Death Mask Page 11

  The elevator doors opened. Inside, there were two technicians from the elevator company, with part of an electric motor on a trolley. They maneuvered it around slowly and awkwardly, while one of them held the doors open.

  Please, God, hurry. Elaine had finished her conversation now and was walking toward the elevator bank with her usual fashion-runway prowl, one stiletto shoe in front of the other.

  The technicians managed to trundle their trolley out of the elevator, and Chrissie immediately stepped on, followed by the other five office workers. Elaine was less than thirty feet away now. “Twenty-one, please,” she told the man with the brown paper bag.

  Elaine raised her hand, and the man with brown paper bag kept his finger on the “open doors” button. Chrissie stared at the back of his neck and thought, You are going to die for this. You are going to die for this and go to hell.

  “Twenty-one, please,” said Elaine, as she stepped inside. The doors closed, and the elevator began to rise. Chrissie stayed right at the back of the car, trying to keep herself concealed behind one of the cappuccino carriers. But when she turned sideways, she realized that Elaine could clearly see her in one of the mirrors.

  Positive action. Don’t show Elaine that you’re intimidated . She excused herself and jostled her way around the cappuccino carrier.

  “Good morning, Elaine.”

  Elaine’s scarlet lips puckered up until they looked like a poisonous rosebud. One eyebrow arched.

  “How was your traffic this morning?” Chrissie asked her, trying hard to sound nonchalant. “The I-75 bridge—what a nightmare. My taxi didn’t move for over twenty minutes.”

  “I live in Mount Adams, if you remember,” said Elaine. “I don’t use bridges.”

  “Oh, so you do. Right next door to Vidal Sassoon. And Mrs. Vidal Sassoon.”

  “How long will it take you to get the presentation ready?” asked Elaine.

  “Fifteen minutes, tops. It’s shaping up so well. The cardigan range … I have three fabulous new colors to show you.”

  Elaine turned to stare at her directly. Her eyes were unblinking. Very quietly, so that nobody else in the elevator could hear her, she said, “This can’t go on, Chrissie. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Elaine—”

  “Every time you’re late, Chrissie, every time you miss a meeting, that’s an act of disrespect to everybody you work with. We respect you. Why don’t you respect us?”

  Chrissie’s mouth opened and closed. “It’s time,” she said. “I don’t know. No matter what I do, it refuses to behave itself.”

  “Time won’t behave itself?” Elaine repeated.

  “The clock jumps when I’m not looking. It’s three-thirty. I look up five minutes later, and it’s almost five. And I’m sure my watch goes faster than anybody else’s.”

  Elaine was about to say something, when the elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open. The corridor outside looked dark and deserted.

  “Fourteenth floor, anybody?” asked the man with the brown paper bag.

  “Nineteenth, I want,” said a tall black man.

  “Nothing here, anyhow,” said one of the cappuccino carriers, peering out. “This used to be Atlas Carriers, before they moved out.”

  The man with the brown paper bag pressed the button for nineteen. The doors closed again, and the elevator continued to rise. But this time it didn’t stop at all.

  “Hey, I said the nineteenth!” the black man protested.

  “I pressed it for the nineteenth. It should have stopped.”

  The black man pushed his way forward and jabbed the button. No matter how hard he jabbed it, however, the elevator continued to rise smoothly upward—twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—all the way up to the twenty-fifth floor, where it stopped. The doors, however, didn’t open.

  “This goddamned building,” said one of the cappuccino carriers. “We should sue the managers, you know that? They must have broken every safety regulation in the book.”

  “Use the emergency phone,” said Elaine.

  The black man opened the hatch and took out the red receiver. He held it up to show her. The wire was cut.

  One of the cappuccino carriers handed his cup to his friend and took out his cell phone. “These building managers … When I take them court, they’re going to go bankrupt, I’m telling you. I’m going to sue them for everything. Criminal negligence, false imprisonment, you name it.”

  He prodded at his cell phone and held it to his ear. “No goddamned signal. Anybody else got a signal?”

  They all took out their cell phones, but none of them showed any reception.

  “Isn’t that just great! We’re stuck here until somebody realizes that we haven’t shown up for work! And knowing my secretary, that will take till lunchtime!”

  Elaine said, “Isn’t there a way to force these doors open?”

  “With what, exactly?”

  “Well, let’s bang on them and shout. Somebody has to hear us.”

  “Okay. Let’s bang on them and shout.”

  The tall black man clenched his fists and hammered on the doors. “Help!” he bellowed. “Help! We’re trapped in the elevator! Help!”

  The rest of them joined in, although they were embarrassed by the different pitches in their voices.

  “Christ,” said the man with the brown bag. “We sound like a crateful of frightened chickens.”

  “Wait,” said the black man, lifting up his hand. They waited, and listened, but there was no response. Only the moaning of the wind down the hoistway, and the sad, distracted singing of the elevator cables. A distant echo of elevator doors, opening and closing, and hummmmm.

  “Okay—let’s try it again.”

  He hammered on the doors with even more fury. “Help! We’re trapped in the elevator! Help!”

  They listened again, but still nobody answered.

  “This is ridiculous!” snapped Elaine, but she sounded more frightened than angry.

  At that moment, the elevator gave a violent jerk and dropped downward two or three feet, then stopped. All of them cried out in alarm, and one of the secretaries burst into tears. “Let me out! Let me out! I have to get out!”

  “It’s okay,” the black man reassured her. “All elevators have emergency brakes. They can never drop all the way down.”

  “Well, that makes me feel a whole lot better—not,” said one of the cappuccino carriers.

  The elevator gave another jerk and dropped another two feet, and then another, and another. With each jerk, they all shouted out, in a terrible off-key chorus.

  Chrissie had wanted to go to the bathroom even before she had arrived at the Giley Building, and now she wet herself. Only a little, but enough to make her feel even more terrified and out of control.

  “We need to shout again and go on shouting,” said Elaine.

  The black man yelled out, “Get us out of here! Get us out of here!” and thumped on the doors with both fists, denting the metal.

  The elevator dropped at least fifteen feet, and then stopped with a sickening thump, sending them all sprawling and splashing hot coffee all over them. Before they could manage to stand up, it dropped again, and stopped; and then again. They had no choice but to crouch on the floor on their hands and knees while the elevator took them down and down in a series of staccato jolts—sometimes six inches and sometimes as much as twenty feet. By the time they were down to the ninth floor, they had stopped shouting and moaning and crying for help. They simply knelt on the floor, grim-faced, each of them silently praying that the elevator would reach ground level without dropping too fast.

  They passed eight—seven—six—five. Just past five, they dropped over thirty feet, all the way down to the third story, and when the elevator came bang! to a halt, Chrissie was flung against one of the junior executives and knocked her forehead against his teeth. Blood ran into her eyes, so that she could hardly see.

  The elevator fell past three—two—one, but as it did so i
t slowed down to a shuddering crawl. When it reached basement level it was sinking so gradually that they hardly felt it come to a standstill.

  “We’ve stopped,” said the black man. “Thank God, we’ve stopped.”

  They clambered to their feet. One of the junior executives pressed the button for the doors to open, but they stayed firmly closed.

  “Now we should shout,” said the black man. “They must be able to hear us down here.”

  “Help!” shrilled out one of the secretaries. “Help, let us out of here!”

  But then, quite unexpectedly, the doors slid open. There was a split-second hesitation, and then a figure in red rushed into the elevator with two butcher knives in his upraised hands, chopping and stabbing at them in a frenzy. They staggered back, screaming, tumbling over each other in confusion. But the figure kept on stabbing and hacking until blood was flying everywhere, like a dark red rainstorm.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Bloodbath

  At almost the same time, in the new Four Days Mall on Fountain Square West, Marshall Willis and his fiancée Dawn Priennik were leaning over the counter at Newman’s Jewelry, trying to decide which wedding bands to buy.

  Marshall favored a wide band with diamond-shaped facets on it, “so it kind of catches the light,” while Dawn preferred a thinner band with alternating twists of yellow and white gold.

  “There’s no law that stipulates that a married couple are obliged to wear matching bands,” said the jewelry store assistant, his bald head gleaming under the spotlights. “After all, sir’s fingers are very generously sized. Compared to madam’s, that is.”

  It wasn’t only Marshall’s fingers that were generously sized. He was generously sized all over—six feet three inches tall with a rugged head that looked as if it had been hacked in a hurry out of hardwood, a massive neck, and a chest as deep as a bison’s.

  Dawn, on the other hand, was tiny—only five feet two inches tall, with long shiny chestnut hair and a round, Kewpie-doll face. She had long black eyelashes that blinked like hummingbird wings, especially when she was excited. Her two most prominent features were her breasts, which filled her little pink vest to the bursting point. Marshall had paid for her breast enlargement last April, as a birthday gift. Dawn’s mother, disgusted, had said that it was a gift for himself, rather than her.

  “I’m pretty much set on matching bands,” said Marshall. “When you have matching bands, it shows people, like, we totally belong to each other.”

  “But we know we totally belong to each other. Why do we need to prove it to anybody else?”

  Marshall slowly shook his head. Now he was showing his dark, possessive side. He had given Dawn much bigger breasts, but if he caught any man ogling her, he would instantly confront him. You checking out my girl? Well, take a good look, dude, because that’s the last thing on this earth you’re ever going to see. And if Dawn even smiled at anybody else, he would slap her when he took her home and accuse her of acting like a “two-bit back-alley whore.” He would always apologize afterward. He would always bring her flowers. But he would always do it again.

  “Maybe we should go for a latte or something and talk it over,” Dawn suggested. She could see that Marshall was working himself up into one of his gnarly moods—moods that he always blamed on everybody else. Now look what you fricking made me do! he always used to protest, after he had kicked over the television or thrown his supper up against the wall or grabbed Dawn so hard that he bruised her upper arms.

  Dawn’s mother said that Dawn was crazy to marry him—crazy. He was a brute. Worse than that, he was a childish brute. But Dawn loved him and knew how gentle and thoughtful he could be. He was childish, yes. But that made her all the more determined to protect him. It wasn’t his fault that the world was so much against him.

  They left the jewelry store and walked across the balcony toward the elevators. The Four Days Mall was only eighteen months old. It was shiny and marble clad and smelled of women’s perfume and new leather belts, and the aroma of freshly ground coffee. The central atrium rose five stories to a clear glass ceiling, so that the center was flooded in brilliant natural sunlight, and everything sparkled. Four floors below them, a stainless-steel fountain represented the Orleans, the first steamboat to sail up the Ohio River to Cincinnati, in 1811.

  Four glass-walled elevators slid up and down the outside of the building, giving their occupants vertiginous views down to Race Street and Seventh Street. From the top floor, they could even see the river, which glittered in the morning sun, and Covington, Kentucky, on the opposite side.

  The doors of the nearest elevator opened, and Marshall and Dawn stepped onto it. Dawn immediately went to the rail and peered down at the traffic below. “Look! They’re like little toy cars!”

  “Oh, really?” said Marshall. He had never liked heights, and he stayed well back.

  For a few seconds they had the elevator to themselves, but just before the doors closed, a crowd of eight or nine noisy teenagers piled their way into it, hooting and laughing and jostling each other.

  One of the boys had a pale spotty face and a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap with the long black brim turned sideways. He produced a pink girl’s thong from out of his sweatshirt pocket and whirled it in the air. It still had the price labels attached. “Hey—see what I just boosted!”

  “Oh, Mikey!” shrilled one of the girls. “Aren’t you going to try it on for us?”

  Another boy wrapped his arm around his shoulders and said, “You never told us you were a cross-dresser, Mikey! I woulda bought you a peephole bra for your birthday, instead of that T-shirt!”

  “Get outta here, Tyler, it’s a present for Linda.”

  “Oh, sure—Linda! I’ll bet she got tired of you wearing her panties, that’s all, so you had to buy some of your own!”

  “Hey, cool it, guys,” said Marshall. “We got a lady in here.”

  The boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap swiveled his head around, mouth open, blinking. “Lady? Where? Where? I don’t see no lady.”

  Marshall grabbed hold of the front of the boy’s sweatshirt and almost lifted him off his feet. “Don’t get funny with me, punk. This lady is my fiancée, okay? And you treat her with respect.”

  The other teenagers, far from being intimidated, started to jeer. “You hear dat, punk? Dis lady is my fyance!”

  Marshall swiveled around to confront them, still gripping the boy’s sweatshirt. “You want trouble, you dick-weed? Is that what you want? Believe me, I can give you trouble.”

  “Woooooooo!” the teenagers howled at him.

  Dawn said, “Come on, Marshall, leave the kid alone. He didn’t do nothing.”

  “Yeah, Marshall!” said the boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap. “Leave the kid alone. I mean who do you think you are, Marshall? The Incredible Bulk?”

  Marshall shoved the boy so that he lost his balance and slammed against the opposite wall of the elevator car.

  “Hey, you psycho!” yelled one of the teenagers.

  Marshall shoved him, too, and he staggered back against the rest of the teenagers, and one of the girls fell against the window, bruising her shoulder.

  “Marshall!” Dawn pleaded, frantically tugging at his arm. “Marshall, leave them alone!”

  The boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap pointed his finger at Marshall and shouted, in his half-broken voice, “That’s it, man! I’m going to call the zoo, man, and have you put back where you belong! In with the goddamned gorillas!”

  Marshall gripped the boy’s sweatshirt again and shook him. As he did so, the elevator reached the third floor, and the doors opened. A crowd of shoppers was waiting to get on, fathers and mothers and children carrying balloons. But when they saw Marshall and the boy struggling together, they all held back.

  One of the teenage boys shouted, “Let’s get out of here, man!” and a girl screamed, “Call the cops! Somebody call the cops! This guy’s gone crazy!”

  Before any of them could move, however, a bulky ma
n in a black suit shouldered his way through the crowd of shoppers and stepped onto the elevator, pushing the button for the first floor. A smart young woman, emboldened, tried to follow him, but the man held his arm out to keep her back. “Hey!” she said, but the doors closed, and the elevator continued on its way downward.

  The man looked at Marshall, and then at Dawn, and then at each of the teenagers very deliberately, as if he were sizing them up. His face was so red that it looked sunburned, or varnished, and he had bristly red hair. His eyes and his mouth were like slits cut into a Japanese mask. He was shorter than Marshall, and not so bulky, but he had an almost tangible aura of menace about him. Marshall relinquished his hold on the spotty boy’s sweatshirt and took a cautious step back, with his hands held up in surrender.

  “Just a little disagreement, man. Nothing to get worked up about.”

  “He attacked me!” put in the spotty boy. “He was going to frigging kill me!”

  The man stared at Marshall, expressionless.

  “And you’re—what?” Marshall asked him. “Security or something?”

  “Security?” asked the man, in a hoarse, foggy whisper. “You should be so lucky.”

  “Then what? These kids were disrespecting my fiancée, and I was teaching them a lesson, that’s all. Not only that, they’ve been shoplifting. You don’t believe me? Make them turn out their pockets.”

  “Do you think I care?”

  One of the teenage boys pointed at Marshall and said, “This guy’s a nut! You going to arrest him? He started pushing us around for no reason at all!”

  But Marshall was confused. “I don’t get it, man. If you’re not security, who the hell are you?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Dawn was clinging to Marshall’s arm and she wasn’t going to let him go. She had suddenly realized where she had seen the man’s face before—on the TV news.

  “Marshall!” she breathed. “It’s him!”

  Marshall wasn’t listening to her. He was too busy challenging the red-faced man. “What? Come on, man. What the two-toned hell is going down here?”