A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

Someone approached Hope from behind, grabbed her by the hair, and pulled her away from the sofa. He wrapped her arms behind her back and spun her around, facing the fireplace. In that instant, when she let go of Bill’s shoulders, Hope heard a heavy thud.

  The man holding her arms thrust them out in front of her, “Look at all the blood. See all that blood. He’s dead. He’s dead.” In the pale firelight, Hope could see that her arms and hands were covered with blood.

  She began to vomit. She ran for the bathroom and the man ran after her, tearing at her clothes. The blouse she had unbuttoned when she lay down came off as she ran. In the bathroom, she fell to her knees and groped in the darkness for the toilet bowl, vomiting and gagging.

  “Get into the bedroom,” the man said, grabbing at her.

  “Leave me alone,” Hope gasped. “I’m going to choke to death.”

  She felt heavy arms around her. She grabbed a towel and jammed it up against her mouth as the man half-dragged, half-carried her into the bedroom, bumping her into the walls along the way. He hurled her onto the bed nearest the window, the bed she’d been sleeping in. “I don’t need a gun to kill you,” he said. “I could crack your neck with one hand.” And he put his hand around her neck. She heard a thunking sound, then she felt his body pressing on hers. He was wearing some kind of sweater, nothing else. Hope lay perfectly still, very passive, as he raped her. Bill is not dead, Bill is not dead, she was thinking. Bill is just unconscious. When this man is finished raping me, he’ll leave, and then I can help Bill.

  The man was kissing her wildly, violently, all over her hair and neck, on her breasts and all over her body, rubbing her, grabbing at her all over, as though he had a hundred hands. “If you make this enough fun for me,” he growled in a deep, rasping voice, “maybe I won’t kill you.” He kept kissing her, jamming his mouth against hers, forcing her mouth open.

  Suddenly he got up; she could hear him thrashing around the room in the darkness.

  “I heard you are a real party girl, a real swinger,” he said harshly. “I heard you can do all kinds of interesting things, and that oral is your specialty.”

  “No, no, no,” Hope moaned. “Leave me alone. I can’t do anything, leave me alone.”

  Then he was on top of her again, kissing her, rubbing her. “And I can do anything,” he said. “What would you like me to do? Do you like oral sex? Anal sex?”

  “No, no, no,” Hope kept moaning. “I don’t want to do anything. I can’t do anything. Leave me alone.” Muttering and breathing hard, the man raped her again. “You’re hurting me,” Hope said, gasping, but that seemed to make him more ferocious. She did not know who he was, only that she felt as though she were in a cage with a gorilla.

  He lay still then, heavily against her body. Hope felt cold, colder than she’d ever felt in her life. The coldness in the room was unreal, unbelievable. It flashed across her mind that evil brings a feeling of intense cold. In the icy cold blackness of the room, she felt she was in the presence of true evil, and that terrified her more than anything that might happen.

  He raised his head slightly. “I can’t leave you alive,” he said. “You could identify me.” Hope moaned again.

  “I don’t even know who you are.”

  “You know I’m about six feet tall and about twenty pounds overweight and you know that my hair is beginning to thin in the back.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Hope said. “There are millions of people who could fit that description. I don’t know who you are. I would never identify you. Please go away. Take my car and go away.”

  The man got up. As she lay motionless, she heard what sounded like tape being ripped, then she was being rolled over on her side. He pulled her hands behind her and her feet up toward her hands, then he wrapped adhesive tape around them, binding them all together in a painful, tight roll.

  “Don’t scream,” he warned. “If you have any ideas about screaming for the foreman, I’ll just kill him and you too.” He covered her with blankets. As he tucked them in around her neck, he bent over and put his face against her cheek. “I love you,” he said. She heard the door close.

  For a long time there was stillness, no sound anywhere. Hope felt she was hallucinating, that none of this was happening, none of this was real. Her heart was pounding so she could hear it echoing around the room. She could feel veins in her wrists throbbing and popping and, very quietly, beneath the blankets, she began to tug at the end of the tape with her right hand, no more than a quarter inch at a time, so slowly and quietly she almost felt she wasn’t doing it at all.

  After a long time, she heard a sound in the room. Someone was there again, sounding agitated but not wild, not violent, not like the wild animal-like man who had been there earlier.

  He pulled the blankets back and felt her hands. “Oh, very clever,” he said in a normal tone of voice. “You’ve unwrapped your hands.”

  “It was hurting so much,” Hope said. “I’m not going to try and do anything. Is Bill dead? Oh please, please tell me Bill isn’t dead. Please go see if Bill is really dead.”

  “I have seen him and he is dead,” the man said calmly.

  Hope began to moan. “Oh, my God, oh, my God, my God, why Bill?” Black pain surged through her head, pounding in her skull. She felt as though it would burst open. Images of Bill flashed through her mind in a crazy dance. Bill holding her, kissing her, saying gently, “I love you.” Bill sweeping K.C. up in his arms. Bill laughing. “Did he know? Did he suffer?”

  “No,” the man said. “He never saw the gun.”

  “Oh, why, oh, why, why Bill?”

  “Because he was with you.”

  “With me?” Hope could not grasp that. “You mean he is dead because of me?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why me? But why me?”

  “Because someone wants you dead,” the man said.

  She could not seem to understand that. It was an impossibly difficult problem to understand.

  “Why me? Why would anybody want me dead? I’ve never hurt anyone in my life. Why me?”

  “Because you’re going to court next week,” the man said in a calm, explanatory, matter-of-fact tone.

  “Oh, God, oh, my God,” Hope said. “That’s only a couple of hundred dollars a month.”

  There was silence. When the man spoke, he sounded confused.

  “Well, I don’t know, then there must be something else.” She heard him pacing around the room at the foot of the bed. “I didn’t want to get involved in this. This isn’t my job. I got involved in this at the very last minute.”

  He would pace for a while, then stop and stand still, sometimes talking in an almost normal voice, sometimes muttering, sometimes talking loudly. Sometimes he would leave the room for a while. Sometimes, when he returned, he would rub her body up and down with clammy, gloved hands—they felt like surgical gloves. Sometimes he rubbed her with the gun, too. Once, when he came back in, he pushed her face to one side on the pillow. “Don’t move,” he warned. A flashbulb popped. He turned her face to the other side; there was another flash. He took a third flash picture full face. “If I decide to let you live, which I haven’t decided, and the day ever comes when you do anything to send the authorities after me, the organization will have your picture and you will be killed,” he said. He allowed her hands to remain unbound.

  At some point during the long, long night—she had no idea of the time—Hope knew, from the voice and from his silhouette in the doorway, as her eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, that the man she was talking to was Taylor.

  She did not call him Taylor, or say she knew who he was. He seemed to assume she knew; part of the conversation referred to Saturday afternoon.

  “Oh, why did I let you come here?” Hope asked the darkness. “I didn’t want you to come. I didn’t invite you, but Bill wanted you to come, and I could never say no to Bill.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Taylor said. “I would have come anywa
y. There’s a contract out on you.”

  Hope could not seem to grasp that, either. “A contract. A contract,” she murmured.

  “Well, I have been misled,” Taylor said in a precise tone. “You were supposed to be about forty-five years old, with grown-up children, and you were supposed to be a drug addict and an alcoholic and you were giving your children drugs and making them sex perverts and ruining them.”

  “The children,” Hope repeated. “What if I had brought the children?”

  “The children were supposed to come,” he said, “and the two older children were supposed to be killed, but the youngest one was to be removed. I would rather not kill you but now I have to because of the contract,” Taylor went on. “I should have killed you when you were asleep. If I leave you alive I will get into trouble.” She heard him pacing near the window as he rambled on.

  “This is not my job; I don’t like it. I have only killed one woman but she was forty-five years old and she was a spy in the Arab-Israeli war. But you are a good person. You are a good mother. Anybody who would pick up an ugly child with a runny nose that isn’t even hers must be a good mother. I would rather die than go back to jail. Why the hell he didn’t get you last week after you left the restaurant I cannot figure out. I am pissed off about that.”

  Hope was trying to follow what he was saying. “Restaurant?” she asked. “Restaurant?”

  “When you and Bill were at the restaurant last weekend,” Taylor said impatiently. “He was supposed to follow you when you left the restaurant and get you then, when you went home.”

  Restaurant. The Brown Derby. She and Bill had gone back to his apartment instead of to her house. She remembered thinking it would be all right to leave K.C. with Martha overnight because K.C. would be asleep by then.

  Taylor kept talking, telling her things, asking her things. He seemed to know a lot about Bill but asked whether Bill had lived with her or someplace else. He seemed to know a lot about her, too. He knew her address on the Drive, where her mother lived, and about the burglar alarm system at her mother’s house. He talked about her stepfather’s heart condition. Hope felt her mind shredding apart. She could not sort out, in her mind, what she had told Taylor on Saturday, or what he might have learned from Bill or someone else.

  Someone else.

  “Who wants me killed?” Hope forced herself to ask.

  “Your husband.”

  “Which husband?” Hope blurted. “I have had two husbands.”

  “You have two husbands?” he repeated. “Well, I don’t know, I don’t know which husband, but your husband wants you dead.” Again he sounded confused and angry. “I didn’t want this job but the guy that was supposed to do it got burned and now I am here and I am supposed to do it.”

  Slowly, in bits and terrifying pieces, as he came and went, Taylor told a story about a contract. He told Hope that her husband had been involved with a man in the organization who had loaned him forty-two thousand dollars—Taylor called it “Family money”—and her husband had taken out a very large insurance policy on her life so that when Hope was dead and he collected on her policy, he could repay the man. Hope thought Taylor said the policy was for two hundred thousand dollars, and that he was being paid thirty-six hundred dollars to carry out the contract.

  He related that he had met her husband at the Beverly Hilton and that her husband had given explicit details. He wanted a blood bath, Taylor said, a Sharon Tate kind of massacre, with butchered bodies and blood splashed all around the room, because that would be good publicity for his business.

  “Did you ever have anal sex with your husband?” Taylor asked.

  “No,” Hope said.

  “Well, did you talk about it much?”

  “No. Why, in God’s name, are you asking me that?”

  “Well,” Taylor said, “because he said to take a piece of wood from the tinderbox and stick it up you.”

  Hope listened in horror as he talked on. “But I never liked that plan. I like a nice clean killing. Your husband told me that you take a great deal of medication, and I would rather have taken you to a party and exchanged your pills for something else. Or I could have made it look like a stroke, or a heart attack, with a needle in your eye or an ice pick in your ear. When I was in the kitchen after dinner I laid out two ice picks I could have used. At a party or in a crowd you can stick someone in the ribs and then get away easily, because it takes the person a minute or two to slump over, and then because the wound is so small no one notices it and assumes the person had a heart attack.”

  Hope could not believe that either of her husbands could do this, that there had been some incredible mistake. She kept trying to make some sense of it.

  “Where did you meet my husband?” she asked.

  “At the Beverly Hilton Hotel.”

  “Well, did he just say, ‘I want a bloodbath, a Sharon Tate kind of thing’?”

  “Oh, no,” Taylor said. “He discussed in detail what he wanted done.”

  “My God,” Hope said. “How long did this conversation last?”

  “About twenty minutes,” Taylor said. “He gave a lot of details, because he said to have you die in a spectacular way would make the papers and the publicity would be valuable for his business.”

  The grotesque story had begun to make a kind of dreadful sense to Hope. She remembered her surprise when Tom had said he was going to meet someone at the Beverly Hilton. She knew he hated the Hilton, and she remembered asking him why the Hilton. “You know it takes forever to park there.” She remembered Tom’s interest—she had called it an obsession—with the Sharon Tate murders. She had seen Tom reading a book—and Tom almost never read books—about those killings. Still she could not accept it.

  “Well, how did he look?” she managed to ask.

  “I didn’t like the way he looked,” Taylor said sternly. “I didn’t like him at all. He’s greasy.”

  Oh, God, Hope thought. Tom did have a greasy look. He was very neat and well groomed but he had to wash his face five times a day, and in the morning his face would be shiny, his skin was so oily. Oh, God, she thought. It must he Tom. If Taylor didn’t meet Tom, how would he know that Tom has oily skin? How would he know that Tom was so interested in the Tate murders? But if it’s Tom, he must have lost his mind and the children need to be protected. The baby needs to be protected.

  “The children,” she said again. “I have to get back to the children. The baby needs me.”

  “Oh, Tom will have the baby on Sunday,” Taylor explained.

  “No, no,” Hope said. “Tom has never had the baby on Sunday. No matter how many times I have asked him—I’ve been sick, I’ve had a hundred thousand problems—he has never taken the baby on Sunday.”

  “I don’t care,” Taylor said mildly. “He’ll take the baby this Sunday.”

  Hope thought about K.C. hurtling toward Bill on his chubby little legs. Oh, K.C. If I die now, he will never even remember that he had a mother who loved him. The thought was unbearable. She began to cry.

  Taylor began to shout. “Stop it, shut up, stop it!” He was kneeling on the bed, shaking her, bumping her with the gun. “I cannot stand it when a woman cries!” he yelled.

  Hope stopped crying. She burrowed her face into the pillow to stop her nose from running; Taylor calmed down right away. He moved away from the bed and talked in a normal tone.

  “Bill was too dull for you anyway,” he said patiently. “You need someone more exciting.”

  “He was not too dull!” Hope cried. “He has one of the most fantastic minds in the world. Just because he’s quiet you think he’s dull, but you don’t know what he’s doing when he’s quiet. He could be composing a song, or he could be thinking of some fabulous thing he’s going to shoot on film. He has very creative ideas, but he just doesn’t talk about them. And besides that, Bill is a very good person and he loves the children and I depend on him for everything, and—”

  Taylor cut her off.

  “I don
’t want to hear any more about Bill,” he said angrily.

  Hope tried to lighten her tone. “And you’re wrong, I don’t need someone more exciting. I’ve had someone more exciting”—she was thinking of Lionel—“and I can’t take it, it wears me out.”

  Taylor sounded hurt. “But you were flexing your pelvis at me all day.”

  “What in God’s name do you mean, flexing my pelvis?” Hope demanded.

  Taylor tried to describe what he meant, but in the pitch darkness, she couldn’t see his gestures.

  “Do you mean the way I move around a lot when I’m sitting, always readjusting my sitting position?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Oh, my God, that’s my back,” Hope said. “I move around to make my back more comfortable.”

  Taylor groaned. “I didn’t know that’s what it was,” he said. Hope thought he sounded actually sorry at his mistake, and she tried to take advantage of his mood.

  “Look, I don’t mind the idea of dying so much,” she told him. “I think there is something going on after we die, and I’m not afraid to die. In fact, sometimes I’ve wanted to die. If Bill is dead, then all my hopes for the future are pretty much dead, too, and I don’t care very much. But the thing is, my children really have nobody else and they will be separated because my mother couldn’t cope with all three, and being separated will destroy them.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Taylor said. “I know what you are saying about your children is true, and every time I go to kill you, I think of you picking up that kid in the market and it bothers me. But I have got to kill you because you have to understand that in a contract killing there is no such thing as a witness left alive. I am really sorry that I took this contract and I really don’t want to kill you. You have cute feet.”

  Hope had determined by now that her fear and pain enraged Taylor and made him violent. She needed to be calm, maybe even funny.

  “Well, before you kill me, can the condemned person have a last cigarette?”

  “No,” Taylor said firmly. “It’s bad for you.”

  “You’re worried about my health?” she asked in amazement.