Pure Instinct

31

Once at the apartment which had previously been Victor Surette's, the two detectives first learned from the superintendent who was the current occupant. It was a young man named Michael Dominique, and they were greeted with a smile from a tall, sallow-faced youth whose eye shadow was half on, half off, his eyelashes startlingly long and lovely, though the rouge and lipstick were a bit overdone. His eyes were extremely feminine, piercing and hypnotic, and as green and hard as jade as he peeked from behind the door chain.

“ I'm Detective Sincebaugh and this is Detective deYampert, ma'am, ahh, sir…Mister… ahh…”

“ Dominique, Michael Emanuel Dominique, and don't mention being sorry around me, sweet cakes. So, you're two big strong strapping cops here just to see me? Really now…” He opened the door wide to reveal that he was in a tie-dyed, rainbow-colored terry robe, his hair in a towel as if just washed.

“ Freshly dyed,” he said, pointing to the towel atop his head, his eyes following Alex's. “Must keep up appearances, you know.”

“ We're here… well, we've been investigating the Queen of Hearts killings from the beginning, and-”

“ Oh, dear, how tragic… how terribly, horribly tragic it all is, but what has it to do with me?” Mr. Dominique looked truly perplexed.

“ Well, we'd like to ask you a few questions about the apartment.”

“ The apartment?'' He was now clearly confused, turning to stare inward at the place. It wasn't a bad place. Lots of room and closet space as Alex had recalled, the bedroom, living area and kitchen three separate rooms, a full bath rounding it off. Most of the older apartments in the area, you had to share a bath at the end of the hall. The furnishings were Surette's or belonged to the super, exactly as they'd last seen the place, a hodgepodge of styles from a steel-and-glass Scandinavian coffee table to an Early American couch with flowers and turkeys as a pattern.

“ Yes, well, one of the victims once lived here,” Alex said. “His name was Victor, Victor Surette.”

The young man turned away and stepped to the couch, asking them to come in before he sat, crossing his cleanly shaved legs, displaying his manicured nails, the fingers long and delicate, his feet covered in bunny-eared slippers. “I wouldn't know. No one's ever told me about that.” Alex thought him extremely composed at learning such information. For all this guy knew, Surette's body might have been found right here in this room, on the very couch where Dominique now sat.

“ Well, it has been a long time,” Alex volunteered, “but my partner and I would like to ask you if at any time during your stay here…”

“ Yes?”

“ If you've gotten mail for Surette, or a phone call asking about him, or just anything about the previous tenant. Or if you'd found anything lying about that might've belonged to Mr. Surette.”

“ Well, no… I'm sorry, but I haven't.”

“ You didn't know him?”

“ Well, no… I didn't.”

“ But you knew of him?”

“ Of him?” He shook his head.

“ Well, he had something of a reputation. He was an entertainer, a cross-dressing entertainer, so I assumed you might have met others in the area who knew of him.” Alex had calculated the number of potential victims for the maniac who preferred cross-dressing gays, and realized that he could well be speaking to a future victim of the killer at this moment.

“ Well, if there's nothing else, gentlemen,” said the young man whom Sincebaugh placed at around twenty-three or twenty-four, a couple of years older than Surette would have been. Looking around and seeing no photos or loose papers lying around, no books or magazines or even a newspaper, made Alex flash again on the sameness of the room. Mr. Dominique or whatever his name was had not put any individual stamp on the place, at least not on this room.

“ Yeah, Sincy, we'd best be on our way,” said deYampert, regaining his feet.

“ Would you mind terribly if we looked around, Mr. Dominique?”

“ For what?” he asked, surprised by the question.

“ Well, for any loose boards or bricks, anything below or behind which Mr. Surette may have placed papers.”

“ What precisely are you looking for?”

“ Frankly, we don't know.”

“ You don't know?”

“ We won't know until we see it.”

“ I see… I think. Well… feel free in here, but as I've said, I have an engagement and must finish dressing. I'll do so in the other room.”

“ Very nice of you to allow us to search,” said Ben, who began to do so in haste-anxious to leave, it appeared. “We'd like to search all the rooms, if that's okay with you, Mr. Dominique,” said Alex. “Your cooperation in this matter would be most appreciated.” Dominique frowned and made a feeble joke. “Guess I'll have to check with my lawyer first.” Then, laughing, he said, “Sure, why not. But, if you should find something useful, and it actually leads you to this maniac, maybe I'll see some-you know…” He seductively blinked his fake lashes at Alex. “Some sort of… reward?”

Ben stifled a laugh.

Alex simply replied, “Your reward might just be in saving your own life in the bargain, Mr. Dominique.”

“ Please, call me Dom or Dommie for short. Everyone does.”

“ All right, Dom.”

Dom then twittered and started on his way into the next room. But he stopped at the door to add, “Just as soon as I'm dressed, you two boys can sniff around my bedroom all you like for all you want.” Now the coyness and the flirtation were overt, challenging.

Alex and Ben exchanged a putrid look as Dominique left the room. When he'd shut the door behind him, the two detectives fell out laughing, each shushing the other. In a moment, they returned to the business at hand, searching every corner of the room, Ben still filled with a disgruntled disbelief that they were even here and a powerful, preconceived notion that they'd find absolutely nothing as before.

“ We're drawing at straws here, pard,” Ben was saying when his eyes fell upon something. His sudden silence made Alex wheel and look down at the hardwood floor below the couch where a strange-looking, white-laced doily with a queen of hearts playing card stitched into it lay half in, half out of the darkness. Dominique had first been sitting and then standing there, possibly trying to conceal the thing earlier. At the same instant, the door to the bedroom burst open and Dominique, in full feminine dress, attacked Ben, who was closest to the door, the huge blade plunging into the big man's chest even as he fended him off.

Alex snatched out his gun, but Ben's enormous form was between them, and with successive strikes of the knife, the big man fell into Alex, knocking him to the floor, Alex's head striking hard against the edge of a bureau.

His vision blurred, with no idea how long he'd been out, Alex's eyes opened on the horrid sight of Dominique in women's clothing, forcing his hand into the cavernous wound he'd opened up in deYampert's chest. Alex saw him come away with his best friend's heart and he cried out, his hands frantically searching for his weapon, which had skittered across the room.

But he was trapped under Ben's dead weight, and now he as she was coming for Alex, prepared to open him up with an enormous, serrated knife that looked like something out of an operating room.

When the killer leaned in over Alex, he saw clearly that Dominique's dress had been ripped and the carefully created breasts were real. The madman had all along been a madwoman. The knife loomed larger and larger as she approached with Ben's blood-soaked heart in her left hand. Alex fought a useless battle to struggle free of his best friend's dead weight, but being pinned beneath Ben deYampert was little different from being pinned below a dead horse. Only Alex's arms had worked free, but they were no match against the cutting machine she would become once she began wielding the knife. He had a second gun strapped to his ankle, but there was no way to get at it.

She enjoyed his complete helplessness.

“ You loved Vicki, too, didn't you? Everybody loved sweet, little Vicki,” she said in a cooing voice. “Ring around the rosy, pocket full of hearts, not posies… a heart is a terrible thing to waste, isn't it? Well, isn't it!”

“ What have you done with the hearts?”

“ Same as I'll do with yours and your friend's. You all have a place waiting at Raveneaux, just like little Vicki.”

He expected her at any moment to bite into the heart which had beat in Ben deYampert's chest only moments before, to cannibalize the organ, but she instead caressed the still-pumping muscle, and reverently placed it onto the glass table-top, which had miraculously escaped the kicking and fighting that'd been the death dance between Ben and Dominique.

The heart flapped like a fish there on the glass-topped table, and Alex's heart sank to see the awful sight, his grief for Ben almost overpowering the evil image of his own dislodged heart lying alongside Ben's.

She came closer with the knife, an elongated ratchet-toothed thing which could cut bone, shining swordlike in its sharp thin lines. Enjoying her self immensely, her tongue flicking about her lips, her animal appetite whetted, she plunged it at his exposed throat and upper torso, but he grabbed her wrist at the last moment, battling her for control. She placed both hands over the knife, shoving her whole weight against it, powerful with the strength given the mad.

Suddenly someone was pounding on the door, shouting from outside for the occupant to open up.

It was garbled, but it sounded like backup or at least the landlord. Someone had heard the disturbance and had called for help.

She glared at Alex and back at the door, which was now being pounded with great force, readying to buckle under the combined weight of at least two men on the outside who continued to shout and storm. She snatched up Ben's heart and rushed into the back room, slamming the door behind her.

Alex shouted for help as two uniformed policemen came crashing through the door, followed by the IAD detectives who'd been hounding Alex's heels since the incident at the cafe. “Get him off meeeee! Get me up!”

“ What in the name of Holy God!”

“ Jesus have mercy,” said one of the uniformed cops, his gun trained on Alex's forehead.

“ We're both detectives. His killer's in the next room, damn you! Tell them, Hirschenfeldt! Get me the hell up and use extreme caution over there!” he shouted to the second uniformed cop, who was trying to get into the other room, having heard noises coming from that quarter. “Damnit, man, it's the Queen of Hearts killer! She's locked herself inside there! Help me to my feet!”

She'd jammed a chair beneath the knob of the inner door, and it took them several minutes before they could break through, but she was gone through an open window where the sash flapped madly as if shouting her direction. Through the window a wild wind howled in on them like a ghostly warning not to follow, but Alex heeded only his rage and instinct, hurling himself toward the window. Half in and half out the window, he realized only now that a sudden storm had blotted out the sky with ominous and inky clouds, ready to burst forth with a heavy rain, the sweet, metallic smell of it insinuating as much, while all around him the wind swept in angry eddies, rattling the fire escape, a backlash of the hurricane.

The woman calling herself Michael Dominique had vanished with little trace of ever having been here, but she'd mercifully dropped or had decided to leave Ben's now-still heart on the wrought-iron fire escape two flights below, where it hadn't met with a gentle landing. Having obviously decided to race on without the organ she'd killed for, she had instead bounded acrobatically up or down the fire escape, and now like a vicious killer out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, the monster had been swallowed up in the stormy New Orleans night.

“ What in the name of God happened here, Detective?” asked Hanson, Hirschenfeldt's partner, in an accusatory tone, grabbing hold of Alex at the windowsill.

“ Never mind that! Beat hell back to your unit. Tell 'em what we have here. I want men scouring the area, including the roof and adjacent buildings. It's the Hearts killer, damn you, and he's a she… a she pretending to be a he, pretending to be a she.”

All the other policemen stared at him, wondering what he was babbling. “The killer's a woman pretending to be a transvestite,” he said, attempting to clarify, “and she gets them that way. Lulls them into a false sense of security and then lets fly with that damned knife of hers.”

He started out the window after the killer.

“ Where're you going?” asked the older of the two uniforms, his partner on the way to the unit, the two IAD guys useless, wide-eyed and gaping.

“ After her.” Alex yanked free of Hanson's grasp and climbed out onto the fire escape, trying to find any clue as to which direction she'd taken, up or down. From the look of the undisturbed dust below him, he opted for going straight up.

“ I think she's on the roof. Send backup as soon as you can!”

Alex raced for the roof, taking the steps two at a time until a powerful gust of wind threatened to lift him over the side. He held on more firmly, and once he'd made it to the top of the roof, he stared across at the expanse, having trouble standing, the powerful wind threatening to send him back over the side without aid of the fire escape. He hunkered down low to the black-tar roof, scanning in a 360-degree turn for every possible avenue of escape. There were hiding places everywhere, and the roof was closely aligned with another.

Something told him it was useless, that she was gone, and only then did he realize just how much blood covered his shirt. Both of his forearms were crisscrossed with knife wounds where he'd fended off the bitch's blows. His shirt and coat were caked with his and Big's blood. He felt a sudden light headedness, an inability to focus, and not even the wind could calm the stench of blood now in his nostrils. He felt an overwhelming sense of loss engulf him, realizing that when he went back down off this roof, he'd never again speak to Ben or be yelled at by the big goon.

A cold, bitter rain began to fall over Alex, drenching his hair, melting his tears and washing his wounds. It was the last thing he felt or remembered before blacking out.