Her eyes were scrunched shut. Please, please, please.

Stella’s white blouse and skirt had been washed and ironed twice, yet she could detect the smell of a thrift shop in the material.

It was the odor of failure. Her head was bowed and her shoulders slumped in a loser’s posture. But that was about to change.

When she had finished her ritual prayer words over the cash machine, it disgorged all the manna she needed to replace the ruined audition suit. Her first thought was that this was her rent money, that the Abandoned Stellas had made an early deposit to her checking account. Her second thought was that there was a god of cash machines, and he loved theater folk.

She ran to the end of the block and joined a herd of shoppers gathered outside the department store, all awaiting the early-bird sale. Stella had her battle plan ready. The doors opened, and the chase was on. She sped past older women in support hose, descended the stairs to the basement level, then charged toward the back wall where the suits were hanging. If the clothes fit, if the producer liked what he saw – her entire life would change. Her future might be literally hanging on the rack before her eyes, and she was rushing toward it.

And then she stopped.

Damn – another New York moment.

A lumpy woman with brown hair and gray roots pulled the only blue suit from the group of size eights. Stella watched, dumbfounded, as the middle-aged shopper popped a button trying to close the blazer over her bulging stomach. Oh, and now the evil bitch had left a smudge of makeup on one sleeve.

Stella was distracted by the sight of her own face in a mirror on the nearby wall. Without intending to, she had slipped under the skin of the aging brunette, imitating the scowl, the narrowed mean little eyes and the absence of a soul.

The older woman gave up the attempt to shoehorn her body into the suit jacket, and she stormed away with heavy footfalls. Stella retrieved the fallen button and collected her prize from the floor where it had been dropped, but not, Thank you, God, trodden upon. She checked the label. It belonged to a designer she had actually heard of. The price had been slashed in half, another divine act, or, as the Abandoned Stellas would say, Jesus saves.

She glanced at her watch. It was late, but she would make the audition if she hurried, if the line at the cashier was not too long, if the trains were not late. She was still chaining her conditions of success when she ran into the fitting room, where she stripped, tried on the suit and pronounced it a perfect fit.

Stella slung her old skirt over one arm as she walked toward the cashier’s counter. Miraculously, there was no one in line. This afforded her the luxury of a few minutes of preening before a three-sided looking glass, admiring herself from every angle. The makeup stain was invisible as long as she kept her right hand by her side. And there was more than enough time to sew on a button during the subway ride. For a whole year, she had carried a small traveler’s sewing kit in every purse she owned, just waiting for a day like today, when her life might hang upon a button.

She was knocked into the mirror by a hard slam to her back. Stella sucked in her breath, then braced both hands on the glass. In one of the three reflecting panels, she saw a man standing behind her, breaking the rules, for all New York collisions were hit-and-run affairs. Everyone else in the crowd was in motion, hustling from rack to rack, flinging clothes and hangers. Only this man was absolutely still, and he only had eyes for Stella.

CHAPTER 14

The man in the department store mirror was obviously another fan of daytime soap operas. Stella smiled at his reflection.

Yes, it’s me.

He did not acknowledge her smile, nor did he make eye contact like any normal person. The man stared at her as if she were an object all of one piece and without eyes of her own to see him. She stiffened her body, imitating his posture, then focused on her own reflection and watched her eyes go cold and colder. Her mouth became a simple line, committed to no expression. And now she had his likeness inside and out. There was no one home inside of her anymore – just a little graveyard dust.

The man did not seem to appreciate or even notice her artful portrayal of him. Beneath the brim of a baseball cap, his face was unchanged, frozen, one inanimate object facing another – herself. Pushing the likeness just a bit further, Stella’s eyes had gone entirely dead, and she became -

The audition!

She was going to be late.

Stella broke off this eerie connection to glance at her watch.

When she looked up again, she saw the reflection of his baseball cap just visible above the heads of female shoppers as he moved backward, blending into the crowd, a player doing his walk-on in reverse.

Mesmerized, Stella did not move until he was out of sight. Again, she looked at her watch. More time had passed than she would have believed possible. Other customers were moving toward the cash registers. She ran full-out to beat a slow-moving elderly woman to the checkout counter. Hunched over, neck-and-neck with the stooped, white-haired shopper, Stella unconsciously mirrored the sudden alarm in her opponent’s eyes. The old woman put on some speed toward the end, then gave up the foot race to youth; panting and wheezing, support hose bagging at the ankles, the loser stood in line behind the grinning actress.

When it was Stella’s turn to be waited on, her mouth dipped down on one side, copying the face before her, and she also assumed the overly efficient air of the sales clerk. ‘I’m in a big hurry. Just cut the tags. I’ll wear it.’ Stella pushed her old skirt across the counter. ‘And bag this, okay?’

‘Suit yourself The clerk’s voice was the monotone of a telephone company recording. ‘No returns on sales.’

Stella held out one pale blue sleeve so the other woman could snip off the price tags. ‘You be careful with those scissors, all right?’

The clerk’s voice betrayed a sudden annoyance. ‘Like I said, lady – no returns.’ Not quite so efficient anymore, the woman allowed Stella’s arm to hang in the air. Taking her own maddening time to put the blond actress in her place, the clerk picked up the old skirt ‘twixt thumb and forefinger, then held it at the distance of a bad smell before dropping it into a bag. Finally, she reached for her scissors and slowly cut the tag strings from Stella’s sleeve. The cashier glanced at the mirror behind the line of customers, saying, ‘You know this jacket is damaged, right? Stained?’

Oh, the makeup smudge.

‘No problem. I can get that out.’

‘Yeah, sure you can.’ The clerk watched the blonde walk away with a black X scrawled on the back of the new suit. Then she turned a merciless eye on the next customer in line, an elderly woman slowly approaching the counter. ‘Move it, lady!’

Lieutenant Coffey watched the last actress leave the squad room in company with two detectives, the number of men it took to escort a pretty woman downstairs. The deputy commissioner’s son-in-law passed them at the stairwell door, and now he walked toward the private office.

So Mallory and Riker had managed to lose Deluthe again.

While the lieutenant checked his list of blondes for the second day of interviews, the younger man stood at a respectful distance and waited to be acknowledged. Coffey liked the deference to rank, but he had his doubts that this youngster was going to make it as a detective.

‘I thought you were watching Lars Geldorf’

‘He’s staying home today. I’m looking for Sergeant Riker.’

‘He’ll be here in half an hour.’ Coffey held up a tabloid with the headline: actress stabbed in broad daylight. ‘Okay, kid, make yourself useful.’ He pointed to the handwritten notes and a telephone number scrawled across the top of the front page. ‘This Midtown precinct never called back with a name on the actress. Find out who she is, then check the interview list. If we haven’t talked to her, get her down here today.’