“I could have sworn she was dead when I left,” Tansy said blithely. “I guess she just had more fight in her than the others.”
“She was desperate to be the one to break this story. That’s what kept her alive long enough to dial that phone. She was a reporter to the end, always a terrific eye for detail. Of course, that’s true of you as well, isn’t it? You filled those chapters with one incriminating detail after another—
E
as in Ezra,
T
as in Tuttle. Ring Lardner, Yushies, Tuttle’s penchant for leggy, toothy women. His loathing of computers. His old sign-off—‘Just think how much fun I’d be having if I didn’t have to work.’ You used all of those things. You
knew
all of those things.”
“And I know you,” she added, gazing deeply into my eyes. Hers burned as if there were a fever inside of her. “I knew you’d figure out that the answer man and Tuttle were one and the same. I knew you’d agonize over it for a few days. And I knew that when push came to shove you’d turn Tuttle in.”
“I’m glad I’m so predictable.”
“You’re not predictable. You’re a dear, sweet man who is way too decent to ever hurt Merilee, even though she’s been tormenting you for years. Throwing you out. Taking you back. Putting you through that awful pregnancy scandal in the tabloids. You deserve better, Hoagy. You’ve always deserved better. And now you’re going to get what you deserve, only we have to move fast.”
I gripped her hand tighter, holding her there. I didn’t want any of what she had in mind for outside of this room. “What about the novel, Tansy? The auction, the movie sale—was all of that just pretend or was it for real?”
“Why, of course it was for real,” she replied, her manner turning bright and cheerful. “Because I also knew you’d never, ever be content to live on my money. You’re too proud. You’d have to have your own. That’s why I made up the answer man. I’ll have you know I made a thorough study of the matter.
Nothing
sells better these days than books about serial killers. Especially when the victims are young and pretty. Especially when the killer is a cold, merciless stalker who hunts down his innocent victims and numbers them. That’s why I put the question marks on their foreheads. Because I knew the New York tabloids would have a field day with it. Just as I knew New York book publishers would be reading about him every single day and growing more and more desperate to buy the book. Nothing gets them more excited than a hot story in their own backyard. That’s why I did it the way I did, Hoagy. That’s why I put the city through all of this. I did it so you’d have a bestseller.” She raised my hand to her lips and kissed the knuckles softly, one by one by one. “I did it for you.”
“Tansy?”
“Yes, Hoagy?” Now she was rubbing her unfeeling cheek against my hand, rather like a cat.
“Why didn’t you just kill Tuttle?”
“No fucking way,” she snarled savagely. “That wouldn’t do. No, no. I wanted him to
know
what public humiliation feels like. I wanted him to lose his restaurant, lose his name. I wanted him to go to jail for life. And find out for himself what it means to lie in fear, night after night, waiting to be violated and abused and tortured. This was my revenge, Hoagy, for what he did to me. Thirty-one. That’s how many bones he broke in my face. All because I committed the unpardonable sin of getting upset that he was fucking other women behind my back. I went through months and months of unbearable pain. The operations. The healing. This was how I got through it. I lay awake, night after night, planning my revenge. I planned it and I took it. I pursued the kind of women he always liked to fuck, the ones with the big smiles and the good legs and the pretty hair. I befriended them. I killed them. And I framed him. He wanted to be a writer. I made it look like he was one. I still had his typewriter—never did throw it out. I constructed the perfect frame, in my opinion. Of course, I wasn’t figuring he’d commit suicide. Men like Tuttle, men who beat up on women, they generally don’t have the nerve to take their own lives. But I’m okay with that. Because it’s over now. And because I was getting tired.”
“So you said in your last letter.”
“It took so much work, Hoagy. The planning, the doing, the writing. I had to be so careful. No slips, not one. I left no fingerprints, no hair samples, no fibers, no nothing. Do you have any idea how hard that is?”
“Something of an idea.”
“The first one was the hardest, you know.”
“Diane,” I said. “Her name was Diane.”
“I-I almost blew it. I actually brought her back to my own apartment, which was just so stupid. Only, well, I needed a safe place to hide her body while I wrote the first chapter.”
“You kept her in your apartment? How cozy.”
“I
had
to,” she insisted. “I wanted to make sure you got Chapter One before the body was found. You know, for maximum effect. The downside was that they might find something on her body that they could somehow trace back to me.”
“Only they didn’t, your apartment is so spotless. No rugs. No pets. Nothing but bare surfaces. Plus you have the perfect setup for disposing a body. Your own private elevator down to your own private garage. So you stuffed Diane in a blue garment bag, knowing Tuttle had one just like it—”
“They were ours, from when we were married.”
“—and you put her in one of your Garden Lady vans, took her to the park in the middle of the night and dumped her there. Diane was little. You had no problem carrying her.”
“I was such a nervous wreck,” she said with a shy laugh, as if she were an ingénue talking about her opening night performance. She seemed relieved to be talking about it. She hadn’t been able to talk about it. Possibly she’d even be smiling, too. If only she could smile. “That’s how come I bashed her head in. I panicked. But I got better at it after that. Went to their place, not mine. And I did it neat and tidy. It got easier after that. It gets easier.”
“Score one for Inspector Feldman,” I said. “Next came Laurie …”
Tansy was growing impatient again, pulling away from me. “What about her?”
“You made such a big deal about that Band-Aid on her foot. You even took it with you. Why? How did that point to Tuttle?”
“That was just me getting into it. This guy I used to work with was always staring at my feet. Drove me nuts.”
“I’ll say. But you knew what you wanted to do. You were cool. You were calculating. You were everywhere. You followed me from the outset—that first time I met Lieutenant Very at Barney Greengrass.”
“I felt closer to you that way.”
“How long did you follow Luz? She thought it was Tuttle. Tuttle swore it wasn’t him. And it wasn’t. It was you.”
“Tuttle had written me all about her,” Tansy said. “How she’d dumped him. I intended to make her one of the answer man’s victims. I figured this would tighten the noose around Tuttle’s neck for sure. He was a jilted lover, violent past. My problem was opportunity. The stupid bitch slept all day, had an attentive new boyfriend. The cow was never alone.”
“Lucky her. So you played it safe and you moved on. But then you panicked all over again with Francie, the flute player. It got ugly between you two in Riverside Park.
You
got ugly. What happened, Tansy? Why did you do that to her?”
“She kissed me,” Tansy replied simply.
I considered this a moment. “Francie was gay?”
She nodded her head in that little girl way of hers again. “She came on to me, big-time. And it threw me, big-time. Believe me, Hoagy, this was not something I was expecting. And she was
so
insistent. W-We struggled. I hit her with a rock and … It happened just the way I wrote it, really. Only, she
scratched
me.”
“I saw scratches on your hands that night I visited you. They were from her?”
“Yes. My skin was under her nails. And she bit my lip when she was kissing me. Not terribly. Not so anyone would notice. But what might they find in her mouth when they did their DNA tests? Would they find a trace of my blood? My saliva? I didn’t know.”
“Score one for Lieutenant Very. So you went back and you hacked off her head and her hands with one of your Garden Lady axes before you buried her. Thus making the story ten times hotter than it had been.”
“The publicity wasn’t in my thoughts at all when I did it,” she confessed. “Although I was glad about it, for your sake.”
“What did you do with Francie’s head and hands, by the way?”
“I stopped off in Central Park on my way home and buried them there. I improvised.”
“Like the way you improvised when you found out Tuttle had gone and ended it,” I said. “The police had sealed his apartment. Only, there was one vital piece of evidence missing—the typewriter. It was nowhere to be found. Because
you
had it. A troubling loose end. So, once again, you improvised. After the police had searched the place from top to bottom you slipped over the garden wall in the night and you planted it in the woodshed. You knew about the back way in from Sixty-sixth Street. You did live there once, after all. No one saw you. And of course no one suspected that the typewriter had been put there
after
the search. They had no reason to. They had their man and he was dead. They just figured they did a sloppy job first time around. You’re smart, Tansy. And you’re a gifted writer.”
This seemed to startle her. “W-Why, thank you, Hoagy. That means a lot, coming from you. I always kept a journal. At Miss Porter’s, at Vassar, at Cornell. I got in the habit of scribbling. I’d fill notebook after notebook lying on my bed at night. I guess that’s how I was able to do it—just kind of churned it out.” This was vintage Tansy. She always had been modest about her many accomplishments, no matter how remarkable they seemed.
“Well, you caught your character’s voice perfectly. Who was he, anyway?”
“Just someone lonely and angry and hurting. He was me, I guess.”
“I loved that whole random-act-of-kindness thing. It was so convincing. You had everyone believing that this guy actually existed. You even fooled a panel of shrinks.”
“Shrinks believe what they want to believe.” She said it bitterly. “I’ve been fooling them for years.”
“You fooled me, too, Tansy. Almost.”
She stiffened. “What do you mean,
almost?”
“You made one mistake. It was in the third chapter, when you were watching Bridget swim laps at the health club. A small detail, really. But it gave you away.”
“What was it?” she demanded angrily. “What did I say?”
“You said, and I quote, ‘I just stood there in my own swimsuit watching for a minute, transfixed.’”
“What’s so wrong with that?”
“Not a thing. Except that there isn’t a man alive who would have written it. Men say
swimming trunks
or
swim trunks
or just plain
trunks.
Men never, ever say
swimsuit.
Only a woman would use that word. But don’t get down on yourself about it. Writers always nitpick each other’s work.”
She was edging toward the door now. Time was running out.
“You put me through hell, Tansy. You do know that, don’t you?”
“I do, Hoagy. But I couldn’t let you know the truth. That would have spoiled everything. You understand that, don’t you? It’s going to be worth it, I swear. I’ll make it worth it.”
She reached over and flicked off the bathroom light. I didn’t know why. Now there was only blackness. And silence. I could hear her breathing. It was warm in there. I could smell her, a humid, pungent scent that tweaked my nostrils.
“Hoagy?” she whispered at me in the darkness. “Are you feeling the way I’m feeling right now?”
“I doubt it, Tansy. How are you feeling?”
She showed me how. Guided my hand down between her legs, gasping when my fingers made contact with the wetness that they found there. “It’s the anticipation, Hoagy. I always feel this way when I’m about to do it. Afterward—you won’t believe how it feels afterward. And now that we’re together, God, it’s going to be
so
good.” Now she was in the bathroom doorway, tugging me out into the great sea of blackness. “Come on, darling. Let’s go for it.”
So I did. I went for the hand with the gun, groping for it blindly in the dark, grappling with her, wrestling her for it. She fought back savagely, a hissing sound coming from between her teeth. God, she was strong. And then suddenly there was this tremendous explosion and my shoulder, my right shoulder, went completely dead.
“Now look what you’ve done, Hoagy,” she scolded me.
“Stupid me,” I said. The sound of the gunshot was still crackling in my ears. My arm felt like I’d been sleeping on it all night. No sensation. None.
“It’s very important to keep your cool. Come on, we have to scoot. The neighbors. We’ve made a noise.”
“Stupid us,” I said, the fingers of my right hand turning cold. My ears were ringing. And I felt dizzy. Couldn’t get my bearings in that darkness. Couldn’t tell if I was standing up or lying down or …
She flicked on the bathroom light again, blinking at me in the brightness. “Oh, dear, look at your shoulder.”
“I’d really rather not, thank you.”
“Here.” She pressed a hand towel over it, grabbed my other hand and held it there. “Just keep pressure on it. We’ll take care of it afterward.” She pulled me out into the entry hall, the light from the powder room illuminating our path. There was a light switch on the wall next to the front door. A pair of them actually—one to the entry hall ceiling fixture, one to the dining room chandelier. She flicked them both on. Nothing happened. “What’s wrong with your lights?” she wondered, flicking them on and off repeatedly.
I just stood there dumbly. I had no idea. I was too busy losing blood.
“Oh, shit, never mind. Come on, Merilee’s this way.”
Now we were heading toward the dining room, which meant we were back in the blackness again.
“Is there a lamp in here, Hoagy?” Tansy sounded very businesslike now. “Turn on a lamp.”
There was a Frank Lloyd Wright prairie lamp on the sideboard. I staggered blindly over in the direction of it. “It’s okay, Merilee,” I said, raising my voice. “We’ll be okay.” I listened for a muffled moan in response, for the sound of her body straining and heaving against the ropes that bound her to one of the dining chairs. I listened for a sound, any sound. All I heard was my own breathing. I was panting, shallow and quick, like Lulu did on a hot summer day. Lulu … Where was Lulu? Luluuuu …