“What do you mean, it’s not enough? I don’t love you enough?”
“No, I mean you hate what I do. And I want to keep doing it.”
A long silence. Marlene disliked talking this way on the phone, and being covered with congealing blood did not help.
“How’re Lucy and the babies?” she asked.
“They’re fine, Marlene.” Tightly.
“I need to go wash myself, Butch. And take a rest. I’ll be at Edie’s. Call me there.”
“Is that guy still bothering her?”
“Not lately. But he’s probably there.”
“Who, Robinson? Where?”
“On the island. Her sister has a house there and she parties with her pals, and he’s one of them.”
“Oh, shit, Marlene!” A wail.
“I’ll be fine, Butch. I have a gun and a big dog, and after tomorrow I’ll have Wolfe.”
Another silence. When Karp spoke again it sounded as if he was struggling for control. “Let me understand this. You’re guarding her, he’s there, and clearly, you don’t expect him to hold off just because you are there, or else you wouldn’t be there, right out front. So … you expect him to try to get to her right through you. Is that what’s happening, Marlene?”
“Yeah. I think he loves getting through opposition. It’s part of the thrill for him. He’ll make a move.”
“That’s great,” Karp said. “Terrific! The guy’s a killer, Marlene.”
“That’s okay,” she said, almost giddily, “so am I. Tell Lucy to call me at Edie’s tonight, okay? Bye, Butch.”
As she hung up she was reflecting about what she had just said about opposition whetting the thrill for Robinson. It certainly fit with what she already knew about his personality, if that was the word. She thought that if stalking had an NFL, the late Manfred Stolz would be a lot lower draft choice than the Music Lover.
NINETEEN
They let Marlene take a shower in the hospital. She spent three-quarters of an hour in it, and washed and rinsed her hair thrice. When she emerged, she found that her bloody clothes had been removed and replaced with a blue T-shirt printed with a picture of Montauk Light, white jeans, and a bra and panties. Everything fit. Harry clearly, and Marlene smiled at the idea of Dead Harry Bellow buying undies in some tony Southhampton shop. Her bag, a zip-up canvas number, was there too, with Dane’s gun and holster in it. She picked it up and went to visit Wolfe.
He was lying in bed with an IV running into his arm, looking pale and younger than he had before. Dane was there with him, but clearly about to leave.
“Take care, Wolfie,” said Dane. “Some stuff, huh, Marlene?”
“Some stuff is right,” said Marlene.
“How’s that piece working for you?” asked Dane.
“The gun? It’s fine, Dane. I love it. I want to marry it,” replied Marlene snappishly, and regretted her tone when she saw the man’s boy-handsome face stiffen. She sighed and touched his arm. “No, really, Dane, I like it. It’s real light for a.45, and I realize I should be carrying something with more stopping power anyway.”
Dane smiled, and the gun-nut lights flicked on in his eyes. “Yeah, you got one-shot knockdown with that thing. I loaded 185 grain Silvertips in there. I like them better than the old 230 grain round. Better velocity, better expansion.”
“I feel the same way, Dane,” said Marlene with an utterly straight face. “Expansion is the key. I can’t wait to try it out on the range.”
Dane left, a happy man. Marlene pulled up a straight chair and sat down next to Wolfe’s bed.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Okay. They just have me in here for observation. I lost a lot of blood, they tell me.”
“Not as much as Stolz,” Marlene said, and then, when she saw the expression on his face, “Oh, shit! I’m sorry, Wolfe. I can’t seem to control my mouth today.”
“That’s okay. I just never killed a guy before. I mean, in civilian life. ’Nam was different, you know?” She didn’t, but nodded anyway. “I thought it would be, you know, like in the movies, you walk away kind of macho and say some cool shit. But …” He seemed sad to have learned that he was not the sort of person portrayed in the movies.
Marlene patted his arm. “Yeah, I know. Meanwhile, you saved my life. I wanted to thank you.”
He looked her in the eye, and Marlene was surprised by what she saw in his: pain, confusion, some unbearable longing. She wondered briefly if he had a thing for her personally, or for what she represented. Then, in what appeared a conscious effort, he gathered up this potent mixture and stuffed it away behind his bland and phlegmatic daily mask.
“Well, you know, you’re a nice person,” he said with as much of a shrug as a prone person could manage. “You were decent to Dane just now. He’s kind of boring about guns and all, and you kind of made it all right for him. Not many bosses give enough of a shit to do that.”
They must have given him some dope, Marlene thought as she heard this uncharacteristically sensitive remark. There was clearly more depth in the man than she had imagined.
“And if I were a bitch, you would’ve let Stolz chop me up?”
“He wasn’t after you. He was after the client,” Wolfe said, and then, after a moment, “What do you think makes a guy like that tick? I mean, travel all that distance, twist his whole life into a knot, just to kill some tennis-playing girl.”
“Oh, it’s love, without a doubt,” answered Marlene confidently. “In the wrong channel, needless to say, but still love. It’s the only thing powerful enough to make people do stuff that crazy.”
“Love? But he wanted to kill her.”
“Oh, yeah, but what’s weird about that? It’s classic stranger stalking. Look, put yourself in Manfred’s shoes. He’s a simple guy, not much going for him, no talent, no outlet for what’s got to be a passionate nature. One day he sees her, in a photograph or on TV. He’s smitten. Now there’s a channel for his love. Maybe it starts small-he’s a regular fan, like ten thousand others. He collects pictures, souvenirs of Trude Speyr. But that’s not enough. The channel gets deeper, starts to wear away at the banks of his regular life. He starts going to her tournaments. He gives up his job, his friends, assuming he had any, his family. His fantasy life gets richer. He’s only really alive when he’s thinking about her, looking at her. In his mind they’re together. But of course, in real life she doesn’t know he’s alive. After a while this becomes intolerable. He begins writing to her, trying to get close to her physically. Maybe he invades her space, steals little things, makes demands. She’s terrified, naturally, but he reads this as rejection. In his mind, she was always nice as pie. Now the river is raging. It washes away the rest of his life. He’s got nothing left but her, and she rejects him, worse, ignores him. He’s got to make her notice him, or die. So he attacks. When he’s killing her, then maybe she’ll notice him.”
She was watching Wolfe while she spun this out. He was following it all with more intelligence than she had seen in him before, or maybe she hadn’t looked in the right places.
“It sounds like the Music Lover,” he said in a quiet voice.
“No,” said Marlene with absolute confidence. “The Music Lover’s completely different. The Music Lover is a sadist named Vincent Robinson. What he wants is to control and torment his victim. No love involved. He’s got some crazy sado-mas thing going with the target’s sister too, which I’m not even going to try to figure out. Basically, he’s aping a stranger stalker to scare the vic and get his rocks off. He feeds off her terror. The psychology is completely different, and my feeling is, if I catch this guy in the act and dance on his head for a while, he’ll back off and find someone else to play with. That type of guy is relatively easy to chase away from a particular individual. True obsessives are nearly impossible to discourage.”