Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

He came back with the garment in a plastic bag, drew it out, and wrinkled his nose at it. “Smells of dog now,” he said. “Does that ruin it for you?”

“The scent’s immaterial,” she said. “It shouldn’t even matter if it’s been laundered. May I?”

“You need anything special, Ms. Belgrave? The lights out, or candles lit, or—”

She shook her head, told him he could stay, motioned for him to sit down. She took the child’s sunsuit in her hands and closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply, and almost at once her mind began to fill with images. She saw the girl, saw her face, and recognized it from dreams she thought she had forgotten.

She felt things, too. Fear, mostly, and pain, and more fear, and then, at the end, more pain.

“She’s dead,” she said softly, her eyes still closed. “He strangled her.”

“He?”

“I can’t see what he looks like. Just impressions.” She waved a hand in the air, as if to dispel clouds, then extended her arm and pointed. “That direction,” she said.

“You’re pointing southeast.”

“Out of town,” she said. “There’s a white church off by itself. Beyond that there’s a farm.” She could see it from on high, as if she were hovering overhead, like a bird making lazy circles in the sky. “I think it’s abandoned. The barn’s unpainted and deserted. The house has broken windows.”

“There’s the Baptist church on Reistertown Road. A plain white building with a little steeple. And out beyond it there’s the Petty farm. She moved into town when the old man died.”

“It’s abandoned,” she said, “but the fields don’t seem to be overgrown. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Definitely the Petty farm,” he said, his voice quickening. “She let the grazing when she moved.”

“Is there a silo?”

“Seems to me they kept a dairy herd. There’d have be a silo.”

“Look in the silo,” she said.

She was studyingDetective Jeffcote’s palm when the call came. She had already told him he was worried about losing his hair, and that there was nothing he could do about it, that it was inevitable. The inevitability was written in his hand, although she’d sensed it the moment she saw him, just as she had at once sensed his concern. You didn’t need to be psychic for that, though. It was immediately evident in the way he’d grown his remaining hair long and combed it to hide the bald spot.

“You should have it cut short,” she said. “Very short. A crew cut, in fact.”

“I do that,” he said, “and everybody’ll be able to see how thin it’s getting.”

“They won’t notice,” she told him. “The shorter it is, the less attention it draws. Short hair will empower you.”

“Wasn’t it the other way around with Samson?”

“It will strengthen you,” she said. “Inside and out.”

“And you can tell all that just looking at my hand?”

She could tell all that just looking at his head, but she only smiled and nodded. Then she noticed an interesting configuration in his palm and told him about it, making some dietary suggestions based on what she saw. She stopped talking when the phone rang, and he reached to answer it.

He listened for a long moment, then covered the mouthpiece with the very palm she’d been reading. “You were right,” he said. “In the silo, covered up with old silage. They wouldn’t have found her if they hadn’t known to look for her. And the smell of the fermented silage masked the smell of the, uh, decomposition.”

He put the phone to his ear, listened some more, spoke briefly, covered the mouthpiece again. “Marks on her neck,” he said. “Hard to tell if she was strangled, not until there’s a full autopsy, but it looks like a strong possibility.”

“Teeth,” she said suddenly.

“Teeth?”

She frowned, upset with herself. “That’s all I can get when I try to see him .”

“The man who—”

“Took her there, strangled her, killed her. I can’t say if he was tall or short, fat or thin, old or young.”

“Just that he had teeth.”

“I guess that must have been what she noticed. Melissa. She must have been frightened of him because of the teeth.”

“Did he bite her? Because if he did—”

“No,” she said sharply. “Or I don’t know, perhaps he did, but it was the appearance of the teeth that frightened her. He had bad teeth.”

“Bad teeth?”

“Crooked, discolored, broken. They must have made a considerable impression on her.”

“Jesus,” he said, and into the mouthpiece he said, “You still there? What was the name of that son of a bitch, did some handyman work for the kid’s mother? Henrich, Heinrich, something like that? Looked like a dentist’s worst nightmare? Yeah, well, pick him up again.”

He hung up the phone. “We questioned him,” he said, “and we let him go. Big gangly overgrown kid, God made him as ugly as he could and then hit him in the mouth with a shovel. This time I think I’ll talk to him myself. Ms. Belgrave? You all right?”

“Just exhausted, all of a sudden,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping well these past few nights. And what we just did, it takes a lot out of you.”

“I can imagine.”

“But I’ll be all right,” she assured him. And, getting to her feet, she realized she wouldn’t be needing any more aspirin. The headache was gone.

The handyman, whosename turned out to be Walter Hendrick, broke down under questioning and admitted the abduction and murder of Melissa Sporran. Sylvia saw his picture on television but turned off the set, unable to look at him. His mouth was closed, you couldn’t see his teeth, but even so she couldn’t bear the sight of him.

The phone rang, and it was a client she hadn’t seen in months, calling to book a session. She made a note in her appointment calendar and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. She was finishing the tea and trying to decide if she wanted another when the phone rang again.

It was a new client, a Mrs. Huggins, eager to schedule a reading as soon as possible. Sylvia asked the usual questions and made sure she got the woman’s date of birth right. Astrology wasn’t her main focus, but it never hurt to have that data in hand before a client’s first visit. It made it easier, often, to get a grasp on the personality.

“And who told you about me?” she asked, almost as an afterthought. Business always came through referrals, a satisfied client told a friend or relative or co-worker, and she liked to know who was saying good things about her.

“Now who was it?” the woman wondered. “I’ve been meaning to call for such a long time, and I can’t think who it was that originally told me about you.”

She let it go at that. But, hanging up, she realized the woman had just lied to her. That was not exactly unheard of, although it was annoying when they lied about their date of birth, shaving a few years off their age and unwittingly providing her with an erroneous astrological profile in the process. But this woman had found something wholly unique to lie about, and she wondered why.

Within the hour the phone rang again, another old client of whom she’d lost track. “I’ll bet you’re booked solid,” the woman said. “I just hope you can fit me in.”

“Are you being ironic?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Because you know it’s a rare day when I see more than two people, and there are days when I don’t see anyone at all.”

“I don’t know how many people you see,” the woman said. “I do know that it’s always been easy to get an appointment with you at short notice, but I imagine that’s all changed now, hasn’t it?”