77 Shadow Street

windows were less prominent. In an emergency, keeping Iris calm would be the key to keeping her safe.

On her way to her daughter’s room, glancing through the open door to the study, Sparkle saw concentric circles of blue light throbbing from the center of the television, which had been off when last she passed this way. Iris wouldn’t have turned it on. The girl didn’t like TV because its ceaseless stream of changing images struck her as chaotic, first made her nervous and then frightened her: “You don’t know what’s coming next, it’s always just coming at you.”

Sparkle stepped into the study and stared at the eerie blue rings. Apparently it was a test pattern of a kind she had never seen before.

She tried to switch off the TV, but the batteries in the remote seemed to be dead. Approaching the set to use the manual controls, she halted when an uninflected—perhaps computerized—voice spoke.

“Adult female. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Five feet two.”

Having heard herself described, Sparkle frowned.

“Adult female. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Five feet two. Aboveground. Second floor. South wing.”

“What the hell?”

The TV said, “Exterminate. Exterminate.”

20

Apartment 3-F

After the Russian manicurist departed, Mickey Dime went into the study. The wood floor felt sexy under his bare feet. A lot of things felt sexy to Mickey. Nearly everything.

On the carpet, he stood squinching his toes in the deep wool pile. His feet were small and narrow. Well- formed. He was proud of his well-formed feet. His late mother had said that his feet looked like they were carved by the artist Michelangelo.

Mickey liked art. Art was sexy.

Murder was the sexiest thing of all. Murder could be an art, too.

His brother, Jerry, stone-dead and rolled up in the microfiber blanket, wasn’t a work of art. An unplanned murder, committed in haste, without the target being aware that he would soon die, without time for the victim’s terror to ripen, could not be a work of art. It was amateurish. Crude hack work. Driven by emotion.

Great art wasn’t about emotion. It was about sensation. Only the bourgeoisie, the tacky middle class, thought art should affect the better emotions and have meaning. If it touched your heart, it wasn’t art. It was kitsch. Art thrilled. Art spoke to the primitive, to the wild animal within. Art strummed deeper chords than mere emotions. If it made you think, it might be philosophy or science or something, but it wasn’t art. True art was about the meaninglessness of life, about the freedom of transgression, about power.

Mickey learned about art from his mother. His mother had been the smartest person of her time. She knew everything.

He wished his mother were still here. She would know how to dispose of Jerry’s body.

This wasn’t an easy problem to solve. Every hallway in the Pendleton was monitored by security cameras. So were the elevators. So were the garages behind and separate from the main structure. Jerry weighed about 165 pounds. They were on the third floor.

The longer Mickey stood there, staring at the blanket-wrapped corpse, the bigger and heavier it looked.

He returned to his enormous bathroom, where he had received the manicure and the pedicure in his own spa chair. He opened his aromatherapy cabinet. He considered the sixty essences, each in a small glass bottle, racked on the back of the cabinet doors.

Underfoot, the cold marble floor felt sexy. But the chill also sharpened his mind and helped him to make a decision.

The fragrance of limes would further clarify his thinking and aid in the solution of his problem. The vaporizer stood on a roll-out shelf. Using an eyedropper, he distributed five drops of the essence of limes at the designated points on one of the cotton pads that came with the machine.

Fragrant steam billowed forth. Mickey breathed deeply. Any pleasant scent, if concentrated enough, could be intoxicating. He was exhilarated by the intense, astringent clarity of limes.

Smell might be the most erotic of the five senses. Pheromones that men and women produced, of which they were not consciously aware, drew them inexorably to one another more than did appearances or any other qualities they might possess. The nose was aroused before the genitals.

Mickey returned to the study. Dead Jerry waited in the blanket, the ends secured with neckties.

Mickey stood over the bundle. He regarded it with calculation, his mind lime-fresh and ready to get on with business. He paced around the cadaver. He sat in an armchair, pondering it.

He went to a window to peer down at the rain-washed courtyard, which was enclosed on three sides by the Pendleton and on the east end by a fourteen-foot-high limestone wall. An ornate bronze gate in that wall led to an open-air transitional space, which had other gates at its north and south ends. That space connected with the first garage, which had been converted from the carriage house.

Mickey’s parking space lay even farther away, in the second and larger garage, a new structure that stood alone, with three floors, one of them underground.

His attention shifted to the south wing, across the courtyard. On the second floor, someone stood backlighted at a window. If anyone had been trundling a blanket-wrapped stiff past the fountains and the ornamental shrubs