“I had a rough day, too,” Dan said, oblivious to my inner turmoil. “Two prostitutes slashed to ribbons in Bryant Park. No witnesses because of the storm. Luckily, a mailman decided to cut through the park and found the bodies. He notified the station immediately, and we got there pretty quick, but it was snowing so hard that whatever clues there may have been were already buried. No footprints except the mailman’s. By that time, even the corpses were covered. And the ambulance had a hell of a time getting down the snowbound street to the scene. I was there all afternoon and evening, digging through the bloody ice, freezing my castanets off.”
“That’s awful!” I cried, glad the focus of our conversation had shifted from my day to his, and hoping I could keep it that way. “But how do you know the victims were prostitutes?” I asked. “Have the bodies been identified?”
“Yes, that was the easy… ”
“And what about the weapon? Did you find a knife or anything?”
“Uh, no, we… ”
“Did you check out the mailman? His story sounds kind of fishy to me. Why would he cut through the park in the middle of a snowstorm?”
“Hold it right there, Paige!” Dan said, in his toughest law enforcement tone. “No more questions. I’ve told you too much as it is. And don’t think for one second you’re going to play detective again and write a big story about this case. I’ll stop you before you even sharpen your pencil.” He sounded so cute I wanted to kiss him on the neck. His lovable but insufferably stiff neck.
“The thought never crossed my mind,” I said, telling the truth and nothing but the truth (if you don’t count the pouty inflection I put in my voice to give Dan the impression-just the slightest hint, I swear!-that he may have hurt my feelings). “I’m innocent of all charges!”
“That’s my girl,” Dan said, relieved. “You know I hate to be a bear, but it’s only for your own good.”
“I know… I know!” I said, heaving a huge (and totally honest) sigh. Then I quickly changed the subject. “I’m sorry you had to stay out in the cold so long. Have you thawed out yet? Where are you now?”
“Back at Headquarters. Got a lot of paperwork.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” I asked, suddenly longing for his company. I wasn’t feeling tired anymore. Now I was just feeling lonely. Desperately lonely. (The specter of death often has that effect on me.) “Come on over for a nightcap,” I begged, neglecting to mention that all I had in the house to drink was Dr. Pepper.
“I’d love to, Paige, but I really can’t. Too much work, and the driving’s impossible. I even canceled my regular Monday evening visit with Katy,” he said, referring to his much beloved fourteen-year-old daughter-his only child (and the only happy outcome of his very unhappy marriage to the vain, unfaithful wife he divorced some six years ago). “I’ve got at least an hour’s worth of forms to fill out,” he grumbled, “and with all this snow, it could take me two hours to get downtown to you.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Come on-a my house, my house-a come on,” I crooned, trying to sing like Rosemary Clooney, but surely sounding more like Andy Devine. “I’m-a gonna give-a you figs and dates and grapes and cakes… ”
Dan chuckled, and the way his laughter curled around in his throat made my skin tingle. “Very tempting,” he said, “but I’ve got to write these reports up now, while the facts are still clear in my mind. And I thought you said you were tired… on your way up to bed.”
“The sound of your voice rejuvenated me,” I told him. “And I feel sorry for your cold castanets.”
The minute those words were out of my mouth, my face turned hot as a bonfire. I hardly ever made suggestive comments like that (except to Mike and Mario, when I was trying to deflect their suggestive comments to me). And I never spoke that way to Dan. Really! I don’t know what came over me. Either I’d lost my head in the whirlwind of the day’s startling and emotional events, or I’d picked up a racy (okay, raunchy) new manner of self-expression just from hanging out with Abby.
If Dan was shocked by my risqué remark, he didn’t let on. If anything, he seemed pleased. Another deep chuckle came rumbling through the receiver, ending in a long, luscious (dare I say lusty?) sigh. “I’ll come tomorrow night,” he said. “Snow or no snow. Around nine o’clock. Will that be okay?”
“Sure thing, Sergeant,” I said, trying to sound cool though my face was still flaming. “Be there or be square.”
AS ON-EDGE AND ANXIOUS AS I WAS, I FELL asleep the minute my bones hit the mattress. It wasn’t a deep and restful sleep-I kept thrashing around in the tangled covers, dreaming about guns, and diamonds, and dimples, and dachshunds, and soldiers with snow for hair-but at least I squirmed through the night in a somewhat unconscious state, and when my alarm clock woke me up in the morning I felt somewhat refreshed.
I showered, dressed (black wool skirt, pale yellow sweater set), slapped on some makeup, and hurried downstairs to the coat closet. The Thom McAn shoebox was there, right where I’d put it on the shelf, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that the upsetting events of the previous day had been real, not an invention of my freaky imagination. I took the shoebox down, yanked off the lid, and dumped Terry’s notes and the two photos out on the table. Then I scraped the scattered items into a neat little pile, stuffed the pile into the side pocket of my large black leather clutch bag (next to the newspaper clips about the murder), and zipped it closed.
After putting on all my outerwear-my camel’s hair coat, black beret, black gloves, green plaid muffler, and warm, dry, fur-lined, ankle-high snowboots-I stepped over to the cabinet above the kitchen sink and pulled it open. The white-haired man in the Quaker hat was still there, smiling out at me from the shadows, standing tall behind the Campbell ’s soup cans like a faithful yeoman of the guard. I gave him a sly wink and a grateful curtsy, closed the cabinet door, and left for work.
No traffic was moving on Bleecker. The cars lining the curb were all buried under a foot of snow, and there was an accumulation of at least ten inches in the street. The sidewalks weren’t much better. A few bundled-up pedestrians were making their way to the subway (and onward, I assumed, to work), but they were walking very slowly and carefully, in single file, along narrow footpaths that had been worn, like trenches, through the hardening snowbanks.
It was colder than a butcher’s freezer, but at least it wasn’t snowing anymore. Wrapping my muffler over the lower half of my face so my breath would keep my nose warm, and hugging my clutch bag in close to my chest like a baby, I joined the slow-moving procession toward Sixth Avenue and the West 4th Street entrance to the BMT.
It was freezing cold below ground, too. The handful of people waiting near the track for the uptown train were standing unusually close together-in an almost-but-not-quite huddle-hoping, I realized, to draw some warmth from each other. I wormed my way into the middle of the small crowd and stood there, shivering, watching everybody’s breath turn to steam, until the train screeched into the station.
It was one of the older, heavier, clankier trains-the kind that had been around since the late 1920s-with the long, segmented, caterpillar-like cars. When the doors slid open, I scurried into the closest car, hoping the air would be warmer inside. It was-a little. Sitting down in the first forward-facing seat I came to, I carefully arranged my coat underneath my legs to keep my nylons from snagging on the frayed rattan seats.
The train was old, but the overhead advertisements were new. Judy Garland smiled down from one of the posters, proclaiming that Westmore lipstick had been KISS-TESTED, and had PROVED BEST in movie close-ups, while right across the aisle-dressed in a white evening gown and proudly smoking a cigarette-Mrs. Francis Irénéé du Pont II of Wilmington and New York, “one of Society’s most charming young matrons,” declared she wouldn’t go anywhere without her Camels. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made hostile faces at each other in an ad for The Colgate Comedy Hour, and the owners of a certain brewery were proud to present Miss Adrienne Garrott-a golden-skinned girl with a thick, foamy head of light blonde hair-as Miss Rhein gold of 1954 (I wondered if she’d been chosen for her likeness to a glass of beer). There were lots of other ads, too-for products like Ovaltine, Tussy lotion, Duz detergent, Camay soap, Odo-ro-no cream deodorant, and (eerily enough) Thom McAn shoes-and I dutifully scanned them all.