Authors: William Hjortsberg
On my way out, I blew a loud kiss at the receptionist with the poker up her ass. The face she made suggested a mouthful of caterpillar guts, but two salesmen cooling their heels in matching Barcelona chairs thought it was real cute.
I did a quick-change number in the broom closet that would have made Superman envious. There wasn’t time to repack the attaché case, so I stuffed my Smith & Wesson and the contact mike in my overcoat pockets and left the coveralls and safety harness crammed into the dented bucket. In the elevator, I remembered my necktie and made a clumsy, blind job of twisting a knot around my shirt collar.
There was no sign of Margaret Krusemark out on the street. She had mentioned going to Saks, and I figured she caught a cab. Deciding to give her time to change her mind, I cut across Lexington to Grand Central and went in through a side entrance.
I detoured down the ramp to the Oyster Bar and ordered a dozen bluepoints on the half-shell. They went fast. I sipped the juice from the empty shells and ordered another half-dozen, taking my time with them. Twenty minutes later I pushed my plate back and headed for a pay phone. I dialed Margaret Krusemark’s number and let it ring ten times before hanging up. She was safe at Saks. Maybe she’d hit Bonwit’s and Bergdorf’s before heading home.
The shuttle train hauled my mollusk-stuffed carcass over to Times Square where I caught an uptown BMT local to 57th Street. I called Margaret Krusemark’s apartment from the phone booth on the corner and again got no answer. Walking past the entrance to 881 Seventh, I spotted three people waiting for the elevator and continued on to the corner of 56th. I lit a cigarette and started back uptown. This time the lobby was empty. I went straight to the fire stairs. There was no percentage in being recognized by elevator operators.
Climbing eleven flights is all right if you’re in training for the marathon, but no fun at all with eighteen oysters tumbling around inside. I took it easy, resting every couple of floors, surrounded by the cacophonous blend of a dozen disparate music lessons.
When I got to Margaret Krusemark’s door I was breathing hard and my heart hammered like a metronome in presto. The hallway was deserted. I opened my attaché case and pulled on the rubber surgeon’s gloves. The lock was a standard make. I rang the doorbell several times before sorting through my ring of expensive skeleton keys for the appropriate series.
The third key I tried did the trick. I picked up the attaché case, stepped inside, and dosed the door behind me. The smell of ether was overpowering. It hung in the air, volatile and aromatic, bringing back memories of the ward. I got my .38 out of my overcoat and edged along the wall of the shadowed foyer. It didn’t take a Sherlock to know something was very wrong.
Margaret Krusemark hadn’t gone shopping after all. She was lying on her back in the sunlit living room, spread out across the low coffee table under all those potted palms. The couch we’d had tea on was pushed over against the wall so that she was all alone in the center of the rug like a figure on an altar.
Her peasant blouse was torn open, and her tiny breasts were pale and not at all unpleasant to look at except for the ragged incision that split her chest from a point below the diaphragm to midway up her sternum. The wound brimmed with blood and red rivulets ran down across her ribs and puddled on the tabletop. At least her eyes were closed; there was something to be said for that.
I put my gun away and touched my fingertips to the side of her throat. Through the thin latex I could feel she was still warm. Her features were composed, almost as if she were only sleeping, and something very much like a smile lingered on her lips. At the far end of the room, a mantel clock chimed the hour. It was 5:00 P.M.
I found the murder weapon under the coffee table. An Aztec sacrificial knife from Margaret Krusemark’s own collection, the bright obsidian blade dulled with drying blood. I didn’t touch it. There was no sign of any struggle. The couch had been carefully moved. It was easy to reconstruct the crime.
Margaret Krusemark had changed her mind about shopping. She’d come straight home instead, and the murderer was waiting for her inside the apartment. He, or she, surprised her from behind and clamped an ether-soaked pad over her nose and mouth. She was unconscious before she had time to put up a fight.
A wrinkled prayer rug near the entrance showed where she’d been dragged into the living room. Carefully, almost lovingly, the killer had lifted her onto the table and moved the furniture back so there’d be lots of space to work in.
I had a long look around. Nothing seemed to be missing. Margaret Krusemark’s collection of occult doodads appeared intact. Only the obsidian dagger was out of place, and I knew where to find that. No drawers were opened; no closets rifled. There was no attempt to simulate a burglary.
Over by the tall window, between a philodendron and a delphinium, I made one small discovery. Resting in the basin of a tall bronze Hellenic tripod was a glistening lump of bloodsoaked muscle about the size of a misshapen tennis ball. It looked like something the dog might have dragged in, and I stared at it a long time before I knew what it was. Valentine’s Day would no longer seem the same. It was Margaret Krusemark’s heart.
Such a simple thing, the human heart. It goes on pumping day by day, year after year, until someone comes along and rips it out, and it ends up looking like so much dog food. I turned away from the Witch of Wellesley’s ticker, feeling all eighteen oysters stampeding to get out.
After a bit of poking around, I found an ether-saturated rag in a woven wicker wastebasket in the foyer. I left it there for the homicide boys to play with. Let them take it downtown with the dead meat and run it through the lab. There’d be reports to file in triplicate. That was their job, not mine.
There was little of interest in the kitchen. It was just another kitchen: cookbooks, pots and pans, a spice rack, an icebox full of leftovers. A shopping bag from Bloomingdale’s held the trash, but it was just trash: coffee grounds and chicken bones.
The bedroom looked more promising. The bed was unmade, rumpled sheets stained with sex. The witch was not without her warlocks. In a small adjoining bathroom I found the plastic case to her diaphragm. It was empty. If she got laid this morning, she must still be wearing it. The boys from downtown would find that, too.
Margaret Krusemark’s medicine cabinet overflowed onto tall shelves framing either side of the mirror above the sink. Aspirin, tooth powder, milk of magnesia, and small vials of prescription drugs competed for space with jars of foul-smelling powders marked by obscure alchemical symbols. A variety of aromatic herbs was sealed in matching metal canisters. Mint was the only one I recognized by smell.
A yellow skull grinned up at me from the top of a Kleenex box. There was a mortar and pestle on the counter next to the Tampax. A double-edged dagger, a copy of
Vogue
, a hairbrush, and four fat, black candles crowded the lid of the toilet tank.
Behind a jar of face cream I found a severed human hand. Dark and shriveled, it lay there like a discarded glove. When I picked it up it weighed so little I nearly dropped it. I didn’t find any eye of newt but not because I didn’t try.
There was a small alcove off the bedroom where she did her work. A filing cabinet crammed with customers’ horoscopes meant nothing to me. I looked under the “
F’s
” for Favorite and the “
L’s”
for Liebling without success. There was a small row of reference texts and a globe. The books were propped against a sealed alabaster casket about the size of a cigar box. Carved on the lid was a three-headed snake.
I thumbed through the books hoping for some hidden scrap, but found nothing. Searching among the disordered papers on the desktop, a small printed card edged in black caught my attention. An inverted five-pointed star inscribed within a circle was printed at the top. Superimposed within the pentagram was the head of a horned goat. Below the talisman it said MISSA NIGER in ornate caps. The text was also in Latin. At the bottom were the numerals: III. XXII. MCMLIX. It was a date. Palm Sunday, four days away. There was a matching envelope addressed to Margaret Krusemark. I slipped the card back inside and stuck it in my attaché case.
Most of the other papers on the desk were sidereal calculations and horoscopes in progress. I glanced at them without interest and found one with my name written on the top. Wouldn’t Lieutenant Sterne like to get his hands on that? I should have set fire to it, or flushed it down the toilet, but instead, like a dummy, I tucked it in my attaché case.
Finding the horoscope made me think to check Margaret Krusemark’s desk calendar. There I was on Monday the 16th: “H. Angel, 1:30 P.M.” I ripped the page free and put it with the other stuff in my case. Today’s page on the desk calendar showed an appointment for five-thirty. My watch was a few minutes fast, but twenty after was close enough.
On the way out, I left the apartment door slightly ajar. Someone else could find the body and call the police. I wanted no part of this mess. Fat chance! I was in it up to my neck.
TWENTY-NINE
There was no rush going down the fire stairs. I’d had enough exercise for one day. When I hit the lobby I didn’t make for the street, but cut through the narrow passage leading to the Carnegie Tavern. I always buy myself a drink after finding a body. It’s an old family custom.
The bar was jammed with the Happy Hour crowd. I elbowed through the press and ordered a double Manhattan on the rocks. When it came, I took a long swallow and struggled back with it, stepping on toes all the way to the pay phone.
I dialed Epiphany Proudfoot’s number and finished my drink while listening to the endless ringing. There was something ominous about not getting any answer. I hung up, thinking of Margaret Krusemark split like a Christmas goose eleven flights above. Hers was the last number that didn’t answer. I left my empty glass on the shelf under the phone and shouldered through to the street.
A cab was letting someone out halfway down the block in front of the mosquelike City Center Theatre. I yelled and it waited with the door open, although I had to run to beat a determined woman who came charging across the street, brandishing a furled umbrella.
The cabby was a Negro who didn’t bat an eyelash when I told him to take me to 123rd and Lenox. He probably figured it was my funeral and was happy to have the final tip. We drove uptown without any philosophy. A transistor radio on the front seat was loudly tuned to a scat-talking deejay on WOV: “the power-tower station, the nation’s sensation …”
He dropped me in front of Proudfoot Pharmaceuticals twenty minutes later and sped off in a cadenza of rhythm-and-blues. The shop remained closed for business, the long green shade hanging behind the glass door like a flag lowered in defeat. I knocked and rattled the knob without success.
Epiphany had mentioned an apartment above the store, so I walked to the building’s entrance further down Lenox and checked the names on the mailboxes in the lobby. Third from the left: PROUDFOOT, 2-D. The hall door was unlatched, and I went inside.
The narrow, tiled hallway smelled of urine and boiling pigs’ feet. I climbed the age-scalloped marble steps to the second floor and heard a toilet flush somewhere above. Apartment 2-D was at the far end of the landing. I rang the bell as a precaution, but there was no answer.
The lock was no problem. I had half a dozen keys to fit it. I pulled on my latex gloves and opened the door, sniffing instinctively for ether. The large, corner living room had windows facing both Lenox Avenue and 123rd Street. It was decorated with functional lay-away-plan furniture and African wood carvings.
The bed was carefully made in the bedroom. A pair of grimacing masks flanked a bird’s-eye maple vanity table. I went through the dresser drawers and the closet without finding anything other than clothing and personal effects. Several silver-framed photographs stood on a bedside table, all of the same haughty, fine-featured woman. There was something of Epiphany in the lyric curve of her mouth, but the nose was flatter, and the eyes were wild and wide like a person possessed. I was looking at Evangeline Proudfoot.
She trained her daughter to be neat. The kitchen was clean and orderly, no dishes in the sink or crumbs on the table. Fresh food in the refrigerator was the only sign of recent habitation.
It was dark as a cave in the last room. The light switch didn’t work, so I used my penlight. I didn’t want to trip over any bodies and checked the floor first. Once upon a time the place must have been an extra bedroom, but that was long ago. The window glass had been painted the same deep, midnight blue as the walls and ceiling. Over this swirled a neon rainbow of graffiti. Leaves and flowers entwined along one wall. Crudely drawn fish and mermaids cavorted across another. The ceiling blazed with stars and crescent moons.
The room was a voodoo temple. A rough brickwork altar had been built against the far wall. It resembled a stall in an outdoor market with rows of covered earthenware jugs ranked in tiers. An elaborate wrought-iron cross crowned with a battered silk top hat stood in the center. A wooden crutch hung to one side. Candle stubs by the dozen oozed beneath gaudy chromoliths of Catholic saints curling on the bricks like ancient promo posters. Stuck into the floorboards in front of the altar, a rusted sabre swayed slightly at my touch.
I saw several gourd rattles and a pair of iron clappers on a shelf. An assortment of colored bottles and jars clustered next to them. A childlike painting of a tramp steamer filled most of the wall above the altar.
I thought of Epiphany in her white dress, chanting and moaning, while drums throbbed and the gourds whispered like snakes moving in dry grass. I remembered the deft turn of her wrist and a bright fountaining of rooster blood in the night. On my way out of the humfo, I bumped my head on a pair of decorated wood-and-skin conga drums hanging from the ceiling.
I went through the hall closet without a score but got lucky in the kitchen and found a flight of narrow stairs leading to the store below. I went over the back room, searching among the inventory of dried roots, leaves, and powders without knowing what to look for.