The Polka Dot Girl Read online

  I said, “You shouldn’t have got that. I wanted to pay.”

  She held my coat out for me to back into. “You can get it next time.”

  I looked at her, face-on. “So there’ll be a next time?” “I’m sure of it.”

  “Okay. I mean, good.”

  We waved goodbye to the proprietor. Stepping outside I saw we were the last customers there. It was cold in the street but the air was still; your skin only noticed the temperature when you moved. I lit a Dark Nine, watched it fog up that still, cold night.

  I said, “Where to now?”

  “I thought maybe home. You know, to tussle.”

  I laughed up at her. Who am I to refuse a beautiful young lady her one desire? “Home you or home me?”

  “Yours. Definitely yours.” “Okay. If that’s what…”

  “Sorry, there might be people there I don’t want to meet.”

  I said teasingly, “You mean you don’t want me to meet. You’re ashamed of me.”

  The sense of something, some displeasure or impatience, ghosted across her face as she said, “I don’t want anyone to meet.” Then she smiled brightly and took my hand, and began walking towards a cab rank across the street. “Come on. It’s just you and me tonight, baby. Let’s forget about everyone else. Let’s just wrap ourselves up in ourselves. How does that sound?”

  “Magical.”

  We laughed at the same time and then started running for home.

  Later, in the wee small hours, I stared at the ceiling of my bedroom, trying to ignore the asthmatic wheeze of my crapped- out air conditioning, trying to concentrate instead on the sound of Cassandra breathing, a deep nasal hum. Trying not to concen- trate. What was happening here? I didn’t know. I didn’t know that I wanted to know. Most of all I didn’t want to over-inves- tigate it, think too deeply about it, analyze and thus paralyze. It was good so far—it was better than good—so why stress it? Leave it alone, I told myself; enjoy yourself for once. Be in the moment. Be with Cassandra. Be happy. Just be.

  But that’s not possible, is it? Maybe a Buddhist can “just be”, or a dog or a lump of stone. Normal people like me can’t help being conscious and self-conscious. We can’t help thinking the shit out of everything. Well, I can’t, anyway. I lit a cigarette as quietly as I could and blew the smoke towards the window, open a few inches at the top, and wondered: was this the start of something special? Me, her, us—was there an “us” yet? Or maybe the possibility of one? Or were we just two lonely women thrown together by circumstance and desire and the most random of chance, entangled in one another ’s lives for a while, until the knots loosened and we fell apart?

  Arrgh—shut up, brain. Cassandra shifted in the bed beside me, warmth lifting from her body like off the naked bars of an electric fire. The movement made me think of Odette for some reason. Odette: the longest relationship I’d ever had, the one that still nagged at the edges of my consciousness and conscience like a judgmental elder relative. I thought about her less and less as the months went by, but not enough months had yet gone by. I’d always sort of assumed that she and I would hang around together forever, and perhaps that was the problem: she saw it as an affair of passion and vigor and hard work, an active thing; I saw it as a kind of semi-formal arrangement in which I had passively, though not unhappily, become involved. Hanging around. Christ. That was it, wasn’t it? I hung around in our relationship, she got involved. Odette lived it and I watched her living it.

  Forget all that, Genie. Fuck the past, bury it, say a prayer for it if you want, so long as you accept: it’s gone, it’s dead. There’s nothing more you can do. No crime to investigate here, nobody worth blaming. I stubbed out the cigarette, put the ashtray on the floor and snuggled into Cassandra’s warm flank. She was here and I was here and we were naked together and we liked one another and talked like friends and laughed at the same things and the same time. That was good enough for the moment. Just being was good enough.

  I put my arm across her breast and shut my eyes. As I slid into half-sleep I vaguely realized that I had never actually told Cassandra I was a cop. But by that stage I was too tired and sluggish to care or remember, I was gone.

  Chapter 17

  Bethany

  I SAT in court the next morning as our five singing beauties upped and walked. Yep, just like that. Anneka Klosterman, Nora Hofton, Alejandra Villegas, Dinah Spaulding and Liz Arendt withdrew their murder confessions simultaneously. Since there was no concrete evidence against any of them, and each one contradicted the other, they couldn’t be held. The judge frowned and harrumphed and vowed to bring charges of wasting court and police time against them, but she had to sign the release forms anyway. So they walked. Jamie Sobel had the good grace not to give the usual insincere defense speech about miscarriages of justice and her clients’ good names being returned to them and how she’s this close to making a false arrest claim against the HCPD. She had the good grace to look a teensy bit embarrassed. Sobel crossed the necessary legal Ts and dotted the Is, ushered her charges out the door and released them back into the world. Oddly, nobody was around for them—nobody came to meet them or drive them away, not their families, no one. The women simply walked off into the crowds.

  Etienne had been right: apart from Klosterman, they all acted like zombies. (She acted like she was calculating exactly how much she should display of the profound contempt she felt for the court.) Arendt actually looked like a zombie, with those dark panda eyes set deep in a thin pale face. I was there in person because Sobel had told us first thing that morning what was going to happen, as per procedural requirement in a capital case; the Chief sent me down as the dick involved. I was glad to go, anyway; I wanted to see them in the flesh again, to verify my first impressions. And they were verified: these broads were no more acting under their own volition than a deck of cards. Like four automatons they filed out, blank-eyed, sticking to the preordained script. But it was more than that, more than the women merely playing a part and parroting someone else’s words. It was like their brains had been wiped clean. They could still function, they knew where they were and what their names were, but those four just…weren’t there. Their minds and personalities, whatever is that holy spark inside us which creates the person, which makes you “you”—it was absent. They weren’t even the same as serial killers: there was no malice, no unfettered sadism or fucked-up sexual compulsion. There wasn’t really anything. They were like dolls. Four dolls and then Klosterman, the cruel, arrogant child striding at the head of the line.

  I met Sobel outside, on the courthouse steps—she lit my cigarette with a platinum-plated Zippo lighter. It looked almost as expensive as her watch which looked almost as expensive as her suit, which looked pretty goddamn expensive. The rewards of brilliance…and knowing how to not be bothered by what she did. I asked her once, you know, the usual line: “How do you sleep at night?” or whatever.

  She had replied, “I don’t think about work unless I’m working. Do you?”

  When I surprised her by admitting, yes, sometimes I did, she said: “Genie, I’m going to say but one thing to you. And you know this isn’t an excuse or justification, because you know I don’t care what you think of me. We barely know each other, you’re not my family, so. And that one thing is: yes, I make a lot of money defending these scumbags. But someone has to represent them in court; otherwise this is nothing but a fascist society. Would you agree with that?”

  I reluctantly nodded.

  “That someone is often me. And I do my job to the best of my ability—as is my obligation. I don’t break the law. I don’t even bend it. I use it, I work with it, I play it, I spin it. All within the rules. I do my job. So yeah, I sleep fine at night. And believe it or not, I hope you do, too. I’ve a lot of respect for the police.”

  “Whatever, Jamie. Keep telling yourself that.” “I will.”

  I’d smiled bitterly and shook my head and walked off. The most annoying thing about it was that, as usual, she was correct to
a large extent. I didn’t like it but the system needed people like her.

  Ah, Sobel was actually alright. I’d spoken to her quite a lot, both professionally and socially; she was one of the most straight- talking people I’d ever met. She wasn’t needlessly harsh—she had some tact—but Jamie told it like she saw it. I liked that in her, even though I didn’t in everyone. I don’t know, it was weird; it seemed to suit her, like those expensive threads.

  Now she slipped the lighter into the jacket pocket of her black trouser suit and we stood together in silence and a cloud of smoke. After half a minute I said, “Thanks for the light, Jamie. Wanna do me another favor?”

  Sobel smiled. “No, I won’t tell you who’s employing me. You know the rules, Genie. You know I don’t have to.”

  “Hey. Nobody’s saying anything about ‘have to.’ But what about ‘want to?’”

  “I don’t think so. Not without their instruction.” “Ah. So it’s more than one person, then?”

  She smiled again. “‘Their ’ being used flexibly in this instance. May be a ‘they’, may be a ‘her.’ You won’t find out from me.”

  “Thanks, Jamie. Appreciated as always.” “No problem. You take care, Genie.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette under the pointy toe of an exquisitely crafted leather boot and walked back inside the court- house. I lit another one and felt a familiar tension in my mind, opposing urges pulling inside me, stretching me thin.

  Here’s irony: not one hour later I returned to the office and there on my desk, in a gray-brown cardboard file-holder, was the psyche assessment of the five women. I’d asked our behavioral brainiacs to look for compulsive confession syndrome—total strike-out. As I expected, really. None of our robots suffered from that strange, rare condition, and I had figured they wouldn’t; these confessions were clearly driven by a more controlled, venal imperative.

  Indeed, the reports showed that all five were perfectly rational, integrated, functioning women…in theory. And in theory Misery might be inviting me ’round for tea and crumpets next Christmas. Certainly, within the parameters of their field of study, our shrinks had made the correct evaluation: Hofton, Arendt, Villegas and Spaulding weren’t psychotic or sociopathic; they weren’t afflicted with dissociative identity disorder or delusional schizophrenia or megalomaniac paranoia. In that sense, they were technically “normal.” They had been subjected to the tests and questionnaires and interviews, their data rated and collated, and their personality types fell somewhere in the middle, somewhere within the huge fuzzy mass of womanhood.

  But I’d witnessed how they acted and moved, seen in their eyes how the flame of life and self seemed snuffed out within them. These broads were not normal on any planet I inhabited. And Klosterman, she had “danger ” coming out of her pores. That woman scared the bejeesus out of me.

  I decided to forget about the odd five and muse instead on my own interviews so far. I floated upstairs to the staff canteen and sat in a corner with a steaming mug of coffee and mulled things over. I zoned out the ambient noise of conversation and metal clinking on ceramic and the milk foamer squealing angrily, and thought hard: about the Madeleine Top Ten list, about Poison Rose, about Misery and the genius twin security guards. About Cassandra and Erika Baton.

  I had got, I felt, a fairly full portrait of what Madeleine was like as a person, but not much else. Gilbert and Tussing said they knew her but denied really knowing her; Camilla had seen her around some, but not lately; Noni Ashbery colored in some psychological background; Sasha Hiscock was tangential at best; Odette and Virginia Newman I still hadn’t managed to pin down; Klosterman knew something but getting it out of her looked nigh-on impossible. Misery had told me plenty about her daughter but knew little about her demise. Then there was LaVey and her aide de camp Queneau. Those two were somewhere near the heart of it; that’s what my own heart was telling me. If there was a conspiracy—forget about “if ”, there was—LaVey was involved, and probably Queneau. Most of the women in their extended circle seemed to know more than they were letting on; they seemed to be covering up. I made an assumption: LaVey told them to talk freely enough about Madeleine and their relationship with her—up to a point. After that mark, they were ordered to deny, confuse, cover up.

  LaVey, you bitch. Nana was always right and I had a set against that fake, that cod-intellectual poseur. She was the one, my gut screamed it at me. But…to prove it. To even know it for sure, myself. There was the almighty rub. I still had no evidence and nobody willing to provide it.

  Odette and Virginia, Virginia and Odette… Did they hold the key to the mystery? Hope said yes, realism said probably not. I had to brace them, anyway, but for some reason I didn’t feel like doing it today. I’m not sure why. Odette, I just didn’t want to talk to right then. I felt resentful towards her, a lingering sort of bitterness, something spiteful and small. Who knows why? But I didn’t know how I’d react when I finally spoke to her again. I wasn’t certain how professional I’d be. Virginia Newman, though, was different; in that case I wanted to postpone it a little. Like I was savoring the anticipation and wanted to enjoy it a tiny bit longer. This true friend of Madeleine, the girl who showed up at her funeral, the fast-driving flake who stood by her pal even unto death: I was really looking forward to meeting her. But not just yet.

  I can’t explain any of this. It baffled me and threatened to paralyze me completely, here with my coffee and my corner chair. So I made a snap decision: get out of the building and hit for the bars Madeleine used to know. A shot and a long shot in each, but what the hell, it’s how she would have spent her day. At least I’d get to walk in the dead girl’s shoes, and maybe that way get a few steps closer to the person who killed her.

  Ten o’clock that night and I sat in a busted armchair in my apartment, my stomach reeling but my head straight and sober. I’d done what I promised, had a drink in every bar that I knew Madeleine knew, and it hadn’t made me the slightest bit drunk. How odd. My belly was curdling with acid and sourness, but my mind was sharp. Like the booze had decided to only venture downwards. And this was a lot of booze. I have a normal tolerance for alcohol which is why this post-binge sobriety was weirding me out so much. Maybe it was the long walks between bars, the smokes and chats with bouncers in the night air, the bowl of peanuts here and quick sandwich there. Maybe it was that I didn’t want to be drunk. I needed to drink but I also needed to think, and tonight I’d done both.

  Either way I was sober enough to reflect on my odyssey around Hera City’s drinking establishments. There are hundreds of these places but I stuck strictly to those mentioned in the Misery dossier or by others: Gilbert, Camilla. Which made 14 or 15 in total: a few decent joints, some dive bars, a strip club, even a disco called Funky Clown which runs all day, every day, without a break in the thumping techno music or the pervasive air of desperation and horribly enforced jollity. By the end of it I was smoked-out, depressed and had a ringing in my ear. The city itself could be depressing, I realized—or maybe remembered. And then night time gives a different aura to a place: it bleaches all the colors and a lot of the warmth. Everything looks starker, colder; things get murky in the wee hours. I thought about my own wasted nights staring down a bottle or a glass; nothing out of the ordinary, indeed quite moderate for a HCPD cop, but still wasted. Hundreds and thousands of hours literally and metaphorically pissed away. I thought about Cassandra and our potential future, and didn’t see us wasting much time together.

  Back to the matter at hand. Again, I had got very little useable information. A few little chicks in Reaper ’s hid their booze when they saw me flash my badge at the bartender but eventually opened up when I assured them I wasn’t on the trawl for license violations. They knew Madeleine by sight, hadn’t seen her in several weeks. A bit better in Bush Babies: the woman doing security had spoken to Madeleine maybe eight or nine days previously. She was drunk, as she usually was. She stayed late and left with a girl she’d just met, as she often did. She was trouble
-free, as she always was. In Musique Drum I had an extremely loud conversation with a 19-stone tattoo artist who thought she knew the girl who’d done the rose on Madeleine’s breast. Hadn’t seen her in fuckin’ ages and ages, quote-unquote, but she’d been doing a lot of solvents lately so her head was all scrambled. In fact she was whacked on paint-thinner and Bushmill’s right now. The owner of Kars ‘n’ Stars reckoned she’d served Madeleine only a few nights before her death, which set my senses a-tingle, but then realized no, she was thinking of someone else entirely and couldn’t place the Greenhill girl at all. Hasta La Vista was almost empty for some reason so there wasn’t really anyone to talk to. In Swing Kids I met identical sisters, two- thirds of a set of triplets, who claimed to know Madeleine quite well, liked her even better and were shocked to hear that she was dead. They asked me if I wanted to join them in mourning, then called two more double gins from the bartender and set about dealing with their grief.

  On and on I went. And here was my conclusion, as I later sat in that armchair and nursed a half-warm cup of coffee and a cigarette: a good number of people remembered Madeleine, some had known her and more had seen her, a few had scammed drinks off her and one or two Good Samaritans had helped her to a taxi when her own legs were too shot to carry her. But nobody could recall seeing her on the last night of her young life; or if they did, they weren’t ’fessing up to me. The job has that effect sometimes: people clam up to the woman who most needs them to talk. Ironic, irritating and very unhelpful.

  Fuck. Goddamn. I let my head drop down over the back of the chair and emitted a slow, pained groan. I was starting to lose hope. I wasn’t even fully conscious of it yet—at that moment I didn’t stop and say to myself, “I am starting to lose hope”—but the thought was there, wheedling and insistent, a seductive presence on the outer edges of my mental universe, a dust cloud, a phantasm, something black and dense collapsing into itself. My hope was beginning to die.