by Jack Ketchum
When she was through she slipped the condom over her blue-gloved index finger and pricked its well-end with the pin. Then she inserted the condom and pushed until she was certain the condom was pretty much drained of Tommy. Then she withdrew and packed up. The condom and pin went into one ziplock baggie and the rubber gloves into another.
And that was that.
Driving home she tossed first one baggie and then the other and finally the belt out the window along the road a half mile or so apart from each other. When she got home Tommy was still sleeping.
She took off her clothes and got into bed.
She felt the familiar humid warmth of him beside her and thought for a moment how sad it was, really, that he’d be leaving anyway. Not where he wanted to go but somewhere.
She’d been telling him the truth before.
God’s honest truth.
He was far and away the best she’d ever had.
Redemption
Dora followed them down into the Forty-second street station, standing well back in the line as he paid for both their tokens.
Big spender.
She watched him take her hand as they went through the turnstiles side by side, then fished a token out of her change purse and followed them down the stairs to the uptown local waiting on the tracks. Her luck was holding—she slipped into the car ahead of theirs just as the doors slid closed in the face of the old black bag lady behind her. The woman howled and swatted at the door like she was chasing flies.
So many of these women. So many flies.
She could see them through the door windows, standing, straphanging, swaying together as the train pulled away. The back of Howard’s suit looked wilted with heat and humidity. The woman was smiling.
Dora gave him this much, he’d always had taste.
The woman wore a black silk jumpsuit, possibly Versace—black, for God’s sake, on a day like this—looking fresh and clean despite the ninety-degree weather. Her skin was pale, drawn tight across the delicate facial bones, her hair long and black, lips stained bright red and teeth very white.
Her body was not unlike Dora’s, but built on a different scale. The woman had easily three inches on her and maybe four—five seven or five eight—so that the slim thighs looked even slimmer, the breasts and buttocks fuller by contrast.
Early thirties.
Irish, probably.
And money. The jumpsuit was expensive. So were the heavy silver bracelet and the ruby-studded earrings.
She was the best one yet as far as Dora was concerned.
Good for you, Howard, she thought.
Bastard.
They got off at Sixty-sixth, walked out of the station and up to Sixty-eighth and then eastward toward the park. A homeless woman in front of the Food Emporium was hawking the Daily News. To Dora she looked like one of those dust bowl photos by Walker Evans, all gaunt angles and sad hard lines. The teeth in her mouth would be rotten. Her flesh would smell of mildew and old leaves.
She felt a flash of pity for the woman that was not entirely free of pity for herself.
It was rush hour. Yet this far uptown the sidewalk traffic was light, and she had no trouble following them. At Columbus they turned north past Fellini’s, and he took her hand again as they stopped for a moment in front of a boutique, gazing in at the lingerie in the window, while Dora ducked inside a store and picked up the latest copy of Elle. The Elle fit nicely with the light tailored Burberry suit and Mark Cross briefcase.
Just another pretty young career woman on the rise.
The magazine was an accessory.
With the first one it had been glasses. For some reason no one ever worried about a woman wearing glasses, and the girl, some goddamn secretary no less, had opened the door immediately. All Dora’d said was that she was looking for Howard, she was an old friend from school and he’d given her this address in case he wasn’t at his own apartment—and since he wasn’t here, either, would the girl mind if she left him a note? Sure, said the girl and turned her back on Dora to show her in. She took the six-inch stainless-steel carving knife out of her handbag, reached up into the girl’s frizzy red hair, pulled her head back, and slit her throat.
The rest of it was harder. She had to get the body into the bedroom, up on the bed, and strip it naked, making it look like a sex crime and not what it was, an execution, and the girl was heavier than she looked, heavier in fact than Howard usually liked them, so that she had to wonder what it was the girl had—she wasn’t all that pretty, really—not like this one—and she supposed it was the sex, it had to be; Howard always did think with his prick. And considering that took some of the unpleasantness out of inserting the handle of the electric broom and then, rolling her over, the bottle.
On Seventy-first street they moved east again. Halfway between Columbus and Central Park West they turned up the stairs of a renovated brownstone. Number thirty-nine. The woman opened the door. Dora crossed the street, staring up at the windows, slowly walking by. It was dusk by then, and the apartment would be dark inside. She watched. Once again her luck was good. The woman had a front apartment. She saw the light go on the third floor, had a brief impression of high white ceilings and plants hanging in the window. She looked away and continued walking.
At Central Park West she turned back the way she came. She glanced at the apartment and saw that the curtains were drawn now, their color indistinguishable. Dark, heavy material. At Pizza Joint Two she asked the waiter for a table by the window and seated herself facing east so she could watch the entrance to number thirty-nine across the street.
She ordered shrimp parmigiana, antipasto, and a glass of wine.
She looked at her watch. Six-thirty-five.
If her luck still held, he wouldn’t stay the night.
And then this would be the easiest yet. Easier even—and far less dangerous—than pushing MaryBeth Chapman, budding blond account exec for Shearson, in front of the Seventh Avenue express at Thirty-fourth street. If anyone had noticed her hands on MaryBeth’s back, they hadn’t said anything. Maybe there was too much shock at the sound of it for anyone to have reacted even if they had noticed—the liquid crack like a huge balloon full of water bursting and a tree-limb snapping, both at once. The enormous red spray.
Easier than both the others because he’d brought the others to his apartment first, and she’d had to wait and follow them once they were alone, planning it, getting to know their habits somewhat—where they lived, who they saw, and where they went.
Here she only had to wait till he left. Then she could go in asking for him the same way she had with the secretary holding the copy of Elle in front of her because it looked right there, a prop. Subliminal. She was neat and fashionable and wasn’t any threat to anybody, and the brand-new eight-inch knife was handy in the briefcase. She would cut her a little differently. Rob her this time. Nothing sexual. No connection from a police point of view. Clean and tragic.
The talking heads on television all loved the word “tragic.”
An abandoned baby in a dumpster was tragic. A kid caught in a crossfire between crack dealers was tragic. A rising young businesswoman falling in front of a subway train—oh yes. That was tragic, too.
Nonsense.
To be tragic you had to have stature. Your suffering—and you—had to be somehow bigger than life. The Electras, the Medeas, the Lears, and the Hamlets. You had to fall from great heights, endure great pain. You had to have all the world to lose—and then you had to lose it.
Take Howard, now. Nothing tragic there.
Though on the surface there were arguments to be made.
A successful corporate lawyer. Yes. Very successful. A modicum of stature was implicit in any success.
Then his mother had died two months ago. Sad.
And then the inexplicable, seemingly random loss of two of his lovers. Each of his lovers following Dora, whom he’d dumped after five long years of practically tying his damn shoelaces for him. Pitiable.
&nb
sp; And now a third to follow.
All this. But still—nothing tragic.
Because Howard was a worm, essentially. Small. Small enough to tell her that the sex was her fault—though he was the one who couldn’t get an erection—and small enough to blame her when the bank had laid her off—along with thirty other people, thank you very much—to say she wasn’t aggressive enough. Wasn’t sharp enough.
Small enough to try to make her feel that much smaller just because his ego needed boosting. And then to dump her entirely.
No. No tragic figure there.
Just a weak little man with a lot of bad luck when it came to romantic involvements.
And his luck would not improve. Not ever. Not if Dora could help it.
Not one of them would live. Not one.
Until finally, one day, sometime in the future, he saw himself for the evil jinx virus he was and stopped trying altogether.
She knew what sex meant to him. For years, until he developed his . . . problem, it meant plenty.
It would absolutely kill him.
Redemption, she thought. It meant to recover something pawned or mortgaged. What she’d mortgaged to Howard.
To set something free.
Her sense of self. Her own true self.
She thought, I need some damn redemption.
At eight o’clock he left the building.
She was dawdling over a second cup of coffee, and she almost missed him—he walked right by her seated in the window. Dora thought he looked sort of sad somehow, thoughtful.
Perhaps upstairs things were not going all that smoothly.
It didn’t matter.
She finished the coffee slowly and paid the bill in cash. No records. A cabbie was picking up a fare—a dapper old man in an expensive suit, wearing a bow tie and carrying a cane—directly across the street from number thirty-nine. She thought of the Walker Evans woman in front of the market. It was still a man’s world. Even an old man’s. She waited until they pulled away and then crossed the street, walked up the stairs, opened the door, and scanned the mailboxes in the hall. Three F was B. Querida. The name surprised her. She’d been sure the woman was Irish.
She buzzed her.
“Yes?”
“Hello. Yes. It’s Janet.”
“Janet?”
“Yes. Is Howard there?”
There was a pause.
“Hold on. I’ll buzz you up.”
The buzzer sounded. She opened the door and went to the elevator and pushed 3.
There were only two apartments on the floor, which said something about their size. And the location was a block from Central Park West. B. Querida was doing rather well for herself, she thought. Probably as well as Howard.
The woman stood in the open doorway, still wearing the black silk jumpsuit—or was that wearing it again?—looking poised and smiling and faintly curious.
“Sorry. You just missed him,” she said.
Dora stopped just outside the doorway.
“Damn!” she said. She looked momentarily confused and flustered. “I work with him. I’ve got some papers for him to sign. Oh, God.”
“He gave you this address?”
“He said he’d be here till about eight, eight-thirty. And I just now got away. Did he say where . . . ?”
“No. Afraid he didn’t.”
“Listen. Would you mind . . . ? Do you think I could use your phone and try to call someone on this?”
“Sure. Of course. Come on in.”
The woman stood aside.
The room in front of Dora was cluttered, almost Victorian, though spotlessly clean. And not nearly as large as she would have guessed. Overstuffed chairs in front of what looked like a working fireplace. Heavy maroon curtains. Bric-a-brac and vases filled with long-stem roses.
The room was dark. Deep reds. Mahogany furniture.
Even the paintings were dark. Landscapes in storm. Undecipherable forms. One of them, she thought, might be an Albert Ryder.
It was not what she’d expected.
“The phone’s in the bedroom. This way.”
The woman was walking in front of her now, through a paneled corridor, black-and-white prints and old sepia photos on the walls, their subjects mostly a blur to her. A closed oak door lay directly ahead of them. The corridor was narrow.
Dora opened the briefcase. Her fingers found the hardwood handle.
It was awkward here, the space too tight.
Better to wait until the bedroom, she thought. Even fake the phone call if she had to.
There would be plenty of opportunity. B. Querida had turned her back on her. She wasn’t afraid. If she’d do it once, she’d do it twice.
The woman’s fingers closed over the cut crystal doorknob, turned it, and gently pushed open the door. And now she was standing in profile, half her face visible to Dora and smiling in the dim hall light, the other half lost in the bedroom’s dark.
“I’ll get the light,” she said. She stepped inside.
Dora stepped in silently behind her, into darkness. And at once felt oddly out of place here, as though she were not in the city at all anymore but in some room in Vermont or New Hampshire, out in the country somewhere on some night when there was no moon and no stars, when the darkness seemed to swallow every shred of light. New York was never black. Never. It glowed.
Not now. Her eyes could make out nothing of the woman inside. She could only hear her cross the room with the practiced ease of someone long blind in a wholly familiar darkness.
And stop. And wait.
And she almost turned away then because there was something wrong with that, somehow it wasn’t right, there was a trick here somewhere, and she didn’t much care to know where or how but this blackness was all wrong and something was telling her to get the hell out of there when she heard a click and suddenly the dark exploded, flooded her with light.
So that she was the blind one for the moment, unaware of the woman moving back across the room until she was already leaning toward her through the beam like some sudden evil angel bathed in light, aware only of heat and scalding brightness until the woman grabbed her arm and her briefcase and shoved her forward into the room, tore the briefcase from her hands and sent her sprawling across the floor.
The door slammed shut.
Dora thought of her father.
The door slammed shut behind him. The lock turned. Whiskey on his clothes and on his breath as he leaned over.
Whose little girl are you?
The woman walked directly toward her out of the klieg light trained on the door.
“Some of my clients want to feel like movie stars,” she said. “Or maybe political prisoners.” She laughed. “Sometimes a little of both.”
The room was strung with track lighting. Out of the beam of the klieg, Dora could see normally. She sat up and looked around, and the woman saw her looking.
She extracted the knife from the briefcase.
As though she knew it was there all along.
“I lied about the bedroom,” she said. “That’s over on the other side of the apartment. And nobody goes there but me. Sorry.”
Dora looked up and felt the hysterical urge to laugh and then the urge to run.
The room was long and narrow, and except for a wooden chair and small oak linen cabinet, empty of conventional furniture. There were no windows. She could see where there had been one, the sill and frame were there but the window itself had been bricked over and painted black. The rest of the room was like the padded cell of an asylum—except that the padding, too, was black. Thick steel rods webbed the ceiling. Chains, harnesses, and manacles dangled from them irregularly, some connected by ropes to pulleys on the wall. There was a wall of instruments made of steel and wood—instruments to clamp and probe, to cut and to pierce and tear.
Another wall displaying masks, belts, whips, some of them tipped with metal balls.
In the center of the room stood two huge eight foot black beams intersecting
to form the letter X.
The wall in front of it was a mirror.
She saw what looked like an outdoor grille made of old rusted iron.
A wooden barrel lying on its side, studded with nails.
She saw a scarred butcher-block table arrayed with weights and clamps and knives.
To this the woman added Dora’s carving knife, setting it down gently, almost lovingly.
“He comes here, you know? He feels guilty.”
“Guilty?”
“Of course he does. Look at what he did to you.”
“Me? How do you know . . . ?”
“Oh, I know you all right. I knew you right away. See, Howard always pays cash. You’d think a guy like him, with the kind of job he’s got, you’d think he’d go with a credit card just to get the float. Not Howard. Always cash. Did you know he still carries a picture of you in his wallet?”
“I . . . he does?”
“I told you. He feels guilty. I bet you didn’t think he had it in him, did you?”
The woman was serious. Her picture was in his wallet. Amazing.
“Of course it’s not just you. There’s the broker and the secretary. He feels guilty about them, too. Though I never could figure out why. Hell, I think he even feels guilty about his mother dying. Howard’s got a lot of guilt. A lot to answer for. At least he thinks so.” She laughed again. “Don’t look so shocked. In this business you hear a lot of stories. People confess. I make them confess.”
She stepped closer.
“Stand up, Dora.”
She did as she was told.
“Take off your jacket. Let me look at you.”
She hesitated.
“I’m a whole lot stronger than you. Without your little toy there. You know that, don’t you?”
Dora looked up into her wide green eyes and nodded. She slipped the jacket off her shoulders. And suddenly felt naked there.
The woman reached out and lightly touched her hair. Her touch was electric.
“So what about you?” she said. “What have you got to answer for?”
You’ve got to get out of here, she thought. Now.
The woman turned away, walked to the klieg light and switched it off.
“Let’s see if I’ve got this correct,” she said. “Once you had him, you didn’t want to fuck him anymore, am I right?” She shrugged. “It happens. For some people, the capture’s everything. Once you’ve proven you can do it, once he’s yours, it’s not so much, is it? Kind of turns to ashes. Especially if you don’t really like yourself much. And you don’t, do you?”