Stuart Kaminsky - Poor Butterfly

She touched the girl’s shoulder. Vera touched the older woman’s hand and patted Miguelito’s head. The dog liked it. Lorna departed.

“I do not like that dog,” Lundeen muttered.

“He’s a sweet dog,” Vera said.

“I can pick it up on my own from here,” I told Lundeen.

“Good. I’ll be in my office most of the night,” Lundeen said, moving to the door. “Do you think you can find your way back there?”

“I’m a detective,” I reminded him.

He smiled and was gone.

“I’ve got some questions,” I said to Vera, sitting in the now available chair and taking my notebook out again.

She shrugged and looked at me. Her eyes were wide, brown, and very deep.

“Yes.” She gave me her attention.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Twenty-nine,” I said, writing in my notebook.

“Thirty-two,” she amended.

I nodded, erased and wrote.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Fifty.”

“Fifty,” she repeated.

“Forty-six,” I said.

She laughed. It was a solid, beautiful, musical laugh.

“Where did you learn to sing?”

“St. Louis,” she said. “I’ve been singing since I was four. You want to know my real name?”

“Sure.”

“Vera Katz.”

“Mine’s Tobias Pevsner.”

“Really?” she said, showing interest. I nodded and she went on. “My mother was a singer. Local, light opera. My father was, is a music professor at Washington University. That’s my life. Sing and get fat.”

“You’re not fat,” I demurred. “You’re very pretty and voluptuous.”

She blushed.

“Brothers, sisters?”

“I was the only one. You?”

“A brother,” I said. “Big, mean, a cop. You know what’s going on here?”

“I’ve heard,” she said with a shrug.

“You afraid?”

“No. Yes. A little. This is my big chance.” She looked at herself in the mirror again. “Are there pudgy … voluptuous Japanese women?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Maestro Stokowski says I should eat health food. I don’t like health food. I like to cook. Look.”

She opened the Woman’s Day to a page with a folded corner.

“There are these great recipes for inexpensive cuts of meat,” she said with enthusiasm, holding up a spread with six black-and-white pictures of plates of food. “Breaded fried tripe. Liver loaves. Brains in croustades. Heart patties.”

“Let’s get a cup of coffee and a carrot sandwich someplace,” I suggested.

She looked at me differently now. “My father’s fifty-two,” she said.

“How old’s your husband?”

“Don’t have one.”

“Boyfriend?” I asked.

She shook her head no, but the no was not emphatic.

“Martin has taken me out to dinner twice,” she said.

“The tenor.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s … and he has a wife in New York.”

“How about that carrot sandwich?”

She nodded and smiled, a smile like the full moon.

It was a great moment. It would have been nice to hold onto it for a few seconds longer, but the scream ended it-a scream that seemed to cut through a dream, like the sound that wakes you from a deep sleep, a sound you’re not quite sure is in the room or in your imagination. I looked at Vera. Her eyes had gone wide. She’d heard it, too.

I got up and went out the door. Vera came after me.

I needed another scream to know which way to turn. It came. From my right. I went after it. Vera was doing a good job of keeping up with me. There wasn’t much light, and workmen had set up shadowed booby traps-piles of brick, boards, planks, tools-for us to trip over. Another scream guided us.

We hit the mezzanine corridor, which had no light but did catch some of the sun from the lobby. No more screams, but someone was running, shoes clapping on marble, heading up stairs, sobbing. When I reached the stairway with Vera a few steps behind, Lorna Bartholomew plowed into me, clutching her throat. I staggered backward. Vera caught us. We all went down. A white ball of fur scuttled across the floor and landed on my face.

“He … he …” Lorna gulped, looking back over her shoulder in the direction of the lobby.

I got to my knees, pushed Miguelito off my face, and helped her up. The shoulder pads in her suit had shifted. She looked like Joan Crawford doing Quasimodo. I reached over to help Vera, but she was up before us. Lundeen and another man came thundering along the mezzanine lobby behind us.

“He … he …” Lorna tried again.

“What’s she laughing at?” the man with Lundeen asked.

“She’s not laughing,” said Vera. “She’s frightened.”

Vera moved past me to put an arm around Lorna’s misplaced shoulders. Miguelito was yapping at her feet. Vera reached down, picked up the dog, and handed him to Lorna, who buried her face in his white fur.

“Are you all right?” Lundeen asked. He was panting. He looked worse than Lorna.

“… tried to … He grabbed, put something around my neck,” Lorna said, touching her neck with her fingers. Her neck looked bruised, marked with purple, yellow, and red. “I think Miguelito bit him.”

“Something’s there, all right,” volunteered the old man with Lundeen.

“Where?” cried Lorna, looking around in fear.

“Round your neck,” said the man. “Red mark. Snakelike.”

I looked at the helpful old man. He was thin, with a mane of white hair over a surprised, chinless Slim Summerville pale face. Under his faded overalls he wore a reasonably clean white shirt and a yellow tie. He moved in close to examine Lorna’s neck.

“Nasty, nasty,” he said, shaking his head. “Saw things like that in the war against Villa. Mexes’d come up on us at night from behind like and take this wire around a neck and …”

“Raymond,” Lundeen warned, trying to catch his breath.

“… like a salami,” Raymond trailed off.

“Get her some water,” Lundeen ordered. “Get me some water.”

Lorna was hyperventilating now.

“Make sense,” Raymond snorted, shaking his head. “Water’s not turned on up here. Got to go downstairs, find some glasses, clean ’em out, fill ’em up, juggle ’em up here. I’ll lose most of it. You could get over to the Longshore Bar before I’d be back.”

Lorna groaned and rubbed her cheek against the little dog. Vera helped her toward a marble bench against the wall.

“Get the water, Raymond,” Lundeen insisted, moving to help Vera with Lorna.

“I’ll miss something,” Raymond complained.

“I’ll bring you up to date,” I promised.

Raymond shuffled off, hands plunged deeply into his overall pockets.

Lorna was sitting on the bench leaning against Vera when I reached the three of them. There was enough room for Lundeen, but he was standing.

“He came up behind me,” Lorna gasped. “I was … from under the staircase. From the right. No, the left. I didn’t hear … well, maybe I heard … something. Then it, something was around my neck. My purse. I dropped my purse.”

She looked around for her purse. Vera showed her it was still on the strap around her neck.

“I screamed,” she said. “I could smell his breath. Sickening. Sweet. My head bumped against his face.” She shuddered. “His face was … hard. I think Miguelito bit him. Then he was gone.”

“I’ll call the police,” Lundeen said, turning.

“The police,” Lorna cried. “What will they do? They’ll say I did it myself, that we’re looking for publicity. If they wouldn’t believe Leopold Stokowski, they certainly won’t believe me. The only thing that would make them believe is my dead body.”

Anger was taking over, masking the fear. I’d seen it before. It was safer to be angry than frightened. She would turn into attacker instead of victim.