Chapter Twenty-one

had to start somewhere.
Although she never knew what to expect, these nerve-wracking meetings were a habit she dared not
break. Some­times the men she met were decent, sometimes they were not, and one of them had almost fit
her nightmare.
She intended to marry well. Mary Banion, her first real outsider friend, told her she must at all costs
conceal her desire for attachment from her prospective mates. "For heaven's sake, Pat, don't let them know
what you're after. You'll scare them to death. Men want whores. As far as they're concerned the fact that
they get wives instead is a disturbing mystery. They spend all their married lives trying to figure out what
the hell happened."
Mary Banion was forty-one, the second wife of a high police official named Mike Banion. Both of them
had lost their first spouses. Patricia had met Mary at the bank, where casual teller-customer conversations
had led to a lunch date and friendship.
Patricia envied Mary the fact that she had always been loved. Her first husband had adored her, but his
private plane had given out on him over the Jersey marshes. Now Mike Banion worshiped her as a
replacement for his child bride, who had died of cancer in her twenties.
Mary looked and acted Patricia's own ideal of female success. She dressed elegantly, in silks and linens.
And she was beautiful, with delicately sculptured features and glow­ing chestnut hair. The fact that her
Mike affected baggy suits and low-grade cigars made her seem even more beautiful.
"I'll make him police commissioner, you'll see. Maybe even mayor if his style comes back into style."
Thus she justified her second marriage. "My old truck," she called him. No doubt she would drive him to the
top.
Tonight Patricia was going to go out with Mary's son Jonathan. He was late, but he must be coming.
He'd better. She'd been preparing herself since she got home from work.
Mary was in the habit of overexplaining him, as if his merely having been born was not justification
enough for his life. "You're going to find him fascinating. He's very bright."
Patricia looked askance at herself in the mirror, arched one eyebrow. Was that sexy? Was that winning?
Most of the men she had met didn't call back. Mary said that often happened to extremely beautiful
women. Men feared great beauty. But not to worry, it was all to the good. Only the best of them would feel
comfortable with her. One undesirable group did call back, though—the nerds. They not only phoned, they
came to her teller window. The girls at the bank called them "schmedlocks." "Don't worry," they said,
"every good-looking teller has her schmedlocks." Ap­parently many undesirable men had hit upon the idea
of meeting girls by becoming depositors at the banks where they worked.
Was Jonathan going to be a schmedlock? Possibly that was why Mary oversold him.
At least, she hoped, he wouldn't be frightening. There had been one young man who was too quiet, who
went through the formalities of the evening like a zombie, who had in-sisted on taking her home with him.
Even when she refused point-blank he had kept driving. Then she saw the little black pistol tucked under his
sports jacket. She had escaped by jumping out of the car when traffic slowed down on the Fifty-Ninth
Street bridge.
Six weeks later a young man was caught in Massapequa, Long Island, with the bodies of three girls under
the floor of his elaborate basement torture chamber. Was it him? She was never sure.
When she heard the buzzer she leaped up from her dress­ing table, flipped off the Sunbeam makeup
mirror, and ran to the intercom in the living room. "Yes?"
"Miss Murray, a Mr. Banion to see you."
"Send him up, Tony."
She had been embarrassed to ask Mary what he looked like, but if he took after his mother he would be
darkly handsome, bright, and sophisticated. Thank heavens bullet-shaped Mike was a foster father. Genial
as he was, Inspector Banion was not a promising source of looks or manners.
A rap at the door. "Yes?"
"It's Jonathan Banion."
What a soft voice. She hadn't noticed that on the phone. She opened the door onto a tall, lean man who
smiled down at her.
"Hello," she said. "Come on in."
He was wearing a seersucker sports jacket over an Oxford shirt. You could even call him handsome, and
she thought he had the sweetest face she could ever remember seeing. He came into the center of the
room and looked at her for a long moment. "Have we met?"
She knew just what he meant. "I think we must have." She laughed. "I can't imagine where."
He held out his hands and she clasped them. They were warm and familiar, as those of a close friend