nap, went out again around four-thirty. I picked up a Post and took it around the corner to Armstrong's. I must have looked at the headline when I bought the paper but somehow it didn't register. I sat down and ordered coffee and looked at the front page and there it was.
call girl slashed to ribbons, it said.
I knew the odds and I also knew that the odds didn't matter. I sat for a moment with my eyes closed and the paper clenched in my fists, trying to alter the story by sheer force of will. Color, the very blue of her northern eyes, flashed behind my closed eyelids. My chest was tight and I could feel that pulse of pain again at the back of my throat.
I turned the goddamned page and there it was on page three just the way I knew it would be. She was dead. The bastard had killed her.
Chapter 6
Kim Dakkinen had died in a room on the seventeenth floor of the Galaxy Downtowner, one of the new high-rise hotels on Sixth Avenue in the Fifties. The room had been rented to a Mr. Charles Owen Jones of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who had paid cash in advance for a one-night stay upon checking in at 9:15
p.m. Sunday, after having phoned ahead for a room half an hour earlier. Since a preliminary check revealed no one of Mr. Jones's name in Fort Wayne, and since the street address he'd entered on the registration card did not seem to exist, he was presumed to have given a false name.
Mr. Jones had made no calls from his room, nor had he billed any charges to his hotel account. After an indeterminable number of hours he had left, and he'd done so without bothering to drop off his key at the desk. Indeed, he'd hung the do not disturb sign on the door of his room, and the housekeeping staff had scrupulously honored it until shortly after the 11:00 a.m. checkout time Monday morning. At that time one of the maids put through a call to the room. When the phone went unanswered she knocked on the door; when that brought no response she opened it with her passkey.
She walked in on what the Post reporter called 'a scene of indescribable horror.' A nude woman lay on the carpet at the foot of the unmade bed. Bed and carpet were soaked with her blood. The woman had died of multiple wounds, having been stabbed and slashed innumerable times with what a deputy medical examiner guessed might have been a bayonet or machete. Her killer had hacked her face into 'an unrecognizable mess,' but a photograph retrieved by an enterprising reporter from Miss Dakkinen's
'luxurious Murray Hill apartment' showed what he'd had to work with. Kim's blonde hair was quite different in the photograph, flowing down over her shoulders with one single braid wrapped around the crown like a tiara. She was clear-eyed and radiant in the photo, and looked like a grown-up Heidi.
Identification had been made on the basis of the woman's purse, found at the scene. A sum of cash in the purse had enabled police investigators to rule out money as a motive in the slaying.
No kidding.
I put down the paper. I noticed without much surprise that my hands were shaking. I was even shakier on the inside. I caught Evelyn's eye, and when she came over I asked her to bring me a double shot of bourbon.
She said, 'Are you sure, Matt?'
'Why not?'
'Well, you haven't been drinking. Are you sure you want to start?'
I thought, What's it to you, kid? I took a breath and let it out and said, 'Maybe you're right.'
'How about some more coffee?'
'Sure.'
I went back to the story. A preliminary examination fixed the time of death some time around midnight. I tried to think what I'd been doing when he killed her. I'd come to Armstrong's after the meeting, but what time had it been when I'd left? I made it a fairly early night, but even so it had probably been close to midnight by the time I packed it in. Of course the time of death was approximate, so I might have been already asleep when he started to chop her life away.
I sat there and I kept drinking coffee and I read the story over and over and over.
From Armstrong's I went to St. Paul's. I sat in a rear pew and tried to think. Images kept bouncing back and forth, flashes of my two meetings with Kim intercut with my conversation with Chance.
I put fifty futile dollars in the poor box. I lit a candle and stared at it as if I expected to see something dancing in its flame.
I went back and sat down again. I was still sitting there when a soft-spoken young priest came over and told me apologetically that they would be closing for the night. I nodded, got to my feet.
'You seem disturbed,' he offered. 'Could I help you in any way?'
'I don't think so.'
'I've seen you come in here from time to time. Sometimes it helps to talk to someone.'
Does it? I said, 'I'm not even Catholic, Father.'
'That's not a requirement. If there's something troubling you—'
'Just some hard news, Father. The unexpected death of a friend.'
'That's always difficult.'
I was afraid he'd hand me something about God's mysterious plan, but he seemed to be waiting for me to say more. I managed to get out of there and stood for a moment on the sidewalk, wondering where to go next.
It was around six-thirty. The meeting wasn't for another two hours.
