CHAPTER 14
GUN READY, MUZZLE UP, CHAMBER BY HALL by chamber, through Dunny Whistler?s nautilus apartment, Ethan came to the bedroom.
One nightstand lamp had been left on. Against the headboard of the Chinese sleigh bed, decorative silk pillows fashioned from cheongsam fabrics had been artfully arranged by the housekeeper.
Also on the bed, cast off with evident haste, lay articles of men?s clothing. Wrinkled, stained, still damp from the rain. Slacks, shirt, socks, underwear.
Tumbled in a corner were a pair of shoes.
Ethan didn?t know what Dunny had been wearing when he had left the morgue at Our Lady of Angels Hospital. However, he wouldn?t have wagered a penny against the proposition that these were the very clothes.
Moving closer to the bed, he detected the faint malodor that he?d first smelled in the elevator. Some of the components of the scent were more easily identified than they had been earlier: stale perspiration, a whiff of rancid ointment with a sulfate base, thin fumes of sour urine. The smell of illness, of being long abed and bathed only with basin and sponge.
[104] Ethan became aware of a background sizzle, which he initially mistook for a new manifestation of the rain. Then he realized that he was listening to the fall of water in the master-bathroom shower.
The bathroom door stood ajar. Past the jamb and through the gap, with the sizzle came a wedge of light and wisps of steam.
He eased the door all the way open.
Golden marble sheathed the floor, the walls. In the black granite countertop, two black ceramic sinks were served by brushed-gold spouts and faucets.
Above the counter, a long expanse of beveled mirror, hazed with condensation, failed to present a clear reflection. His distorted shape moved under that frosted surface, like a strange pale something glimpsed swimming just beneath the shadow-dappled surface of a pond.
Veils of steam floated in the air.
Within the bathroom was a water closet. The door stood open, the toilet visible. No one in there.
Dunny had nearly been drowned in this toilet.
Neighbors in a fourth-floor apartment had heard him struggling furiously for his life, shouting for help.
Police arrived quickly and caught the assailants in desperate flight. They found Dunny lying on his side in front of the toilet, semiconscious and coughing up water.
By the time the ambulance arrived, he had fallen into a coma.
His attackers-who?d come for money, vengeance, or both-had not been cheated recently by Dunny. They had been in prison for six years and, only recently released, had come to settle a long-overdue account.
Dunny might have hoped to journey far from his life of crime, but old sins had caught up with him that night.
Now on the bathroom floor lay two rumpled, damp black towels. Two dry towels still hung on the rack.
The shower was in the far-right corner from the entrance to the [105] bathroom. Even if the steam-opaqued glass door had been clear, Ethan couldn?t have seen into that cubicle from any distance.
Approaching the stall, he had an image in his mind of the Dunny Whistler whom he expected to encounter. Skin sickly pale where not a lifeless gray, impervious to the pinking effect of hot water. Gray eyes, the whites now pure crimson with hemorrhages.
Still holding the gun in his right hand, he gripped the door with his left and, after a hesitation, pulled it open.
The stall was unoccupied. Water beat upon the marble floor and swirled down the drain.
Leaning into the stall, he reached behind the cascade, to the single control, and turned off the flow.
The sudden silence in the wake of the watery sizzle seemed to announce his presence as clearly as if he had triggered an air horn.
Nervously, he turned toward the bathroom entrance, expecting some response, but not sure what that might be.
Even with the water turned off, steam continued to escape the shower, though in thinner veils, pouring over the top of the glass door and around Ethan.
In spite of the moist air, his mouth had gone dry. Pressed together, tongue and palate came apart as reluctantly as two strips of Velcro.
When he started toward the bathroom door, his attention was drawn again to the movement of his vague and distorted reflection in the clouded mirror above the sinks.
Then he saw the impossible shape, which brought him to a halt.
In the mirror, under the skin of condensation, loomed a pale form as blurred as Ethan?s veiled image but nonetheless recognizable as a figure, man or woman.
Ethan was alone. A quick survey of the bathroom failed to reveal any object or any fluke of architecture that the misted mirror might trick into a ghostly human shape.
So he closed his eyes. Opened them. Still the shape.
He could hear only his heart now, only his heart, not fast, but faster, [106] sledgehammer heavy, pounding and pounding, slamming blood to his brain to flush out unreason.
Of course his imagination had given meaning to a meaningless blur in a mirror, in the same way that he might have found men and dragons and all kinds of fanciful creatures among the clouds in a summer sky. Imagination. Of course.
But then this man, this dragon, whatever-it moved in the mirror. Not much: a little, enough to make Ethan?s sledgehammer heart stutter between blows.
Maybe the movement also was imaginary.
Hesitantly he approached the mirror. He didn?t step directly in front of the phantom form, for in spite of the strong rush of blood that ought to have clarified his thinking, Ethan suffered from the superstitious conviction that something terrible would happen to him if his reflection were to overlay the ghostly shape.
Surely the movement of the misted apparition had been imaginary, but if it had been, then he imagined it again. The figure seemed to be motioning for him to come forward, closer.
Ethan would not have admitted to Hazard Yancy or to any other cop from the old days, perhaps not even to Hannah if she were alive, that when he put his hand to the mirror, he half expected to feel not wet glass, but the hand of another, making contact from a cold and forbidding Elsewhere.
He swabbed away an arc of mist, leaving a glimmering smear of water.
Even as Ethan?s hand moved, so did the phantom in the mirror, sliding away from the cleansing swipe. Cunningly elusive, it remained behind the shielding condensation-and moved directly in front of him.
With the exception of his face, Ethan?s vague reflection in the misted glass had been dark because his clothes were dark, his hair. The steam-frosted shape now before him rose as pale as moonlight and moth wings, impossibly supplanting his own image.
[107] Fear knocked on his heart, but he wouldn?t let it in, as when he?d been a cop under fire and dared not panic.
Anyway, he felt as though he were half in a trance, accepting the impossible here as he might easily accept it in a dream.
The apparition leaned toward him, as if trying to discern his nature from the far side of the silvered glass, in much the same way that he himself leaned forward to study it.
Raising his hand once more, Ethan tentatively wiped away a narrow swath of mist, fully expecting that when he came eye to eye with his reflection, the eyes would not be his, but gray like Dunny Whistler?s eyes.
Again the mystery in the mirror moved, quicker than Ethan?s hand, remaining blurred behind the frosting of condensation.
Only when breath exploded from Ethan did he realize that he had been holding it.
On the inhale, he heard a crash in a far room of the apartment, the brittle music of shattering glass.