Chapter 7 Chapter 6 The Death of Clausen

Doody Eberhart is mad, and when Doody Eberhart is mad, you better leave her alone.She climbed the stairs of the L Street apartment impassively like a rhino across a vast pasture.She was dressed in a dark blue dress, with gigantic breasts and fat arms that swung like pendulums. Many years ago, this woman was one of the prettiest call girls in Washington.In those days, her height—six foot three—and her good looks made her famous.People chased after her, and sleeping with her became an extremely honorable thing.Anyone interested in looking through photographs of Washington festivals and galas under the second Johnson administration and the first Nixon administration will find Doody Eberhart, often on her arm, with a famous person.Her height makes it impossible for you to miss her.

Du Di is a whore with the heart of a bank teller and the soul of a cockroach.Two of her regular clients, a Democratic senator and a Republican senator, paid her enough cash to get out of the business.They don't all do it voluntarily.Du Di knew that the risk of getting sick was not decreasing (senior government officials were just as susceptible to AIDS and other STDs), nor was she getting younger.They've all promised to leave her something in their wills, but she doesn't quite trust the gentlemen.I'm sorry, she told them, but I don't believe in Santa Claus or fairy tales, and little Doody has always lived on her own.

Little Du Di bought three apartments with the money.Over the years, the one-hundred-and-seventy-pound weight that was overwhelming had turned into two hundred and eighty pounds.Investing that worked well in the 1970s turned out to be bad in the 1980s, when everyone else investing in the stock market seemed to be doing just fine.She had had relationships with two brilliant stockbrokers, and she regretted not clinging to them when she quit the business. One apartment house sold in 1984; a second in 1986 after a disastrous tax inspection.She clung to this building on L Street as if she was holding on to the last straw.He believed that she would not have to sell the house in one or two years.If it gets there, she's ready to pack her bags and head to Aruba.Until then, the landlord, who was once the capital's hottest job girl, will stick around.

She used to be persistent. She's going to do the same in the future. God bless those who stand in her way. Like Frederick Clausen, for example. She walked to the second floor platform.Guns N' Roses was blaring in the Schumans' room. "Turn off that damn tape recorder!" she yelled with all her might... When Doody Eberhart's voice reached its highest pitch, it could rattle windows, rupture children's eardrums, and dogs fall dead. The music instantly changed from screams to whispers.She could feel the Schumans huddling together like a pair of puppies in a rainstorm, praying she wouldn't go to them.They are afraid of her, which is sensible.Schuman is a lawyer with a powerful company, but he is not strong enough to make Du Di think twice.If he messed with her at this stage of his young life, she'd have him completely crippled, and he knew that, and that was satisfying.

When your bank loans and investments plummet, you have to bend to circumstances and enjoy yourself. Dudi began to climb the stairs to the third floor, where Frederick Clausen lived in luxury.She raised her head and walked like a rhinoceros, calm and calm. She has been looking forward to this day. Clausen never made it up the lawyer's ladder.Now, he's not on the ladder at all.Like all the law students she's ever met (mostly tenants; she's never had sex with them in what she calls her "previous life"), he's ambitious, underfunded, and blah blah blah Kan.Generally speaking, Du Di would not confuse strength with nonsense.She thought it foolish to believe the empty words of a law student.Once you start tolerating this kind of behavior, you can be scammed into selling your panties.

Of course, this is a metaphor. But Frederick Clausen broke her routine.He had been late paying rent four times in a row, and she tolerated it because he convinced her this time that his words were true: he was really going to get rich. If he claimed that Sidney Shelton was really Robert Ludlum, or that Victoria Holt was really Rosamary Rogos, she would never have believed him, because she Look down on those writers and their countless admirers.She likes crime novels, and the gory the better.Judging by the Mail on Sunday bestseller list, she thinks there are a lot of people who like romance and spy novels and that kind of shit, but she's been reading Elmore Leonard for a few years now since he was a bestseller works, and she is also very fond of Jim Thompson, David Gooddis, Horace MacCoy, Charles Wellerford, and many others.In short, Du Di liked the kind of novels in which men raped banks, fought, and beat their women to death.

Of these writers, she thought, George Stark was the best.She had read Marcin's Way, Oxford Blues, and finally Sail to Babylon, and loved them. The first time she came to Clausen's room on the third floor to demand rent (it was only three days late, but if you put up with it, he would push it), the room was filled with notes and Stark novels.At her urging, he promised to give her a check by noon tomorrow, and she asked him if Stark novels were required reading for a career in law. "No," said Clausen, with a smile that was easy, cheerful, and wicked, "but they bring money."

It was the smile that attracted her, and made her believe him, and she is usually not easy to believe people.She had seen that smile many times in her own mirror, believed it to be impossible to fake, and believed it now.Clausen had really discovered Ted Beaumont's secret, and his mistake had been overconfidence in thinking Ted would be at his mercy, Frederick Clausen.It was also her mistake. After Clausen explained his discovery to her, she read one of Beaumont's two novels, The Purple Haze, and thought it was an utterly stupid novel.Although Clausen showed her both the letter and the photocopies, she still could not believe that the author was the same person.Except... three quarters of the way through and she was ready to throw the shit out of the book and forget about the whole thing when she read a scene where a farmer shoots a horse.The horse has two broken legs and has to be killed, but the thing is, old farmer John is happy to do it.He actually puts the barrel of the gun to the horse's head and starts masturbating, pulling the trigger at the moment of orgasm.

She thought it was as if Beaumont was walking away to that cup of coffee when he wrote this...George Stark walked in and wrote the scene.That must have been the only gold in that hay. Ah, now none of that matters.It proves that no one stays fooled forever.Clausen lied to her, but at least not for long.It's all over now. When Du Di walked to the third-floor platform, her hands were clenched into fists, and she was about to slam the door hard. At this moment, she saw that slamming the door was unnecessary.The Clausen Gate is false. "Oh my god!" Du Di curled her lips and said in a low voice.It's not a place for drug addicts, but to rob an idiot's apartment, they're more than happy to cross the line.This guy was even stupider than she thought.

She knocked on the door with her knuckles and it opened. "Clawson!" she snapped. no answer.Looking down the short hall, she could see that the curtains were drawn in the living room, the ceiling lights were on, and the radio was on, not loudly. "Clawson, I want to talk to you!" She walks down the short aisle...stops. There is a sofa cushion on the floor. that is it.There was no sign that the place had been robbed by a drug addict, but her instincts were still sharp, and she felt an immediate sense of dread.She smelled something, very faintly but definitely there, like spoiled but not rotten food.Not exactly, but it was all she could think of.Had she smelled this scent before?She thought she had.

There was another smell, though not through her nose.She smelled it immediately.She and Connecticut leaf cop Hamilton would agree on one thing: bad smell. She stood outside the living room, looking at the fallen sofa cushions and listening to the radio.She was out of breath after climbing three flights of stairs, but the harmless sofa cushion made her heart beat wildly under her fat left breast, making her short of breath.Something is wrong here, very wrong.The question is whether she will be a part of it if she stays here. Common sense told her to leave, to leave while she still had the chance, and common sense was powerful.Curiosity told her to stay and peek...and it was stronger. She poked her head slowly into the living room entrance, looking first to her right, where there was a false fireplace, two windows facing L Street, and nothing else.She looked to the left, her head stopped moving suddenly, it actually seemed to be locked in that position, her eyes widened. The locked gaze did not exceed three seconds, but she felt it was much longer.She saw everything, down to the tiniest detail; her mind took a picture of what it saw, clear and sharp, like those crime-scene photos that would soon be taken. She saw two bottles of beer on the coffee table, one empty, one half empty, with only a ring of foam in the neck.She saw the ashtray, with the words "Chicago Resort" written on its curved surface.She saw two cigarette butts, without filters, squashed in a white ashtray, although Clausen didn't smoke.She saw the little plastic box once full of pins dumped between the wine bottle and the ashtray.The pins, which Clausen used to staple items to the kitchen clipboard, are now strewn across the glass of the coffee table.She saw some landed on an open copy of Popular magazine that had a Ted Beaumont/George Stark story.She could see Mr. and Mrs. Beaumont shaking hands on Stark's tombstone, though upside down from here.According to Frederick Clausen, this is a story that will never be published.On the contrary, it will make him quite a rich man.He was wrong about this, in fact he seemed dead wrong. She could see Frederick Clausen, who had gone from great man to nothing, sitting in one of the two chairs in the living room.He was strapped to it, naked and his clothes were thrown under the coffee table in a ball.She saw the bloody hole between his ass.His testicles were still where they were and his genitals were stuffed in his mouth.There was plenty of room there, because the killer also cut off Clausen's tongue.The tongue was pinned to the wall, the pin dug so deep into the pink flesh that all she could see was a yellowish moon-shaped spot, the top of the pin, and her heart beat ruthlessly to this detail.Blood soaked the wallpaper below, forming a fan-shaped ripple. The killer pinned the second page of the Popular magazine article to Clausen's naked chest with another pale green pin.She couldn't see Liz Beaumont's face—it was blurred by Clausen's—but she could see the woman's hand, which was holding up a tray of chocolate candies for Tad to inspect with a smile.She remembered that photo in particular made Clausen angry. "How contrived!" he exclaimed. "She doesn't like cooking at all—she said so in an interview after Beaumont's first book came out." On the tongue nailed to the wall, there are five large characters written with blood dipped in your fingers: sparrows fly again God, he thought to himself.It's like a George Stark novel... like something Alex Massin does. There was a soft crash behind her. Du Di screamed and turned around.Marcin came toward her, his dreadful razor in his hand, his shiny steel blade now dipped in Frederick Clausen's blood.His face was all the twisted scars that Noni Griffith had razored at the end of "Macin's Way," and— And there was no one there at all. The door closed, that was all, as the door sometimes shuts itself. Is that right?She was asking deep in her heart...but this time it was closer, her voice was louder, and she was panicked and hurried.It's definitely ajar when you go up the stairs, not wide open, but enough for you to see it's not closed. Now her eyes returned to the beer bottles on the coffee table, one empty, one half empty, with a ring of foam inside the neck.The murderer was behind the door when she entered.If she had turned her head, she would surely have seen him... then she must be dead by now too. When she stood here and was attracted by Clausen's colorful corpse, he walked out nonchalantly and closed the door behind him. Her legs suddenly lost all strength, and her knees gave way and she fell to the ground in an odd position, like a girl about to receive communion.Only one thought was running wildly in her mind: oh, I shouldn't scream, he'll come back, oh, I shouldn't have screamed, he'll come back, oh, I shouldn't have screamed— At this time, she heard his voice, his big feet walking on the corridor carpet, making a thumping sound.Later she believed that the damned Schumanns had turned them up again and she mistook the thump of the bottom instrument for footsteps, but for a split second she was sure it was Alex Massin and he was back ...a man so focused and brutal that not even death could stop him. Du Di fainted for the first time in her life. In less than three minutes, she woke up.Still unable to stand on her legs, she crawled down the short apartment hallway to the door, her hair disheveled.She wanted to open the door and look outside, but couldn't.She closed the deadbolt, bolted the deadbolt, and drove the iron bar into the steel base.After finishing these things, she sat with her back against the door, panting heavily, her eyes blurred.She was vaguely aware that she had chained herself to a broken corpse, but that wasn't too bad.It's not bad at all, when you consider the alternative. Her strength slowly came back and she was able to stand up.She turned the corner at the top of the hall and went into the kitchen, where the phone was.She tried not to look at Clausen's body, though it was useless, for a long time to come she would have to see the clear and terrifying picture of that mind. She called the police, and when they came, she refused to let them in until one of the officers slipped the papers under the door. "What's your wife's name?" she asked the policeman, whose thin papers listed him as Charles F. Toomey.Her voice was high-pitched, trembling, so different from her usual voice that her closest friends (if she had one) would not be able to hear it. "Stephanie, ma'am," the voice on the other side of the door answered patiently. "I can call your bureau, you know!" she almost screamed. "I know you can, Mrs. Eberhart," the voice replied, "but you'll feel safer if you let us in sooner, don't you think?" Since she could still recognize police voices as easily as she could recognize bad smells, she opened the door and let Toomey and his companions in.As soon as they came in, Dudi did something she had never done before: she went into a hysterical fit.