The Ledger Read online

  Casey Reardon straightened up, his finger still fingering on a fine of numbers that Stoney had indicated to him. “There is a law, honey,” he said. “It’s very simple: the boss gets the best.” Christie smiled weakly. “Good law. If you’re the boss.”

  “You better believe it. Go on in my office and wait for me. And try to absorb some of the warmth because we’re going out into the cold, cold night.”

  8

  SOFT MUSIC SEEMED TO hum from the walls of the lobby; it was carefully modulated and unobtrusive. Christie wondered if anyone ever used the expensive furniture which was arranged into room settings, each separate and apart from the others. The whole wide area looked like a furniture store, but a very discreet furniture store where the customers didn’t look at the price tag before arriving at a decision. Reardon finished his conversation with the doorman, who turned away, laughing and shaking his head over Reardon’s last remark.

  “Okay, straight ahead, Christie,” he instructed her. He touched the tip of his finger to the recessed square elevator signal, and the door slid open immediately.

  The music followed them out of the elevator and down the carpeted corridor to Apartment 901. Reardon pointed to the small engraved brass nameplate set into the door. In delicate script, it bore the name “Elena Vargas.”

  Reardon was familiar with the apartment. As he pocketed the latchkey, he reached to his left and pressed a silent switch which flooded the entrance hall with soft light. “Give me your coat, Christie, it’s pretty warm in here.” He tossed her coat and his over the intricately carved wooden railing that separated the entrance from the sunken living room. “Well, what do you think of this place?”

  It was large, lavish and as totally impersonal as the lobby. There was no trace of an individual, no trace of Elena anywhere apparent. “I don’t think I could afford it,” she said.

  “Six hundred and fifty bucks a month,” Reardon told her. “Not on your salary you couldn’t afford it. Wait a minute.” He dug in his jacket pocket, extracted a slip of paper. “Here’s the list of clothing our little witness has requested. If there’s anything that looks a little too ... inappropriate, just forget it. I’ll get a suitcase out of the hall closet.” He walked to the bar which was built into one wall of the hallway. “Want something for your cold?”

  Christie shook her head. “No thanks.”

  The bedroom was dark and Christie slid her hand along the wall searching for a light switch. Her fingers hit a collection of switches: light filled the room in quick, sharp flickers, gashing across the walls. Sound came at her from overhead, hard, staccato drumbeats and low whining electronic screams. Christie jiggled switches up and down; each switch produced an immediate, unexpected effect of light or sound. With the palm of her hand, Christie quickly pushed all of the switches to the down position. She leaned into the living room and called, “I ... er ... seem to be having a problem, Mr. Reardon. With the lights.”

  “Try the switch to the right of the door, inside the room.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  The room was as clearly and naturally lit as if by afternoon sunlight. The bed was the first thing that caught Christie’s attention. It was larger than any she had ever seen and it was covered by a thick, lush lavender-velvet spread. As Elena had said, everything was lavender: springy shag carpeting, drapes, large dresser, even the mirror, floor-to-ceiling set into a panel facing the bed, was lavender tinged and it reflected not only the bed but something Christie could not identify. She frowned into the mirror, then turned. Wallpaper lined the room, interrupted only by doors or draped windows. It was, in keeping with the rest of the room, soft lavender, tones of lavender flowing according to the intensity of shadow and light as caught by the camera. Larger than life, hundreds of nude lavender Elenas, in all conceivable and some inconceivable poses, watched Christie Opara.

  A tense, curled Elena waited near the floor; an exuberant, almost innocently naked Elena, the back of one hand flung over her eyes, head tossed back, leaned against the hip of an Elena in studied repose. Some of the figures were complete statements, others were fragmentary portions of a rounded female body, puzzling because they bore no connection to any other part of any particular body. Yet, unquestionably, everything on every wall—roundly, lushly, lewdly, joyously, obscenely, eyes opened wide or closed, face blatant and taunting or unawares and turned away, body offered or teasingly concealed by some other abstract section of body—everything surrounding Christie was Elena Vargas.

  “Well, what do you think of Elena’s lair?”

  Christie turned, startled. She hadn’t heard Reardon enter the room. “Well. It’s ... different.” She realized that her hands were moving in empty gestures, indicating the walls, the bed, the whole room.

  “Sit down,” Reardon said. He pulled a chair from the dressing table. “Here, sit down. I’ll show you some of these gadgets.”

  Christie sat tensely on the edge of the chair. The room went dark.

  “Now,” Reardon’s voice was soft in the darkness, “let’s say a little soothing of frayed nerves is called for.” Music, gentle and quietly melodious, swept across the room in easy waves. “Then, we can pick up the tempo. Maybe a little Latin.” A beat took form, built in intensity. The blackness softened, was no longer black; there was no actual light apparent but rather a lightness. Christie could see Casey Reardon clearly outlined, his hand poised over the switches. “Now,” he said, “let’s say our particular problem is with a guy who needs to be bombarded with sensation.”

  A scream flashed across the room with a burst of light, then was gone. Each shock of sound seemed to be carried within a beam of light and each beam of light disclosed, in rapid succession, one blinding flash of Elena, or some part of Elena’s body. The flashes changed from yellow to red to green to violent purple and hit the walk and ceiling and bed in such perfect synchronization with the sound that the light seemed to be shrieking. The noise and light stopped abruptly; soft music welled up; it was dark again, then the light, natural daylight, filled the room.

  Reardon ran his fingertips over several other switches. “The rest of these I won’t demonstrate. I’ll let you speculate. This whole panel can be preset to run in any given cycle for any particular period of time. Well, what do you think about all this, Christie?”

  Christie clenched her fingers tightly. She shrugged. “Well, I’ve never, you know, never seen anything like this. I guess, well, if the men who come here want ... entertainment ... I guess this is the kind of thing.” She stood up abruptly. “I don’t know, this whole place is pretty ... unsettling.”

  Reardon pressed his fingers into his eyes for a moment then blinked. He put the suitcase on the dressing table and jerked his thumb toward a closet. “Get the things Elena wanted.”

  “Right.” She slid the closet door open and was confronted by eighteen feet of shelves and hanging garment bags. She turned in confusion. “I don’t know what I did with the list you gave me. From Elena. The list of clothes and things.”

  Reardon leaned against the dressing table and his eyes flicked from Christie to the bed. “Go over to the bed.”

  “Huh?”

  “The list is on the bed.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Christie felt the tension along her throat, in the dryness of her mouth and in her hands which were cold in spite of the warmth of the room. Elena Vargas intruded not only from the walls and from the very air of the room but from within her own brain. The empty spaces between Reardon and herself were not empty and they both seemed to know it now.

  She grasped several dresses without consulting the slip of paper, folded them and reached for the suitcase. “Excuse me,” she said without looking at Reardon. He moved slightly. “Mr. Reardon, do you have to stand there like that? I mean, this will take a few minutes and ...”

  “What’s the matter, Christie?”

  She started to answer but stopped, slowed herself down, raised her face to his. “You know what’s the matter.”

 
; Reardon nodded slightly. “Yes. I know what’s the matter. I want to know if you do, too.”

  “This ... this room,” she turned, moved her hands. “And those, those lights and switches and noises and ... this room and everything.”

  “And what else, Christie?” He persisted, gently but insistent.

  Christie took a deep breath. “And you. And me.”

  Reardon moved toward her, his physical presence the only reality in a room of fantasy. He pulled her to him, his solidity warm and certain. Christie’s hands felt the fabric of his shirt on his chest, then slid, naturally, easily, inside his open jacket until she felt the solid muscles of his back and shoulders. She felt the scrape of his chin along her mouth and she rubbed his face against hers. She closed her eyes tightly, let all sensation come to her through him, as he pressed his mouth on hers and moved against her steadily. The resistance her body offered was not really resistance but increased the pressure of Reardon against her.

  She felt the bed beneath her, soft and yielding, the cover warm against her back and Casey Reardon’s mouth warm along her neck, her cheek, her mouth. She turned her face away, unexpectedly, and he waited.

  “Say my name,” she whispered, not looking at him.

  His hand ran gently along the contours of her face, turning her toward him so that she looked directly into his eyes. His expression was different from any she had ever seen those hard features assume: a kindness, a patience, an understanding she had not anticipated. He sat up, his hands pressed down on her shoulders and held her as he leaned forward and kissed her again, but lightly, first on the forehead, then on the lips.

  “Go ahead,” he said, “ask me.”

  “Ask you what?”

  He touched her face with the back of his hand. “If it’s because of you or because of the room. That’s what stopped you, right?” She turned away, but he forced her to face him. “It’s okay, Christie. But we should get one thing straight, right now. This room is one vast gimmick. It wouldn’t matter to me if this was a ten-by-ten broom closet. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Yes, but ...”

  “No buts, Christie. This room hasn’t a damn thing to do with us. Come on, relax. It’s the wrong place and we’ll let it go at that, okay?”

  She reached up, her fingers light on his face, along his lips. “All right, Mr. Reardon.” She bit her lip. “All right, Casey.” She had never addressed him by his first name; in this setting, on this bed, with him, with his hands still holding her, it still felt strange and she was annoyed with herself. Elena confronted her from the ceiling: the smile was mocking. “You’d think she’d get tired of seeing herself,” she said shortly.

  Reardon laughed and pulled her to her feet. “I doubt that she even notices all of this.” His eyes moved over the walls, slowly, then he looked at Christie sharply. “Hey, what else? Come on, now, Christie. You look like you’re about to strangle on something. Say it, Christie.”

  “All right. If ... if she was here, right now, instead of me. Would ... would you make love to her?”

  He answered immediately. “Nope. Not ‘make love’ to her. I would use her. I would respond to the stimuli all around me and to the various techniques she would offer me. I would use her sexually and she would encourage me to satisfy myself any way I wanted. Hell, that’s what this room is all about, Christie. I wouldn’t use you. I’d make love to you and there is one vast difference. But not here.”

  Christie’s voice was low and steady. “Why not here?”

  He was silent for a moment. His hands went to her shoulders and tightened. “Because afterward, you would begin to wonder. You would think about this room and this bed and about Elena displayed all around the place and you would begin to brood. You’d look at me and you’d begin to turn everything over and over in your mind. And it wouldn’t come out the way it was meant.” She closed her eyes and nodded. “I told you once, a long time ago, Christie: I can read you. Clearly and accurately.” He released her, took a step back. “When I make love to you, Christie, it won’t be in the bedroom of a whore, and you won’t have to wonder if it’s because that whore is not around. There will be absolutely no doubt in your mind as to why. And you won’t have to ask me to say your name. Now,” he turned her toward the dresser, “you go and collect the things you’re supposed to collect and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  He stopped at the door, turned and faced her again. Reardon shook his head over the room, himself, the bright and pretty girl who wasn’t really sure yet just how she felt. “And make it fast, Opara, or I just might forget everything I’ve just said.”

  Christie sorted the various garments indicated on the list but her mind wasn’t on what she was doing. She raised her eyes and was confronted by a mocking Elena, lips drawn back in a contemptuous grin.

  “Go to hell,” she said softly.

  9

  CHRISTIE LEANED BACK AGAINST the wooden frame chair and shivered inside her heavy toggle coat. The atmosphere of the room was composed of various shades of brown, amber and tan, all calculated to give the effect of mellow age. Directly across from the table where Reardon had led her was a three-foot-high, English-script-on-old-wood listing of the specialties of the house: hamburgers, fried onions, French fried potatoes. The rest of the items had been obscured, apparently, by time. There was no aroma of food, only a mild mingling of various kinds of smoke. Christie caught sight of Reardon; he stood, his hand on the waiter’s sleeve. They looked in her direction, the waiter nodded and wrote on his order pad.

  Reardon moved to the bar, stopped beside a man whose face she couldn’t see. He gestured toward the table, then worked his way through the narrow aisle. His face was warm and relaxed. “I ordered something for your cold. And some hamburgers. You ever been here before?” She shook her head. “Ah, here comes my man now.”

  Everything about Detective Bill Dudley seemed too much: he was too tall, too broad-shouldered, too handsome, too vivid. He had a thick mass of dark-brown curls which spilled along the edge of his yellow turtleneck sweater. His sideburns were wide and led to a neat, clipped beard. His moustache was perfectly suited to his face and did not distract from his surprisingly blue eyes. Reardon introduced them, and Bill Dudley’s hand, large and warm, held Christie’s tightly for a moment. When he smiled, his teeth were square and very white.

  “With hands this cold, Christie, you have to have a warm heart.”

  He had a way of moving his eyes, of leaning slightly forward, that indicated all of his attention was fixed on the person he addressed. “You’d better take your coat off, Christie.” He helped her, placed the coat over the back of her chair. He reached two long fingers into the small pocket of his yellow-and-brown plaid vest and consulted a gold watch. “The clock up there is generally off by anywhere from five to ten minutes or one to three hours. Mine has stopped completely.” He reached across the table and, with easy familiarity, turned Christie’s wrist toward him. “I’ll set my watch by yours, Christie.”

  “I’m usually ten minutes off, one way or the other.”

  Reardon’s voice was sharp and familiar. “Ten minutes late usually.”

  Everything about Dudley would have seemed an affectation in some other man, but even the easy flirting seemed genuine. Christie glanced around the room, her eyes scanned the old-fashioned schoolroom clock, the stained-glass chandeliers, the dark wood, but inevitably she kept coming back to Bill Dudley. He was the unreal, physically perfect male animal seen in cigarette ads and Christie was aware of Reardon’s close scrutiny. She felt slightly giddy.

  The waiter, wiry and expressionless, put two plates in the center of the table, gave Reardon a drink and wrapped a napkin around a steaming glass which he placed in front of Christie. He leaned to Dudley and said, “Hey, Dude. Celia’s at the bar. You want her over here, or what?”

  “Thanks, Jack. I’ll join her.” When he stood, a huge shadow covered the table. “Casey, we’ll give you fifteen or twenty minutes, then I’ll bring her
over.” He touched Christie’s glass carefully, then smiled. “Wrap your hands around this, Christie. It’ll make the cold go away.”

  Reardon took a long swallow from his drink, then rotated the glass between his open palms. “You’re gaping, Opara. Do you know that your mouth is open?”

  “I’m just trying to breathe, Mr. Reardon. My cold has me all stuffed.”

  “He’s a good-looking guy, Dudley the Dude.”

  Christie shrugged. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Then she grinned, “My God, he doesn’t look real.”

  “He’s real all right. And a hell of a good man for his job. A guy like Dudley can do it either of two ways: muscle or charm. The only problem is, sometimes he can’t seem to relax the charm.” He abruptly pushed a plate of food toward Christie. “Come on, get something into you.” He moved his hand over his face. “You got something to say, Christie? You’ve got a peculiar look on your face. What the hell are you laughing at?”

  It was the first time she had ever seen Reardon rattled and she enjoyed it. Her smile was deliberate. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Reardon.”

  “The hell you don’t. Will you eat that goddamn hamburger?”

  The hamburger was dry and tasteless and there were no ketchup bottles on any of the tables. It would probably be considered outrageous to request anything to enhance the specialty of the house. Cautiously, she sipped the drink, which didn’t seem too hot until she took a larger swallow. Tears sprang to her eyes and she felt her voice go hollow. “Wow. What is that stuff? It tastes like cleaning fluid.”

  “That’s what it is. Hot cleaning fluid. Are you really choking, Christie?”