Эд Макбейн - Snow White and Rose Red

“Would you mind giving me some room in here, sir?” the intern said.

Bloom showed him his shield. “Calusa PD,” he said.

“You can stuff that up your ass,” the intern said. “I’ve got a badly injured woman here.”

“Had one just like it in Hicksville, Long Island,” Bloom said. “Woman in a bar took off this high-heeled shoe she was wearing, whacked her husband on the side of his head, almost killed him. How is she?” he asked the intern.

“Breathing,” the intern said, annoyed. He had fastened a butterfly suture to the wound, and was putting a bandage over it now. “Bring that stretcher in here,” he called to the ambulance attendant outside. “Stand back, please, will you please?” he said to Bloom.

They carried Christine out on the stretcher and loaded her into the ambulance. The garage attendants and a man in bib overalls, his hands on his hips, watched from the open garage door bays. The ambulance went off with its siren screaming. And then the corner of Xavier and Taylor was still again.

“What happened?” Bloom asked me.

I started to tell him what had happened, what I thought had happened. My eyes were blinking. He put his hand on my arm.

“Calm down,” he said.

I nodded. I took a deep breath. I told him about the case I’d been working on — he remembered the case, didn’t he? The time I came in asking about the night of September twenty-seventh? Asking to talk to the patrolman who had gone to the Whittaker house...

“Whittaker, yeah,” he said.

I told him I’d been trying to effect Sarah Whittaker’s release from Knott’s Retreat. I started to tell him—

“Sarah Whittaker, huh?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Any relation to Horace Whittaker?”

“His daughter,” I said.

“Yeah,” Bloom said, and sighed heavily.

There were contradictions and convolutions.

In Bloom’s office some forty minutes later, we tried to untangle it.

If Horace Whittaker was the man who’d set up Tracy Kilbourne in that luxurious apartment on Whisper Key, then Sarah was not crazy; her father had indeed been involved with another woman.

Bloom said there was no concrete proof that the apartment owned by Arch Realty had been used by Horace Whittaker as a love nest.

But Horace Whittaker had been president of the corporation at the time.

And Horace Whittaker was the only one of the officers who made his residence in Calusa, Florida.

It was a possibility.

A strong possibility.

I remembered that Sarah had described her father as “a faithful, generous, decent, hardworking man. Faithful, yes. To my mother and to me. No cuties on the side, Matthew.”

I remembered that Mrs. Whittaker had said, “Horace was a faithful, decent, loving man. I trusted him completely.”

But Bloom remembered what Sylvia Kazenski, alias Tiffany Carter, had said about Tracy: “The younger guys went for her, naturally — she was their dream girl next door, you know, all peaches and cream, that honey-blonde hair and those blue eyes flashing like lightning, sweet as a virgin and built like God you could die just seeing her move her pinkie. But she got an even bigger play from the older guys, the geezers who it took all night for them to get a hard-on. She played to these guys like she’d been waiting all night for them to walk through the door...”

Had Horace Whittaker walked through the door of Up Front one night, and had Tracy strutted her stuff on that stage for him, made him feel like a million bucks when she went to his table?

Had he taken her away from there in July, set her up in the apartment on Whisper Key, given her the use of the company telephone and car, visited her whenever opportunity allowed?

Tracy Kilbourne wanted to be a movie star.

Was she Horace Whittaker’s personal star?

If so, there was another woman in Whittaker’s life, and Sarah was not crazy.

“The girl is nuttier than a Hershey bar with almonds.”

Mark Ritter talking.

“In this ‘elaborate’ delusional system I am alleged to have evolved, Daddy was having an affair with one or perhaps many women, it varies from day to day — we lunatics are not often consistent, you know — which naturally infuriated his only daughter because it deprived her of the love and affection to which she was entitled as her birthright.”

Sarah speaking.

But if Horace Whittaker was keeping Tracy Kilbourne, then it was not a delusion.

In which case...

“Either I believed, still believe, my father was having an affair — or I don’t believe it, and didn’t then. If I’m sane, I didn’t go running off after a person who existed only in my mind.”

Sarah again.

But Tracy Kilbourne did exist, and not only in Sarah’s mind.

Then why protest?

Why the hell protest, pretend , that a delusional system was invented for her when all along the primary aspect of that alleged system was firmly rooted in the truth?

The truth, Bloom reminded me, only if Horace Whittaker and Tracy Kilbourne were indeed romantically linked.

Contradictions and convolutions.

“She said she’d been out searching for her father’s phantom lover...”

Pearson’s words.

But Tracy Kilbourne was no phantom.

“Voices had commanded her to find ‘Daddy’s bimbo,’ as she called her, confront her, get back the money that was rightfully hers — Sarah’s, that is — stolen from her by her mother and her father’s mysterious girlfriend.”

Well, damn it, was there a girlfriend or wasn’t there? Did a delusional system exist, or didn’t it? Everyone involved with Sarah’s hospitalization had done his or her best to convince me that Horace Whittaker’s lover was a figment of Sarah’s imagination. Sarah herself had told me flatly that she did not believe her father was involved with another woman. But Tracy Kilbourne was a reality, and the apartment owned by Archer Realty was another reality, and Tracy had been living in that apartment and using the company car, and Horace Whittaker was the only officer of the corporation who lived in Calusa. So where did the reality end and the delusion begin?

If indeed there had been a relationship between Whittaker and Tracy, had Sarah in fact gone out looking for Daddy’s bimbo, and had she confronted her?

“Sarah looked at me, her eyes wide, the razor blade trembling in her hand, and I... I said, I said very gently, ‘Sarah, are you all right?’ and she said, ‘I went looking for her.’ ”

Mrs. Whittaker reporting on her daughter’s condition when she’d found her in the bathroom on September 27 last year.

“So much blood.”

Sarah’s words, again as reported by Mrs. Whittaker.

But there had not been much blood from the superficial cuts she’d allegedly inflicted on her own wrist. So what was she referring to? The blood that surely gushed from Tracy’s throat when she was shot? The blood that flowed when her tongue was cut out?

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Was it possible?

Had Sarah gone searching for Tracy Kilbourne, and found her, and confronted her...

And killed her?

“She got into her car,” Mrs. Whittaker had told me. “I believe she got into her car. Yes. And went searching for another woman. And found this other woman, found her father’s lover. Found herself , Mr. Hope. Recognized herself as the phantom lover she had created. And could not bear the horror of it. And tried to kill herself.”

Or had the horror been the reality of murder?

The open Jane Doe/Tracy Kilbourne file was on Bloom’s desk.