Beauty vs. the Beast

by M. J. Rodgers

  “I didn’t lie, Kay.”

  “Are we playing word games here? Did you or did you not attack Vince Boson?”

  “I did.”

  “Did he attack you first?”

  “He didn’t attack me at all. He barged into my private session with his wife. He yanked her out of her chair, dislocating her shoulder. She screamed in pain as he dragged her to the door, yelling at me that he’d kill me and then her if I tried to interfere.”

  “Oh. And you ignored his threats and came to her rescue?”

  Logical lady lawyer notwithstanding, he could hear the trust boldly evident in her tone. He could have predicted it would be there just by the way she had shown so much trust in him when they’d made love. A woman only opened herself like that with a man because she trusted him. It was that trust that would now make her believe whatever he told her.

  For the first time, Damian saw with precision what he had only glimpsed before—that vulnerable, soft core of deep caring within the hard casing of her logic and intellect.

  And he was seeing it so clearly now, he realized, because that deep caring was for him. And that deep caring was love.

  Chills danced all over his skin as that knowledge sunk deep inside him. He knew a brief instant of intense joy that immediately ricocheted into alarm. He moved away from her. Lay on his back. Closed his eyes.

  This is what he had feared from the first moment he saw her. This was what had made him try to walk away from her. This was what had also made him unable to. Like a brainless lemming, he’d kept marching right toward the cliff. And now here he stood, poised on its edge, the sharp rocks and boiling sea below.

  Should he honor her trust? Or betray it? Which would be kinder?

  * * *

  AS KAY WATCHED Damian draw away from her she had the eerie feeling that he was engaged in some internal battle and both sides were losing. He kept his eyes closed, as though he could no longer look at her. When he finally spoke, it was in that calm, controlled tone that she had come to know so well.

  “I couldn’t stop myself from beating Vince Boson.”

  “I understand. You were protecting Bette when you fought him.”

  Damian’s eyes opened. He rolled to his side and leaned his jaw on his hand. The previous sexual heat of his eyes that had so deliciously baked her body and brains had disappeared like the trailing smoke of an extinguished candle. The cold green glint was back.

  “I wouldn’t call it much of a fight. After I dislocated his shoulder, I just beat the living hell out of him. He’d been doing it to her for years.”

  There was no anger in Damian’s tone. Kay almost wished there was. His calm recitation of the facts was unnerving.

  “One of Bette’s personalities was a masochist, which split out when Bette was just a tiny little thing. Her masochist alter accepted the pain of abuse as pleasure in order to protect the child’s mind from going insane. Vince Boson is a sadist who delighted in this personality part of his wife and didn’t want me to extinguish it.”

  “If it had been in my power,” Kay said with conviction, “I would have beaten him up, too. So what happened afterward?”

  “Tim Haley, my receptionist, called an ambulance for both Bette and Vince. Bette corroborated my story to the police. Her medical records convinced them of the severity of the domestic abuse she’d been enduring for a decade. They decided my fight with Boson was self-defense and dropped the charges against me.”

  “And you continued treating Bette.”

  “The incident proved a breakthrough for her. She saw the abuse for the first time as a reenactment of her childhood horrors. She filed for divorce from Boson.”

  “So your fight with her husband gave her the courage to break out of an abusive marriage?”

  “I’d been seeing Bette for five months. She’d been denying the severity and extent of her husband’s abuse up until then, just as vehemently as she’d been denying her parents’ abuse of her as a child, which resulted in her becoming a multiple personality. The day she watched me beat up her husband, another personality called Bob made itself known. He’s her protector. With Bob’s help, Bette has made amazing progress ever since.”

  “So a lot of good came out of that confrontation Vince Boson forced on you with his threats.”

  “I didn’t beat him because of his threats, Kay. I beat him because finally, after all these years, I got my opportunity to get the bastard.”

  Kay was certain she must have misunderstood. After all these years? But he just said he’d been treating Bette for only five months. What was she missing here?

  “Damian, are you saying you were looking for an opportunity to beat Boson?”

  “Beating him was only the start. If Priscilla and Tim hadn’t pulled me off, I would have killed him. Any man who raises his hand to a woman or child should be pounded into a bloody pulp.”

  Damian’s tranquil tone had remained absolutely even. One could easily have thought he’d been agreeing it was a hot summer instead of coolly admitting to being able to kill a man.

  Until one saw the hard glint in his eyes, sharpened razor-fine from the grains of revenge refined over time.

  That glint told Kay, more than anything else could, that Damian was deadly serious about everything he had just said. He wouldn’t just have been able to kill that man. He had actually wanted to.

  But why? Why would such a seemingly balanced psychologist have such a hatred for—

  The answer flashed into her mind at the same instant it made the peach fuzz stand straight up on her arms. Her back snapped into a stiff board.

  “You weren’t just beating Vince Boson, were you? You were beating someone else—someone you’ve wanted to beat for a very long time. Who, Damian?”

  He didn’t say anything. It was the most chilling answer he could have given.

  “Damian?”

  His eyes were closed tight. She touched him on the shoulder lightly with her hand.

  “Damian. I need to know.”

  After what seemed like a very long time, he began to speak, in that same far-too-calm voice. “My father beat my mother in uncontrollable rages. I would try to stop him. He’d just push me aside.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Two. Three. Four. It had been going on since I was born. Then one night when I was five, I awoke to her screams and came running into the living room to find my father standing over her still body. He was kicking her, yelling at her to get up.”

  He paused. His jaw tightened. He swallowed hard, said nothing for a moment. Kay understood he was seeing it all again, reliving it all...with the eyes of a five-year-old boy. She could hardly bear the images his words evoked. She had no idea how he could. She waited.

  His voice was barely a whisper now, a harsh, unhappy whisper. “When my father finally realized he’d killed my mother that night, he got out his gun and blew his brains out.”

  Kay sucked in a shocked breath. She would have sworn the images couldn’t get worse. She’d been wrong. “Dear sweet heavens. You didn’t...see that, too?”

  His eyes came open then, glinting green and hard. Their look gave Kay a new chill.

  “My grandfather told me about it later. A shame, really. I had so looked forward to beating him to death one day.”

  And he meant it, too. Kay could see the truth behind that hard green glint, hear it in the awful raw reality of his voice.

  She shrunk back uncontrollably. “Dear God.”

  He smiled with no mirth whatsoever. “Yes, you would be smart to keep your distance. That uncontrollable rage runs through me, too. Even as a five-year-old child, I would explode. That’s why my grandparents sent me to a psychologist. Nearly a lifetime of therapy and it still hovers, just below the surface. You see, Kay, just like LeRoy, I ended up embracing what I most abhorred. I ended up becoming my father.”

  She leaned forward again, horribly alarmed at the words. “How can you say that? You’re nothing like that! Damian, you are a superbly discipli
ned man!”

  “That’s surface, Kay. The violence is there, waiting, believe me. It’s why I’ll never marry.”

  “But you’re so gentle and protective. You’d never abuse a wife or child.”

  “Abuse comes in many forms, Kay. I see it every day in my practice. People swearing they’d never do to their children what was done to them. And then doing it. Violence is passed on to children by example more than anything else. It was passed on to me. I will not pass it on to another.”

  She shook her head. “No, I won’t believe it. You are not subject to uncontrollable rages.”

  “If Priscilla and Tim hadn’t pulled me off Vince Boson, I would have killed him.”

  “But you didn’t. And you can’t convince me you didn’t only because Priscilla and Tim pulled you off him. I’ve seen how strong you are, Damian. If you had really been in an uncontrollable rage, no one could have pulled you off him. You let Priscilla and Tim stop you.”

  The hard, dark glint in his eyes softened. He reached out his hand to run his fingers through her hair.

  “You’re trying to convince yourself.”

  “I’m already convinced. I’m trying to convince you. Damn! How can you be so understanding of others and so blind when it comes to understanding yourself?”

  The shrill sound of the telephone ringing added emphasis to her words. Damian leaned toward the instrument sitting on the nightstand and picked up the receiver.

  A familiar, breathy voice responded to his hello.

  “I purposely aimed for the old armor. Just wanted to let you know, next time it could be you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Kay read the newspaper headline that sat on the judge’s desk in his private chambers: Shrink in Dual-Personality Court Case Dodges Shotgun.

  Ever since Damian had received that telephone call the night before, her stomach had felt like a microwave turned on high with a ton of popcorn kernels exploding inside. She’d been a fool not to take those threats and close calls more seriously.

  Ingle tapped impatient fingers on the early-morning edition of his newspaper and looked hard at her.

  “Ms. Kellogg, I was awakened this morning by a Detective Roth, who not only told me that your client was shot at last evening, but that he’s been getting threatening notes and telephone calls, speedboats and cars missing him by inches and even a letter bomb that exploded in my courtroom yesterday. And now, here it all is in gory detail splashed over the front page. Why wasn’t I told about any of this?”

  Kay spared a quick sidelong glance at Croghan’s face. He was stroking his dark beard in pure pleasure at the judge’s reprimand.

  She spoke up quickly. “There was no letter bomb, Your Honor. An envelope, slipped into Dr. Steele’s pocket, caught fire. I didn’t mention it, or these other things, precisely because I didn’t want the press sensationalizing the incident.”

  “Well, they are sensationalizing it, Ms. Kellogg, despite your failure to inform this court. And may I remind you, I am not the press.”

  “No, Your Honor, of course not. But you are a very busy judge, and it did not seem appropriate to bother you about the same kind of crank calls and letters that always start when a trial like this is so highly publicized.”

  “And what about that envelope that caught fire in my courtroom? Did you not think to bother me about that, either?”

  “It ignited yesterday after court and in the presence of no one but Dr. Steele and myself. Furthermore, it was passed surreptitiously to Dr. Steele before he entered your courtroom.”

  Kay paused to glance at Mrs. Nye, looking so impossibly innocent as she sat next to her attorney. Was this woman such a consummate actress that she was fooling them all? “As a matter of fact, Dr. Steele found it in his pocket right after Mrs. Nye bumped into him in the hallway outside.”

  “I object!” Croghan yelled, flying to his feet.

  “I’m the only one who can object in here, Mr. Croghan,” Ingle said, waving the lawyer back to his seat. “Now, Ms. Kellogg, Detective Roth tells me a slug from a shotgun dropped an old suit of armor at Dr. Steele’s home last evening, and could have just as easily dropped him. I trust you are no longer dismissing these incidents as cranks?”

  “Of course not. But until last night’s shooting and telephone threat, I thought that the perpetrator was just trying to intimidate Dr. Steele. That’s why I was trying to keep the incidents out of the press.”

  “If you didn’t inform the press of these matters, who did?”

  “The reporters must have interviewed Detective Roth.”

  “To be expected, I suppose. All right, this is the way it’s going to be. The bailiff will pass all spectators through a metal detector this morning to insure no weapons get inside the courtroom. And from now on, if either Dr. Steele or you receive any more threatening notes or calls, or if either of you even gets a hangnail, I want to be informed. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Kay replied, hearing the former stodgy, by-the-book judge’s voice returning momentarily beneath that ridiculous mohawk haircut.

  Judge Ingle turned away from Kay and Damian.

  “Mr. Croghan, when do you plan to complete the plaintiff’s case?”

  “This afternoon, Your Honor.”

  “Good. Be prepared to start your defense tomorrow morning, Ms. Kellogg. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Round three coming up. Get to your corners and come out fighting.”

  * * *

  “LARRY NYE, what can you tell the court about your father?” Croghan asked as he paced in front of his first witness for the day. Roy Nye’s son was in his early twenties, his hair slicked back into a long ponytail. He wore an ill-fitting dark suit and tie, the latter with which he fiddled constantly as though it were cutting off the circulation in his neck.

  If Damian had to guess, he’d bet it was the first suit Larry Nye had ever worn. He saw more resemblance to Roy than Lee Nye in the young man’s mannerisms and expression, which did not bode well for the man’s future.

  “My old man was okay when he wasn’t drinking. He was a good father. But he got kinda crazy when he had a few. He was allergic to booze.”

  “So, you loved your father despite his drinking problem, Larry?”

  “Yeah, of course. He couldn’t help it if drinking changed him.”

  “Drinking changed him,” Croghan repeated, obviously for emphasis. “Can you describe how drinking changed your father, Larry?”

  “Well, he’d yell and cuss and beat up on us some. But he didn’t mean it.”

  “It was the drink that made him do this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When he was sober, he was a good father to you?”

  “I had no complaints.”

  “Do you miss your father, Larry?”

  “‘Course I miss him. He was my old man, wasn’t he? Okay, so he weren’t no choirboy. That don’t give no psychologist a right to snuff him. He had a right to his life. Do only perfect people get to live? My old lady’s got nobody now. It’s not right.”

  “Thank you, Larry. That’s all I have.”

  * * *

  KAY WALKED UP to Larry Nye and watched the man’s eyes follow her. He looked her up and down, and his upper lip curled as he casually leaned back and draped his short, stocky frame over the witness chair.

  She read the contempt on his face as easily as if it had been painted on a six-foot billboard.

  Just a female. Good for one thing, was what he was thinking. She was sure of it.

  Larry Nye resembled Roy far too much.

  She smiled at him to see if it would disconcert him enough to remove that sneer. The sneer remained fearlessly in place.

  “Larry, what do you do for a living?”

  “Construction work.”

  “Which means?”

  “Digging ditches.”

  “Are you currently employed?”

  “No.”

  “What is your source of income?”

  “The old lady hel
ps me out.”

  “Are you speaking of your mother, Fedora Nye?”

  “Yeah. She’s a nice old broad.”

  “So your nice old broad of a mother is supporting you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you expecting to get some settlement money if your mother’s suit against Dr. Steele is successful?”

  “Your Honor, I object!” Croghan cut in. “What the witness is or isn’t expecting has no bearing on this matter.”

  “It goes to motive for the witness’s testimony, Your Honor,” Kay retaliated.

  “I’ll allow it,” Ingle said. “You may answer the question, Mr. Nye.”

  “So what if she gives me half? You got a beef with that?”

  “I ask the questions here, Mr. Nye,” Kay informed him as she looked him deliberately in the eye. “How old are you?”

  The sneer had begun to get a little frayed around the edges. “Twenty-two.”

  “Do you still live with your mother?”

  “Yeah. I don’t mind hanging around the old lady. She does the cooking, laundry. Like I said, she’s a nice old broad.”

  “Yes, like you’ve said. You’ve also said your father was okay to you when he wasn’t drunk, is that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you do father-and-son things together?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “What type of father-and-son things did you do?”

  “This and that.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  He repositioned himself in his chair, again. His head went back, his eyes wandered to the ceiling as though bored. “It was a while back. I don’t remember.”

  “How old were you when you last saw your father?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “You don’t remember what you did with your father from the time you were small until the time you were sixteen?”

  “He wasn’t home that much.”

  “Did you and your father ever go to see a ball game together?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t ever remember going to see a ball game with your father?” she asked incredulously.

  Larry’s head came forward. “I wasn’t home when he was.”