“What?”
“That you could sneak in and watch.”
“Would you have liked that?”
“Are you kidding? I’d have loved it.”
“It never even occurred to me.”
“I didn’t think it would. Or that you’d do it, even if you thought of it. You know what was going on in my head the whole time? Absolutely the whole time? How hot it would be when I told you all about it.”
“Really.”
“How’s that for weird? I mean, it’s like normal to think about fucking while you masturbate, but having fantasies of masturbating while somebody’s got his dick in you?”
“But I can see how it could happen.”
“So you don’t think I’m weird?”
“Oh, you’re plenty weird, Rita. But not in a bad way.”
“I’ll settle for that. And I could probably say the same about you.”
“Moi?”
“You and that guy who smelled.”
“Yeah, I can see where you could call me weird for that one.”
“I might have done it myself,” Rita said, “but I’d have wanted to kill him afterward.”
Oh, sweetie, if you only knew—
“Oops,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’ve got an appointment I’ll be lucky to get to on time.”
“You want me to drive you?”
“No, I’ll be fine with the bike. But I was thinking maybe tonight—”
“We’re on the same page. But I’m not gonna bother cooking. You up for it if I order a pizza?
“Sure. And I don’t know when I’ll be home, so don’t order it until I get here.”
“And this time I’ll buy the wine. How do you say what we had, Nooey San George’s?”
“Close enough.”
“And don’t worry that this is going to make us lesbians. I mean, that was a guy I was on the couch with, you know?”
“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” she said. “the thing is, I still get a lot of pleasure out of it.”
“Acting out?”
“Right. I realize I’m compulsive about it, and it’s almost as if I don’t have any choice, but, you know, it feels good.”
“Of course it does,” he said. “And you may not be ready to stop. It always felt good to me, too.”
“It did?”
“But less so,” he said, “toward the end. That’s not why I stopped, I stopped because sexual compulsivity was making my life unmanageable, but the pleasure did drop off as time went on. Even at the moment of release I’d find myself thinking about the next time. And, of course, regretting everything that was regrettable about the present moment.”
She told him she guessed she could relate to that.
She’d met him in the parking lot at a quarter to twelve, wearing jeans and a modest top, with a capacious shoulder bag on her arm. She’d locked her bike to the cyclone fence and joined him in the front seat of the Subaru. And now they were on their way to the meeting in Redmond, and conversation was no problem, because all she had to do was get it started and he’d carry the ball, telling her chunks of his story of sin and redemption. It would have been more interesting if he’d gone into detail, but as she already knew, not going into detail was part of the SCA program, because God forbid any of them should get any pleasure out of anything for the rest of their miserable lives.
“Here we are,” he said, eventually, and waited to make a left turn into a church parking lot. There were a handful of cars all clustered at the front of the lot, and nothing but a van farther back.
She said, “Graham? Could we stop for a minute? There’s something I need to say.” He braked, and she said, “Maybe if you could pull up, oh, near that van? Like, away from all these cars?”
He drove to the rear of the lot, swung the Subaru around and pulled up next to the van. That vehicle’s side bore the name of the church, and the injunction to get right with God.
Now you tell me.
She unbuckled her seat belt, slipped her right hand into her shoulder bag. He kept his own seat belt fastened, she noted with approval, so he’d be safely buckled up during the hazardous five-mile-an-hour return trip to a parking spot with his SCA buddies.
“There’s this thing they do in AA,” she said. “According to what I’ve read. Like, sometimes when they’re taking a man to his first meeting, or to a rehab, they give him one final drink on the way. So he won’t go into withdrawal. So what I was wondering—”
Oh, the look on his face!
“I guess that’s a no, huh?”
“Kim—”
“Oh, c’mon,” she said. “That was a joke, for God’s sake! But what I really do need to do is I have to tell you why I came on so strong.”
“Believe me, Kim, I understand. I’ve been there myself. The idea of taking no for an answer—”
“That’s only part of it. See, I’ve got this list. There are only four names on it, and you’re one of them.”
“Well, I’m flattered, but as I said—”
“No, don’t be flattered. What I wanted to do, I wanted to be able to cross you off the list, and in order to do that I’d have to sleep with you first.”
There was a padded mailer in her bag. Her hand slipped into the open end, fastened on the handle of the knife. He was saying something but she paid no attention, concentrating instead on the move she’d make, visualizing it in her mind’s eye.
“And when you turned me down,” she went on, “I just couldn’t stand it, and I was so upset that it kept me from seeing what should have been obvious.”
“Sometimes the hardest thing to see is what’s right in front of our eyes.”
Gee, Graham, I’d better go write that down.
“What I didn’t let myself realize,” she said, “is that I’d already fucked you. I mean, that’s how you got on the list in the first place, right? So I didn’t have to fuck you again, much as I might want to. All I had to do to cross you off the list, was, well, this.”
Just as she’d visualized it: her right hand emerging from the shoulder bag, gripping the kitchen knife, bringing it in one graceful motion into the center of his chest.
Just like that.
“You fucking idiot,” she said. “You sanctimonious asshole. You could have died happy.”
Did he even hear the words? Hard to say. There was no blood to speak of, so she must have found the heart and stopped it. His eyes were wide, but the light was leaving them.
Three.
Now what? Her plan had worked perfectly, but it hadn’t included the aftermath.
Just leave him here? But she had to go back to the Barling lot for her bike, and how was she going to get there? Call a taxi?
Take his place behind the wheel? The key was right there in the ignition, and despite what she’d told Rita, she was perfectly capable of driving anything with wheels. All she had to do was dump his body and drive his car back to where she’d left the bike. His car could return to the slot where it belonged, and she could bike off into the sunset.
Dump his body where? Just leave him in the church parking lot? They’d find him soon enough, and connect him to the SCA meeting, and who was to say he hadn’t talked about her with some of his we-don’t-fuck-anymore buddies? It might not lead to her, but it would guarantee headlines.
How about the church van? It was dusty, so it probably didn’t get used much, and by the time anybody found a body in it there’d have been a dozen other 12-Step groups meeting there. Not a perfect idea, but—
Forget it. Fucking thing was locked up tighter than an SCA member’s asshole.
If the Subaru had a trunk, that would work. Probably be a struggle getting him into it, but she could reposition the car first so that it screened her actions from observers. But the thing was a squareback, the contents of its rear compartment glaringly visible, so scratch that.
So what did that leave?
Switching seats with him wasn’t the hardest part. It was a little complicated, she
had to maneuver him from behind the wheel into the passenger seat, but it went smoothly enough. She fastened his seatbelt and tightened it so it would keep him in position, then took his place behind the wheel and drove out of there.
Now it got tricky. Not finding her way — that was easy, as the Subaru had a GPS device, complete with a woman’s voice to tell you when and where to turn, and Barling Industries was already available on his list of recent destinations, so all she had to do was select it and follow the prompts.
But there she was, driving through traffic with a dead man sitting up next to her. The premise, of course, was that his condition wouldn’t be evident to a casual onlooker, and no one would see blood, because she’d adjusted his necktie to cover the wound. But he still looked dead as a doornail to her, and every time she braked for a stoplight with another car alongside, she found herself holding her breath. At any moment she’d hear sirens and there’d be people screaming and cops yanking the doors open and—
And each time the light changed and she drove away.
“Approaching right turn,” the voice told her at length, and this final right turn brought her into the Barling lot. “You have arrived.”
No shit, Sherlock.
Did the GPS doohickey have a memory? Could it tell the police where it had been?
Well, they’d have to find it first. She unhooked it from its moorings and dropped it into her handbag. Something to get rid of down the line, along with the knife.
Did the SCA people know about the GPS? Like, were they okay with him having an authoritative female voice telling him where to go and what to do? Like, couldn’t he have a male voice, just to remove another possible occasion of sin?
Fucking moron.
She left him in his car, parked right where it had been when she joined him for the ride to Redmond. She took a moment to put him back behind the wheel; it would help keep him upright, and was a more natural spot for him, although it wouldn’t fool anyone who took a good look.
They’d think he’d had a heart attack. Got behind the wheel, stuck the key in the ignition, and the poor devil’s ticker quit on him. They’d know different soon enough, and it wouldn’t take a formal autopsy to spot the knife wound in his chest, but by then she’d be long gone.
She took a moment to wipe the surfaces she might have touched. And at the last minute she remembered to go through his wallet. He had just over three hundred dollars, mostly in twenties and tens, and something made her look in the compartment behind his State of Washington driver’s license, where he’d tucked away two fifties and a hundred for an emergency.
Well, this was an emergency, all right. The Nuits-Saint-Georges had left her alarmingly close to broke.
She locked the car on her way out, unlocked her bike, and left.
Now what? Back to Rita’s house?
For pizza and French wine and another session in the living room? This one, she knew, would go further than the last. Their hands wouldn’t be limited to their own flesh, and she could see how the evening might well end with one or both of them getting eaten out.
It wasn’t really a lesbian experience, Kimmie, because we’re not lesbians.
What would it be like, having another woman do that?
Or doing it herself?
She was getting hot thinking about it. But it wasn’t going to happen, and she was going to make sure it didn’t happen by skipping the pizza, skipping the wine, and skipping Rita’s house altogether. If she went there, what could possibly happen afterward? Either she’d want to stay with Rita and try to make some kind of a life together, or she’d feel the need to kill her before moving on. She didn’t want to kill Rita, not now, not in the least, and she couldn’t stay with her in a town where she’d just murdered a man. She wanted at a minimum to be on the other side of a state line, and ideally clear across the country.
And she’d looked ahead enough to tuck what she could into her handbag. Not all she’d have liked to take, the bag was really no more than an overgrown purse, but enough to hold her until she had a chance to buy something new.
More to the point, nothing she’d left in Rita’s spare bedroom could be traced back to her. Sooner or later she’d call Rita, and by then she’d have a story ready to explain her abrupt departure. But for now all she could do was disappear.
A pity she couldn’t return the bike. Park it someplace, tell Rita where to find it? No, keep it simple.
She left it unlocked a block from the bus station, propped it against a lamp post and walked away from it. Someone was sure to adopt it — before her bus left, and before anyone could begin to wonder who stuck a knife into Graham Weider.
FOURTEEN
When she first laid eyes on him, he’d looked preppy. That was in a bar in Riverdale, within walking distance of the last stop on the Bronx-bound 1 train, and she knew that much because she knew she’d walked there. She was drinking a Cosmopolitan when their eyes met. He bought her the next Cosmo, and the next thing she’d been able to remember was waking up in his bed.
He had looked a little less generic in the morning. In daylight she’d noted the vivid blue eyes, the once-broken nose, the pouting sensuous mouth. He was a Wall Street guy, she’d learned, and she could see him in that role, aiming to take his place as one of the self-styled masters of the universe.
That had been a while ago, and the years had taken their toll. Online, she’d learned that he’d come by the preppy look honestly. He’d been at Choate first, then Yale, then the B school at Columbia. Destiny had clearly meant him to wear suits from J. Press, khakis and polos from J. Crew.
Was it any wonder that he looked a little older and less prepossessing in a burnt-orange jumpsuit?
That would add years, all right. And it wasn’t a simple matter of costume. Just being incarcerated — that would tend to age a man, wouldn’t it?
The prison was in an upstate New York town she’d never heard of, a good deal closer to the Canadian border than to the city of New York. You had to take two buses to get there, an express to Albany and a local the rest of the way. She was one of a dozen women who migrated from the express to the local, and she figured they were all on similar errands, visiting their incarcerated mates.
An interesting word, incarcerated. As far as she could tell, it was used exclusively by persons to whom it applied — and, to be sure, by the women who loved them. The five syllables served to take the sting out; I am presently incarcerated didn’t hit as hard as The fuckers locked me up and swallowed the key.
She’d noticed one woman in particular on the Albany express, a dishwater blonde with sharp facial features and a feral look to her. Not long ago she’d watched a cable documentary on crystal meth, and every woman in it looked like this one. So did half the women on any episode of Cops.
They’d exchanged glances, and she wasn’t surprised when the blonde took the seat next to her on the local bus. “I’m Barb,” she announced.
“Audrey.”
“I guess we’re going to the same place, huh?”
“I guess.”
“I’m on this bus every week. You see a lot of the same people, and then you stop seein’ some of ’em and instead you start to see different ones.”
“Like life itself.”
Barb had to think about that. Then she nodded. “Got that right,” she said. “I don’t think I seen you before.”
“First visit.”
“Yeah? Your man, right?”
And I’m standing by him. Just like Tammy Wynette wants me to do.
“Well, sort of,” she said. “But I haven’t seen him in years. We more or less lost track of each other. I’m not sure he’ll remember me.”
Barb gave her a look. “How’s anybody gonna forget you? Only question’s are you on the list. ’Cause if you’re not an approved visitor, no way they gonna let you in.”
“His lawyer said I’m approved, I won’t have any trouble.”
“Well, you’re okay, then. You figure on using the truck?”
“The truck?”
“You know, Audrey. The truck.” A sigh. “The fuck truck. Pardon the expression, but that’s what everybody calls it. What it is, it’s a trailer more’n a truck, and you get an hour in there. Like, private time.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “See, in a way I hardly know him. He’s been, uh, incarcerated for almost three years, and I didn’t even find out about it until a month ago. I’m not even sure why I’m here visiting him. Would I want private time with him? Maybe, but how do I know he’d want to go in the truck with me?”
Barb gave her a look. She said, “Three years?”
“Plus a couple of months.”
“Honey,” Barb said, “that man’d settle for private time with a nanny goat. Will he go in the truck with you? You’re kidding, right?”
But when they brought her in to see Peter Fuhrmann, it wasn’t in the designated trailer, and you couldn’t call it private time. After she’d passed through a scanner and been strip-searched by a matron, she wound up sitting in front of a long window. There were women on either side of her, talking to men in orange jumpsuits on the other side of the window. There was an empty chair across from her, but it didn’t remain empty for long. A man appeared, wearing the orange jumpsuit that seemed to be standard here, walked to the empty chair, and looked at her for a long moment before sitting down.
Would she have recognized him?
She knew him right away, saw the man she’d spent a night with in the man who sat across from her now. But she’d been expecting him. If she’d encountered him across the aisle in a subway car, or at adjacent tables in a diner, would any mental bells have rung?
No way to tell. And what did it matter? He was here now, and so was she.
He said, “Audrey Willard.”
“That’s right.”
“Do I know you? Because the name didn’t register when my lawyer mentioned it.”
Well, how could it? She’d never used it before. She sort of liked Audrey, it was unusual without being weird, old-fashioned without smelling of lavender sachets. He’d have known her by another name, and she was clueless as to what that name might have been.
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