77 Shadow Street

20

Apartment 3-F

After the Russian manicurist departed, Mickey Dime went into the study. The wood floor felt sexy under his bare feet. A lot of things felt sexy to Mickey. Nearly everything.

On the carpet, he stood squinching his toes in the deep wool pile. His feet were small and narrow. Well-formed. He was proud of his well-formed feet. His late mother had said that his feet looked like they were carved by the artist Michelangelo.

Mickey liked art. Art was sexy.

Murder was the sexiest thing of all. Murder could be an art, too.

His brother, Jerry, stone-dead and rolled up in the microfiber blanket, wasn’t a work of art. An unplanned murder, committed in haste, without the target being aware that he would soon die, without time for the victim’s terror to ripen, could not be a work of art. It was amateurish. Crude hack work. Driven by emotion.

Great art wasn’t about emotion. It was about sensation. Only the bourgeoisie, the tacky middle class, thought art should affect the better emotions and have meaning. If it touched your heart, it wasn’t art. It was kitsch. Art thrilled. Art spoke to the primitive, to the wild animal within. Art strummed deeper chords than mere emotions. If it made you think, it might be philosophy or science or something, but it wasn’t art. True art was about the meaninglessness of life, about the freedom of transgression, about power.

Mickey learned about art from his mother. His mother had been the smartest person of her time. She knew everything.

He wished his mother were still here. She would know how to dispose of Jerry’s body.

This wasn’t an easy problem to solve. Every hallway in the Pendleton was monitored by security cameras. So were the elevators. So were the garages behind and separate from the main structure. Jerry weighed about 165 pounds. They were on the third floor.

The longer Mickey stood there, staring at the blanket-wrapped corpse, the bigger and heavier it looked.

He returned to his enormous bathroom, where he had received the manicure and the pedicure in his own spa chair. He opened his aromatherapy cabinet. He considered the sixty essences, each in a small glass bottle, racked on the back of the cabinet doors.

Underfoot, the cold marble floor felt sexy. But the chill also sharpened his mind and helped him to make a decision.

The fragrance of limes would further clarify his thinking and aid in the solution of his problem. The vaporizer stood on a roll-out shelf. Using an eyedropper, he distributed five drops of the essence of limes at the designated points on one of the cotton pads that came with the machine.

Fragrant steam billowed forth. Mickey breathed deeply. Any pleasant scent, if concentrated enough, could be intoxicating. He was exhilarated by the intense, astringent clarity of limes.

Smell might be the most erotic of the five senses. Pheromones that men and women produced, of which they were not consciously aware, drew them inexorably to one another more than did appearances or any other qualities they might possess. The nose was aroused before the genitals.

Mickey returned to the study. Dead Jerry waited in the blanket, the ends secured with neckties.

Mickey stood over the bundle. He regarded it with calculation, his mind lime-fresh and ready to get on with business. He paced around the cadaver. He sat in an armchair, pondering it.

He went to a window to peer down at the rain-washed courtyard, which was enclosed on three sides by the Pendleton and on the east end by a fourteen-foot-high limestone wall. An ornate bronze gate in that wall led to an open-air transitional space, which had other gates at its north and south ends. That space connected with the first garage, which had been converted from the carriage house.

Mickey’s parking space lay even farther away, in the second and larger garage, a new structure that stood alone, with three floors, one of them underground.

His attention shifted to the south wing, across the courtyard. On the second floor, someone stood backlighted at a window. If anyone had been trundling a blanket-wrapped stiff past the fountains and the ornamental shrubs below, he would have been seen.

Mickey returned to dead Jerry. A blanket didn’t sufficiently disguise a corpse. When you started hauling it around, anyone who saw it would know it was a dead guy in there.

Sensation was the only reason for living. Sensation stimulated thought and action. In this case, aromatherapy wasn’t potent enough to rev up his mind.

Mickey went to the walk-in closet in his bedroom. From a high shelf, he took down a black carryall. The smell and feel of the leather pleased him.

In the bedroom, he put the carryall on the bed. He pinched the pull tab between thumb and forefinger. He relished the erotic sound of the slider separating the teeth of the zipper.

From the bag he removed panties and lingerie that had belonged to his mother. Silk, satin, lace.

Tactile sensation can be a powerful stimulant.

After a while, he knew how he must dispose of the body. The only problematic part of the plan would be killing the guard currently on duty in the security room.

Murdering the guy would be easy. But that would be two jobs for which nobody was paying Mickey. Not good. The various people who contracted his services must never discover that he was murdering for free. They might decide he was no longer professional enough to be trusted. Then they would put out a contract on him.

In order to enjoy the most intense sensations that this world offered, you had to earn entrance into the right circles, to be one of those with a license to do anything you wanted and the wealth to ensure you could fulfill your most exotic desires. His mother had taught him that to be certain of achieving such a rarefied position, far beyond the reach of ordinary law, you had to make yourself useful to the Anointed, which was the class to which she belonged.

Like his mother, he exterminated people to make himself useful. She hadn’t used guns or garrotes, but words—theories and analyses and well-crafted lies. His mom killed reputations. She destroyed people intellectually, emotionally. She was always happy to see them dead if later they committed suicide or if eventually disease got them, but she never actually pulled a trigger, slid in a shiv, or set the timer on a bomb.

Mickey would dispose of the guard in the same place he dropped Jerry. By the time they were found, if they ever were, too little of them would remain to be identified, and no one would know how they had died.

With that decision made, to his surprise a vivid series of erotic images teased his mind’s eye. There was another resident of the Pendleton whom he found incredibly hot. But he couldn’t buy sex with Sparkle Sykes, because she didn’t need the money. He liked her daughter, too. They reminded him of Mallory, the cocktail waitress, and her younger sister, two of his first three murders. A nostalgic yearning overcame him. He would never again have sex with someone before killing her. Too risky. But if disposing of dead Jerry and the guard proved as simple as he expected, there was no harm in a little fantasizing about someday doing the Sykes girls and disposing of them in the same manner. Everybody liked to daydream.

Inspired, he put away the panties and lingerie. He returned the carryall to the closet.

He pulled on a pair of socks. They were a cashmere blend. His newly manicured toes were snug and warm in them.