Rose Madder (55 page)

“Oh you dopey gal,” Norman breathed. “Put your eye out on the fucking coathook, how stupid is that?”

He shook her in his arms. Her head flopped bonelessly from side to side. She now wore a wet red bib on the front of her white uniform. He carried Pam back over to the coverlets and dropped her there. She sprawled with her legs apart.

“Brazen bitch,” Norman said. “You can't even quit when you're dead, can you?” He crossed her legs. One of her arms dropped off her lap and thumped onto the coverlets. He saw a kinky purple bracelet around her wrist—it looked almost like a short length of telephone cord. On it was a key.

Norman looked at this, then toward the lockers at the far end of the room.

You can't go there, Normie,
his father said.
I know what you're thinking, but you're nuts if you go anywhere near their place on Durham Avenue.

Norman smiled.
You're nuts if you go there.
That was sort of funny, when you thought about it. Besides, where else was there to go? What else was there to try? He didn't have much time. His bridges were burning merrily behind him, all of them.

“The time is out of joint,” Norman Daniels murmured, and stripped the key-bracelet off Pam's wrist. He went down to the lockers, holding the bracelet between his teeth long enough to stick the bullmask back on his hand. Then he held Ferd up and let him scan the Dymotapes on the lockers.

“This one,” Ferd said, and tapped the locker marked
PAM HAVERFORD
with his rubber face.

The key fit the lock. Inside was a pair of jeans, a tee-shirt, a sports bra, a shower-bag, and Pam's purse. Norman took the purse over to one of the Dandux baskets and spilled out the contents on the towels. He cruised Ferdinand over the stuff like some bizarre spy satellite.

“There you go, big boy,” Ferd murmured.

Norman plucked a thin slice of gray plastic from the rubble of cosmetics, tissues, and papers. It would open the front door of their clubhouse, no doubt about that. He picked it up, started to turn away—

“Wait,” ze bool said. It went to Norman's ear and whispered, flower-decked horns bobbing.

Norman listened, then nodded. He stripped the mask off his sweaty hand again, stuffed it back into his pocket, and bent over Pam's purse-litter. He sifted carefully this time, much as he would have if he had been investigating what
was called “an event scene” in the current jargon . . . only then he would have used the tip of a pen or pencil instead of the tips of his fingers.

Fingerprints certainly aren't a problem here,
he thought, and laughed.
Not anymore.

He pushed her billfold aside and picked up a small red book with
TELEPHONE ADDRESS
on the front. He looked under D,
found an entry for Daughters and Sisters, but it wasn't what he was looking for. He turned to the front page of the book, where a great many numbers had been written over and around Pam's doodles—eyes and cartoon bowties, mostly. The numbers all looked like phone numbers, though.

He turned to the back page, the other likely spot. More phone numbers, more eyes, more bowties . . . and in the middle, neatly boxed and marked with asterisks, this:

“Oh boy,” he said. “Hold your cards, folks, but I think we have a Bingo. We do, don't we, Pammy?”

Norman tore the back page out of Pam's book, stuffed it in his front pocket, and tiptoed back to the door. He listened. No one out there. He let out a breath and touched the corner of the paper he'd just stuck in his pocket. His mind lifted off in another one of those skips as he did so, and for a little while there was nothing at all.

H
ale and Gustafson led Rosie and Gert to a corner of the squadroom that was almost like a conversation-pit; the furniture was old but fairly comfortable, and there were no desks for the detectives to sit behind. They dropped instead onto a faded green sofa parked between the soft-drink machine and the table with the Bunn-O-Matic on it. Instead of a grim picture of drug addicts or AIDS victims, there was a travel-agency poster of the Swiss Alps over the coffee-maker. The detectives were calm and sympathetic, the interview was low-key and respectful, but neither their attitude nor the informal surroundings helped Rosie much. She was still angry,
more furious than she had ever been in her life, but she was also terrified. It was being in this place.

Several times as the Q-and-A went on, she came close to losing control of her emotions, and each time this happened she would look across the room to where Bill was sitting patiently outside the waist-high railing with its sign reading
POLICE BUSINESS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, PLEASE.

She knew she should get up, go over to him, and tell him not to wait any longer—to just take himself on home and call her tomorrow. She couldn't bring herself to do it. She needed him to be there the way she'd needed him to be behind her on the Harley when the detectives had been driving them here, needed him as an overimaginative child needs a nightlight when she wakes up in the middle of the night.

The thing was, she kept having crazy ideas. She
knew
they were crazy, but knowing didn't help. For awhile they would go away, she would simply answer their questions and not have the crazy ideas, and then she would catch herself thinking that they had Norman down in the basement, that they were
hiding
him down there, sure they were, because law enforcement was a family, cops were brothers, and cops' wives weren't allowed to run away and have lives of their own no matter what. Norman was safely tucked away in some tiny sub-basement room where no one could hear you even if you screamed at the top of your lungs, a room with sweaty concrete walls and a single bare bulb hanging down from a cord, and when this meaningless charade was over, they would take her to him. They would take her to Norman.

Crazy. But she only fully
knew
it was crazy when she looked up and saw Bill on the other side of the low railing, watching her and waiting for her to be done so he could take her home on the back of his iron pony.

They went over it and over it, sometimes Gustafson asking the questions, sometimes Hale, and while Rosie had no sense that the two men were playing good-cop/bad-cop, she wished they would finish with their interminable questions and their interminable forms and let them go. Maybe when she got out of here, those paralyzing swoops between rage and terror would abate a little.

“Tell me again how you happened to have Mr. Daniels's picture in your purse, Ms. Kinshaw,” Gustafson said. He had a half-completed report in front of him and a Bic in one
hand. He was frowning horribly; to Rosie he looked like a kid taking a final he hasn't studied for.

“I've told you that twice already,” Gert said.

“This'll be the last time,” Hale said quietly.

Gert looked at him. “Scout's Honor?”

Hale grinned—a very winning grin—and nodded. “Scout's Honor.”

So she told them again how she and Anna had tentatively connected Norman Daniels to the murder of Peter Slowik, and how they had gotten Norman's picture by fax. From there she went on to how she had noticed the man in the wheelchair when the ticket-agent shouted at him. Rosie was familiar with the story now, but Gert's bravery still amazed her. When Gert got to the confrontation with Norman behind the comfort station, relating it in the matter-of-fact tones of a woman reciting a shopping list, Rosie took her big hand and squeezed it hard.

When she finished this time, Gert looked at Hale and raised her eyebrows. “Okay?”

“Yes,” Hale said. “Very okay. Cynthia Smith owes you her life. If you were a cop, I'd put you in for a citation.”

Gert snorted. “I'd never pass the physical. Too fat.”

“Just the same,” Hale said, not smiling, meeting her eyes.

“Well, I appreciate the compliment, but what I really want to hear from you is that you're going to catch the guy.”

“We'll catch him,” Gustafson said. He sounded absolutely sure of himself and Rosie thought,
You don't know my Norman, Officer.

“Are you done with us?” Gert asked.

“With you, yes,” Hale said. “I have a few more questions for Ms. McClendon . . . can you deal with that? If not, they could wait.” He paused. “But they really
shouldn't
wait. I think we both know that, don't we?”

Rosie closed her eyes briefly, then opened them. She looked toward Bill, who was still sitting outside the railing, and then back at Hale.

“Ask what you have to,” she said. “Just finish as soon as you can. I want to go home.”

T
his time when he came back into his own head he was getting out of the Tempo on a quiet street he recognized almost at once as Durham Avenue. He was parked a block and a half down from the Pussy Palace. It wasn't dark yet, but getting there; the shadows under the trees were thick and velvety, somehow luscious.

He looked down at himself and saw that he must have gone to his room before leaving the hotel. His skin smelled of soap and he was wearing different clothes. They were good clothes for his errand, too: chinos, a white roundneck tee-shirt, and a blue work-shirt with the tails hanging out. He looked like the sort of guy who might turn out on a weekend to check a faulty gas connection or . . .

“Or to check the burglar alarm,” Norman said under his breath, and grinned. “Pretty brazen, Señor Daniels. Pretty goddam bra—”

Panic struck like a thunderclap then, and he slapped at the lefthand rear pocket of the chinos he was now wearing. He felt nothing but the lump of his wallet. He slapped at the righthand rear and let out a harsh sigh of relief as the limp rubber of the mask flopped against his hand. He had forgotten his service revolver, apparently—left it back in the room safe—but he'd remembered the mask, and right now the mask seemed a lot more important than the gun. Probably crazy, but there it was.

He started up the sidewalk toward 251. If there were only a few cunts there, he'd try to take them all hostage. If there were a lot, he'd hold onto as many as he could—maybe half a dozen—and send the rest scampering for the hills. Then he'd simply start shooting them, one by one, until somebody coughed up Rose's address. If none of them knew it, he'd shoot them all and start checking files . . . but he didn't think it would come to that.

What will you do if the cops are there, Normie?
his father asked nervously.
Cops out front, cops inside, cops protecting the place from you?

He didn't know. And didn't much care.

He passed 245, 247, 249. There was a hedge between that
last one and the sidewalk, and as Norman reached the end of it he stopped suddenly, looking at 251 Durham Avenue with narrow, suspicious eyes. He had been prepared to see a lot of activity or a little activity, but he had not been prepared for what he
was
seeing, which was no activity at all.

Daughters and Sisters stood at the end of its narrow, deep lawn with the second- and third-story shades pulled against the heat of the day. It was as silent as a relic. The windows to the left of the porch were unshaded but dark. There were no shapes moving in there. No one on the porch. No cars in the driveway.

I can't just stand here,
he thought, and got moving again. He walked past the place, looking into the vegetable garden where he'd seen the two whores before—one of them the whore he'd grabbed at the comfort station. The garden was also empty this evening. And from what he could see of the back yard, that was empty, too.

It's a trap, Normie,
his father said.
You know that, don't you?

Norman walked as far as a Cape Cod with 257 on the door, then turned and began to saunter casually back down the sidewalk. He knew it
looked
like a trap, the father-voice was right about that, but somehow it didn't
feel
like a trap.

Ferdinand the Bull rose up before his eyes like a cheesy rubber ghost—Norman had pulled the mask out of his back pocket and put it on his hand without even realizing it. He knew this was a bad idea; anyone looking out a window would be sure to wonder why the big man with the swollen face was talking to the rubber mask . . . and making the mask answer back by wiggling its lips. Yet none of that seemed to matter, either. Life had gotten very . . . well, basic. Norman sort of liked that.

“Nah, it's not a trap,” Ferdinand said.

“Are you sure?” he asked. He was almost in front of 251 again.