let you know.”
“Good, Victor. Fine.”
Still looking puzzled, he shrugged into his coat, shot her a quizzical smile, and went outside.
Mary immediately switched on the small portable radio she kept in her desk drawer.
The rest of the afternoon she played with the radio dial, jumping from station to station. She heard mostly music, a smattering of news, a few minutes of a heartfelt debate about cellulite, but nothing about a murder in Kansas City. Maybe the police were keeping it secret for now. No, that couldn’t be-that reporter, Pete something, had phoned Rene, so the press must know. Probably it simply wasn’t a big enough story to make the national news. It wouldn’t become big enough until the police realized Rene had been in town, or until they made the connection between the Kansas City victim and the women murdered in New Orleans and Seattle.
Assuming there actually was a connection.
Rene had learned about the murder around midnight, so the story might be in the papers. Newspapers reported crime more thoroughly than radio or television; crime seemed to get more complex, unlike how it sounded or looked, the longer it was covered.
As soon as five o’clock arrived, Mary hurried from work and drove to a drugstore, where she bought a Chicago Tribune and a St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
In her car, with the lowering sun beating through the windshield and giving her a headache, she examined the papers and finally found the news item on page four in the Post.
She sucked in her breath. The victim’s photograph accompanied the story, and her name, Vivian Ferris. The story had made the St. Louis paper because of the relative nearness of Kansas City and the viciousness of the crime. The victim’s throat had been deeply slashed, her breasts and genitalia mutilated, and the speculation was that she’d been raped.
Mary was sure the autopsy would reveal intercourse had occurred after death.
She felt dizzy. Death and sex, sex and death. Marriages and funerals. Lady-killers and lovers’ leaps. Was death so much a part of the danger and allure of sex?
Despite the grainy black-and-white newspaper photograph, she was positive she and Vivian Ferris could have passed for sisters.
36
As she was driving to try on her dress at Denise’s before work the next morning, Mary heard on KMOX news that Rene had been questioned by the police, then released. Two people at the Kansas City dance competition were sure they’d seen him there at the time of the murder, a tall man with dark hair and a deeply cleft chin, avidly watching the dancers.
Though she’d planned on waiting until she’d picked up the dress, Mary stopped at a vending machine and bought a newspaper. She leafed through the front section until she found the story.
The information was the same as the report she’d heard on her car radio, only it confirmed that Vivian Ferris had been sexually molested after death. A newer, more sharply focused photograph of the victim was in this edition; Mary was struck even more by the resemblance to her own image in the mirror. Dark hair, lean features, even something about the tilt of the head. And beyond that, some essence.
Helen had laughed and told her it was her imagination, that she and Vivian Ferris looked nothing alike. She’d argued with Helen about that.
Occasionally Mary would answer her phone and no one would speak, though she was sure someone was on the other end of the connection. Crank phone calls? Or Jake?
Despite, or maybe because of, the day she’d resisted him and forced him from her apartment, Jake still concerned her. Though no longer in her life, she suspected he’d reappear in a way she wouldn’t like. He was a problem looming like a specter in her near future, one of those dilemmas the mind shied away from, like an impending war too terrible to contemplate.
Denise, chunky and energetic, met her at the door, holding the black dress high on a hanger so she could be impressed. She said, “Duh-duh!” A drum roll was conspicuous by its absence.
But Mary was impressed. The skirt draped in graceful folds where Denise had raised the hem above the knee on one side, the filmy shoulder sleeves appeared perfect, and the sequins caught and gave back morning light like black stars winking at midnight.
“So whad’ya think?” Denise asked, grinning and obviously proud of herself.
“I hope I do it justice,” Mary said, reaching out and touching the dress as if it were alive and might snap at her.
“Quit doin’ a number on yourself, Mary, just try it on.” Denise stepped away from the door to let her in. Her own stocky body was clad in baggy slacks and a sweater with a hunting scene on it, knitted men aiming their rifles at a V-formation of knitted ducks. One of the ducks had tumbled from the sky to beneath her left breast. Her taste and talent were reserved for her clients.
As soon as Mary zipped up the dress in the changing room, she knew it was perfect. It fit perfectly, anyway. How it looked might be another matter.
Avoiding stepping on the many pins lying in ambush on the carpet, she slipped into her Latin shoes, now dyed black, and apprehensively stepped outside the privacy curtain.
She stood in front of the full-length mirror and stared at herself, adjusting the diaphanous sleeves. Denise was gazing at her in the mirror, forefinger to lips, as if warning her to be silent in this moment of truth. She cocked her head to the side and moved the finger in a whirling motion, signaling Mary to turn around.
Mary spun as if doing a walk-around dance turn, gazing at her reflection over her shoulder, automatically putting on the flirtatious expression Mel wanted during the maneuver in the competition. She shocked herself; she looked saucy and put together. Damned sexy, in fact.
“I love it on you,” Denise pronounced. “Absolutely!”
Mary still wasn’t sure. She stood in a deliberately awkward posture and studied the dress in the mirror. “Not too much leg showing when I dance?”
“Hell, Mary, you’ll be one of the more conservative ones out there. You oughta see some of the stuff I been making lately. More skin than material showing, I can tell you.”
“It seems to fit all right.” She switched her hips, making the gathered skirt flare. Hey, she liked the way that looked!
“No way anybody can fit it to you better,” Denise said, sounding slightly miffed by Mary’s lack of enthusiasm.
Mary smiled at her via the mirror. “Okay, I think it’s great!”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Mary changed back into her working-woman clothes and wrote the mollified Denise a check. She was spending plenty for the dress, but Denise was worth it, and the price was exactly the amount agreed upon and allotted by Mary. And though the Ohio competition would be expensive, she’d set money aside for it. Frugality was about to reward her, exactly as Angie and the nuns at Saint Elizabeth’s had preached. What else might they have been right about? If they’d known the score about frugality, why not eternity?
She couldn’t stop thinking about the dress as she drove to work, glancing at it now and then in the rearview mirror, where it was draped in a plastic bag on a hanger in the back of the car. The more she thought about it, the more she liked it. And she could wear her simple cocktail dress for the smooth dance competition; that’s what most dancers wore in the Newcomer category.
Tapping her fingers on the steering wheel in cha-cha rhythm, she smiled as she drove. She’d danced experimentally on carpet with the new Latin shoes, and finally she was sure she’d found a pair that fit. And they were great with the dress. She was set now with what she needed to wear in Ohio. An important and worrisome hurdle had been cleared.
She was still pleased as she parked in the lot behind Summers Realty. A chill fall wind gusted in off Kingshighway, scattering dust and scraps of paper before it, but she didn’t feel cold.
