The Polka Dot Girl Read online

  “Yeah. Good memory. You?”

  “Narco. Two years, three almost. Used to be Homicide myself. Think we might have just missed each other there.”

  “Cool. So, uh, are you guys celebrating a big bust or something?”

  Arlene smiled. “No. Nothing like that. This is bizarre. It’s just this weird fucking story. Came in, like, an hour ago. Chick got killed down in the Zig-Zag this morning. They’ve arrested the shooter. Anyway here’s the interesting part: the dead woman? She was a pro herself.”

  “No way.”

  She nodded and said, “Yes way. A bad-ass for-real assassin. And you know what she was called? Slaymaker.”

  I burst out laughing, spluttering coffee onto my chin. “No way! Really, this time, no way. You’ve gotta be kidding me. A professional killer called Slaymaker?”

  Arlene laughed as well. “Yes-yes-yes way. And it gets even better: the one who killed her is called Tammy Gun.”

  “Aw, bullshit.”

  “No bullshit, Genie. ’Course, that’s a fake name. Tammy’s proper surname ain’t Gun, that’s just her handle on the street. But Slaymaker, sure. It’s real. I remember all these fucking idiots from my stint in Homicide. Did some time on an organized crime task-force, you know, that kind of thing.”

  I took another sip of coffee. “What happened anyway? They get into a little tiff over who’s supposed to be whacking who?”

  Arlene pointed a thumb towards the holding cells. “Girls back there’re saying that old Tammy is saying they just got into a fight and ended up in a quick-draw. Like the fucking Wild West, right?! Two gunslingers, facing each other in the dusty streets of the Zig-Zag. Draw, bang! Down goes Slaymaker. Tammy more or less turned herself in. Think a patrol car was passing or something. Anyway that’s all she’ll say. It was a personal thing, like a fight that got out of control. Says Slaymaker pulled her piece first and she shot in self-defense. What a wonderful fucking world, huh?”

  She laughed and thumped me playfully on the shoulder, then moved off, back to her colleagues, back to work. I thought about what Cella had said, the rumors of Misericordiae putting a bounty on the head of whoever killed her daughter. A few days later two shooters get into a “personal thing” and it ends up with one of them dead, and this is all a coincidence, just unhappy happenstance? I don’t think so. Misery might want the murderer alive but these dames, the likes of Tammy Gun and Slaymaker, they’re too stupid and too greedy to read the fine print on the unwritten contracts of their industry. I figure one of them thought to bring down the other one and bring her to Misery—dead, yes, but half a bounty’s better than none at all. And dead women can’t defend themselves by saying, “It wasn’t me who killed your girl.” But all this was just speculation on my part. I topped up my coffee and returned to my desk, dialing the number Cella gave me. A fairly young voice answered, late teens, maybe early twenties: “Hello?”

  “Hi there. Genie Auf der Maur. I’m calling for Marcella?” “Just a second.”

  The sound of a phone being put down on a desk. Distant, muffled noises. Then a heavy wheezing, a chair creaking, Cella clearing her throat. She said, “Genie. So soon?”

  I chuckled and said, “Hey, Cell. Listen, two quick questions for you. You heard anything about a shoot-out in the Zig-Zag this morning? Two pros slugging it out? One of ’em’s dead now.”

  “Yeah, someone said something…” She lit a cigarette, the flare of a match followed by the wind-tunnel sound of her exhaling smoke. “Tammy Gun and that other broad, right? I got the basic gist. Great fucking loss to society, I’m sure. What about it? Connected to your thing?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe something to do with that contract you mentioned.”

  Cella paused, remembering. “Oooh. Right. That contract. Yeah. I mean, yeah, maybe. Anything’s possible in this crazy world we got going here.”

  “You really think so?”

  Her voice dropped the patina of sarky playfulness. She said quietly, “Genie, you know what I think. Anything is possible with her. Whether this Tammy thing is or isn’t connected, I don’t know. But it could be, sure.”

  “Okay.”

  “And the second question?”

  “Yeah. Uh, you ever heard of a place called That Island? Some sort of private club out in the ’burbs?”

  “No, I don’t think… What’s the name again? The Island?”

  I could hear her scribbling in a notepad. I said, “That Island. A private club, like a members only thing.”

  “That Island. No…can’t say I ever heard of it. Should I have?” “Probably not. It’s not the sort of joint that advertises in the

  Hera Investigator.”

  “Mm. And this is connected?” “Think so.”

  “Alright. Well, I’ll check it out. See if I can’t dig up something more.”

  “You’re a sweetheart. Talk soon.” “Anytime, kiddo.”

  The connection terminated. I held the receiver for a second, listening to the distant pips escaping from its plastic mouth. I hadn’t spoken to Odette since the day the baton lady ramped her car at me, which made my former paramour the only woman on Misery’s Top Ten list yet to be officially questioned. “Officially questioned”—ugh. It sounded all wrong for her. Odette and me, well, we had that history… We’d played our individual roles in our collective drama, running nightly for three years. We knew where we stood there, who we were; we were familiar with the scenery, the dynamics, the characters’ motivation, our entries and exits. Now circumstances had arrived at the theater back- door with a fresh script, a radical reworking, and expected us to slip into these new parts with the ease of a versatile veteran.

  The role of interrogator to Odette didn’t suit me, I realized. I was never good at acting. I was Genie, straightforward, easy to read, honest in all senses. I knew my duty and knew my place. I knew where to stand on the stage. Now I had to stand somewhere else. It made me feel muddled, put out of joint.

  I pressed the disconnect button twice and opened a fresh line. Odette’s phone rang for ten, maybe 12 seconds, then the sicken- ingly familiar disembodied tones of the message machine. “You’ve reached the home of Odette Crawford. I can’t…” Strike three. Either Odette had given up entirely on answering her telephone or she was currently bound and gagged by a wild-eyed maniac who was ransacking her collection of valuable musical artifacts. Part of the original score for Lili Boulanger ’s La Princess Maleine, handwritten and time-beaten. A violin bow said to have once belonged to Jacqueline du Pré. A beautiful, ornate fan used during Madama Butterfly by the incomparable La Divina.

  Where had she got all that stuff again? I couldn’t remember. And how had she paid for it? I couldn’t remember that, either. Her rich parents, I guess.

  I’d have to call ’round to our old home. Goddamn. That wouldn’t make it any easier. I ordered myself to stop whining, grabbed my car keys and hit for the door.

  She wasn’t there. Or at least, she didn’t answer when I rang the bell at Number 57 Datlow Street six or eight times. I stepped back onto the street and squinted up—no shadowy movement, no twitching curtains, nothing. I pushed the bell again, twice, three times. Counted down the long minute it would take for her to descend the several flights of stairs from her apartment. She didn’t appear when I reached 60 and didn’t appear as I lit a Dark Nine and thought about what to do next. I was pretty certain Odette was tangential to this investigation, at most, so I could keep moving forward without talking to her. I supposed I wanted to talk to her, though. I should have wanted to, anyway. But I wasn’t sure that I did.

  I looked up to the window again. Those familiar, heavy-lace curtains. And what lay behind them… I hadn’t stepped inside my old apartment door since the night I split, half a year ago. I say “split”, but it wasn’t really like that. There were no tearful entreaties from Odette, no pleading with me to stay. And on the other hand, no angry demands that I get the fuck out of her life this minute. (Odette never swore, anyway. Far too well brought up
for that.) It was all perfectly civilized and rational. It was calm and shivery-cold. An hour beforehand she’d said out loud what both of us were thinking: “It’s over between us. You should leave.” Such finality in those few quiet words; no appeals, no returns. So why wait, why delay the necessary amputation? I immediately packed my belongings—not many—and walked away without another word passing between us. Literally not one; not even “Goodbye, take care, hope to see you again.” Neither of us had anything left to say.

  That felt like a long time ago now. We’d gradually re-estab- lished communication after a few months, after enough time had passed for wounds to close and emotional equilibrium to be restored. Enough time for us to start forgetting.

  The end of my cigarette burned my fingers and I realized I’d been standing here for several minutes, spaced-out, glazed-eyed in reverie. Then sensory instinct kicked in again and I realized someone was watching me watching my old place. Tall, skinny, maybe dark-haired; my peripheral vision scrabbled for scraps of information. She was standing behind me, at about five o’clock as I faced forward, on the other side of the street. I knew, but couldn’t exactly see, that she was leaning against a lamp-post, trying to look inconspicuous, to blend in, twisting a newspaper in her hands. I chanced a little turn of the head and saw that she had spotted this and was now staring into the distance intently, like someone pretending to be on the look-out for a rendezvous, a friend running late.

  It wasn’t the baton killer. This woman’s face was obscured but I could tell from the body shape, the absence of that brutal heft, the way my wannabe assassin’s shoulders had seemed to roll even when she wasn’t moving.

  What the hell, I thought, let’s provoke something. Let’s push things forward.

  I stepped off the curb and started walking briskly towards her, one arm in the air. “Hey,” I called. “Hey, I need to talk to you…” She moved faster than I thought she would, dropping the paper and scuttling off, back towards the city center. I stepped up my speed and she broke into a trot and I broke into a jog and she broke into a run. Then she made a quick turn right, onto one of the tiny residential streets off Datlow, and I stopped dead. No point following her down that labyrinth, and anyway, on what grounds was I chasing her? A person had the legal right to stand on a street and the legal right to run in public.

  I looked down at the woman’s discarded paper, now wrapped around the lamp post like a soft car smash. The headline on the front read “MADDY LAID TO REST”, with a very blurry paparazzi shot of yesterday’s burial, so murky and out-of-focus it was actually pointless to print it. That could have been a picture of almost anything. It irritated me that they’d called her “Maddy.” They didn’t know the girl, what made them think they could use that stupid pet name? Her name was Madeleine.

  Back at HQ an hour later and I got a break. A definitive, unmis- takable, this-could-be-it moment. I found out who had tried to kill me.

  The duty officer from my trip to the catacombs, the cheery Kildare, had left an urgent message. I urgently returned her call. And she urgently told me: “Detective Auf der Maur, how are ya?

  Listen, don’t say anything for a minute, just hear me out, okay? Now I’m real sorry about this but I screwed up the other day, the day you were here? Looking for the big bulky lady who looks like Dolores de los Lobos. We couldn’t find her and it’s all my fault. See, there was another book of mug-shots we didn’t go through—they were in another room, we had some problems with damp a while back and had to dry-line the whole place. Anyway some of the stuff got moved around a bit and obviously some of it didn’t get moved back, ha ha!”

  She gave that endearing honk-laugh I remembered from the other day and continued, “Well I found this book, squeezed in under a radiator, so I says to myself, ‘Why drag Detective Auf der Maur all the way back up here if it’s just going to be a big waste of her time, her time’s more precious than yours, you got nothing else to do down here anyway.’ You know, am I right?”

  I wanted to tell Officer Kildare to please, please get to the point—if, indeed, there was one—but I couldn’t. I was smiling too much.

  She said, “I had your description of the bird in question so I went right on ahead and looked through the mug-shots myself. Gave ’em a good, real thorough examination. And, well, that’s why I called you.”

  I laughed out loud, from amusement and exhaustion and strange affection for this sweet, scatty woman I didn’t know. “Uh-huh. And…?”

  “And I think we got her. I think I’m looking at your Jane Doe right now. And I tell ya, she is one ornery-looking cove. You had her description right, alright.”

  I was already out of my seat. “I’ll be over to you in ten minutes. Hold on.”

  “No need. I’m sending a facsimile of the page by courier. Full color. Should be at your building by now. Marked for your attention.”

  “Great work, Officer Kildare. Excellent work. Thank you.”

  “Just doing my job, Detective,” she said proudly. “That’s all. Doing my job.”

  She was called Erika Baton. That wasn’t her proper name, I soon found out, and that wasn’t the name printed underneath the mug-shot. Here she was plain old Mary Ann Murphy—so obviously a fake, I’m amazed the processing officers bought it. She’d been arrested on a drink-driving rap; the information panel didn’t elaborate, didn’t tell me if the woman had been charged or convicted or what. But then again, I guess someone like Erika Baton doing time for a DUI is a bit like locking up a serial arsonist for littering violations.

  “One ornery-looking cove”: Kildare had that right. Erika was younger in this picture—I estimated by about eight years—her hair was even shorter, cropped almost to the bone, and the tattoo was absent. But some faces don’t change; some people don’t. She had the same hardness about her, the same indifferent, insolent glare; that exact same horrifying blankness of the eyes that I remembered from the other night. Hard to forget a thing like that when someone is leaning over your prone body, whispering obscenities, half a second from ending your life. I thought I felt myself shiver but maybe that was just a cold breeze squeaking in the window behind me.

  I found Arlene Galanis at her station, poring over surveillance shots of pimps strutting and strolling along the Bolo red-light drag. Talk about people not changing: they all looked identical, if not in specific features then in aspect—cynical, brutish, suffused with a weird sort of anxiety, a drug-rush jitter. I dropped the picture onto her desk, without comment. Arlene looked up at me, smiled quizzically and examined the photograph.

  Then I said, “Do you know this one?”

  She nodded slowly. “Sure. Sure I do. Erika Baton. Again, not her real name.”

  “A pseudonym?”

  “Mm. More like a nom de guerre. Sounds French, doesn’t it? You know, like ‘baah-tohn?’ But it’s nothing to do with that. She’s called that because it’s her trademark weapon—this retractable steel baton she uses on her victims. Fucking terrifying thing. Never proved, of course. Officially Erika’s clean as a whistle, relatively speaking.”

  “I can prove it. She tried to kill me with it two nights ago.” “Well. That is interesting. I mean, this psycho bitch is a psycho bitch, no question, but I never heard of her gunning for cops before. Did she know you were one of us?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. I think it was a contract for someone else.”

  Arlene smiled wearily. “Oh yeah. That’d be Erika. She kills for money, not for fun—the fun’s in the killing itself, right? An added fucking bonus of her work. …I think her real name’s Erika Schmidt, but none of us are 100 per cent on that. She was suspected of at least a dozen murders during my time in Homicide—again, nothing ever proven. Obviously, or we’d have her in here and not out there.”

  “How come I’ve never heard of her?”

  “Dunno. She’s been keeping a low profile, I guess. I remember rumors, my last month before transfer, something going really bad on a hit; like, the wrong person took it, or maybe a kid g
ot killed. Something awful. I guess fuck-wad here hit the floor for a while, let the heat cool off. From both sides. But I’m just guessing really, Genie.”

  “Right…that could have been how it played out.”

  “Yeah, I mean she’s an idiot, you know? Good at her job but she’s got a fucking rock for a brain. Probably hung out in some crappy apartment watching TV for two years and didn’t once get bored.”

  I swallowed hard and said it: “So how worried should I be?” Arlene thought about this. She twirled a beautiful pen in her slim fingers as she said, “Well…you’re obviously trained and can handle yourself, so I figure you should be okay. But watch your back. Erika’s fucking demented. Strong as an ox, relentless, ruthless—and thorough. She’s a maniac but she knows how to cover her tracks. Some low-life instinct, I guess. The rat knowing how to escape the sewer. All our witnesses in those other cases had a nasty habit of turning up with their skulls crushed, you know? No witness, no conviction.”

  “Alright. Thanks, Arlene.”

  She nodded okay, and I turned to go. Then she called after me: “Hey, Genie. Get the asshole for us, would you, honey? Bring that crazy bitch down.”

  I nodded back, unsure but determined, and left. The evening was drawing in and I had a date to prepare for.

  Chapter 16

  Cassandra

  NEW romance makes everyone revert to being a teenager. You know that almost-permanent state of adolescence, where every- thing is heightened, everything’s exaggerated, all your emotions are more colorful and more spectacular, and your senses are aflame? A new romance brings you back to that place whatever your age. I sat opposite Cassandra as she blew on a spoonful of steaming minestrone and felt 16 again.

  I’m pretty sure the dumb smile pasted across my face hadn’t weakened in the hour-and-a-half we’d been together. Remind me again how I managed to find myself at dinner with this beauty who was beyond beautiful? Please, don’t take me for shallow or over-sexed or anything like that—I’m not. What first attracted me to Odette, for instance, wasn’t her looks but different things, indefinable things: her gently sarcastic sense of humor, her love of art and music, the way she used to touch my upper arm while we spoke and leave it there a half-second longer than necessary.