The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 22

Kat showed up just after nightfall, and I went down in the big elevator to fetch her. She was shuffling from foot to foot on the marble floor of the building’s lobby, humming a little tune and jerking her body around in time to it. At the elevator’s approach she spun to face me, and even from that distance I could tell that she’d been at the burny again.

“Stevie!” she called, with a big, disturbing sort of smile. “I got the goods!” She held up a medium-sized parcel, plain brown paper tied with some twine.

As I dragged the grate open, she jumped inside and threw herself against me, laughing out loud at nothing at all. “Kat,” I said, trying not to sound as disappointed-even angry-as I felt, “get a grip on yourself, okay? This is serious.”

She frowned, mocking me. “Oh. Sorry, Inspector.” Then I closed the grate, and as we started up in the near darkness she threw her arms around me, moving her lips close to my ear. “Want to have another go, Stevie? Right here in the elevator? Been a long time…”

I slammed the control handle of the machine into the STOP position, so hard that Kat was jerked away from me. She gave out a little squeal as she fell backward.

“Kat!” I said, still trying to control myself. “Why the hell did you have to show up in this kind of condition?”

The blue eyes turned mean, a meanness made all the worse by the cocaine. “Don’t you take that tone with me, Stevie Taggert! Ain’t I spent the whole week risking my neck to get you and your friends what you wanted? If I allow myself to celebrate a little, now that it’s over, then I hope I can be forgiven by your high-minded self!”

Letting out a frustrated burst of air, I nodded at the package. “Maybe you should just let me take it,” I said. “I’ll meet you later, bring you the money and the ticket.”

“Oh, no,” Kat shot back, holding the package away from me. “I know that deal! I’m gettin’ paid now, and I’m gettin’ paid in person! If you’re so damned embarrassed by me, don’t worry, I won’t stick around long! Who’d want to? Bunch of mighty strange types, is what you all are, and I mean to celebrate my good fortune tonight with them what knows how!”

I grabbed the elevator handle and threw the thing back into motion. “All right,” I said, “if that’s how you want it.”

“How I want it? That’s what you want, ain’t it?” She faced the elevator grate and tried to fix her hair. “Damn me… the airs some people take on, just because they find themselves on the other side of the tracks…”

The rest of Kat’s visit didn’t go much better. Her anger made her keep her words to a minimum, but it was still obvious to me-and, I’m sure, to everybody else-that she was loaded with burny and that hers was no chippy (which is to say, irregular) habit. Oh, she had the goods she’d promised, all right: we opened the parcel up on the billiard table next to the detective sergeants’ vials of fingerprint powder and their comparison microscope, and found that it contained one tight-fitting, bloodred satin jacket-with, to order, large, flat black buttons. Kat wanted to get paid right there and then, and her temper wasn’t improved when the Doctor said that she’d have to wait for the detective sergeants to verify that the jacket belonged to the woman we knew as Elspeth Hunter. Kat declared that she’d wait for the fingerprinting to be done, but no longer-she couldn’t imagine what else we wanted the thing for, and she wasn’t going to wait to find out. The deal she’d struck required her to show up with one jacket belonging to Libby Hatch, she said; after we’d all agreed that she’d lived up to her side of the bargain, she’d take her leave. Having said this, she threw herself sullenly into one of the big easy chairs.

The process of lifting the prints didn’t take long. The buttons being black, Marcus used a camel’s-hair paintbrush to dust them with some fine, gray-white aluminum powder, which he then blew away, revealing a clear set of waving lines what he held up against a photograph of the lead pipe they’d found in Central Park for comparison. Nodding to the Doctor, Marcus said only, “It’s a match,” at which point Kat, figuring that was her cue, got to her feet and marched up to the Doctor.

“We all square?” she said to him, a little frantically.

The Doctor-who, I could see, was worried by both Kat’s physical state and her attitude-attempted to be cordial. “We are indeed all square, Miss Devlin. Can we offer you anything by way of thanks? Some coffee, or tea, perhaps-”

“My money and my ticket,” Kat said, holding out a hand. Then she thought to add, “Thank you very much, sir.” Looking my way, she narrowed her eyes and spat out, “I wouldn’t want to overstay my welcome, or make anybody uncomfortable.”

The Doctor glanced from her to me and back again. I think he was on the verge of saying something more, but finally he just nodded and took an envelope from his breast pocket. “Three hundred dollars in cash,” he said with a smile, “and one ticket to San Francisco. Valid at any time during the next six months. Oh,” he added, as Kat near grabbed the envelope, “and the ticket is for a first-class compartment. To show our appreciation.”

That melted her a bit, toward him if not me. “That’s-very decent of you, sir. Thank you.” She glanced at the envelope and smiled just a little. “I ain’t never traveled first class. My papa, he used to say-” Seeming to catch herself, she went rigid again. “I’ll be on my way now, sir. If that’s all.”

The Doctor nodded. “I’m sorry you can’t stay.” She’d just turned when he added, “Miss Devlin-” He took a business card from another pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. “I operate a-school, of sorts, downtown. For young people who want or need to make a change in their lives. Here is the address and the telephone number. Should you ever find yourself in New York again and be interested in such-assistance, please do not hesitate to telephone or stop by.”

Kat looked at the card, and her face went wicked again; but she forced herself to smile. “Yeah. I heard about your place, Doctor.” She looked up at him. “I heard you ain’t runnin’ it no more, is what I heard.”

At that I stepped in fast. “Kat, come on,” I said, pushing her toward the door.

“So who’s to say, Doctor,” she called over her shoulder, “which one of us needs the-assistance?”

I got her wriggling form back into the elevator, slammed the door shut, and closed the grate with a bang. Fairly tearing the control handle off, I started us back down. “You had no call to talk that way,” I said through my teeth. “He was only tryin’ to help, dammit all, Kat. What’s wrong with you? Can’t you ever let anybody help?”

“I don’t want nobody’s help!” she hollered back. “I want to take care of myself, if that’s all right with you!”

“Yeah? Well, you’re doin’ a hell of a job!”

“Maybe you don’t think so-but I ain’t no servant, and I ain’t yet fallen into the river dead stinkin’ drunk! So just leave me alone, can’t you, Stevie? Leave me be!” She turned away again, and choked back some tears as she tried to catch her breath. Glancing down at the envelope in her hands, she tore it open. “I’m countin’ this,” she said, just looking for more ways to sting me. She scooped out the envelope’s contents, coming first across the train ticket. “Hunh. First class. Hell, I could sell this and buy three tickets…” Her eyes made out some small print at the edge of the thing. “What’s this-‘non… transferable… non… refundable.’ What’s all that mean?”

I was still pretty hot myself, so I just laid it out: “It means you can’t sell it to anybody else and you can’t cash it in, that’s what it means.”

The words were meant to hurt, and it was clear they did. “You mean, if I was lyin’ all along about my aunt and just wanted some more money for burny, is that it?”

We’d reached the ground floor. I grabbed the handle of the grate, but before opening it I remembered one last detail. “We need to know when the woman’s gonna be at the Dusters’. At night, and for sure.”

“All right,” Kat answered quietly, her own teeth grinding. “Since that’s all you care about. They’re havin’ a big to-do tomorrow night. It’s Goo Goo’s birthday. She’ll be there. I won’t. Can I go now?”

I pulled the grate open for her without answering. She just looked at me and shook her head for a moment, then stormed on out. “Good-bye, Stevie,” she said, still fuming quietly.

Ordinarily, I would’ve run after her; but that night I just didn’t have it in me. There were a lot of reasons why, some of which I’d come to understand in the near future, some of which would take me years to really get. But to this day I still wonder how things might’ve turned out if I had gone…

I gave myself a few minutes and then headed back upstairs. Miss Howard was waiting for me when I stepped out of the elevator, and while the others were all clustered around the billiard table, watching Detective Sergeant Lucius as he peered through the comparison microscope, she pulled me over to the front window.

“Stevie,” she said quietly, “is everything all right?”

Struggling to keep down a rush of irritation at the thought that everyone in the room had been let in on my personal dealings, I just threw up my hands, then wiped sweat from my forehead. “Yes, miss,” I said. “Will be, anyway…”

Being as I kept my eyes to the floor, I couldn’t swear to it, but I felt that Miss Howard was searching my face. “I was right about you,” she said, causing me to look up and find her smiling. “You wouldn’t fall for a fool.”

“No, miss,” I answered. “Too busy being one, I guess.”

“Don’t,” Miss Howard answered quickly, touching my arm. “How she behaves doesn’t make you a fool. She’s a clever girl, your Kat-clever and independent in a world that wants her to be stupid and submissive. And pretty, too. Pretty enough to be able to take serious risks, trying to make a life for herself-and clever enough to think that she can manage the dangers that come with those risks. But she can’t. No one can. And so her schemes end up hurting her worst of all-much as they may hurt you, too.”

I knocked my fist against the window frame and, out of sheer frustration, asked a question I already knew the answer to: “But-she could choose another way to go if she wanted to, couldn’t she?”

“Theoretically, yes,” Miss Howard said with a nod. “But ask yourself this, Stevie: If the Doctor hadn’t offered you another way, would you have chosen one?”

I looked away, not wanting to give an honest answer but not knowing what else to say. Fortunately, Detective Sergeant Lucius made further conversation unnecessary:

“Yes,” he said in a loud voice, from his seat across the room. “Yes, that’s it… that’s it! A perfect match!” Miss Howard and I turned to see him look up from the twin brass eyepieces of the comparison microscope, his sweaty face beaming like a kid’s. “She’s there-without question, the girl is in that house!”

Marcus fairly tore his brother out of the chair so he could get a look into the microscope, while Cyrus and the Doctor shook hands with Lucius. Miss Howard and I ran over to do the same, and then waited our turns to take a look into the contraption on the billiard table. When I finally sat to get my glimpse, I’ll admit that I was a bit disappointed, as all I was able to see were what looked like two hazy pieces of the same length of string, or rope; but to the trained eye, I was assured, what I was looking at, magnified many times over, was two hairs off of the same baby’s head: Ana Linares’s head.

And so we finally had our proof, and along with it an open road to direct action; and, scared as that prospect had made me during recent days, at that particular moment the prospect of putting everything else aside and rolling the dice on the break-in made me feel just fine.

“All we lack now,” the Doctor said, heading over to review the notes on the chalkboard and make a few additions, “is a time when we can be certain the woman will be out of the house.”

“But-we’ve got it.” Barely aware that I’d said the words out loud, I looked around to find everyone staring at me. “Tomorrow night,” I went on. “It’s Goo Goo Knox’s birthday-she’s sure to be at the Dusters’.”

The Doctor gave me what you might call a searching look, then nodded slowly. “Well, then,” he said, “tomorrow night.” He began to toss his piece of chalk up and down lightly. “Tomorrow night she assumes her second personality-and in so doing gives us a chance to peer into her first. The woman of two names, two faces, two lives has-quite unconsciously-set the two halves of herself to work, each against the other. We must pray our job is finished before that conflict comes to an end.” The Doctor fixed his black eyes on the board. “We must interrupt the work of the savior, before the destroyer has her way…”