After work she’d pick up half a barbecued chicken or some Chinese take-out and eat in her room; when that got old she’d stop at a diner and sit in a rear booth reading the paper while she ate. Back in her room she read library books until it was bedtime. She went to bed early and didn’t get up until she had to. If this city was a place to hide, well, so was sleep.
*
It was strange. She’d felt uplifted after she left Hedgemont, felt she’d done something good, something transcendent. She’d given Alvin Kirkaby something he longed for, and something no one else could or would have given him—the liberation of a peaceful death.
And that made her feel good, in an unfamiliar way, and she enjoyed the feeling while it lasted.
But it didn’t last very long, and when it passed it gave way to a feeling of emptiness. Her life stretched out in front of her, and she saw herself going on like this forever, hooking up with men, sleeping with them, killing them, and moving on. What she had always enjoyed, what had indeed never failed to thrill her, all at once seemed unendurable.
So she worked in the daytime and read in the evenings and slept at night. And put everything on hold, waiting.
One afternoon she bought a phone. Prepaid, good for a couple of hours of calls. You could trace it back to the store where she bought it, but no further than that. They didn’t make her give a name, let alone show ID.
She took it back to her room, put it in a drawer. Three nights later she picked it up and made a call.
“Kimmie!”
“Hi, Rita.”
“I was wondering if I’d ever hear from you again.”
“Oh, I’m harder to shake than a summer cold.”
“It’s so good to hear your voice. Only the thing is—”
“You’ve got company.”
“How’d you know?”
“Is he cute? Has he got a nice cock?”
“Kimmie...”
“You want to call me back when you’re done? I’ll give you my number.”
There’d been no calls, to Rita or to anyone else, since she left Hedgemont. There’d been no phone—she’d left the battery in one trash receptacle and the phone in another, and hadn’t bothered to get a new phone until just the other day, when a store she’d passed every day suddenly drew her in.
And then, the new phone in her possession, she’d left it alone until tonight. She’d bought it for one reason and one reason only, to call Rita. So why did it take her three days to get around to making the call?
“So did you fuck him?”
“Kimmie! Suppose it was somebody else calling?”
“Not much chance of that. Nobody else has the number. Anyway, I know the answer. Either you fucked him or there was something really good on TV, because I was just about ready to give up on you and go to sleep.”
“What, at nine-thirty? Oh, you must be in one of those weird eastern time zones.”
“Central. It’s eleven-thirty here.”
Talking, back and forth. She found herself talking a little about her job, about the place where she was staying. And realized how she’d missed this contact, this connection.
“Such an exciting life,” Rita was saying. “A new job, a new address...”
“Feeding a Xerox machine. Picking up General Tso’s chicken on my way home. I don’t know if my heart can stand the excitement.”
“I guess you don’t want to hear how I spent the evening.”
“By the fireside, knitting sweaters for our troops in Siberia.”
“We have troops in Siberia?”
“Not yet. Well? Let’s hear it.”
“Let’s see, you called me when, two hours ago?”
“More like two and a half.”
“How time flies. Well, in those two and a half hours I slept with over a hundred and fifty men.”
“Huh?”
“One hundred and fifty-two, to be precise. You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Not a clue.”
“He was a Mormon, Kimmie.”
“The guy.”
“Yeah.”
“So he had what, five or ten wives? How does that put you in bed with a hundred and fifty guys?”
“A hundred fifty-two.”
“Whatever.”
“And he’s not polygamous. He’s not even married. He’s engaged to be married, but the wedding’s not until sometime next year.”
“I’ll clear my calendar. I still don’t get it.”
“Okay, I’ll explain. There were two of them, and they came to my door and rang the bell.”
“Him and his fiancée?”
“No, she’s back in Utah. Him and another guy. What happened, I was online a month or two ago, I can’t even remember, and I guess I checked something about wanting information on the Mormon faith. I thought they were going to send me a book.”
“And instead they sent you two guys? And you fucked them both? That still leaves a hundred fifty unaccounted for.”
“I only fucked one of them. They were there to hand-deliver a copy of the Book of Mormon and some other literature, and, you know, to convert me. And one of them was really drippy-looking, like he’d have been a nerd but his IQ wasn’t high enough.”
“But you liked the other one.”
“Kellen, his name was. Tall, blond, big shoulders, small waist.”
“Your basic hunk.”
“And, you know, we connected. I managed to get him away from his buddy—”
“The failed nerd.”
“—and we set it up that he’d ditch Dopey and come back. And he did, and things were moving along nicely, and then you called.”
“Sorry about the timing.”
“It was no problem. I got off the phone, and then, well—”
“You got off.”
“You bet. And no, I didn’t wear the butt plug. I thought I might have my own personal Mormon butt plug, but that was out because of his fiancée back in Provo. See, ass-fucking is one of the things he’s saving for marriage. But the man couldn’t get enough of my pussy. Listen to me, will you? I don’t know why I’m talking like this.”
“Don’t stop now.”
“Are you wet, Kimmie? Are you touching yourself?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, don’t stop. Because it was really hot...”
“Rita, you’re something else.”
“Did you come good, Kimmie?”
“You know I did.”
“Me too. When he was doing me, and I was really into it and everything, I couldn’t stop thinking how I’d call you back and tell you all about it. And once we were done I couldn’t wait to get rid of him so I could call you. I don’t care if we’re lesbians.”
“You’d probably have a tough time convincing Kellen you’re a lesbian. Speaking of Kellen—”
“I know, I still didn’t tell you how he got to be a hundred and fifty-two people.”
“Right.”
“He was baptized.”
“Well, so was I, not that I can claim to remember it. And it didn’t make me sprout a hundred clones. I’m still only one person.”
“One very special person. If I’m a lesbian, I’m just a lesbian for you, you know. If you were here right now—”
“We’d go down on each other.”
“Yes, we would.”
“And do a lot of other things.”
“Most of which I’ve been thinking about.”
Deep breath. “Can we get back to Kellen, Rita?”
“He was baptized a hundred and fifty-two times.”
“He was? Why, for God’s sake?”
“Exactly.”
“Huh?”
“For God’s sake, and for the sake of a hundred and fifty-one poor souls who went through life without being baptized. It’s a Mormon thing, Kimmie. It’s called proxy baptism. You know how they’ve got this big genealogical research project in Salt Lake City? How they’re trying to get the names of everybody who ever lived?
”
“I guess I read something about that.”
“Well, their goal is to baptize all the people who lived and died without going through that sacrament. And participating in the process is one form of missionary work. Instead of turning up on people’s doorsteps—”
“And fucking them senseless.”
“—you go through a ceremony designed to get the unbaptized dead into Heaven.”
“Salvation for the unsaved.”
“That’s the idea. New hope for the dead.”
“I never heard of that before,” she said. “It’s deeply weird.”
“Well, so was Kellen. He wouldn’t go down on me.”
“He wouldn’t? The moron. I would.”
“Would you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh, tell me. Tell me what you’d do.”
In the morning she showered and put on her sweater and jeans and walked to work. On her break she sat down at one of the backoffice computers and Googled her way to Mormon proxy baptism. It was pretty much as Rita had reported, and there was no question about it, the whole business was deeply weird.
On the other hand, who was she to hang that label on anything anybody did? She was crisscrossing the country, trying to regrow her psychic hymen by killing every man who ever had sex with her, and she was involved in a wildly exciting lesbian affair with a woman she’d never laid a hand on. How was that for weird?
Two nights later she couldn’t sleep. She’d sat in her room reading until she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and then she got undressed and slipped under the blanket and hovered for half an hour on the edge of consciousness. She almost went under, and then she surfaced, and she sat up in bed, knowing it wasn’t going to happen.
There was one man left, one blot on her record, and no way on earth to track him down. You could find anything and anybody with Google, but you had to have at least a vague idea what you were searching for, and all she had was a first name and the vaguest possible recollection of a face, undefined in her mind but for a gap between his two top incisors.
And she knew where she’d picked him up, in a Race Street bar in Philadelphia, but all that told her was that he was from some place other than Philadelphia, because he took her to his hotel room, and he wouldn’t be staying in a hotel if he lived there, would he? And he’d told her his name was Sid, and maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, and where did that leave her? The one man who’d fucked her and lived to tell the tale was not from Philadelphia, and his name was or wasn’t Sid. And, just to narrow it down still further, he had a gap between his teeth.
Wonderful. Google that, see where it gets you.
She got out of bed, put on the clothes she’d worn earlier. Was it too late to call Rita? No, not with the time difference. She picked up the phone, put it down again. It was, she decided, not too late to call but too early. Maybe in a few days, maybe in a week, but not yet.
She didn’t know what she was going to do about Rita. Well, how could she? She didn’t know what she was going to do about her whole goddamn life.
She couldn’t keep on doing this forever, could she? Shedding one name and taking on another, leaving one town and moving on to another, sleeping with men and leaving them lifeless? How long could you do that?
She’d rarely stopped to take long views, living in the moment, but something had happened to her in Hedgemont. She couldn’t define it or figure it out, but it had changed her by more than the simple subtraction of a name from her list. She’d left North Carolina feeling somehow ennobled, and ever since then she’d seen herself and her life not in extreme close-up but as if from a distance.
Like she was seeing a bigger picture, sort of.
She added a hoodie for warmth and walked down a flight of stairs and out of the hotel. The city shut down early, and the streets were empty, with no traffic to speak of. The bars were closed. There was sure to be an all-night café somewhere, but she wasn’t hungry, didn’t want coffee, didn’t want company. She just felt like walking for a while and letting her thoughts run free.
Could she possibly have a life? A life, say, where she stayed in one place, and had the same name all the time? A life she might even share with another human being?
Like, for example, Rita?
It seemed ridiculous even to imagine it. She’d never had sex with another woman, never wanted to, never really gave it a thought. Then she and Rita spent one unplanned night, having a weird sort of phoneless phone sex, and the next day she was out of there like a bat out of hell. And since then they’d had real phone sex, which is to say they did it over the phone, telling each other stories, and most recently talking about what they’d do to each other if they ever found themselves under the same roof again.
Would she even want to?
Would it be repulsive to kiss another woman on the mouth? Or on the breasts? Would it turn her on to go down on another woman? Or would it turn her stomach?
She’d done just about everything there was to do with men, and she always enjoyed it. The fact that some people regarded an act as perverted or unnatural never bothered her. For God’s sake, hadn’t she killed a guy, crossed him off her list, and then fucked him one last time? If she could get off doing that, why draw the line at eating pussy?
No, that wasn’t the problem. The sex would be all right. It might be quieter and less exciting if it was girl on girl, but it might just as easily be better.
The question was what came afterward.
With men, there was no question. The bed a man shared with her was his deathbed. As soon as she could arrange it, she whisked him out of the world and wiped him off the slate.
And with women? Would she feel the same compulsion, the same genuine need to take her partner’s life?
Maybe. Maybe not. She could see the logic in either answer.
It was her father’s sexual abuse that sent her down the path she’d been walking all her life. He’d been her first lover, and she’d killed him for it, and all the men since then had been her lovers on the way to becoming her victims. If she slept with a woman, that wouldn’t be her father all over again, would it? Women were different. Women were soft where men were hard, yielding where men were obdurate. Women had never abused her.
And yet...
The first person she ever killed was her mother.
That was something she didn’t think about too often. For some reason it was easy to forget, even as her mother had been an essentially forgettable person. And it was easy, too, to regard her mother’s death as a means to an end. By killing her mother, she set the stage for the murder/suicide the police would discover.
Still, it was hard to pass off matricide as an afterthought. And, no question, she blamed her mother for the abuse. Either the woman deliberately overlooked it or she was willfully obtuse, refusing to see what was right in front of her eyes. She probably welcomed it, because it saved her from the unpleasant duty of satisfying her husband.
Well, she had a lot of ways to look at it. But it was hard to get past the fact that she’d killed the woman, and would she feel a need to kill other women?
She didn’t want that to happen to Rita.
For God’s sake, she had fun with Rita. She enjoyed being with Rita. And it wasn’t just girls being pals, girls dashing off to the bathroom together to talk about which boys were cute and which weren’t.
No, it was sexual. It was sharing sex histories—Jesus, getting her gay hairdresser to teach her how to give a blow job! And it was phone sex without a phone, and then phone sex with a phone, and lots of mutual assurances that there was nothing genuinely lesbian about what they were doing, until they’d passed that point and recognized that it didn’t matter whether their actions made them lesbians. If you were here I’d touch you. If you were here I’d go down on you. Wish you were here...
All she had to do was get on a plane to Seattle. A nice dinner for two in a comfortable suburban house. Rita would cook, she’d bring the wine. Nuits-Saint-Georges, because it had
certainly done the job before.
And then what?
What was required, she realized, was an experiment. She had to go to bed with a woman and see what happened. Not what happened in bed, although it would be good to know if the acts repelled or delighted her, but what happened afterward. If she could walk away from her female partner without harming her, and if the woman’s continued existence didn’t drive her crazy, then maybe she and Rita had a chance.
If not, she’d stay the hell away from the whole state of Washington. Because she didn’t want anything bad to happen to Rita. Because, well, she seemed to care about Rita.
Maybe even loved her. Whatever the hell that was, and it wasn’t something to think about, not now. If ever.
First things first. Was there even a lesbian bar in this perfect shithole of a town?
There almost had to be, and it couldn’t be too hard to find. But it would be closed at this hour, and in any case she wasn’t in shape to go cruising. Not in this outfit, not with her hair such a mess, not when she sorely needed a shower. It wouldn’t be hard to pass as a lesbian, dressed and groomed as she was, but it might be tricky to find somebody who’d want to go home with her.
A different outfit, she thought. And her hair fixed in a more becoming fashion, and maybe just a touch of lipstick.
She had to get out of this town. But when?
“Little late to be out walking.”
She’d been aware of the car alongside her but hadn’t paid attention until the driver lowered the window and spoke. She turned her head, took in the dark late-model sedan, the driver’s face hard to make out. And just then the dome light came on, as if a look at him would be reassuring.
And it was, sort of. Forties, jacket and tie, eyeglasses, balding, hair still dark. A little jowly, a little pudgy. A businessman, maybe a corporate guy. A solid citizen, for sure.
“Neighborhood’s coming back,” he went on. “Still, I have to say it’s got a ways to go. Young woman like yourself shouldn’t be walking around at this hour.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
“Neither could I. Full moon, gets me every time.” He leaned across the seat, opened the door in invitation.
Hard Case Crime: Getting Off Page 18