His name was Brice.
She went into the parking lot of St. John’s Hospital and stood waiting for him beside his car – a white Triumph in a private slot marked Reserved for Dr. James Brice.
The Eye panicked. They were certainly going to drive somewhere and he had no wheels! There was a taxi stand on Windfall Lane, one lone cab at the curb. He flashed his fake badge at the driver, gave him a ten-dollar bill, told him to wait for him.
He went back to the lot. Eve was still alone, leaning against the Triumph, smoking a Gitane, one hand on her hip.
But she was no longer Eve. She’d changed again. Her exuberance and grins, her nervous energy and plentifulness were gone. She was languid now, somber, magic, Mediterranean – Cretan – no, farther East – Cyprus, the Euphrates, Parthia – a votaress in a blue smock, in a smoky temple, worshiping crocodiles. In a moment she would gaze into a basin of witches’ slime and see him, standing behind her.
Instead, she ate the other pear.
Dr. Brice showed up at two sharp. They kissed. He was in his forties, handsome, trim, solid. He put her overnight case into the trunk, and they drove away.
The Eye ran down Windfall Lane and got into the taxi. He followed them to the Linker Bank and Trust Building. There was nowhere to park, so Eve drove the car around the block while Brice went inside. The Eye told the cabbie to stay with the Triumph and went after the doctor.
Brice withdrew twenty thousand dollars, which he put into a large billfold in his pocket. He went outside. The Triumph drove up, and he climbed in beside Eve. The taxi was just behind them. The Eye plunged into it, panting like a kettle. His chest was throbbing, his hands wet with sweat.
The traffic was murderous. The cabbie lost them on Maddox Drive, found them again on Lamont, lost them again on Riverside.
Then three trucks and a Jag wedged them into a jam and they stopped dead. Horns blared. A Doberman poked its python head out of the window of the Jag and bayed.
The Eye sprang to the sidewalk and ran up Riverside. A thousand cars were packed in the street. He turned down Gibbon, trotted into the Circle – stopped. Where the fuck was he going! He ran back to the cab. It was still there, squashed between the trucks and the Jag. He flopped into it. The Doberman barked at him. The jam broke, the traffic flowed on.
They drove into Frederick Avenue, passed the chapel on Woodlawn.
‘They gave us the slip,’ the cabbie said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Where’bouts now?’
‘Keep going.’
‘Which way?’
‘Straight ahead. No. Hold it! Stop here!’ He gave him another five, just for luck, and walked back down Frederick to Woodlawn.
Why not? Flatfleet, the missing persons connoisseur, was always saying, ‘What’s the pattern? Look for the pattern!’ Well, this was a fucking pattern, wasn’t it? The bank, the wig, Brice. And a motherfucking chapel!
He went up a pathway to the back of the chapel. The Triumph was there, in the rear parking area. He went into the vestry and tiptoed into the nave. He sat down wearily in the last pew.
Eve and Dr. Brice were standing at the altar, getting married.
Her new name was Josephine Brunswick.
There were a dozen people present, all smartly dressed mod swingers in their twenties and thirties, smelling of green. Three pro photographers sat uninvited in a side pew, so – as usual – no one paid any attention to the Eye, slouched amongst them, holding the Minolta.
Lucy Brentano. Eve Granger. Mrs. Paul Hugo. Josephine Brunswick. Mrs. James Brice.
Who was she?
She turned slightly, glancing over her shoulder, looking at – what?
God Almighty? She was unutterably lovely. Her beauty stung him. He sat there, her scorpion’s caress paralyzing him with rapture, her venom warming his blood. Who on earth was this girl? She had gray-blue-green eyes. She wore a goat on a chain around her neck. She often stood with her hands on her hips. She ate pears. She smoked Gitanes. She believed in the stars. And she was born on the twenty-fourth of December.
Capricorn. The Winter Symbol.
She killed a man last night and robbed him of eighteen thousand dollars. She was going to kill again tonight for twenty thousand.
He slid to his knees and prayed fervidly. O Lord, don’t take her away from me! Don’t leave me all alone again, braying in the dark, like a wounded donkey!
‘I do,’ said Josephine Brunswick.
After the ceremony the bride and groom, accompanied by the swarm of guests, went out on the front steps and posed for pictures. She’ll never get away with this one. The Eye stood with the three photographers for a moment, taking a few shots. Then he ran to the back of the chapel and dashed like a madman from one parked car to another.
He found a brand new unlocked Honda Accord with the keys in the ignition. He sprang behind the wheel and drove out to Woodlawn Street.
He backed into the driveway of an empty house, stopped behind a hedge. It would be two or three hours before the hot car call went out to the cruisers. That would be time enough to fuck all.
Twenty minutes later the Triumph passed, heading south. He followed it.
They drove along Cooper Avenue and all the way down Jefferson Boulevard, past the University and the Country Club. At Stuyvesant they broke out into the open wilderness and Richland, Ormo, and Hayward flew by. They stopped at Fort Vale. Dr. Brice bought a carton of cigarettes; Josephine bought a toothbrush and a bottle of Gaston de Lagrange; the Eye bought a paperback of crossword puzzles.
The hot car squeal was circulating by now; but there were no patrols in sight. They drove on and on. At ten o’clock the Triumph pulled into the parking lot of The Cat’s Pajamas, a roadhouse near St. Vincent.
A combo was playing. A girl in a see-through sari was singing. Air Force officers from the nearby base were dancing with girls wearing awning-like dresses.
The bride and groom drank champagne and ate cailles du Liban. The Eye ordered a fifteen-dollar meal and devoured every calorie of it. While he was eating he did the first five crosswords in the book.
The room was a thick quicksand mire of well-being. Silver glittered on snowy tablecloths. Eagles flashed on natty uniforms. Jewels and women’s eyes glimmered in the cloying dimness like harbor lights.
‘This party’s getting dirty!’ a drunken Colonel shouted. ‘Give me back my pants!’
Everybody laughed. The Eye finished the fifth puzzle. Eleven down, Blindfold. Eight letters. Hoodwink.
He pulled the classroom photo out of his pocket and set it against the lamp. He invited the little girls to join him for dessert.
He had taken Maggie’s phantom with him to so many places! To plays and concerts, to baseball games and racetracks and fencing matches. Wherever he went, she came along. And now they were eating ice cream together in an officers’ dive in the middle of nowhere.
The fifteen little faces stared at him, making his heart ache. They were all gone now, claimed by others. Maggie, too. It wasn’t fair. The game was rigged. God’s plotting-board map was a rat trap; it lured wayfarers into no-man’s-land and slaughtered them with time and loss.
Josephine dropped a spoon. Brice took her hand and kissed her fingers. She looked over her shoulder.
The combo was playing ‘La Paloma.’
They got up and moved to the dance floor. The Eye sat back in his chair, folded his arms, watched them. They danced past his table.
She stood swaying just in front of him, her eyes closed. He’d never been this close to her before. Her left hand, on Brice’s shoulder, pointed at him. The index was deformed, bent like a hook. Her eye paint in the half-light gave her face a mask’s eeriness. Tiny pearls clung to her earlobes. Her flesh expelled the darkness, illuminating it, clothing her in a halo of incandescence.
Brice was aware of his scrutiny. He frowned, danced her away from the table.
Ten minutes later they left.
The Triumph turned off the highway and climbed a dirt road through a wood. A rustic sign with an arrow pointed into the trees – The Birdcage.
The Eye left the Accord in a glen and went up the hill on foot. In a clearing on the summit was a lodge with glass walls.
Brice was in the largest room, tossing lighted matches into a gigantic fireplace. Josephine was in one of the wings, pulling off her blue frock. ‘Jim!’
‘Ho?’
‘Aren’t there any curtains?’
‘Any what?’ Flames blazed in the fireplace.
‘Curtains! On the windows!’
‘What for? If anybody comes all the way up here just to peek, he deserves an eyeful!’
True enough!
Brice was in the other wing now, undressing, getting into a judo outfit. He combed his hair. Then he put a Vivaldi record on a Kenwood. The glass rooms and surrounding woods quivered with music.
Josephine opened the bottle of Gaston and poured a stiff drink.
The Eye went up to the porch and sat down on the railing. Brice came back into the main room, passing in front of him like a kung fu hero in Cinerama. ‘Do you like Vavaldi?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Jo!’
‘What?’
‘Do you like Vavaldi?’
‘It’s Vivaldi, Jim. Sure. He’s peachy.’ She took off her bra and her stockings.
‘What time do you want to leave tomorrow?’
‘I don’t care.’ She held up her crooked left finger, rubbed it with her right thumb. ‘There’s no hurry.’
‘No. But it’s a long drive. I feel like a beer. And we have to be in Miami by Friday.’
He lit a cigarette. The Eye could see the pack. Larks. There was a steel bar in the corner of the room. He stepped behind it, lifted a lid, plucked out a can of beer. He changed his mind. He took a bottle down from a shelf. The Eye could see its yellow label. Kahlúa. He could see the goat disc, too, hanging on Josephine’s naked breasts. She took her tan jacket from the overnight case, pulled it on.
Brice poured a drink. He was jittery. The Eye was certain they’d never been to bed together.
‘Jim, these fucking windows make me nervous.’
‘You’ll get used to it.’
She turned out a lamp and disappeared. The Eye swung his legs over the railing and rolled off the porch into a pouch of darkness.
She came out of the house and stood beside him. She sipped her cognac, gazed at the woods. Brice joined her, pouring another Kahlúa.
‘On nights like this I don’t regret all the loot I spent building this pad.’
‘I’d like to live here.’
‘No way! It would mean a five-hour drive back and forth to town every day! Outta sight!’
‘You could stay in town. I’d live here alone.’
‘Alone?’ This took him aback totally. ‘What do you mean? You’d go bananas staying out here all by yourself. What would you do for kicks?’ He was as cool as his vocabulary.
‘Solitude,’ Josephine said. ‘Solitude and peace. What better kicks are there?’
‘What would you do?’ He set the bottle on the railing, a foot from the Eye’s elbow. ‘I mean, like what would you do?’
‘I’d listen to the wind and walk in the woods.’ She moved over to the opposite side of the porch. He followed her. ‘And lie in the sun all day.’
‘And at night?’ He put his hands under her jacket.
‘I’d go to bed and make love to myself.’ She leaned away from him. ‘Slowly and blissfully, as if I were sleeping with a friend … a dear friend …’
‘Eh?’ He was shocked. ‘What kind of nonsense is that? Masturbation is … lonely.’
She laughed. ‘Where did you read that? In Playboy?’
He laughed, too, ashamed of his moribund reaction. He hoped she hadn’t noticed. ‘Okay!’ He was master of his swinging pad again, with a swinging chick in his arms, a tall, tanned, supple, mysteriously smiling centerfold chick wearing only a jacket, baby-doll-like, over her thighs. In fact she was his wife. ‘Right you are, Mrs. Brice!’ He was on his swinging honeymoon, with a swinging bride in his swinging Birdcage. ‘Right on! So just pretend I’m you!’
He dropped to his knees and kissed her stomach. Then his head was under the jacket and his nose between her legs. ‘Yum! yum!’
Josephine sipped her cognac, ignoring him. Then she looked over her shoulder, straight into the Eye’s hiding place.
‘There’s somebody there, Jim!’ She pushed him aside. ‘He’s watching us!’
Brice jumped up. ‘You gotta be kidding!’
‘Over there,’ she pointed. ‘Look!’
‘There’s nobody there, Jo!’
‘Yes, there is!’
He went into the lodge and flicked on a switch. The Eye had dropped silently to the ground and somersaulted under the porch. A spotlight went on.
‘You see?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she laughed. ‘Weddings always make me paranoid.’
‘Come on inside, I’m freezing.’
‘I’m going to make a cup of tea. Do you mind, Jim?’
‘Of course not!’
The light went out.
She was in the kitchen, drinking a cup of tea and smoking a Gitane. Brice was in the other room, squatting before the fireplace cowboy fashion, tossing twigs into the flames. A Bach record was playing.
The Eye paced around the clearing, his hands in his pockets. An owl cried in the woods. Three jets hissed by, coming into the base. Fighters. He remembered the stories in magazines he’d read faithfully every month when he was a boy. G-8 and His Battle Aces. The Mark of the Vulture. Fangs of the Sky Leopard. Flight from the Grave. Ed Billings lived around the block. He read The Shadow. Simonozitz, over on Second Street, bought Doc Savage. They’d pass them back and forth, like cranky scholars exchanging folios, arguing who was the greatest writer in America. Was it Maxwell Grant or Robert J. Hogan or – what was the other fellow’s name? Roberts? He’d kept all the copies for years. His wife threw them away. Billings was in Washington. He got involved in the Watergate bit. Simonozitz was a dentist in Denver. His son was a TWA exec. Billings’s ex-wife married an Italian count. She was in the movies now. He saw her in a picture last week, with Steve McQueen.
In the fishbowl kitchen Josephine pulled on a pair of gloves. She went to the buffet, pulled out a drawer, took a butcher knife, tapped its blade on the sink – ting! ting! ting! ting!
She walked over to the fuse box on the wall, jerked down the lever.
All the lights died. Bach growled off.
‘Jim!’
‘It’s all right, sweetie! Probably just a blown fuse!’
The Eye heard him walk into the kitchen, heard him scream. A pan banged to the floor. Another jet flew by. A chair skidded into the refrigerator.
‘Jo!’
The Eye walked over to the Triumph, kicked its tire.
Five … ten … fifteen minutes later the lights went on again. Josephine came into the main room. Her mouth was ajar, opening a deep gap in her face. The Eye watched her, appalled. She was going to scream! He waited, his hands on his ears …
Christ! She was yawning!
He almost laughed. It was incredible! Jesus! That thing lying there in the kitchen wasn’t really a corpse at all; it was simply an annoyance, a drunken boyfriend who had dropped in on her in the middle of the night and passed out on the floor. She’d let him sleep it off, and in the morning he’d apologize and leave. And in the meantime she would just tidy up a bit.
There was blood on her legs. She wiped it with a handkerchief.
The Bach concert continued.
She threw the handkerchief into the fireplace, removed her tan jacket, draped it neatly over a chair, opened a closet, took out a sheet.
She went back into the kitchen, wrapped Brice in the sheet, dragged him outside, rolled him off the rear porch and into the thickets.
The Eye retreated into the trees.
She found a shovel in the carport, dug a hole on the edge of the clearing, and buried him.
Now she was on her hands and knees, naked, scrubbing the kitchen floor. There was a smear of red on the refrigerator. She wiped it clean with a glove, soaped it, scoured it.
The Eye listened. She was whistling ‘La Paloma.’
She went to the sink, washed the knife, dried it, put it back into the buffet drawer, poured a shot of Gaston, gulped it down, washed and dried the glass.
She took a clean towel from the pantry and went through the lodge, wiping away fingerprints. Then, still wearing her gloves, she took a bath. She dozed in the tub for a half-hour. The moon was high. Whippoorwills were singing all up and down the hillside. In her half-sleep she removed one glove and put her bare hand on her heart.
The Eye’s throat was rank with thirst. He slipped into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. There was a spot of blood on the wall. He dabbed it with a rag. They were supposed to be going to Miami, so it would be days – probably weeks – before Brice was missed. Good enough. The grave was a risk, though. The freshly turned earth was a giveaway. And rats or foxes might uncover it. He took the shovel from the carport. He dug up the body, hauled it into the woods. He dug another hole in a patch of ferns. He rebuffed it, refilled the hole, came back to the clearing just as she climbed out of the tub. She shaved her legs with Brice’s razor. That reminded him – he had to buy a new razor. She went into the other room and dropped the gloves into the fireplace.
He put the shovel back in the carport.
She dressed, putting on the boots and tan outfit. She packed the Italian shoes and her blue wedding frock in the overnight case. She took another long swig of cognac and then put the bottle in the case, too. She went into the bedroom again, pulled the billfold from the pocket of his coat, counted the money, stuffed the bills into her sack. She found some more bills in his trouser pocket, at least two or three hundred, and threw them into the sack. All his loose change, too – quarters, nickels, dimes, everything. She wiped the billfold with the edge of the bedspread, flipped it to the floor under a chair. She lit a Gitane, picked up her case and sack, came outside. She locked the door behind her.
The Eye ran down the hill and got into the Accord. He drove off toward St. Vincent. A few minutes later the Porsche appeared behind him. He accelerated.
She followed him all the way to Fort Vale, then passed him.
During the instant the two cars rolled abreast of each other he glanced at her. She was looking straight ahead, oblivious of him.
They got back to the city at seven thirty. She left the car in a long-term parking garage, having changed wigs during the trip. As she walked down Carter Street she was Eve Granger again.
The Eye followed her, abandoning the Accord with vast relief.
She went directly to the Hotel Concorde. The doorman saluted her. ‘Morning, Miss Granger.’
‘Hi!’
She went into the lobby. Voragine waved to her. ‘What d’you say, Miss Granger!’
‘Good morning,’ She took her key and walked into an elevator.
The Eye floated in, sat down in the lounge. Voragine came over to him. ‘I saw Flatfleet in Scipio’s last night,’ he said. ‘He told me you was in Montreal.’
‘I just got back.’
‘You catch that guy?’
‘Not yet. I’m convinced he’s still here.’
‘There ain’t nobody at the hotel with the initials J.R.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything. What about R.J.?’
‘R.J.?’
‘You know, backwards. They often do that when they change names. Just switch the initials around.’
‘Yeah, that’s an idea. I’ll take a look.’ He ambled away.
Eve Granger checked out at nine o’clock. She took a taxi to the air terminal. During the ride uptown she removed her wig.
She bought a one-way ticket to Chicago, paying for it in cash. Her name now was Dorothea Bishop.