Lustmord 1

by Kirk Alex

  “Leaper?”

  “What they call the ho in the paper.”

  “Why not fire the bitch, then? If she can’t do the job. Replace her.”

  “Cecil say he ain’t got the heart to can Greta. Big ho got her face all fucked up in a fire an’ can’t get no job out there. If you aks me, all that be a bunch of boo-shit. But we ain’t got to talk about it.”

  He walked over. Kissed her neck in his own clumsy manner. Reached inside the T-shirt she had on to squeeze a breast or two. His hand then slid down toward the belly button, bent lower, reaching pubic hair, and beyond. Stella stayed with him for a while this way. Reciprocated by fondling his impressive groin. Felt it develop mass rapidly enough, and then told him to go and wait for her in the other room with Lana and Peaches, that she would join them all for the encore, as soon as she finished up in the john.

  “‘Encore’? Head was sure good. Don’t it be ’bout time to give this nigga some pussy by now?”

  “Have to pee, handsome.”

  “When the ho got to go, go wiff the ho.”

  “You’re not going anywhere with me.” Stella broke away. “I need my privacy.”

  “You private? That it? Take too long, and Mack Daddy Muck gonna come lookin’ for yo private ass, sugah-bush.”

  Stella entered the john, closing the door in his face. Muck entered the utility room, pushed a sliding panel open and stepped into the closet. He sat in a folding chair, looking through a two-way mirror that gave him pretty much a full view of the living room.

  CHAPTER 171

  There were developments taking place in the basement. With Norbert Fimple’s help, Big Tex was able to break the lock right off the door that had kept Dione imprisoned in the pit. The bandage over her right eye was soggy from periodic exposure to water and the bacteria in it and the surrounding swelling had only gotten worse. Flies buzzed around overhead and would not leave her alone. Big Tex thought to give the naked, manic-looking woman a helping head. Enfolded his arms around her waist, pressing her chest hard against his, and hauled her out. Greta handed him a robe with a hoodie and the cowboy assisted Dione into it. Guided her over to the stairwell and sat her down on the steps near the bottom and watched her shoulders go up and down as she sobbed uncontrollably.

  “Isn’t anyone ever going to help us get out of here?”

  Dione Aragon looked around at the others, who had emerged from the Bunk Room with glares of pure contempt for Big T.

  There were rules to abide by, restrictions to be aware of—and the “part-time bronc-buster” was bound to bring down unspeakable doom upon their existence with his selfish behavior.

  No one said a word. Dione looked up at the door at the top of the stairs.

  “Maybe they can help us. There’s somebody up there. Maybe they can help if we can let them know somehow that we’re down here, that we need medical attention, that we need to be looked after, fed and given a chance to clean ourselves properly.” She wept. “I think I’ve got lice in my hair. . . . Doesn’t anyone want to do anything about getting out of here?”

  As if on cue, there was the sound of the toilet flushing in the basement john and the deep-throated voice of Betty Lou Rutterschmidt uttering: “There’s your answer, you disease-ridden, filthy trollop.”

  “I want—”

  “You want?” said Betty Lou, who was pushed out of the john in her wheelchair by the ever-loyal Mildred Elizabeth. “It’s about you, isn’t it? Always about you. Self-centered, rotten slut. What we want is for you to button your lip and close up your vagina, harlot!” the ninety-two-year-old woman shrieked. “I can smell a harlot a mile off . . . and to me you smell like a harlot!”

  “You’re wrong. My God, you are so wrong. I’m married and have a little daughter named Clarissa.”

  “What gives you the right to make that claim? When I should be the one! There is no one kinder, more faithful and true; no one with more patience! What audacity for a strumpet. Don’t waste your breath denying it! Look at you! Written all over your filthy whore’s body! They run around like the wanton fornicators that they are and then have the unmitigated gall to deny it! Whore!”

  “I only worked in that night club because we needed money to get back home,” Dione made every effort to explain to these people who were clearly unstable. What choice did she have?

  “If my mother says you’re a whore, then you’re a whore!” Miss Betty Lou’s sixty-seven-year-old daughter Mildred cackled. “There’s the smell of the gutter tramp about you—and you can’t deny that, bitch! You’re being punished for it now! Take it, because you earned it! Brought it on yourself! That’s what all this is about!”

  “All I did was work as a dancer in a night club. I didn’t do anything else. . . .”

  “You did enough!” Miss Betty Lou said.

  “We needed money to eat and take care of the baby. . . . We were trying to get back to Bakersfield. . . . We did nothing . . .”

  Mildred, having borrowed the lengthy chain from Mama Betty Lou, ran up and whipped the chain at her; whipped her across the back as hard and viciously as she was able.

  Greta, the Leaper, Otto, saw it and hadn’t liked it. Stepped in, got both hands on the chain and wound it once about Mildred’s neck and yanked back so vehemently on it that she practically had her off her feet. Greta stayed with it: yanking, then heaved her with enough force in “Mommy Dearest’s” direction that Mildred, completely off-balance and backpedaling, collided against the organist in the wheelchair with such impact that she not only knocked her over, but ended up sprawled on the floor herself.

  Greta retrieved the chain and decided to hold on to it. Remained standing there for the time being, taking in the wretched old prunes and their pathetic moaning and griping.

  Any other time she may have sided with them, felt a sense of kinship. Not here, not now—not after the way she saw them badger someone who was nothing more than a victim, one of their own stuck in the mire.

  It took Mildred a moment to recover. Once she was able, she lifted the wheelchair upright, then helped her mother get back into it. Attempted to, in her own clumsy way. She had failed to lock the wheels and the chair had rolled back, away from them, and left the mother standing on wobbly legs.

  “Apply the brakes!” urged Betty Lou. “Lock the brakes in! Lock them in next time! The brakes!”

  Mildred pulled the chair up. Did what she was supposed to with the levers down there.

  “I am!You see me doing it!”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes!”

  “Took you long enough.”

  This time Mildred Elizabeth was able to guide Betty Lou Rutterschmidt’s bony body into the wheelchair without further ado. This did not stop the older woman from cursing up a storm, grumbling to herself. Incensed and exhausted, the last thing she needed was for Mildred to act like some kind of ding-a-ling by nodding and going along with everything she said, which, in fact, she was guilty of.

  “I couldn’t agree more. Fornicators got it coming to them. Every one. They’ll fry. Down there. When they meet up with the Nefarious One.”

  “Oh shut up, Millie, and hand me my Bible.” Mildred did this. “My flashlight. Find it.” It took some effort. The daughter managed to locate it. Handed it to her.

  “Give me a push now.”

  “Where, Mother?”

  “Where else? The crapper. Before I go in this wheelchair.”

  Betty Lou gestured with her left hand for Mildred to start pushing, then with the other pointed in the direction of the bathroom in the corner.

  “I’m doing it. Only you just went. How can you go again?”

  “What a question. I have to take a dump, you ninny. I have waited days for this bowel movement. Days. And it’s finally taking place. Why should I have to explain anything? Isn’t it enough that I have warts on my behind?”

  “All right. So you have to go; and you see me doing my best.” She gave the wheelchair a push, steering Betty Lou in the direction.


  CHAPTER 172

  Dione rose to her feet and slowly climbed to the top of the staircase, lest she missed out on any other signs that might otherwise detract from what she needed so badly to believe—that her friends were in the house.

  When she got there, she wasted no time banging on the door, begging to be let out, pleading for help. The voice she heard earlier had sounded like Stella, must have been, had to have been—and she called out Stella’s name.

  If that’s Stella Martel out there, she thought, then the others might be with her. Lana and Pearleen. Could be they were with her. Got to be. Marvin was always trying to get them to come here and dance for Cecil. She knew that Stella and Lana had been here once or twice before, had gotten high with Biggs, danced for him and had sex with him for drugs and money (or both).

  Marvin had always been after Pearleen to join them and Pearleen had usually turned them down. Most of the time. Could be that’s who that other woman’s voice had sounded like: her friend Pearleen Bell.

  Maybe if she kept calling and making noise, one of the girls would hear and then they might go out and get help.

  They would have to; someone would have to go out and get help. The girls will eventually figure out what’s going on in this place. I know they will. I have to keep trying.

  She also knew she risked getting sparked. She knew it well enough. So be it—even if it meant paying with her life.

  Big T. looked up at her from where he stood at the bottom of the stairwell. Tilted his head to the left a bit, needing to see what was under the robe. Tried tilting to the other side. Generally poor lighting conditions always made something like this difficult.

  “I wouldn’t go on makin’ all that fuss, little darlin’. Bishop is likely to hear ya and he just might get riled about it and raise hell with all of us later. You know darn well he’s got that thing he calls Pit Therapy that he does as a way to keep folks in line. Pit Therapy. You seen it, darlin’. He don’t just take somebody and shoves them in the water, neither, not the second time around. Why he got all that water in it. Enjoys stickin’ live wires in there, enjoys seein’ them sparks.”

  He indicated the metal collar round his neck. “What this is for. You know it. Why you want to carry on like you don’t? Makes no kinda sense to me.”

  He paused. “Can’t say as I blame the preacher for doin’ it. Keeps troublemakers in line that way. Some folk can only be kept in line when you put a little fear in them. Harsh way of lookin’ at it, I know that, but it sure is true; it is.” He had no idea if he was getting through or not. “I can tell you right now, Pit Therapy ain’t exactly my idea of a hootenanny.”

  Dione’s desperation to seek help any way that she might, easily overruled the fear she may have felt, fear underscored by Big T.’s earnest words of warning. She called her friends’ names until she was simply too weak to go on.

  Big Tex shook his head, dreading the consequences all this racket and ruckus could easily result in. He’d be dealt with for sure if Biggs ever found out he’d helped the filly break out of the pit.

  CHAPTER 173

  Gospel numbers mixed-in with funk and rock played so loud it made it impossible for Stella to determine if she had heard a girl or woman, someone, screaming in the basement. She had pressed her ear to the basement door and listened. Heard nothing. The music was too goddamned loud.

  Where was the man’s stash? Where was all that blow and crack she’d heard so much about hidden? Where was it? She knew that it had to be somewhere in the house—but where?

  All the doors were locked. How the hell was she supposed to find anything like this? It was impossible. Lana had the nerve to accuse her of not trying hard enough. She out here doing what I’m doing?

  Screw it. Marvin was waiting in the living room and there was no way she could keep roaming about. Let the Mex bitch and Peachy go snooping about and risk getting busted by the creep.

  Yeah, let them get caught trying to steal the shit. Why should it be me? She’d already been busted by Biggs, and then by Marvin, and wasn’t about to push it. Or was she?

  If she got her hands on it first she could probably keep it all for herself and wouldn’t have to share.

  She walked to the bathroom in the hallway. Remembered to leave her hairbrush on the sink this time so that she would have a valid enough reason to scurry out of the living room later, should she decide to, and joined Lana and Pearleen.

  “Where’s Livia, Stel?”

  “What difference does it make, Lana? Who cares? Probably still upstairs. She ain’t going for it. Told you that already. Somehow she got it in her head that her virginity will actually mean something to the jerk she finally marries. What she don’t know no matter who she hooks up with the asshole will have had his share of good times. What I want to know is: If the ‘groom’ ain’t gonna be ‘clean and pure,’ why should the woman? Fucking double standard. Shouldn’t both of them be virgins?”

  Stella thought to ask about Marvin. Where was he?

  “In the john.”

  “No, he ain’t. I just come from the john.”

  Pearleen was of the opinion that they were both being too hard on the Duarte girl.

  “Like hell I am. Square bitch tried to slap me down. Showed her all right.”

  “I think you’re probably jealous that she’s a virgin and got herself a guy who wants to marry her,” Pearleen Bell suggested.

  “Bullshit,” Lana said. “How do you know that Rudy Perez and his brother ain’t been with half the hoes in the Valley?”

  “We gotta figure out a way to get our hands on some more rocks; to take with us for later—so we can get the hell out of this nasty house,” Pearleen said. Stood in front of the section of the wall that was covered in mirror squares and applied a touch of magenta lipstick to her lips, unaware that one of the squares was a two-way mirror and that Cecil’s right-hand man, Marvin Muck, was on the other side of this mirror in another room, a closet, that he had entered from the hallway via the utility/laundry room, and was keeping an eye on them—per the bishop’s instructions.

  “Hey,” said Lana.

  “What?” said Pearleen.

  “How come there’s no phone in here? Do you see a phone? I don’t see a phone. There was a phone in this room last time we were here.”

  “To keep chicks like you from abusing the privilege.”

  “I don’t like it. I know there was a phone in here.”

  “Keeps it under lock and key, like everything else. What do you expect from a paranoid schizophrenic?”

  “Listen, you two. I know this sounds insane . . . but I heard screams when I was in the hallway. . . . Like a woman, you know, screaming. Through the basement door—and it sounded like Dione.”

  The other two stopped what they had been doing—and looked at her, not knowing what to think. Last thing they wanted to hear was something that would fuck up their highs.

  CHAPTER 174

  The cowboy had climbed the basement stairs to where Dione was at the landing, had put his arms around her and tried to talk her into stopping the pounding and screaming, tried to convince her to keep it down, because, as he saw it, the noise would only cause to bring Bishop’s wrath down on them all.

  He’d managed to convince Dione to descend the stairs, only to have her break away from him and scramble back up.

  “Don’t you see? We have to get out of here. How can you go on living like this?”

  And it crossed her mind that she could have been trying to reason with mentally unbalanced people; they clearly seemed to be. But even if they were nutty, how could they not want to get out of this smelly, dark hellhole of a basement? How could they not want to get out? It was way too dark when the small black-and-white set in the crazies’ room was not on, and since Cecil Biggs kept the remote and controlled viewing hours, the set was not left on all the time, hence, the light it generated was limited. Depended on the mood Biggs happened to be in.

  There was the nightlight that gave off a weak, hellish-
red glow, the nightlight down there by the bookcase and patio table, only the wattage was so low it was hardly anything to speak of. About the only other source of light that they perceived came from the bottom of this basement door, light that filtered through from the hallway (when the light was on).

  “Ja ja.” Julian Ionesco had positioned himself at the bottom of the stairwell. “He help us.”

  “How did he help you? By keeping you imprisoned in this dungeon? By keeping me locked up in that pit?”

  “He help by taking us when hospital let everybody go. Many hospital people said we was free to leave and live with society—only we have no place to stay, no money, and sleep on sidewalk. Ja, ja. I sleep in cardboard box downtown near to city hall when Cecil help me. Same with others. He help everybody.”

  “He kills people. He’s a cannibal. Drinks blood. He killed my husband.”

  “None of that makes any difference.” It was not Ionesco this time. Someone else had joined the conversation. “Because the plague is coming.”

  “The plague?”

  “Apocalypse,” one of the crew said.

  “He’s a murderer, a killer. He murdered Danny, my husband. Just murdered him.”

  “Because your husband do something to Cecil to make him unhappy, make him angry,” the Rumanian reasoned.

  “Like you’re doin’ right now, little darlin’.”

  The one who looked like an underfed undertaker and went by Big Tex had followed her to the landing and was rubbing the back of her head and neck.

  “Biggs ain’t gonna be happy about it. Hate to say it, don’t care to think it: could be you got discipline coming. Was bad enough for you to break out of the pit. Preacher must have a good reason for keepin’ you in it. Your kind can’t be counted on, can’t be trusted. Preacher don’t cotton to that. Could be you got discipline on the way.”

  “Please understand. I just want us all to get help. . . . Look at my face. . . . Don’t you think I need to be treated by a doctor? Look at me. Please, look at me. . . .”