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  Looker

  Michael Kilian

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For Dianne deWitt

  and for Jan Strimple,

  my loveliest friends.

  CHAPTER 1

  The old Gullah granny woman was an ancient thing, as old, it almost seemed, as Tawabaw Island itself. She was a bent and bony creature with stalk limbs and black, crab hands who nattered and cackled to herself as she tottered around her decrepit shack at all hours of the day and night between the brief but deathlike naps that were her only sleep.

  She had few clothes and went about in most of them—a faded and shapeless cotton print dress that came down to her knobby ankles, a shorter dress over that, and then a soiled and tattered apron. Her head and the tops of her long, flappy ears were covered with a tightly wound cotton kerchief. Her gnarled feet were sheltered from the dirt and muck around her dwelling place by old leather shuffle moccasins so worn they might have been made from her skin. When she went outside to rummage in the nearby swamp grass and moss-laden trees or fuss with the animal carcasses she kept hanging about the place, she wore a ragged black cloak and wide-brimmed hat that once perhaps had been Sunday church finery. She used a stick as gnarled and knobby as she was to support her fragile weight and poke about the weeds and foliage.

  When she sat in the sun, it was on a plain board bench by her door. The only other furniture was a homemade rocking chair kept by the shack’s clay-brick fireplace, a sagging cot with a ragged quilt, and a rude table heaped with dusty crockery and medicines. She kept animal bones and skins in careful heaps about the floor and, in a box in one corner, roots and herbs and musky swamp plants. Among the gutted carcasses of animals and sea creatures hanging on the shack’s outside wall and from the surrounding trees was one of a gray dog so large it might have been a wolf. Some of the island children believed that it was. She had put seashells in the empty eye sockets, and when she had a fire burning outside, the flickering reflection of the firelight made it seem as though the wretched, ratty thing could see.

  Throughout the island she was spoken of as a hoodoo nana, an evil hag steeped in the bewitched West African ways of the first slaves. The people of the village just across the narrow inlet that was her moat brought her food and kerosene for her lamp, but otherwise stayed fearfully away unless they were desperately ill and in need of her curatives. Many were just as fearful of the doctor from the mainland who came by on occasional rounds. He had come twice to attend to the old woman when she was shaking with fever and moaning and crying in the night, but she had only screeched and hissed at him, and ignored the pills he had left among the animal detritus and roots and powders on her table.

  The old woman sang at odd times, and always when there was a moon or at day clean, as the islanders called daybreak. She muttered Gullah chants when she had a consultation—her consultation of the spirits. She chatted with her biddies, the little chickens who pecked and fluttered about her small, cluttered yard until they fell victim to her religion. She wailed about the long eye of the bukras who wished to make resort developments of her patch and other shore holdings on the island as they had all over Hilton Head and Daufuskie Island, which lay just across the channel.

  The islanders humored her in this. She gave them the dread feeling, but in a way they cherished her. It was believed that she cast a strong magic, and that while she lived, the white bukra and his bulldozers would never come near.

  Her eyes, set in deep wrinkled holes of bone and skin, were the oldest thing about her, and she could but dimly see, but she could find strange treasures in swamp grass and boggy creek beds that to others were only worthless barren. Her hearing had badly faded and she responded only vaguely to speech, yet she could sense the presence of wild creatures and ken the call of seabirds when something had disturbed them. She could name the sounds of the night.

  It was fully night now, as many hours from the day clean as from the sun’s last rosy glow above the thick trees that shielded the island from all view of the channel separating Tawabaw from Daufuskie and the mainland. She sat hunched in her rocker, her hands occupied only with themselves, singing softly to herself. The flickering lamplight danced her silhouette against the wall. The air was sweet with the fresh spring heat. It gave her pleasure.

  The door swung open. She lifted her head slowly, without startle or fright, as though she expected or at least welcomed the man who stepped inside. He stood a moment without speaking, his searching glance about the shack’s shadowy interior his only movement. She smiled, her dark, creased lips widening across her weathered face. She spoke gibberish, then cackled and broke into Gullah, “Heh! You ben don ’em. One day ’mong all!”

  “Where is it, Nana?” said the man, his deep voice attempting friendliness, but full of threat and anger.

  Her speech lapsed into chicken sounds.

  “Where is it? Where’s his tote?”

  She seemed to be ignoring him. She was talking to herself, to spirits, to ancestors, in words he couldn’t understand—words that were simply noise. He had come far, traveling with difficulty through the night, and this is what he found. He began shouting.

  She continued her nattering. He strode up to her, hulking over her, intimidating.

  “Where is it, Nana?!” The question came forth as a bellow. He grasped her by her thin shoulders, his thumbs near her long, scrawny neck. Her head eased forward, almost as though she were offering herself to his strong hands. He gripped her hard, then harder, and began shaking. There was a sudden snap. Her eyelids closed for the last time. He held her head erect above the humps of her shoulder bones, as though there were still a few whispers of life within her.

  But she had died in an instant. The thread of her existence had been as frail as those that hung from the edges of her garments. Gently, he lifted and eased her back into the rocker. It moved to and fro a few times. She might merely have been nodding into sleep.

  He stood back, as enraged at himself as he had been at her. He took deep breaths to calm himself, reminding himself of his mission and his hurry. He looked about the shack. There was not much to search. He went at the task with swiftness and great purpose, overturning her crude bed and tearing open its wretched mattress. Finding nothing, he pawed through her one cupboard, knocking crockery to the floor. He seized the old pitted poker from the fireplace and used it to break open her decrepit wooden chest. In frustration, he jabbed at loose bricks and pulled up loose floorboards, finding nothing.

  The rocking chair jittered with the violence of his effort. Her head lolled to one side, as though she were turning to see what he was about.

  Eyes. He crashed his way outside. The firelight reached through the open door and window, its glow limning the animal carcasses hanging from the edge of the shack’s roof and the tree limbs beyond. He knocked one down with the poker and ripped it open, revealing only slime and crawly little insects. He went down the line, repeating the grisly process. In one, so old the interior had mummified into something like leather, he found a rusting old tin box and kicked it open. It contained only shells and pieces of bones.

  A dead bobcat, twirling slowly, hung from the thick limb of a nearby tree. He went up to it and, dropping the poker, pulled the belly apart with his bare hands. A spattering moistness fell upon his face and neck and into his shirt, l
ittle pieces of slimy grit that at once began to move. He brushed madly at the terrible multitude of things, causing some to fall down his chest and back. His skin was alive with them.

  A dog barked. He jerked around toward the path that led to the distant village, catching a flicker of light in the distance. Standing motionless, he heard muffled voices.

  The villagers were fisher folk. It could be a party of fishermen taking early to their boats to catch the night tide. But it might just as easily be people startled from their sleep by his noisy actions. Had he called out when these damned crawlies had fallen into his collar? He couldn’t remember.

  The dog barked again, more loudly. He hadn’t uncovered even a hint of what he’d come to find. If the old nana had it, she could have hidden it anywhere on the island. He hadn’t the days it might take now to discover it. He hadn’t minutes. He saw the light flicker again. He ran, his feet squishing into patches of muck as he headed for the beach. He’d have to think of another way.

  In the afternoon, when the sheriff’s men from the mainland came by boat in response to the islanders’ summons, her body was still in the rocking chair. The sheriff’s men took away her remains but left everything else as it lay. So did the villagers, who thereafter treated the shack and swampy plot of land as a haunted place.

  The death bringer had left a few footprints in the wet soil leading down along the inlet to the beach. A boat’s keel had made a long imprint in the sand, but both traces of his coming disappeared in the next rain and following tides.

  A homicide report was clumsily typed and forwarded and filed. There was the requisite autopsy and a coroner’s report. But there was little subsequent investigation, there being no one to press charges, and few to mourn.

  CHAPTER 2

  Those who regularly attend the gilded social rites that are New York fashion shows do so as much to be seen as to see, and the crowd that was packed into the Terrace Room of the Plaza Hotel for the presentation of the new Philippe Arbre fur collection was as richly dressed as the models. The women ranged from fading young beauties to aging matrons clinging to the last vestiges of glamour. They glittered with expense, their carefully tailored garments set off with magnificent jewelry of the sort displayed in Fifth Avenue store windows where price was a mere detail. There were a few men in the audience, the younger largely in Italian designer suits and fashionably slicked-back hair, the older tending to more openly effeminate garb. They were present either because they were in the business of fashion or because they were “walkers,” daytime companions of the wives of rich, powerful, and extremely busy husbands who found fashion shows and afternoon teas a frivolous and embarrassing waste of time. The walkers were as commonplace at these patrician pageants as eunuchs in a sultan’s harem, and perhaps as necessary. Yet they seemed somehow inappropriate, like the rouged and peroxided women who hang out at prizefights.

  A.C. James was not like them. He ostensibly came to fashion shows because his friend Vanessa Meyers did. She appreciated his company and he was very fond of hers. But he mostly came because he liked to watch the girls.

  Vanessa was the New York Globe’s fashion editor and these shows for her were serious work. A.C. wrote a column for the tabloid on the city’s social and celebrity life, and also contributed commentary on the theater and the arts.

  For all its glamour and obvious pleasures, it was a frivolous, even trivial job, the sort often given to worthy but battered old reporters ready for the pasture. A.C. was not even forty. He’d been a foreign and military correspondent, specializing in nasty little wars like Northern Ireland and El Salvador. After he’d been wounded accompanying a British foot patrol in Belfast, his wife, Kitty, had made him take reassignment to the Globe’s Washington bureau. When he’d embroiled the paper in too many fights with the White House and the Pentagon, she’d then made him move to New York and accept the post of social columnist and arts critic.

  No one had thought it peculiar that she could order him about in this manner. Kitty was not only his wife; she and her brother owned the Globe.

  She had come to regret this last move. To everyone’s surprise, A.C. had taken well to the life of a boulevardier. He found he enjoyed spending his afternoons in museums and taking tea or cocktails with lovely ladies as much as he had the adventure of helicoptering into the deadly mountains of Central America and riding in tanks with the Third Armored Division. He’d discovered there were as many fools and villains in the Upper East Side haut monde as there were among the power elite of Washington. And he wrote about them just as boldly and woundingly.

  Now there was no place left for Kitty to make him go except away. They’d been quarreling frequently. Their last fight, occasioned by a cozy four-hour lunch he’d had the previous week with a rather notorious corporate “second wife,” had led to his moving into the East Side apartment he and Kitty kept for late evenings in town. She had remained in their big place on the river up in Westchester, smoldering.

  A.C. didn’t like Philippe Arbre much, and had said so in print. The man was both a fawning social climber and a vicious gossip. He had hurt a lot of people in New York he now considered beneath him. A.C. had written of him that he was reminiscent of Truman Capote and Elsa Maxwell, except that he hadn’t Capote’s talent or Maxwell’s taste. Arbre hadn’t spoken to him since.

  But A.C. loved Arbre’s models. They weren’t superstars like Dianne deWitt, Jan Strimple, Margaret Donahoe, Iman, and Laura Dean. Those girls—and all fashion mannequins referred to themselves as girls—worked the top-line shows for the very best fashion houses. Despite the fashion-press hype he had been able to generate with his fawning, Arbre was essentially a second-echelon designer, and in the high season often had to settle for new girls breaking into New York from other cities or older veterans no longer quite right for the perfection demanded by fashion photography but still able to earn a considerable living on the runways. They were nonetheless remarkable beauties, and worked hard for their money. A.C. admired them very much.

  A.C. was what the French call un homme amoureux, a man who loved women. He delighted in everything about them. He was still in love with his Kitty, and, though no one believed it, had been scrupulously faithful to her—in the sense that he had never actually gone to bed with the objects of his many infatuations. But he was by nature courtly and reflexively flirtatious. His society columnist job kept him constantly in the company of other women, and the resulting relationships were not always platonic. His wife had never understood. The sadness he felt over their quarreling had begun to show in his eyes as much as the wars he had covered did.

  Vanessa didn’t fully understand his attitude toward women, either, but they were very close friends and she humored him.

  They were seated snugly together in the front row of the press section that afternoon at the Arbre show, up against the brightly illuminated risers of the runway and in the full glare of the carefully arranged floodlights.

  They were a stylishly attractive couple and drew not a few glances from their social betters. A.C. was tall and slender and tanned, handsome enough despite a few scars and a slightly odd angle to his face caused by some long-ago broken bones. Disdaining the Gucci, Armani, Ralph Lauren foppery so prevalent on the Upper East Side, his journalistic hunting ground, A.C. dressed to suit himself, rather as his grandfather had dressed. In winter weather, this meant dark, conservative, vested suits, mostly from Brooks Brothers. On a bright and breezy June day like this, his style allowed for the flamboyance of white shoes, white ducks, and blue blazer.

  Vanessa was neither as beautiful as the models nor as rich as Arbre’s clients, but she was pretty and, thanks to a successful and generous husband and her own impeccable taste, as stylish as anyone in the room. Her light brown hair was perfectly cut, and she wore a cream-colored silk blouse, short black skirt, and tan and black shoes. The gold chain around her slender neck was from Cartier and her gold watch from Tiffany’s. She wore no other jewelery. Despite her small stature, she had a model’
s legs, and, as always, A.C. resisted the temptation to caress her knee.

  He was distracted by movement at the other end of the room. One of the mannequins was beginning her descent of the runway in a huge sable coat with wide collar and ermine trim. She was a blonde and her long, abundant hair shimmered as luxuriantly as the fur. Her well-formed face was as immaculate as a new white marble sculpture. As she came closer to him now with the sable thrown open to reveal a short-skirted gray couture suit beneath, he noted the springy insouciance of her step and the haunting depth and glimmer of her blue-gray eyes. All runway models performed their promenades like empresses arriving at court, goddesses descended temporarily to earth, but this girl had an especially commanding presence. The chatter among the rich ladies who filled the room fell away as she passed by them. No garment, plastic surgeon, health spa, or three weeks’ pounding and painting at Elizabeth Arden could make any of them remotely resemble this spectacular, still young woman.

  “Who is she?” he said, turning to whisper quickly to Vanessa, who was scribbling something hurridly in her leather-bound notebook.

  “Be quiet, A.C.,” she whispered back.

  “She’s bloody marvelous,” he said, perhaps too loudly, for as the blonde came nearer, Vanessa flushed, as much with anger as embarrassment.

  The model halted just in front of them, turning to flare the sable coat, a movement as practiced and perfect as a dancer’s arabesque. He found himself staring at her marvelous legs from a distance of less than two feet.

  She glanced down at him with the briefest flicker of eyelash, as she might at something she had inadvertently stepped on, then, with another swirl of furry hem, she swept on down the avenue of floodlights. He found himself as intoxicated as if he had just gulped a half pint of gin.

  She disappeared through an exit to the rear as two more girls appeared at the top of the runway, a change in the taped musical accompaniment to the show announcing their arrival—the richly mournful saxophone of David Sanborn that had served as sensuous background music for the new blonde segueing to a rock beat. Moving in time to it, the two of them nimbly negotiated the first of the descending steps of the runway side by side, not once looking down.