As soon as I’d locked my apartment door, I found myself trembling uncontrollably. I wasn’t alone! I pulled out my gun and checked my apartment thoroughly. It was empty. Still wearing my overcoat, I sat down and just felt profoundly stupid and guilty. Why the hell did I ever choose to descend into that miserable underworld and put myself in such a clearly awful situation. What the fuck was I thinking!
I punched myself in the thigh and, before I could do anything worse to myself, went into my kitchen and started cleaning the shelves. I started with the canned and bottled items, wiping them off then washing down the shelves and putting them back in place. Then I worked my way through the seasonings rack, cleaning as I went. Finally I dusted and reorganized the pots, pans, plates, and silverware.
I basically had this OCD thing under control except for mild flare-ups now and then. On New Years Day. after things had gone poorly with O’Ryan, I’d spent three hours reorganizing all the soaps, sprays, lotions, and pharmaceuticals in my bathroom, feeling better even as I did it.
This time it was different. As I cleaned, I kept remembering the moment when O’Flaherty had shoved his claws down my pants. It literally felt as if he had inserted some awful part of himself inside me. I shattered a crystal champagne glass my grandmother had brought here from the old country. That was enough. I carefully swept up the shattered pieces and ran a bath.
I sat in it and had a long cry. Then, just as I was beginning to drift off, I saw O’Flaherty’s bony fists coming down on my face, his broken claws scratching along my belly. Bolting upright, I sent a splash of water over the sides of the tub and onto the floor. After I’d dried off, I lay down and dozed for a while.
When I awoke and thought about the afternoon’s events, I realized with a start that after the attack in the elevator, when I was exhausted from the beating—and perhaps liberated from self-consciousness—I must’ve finally had some kind of mystical experience. How else to explain the way I was drawn to O’Flaherty’s window where I spotted the tip of what turned out to be his knife? It truly felt as though the spirit of Diana had shoved my head out of there to show me the bloody weapon. I was too tired even to be excited by this, so I took a sleeping pill and slept right through until early the next morning.
When I turned on my computer, there were various local news stories with headlines like NYPD POLICEWOMAN NARROWLY ESCAPES DEATH CAPTURING KILLER! and a vague but sensationalized description of what had happened last night, along with my official NYPD photo.
As I thought about Nessun O’Flaherty and the postcard of Diana in his room, I wondered if, consciously or unconsciously, he was giving us a clue to what he’d done. I went back to a web site about Greek myths, intending to read more about Diana, but ended up finding something even more interesting. Because his name was so similar to our suspect’s, I was drawn to the story of Nessus. He was a centaur—half-man, half-horse, who abducted Deianera, the wife of Hercules. But before he could get away with her, Hercules shot him with an arrow. While the lecherous Nessus was dying, he told his would-be victim that his blood would ensure that her husband remained faithful to her. Later, when she feared Hercules was losing affection for her, she spread this blood on her beloved’s shirt—it ended up killing him.
I’d been ordered to rest, but I felt too restless, so I went downstairs to the yoga studio across the street. It was just before noon, and several students were rolling out their mats. The Renunciate waved me in.
He looked at the bruises on my face. “What happened?”
“An accident,” I said dismissively.
“I have to teach a class, but—”
“I was wondering if you could give me a little advice,” I said awkwardly.
“Sure.”
“I’m feeling a little . . .” I spun my hand and let out a deep breath.
“Uprooted?” The room was filling up.
“Yeah. I was wondering if there was something I could do for that . . .”
He thought a moment then calmly said, “Wear red. It will comfort you.”
“Red?”
“Yes, it’s the color of the root chakra. Visualize it around you.”
I just stared at him, thinking I could’ve just left last night’s blood on my face.
He closed his eyes peacefully. The room was full of seated women who seemed as calm as purring cats. His Oms were a signal for me to back out of the sacred space.
Since I couldn’t do a workout, and felt too tense to stay at home, I decided I might as well go see if O’Flaherty had confessed.
By the time I got to the precinct, the capture of the Blonde Hooker Killer had gone viral. News vans lined the sidewalk, waiting for the latest briefing. Apparently O’Flaherty had refused to say a word last night until he had been taken to the hospital, where a doctor insisted that he be sedated and allowed to sleep. So it wasn’t until a couple hours ago that they finally were able to start interrogating him.
The bruises on my face must’ve bloomed into a colorful bouquet, as everyone did a double take. Because I’d been dumb enough to get sacked from behind and almost killed, the sergeant and others treated me like a hero.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Bernie asked when I got to Homicide. “You were injured in the line of duty. Go home!”
I said I wouldn’t have any peace of mind until I knew my pain had earned us a confession, and asked, “Did he lawyer up?”
“He declined a lawyer because he is one,” Annie said. “We’re pretty pissed he got a good night’s sleep, though. We should’ve had his statement by now.”
She and Bernie led me into the surveillance room, where we could watch the interrogation from behind a one-way mirror.
Because Bernie had nearly drowned O’Flaherty in his own crapper, he had to leave the interrogation to others. Alex, Barry, and the ADA who’d been appointed to the case were taking turns questioning him.
On the wall behind them, Annie had taped up large photos of the carnage he had wrought—the butchered bodies of Mary Lynn MacArthur, Denise Giantonni, Nelly Linquist, and the others.
“It’s a simple question.” We listened as Alex spoke softly. “Why did you kill them?”
“You're worried about a couple of two-bit hookers while an entire city is being murdered. How about going after the real criminals!” O’Flaherty hissed.
“And who would that be?” the ADA asked.
“These entitled fucking rich kids who have invaded New York because their own homes are sterile shells. And what’s the first thing they do? They destroy our city and replace it with the kind of boring, suburban shit that made the rest of this country so meaningless.”
Annie silently offered me an ice cube wrapped in a napkin, which I pressed in turn to my cheek, nose, and lips. Like me, O’Flaherty was flamboyantly cut up and bruised. He was babbling on about how his community had been systematically decimated by the invading army of Yuppie ants, whose money was manipulating the police, politicians, and developers, and how all he was doing was trying to defend it.
After a half hour of this, it was clear that the interrogation was stalled. He simply wouldn’t own up to the killings. Fortunately, we probably didn’t need a confession—the fact that we had the weapon pretty much sealed the case—so Bernie received permission from the captain to see if he could get a result.
Before going inside though, Bernie rummaged through the communal refrigerator and grabbed a dried-out American cheese sandwich that had been unclaimed for a week now. He tipped out the pens and pencils from the mug on his desk and filled it with the burnt dregs from our coffee pot and added some skim milk long past its expiration date.
O’Flaherty flinched as his tormentor from last night entered the room and placed the offerings on the table before him.
“From one lapsed Catholic to another, here’s my little act of contrition,” Bernie said, taking a seat across from him. “When you shot at my partner, some poor young girl, I’da been well within my rights to splatter your brains on the elevator wall. But I didn’t, did I?”
O’Flaherty began wolfing down the moldy sandwich. In between swallows, he told Bernie he was sorry for what he had done to me. He glanced at the one-way glass, and I knew he was looking for me.
“Look, Nessun,” Bernie began. We’ve got you on this. It’s an open-and-shut case. You’re staring six murder one charges in the face. In other words, lethal injection. If you confess, maybe you can plead diminished responsibility and escape the death penalty.”
“That’s not the way I see it,” O’Flaherty said. “The way I see it, you got me for assaulting that Amazonian kneecapper, but that’s it.” He took an authoritative sip of the burnt coffee.
“We got the murder weapon from your room, with various blood samples and your prints all over it.”
“That’ll be thrown out of court! It was an illegal search. You had no warrant!”
“You’re not stupid,” the ADA said, “so let’s not play games.”
“Maybe so,” O’Flaherty replied calmly. “But as you well know, I have alibis for some of those killings.”
“So what are you saying?” Bernie asked.
“Voluntary manslaughter. Murder two, tops. Twenty years with a parole option.”
The ADA responded that if O’Flaherty worked with them, providing iron-clad alibis for the times of the murders he said he didn’t commit and confessing to the murders he did, then he’d take it to the DA and see if he could get him a deal.
“I only killed two girls,” O’Flaherty said bluntly. “and I only did them in self-defense.”
“Sure,” Bernie replied. “They attacked you while they were unconscious, so you chopped their heads off.”
“All the butchery was after they’d died. They didn’t feel any of it.”
“Okay, so what did you do to them while they were still alive?” the ADA asked.
“I had a little routine, really nothing more than a harmless chat. Verbal foreplay. In fact, I never even had sex with any of them—it was all just talk. Been doing it that way for years.”
“Years?”
“Suffice to say, I’ve been with a lot of girls. If you ask some of the regulars they’ll tell you I was always a gentleman.”
“So why did you ‘butcher’ two of them, as you put it?” Bernie asked,
“What you need to know is: Number one, I had no premeditation. It was a crime of passion, so to speak.”
“If it wasn’t premeditated,” began the ADA. “then how do you explain using sleeping pills—”
Bernie raised his hand to silence him.
“Number two, they went calmly to sleep, without any fear or suffering. And number three, all the messy stuff took place after their spirits had left their bodies.”
“Just walk us through it,” Bernie said. “Who was first?”
“Mary Lynn was the first.”
“Why’d you kill her?”
“She tried to run off with my disability check so I . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Where’d you meet her?” Bernie asked.
“Some sordid agency I found in the back of one of those disreputable newspapers. I asked for a tall blonde and they sent her.”
“Where’d you get the credit card?”
“From some yuphole at Starbucks.”
“I don’t understand,” Alex spoke up. “So you had the girl come up and give you a blow job, then you killed her?”
“Please!” O’Flaherty groaned in disgust. “They’re all infected with HIV. I don’t want to get AIDS. I don’t even shake their diseased hands. I just talk to them.”
“So what did you do, pray together?” Bernie asked.
“Freud said that the female libido is essentially masochistic while the male libido is sadistic, and this dynamic has always intrigued me. I start by asking them about their past, what drives them to degrade themselves with strange men.”
“Does this little routine ever involve Marilyn Monroe?” Barry spoke up for the first time.
“Is that some kind of joke?” O’Flaherty shot back. “Are you mocking me?”
“Not at all,” Barry said earnestly. Although O’Flaherty had evidently read about the additional murders, we had managed to keep the Marilyn Monroe details out of the press.
“So Mary Lynn tried to rip you off and you fought back?” Bernie said, returning to the narrative.
“That’s right.”
“You killed her.”
“Yes.”
“And which one was Nelly?” Bernie said looking at the gruesome pictures behind him.
“She was the one with the tear drop marks near her eyes,” O’Flaherty pointed to the photo of her. “Crappy prison tats. That tipped me off immediately that she was no good.”
“And Denise . . .”
“Yeah.”
“And Tabetha,” Bern said as almost an afterthought.
“Who?” O’Flaherty said.
“You cocksucker, you twisted that girl’s head right off her fucking shoulders and you’re gonna sit there and say who?”
“I just didn’t hear her name, goddamn it!”
“The one at the Fabio.” Bernie leaned forward so he was right in the man’s face. “You twisted that poor kid’s head off and you’re gonna tell me why.”
“Why?”
“Yeah, why? What the fuck did she do to you?”
“Nothing, she was dead. I just got tired of cutting their heads off. Takes a lot of work to butcher a body.”
“That would explain these two, Jane and Caty,” Bernie tapped at the other photos. “Their heads were still attached.”
“See, this is the kind of shit that pisses me off!” O’Flaherty hissed. “I’m being straightforward with you and then you start throwing in every whore in the city who winds up dead.”
“Fine, let’s just talk about your gang of four,” Bernie pointed to their photos. “Because it’s four killings you’ve now confessed to, not two. You expect us to believe they all mugged you, or what?”
“I’d perform a little test. I’d leave my wallet out, go to the bathroom.”
“Sounds like entrapment,” Bernie said.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought when the NYPD did it to me. But then when it held up in court, I figured, what’s good for the goose . . .”
“Okay, so if your cash was missing when you came back, what then?” Bernie asked.
“Did any of the prostitutes not take your wallet?” Barry asked delicately.
“Yeah, some didn’t.”
“If we could get their names,” Barry continued, “it might help your case.”
“I didn’t exactly stay in touch.”
“Getting back to those four, the ones you say ripped you off,” continued Bernie.
“With them, I’d . . . get justice.”
“By cutting their heads off?” Alex asked.
“No! I told you I never hurt anyone. I’d simply offer them a bottle of beer laced with sleeping pills—if they didn’t drink the beer, that would be the end of it, because I don’t believe in violence. But guess what? They always drank it.” he said with a snicker. “Then I’d just talk until they passed out.”
“And then you’d strangle them?” the ADA asked.
“They had ripped me off. I was merely defending myself and my property.”
“Fair enough, but what was the purpose of this gruesome display?” Barry pointed to the post-mortem tableaus on the wall.
“After someone’s dead, what does it matter?”
“Well, years from now criminologists are going to be debating the significance of the numbers you carved into their limbs, as well as the fact that you always arranged the body in the same exact position,” Barry said, elevating O’Flaherty’s crimes to legendary status.
“Call it late Abstract Expressionism,” O’Flaherty said, refusing to be drawn.
“From your window I could see the new Times Square complex,” Bernie said tiredly. “You must’ve hated watching those damn buildings going up.”
“So you figured it out,” O’Flaherty replied. “Bully for you.”
“And you’re a lying piece of shit,” Bernie said, leaning into him again. “You didn’t kill those girls because of your empty wallet. You did it because you’re a fucking faggot who hates women.”
“Our SRO was purchased by a developer three years ago,” he replied. “We stopped them demolishing it for a while, but now we’ve only got a couple months left, then we’re all out on our asses. Do you know, some of the residents have been living in that neighborhood as far back as the 1920s? Anna Hurley in room 306 was in Times Square when they announced the end of World War Two. Just ’cause rents are going up shouldn’t mean you can just roll up the past and chuck us all into homeless shelters in Queens!”
“What the hell does all this have to do with you butchering hookers?” Alex asked.
“High crime rates kept the property values down for years,” O’Flaherty replied.
“Boy, Jane Jacobs woulda given you a handjob out of sheer gratitude,” Bernie said straight-faced. “You’re a political fucking prisoner, fighting to preserve the integrity of old New York.”
“You’re goddamn right I am!”
“There are just a couple small problems . . .”
“Like what?”
“For starters, the very first hooker you killed,” Bernie said.
“What?”
“Crystal was murdered back in the early ’80s, when the neighborhood was still a big stinking shitpile.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Crystal Hodges. And don’t tell me you don’t know her. I checked her records and she lived in your shitty, rat-infested tenement on Forty-fifth Street before you even went to jail.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“They didn’t have DNA testing then, but guess what, Crystal had sperm in her and we still have that stored, so when we test your DNA against that sample . . .”
“Even if what you’re saying were true, any specimen would’ve undoubtedly been corrupted by now. But it was a good bluff. Kudos to you, Junior.”
“We’re getting a warrant to take a DNA sample from you,” the ADA fired back.
“Her pimp killed her.”
“Oh, look at this! Suddenly he remembers a twenty-five-year-old case,” Bernie commented. “They charged her pimp, it’s true, but he went to jail for another murder. And three months later you got sent away for what turned out to be twenty years. Tell me there is no God.”
“The murder rate in this city was through the roof back then,” O’Flaherty responded. “Good luck proving I killed some hooker trash all those years ago.”
“You’ve confessed to four murders,” Bernie said. “And I bet we can convince the jury of the last three murders.”
“You want to accuse me of seven murders,” O’Flaherty said with a grin, “Be my guest. When my buddies line up to say I was with them on most of those dates, it’ll be a lot easier to beat all the charges.”
At that moment, I realized we had a photo of the knife that was used in the Jane Hansen murder—one of the two killings Bernie had suspected were done by someone else. It was visible in one of the jpegs that had been sent to Miriam’s web site. I went to Bernie’s desk and flipped through the file until I located the hard copy. The knife handle in the photo didn’t look anything like O’Flaherty’s weapon.
But I shouldn’t have been disappointed. Bernie had been saying for a long time now that two killers were involved. Still, we’d hoped that it was all over.
Annie was taking a call at a neighboring desk. When she hung up, I told her what I’d discovered. She said she had just got a phone call from the desk sergeant. O’Flaherty’s first official victim, his step-daughter Daisy Leary, whose statutory rape had got him jailed over twenty years ago, was waiting downstairs. We called Bernie out of the interrogation room to tell him, and he instructed Annie and me to try to extract any useful information from her.
As soon as I saw the stepdaughter, sitting blankly over a can of Diet Coke, one big mystery was solved. She was a tall blonde, now heavyset and middle-aged, with deep, dark circles under her bright blue eyes. And because she was a tall blonde, all the victims were as well—which in turn was why I had gotten this assignment.
Annie thanked Daisy for coming in, and introduced me as one of the investigators on the case.
“What happened to you?” Daisy asked as we walked, looking at my bruises.
“Your stepfather,” I said.
“Nessun did that to you?” she asked nervously as Annie dashed before us looking for an available conference room. They were all occupied.
“You’re not charging Nessun with those midtown murders, are you?” Daisy asked. To my surprise, she seemed to have some sympathy for her former rapist.
“We know he did them,” I said.
“Oh my God . . . What do you want from me?”
“It was your case that led to his initial arrest.”
“But he was never violent to me. Not once. He probably would’ve gotten off if he didn’t hit that cop. That was what got him jail time. He always had problems with authority.”
“So he didn’t forcibly rape you?” I asked.
“Come on,” Annie said, spotting Bernie’s office as the only empty room that offered some privacy. “Let’s go in here.”
“He didn’t actually rape me,” she said, taking a seat. “What happened was, he started dating my mother. I was 16, stupid and lonely, and we ended up getting involved.”
Apparently the details of the case had gotten screwed up in the retelling. I had gotten the impression she was only thirteen at the time.
“So you started a consensual relationship with him?”
“It’s complicated.” She looked to the floor.
“Well you must’ve had sex with him if he was charged with statutory rape.”
“Let’s just say he took advantage,” she said simply.
“How did he take advantage?” Annie pushed.
“He used to watch me.”
“Watch you undress?”
“Yes, but . . .” she paused, “See, I knew he was watching me, and I kept doing it. Then he’d give me a few bucks here and there. He was a peeper, which was probably why he lived near Forty-second Street.” Before the Internet, Times Square was the closest you could get to a 24-hour supply of porn.
“Look, if he went to jail on false charges . . .”
“They weren’t entirely false,” Daisy said.
“Maybe you should just tell us what happened. That’ll save us all time.”
“I was young and dumb, and the ADA kind of pressured me, so if you want me to say more, I’m gonna need some immunity,” she said directly.
Annie excused herself while she made a call to the ADA upstairs. When she came back, she said he’d checked O’Flaherty’s file and discovered the statutory rape charge initially brought against him years ago had ultimately been dropped due to insufficient evidence. Daisy never even testified, so there was no question of her being prosecuted for perjury.
Annie resumed questioning her: “According to your mom’s statement, she found several thousand dollars in your drawer that she said O’Flaherty had paid you.”
“That was a lie. I mean, it wasn’t from sex.”
“You made all that money from his peeping?”
“Sure.”
She was being too protective of the sleazebag, I thought. She had to be hiding something herself.
“You helped him, didn’t you?” I asked.
She flinched, then recovered. “Helped him with what?”
“He told us everything about the girls,” I replied playing up what I knew. During our first meeting with O’Flaherty he had all but said that he collected runaways, probably from trawling the Port Authority Bus Depot right down the block from his house.
“So he did a little chickenhawking now and then,” she said. “Big deal.” The fact that she knew the lingo made me realize how sleazy she really was.
“He was a pimp?”
“No, but he’d . . . find girls for pimps.”
“How many girls are we talking about?” Annie asked.
“Who remembers?”
Suddenly her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. She looked like she’d seen a ghost. Following her sight line, I saw that she was staring at the little wooden framed picture of Juanita Lopez Kelly, Bert’s young wife from whom he’d contracted HIV.
“You remember her?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said softly, and reflected for a moment. Then, without prompting, she continued, “We were heading into the bus depot one night just as she was leaving. She had this little knapsack on her back. She was trying to cross the street when she fell right into this huge puddle. The drain was stopped up so it was more like a fucking lake. And it was cold out. Nessun went right in after her. He was a real gentleman that way. She was sopping wet. She said she had just got off the bus and didn’t know anyone here. I mean, she might as well have been wearing a bulls eye. Nessun invited her to come home with us to dry off.”
“Then what happened?”
“She had no job, nowhere to go, and she was just a kid, like me. Ness would let the girls stay in an empty room in the basement and I’d hang out with them for a few weeks. Become friends. And after a while he’d bring pimps by.”
“So how exactly did it work? Were they raped or drugged?”
“Hell no, it was all on the level! The girls were given a tour. The guys were like, ‘Look what I’m doing for my ladies.’ Pimps would drive them around and say shit like, ‘This is the sweet life. I love them and they love me back.’ Easy money. Nice clothes. Coke and clubs. If they went with the pimp, Nessun would get a quick grand and he’d throw me a couple hundred.”
“How do you live with yourself?” I asked.
“It wasn’t like I was pulling any triggers. I just went along with it and got some cash. We never forced anyone to do anything they didn’t want to, and that’s the truth!”
“So how’d your mother catch you?” Annie asked.
“I thought Nessun had shortchanged me over one girl. I was sure we was alone so I was cursing and yelling at him when suddenly my mother walks in. I hushed up, but it was too late. She asked me if I was fucking Nessun and I said no, which was true. But she took me to a doctor who examined me and saw that I wasn’t a virgin.”
“But it wasn’t Nessun?”
“No, I had a boyfriend by then. Still, my mother asked if Ness had raped me, and I thought I’d be helping him if I said I had consented. She went nuts. I swore he hadn’t fucked me, but it was too late. She was the one who said I had to claim it was statutory rape. Between losing my mother and sacrificing Nessun . . . Well, I didn’t think he’d go to jail. But I sure as shit didn’t expect him to do what he did then.”
“Which was?” Annie asked.
“Some smartass rookie cop started pushing him around, so Nessun waited until the officer was talking to my mom and then he jumped on him, knocked him to the ground.”
“He didn’t hit the guy hard, just knocked him over, really. But when they dropped the rape charge, some other detective who was there said that he’d seen Ness hanging out at Port Authority and knew he was up to no good. He was the one who pushed for the assault charge on Ness.”
Looking at the file Annie was reading from, I saw her finger pointing at the name. Kelly, Bernie’s old partner, who was working in Vice at the time, was the detective.
“Did Nessun ever make any attempts to get ahold of you over the years?” Annie asked.
“At first he did. For the first year or so, while we were still living in the neighborhood, he sent threatening letters from jail. So Mom moved us out of the city down to Asbury Park, in Jersey. That was over twenty years ago, and I never heard from him again after that. I moved back up here a few years ago when my second marriage ended.”
Annie had me stay with Daisy Leary while she went to discuss what we’d discovered with the ADA. When she came back she told Daisy the statute of limitations had run out on any possible charges against her for involvement in Nessun’s chickenhawking activities, and she was free to leave.
Daisy stood up and looked at each of us in turn. “For the record, Ness was never mean to me. He never forced me or any of the others to do anything, and that’s God’s honest truth.”
After she left, Annie said, “You did a great job with the interview, Gladyss, but I want you to do me a favor. Don’t mention any of this to Bernie.”
“Why?”
“I can see him putting two and two together, figuring out it was Nessun who turned Bert’s wife into a hooker. And then going on to blame him for Bert’s death, with all the aggravation that will bring. But Bert already knew Juanita was a hooker when he met her.”
Just the similarity of their unusual names should’ve cued me into it earlier, but it wasn’t until Annie made that remark that it all started to fit together. The discovery that it was Nessun O’Flaherty who had led Detective’s Kelly’s wife into prostitution had an odd parallel to the Greek myth I’d had just read, the story of the Shirt of Nessus. The fact that Juanita Kelly had contracted AIDS and passed it along to Bert was reminiscent of the strange way in which Nessus’s blood had ended up killing Hercules long after the centaur himself had died. But how could O’Flaherty have retro-plotted such a complex revenge? He knew his Greek mythology—he’d been reading Bulfinch the other day in Starbucks when I first met him—but back then, how could he have known that one particular runaway of the many he had carefully inducted into the whirlwind life of whoring would contract AIDS and subsequently marry a cop who had been instrumental in getting him sent to prison, and that almost twenty years later the virus would end up killing Detective Kelly? It sounded like the plot of a tacky sci-fi novel.
“I’m still blown away that it was Bert Kelly who was behind Nessun’s arrest,” was all I could say. Just to explain the parallel myth would require more energy than I had.
I stayed in Bernie’s office until he’d finished interrogating O’Flaherty so I could break the news that the knife used in the Jane Hansen murder was a different one. While I was waiting, I picked up the Duffy file and looked closely at the autopsy photos. I tiredly compared them to the dolled-up jpegs that had been uploaded to Miriam’s web site. That was when I figured out why there were traces of adhesive on Caty’s face.
“Bernie, the knife in the jpeg photo of the Hansen murder is not the one we found at O’Flaherty’s place. It has a completely different kind of handle.”
He sighed.
“Also: it’s a poor man’s facelift.”
“What is?”
“The adhesive residue on Caty’s Duffy’s face.”
I showed him the emailed image. “See, she looks younger in the jpeg than in the autopsy photos. That’s ’cause he taped her face back.” I held up the two photos for him to compare.”
“Holy shit! But why?”
I felt slightly vindicated, since he had spotted (and I had initially missed) the differences between the jpegs we’d been sent of Jane Hansen’s murder scene and the crime scene as we found it. I had no answer for his question. Solving the other killings would have to wait for another day.
I wished him a good night, put on my hat, scarf, and coat, and walked outside. A crowd of reporters and cameramen filled the street like a hostile surprise party, starving for any further news on the Blonde Hooker Killer. I retreated back in and went out the rear exit and walked east to Eighth Avenue. I was still too frazzled to deal with yoga and meditation. As I walked down street after street, I couldn’t turn off that perpetual loop of film in my head, reliving being beaten and terrorized in that filthy fucking elevator.
I kept recalling the sensation of O’Flaherty’s knobbly hand shoving its way down the front of my pants and his grimy fingernails ripping into my crotch. The only memory that could push it out was that of the moment when I felt my gun’s muzzle pressed to my skull and that bladder-releasing click that I was sure would be the last sound I’d ever hear.
A van turned sharply in front of me, nearly running over my toes. I punched the side of it and screamed, “FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!” If the driver had stopped to argue, I’m sure I would’ve pulled my Glock. When I reached the next corner I stopped and took some deep, steady breaths, telling myself, You are above this.
When I arrived home, I started surfing the Internet looking for more stuff about Greek mythology, something that might explain the coincidences I’d spotted between the Nessus/Hercules myth and what I’d just learned about Nessun O’Flaherty and Bert Kelly. The closest I could come up with was something about a theory of archetypes developed by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Apparently he believed that different types of personality recurred through the ages, and he used certain myths to categorize these character types. But none of them really shed much light on my concerns.
As I was reading further, I heard rapping on the wall and Maggie shouting, “Gladyss! Turn to Channel Two!” When I turned the TV on, Leeza Gibbons of Entertainment Tonight was beginning her news piece:
“A scandal of epic Hollywood proportions spilled onto the red carpet today during the premiere of Fashion Dogs. It had begun earlier this week when movie starlet and disinherited heiress Venezia Ramada turned up in a sex video that has gone viral on the Internet. But scandal turned to scuffle when her co-star Noel Holden and her fiancé, the film’s director Crispin Marachino, exchanged blows when the two met at the grand opening.”
The onscreen footage showed a reporter approaching some young starlet who was strutting between velvet ropes. The garbled sound of two men yelling could be heard in the background. The camera swung around and slowly focused on Crispin, who was squaring off against Noel. The taller, more muscular leading man gave his director a poke in the belly, which sent him to the ground. Others raced over to separate the celebrity pugilists.
“Oh shit!” Maggie said, entering my apartment and seeing my checkered face. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“Shush!” I said, swept up in the story.
“Although neither party explained why punches were thrown, rumors flew back and forth about whether Venezia’s unidentified partner in the sex video was either Noel Holden or Crispin Marachino. However, such reports were quickly denied by spokesmen for both camps. After the premiere, a red-eyed Venezia was seen getting into Holden’s limo.” As Leeza said this, they showed footage of Noel and Venezia kissing passionately in the back of a shiny white vehicle.
As the show headed to commercial, Maggie asked again, “So who the hell hit you?”
“I got into a fight with the murderer.”
“Wow, are you okay?”
“Yeah, but that’s the least of it,” I began.
Before I could say another word, she ran to my desk and sat at my laptop. “Let’s see which one’s nailing Venezia.” She was Googling the sex tape.
“They’ve both dated her,” I replied, closing the lid. “So why does it matter?”
“Crispin would’ve told me if he’d done it,” she said.
I remembered being woken up a few nights ago and hearing the director’s grating voice accompanied by her shouts coming through her wall. Since this was the first time she had confessed to their being together, I asked, “So when did you two start seeing each other?”
“After that party at Miriam’s house, he escorted me home. We’ve dated a couple of times since.”
Though the guy struck me as kind of sleazy, I really didn’t mind. But I was pissed at myself for feeling jealous at the sight of Noel kissing Venezia. I’d only agreed to see him in the first place because I thought he might be the murderer, and it was clearly dumb of me to have gotten involved any deeper. Oddly, it was all because of Tinkerman. If the old animal doctor hadn’t hung himself, leaving me feeling guilty and vulnerable on that particular night, I would never have let my defenses down and gone to Noel’s apartment. Right then and there, I decided to end things with the flaky movie star.
Maggie said she had to see the Venezia tape for herself and went back to her apartment.
The effect of the painkillers I’d been given at the hospital the previous night had thinned out sufficiently that my facial bruises were starting to throb. Stupidly I hadn’t bothered to fill the scripts the doctor had given me, and I couldn’t face going out again tonight. I took a big swig of vodka and lay down in bed. But the alcohol only sped up my system and made me flush. Unable to watch TV, or call Noel, the asshole, I broke down and got my laptop. Unable to resist, I found a web site offering Venezia’s pornographic performance, and after paying with my VISA card, I watched the brief, poorly lit footage of a faceless male having frantic sex with the brainless starlet. It might’ve been Noel but I couldn’t be sure.