Feast of Murder(28)

Later, going back downtown, Julie began to wonder if she should have left the office at all. This was an important day. There were a million things to get done, and she was dealing with a lot of Europeans, who still thought a woman’s place was in the typing pool. Every last one of them was looking for an excuse to complain about her to Calvin. She could already hear them in her head, their voices drawling and low in the way only speaking French could make them, saying, “Of course, she has no concentration. Women never do.”

At the corner of Willow and Wall, Julie stopped, put her hand against the street signpost, and closed her eyes. People swirled past her, paying no attention. She was an expensive-looking young woman in a red suit with a very short skirt. There were hundreds like her spread through the law firms and brokerage houses and consulting companies that filled this part of town. She opened her eyes and closed them again and opened them again and closed them, wondering why she was so dizzy. It took hours for food poisoning to work, but food poisoning was just what she felt like she had. Underneath her feet, the pavement seemed to be rippling. The air around her had begun to feel too cold at just the same instant when her skin began to feel too hot. Even her suit felt wrong, and it was one of her best, raw silk, imported from France, made by Dior. She gripped the signpost tightly and began to heave. Her ribs expanded and contracted against the rough thread knobs that held the buttons on her blouse. Nothing’s coming up, she thought. That’s good. And then, of course, something did come up. Everything came up. Great gobs of undigested Chinese food. Thin streams of brown that were probably cups of coffee. The hard-edged remnants of fortune cookies. Julie leaned as far into the street as she could and let it happen. Her body felt possessed by demons and her mouth felt full of fire.

Less than a minute later, it was over. Julie straightened up and looked around. There was a puddle of goo in the street she couldn’t bear to look at. There were people passing back and forth as if she weren’t there. Only one woman had stopped to watch. She was thin and black and standing better than an arm’s length away, as if Julie might turn out to be crazy or angry or full of drugs and not worth bothering with.

“Are you all right?” the black woman said.

“Fine,” Julie told her, looking down at her suit. The suit was clean. At least she hadn’t thrown up on that.

“You ought to have that taken care of,” the black woman said. “Whatever it is.”

“I will,” Julie said. “I will.”

“I just hope it’s not that AIDS,” the black woman said. “If it’s that AIDS, you’re as good as dead.”

“It’s not AIDS,” Julie said.

“If it’s not AIDS, you’re probably pregnant,” the black woman said. “That’s why I stopped to ask. You look pregnant.”

“What?” Julie said.

The black woman was gone, vanished, as thoroughly disappeared as if she had been a shade or a telepathic premonition in a novel by Stephen King. Julie looked into the crowd to see where she might have gone, but it was useless. That was when the light changed to “Walk” in front of her, and Julie decided it was time to go. The puddle was still there in the gutter at her feet, but there was nothing to connect her to it. The people around her now had not been around her then. They had no idea she had anything to do with the mess. They probably never imagined she could. Julie crossed the street and began to pick her way carefully along the cracked and curving sidewalks that led to the Trade Center, picking up speed as she went.

Ten minutes later, she came out of the elevator on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center, leaned against the metal ashtray sticking out of the wall there, and closed her eyes again. The elevator from the 45th floor was an express. It traveled so fast and went so high it made your ears pop, and at right about that point Julie had thought she was going to be sick again. She hadn’t been, miracle of miracles, and if she just stood here for a moment longer she wouldn’t be now.

The second miracle of miracles came to pass. Her head cleared. Her stomach settled. She straightened up and brushed herself off and marched through the hall to the glass doors that led to the reception desk. Since Baird Financial rented this entire floor, it could have had its reception desk directly in front of the elevator doors—and it had, in the beginning. Then there had been a bomb threat and a client so angry he threatened to use a gun, and the firm had decided that the 1980s were roaring a little too loudly to do without security.

Julie went through the glass doors and around the corner and found Lindsay at the desk. Lindsay was a pleasant-faced straight-haired blond with bones so fragile she looked like she’d have osteoporosis by the time she was twenty-three.