Little Death by the Sea (12 page)

Why am I always finding myself out after
dark? she wondered breathlessly. She marched up the sidewalk,
redistributed the weight of her purchases and wished she had
remembered to carry her mace can.

She glanced up at her apartment window and
was glad to see that the living room light was on. Elise is awake
anyway, she thought, and, immediately, was struck by the pleasant
anticipation she realized she’d been feeling all day long. It was a
nice feeling. That she would come home to find Elise, perhaps with
a pot of tea ready? She had felt a little apprehensive in shopping
for clothing for her sister. In the end, after more than an hour of
scouring rack after rack of juniors, misses, and designers’
separates, she’d decided on simple tubular dressing: a knit skirt,
a crew-neck top and a turban. Each in a raspberry wine color with
navy piping.

Maggie unlocked the front door to the
building and shifted her parcels again. The take-out sack of
Chinese food was pressed close to her chest and the aroma of
steamed dumplings and mu shu pork rose lightly into her
nostrils.

As she stepped through the building’s front
entrance, Maggie realized how badly she wanted to tell Elise about
Laurent. Even if he hadn’t really taught at the Sorbonne and
M.I.T., he was still more intelligent than half the gaggle of
accountants and lawyers Maggie had dated last year. She wanted to
tell Elise how mysterious and sweet and sensual Laurent was. From
his heavy, expressive eyebrows to the subtle twitch of his full
French lips. Maggie found herself nearly jogging down the corridor
that led to her apartment.

3

“And that kind of frequency looks good to
you?” Gerry gazed out his office window into the black pool of
nighttime Buckhead. He tossed a pencil in his hand.

“It looks excellent to me, Gerry.” Patti sat
opposite Gerry in his office. Her blonde hair was teased into a
frizzier version of what Gerry was sure was popular these days. Her
make-up was a little toned down today, though, he decided, and she
looked, if not pretty, at least, not awful. “This buy will
guarantee saturation, practically.”

“Practically.” The voice came from the
doorway.

Gerry looked up at Pokey Lane standing in the
hall, smirking.

“Ah, Pokey,” Gerry said. “Leaving for the
night, are you?”

“What do you mean, ‘practically’?” Patti
Stump swung her bony legs into a crossed ankle position, as if
aiming them at the art director in the doorway. “What do you know
about frequency? Give me a break.”

“Hey, come on, Patti...” Gerry made a
calm-down gesture with his hands. It was too late in the day for
this shit.

“I know as much as any first-year assistant
buyer would know, darlin’. That if you spend a fortune on
drive-time and every other kinda prime air time that you can
saturate just about anything. ‘Practically,’” he added
sarcastically.

“How much are we spending, Patti?” Gerry
looked up from his hands.

“I don’t believe this!” Patti shrieked. “I
have a budget. Does anybody remember the budget?”

“Yeah, that’s what the client is gonna wanna
know.” Pokey shook his head.

“Settle down, Pokey,” Gerry said. “In fact,
if that’s all for the day...”

“I don’t know what your problem is,
ass-hole,” Patti snarled at Pokey. “But I—”

“Hey! Hey! That’s not necessary, Patti,”
Gerry said. “Come on, let’s pack it up for tonight, what do you
say?”

“I’ll say we should pack it up, when a little
monkey-faced layout artist can tell me how to buy time—”

“I said, that’s enough, Patti!” Gerry wanted
to reach over and stuff her red floral scarf down her throat. “So,
knock it off, both of you. Pokey, kindly take off, will you?” Pokey
shrugged and gestured to Gerry in a catch-ya-later-buddy motion
that served to further infuriate Patti in its attempt at male
confederacy. She folded her arms onto her chest and glared at the
retreating art director.

“Jeez, Patti, don’t let him get to you, will
you?” Gerry rubbed his eyes and leaned back into his chair. “It’s
really to late to get much more work done, what is it? Eleven
o’clock?” Let’s knock off, shall we? I mean, what is it between you
two? Are you, like, ex-lovers or something?”

“Don’t be revolting. The man’s an ape.”

“Yeah, well, stranger things have happened in
my experience. Anyway, tomorrow, all right?”

“Gerry.” She paused dramatically, slowly
getting up from the swivel chair that faced Gerry’s desk. Her face
was flushed, unpleasantly so, and her eyes were wide and fixed on
Gerry. Her long fingers groped unconsciously at the loose cotton
belt that hung from her waist.

He found himself bracing against her
words.

“Gerry, I would like to talk with you about
something that’s personal.”

“Patti, did you talk to Maggie? You know I
have all the women in the office talk with—”

“I know you do, and I did. She was
useless.”

“I see. Well, can it wait?” In his present
state, he’d probably give her a thirty per cent salary increase
just to be able to be in his car and on his way home within the
next fifteen minutes.

“I don’t feel it can, no.”

“All right.” He stood up and began packing up
his briefcase, hoping this would at least be moving them both in
the right direction: out the door.

“There is someone in the office who is making
it difficult for me to perform my job.”

“Do you mean Pokey?”

She made a face.

“No. No, I mean difficult in that I find
myself distracted as a result of our close working
relationship.”

Omigod. Gerry snapped shut his briefcase and
looked up at the woman. She was dressed in some awful polyester
double knit skirt suit. A tall woman, she, nonetheless, looked like
she was swimming in the bulky material and Gerry was struck by how
warm she must be in it. “Let’s continue this talk in the elevator,
shall we?” He nodded toward the door.

She picked up her own briefcase at the foot
of her chair.

“You know, Patti, these things happen all the
time.” He knew he sounded idiotic. “But we’re expected to behave
professionally in any case, you know?” I mean, we need to transcend
our feelings and emotions and get on with getting the job done. I
mean, what would the industry be like if we all just sort of
behaved according to how we felt at the time? Like, if I hated a
particular voice talent but he was the best one for the job, I’d be
shooting myself in the foot, right?” I’m blathering, he thought, as
he jabbed his finger at the down arrow on the elevator. “So, we all
have to, you know, do things and work with people we don’t—”

“Why do you keep inferring that I’m having
trouble getting along with someone?” Patti’s brittle voice stabbed
at the airspace between them with no air conditioner’s hum to
softly blanket its abrasiveness. “I am attracted to someone in our
office. I think they may be attracted to me too.”

“Well? Then, what’s the problem?” Gerry
punched the down button again.
Damn, stupid elevators
!
Has the building turned off the damn, stupid electricity or
what?

“The problem, as I’m sure you know only too
well, Gerry, is that I’ve fallen quite hopelessly in love with
you.”

4

The Macy’s shopping bag sat in a collapsed
heap next to Maggie’s purse on the floor of her living room. Maggie
took a quick breath and expelled it slowly. She had checked the
entire apartment, at first calling merrily: ‘
Allo! Ma soeur! Ou
ête vous?
’ and then, in a panic. Elise was not in the bathroom,
the tiny galley kitchen or the bedroom. Maggie had even checked the
closets, just in case it turned out her sister had returned to her
even madder than when she’d left. No Elise. No note.

Maggie walked into the kitchen. Either Elise
had not eaten lunch or she’d washed up expertly after herself, an
idea Maggie found difficult to believe. Her mind raced: she had
talked with her shortly after eleven a.m. and then had not been
able to get through. She tried not to think of Gerard. Tried not to
think of the torturing bastard again with his claws into Elise.
Frail, pale, sad Elise. Maggie’s hand rested on the phone and her
heart pounded up into her throat. It wasn’t possible that Elise
could be taken from her again! That she could appear and then
disappear without a vestige that she’d ever been here. No record,
no memorial.

Maggie pushed the playback button on her
answering machine and listened quickly to the handful of messages:
two telemarketing reps, her mother, (‘why don’t you and Brownie
come to supper on Saturday, darling? Your father wants to cook
out.’), and a hang up. Maggie replayed the messages to try to
determine when the hang-up had occurred. Her mother must have
called after work, or she would have called her at her office. (Why
don’t people tell you the bloody time they called?) The
telemarketing calls were the last two calls on the tape, which made
sense from a marketing stand point: dinner time, the best time to
catch people in and with their guards down. The hang-up was the
first message. Precise time unknown and not determinable.

In exasperation, Maggie turned away from the
machine. What the hell difference did it make anyway? Elise hadn’t
left a message on the machine, probably didn’t even know how.
Maggie scanned the living room for any signs of a struggle. There
were none that she could see. The living room was tidy, each
cushion in its place, the smell of Chinese pancakes and plum sauce
slowly beginning to mix with the scent of lavender potpourri on the
coffee table.

It was while she was standing in her living
room, holding her breath, that she could hear the noise. It had
certainly been there all along, but she hadn’t picked up on it
until she stood still. A rumbling hum of voices was coming from
somewhere nearby. She moved to the door, aware of the loud ticking
of her living room clock, the muted gurgling of the pipes in the
kitchen. She held the door open and listened. Now she could hear
the staccato burping of police walkie-talkies, the velvet mumblings
of a gathering crowd. It had been there all along, but blanketed in
her excitement to see Elise and to tell her about Laurent, or
perhaps she had delegated it to the part of her brain that chalked
up all inexplicable background noise as television programs seeping
through her thin apartment walls. She stood and listened. This was
no television program.

A man appeared in the hallway and walked
slowly toward her in the semi-darkness. He seemed to drag his feet
painfully as he approached her. Maggie watched him come, knowing,
in the way people do when the unthinkable is unfolding, why he was
coming, knowing what he would say.

His name was Bill and he lived down the hall
from her. She’d only nodded at him a few times, although she had no
reason to believe he wasn’t worth knowing. No reason except he
always looked like he was just coming off a bender, or about to
begin one. Bill had that washed-out, drugged-out look of too much
recreation, not enough fun.

“You’re not gonna believe what’s going on
upstairs,” he said to her as he passed her in the doorway. “Two
cops are upstairs right now, you know? in the second floor landing.
They got a dead friggin’ body up there, man. Some woman bought it
in our building, can you handle it?” He whistled, and continued his
shambling walk to his apartment door, not bothering to see her
reaction.

Maggie retreated back into her apartment and
closed the door. She staggered to her couch and sank into it, her
heart a heavyweight of emotion. She stared out the narrow French
doors that led to the small stone balcony overlooking Peachtree
Road. She could see the tips of the lone mimosa tree just outside
her apartment, its stubborn, flamboyant blooms unfurled amongst a
stand of the ubiquitous Georgia pine, a radiant reminder of
nature’s individuality, its irony.

Her eyes, dry and wide, slowly lowered to
look at the Macy’s bag of gladrags, her sister’s triumphant
homecoming gown. The bitter melancholia blurred her eyesight until
the little fleck of gold caught in the intricate pattern of the
coral Isfahan rug beneath her feet nearly jumped out at her.

Maggie reached down to touch the little
glittering droplet. She picked up the gold charm in trembling
fingers.

Chapter 8

1

Chief Detective Jack Burton stood in the
kitchenette and stared out the little curtained window into the
inky night. For some reason, his claustrophobia hadn’t kicked in
tonight. The apartment was small, the rooms cramped and
over-decorated but he still felt able to breathe. He glanced down
at the small plastic bag containing the charm. It was a gold Scotty
dog.

Elise Newberry’s body was found at the bottom
of the side stairway leading to the second floor of the apartment
building. She had been strangled with a strong cord and stabbed.
She’d evidently put up a fight. Had been, Burton surmised, in the
process of running for her life when she was cornered on the
staircase. It was not a tidy, surprise murder. Elise Newberry had
seen her killer coming.

“The guy was pretty sloppy.” Kazmaroff’s form
filled the kitchen doorjamb. Burton detected a whiff of male
cologne. Dave Kazmaroff had the sort of natural, hazy good looks
one would expect to find packed into Ralph Lauren summer clothes:
tanned-faced, rugged grins, stark-white polo shirts, khaki slacks.
Solidly built and lean, he also had a kind of natural grace to his
every movement.

His partner didn’t come from money, Burton
knew. He just looked as if he did. Maybe that was the initial
reason Burton hated the man, but he’d gathered a stream of other
logical defenses by now to make himself believe that his animosity
was not personal. Kazmaroff was too impulsive, too swayed by the
flamboyant, too impatient with the tedium of their jobs. He even
spoke in headlines, it seemed to Burton.