Winter wonderland. That's how Mitch saw all the snow now. Yesterday, before he'd found Cini, Mitch looked at the eight inches of white stuff as a curse, something Midwesterners had to endure because of impure thoughts or because of constantly (and secretly) abusing themselves.
But now, with the socialite case solved, and with Cinihe felt certainagreeing to cooperate and clear Jill… well, it was a winter wonderland.
Whistling, he walked down the street to Cini's apartment house. Pretty co-eds all apple-cheeked and bundled-up passed him in twos and threes, their perfume lovely and wan and sexy on the night air. They probably figured he was on his way to pick up his date, he was so happy and all.
He winked at a snowman and bowed to a snow angel.
He picked up a tiny tricycle from the middle of a walk and carried it up on the porch; and he took a big chunk of icy snow and set it back in place on the snow fort from which it had fallen.
And finally
He got a running start and slid down the snow-packed sidewalk the way he had when he was a kid.
Damn near falling on his ass.
And breaking a couple of bones.
But he kept right on whistling, right on passing pretty girls, right on dreaming of holding his own pretty girl later on tonight.
There was a Domino's Pizza truck parked in a NO PARKING zone several yards from Cini's.
Mitch went up the front steps just as the Domino's kid was coming down. The kid nodded. He was hurrying. This time of night was probably his optimum time of the evening.
The hallway was positively festive, several different kinds of music fighting each other for dominance, several different kinds of meals mixing into a not-unpleasant odor of heat and sweetness.
He went up to Cini's door and knocked.
Hard to tell if anybody was inside because of all the noise in the hallway.
He knocked again, louder.
The door opened behind him.
A kid with acne and a sarcastic grin was shrugging into a Navy P-coat as he pulled his apartment door closed behind him.
'You know Cini?'
'Sure,' the kid said.
'You see her this afternoon or this evening?'
'You her dad or something?'
'Or something,' Mitch said, showing him the badge.
'Wow,' the kid said. 'What's going on?'
'I'm just looking for Cini.'
'She in trouble?'
'Not at all.'
'I always thought of her as pretty uncool, actually, way too uncool to get into any kind of trouble.'
'Uncool in what way?'
'Well, you know, she never comes over to my place when I ask her.'
Yeah, Mitch thought, that makes her uncool all right.
The kid pulled a dark stocking cap down over his ears. 'Cops. Cool.'
Mitch did some more useless knocking.
During a lull in the various symphonies, he pressed his ear to the door. Heard nothing.
He touched his hand to the doorknob.
Gave it a turn.
Unlocked.
He thought of how cautious she'd been when he'd appeared here earlier. Very suspicious. Two big imposing chains to keep him on the far side of the door.
Now it was unlocked.
Not like Cini at all.
He turned the knob. Pushed open the door.
The smell was high and sweet and he identified it immediately. Not something you mistake once its put into your personal computer.
Somebody had fouled themselves at the point of dying.
He was afraid he knew who.
From his jacket, he took a pair of gloves.
Had to be very, very careful now.
He found a wall switch and flipped it on.
She was sprawled across the couch, facing him, arms flung wide. Her head was tilted far back. Her throat had been cut. The front of her was a mess. Dried blood everywhere.
He checked out the apartment for anything else of note.
He wasn't whistling now.
Why had he ever been such a dumb sonofabitch as to whistle in the first place?
He went to the phone, even with gloves careful of touching the receiver, and called for the crime lab.
The gates had been left open.
The gates were never left open.
Jill's headlights shone on the darkness beyond the parted gates, the darkness that led up the winding drive to the even greater darkness of the great dark mansion.
She wanted to turn back. She wanted to be safe in the cozy warmth of her home.
But she had to talk to Doris, had to find out what Doris knew about Eric's murder.
She put the car in gear and started up the curving drive.
As the mansion came into view, she was struck, as she always had been, by how closed and obstinate it appeared, like an angry face. Only once, on Evelyn's fifty-fifth birthday, had the doors ever been flung wide and guests invited in. Japanese lanterns of green and gold and orange had lit the night like giant electric bugs. A small dance orchestra had played. Peter and Doris had acted like perfectly normal people living in a perfectly normal household. Even Evelyn had been kind that night, her smile, for once, seeming almost sincere.
But now the mansion was itself again; closed, hostile, impregnable as it towered against the racing clouds of the quarter moon.
She pulled up in front of the sweeping front steps and shut off lights and engine.
She took her flashlight from the seat, grasping it tightly. It could also be used as a weapon.
She got out of the car. The sub-zero weather attacked her like a hungry beast.
She crunched through the snow up to the steps, clipped on her flashlight, played it across the front of the vast house.
The massive arched front door stood open.
Once again her impulse was to flee, to run back to the safety of her own place.
She tried to convince herself that the girl Cini would tell the police the truth. But what if Cini refused? Then who would Jill turn to?
She needed to go into the house.
She angled the flashlight beam through the open door and walked up the steps.
When she reached the door, she paused, listening.
No lights anywhere inside. No sound.
Moonbeams highlighted the winding staircase that cut through the center of the house.
She walked inside, her footsteps loud and hollow on the parquet floor. She found a light switch, tried it. The electricity was off.
'Doris? Doris?'
But silence was the only response.
She walked deeper into the house, memories returning as she did so. The great stone fireplace; the short hall leading to the servants' small apartment; the den
She stopped, looked in.
At one point, the den had been her only retreat. Peter and Evelyn both displeased that she'd started working again, Jill had shut herself up here, watching the highly improbable romantic adventures of Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue or Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello on the late show. A prisoner is what she'd been; a prisoner.
The den had been changed, the style of furnishings more modern now. To double-check herself, she turned the lamp switch to On. No lights came. The power really was out. She lifted the receiver of the telephone to her ear. Somebody had also cut off the phone.
The smell came to her, then.
She knew instinctively what the odor was, but consciously wanted to deny it.
She stepped over to the desk and trained her light on the floor.
Puddles and splotches and puddings of dark fresh blood covered the Persian rug.
She raised the beam of the light and followed the trail of blood behind the desk, back of the couch, along the built-in bookcase and right up to the closet.
The brass doorknob of the closet was smeared with blood.
She played the light along the bottom of the closet door. A small river of dark blood was flowing from inside.
She had never heard her heart pound so loud.
Once more, her impulse was to flee.
But now she had to knowhad to see for herselfwhat lay inside the closet.
She put her finger on the blood-sticky doorknob and started to turn.
'You really don't want to see what's in there. Take my word for it, Toots.'
Peter. He'd always called her Toots.
She froze there for a long and disbelieving moment. She couldn't mistake the voice of the man she'd loved for so many yearsPeter. She was afraid to turn around and see who had spoken.
But how could it be Peter?
He was dead, executed in the electric chair.
This had to be some kind of memory trick. Being in the mansion again had made her think that the man was
She turned slowly around.
The man with the white hair and the James Coburn face stood in the den's doorway, looking at her.
He walked out of the shadow and into the moonlight. He wore a light gray expensive suit. The jacket was soaked with dark spots. His hands were bright red. She didn't have to wonder what it was.
'You look a little shocked, Toots. Like you're surprised I'm alive or something.'
He kept coming, slowly, closer, closer.
'If you're worried about Doris, she's fine. I just sort of tied her up so she couldn't call anybody.' He gave her a little-boy mock frown. 'I guess she wasn't very happy about what I did to poor old Mom. I thought she might be grateful. You know, given what that bitch did to us all our lives.'
He was close enough to put his hand on the flashlight and try to tug it away from her.
She held on tight.
He slapped her.
Very fast and so hard that her eyes teared and for a moment everything went dark.
'One thing you'll have to get used to now, Jill. I'm not the nice old easy-going Peter I used to be. Now when I tell you to do something, I expect you to do it. You understand?'
She didn't say anything.
He slapped her again, so hard that he rocked her back on her heels.
'You understand?'
'Yes,' she whispered.
'Good. Very good.'
He turned her gently around so that she was facing the closet.
'You never did like my mother, did you?' He laughed.
'Now don't lie. We're too old to lie to each other anymore. You couldn't stand her and she couldn't stand you. Wellmaybe you'll be a little more appreciative than Doris was.'
He opened the closet door and shone the light on Evelyn's head, which he had set on the shelf above the hangers.
The rest of her body, blood-soaked, was propped up against the base of the wall.
Jill tried very hard not to scream. Very hard.
Mitch decided to tell Jill in person about the girl named Cini. He wanted to be able to hold her, comfort her, after she'd heard such bad news.
Traffic was a bitch, many of the people over-cautious on the snow and ice, many others completely reckless.
In the course of his forty-five-minute drive, two drivers honked at him, one gave him the finger and one made a face at him. These kind of road conditions brought out the worst in people; they got uptight and took their uptightness out on everybody else.
He passed through a dour working-class neighborhood before seeing the relative glitz of Jill's neighborhood, everything refurbished and shiny clean and upwardly mobile.
He had to park a block away.
He smiled at the Christmas music coming from a CD store. Not Thanksgiving yet and already merchants were trying to put people in a buying mood. Mitch was glad that people honored Christ's birthday so irreverently. If Christ were alive today, that's just what He'd be doing, hawking CDs.
He knocked first and then, getting no response, rang Jill's bell.
He kept looking at the passersby. He liked people in their winter clothes. It made them more vulnerable, more human. In summer you saw all the hard human angles and the sweat, and picked up on all the smells. It was nice, every once in a while, to see people who resembled big dumb friendly bears.
He rang the bell twice more before thinking: She isn't home.
On the phone, in the bathroom, maybe working in the darkroomby now Mitch had eliminated all the likely things that would have kept Jill from bounding down the stairs the way she did when she suspected it was him.
No bounding now.
Just a cold dark front stoop. And a cold dark front door.
And an unanswered bell.
He thought: Where the hell is she?
He wasn't sure why exactly, but his cop instinct told him that something was wrong here. She should be home. Because of the way the press traipsed after her these days, she almost never went out at night.
But now she was gone.
Again that quirky but urgent sense of something wrong. Where the hell was she, anyway?
'So you're taking me with you?'
'That's the plan, Toots.'
'How far?'
'I'm not sure yet. Probably Vegas or someplace like that. Then I catch a plane. Right now, the cops'll be looking for me around here. They'll be watching the airport.' He smiled over at her. 'Meanwhile, I'll be whizzing down the Interstate with a nice new hostage.'
When they'd left the mansion, he'd steered her to his car but when she saw the bloody head of Adam Morrow in the backseat, she went into momentary shock and would not get in. First Evelyn and the maid and now this man's head in the backseat…
Now they were in her car and she was driving. This time of night, this area of the city, traffic had thinned. Buried beneath snow, and tinted by mercury vapor lights, all the working-class houses looked small and shabby and sad.
Peter held a gun on her. He looked quite comfortable and quite content doing so. Every few minutes, she'd glance at his face, at the mask plastic surgery had put there, and think: No, this isn't Peter. This isn't possible. Peter died in the electric chair. But then he'd speak and she'd know it was Peter for sure.
He had given her directions a few minutes ago. She said, 'Where are we going?'
'A storage garage. I need to pick up a suitcase. Got my traveling money in there. A quarter million.'
'I won't be able to drive all night, if that's what you're thinking. I'm drained, Peter, and I'm trembling. My whole body is trembling.'
'Soon as we get my stuff at the garage, I'll buy us something to eat.'
She almost smiled. 'Something to eat? You think that's going to do it for me?'
'It'd better, Toots. Because you are going to be driving all night. Up here, hang a left.'
She turned left.
'Six, seven blocks straight down,' he said.
They passed a block that held three different taverns. On the sidewalk of the second one, an old man was throwing up, his vomit a lurid green from the tint of the neon sign in the window.
Peter said, 'I'll bet he'd go out with you.'
That was one of Peter's old gags. He'd see somebody notably ugly and say, 'Bet he'd go out with you.'
She said, 'Don't you feel anything for what you just did?'
'You mean killing my mother?'
'Yes.'
'That's kind of funny, coming from you.' He genuinely laughed. 'I mean, all those years when you wanted to kill her yourself.'
'No, I didn't. I just wanted to leave.'
'Well, bitch, that's just what you did, didn't you?'
The cold anger. The old Peter. She knew better than to push him past this point.
Even the streetlights in this neighborhood were dim and dirty. Tiny ethnic houses cowered against the night like children trying to fend off a blow. The cars parked along the curbs were ancient rusty beasts.
'You're going to kill me, aren't you?' she said after a time.
'I have to admit the thought has crossed my mind.'
'Will you make it fast? And do it with a gun?'
The smile. 'Still making demands, eh, Jill?'
'Just don'tThe axe. You know.'
'Not to worry, Toots. I left the axe lying at the front of the family manse. And anyway, you don't have to worry about dying until we hit Vegas. Up here, pull in.'
She pulled in.
At the far end of the alley she could see cyclone fencing and powerful thief lights. The storage facility.
She drove toward the light.
She was still trembling badly and trying hard not to.
Mitch called the station and asked the dispatcher to put
Jill's license number out. If anybody spotted it, they should call in, but not stop the car. He didn't want to embarrass Jill if she'd just gone for a ride or something.