Men were watching her.
She could tell, she could always tell. Their gazes fell on her and warmed the skin where they touched her. Odd, she thought, how the same sensation that had been so disturbing and unpleasant all day long was so desirable and exciting now.
She raised her glass, sipped her drink. The combined flavour of cognac and creme de menthe was at once warm and cold upon her lips and tongue. She swallowed, sipped again.
“That a stinger?”
He was at her elbow and she flicked her eyes in his direction while continuing to face forward. A small man, stockily built, balding, tanned, with a dusting of freckles across his high forehead. He wore a navy blue Quiana shirt open at the throat, and his dark chest hair was beginning to go grey.
“Drink up,” he suggested. “Let me buy you another.”
She turned now, looked levelly at him. He had small eyes. Their whites showed a tracery of blue veins at their outer corners. The irises were a very dark brown, an unreadable colour, and the black pupils, hugely dilated in the bar’s dim interior, covered most of the irises.
“I haven’t seen you here,” he said, hoisting himself on to the seat beside her. “I usually drop in around this time, have a couple, see my friends. Not new in the neighbourhood, are you?”
Calculating eyes, she thought. Curiously passionless eyes, for all their cool intensity. Worst of all, they were small eyes, almost beady eyes.
“I don’t want company,” she said.
“Hey, how do you know you don’t like me if you don’t give me a chance?” He was grinning, but there was no humour in it. “You don’t even know my name, lady. How can you despise a total stranger?”
“Please leave me alone.”
“What are you, Greta Garbo?” He got up from his stool, took a half step away from her, gave her a glare and a curled lip. “You want to drink alone,” he said, “why don’t you just buy a bottle and take it home with you? You can take it to bed and suck on it, honey.”
He had ruined the bar for her. She scooped up her change, left her drink unfinished. Two blocks down and one block over she found a second cocktail lounge virtually indistinguishable from the first one. Perhaps the lighting was a little softer, the background music the slightest bit lower in pitch. Again she passed up the row of tables and seated herself at the bar. Again she ordered a stinger and let it rest on the bar top for a moment before taking the first exquisite sip.
Again she felt male eyes upon her, and again they gave her the same hot-cold sensation as the combination of brandy and crème de menthe.
This time when a man approached her she sensed his presence for a long moment before he spoke. She studied him out of the corner of her eye. He was tall and lean, she noted, and there was a self-contained air about him, a sense of considerable self-assurance. She wanted to turn, to look directly into his eyes, but instead she raised her glass to her lips and waited for him to make a move.
“You’re a few minutes late,” he said.
She turned, looked at him. There was a weathered, raw-boned look to him that matched the western-style clothes he wore - the faded chambray shirt, the skintight denim jeans. Without glancing down she knew he’d be wearing boots and they would be good ones.
“I’m late?”
He nodded. “I’ve been waiting for you for close to an hour. Of course it wasn’t until you walked in that I knew it was you I was waiting for, but one look was all it took. My name’s Harley.”
She made up a name. He seemed satisfied with it, using it when he asked her if he could buy her a drink.
“I’m not done with this one yet,” she said.
“Then why don’t you just finish it and come for a walk in the moonlight?”
“Where would we walk?”
“My apartment’s a block and a half from here.”
“You don’t waste time.”
“I told you, I waited close to an hour for you. I figure the rest of the evening’s too precious to waste.”
She had been unwilling to look directly into his eyes but she did so now and she was not disappointed. His eyes were large and well-spaced, blue in colour, a light blue of a shade that often struck her as cold and forbidding. But his eyes were anything but cold. On the contrary, they burned with passionate intensity.
She knew, looking into them, that he was a dangerous man. He was strong, he was direct, and he was dangerous. She could tell all this in a few seconds, merely by meeting his relentless gaze.
Well, that was fine. Danger, after all, was an inextricable part of it.
She pushed her glass aside, scooped up her change. “I don’t really want the rest of this,” she said.
“I didn’t think you did. I think I know what you really want.”
“I think you probably do.”
He took her arm, tucked it under his own. They left the lounge, and on the way out she could feel other eyes on her, envious eyes. She drew closer to him and swung her hips so that her buttocks bumped into his lean flank. Her purse slapped against her other hip. Then they were out the door and heading down the street.
She felt excitement mixed with fear, an emotional combination not unlike her stinger. The fear, like the danger, was part of it.
~ * ~
His apartment was two sparsely furnished rooms three flights up from street level. They walked wordlessly into the bedroom and undressed. She laid her clothes across a wooden chair, set her handbag on the floor at the side of the platform bed. She got on to the bed and he joined her and they embraced. He smelled faintly of leather and tobacco and male perspiration, and even with her eyes shut she could see his blue eyes burning in the darkness.
She wasn’t surprised when his hands gripped her shoulders and eased her downward on the bed. She had been expecting this and welcomed it. She swung her head, letting her long hair brush across his flat abdomen, and then she moved to accept him. He tangled his fingers in her hair, hurting her in a not unpleasant way. She inhaled his musk as her mouth embraced him, and in her own fashion she matched his strength with strength of her own, teasing, taunting, heightening his passion and then cooling it down just short of culmination. His breathing grew ragged, and muscles worked in his legs and abdomen.
At length he let go of her hair. She moved upward on the bed to join him and he rolled her over on to her back and covered her, his mouth seeking hers, his flesh burying itself in her flesh. She locked her thighs around his hips. He pounded at her loins, hammering her, hurting her with the brute force of his masculinity.
How strong he was, and how insistent. Once again she thought what a dangerous man he was, and what a dangerous game she was playing. The thought served only to spur her own passion on, to build her fire higher and hotter.
She felt her body preparing itself for orgasm, felt the urge growing to abandon herself, to lose control utterly. But a portion of herself remained remote, aloof, and she let her arm hang over the side of the bed and reached for her purse, groped within it.
And found the knife.
Now she could relax, now she could give up, now she could surrender to what she felt. She opened her eyes, stared upward. His own eyes were closed as he thrust furiously at her. Open your eyes, she urged him silently. Open them, open them and look at me—
And it seemed that his eyes did open to meet hers, even as they climaxed together, even as she centred the knife over his back and plunged it unerringly into his heart.
~ * ~
Afterward, in her own apartment, she put his eyes in the box with the others.
<
~ * ~
JAY RUSSELL
Hush…Hush, Sweet Shushie
TIME IS LIKE a river, some unemployed philosopher mused. It has something to do with not being able to step in the same bit of it twice. I was never big on philosophy, lacking one of my own. I did once go on a silent, meditative retreat at Leonard Cohen’s Zen hangout in the Hills, but all I came up with w
as: “Make it stop!” I kept yelling it until they booted my bored ass right off Torn Mountain.
On the other hand, I have stepped in the LA River - several times, mind - though famously, of course, it doesn’t have any water in it. That seems to me to raise a whole bunch of other deep questions: all that one-hand-clapping, tree-falling-in-forest, who-(who)-who-wrote-the-book-of-love razzamatazz. I don’t know, maybe that’s the way philosophy is supposed to work.
Or maybe I’m just the wrong person to ask.
If you do ask me - and remember right up front that no one’s putting a gun to your head - time is mostly like a big heap of doggie-do: step in it once and no matter how hard you try, you can never scrape all the shit off your shoes.
~ * ~
“Shushie!”
“Hello, Martin.”
You could have knocked me over with a steamroller.
“I didn’t think you’d recognize me.”
“I don’t know if I do,” I said, frozen in my front doorway.
But that wasn’t true. If Shushie was a grain of sand, I’d be able to pick her out of Malibu Beach.
“You look ... wowie-kazowie.”
“Always the sweet-talker. You look good, too, Martin.”
“You still lie like a pro, Shush. I’m fatter in the middle, thinner on the top, and all the gunk they’ve sucked out of Roseanne over the years has somehow ended up in my ass.”
Shushie leaned forward, twisted those filthy, fat lips of hers into the smile I’ve also never forgotten, and warm breath tickling my hairy ear, whispered, “But I bet you’ve still got the prettiest, sweetest-tasting cock in Hollywood.”
I let her in, of course.
~ * ~
Shoshona Elaine Horowitz is what it said on our marriage licence.
Shushie is what I always called her.
We were married for two months three lifetimes ago. We were kids at the time: I wasn’t much past twenty and Shushie was three years older than me. I suppose she still is. Maybe you couldn’t rightly call us “kids” at those ages, but we sure as hell acted like kids, laughed like them (screwed like them). And getting married six days after meeting wasn’t the most grown-up thing to do. Though it sure felt like it back then.
And if God could make a whole universe in six days, it had seemed more than enough time to know we’d be Together 4Ever.
Goddamn God.
Shushie had been a wild child. Me, too. I was on my first bounce-back into The Business after bottoming out following a savage Hollywood adolescence. My child acting heydays had already faded into booze-fed, Stardust - ha! Poprock - memories, but I’d miraculously sobered up enough to snag a couple of decent TV parts. I made William Conrad beg for mercy in a killer episode of Cannon (he really was a corpulent sonofabitch - Jesus, could he eat!), and all but induced a stroke in Buddy Ebsen in a senses-shattering Barnaby Jones. It’d helped me re-establish a bona fide or two. Enough to get me cast in a John Huston pic on location in Mexico. We were shooting around Cuernavaca. Actually, I was mostly chugging Cuervo and Tecates and spending every penny I had on an all-you-can-eat buffet of drugs and Mexican whores (did I mention it was a John Huston film?). There were a lot of pennies, a lot of blow, a lot of whores.
And Shushie.
~ * ~
“You live alone.”
“Is it that obvious?” I said.
“Mmm,” Shushie mmmed.
She strolled around the living room, touching objects randomly along the way; a glass fruit bowl with some over-ripe plums; a framed photograph of me with Hector Elizondo and Joe Santos; a broken Golden Globe award; an empty package of Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews. She wiped her fingertips on a grimy antimacassar and sat herself down on the sofa. She picked up a cushion, sniffed it - I suddenly remembered that Shushie was always sniffing stuff - then tossed it on to the chair opposite.
“Mmm,” she repeated. She looked me square in the eyes and smiled.
“You’ve had your teeth done,” I said.
“Ages ago. Cost a bundle. Braces are no fun as a grown-up.”
“What is?”
She snorted.
“They look good. The teeth. You look good. I repeat that. I might even say it again at some point soon.”
Her smile widened. So did mine. Then I let it droop.
“What in the name of the Dark Lord Beelzebub and all his unholy works and practices are you doing here, Shushie?”
She laughed.
I didn’t.
The doggie-do was already hardening on my Skechers.
~ * ~
The thing about Shushie - and her name alone should have been the tip off - is that she was nuts. Really nuts.
It was a big part of her charm, at first. But there’s a line between zany, Teri Garr eccentricity and menacing, Ray Liotta psychosis. You’d think it would be a thick old, double-yellow line, but it’s worryingly thin and fades in bright sun. I see it more clearly now that I’m old and ever so wise (there’s a reason why I live alone and it’s not just on account of the smell of my cushions), but back then, under the glamours of youth, I didn’t recognize it.
I confused self-destruction with free-spiritedness, and mistook vitriol for passion. I got lots of other stuff wrong, too. I thought Shushie was wild and provocative and uninhibited, and all those idiotic characteristics that the immature imagine to be better and more important than an elasticated waist.
We grow too soon old and too late smart, as my mom used to say.
Shushie landed in Cuernavaca on her father’s stolen Amex card. She did it all the time, I soon learned. Why her dad - a La Jolla cosmetic dentist - didn’t simply pay with cash I never could figure out. But Shushie was his only child and she could do no wrong in his eyes.
Of course, he never saw her giving a blumpkin to a fat First AD, tight ass-naked in an open-air Mexican latrine.
“Who’s next?” she’d challenged, raising her head. Her mouth - it needed wiping - was twisted into that fat little smile.
I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen and I was in love. My hand shot up like an eager schoolboy in history class.
I was a festering idiot.
Many would say I still am.
~ * ~
“He’s been gone four days,” Shushie told me.
She sat on my sofa, sipping green tea out of a mug with my face on it. I chose it deliberately to gauge her reaction. I don’t often use mugs adorned with my picture, though as it happens I have a whole case of them left over from my days starring on Burning Bright. And I might not seem like a green tea kind of guy, but I’ve taken to drinking the stuff. It’s supposed to be good for you and it doesn’t taste as bad as most of what’s supposed to be good for you. It also stops me from drinking quite so much beer.
Shushie had accepted the mug with her sweet little smile and offered a delighted “oooh” when she tasted the tea. She seemed so sensible, so grown-up.
Don’t forget that thing about me being an idiot.
“Four days isn’t long to be out of touch,” I said. “How old is he again?”
“He’s twenty-two, Martin. I just told you.”
“You did. But he’s not a kid then, is he? I mean, a twenty-two year old not calling his mom for a few days isn’t exactly amber alert time. Maybe he went to Vegas or Ensenada or wherever the hell young people go these days to drink and party.”
“Young people?”
“Kids. Young adults. Twilight readers. Whatever. People whose idea of a good time consists of more than sitting on the sofa watching HBO with an iPad on their lap.”
“Do you do that, Martin?”
“I don’t care to say.”
She shook her head a little and smiled briefly. Then she got serious again.
“He’s very immature, Martin. And he’s been in trouble before.”
“You mentioned that.”
“The police are not going to be interested, given his ... indis
cretions.”
“That’s a generous euphemism for felony assault. Where the hell do you even get a jai alai basket? How do you beat someone with it?”
“It’s called a xislera, actually. And the damage was done with the pelota not the basket.”
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 24