped past her, inside.
She closed the door and put the bolt lock in place and turned to him and said, “Whatever trouble—”
Moving quickly for such a large man he slammed her against the door, brought up the knife, shifted it from his left hand to his right hand, and lightly pricked her throat with the point of the blade.
Her green eyes were very wide. She’d had the breath knocked out of her and could not scream.
“No noise,” Bollinger said fiercely. “If you try to call for help, I’ll push this pig sticker straight into your lovely throat. I’ll ram it right out the back of your neck. Do you understand?”
She stared at him.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said thinly.
“Are you going to cooperate?”
She said nothing. Her gaze traveled down from his eyes, over his proud nose and full lips and strong jaw-line, down to his fist and to the handle of the knife.
“If you aren’t going to cooperate,” he said quietly, “I can skewer you right here. I’ll pin you to the damn door.” He was breathing hard.
A tremor passed through her.
He grinned.
Still trembling, she said, “What do you want?”
“Not much. Not very much at all. Just a little loving.”
She closed her eyes. “Are you—him?”
A slender, all but invisible thread of blood trickled from beneath the needlelike point of the knife, slid along her throat to the neck of her bright red robe. Watching the minuscule flow of blood as if he were a scientist observing an extremely rare bacterium through a microscope, pleased by it, nearly mesmerized by it, he said, “Him? Who is ‘him’? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know,” she said weakly.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Are you
him?”
she bit her lip. “The one who—who’s cut up all those other women?”
Looking up from her throat, he said, “I see. I see how it is. Of course. You mean the one they call the Butcher. You think I’m the Butcher.”
“Are you?”
“I’ve been reading a great deal about him in the
Daily
News. He slits their throats, doesn’t he? From one ear to the other. Isn’t that right?” He was teasing her and enjoying himself immensely. “Sometimes he even disembowels them. Doesn’t he? Correct me if I’m wrong. But that’s what he does sometimes, isn’t it?”
She said nothing.
“I believe I read in the
News
that he sliced the ears off one of them. When the police found her, her ears were on the nightstand beside her bed.”
She shuddered more violently than ever.
“Poor little Edna. You think I’m the Butcher. No wonder you’re so frightened.” He patted her shoulder, smoothed her dark hair as if he were quieting an animal. “I’d be scared too if I were in your shoes right now.
But I’m not. I’m not in your shoes and I’m not this guy they call the Butcher. You can relax.”
She opened her eyes and searched his, trying to tell whether he spoke the truth.
“What kind of man do you think I am, Edna?” he asked, pretending to have been hurt by her suspicion. “I don’t want to harm you. I will if I must. I will cause you a great deal of harm if you don’t cooperate with me. But if you’re docile, if you’re good to me, I’ll be good to you. I’ll make you very happy, and I’ll leave you just like I found you. Flawless. You are flawless, you know. Perfectly beautiful. And your breath smells like strawberries. Isn’t that nice? That’s such a wonderful way for us to begin, such a nice touch, that scent of strawberries on your breath. Were you eating when I knocked?”
“You’re crazy,” she said softly.
“Now, Edna, let’s have cooperation. Were you eating strawberries?”
Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes.
He pressed a bit harder with the knife.
She whimpered.
“Well?” he said.
“Wine.”
“What?”
“It was wine.”
“Strawberry wine?”
“Yes.”
“Is there any left?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to have some.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
“I’ll get it myself,” he said. “But first I’ve got to take you into the bedroom and tie you up. Now, now. Don’t be scared. If I didn’t tie you up, sooner or later you’d try to escape. If you tried to escape, I’d have to kill you. So, you see, I’m going to tie you up for your own good, so that you won’t make it necessary for me to hurt you.”
Still holding the knife at her throat, he kissed her. Her lips were cold and stiff.
“Please don’t,” she said.
“Relax and enjoy yourself, Edna.” He untied the sash at her waist. The robe fell open. Under it, she was naked. He gently squeezed her breasts. “If you cooperate you’ll come out of this just fine. And you’ll have a lot of fun. I’m not going to kill you unless you force me to it. I’m no butcher, Edna. Me ... I’m nothing but your ordinary, everyday rapist.”
2
Graham Harris sensed that there was trouble coming. He shifted in his chair but could not get comfortable. He glanced at the three television cameras and suddenly felt as if he were surrounded by intelligent and hostile robots. He almost laughed at that bizarre image
;
the tension made him slightly giddy.
“Nervous?” Anthony Prine asked.
“A little.”
“No need to be.”
“Maybe not while the commercials are running, but—”
“Not when we’re back on the air again, either,” Prine said. “You’ve handled yourself well so far.” Although he was as American as Harris, Prine managed to look like the stereotypical British gentleman: sophisticated, rather jaded yet just a bit stuffy, completely relaxed, a model of self-confidence. He was sitting in a high-backed leather armchair, an exact copy of the chair in which Graham had suddenly found himself so uncomfortable. “You’re a most interesting guest, Mr. Harris.”
“Thank you. You’re interesting yourself. I don’t see how you can keep your wits about you. I mean, doing this much
live
television, five nights a week—”
“But the fact that it’s live is what makes it so exciting,” Prine said. “Being on the air
live,
risking all, taking a chance of making a fool of yourself—that keeps the juices flowing. That’s why I hesitate to accept one of these offers to syndicate the show or to go network with it. They’d want it on tape, all neatly edited down from two hours to ninety minutes. And that wouldn’t be the same.”
The program director, a heavyset man in a white turtleneck sweater and houndstooth-check slacks, said, “Twenty seconds, Tony.”
“Relax,” Prine told Harris. “You’ll be off in fifteen more minutes.”
Harris nodded. Prine seemed friendly—yet he could not shake the feeling that the night was going to go sour for him, and soon.
Anthony Prine was the host of
Manhattan at Midnight,
an informal two-hour-long interview program that originated from a local New York City station.
Manhattan at Midnight
provided the same sort of entertainment to be found on all other talk shows—actors and actresses plugging their latest movies, authors plugging their latest books, musicians plugging their latest records, politicians plugging their latest campaigns (as yet unannounced campaigns and thus unfettered by the equal-time provisions of the election laws)—except that it presented a greater number of mind readers and psychics and UFO “experts” than did most talk shows. Prine was a
Believer.
He was also damned good at his job, so good there were rumors ABC wanted to pick him up for a nationwide audience. He was not so witty as Johnny Carson or so homey as Mike Douglas, but no one asked better or more probing questions than he did. Most of the time he was serene, in lazy command of his show; and when things were going well, he looked somewhat like a slimmed-down Santa Claus: completely white hair, a round face and merry blue eyes. He appeared to be incapable of rudeness. However, there were occasions—no more often than once a night, sometimes only once a week—when he would lash out at a guest, prove him a liar or in some other way thoroughly embarrass and humiliate him with a series of wickedly pointed questions. The attack never lasted more than three or four minutes, but it was as brutal and as relentless as it was surprising.