Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

“Blow-up doll?”

“You don’t know what that is?”

“Would I ask otherwise?”

“Don’t get testy! And if you don’t know, I’m not gonna tell you. I can see why Vassar liked you.”

“If you won’t tell me about a blow-up doll, why are you telling me about her?”

“Because you knew her.”

“Not much. Not for long.”

“Doesn’t matter. How long. How much. What matters is, how … real. Anyway, I was tryin’ to be her phone buddy. I’d get her on the line—she always called me, and hung up on me too, when she was done for the time bein’. She’d get me on the line and dribble out the teeniest bit of a question. Need. Want. Aggressive, she was. About what she was doin’. But not really.”

“Do you know what I was seeing her for?”

“No, sir. I imagine you were a client, is all.”

Is all. A client. Of a call girl. Matt tried not to hear himself described in the terms that applied.

“Anyway—”

Matt thought that he would strangle the next person to use that opening expression.

“I was gettin’ nowhere with Vassar. I mean, what do I know about fancy northeastern schools? She’d been there. Hadn’t been happy there, but she’d been there. Had a chance to be everythin’ upscale: northern, snooty, ed-ucat-ed”—just there she’d sounded like Leticia—“sophisti-cat-ed. A natural woman. Only it didn’t really feel natural, and Monday night she called me. She phoned home, bless her, my little ET. I can’t tell you how happy I was to see her need me for the first time. Call it an addiction, but it’s my kind of happy. I like to be of service, is that so wrong? I like to help people rather than harm them. Now that is not cool in an MTV world. That seems to be … embarrassin’, in some way, don’t you think? No, you don’t, you like to do the same thing, don’t you?”

“No,” Matt said automatically, embarrassed. Then he listened for the cock to crow. “Yes.”

“Yes. Of course. Here’s the thing. She called me from some fancy hotel. What hotel in this town isn’t fancy, right? It was … oh, the wee hours of Tuesday.”

“Early Tuesday? What time?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Her call woke me up. Whatever you might be thinkin’, I’m a decent woman and in bed before midnight.”

“Then you don’t listen to my show. Program.”

She looked really embarrassed. Almost blushed. “No, sir. I’d never heard of you or your … program, until Vassar mentioned it during that call.”

“She knew who I was?”

“She was a fan! Before and … um, after the fact.” Matt winced to consider what the “fact” Deborah Ann referred to so blithely might be.

“Anyway … that’s when she told me all about you. She was so excited.”

“She was?”

“Oh, yes. You were a celebrity, but, best of all, you listened to her. I’d never gotten to Page One with her, but you put her on Page Eighteen. She couldn’t wait to see me the next day. She’d made up her mind. She’d start raging in the middle of being ecstatic. Said her last client before you was a prick. A real pig. But you weren’t. That showed her something. You showed her something. She was going to do something with her life. She wasn’t sure just what, but somethin’. She was going to leave.”

“Leave? Las Vegas?”

“No! The Life. You know. Hookin’. She was lookin’ at it in a whole new way. Something you said. Lotta somethin’s you said. I couldn’t get everythin’ she was sayin’. She talked so fast. My, but she was hyped. I’d never heard her so excited.”

“Happy? Are you saying she was happy?”

Deborah Ann sat back to consider, then sipped on her straw. “Don’t know any other way to describe it.”

“She wasn’t in despair?”

Deborah stared at him. ” ‘Despair’? Honey, that girl was so high she must have been wearin’ platform mattress springs. I’d never been able to get beyond that worldly wise attitude of hers. So teenage, really. Anyway—”

“Yes, anyway?” Matt was getting impatient. Blue Norther impatient.

Deborah Ann leaned into the table, closer, so only he could hear her, as if anyone would eavesdrop on them at a Taco Bell.

“It doesn’t make sense. No, sir. The woman I talked to was a happy camper. I don’t see her … killing herself, that’s all.”

“And then what happened?”

“Well, we were cut off.”

“Cut off?”

“Right. Or cut out. Cell phones will do that to you, you know. You have a cell phone?”

“No. I probably should have.”

“You should. A very handy sort of thing.”

“But you had one, and Vassar had one, and the line was cut.”

“It’s not a line, I don’t think. More like … air. There was a lot of echo while we talked, and then … She was gone, that’s all.”

“Never said good-bye?”

“No.”

“Never said anything more?”

“No.”

“Did you hear anything more?”

“No. Just an open line. And … a kind of cackling, cracking on it.”

“Like a person?”

“No!”

“Like what?”

“Like nothing, that’s all. We were cut off.”

“That’s what you came to tell me? She didn’t hang up. You were cut off?”

“No. I came to tell you that you converted Vassar. Sorry, I have a Southern Baptist mentality when I’m not reverting to my Quaker sojourn. She was out of that life. Born again. She was going to talk to me some more. You did it. That’s what I came to tell you. I didn’t know who or what youwere, or why you bothered to talk to her, given the situation, but she said enough that I knew I ought to tell you. It’s not every day a person does a good deed. I’d been trying to good-deed that woman into her senses, and somehow you just cruised along like any ole customer and did it, all by your lonesome. I thought you’d like to know, ought to know, that she’d been a new woman when she died. ‘Cuz she must have died not long after that, accordin’ to the newspaper, if you can believe the newspaper.”

He nodded. Vassar must have been standing in the hall, near the railing. He remembered leaving her there, insisting she didn’t want to go down in the elevator. She wanted to think.

So instead she’d gone down on an invisible downdraft of air.

Apparently.

Converted, she had floated like a butterfly, an angel, to her death twenty-one stories below. Called her counselor and then dived.

It didn’t make sense.

Deborah Walker had come forward because she wanted to make sense of it all.

But everything was only more confused. Nothing was clear.

Except …

Vassar had left him happy. In a good mood. Not suicidal.

And she had been cut off.

Not only in her life, but on a cell phone.

Something had happened.

What?

Or had … someone … happened?

Kitty. Kathleen O’Connor.

Did she watch? See Matt leave, an undefeated Matt? See Vassar euphoric, dialing what passed for a girlfriend, crowing about what had not happened?

Had Kitty then pushed Vassar over the literal edge?

Happiness would madden a killjoy personality like hers. Anyone’s happiness.

So Matt had managed to kill Vassar with kindness. One way or the other.

Chapter 43

Crime Seen

We have returned to the twentieth floor.

Miss Midnight Louise and myself, that is. (She insisted, though she still limps, and I objected.) But we have returned.

Midnight, Inc.

Tonight, call us Murder, Inc., for we are determined to lay all questions to rest, and any spare call girls too. “I am convinced,” Miss Louise says, “that we have missed a key point in this case.”

“We?”

“Well, I do not know where your brain has been on leave, but mine has been very unhappy with our conclusions thus far. Are you not concerned about the testimony of the parakeet?”