LoveMurder

by Saul Black

  Nick had been taken. Imagine if it had been Deborah, or Logan, or Marion. It was unthinkable. He would lose his mind. Part of the reason he was working himself into exhaustion was, naturally, desperate loyalty to Valerie, for what she was going through. But part of it was simply shameful gratitude. That it hadn’t happened to him. He wasn’t proud of the feeling, but it was there nonetheless.

  Marion came out of the bathroom wearing nothing but high heels.

  He was astonished.

  “Right, Mister,” she said. “Listen to me. Enough with this broken-balls nonsense. I’m going to give you the best fucking blow job you’ve ever had.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You don’t have to do anything but lie back and enjoy it. I’m hot and you have been medically approved for action. It’s completely psychological and it has to be nipped in the bud. Enough is enough. Now give me a goddamned kiss.”

  “Holy mother of God,” Will said.

  “Leave God out of it,” Marion said. “This is going to be all the Devil’s work.”

  “Isn’t this your show?” he said. The TV was on, muted. Orange Is the New Black, to which Marion had become addicted.

  “Priorities. Now shut the fuck up and let me perform this incredible selfless act.”

  She kissed him, slowly. Ran her fingernails very lightly over his cock, the method they both knew was infallible. Will had a brief, nightmarish image of a diagram of his balls, felt the ghost of anxiety and tenderness for his parts, the way the doctor had said: It’s nothing. I can do this procedure in my sleep—but Marion knew what she was doing, and after the first few kisses, when she slid her leg over his and he felt the heel of her shoe graze his calf, his body took over.

  Afterward, he said: “Jesus Christ.”

  “I think I might have been a hooker in a former life.”

  “Thank God for reincarnation.”

  Onscreen, two of the inmates were getting into an argument.

  “You know I said it was a selfless act?”

  “Yes?”

  She took his hand and slid it between her legs. She was wet.

  “It’s possible I lied about that.”

  Onscreen, a prison warden poured herself a cup of coffee.

  Will lifted Marion’s wrists above her head. Kissed her nude underarm.

  Stopped. Froze.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  “What is it? Is it your balls?”

  “Fuck,” Will repeated. He leaped off the bed.

  “Jesus, Will, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Stay there. Just … Holy shit.”

  He pulled on his discarded trousers and hurried downstairs. His laptop was on the couch in the living room. He could hear Marion coming down after him. He opened the screen and selected the footage from the Katherine Glass trial.

  “What are you doing?” Marion said from the doorway. She’d taken off the heels and thrown her pink terry cloth robe around herself.

  “Sorry,” Will said. “Just … I just … Just hang on a second.”

  He fast-forwarded. Backed up. Went forward again. The public gallery. Seconds. Two minutes. The faces he’d gotten sick of seeing, though he knew now why he hadn’t been able to leave it alone.

  43

  He called Valerie from his car. Voice mail.

  “Val, it’s Will. Listen, the footage of the Glass trial. I thought I was nuts, but it turns out I wasn’t. There’s a girl in the public gallery. She’s there every day. I cross-checked with the Bureau’s profiles of prison personnel and ran the names through DMV. Melody Lomax. White female, twenty-eight years old, no arrests, no priors. Check your in-box for the photo. She’s one of the guards who brought Katherine down to see us at Red Ridge. It’s six years on and she’s gained some weight, but it’s definitely her. No coincidence. Local blues say she’s not home and she didn’t show up at work today, but I’ve got an APB out and I’m driving up there now. Search warrant’s coming. She’s not far from Red Ridge, so call me back when you get this. Stay strong, kiddo.”

  It was after three A.M. when Will pulled up outside Melody Lomax’s bungalow on the outskirts of Garston, a small town of just over two thousand souls, ten miles west of Red Ridge prison. The homes here were plain, but solid enough: whitewashed exteriors and short, dusty front yards, some shingle, some grass. Blue-collar territory. There had been a steel plant, but it had shut down a decade ago. The place had the look of a struggle for reinvention, a community still trying to work out whether it was viable.

  The local sheriff’s deputy, Remmick, was waiting for him, a square-built young guy with a mustache that would have been at home on the face of a seventies porn actor. Will struggled to suppress his irritation: it’s a stakeout, moron. You don’t show up in a marked department car. Then he considered the size of the place. There was probably no alternative.

  “No sign?” Will asked.

  “Nope, nothing.”

  “You know anything about this girl?”

  “Never heard of her. What’d she do?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Will said. “They send the warrant?”

  “Sure did. Got it right here.”

  “Okay, can you move your car a couple of blocks over? If she shows…”

  Slight embarrassment from Remmick. “Oh, sure. Right. Yeah.”

  Assume the requisite information had been passed to Katherine by Melody Lomax. (So much for the genius code-breaker—although even thinking this Will had to concede the quality of Katherine’s performance.) Lomax would go down at the very least as a conspirator or accessory to murder, but the real prize, obviously, was whomever she was getting the information from. Face-to-face? Would he risk that? It galled Will to think of the hours that had gone into the bullshit with the material Katherine’s lover had sent. The whole fucking thing designed to get her into exactly the position she was in now. I’ll show you the location. Thank God Valerie wasn’t alone. Alone she’d be a sitting duck. McLuhan—Will had a vague respect for the agent’s grinding dedication, his apparently joyless commitment to getting through the work—wouldn’t go without a team. Valerie would’ve railed at the delay (as would Will, had it been Marion in Nick’s place), but McLuhan was dispassionate. It was too easy to mock the slaves to protocol. Times like this, you needed them. God bless you, Vic. Keep her alive. Keep her alive.

  But where were they now? And why hadn’t Valerie returned his call?

  The choice: wait and hope that Melody showed—or go in now?

  By the time Remmick returned, Will had made up his mind. However remote the possibility, it was conceivable Nick was being held here. A basement? Jesus fucking Christ.

  “Let’s go,” Will said. “Put on your gloves—and in any case, please don’t touch anything.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Under flashlight illumination Will picked the lock on the back door. The warrant allowed for forced entry, but he wanted their visit invisible if and when she came back. If she was in face-to-face contact with Katherine’s guy (Eugene? Jesus, could it really, seriously, be Eugene?) she’d be more valuable as the subject of a tail.

  The door opened straight into a small, untidy kitchen. Not quite a health hazard, but there were dishes stacked in the sink, unwashed pans on the stove, and a day-old pizza box on the Formica-topped table. The swing-top bin was at maximum capacity. Twenty-four hours more without a cleanup and the place would stop looking slovenly and start looking, officially, A Mess.

  Nothing exciting to report from the living room, nor the bathroom. Evidence said a quiet, glamourless single life (no shaving foam or male cosmetics), Home Depot clearance furnishings, and a TV two generations behind state-of-the-art. Incongruously, it seemed, a large reproduction canvas of a Spanish bullfighter, mid-kill. Will was no connoisseur, but it looked like a K-Mart compensation for a complete lack of taste. The first other room they tried was stacked with junk: cardboard boxes with old copies of lifestyle magazin
es, newspapers, battered shoes, clothes bagged as if for Goodwill, utility bills and credit card statements, a dressmaker’s dummy torso, a fish tank with neither water nor fish in it. A lug wrench.

  “Weird,” Remmick said. Will could feel the thrill coming off him. Small-town deputy. This was probably the most fun he’d had in years. He smelled of brutal alpine deodorant and a freshly starched shirt. Underneath, cinnamonish sweat, not unpleasant. Will imagined a loyal, pale, dreamy wife in flip-flops and a sundress at home in a house only a little ritzier than this one. An unreflective marriage, but not a violent or toxic one. Maybe even love, in an understated way. He was sensitive to love, these days.

  He opened the bedroom door. Nothing out of the ordinary in here, either. The same unloved and unlovely furnishings as throughout. The dark-green carpet didn’t go all the way to the baseboards. There were two bookcases, but they held ceramic ornaments—animal figurines, mostly—some of which looked homemade. Will went around the room. It was true: he didn’t know, exactly, what he was looking for. He thought of the countless times neighbors of crazy murderers said: Jeez, he just seemed like a totally normal guy. In this case, girl. Woman. She seemed like a totally ordinary young woman. Kept herself to herself, but, you know? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, right?

  There was no basement. Nor, as far as they could see, access to an attic space. The garage was empty, aside from more boxes of junk, a push lawn mower, and a half-dismantled vacuum cleaner.

  They were passing the bedroom on their way out when something caught Will’s eye. Something hard and black was protruding from under the mattress of the unmade bed. He swung the flashlight.

  “Hold on,” he said.

  It was a cloth-bound book. Which, when opened, revealed itself to be a journal. The handwriting was big and schoolgirlish.

  Will flicked to a random page. Remmick was at his shoulder. The kid’s body heat was close. Will scanned. Flicked another page. Read more. Something tonked in the air-conditioning.

  “Right,” Will said. “Holy fucking shit.”

  44

  It took too long. Any length of time was by definition too long. To his credit, McLuhan didn’t make her go through the obstacle course of persuading him. To his credit, he saw the logical necessities immediately, though it was plain from his face that they disgusted him. But he was immovable on the practicalities. It took more than two hours of scrambling: calls to the Bureau; the Justice Department; Warden Clayton, who’d dragged herself out of bed and driven over and had what was obviously a quiet but heated argument with him behind the closed door of her office. For Valerie the seconds and minutes were dry leaves consumed in a fire. Her body pounded, as if her soul were trying to escape. Every moment of her existence was a moment of Nick’s existence. The time it took for the wheels to turn was the same time it took Nick to survive whatever wheels were turning for him. What she wanted was to get Katherine alone and simply torture the information out of her. Her fantasy was a confusion of all the things she knew—now—she was capable of doing, and at the same time all the ways every one of them could betray her. Because the bottom line was that Katherine could send them on a wild-goose chase, tortured or not. Eat up more of the time Nick didn’t have. The corollary of that, of course, was that Katherine could be taking them on a wild-goose chase anyway, now, though it didn’t alter their obligation to go through with it. Again, that was Katherine: no choice. Or Sophie’s Choice. There was no escaping the possibility—likelihood, in fact—that she’d been planning for this moment from the start. And even that didn’t make a difference. Face value or not, the Katherine option was one they couldn’t afford not to take.

  It was after two thirty A.M. when everything was ready. McLuhan commandeered an armored prisoner transfer vehicle and called in a six-man SWAT team. Two local squad cars for escort. With them, Valerie, McLuhan, and Susanna Arden, weapons restored from the Red Ridge lockup. Between them the crew had enough firepower to take down a small fortress. Valerie was aware of some offstage conflict between Arden and McLuhan. She could guess why: Arden looked dead on her feet. Arden, apparently, prevailed.

  “No,” Katherine said, when she shambled out in her restraints between Valerie and McLuhan. “No chopper.” She had the road atlas clutched between her cuffed hands.

  “You’re not going in it,” Valerie said. “It’s escort only.”

  “Are you insane? He’ll hear it.”

  “Not your call,” McLuhan said.

  Katherine smiled. Took a moment to fill her nostrils with the night air. In spite of everything it made Valerie notice the scent of the land in the darkness and gave her a useless understanding of the earth’s indifference to human affairs. Billions had been born, lived, and died, sparks sucked into the infinite furnace, moments, glimpses, nothing. Her life. Nick’s. Everyone’s.

  “No chopper or no dice,” Katherine said. “And I’m not riding in that, either. I want a window to look out of.” The prisoner transfer van was, naturally, windowless but for the windshield, which was screened from the back by an armored plate. “Otherwise I might as well be in my cell.”

  “It’s not going to happen,” McLuhan said.

  “Yes, it is,” Katherine said sweetly. “And don’t make me add any more conditions, please. It’s not as if I couldn’t come up with a list. It’s been six years since I had a martini, for a start.”

  McLuhan took Valerie aside, out of Katherine’s earshot.

  “Just do it,” Valerie said. “There are cuff bolts in the squad car.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” McLuhan said. “Listen. The Bureau’s tracking my phone. Wherever we are, they’ll know. The chopper’s coming, whatever she says. He’ll hang back, but he’ll be there. Anything fucks up, I just want you to know the cavalry’s not far. Okay?”

  They put Katherine in the backseat of one of the squad cars and cuffed her restraints to the built-in bolt. Valerie slid in next to her. McLuhan and Arden up front, McLuhan behind the wheel. Everyone bar Katherine was equipped with headsets, channel open to the SWAT guys and second squad car.

  “Jesus,” Katherine said. “The smell of a car. Even a police car. Humble vinyl and stale coffee. Bliss. It might sound ridiculous but this is like cocaine to me. You free people take all this for granted. Everyone should go to prison, just once, if only to make them appreciate everything prison takes away.”

  “Just tell me where I’m going,” McLuhan said.

  Katherine opened the road atlas. “This is so exciting,” she said. “Get on the 101 and head north.”

  * * *

  They’d been on the road less than ten minutes when Katherine said: “Okay, now stay on this all the way to Santa Rosa. I’ll tell you what to do when we get there.” She turned to Valerie. “This might be the time,” she said.

  “The time for what?”

  “For the other thing I wanted to discuss with you.”

  “We already discussed that.”

  “No, remember my words: one of the things, I said. There are several. In fact the truth is I can’t imagine there’s much it wouldn’t be worth my while to discuss with you. You underestimate the richness of your mind, Valerie.”

  She nudged the side of Valerie’s thigh with her own. Valerie couldn’t stop the reflex to pull away.

  Katherine laughed. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, jangling her restraints. “Don’t fret. I can hardly jump on you, can I?”

  Valerie forced herself to suppress a shudder. “All right, what is it?”

  “Look at me,” Katherine said. “I need you to see my face so you’ll know I’m not lying.”

  Valerie turned in her seat. The freeway lights went over both of them in rhythmic stripes. Katherine’s eyes were clear and bright.

  “Nineteen years ago,” Katherine said, “when I was a mere slip of a girl of nineteen, I went to a party in San Diego. Hillcrest, in fact. Hipsters, mainly, even though I don’t recall that word being much used back then. Anyway, having not yet shed the skin of woeful cli
ché, I was dating the bass guitarist of a band called—if you can believe this—the Grits. A very sweet boy, almost as pretty as me, but drearily conventional in the boudoir. Well, as you can imagine, he was on borrowed time from day one.”

  Valerie glanced up front and caught McLuhan’s eyes checking her in the rearview. Katherine had lowered her voice, but she still wondered how much of this he was hearing. Instinctively, she didn’t want him to hear any of it.

  “At the party,” Katherine continued, “I met a guy, a different guy. Handsome rather than pretty. The chemistry was instant. He was understated. Like a cowboy, so good with a gun he doesn’t have to say much. A little older than me, I guessed, but that only added to his appeal. He played it awfully cool, but you know, I was, well, me. As you pointed out: my only gift. I was used to guys foaming at the mouth if I so much as glanced at them. Every consummate skill is in danger of disgusting the person to whom it belongs. There must’ve been times, don’t you think, when Robin Hood, nauseated at yet another bull’s-eye, felt like breaking his bow over Friar Tuck’s head. I digress. The point is, in spite of cowboy’s admirable laconicism it was obvious he wanted me. You know how that is. I don’t imagine there have been any men you’ve wanted that you haven’t had?”

  Definitely a question. Valerie didn’t answer—though for a moment she couldn’t stop herself from looking away. A road sign loomed up: SANTA ROSA 3 MILES.

  “Look at me,” Katherine repeated.

  “Get on with it then,” Valerie said, not merely looking at Katherine but staring into her eyes. This time, Katherine looked away.

  “God, Valerie, you’re fierce. I so much wish we’d met under different circumstances.”

  “We still good?” McLuhan called over his shoulder.

  “Yes,” Katherine said, leaning forward as far as the restraints allowed. “Another ten miles at least. Then the exit to Geyserville.”

  She sat back in her seat. “So,” she went on in a lowered voice, “I sought out my bass player and told him I had no further use for him. I know that sounds harsh, but to be honest he was lucky I bothered. I was, I repeat, very young. It’s extraordinary to me now how long my social decencies endured. I wasn’t even particularly promiscuous. I barely ever outright cheated on anyone. Relative to my nature I was practically a nun!” Katherine smiled, as with incredulous but fond reminiscence. “I didn’t waste any time after that. I took cowboy to one of the lockable bedrooms. It was strange. He had depth. I wasn’t entirely sure how to be, you know? Which of the many masks to put on? Slut? Naughty girl? Princess? Trembling innocent? Hyperventilating romantic? I had the full gallery of faces, the comprehensive range of personae—but unlike every other man I’d ever been with his desire was opaque. I was used to being able to turn on a dime, but—rather maddeningly to me at the time—he seemed not to be wearing his preferences on his sleeve. Fuck, that’s two hackneyed idioms in one sentence. I’m sorry. This is what comes of having a prison library full of bad books. One’s narrative style suffers. But then one wouldn’t expect Nadia Comaneci to launch straight into her uneven bars routine after doing nothing but cartwheels for six years.”