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SHE was back the next morning. I almost didn’t recognize her without her makeup. It was a vast improvement. She looked like any other college girl.
Except for the fact she was hysterical.
I tried to calm her down, find out what was the matter.
Turned out it was simple.
“He didn’t show up!”
Ah, youth.
I smiled reassuringly. “You’re not the first girl in the world ever got stood up.”
She shook her head. Practically stamped her foot. “No! He’s not like that. He wouldn’t do that. If he didn’t show up, something is wrong!”
“Did you check up on him?”
“How could I check up on him? You didn’t give me his address. You just assured me everything was all right. Well, guess what. Turns out you were wrong.”
“I understand. You’re upset. You feel helpless. But I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“You’re sure? Like you were sure everything was okay. Why won’t anyone pay attention to me? Why won’t anyone listen?”
And there she was, the girl in the horror movie, pleading for help. Which is what brought me to MacAullif’s office. That and a sense of obligation and a desire to pass the buck. In the movies, the people pleading for help are the good guys, and the people not listening are the jerks. Not that I wished the role of jerk on MacAullif. I just didn’t want it on me. I talked MacAullif into ru
HE got back to me later that afternoon. I was in Queens interviewing a woman who’d fallen on a city bus when the office beeped me, told me MacAullif wanted me to call. That couldn’t be good.
It wasn’t.
“A corpse matching your description turned up yesterday morning.”
“Yesterday? How come you’re just getting to me now?”
“You gave me Morris Feldman. This guy’s Michael Fletcher. Same initials, so I ran it down. You go
“Yesterday morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Where was the body?”
“ Riverside Park at 114th. Just off the upper path, buried in a shallow grave.”
“What do you mean by shallow grave?”
“That’s the way it was described to me. I didn’t happen to see it. The guy was at the morgue by the time I got the lead.”
“How’d he die?”
“Multiple stab wounds. From a sharp object, most likely a butcher knife.”
“What about the time of death?”
“About twelve hours before he was found.”
I sucked in my breath. “Right after I saw him.”
“You saw him?”
“Yeah.”
“You were the last person to see him alive?”
“Aside from the killer.”
MacAulliflet that lie there just long enough for the silence to become uncomfortable. “Wa
IT was.
The guy on the marble slab looked exactly like the vampire I’d met. With perhaps a few pints less blood.
The medical examiner was cutting up some woman. He stopped long enough to check us out.
“You did the autopsy on this one?” MacAullif asked.
“Yeah.”
“Can you give me the cause of death?”
“You want me to talk in front of him?”
“Relax. He’s on our side. What killed him?”
“Multiple stab wounds to the torso. Some sharp object, probably a butcher knife.”
“Which one killed him?”
“The one in the heart,” he shrugged. “He might have died from the one in the lung. But the one in the heart wasn’t postmortem, because it was still pumping blood. Was it the last wound? I don’t know. Was it a mortal wound? Yes, it was. What ‘killed him’”-he made quotation marks around the word with his fingers-“is splitting hairs. You sure this guy’s not a lawyer?”
“Any contributing cause of death?” I said.
“Fu
“Why? Was he drugged?”
He shook his head. “Tox screen was clean. But when you mention contributing cause of death…”
“Yeah?”
“He was also stabbed with a sharp piece of wood. I didn’t see it at first. Found it in his clothes. It was in the wound and had fallen out.”
“The wound?”
“The wound in his heart.”
“Are you saying a wooden stake caused his death?”
“No. He was stabbed in the heart with a butcher knife, just like all the other wounds. The killer stuck the stake in his heart afterward.”
“You mean he was dead?”
“He was probably still alive. There was a lot of blood on the wood. But he died shortly thereafter. I figure the heart pumping blood pushed the wood out of the wound. Just before he died. We’re not talking a long time here. A few seconds, maybe.”
I walked out as if in a fog. MacAullif had to take my arm, guide me to the car.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a shock, seeing ’em cut up like that.”
“I’ve been in a morgue before.”
“Don’t get hung up on the stake. There’s more important things here. Like who killed him, for instance.”
“I know who killed him.”
“Oh?”
“It was her father. He couldn’t stand him messing around with his little girl.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure. If I was her father, I might have killed him myself.”
“He was that bad?”
“Actually, I kind ofliked him.”
“You really think it’s the father?”
“Yeah.”
IT was Daddy all right. MacAullif picked him up, shook him down, he caved right in. That’s how it is with some tough guys. They put up a good front until their luck turns. Daddy spilled his guts. Admitted it all.
“Except for the stake,” MacAullif said. “He won’t admit to the stake.”
“What?”
“Claims he never saw the stake. Didn’t mention it till we brought it up. Then he denied it.”
“Really?”
MacAullif waved it away. “Not that it matters. He admits to the knife. Between his confession and the testimony of the medical examiner, we got him dead to rights.”
I nodded as if I agreed. But that wooden stake would haunt me long after the event. As would the image of the goth girl, her boyfriend dead, her daddy convicted of the crime. A hell of a legacy to carry with her. I had visions of her getting a law degree, finding a loophole, getting Daddy out. A pipe dream, of course. But sometimes pipe dreams keep you going.
Yeah, MacAullif was satisfied. But I couldn’t help thinking of that wooden stake.
The way I saw it, there were only two ways that could have happened.
I only met the vampire once, but as I told MacAullif, I liked him. I don’t know if he was crazy or playacting or what, but within his own separate universe, he seemed to have his own set of rules. There was a certain gallant nobility about him. I could imagine him, realizing he was dying, wanting to go out with a bang. Or not wanting to disappoint the goth. Or wanting to keep up the mystique, for to him image was everything.
I could imagine him pulling the wooden stake out of his pocket and sticking it in the knife wound in his heart.
Either that, or Daddy was lying. Not unusual in a perpetrator, though somewhat unlikely in one confessing all. Still, I could imagine the guy being embarrassed about it, withholding it because he figured it didn’t matter.
And because he couldn’t face it.
Because, according to the medical report, Daddy killed the vampire right after I left him that night. Which meant that, despite Debbie’s warning, and in spite of the fact I never spotted him, Daddy was there when I spoke to the vampire. Daddy saw the vampire show me the stake and put it back in his pocket. So Daddy knew it was there.
I could envision Daddy stabbing the kid again and again and again with the butcher knife, and he still won’t die. Until, in spite of himself, Daddy takes the wooden stake out of the vampire’s pocket, and plunges it into his heart. He drags the body into the bushes, throws dirt over him. And refuses to admit, even to himself, that the stake was what killed him.