Mr. Apology Read online

  He moved slowly around the kitchen. The place was neat, tidy; nothing had been disturbed here. He stopped in the doorway and glanced across the living room. There they were, the workhorses of death, the guys with their dusting powders, their cameras, the uniformed guys who stood close to the front door as if they were guarding royalty instead of this awful thing. A small desk was overturned, a typewriter upside down, sheets of paper strewn across the floor. And, at his back, the constant sobbing. He’d have to get a doctor here, someone who could administer a shot of some sedative to the guy, whose name was Walt Spencer.

  He went inside the living room. Across the room, through the open bedroom door, he could see Moody moving around the bed. He was crouching, examining, taking it in with his eyes. He isn’t as used to death as you, Frank. Give him some time. Let the gloss of brutality wear him down. I am not immune these days, he thought. I used to be. But not now.

  He stuck his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. It was hot and stuffy in this place and he wanted to take the coat off, but he didn’t even undo the buttons. He looked at the Chinese screens, the paper lanterns, the oriental rugs. He looked at the hanging silks, faces of dragons, scarlet butterflies, fragile little birds. She died among all this tourist shit that looks like it was bought in some dreary back-street warehouse in Chinatown. The bamboo, the raffia, the silks. He moved towards the overturned desk, avoiding the flash of a camera, and he leaned down—groaning a little—to pick up some of the spilled sheets of paper. He read a moment: They were about some guy in the Bronx who’d won the state lottery. She had been typing this story when she’d been killed. Unfinished business.

  Killed, he thought.

  Killed was a word that described a bullet through the heart. A knife in the chest. A simple strangulation. Killed was a simple word.

  This woman hadn’t been killed in that sense.

  What do you have to do to deserve a death like this one?

  What do you have to do, Frank?

  You’re getting soft. Those days when any kind of killing didn’t matter are in the past. Then he realized the idea of violent death had only begun to touch him after Sarah had gone, almost as if, in her absence, by proxy, he had begun to see the events of the world through her eyes. He had begun to weaken in front of brutal, pointless death. Face it, Frank, the stomach goes first in a homicide cop. The guts yield. Even now, as he walked towards the bedroom, towards Moody, he wanted to turn away. His legs felt weak, the muscles shredded. There was a throbbing pain inside his head. He paused on the threshold of the bedroom and looked at Moody, waiting for the Boy Wonder to come out with something glib, hoping he’d utter something whimsical that might raise his spirits and put everything in an official perspective, reduce death to the absurdity of a police report.

  Strangulation, he thought.

  Only this time—

  Moody stared at him. “She had a hard time, Frank.”

  “Well, there’s a guy in the kitchen having a hard time as well.” Nightingale looked at the bed. The body. The blood that soaked the sheets, the Chinese quilt. It was all red, everything red, touched and marked by the same goddamn color. The color of blood.

  “He’s alive at least,” Moody said.

  “Yeah.” Yeah, so what? That guy couldn’t ever get the memory of this discovery out of his mind, walking into this bedroom and seeing the dead woman—he’d dream about that for the rest of his life. Bad dreams. So he was alive to have bad dreams. It wasn’t so terrific, Nightingale thought. It wasn’t exactly a consolation.

  Moody, notebook in hand, said: “Okay, I see it like this. She forgets to lock the door. She’s got journalism on her mind. Whatever. She’s preoccupied, distracted. The guy comes in. Easy. He comes in, hauls her from behind the desk, drags her in here to the bedroom, takes her clothes off. Or makes her take them off. Either way. I don’t think it matters who does what at this point.”

  Jesus, a cold recitation, Nightingale thought.

  The supposed facts. Just the facts. No shades, no delicate colorings.

  Don’t go on, Moody.

  “Then, maybe he has a weapon, who knows, forces her to lie down. Ties her to the bed with all those goddamn silk ribbons and scarves. He plugs the fucking hairdryer into the wall. He rapes her with it.” Moody looked up from the bed where the woman was lying, her face discolored, her lips pale, her limbs bound to the mattress by bright ribbons, rainbows of silk. Nightingale forced himself to stare at the woman. The hairdryer was stuck nozzle first into her vagina; the cord of the machine had been knotted around her neck—but that wasn’t what sickened him, that wasn’t what appalled him. It wasn’t the rape with the appliance or the strangulation with the length of cord, it was the gratuitous stuff, the stuff that wasn’t needed, like the killer couldn’t stop once he’d begun, like he had to go on, and, like some insane artist, leave his signature on the woman’s flesh.

  The nipples were gone. A razor lay in a puddle of blood on the bedside rug.

  A deep terrible line had been carved from navel to pubic hair.

  And—

  Nightingale turned away from the corpse and wandered around the bedroom. He looked out the window: the same goddamn crazy city, the same lights, the same mother-fucking sickness of violence. He clenched his fists and rapped them against the wall. Maybe Sarah had done the right thing by getting the hell out of this garbage can of madness. Maybe she was right, living upstate in fresh clean air where crimes of violence were presumably rare, where the only altercations that took place every Saturday night concerned who had done the best Hank Williams impersonation, and the local slammer was stuffed with guys in cowboy hats, silk shirts with arrowed pockets, and drunken voices singing “I Can’t Help It if I’m Still in Love with You.”

  You wouldn’t miss this city, Frank. Would you?

  What would you miss?

  He pressed his hands together and looked back towards the bed.

  Go ahead. Make something out of it. See if there’s a pattern to madness, to the cruelty and excess of this murder.…

  He takes the same razor—whoever he is, whoever this madman is—he takes the same goddamn razor and slices the woman’s tongue out of her mouth and drops it casually on the floor. Casually. The tongue, lying there pink and shriveled like the corpse of some unlikely lizard or some fetal flamingo half born, set against a pretty pattern on a Chinese rug.

  “Something wrong?” Moody asked.

  You poor kid. You’ve got a ways to go. “It’s stuffy in here,” Nightingale said.

  “Yeah.” Moody went to the window and opened it a couple of inches and then looked at Nightingale. “That better?”

  The rain. The night air. The smell of winter. Nightingale loosened his tie. “It’s fine.” Murder and heat, violence and scalding warmth—they went together. He could feel enormous drops of sweat slide down the insides of his shirt with all the cognitive alacrity of tadpoles. I need to get out of here. I need to.

  “Finally,” Moody said. “This guy is in no mood to fuck around with half-measures, Frank. So finally, like I said, he goes inside the mouth and razors the goddamn tongue out.” Moody looked sad a moment and Nightingale thought, Something is happening inside him, something touching him. But then he smiled suddenly, as if he were an assistant professor addressing a criminology class. “Tongue, nipples, the rape with the hairdryer, which distended her vaginal cavity—notice the blood on the inner thigh, Frank—and the strangulation. Not necessarily in that order. I’d say the tongue was an afterthought. Something this guy just tacked on at the end before he left. Why the tongue, Frank? Why that? Why didn’t he cut an ear off or split a nostril?”

  Nightingale felt his stomach turn over like one of those old globes of the world that schoolkids spin with a jerk of a hand. Around and around and around. He faced the window again. Air, he thought. Chill moist rainy air. It doesn’t matter what, something other than the stuffiness of death.

  “Maybe the tongue means something,” Moody said. “Maybe it sugg
ests something.”

  Like what? Nightingale shut his eyes. He could hear the broken crying of the guy in the kitchen and he wished somebody would close all the goddamn doors. I don’t need to hear that any more than Walt Spencer needs to feel it, he thought. The tongue. What the fuck would a severed tongue mean? What was Moody driving at? His years at university, Nightingale thought, have unhinged his fucking brain. He looks for signs and symbols and relationships as if they were footnotes in a scholastic essay, little numbers he might stick at the bottom of his goddamn pages. A woman is dead. Brutally killed. And you bullshit about the meaning of a goddamn tongue!

  “What the hell, Doug. She had the thing cut out. Why don’t you just leave it there and quit playing around with fucking intellectual nonsense!”

  “You sound sore, Frank. Have I upset you?”

  Nightingale shrugged. “She upsets me. That poor goddamn woman lying there upsets me. I mean, Jesus Christ, what kind of monster, Doug? What kind of monster?” He realized his eyes were watering and he turned his face to the side. There was a pain in the center of his chest, a sudden intense pain. You can detach yourself, Boy Wonder, but I’ve forgotten how. I’m so weary. He rubbed his eyes against the sleeve of his coat and then looked back at Moody. “Don’t talk to me about tongues, Doug. Okay? Don’t talk to me about a severed tongue being goddamn symbolic of something, because that’s an asshole kind of comment! She’s dead. That’s all I need to know.” And he turned away again, opening the window wider, pushing his face out into the dark, feeling the rain fall against his eyelids. It grows too big for you, he thought. The city grows too big, too weird—it isn’t something you understand the way you used to when you first joined the force. It’s tilted, crazy, cruel: It isn’t the place you first knew, first cared about. It doesn’t have the heart anymore.

  He glanced back at the dead woman.

  A journalist. Jamey Caroline Hausermann. Well respected in her field, it seemed. What killed her? Who killed her? Who killed her like this? He saw, from the side of his eye, the tongue lying on the floor. Then he twisted his face away.

  Nobody does this kind of killing, Frank.

  Dejected, he stuck his face out of the window again and back into the soft rain.

  “The motive,” Moody was saying. “Did she know something, Frank? Did she know something significant? Something she wasn’t supposed to know? Is that what the tongue means? Was it cut out because she told somebody something or because she refused to? Or was there some other reason?”

  Questions. Take them to your oracle of madness, Nightingale thought.

  Don’t ask me.

  Come on, pull your shit together. You’re still being paid to do a job, Frank. You’re being paid to find killers. He moved his head away from the window, wiping a drop of rain from his eye. When he looked at Moody, the Boy Wonder was blurry, smeared, as if his colors had started to run.

  “Why was she killed?” Nightingale asked. “Why would somebody come here and kill her?” His questions hung on the air like half-masted flags, feeble. “I need to know what she was working on. What she’d worked on in the past. The kinds of people she might have talked to recently. I need to know what made some motherfucker come in here and do this to her!”

  Moody nodded. “I’ll get everything I can,” he said quietly.

  Then Moody came across the room, placing one hand on Nightingale’s shoulder. “I see it in your eyes, Frank. I see it in the way you look. I probably shouldn’t say anything—you’re seeing Sarah on that bed, Frank. That’s what you’re looking at. Don’t answer me. It’s not important. It’s just an intuition.”

  Nightingale looked at his young partner: Is that what I’m seeing? My wife lying like that, humiliated in murder? He shook his head and clapped Moody on the arm. “They tell me Fulton is a safe place, Doug. They tell me homicides are rare. I hear they had their last murder case back in forty-seven. People up there might hit each other with empty bottles on a Saturday night, but I don’t see the joint having a big homicide department. Seriously.”

  “Okay.” Moody talked in a low voice, almost a whisper. “As long as you feel all right, Frank.”

  “I feel as fine as I could be. Does that tell you anything?” Nightingale turned around and looked out into the darkness. He was going stale. He didn’t belong in the arena of death anymore. He belonged with Sarah in some idiot one-horse town, selling postcards and souvenirs to tourists who never came. That’s where he belonged. With the woman he loved. Buried and forgotten in an upstate cemetery. He was sick to his heart with death, the madness of the metropolis, the random rages that finished with some tagged corpse lying in a municipal refrigerator. He didn’t think he could take much more of that.

  He looked back at the dead woman one last time. He shut his eyes but couldn’t get rid of the afterimage of the blood-streaked torso, the slashed breasts, the incongruous hairdryer shoved between the legs, the cord twisted around the neck, the terrible openness of the eyes which seemed to suggest perception and life and comprehension—a profound puzzle finally worked out and understood. A deep pool into which a pebble is dropped and is heard to hit bottom.

  He moved towards the bed. He touched the eyelids gently, pushing them down, closing them. And he wished he could do the same with his own, blinding himself from what he saw.

  “I’ll nail this fucker, Doug,” he said, suprised by the strange vehemence in his own voice. “I swear to God I’ll nail him!”

  Moody smiled. It was the kind of smile that might have said: You’ve still got some fight left in you, huh? Nightingale clenched his fists and stuck them in the cavernous pockets of his coat and tried to tune out the sound of the bereaved guy moaning in the kitchen.

  “Get a physician, Doug,” he said. “Somebody has to sleep tonight.”

  And it won’t be you, Frank. It won’t be you.

  SIX

  1.

  Harrison opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling. This feeling, this inner sense of darkness, of clouds rolling across some empty landscape … Something is wrong. Something is very wrong. He raised his face from the pillow and looked across the bed. Madeleine was gone. The bedroom was empty. He pressed the palms of his hands to the sides of his face and sat up, groaning. Something wrong, something more than just the calls, more than the voice, the threats. A dream? Had he dreamed something menacing, the traces of which lay inside his head now like the broken fragments of a hangover? He couldn’t remember a dream. He shivered, set his feet on the floor, walked to the doorway.

  A faint noise from the kitchen, a rustling, then water running.

  Madeleine?

  He rubbed his eyes and moved towards the kitchen door. She was leaning against the sink, fully clothed, her face inclined beneath water running from a faucet, dripping through her hair, splashing against her shoulders. Is she sick? Does she feel ill? It was more than that—he had the feeling that it was more than that. Something else. He stared at her, conscious of the small portable radio playing on the kitchen table. A rock singer’s voice. Dear Christ, you didn’t need that kind of noise so early in the day. He went towards Madeleine and laid one hand softly against her shoulder.

  She didn’t raise her face, didn’t look at him. She was making soft whispered noises, as if she were trying to speak words that wouldn’t quite come. He touched the side of her face, which was wet and cold.

  “Maddy?” he said. “What’s the matter?” It was strange how alarmed he felt, how attuned to her obvious distress. Was this love too—this weird telepathic link, this curious empathy? “Maddy. Talk to me.”

  She turned her face towards him slowly. She was white, white as old bone; water streaked across her forehead and her cheeks, gathered in tiny glistening drops on her upper lip. She opened her mouth to say something. But nothing came.

  “Do you want a doctor, Maddy? Do you want me to take you to a doctor?” he asked.

  She closed her eyes. She gripped his fingers hard. He moved her away from the sink, made her sit down
at the table. He turned the radio off. She was trembling; tiny spasms ran through her, quick little shivers. The light hairs on the backs of her arms seemed to have been brushed backwards—fear, it’s fear, he thought. Your hair stands on end. Talk to me, Maddy. Tell me what has happened this morning to make you look this way.

  She stared at him now. She was still silent and her eyes were red. He felt clumsy suddenly, as if he were intruding upon an emotion of hers which he didn’t have the delicacy to handle. He didn’t have the knack. He rubbed her shoulders, massaging them slowly in small circular motions.

  “What is it?” he said, his tone one of patience. “You can tell me, Maddy. Is it because of the caller? Is that it?”

  She shook her head from side to side. She looked at the silent radio and pointed a finger at it. “I heard it,” she said.

  “What did you hear?”

  “It was on the news. A few minutes ago.” She turned to look at him again.

  He waited. It was going to be unpleasant, whatever it was. It was going to be something awful, something he knew he didn’t want to hear. And he thought: There’s been another death. Somebody else has died. But the thought was too quick for him, a mercurial thing that slipped out of his mind before he could examine it properly. You don’t want to hear about any more deaths, do you, Harry? You want it all to come to an end.

  “The announcer said she’d been strangled,” Maddy said. And her voice was flat, without nuance, as if she were reciting a dry old fact, nothing that had any significance.

  She’d been strangled. Who was she? His eye caught the little pile of magazines Madeleine had bought last night. They were stacked in a tidy way on the table. He read about himself on the front cover. She. She … he came to a dark dead end.

  “Jamey,” Madeleine said. “He said it was Jamey Hausermann, Harry. I just kept thinking it couldn’t be the same one I knew. I wanted to keep thinking that, then he said she was a journalist and mentioned the magazine she worked for, and even then I didn’t want to make the connection. I wanted to pretend …” She was sobbing suddenly, her face flat against the table. He went down on his knees beside her chair and touched her hands, tried to comfort her. Jamey Hausermann, he thought. Somebody had killed her. Strangled her. He felt a cold flash of shock somewhere inside his chest. Ice around the heart. A touch of permafrost. Why her? Why would somebody kill her? You already see it, Harry. You already hear the words forming themselves inside your brain, only you wish you didn’t have to pay attention to them; you wish they’d just go away, but you already hear them rise up and take shape out of the shadows at the back of your head. You know what’s coming now; you know the very next thing. You already know the answer to your own question. He shut his eyes and pressed his face against Maddy’s arm. She was silent now and somehow that was worse than the crying, the sobbing; there had been something healthy about the tears—but this silence, this sudden drawing down of a blind, scared him. He had no way of knowing where she was retreating to.