by Terry Mort
She moaned again and then opened her exquisite blue eyes and tried to focus. There was a small bruise on her left cheek. I noticed that her clothes were scattered around the room. They were torn to shreds. It didn’t take too much imagination to figure out what had happened.
“Oh, Riley,” she whispered. “Thank God.” She sat up slowly and touched the bruise with her fingers. Then she saw Rex lying there in the pool of blood. “Is he dead?” she asked.
“I think so. What happened?”
“Get me my robe, please. It’s hanging behind the bathroom door.”
I did and draped it over her shoulders as she sat up and stared at the body. She was trembling.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“He raped me and I killed him,” she said in a low monotone. “I’m glad.”
Well, after all those years of living near Youngstown, I knew you didn’t mess with the Slavs. They were good at manual labor, and they were good at religion, and they were good at violent hatred, not necessarily in that order.
“How did it happen?”
“He came to pick me up for class, the same as always.”
“He wasn’t here overnight?”
She looked at me, disbelieving and a little hurt. I felt justifiable guilt.
“What? No. Of course not. He brought me home last night, and I asked him in for a drink to be friendly. I thought you would be coming soon. I saw no harm in it. But he took it the wrong way and tried to make a pass, but I sent him away. He was very angry when he left. Then when he came this morning, he had a terrible look in his eye; and when he came into the house he started closing all the drapes, and then he punched me in the face and knocked me almost out and then tore off my clothes and stuffed my panties in my mouth so I couldn’t cry for help. And then he raped me.”
“How badly are you hurt?”
“I am very sore. Could you get me a wet towel, please?”
“We should get you to a doctor.”
“No,” she said. “I will be all right. A doctor would ask questions.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
I got her a towel and helped her clean herself. Then she told me the rest.
“So when he had done that, he rolled away and lay on his back and smiled and said something like ‘that’ll teach a cockteaser.’ Is that the right word?”
“Most likely.”
“That smile was a bad thing. Then he started laughing and I could see he was getting ready to do it again, so I rolled over and grabbed the fire poker and swung as hard as I could and hit him in the head. That was a surprise to him, I could see. Then I hit him again and again, and you see how it is with him now.”
“Yes. You were very thorough.”
“He had it coming.”
“Yes, again. How long ago did all this happen?”
“I don’t know exactly. Maybe only a few minutes before you came. Maybe longer. What am I to do now?”
“Well, the police generally like to hear about things like this. We should call them. It’s obviously a case of self-defense.”
“The police! Oh, no, Riley.”
The word clearly terrified her. In the “old country,” the police were never interested in protecting the rights of their citizens; they were more often the hired thugs of the ruling party. And when she emigrated to Youngstown, the cops there were hardly models of civic virtue either; everyone knew they were corrupt, and regular people like Myrtle went out of their way to stay out of their clutches.
Then, too, there was her acting career. She was just getting started in a new life, and this sort of publicity would ruin her before she even got established. The studios might, and I emphasize might, go all-out to protect one of their big stars, but they’d think nothing of throwing Yvonne Adore to the wolves. There were plenty more where she came from. The studios were getting a lot of heat from the state and federal governments about the racy nature of their product. Censorship was nipping at their heels. The bosses would run from salacious and negative publicity faster than their ancestors ran from the Cossacks.
“Let us wait until dark and then throw him in the ocean,” she said. “Let the fish take care of him.”
I made a mental note not to get on her bad side.
“That won’t work. There’s the little matter of the Duesenberg.”
“Oh. Yes. That will be a problem.”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
Fortunately, the driveway and the cars were hidden from the main road by the winding driveway and the overgrown oleanders. Anyone wanting to see the house would have to come at least halfway down the drive, the way I had last night. Most likely, then, there wouldn’t be any problem with random witnesses to whatever we decided to do—or, rather, try.
“What can we do?” she asked, still trembling.
“Well, the best thing is to call the cops.”
“Oh, no, Riley. Please. There must be a better way.”
I knew there was another way. I was pretty sure it wasn’t better, and I didn’t like it. But considering the state she was in, I couldn’t very well refuse her.
“Maybe there is.”
“Yes. Please.”
“All right. Let me think.”
“Yes, think for both of us.”
Well, this was one of those turning points. I had made a pact with myself to protect her, regardless of what happened. And now something very bad had happened. That didn’t change the pact. But it made it harder to live up to.
“For one thing, you must go to your acting class,” I said finally. As soon as I said that, I realized that all future decisions would come under the “how” rather than the “whether” category, as in how to get away with this situation rather than whether to call the cops. I remembered my old teacher’s Latin class and the big deal she had made out of “Alea jacta est.” “The die is cast.” That’s what Caesar said when he crossed the Rubicon with his army on the way back to Rome to take over. Still, at that moment I didn’t feel much like Caesar, but I did recognize we were at a turning point.
“Are you up to going to class, or are you too badly hurt?”
“No, I can do it. If someone asks why I am walking strangely, I’ll tell them it’s monthly cramps.”
“Don’t overdo it. Don’t give any information you don’t have to. Be careful.”
“Yes. I will. Don’t worry.”
And so we had moved on to the next stage. What was it Frost said? We had taken the fork in the yellow wood, and it was decidedly not the road we should have taken. Frost and Caesar had some of the same things in common, it seemed. As for Myrtle and me, any further rationalizing was beside the point.
“All right. Take my car. If anyone asks you where Rex is, just tell them he was supposed to pick you up but he never showed, so you borrowed your boyfriend’s car to come to class. You don’t know anything else about it.”
“Are you my boyfriend?” she asked, quietly, sweetly.
“You bet.” I put my arms around her and kissed her very gently.
“I’m glad,” she said. “You make me feel safe.”
“I’m glad too.” I wasn’t sure I was, but I was in it now, and half of me was in fact content, if not exactly happy, about it. Who knows where love starts and stops?
“Don’t make a big deal of your friendship with Rex,” I said, trying to think fast. “The less connection between you and him, the better. Especially romantic connection. It’s better if people think you’re involved with someone else and that Rex was just an occasional ride to work.”
“But that is the truth.”
“Well, sometimes the truth is useful.”
“I will tell them that he made a pass at me the night before and I sent him away”
“No. Don’t do that. The last thing we need is the whiff of a motive. Nothing turns on the cops like a lover’s spat after which one of the lovers ends up missing or dead. Better that he was just a professional acquaintance who gave you a lift to ac
ting class now and then. Not every day. Nothing more.”
“Yes. I see. You’re right.”
Then it occurred to me that Rex might have mentioned something to a friend or maybe a roommate, something about wanting to teach a cockteaser a lesson.
“Do you know if Rex lived alone?”
“Yes. He told me last night that he had an apartment in Bel Air. He was proud of that.”
“What about friends in the class? Is there anyone he might have . . . confided in, maybe mentioned that he was interested in you?”
“I don’t think so. We only started this week. And he was the only man. And the two other girls were just fourteen and fifteen. I don’t think anyone will know he came here. He’d have no reason to tell those little girls.”
“How about your instructor?”
“No one likes him. He prances around and wears cologne. Rex thinks he’s a homosexual.”
So, it looked as though no one would know that Rex had had designs on Myrtle.
“Can you cover up that bruise with makeup?”
“Yes, I think so. If not, I will tell them I ran into a door.”
“No one ever believes that story. Say you had an automobile accident on the way to class. Bumped your face on the dashboard when some yahoo from Oklahoma ran into you from behind.”
“Oklahoma?”
“Yeah. Details add believability.” As long as you can remember them afterwards, I thought.
“What will you do if I take your car?”
“I’m working on that.”
A little while later, she left for her class, driving away in my Packard. And when she left, I felt extremely alone, because my only company was a dead film actor with his pants down around his ankles. He was not a pretty sight. Things happen to a body after it dies.
Looking down on the recent Rex, I began to wonder whether Myrtle was worth the coming difficulties. As in previous, similar musings, I decided she was. It was not an easy decision. But to understand, you would have to see her eyes and her mouth and to listen to her speaking Croatian in her sleep. And it was more than that.
The Duesenberg was the problem. It was too damned distinctive. Myrtle had said it was Rex’s father’s car, so it seemed reasonable to assume that people in town would recognize it if they saw the chiseled features of yours truly driving it away. And I couldn’t just leave it parked somewhere, because inevitably that would raise questions about what had happened to the driver. They both had to go.
Then I remembered that Rex had mentioned he was from Chicago. Maybe the car had come from there, too. Maybe Daddy was not a local. Maybe no one would know who the car belonged to. Maybe I could just drive it away and leave it somewhere and let the cops wonder what had happened to the driver. Better yet, maybe I could take it up to Mulholland Drive and send it over one of the many cliffs, complete with a dead Gatsby lookalike behind the wheel. If we were lucky, it would blow up.
I went out and checked the rear end of the Duesenberg. Illinois plates! Here was a piece of luck in an otherwise sticky scenario. It was not a Hollywood car after all. Apparently, Junior had driven it out here from Chicago.
I went back into the house and called Della’s home number.
“Della!”
“Hello, chief. What’s the rumpus?”
“Is Perry around? I need to ask him a question.”
“That’s what the cops always say. Last time I saw him, he was on the couch looking at smutty magazines and drinking beer. It’s Friday.”
“Let me talk to him, please.”
“Is everything all right with you?” This time she sounded sincere.
“Not exactly.”
“Hold on.”
A minute later, Perry picked up.
“What’s up, chief?” Perry’s use of the word was more generic and had nothing to do with the employer/employee relationship.
“I have a hypothetical question for you,” I said.
“Good. That’s usually the opening line in a deal.”
“Okay. Here’s the question—what’s the going rate for getting rid of a dead body and a car?”
There was a slight pause on the other end of the line.
“What kind of car?” he asked, finally.
Leave it to Perry to home in on the heart of the matter.
“A two-seater Duesenberg, maroon and gray. Illinois plates. I was thinking of maybe running both items up to Mulholland Drive and pushing them off the cliff. Two birds with one stone, but I need a helper to meet me there and drive me back.”
“How did the departed meet his maker?”
“Several blows from a fire poker.”
“Hmmm. I assume he had it coming.”
“Take my word for it.”
“Your handiwork?”
“No. A friend.”
“Gotcha. Well, the staged accident might work in that case. You’d expect the head to be a little damaged from a tumble down those cliffs. And with luck—or a little planning—the car just might explode.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“It might work, but I wouldn’t do it that way.”
“Why not?”
“First of all, it’s risky. Mulholland Drive is a regular lover’s lane. All those remote cliff roads are. You can’t be sure you won’t be seen either arriving or leaving the scene. Or, worse, pushing the car over the side.
“Second, when a car goes over a cliff, there are usually skid marks on the highway and ruts in the edge of the cliff. But in this case there’s no way to duplicate the signs that the driver was going too fast and lost control. Cops get suspicious when the usual signs aren’t there. This sort of thing has been tried before, you know. It ain’t easy to stage it right, especially when some horny kids might come around the corner just when you’re shoving the car over.”
“I see your point.”
“There’s something else. Something practical.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t think you have to waste the value of an expensive car just to dispose of a body. I’d think of this hypothetical as two unrelated problems—how to get rid of the body and how to get rid of the car. The body is no problem to someone who has a boat and knows the tides around here.
“But the car is an expensive item. There are all sorts of rich Mexican crooks outside Tijuana who’d jump at the chance to get ahold of one of those beauties at a discount, no questions asked. All it would take is for the same enterprising boat owner to feed the departed to the fishes and then drive the valuable car across the border and turn it over to people he knew who’d be happy to act as agents. Everyone benefits, and you’re out no cash. Capisce? The car pays for the whole deal, and then some. I figure a car like that’s gotta be worth close to fifteen grand. The going rate for getting rid of a body’s no more than a grand, tops. So even if the car gets sold at a big discount, there’s plenty to go around.”
“That could work.”
“It always has.”
I let that one go.
“This way is much neater than a staged accident,” said Perry. “Our cops couldn’t do anything against the boys across the border, even if by some chance they heard about the car being down there. But if they did hear about the car, they’d naturally assume the departed got departed when his car was stolen by banditos. That would give our cops enough to close any missing-person case. Open cases give ‘em heartburn, and they’d jump at any excuse to wrap this one up. This is all hypothetical, you understand.”
“Hypothetically, do you know anyone with a boat and contacts across the border?”
“I’ll be there in an hour or so. Where is there, by the way?”
I figured I had about five hours between now and darkness. That was five hours of sweating and wondering whether what I was about to do made sense. I didn’t care about the financial aspect of Perry’s plan. Perry and his intermediaries could keep all the money from selling the car. I didn’t want any part of that.
I was concerned about Myr
tle. Her ingrained fear of the police wasn’t really a good excuse for not reporting the killing. There was plenty of physical evidence to prove self-defense. She had been torn up pretty badly and would take time to heal, and during that time a doctor’s exam could prove rape and therefore self-defense.
But there was the thought of her career and her hopes that had just been kindled by this big break. Did it make sense to destroy those hopes? Who would benefit? The rapist was dead. Dragging Myrtle through the court system and most likely ruining her career wouldn’t bring Rex back. And while it was no doubt too easy to say that Rex had gotten what was coming to him, there was an element of truth in that, wasn’t there? I would have done the same thing in her place, but then no one had contacted me to write a book on morality. And there was the bare fact that all of this was academic; it had gotten academic when she left the scene of the crime and went off to acting class as though nothing had happened.
I did wonder, though, about Rex’s family. Did he have a sister or sweetheart somewhere, someone who would forever wonder how and why he had disappeared? And what about his parents? They would never know what had happened to their handsome and promising son. Was it better to let them wonder, or for them to learn the brutal truth? And just how much of the truth was enough? Without question, there were details that wouldn’t do them any good to know. There was a writer once who said mankind cannot stand too much reality. Was it T. S. Eliot? Whoever said it had it right.
I thought about finding out who Rex really was and thinking of some way to let his family know that he’d been killed, in some sort of accident or incident related to the disappearance of the car. Maybe we’d tell them that Rex had decided to take a weekend drive into Mexico and that was the last we ever heard from him. No one knew anything more than that; it was all a big mystery. I figured we owed them that much.
Then it occurred to me that if I was in the family’s shoes, I’d want to know more than that: I’d want the details. They obviously had money or they couldn’t have given junior such an expensive car. In all probability they’d hire private investigators to try to fill in the blanks. They’d do that anyway, after some time had elapsed and they hadn’t heard from him. But did it make any sense to give them a lead by making up some story about a Mexican lost weekend that apparently had led to car theft and murder? Any detective worth his salt would then start in Mexico and try to retrace the steps. It wouldn’t be hard to find a Duesenberg two-seater in Tijuana.