“DID YOU CALL NINE-ONE-ONE?” Bernhardt asked. It was an automatic question, a required question.
A useless question. Too late.
A lifetime too late.
She lay on the floor in front of the couch. Her open eyes were sightless; her mouth was agape. Already, her skin at the neck was cool to the touch. And, yes, the room reeked with the smell of her body’s wastes. As if it were a scene conceived by a director of B movies, her leather tote bag, open, spilling bottles of pills, lay on the couch beside her. One of the bottles was open; some of the pills from it had spilled out on the carpet beside Diane’s claw-crooked hand. Her fingernails, Bernhardt noticed, were bitten to the quick.
Poor little rich girl.
“Dale called, nine-one-one,” Carley Hanks’s voice was hardly more than a whisper.
“What happened?” As he asked the question, he focused his gaze on Carley: the living, not the dead. Across the room, pale and ill, Carley’s boyfriend—Dale—sat slumped on a straight-backed chair. His eyes were glazed. He looked like a badly beaten fighter, between rounds.
“As soon as you guys left,” Carley answered, “she got that goddamn tote bag from the closet, and started popping pills. Three, four pills, maybe more.” Numbed, she shook her head. “Then she started on the whiskey. A lot of whiskey.”
A lot of whiskey, before the couple arrived. And a lot of whiskey afterward. And pills. Quaaludes, probably. Or worse. Pills and alcohol, the killer combination.
“How’d you know—” Bernhardt broke off. But she understood the question:
“I don’t know what woke me up. Maybe nothing. I had a dream, I think that was it. And then—” Helplessly, her eyes returned to her dead friend, lying at her feet. At that moment, outside, the sound of a siren began.