“Swine!” she kept screaming, scratching at his face. “Filthy, dirty, buggering, cocksucking faggot whore!”
She lifted the lamp and tried to swing it at his head from a half-sitting position. He warded off the blow with his forearm, and the lamp bounced on the floor just out of her reach. She stretched to retrieve it. He lunged with his left foot and put it down hard on her wrist. He was practically in a split above her as he leaned down to take the lamp away from her.
In a flash she had him by the whole “shebang.” She wrenched her left arm from under his foot and took him with both hands, like hanging or swinging on a rope, tearing and pulling at his cock and balls. Her grip was a vise on him.
He grabbed a handful of her hair and dragged her toward the bed as she clung to and tore at his privates. He heard his own voice cry out in pain as hers went on filling the room with obscenities.
He had to shut her up. They’d hear downstairs and come running. “Shut up, I said!” He slapped her with his hand.
She let out a cry of pain and pulled herself up by his genitals and brought her face to them and bit hard into one of his balls. He let out a bloodcurdling scream. The agony was unbearable, and a searing pain went through his entire body.
Perry stretched both hands above his head and brought them, with something heavy in them, down on her head. There was a cracking thud, a gush of blood, and she slumped to the floor as he cupped his scrotum and swayed back and forth moaning with pain.
He’d never felt anything like it. It was all wet. Has she bitten it off? He took his hand away. It was covered with blood. Jesus, she has bitten it off
He touched himself frantically, wiping at the flood of blood that seemed to come from some sort of fountain. His only thought was his pain, and he could hear himself whimpering and grunting as he grabbed a towel from the floor and wiped gingerly at himself. He crumpled with relief when he saw he was still intact — swollen but everything in place.
Perry put a hand out to steady himself, and it slipped in something slimy, causing him to lose his balance, and his face bumped against Bet’s cheek.
He looked at her. What in the world has happened? Her head was smashed wide open. Blood covered her hair and face. How did this happen?
He was aware of silence. He’d stopped moaning, and Bet had stopped screaming. He pulled his hand out of the slippery stuff and slowly straightened above her. Where his feet straddled her was a pool of dark red. He slowly straightened his legs, righting himself painfully, still cupping his throbbing scrotum, and tried to take it all in.
The silence spoke to him. The blood-soaked room spoke to him. He understood. Bet was dead. He’d killed her.
As the realization took root, everything in him was killed too. He recoiled from the tangled body and the blood in a slow-motion ballet of horror. He held his hands out from his sides, dangling and dripping, afraid to touch anything.
By the time he’d got into the shower, he wondered how he’d got there. The water ran red, and he wondered why. He’d lost all sense of the physical world.
Back in the chaotic room, he looked at it with disbelief. It had nothing to do with him. The body on the floor was nobody he knew.
He picked up his clothes absently and went into the dressing room. Half dressed, he noticed that his uniform was covered with blood. He took it off and found an empty Bonwit Teller suit box and folded the clothes in it neatly and dressed in a smart suit with a tie that somehow matched. Straightening the tie, he noticed that there were scratches on his face and wondered how they got there. With the box under his arm, he went through the room again, looking neither to the left nor right. He was tiptoeing again, making no sound. This house wasn’t his.
Echoes of Bet’s screams filled his head as he glided noiselessly down the stairs. How could Nanny and Billy not have heard?
In front of Billy’s door he stood, holding his breath and listening until he thought his lungs would burst. The silence was the silence of death. He opened the door cautiously. The giraffe sat grinning at him stupidly from Billy’s bed. It hadn’t been touched. Billy wasn’t here. He stood rigid for several minutes and then leaned his head against the doorjamb, and his shoulders shook, and then his entire body shook. Whether with tears or laughter, he couldn’t tell. All he knew was that Billy wasn’t here. He’d been spared Bet’s screams. He thanked God for that. Billy wasn’t here.
A strange sound came from deep inside his gut, and he banged his head gently three times against the wood of the door. He understood now. Bet knew Billy wasn’t here. She’d tricked him. She’d tricked him about Arlene. She’d tricked him about Billy. The trick had backfired. She’d tricked him into killing her.
After letting himself out and closing the door after him, he walked to the river and calmly threw the smart box into the river and went to Grand Central Station and took a train for Toronto. He had to get back to the base. That was his only thought. On the train, with the events running though his head, he was almost doubled over with a racking panic that left him sweating with terror. It lasted only a minute before an icy calm settled on him. Nothing about any of what had happened had or would acquire any objective sense or shape; it had all happened inside him.
He’d left the giraffe. Nanny would know he’d been there. He’d left fingerprints, footprints, blood prints all over the place. He wondered how long it would take them to come get him.
It didn’t take them long. They were waiting for him at the base, and he was brought back to New York to face trial.
All the papers gave the sensational story plenty of space, but the Daily News featured the case on its front page and treated the story almost as its own exclusive. The Langham murder had pushed the war off the front pages. The Daily News printed each development as though it were serializing a book. Perry read it like that — like a book, a piece of fiction that couldn’t have happened to anybody and certainly not to him.
DAILY NEWS
October 25, 1943
AIRMAN’S HEIRESS WIFE SLAIN IN BEEKMAN PLACE HOME
October 26, 1943
SLAIN HEIRESS’S HUSBAND HELD
October 27, 1943
HUSBAND GUILTY: WIFE’S NAILS YIELD CLUE
October 30, 1943
SEXUAL TWIST CAN’T AID LANGHAM’S CASE
Perry Langham’s bizarre sexual personality will not afford him an insanity defense, leading New York psychiatrists agreed yesterday. Homosexuality, discovered in the files of the Selective Service examiners and admitted by him after his arrest in Canada, does not make him insane in the slightest, the medical authorities stated…
November 2, 1943
LANGHAM HAD BEEN LOVER OF SLAIN HEIRESS’S FATHER
There. It had all come out. Poor Billy was plastered all over the papers anyway.
Perry lost interest in the newspaper stories. They were a bit too familiar to hold his interest. His sense of his life having ended had taken such an unyielding grip on him that it didn’t particularly touch him. Money was accepted as the motive for his actions.
What did interest him was Little Billy. He learned that Mrs. Hahn and Arlene had together taken custody of the boy, and he realized that he’d probably never see him again. Even that blow he took in his stride. Everything that had made life worth living to him had vanished in that unimaginable moment in October.
His lawyers managed somehow through a technicality to keep him out of the electric chair. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, which confirmed what he already felt: It was of little importance whether he was alive or dead.
That attitude was shared by his hosts of friends, all of whom vanished. Only Timmy remained loyal and wrote affectionate letters and sent messages. The letters Perry received from his mother and sister he destroyed without reading. They should think of him as dead too.
After twenty-two years in prison, the lawyers secured Perry’s release on parole in 1966. He learned later that it had been Timmy who’d hounded the lawyers for the parole. Timmy was
waiting for him outside the huge gates, a youthful man in his mid forties, when Perry was released.
“What are you doing here?” Perry said, smiling as Timmy walked toward him. “Don’t you know that shipboard romances don’t last?”
“I know,” Timmy replied, taking the small bag from Perry’s hand and, with his arm over his shoulder, leading him to his car.
On their way to Philadelphia, where Timmy had arranged for Perry to live, Timmy told him about Little Billy. His last name had been changed to Vernon just after the trial, and Billy, now twenty-three, had come into the twenty-million—dollar fortune left him by Mrs. Hahn. He had no need of a jailbird father at this time.
When Perry died of a heart attack in Philadelphia, The New York Times went over the old story, in the way that Perry had hoped they wouldn’t. His life — what was left of it after prison — wasn’t news, but his death was.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 10, 1986
PERRY LANGHAM, 67,
KILLER OF HEIRESS WIFE,
DIES IN PHILADELPHIA
Perry Langham, convicted in one of the most sensational trials of the 1940s of the skying of his wife, Bettina Vernon, heiress of a New York chain store fortune, died yesterday in Philadelphia. He was 67.
Mr. Langham, who was sentenced to 35 years to life after his conviction, was released in 1966. Because of the case’s tangled drama, which included elements of love, hate, jealousy, and bizarre sex practices, it attracted national attention.
Portrayed during the trial as a morally corrupt playboy, Mr. Langham met his wife through her father, who had been his “patron.”
Mr. Langham met his “patron,” Mr. William “Billy” Vernon, a respected portrait painter, in 1939 while working at the New York World’s Fair as a “chair boy” who pushed wealthy sightseers around the grounds.
The Langhams were well-known in the young “café society” set of New York, where they lived what was described as a “wild life,” drinking and carousing in nightclubs until dawn. Their son, William Anthony, was a year old at the time of the tragedy. In 1954 their son, whose name had been legally changed a decade earlier to William Anthony Vernon, inherited the fortune originally intended for his mother.
Langham died in an apartment owned by Timothy R. Dillingham, where he had resided since his release from prison.
About the Author
Gordon Merrick (1916–1988) was an actor, television writer, and journalist. Merrick was one of the first authors to write about gay themes for a mass audience. He wrote fourteen books, including the beloved Peter & Charlie Trilogy. The Lord Won’t Mind spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list in 1970. Merrick’s posthumously published novel The Good Life, coauthored with his partner, Charles G. Hulse, was a bestseller as well. Merrick died in Sri Lanka.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Charles G. Hulse, Estate of Gordon Merrick
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
ISBN: 978-1-4976-6643-6
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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The Good Life Page 46