Fuck it. Fuck them both. They’d have done the same thing. They were going to fucking dump her like garbage on the side of the road and she’d clawed back.
Viridiana looked at the man in the velvet jacket.
“It was Daisy who pushed for it.”
“It figures,” Henry said, but rather than approach Daisy he pointed at Gregory, who stepped back, a scared wild animal trying to find a burrow. “Scott. Teach him a lesson.”
The big man took out a knife, as casually as if he was taking out a cigarette, and went towards Gregory. Gregory tried to put up a fight, he yelled and raised his arms. But the man was big and fast and tough. Gregory landed a couple of punches, but Scott took it all in stride. Give him half a minute and he was slashing at Gregory’s face and give him another at the belly, once, twice. Then he tossed him on the floor like a clump of wet tissue. Gregory rolled on his back, mouth open wide, looking very much like the sharks when they drag them onto the hot sand. He tried to roll away and let out a pitiful groan, pressing a hand against his belly.
Henry approached him and kicked Gregory in the face. He groaned again.
“Don’t ever say I wasn’t nice to you,” Henry said, looking down at Gregory. “Scott, get Lily to the car. I’ll be over in a minute.”
The big man motioned to Daisy and Daisy lifted her head. Her eyes were not on her lover, who was whimpering on the floor, they were set on Viridiana. If a ghost rose from the waters off the coast to haunt Viridiana, she knew that ghost would have those eyes. But she was ready to be haunted. Ready to pay the coin.
She had been ready for a while now.
Scott and Daisy walked out. It was the three of them now.
“One for the road,” Henry said, pouring himself more whiskey. “You sure you don’t drink?”
“Not on a night like this,” she said, her voice a whisper, but he must have heard her because he smiled at her. Or could be it didn’t matter what she said.
“I told you I was a gentleman,” he said, downing his drink and setting it down. “I’m going to prove it now. You better listen carefully, kid.”
The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, too, she thought. Funny how that quip had not occurred to her before, how she’d forgotten that in the lobby of the hotel and now it was in her head. Oh, the devil is quite a gentleman. He’s called Modo and Mahu.
“He’s not dead yet. You can get him a doctor if you want. But you’ve done me a favor tonight so I’ll do one back for you. He’s trouble. He stays alive, I bet trouble follows you around. You don’t want trouble, do you?”
She wanted city lights and city fun and money and Gregory, but Gregory was on the ground with blood on his face and blood seeping from his gut.
Viridiana did not reply.
“Up to you,” he said. “Give me your hand.”
She stretched out a hand and he shook it with a firm grip and leaned forward a little.
“Don’t be telling anyone about me, will you?” he whispered in her ear.
“No. Wouldn’t want trouble following me around,” she said.
The man smiled at her. A smile that was all teeth. Then he was gone. Gregory had managed to quiet his moans, but as soon as Henry left he began to complain.
“That motherfucker,” he said, rubbing a hand against his face, smearing blood on his forehead in the process. “Get me bandages, some… some alcohol. I’ll need the doctor.”
“Okay,” she said. “But first, where’s the cassette?”
“What?”
“The cassette,” she repeated. “Where did Daisy put it?”
“What are you worrying on about that!”
“Tell me and I’ll help get you patched up. Come on, you don’t want to waste time, do you?”
He stared at her and let out a dry chuckle. “You’re a fast learner. Try the toilet upstairs and then hurry the fuck down.”
Chapter 22
The door was still unlocked from when Daisy had gone to fetch the papers, so Viridiana didn’t have to smash her way inside, which would have been a hassle. And the tape was where Gregory said it would be: wrapped in a plastic bag and taped to the inside of the toilet tank. Viridiana tucked it in the back of her jeans.
A half-packed suitcase lay on Daisy’s bed. Viridiana rummaged inside of it, then opened the drawers on the night tables. A purse contained traveller’s checks and a makeup compact and nothing else. They were of no use to her – cops might be able to trace them, it was too risky – so she tucked them back inside the purse.
She went downstairs.
Gregory had not moved nor attempted to sit up. When she walked into the room he turned his head to look at her.
“I said…I said get bandages.”
“There are no bandages,” she informed him.
“Fuck. Cut a bed sheet. Get me rubbing alcohol. Get me a doctor.”
“There is no doctor,” she said.
“A doctor…that doctor you know.”
Viridiana looked down at him. It was like he hadn’t heard her or didn’t care what she said. He had both of his hands pressed against his stomach and he was licking his lips. He tried to sit up and when he did the crimson stain on his shirt seemed to grow bigger. He winced.
“Help me up, help me to the couch,” he said. “Come on. I told you were the cassette was, didn’t I?”
She did not approach him, contemplating him from across the room.
“You were going to leave me behind.”
He managed to sit up, grunted and looked down at his wound, but he snapped up his head when she spoke.
“I don’t know what you’re saying. Come on Viridiana, what are you saying? That guy stabbed me in the fucking liver, stabbed me in the fucking… God…go get the doctor.”
He managed to stand and stumble onto the white couch, smearing it with his hands, smearing it red. He sat down. She didn’t think he could walk more than a few steps.
“Viridiana,” he said. “You’ve got to help me.”
“I’ll go into town and come back,” she told him. “If you say you love me, I swear I’ll come back.”
“Of course, I love you. I do.”
“Loved me the moment you saw me,” she whispered.
“I loved you before I saw you,” he said, eagerly spitting out the words, in a cheap imitation of dear Montgomery Clift.
But now she could admit she was no Liz Taylor. She wasn’t living in one of those matinee movies her grandma used to watch, no romance, no musical, none of that. No black and white photography. It was bright red, the blood on Gregory’s face, wide eyed his pain.
The space where her heart used to rest had been torn raw and she looked at him but all she felt was a heavy blankness.
She nodded. “I’ll come back,” she promised.
The men had taken both cars, but she still had her bicycle. She rode with ease into town, stopping to crush the tape in her back pocket, stomping on it twice, then tossing it away. It fell near a lonely cactus, upsetting a lizard or small animal, which scurried away.
No one saw her do it, no one but the moon. The Coyote moon, hungry and eager, keeping her secrets.
She went straight to the pharmacy. There were a few men gathered near it. Not Alejandro’s crowd, but the same type of men. Doing nothing, wasting time.
Daisy said improvisation was the key to success, and Viridiana wouldn’t deny improvisation was a good skill, but you also need good planning.
You need to have thought things through.
“Can I get a pack of condoms?” she asked the pharmacist and he gave her a disapproving look, but sold them to her all the same.
She’d thought this through, she’d had days to go over the whole sequence of events in her head. After the first reel, there comes the second one and so forth. She had to follow through, one foot after another.
She stopped at the front desk of the hotel and asked the clerk to ring Mr. Landry.
“Can I see y
ou? What room are you staying in?” she asked, twisting the cord between her fingers.
“Uh, Twenty-one,” he said.
“I’ll be up.”
She gave the handset back to the front desk clerk who looked at her curiously.
Twenty-one was twelve inverted. There’s some symmetry there, she thought, since that was Henry’s room number. Might be an omen, but this time, she wagered it was a good one.
She traced the door numbers with her index finger before knocking.
“Come in,” Lawrence said.
His room was like Henry’s, except the painting on the wall was a view of the Sea of Cortez. The TV was on, but he’d turned down the volume. A black and white movie was playing and she recognized it immediately, even without hearing a line of dialogue.
“Not a big night on the town, huh?” she said. He’d had room service, the tray was still sitting on the table along with a glass bottle of Coca-Cola.
“Not exactly,” he said, sliding his hands into his pajama’s pockets.
“Creature from the Black Lagoon?”
The woman in her pale bathing suit had jumped into the water. She was swimming on her back and the creature peeked at her from behind a clump of algae. There she went and there he went, following her.
“You’re a romantic, then,” she said.
“What?” he said with a chuckle.
“It’s a love story,” she replied. “A lot of the monster movies are love stories, too. Bride of Frankenstein and The Mummy work like that. It’s all unrequited, of course.”
Her eyes were fixed on him, black, like peering into abyssal depths.
“I guess you could see it that way. Did you want… I mean, I could get dressed and—”
“I asked you if we could hang out tonight.”
“Do you want to go out? I’ll get changed,” he offered.
“I suppose they couldn’t be happy together. He’s a scaly monster, she’s a pretty lady without gills,” she said, turning her head and looking at the TV set.
“She’d have to buy a gigantic fish bowl to keep him in it,” he said. “Cleaning an aquarium is no easy thing when it’s that big.”
“Someone once told me a goldfish will grow as big as its bowl.”
Gregory told her. That’s who. Gregory who was James who was someone else, who was a liar and a cheat. Who was dying all alone. Back in the house on the cliff, with no one but the moon watching over him. She could save him if she wanted, pull him from the jaws of the hungry Coyote moon.
“I’ve never been much for fish,” Lawrence said.
“Try a shark,” she said, for the sake of saying something and slid a hand into the back pocket of her jeans, checking that she still had the condoms.
It’s important to know who you are, she thought. It’s important to know how far you’ll go. It’s important I do this now.
It’s the only way it worked. She needed an alibi or they’d get suspicious. What better alibi. Custom made.
Viridiana turned to him and lifting herself on her tiptoes wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. There were no swelling violins, nothing like that, it was a brief kiss, but still she borrowed a line from that old movie.
“Do I make you nervous?” she asked, in a pitch-perfect imitation of Taylor.
She didn’t care about the answer and kissed him again, this time with all the passion and skill Gregory had taught her. He pressed a hand behind her neck, a lock of hair snagging between his fingers.
He probably wouldn’t have cared to answer even if she’d had given him the chance, because despite whatever Boy Scout instincts he possessed, he took off his clothes quick enough, though not as quick as Viridiana.
Here’s the reason why they didn’t show sex scenes in the old Hollywood movies, she thought. It’s not because they were prudes scared of hiding breasts—although she knew there were censors and codes—but really, in the end, when you reduce it all to its basic elements one body is like another body, and a fuck is a fuck.
The way things worked between Viridiana and Gregory was that he initiated everything. He asked for caresses, kisses, blow jobs. She let him have them. With Lawrence, it was the reverse: she asked, she coaxed; he responded, dizzy with feeling. But it was still a body next to her body, it was still lips on her breasts and a hand touching her thigh. It was her head resting on the curve of a neck and the frantic, ragged breathing in her ear.
This is a movie, she thought. It’s not the movie I started watching but it’s the movie that it’s become.
When she went to the bathroom and dragged her hand across her thighs, looking at the blood on her fingertips, blood on her nails, and she looked up at the mirror, she thought it was such a big fuss over this? Everyone in her family always insisting on Catholic virtues, talking about the danger of being “easy”, and the priest from the pulpit shaking his head at women in tight shirts. But it was such a little thing. No big deal at all.
There’s worse sins, she thought. It’s not even a sin.
No, a sin was the man waiting back at the house, bloodied and injured and scared. Waiting for her to return with the doctor. She hadn’t lied about that. She’d head back.
Later.
If there’s something she had learned, it was that in order to deceive you should speak the truth.
She had not told a single lie that day.
“I see you’ve had a misspent youth,” she told the mirror and then she smiled, the way Liz Taylor smiled, lips curling a little.
She washed her hands and leaned forward, drawing a line across her reflection from the bridge of her nose to her chin.
“Do I make you nervous?” she asked the mirror.
She didn’t sleep much, that’s true. She’d learned that nerves are no good, you’ve got to approach each situation with a firm resolution and a cold head, but she still couldn’t make herself sleep.
When it was morning and they had showered, and she was combing her hair with his comb, Lawrence looked appropriately embarrassed, he even blushed as if he had been the virgin.
“You should have told me,” he said. “I thought you’d done it before.”
It. Like a kid in high school, this was exactly the way her friends had talked, whispering as they fixed their makeup and their hair in the school’s bathroom. Have you done it with Manuel? Have you gone all the way? How far, then?
Nothing, nothing, we are only fooling around. That had been her stock response.
Viridiana shrugged. She sat next to him on the bed.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It could have been nicer.”
“You’re a nice guy, Stanley Lawrence Landry.”
He really was a nice guy. The sort of man who would help little old ladies cross the street, who would take in stray puppies and inform a shopkeeper that they’d given him too much change.
“Besides, I didn’t want you chickening out,” she added, flopping back onto the bed and looking at the ceiling.
“I like your high opinion of me. Or is it low?”
“Low. Make it up to me.”
He ran a hand through his hair and laughed, like an awkward kid. “Want to have breakfast? And maybe there’s a matinee at that old movie theater in the next town.”
“Sure,” she said. “But I should get into a change of clothes and tell Daisy and Gregory that I’m hanging out with you.”
As they drove back to the house she felt her heart accelerating—boom, boom, boom it went beneath her fingertips—and Viridiana reminded herself that she shouldn’t be nervous. After all, she didn’t really have a heart anymore. It was a blank space.
They got out of the car.
The front door was open and the living room was the same mess she’d left behind: bottles and glasses and cigarettes in an ash tray testifying to an interrupted celebration. And a puddle of blood on the floor, blood stains on the couch, a trail of blood which led them down the hallway, to the
downstairs bathroom.
Gregory had dragged himself there and lay half slumped next to the bathtub. He must have tried to stand up and grabbed on to the shower curtain, because it half-covered him like a mockery of a shroud.
She couldn’t see his face properly from where she was standing, but it jolted her all the same and she had to step aside and turn away, a hand pressed against her mouth, despite all her plans to remain calm.
“Dear God,” Lawrence said. He tried to hold her, but she brushed his hands aside and rushed outside the house.
She stared up at the sky. The sun was up high, blazing and cruel, like the unblinking eye of a god and she crossed her arms, grasped her shoulders, feeling the bones beneath. She hurled near the entrance and then Lawrence came out, helped her up. Now she let him hold her, cheek pressed against his chest, her eyes wide open.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s get the police.”
They got back in the car and drove into town and thankfully Lawrence was also rattled, so he didn’t speak to her because the taste of bile in her mouth made her want to tell him everything. But she clamped her mouth shut.
Chapter 23
It proved a little difficult to find the policeman because he had gone out on a bender the night before and wasn’t home. Eventually the doctor came over and the policeman, and they began asking questions.
The questions were easy to answer, but a murder is not the same as an old man falling down the stairs. A murder and the disappearance of an American tourist is an even stranger, more pressing category, meaning that the judicial police was summoned. Three officers waltzed into town, much to the amazement of everyone.
The man who questioned her wore large sunglasses, and when he began talking to her he took them off and slowly set them on the desk. They were sitting at the police station and it ought to have been the same drill, but this guy seemed more menacing than Homero. She knew Homero. He was a kid like her.
The judicial took out a tape recorder, much like her own, and placed it on the desk. He also took out a notebook and a pen.
He asked her to tell him how she knew the American. The he asked her what she had done the day Gregory died and Daisy went missing, beginning in the morning. Viridiana explained that they had gone to the notary public, then she had helped Daisy pack her clothes. She said this in case they dusted fingerprints from the room and found hers.
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