Then I turned her over and pushed her onto the desk, spreading her legs and taking her hard and fast, spilling Jack Daniel’s on the carpet and sending paperwork flying all over the room.
Afterward, before I even had a chance to catch my breath, she dressed, finished the taste of Jack remaining in the overturned bottle, and left me sitting naked and spent in my leather office chair.
A moment later, light from the alley behind the building brightened my entire office. I spun my chair around, lifted the corner of the window shade and watched as Cassie slipped into the back seat of a silver Mercedes. I continued watching as Carvel drove the Mercedes out of the alley and around the corner.
Early the next afternoon two plainclothes officers from the Waco Police Department visited my office.
“When’s the last time you visited Texarkana?” the tall one asked.
I told him.
“Purpose of your visit?”
“Professional,” I said. “Picking up something for a client.”
“There’s a .38 registered in your name,” the short one said. “Still got it?”
I opened my jacket and showed them the shoulder rig.
“Could you place it on the table, please? Use two fingers.”
I lifted the revolver from my holster and placed it on my desk, covering a science fiction magazine that now smelled of Jack Daniel’s.
“There was a guy killed in Texarkana the night you visited,” the tall one said. “Shot in the head with a .38.”
“I heard.”
“Why didn’t you come forward?” the short one asked.
I shrugged. “Lots of people in lots of places get shot with .38s. Don’t have a thing to do with me.”
“Mind if we take this?” the short one asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. He wrapped a handkerchief around the revolver’s handle, then lifted the gun and slipped it into a paper bag.
His partner issued me a receipt. “We’ll run a few tests and get back to you.”
“You do that,” I said.
Millie brought a late lunch and we sat in my office eating wings and fries. When Elroy Johnson pushed the door open without knocking, Millie quickly excused himself and returned to the tattoo parlor up front.
“Now the doctor’s not sure what he saw,” Elroy said after closing the door. “Turns out the nurse’s husband is a divorce attorney. Suddenly the doc don’t want to admit where he was, who he was with, or what he was doing there.”
“Too late,” I said. “The cops’ve already been here.”
“Tell them anything?”
I shook my head. “Nothing to tell.”
Elroy fired up an unfiltered Camel, took a long drag, then let the smoke out through his nostrils. He pointed his cigarette at the science fiction magazine still on my desk. “You going to read that?”
“Take it.” I pushed the magazine across the desk and Elroy picked it up.
“Jesus,” he said. “Smells like you dipped it in whiskey.”
“Close enough,” I told him, remembering the bottle that had spilled while I fucked Cassie Wilson on my desk.
Cassie hadn’t finished thanking me. The next night we drove downtown for Mexican food, then returned to my little brick two-bedroom home just off of New Road. I’d barely closed the door when she began tearing my clothes off.
I carried her to the bedroom, where we had hard, violent sex that left finger-shaped bruises on Cassie’s breasts and hips and thighs where I’d clung to her. Afterward, I pushed myself off the bed and paced the bedroom, stealing glances at her as I thought.
She sat on the bed, leaning against the headboard, the sheet pooled at her waist.
“You like being slapped around,” I told her.
Cassie didn’t seem surprised by my revelation.
“But Jeremy went too far, didn’t he?” I asked. “He began to like hitting you as much as you liked being hit.”
She shrugged.
“Why did your father really send me after you?” I asked. “Why didn’t he send that lapdog of yours?”
“Carvel?”
I lifted one corner of the shade. “He’s out there right now, sitting in the Mercedes, waiting for you.”
“Carvel’s harmless.”
“Then why the gun?”
“To protect my father’s interests.”
I turned toward her. “You?”
She lifted the sheet and tossed it aside, spreading her legs. “Think you can do it again?”
For a few minutes I forgot about the man outside.
Two hours later, dressed and standing in my living room, Cassie asked, “You take anything else from the room that night?”
“Just you,” I said. “That’s all I was hired to do. Why?”
“My suitcase didn’t make it home. The police didn’t find it in the room with Jeremy.”
“What was in it that’s so important?”
“Clothes,” she said. “Just clothes. Hate to have to replace them.”
I didn’t believe her. “Take you home?”
“Carvel’s still out there,” she said. “He’ll take me.”
I opened the door. Before Cassie could step outside, I pulled her into my arms and kissed her. She bit my bottom lip and I jerked away in surprise.
I tasted blood.
“I’m not the only one who likes pain,” she whispered. Then she stepped through the open doorway and hurried down the walk to the waiting Mercedes.
“Jeremy was a bag boy, worked for her father,” Elroy explained. We stood at Lion’s Park, watching go-karts circle the track.
“Cassie know?”
Elroy shrugged. “Jeremy wanted a bigger piece of the action, but couldn’t figure out how to get it. Their little sex games went too far and he took his frustration out on his wife.”
I waited.
“Then you showed up,” he said.
“And screwed the pooch,” I said. “Somebody’s plans went all to hell when I pulled Cassie out of that motel room.”
“Whose?” Elroy asked. “I thought we had things under control.”
Richard Masterson moved money through one of Waco’s smaller banks, an opportunity Elroy had presented to him many years earlier when Masterson’s inability to cover bad bets had jeopardized his position at the bank. Elroy had monitored the banker’s activities ever since.
I’d been thinking about it for two days before I talked to Millie. “I need your help,” I said, then explained what I needed.
I’d been fucking Cassie every night, and that night wasn’t much different. We skipped dinner and went straight to my place. I slapped her around, getting her in the mood, then I stripped her and threw her on the bed. I had climbed on top of her when the phone rang.
I rolled off of Cassie and lifted the receiver. “Yeah?”
“I have it,” Millie said. “How much longer?”
I glanced at Cassie. “Twenty minutes, tops.”
“I’m on the way.”
I dropped the telephone handset into its cradle.
Cassie pushed me onto my back and straddled me, her heavy breasts brushing my chest. “What was that?”
“Business,” I said.
“Don’t lie to me.”
I grabbed her wrists, twisting until she grimaced in pain. Then I rolled her off of me and onto her back. She spread her legs and I buried myself deep inside her. Like before, the sex was hard and left us both bruised in places not usually shown to others.
Afterward, we dressed and I walked her to the door.
She stepped outside and hesitated on the front walk. Then she looked back at me. “Carvel’s not here.”
“I’ll phone a cab.”
She looked up and down the street.
“That’s not like Carvel,” she said. “He’s never far from me.”
Hours after the park had closed, I met Millie and Carvel at Lover’s Leap, overlooking the Brazos River in Cameron Park.
“What the fuck is this about?” Carvel asked.
“Millie has the suitcase,” I explained. I held my hand at my side, my fingers wrapped around Deadwood’s Glock, the safety off and my finger resting lightly on the trigger. “He found it in your apartment.”
“What suitcase?” Carvel stood next to the rock wall. He stepped back so he could watch both of us. He stopped when his ass touched the wall and he could go no farther.
“You were in Texarkana same time I was,” I said. “You’d followed Cassie and Jeremy, protecting her father’s interests. You saw me take her from the room. You saw how messed up she was.”
Carvel’s gaze darted from me to Millie and back. He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue.
“You knew we didn’t have the suitcase so you went in after it,” I continued. “So what happened? Did Jeremy surprise you, start to get up, what?”
Carvel shook his head.
“Doesn’t matter why,” I said. “You shot him.”
Carvel charged.
I lifted the Glock and squeezed the trigger. A single bullet ripped into Carvel’s chest and knocked him back onto the stone wall.
Millie walked up to the wall, pressed one boot against Carvel’s side, and pushed. The body tumbled down the side of the cliff. Then Millie dropped Carvel’s .38 over the side.
We left the silver Mercedes parked at Lover’s Leap for the police to discover and Millie rode with me back to the office. Along the way, we stopped long enough to dispose of Deadwood’s Glock.
Millie moved the suitcase from the tattoo parlor into my office, then he drove home. I drove up Austin Avenue to Masterson’s house.
I leaned into the doorbell and waited until Masterson finally pulled the door open. He hadn’t been expecting me and he wore gray sweatpants that he’d hurriedly pulled on before opening the door.
“Yes?”
Cassie appeared at the top of the stairs, saw me standing in the open doorway, and hurried down the steps to the foyer.
“Where’s Carvel?” she demanded. She wore a red terry-cloth robe that she held closed.
“He’s with your husband.”
Cassie slapped me. The robe gaped open and I took one last look at her naked body, seeing the bruises I’d left on her during our sex only a few hours earlier.
Masterson’s eyes narrowed while he considered the implications of what I’d said. “Know anybody looking for work?” he asked. “Someone trustworthy.”
“I think of anybody, I’ll let you know.”
Police found the abandoned Mercedes about the time dawn arrived in Waco, and a few hours later a jogger running along the riverfront path found Carvel’s body. Over the course of the day, the police found Carvel’s .38 and the spent shell from Deadwood’s Glock.
That afternoon, Elroy met me at my office and I handed him the suitcase Millie had found in Carvel’s apartment.
“You clean on everything?” Elroy asked.
“Clean as I can be.”
“The gun?”
“Bottom of the Brazos.”
Elroy opened the suitcase and handed me a banded stack of hundred-dollar bills. “Finder’s fee,” he said.
“What happened?”
“Jeremy planned to double-cross his father-in-law,” Elroy explained. “The money was for some of my associates in St Louis. When Jeremy didn’t show at the meet, they knew something had gone wrong. They wanted me to resolve the issue so I had a guy lined up for the next day.” Elroy paused, pulled an unfiltered Camel from the pack in his shirt pocket, and lit it with a silver Zippo. After a long drag, he continued. “Then you showed up, followed only a few minutes later by Carvel. Changed all my plans.”
Elroy carried the suitcase to the office door, then stopped and turned back.
“And give this to your kid, next time you see him.” Elroy pulled the latest issue of one of the science fiction magazines from his pocket and tossed it on the desk. “It’s a good issue,” he said. “Just don’t spill nothing on it.”
I counted the money later and split it with Millie – 30,000 for him, 70,000 for me.
The lab later confirmed that Carvel Casey’s .38 had killed Jeremy Wilson. Texarkana closed their file on the murder of Jeremy Wilson. Waco’s file on Carvel Casey remains open but inactive. Richard Masterson disappeared one day after an intensive interview with local police and I suspect that Elroy Johnson or his associates gave Masterson a one-way ticket to the bottom of Lake Waco. Cassie Masterson Wilson moved to L.A., where she started a members-only website for pain lovers. And my bruises finally healed.
Two days after finding Carvel’s body, the police phoned to tell me the tests on my .38 had turned up negative and that I could retrieve the revolver at my convenience. They never did ask any more questions.
The Summer of Grant Lee Buffalo
Maxim Jakubowski
I was asking her, as you do, about other men.
I already knew about those who had come before she met her present husband. Three in all, a modest figure. I was number five. Or did husbands maybe count double?
But surely I enquired there had been temptations, infatuations, attractions, even if nothing sexual had actually occurred?
“Well,” she hesitated, lowering her eyes with false modesty, “there was a man in Wales. He was a bit like you in looks. Just saw him staring at me in a strange, insistent way from across the room at a reading I attended. It was last year. October.”
“Really?”
“The way it goes. A look in someone’s eye and you think, it could happen, there could be sparks. Sort of wondering what it would be like to fuck him, be fucked by him . . . But we never even spoke.”
“Oh . . .” somehow I was disappointed. “Anyone else?”
“Well,” her eyes again avoided me.
“Come on,” I insisted.
“The bass player from Grant Lee Buffalo,” she spat out, her tone almost breathless. “It was at their gig, just last week at the ICA. I was toward the front of the crowd and he was on stage. Our eyes met. Jesus, he could have had me right there. It was crazy. I felt like a slut. I think Chris must have guessed, or something, because he wanted us to leave at the end of the set and wouldn’t stay for the obligatory encores.”
I smiled. The next day I looked up the American musician’s name (and physiognomy – rough trade with an intellectual bent) in the CD liner notes. But never remembered it later.
“Was it the music?”
“No, just him, up there, it was his eyes, they just cut through me, I swear. He was deathly thin, even gaunt, not even my type of man. But I knew, and I think that he also knew that something was in the air that night. I even guess my husband had some second sense of it because he also behaved unusually at the end of the concert, annoyed, frightened maybe.”
Frankly I couldn’t see what she saw in him. Too American, too rock ’n’roll. But there was an element of danger. Forbidden fruit? But then I was still amazed that she was even having an affair with me.
Would I ever understand women?
Even as I slept with them, gazed voyeuristically at their features in repose as they dreamed next to me in the illicit beds of the hotel rooms we inhabited, I felt I could read in their soft breath the seeds of their future absence or betrayal.
This was the summer of Grant Lee Buffalo. After we broke up I discovered Counting Crows and ached with the knowledge I would never play their music to her or whisper into her ears the lyrics of a couple of songs on the CD which just broke me up inside. Much later I’d come across Matthew Ryan. And others. Singers, groups, musicians. Funny the way rock music punctuated the major events in my life, the women in my life.
This was Kate, of the tousled hair, the porcelain skin, the repressed anger, for whom I would buy a Leonard Cohen CD and prepare an assortment of compilation tapes she would only be able to play on her Walkman on her way to work near Goodge Street.
Was being the operative word.
A summer that lasted into early winter as lust made place for love and then desperation, as embraces
grew in intensity and the fucking took on an aura of violence as I realized my days with her were numbered. It was already there, in her voice, in her eyes, in the subtle twist of her lips as she shied away from passion, her cold, cold heart drifting away from more serious involvement than sweaty copulations on office floors or adulterous hotel rooms, rented for the duration of the lunch break. Those things you feel inside, don’t you? So, you turn the screw on your anger; you tighten your hold on her wrists as you hold her down and thrust inside her, and she feebly protests that you are hurting her. You thread out the belt from your black trousers and, one night, tie her hands and render her helpless. She does not protest. Lets you do it. You raise the ante. Order her to close her eyes, and circle her fragile neck with the dark brown leather belt. Just like a slave collar. You install her on hands and knees and forcefully take her from behind, watching in fascination as your thick, darker member breaches her openings and makes its savage way into her wet intimacy, all the while holding on to the belt and pulling firmly, keeping her head in a vertical posture. With every new fuck you feel her moving mentally further away from you. But in her silence she still submits to those perverted whims of yours.
She comes, again and again, under your ministrations, with a soft moan, a deep sigh and, torturing yourself, you imagine her being taken in a similar position by another man, maybe the bass player from Grant Lee Buffalo even. You have used a piece of black silk to cover her eyes and positioned her over the bed cover, spread open, obscenely gaping, then led him to the room and indicated to him she is his for the taking. You watch. Of course he is bigger, longer and thicker than you, and as he makes his way past her lips, his cock brushes the folds of her labia away inwards, and every in and out movement, shakes her whole, white body as he pumps into her, bruises her engorged skin, marking her for ever. And, God in heaven, he stays hard so long and never tires. The sweat glistens on her back, her breasts swing gently under the impact of his attack, and the animal sounds that rise from deep inside her are unlike any I have ever heard rise from her before. Or, at any rate, with me.
Ah, isn’t my imagination vile?
Or had I actually shared her with another man, whored her for the sake of my madness, would she not have returned to her husband? Maybe it was something she actually craved?
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