Are Snakes Necessary?

by Brian De Palma

  Rogers nods, blankly. He has the odd feeling that a Columbo episode is unfolding in his house, in his life.

  “All right, let’s get her out of here,” says Brock. He lifts her body from the floor and cradles her weight in his arms. He takes her out through the bedroom and into the hall. One of Jenny’s smart air hostess shoes presses against the wall as Brock lugs her down the stairs. Squeak, squeak.

  CHAPTER 36

  “What are you going to do with her?”

  The sight of Jenny, a limp bundle in a blanket, now hanging over Brock’s shoulder, makes Rogers queasy.

  “You don’t want to know. Stay in the dark. What you don’t know you don’t have to lie about.”

  Rogers wishes he were a little more numb than he actually is. Connie. Fanny. Jenny. How did everything spin out of control. Brock with Jenny over his shoulder. Really. Rogers doesn’t even know where he got on the lunatic road that’s brought him here.

  Brock carries his burden to the service door. “Let’s hope to god she stays out of the picture until we find her fucking daughter. Doesn’t the girl have a cell phone?”

  “Yes, of course. I keep getting her voicemail.”

  “Keep trying.”

  Brock carries Jenny out, stuffs her into the back seat of his car. Where should he leave this package? Brock is used to crisis. But this is a new one even for him.

  He is pleased to see, as he heads towards Rock Creek Park, that it is an especially dark evening. He pulls off the road, parks on a deserted dirt path, grabs a thing or two from the trunk, then unwraps the blanket in the back of the car and lifts Jenny out. He holds Jenny in his arms in front of him as if he were carrying her over a threshold. He walks down a deserted path, and lays Jenny on the grass several feet from the path.

  Slowly he kneels beside her and, listening to make certain they are entirely alone in the dark, he clamps his hand over her mouth. He fixes her nose in his big palm and shuts it down, tenderly almost, until her breath is gone.

  He holds on for an extra minute. Just to make sure.

  All done, thinks Brock.

  Except of course he’s not.

  He opens the collapsible shovel he took from his trunk.

  The digging is slow, hot, tedious work. Halfway through, the mask he was wearing lies discarded on the ground beside him. The hell with it. No one around to see him now, and if there were, no disguise would help him.

  When he’s got a Jenny-sized rectangle roughed out—not very deep but it’ll have to do—he rolls her into the ground. Then he stands in the dark, shoveling dirt back into the hole. It takes at least ten minutes—lots of dirty, heavy lifting—to put the disturbed earth (and Jenny’s bones) to rest.

  And Brock’s work is still not done. He gets up, walks back to his car, and drives to the DDC.

  CHAPTER 37

  Rogers is on the sofa in his living room when Brock returns. He’s slumped over, and has a dazed how-did-I-get-here? expression.

  Brock pulls a chair out from the 18th-century English writing desk and sets it down facing Rogers. He grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him hard.

  “Pull yourself together.”

  Brock might as well be on Neptune. Connie. Fanny. Jenny. Rogers doesn’t know where to start putting things back in order. Connie is going to kill him. If all this messes up his re-election prospects…

  “Senator. We’ve got work to do. We can get this under control. First, you call a press conference…”

  “What about Jenny?”

  “Forget her. She didn’t make it.”

  “Oh my god.” Rogers looks stricken. “No. No. No. I thought you said—”

  “By the time I…deposited her…she was gone.”

  God, no. Please. God. No. Not a scandal before the election, Rogers thinks. Connie is weak. This could kill her. No…

  Brock interrupts his panic. “Right now, these are the facts: Distraught mother confronts daughter’s seducer and dies.” He lets Rogers process this.

  Rogers starts to tremble.

  “We’re going to jail, Lee. Unless…”

  Suddenly Rogers is very alert. “Unless?”

  “Unless we spin the facts. And we can only do that if Fanny is quiet. Kept quiet.”

  “Kept quiet? Are you crazy? She’s a kid. And she could be my kid!”

  Brock is stone-faced. “It doesn’t matter what she is.”

  “I have to know,” says Rogers.

  “Alright, alright.” Brock pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket. “DNA test results. Do you want to read it yourself?”

  “How did you get that done so quickly?”

  “I’ve got a friend at the DDC lab.”

  The blood drains from Rogers’ face. He pushes the paper away.

  “You tell me what it says.”

  Brock holds the paper up. He pulls back the way middle-aged people do in order to read clearly.

  Rogers can’t see the paper, which if he could would stop his heart (not to mention his campaign); in clear bold print, the paper says Paternity Test Results: POSITIVE.

  “It says: Negative,” Brock says. And he says it with the full conviction of the practiced liar.

  Relief floods Rogers’ face.

  “She made the whole thing up,” Brock says. “Just another devilish leopard in the jungle that is public life. It’s war, Lee. Politics and jungle life. One big war. And you know what they say, war isn’t about who’s right, it’s about who’s left.”

  Rogers isn’t listening anymore. He wonders if it’s getting hot inside or what. He pulls his collar away from his skin. It’s damp. Everywhere.

  CHAPTER 38

  Elizabeth, still enjoying the Monhegan quiet, wonders whether Dottie’s advice makes any difference to anyone. She tries hard to imagine being so desperate you turn to a faceless newspaper columnist for help. She doesn’t think she’s ever slipped that low.

  There has always been someone there to rescue Elizabeth. Bruce was there when things were really bad, during what Elizabeth remembers as the darkest days of her life. And then Nick. All part of the past now.

  She’s done a kind of self-cauterizing, closed down the nerves that led to certain memories. It was a kind of suicide; she seared the edges off her mind, her heart and everything else that was once alive and attached to the person she used to be.

  There are some (notably those who were left behind) who might find something monstrous about Elizabeth and the way she rubbed out her own past, eliminated it wholesale from her mind. And maybe there is.

  Sometimes you’re preyed upon, sometimes you’re the predator. This is what Elizabeth would have thought if she were capable of or interested in thinking it through, which she isn’t.

  Call it monstrous. Call it whatever you want. Elizabeth survived.

  She remembers arriving in Las Vegas. She was entirely Elizabeth, the new Elizabeth, when Bruce picked her up in the Atomic Café where she’d gone to refuel after getting off at the bus station, all that she owned in the world packed into one not-all-that-heavy duffel bag.

  “Baby, you’re too pretty to eat alone,” he said. “Mind if I bring my Meltdown Coffee and Atom Bombe cake over and sit with you?” Bruce was about as easy with the clichés as the Atomic Café menu.

  “Sure, why not.” Elizabeth gave Bruce a quick once-over. She didn’t need to go much farther than the Gucci loafers. It was obvious who Bruce was or wanted to be: a big-money player, a Vegas high-roller, one with all the class money could buy.

  The coincidence—the fact that Bruce was in fact the very person Elizabeth was supposed to contact when she arrived in Vegas—soon emerged and cemented what was already inevitable.

  Some things aren’t complicated. Rich, single guy who fancies himself a collector of treasured objects meets pretty blonde in a café, bombards her with flirtatious remarks and, well, if she’s looking for anything (which Elizabeth was, namely a place to live and a new life to go with it), it’s not hard to guess that a bed might soon be in the picture.


  The idea of being Mrs. Diamond didn’t occur to Elizabeth right away. But it didn’t take long. The sheets on Bruce’s bed were a clincher. They were the crazy softest thing Elizabeth ever felt in her life. Working at fast-food restaurants for fast-food pay didn’t exactly bring in money for 1,600-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets.

  The house had a big pool. Elizabeth sat beside it when it wasn’t too hot and swam laps when it was. People watching might be hard pressed to find evidence that Elizabeth had a mind. There were no books on the poolside table. No International Herald Tribune. But no one would deny that she had a killer body. The 40-50 laps a day didn’t hurt. Plus they had the convenient effect of filling a lot of time.

  What else did Elizabeth do with her days? She taught herself how to spend money. She’d never had any before. Shoes. She loved shoes and bought herself a whole closet full of Louboutins, Jimmy Choos.

  Where was she supposed to wear these? The one magazine she read from time to time was Vegas Today, which her husband owned, and in its pages she saw how Nevada’s smart set dressed. She also watched the women in Bruce’s casinos. She was a quick study and a great mimic.

  It didn’t take long before she got it: the Choos, replaced by cooler, low-key fare, went unworn after Elizabeth learned that jeans and fancy t-shirts actually gave a good-looking woman a richer, more natural look, and frankly more of a “fuck you” look too.

  Throw on some diamond earrings and a tasteful $300,000 Patek Philippe watch and voila! Elizabeth fit right in with the expensively maintained supermodels and actresses who sometimes came to town and blew everyone away with their Who me? I barely gave a thought to my appearance!

  Bruce was okay at first. He bought her things, fucked her hard, left her alone. But it got old fast. And the jealousy that followed gave Elizabeth a big pain.

  “Who’s that punk hanging around by the pool?” “Why did that guy at the blackjack table give you that look?” “Why are you so giddy after you go to the gallery in the afternoon?” Bruce suspected everyone from the pool man to his accountant. As if.

  The more remote Elizabeth got, the more intense Bruce’s jealousy. He checked her email. It wasn’t like there was a lot to check. Elizabeth’s correspondence was limited to a girlfriend or two she’d met at the hotel, “Facial this afternoon?”, and receipts from Neiman Marcus and the other stores from which she ordered shoes and dresses and later jeans and t-shirts.

  It got annoying. For about five minutes. Then Elizabeth took comfort in the pool man, the accountant, the guy at the gallery. All the men that Bruce suspected. Okay, not the pool man. Or the accountant. But the art dealer, the guy from Chicago who was in town for the World Series of Poker, the trainer at the gym, the maître d’ at the steak joint in the Diamond Casino. Oh, and Nick Sculley the good-looking kid from New York.

  CHAPTER 39

  Rogers is clean and dry when the doorbell rings thirty-six hours later, but inside? Inside, he’s still sweating and has been the whole time. He’s just finished reading the papers—the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal—and has forced down the fruit and oatmeal sprinkled with flax and chia seeds that Connie, ever mindful of his health, likes him to eat for breakfast.

  Connie, thank god, is still in Pennsylvania.

  Jenny’s body—wherever Brock left it—hasn’t been found yet. Or at least if it has been, it’s been kept out of the papers.

  But here it is, 7am on a Wednesday morning, and Rogers’ doorbell is ringing. A sixth sense tells him it’s not unrelated.

  Rogers dabs the corners of his mouth, folds his napkin, pushes his chair back from the table, and makes his way with a great show of calmness (performed for no one’s benefit but his own) to the front door.

  D.C. Detective Emmett Ernst stands at the door holding a leather case that flaps open to reveal his badge.

  “Sorry to bother you at home, Senator.” Ernst looks genuinely sorry, but as a professional faker of genuineness, Rogers isn’t buying it. “I need to ask you a few questions about a woman I believe you know, a Ms., uh, Cours?”

  They found her. And now they’ve found me. Goddamn it, Brock, why aren’t you here to get me out of this?

  “I do,” Rogers says, carefully. “Know her. I did, many years ago.”

  “Years?” The detective looks puzzled. “I thought she joined your campaign at the end of the summer.”

  “Oh!” Rogers says, with relief. “You mean Fanny. I thought you meant her mother.”

  “Well, her mother’s part of it,” Ernst says. “But I do mean Fanny. Apparently her mother’s been unable to locate her. Her roommate says Fanny hasn’t been home or reachable for several days.”

  “And that’s a matter for the police? She’s a college student. Maybe she decided to take a trip somewhere.”

  “Maybe so,” Ernst says. “But now her mother’s unreachable as well. She telephoned her daughter’s roommate, Amy, uh—” He pulls a small spiral-bound notepad from his pocket and flips through it. “—Rosenbaum more than one dozen times in a twenty-four-hour period, expressing severe concern about her daughter’s not having arrived on a flight home as planned. She insisted that Ms. Rosenbaum call her daily to check in and now she seems to be unreachable herself. Her phone’s not answering. So Ms. Rosenbaum called us.” The detective looks past Rogers into the entry foyer. “May I come in?”

  “Of course.” He ushers Ernst into the living room, offers him coffee. Offers him oatmeal with flax and chia seeds. “Keeps you healthy—or so says my wife, ha ha.”

  Ernst does not want oatmeal or seeds. Nor, for that matter, does he want a bunch of gladhanding chitchat from a slick D.C. insider with a bunch of photos of horses and dogs all over his living room. But he keeps the smile on his face, the tone of deference in his voice.

  “So, do you have any idea where Ms. Cours is?”

  “The daughter,” Rogers says.

  “Either of them.”

  “No. I’m sorry to say I don’t. I’d like to help—I really would. But the fact of the matter, Detective, is that I really didn’t know the daughter well at all. I just gave her the internship as a favor to an old friend. She joined the campaign to do some videos for school credit, an inside look at how a campaign works on the road, that sort of thing.”

  “Did she interview you?”

  “Once or twice, I think so, I don’t really remember. A couple times maybe.”

  “Where?”

  “Where?”

  “Where were you when she interviewed you?”

  “You mean what towns?”

  The detective is shaking his head. “What settings.”

  “Ah, let me see. Campaign buses, planes, hotel lobbies.”

  “Were you ever alone with her?”

  “Golly, I’m just not sure. Maybe. It’s possible, I guess, yes.”

  “Have you heard from her in the last seventy-two hours?”

  “No sir, I haven’t. Not for some time.”

  “How much time?”

  “We have eight interns this summer, Detective. Busy kids. Smart too. I don’t keep close tabs on them, and I don’t remember the when and where of every conversation I have with them. I’ve got a campaign to run and a lot of other things I need to focus my attention on.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t remember when you saw her last?”

  “Exactly.”

  Detective Ernst looks around the room. At the bookcases with their leatherbound books and at the photos—Rogers with Presidents Bush and Carter and Clinton. (Is he really staring into Rogers’ eyes in that photo? Yes. It seems that he is. Amazing. Probably remembers Rogers’ name too.) Ernst’s glance travels down a shelf to a photo of Willa on a horse, and from there down to the parquet floor. He notices something. Something that looks like a faint trace of a stain, a brownish streak. He looks back at Rogers.

  “Senator, your security detail told us that Fanny Cours came by to visit you here, last Friday around nine in the evening.”


  “Oh, yes. Yes. Yes, I remember now, she came here to discuss some plan for her videography. We didn’t speak long.”

  “I understand she was here for some time,” Ernst says. “If you didn’t speak long, what did you do for the rest of the time?”

  It’s the most pointed question he’s asked yet, but Rogers smiles another of his engaging smiles and answers calmly, confidently.

  “I doubt she was here more than twenty minutes. If my people told you otherwise, they were mistaken. They probably just missed seeing her leave.”

  Detective Ernst squats down next to the stain on the floor. “What happened here?”

  “Cut myself,” Rogers says. “Thought I wiped that up.”

  “I’m sure that’s right,” Detective Ernst says, “and I know this will sound terrible, but would you mind if we test it? Just protocol, you understand. The department’ll have my ass if I don’t follow procedure.”

  Poof, the near unctuous grace with which Rogers greeted Ernst finally vanishes and is quickly replaced by chill efficiency.

  “You can test anything you want, but you’ll have to come back with a warrant first. I mean, if we’re talking about following procedure here. And if you have any more questions, I think the proper protocol would be for me to have my lawyer present. Good morning, Detective.”

  Rogers shows Detective Ernst the door.

  CHAPTER 40

  Has Elizabeth really allowed herself to be rescued by a series of different men? On reflection, she doesn’t think so. In fact insofar as she thinks about it at all, she is insistent that the one and only rescuer in Elizabeth’s story has been Elizabeth.

  She’s used what she had, used it to the fullest, and in the direction of not just survival, but triumph. Good sheets. Nice shoes. Well-muscled bodies. And now, a pretty view, a lot of quiet, the song of larks, money in the bank and Dear Dottie letters that are full of marvels and keep her wondering.

  What is the matter with “Fighting Hard” and “It Won’t Be Long” and the rest of the Dear Dottie gang? Also why are the letter writers almost 100% women? Don’t women take more anti-depressant medicine than men? Shouldn’t that help? Elizabeth is genuinely puzzled. This does not interfere with the pleasure of the long days on Monhegan Island.