she’d had about him. Then she had felt frustrated, interrupted, when she had not been permitted to end the relationship with David Larson the right way. The chance meeting with Bill Thayer had been pure adventure—a strong dose of fear, some quick thinking, and then it was over. But it had left her with a peculiar tingling, a pleasant excitement. The night with Brian Corey was different from all of the others. It had been wilder, riskier, and more exciting.
She loved being with men and feeling the strength of her ability to attract them. She liked the way they looked at her. She liked having sex with some of them. But afterward, she always detected in herself a surprising resentment for what they had taken from her. Even though she had gone out hoping that she would have the chance to make this happen, and had then struggled to get their attention, she didn’t exactly wish them well—she just needed them to want her. With some of them, she suspected that they felt superior because they had cajoled and flattered her into bed. Even when she was with the best of them, the physical act made her feel that they were controlling her, making her feel one sensation, then another, always at their discretion. After she had put all the effort into seducing them, she felt as though she had been coerced.
She had felt that with Brian from the beginning. There had been a joy in attracting him, and in spending the beautiful warm night with him, but there had been another kind of pleasure in knowing that all along she was fooling him, manipulating him, spending the whole time patiently moving him toward that balcony.
It was getting to be dinnertime again when she walked back to the apartment. She still felt the energy that wouldn’t let her rest, but she knew that she must be as close to invisible as she could manage. She went up the steps and opened the door, walked through the little lobby, past the mailboxes, and had entered her hallway when the door across the hall opened. “Nancy?”
It was Nancy’s nearest neighbor. A woman of about sixty, she always looked worn, haggard, and upset, as though she were engaged in some great task in her apartment when the door was closed. What was her name? The label on her door of the big mailbox in the lobby said M. Tilson. They had met down there several times. What was it—May, Mandy, Marcie, Marilyn? No. Just Mary. “Hi, Mary.”
Mary Tilson pulled her door open wide and touched her short brown hair nervously. “Do you have a second?”
Nancy stepped inside. Mary seemed anxious, a bit more upset than usual. Nancy had never been inside her apartment before. She could see that the layout was exactly the same as hers, only on the other side of the building, reversed like a mirror image. There was a lingering smell of chlorine, as though Mary had recently scrubbed her sinks with cleanser. Nancy imagined her as one of those women who were always scrubbing and cleaning things, and a glance around the apartment confirmed it. The light beige carpet looked new, and the shelves filled beyond capacity with horrible china dogs were free of dust.
Mary hurried to the well-waxed dining room table, snatched up a newspaper, and hurried back. Nancy could see it was the
“Oh?” said Nancy. “What a smart idea.” It didn’t seem to her to be a smart idea. It seemed sad. She sensed that Mary was going to be a neighbor who bothered her with bulletins about tiny aspects of her daily life. Soon it would be recipes and coupons for the supermarket. She made a resolution to avoid being cornered like this again.
“Yes,” said Mary. “I started doing it with the Sunday papers, because they came out on Saturday afternoon, and there was so much extra stuff in them.” She seemed to struggle to get past these topics that made her comfortable, and into something that was making her uncomfortable. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think I have to.” She handed the newspaper to Nancy. “Is this picture you?”
Nancy held the newspaper in both hands and stared at the picture on the front page. She realized that she was in a state of amazement that was making it hard for her to think past the brute fact of the photograph. How had anyone taken a picture of her in the hotel? How could they have it in the newspaper? The picture was a random blow to her, like a runaway car suddenly veering off the street to run her down. She knew she had to force herself to react, to talk. “That’s something, isn’t it?” she said.
“Is it you?”
“Of course not,” said Nancy. “I guess there are a lot of girls who look like me, or sort of like me. What’s the story about?” As she chattered, she was trying to scan the two columns of print below the picture, but she was too agitated to keep her eyes on the print and too impatient to decipher it. She knew what it had to be about. She had instantly recognized the lobby of the Beverly Hilton hotel, recognized Brian, recognized herself, recognized the clothes she had been wearing.
“It’s . . . it says that the man this woman was with the other night fell out of a hotel window.” She seemed alarmed by the way she had said it, then gave a nervous laugh. “I’m glad it wasn’t you. That would have been really awful. The man who fell, or jumped, would have been somebody you knew.”
Nancy handed the newspaper back to her. “Well, thanks for checking. If it had been me, I guess I’d want to know.”
“No trouble at all. When I saw it in the store, I just couldn’t believe it. I said to myself, ‘It can’t be.’ And I was right. It wasn’t. What a relief.”
Nancy started toward the door. She had been so edgy and full of restless energy when Mary had stopped her that she had barely been able to force herself to enter, and now the smells and the impression of clutter from the unnecessary furniture and the china dogs and clusters of framed pictures made her want to run.
“Wait.”
Nancy’s mind was racing. She stopped because she knew she had to. But she needed to get out and think, and her mind kept jumping from one thought to another, never settling on one. She fixed an inquisitive, friendly expression on her face, and turned to look at Mary. “What’s wrong?”
“I was thinking. That picture looks so much like you. I wonder if you ought to call the police and tell them it’s not you.”
“What?”
“It looks just exactly like you. There will be other people who see it. What if everybody in the building calls them, and the people at the supermarket and everywhere else you go call them and say that the picture is you?”
“I could hardly blame them,” said Nancy.
“Well, then would it be better to call the police and say, ‘I know you’re going to get calls saying that’s me,’ so they know they can eliminate you ahead of time? That way, they’re not going to come looking for you. It could save you a whole lot of trouble and unpleasantness.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The paper said they want to talk to you about that man’s death, which they said is suspicious. You know what that means. If they come, they might arrest you.”
“I doubt it. I’m a pretty harmless person.”
“I saw this show on TV not too long ago about this young black guy who got arrested because he looked like this other young black guy who had robbed a liquor store and shot people. He was really a teacher, and he was just driving home from coaching the debating team, and they ended up convicting him of murder. When the real killer confessed, he didn’t even look all that much like the innocent guy. Not nearly as much as you look like that picture.”
Nancy shrugged. “If I have time tomorrow, I’ll give them a call. I might end up saving them a trip. Thanks.”
“Would you mind if I called them for you in the meantime?”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because tomorrow morning, when this picture is on doorsteps all over the city, it’s going to be too late. We could have a SWAT team here kicking down the door.”
The restless energy that Nancy had felt since the moment when she had pushed Brian off the balcony was beginning to overwhelm her again. She could feel her neck and shoulders tensing, and she clenched her hands like claws to keep them still. “I wish you wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“I’m giving you the chance to do it yourself.”
