Stuart Kaminsky - Poor Butterfly

“Go for your gun, ladron ,” Santiago challenged.

The dazed skinny kid looked at the mad old man in the Shell baseball cap and started to reach for the gun in his pocket.

“Hold it,” I shouted and the kid stopped.

Santiago cursed.

“I want to kill somebody,” the old man hissed. “I am unfulfilled.”

“Go home and play with yourself,” I said. To the kid I said, “Take off.”

The skinny kid scuttled off in the same direction his friend had driven.

I remembered that night, all right. I had made the mistake of telling Anne about it. I’d come home on top of the world and twenty bucks richer, ready to buy her flowers and a damn-the-Depression dinner at Chasen’s. I told her the story and she packed and said it was the end.

“I remember, Farkas,” I said. “Thanks for the memory. If the cops show up and you’re still sitting here, send them up to apartment six-D. Got it?”

“Got it,” he said, holding up the five. “They’re doin’ an opera somewhere near here sometime soon. Maybe I can find it and buy a ticket. Today’s my lucky day. Come back any time and run me over. We’ll talk about old times.”

“Old times,” I said, thinking of Anne.

I looked up at Lorna Bartholomew’s building. It was a six-story, trying to bring up the neighborhood and failing.

I stepped into the lobby foyer. An old man in a ratty gray sweater and a little badge sat on a bridge chair reading the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly . He didn’t look up.

“Pardon me,” I said.

He looked up.

“Bob La Follette’s worrying about prohibition making a comeback,” he said, pointing to the article on his lap. “Can you imagine with what’s going on in the world someone worrying about people drinking?”

“No,” I said. “I’d like to see Miss Bartholomew.”

“Name?” he asked.

“Peters.”

The old man nodded. I looked out into the street. No cops yet Farkas was sitting there admiring the five I had given him and remembering the good old days in Los Angeles.

“First name?”

“Toby.”

“Check,” he said, and picked up the house phone. “Peters here.”

He hung up, reached under the wooden counter, and the inner lobby door clicked open.

“Six-D,” he said. “She said you can come on up.” The old man sank back in his seat with his magazine.

The lobby was full of glass and mirror, with a cracked white tile floor. No people. The inner lobby door clicked closed behind me, and I headed for the elevator. It was waiting and open. I got in and pushed six, thinking the place was a lot like the one Anne had moved into after walking out on me.

When the elevator opened, I thought I heard a door close, but no one was in the hallway. Six-D was halfway down the corridor to my left. All the doors I passed were the same except for 6-D, which was open. I hoped Lorna had simply opened it when the old doorman called, but she wasn’t standing just inside waiting for me. I expected Miguelito to come yapping out of the shadows and go for my throat, but there was nothing.

“Lorna?” I called, stepping into darkness.

My foot hit something that went skittering across the floor.

I pulled out my:38 and got out of the light from the door.

“Lorna?” I called out again, more softly.

There was no answer. I reached for a light switch on the wall against which I was leaning, found none, and moved back to the open apartment door, there I found a switch, hit it, and turned, gun leveled into the room.

I saw that in the darkness I had kicked a lamp. The lamp didn’t belong on the floor. Neither did most of what was on the floor in the alcove and in the living room beyond. The place was a mess. A mad baboon had been let loose, or the Stanford football team had had a party. The sofa was turned over and ripped open. The radio was smashed and on its back on the floor. Two matching stuffed chairs no longer matched and probably wouldn’t be worth fixing. Even the carpeting had been torn up, but nothing had been torn up as much as Lorna, who lay sprawled on the floor.

“Lorna,” I whispered, and I thought she moved, but I didn’t go to her. Someone had answered the doorman’s call and it hadn’t been her. Whoever it was might still be here. I moved to the windows and threw open the drapes, letting in sunlight.

Then I kicked open the bathroom door. This room had been attacked, too. Medicine cabinet open, broken bottles on the floor. And the bedroom had been chewed up by a giant lawn mower while the kitchen was a swamp of food, drink, and ice cubes on the floor. The refrigerator door was open and everything, even the box of Arm and Hammer, had been pulled out and thrown to the floor or in the general direction of the sink. A dog-food dish was upside down in a corner.

Sure now that no one was there but me, I closed the front door and hurried to Lorna. I kneeled next to her and touched her face. It was cool and turning white.

“Lorna?” I asked, but the question was really Are you alive? Lorna’s eyelids fluttered open. She looked to her left like a disoriented newborn baby and then up at me. A trickle of blood meandered from the corner of her red mouth down her chin.

Her mouth moved, forming a word but no sound.

“He?” I asked.

Her eyes fluttered, and she looked like she was going back into her sleep.

“I’ve gotta call an ambulance.”

She grasped my hand, her fingernails cutting into the flesh of my palms. She had more to say.

“We,” she gasped.

“We?” I asked.

The eyes fluttered. “We are the Phantom.”

“Who did this?” I asked, my face near enough hers to taste her bloody breath.

“Lorna’s mouth opened. “Rance and Johnson. And Minnie. Don’t forget Minnie.”

“Minnie?” I asked.

“Miguelito,” she answered.

“Miguelito did this?”

She shook her head. “Ask Miguelito,” she gasped, and made a motion with her right hand. “Shave,” she whispered.

I touched my cheek. I needed a shave all right, but this wasn’t the time to talk about it. She convulsed in my arms, reached up, trying to grab for life, and scratched her fingers across my face. Then she was dead.

Reactions came quickly. The first was a weariness, the most overwhelming sense of being tired that I had ever felt. I wanted to turn over the ripped sofa and take a nap.

Think, I told myself. Think. I got up, staggered to the door to the small balcony. It was open. I could see the bay. The apartment was right at the edge of the water. I stepped out and caught the bay breeze and smell of fish.

Someone had killed Lorna and wanted something she had, had torn the apartment apart to find it. Either he had gone through everything and found whatever it was he was looking for in the last place he looked, or it was still somewhere and I might find it, whatever it was.

I didn’t find the knife that had been used on Lorna. I figured the killer-or killers, if Lorna was right-had taken it away. Or had pitched it out the window into the ocean. I imagined the bloody knife spinning on the way down, catching the reflection of the sun, clanking against the rocks and flipping into the water.

I touched my forehead to see if I was feverish and my hand came back red with blood. My cheek was bleeding where Lorna had reached for me in her last shudder.

I went into the kitchen, found an unbroken glass on the counter near the sink, and got a drink of cool water from the tap. Then I used a clean dish towel to wipe the blood from my cheek. There was something I should be doing, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I leaned forward over the kitchen sink. Somewhere beyond the window I heard a siren.

Then my brain kicked into second gear. Lorna Bartholomew was dead. My face was scratched. The murder weapon was missing. With a little help from a classy assistant district attorney and the testimony of a doorman, I would make a pretty good murder suspect.