“I was asking about him. What time do you think he’ll be getting here?”
“Our New York people’ll have that information. I’ll let you know sometime tomorrow.”
“I want to make sure he gets a nice welcome,” Carruthers said, and smiled. “Lots of people are mighty fond of that man.”
“I’ll bet,” Dobbs said.
Sunset was expected at seven thirty-three.
In the Hamptons, a cocktail party invitation for six P.M. was usually honored at seven. People drifted in and out in a variety of costumes. Those who planned to go home after the drinks and finger food generally arrived in casual beachwear ranging from jeans to shorts to — on one memorable occasion in Easthampton — a woman wearing only high heels, a bikini bottom, and a gold chainlink top she’d purchased in the city of Rome. Those who planned to go on to dinner at one of the local eateries came dressed in what some of the hostesses called Casual Elegant. For the men, this usually meant blue blazer, pale slacks, and white shirt open at the throat, with or without a colorful ascot. Some women actually managed to look both casual and elegant. Others, loaded for bear the way Carolyn was tonight, arrived in more blatantly seductive outfits; the white dress was recklessly low-cut, tight across the behind, and high on the leg. Sonny was wearing white slacks and a purple, crew-necked Ralph Lauren shirt.
On the deck of the Cabot house tonight — while the assembled guests, some fifty in all, waited to “ooh” and “ahh” yet another magnificent sunset, ho-hum — the talk was mostly about the murder that had taken place at the Hilton Hotel.
A woman who introduced herself as Dr. Sylvia Hirsch — who Sonny later learned from Carolyn was a noted psychiatrist — was holding forth on the theory that the murder had been homosexually motivated, an icepick being the weapon of choice in such murders, although she was surprised the victim’s hands hadn’t been tied behind his back with a wire hanger.
“Mr. Gomez?” he’d said.
“Yes, come in, won’t you, please?” Sonny said.
The icepick behind his back. From the refrigerator bar. The door to the room closing. The detective turning toward him.
“It’s very nice of you to...”
The icepick thrusting.
“Because an icepick is a phallic weapon,” Dr. Hirsch said.
“I thought a knife was supposed to be phallic,” someone said.
“Also,” Dr. Hirsch said, with a curt nod. She had a faint German accent. The word came out “Ahlzo.”
A man whom Carolyn introduced as Buddy Johnson of CBS News told Dr. Hirsch — and the several other people who were now gathered to hear the inside story — that his people had come up with some particularly grisly footage that the police wouldn’t allow them to show because...
There had been a lot of blood, Sonny recalled.
... only the killer would know all the details of the crime.
Wrapping him in the quilted bedspread, checking the hallway to make sure it was empty, hearing the chambermaids chattering in Spanish down at the far end. Dragging the body down the hall and dumping it into a wheeled laundry cart standing alongside a service elevator. Scooping up a handful of dirty towels and sheets lying on the service alcove floor, tossing them in over the body. Making sure the body would not be linked to room 2312. And buying time as well. The longer it took them to discover the corpse, the further away he’d be.
“How about those other two?” a woman said. She was wearing purple slacks and a white silk blouse unbuttoned very low on her tanned chest.
“Got to be some kind of satanic cult,” the man with her said. He was wearing a boldly striped Tommy Hilfiger sports shirt.
“The newspapers didn’t say what kind of tattoos, though, did you notice?” someone else said.
Sonny was instantly alert.
“Or where on the body they were located.”
“Probably you-know-where,” a woman said, and giggled.
“Tell us where, Sally,” a man suggested.
“Two women with tattoos, I think that’s odd,” another woman said. “You don’t find too many women with tattoos these days.”
“Oh, there must be thousands of them, Jean.”
“Two women with tattoos? Both of them shot with the same gun?”
“Very odd.”
“Very very odd.”
“I think this new one is even odder. A man in a laundry bin? Jesus!”
“Wasn’t a musician killed on the roof of the Hilton a little while back?” a woman asked.
“That was Carnegie Hall,” the man with her said. “The roof of Carnegie Hall. She was some kind of musician.”
“Lincoln Center,” someone said.
“A cellist,” someone said.
“I thought a flautist,” someone said.
“Watch your language,” someone said, and everyone laughed.
“Will you be covering the President’s speech on the Fourth?” Sonny asked the man from CBS.
Geoffrey was telling her that once, when he was thirteen years old, he pretended he’d had a fist fight — and faked a resultant black eye — just to impress a girl with hair as blond as Elita’s.
They were sipping their cocktails and munching on the complimentary bruschetta their waiter had brought to the table. The place was an Italian restaurant on Fifty-third and Third. Geoffrey had earlier told her that he often came here for lunch, but that it sometimes got hectic at dinnertime.
“Unless you enjoy looking at Woody Allen,” he’d said.
Woody Allen wasn’t here tonight. Nor was the place particularly crowded at a little past seven o’clock.
“Although hers was curly,” he said.
“Mine used to be curly,” Elita said. “It got absolutely straight when I turned twelve.”
“A miracle,” he said.
“No, I think it had something to do with... well, never mind. But how can anyone fake a black eye?”
“With water-soluble pencils,” he said.
“With what?”
“They’re these colored pencils you can draw with dry, or else dip them in water and use them like water colors.”
“I still don’t...”
“I used them wet. Under my left eye. To draw a bruise. I must tell you it was an absolutely perfect shiner, all blues and greens and yellows, magnificent, a bruise of monstrous proportions. Judith never once doubted its authenticity. That was her name. Judith. I was madly in love with her. Well, with her hair, actually.”
“But why’d you pretend you’d had a fist fight?”
“To show her how much I adored her. I told her a great bully of a boy had said something derogatory about her honor, and I’d punched him halfway round the crescent before he landed a solid blow to my eye. I allowed the bruise to fade a bit each day, using the wet pencils, changing the color. It was quite the most brilliant bit of art I’d ever done.”
“Do you still draw?”
“Not under my eye anymore. And only every now and again.”
“Are you good at it?”
“Not very.”
“I can’t draw a straight line.”
“I do it because I find it relaxing.”
“No one’s ever faked a black eye for me,” she said.
“I’ll paint one on the next time I see you,” he said. “I still have the pencils.”
She imagined him at thirteen, probably long and lanky, with the same eyelashes he had now, lashes a girl would kill for, standing before a mirror and decorating his eye with blues, yellows and greens...