THE LADY KILLER: intense, suspenseful, gripping literary fiction

by LEE OLDS

  And though having spent far more time in the sophisticated beach town than in Salinas, Brochowitz was obviously better known there. His reappearance like the gadfly Barney’s had stirred the residents with open alarm. One thought of Paul Revere riding his horse as the news spread from the grocery store where he’d stopped to buy some of his favorite food, yogurt, to the fire station to the bar crowd, which he never intermingled with but that knew him, the shops along the highway and even to the little grade school, which had finally hired the carpenter. His arrival hovered over the beach like the buzz of the many-eyed rumor as she spread her earthly gossip.

  The sloth or swamp people as they were called, would have nothing to do with Brochowitz and matter of fact had threatened him if he didn’t give them a clear berth which, of course, he did, for like all bullies or people who make their way by brute force, he was a coward at heart. And that’s true whether those characters are willing to die unflinchingly for their peculiar characteristics or not for dominance by fear implies the notion even if they don’t invariably back down before a superior force. You don’t have to be a begging, quailing fool to be a coward. All tyrants in fact are.

  Brochowitz, of course, knew exactly where he was, what he was doing and how to make an approach. He wasn’t unfriendly, just horrifying in his Godlike fashion. He knew he wasn’t popular. It flattered his vanity. He wasn’t anyplace he went for his inbuilt aggression gave him the appearance of a wounded animal that has nothing to lose so he charges. Fear turns to violence almost automatically like in fact they’re one and the same thing.

  That afternoon Brochowitz found the one friend he could count on. This was Simi the Hawaiian a beach bum, who drank most of the time between his odd jobs, lay on the beach and swam the rest. Simi was another loner by choice. It wasn’t that he hated people like Brochowitz. Matter of fact he loved them. He was lonely for the islands, ‘his islands’ as he called them, and the constant longing to get back to them. He just could never put together the fare. Every time he got a start he drank up the money.

  He’d met Brochowitz some time ago at the beach and he also knew Sandy whom he liked. He really hadn’t known anything about her and Brochowitz’s quarrel only that Brochowitz’d been put away. And … here he was again walking down the beach with his suitcase.

  Simi jumped up smiling his wide moon face lit up like a pumpkin’s, for he didn’t have many real friends and this was someone he’d gotten close to. Who knows why they got along?

  “Jeff,” he said as the two hugged. “How’ve you been?’ The two men broke apart and stood looking one another over.

  “Pretty good,” said Brochowitz. “Just passing through.” He knew Simi’d be good for a night or two in his trailer. You didn’t want to say to him, ‘I’m here to stay. Back from the honor farm, moved to paradise forever’. Then Simi might not offer a bed for a couple of nights.

  “Obviously not,” said Hammond who didn’t know a thing about it. “For that’s not what he came for. He was out after the rich girl.”

  “He was and he wasn’t,” I said.

  Brochowitz was also pretty well known in the beach town of Santa Monica way further south where he’d found residence in a large apartment complex there for the mentally disturbed right on the beach. He liked the beach, the beach and the sun. I believe that was his ultimate destination. He just meant to stop by the socialite’s to retrieve his dog before moving on. Simi’s little trailer, which was parked on a side street near the swamp was the perfect hideaway en passant so to speak. And the man was calm, deathly calm, for he was still on his medication and hopefully’d never go off it. But still, what sort of justice system lets a person like that out on the loose with the trust he’ll take his medicine. No sane one I can assure you, that administers its justice by the amount of money available to do so.

  Sandy, of course, knew the madman was back in town. Although she hadn’t seen him she’d been informed. Matter of fact her son, the aspirant race car driver had told her.

  “You know who’s back in town,” he said curtly. “If he comes into this house once I’m leaving. Just remember that.” For the kid still saw all too well not only how the maniac’d all but strangled his mother, but how they’d shared her bedroom for all that time.

  “He won’t, I promise,” Sandy reassured her son.

  And you know I don’t believe she ever would’ve let him in the house again either. Mainly because of Hartwig who, though he was no longer there to defend her, still preoccupied almost all her waking thoughts and some of her dreams. She knew, of course, she had the little dachshund and that her ex would come for that. She kept it penned on the deck hoping Brochowitz’d come and fetch it so she wouldn’t have to see him; then he’d leave the area. She was sincerely desirous of that. She made certain she locked all her doors and was even thinking of staying in Sausalito and leaving the dog with her son to return to her ex until such a time Brochowitz’d move on. She figured she knew his habits well. This beach was in fact too cold for him.

  But you know how pets can grow on people. They become symbols of everything they stand for. Sure Brochowitz loved his dog but it also in reality constituted the only tie he had to her, the only real tie he’d ever had with any woman in his life. And that’d been nirvana. It, the tiny dachshund, in other words was merely an excuse to once again worm his way back into her presence. He felt it was certainly plausible. As Sandy’d heard of his arrival, Brochowitz had been informed of her relation with Hartwig. He’d respected it for he respected Hartwig and didn’t want any trouble with him. He’d also discovered she and Hartwig’d broken up. Simi’d told him that. Few people in that tiny beach town knew more about the goings on in it than Simi.

  Then one morning as the fog’d rolled back to hover just off the beach like a massive wave about to explode, Sandy, following her daily exercise routine on TV in the high raftered living room, heard a knock on the door – couldn’t be sure, could’ve been the wind rattling it – then the knocker went down again this time a little louder.

  She laid her dumbbells on the couch, went to the peephole and opened it. There, of course, she saw the face of Adonis, the most beautiful she’d ever seen with its curly chestnut hair, Greco like features and the hidden physique that she knew and remembered all too well because of the sheer terror and passion it had inspired in her.

  “So,” said Hammond “Did she let him in? Something had to happen.”

  “No,” I said. “This time she merely opened the door a crack.”

  All the while, of course, she was shaking. Shaking from what one might ask, as she looked the man up and down, desire or fear or a combination of both? You know how close the romantics claim the two states are related. Well, believe me, the more I think about it these two were a pair. Definitely more so than she and Hartwig. They deserved one another and to die in one another’s arms. Hartwig was simply too nice a guy for her. Some women are really moved by the evil persona. None other’ll really get them off. But then pairs don’t always match despite the definition.

  “It’s me,” said the stolid voice of the shaggy shirted visitor with the perfect tan. “I’ve come to get my dog.”

  “I … I can see that,” said a pleasant looking woman who held something on a leash behind her, but was soon passing it out to her visitor as along came the tiny dog. Then…

  “I … I really can’t have you in, you understand,” she said to her musky visitor whose odor’d been one of her greatest attractions to him. Pheromones are no lie. They work in the animal kingdom. They work in ours. “I wish I could but you…” Was she wavering already? Or merely reeking of betrayal?

  “Of course you can’t,” said the proper mannered Brochowitz. “I wouldn’t expect it.”

  They sounded like two school children rehearsing a soap opera but the meeting worked. The socialite’d shut the door unharmed, the dog had been delivered to its rightful owner, who’d now leave town. Mission accomplished.

  Sandy’d even had several of her friend
s over to celebrate the ‘returning of the dog’, for she thought once the madman had his dog that’d surfeit his emotions when, of course, it just whetted them and it was her he really wanted. The dog be damned. He’d slit its throat if he had to. He’d threatened that many times too, evidently, but what does a dog do even if it can understand its tormentor. It runs away if it can, but go to the police, never, for that’s a man-made panacea, which dogs don’t have. They’re not human enough.

  Among the others, who’d heard of Brochowitz’s return, of course, was Hartwig for news seemed to fly as fast across the mountain as it did along the beach. He, of course, remembering part of his original intent for taking up with the heiress was to save her from the madman if he ever reappeared, took it upon himself to intervene in the situation even though he’d broken up with the socialite and didn’t want any more to do with her. Now I thought that was noble.

  “Sir Gawain?” Said Hammond proudly.

  “Sort of,” I replied, “but as usual in those cases the aspirant hero makes things worse than they really are. I believe that’s what happened here.”

  “How so? Impossible!”

  “No, Hartwig drove straight out to the beach looking for Brochowitz too. He found him with his dog in his lap sitting at one of the outdoor tables of the Sea Witch deli eating a Ruben sandwich. Hartwig went right up to him.”

  “Really,” said Hammond, “what’d he say?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “at least not to his rival. He did tell the dog, however,

  “How can such a nice doggie have such a cruel master? He’d better not ever harm a hair on its head.” He then patted the dog that, of course, recognized him for the two’d been virtually together the last four months ever since Brochowitz had been put away. And though Brochowitz said nothing in reply, but merely glanced at Hartwig with his menacing war God stare, Hartwig said he believed Jeff got the message. If he ever harmed a hair on Sandy’s head it’d be all over for him. Hartwig’d track him down and make him pay the consequences.

  “So much for heroes,” said Hammond.

  “So much for heroes,” I threw up my hands. “If they’re on the spot it might be one thing. If they’re not it’s certainly another.”

  All I can see Hartwig’s tacit threat did was to inspire the madman to defy the dictum all the more, which, in fact, he ultimately did. We, of course, were all waiting. Hoping he’d head south and that’d be the end of it. Those sorts of wishes unfortunately are seldom fulfilled where compulsive persons are involved. You just don’t know how impassioned they are. That’s the main reason you can seldom stop them.

  There were other issues too and not just at the beach. Just after Gloria’d moved to the city, her friend and confidante, Barth, the older ex New York newspaperman, got real sick. He’d swallowed so much blood his bowels declined to work. He became constipated, couldn’t take in nutrition so that he actually became too weak to eat. He could hold the food up to his mouth on a fork or spoon and even put it in. It was just that he couldn’t chew or swallow. He spit the stuff up until, with Gloria no longer there to clean up after him, the nice place with the bay view came to smell like a sewer.

  “And you know,” I said to Hammond, “even in that state the old bastard managed to climb into his car, drive across the Golden Gate bridge and out to the hospital in the presidio where, after parking, he fell out of it in his bathrobe half drunk.”

  He was really wanting to live and save himself at that point. Luckily a nearby visitor, who’d observed the wobbly figure called the attendants, who immediately arrived and hoisted him into the emergency room on a stretcher. Here the first thing they did, of course, was to pump his stomach and clean him out so he could take in nutrition though at that point he needed far more than that for his tumor had not only returned, causing a major blockage of the area, but like wildfire it had metastasized to his liver. After receiving three quarts of blood, an IV and some sedation they finally got him stabilized.

  “How’re you feeling?” said the doctor.

  “Good enough to call my girlfriend,” for the old soldier displayed his cell phone, which one of the orderlies had fetched from his car.

  “You’d better let that wait for a while,” and the doctor, taking the device, set it on his night table.

  “So,” said Barth who looked like the terrible shape he was in. From drinking and just dissipating in general on top of being moribund. “What’s the verdict doc? I really want to know.” The physician, an old army man himself, being open-minded told him.

  “If you really want to know …” And he began a full discourse on Barth’s condition. There was chemo and surgery along with hormones, all the very things Barth’d sworn he’d never undergo again. And the most any could do now was to prolong the inevitable just a little longer. Before the doctor was through, however, Barth stopped him.

  “That’s … that’s enough,” said the miserable creature. “That concludes the deal. I want a lot of downers.” A faint smile crossed the newspaperman’s lips.

  “Deal, what deal? Said the doctor sensing some sort of self-pact.

  “That,” said Barth, “is my secret, doctor, see you in hell.”

  And after a few minutes the doctor left. He thought he knew what the man was saying but found that was impossible. No one in the hospital would allow that sort of thing. A few states had adopted euthanasia but this wasn’t one of them. And at the hall desk he stopped and told the nurse to keep a close watch on twenty-one hundred five. Not to leave any pill bottles near him.

  Barth, of course, as in all those cases where you know something the other doesn’t did have a complete plan in the event something proved to be so terminal for him and evidently he took life from it. He certainly wasn’t telling the doctor. And it had nothing to do with the hospital. That’d merely been his smokescreen, a final sort of braggadocio that was he. Unafraid as always. On the other hand scared to death.

  “Life from it? You mean from his own death?” Said Hammond. “That’s impossible. Why the very contra … the very contra… And fooling the doctor?” He was shaking his head.

  “Not so impossible it would seem,” I said, “if from that minute on every fiber of your body puts forth an effort to execute that plan.”

  And at his stage that takes an awful lot of energy, life-giving energy. He, in other words, had begun conniving how to get out of there and back to his apartment even though he was virtually bedridden. Probably from the very day he’d been admitted. He knew he could never drive the way he was even though he’d made it over there. But he had his phone, that was his key, and he had his system or plan. Whether it was tomorrow or the next day whenever he got well enough to walk, walk he would, right out of there. He’d seen the layout before he’d been a patient. Let’s just say he’d cased the joint though the terminology usually applies to a prison one’s attempting to escape or a bank one intends to rob. But with him that’s what it was. The hospital (especially after his prognosis) represented a prison, his apartment freedom. You see …

  “Freedom,” Hammond stopped me angrily, “to do what? Take one’s own life like he’d threatened before? Certainly sounds like a strange sort of freedom to me. Like the sort Kafka found in his own stories.” I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Not everything’s so democratic if anything is,” was the only response I could think to make. Several days later, when the old codger phoned Gloria at her office, guess what he said to her in a victorious tone of voice.

  “I’m at home. My car’s at the hospital. Door’s open. Keys are under the seat. Can you please drive it here?”

  “Jeff,” she answered in disbelief for she hadn’t heard about his newest development.

  He still owed her the money he claimed he’d pay her and now ironically she needed it. She decided she needed some electronic equipment for work. Stuff she’d never ask Sylvia for. “What’re you doing there if your car’s at the hospital?” Her mind clicked as he gradually painted the picture. He didn’t want to tell her
about his clothes and camcorder that he’d left in his room fearing to have her try and fetch them’d be too complicated.

  After divesting himself of the paraphernalia attached to him, he’d snuck out of the hospital that very morning as the nurses were changing shifts. The service elevator was at the end of the hall. He’d caught a ride down with one of the janitors who was carrying a mop bucket. He was still wearing his robe and slippers so even as he passed the front desk and approached the door to his freedom he didn’t seem to be going anywhere. He was shuffling about harmlessly like and old fuddy duddy might in fact do.

  “Just to look,” he told an orderly who’d approached him, “for my people you know.” Then he’d winked indignantly. “They’re coming to visit.”

  The man smiled and walked away. Patients and visitors walked around the hospital constantly. That, of course, was when Barth made his break for it. He saw the cab approach in front, assumed it was his. He’d tripped the electronic eye of the door and staggered down the steps as the cabbie let him in. The man in his yellow hat and black suit obviously didn’t know this was an escapee. That it was against the law to leave the hospital without being formally discharged. He didn’t know Barth from Adam as he plopped down in the back seat and gave the driver instructions. While driving away Barth turned and noticed a commotion on the steps. Someone was pointing to his cab. His heart might’ve beat a little faster but several blocks away he relaxed. To take him back now they’d have to fight him and he’d probably die from that. Then what were they going to do, send a police car after him? After all a man’s life was his own business; yet everyone else seemed to think it was theirs. That he should live the way they chose. How wrong they were. Who or what was a hospital to keep a man against his will? He was now in his apartment obviously drunk.

  “Will you do that? Please bring my car?” He reiterated to Gloria over the phone. “And I have something for you. It’s right here in my hand.” She could visualize him standing before their sacred window. She also, of course, could visualize the money. His annuity must’ve come through. She needed it but she was more concerned about him.