I filled her in on my day, and when I got to the part where I’d got into it at the office with the two intruders, she came over and checked the back of my head. She smelled great. It was just soap, but, man…
“You’ll live,” she said, and sat back down on the edge of her bed. “What then?”
I told her about my visit to Louie’s, and decided the better part of valor would be to omit going to Marion’s crib. Moving the gist of that conversation to Louie’s place wouldn’t hurt anything, and there was no need to get Velda’s nose out of joint. The Ruston girl parading herself for me, and yours truly pretending not to be interested, would not seem the harmless fun it had been. Not to a secretary who gave me hell for two weeks after spotting one lousy lipstick smear on my shirt collar.
“So Sharron’s silent partner,” Velda said, “is some big gambler from the city. It wouldn’t be this Miami Bull character you mentioned, or…?”
“Bill Evans. No-wrong city. They’re Chicago boys.”
“I hear there’s crime in Chicago.”
“Yeah, I heard that rumor, too, but this will be some big boy from New York, and I may try to track down Evans and Miami Bull to lead me to him. They won’t have anything to lose.”
“Our friend Dekkert has ties in the city.”
“That fact is not lost on me, honey. How was your day?”
She put her hands on the terrycloth over her knees and rocked like a little girl. “Quiet. You’d almost think I was on vacation.”
“Ouch.”
“I had a few conversations with locals, but most of the stores weren’t open. Either closed on Sunday or not open for the season yet.”
“No surprise.”
She went back to toweling her hair. “I spoke to several reporters, but I knew more than they did. They got wind of Doc Moody, but I handled that.”
“So that was your fine hand at work? Good job all around. What about Poochie? Did you see him today?”
She smiled tightly. There was frustration in it.
“I did,” she said. “But the doc is mostly keeping him sedated. I finally spoke with the little guy this evening, but you’re not going to like what I found.”
“He didn’t finger Dekkert as the shooter in the window?”
She shook her head. “At first he said he didn’t remember. Then when I pressed, he said he just saw the gun and that a man was holding it. But it was too dark outside for him to see who was aiming the gun.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe you can get more out of him. I pressed as hard and as long as the doctor would allow. Obviously, the poor soul may just be scared, Mike. Dekkert almost killed him the other night. And getting beaten to death is a hard way to go.”
I nodded. “Say, you look tan. Don’t tell me you actually got some sun?”
“I did!” She hopped off the bed. “Want to see?”
“Easy there, kitten…”
“Oh, don’t be a prude. You’re a big boy.”
Getting bigger all the time.
“I have a bra and panties on,” she said, “you coward. My bikini is skimpier, you know.”
She opened the terrycloth robe. It was like curtains parting on a masterpiece of sculpture devoted to the female form. She had a nice tan going, all right, nicely dark against the underthings. And I had seen her in a two- piece suit before, but the psychology of seeing her that way, presenting herself to me with a proud smile, letting me admire the jut of her breasts, the curve of her hips, the hint of dark curls behind the whiteness of panty, the long, long legs, not the pipe cleaner legs of a model but the fully fleshed, muscular legs of a vibrant woman.
“What do you think?” she said, as she closed the robe and cinched the terrycloth belt.
“I think,” I said, managing to get to my feet, “that it’s been a long day, and I could use a shower myself. A cold one.”
She laughed and showed me to the door.
“See you in the morning,” she said.
“See you, kitten.”
You’re here to find a killer, buster, a voice in my head said.
“If these dames don’t kill me first,” I muttered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The two naked bodies were strung by their heels from a rafter in the barn, their fingertips almost brushing the warped planked flooring. Dried blood in frightful trails from countless wounds made vertical stripes down twin flesh in horrible design. The smears of blood beneath had clotted, merging into each other like an obscene Rorschach test ink-blot pattern peppered with blow flies trying to feast there.
The dignity of death was missing. The skillful surgery that had been performed on each, slowly and intricately, had wiped all that out. It was more like taking a look inside a slaughterhouse on a hot day.
Or maybe that was just my opinion because I had seen this kind of horror before and could be almost objective about it now. Not quite, but almost. The one thing that stood out was that, at one time, those two girls had been pretty.
I handed the grisly photograph back to Dave Miles.
“I remember reading about it,” I said. “Early this spring, right? But this doesn’t really resemble the Sharron Wesley killing.”
Dave had called me early at the Sidon Arms-seven o’clock. He had seen the write-ups in both the local and New York papers, saw my name, and called me. He said to come right out to his Quonset hut office at the brick manufacturing works near Wilcox. I pushed a note under Velda’s door, grabbed a napkin-wrapped cruller and paper cup of coffee at Big Steve’s, and took the heap for a thirty-mile spin.
“The common thread,” Dave said, “is beautiful nude women. Dead ones.”
“That’s typical fare on a sex killer’s menu.”
“Mike, my gut tells me it’s the same sick bastard. And there’s another kill, one none of the police authorities have ever connected up.”
One time Dave had been a big man, physically and professionally, an inspector in the New York PD, and Pat’s immediate superior.
But even as an inspector, Dave couldn’t stay off the street and two years ago he had gone in an apartment after a killer and a blast from the punk’s shotgun had taken off his lower leg, and he’d had to retire. He wound up as head of security at the brick-making plant that was Wilcox’s only industry besides tourism.
Now he sat behind his desk, looking slightly shrunken in an old suit, his plastic leg a disembodied thing propped against the windowsill behind him. A frown creased his face into a caricature of weariness and he shook his head.
“Oh, hell, Mike. Maybe you’re right to be skeptical. I just saw the write-ups in the papers this morning, and your name in the middle of it, and…”
I jammed a butt in my face and lit up. “Okay. So what’s this other kill?”
Some life came into his eyes and he leaned forward. “Six months ago a girl was strangled with her own nylon stocking out on a stretch of beach. Her clothes were gone. Never found. She lay there with the stocking that killed her still knotted around her throat.”
“Where was this?”
“Down a side road, about halfway between here and Sidon.”
He had my attention. Two strangulations. Two dead naked females, pretty ones.
“Whose case?” I asked.
“The Suffolk County Sheriff’s department.”
“What do you know about them?”
