Serpent's Kiss

by Ed Gorman

  The TV industry was jam packed with former reps who'd taken over the management reins. This said a lot about why the level of programming was so low. (O'Sullivan's favourite joke was, "Know what the three lowest forms of life are? Wife beaters, child abusers, and TV reps." He never tired of telling this particular gag.)

  Chris went to her desk and tried to read the morning paper. Thanks to her tears, she almost smeared the type. Also thanks to her tears, her lower lip was trembling. She sat scrunched up tight to her desk so nobody could see her face. When somebody would walk by and say good morning, she'd mutter something that sounded like "Mmwffffr" and hoped they wouldn't ask her to translate it.

  She sat this way for fifteen minutes. Or mostly she did. Every other minute or so she'd have this little flurry of optimism and then she'd sit up straight, shoulders thrown back, and make a fist and say (to herself) Fuck TV news consultants; they're little no dick no brain wimps anyway. (She'd recently read one of those books that told you how to Take Charge of Your Life, and this was one of the 'Seven Dramatic Lessons' the back cover copy had promised-Lesson Three to be exact, 'Getting Pissed and Getting Even.')

  And then the phone rang.

  Her first inclination was not to pick up.

  She'd just sound sniffly anyway.

  So she let it ring.

  Six, seven, eight times.

  "Jesus Christ, Holland, are you fucking deaf or what?" somebody shouted over her cubicle.

  Those were the dulcet tones of Mike Ramsey, Ace Reporter. He sat in the cubicle next to Chris's. He was living proof that men indeed had periods. Chris estimated that Ramsey was on the rag approximately twenty-nine days per month.

  So she picked up.

  "Chris Holland. Channel 3 News."

  There was a slight pause, then an intelligent-sounding female voice said, "I guess I don't know how to start exactly."

  "Start?"

  "With my story."

  "I see."

  "So is it all right?"

  "Ma'am?"

  "If I just start in, I mean."

  "Sure."

  "It's about a murder."

  And right then and right there, Chris forgot about all the morning's misery.

  "A murder?" She was drooling.

  "Several murders actually."

  "Several murders?"

  My God-several murders!

  "But the man they accused-he wasn't really responsible."

  "He wasn't?"

  There was a pause again. "I'd really like to see you in person."

  "In person?"

  "I couldn't make it till this evening. And even then I'm not absolutely sure about that."

  "Ma'am?" Chris said.

  "Yes."

  "Is this all on the level?"

  "Why, of course."

  "You know something about the man they accused of these murders?"

  "Yes," the woman said.

  "Would you tell me who this man was?"

  "Of course. He was my brother."

  "I see."

  "Do you know where the Starlight Room is?"

  "In Shaffer's Mall?"

  "Right."

  "Sure."

  "Could you meet me there at six-thirty?" the woman asked. "Of course."

  "In the lounge. We could have a drink."

  "That would be nice," Chris said. Then, "Oh, wait."

  "Yes?"

  "How come you called me?"

  The woman laughed softly, sounding almost embarrassed. "I like Channel 3 news best and I… I guess I just like your face. You don't look like a Dallas cheerleader. And that's nice."

  "Believe me, there are days when I wish I did look like a Dallas cheerleader."

  Like when no dick no brain TV news consultants are conducting focus groups, she thought.

  The woman was back to sounding sombre again. "Tonight then. About six-thirty."

  "About six-thirty. Right."

  After she hung up, Chris called over the top of her cubicle wall, "Hey, Ramsey."

  "Yeah?" he shouted back. "What?"

  "Thanks for telling me to answer my phone."

  "Huh?"

  "Never mind."

  She sat there exultant. Several murders, she kept saying to herself over and over again, thoughts of herself as the On the Town girl fading fast.

  Several murders.

  Wasn't life grand sometimes?

  2

  ROB LINDSTROM

  MAY 10, 1978

  ROB HAD ALWAYS FELT that he would have been more popular in his college days if he'd been a Democrat. Unfortunately, he had inherited his political outlook from his father, a large, blunt Swedish immigrant who had come to these shores with nothing, and who now owned two department stores. Rob's conservatism came naturally.

  Rob entered college just as the student movement of the late sixties was beginning to take over campuses. His first night in the dorm, he watched the ROTC building on the east edge of campus go up in flames. With all the smoke and the screaming and the sirens, the university resembled a war zone. Rob watched all this from his window. He was afraid to venture out.

  Rob's political opinions didn't change until senior year, which was when he met Lisa. She was a dazzling blonde from New York. She was everything Rob wasn't-Catholic, sophisticated, and unafraid to try new experiences. While hardly a heavy doper, she did introduce good ol' Lutheran Rob to the pleasures of marijuana (or 'Mary Jane' as she mockingly liked to call it), New Orleans blues, dawn as seen from the dewy crest of Stratterhom Park, oral sex (the notion of a clitoris had pretty much been an abstraction to him), and Democratic politics. Lisa's father was a congressman who had been a good friend of Adlai Stevenson's, a man who had always reminded Rob of a greatly respected child molester.

  Lisa changed virtually everything about Rob. His hair got long, his grade average went from a 3.8 to a 2.1, he started wearing the same shirt two days in a row, he started seeing the humour in the Three Stooges, he began experiencing vastly shifting mood changes depending on how things were going with Lisa, and he became a Democrat.

  He even went to one SDS meeting with Lisa, though when he met the leader afterward he was totally put off. The leader- a fierce, bearded, crazed looking kid who carried a Bowie knife in his belt-complained that "since I joined SDS, my old man has cut my monthly allowance in half." The kid saw no humour in this. Had Lenin or Trotsky got allowances while attempting to overthrow their government? While Rob's opinion of mainstream liberalism had changed, his feelings about campus radicals hadn't. They still seemed like self indulgent children to him.

  Lisa had changed one other thing about Rob: his plans for the future. His father had just assumed that after college, Rob would come back to Minneapolis and start work at one of the department stores, learning the business from the lowliest position to the most exalted. Eventually, of course, Rob's father would pass the management of the stores over to Rob.

  But as graduation approached, Rob began to share Lisa's fantasy of heading for Mexico after college, and "living near the water somewhere and having lots of dope and getting away from all the hypocritical bullshit in this country. You know?"

  So those were their plans anyway. But then Lisa met Michael.

  Michael Blumenthal was a federal civil rights lawyer who was at the university giving a lecture to pre-law students. At this time, Lisa's plans-after returning from her eyrie in Mexico- were to become a lawyer. So she was in Michael Blumenthal's audience.

  As she later told it to Rob, she just couldn't help what happened. There seemed to be an inevitability about her reaction to his dark good looks, his curious mixing of anger and compassion, and his intense desire to make the world a better place. After the lecture, she went up and introduced herself, and they became so engrossed in their conversation about his civil rights work in the South that they continued it in the student union over coffee, and then in a little bar several blocks away over beers, and finally in her apartment where, after pizza and ungodly amounts of marijuana, they
climbed into her rumpled bed and made love.

  And three days later ran off to Missouri to elope.

  She told Rob all this the day after she got back from Missouri. She had only two weeks to go till graduation and then she and Michael were moving back to New York, him working for the government and her going to Columbia.

  She hoped Rob would understand, crazy as it all was. She was sure Rob would find the exact right woman for himself very soon now because there wasn't anybody sweeter or more deserving anywhere on the planet than Rob Lindstrom and she'd never forget him or all the wonderful times they'd had.

  But right now she had to run. (A quick wet kiss on the cheek- the goddamn cheek-and then she was gone from his life forever.)

  Just like that.

  So Rob went home to his father's stores. He dealt with the 'Lisa problem' as his mother had taken to calling it by reverting to his former self (at least externally). He cut his hair, he began wearing ties and sports jackets again, he spent Sunday afternoons watching Firing Line with William Buckley and savouring the way Buckley thrust and parried and ultimately destroyed his liberal guests, and he dated any number of young women who were eminently right for him in most of the ways that mattered to his parents. He tried to convince himself that he had survived something that more resembled an illness than love.

  His sister, Emily, was his only confidante. Only Emily knew what Rob was really going through. The killer depressions. The crying jags. The inability to eat (or at least hold anything down for long). The disinterest in sex.

  He would lie for hours on his bed, going over and over his relationship with Lisa, trying to determine if he'd done anything wrong to cause her running off with Michael that way. He hated her and loved her, missed her and never wanted to see her again, lusted after her and wanted to beat her to death with his fists.

  And then came the night when he took the Norpramin.

  Dr. Steiner, the shrink whom Emily had secretly arranged for him to see (Rob's father seemed to believe that shrinks were part of the communist conspiracy he saw evidence of everywhere), had given Rob pills that worked as both antidepressants and sleeping pills. He was to take three of them at bedtime.

  This one particular night, Rob took sixty.

  Emily, out on a late date, decided to stop by his room on her way to the late night bath she liked to linger in, and when she got no response, she decided he was asleep and she'd go in and give him a little sisterly kiss.

  She found him sprawled on the floor of his room and barely breathing.

  Within twenty-five minutes, he was in the hospital emergency ward.

  And within twenty-four hours after that, he began a three year stay at a mental hospital called Hastings House.

  ***

  He killed his first woman on the night of May 11, 1978. This was the first time he escaped the mental hospital.

  After a few hours' freedom, during which time he ate a good steak dinner and rented a car, he drove up into the hills where he saw a somewhat plump but pretty young woman standing in front of a somewhat battered 1968 Fairlane, the hood up, and steam pouring out of the radiator. She seemed so helpless and disconsolate that she looked positively fetching. The image of a helpless woman appealed to him enormously.

  He pulled in behind where she'd parked just off the road, got out, and went over to her.

  He smiled. "You look like you've got your hands full."

  "I sure do." She touched surprisingly delicate fingers to her face and shook her head. "I'm supposed to be at a wedding shower in twenty minutes."

  "Why don't I take a look?" he said, sounding like a doctor about to peek in at a sore throat.

  He saw the problem immediately. A hole in her radiator. A rock could have put it there or kids sabotaging cars in a parking lot.

  He leaned back from inside the hood. "Tell you what. Why don't I give you a ride? There's a Standard station down the way. They can come back and tow your car in and if it's not too far out of my way, I can give you a ride to your party."

  "Jeez, it's gonna need towing?"

  He smiled again. "Afraid so."

  She didn't say thanks for the offer of a ride; thanks for looking at my car. She was as cheap as her watch.

  "So what's wrong with it?"

  "Hole in your radiator probably."

  Cars went by, most of them filled with teenagers prowling the night. Rock music trailed in their wake like banners fluttering in the wind.

  "Jeez," she said, "why does this crap always happen to me?"

  "My name's O'Rourke," he said. The odd thing was, the false name surprised him. He had no idea why he'd used it. No idea yet what he really had in mind. He put out a slender hand (he'd always hated his hands, tiny as a fourteen year old girl's, the wrists delicate no matter how long he lifted weights) and she took it.

  "Paula. Stufflebeam."

  "Now there's a sturdy name for you."

  "Hah. Sturdy. Shitty is what you mean."

  They got in the car and started driving. The radio played Andy Gibb. The girl started singing along very low and then asked if he could maybe turn up the radio a little. Even in his radio playing he was conservative. Kept it low all the time.

  When the song was over, she looked at him and said, "This is a nice car."

  "Thank you." He wasn't sure why but he didn't want to tell her it was rented.

  "If I woulda got married last fall, I woulda had a car like this. The guy really had bucks."

  "Oh?"

  "But he was all fucked up, pardon my French. Nam. He had these nightmares. He scared me."

  "I'm sorry for both of you."

  "Well, like my mother says, there's always more fish in the sea."

  The night was busy. Mosquitoes slapped against the windshield. Distantly he could smell the river and the hot fishy odours on the darkness. Donna Summer came on. He wondered what Lisa was doing tonight. Probably something fashionable. Her last note indicated that she had become involved in theatre and had met the neatest acting coach. He wondered if she had already betrayed her husband and if she was sleeping with this acting coach.

  He knew he had to hurry. He had to get back to the hospital before he was reported missing.

  Two blocks from the Standard station, he suddenly veered right, still not knowing why. A sign said WARNER PARK, TWO BLOCKS. The Beatles sang Paperback Writer.

  "Hey," she said.

  "Pardon me?"

  "This ain't the way to the gas station."

  "No?"

  "No."

  He increased his speed. He was now going forty miles per hour. He had to be careful. He could get stopped by a cop.

  She looked at him. "Don't get any ideas. About me, I mean."

  "Wouldn't you like to look over the city? Just sort of take a break?"

  "I don't even know you."

  He turned toward her. Smiled. "I'm not going to put the make on you, if that's what you're afraid of." He frowned. "I'll be honest with you."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yes. My girlfriend-" He sighed. His words sounded painful beyond belief. "My girlfriend left me for somebody else."

  "That's too bad."

  "So right now I could use some company, you know? Just a friend."

  "But I gotta be at that wedding shower."

  "Just a few minutes is all. Just go up and look out over the city. Just a few minutes."

  "Well-"

  "And I won't try anything. I promise."

  "You're sure?"

  "I'm sure."

  She sighed. "Some guy dumped me once so I know how you're feeling, the pecker." And again she sighed. "I could only spend a few minutes."

  "I've got things to do myself."

  "You mind if I smoke this roach I got in my purse?"

  "Not at all."

  "I'm not a doper or anything. I just like a little grass once in a while. It relaxes me."

  "Fine."

  She took out this tiny roach clip and then inserted this even tinier roach in it. He was
amazed that she got it going. She took three heavy tokes on it and then leaned her head back against the seat. The Bee Gees sang Stayin' Alive.

  "You want a toke?" she said.

  "No thanks."

  Her voice was kind of raspy now. "It really relaxes me."

  "Yes, that's what you said."

  After he parked the car, they got out and went to the edge of a grassy cliff. The night air was slow and hot, filled with fireflies and bam owls. Below them the city lay like a vast drug dream, unreal in the way it sprawled shimmering over the prairie landscape and then ended abruptly, giving way to the plains and the forest again. Next to him, Paula Stufflebeam smelled of sweat and faded perfume and sexual juices. She had a run in her stockings so bad he could see it even in the moonlit darkness and oddly enough it made him feel sorry for her. She wasn't cheap, she was poor and uneducated and there was a difference. He had to keep this in mind whenever he took to judging people from the eyrie of his privileged life.

  "So who'd she dump you for?" Paula said after they'd been there a few minutes.

  "A lawyer."

  "A lawyer, huh? Bet he pulls down the bucks."

  "No. He's a civil rights lawyer."

  "You mean like black people and people like that?"

  "Right."

  "Oh." She didn't sound impressed. "Well, you know what my mother told me."

  "That there're plenty of other fish in the sea?"

  "Right."

  He slid his arm across her shoulder and brought her closer to him. He'd never been good at making out. He'd always been afraid he was doing all the wrong things. But tonight he felt a curious self-confidence.

  He brought her to him and she surprised him by coming along willingly. He felt her press up against him, the shift of her breasts beneath the polyester of her dress, the faint wisp of hair spray, and the bubblegum taste of her lipstick. Their groins were pressed together, too, and he felt a hard, breathless lust start to increase his heartbeat.