The Venus Fix Page 4

  For a detective, he had a lot of fine things. Smiling, he ran his hand lovingly over the piano’s black-lacquer top. Even though he’d only published a few dozen songs over the years, they’d sold well and afforded him some extras. His apartment was beyond the reach of a detective’s salary, as were the antiques and artwork. These things were indulgences, but he appreciated each and every one of them. Like the whiskey, they smoothed away some of the rougher edges of his job.

  Noah took a drink, put the glass down and started to play. It took almost fifteen minutes for him to slip into the zone where he was no longer conscious of his fingers flying over the keys, or the day he’d had, or the problems waiting for him at the precinct house. There was just music. And he was sailing on it.

  Being a detective was part of him. It was what his dad did. What he always wanted to do. But he played piano from inside. He needed it for balance, for beauty. For the sliver of soul he still had intact. That’s what the music had salvaged.

  The music.

  It had always come through for him the way nothing else had. When his father died, when his long-term relationship had broken up, when a case burned its images into his head and held him captive in its gruesomeness, only the music offered consolation.

  It had been too long since he’d felt the first thrill of the birth of a new jazz piece. He needed to hear one now, so he stayed at it long after the whiskey was gone, longer than he should have, considering how many hours he’d been awake.

  The sounds that rose up soothed him even when they made his listeners want to weep, but there was no one there to hear him that night. That mattered. But not that much. The music mattered more. It was his faith. As long as he could write it, and as long as a few people showed up to listen to him play it on Saturday nights at the jazz bar around the corner, he could take the darkness when it came.

  Inside of him, that darkness churned. Until he’d met Morgan he’d never tried to explain it to anyone. But she’d understood. Because she was insightful and listened to him with her heart as hard as she listened with her head. She did everything like that.

  But it was more than that. Morgan had understood because she had that same darkness inside of her.

  Morgan.

  He pounded the keys.

  Morgan.

  Morgan of the fathomless brown eyes brimming with compassion. Morgan of the skin that felt too soft for his callused fingers. He closed his eyes. Notes poured out. He could almost feel her head on his chest, her tears wetting his skin.

  You let me cry and it doesn’t scare you, she’d said to him once. And that’s practically some kind of miracle. If only I believed in miracles.

  It was the same for him, too. Because of their professions, they were both confronted with proof of too much depravity. Evidence of too much evil shoved in their faces, twenty-four hours a day. They had no choice but to focus on it. You couldn’t just shake off the darkness when you got home. Couldn’t just drown it in a drink, though God knows how many of his fellow officers tried.

  He liked the idea that what he was writing would be Morgan’s song. Then he smiled at the utter romanticism of the thought.

  Noah worked on it for a while longer, wanting to get it down and smoothed out before he saw her again.

  They hadn’t gotten off to a good start when they’d first met. They clashed as much as they connected. And now they didn’t see each other often enough. Unlike so many people who fell into being together all the time, they hadn’t. The old-fashioned pacing was foreign to him, reminding him of a time and place he’d never experienced. It made him that much more aware of how tenuous their connection still was.

  The song was complicated: an enigma for a few bars that turned suddenly, revealing a hint of sensuality. It was uneasy. Edgy. And exciting.

  Parts of Morgan were closed down so tight that he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to pry them open. For the present, he wasn’t trying. When she felt too exposed, she disappeared and he had to start over. He didn’t want to grow tired of doing that and so this time he was hoping he could wait her out. Perez kidded him that the more complicated a case, the more hopeless, the more it obsessed him and captivated him. The more tenacious he became.

  It was true. Not just with work. Other women, less complicated women, hadn’t held his interest. But still…

  Jordain began his search for a riff that would lead him past the transition. He was picturing Morgan waking up in his bed, each time still slightly astonished that she was there.

  They’d known each other eight months, separated into two periods. Four weeks last June, followed by a three-month break, then together again in the October. Since then they’d seen each other regularly, usually once a week. Her first priority was her teenage daughter. Her second was her job. Then there was his schedule. After those three things, there wasn’t all that much time left. It was simple to explain.

  And yet.

  He played the riff again.

  And yet.

  Morgan remained just out of reach for a reason.

  His phone rang. Once. Twice. His fingers hovered over the keys. Damn how he wished he didn’t have to get up and answer it.

  “Jordain,” he said tersely into the receiver.

  “So, can you see the Met Life tower from your window?” Perez asked.

  “No, I can’t. What’s up?”

  “Well, I’m only about six blocks away from you and I can see it just fine.”

  Nine

  The apartment, on 17th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, was just one room, twelve sorry feet wide by fourteen pathetic feet long. The only thing that saved it from being unlivable, Jordain thought, was the magical view out the window, where the tower of the Met Life building sparkled like a beacon.

  There was a bathroom but no separate kitchen. Everything—bed, table, small refrigerator, smaller stove, still smaller sink—was crammed in. But it was astoundingly clean. Spotless tub and toilet. Not even a stray hair in the sink.

  That made the stench all the more horrific. It made the sight of the young woman, folded up on herself, fallen out of her chair, all the sadder.

  Jordain watched the forensic team preparing the body for removal.

  “How old?” he asked the medical examiner who was leaning over the girl.

  “Twenty-three.”

  “She looks younger.”

  “Yeah,” the ME agreed.

  Jordain looked away from the woman’s bloated face to the shocking pink plastic dildo on the floor beside her left foot, the color of the sex toy too bright for the solemn occasion. He looked up at the wall and at the paintings. Three canvases, each of a nighttime Manhattan skyline. They weren’t bad.

  “You read the descriptions of the symptoms she exhibited?”

  The ME nodded.

  “Any educated guesses as to what it might have been?”

  Sam Gordon looked up. “Noah, give me some time. Don’t make me guess what happened until I at least run some tests.”

  “But your instincts are so right on that I thought—”

  Gordon held up his hand. “Buttering me up won’t get me to speculate. I need some time.”

  “Time. Yeah. Sure, you take your time. After all, it’s not your fault it took so fucking long to find her.” Jordain’s voice was full of recrimination.

  Across the room, Perez looked up. “Hey, it happened. Calm down.”

  Jordain shook his head. “It shouldn’t have.”

  Officer Tana Butler, who was standing at the woman’s desk dusting her computer for prints, heard Jordain’s complaint and turned around to explain. “The calls were too scattered, boss. They came from all over the country into local police stations and no one noticed the pattern for the first forty-eight hours.”

  “I heard.”

  “Then finding the company that owns the company that owns the porn site wasn’t easy. Did you know that a subpoena issued in New York City, even to a company that does business as New York Girls and employs some Ne
w York girls, doesn’t mean much to a group of guys working out of a parent company in Shanghai called Global Communications?”

  “Excuses,” Jordain muttered as he watched the forensic team lift the body. He’d seen this ritual enough times that he should be inured to it. But on occasion something would get to him. Like the lock of hair that had fallen across the young woman’s forehead as they put her into the bag. He wanted to brush it back, get it out of her eyes.

  Butler was still quoting statistics. “Approximately five thousand men logged on to Penny’s Web site during the last hour of her shift. That doesn’t mean they all saw the end of her performance. Some of them no doubt left their computers because of phone calls or wives coming home, or because they just weren’t in the mood. There’s no way to know how many men might have still been watching during the last fifteen minutes, when she actually got sick. But certainly, men were signing on at various points throughout her performance. She’s usually on for at least an hour and a half. She got sick after forty-five minutes.”

  “These guys were sitting in front of their screens, their eyes glued to Penny’s bare breasts, wide eyes and wet lips, and they listened to her moans and dirty chatter and watched her get sick and didn’t do anything about it? What did they think?”

  “Well some of them thought she was getting a flu or had food poisoning,” Butler said.

  “Or that it was a kinky new game she was playing,” Perez said.

  “I still don’t understand why it took so long for us to find her,” Jordain said. “From the report, within the first twenty-four hours, fifty calls had been made. Within forty-eight hours there were hundreds. I know the calls meant nothing without the woman’s name and address. But she was online, for Christ’s sake. Wasn’t there a way to trace her connection?”

  “Sure. If her connection had stayed live,” Butler answered.

  “I didn’t hear about that. What happened?” Jordain asked.

  Butler plugged the power cord back into the laptop. A red light came on. “It looks like her battery died.”

  So it had taken five days from the time the first phone call had been logged to find the woman whose screen name was Penny Whistle, and whose ad claimed that she’d “Wet your Whistle, so good.” That had been one hour and twenty-four minutes ago. At that point, the police had realized that Penny was the same woman whose parents had reported her missing thirty-six hours earlier—just a dozen hours short of what the NYPD requires before starting work on a missing persons case.

  “Is there any chance she could have been saved if someone had gotten to her in time?” Jordain asked just before they took the body away.

  Gordon, who was at the door, turned, looked back and shook his head. “I won’t know that until I know what killed her. Besides what good is knowing?”

  No one needed to answer.

  “And there is absolutely no sign of anyone breaking in?” Jordain asked even though he knew the answer.

  “And no sign that anyone was here with her,” Perez said.

  Jordain couldn’t stop staring at her, asking her questions in his head.

  Did you kill yourself? Or did you get sick? It couldn’t have been that sudden. Why didn’t you call someone before it got too bad? Didn’t you realize how sick you were? Or did someone do this to you?

  Jordain shook his head. At no one. Or at her ghost, who couldn’t answer, anyway. They’d find out eventually. As if it would matter to her. As if it would matter to anyone who loved her.

  If she hadn’t died from an illness or an accident—if someone had done this to her—then at least they might be able to protect another life. That was what you had to focus on. His father had always said it. And Jordain knew it was true. “Your job isn’t to punish, it’s to protect.”

  Perez nodded at the laptop Butler was dusting. “There’s got to be information on there that can help us.”

  Jordain looked over at Butler, and as he did he noticed a small, finely painted, porcelain robin on the floor behind the chair.

  “Did you see that?” he asked her.

  She hadn’t. Jordain walked over and inspected it. A simple painted porcelain bird. A lovely thing, except for a chip in one wing. Had that happened when it fell? The bird had his head cocked and there was a sparkle in his black eye. Had someone given Debra—her real name was Debra, and the least he could do was call her by her name—this bird? Had it meant something to her?

  It didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything to anyone anymore.

  Ten

  Dearest,

  In the dark, there is one candle lit and the smell of the wax is a promise. I have four more candles on the table, ready to light. One candle for each woman—if you can call that a woman. I call her a witch who dreams evil and shows it to any man who wants to see, who offers up her own blood to quench their addictions and watches as their eyes glaze over and their fat fingers itch and they give in and give up to the plastic fantastic sham. These who call themselves women take bites out of the people they pretend to please, leaving poison on the skin. The pollution of innocence and filth in the name of freedom. No more. No more. No more. Nomorenomore. Nomorenomorenomore.

  Last week wasn’t the first time I watched your little friend. Did I tell you that? I’d watched her a half a dozen times before, but what choice did I have? I had to see what she did, what her “act”was, didn’t I? How else could I have approached her or known where her weak spot would be?

  She peddled, and she lied, and she plied, and she seduced with a falsity that seemed so obvious to me it’s a wonder that anyone falls for it. Can’t men see she is just playing with them? Didn’t you realize the damage, the ravage, the travesty that is enacted, pulled off, executed by these women who are not women but are instead this other thing?

  There was nothing innocent about the way she died except that she didn’t suspect it and that was my own sweet surprise. She just performed as usual, twisting her little toy up high into her vagina without guessing that there was anything different about it. Not an idea in her head that it would be her last night and that her minions, her army, her horde out there, alone in the dark, watching her, imagining that she was performing lust just for them, were seeing her for the last time. For the last time might be one of the saddest phrases I’ve ever written, don’t you think? For the last time…no, not there, I will not go there and not play that misery game where I try to remember the last time I felt your arms around me. You do not remember something you do not expect to lose. Lose. Life. Lost life. Her life lost. It wasn’t an easy end for her, you know, it wasn’t a sweet sleep death or a drifting but a jerking, painful sickening full of shit and stink and vomit and sweat death. Toward the end there was none of that vile purple lipstick left on her lips. And her hair wasn’t all wavy and soft and pretty anymore. She was not that lovely woman who was not a woman anymore, anyway. Not lovely. Lovely. Love.

  You see how much I love you, don’t you? This worst thing I could do is the best thing I will ever do—prove to you what you are to me. I don’t feel any relief or happiness, but there is satisfaction and there is biblical justice and there is rightness. I don’t care if I am ever forgiven for this. Until you have lost someone you love you can’t understand how crippling emotional pain can be. And, oh, how I love you.

  I didn’t think I was going to be able to watch her die, and certainly it wasn’t easy for me. It made me remember too much. But when the time came, I had to do it, because this I did for you.

  Tuesday

  Seventeen days remaining

  Eleven

  Her eyes sparkled and there were snowflakes melting in her thick lashes. You always noticed her eyes first. They were a very light green, the color of a new spring leaf. But it was the way she looked at you, from under those lashes, in a surprisingly innocent and sensual way, that you remembered. It was incongruous. But then so much about Blythe was.

  “God, it’s freezing outside,” she said as she dropped her leather backpack on the floor. Arou
nd her shoulders and flowing behind was an old-fashioned, green velvet cape. She unhooked it and took it off, revealing a pair of black trousers, a white tuxedo shirt and what looked like a real leopard vest, but I couldn’t be sure. A devotée of eclectic vintage clothing stores, Blythe put outfits together the way an artist mixes colors.

  After draping her cape on the coat stand in the corner of my office, she sat down on the couch. Her movements were lithe and lovely.

  “Is it okay if we don’t talk about my patients today? I need some help. I had a serious setback this week—it’s really affecting me badly,” Blythe said. Her voice was soft and sounded the way a rose petal feels. The sensuality subtle but unmistakable.

  Blythe was a getting her Ph.D. in psychology at Columbia University and was specializing in sex therapy. It was not an unusual choice given her own problems. All too often we find that therapists are best at helping those whose problems somehow mirror their own. All psychologists starting out are supervised. Nina had liked Blythe enough to hire her to work in the clinic—a free service we run for a dozen or so patients who can’t pay our prices—and asked Simon Weiss, one of my closest friends and the senior therapist at the institute, to be her supervisor.

  Simon had met with her once.

  The next day he asked me out to lunch. After one session, he recognized that he was not the right therapist for Blythe. He was a forty-year-old man with a shaky marriage, and, despite his best efforts, he found Blythe provocative. When I saw her, I wasn’t surprised. After I heard what her issues were, I understood completely.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Blythe squeezed her right hand with her left and her skin went white under the pressure. What she was doing was clearly painful. She repeated the action, and every time she did, I fought the urge to reach out and separate her hands.