False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (29 page)

“First time you sorry for anything.”

He patted the mattress, made room for her beside him.

“In the mood for romance?” She ran a finger across her swollen jaw. “Makes one of us. Don’t suppose you can get my pictures. I’d still like to have ’em. No hard feelings, not too many, if you can.”

Jordan didn’t answer.

“Anything penetrate? Or do I need to run the cold water over your head?”

“You’re not the only girl I sent to him.”

“Other one know how to fight dirty?”

“With her mouth.”

“Might want to tell her to cancel the appointment.”

“It’s too late.”

“Could be things didn’t turn out bad for her.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Might’ve turned out worse.” She dropped the towel, and slipped under the covers, stiff-arming Jordan before she relented, and let him kiss her cheek, the back of her neck, her shoulders. She was squirming into his arms when he dangled his legs over the side of the bed.

“Put you in mind to be with her?”

“Her and Pixley.”

“Makin’ me laugh.”

“Mollie wouldn’t know how to fight back.”

“She’ll figure out what she got to do to satisfy him. She can do that, huh? Do it good enough?”

“You told me yourself, that’s not what Pixley wants.”

“Don’t give a good goddamn about her. All I been through, I’m still shaking.
I
need you now.”

“I just want to know she’s okay.”

“Ain’t that fine and dandy?”

He tried to stand, then sat down again.

“So stoned you can hardly move.”

He tied his shoes, reached back for her.

“Don’t kiss me, don’t touch me, don’t say nothin’ more.” She turned her back as he stood over the bed. “Don’t bother comin’ back.”

He left the joint on the night table, and went out.

He hurried past the empty hack line to the next block. Outside an all-night hash joint he got into a parked taxi displaying an off-duty sign, and leaned on the horn. It brought him to the Alcazaba, the cabbie chewing a ham sandwich while Jordan stepped under the darkened marquee and let a match flicker against the glass showcase. The credit beside the portrait of Anita Coburn was hidden behind the frame. The match burned out, and he returned to the cab. “Let me have your tire iron,” he said.

“What for?” the cabbie said.

“For a bigger tip.”

Three sailors staggered by arm-in-arm while he held the jack handle behind his back. They were almost out of sight when he smashed the glass. Picking through the shards, he fished out the card. The beautiful murder victim had been posed artfully. The picture would make for a fine cover for
Real Detective
, and sell thousands of additional newsstand copies. The photographer would see his name in bold type, but wouldn’t collect a fee.
Photo by PixleyPix
.

“Next stop is New York Avenue,” he told the cabbie. “A block from the Central Pier.”

Murders were piling up faster than he could make room in the magazine. But this case had it all. No woman who wasn’t a knockout need apply to join the victims. It was a story to make his name, put him on the best-seller lists, even on track to Hollywood. All that was required to soothe his conscience was to get to the damn killer ahead of the damn cops, and before the next next Miss America.

Pixley’s building was unlocked, but not his loft. Jordan rattled the door, threw his shoulder against it, hammered the knob with his heel. The second floor dance studio was sealed, too, but the transom had been left open to allow fresh air. Jordan ran back up a flight, removed two quarts from Pixley’s milk box, and lugged the box downstairs, used it as a platform to hoist himself up to the transom.

B&Es would never be his day job. Squeezing inside the studio, he found little that wasn’t nailed down aside from a stack of scratchy records he didn’t want. A rusted fire escape enclosed the windows. As he dropped over the sill, the twanging of decayed metal brought forebodings of doom. Three stories below, a cat scrounged in a garbage can. When he didn’t crash down onto it, he ran up the ladder to the third floor.

Pixley’s loft, behind a barricade of geraniums, was too dark
to see inside. He forced a window a couple of inches before it stuck, then hurled a flowerpot through the glass. He was a bull in a china shop tonight. A stoned bull, but not a reckless one. A quick tour of the loft turned up nothing. He needed light, but feared ending up on the wrong side of a burglary rap. He reprimanded himself for being paranoid, allowing dope to influence his thinking. Nothing more than that making him sweat.
Well, wasn’t it?

He poked around the living area, went back, and looked under the bed, expanded his search to the darkroom and closets. A white backdrop suspended from ceiling hooks shielded pantry shelves bowed under jugs of chemicals and photographic paper. Discarded backdrops were tangled on the floor, blue, black, red, green, and another, which, as he raised a corner, he saw was painted to look like a sunset over Monument Valley, a convincing trompe l’oeil. The foot swaddled inside it, colorless aside from red toenails, was not designed to fool the eye, but rather, it seemed, to turn the stomach.

It was time—well past time—to bring in the cops. Noticing a phone beside Pixley’s bed, he reached around it for a camera, a 35mm Leica with fourteen shots remaining. He used two on the pantry before unraveling the backdrops on the floor.

The foot was a woman’s, cold, not stiff, a woman dead less than twelve hours or more than twenty-four. Nicks on her bare leg told him she had shaved it shortly before she died. On the other leg was a nylon. Its partner, a tourniquet almost invisible around her throat, was only a contributing cause of death. A gummy trickle was stalled below a small hole next to her ear. In profile she looked like no one in particular. He preferred that to the finality that came with seeing her face.

It didn’t matter to his readers who she was. They were in the know that she’d been beautiful, saintly as well as seductive, trusting his appraisal.
Real Detective
readers were hard-nosed
connoisseurs of facts the newspapers were too squeamish to reveal. For these they depended on Adam Jordan, who portrayed murder honestly while keeping the nightmares for himself. This case was no different despite his own involvement. Regarding Mollie Gordon readers might share his sleepless nights, but without a full measure of his guilt.

He cupped her chin as if to steal a kiss. Her eyes were open, dull and dry. He made a mental note of it, and of the way she felt, the cool vacancy of beauty robbed of life, observations which would be attributed in his story to an unbiased witness. He snapped two pictures of her face, and then finished the roll, an intimate album to consult when he was overwhelmed with murder, and its victims lost their individuality. He pocketed the roll. The used flashbulbs went into the alley, frightening away the cat. He was returning the camera to its shelf when he slipped on some photos scattered face down around the body.

Several flipped over as he kicked them, one a shot of a restaurant with mackie’s in bright neon in the window. He didn’t recognize the faces, but remembered the case, the Virginia Beach stickup-murder and fake suicide. Downstairs he shouted at the cabbie, “The beach—get going.”

“It’s four-thirty, I need to go home.”

“Take me there, and leave. You can do that.”

“Pay me first.” The engine didn’t start till Jordan pulled out his wallet. “Which beach?” the cabbie said. “All we got is beaches.”

“Little Egg Harbor. Try there.”

The sand belonged to two barefoot runners, a man toweling off after a moonlit swim, a couple under a blanket oblivious to the sun creeping out of the ocean. Jordan kicked off his shoes, and tramped across fluffy dunes bound by beach grass. A small fishing boat teetered on the horizon. The sun rose into the sky. Sea ducks skimmed the waves. That was all there was to see.

He was playing a weak hunch without a fallback if it didn’t pan out. At least he would have an invigorating walk to start the day.

The dope filtering from his system left a sense of calm clarity. A flash of light near the place where he’d found Suzie Chase brought him higher into the dunes, and he looked down into the sun reflected from a windshield. Trampled grass led away from the car to a cove where the ocean fell apart on a rock shelf.

A man was dragging a bulky object toward the water, stopping to rest each time he advanced a few feet. Above the tide line a cloth bundle was sheltered in a depression scooped from the sand. The bulky object was also a man. He wasn’t big, Jordan noticed, the same size as the man pulling him on his back. The pair were well-matched, the man on his feet grunting and cursing with sweat rolling down his forehead as he struggled to move the other man—who was nude—by the legs, a tug of war the man on his back couldn’t win. He was dead.

Jordan circled toward the bundle, a tangle of men’s clothing, the outfit Pixley was wearing the last time he’d seen him. A camera anchored it to the sand, and between the camera and the clothes a sheet of paper flapped in the breeze. Jordan had an idea what was written on it.

Bent over the corpse, Pixley reached into his pocket as Jordan came up on him. “Grab a drumstick. I’ve been expecting you.”

The body was that of a blond man with the face of an impish boy, about 120 pounds or so, Jordan estimated, or would be when he was soaking wet.

“Who is he?”

“Marcel,” Pixley said. “Sacrificed in the service of a higher cause.”

“To save your neck.”

“It’s better if people think he shot himself. Or rather that I did. Shot myself, I mean. You’re doing the story? I don’t see a notepad.”

“I know how it turns out.”

“I’ve added a twist,” Pixley said. “The bad guy, and he’s a very, very bad guy, Adam—no excuses—the bad guy gets away scot-free. It’s a story without a moral. You’ve never done one like it.”

Jordan studied a ragged exit wound in the back of Marcel’s head.

“Marcel was my biggest fan. He loved my pictures, even posed for some of them. He was under the illusion I’d brought him here to photograph him. He loved
me
. If you must know, he was that way.” Pixley fluttered his wrist. “A pest who won’t be missed.”

“And looked enough like you to be your twin.”

“Goodness, no, I’m
much
better looking,” Pixley said. “Marcel tried to imitate everything about me. He’d hate me for giving away his secret, but he colored his hair. There, see for yourself. He wanted to
be
me. Now he is. Did you happen to read the note?” His hand came out of the pocket wrapped around the grip of a gun, and then he put it back. “It’s the last testament of the tormented artist and loveable roué Pix Pixley, in which he admits to the murders of four women, expresses his shame and regret, begs forgiveness, and consigns his body to the sea, and his soul to God. I got the idea from one of your stories. Do you remember the dope who couldn’t stage his own suicide without landing behind bars? I’ve made improvements to the plot. I’ve supplied proof that I’m dead, and Marcel will look so much more like me—rather he’ll look less like himself after he’s been in the water.” He heaved at the body. “I’ve done the hard part. It’s your turn to pitch in.”

“Why’d you kill the girls?”

“Motives, shmotives. I gave your readers the best crime photos. That’s all I owe them.”

“You owe
me
.”

“Let’s quit kidding.” Pixley pulled the gun. “You aren’t going to write my story. I have to shoot you, which is a lousy way to end a friendship. I always liked you, and admired you, although
I wouldn’t want to be you. Not now. Trust me to give you a dignified burial in a beautiful place.”

“Why did you kill them?”

“Why do you think?” Pixley said. “Actually, you’d be wrong. I do fine with women, always have. And not because they pity me. No sympathy sex—I don’t play that game. They find me... um, understanding. But a real man. They love me. Adore me. I do better with them, I bet, than you.”

“So you kill them.”

“Being understanding is a bore. Snapping gorgeous women, sleeping with any I want, that becomes boring, too. Controlling them never grows old. Destroying them—there’s something new and exciting every time. Don’t assume I never give it a thought. But you won’t find me on a psychiatrist’s couch.”

“He’d say you’re a remorseless predator.”

“You’re no better,” Pixley said. “A vulture. The vulture and the wolf, that’s us, feeding off the same carcasses. Put Marcel in the water.”

“The tide will wash him back.”

“I don’t want to sail him to China. The body will be found near my suicide note, my wallet, my clothes, my favorite camera. No one will doubt I shot myself.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Another minute or two to enjoy my company.” The gun pointed across the corpse. “Lots can happen in a couple of minutes. I could be hit by lightning, have a heart attack. God might strike me dead, though I’m skeptical. In two minutes perhaps you can talk me into giving you thirty seconds more. You see, I also enjoy controlling you. What’s it going to be, Adam? I know what I’d do.”

Jordan took Marcel under the arms, and backed toward the water. One of the dead man’s heels dug into the sand. Pixley raised it, used it as a tiller to steer Jordan to the surf.

Waves thundered into the cove, and died at Jordan’s ankles.
Whitecaps boiled over the shoal. A series of combers scoured the beach up to the tide line. As they retreated, Pixley tumbled the body into the trough, and saw it float away before the wind and waves returned it to the sand.

“Carry him deep. We’ll send him off on the next big one,” Pixley said. “Do you know what the surfboard riders say in the Hawaiian islands? Every seventh wave is from heaven.”

He held Marcel back from a knee-high curler as giants stacked up on the horizon. One angled into the cove, a green Niagara swelling until its sheer size brought it down. “Now!” he shouted, and hurled Marcel into the foam.

Jordan dived after the body as a shot rang out. His arm burned from his shoulder to his wrist, while he ground his teeth to keep from shouting into the sea. Using a compact kick he swam underwater, surfaced to see Pixley fire at a red slick, dived again.