“I know your voice.” She saw herself as if through the window, a conservatively dressed real estate employee talking on the phone, her hammering heart not visible. The closing woman. Amazing what went on beneath the calm surface of normality.
“Sorry about calling you at work, but I needed to talk.”
“It’s okay, really.”
“I tried your apartment last night, but you weren’t home. No one was.”
“Rene, the guy we talked about-Jake-he’s moved out for good.”
“It was your idea?”
“Yeah. Things weren’t good between us. They never were good, actually.”
“It sounds like you did the right thing.”
“I’m sure I did.” He didn’t say anything, but she could hear him breathing. “Rene, did I mention to you where I worked?”
“No. Why?”
“The phone number here. How’d you get it?”
“Oh! I figured you’d left for work this morning, and I didn’t wanna call again at your apartment. Then I remembered you said you worked at a real estate company, so I got a St. Louis phone directory at the library and started going down the list. Called each one till I got to Summers and asked for you, and a woman said you hadn’t come in yet, so I knew I had the right place. Is it okay? I mean, can you talk?”
“Sure, no problem.”
“Another woman’s died, Mary. Here in Kansas City.”
Whoa! She mashed the receiver harder into her ear, as if to press in the realization of what she’d just heard. “You’re in Kansas City?”
“Yeah, but not for long. The police don’t know I’m here yet, and I’m catching a flight back to New Orleans in a few hours.”
“The woman who was killed?…”
“She was a dancer, in her thirties, with dark hair. Like Danielle.”
Like me. “And you were in Kansas City when it happened.”
“I’m afraid I was. For the dance competition. Checking up on some of the names you gave me. I talked to a reporter with one of the papers, a man I met about five years ago at a convention here. Name’s Pete Joller. I told him about my theory of a sort of intercity Jack the Ripper who kills ballroom dancers. He thinks it makes sense, and he agreed to help me cross-check the names with a list of Kansas City female homicide victims the past five years. He called last night about midnight, and I expected him to let me know the results. Instead he told me he’d gotten word a woman had just been discovered with her throat slashed. He checked and found out she was a ballroom dancer-local, though, not part of the competition.”
“Had she?-”
“That’s all I know about it,” Rene interrupted, his voice tight. “But just the fact I was in town when it happened’ll get the police all over me again.”
Mary barely saw, barely heard, the cars swishing past outside the window on Kingshighway. The people in the cars were engrossed in their own problems, their own universe, and had no idea what kind of conversation was taking place so close to them; a different world behind every windshield. “You got any kind of alibi?”
“No. I was at the dance competition, but nobody’ll remember me. Then I went back to my hotel. The murder occurred about ten o’clock, when I was in my room alone.”
“What can I do?” Mary asked. She was beginning to grasp the dimensions of this, how it would look for Rene when the New Orleans police found out. And they would find out, especially if the woman had been violated after death. “Where were you?” they’d ask their prime suspect. The answer could prove fatal.
“I don’t want you to do anything,” Rene told her. “I’ll have to tell the police I was in Kansas City for the dance competition, hoping to learn something about Danielle’s murder.”
“That’s the truth.”
“You and I know it, anyway. The police’ll be skeptical. I won’t tell them about you giving me information.”
If you have to, go ahead. She thought it, heard it in her mind, but she didn’t say it. She was afraid of the police, of authority. Fear had been with her all her life, like a parasite in her bowels, sapping her of resolve and independence. The frustration, the curse, was that she knew it and could do nothing about it. That was the nature of fear.
“I just wanted to talk to you before you saw or heard about the murder on the news,” Rene said. “Wanted to assure you, no matter what you hear about me, no matter what anybody says, I never so much as laid eyes on that woman.”
“ ’Course you didn’t.”
“I’m afraid the police’ll buy into the importance of the dancing connection now, after three murders. After all, it’s what I’ve been trying to convince them of all along. I should stay away from dance competitions. I’ve been hanging myself and didn’t know it; it never occurred to me a woman’d be murdered while I was in the same city. The police’ll think I have some mental problem about dancers who look like Danielle. I don’t, of course. Sweet Lord, I do some dancing myself. My mother was a ballroom dancer. A dancer’s the very last person I’d hurt.”
“Maybe this murder’s not even connected. Maybe the dead woman did just happen to take dancing lessons.”
“And get her throat slit the way Danielle did?”
“It could have happened that way. People get murdered all the time, ten times more often than they win the lottery. Almost one every day here in St. Louis.”
“I hope that’s the way it is, despite the fact this murder fits with my theory. I haven’t seen the victim’s photo yet. Pete didn’t even know her name when he called. I hope she’s black or Oriental and her husband’s already confessed. But I doubt it; I’ve got a feeling I was right about this, and the killer came to the competition to scout a victim. It builds up in someone like that, someone mentally tortured. The pressure gets worse and worse. It was time for him to kill again, and I happened to be in the same city when he acted out his sickness. It’s not really that much of a coincidence, you stop to think about it. Christ, it’s something I should’ve taken into account.”
Mary gathered her courage until it encased her heart like cold, hard armor. “Rene, if you have to, go ahead and tell the police about why you went to Kansas City, about the information I sent you. Honest, I don’t care.”
“I do care. I promised I’d keep you clear, and I meant it. Your name stays out of this. Which is another reason I called, to tell you I won’t talk with you again till this is over. If I try to contact you, the police’ll almost certainly know. If they were watching me before, they’ll be hiding in every shadow now, using every kind of electronic eavesdropping gadgetry. They’re merciless and relentless, and they’d close in on you like wolves.”
“Rene, it doesn’t matter-”
“It does to me, Mary. I won’t have you dragged through this kinda crap.”
“Don’t worry, any problems it causes can be worked out.”
“But it doesn’t need to be that way. Not on my account, anyway. It was never my intention to mess up your life, Mary. I won’t let it happen.”
“Rene-”
“Bye, Mary. I’ll talk to you again when this is over. A promise.”
“But-”
The receiver clicked in her ear.
“Mary?”
She hung up the phone and stared at Victor, standing before her desk and frowning down at her. The bright light from outside was behind him, creating a blinding aura around him, making him seem slim and tall and making her squint.
“Something wrong, Mary? I hope not your mother?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing, Victor. Please!”
“Please what?” He looked perplexed.
She sighed. What could she tell him? What could you ever tell someone like Victor? “You call that four-family buyer about closing figures?”
“Sure did. I’m leaving now to meet him at the Maplewood property. I just thought I’d stop by your desk and
