He grabbed the arm and yanked it until she squeaked. “Don’t do that. It’s not a game.”
“Ow.”
“Do it right.”
“I just wanted to know what kind of pictures,” she whined. “You can’t mess me up.”
“I only do good pictures. Now hold still.” He tied her hands together over her head.
She giggled. Then he went to the other end of the sofa and grabbed a foot. She stopped laughing.
“Hey, don’t tie my feet. I got claustrophobia.”
“Shut up. I’m doing this.” She didn’t look so bad like this. Now he was feeling better.
She kicked with the free foot. “Hey. I said not the feet.”
He pulled the switchblade out of his pocket and flicked it open.
Her eyes bulged at the knife. “Oh, shit. You said you weren’t going to hurt me.”
“You’re supposed to give me a good time,” he said angrily. He kicked the sofa. “Now do it right. Act like you’re in a movie.”
“I’m going to need another hit,” she wheedled.
“When I’m finished.” He grabbed the other foot and tied the ankle down.
She pouted.
He was satisfied at the picture she made. This sofa was not as good as the other one. He had to tie her hands over her head, but she was spread-eagled from the waist down. The sparse tuft of pubic hair showed she was a real blond. He cursed himself for not thinking of bringing a razor to shave it off. He knew just what to draw there. He pulled up the chair and laid out his equipment: four pens—red, blue, black, and green—rubber gloves, the switchblade, the Zippo, and two condoms.
She giggled nervously when he put on the gloves. But he had already forgotten her. He was planning the picture. Snakes going up the inner thighs with fangs darting into her cunt. Then the torso would have a new addition, the doctor’s staff, since he was the Doctor of Death. The flames would curl out of the staff, burning it up.
When the first pen tip touched her thigh, she jumped back in alarm. But after he unzipped his pants, and had her suck on him, she got into it. By the time he began shoving rubber fingers into her, and his double-sheathed penis, and biting the pictures he had drawn, she was way out in outer space.
54
In the early hours of the morning, Jason pulled himself out of the taxi and headed for his front door. As he rang the bell for the doorman, he was seized again with the same wild, unreasonable hope that had been nudging at the corners of his mind all the way across the country, the hope that his instincts had been wrong all along. Emma was not really threatened. She had just moved into another life without him. The letters were just an excuse for him to develop an elaborate fantasy of a madman’s retribution for his wife’s transformation from teen angel to movie-star whore. In this scenario he was the one who was threatened by it, and the hurt and anger were his alone. Nothing else was acceptable. He desperately wanted to be the crazy one, so caught up in the fantasy of retribution that he went all the way to San Diego to find himself an imaginary serial killer.
Francis wasn’t at the door. Jason had to ring twice. Maybe Emma had come home, and he would be proven a fool. Rumpled and exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes, he thought about that as he waited for Francis to appear.
Not many people actually did what they dreamed of doing. Even Charles had suggested more than once that there was a big difference between writing letters and acting on the rage and hatred expressed in them.
Francis shuffled across the lobby and started at the sight of him. “Oh, Dr. Frank, Dr. Frank. Thank God you’re back. The police were here,” the doorman cried as he swung the heavy door open.
“I know,” Jason said.
“What do they think happened to Mrs. Frank?” he demanded. “They just didn’t give me no choice. They forced their way in. What did they expect to find anyway?”
“It’s all right.” Mechanically, Jason went through the motions of calming him down. He was a stoic and a doctor. Staying in control when people around him were bouncing off walls was what he did. He had managed his raging panic on the plane and continued to do so now without thinking.
“It set me off for the whole night, I’ll tell you.” The man followed him to the elevator. “I didn’t leave them alone for a minute. Stayed with them the whole time,” he insisted.
“Thank you.” Jason got on the elevator, hardly knowing what he was saying. The acid had begun eating away at his insides again. Emma had not magically returned. He refused to let himself think about Troland Grebs.
Upstairs, he went through the apartment carefully. He saw the towels, still damp in the bathroom, and her purse on the bed. Nothing of hers seemed to be missing. Not a coat, not a dress, not a credit card, not a hairbrush or a toothbrush or a lipstick. There was no way in the world that she would voluntarily go anywhere without those essential items.
He went into the kitchen. There was the lettuce in a bowl in the sink. The treadmill in the laundry room was still on Pause. In the bedroom he turned on the answering machine and fiddled with it. Detective Woo had been right. Several messages had been counted by the machine, but not recorded. Only blank tape played back. This had happened with the machine before, but it had righted itself before Emma had gotten around to getting it fixed.
Just like the police, Jason saw an interruption in life in the apartment. But he did not want to jump to any conclusions about it. There could be more than one explanation for Emma’s disappearance. She could have gone out to the store for something and had an accident. Only a month ago an old woman crossing Riverside Drive had been struck by a van when the driver ran a red light. More recently a taxi jumped the curb and smashed into the window of the video store on Broadway. The driver had been distracted by a homeless man waving a stick at him. And other things happened, too. Bicycle messengers, silently racing the wrong way on one-way streets, knocked people over all the time.
Emma might have been sideswiped by a bus, or a car, and was in the hospital. There were a thousand unexpected, freaky things that happened to people every day in New York City.
Jason took his jacket off and went back into the kitchen. He made himself a cup of strong coffee and started calling hospital emergency rooms and morgues. No Emma Chapman or unidentified woman who fit her description had been admitted anywhere that night.
When he could think of nothing else to do, he went into his office and played back the messages from his own answering machine.
55
April had arranged to meet Dr. Frank in his office as soon after eight o’clock as she could get there. She had that in her mind as she spent several precious minutes placating her angry mother.
But even after she got away from Skinny Dragon Mother late at night, April didn’t sleep. She spent nearly an hour writing up her notes on the Chapman case. As she worked, she tried to put out of her mind the unrelated incidents her mother insisted on telling her as tit for tat about jealous lovers and humiliated husbands in long-ago China. April hadn’t wanted to hear about it. It was after two in the morning, and had nothing to do with now.
“That’s what you think,” Sai said huffily, blocking the stairs. “People crazy like fox everywhere.”
Her mother was offended, but April had to sleep. What did a kidnapped young noblewoman locked up in a farmer’s cave in a mountain because she was pregnant and his only wife was barren—ninety years ago—have to do with anything?
Still, April kept thinking about the young woman in the cave for a long time before she could fall asleep. What was the meaning of the story? There was no way to know if it was true, or the myth of anxious mothers-in-law, made up to prevent unhappy young wives from straying far from home. Women had to be obedient or suffer terrible consequences in China.
