“Really makes me angry,” Carmel said. “Really, really . . .”
“I can’t believe it,” Rinker said. “It’s like a complete emotional betrayal. You’re tough enough to take it, but other women? They could be totally emotionally crushed by something like this.”
In another ten minutes, they were back at Clark’s house, walking up the sidewalk again, Carmel carrying the phone books. Clark had just gone inside, and the lights were coming on. Rinker caught Carmel’s arm and whispered, “Let me go first. If she sees you . . .”
At the door, Carmel stepped to the side and Rinker pulled open the storm door, propped it back with her foot, took a breath, dropped her gun hand to her side and knocked urgently on the door with her other hand. They heard Clark walking toward the door, and a voice through the wood panel: “Who is it?”
“Clara Rinker, from down the block,” Rinker said. “I think you’ve got a little fire.”
“A fire?”
“A little fire, by the corner of your house, there’s smoke . . .”
The door opened, tentatively; no chain. Rinker stiffarmed it, hard, and it banged open, past the startled, mouth-open face of Louise Clark. The gun was up and Rinker was inside, pushing her, followed by Carmel. Louise cried, “Carmel, what are you doing, Carmel . . .”
Carmel said, “You’re fucking my boyfriend. That’s gotta stop.” She caught the sleeve of Clark’s blouse, and pulled her toward the back of the house. Rinker kept the gun in her eyes. “Carmel, Carmel . . .”
“You’re fucking my boyfriend,” Carmel said. They could see the bathroom down a short hall, a door open in the hall to one side. Carmel flipped a light: the bedroom. “Lay down on the bed, and keep your mouth shut,” Carmel said. “Just keep your mouth shut.”
“You’re going to kill me,” Clark said, sinking on the mattress. “You killed those other people.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, we’re just gonna talk to you about Hale,” Carmel said. “We’re gonna get a few things straight.”
They got her down on the bed, faceup; got her down on the pillow. Then Carmel walked around the bed and said, “Look at me,” and when Clark looked at her, Rinker, who’d been kneeling on the floor with the gun, reached forward, put the barrel of the gun against Clark’s temple and pulled the trigger.
The bullet shattered Clark’s skull, continuing through her head and into the wall on the other side. A red cone of blood on the pillow pointed back to Clark’s head like a crimson arrow; the expelled shell landed next to her ear. The gun was a neat ladies’ .380, with a neat ladies’ silencer. As Rinker had explained to Carmel, a .22 didn’t always kill with one shot, even from two inches, and a second shot would be awkward if the victim was supposed to be a suicide . . .
“Good,” Carmel said, looking down at the body. “You can see exactly how it happened. The rest of it probably won’t be necessary, because they were back there fucking, but let’s do it anyway.”
Getting Clark out of her clothing without smearing anything was the hard part; she’d soiled her underpants, so they left them on, found a pink negligee in her chest of drawers, and pulled that over her head and let her drop back on the bed.
“Ah, God, we forgot the pubic hair,” Carmel said.
“Yuck.”
Rinker lifted Clark’s negligee and Carmel slid one hand into her pants, gave a tug, and came back with a half-dozen pubic hairs, which she folded into a piece of notebook paper.
“The coke,” Rinker said. “And the gun.”
“Yeah.” Carmel had had a bit of coke on hand, had rounded up a few more grams during the week. She put it all into an amber medicine bottle and dropped it into the bedstand drawer. Rinker took one of the silenced .22s out of her carry-girdle. They hid it in a winter boot, in the closet.
“That’s it?” Rinker asked.
“I think so,” Carmel said. “Except for the nitrites.”
“Okay,” Rinker said. “Just set the phone books up over there.”
She fit Clark’s hand to the gun, aimed it at the phone books, and pulled the trigger. The slug hit the front phone book with a whack!, and they fell over. The slug hadn’t made it through the first one. “Get the phone books, and let’s go,” Rinker said as she picked up the empty shell.
Ten minutes later, they were back at Allen’s place. “We can’t go back now,” Rinker said. “If we go back now, nothing will make any sense.”
“I don’t have any intention of going back,” Carmel said.
“I sorta thought, when we got right down to it . . .”
“You sorta thought right. But you’ve got to have priorities,” Carmel said. “That’s one of the first things we were taught in law school: prioritize. Besides, he was getting on my nerves even before this Louise Clark thing. You ever been with a man who lays in bed at night and picks the calluses on his feet?”
“No . . . And tell you the truth, that seems kind of minor.”
“Not if you’ve got a ten o’clock appearance the next day and there’s all kinds of pressure and you need sleep more than anything, and he’s over there, pick, pick, pick . . . And he tries to sneak it in, so I won’t hear it, so I wait . . . God!”
“How do you want to do it?”
“I’ll just do it,” Carmel said. “There’s nothing else to do at this end. No arrangements of anything.”
“I’ll go around the block,” Rinker said. “Hurry.”
CARMEL GOT OUT, walked down the block to Allen’s. He met her in a bathrobe, at the door, with a big grin. “God, you got off,” he said. “That’s great.”
“Gotta make a call,” she said. She called the office law library, the answering machine, dropped the receiver on the table, said, “C’mere,” and walked around him back to the bedroom.
“What?” He looked at the phone, puzzled, then went after her.
He was six or seven steps behind her. At the bedroom door, she slowed, let him catch up, turned with the gun, bringing it up. His warm brown puppy-dog eyes had no chance to show fear or anything else. She pulled the trigger and the gun went whack! And Hale Allen, as dead as his former wife, started falling backward. Carmel fired three more times as he fell, and afterward stepped up beside him, pointed the gun down at his forehead and fired twice more: whack, whack. And again into his heart: whack.
“Goddamnit, Hale,” she said as she walked back into the bedroom. “You were my one true love.” Her photo smiled at her from the bedstand as she opened the folded piece of notebook paper, and let the odd strands of Clark’s pubic hair fall on the sheet. On the way out, she hung up the phone, then looked back at Hale Allen’s motionless body.
“You prick,” she snarled. “Screw around on me . . .”
She kicked him in the chest, and then again, in the face, and then in the arm; and, breathing hard, went to the door. On the street, Rinker was coming around for the first time. Carmel stepped out and Rinker pulled over. “That was quick,” Rinker said as Carmel got in the car.
“No point in messing around,” Carmel said. “Let’s move.”
“Did you say good-bye?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Carmel said. “I did the phone thing, got him walking and shot him in the head.”
“Huh.” Rinker continued on for a block, then said, “You know something?”
“What?”
“We’re good at this. If I’d met you ten years ago, I bet we could have set things up so that all of my outside jobs pointed somewhere else.”
“Not too late for that,” Carmel said. “When you get to wherever you’re going, you get established, set up a couple new IDs, cool off for a while . . . and then come talk.”
“It doesn’t bother you? At all?”
“Actually, I kind of like it,” Carmel said. “It’s something different, you know? You get out of the office. You see lawyers on television, running around the courthouse, but ninety percent of my time is sitting in front of a computer. This is a little exercise, if nothing else.”
BAC
K AT CLARK’S, Rinker carefully pulled the clip, pressed an extra shell into the bottom of the clip using a piece of toilet paper to keep her prints off of it, then reloaded the cartridges in the same order that they’d come out. They left the gun next to Clark’s hand on the bed, but pointed away. “I saw a suicide once, one of my clients,” Carmel said. “The gun was like that.”
“Then that’s good,” Rinker said. She took a last look around. “We’re done.”
ON THE SIDEWALK outside, Carmel looked up at the sky and said, “I’m gonna miss you. Do you think you could get the New York Times wherever you’re going?”
“I’m sure I could.”
“Okay. Then listen: I’ll leave a message for Pamela Stone in the New York Times personal column on Halloween, and the days around there. It’ll just say something like, ‘Pamela: Zihuatanejo Hilton, November 24–30.’ Or wherever. That’s where I’ll be, if you feel safe and still want to do Mexico.”
“I’ll look for it,” Rinker said.
“Listen, are you gonna need the other gun?”
“No, probably not. I’ve got a couple more stashed.”
“Could I have the one you’ve got?”
“Sure, but it could be dangerous. If you were caught with it.”
“I’ll hide it out,” Carmel said. “But if anything else comes up . . .”
“All right.” As they got back in the car, Rinker slipped the gun out of her girdle, pulled the clip, jacked the shell out of the chamber, pushed it back into the clip and handed the pistol to Carmel. “There you go. Be careful.”
“I will be . . . Are you gone, then?”
“Yeah. I gotta move: I’ll be out of the country in a week. And I’ve got to make a few stops. I’ve got money stashed all over the place.”
Back at the parking ramp, Rinker and Carmel shook hands: good friends, who’d been through a lot together. “If I don’t see you again, I’ll remember you,” Carmel said.
“See you in Mexico, Halloween,” Rinker said. “Hey— and don’t forget to check that phone tape, and erase it, if there’s anything on it.”
“Top of my list,” Carmel said.
She walked back through the building, let herself into the office suite, unplugged the answering machine from the phone line and listened to her message. The call from Hale’s house had something on it, but she doubted that anyone could tell what it was. She was taking no chances, though. She replaced the phone tape with a new one, stripped the tape out of the cartridge and burned it. The little fire left a nasty odor in the office and she opened an outside window, to air it.
She could see three or four cars parked up and down the street. At least a couple of them, she thought, were loaded with cops.
With the answered phone call, and the watching cops, she had the perfect alibi. She should wait a few minutes, cool out and get back home, she thought.
And maybe have a good cry. Although she didn’t feel much like crying; she was more excited than saddened.
Man, that was something else.
He was right there and Whack! Whack! Whack! Alive, then dead. Something else.
TWENTY-THREE
Allen’s body was found by his secretary, who first called Carmel to find out if she’d seen him.
“Well, no, I haven’t,” Carmel said. She felt a crawling sensation on the back of her neck: this was it, the beginning of the endgame. “Not since day before yesterday—I had to work last night. I did talk to him last night, though.
Sometime about eleven o’clock, I think.”
“Well, I don’t know what to do,” the secretary said. “He missed a closing this morning, and people are upset. He could miss another one if he’s not here in the next twenty minutes. That’s not like him.”
“How about his cell phone? That’s permanently attached to him.”
“It rings, but there’s no answer.”
“Huh. Well, maybe we ought to check with a neighbor or something,” Carmel said. “I’d go, but I don’t have a key, and I do have a court date.”
“I’ve got a key,” the secretary said, the concern right on the surface of her voice. “He keeps an emergency key in his desk drawer. I can go over . . .”
“You don’t think anything’s happened, do you?” Carmel asked. She put concern in her own voice. “I bet he just lost track of time somewhere, he was talking about buying a new sport coat . . .”
“He was supposed to be here at nine o’clock. That’s a lot of time,” the secretary said.
“Now you’ve got me worried,” Carmel said. “Keep me posted.”
AS THE SECRETARY, whose name was Alice Miller, hung up, it occurred to her she’d just had her most congenial conversation with Carmel Loan, who tended to treat secretaries like unavoidable morons. Allen, she thought, was known for a certain mellowing effect he had on women . . .
When Allen didn’t show up for the next closing, she apologized for him, told the participants that she was very concerned, that he hadn’t been heard from; that she was going to his house to check on him. She felt increasing concern as she drove out to Allen’s house. And once there, she called back to the firm to make sure he hadn’t shown up in the meantime. He hadn’t.
Miller got out of the car and looked up the driveway. Remembered what had happened to Allen’s wife; started up the drive. The house felt occupied, but quiet: a bad vibration. She stopped in the driveway and said, “Oh, God,” and crossed herself.
The front door was open an inch, and she called, “Hale? It’s Alice. Hale?”
No answer. She stepped inside, and some atavistic cell deep in Alice Miller’s brain, a cell that had never before been called upon, triggered, and Alice Miller smelled human blood.
Knew what it was, somehow, deep in the brain. Clutched her purse to her breasts and took three more steps into the house, leaned sideways, looked into the hall . . .
At Hale Allen’s shattered skull.
She may have screamed there, inside the house. Later, she couldn’t remember. For sure, she turned and ran toward the front door, still clutching her purse, turned just before she got to the door to look back, to see that Hale Allen’s corpse wasn’t following her, and ran straight into the doorjamb.
The blow nearly knocked her down. She dropped the purse, dazed, struck out and pushed her hand through the glass window on the storm door. Now she did scream, a low wavering cry, and clutching her bleeding arm, she managed to get outside, where she ran down the driveway. A man was walking his dog along the curb, and she ran at him, whimpering, bleeding badly from the arm cuts.
“Help me,” she cried. “Please please please . . .”
THE RESPONDING COPS thought Alice Miller probably had something to do with the shooting, as cut up as she was. But the patrol sergeant who was second at the scene took a moment to walk through the house, to note the drying blood on the floor and the fresh blood on the door. He listened to Alice as she sat on the grass next to the squad car, and finally said, “Call Davenport. And somebody ride this lady into the hospital.”
SHERRILL AND BLACK got to Hale Allen’s house five minutes before Lucas. Black looked at Allen’s body and said, “Totally awesome. Somebody shot the shit out of him.”
“Poor guy,” Sherrill said. Her lip trembled, and Black patted her on the back.
“How long was Carmel loose last night?” Black asked. “You didn’t go back, did you?”
“No, but John Hosta did. She came downstairs at one o’clock and went right home.”
“This is a little different than the other ones,” Black said, looking closer at the gunshot pattern. “Not a twenty-two, for one thing. Bigger caliber. Still not huge, but bigger. And whoever shot him, really unloaded . . .”
“Lovers’ quarrel,” Sherrill said.
“Jesus, if we hadn’t been watching Carmel, she could be in trouble,” Black said.
“I don’t know,” Sherrill said. “To tell you the truth, they were still running pretty hot. I don’t think they were at the shooting stage.” br />
“Maybe he blew her off, maybe . . .”
A cop at the door called in to them: “Davenport’s here.”
“All right,” Sherrill said. “Let’s talk.”
LUCAS WAS in a cold rage: he should have thought of this. He should have understood that Hale Allen might be in trouble. Had Allen discovered something? Had Carmel told him something in pillow talk? Something that led to accusations?
Sherrill walked him through the house, watching him. “Take it easy,” she said, once. “You’re gonna have a goddamned heart attack.”
“I’m not gonna have a goddamned heart attack,” Lucas grated.
“Your blood pressure is about two hundred over two hundred. I know the signs, remember?”
“Off my case,” he said. “And tell me about Carmel.” “She was loose for a while last night,” Sherrill said. “More than an hour.”
“It’d take a hell of a coincidence,” Lucas said.
“It’d take more than that,” Sherrill said. “She would have had to leave the minute we did, get over here, work herself into a rage, shoot him, get away without any neighbors hearing the shots . . . it’s bullshit.”
“Maybe the other woman did it, the shooter,” Lucas said.
“Look at the wounds,” she said. “That looks like somebody who was pissed off, not a cold-blooded professional killer.”
“But look at the group in the forehead . . . that looks like a pro.” Lucas shook his head. “This is ludicrous,” he said. “I don’t even believe it. What happened to the woman who found the body? Alice . . .”
“Alice Miller. She’s getting her arm sewn up. She saw the body and took off and ran right through the door, put her hand through the glass.”
“She’s not . . .”
“No. She came here looking for him, because he’d missed a couple of serious appointments, and she couldn’t get through to him,” Sherrill said. “Besides, even if she was a put-up deal, did you ever hear of anybody slicing up their arm for verisimilitude?”