by Ed Gorman
VIC
CHECK
FIGHT
$
I looked at the note and then at her.
“I guess I don’t understand. You want me to check something about Vic?”
Her darting blue eyes said no.
I thought a moment: Vic, check. All I could think of was checking Vic out. Then, “Oh, a check? Vic gets some kind of check?”
The darting blue eyes said yes.
“Vic was having an argument about a check?”
Yes.
“With your mother?”
Yes.
“About the amount of the check?”
Yes.
“About it not being enough?”
Yes.
And then she started crying. And I knew then that she knew. Who’d killed her father. And who’d tried to kill her.
I sat with her a long time that afternoon. At one point a fawn came to the edge of the pines. Kendra made a cooing sound when she saw it, tender and excited. Starry night came and through the open window we could hear a barn owl and later a dog that sounded almost like a coyote. She slept sometimes, and sometimes I just told her the stories she liked to hear, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Rapunzel, stories, she’d once confided, that neither her mother or father had ever told her. But this night I was distracted and I think she sensed it. I wanted her to understand how much I loved her. I wanted her to understand that even if there were no justice in the universe at large, at least there was justice in our little corner of it.
On a rainy Friday night in September, in an apartment Vic kept so he could rendezvous with a number of the young women Amy had mentioned, a tall and chunky man, described as black by two neighbors who got a glimpse of him, broke into Vic Bailey’s place and shot him to death. Three bullets. Two directly to the brain. The thief then took more than $5,000 in cash and travelers checks (Vic having planned to leave for a European vacation in four days).
The police inquired of Amy, of course, as to how Vic had been acting lately. They weren’t as yet quite convinced that his death had been the result of a simple burglary. The police are suspicious people but not, alas, suspicious enough. Just as they ultimately put Randy’s death down to a robbery-and-murder, so they ultimately ruled that Vic had died at the hand of a burglar, too.
On the day Amy returned from the funeral, I had a little surprise for her, just to show her that things were going to be different from now on.
That morning I’d brought in a hair stylist and a make-up woman. They spent three hours with Kendra and when they were finished, she was as beautiful as she’d ever been.
We greeted Amy at the vaulted front door—dressing in black was becoming a habit with her—and when she saw Kendra, she looked at me and said, “She looks pathetic. I hope you know that.” She went directly to the den where she spent most of the day drinking scotch and screaming at the servants.
Kendra spent an hour in her room, crying. She wrote the word “pathetic” several times on her paper. I held her hand and tried to assure her that she indeed looked beautiful, which she did.
That night, as I was leaving—we’d taken dinner in Kendra’s room, neither of us wanting to see Amy any more than we needed to—she was waiting, in my car again, even drunker than she’d been the first time. She had her inevitable drink in her hand. She wore a dark turtle-neck and white jeans with a wide, sash-like leather belt. She looked a lot better than I wanted her to.
“You prick, you think I don’t know what you did? I know your god-damned secret and don’t think I don’t.”
“Welcome to the club. I know a lot of secrets.”
“I happened to have fucking loved him.”
“I’m tired, Amy. I want to go home.”
In the pine-smelling night, a silver October moon looked as ancient and fierce as an Aztec icon.
“You killed Vic,” she said.
“Sure, I did. And I also assassinated JFK.”
“You killed Vic, you bastard.”
“Vic shot Kendra.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“Well, you can’t prove that I shot Vic, either. So please remove your ass from my car.”
“I really never though you’d have the balls. I always figured you for the faggot-type.”
“Just get out, Amy.”
“You think you’ve won this, Roger. But you haven’t. You’re fucking with the wrong person, believe me.”
“Good night, Amy.”
She got out of the car and then put her head back in the open window. “Well, at least there’s one woman you can satisfy, anyway. I’m sure Kendra thinks you’re a great lover. Now that she’s paralyzed, anyway.”
I couldn’t help it. I got out of the car and walked over to her across the dewy grass. I ripped the drink from her hand and then said, “You leave Kendra and me alone, do you understand?”
“Big brave man,” she said. “Big brave man.”
I hurled her drink into the bushes and then walked back to the car.
In the morning, the idea was there waiting for me.
I called work and told them I wouldn’t be in and then spent the next three hours making phone calls to various doctors and medical supply houses as to exactly what I’d need, and what I’d need to do. I even set up a temporary plan for private-duty nurses. I’d have to dig into my inheritance but this was certainly worth it. Then I drove downtown to the jeweler’s, stopping by the travel agency on my way back.
I didn’t phone. I wanted to surprise her.
The Australian groundsman was covering some tulips when I got there. Frost was predicted. “G’day,” he said, smiling. If he wasn’t over sixty with a pot belly and white hair, I would have suspected Amy of using him for her personal pleasure.
The maid let me in. I went out to the back terrace, where she said I’d find Kendra.
She liked to look at the rolling hills and the green green pines, remembering, I suppose, when she was young and had roamed this land, all bright and innocent and merry—merry as you could be with Amy and Randy as parents, anyway.
I tip-toed up behind her, flicked open the ring case and held it in front of her eyes. She made that exultant cooing sound in her throat and then I walked around in front of her and leaned over and gave her a gentle, tender kiss. “I love you,” I said. “And I want to marry you right away and have you move in with me.”
She was crying but then so was I. I knelt down beside her and put my head on her lap, on the cool surface of her pink quilted housecoat. I let it lie there for a long time as I watched a dark graceful bird ride the wind currents above, gliding down the long sunny autumn day. I even dozed off for a time.
At dinner time, I rolled Kendra to the front of the house, where Amy was entertaining one of the Ken-doll men she’d taken up with these days. She was already slurring her words. “We came up here to tell you that we’re going to get married.”
The doll-man, not understanding the human politics here, said in a Hollywood kind of way, “Well, congratulations to both of you. That’s wonderful.” He even toasted us with his martini glass.
Amy said, “He’s actually in love with me.”
Doll-man looked at me and then back at Amy and then down at Kendra.
I turned her chair sharply from the room and began pushing it quickly over the parquet floor toward the hallway.
“He’s been in love with me since second grade and he’s only marrying her because he knows he can’t have me!”
And then she hurled her glass against the wall, smashing it, and I heard, in the ensuing silence, doll-man cough anxiously and say, “Maybe I’d better be going, Amy. Maybe another night would be better.”
“You sit right where you fucking are,” Amy said, “and don’t fucking move.”
I locked Kendra’s door behind us on the unlikely chance that Amy would come down to apologize.
We sat for three hours in the shadows of her room, watching the harvest moon and the silver jet trails glowing in th
e night sky. I told her that she’d soon be away from her mother and that we’d have our own life together, a better life than either of us had ever known before. And then I stretched her out on the bed and lay next to her and told her of Jack and the Beanstalk and The Three Bears. She liked the Bears especially because I tried different voices for Mama and Papa and Baby. And then we just lay there and I felt safer and saner and happier than I ever had before.
Around ten, she began to snore quietly. The nurse knocked softly on the door. “I need to get in there, sir. The missus is upstairs sleeping.”
I leaned over and kissed Kendra tenderly on the mouth.
We set the date two weeks hence. I didn’t ask Amy for any help at all. In fact, I avoided her as much as possible. She seemed similarly inclined. I was always let in and out by one of the servants.
Kendra grew more excited each day. We were going to be married in my living room by a minister I knew vaguely from the country club. I sent Amy a handwritten note inviting her but she didn’t respond in any way.
I suppose I didn’t qualify as closest kin. I suppose that’s why I had to hear it on the radio that overcast morning as I drove to work.
It seemed that one of the city’s most prominent families had been visited yet again by tragedy—first the father dying in a robbery attempt a year earlier, and now the wheelchair-confined daughter falling down the long staircase in the family mansion. Apparently she’d come too close to the top of the stairs and simply lost control. She’d broken her neck. The mother was said to be under heavy sedation.
I must have called Amy twenty times that day but she never took my calls. The Aussie gardener usually picked up. “Very sad here today, mate. She was certainly a lovely lass, she was. You have my condolences.”
I cried till I could cry no more and then I took down a bottle of Black and White scotch and proceeded to do it considerable damage as I sat in the gray gloom of my den.
The liquor dragged me through a Wagnerian opera of moods— forlorn, melancholy, sentimental, enraged—and finally left me wrapped round my cold hard toilet bowl, vomiting. I was not exactly a world-class drinker.
She called just before midnight, as I stared dully at CNN. Nothing they said registered on my conscious mind.
“Now you know how I felt when you killed Vic.”
“She was your own daughter.”
“What kind of life would she have had in that wheelchair?”
“You put here there!” And then I was up, frantic crazed animal, walking in small tight circles, screaming names at her.
“Tomorrow, I’m going to the police,” I said.
“You do that. Then I’ll go there after you do and tell them about Vic.”
“You can’t prove a damned thing.”
“Maybe not. But I can make them awfully suspicious. I’d remember that if I were you.”
She hung up.
It was November then, and the radio was filled with tiny cynical messages of Christmas. I went to the cemetery once a day and talked to her and then I came home and put myself to sleep with Black and White and Valium. I knew it was Russian roulette, that particular combination, but I thought I might get lucky and lose.
The day after Thanksgiving, she called again. I hadn’t heard from her since the funeral.
“I’m going away.”
“So?”
“So. I just thought I’d tell you that in case you wanted to get hold of me.”
“And why would I want to do that?”
“Because we’re joined at the hip, darling, so to speak. You can put me in the electric chair and I can do the same for you.”
“Maybe I don’t give a damn.”
“Now you’re being dramatic. If you truly didn’t give a damn, you would’ve gone to the police two months ago.”
“You bitch.”
“I’m going to bring you a little surprise when I come back from my trip. A Christmas gift, I guess you’d call it.” I tried working but I couldn’t concentrate. I took an extended leave. The booze was becoming a problem. There was alcoholism on both sides of my family so my ever-increasing reliance on blackouts wasn’t totally unexpected, I suppose. I stopped going out. I learned that virtually anything you needed would happily be brought to you if you had the money, everything from groceries to liquor. A cleaning woman came in one day a week and bulldozed her way through the mess. I watched old movies on cable, trying to lose myself especially in the triviality of the musicals. Kendra would have loved them. I found myself waking, many mornings, in the middle of the den, splayed on the floor, after apparently trying to make it to the door but failing. One morning I found that I’d wet myself. I didn’t much care, actually. I tried not to think of Kendra, and yet she was all I did want to think about. I must have wept six or seven times a day. I dropped twelve pounds in two weeks.
I got sentimental about Christmas Eve, decided to try and stay reasonably sober and clean myself up a little bit. I told myself I was doing this in honor of Kendra. It would have been our first Christmas Eve together.
The cleaning lady was also a good cook and had left a fine roast beef with vegetable and potato fixings in the refrigerator. All I had to do was heat it up in the microwave.
I had just set my place at the dining room table—with an identical place setting to my right for Kendra—when the doorbell rang.
I answered it, opening the door and looking out into the snow-whipped darkness.
I know I made a loud and harsh sound, though if it was a scream exactly, I’m not sure.
I stepped back from the doorway and let her come in. She’d even changed her walk a little, to make it more like her daughter’s. The clothes, too, the long double-breasted camel hair coat and the wine-colored beret, were more Kendra’s style than her own. Beneath was a four-button empire dress that matched the color of the beret… the exact dress Kendra had often worn.
But the clothes were only props.
It was the face that possessed me.
The surgeon had done a damned good job, whoever he or she was, a damned good job. The nose was smaller and the chin was now heart-shaped and the cheekbones were more pronounced and perhaps a half-inch higher. And with her blue blue contacts—
Kendra. She was Kendra.
“You’re properly impressed, Roger, and I’m grateful for that,” she said, walking past me to the dry bar. “I mean, this was not without pain, believe me. But then you know that first-hand, don’t you, being an old hand at plastic surgery yourself.”
She dropped her coat in an armchair and fixed herself a drink.
“You bitch,” I said, slapping the drink from her hand, hearing it shatter against the stone of the fireplace. “You’re a goddamned ghoul.”
“Maybe I’m Kendra reincarnated,” she smiled. “Have you ever thought of that?”
“I want you out of here.”
She stood on tiptoes, just as Kendra had once done, and touched my lips to hers. “I knew you’d be gruff the first time you saw me. But you’ll come around. You’ll get curious about me. If I taste any different, or feel any different. If I’m—Kendra.”
I went over to the door, grabbing her coat as I did so. Then I yanked her by the wrist and spun her out into the snowy cold night, throwing her coat after her. I slammed the door.
Twenty minutes later, the knock came again. I opened the door, knowing just who it would be. There were drinks, hours of drinks, and then, quite before I knew what was happening and much against all I held sacred and dear, we were somehow in bed and as she slid her arms around me there in the darkness, she said, “You always knew I’d fall in love with you someday, didn’t you, Roger?”
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
1
All this started one spring when I couldn’t find any women. The weather was so beautiful it just made me crazier. I’d lie on my bed in my little apartment, feeling the moon-breezes andwould ache, absolutely effing ache, to be with a woman I cared about. I was in one of those periods when I needed to fall r
idiculously in love. It wasn’t just that sex would be better—everything would be better. Fifty times a day I’d spot women who seemed likely candidates— they’d be in supermarkets or video stores or walking along the river or getting into their cars. The first thing I did was inspect them quickly for wedding rings. A good number of them were unburdened. But still, meeting them was impossible. If you just walked up to them and introduced yourself, you’d probably look like a rapist. And if you told them how lonely you were, you might not look like a rapist but you’d sure seem pathetic. I tried all the usual places, the bars and the dance clubs and some of the splashier parties, but I didn’t see it in their eyes. They were looking for quick sex or companionship while they tended broken hearts, or simply a warm body at their dinner tables when too many lonely Saturday nights became intolerable. But they weren’t looking for the same thing I was, some kind of spiritual redemption. Not that I didn’t settle some nights for quick sex and companionship, but next morning, I felt just as lonely and disconsolate. I couldn’t settle very often. I wanted my ideal woman, this notion I’ve had in my mind since I was seven or eight years old, this ethereal Madonna I had longed for down the decades.
So of course the night I met Linda I wasn’t even looking for anybody. I just walked into this little coffee shop over by the public library and there she was, sitting alone at the counter drinking coffee.
I wasn’t sure she could rescue me, and I doubt she was sure I could rescue her, but at least the potential was there, so two nights later we started going to bed. Even though we were sort of awkward with each other, we kept trying till we got it right, and then we became pretty good lovers.
The only thing that got me down was she was still pretty hung up on this football coach who’d dumped her recently. She kept telling me how it had only been for sex, and how he was an animal six, seven hours a night, which did not exactly fill me with self-confidence. I wasn’t jealous of the guy but I didn’t necessarily want to attend his testimonial dinner every night, either. The only other thing that bothered me was her two teenaged daughters. They were usually around the house while Linda and I were making love. Linda always laughed when I got uptight. “Hey, what do you think they do in their bedrooms when they bring their boyfriends over here?”