by Linda Barlow
He also didn’t want any woman poking into his past.
He just wanted to fuck as many females as possible. Preferably the good-looking; submissive ones.
Annie fascinated him. She was cool on the surface, but he fantasized that underneath that elegant control was a woman who shared his own dark passions.
He had to be careful, though. Fucking female colleagues was not smart. These days you could get hit with a lawsuit for even seeming interested in fucking female colleagues. His real heyday had been years ago in the singles bars, where the women were so eager to get home for a quick roll that he barely had to do a thing. His looks had been good enough—and they’d loved his well-toned, muscular body.
But the bar scene wasn’t the same since the advent of HIV. Especially here in the City of Fairies. He had his best luck these days in the gym where he worked out. Women were into weight training these days. And there in the exercise room in front of the full-length mirrors that adorned every wall, he could check them out and they could check him out and it could all be arranged hardly without saying a word.
Trouble was, Fletcher didn’t go for the hard-body type. He liked his women soft. He wanted to run his palms and fingers over soft juicy breasts, not hard pecs. He didn’t want some bitch who could wrestle and pin him. He wanted one who was fluttery and helpless in his arms. He wanted a shy, reluctant lady, not a muscle-pumping bull dyke.
Despite the fact that she worked at least part of every day in a hard-hat construction site, Annie Jefferson always looked like a lady. She dressed like a lady, too, in suits and blouses and shiny shoes with little heels and matching handbags. She wore pale lipstick, and her perfect little fingernails were always painted soft pink or beige, never harsh and red. She was sweet and gentle, with a well-modulated voice and a patient smile even when things weren’t going well. She was all woman. She was everything he’d ever wanted.
He loved to picture it—Annie Jefferson’s slim, elegant body naked under his, straining and thrashing, a lovely sheen of perspiration rising on her honey-gold skin, her head tipped back, her eyes wide with passion—or, better, with fear—and her soft lips widening in a scream.…
One night.
It was all he wanted, all he needed.
One night that she would remember forever.
Chapter Five
Darcy laid out the tarot deck and pondered the cards.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that around me,” Annie said.
Darcy looked up, blinking. “I thought you didn’t believe in it.”
“I don’t. Well… I don’t think I do,” she added with a smile. “But you always look so serious, and I find myself half expecting some gloomy death and disaster card to show up.”
“There’ve been a lot of those gloomy death and disaster cards lately, it’s true,” Darcy said cheerfully. “But I’ve also seen some good cards for you. A strong, exciting man. Passion. Romance.”
“Now that’s the sort of thing I want to hear—good cards, predicting wonderful events and summoning handsome, sensitive, capable-of-commitment men!”
Darcy giggled. “Hey, they’re my cards—I’ve got dibs on those guys, if they exist.”
She and Darcy had gotten together for supper, as they often did on weeknights after work. Tonight was Annie’s turn to cook, and she was tossing a salad while Darcy read the tarot.
“So what do you see in store for yourself?” Annie asked as she popped a loaf of San Francisco’s famous sourdough bread into the oven.
The lower level of the house was open space, without walls separating the living, dining, and kitchen areas. Annie could see Darcy glaring at the latest spread on the coffee table before scattering it with her hands.
“Trouble,” she said glumly. “Why’d I ever take up this New Agey stuff anyway? It’s depressing as hell. You’d think I’d be resigned by now to being a dull person leading an uninspired life.”
“Nonsense!” said Annie. “You are by no means a dull person. Everybody adores you, Darcy.”
And it was true, she thought. She wasn’t just complimenting her best friend. Women liked Darcy because she was unpretentious, lively, and empathetic. Men liked her because she was easygoing, friendly, logical, and quick with her hearty laugh.
“Well, I hate my life,” Darcy said. “I wish I could be more like you. You’re so polite to people, so diplomatic, so ladylike, so serene.” Darcy idly picked up the remote control and flicked on the TV. “Don’t you ever just feel like boiling over?”
Annie bit her lip and smiled. Did she? Certainly she used to feel like boiling over. She’d spent the first half of her life, in fact, doing just that.
Born to a single mother who was sent to prison for armed robbery when Annie was three, Annie was shuffled from one foster home in the Los Angeles area to another. She had adored her mother and could not understand why the police had taken her away. She’d hated the police after that.
Anger and grief over losing her mother came out in disruptive behavior, and by the time she was seven, Annie was notorious in the Department of Social Services for “acting out” and “recalcitrance.” Foster parents couldn’t deal with her. She was rude, combative, and a major behavior problem in every elementary school she was sent to. Despite placing well above average in intelligence tests, the various social workers who were assigned to her case reported that she appeared to have little interest in learning.
There were a few dedicated teachers who worked hard to get through to her. One of them used to take Annie home with her after school, feed her milk and cookies, and tell her wonderful stories about heroes and villains, gods and goddesses. The teacher even gave Annie a book of her very own with myths and legends in it. It was too hard for her to read, but she loved to look at the color plate of Perseus with his mirrored shield and his mighty sword fighting Medusa. And the one of Eros rescuing Psyche, who was chained to a rock over the sea, waiting for a dread monster to come and devour her.
The foster family she was living with at the time were strict born-again, evangelical, Word-of-the-Lord Christians. When her foster father found Annie trying to spell out the words in the book of myths one evening before supper, he took the volume from her, leafed through it, and declared it impious and sacrilegious. He burned her precious book in the fireplace, unmoved by Annie’s screams of protest and rage, and then he whipped her soundly with his belt.
Annie ran away, swearing that she would kill herself if they tried to send her back. Instead they sent her to a group home with other difficult-to-place children. By the time she was ten years old it was clear to Annie that nobody wanted her… and nobody ever would.
She took to thieving the next year. Various social workers and foster parents had drilled it into her head over the years that she was a thief’s daughter, so she figured she might as well live up to her heritage.
She stole, and she lied about stealing. She did it less out of need than out of rage. Everything that had ever mattered to her had been stolen from her.
By the time she was thirteen she’d been arrested three times and was well on her way to proving the curse of her genes.
With her blond hair, her pretty, waifish face, and her angelic turquoise eyes, Annie’s best scam was to mimic a scared child from a good home who had somehow gotten lost in the city. She could spot a bleeding-heart sucker a mile away. She’d squeeze out a few tears and whimpers, mixed in with an occasional melting smile, and the marks would buy her food and clothing, ice cream, taxi or bus fare “home.” When she’d taken them for all she could, she’d disappear, usually with their wallets as well.
It worked fine until the day she tried her game on Charlie Jefferson, then a college student, who proved to be not as soft a touch as he looked. Annie was fourteen by this time but small for her age. She hid her breasts under a baggy shirt and tried to look ten.
Charlie gave her a five-dollar bill on her first appeal, but she’d caught a glimpse of his wallet, which looked thick. So she distracted him—or trie
d to—and went for the wallet, but he was quicker than she was. He got a good grip on her wrist, and all her squirming, kicking, and yelling Robbery! Rape! and Murder! didn’t unnerve him one bit.
He held her firmly until the cops came, and then, to her utter amazement, he told the officers that she was his kid sister who’d run away from somewhere in Orange County and he was taking her home. Because the officer in charge didn’t know her, and probably because both she and Charlie looked so clean-cut, he’d turned them both loose. Charlie, whose grip on her arm hadn’t for a moment wavered, then dragged her away to his car.
“You’re a child molester!” she cried, resisting every step of the way.
“I’m a college student,” he retorted. “My parents are child molesters. They collect incorrigible brats like you.”
It turned out that his parents were educators who ran a progressive school for troubled adolescents. The emphasis was on individual responsibility rather than discipline, and one of the first courses Annie was offered was in Greek and Roman mythology. Even so, she continued to be rebellious, and it took the Jeffersons several months to win her heart and convince her that someone, at last, did want her.
She didn’t see much of Charlie, who was away at school studying architecture, but she never forgot that he was the one who had rescued her. She was a beautiful young woman of eighteen when he came home to spend an entire summer. The mysterious chemistry that had initially drawn them together began working once again.
At first the relationship seemed doomed. When she tried to fit in to the Jefferson’s social world, she felt completely outclassed. Although she had learned to behave herself, she had not learned the finer aspects of etiquette—the right things to say, the right forms of address, the right silverware to use, the proper way to dress, the correct subjects for polite conversation, the right way to conduct herself in every situation. “I’ll never be good enough for you,” she told Charlie, who laughed and reassured her. Anything she needed to learn, he would teach her.
He was a very persuasive young man. Like a hero from one of her myths, he had played Pygmalion to her Galatea, discovering within her intelligence, ambition, and a true hunger for learning. Annie flung herself into her studies. She vowed never, ever, to make him sorry for loving her.
With Charlie’s help, she finished high school and enrolled in college. He taught her everything he knew and loved about buildings and encouraged her artistic side. For a while she had dreamed of following his footsteps into architecture, but eventually she had chosen interior design, and during the course of graduate school she’d shifted into corporate design.
And she and Charlie had gotten married.
Together, they’d founded Fabrications.
She hadn’t realized how dependent she was on him until he died. Or how hard it was to make her way in a world deprived of magic and myth.
“Annie?” Darcy’s voice brought her crashing back to the present. “Come here, and take a look at this.” Darcy increased the volume on the television. “Looks like the jury’s back in the courtroom. And they’re smiling and making eye contact. Shit, I think that scumbag is going to walk after all.”
Annie hurried into the living room area. She didn’t have to ask “what jury?” The murder trial of Matthew Carlyle was one of the biggest crime stories to hit the country in recent years.
“You mean they’ve acquitted him?”
“They haven’t announced the verdict yet, but it looks like the judge is about to say something.”
The panel of eight women and four men were shown seated in the jury box, and the judge, a middle-aged woman who had been profiled by all the local and national TV stations and newspapers, was speaking to the bailiff. It had been a long trial, and every argument made by both the defense and the prosecution had been analyzed endlessly in the press. The closing arguments had been presented to the jury several days ago, and since then they had been deliberating.
Annie had had mixed feelings about the trial from the beginning. It was as if two completely separate processes had been inextricably linked to one another—the building of the cathedral and the trial of Matthew Carlyle. Because Francesca Carlyle had been the prime mover behind building the cathedral, her violent death and her husband’s subsequent trial had thrown a pall over the project.
Ironically, as the cathedral had been slowly constructed stone by stone, Matthew Carlyle’s reputation and credibility had been deconstructed in the same slow manner. There was no doubt about the outcome of Matthew Carlyle’s trial in the press: In their view, he had already been judged and found guilty.
At least with the cathedral, something was being built rather than torn down.
The camera shifted to the defendant, who was sitting stiffly beside his attorney, his face was drawn, and there were visible lines around his mouth that Annie was sure hadn’t been there that day two and a half years ago when he’d crushed her hopes of saving Fabrications. How the mighty are fallen, she thought.
According to the prosecution, it was Carlyle who had inflicted the heavy blow to Francesca’s face that had caused her to fall and strike her head. Afterward, he’d thrown her unconscious body over the side of the yacht and in the Bay, where she drowned.
Carlyle’s motive, said the district attorney, was simple: If Francesca had carried out her threat to divorce him, he would have lost half of his $4 billion fortune.
As Annie settled down on the sofa to watch the verdict, she focused on Matt Carlyle’s face. She was amazed to feel a pulse of sympathy for him. How awful it must be to sit in a courtroom waiting to hear yourself judged by twelve strangers.
Dressed in a conservative dark suit and tasteful tie that his jury consultants had no doubt recommended, he sat upright, a model of restraint and self-control. His face was expressionless, but every now and then the camera caught a flicker of anguish in his eyes. It seemed to Annie that it was all the more vivid because of his efforts to hide it.
He doesn’t deserve my pity, she reminded herself. If I must feel sorry for someone, it should be for Francesca.
“Has the jury reached a verdict?”
“Yes, Your Honor, we have.”
Annie felt her heart rate accelerate. Had he done it? He was certainly ruthless enough.
“We find the defendant, Matthew Carlyle, not guilty,” the jury forewoman said.
The courtroom erupted in pandemonium.
“You see, I told you,” Darcy said with disgust. “A rich man can get away with anything in this country. So much for the American system of justice. Francesca Carlyle lies unavenged in her grave because the law will always side with the members of the power elite.”
Annie couldn’t think of much to say. Essentially she agreed with Darcy, although she didn’t think the verdict indicated a social conspiracy. “I guess that as far as the jury was concerned, the prosecution didn’t prove its case. At least not beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“Of course it did! Anyway, who else had any reason to kill her?”
“I don’t know,” Annie said. “Maybe the man she was having the affair with.”
“If she was having an affair.”
Carlyle’s high-priced defense team had asserted that Francesca’s behavior that night at her party had been an embarrassing but oft-repeated feature of a turbulent marriage. She was an alcoholic who frequently had affairs and threatened to leave, but when sober she always changed her mind. After the party had ended and all the guests had gone, she and Matthew had reconciled. Her death the next morning was a tragic and unexpected blow to her grieving husband.
The defense had further asserted that it must have been her lover who had murdered her, likely because he was enraged at losing the chance to marry Francesca and her $2 billion.
But the lover, if she’d had one, had never come forward, nor had the police ever figured out who he was.
Annie had wondered several times about Sid Canin, who had looked so possessively at Francesca on the final night of her life. Like ev
erybody else at the party, he’d been questioned by the police, but there couldn’t have been any evidence against him, since Sid had not been called as a witness at the trial.
Could a person have an affair without anybody ever finding out? Probably, Annie thought. No one had ever questioned her about what had nearly happened between herself and Matthew several years ago in England.
Abruptly, the cameras cut away from the analysts in the studio to the street outside the courthouse. Carlyle was emerging with his attorney. Annie expected him to be whisked away into a car, but instead the acquitted billionaire strode right up to the reporters whom he had been ignoring for months. They rushed to surround him, sticking their microphones in his face.
“I have a statement to make,” he said over the voice of his attorney, who seemed to be about to say something himself. “I am grateful to the people of California for hearing my case and evaluating the evidence fairly. As far as I personally am concerned, justice has been done. But—” he paused for a second, looking intensely into the dozens of cameras pointed at his face, “justice has not yet been done on Francesca’s behalf. She was brutally murdered. Her murderer is still at large. The San Francisco police, regretfully, stopped searching for him in their zeal to develop a case against me. I consider that a travesty.”
He stopped speaking and was immediately assaulted with questions from the reporters, all of which he ignored. “That’s all I have to say at this time,” he said, then belatedly added, “Thank you.”
He had sounded sincere, Annie thought. He had sounded as if he really thought that the killer was still out there.
Matthew Carlyle got into the waiting limousine and was driven away.
A free man.
That night, Annie could not sleep. Her mind kept replaying memories. She tried to focus them on Charlie and all the myriad joys of their life together, but memories can be wild horses, impossible to harness. And that night her memories were all of Matt Carlyle.