“You are legally required to take a few days off.”
I got up the next morning to find Bernie had left a message on my voice mail. It went on: “You’re listed as injured. If O’Flaherty finds out you were back at work the next morning, he can use it in court to argue that he never really assaulted you.”
He was right. I needed to calm down and heal. Recalling the Renunciate’s advice, I went through my wardrobe in search of red clothing. My root chakra desperately needed grounding. Before I’d located more than a pair of crimson socks, my cell chimed. It was the great star of stage, screen and credit-card-accessible Internet, calling from an eastbound plane to ask if I’d heard about the runway fiasco at the premiere of Fashion Dogs.
“Yeah,” I said trying not to sound like I cared too much. “So whose prick is starring in the Venezia video?”
“Oh, you don’t think—”
“I’m just asking. I mean, I saw you get into a fistfight with Crispin.”
“It was totally bogus,” he said in a whisper. “The son of a bitch orchestrated the whole thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t think it’s a coincidence that the sex tape happened to hit the Internet just before the film premiered, do you? It was all a publicity stunt.”
“You’re kidding.”
“What I don’t know is whether Venezia’s career will survive this. If anything, she was the injured party. I mean, I found the whole thing vulgar. But she’s always so out of it, she doesn’t seem to know or care.”
“So you didn’t sleep with her?”
“Of course I slept with her. I told you about it.”
“But you weren’t in the video?”
“Hell no.”
“Did you sleep with her this weekend?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I don’t understand how getting into a fight with your director makes good publicity.”
“Well you heard about it. It got top billing in all the tabloids. And after all, the plot of Fashion Dogs is about a love triangle between the three of us. It’s all about trying to make people believe that whatever happens up on the screen is really happening on the street.”
“Why did you have to make out with Venezia in the car?” That had looked incredibly genuine to me.
“We didn’t make out. She was crying and I was consoling her. I told you, we still have to appear to be together for the movie. Remember?”
Of course I remembered, but I was still jealous.
“But I also have to show that I’m still best buddies with Crispin tonight, when we’re all at this ridiculous fashion thing, the Rocmarni show. Both Venezia and I will be on the catwalk. Why don’t you come by? We can hook up afterwards.”
“I don’t know if you’d want to be seen with me. I got a little bruised up yesterday,” I said.
“What happened?”
“If you’d flipped from the gossip page you would’ve read that we caught the Blonde Hooker Killer two days ago.”
“I didn’t have time to read anything. Tell me what happened.”
“We were on a stakeout. The place was freezing so I went out to get coffee and as I was coming back the asshole jumped me from behind.”
“You’re kidding me!”
“He knocked me down just as the elevator door closed. I was stuck fighting him alone in there for like ten minutes, and—”
“Oh my God! Are you okay?”
“I got punched a couple times and scalded with coffee, and then he put my pistol to my head and pulled the trigger.”
“You are fucking kidding!”
“He missed, but the long and short of it is, I don’t think I’m ready for any public appearances.”
“Come on, you have to be there.” He really sounded as though he wanted to see me. “Maggie will help you, won’t she.”
“Maggie?”
“Yeah, Crispin said he invited her.”
I sighed. “What time is the show?”
“Eight o’clock.” It’s at Bryant Park. I’ll make sure there’s a ticket waiting for you at the door.” Even as I wrote down the details, I wondered what the hell I was doing.
I spent the entire morning sitting at home, trying to relax. Shallow breaths, calm visualizations, soothing teas, red (well, off-red) clothing—nothing was helping. When I wasn’t reliving my near execution, or fingernail rape, I found myself obsessing about whether Noel had actually cheated on me with that silicone-upholstered tramp.
At 2 p.m. I got dressed and again went to the precinct. When I walked into Bernie’s office he was talking to Barry.
“Are you deaf, girl! Bernie shouted. “I told you, you have the fucking day off! Get the hell out of here!” He started coughing.
“Relax, no one will know. I’m going batty just sitting at home.”
“Shit!” He took a hit from his Ventolin inhaler. He needed a break much more than I did. The stakeout that night in O’Flaherty’s meat-locker must’ve given him pneumonia.
“Okay, you’re here cause you left something at work,” Bernie said, giving me an instant alibi. “But think of something specific just in case he finds out, ’cause I guarantee he’ll ask you that in court.”
With that technicality covered, Bernie confirmed what we already knew. The prelims had come back, and although we had no fiber, hair, or prints that connected him to any of the crime scenes, the blood on his knife was enough to pin four of the six murders on him. As I expected, neither Jane’s nor Caty’s DNA was on the blade. What’s more, O’Flaherty had solid alibis for the nights of those two murders.
Bernie took yet another squirt from his inhaler, then continued. “O’Flaherty claimed that when he first realized someone else was mimicking his M.O., he tried to quit his little murder spree and let the new guy take the fall. Ultimately though, he just couldn’t stop himself. They never can.”
“That’s probably why he started binge drinking,” Barry threw in.
“The thing that’s weird is that our new killer has put his own spin on the murders,” Bernie said. “He’s taping up their arms and legs, and carving the old numbers on them, but he’s getting girls with bigger boobies, he’s taking them to more upscale hotels, and he’s leaving their heads on while slicing their tits off.”
“And he’s posting pictures of what he’s doing,” I added.
“Yeah. See, that’s what I was talking about. O’Flaherty is old school, he wouldn’t do any bullshit like that.”
“So the new guy is not quite copycatting, is he?” said Barry. “The big question is, why.”
“And his latest vic isn’t even a hooker,” I pointed out. “We don’t know that Jane Hansen was, either. He could start killing anyone now.”
“That’s the first thing we got to figure out,” Bernie said. “We need to find out why he killed Caty Duffy.”
“Well, you established a possible motive for her death,” I reminded him.
“That’s right!” he remembered almost happily. “The bitch was cheating on him with Mr. Reynolds in accounting. Get me the husband’s number.”
Since Caty was clearly not one of O’Flaherty’s victims, we definitely needed to talk to her husband. Bernie called the widower and asked if he could pay him a visit. After he hung up he said Mr. Duffy told him he was at work because it was too painful to stay at home alone. I could identify with that, but Bernie found it suspicious.
As we were walking out the rear door of the precinct to the Lumina, Bernie had another of his sudden coughing fits. After he finally spat out a disgusting gob of green phlegm he said, “This guy tries to blitz me, it’ll be your turn to shove his head in the toilet.”
While we were driving up to Duffy’s publicity firm on Madison Avenue, I asked Bernie if he really thought we could get anything from the widower.
“Considering the fact that she was seriously cheating on him, we’d be pathetic if we couldn’t,” he replied. “Spouses are always offing each other. Jealousy, betrayal, shared property—custody problems if they got kids, and the Duffys do. That shit turns love into a minefield.”
Hearing the bitterness in his voice, I couldn’t help thinking that poor Bernie was reviewing his own recently failed marriage.
“You know, I can see him killing his wife and trying to make it blend into the serial killings, but do you really think Frank Duffy killed Jane Hansen first to cover his future tracks, and then killed his own wife?”
“No, Hansen’s husband probably killed her,” he kidded, adding more seriously, “We have to do a face to face just to be sure.”
“Are you really going to tell him his dead wife was having an affair with another man?”
“Hell no. I want to see if he suspected anything.”
We parked in a loading zone and went up to Duffy’s office. Bouquets of flowers and condolence cards littered his room. Frank Duffy was a small man with graying sideburns. He looked permanently drained of happiness. If he had killed his wife, or for that matter if he knew she was cheating on him, he was doing a great job at covering it up.
Before he even closed his door he asked us a rush of raw questions—How was she killed? Was she raped? Did we have any suspects? Bernie threw him a curve ball, claiming that we had a suspect in custody. He was either trying to throw the widower off-guard, or he was holding back until Duffy could be completely cleared. Then he delicately mentioned Caty’s mutilation and poor Mr. Duffy broke down, nearly collapsing onto the carpet. Bernie helped him back into his swivel chair while I went to get him a cup of water. When Frank regained his composure, Bernie asked him about his marriage.
“We used to meet at her office, and commute home together, but they had her working later and later at night. Whenever she was alone, Caty would walk west on the north side of Forty-second to Port Authority, where she’d grab the bus to Union City.”
“Do you know if anyone at work ever walked her to the bus?” he asked.
“Maybe her lover,” Frank said casually. “She was having an affair.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“She told me,” he said. “It wasn’t her first.”
“How long have you been married?” Bernie changed his tone.
“Just over ten years . . . She told me she had met some young hotshot at work.”
“Did she tell you anything else?”
“She said he was married with a kid, too. Neither of them wanted to leave their families.”
“Didn’t that piss you off?” Bernie asked.
“Officer, please, we’re realists.”
“Really?” Bernie said, leaning forward, “so being at home, changing your kid’s shitty diapers, and picturing some guy banging your wife—that realistically didn’t bug you?”
“I cheated on her a couple of times and never even told her about it. Do you think it would’ve bothered her?”
“Guys tend to be a little more possessive,” Bernie said.
“What can I say? We loved each other but, however much we wanted to be, we just weren’t intimate anymore, so we had affairs. We agreed to be discreet about it.”
“Do you think there’s any chance the other guy killed her?” Bernie asked. “Maybe he actually did want her to leave you and run off with him.”
“Guys usually don’t want their mistresses to leave their husbands, only the mistresses want that. No, he had exactly what he wanted: a wife, a kid, and an afternoon lover.”
“I gotta tell you, all this would just burn the shit out of me,” Bernie confessed.
Duffy sighed. “I wish the kind of passion and loyalty I felt toward Caty would’ve lasted forever. We were together for over fifteen years. For ten of those years she was my wife as well as my lover, but gradually the sex came to a halt. We tried to fix it, we really did, but we finally decided that at least we could be honest with each other. We amended our vows and agreed we would stay together and try to hold on to what we had. You can always find another lover, but a best friend and a loving mom for your child, those are a lot harder to find.”
The New York Times on Duffy’s desk was open to a full-page advertisement for Fashion Dogs. As Bernie asked a few final questions, just formalities really, it occurred to me that it was only after my evening with Noel at his apartment—specifically after I had told him details of O’Flaherty’s crimes—that the two copycat murders had occurred. Bernie thanked Mr. Duffy and said he’d be in touch when there was any news.
When we returned to the precinct, I was able to look at the evidence logs forensics had compiled for the Hansen and Duffy crime scenes. Among the dozen or so new prints, fibers, and other microscopic details that had been painstakingly lifted from the two scenes was a size eleven shoe print—Noel’s size.
Caty Duffy had been killed earlier the same evening that Noel saw me, just before his big trip to L.A. For someone so in control and in a weird way asexual, Noel was oddly virile that night. It was after I’d heard that Tinkerman had killed himself that he called and insisted he had to help me deal with my guilt, as though he had a lot of personal experience coping with it. Then I remembered that he had painfully recounted that weird incident in which, as a child, he had unintentionally maimed a cat. Strangely the victim who would die the following morning was named Caty. I’d been taught at the academy that murderers were always leaving subconscious traces of their guilt behind. Could removing her breasts be some kind of parallel for his amputation of the cats’ paws?
But why? Why would he do this? Other than the fact that he was fascinated with murderers—which was probably true of most Americans—Noel never displayed any violent tendencies.
I couldn’t fully dismiss him as a suspect, and yet I was supposed to meet him tomorrow for his publicity stunt on the catwalk. What had I gotten myself into?