Nowhere to Hide (16 page)

An odd phrase, that, she thought, in the light, or darkness, of things. She supposed it had been unconsciously deliberate on her part that she’d left things as they were. With the evidence of the violence Gail suffered wiped clean, some of the energy of that night had dissipated as well.
However well meaning, Ellen found herself resenting the landlady’s interference.

"Thank you, Mrs. Bloom," she said. "That was kind of you."

"No trouble, dear. Oh, by the way you had a caller earlier."

"Oh?
Who?"

"He wouldn’t give his name. He just said he wanted to talk to you.
Said he’d catch up with you later."

"What did he look like?"

"He wore one of them trench coats," the landlady said.
"And dark glasses."

Nineteen

Though the doorman had promised to pick her up at ten, it was after eleven when his silver Honda finally pulled up in front of the building, and nearly noon when they arrived at the police station. Other than some of the players, little had changed about the scene since yesterday, or the day before that. The place was a bedlam.
Phones clamoring, men shouting to one another.
From somewhere came the tap-tapping of a typewriter Ellen couldn’t see.

Clearly not everyone had entered the computer age. Laughter rang out from the far corner of the room where a black woman sat on the edge of a desk, showing off long, shapely legs clad in net stockings for the benefit of the policeman who was admiring the view with hard, bemused eyes. As if sensing competition, the woman turned and gave Ellen a slow once-over. The policeman’s eyes followed.

She passed by a girl of about twelve sitting slouched on a bench, her arms crossed defiantly over her adolescent chest, an expression of surliness on her face. Beside her, a dark-haired woman who might once have been pretty sat stiffly, her own face impassive.

The place smelled of sweat, stale cigarettes, and human desperation. She looked around at the greasy walls hung with yellowing wanted posters, sprawling maps stuck with blue-headed pins. It was like a scene out of some forties’ cop movie.

Sergeant Shannon sighed perceptibly as she entered his office, A.J. in tow. He gave the doorman a cursory glance. He looked at his watch. "You’re late, Mrs. Harris."

"Heavy traffic," she joked, surprising herself that she still could. She introduced the doorman. Shannon nodded. Turning on a long-suffering, though not unsympathetic smile on Ellen, he said, "Obviously, you had a change of heart about going home today. No doubt you had a good reason."

His expression told her he didn’t for a second expect one, so it gave her a measure of satisfaction to see his interest perk considerably when she told him why they were there.

Hefting his bulky frame from behind the desk, the detective crossed the room and closed the door on the din outside, leaving only muffled sounds to be heard, and moving shadows to be seen through the opaque glass.

The doorman’s growing unease made Ellen wonder for the first time if he’d always operated on the right side of the law. Her gaze traveled to his hands—big hands—quite capable of bouncing an unruly drunk from the premises of the
Shelton Room
.
Or strangling a small woman to death.

Had she really heard Gail whisper, "Yes, Ellen, yes," at her shoulder? Or had she imagined it? If she hadn’t, could it have been the doorman she was accusing, rather than some mysterious stranger he’d made up?

Stop it!
My God, she was beginning to suspect every man she came in contact with. Surely A.J. wouldn’t be here with her if he were Gail’s killer. Yet, hadn’t she heard of murderers who actually took part in the search for their victims?

She wondered again about the man who came to the apartment last night, the man who refused to give Mrs. Bloom his name. She hadn’t mentioned him to A.J., or Sergeant Shannon. There seemed little point. Since the man planned to "catch up" with her, she would know soon enough.
Plenty of people wore dark glasses, didn’t they?

"Mr. Booker is quite right, of course," the detective was saying, leaning his weight against his desk, beating out a slow tattoo on its edge with his pen, "about the glasses presenting something of an obstacle in coming up with a good likeness. But since it’s all we have at the moment, naturally we’ll go with it." He looked vaguely sympathetic at Ellen, who sank weakly into a chair. "You never know," he said. "Could be they’re prescription glasses. Maybe someone will recognize him and call in."

But Ellen knew he thought she was grasping at straws. She didn’t care; at least he was going to follow up on it. "That’s the general idea, Sergeant," she said. Soon after, leaving A.J. in the hands of the police sketch artist, Ellen took a cab to the CBS studios on
Fifty-seventh
Street, near Eleventh Avenue.

Twenty

Two hours later, a young girl wearing granny glasses was clipping a microphone to the lapel of Ellen’s blue wool jacket. "If you wouldn’t mind just snaking that wire down the inside," she smiled, rolling the wad of gum she was chewing over in her mouth, giving off a faint scent of Juicy Fruit.

If not for the tangle of cables, the cameras, lights and technicians, Ellen might have been sitting in someone’s den or library. Two big, comfy chairs angled toward one another, fronted by a long coffee table centered with a bowl of silk daisies. To complete the illusion, shelves of books rose up behind her.

The camera rose and dollied in like some strange robot, posturing, seeking her out. Catching a glimpse of herself in the monitor, it startled her to see how pale and drawn she looked, despite the heavy makeup.

Carol Braddock had been standing talking to one of the cameramen. Now she approached Ellen, smiling warmly. As she positioned herself in the other chair, clipping on her own microphone, Ellen could see her mentally preparing herself, buckling in like a seasoned pilot, waiting for the signal for take-off.

She seemed to be lit from the inside, sleek platinum hair coming just to the tops of her bejeweled ears, a froth of peach scarf at her throat, brows expertly arched over clear, green eyes.

Ellen had been deliberately focusing her attention on the interviewer. Now, seeing the cameraman’s hand go up, she felt trapped by more than just the heat and glare of the studio lights. Her heart was hammering and her palms were slick with sweat.

"Just follow the right light," the interviewer had coached her.

Ellen wanted to run.
What the hell am I doing here? I’m a private person. I hate being "out there".
Gail is the performer in the family. No, Gail was the performer, she reminded herself. Just hold that thought. Hold onto it tight.

"Okay?" the interviewer asked, smiling at her with some concern.

Ellen nodded weakly.

"No need to be nervous." She gave Ellen’s hand a reassuring squeeze. "You’ll do just fine. This is your chance, Ellen," she said, her voice as intimate as if they were old school chums. "Someone may have seen something. Someone may know something."

Someone does, she thought. And he just might be watching. She was counting on it. It was part of the reason she was here.

"Remember, Ellen," the woman said, lowering her voice conspiratorially, "
this
madman took something very precious from you. Concentrate on that. Your sister’s life is over, and your own will never be the same. Isn’t that what you told me?"

"Yes," Ellen said, sensing an air of unholy excitement in the woman. Not that she was complaining. It was
her own
decision to do this. No one had forced her. She’d been, in fact, quite prepared to plead to go on. Fortunately, it hadn’t been necessary.

Ellen adjusted her jacket, being careful not to dislodge the microphone. Feeling clammy inside her clothes, she let out a long, shuddery breath as the cameraman held up four fingers, then three, two, one...

"Good evening. I’m Carol Braddock." The newswoman’s green gaze was steady in the monitor, her voice clear and resonant. "It has been twelve days now since Gail Morgan’s nude body was discovered by her landlady in the bedroom of her semi-basement apartment on New York’s East Side. The singer was raped, beaten and strangled." Each word was a tiny hammer blow against Ellen’s heart. "Police are saying little…"

Ellen watched part of the interview with Sergeant Shannon in which he grimly told reporters there were no new leads in the case, but that the investigation was continuing. There was a brief shot of Gail on stage at the
Shelton
, shifting quickly to the building where she’d lived, zooming in on the window in the alley through which her killer had gained entry. Then Gail’s body, draped with a sheet, being solemnly carried from the building on a stretcher, being lifted into the waiting ambulance, while on the snow-packed sidewalk a small crowd looked on. The ambulance pulling away, not speeding, no need now, sirens silent.
A strange dreamlike quality to the scene.

The next clip was one Ellen had not seen before, of Mrs. Bloom, orange hair wisped out from beneath her scarf, standing on the steps of her apartment building, wringing her hands, a dozen microphones shoved in her face. "...such a lovely girl... everyone loved her... no trouble..."

Ellen heard her own name spoken as if through a howling wind tunnel.

"One can’t begin to know the degree of suffering Miss Morgan experienced at the hands of her fiendish killer," Carol Braddock said, her voice emanating with talk-show sensitivity. "But one thing we do know; her suffering is over now. Gail Morgan is at rest. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for psychologist, Ellen Harris, an only sister of the victim. For Ellen, the tragedy lives on." Carol Braddock shifted expertly in her chair to face Ellen.

"Ellen, I know this is a difficult time for you, to say the least, but can you share with our viewers what you’re feeling right now. I know this must seem an absurd question when the answer should be so obvious, and yet perhaps it will help her killer to understand the terrible pain he has caused you, will help him to—"

"He doesn’t care about that," Ellen said incredulously, snapping a look at her, forgetting for an instant she was being seen by millions of people.

Carol Braddock went perfectly still, silent.

The camera moved in for a close-up, filling the screen with Ellen’s face.

"If you could look into his eyes right now, Ellen," Carol Braddock’s manner and voice intense, persuasive, "what would you say? What do you want him to know?"

As Ellen shifted her own gaze to look directly into the camera, all her nervousness gradually seeped away.
He was watching. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. She knew it with an absolute certainty. In that moment, the cables, the technicians, even the woman beside her, receded to some far place in her mind. There was just herself and Gail’s killer.

Out there.
Watching.
Listening.

She spoke slowly, deliberately, in a voice so icy calm she almost didn’t recognize it was her own. "You think you are God," she began, "with power over life and death. But you are less than nothing. Deep down, you know that, don’t you? My sister wasn’t expecting you. You were hiding in her closet. Coiled there, like the cowardly, slithering thing you are. Why don’t you come after me, you bastard? I’ll be waiting for you."

~ * ~

"I didn’t know you were going to do that," Carol Braddock said tightly as Ellen was getting into her coat. "I wouldn’t have agreed to let you go on if I’d known."

She was clearly agitated. She’s frightened for me, Ellen thought, and realized she had misjudged her. "I know," she said, remembering that she had told the production assistant that she wanted only to make a special plea for Gail’s killer to come
forward,
or for assistance from anyone who might have seen something, who might know something.

"You’re in no way responsible, Ms. Braddock," Ellen said.
"Nor is your station.
I didn’t know I was going to say what I did, either." She didn’t know if that was true or not. Either way, it didn’t matter. It was done.

On her way out, she heard someone behind her say with a grin in his voice that the phone lines were lit up brighter than the Times Square Christmas Tree.