Skin Tight

  “Yeah,” said Joe Salazar. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Not much time, I hope.”

  “We’ll do what we can, Commissioner.”

  “There might even be a promotion in it.”

  “Oh boy, a promotion,” said John Murdock. “Joey, you hear that? A promotion!” The detective burped at the commissioner and said, “How about some green instead?”

  Roberto Pepsical winced as if a hornet had buzzed into his ear. “Jesus, are you saying—”

  “Money,” said Joe Salazar, chomping a pickle. “He means money.”

  “Let me get this straight: You guys want a bribe for solving a murder?”

  “No,” Murdock said, “just for making the arrest.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Sure you can,” Joe Salazar said. “Your friend wants Stranahan out of the way, right? The county jail, that’s fucking out of the way.”

  Roberto buried his rubbery chin in his hands. “Money,” he murmured.

  “I don’t know what you guys call it over at Government Center, but around here we call it a bonus.” John Murdock grinned at the county commissioner. “What do you guys call it?”

  To Roberto it seemed reckless to be discussing a payoff in the middle of the detective squad room. He felt like passing gas.

  In a low voice he said to John Murdock, “All right, we’ll work something out.”

  “Good.”

  The commissioner stood up. He was about to reach out and shake their hands, but he changed his mind. “Look, we never had this meeting,” he said to the two detectives.

  “Of course not,” John Murdock agreed.

  Joe Salazar said, “Hey, you can trust us.”

  About as far as I can spit, thought Roberto Pepsical.

  THREE days before Mick Stranahan, Christina Marks, and Reynaldo Flemm arrived in Manhattan, and four days before the man called Chemo showed up, Maggie Gonzalez walked into a video-rental shop on West 52nd Street and asked to make a tape. She gave the shop clerk seventy-five dollars cash, and he led her to “the studio,” a narrow backroom paneled with cheap brown cork. The studio reeked of Lysol. On the floor was a stained gray mattress and a bright clump of used Kleenex, which, at Maggie’s insistence, the clerk removed. A Sony video camera was mounted on an aluminum tripod at one end of the room; behind it, on another stem, was a small bank of lights. The clerk opened a metal folding chair and placed it eight feet in front of the lens.

  Maggie sat down, opened her purse and unfolded some notes she had written on Plaza stationery. While she read them to herself, the clerk was making impatient chewing-gum noises in his cheeks, like he had better things to do. Finally Maggie told him to start the tape, and a tiny red light twinkled over the Sony’s cold black eye.

  Maggie was all set to begin when she noticed the clerk hovering motionless in the darkest corner, a cockroach trying to blend into the cork. She told the guy to get lost, waited until the door slammed, then took a breath and addressed the camera.

  “My name is Maggie Orestes Gonzalez,” she said. “On the twelfth of March, 1986, I was a witness to the killing of a young woman named Victoria Barletta . . .”

  The taping took fourteen minutes. Afterward Maggie got two extra copies made at twenty dollars each. On the way back to the hotel she stopped at a branch of the Merchant Bank and rented a safe-deposit box, where she left the two extra videotapes. She took the original up to her room at the Plaza, and placed it in the nightstand, under the room-service menu.

  The very next day Maggie Gonzalez took a cab to the office of Dr. Leonard Leaper on the corner of 50th Street and Lexington. Dr. Leaper was a nationally renowned and internationally published plastic surgeon; Maggie had read up on him in the journals. “You have a decent reputation,” she told Dr. Leaper. “I hope it’s not just hype.” Her experiences in Dr. Rudy Graveline’s surgical suite had taught her to be exceedingly careful when choosing a physician.

  Neutrally Dr. Leaper said, “What can I do for you, young lady?”

  “The works,” Maggie replied.

  “The works?”

  “I want a bleph, a lift, and I want the hump taken out of this nose. Also, I want you to trim the septum so it looks like this.” With a finger she repositioned the tip of her nose at a perky, Sandy Duncan-type angle. “See?”

  Dr. Leaper nodded.

  “I’m a nurse,” Maggie said. “I used to work for a plastic surgeon.”

  “I figured something like that,” Dr. Leaper said. “Why do you want these operations?”

  “None of your business.”

  Dr. Leaper said, “Miss Gonzalez, if indeed you worked for a surgeon, then you understand I’ve got to ask some personal questions. There are good reasons for elective cosmetic surgery and bad reasons, good candidates and poor candidates. Some patients believe it will solve all their problems, and of course it won’t—”

  “Cut the crap,” Maggie said, “and take my word: Surgery will definitely solve my problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “None of your business.”

  Dr. Leaper stood up. “Then I’m afraid I can’t help.”

  “You guys are all alike,” Maggie complained.

  “No, we’re not,” Dr. Leaper said. “That’s why you’re here. You wanted somebody good.”

  His composure was maddening. Maggie said, “All right—will you do the surgery if I tell you the reason?”

  “If it’s a good one,” the doctor replied.

  She said, “I need a new face.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am about to . . . testify against someone.”

  Dr. Leaper said, “Can you tell me more?”

  “It’s a serious matter, and I expect he’ll send someone to find me before it’s over. I don’t want to be found.”

  Dr. Leaper said, “But surgery can only do so much—”

  “Look, I’ve seen hundreds of cases, and I know good results from bad results. I also know the limitations of the procedures. You just do the nose, the neck, the eyes, maybe a plastic implant in the chin . . . and let me and Lady Clairol do the rest. I guarantee the bastard won’t recognize me.”

  Dr. Leaper locked his hands. In a grave voice he said, “Let me understand: You’re a witness in a criminal matter?”

  “Undoubtedly,” Maggie said. “A homicide, to be exact.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “And I must testify, Doctor.” The word testify was a stretch, but it wasn’t far from the truth. “It’s the right thing for me to do,” Maggie asserted.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Leaper, without conviction.

  “So, you see why I need your help.”

  The surgeon sighed. “Why should I believe you?”

  Maggie said, “Why should I lie? If it weren’t an emergency, don’t you think I would have had this done a long time ago, when I could’ve got a deal on the fees?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Please, Doctor. It’s not vanity, it’s survival. Do my face, you’ll be saving a life.”

  Dr. Leaper opened his schedule book. “I’ve got a lipo tomorrow at two, but I’m going to bump him for you. Don’t eat or drink anything after midnight—”

  “I know the routine,” Maggie Gonzalez said ebulliently. “Thank you very much.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “One more thing.”

  “Yes?” said Dr. Leaper, cocking one gray eyebrow.

  “I was wondering if there’s any chance of a professional discount? I mean, since I am a nurse.”

  MICK Stranahan stood on the curb outside La Guardia Airport and watched Reynaldo Flemm climb into a long black limousine. The limo driver, holding the door, eyed Reynaldo’s new hair and looked to Christina Marks for a clue. She said something quietly to the driver, then waved good-bye to Reynaldo in the backseat. Through the smoked gray window Stranahan thought he saw Flemm shoot him a bitter look as the limo pulled away.

  “I don’t like this place,” Stra
nahan muttered, his breath frosty.

  “What places do you like?” Christina asked.

  “Old Rhodes Key. That’s one place you won’t see frozen spit on the sidewalk. Fact, you won’t even see a sidewalk.”

  “You old curmudgeon.” Christina said it much too sarcastically for Stranahan. “Come on, let’s get a cab.”

  Her apartment was off 72nd Street on the Upper East Side. Third floor, one bedroom with a small kitchen and a garden patio scarcely big enough for a Norway rat. The furniture was low and modern: glass, chrome, and sharp angles. One of those sofas you put together like a jigsaw puzzle. Potted plants occupied three of the four corners in the living room. On the main wall hung a vast and frenetic abstract painting.

  Stranahan took a step back and studied it. “Boy, I don’t know,” he said.

  From the bedroom came Christina’s voice. “You like it?”

  “Not really,” Stranahan said.

  When Christina walked out, he saw that she had changed to blue jeans and a navy pullover sweater. She stood next to him in front of the painting and said, “It’s supposed to be springtime. Spring in the city.”

  “Looks like an Amoco station on fire.”

  “Thank you,” Christina said. “Such a sensitive man.”

  Stranahan shrugged. “Let’s go. I gotta check in.”

  “Why don’t you stay here?” She gave it a beat. “On the sectional.”

  “The sectional? I don’t think so.”

  “It’s safer than a hotel, Mick.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Christina said, “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  “It’s not me I was thinking of. Believe it or not.”

  “Sorry. Please stay.”

  “The Great Reynaldo will not be pleased.”

  “All the more reason,” Christina said.

  They ate a late lunch at a small Italian restaurant three blocks from Christina’s apartment. She ordered a pasta salad and Perrier, while Stranahan had spaghetti and meatballs and two beers. Then they took a taxi to the Plaza Hotel.

  “She’s here?” Christina asked, once in the lobby and again in the elevator.

  Stranahan knocked repeatedly on the door to Maggie Gonzalez’s room, but no one answered. Maggie was in bed, coasting through a codeine dreamland with a brand-new face that she had not yet seen. The sound of Mick Stranahan’s knocking was but a muffled drumbeat in her delicious pharmaceutical fog, and Maggie paid it no attention. It would be hours before the drumming returned, and by then she would be conscious enough to stumble toward the door.

  HER big mistake had been to call Dr. Rudy Graveline four days earlier when she had gotten the message on her machine in Miami. Curiosity had triumphed over common sense; Maggie had been dying for an update on the Stranahan situation. She needed to stay close to Rudy, but not too close. It was a dicey act. She wanted the doctor to believe that they were on the same side, his side. She also wanted to keep the expense money coming.

  The phone call, though, had been peculiar. At first Dr. Graveline had seemed relieved to hear her voice. But the more questions Maggie had asked—about Stranahan, the TV people, the money situation—the more remote the doctor had become, his voice getting tighter and colder on the other end. Finally Rudy had said that something had come up in the office, could he call her right back? Certainly, Maggie had said and—stupidly, it turned out—had given Rudy the phone number at the hotel. Days later the doctor still had not called back, and Maggie wondered why in the hell he had asked for the number in the first place.

  The answer was simple.

  On the thirteenth of February, the man known as Chemo got off a Delta flight from Miami to New York. He wore a dusty broad-brimmed hat pulled down tightly to shadow his igneous face, a calfskin golf-bag cover snapped over his left arm to conceal the prosthesis, a pea-green woolen overcoat to protect against the winter wind, and heavy rubber-soled shoes to combat the famous New York City slush. He also had in his possession a Rapala fishing knife, the phone number of a man in Queens who would sell him a gun, and a slip of prescription paper on which were written these words in Dr. Rudy Graveline’s spastic scrawl: “Plaza Hotel, Rm. 966.”

  CHAPTER 18

  WHEN they returned from the Plaza to the apartment, Mick Stranahan said to Christina Marks: “Sure you want a killer sleeping on the sectional?”

  “Do you snore?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Me, too.” From a closet she got a flannel sheet, a blanket, and two pillows. “I’ve got a space heater that works, sometimes,” she said.

  “No, this is fine.” Stranahan pulled off his shoes, turned on Letterman and stretched out on the sofa, which he had rearranged to contain his legs. He heard the shower running in the bathroom. After a few minutes Christina came out in a cloud of steam and sat down at the kitchen table. Her cheeks were flushed from the hot water. She wore a short blue robe, and her hair was wet. Stranahan could tell she’d brushed it out.

  “We’ll try again first thing in the morning,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Maggie’s room at the hotel.”

  “Oh, right.” She looked distracted.

  He sat up and said, “Come sit here.”

  “I don’t think so,” Christina said.

  Stranahan could tell she had the radar up. He said, “I must’ve scared you on the plane.”

  “No, you didn’t.” She wanted to ask about everything, his life; he was trying to make it easier and not doing so well.

  “You didn’t scare me,” Christina said again. “If you did, I wouldn’t let you stay.” But he had, and she did. That worried her even more.

  Stranahan picked up the remote control and turned off the television. He heard sirens passing on the street outside and wished he were home, asleep on the bay.

  When Christina spoke again, she didn’t sound like a seasoned professional interviewer. She said, “Five men?”

  Stranahan was glad she’d started with the killings. The marriages would be harder to justify.

  “Are we off the record?”

  She hesitated, then said yes.

  “The men I killed,” he began, “would have killed me first. You’ll just have to take my word.” Deep down, he wasn’t sure about Thomas Henry Thomas, the fried-chicken robber. That one was a toss-up.

  “What was it like?” Christina asked.

  “Horrible.”

  She waited for the details; often men like Stranahan wanted to tell about it. Or needed to.

  But all he said was: “Horrible, really. No fun at all.”

  She said, “You regret any of them?”

  “Nope.”

  She had one elbow propped on the table, knuckles pressed to her cheek. The only sound was the hissing of the radiator pipes, warming up. Stranahan peeled off his T-shirt and put it in a neat pile with his other clothes.

  “I’ll get a hotel room tomorrow.”

  “No, you won’t,” she said. “I’m not frightened.”

  “You haven’t heard about my wives.”

  She laughed softly. “Five already at your age. You must be going for the record.”

  Stranahan lay back, hands locked behind his head. “I fall in love with waitresses. I can’t help it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Don’t be a snob. They were all smarter than I was. Even Chloe.”

  Christina said, “If you don’t mind me saying so, she seemed like a very cold woman.”

  He groaned at the memory.

  “What about the others, what were they like?”

  “I loved them all, for a time. Then one day I didn’t.”

  Christina said, “Doesn’t sound like love.”

  “Boy, are you wrong.” He smiled to himself.

  “Mick, you regret any of them?”

  “Nope.”

  The radiator popped. The warmth of it made Stranahan sleepy, and he yawned.

  “What about lovers?” Christina asked—a question sure
to jolt him awake. “All waitresses, no exceptions?”

  “Oh, I’ve made some exceptions.” He scratched his head and pretended there were so many he had to add them up. “Let’s see, there was a lady probate lawyer. And an architect . . . make that two architects. Separately, of course. And an engineer for Pratt Whitney up in West Palm. An honest-to-God rocket scientist.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. And they were all dumber than I was.” Stranahan pulled the blanket up to his neck and closed his eyes. “Good night, Christina.”

  “Good night, Mick.” She turned off the lights, returned to the kitchen table, and sat in the gray darkness for an hour, watching him sleep.

  WHEN Maggie Gonzalez heard the knocking again, she got out of bed and weaved toward the noise. With outstretched arms she staved off menacing walls, doorknobs, and lampshades, but barely. She navigated through a wet gauze, her vision fuzzed by painkillers. When she opened the door, she found herself staring at the breast of a pea-green woolen overcoat. She tilted her throbbing head, one notch at a time, until she found the man’s face.

  “Uh,” she said.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said Chemo, shoving her back in the room, kicking the door shut behind him, savagely cursing his own rotten luck. The woman was wrapped from forehead to throat in white surgical tape—a fucking mummy! He took the photograph from his overcoat and handed it to Maggie Gonzalez.

  “Is that you?” he demanded.

  “No.” The answer came from parchment lips, whispering through a slit in the bandages. “No, it’s not me.”

  Chemo could tell that the woman was woozy. He told her to sit down before she fell down.

  “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re Maggie Gonzalez.”

  She said, “You’re making a big mistake.”

  “Shut up.” He took off his broad-brimmed hat and threw it on the bed. Through the peepholes in the bandage, Maggie was able to get a good look at the man’s remarkable face.

  She said, “My God, what happened to you?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Chemo unbuttoned his overcoat, heaved it over a chair, and paced. The trip was turning into a debacle. First the man in Queens had sold him a rusty Colt .38 with only two bullets. Later, on the subway, he had been forced to flee a group of elderly Amish in the fear that they might recognize him from his previous life. And now this—confusion. While Chemo was reasonably sure that the bandaged woman was Maggie Gonzalez, he didn’t want to screw up and kill the wrong person. Dr. Graveline would never understand.