THE LADY KILLER: intense, suspenseful, gripping literary fiction

by LEE OLDS

  “So, that’s it,” she told him, “you son-of-a-bitch. Why you know when the cook heard what you did to me he was making soup and he started crying. Tears in the soup. This time they were for real. And all because he loved me and wanted me to be happy. He knew for the first time in my life I’d found one of my own. And my son hates you. He knows what you did to me. Perhaps it’s better you don’t come back. And he’s not the only one out there. You’re really not wanted at the beach anymore. They all … for what you’ve done to me.” She, of course, had reversed herself a hundred and eighty degrees in just a few minutes.

  She then broke down crying and in her delirium didn’t seem to be able to move. Her entire body was shaking. Hartwig said he had to help her to her car, which he gallantly did, through the gauntlet of crooks, dealers and reprobates that lived there. When she finally calmed down enough to stick the key in the ignition and start the thing Hartwig said politely, but very impersonally, with his dog jumping up beside him,

  “You sure you’ll be able to drive OK?”

  “And if I weren’t?” She snapped to the alert, “what’d it mean to you? I could run off a cliff and you wouldn’t care.”

  And with that last utterance she drove out of the dirt parking lot leaving him in the dust. It was hard to tell whether she was through with him at that point though, I believe, she’d at least gathered enough resistance to make the attempt. Thinking of Hartwig as a good for nothing con artist certainly helped. And whether literally true or not, sometimes it’s good to make the non sequitur out as a blackguard as long as it helps you forget them. She drove back to the beach that time. I believe she was intent on staying there. On the other hand, without Hartwig, the beach had lost its charm. The sunsets, the open air, the walks at night, those sorts of things.

  “So,” said Hammond “What’d she do then?”

  What does any jilted woman with a fertile imagination and an unlimited memory, though without the good sense to know how to use it, do? She searches for the real reason for her failed affair and that usually points to someone else, a rival. In this case, of course, she didn’t have far to look. That demon could only be Gloria, who with the approbation of Hartwig’s mother, who’d outright thrown her out of her house, was now living with her. That was most certainly the move Hartwig was about to make and why he was going to sell his houseboat. He hadn’t told her that prior. This was the first time she’d heard about it. Maybe he’d been using her all the time or at least temporarily. That she was willing to forgive. But behaving like that while all the time he loved the other, she found herself unable to forgive. She not only hated him for that but also the beautiful young, brilliant woman in whom Hartwig’s disinterest should’ve been suspect. Quite frankly she’d gone a little daffy (daffier) at her, what she still considered to be a retrievable, loan.

  “How could I ever been such a fool,” she babbled to the chanting of the waves as she paced her beach house living room floor in her bare feet staring every now and then up at Hartwig’s painting over the fireplace mantle. She’d actually had Edie Wilson do that of him. One afternoon she’d been able to overcome his resistance and send him up to her friend’s studio. He’d come back with that wrapped in a package.

  “See that you remember it,” she’d chided him. “Now I have you just as your mother still has your father. Let’s just hope I come away with more pleasant memories.”

  And, of course, she hadn’t. That much was clear. She was not only angry but suicidal for rejection can sometimes put the deepest feelers into that state. I imagine she was thinking of ways to do it. Most people do at one time or another as a mental exercise if nothing else, whether they ever seriously contemplate the actual deed itself. I mean this ordinarily gregarious soul who was known out there as the outgoing idiot, was really down. The mood solidified her personality actually, gave it some balance though no one saw it that way.

  She’d begun to shun her neighbors with curt insulting remarks and had all but driven her son out of the house with her recriminations.

  “All this sounds well and good,” said Hammond. “But what if Dracula or whatever his name is hadn’t shown up that night? Wouldn’t those two be honeymooning or whatever in Europe, which is all she really wanted anyhow wasn’t it? Even if he’d come with the dame did that mean there was an actual conspiracy afoot? It just doesn’t wash. Why, ever since this story began Hartwig’d been trying to rid himself of the beauty because he didn’t love her. Why he doesn’t love anyone except perhaps his dog if he even loves him.”

  “Of course,” I replied, “what you say is all very well true but you try to tell that to a woman who’s just been left in the lurch for no particular reason she can understand.” She’ll make up one as sure as anything and the more complicated the mind, the more sophisticated the reason. Not that I’m giving the socialite a phi beta kappa image. But she had an imagination and she decided to go with it. There was no reason, of course, except that Hartwig was tired of the entire scene. It’d become just irritating enough for him to stay away from her and he had.

  Why Christ! She planned all sorts of things. Whether she could get him back or not she wasn’t going to make it easy on him. She even called some of her own legal connections in the city to make sure Gloria was employed properly in the mother’s office. And if not to see to it she was dismissed, sent back to the hick town of her birth, Santa Cruz. I don’t know what substance that had but she also knew people who’d beat the young woman up for a price; force her out of town if need be and she was thinking of contacting them. She really had it bad though the one thing she didn’t want to do was hurt Hartwig.

  “You’re kidding,” said Hammond, “I, why I’d hire a hit man on him myself in a minute if I was her. He’d be the one to go.”

  “I agree,” I claimed, “but then she’d have nothing, no trophy to hang on her wall and wouldn’t have until she found another.”

  The last thing some persons want to do is kill the unrequited love object, for then what do you have, though some persons do that too, so no one else’ll have the privilege of gaining their favor. Of course, she might not find someone else right away either for even you’ll have to admit Hartwig was a unique sort of individual with well-rounded talents. At least from a lady’s standpoint.” Hammond sat there shaking his head.

  “The good news,” I said, “was that none of her destructive fantasies got a chance to develop or take place. And that, of course, was the bad news. Or the walking entity that prevented this was bad news.”

  “Really, what or who was that?” Said Hammond.

  None other than Brochowitz, who else. Remember when this whole thing started. I said he had four months until his release, well they were up and he had been set free. Despite Sandy’s consternation over Hartwig don’t think she wasn’t aware of it either. Matter of fact she’d been dreading it and that was one of the reasons she didn’t want to be in the county when he was. She knew he’d come after her. He always did since the madman had built her up as the surrogate mother he could not only wreak his vengeance on but also love if that makes sense. If it doesn’t to you or I it must to a madman like Brochowitz for that’s just the way it was with him and no amount of catharsis could erase it, it had become so deeply etched. And then if he did come looking for her what’d she tell him.

  “You mean nothing to me anymore, I can’t even see you standing there the other’s so strong in my mind. I’m in love and it’s not with you.”

  “You tell some homicidal nut something like that and if the opportunity’s right, he’ll (or she’ll) kill you.” I stood up.

  “And,” said Hammond, “that’s exactly what happened wasn’t it? She got done in by the madman. You told me that at the beginning of this story and I remembered it.”

  Let’s just say after a knock on the door one afternoon she soon had plenty of reason to drop Hartwig as her first priority and it turned out to be not of her choice either, a very unpleasant state of affairs the like of which, however, as human
beings we seem to be thrust into with enough frightening regularity as if to make out fate, or whatever it is, to be definitely against us. An argument nonetheless that the pundits have been equivocal about for centuries as they tend to favor the more positive sorts of experience to the neglect of the more prominent one. And you can’t blame them. We all want what’s best. For us, for life, for the world. It’s just that this wasn’t very pleasant.

  Chapter Nineteen

  And by the time Brochowitz got around to Sandy to ask her for the real love in his life, his little Dachshund, Shotzee, Brochowitz was no happy camper himself. Though he’d been in a halfway house, a minimum security facility, which treated the troubled like he was, and where Sandy, his one real (I won’t say normal) link to life visited him ritually by the week, which kept his hopes (for something); sanity (whatever that was, a return to normalcy?) alive. Naturally, as her relation with Hartwig developed she stopped those visits, which in effect put a damper on the curative effect of his therapy right there.

  Though she did phone him several times, the neglect led him to doubt the one person in life, who he’d relied on the most. And believe me when you’re out there that’s really something. You or I wouldn’t have any problem with it but we’d never let ourselves depend on one person so thoroughly so that their withdrawal would appear like the end of our life. Imagine you or I losing a daughter or son. It’d be difficult but not impossible to get over. For Brochowitz, never, and Sandy was merely his lover confidante.

  He’d been schooled on a new way to focus on life, drilled into him during those four months I’m sure. But what were they trying to convince him of. Go out, get a job, take a wife, have children, go to war, defend your country? Why this man’s entire life had been nothing more than one large psychotic episode. He took that drug that the Swiss so fortuitously discovered almost like it was water. His inner core was so raw almost any other male he encountered that he couldn’t completely dominate he wanted to kill. Any woman too who might not want him. Those that did he beat up as objects of abuse. No, Hammond normal to him just wasn’t normal to us. The Manicheans were right, if there’s any God at all; there are two not just one, a God of light and a God of darkness. Brochowitz was just born under the dark star. The magnetism of his personality pulled him that way.

  Why in the nuthouse itself, a lovely facility with an outdoor pool, gourmet meals served three times a day, your own unpadded room with bathroom facilities and TV, a complete fitness center, you’d’ve thought the inmate could do nothing else but be happy; get along. But Brochowitz couldn’t. He picked fights. He dressed his fellows down with his evil stares. He, why even in there they were afraid of him. While about Hartwig’s height, this man was far more muscular, a virtual mesomorph from lifting weights all day and working on his abs, you know, U.S.T.V? Do your abs every morning. Well this kid overdid them believe me. He came out of there with the physique of Charles Atlas and the same dark tan as him too, from sunning himself at the pool every day. I mean he emerged from there as every American wants to be, a virtual God. Except for that one damn thing, his brain. You couldn’t unwire that evidently and consequently you couldn’t rewire it.

  “So,” said Hammond. “How’d they control him if he was so intractable?”

  “Lithium, generics, whatever the current drug they treated those sorts with to calm them down.”

  Unfortunately in most cases that’s all they do, calm them down. Once the patient stops, of course, they’re off and running, trying to reach the wire of their twisted destinies. You know we all don’t have benign ones. You only have to look at history to make that observation. It should tell us something Sometimes it doesn’t seem to. No, most of the time it doesn’t.

  Why when Brochowitz was released with his one bag of clothes he’d come in with, and stood at the bus stop waiting it’s a wonder a producer didn’t drive by in a Cadillac, stop and say,

  “Son, you should be in the movies. Come with me I can make you a star. Hop in.”

  And the man’d go off to stardom. But this wasn’t the movies and those weren’t the way things happen in real life. No, Brochowitz had all of two hundred dollars in his pocket, payoff money, a host of prescriptions for the free drugs he’d been schooled to take, probably his only real schooling for the four months. The gates, actually a classic oaken door, had been shut behind him. The maple tree above him that had showered the road with its fall leaves signified his freedom and he boarded the bus only to receive the hostile looks of twenty-four or five people on board simply because they were strangers to him, people he’d never seen before and his own paranoia defined them as enemies. Not potential enemies, enemies fair and square. Nothing now, of course, because of his medication. Mere zips in a world of zips. And so he rides off, not into the sunset, but through the gates of hell.

  “Well yes,” said Hammond. “Once he stops taking his medicine.”

  “But that’s the whole point,” I claimed, “how can you let someone like that out who you know is bonkers and rely upon them to keep taking their medicine. Why any street distraction like a dose or two of acid will prevent that. Your tranquilizers go up in smoke alongside the mysterious world of hallucinations, which for all anyone knows are quite possibly man’s only real nirvana. Some certainly think that way. Some of the saints in fact.”

  And the first thing Brochowitz did actually wasn’t too bad and might’ve been in the right direction if there is any for those sorts outside of permanent housing, prolonged rehab and vocational training none of which the state decides it can afford. After reaching Sausalito, a place Brochowitz knew he wasn’t wanted he caught the bus directly to Salinas where he figured he could hook up with the reverend Bosworth, who let the homeless sleep in the pews at night. At least he’d have a place to stay. He was very aware of that and that a motel cost a hundred dollars a night, the fee for which he had all of two nights in his pocket. Yes, it’d be there for a week or two to become integrated back into the area, then off to Oceanview to see Sandy and pick up his dog. A mere hop, step and a jump across the lagoon. Then, perhaps, off to Santa Monica where there was a facility for people like him.

  Of course the man was so sociopathic his reentry into society lasted no more than several days rather than two weeks. Bosworth’d received him all right, said several prayers for him in his actual presence … do priests really do anything more for their worshippers … and gave him some stern guidance, Bosworth guidance if you like.

  “What do you think about love towards your fellow man?” He’d said to the psychopathic waif. “Isn’t it the right path to follow? Far better than despising him? You’ll be far happier and more at peace with yourself, won’t you?”

  Brochowitz, naturally, looked at the blond haired priest with diabolic self-righteousness before answering in his own Machiavellian fashion.

  “You’re right, reverend,” he’d glossed the advice over. “If anyone’s in a position to know it’s you. No one else takes the homeless in out there.”

  In other words he’d discounted the advice (who wouldn’t the interrogative mode) and managed to change the subject. As Brochowitz built up all the good things the priest was doing for the community the priest actually gained confidence from his most needy subject hence coming to feel better about himself as the spotless easily do upon compliments from the most blameworthy. The two even took a walk along the beach where they talked about old times when the sand spit had virtually been a tent community of the displaced before the more affluent townspeople had declared them too much trouble and put a moratorium on camping.

  “Yes,” said Bosworth. “People believe things are getting tighter but I still have the building.” It was never he believed things were getting tighter, just someone did. The building he was referring to, naturally, was the little chapel.

  “And your wife Tilda makes the best apple pie around.”

  “Do you like it?” Bosworth, the doubter, looked at the harsh countenance of his adversary, wasn’t it, for what else are
worshippers when compared to priests who are competing to see who can be the most sanctimonious before someone they look upon as God? A figure no normal person has ever seen or touched.

  The two walked back to the little chapel of St. Aidan’s and Brochowitz, bare chested, wearing cut offs and sandals, Adonis, returned to the beach where he sat by himself, naturally, for he was a loner if there ever had been and still was. Several groups of the homeless sat fifty yards or so from him. They’d broken out a case of beer and were drinking and cheering the oncoming waves.

  “I … I would’ve thought Brochowitz’d been right there on that account,” said Hammond.

  “To the contrary,” I told him. “Brochowitz didn’t drink a sip of alcohol and although he did indulge in the more potent stimulants such as hash or acid he considered drinking a common man’s habit. He, in other words, as he sat in the sand reading the porno mags he’d bought before he’d come over the hill, considered himself an elitist compared to those who shared his plight. He was extremely sensitive about anything you said to him that might be considered derogatory. He did not possess the shield most people put up to brush off ridicule.

  And even though at that juncture he was still taking his medicine and acted lambishly (for him). He wasn’t cut out to be a wanderer with no real place to stay or roof over his head among a throng of bums who only talked of their shallow self interests and where their next fix was going to come from. And what more natural for a man like that who feels so out of place in his surroundings, to dream of better ones he’s had before.

  So after an argument he’d had with one of the Salinas hangers on, Brochowitz picked up his bag from the priest’s unlocked storage room and without saying a thing to him or his wife (or anyone else) he simply hit the road for Oceanview where, of course, whether he approached his earth mother Sandy or not, he knew he’d at least feel comfortable in her vicinity much like a fledgling in its nest. It’s always nice knowing someone who has money and might be sympathetic to your situation.