Free Dressed to Kill by Campbell Black Page B

several years of service. He had other, simpler, escapes—like having a quiet dinner with his wife in a place on Mulberry Street or taking his kids to a ball game. They were temporary releases from an aching concern; it was like Mary always said: You get too wrapped up in all that stuff, Joseph (always Joseph, never Joe). Why can’t you just see it as a job?
    He wondered why he couldn’t, why the frequent brutalities the city threw up from its darkest places always affected him personally. You put on a front, sure, because you had to; but inside there was the feeling of an emotional meltdown. A corpse—maybe that of a young kid senselessly stabbed or a bum knifed for a half-pint of booze—any corpse always made him feel sick in his gut, always carved some hollow out of his heart. I’m soft is all, he sometimes thought. But the more he thought that the more he tried to hide the softness away, as if the simple human reaction to homicide were a terrible weakness. Can I help what I feel? he’d asked Mary once. She hadn’t answered the question, or if she had he couldn’t remember.
    Now, sitting behind his desk, he closed his eyes and rubbed his eyelids with the tips of his fingers. He sighed. There was a flash again of the dead woman in the elevator. I don’t need that, he told himself. There had been more blood than you’d expect to find in a slaughterhouse. One of the guys from the medical examiner’s office had counted eighteen different incisions made by the blade of the open razor. Okay, he thought. On the bottom line you can’t even imagine the most vindictive kind of vengeance needing that frenzied killing. Two fingers had been mutilated from the right hand. Between the legs the blade had laid the flesh back to the pubic bone. Three times the blade had sliced the skin around the eye, cutting the eyeball open. If I were going to kill somebody, he thought, it would be one shot from a Magnum in a dark place. But that was a rational murder—here you were dealing with something else altogether. Madness. The specific frenzy of insanity. He wondered what she’d felt when the razor first came down. Surprise? Fear? Whatever, it would boil down to the bleak understanding that your clock had run out, and that you were as alone as you had ever been . . .
    He opened his eyes, blinked against the fluorescent light overhead, glanced at the folder on his desk, then stared at the young woman who sat opposite him. Pretty. And scared to death. Watching her, he experienced a wave of weariness rush through him.
    He said, “Let’s run it through again.”
    The young woman stared at him. “Do we have to?”
    Marino nodded. He leaned back in his chair, raising one finger to touch the fringe of his dark moustache. He slid his hands inside his belt and thought: I need to lose some poundage soon. I need to cast off some of this heaviness before I become a total blimp.
    “You pressed the button for the elevator,” Marino said.
    “I did—”
    “Then the car came—”
    “Right. The car came.”
    He studied her face again. Somehow he couldn’t make the connection between the face, the strange innocence of it, and the stuff he’d learned from the fact sheet that lay in front of him. Butter would have a hard time melting in her mouth, he thought. So much for appearances.
    She was silent. She rubbed the palms of her hands together.
    “The car came,” she said. “I don’t remember exactly the sequence of events.”
    “Try.”
    “I’m trying.” She smiled at him. It was a forlorn little expression, a brave front. “You don’t run into a situation like this every day, Lieutenant.”
    He leaned forward now. “The door opened.”
    “Right. The door opened. It was horrible. It was just so goddamn unspeakably . . .” She turned her hands over and stared at the palms. Lovely long fingers, Marino thought.
    “I know it was horrible,” he said. “I saw it, remember?” He listened to the sound of telephones ringing in the