Текст книги "Riptide"

Автор книги: Michael Prescott

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

RIPTIDE

 Michael Prescott

http://michaelprescott.net/

To the memory of my grandfather, Frederick Kleen

 

Some of the historical interludes in this novel are based on real events. Carrie Brown was murdered on April 23, 1891, in the East River Hotel. Press coverage and police investigation of the crime are presented accurately. The October 1896 letter and other quoted correspondence still exist in police archives.

M.P.

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

–W. B. Yeats

1891

Edward Hare sat alone at a corner table, nursing a mug of beer and warding off the blandishments of harlots. It was ten o’clock on a Thursday night, and the sailors and migrants who infested the dockside slums were out carousing. He was familiar with their kind. Some things were the same in every country—the smoky taverns, the alleyways scuttling with rats, the hard faces of those who called this cesspool their home.

The barroom occupied the ground floor of the East River Hotel, a faded hostelry three blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge. The clientele consisted of the human vermin that made their living on the docks, manning ships, lading cargo, and, in the case of the women, servicing dockworkers, passengers, and crews.

The ring of a bell drew his attention. One of the hotel staff, whom the regulars called Mary, opened the main door, and two new arrivals entered, hugging themselves, chilled from the April night.

The pair intrigued him. They were so obviously mismatched. The whore was a gray-haired shopworn hag tottering under the influence of liquor. The man on her arm was twenty years her junior, thin, sharp-faced, with a blond mustache and a shabby black bowler, its crown dented. He had the look of a foreigner, but then nearly everyone in this district was from some other part of the world. Himself included, Hare reflected. In England he had often complained about the hordes of pauper aliens invading the city. Now he was the interloper, his boots planted on foreign soil.

Mary exchanged friendly words with the crone, who tossed back her head and emitted a raven’s caw of laughter. The gentleman ducked low, hiding under his battered billycock, as if ashamed. As well he should be ashamed, to consort with a creature of the streets.

After a few moments of these pleasantries, the gentleman dug in his pants pocket and produced a coin. Payment for a night’s lodging, Hare presumed—although in an establishment of this kind, rooms were likely to be let by the hour.

Mary disappeared into the stairwell and returned bearing a key, a candle, and a tin pail rattling with two bottles of mixed ale on ice. The man took the pail in one hand, holding fast to his rented sweetheart with the other, and Mary led them up the stairs.

Hare watched them go, the woman still screeching, the man silent and slow. Whatever intimacy they would find together would carry no significance for either one.

Time passed, and finally his cup of beer was drained. It was after eleven. Hare was customarily an early riser, except for those nights when business required him to work odd hours. He had no business in Manhattan. He decided to take a room and get some rest.

Mary was at work clearing a table. He approached her and asked the nightly rate. “Two bits,” she said pertly.

He paid the coin. As it vanished into her hand, unaccountably he was reminded of Charon, boatman of the River Styx, who must collect his fare.

Mary smilingly told him to wait there while she got a room for him. Hare lingered by the stairway as she ascended to an office on the first floor landing. She poked her head out of the door and chirped, “Forgot to ask your name. Need it for the register.”

He gave the name of Wilson. Surely this was not the first time a man had used an alias in this establishment. Tonight he had no need of subterfuge, but old habits died hard.

Mary emerged with key and candle, returning to the ground floor to ask if he would like a bit of refreshment in his room. No, he said. With a broad smirk she inquired if he was certain. The hotel offered all manner of diversions for the discriminating gentleman.

Her meaning was unmistakable. Now he knew why he’d thought of Charon the ferryman when she palmed his coin. She was one of the living dead who roamed the streets and haunted the taverns. A fallen woman, whose services at the East River Hotel included nightly visitations to the customers’ rooms.

“I require no diversions,” he said.

She smiled, her crooked teeth repulsive in her splotchy face. “You’re a Brit, ain’t you? Plenty of Brits stop in here. Brits and others. People from all over the world.”

This provoked his first extended response. “Yes. The detritus of the earth. The lees in humanity’s punch bowl.”

Her smile tipped into a scowl. She hadn’t quite understood him, but she had caught his tone. “You lookin’ down yer nose at me, mister?”

“I should hope so.”

“Think you’re better’n the rest of us? If you’re so super, what are you doing here?”

It was a fair question. What was he doing here? He had thrown away his former life, voyaged across the sea—Liverpool to New York, seasick all the way—and at the terminus of his travel he had found only a feculent cot in a dockside doss-house for twenty-five cents at night.

He should not have come. But he was past the point of choosing rightly, or at all. He was master of himself no longer.

“Just give me the goddamned key,” he said. He would not engage this wretch in further conversation.

“I got to show you to your room.”

“Room number’s on the key, isn’t it? I can find it for myself.”

Stern-faced, she handed over key and candle. As he headed for the stairs, he heard her say loudly to those around her, “Feller thinks he’s a big man. I’ll bet he ain’t so big where it counts.”

The remark was met with drunken laughter from the hags and hang-abouts in the saloon. He flushed but kept walking. Let the mob howl.

The room number on his key was thirty-two. He thought it would be on the third story, but it surprised him by being on the fifth, the top floor. He wandered down a dingy flyspecked hall and let himself in. His candle illumined a narrow cave with a bare floor, a washbowl in one corner, and a single window framing blackness. The room, it appeared, had once been part of a larger space, which had been subdivided with thin plywood walls in the name of economy.

He had no baggage with him, having left it in a storage locker until he could get settled. He was shrugging off his jacket when he heard noises through the plywood board. A creak of bed springs and the familiar screeching laugh.

The gray-haired whore’s lodgings were adjacent to his own.

Her consort’s voice came through also. He spoke in German, or was it a Scandinavian tongue? Some continental jibber-jabber.

Hare didn’t want to listen to them. Didn’t want to picture them together, flesh against flesh.

He sat on the bed, head in hands, while the awful noises went on. He thought of his London life, the quiet evenings, the civilized atmosphere. His favorite walks and haunts. His books.

Gone now. Here he was, in a new country, with no employment and little money, and himself not so young anymore. Maybe he didn’t have the strength for it, this starting over. And yet there was no turning back. He was like Macbeth, caught in midstream ...

“Stepped in so far,” he whispered, “that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

There was no more speech from the room next door, only the rhythmic rise and fall of the bed, playing as an undercurrent to a medley of groans and gasps—the whore earning her pay, which she would spend on gin or beer. Whores were no different in any land. Unlike Mr. Darwin’s finches, they exhibited no territorial variations. They were always and everywhere the same.

Hare felt a slow, steady pounding at his temples.

And when he rose from bed, he knew what he would do.

He rummaged in his jacket until he found the knife—a black wooden handle and a sharp blade, ground to a deadly point.

Knife in hand, he left his room and stepped along the empty corridor to the door nearest his own.

His blade, inserted between door and jamb, made quick work of the latch, springing it silently. He eased the door ajar and peered inside.

The room was lit by a single guttering candle on the nightstand. Its glow reached the bed but not the farther corners.

Amid the tangled sheets, his back to the door, the foreigner was humping the crone. The hag had not even troubled to undress, had merely lifted her copious garments over her hips to expose the devil’s mouth between her thighs.

Preoccupied with carnality, neither of them had seen him.

Hare swung the door wide and burst into the room. A crashing blow with the knife handle caught the foreigner on the back of his skull and sent him tumbling to the floor. Hare scrambled over the fallen man onto the bed where the whore, dazed with drink and lust, had only just registered his arrival. He seized her disheveled clothes and jerked them higher, covering her face, then twisted the loose folds of her chemise into a knot and wound it tight. She was both strangled and smothered, her fists beating on the mattress until they could beat no more.

He climbed off her, leaving her as she’d died, her face shrouded, her body nude below the armpits.

Her death had been quick. He hadn’t wanted her to suffer. She could not help being what she was. She was no more responsible for the despoliation she caused than was a toxic bacillus. She must simply be eliminated, cleanly and swiftly, in the name of preserving health.

Hare checked the hall. Still empty. No alarum had been raised. No one had seen or heard. He shut the door and locked it, then took stock of the situation.

The foreigner was his most immediate concern. Half dressed, hatless, he lay outstretched and inert. Dead? No, blood ticked in the carotid at the side of the neck. The man lived.

Hare returned his attention to the harlot. His gaze settled on the forbidden area, the deep hollow of her sex. She had used that secret place to lure men astray. Even in death, it was the source of her power. But not for long.

He stripped to his underwear, neatly folding his clothes. He meant to do the job carefully, methodically, but he was out of practice and the first incision was clumsy, missing the central part of her abdomen and slip-sliding along her left side in a long curling gash that opened her up from the breastbone to the base of the spine. Her insides were hot—he could warm his hands over them—hot and reeking with the charnel-house odor that drove him mad. His twitching hands plunged inside her and found the slick ropes of her intestines, and he was unpacking her corpse, opening a path to her inmost female parts.

He turned her inside out, found one of her ovaries, tore it free. He would unsex her. She had been a cunt, nothing more. Now she would not be even that much.

“Not even that,” he whispered as sweat slimed his face.

His blade took savage bites out of her. He jabbed again and again, perforating her body, then rolled her onto her side and slashed a furious X into her left buttock.

X marks the spot, said the treasure maps. There was no treasure in her. X marked only her bloody rump.

Finally, exhausted, he threw down the knife. Breathing hard, he gathered himself. The room was suddenly hot and close. He propped open the window with one of the whore’s shoes. A moist breeze seeped in, carrying distant drunken cries.

When he looked back at the bed, he saw something only half-human amid the sheets.

Blood was everywhere, gouts of it, drenching the mattress, staining his hands and wrists.

And there was still the foreigner to be dispatched.

Unless a better alternative presented itself.

Hare’s knife lay on the floor. He did not retrieve it. He sat naked on the bed, formulating a plan.

Then carefully he wiped himself clean on the foreigner’s shirt and trouser legs. When he was done, it was the blond man who reeked of blood.

Hare dressed, then left the room. Of course he could not stay the night. He must find lodging elsewhere. The doors to the street would be locked at midnight. After that, the foreigner would be trapped in the hotel, unable to leave without the assistance of the night porter. His bloody clothes would shout for attention. Mary or some other minion would eye him shrewdly: “Whose blood is that, mister?” Imagine the blond ape struggling to answer in his pidgin English, his rude face flashing fear. The room would be entered, the knife and its victim found. The case was open-and-shut.

It was best that way. Best if the crime could be solved this very night. The authorities would not inquire too closely if a scapegoat lay conveniently to hand.

At a few minutes to midnight Hare descended the stairs. The office on the first-floor landing was fortuitously unoccupied, but the tavern on the lobby level was more crowded and boisterous than before. He avoided it, slipping down an adjacent corridor to an outside door. He crossed Water Street and walked along Catherine Slip, keeping clear of the street lights.

No one saw him. No one ever saw him. He was invisible, blending with the fog.

one

She had been in the water for less than twelve hours, but already the fish had begun to feed. Men in wetsuits gently cut her loose from the snarl of fishing lines, separating her from the piling. As she bobbed to the surface, her head fell back, exposing her face to the sun.

The plastic bag was still tied in place, ribboned with kelp, a caul pasted to her features. Her eyes bulged, bloodshot with petechial hemorrhages. Her swollen tongue lay against the plastic like a purple snake.

High above the water, Jennifer Silence stood on the Venice Fishing Pier, hands in the pockets of the nylon windbreaker that beat against her chest.

Beside her, Draper said, “I don’t know why you had to see this.”

“I had to see her.”

“Seen enough?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll take you to her house.”

***

The house was a Craftsman bungalow on Centinela Avenue in Mar Vista. Three black-and-whites were slant-parked on the street outside. No coroner’s van, no SID unit—not yet. Draper had brought her in before the house had been processed.

A uniformed Pacific Area cop guarded the front door, the radio on his hip chattering unintelligibly. Down the hall, in the dining area, there were more uniforms, laughing and joking, their joviality somehow obscene after what Jennifer had seen in the water.

Draper led her into the bedroom at the rear of the cottage. The room had been vandalized. The desktop computer—a Mac, she noted—lay in pieces on the carpet. The mirror over the dresser was spider-webbed with cracks. Chairs were overturned, hanging plants yanked off their ceiling hooks and strewn around the floor, trailing dirt-encrusted roots. A bookcase had been pulled down, scattering its contents—not many books, mostly CDs and videos and a couple of snapshots in metal frames.

On another tabletop lay a spray of porcelain pieces from smashed figurines. Enough recognizable parts remained to identify the figures as owls. On the floor was a larger owl in carved ironwood, and another one chiseled out of some dark green stone.

The many owls’ wide watchful eyes stared up at her in speechless inquiry. They must have been watching last night, when the occupant of this house died on the bathroom floor.

Jennifer knew how it happened. The woman was in bed when the intruder entered the premises. She awoke, hearing a noise. She reached for the bedside phone—now off the hook—but the telco line had been cut outside the house.

She must have known she was in trouble then. She left the bed and tried to reach the bathroom, hoping to lock herself inside. The bed sheets tripped her up, and she fell sprawling. She kicked free and propelled herself onto the bathroom tiles—cheap linoleum, yellowing with age, their corners curling up. She grabbed a towel rack and tried to rise, dislodging the rack from the wall.

Then he was on top of her and she had no chance.

Straddling her, pinning her down and restraining her flailing arms, he slipped the plastic bag over her head and twisted it tight, until the air in the bag was gone.

He trashed the room after that, a senseless show of dominance or rage. Then he carried her out of the bungalow and drove her to the beach.

All this took place sometime last night or early this morning—late Monday or early Tuesday, March 3 or 4. Even in L.A., the nights were cold in March, and her neighbors’ windows were shut. Nobody heard a thing.

Jennifer stood unmoving for a long moment, feeling nothing but emptiness—and a need to make things right.

“Any idea where he dumped her?” she asked.

“Could have been anywhere. He might have thrown her off Santa Monica Pier, or off a boat, or just tossed her into the surf at the shoreline. Around midnight the tide was going out. He was probably hoping she’d be carried out to sea.”

“Why wasn’t she?”

“Got caught in a riptide. It pulled her south to the Venice Pier. You saw those tangled fishing lines. People get their lines snarled and have to cut them off the reel. The lines stay wrapped around the pilings. She got fouled up in them, and someone spotted her this morning.”

Jennifer thought of the woman in the water. She had worn flower-patterned pajamas, light blue, silky. Her feet were bare, the neatly pedicured toenails painted cherry red.

Marilyn Diaz. Insurance agent. Divorced, no kids. Thirty-four years old.

Four years older than I am, Jennifer thought.

Draper stepped closer. She looked up at him. At six feet, he stood a good ten inches taller than her diminutive self. People called him the prince of darkness, a tribute to his saturnine countenance, his dark swept-back hair.

“Thanks for getting there so quickly,” Draper said. “Though it really wasn’t necessary for you to come at all.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“Because it’s always true.”

He was looking around the room, his face impassive. He never displayed emotion at a crime scene. He gave an impression of detachment verging on indifference. But once, she had caught him lifting a small silver crucifix from under his shirt collar and giving it a surreptitious kiss. She knew then that he cared more than he let on.

“I still don’t see why you wanted to be there,” he added. “Or here, for that matter.”

“You know how I work, Roy. I need to see where she lived, how she lived. I need to find out who she was.”

“And what have you learned?”

She liked owls, Jennifer thought. “She was neat, well organized, well groomed. She had family.” Her finger pointed out the framed snapshots from the bookcase. “Not much of a reader, more into movies and music. Probably spent a lot of evenings curled up with a DVD. I think she was attractive, though it’s hard to tell now.”

“Is any of that helpful?”

“I don’t know what may be helpful. I deal in intuition. It’s not an exact science.”

“That’s for sure.” Draper said it with too much asperity.

“For somebody who’s got such doubts about my abilities, you sure do make a habit of calling me in.”

“You’ve given us a couple of leads,” he conceded.

“More than a couple.”

“A couple that panned out. A couple that didn’t.”

“Like I said, not an exact science.”

“And like I said, that’s for damn sure.”

“You didn’t say damn.”

“I was thinking it.”

“Care to guess what word I’m thinking of now?”

“I’m pretty sure I know. See? I can be intuitive, too.”

She gave up and asked how the intruder had gained access.

“Broke a side window, reached in, unlatched the door.”

“The breaking window is probably what woke her. If she’d run for the front door instead of grabbing the phone —”

“Wouldn’t have made any difference. He was in position to intercept her if she left the room.”

“Do you suppose he knew that?”

“You mean did he know the layout? Had he been in the house before? No idea. Maybe your voodoo science will tell us.”

She wasn’t crazy about the voodoo comment, but she let it go. Draper had a way of pushing her buttons. She wasn’t sure what that was all about. At times she wondered if maybe he was interested in her. But he’d never said anything, and he didn’t strike her as shy.

Unless he was gun-shy—burned once too often, afraid to touch the stove for fear it was still hot. It was possible. There was an odd tension between them that was not entirely disagreeable, like the flutter of discomfort she felt on a first date, a nervous self-awareness. She wondered what a real first date with Roy Draper would be like.

“She lived alone,” Jennifer said, not phrasing it as a question because the truth of it was obvious.

“A lot of people do.” Something in Draper’s voice told her it was more than a general observation.

“I know I do. How about you, Roy?”

“Me? Yeah, I’m flying solo now.”

“Divorced?” She’d never asked.

“No, but I was in a long-term relationship. It ended. Obviously. Or I wouldn’t be alone.” The words were spoken lightly but sounded sad.

“How long were you with her?”

“Three years.”

“When did it go south?”

“Last November. November seventeenth. I still have the date marked on my calendar. Never turned the page. How’s that for the perfect metaphor of a guy who can’t get on with his life?”

“You’ll move on eventually.”

“So they tell me…. I don’t know how we started talking about this.”

She knew he was embarrassed, and she also knew her hot-stove theory was correct. Maybe one of these days he’d work up the nerve to touch the burners again.

“I’m guessing there’s a reason you brought me in,” she said.

“When we went through the bills and junk mail on her dining table, we found something. Original’s being tested for prints. This is a copy.”

He removed a single folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. One side was covered from top to bottom by a handwritten message in a spidery, minuscule script. The note was unsigned.

She glanced at the document long enough to ascertain that it was unmistakably a threat message. “Nothing on the back?”

“Nope.”

“Not even a scratch mark, a smudge? Because even the most trivial—”

“There’s nothing, Jen. This is it.”

“Was there an envelope?”

“If there was, we haven’t found it.”

“Go through her trash? Sorry. Of course you did.”

“Nothing in the garbage. I don’t think she would have thrown out an envelope anyway. Anybody who’s ever watched CSI knows you don’t destroy evidence.”

“There may not have been an envelope. The note didn’t have to be mailed. It could have been pushed through her mail slot or left on her windshield. Obviously she didn’t report it, or you would already know how it got to her.”

“There’s no record of any report.”

“That’s odd, don’t you think? A person gets a message like this, the first thing you’d expect them to do is call the police.”

Draper shrugged. “My guess is, she thought it was something she could deal with on her own.”

Jennifer thought of the white, staring face with its clear plastic mask.

“Then she was wrong,” she said.