CHARLIE CUNNINGHAM WAS IN the grip of one of the oldest of mankind’s notion, atavistically alive even in the grip of the plastic cynicism of the twentieth century.
He wanted to die at home.
He was sure he was going to die. There was so damn much blood … all his. He was going to die, and it didn’t even seem like such an unattractive idea. Death. The big sleep. The long good-bye. Dying was fine by him. Save a lot of trouble.
It was dying on the street he wanted to avoid. It would be like dying in the desert with the vultures circling lazily overhead. Only here in the city the vultures would be human, at least barely human, and they’d be thorough. He couldn’t bear that. They’d take everything. His Phi Beta Kappa key … Damn, he’d always thought he’d be buried with the stupid key.
It was impossible to calibrate the pain in the different parts of the body. As he hobbled along in the rain, his blazer soaked, his pants clinging, his shin on fire, his ankle swelling, one finger probably dislocated, holding a dirty old handkerchief to what was left of his ear … as he staggered along, his whole body was crying out for the blessed relief of death. His nose was probably broken, first from the fall over the fence, then in the fall down the stairs from her apartment. His ear throbbed like the kidney stone he’d never had.
He’d never be able to look another bird in the eye!
Christ, it had been like something born in the fevered mind of Stephen King in a vengeful mood. A creature from the stench and fire of the Bottomless Pit.
He hobbled onward, homing in on Perry Street.
Thunder crashed. Sheets of rain hung in the glow of the streetlamps. The streets were slippery with oil and water, lights reflecting like comets.
He stopped and vomited into a trash can near St. Vincent’s Hospital, and the violent cleansing of his guts seemed to clear his head. It wasn’t far now. He could make it.
He slipped and fell on his knee going up the stairs to the front door, but in the symphony of pain, his knee added only another random note. It was late, and he was stranded in the anteroom of Hell, knowing that he’d overreached himself and had been brought low in this insane attempt to … to … well, whatever he’d thought he was accomplishing. Fuck it, he had to do something about his ear…
He got the door to his apartment open and fled to the bathroom, turned on the light and almost fainted when he saw himself in the mirror. He dabbed at the sheared edge of his earlobe and it didn’t feel so hot. He took four aspirin and wiped the blood and rain off his face. He ran a comb through his beard, then went back to inspecting the ear. The bird’s beak seemed to have cauterized the wound to some extent. If he didn’t look at it too closely, he might be able to keep from vomiting again. He made a bandage of gauze from the medicine cabinet and taped it on with adhesive. It took a lot of tape, and he wound up with a bigger bandage than Van Gogh. He took two more aspirin because the first four had had a vaguely pleasant effect. Then he washed his other wounds and limped to his closet for clean slacks, shirt, underwear. He changed in the bathroom. Maybe he would live. But now he had to start thinking about the unholy mess he was in. He needed a drink for that. There was no way things could get worse.
He went into the living room and turned on the light.
He made a funny little noise. He’d made a good many that evening. But this was the funniest.
He was staring directly into the eyes of a man—middle-aged, short gray hair, wearing a suit—who was sitting on a love seat with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
Charlie Cunningham sagged onto a chair and bit his sleeve to keep from crying out loud.
There was no point in spending the night staring at somebody who just stared back. For fifteen minutes, or forty-five minutes, whatever it was, Charlie Cunningham sat and thought. Everywhere he looked he felt utterly out of his depth, yet his basic plan seemed secure still. He could still do what he’d set out to do.
But what was all this razzmatazz around the edges?
It all started with this damn Blandings woman…
Now he was missing a piece of his own personal ear, the murder plan was no longer a secret, he felt like a man headed for a body cast and traction, Celia Blandings was bound to go to the police with his earlobe as evidence, and there was a dead man sitting in his favorite chair.
And who were the two men who’d been following Blandings?
It had gone way, way beyond the bad dream stage.
He girded himself, got up, and went over to the corpse. How in the name of sweet Jesus was he going to explain this?
Naturally the man’s billfold was in his hip pocket, which necessitated a prolonged bout with the dead weight in order to extract it and learn his unwanted guest’s identity.
Vincenzo Giraldi. Of Queens.
It meant nothing to him.
He needed help. There was only one place to turn, like it or not.
Well, he didn’t like it. He didn’t like the feeling of his brain unraveling. His nervous system was fraying. When he thought about things, his psyche began to hurt as much as his body. Impossible. Who was this guy? He frowned at Vincenzo Giraldi. Why wasn’t this idiot home asleep in his own bed? Why couldn’t anything—ever—be easy?
He called Lefferts, who sounded sleepy. Cunningham had some trouble making himself understood. Finally the editor had grasped the essentials. “You sound funny, man,” Lefferts said. “Hey, you know, it’s the middle of the fuckin’ night—”
“You’re right, I do sound funny. You’d never believe how funny I feel. You get the manuscript?”
“Yeah, sure, fine, no prob—”
“Well, everything’s going crazy. People are getting killed. Just sit on the damned thing and … well, if anything happens to me, go for it, publish the damned thing, call press conferences, call Walter Cronkite and the Times and whoever owns CBS this week.”
“Boy, you really sound weird, Charlie. You on something or what?”
“Listen to me, asshole, I’ve got a dead guy I don’t know from Adam sitting in my favorite chair, and he’s staring at me. I gotta get outa here. Tell Julie Christie my last thoughts were of her.”
“Hey, you better get some sleep, man—”
Charlie Cunningham hung up on him. He put on his raincoat and took an umbrella from the closet doorknob. He sighed and said good-bye to poor Vincenzo Giraldi, then limped into the street in search of a cab.
The door to the Bassinetti house stood open, the rain blowing in across the entry hall carpet. Cunningham stopped at the last moment, his finger poised above the bell. Why was the door open? He closed his umbrella and pushed through into the hallway. He heard some music. He went quietly down the hall and stood in the doorway.
She stood by the couch, watching him. She’d been crying, but had apparently stopped. She put her finger to her lips and motioned with her other hand to be quiet, beckoned him into the room. She handed him a heavy statuette of the Goddess Kwan-Yin, which usually decorated an end table. “Hit him,” she whispered, and nodded toward the deck. A man was kneeling beside a body. Hell, just another body. Her voice was insistent, almost hypnotic, commanding him. There was something smeared across the front of her nightgown, but all he could see were her large erect brown nipples poking through her wet nightgown. He had no idea what was going on, but nothing seemed to make any difference anymore. He felt her hand on his back pushing him across the room. The kneeling man hadn’t looked up. She kept pushing until he stood beside him.
“Hit him!” she hissed.
He lifted Kwan-Yin above his own head and brought it down as hard as he could in his weakened condition. Just before impact the man’s head turned a fraction of an inch and Cunningham saw that he wore an eye patch.
There was a solid thud as the statuette whacked into the head. The man slumped forward and sprawled across the body of the evening’s second corpse.
Cunningham sat down while she got him a brandy. It didn’t seem like a good time to tell her that he had a corpse of his own waiting at home. He socked back the brandy and she poured him another. She stood before him, hands on hips, waiting for him to shape up. She’d slipped into gray wool slacks, a silk blouse, and a heavy sweater that hung below her hips.
“Who’s the dead man?” he asked, throat and belly on fire with the brandy. “Who’s the other guy, for that matter? Who killed Pepper?”
“The dead man killed Pepper,” she said. Her eyes bored into him, as if she were looking for cracks in his nervous system.
“And who killed him?”
“I did.”
“Jesus! Who did I hit?”
“A man called Greco. He was here this afternoon with a Miss Blandings.” Her voice was festooned with sarcasm. “Ring a bell?”
“Oh, God
“I have no idea what he came here for tonight, and I certainly didn’t have time to find out. But he had to be nosing around for the same reason they were here for this afternoon. Now listen to me, Charlie. We’ve got to stick to our plan … and we’ll have to get rid of this body. We must get it down to the car and dump it somewhere—”
“What about Greco?”
“I don’t know, I’m thinking. He doesn’t look awfully good at the moment. You probably fractured his skull. First, we get the other body out of the way—”
“Christ, how can you be so calm?”
“Because I’m a homicidal maniac, you fool. Now let’s get moving before Greco wakes up.”
The corpse provided a considerable challenge. With his various injuries, Cunningham found himself unable to carry or drag him for any distance. There was no strength in his wrist. And the damned woman had looked at his ear bandage and refused to ask him what happened. Cold-blooded bitch …
“This isn’t working,” she said. “You’re hopeless. We’ll have to drop him—”
“What? Drop him where?”
“Over the railing, of course. Quickest way.”
Cunningham shuddered. He peered over the railing. Far below, the rain bounced and danced on the shiny bonnet of the Rolls.
“Come on,” she said, “hurry up.” She was tugging at the corpse of Irwin Friborg. He reached down, got the dead weight under the arms, hoisted, then slid his grasp down to the hips and lifted. His ankle gave way under the weight, he slipped forward into one of the huge pots and lost control of the late Mr. Friborg, who plummeted over the railing. His arms flailed in the rain like a bottom-heavy bird trying to take flight. Then his descent was abruptly interrupted by the driver’s front fender of the Rolls. Friborg bounced sluggishly and landed on his back in a deep puddle, one arm outstretched. He looked like he was waving good-bye.
Cunningham slowly followed her down the back stairway, trying to ignore her orders to hurry up. The rain was heavier, if anything, and he was getting soaked again.
“My God, look, just look at that fender!”
“I didn’t aim him,” he shouted back, still trotting carefully behind her.
“If you had, you’d have missed!” She unlocked the trunk and ducked back out of the rain. “Come on, what are you waiting for? Get him into the trunk!”
He pulled and tugged, and dripping with sweat as well as rain, finally lifted the legs up into the cavernous interior and slammed the lid. The traffic on the FDR was so loud it seemed to be running in one ear and out the other. He came back to her, leaned against the wall, out of breath.
“What about Greco?” he asked.
“Come back upstairs …”
Gasping, he followed her. “What are we gonna do?”
She stood in the kitchen, dabbing at her face with a fresh towel. “Kill him,” she said.
“I won’t do it,” he said, shaking his head.
“He knows about us. He knows everything—why do you think he came here? Now don’t argue with me, you’ll bloody well do as you’re told.”
She went into the dining room, picked up the .45, held it out to him.
He took it. He watched her go to the deck.
“Oh, damn!” she said, stamping her foot.
He went to the deck and looked down and sighed with relief.
Greco was gone.