American Obsession td-109

by Warren Murphy

  To the strains of "Baby Love" by Diana Ross and The Supremes, the camera closed in on the pool's shallow end, where the former Miss Nicotine, glowing with youth and health, splashed around in her black thong bikini. At the deep end, Senator Baculum swam in slow, deliberate circles with his eyes and nose just above water. His bald, liver-spotted head bobbed like the top of a well-pickled egg. A fine fringe of silver hair brushed the tops of his large, protruding ears-ears with unusually pendulous lobes. The camera tightly framed the senator as he dog-paddled to the ladder and made his dripping exit from the pool.

  "My, oh, my!" gushed Molly breathlessly. "What's got into great-great-grandpa?"

  The crepe of the senator's chin formed a kind of international date line. Below it, Ludlow Baculum was neither stooped nor sagging nor withered. He was, in fact, a different man.

  He was Tarzan.

  To Remo, it looked like one of those computervideo morph tricks he'd seen a hundred times on MTV. The ancient Sunbelt legislator appeared to have monumentally broad shoulders, huge, densely chiseled muscles and zero body fat. In his zebra-striped Speedo, he padded across the pool deck with the animal grace of a teenager. As Baculum toweled himself dry, the camera lingered a fraction of second on the zebra stripes, just so Molly could gush, "My, oh, my..." one more time.

  "What exactly is the problem here, Smitty?" Remo asked.

  Chiun snorted at his pupil's impossible thickheadedness. "Obviously," he announced, "our Emperor wishes to make this Bambi creature his private concubine. Is the old man with a young man's body an impediment to Emperor Smith's pleasure?"

  "Just watch!" Dr. Smith barked through the speaker with uncharacteristic impatience.

  Then "Peephole USA" ran the "before" tape. It was a segment of a video taken eight months before, at the wedding of Baculum and his twelfth wife, a twenty-three-year-old part-time waitress at a highway restaurant outside of Mobile, Alabama. The ceremony took place in the honeymoon suite of the Holiday Inn next door to the girl's place of casual employment. On the tape, Ludlow looked every one of his ninety-plus years. Hunchbacked, sallow skinned, his shirt collar a mile too big, the senator used a walker to make an excruciatingly slow approach up to his wedding cake. As he did so, he leered, rheumy-eyed, at his gum-snapping bride's round bottom. Behind the wedding cake, along the wall, a row of oxygen tanks and a full-size defibrillator unit were visible.

  "Until two weeks ago, that was Senator Ludlow Baculum," Smith declared.

  "Peephole USA" cut back to Jed and Molly, who half turned in their chairs in order to react to the freeze-frame comparative shots behind them.

  "Has Ludlow Baculum found a fountain of youth?" Jed asked his national audience. "That's what everyone on Capitol Hill wants to know, but so far the good senator is keeping his own counsel on the subject. Molly, you have to admire the guy for wanting to die with a smile on his face."

  "From what I just saw, he isn't going to be the only one smiling tomorrow morning," Molly said as she did her scissor-leg shtick, extraslow.

  Jed fanned himself with his blank sheets of copy while dimpling for the camera.

  "I still don't see a problem," Remo said.

  "Ah-hah!" Chiun exclaimed. "At last all becomes clear. You wish to trade this old man's young body for your own, and he is resisting the chance to be of service. Tell us where you want him delivered, Exalted One. Be assured there will be no further delay." A noise came through the speakerphone.

  Remo would have sworn it was the sound of grinding teeth, only it was much, much too loud.

  Chapter 5

  Puma Lee had blood in her eye as she stalked her nemesis through the shifting press of the club crowd. Lanky in a hot lime spandex minidress, Vindaloo walked with an infuriating little-girl hop in her gait that set her shoulder-length white-gold hair a-swish and her various rounded baby-fat parts a-jiggle.

  There was no longer any jiggle to Puma.

  Bands of steel and cables of Kevlar interlaced under her almost transparently thin skin. Her breasts had lost a full cup size; once luxuriantly soft and resilient, they had turned to granite. Beneath her rock-hard bosom burned a desire more terrible than any she had ever felt.

  And what she felt, felt so right.

  People said things to her as she passed by, showering her with greetings, salutations and praise, fawning shamelessly because of who she was. She couldn't hear their words over the pounding of her own pulse in her ears. Their bright, eager faces meant nothing to her, either. Her fellow party-goers might as well have been stalks of tall, dry grass-spindly things to be pushed aside and walked over.

  Ahead of her, the Swedish actress passed the entrance to the men's room, which was marked with a sign that said Hiss. Vindaloo pushed through the other swinging door, the one marked Not Hiss.

  Only when Puma Lee entered after her quarry, stepping into the blindingly white tiled bathroom, did her sense of hearing return to normal; as the door swung shut, it came back with a rush of pressure against the sides of her head. The bathroom she surveyed was deserted; the Swede was nowhere in sight. To Puma's left, the brushed-steel stall doors were all closed. It was so quiet that she could hear the sawing, sixty-cycle hum of the fluorescent lights above the mirrored sinks.

  Then, from the end of the row of doors, it began. Sudden. Thunderous.

  The ralphing bark of the sea lion echoed in the narrow, tiled room.

  A sound Puma recognized at once. Recognized and expected. Like most successful high-fashion models, Vindaloo was a puker. Had the Swede not been so thoroughly addicted to the hurl, her sylphlike form would have quickly assumed the waistless sausage shape dictated by her Scandinavian-fishwife genetics. Again, the sea lion called.

  Oxfam's buffet spread might have been no-fat, but that didn't mean it was no-calories. Which left a figure-conscious individual with two options: lose it or wear it home. From the upchuck arpeggios raging in the bathroom's last stall, Vindaloo was hell-bent on getting rid of every last smear of that chocolate mousse cake.

  Puma Lee sympathized with the need to vomit after taking one's absolute fill. And not simply to void unnecessary calories, as Vindaloo was doing.

  One also vomited to make room for more.

  As she closed in on her unsuspecting enemy, for the first time in her charmed life, Puma Lee knew exactly what she wanted.

  She wanted it all.

  Money. Possessions. Adoration. Acclaim. Power. Not just the mixed grill, the polite taste of each entree that untold thousands of wanna-be actors would have gladly sold their souls for. Puma Lee already had the fattest lamb chop, the biggest prawn, the juiciest filet, and it was not enough.

  Puma wanted it all.

  She even wanted the wanting.

  The raven-haired actress had decided on her course of action the instant she'd laid eyes on her blond counterpart. There was no final straw, as such. No smirky expression from the Swede at the buffet table had tipped the balance. No ultimate, unforgivable stab in the back. No unfairly bestowed Academy Award. No plum lead role recently stolen.

  Like other corporate giants, like auto makers or hemical companies, the two female megastars competed head-to-head for sales in the world market. As with other international conglomerates, when there were big profits and substantial losses on the line, industrial espionage ran rampant. Puma's underpaid screenwriters and sacked script doctors routinely fled to Vindaloo's studio, and vice versa, their heads bursting with ideas already under development, if not in production. Scripts appeared as if by magic on executives' desks in both camps, leaked by the competition's CPAs, security guards and night janitors. With the opposite camp's material in hand, a team of skilled hacks could quickly pound out a new star vehicle, and one just different enough to avoid successful legal action.

  Which went a long way to explaining why every year the movie mills released two "flight attendant in jeopardy from terrorists" films, or two "just passed the bar woman lawyer in jeopardy from clients" films, or two "Las Vegas dancer in jeopardy from th
e mob" films. Whichever actress had started the process of cloning the other's work, up until tonight it had become the common practice of both, in order to hedge their box-office bets.

  After tonight, all bets were off. What Puma had endured in the past, the irritating threats to her territory, she would endure no longer.

  Puma stepped to within a foot of the door of the last stall. She reached for the door handle and gave it the lightest of tugs. The lock latch rattled in its striker plate.

  "Occupied!" Vindaloo groaned from the other side.

  Through the sizable gap between the door and its frame, Puma could see the Nordic princess on her knees before the porcelain god. She tugged at the handle a little harder.

  Removing her finger from down her throat, Vindaloo cried, "For Christ's sake, didn't you hear what I said? Go away!"

  That was not in the cards. Puma made a flat blade of her right hand and, as if the door had been made of two layers of aluminum foil instead of two layers of eighth-inch sheet steel, she thrust her fingers through to the other side.

  At the shriek of splitting metal, the Swede twisted around and saw the woman's hand poking through the rip in the door, the long, perfectly manicured fingers turning the inside lock button.

  "What do you want?" Vindaloo bawled as the door slowly swung open. When it came to a full stop and she saw who the intruder was, she had her answer. And it was murder.

  Even though the door was no longer a barrier to Puma's desires, in her rage she stripped it off its hinges, and in the same motion sent it crashing sideways into the line of mirrors behind her.

  Like a spooked rabbit, Vindaloo scuttled under the dividing wall between toilet stalls. Puma lunged for her, but not in time. The Nordic model's slim ankle slipped out of reach.

  Undaunted by the steel partitions, Puma pursued her prey, cleaving through the intervening walls with downward slashes of her arms. She made the astounding feat look easy, as easy as the way a circus poodle breaks through a paper-covered hoop. But there was no mistaking the difference. In the tiled room, the impacts of her arms flailing upon the steel boomed like a squadron of jets breaking the sound barrier. And instead of bits of brightly colored tissue paper fluttering about, shards of red-hot metal sang through the air.

  Somewhere, under the din of Puma's singleminded attack, Vindaloo squealed desperately for help.

  CHIZ STOOD at the end of the buffet table, staring at the women's-room door as he waited for the shit to hit the fan. He hadn't tried to calm his bride or to divert her from her purpose because he'd known it wouldn't have done any good. Her strength was such that he could no longer dominate her physically. As an icon of alpha-maleness, he understood Puma's need to control her own turf, to have free range within boundaries of her own making. He also understood-and shared-her lust to destroy something living, to rip it apart for the best of all possible reasons: because she could do it.

  The mob milling around the party food practically begged to be torn to shreds. But as luck would have it, Chiz could find no one to focus his homicidal urges upon. No Vindaloo counterpart. Like a school of bait fish, the benefit crowd was a shifting, dizzying mass of virtually identical targets. And on top of that, unlike his wife, Chiz still felt caution in the presence of so many. He wanted to do bad things, but was held in check by the fear of being caught and punished. The action-adventure star considered his new desires a consequence of the bigger, better body he inhabited. As his power and muscle mass increased, so had his contempt for those who were weaker.

  A noise cut through the vintage rock and roll, the rumble of talk and laughter, and froze every person in the room. It sounded like someone had rammed a truck into the bathroom wall. A very big truck. The club's floor rippled underfoot as the noise boomed again and again.

  When the disk jockey cut off the music, everyone could hear the shrill screams.

  Then Chiz smelled it. Over the spicy aromas of the buffet table and the various costly unguents and perfumes of his fellow guests, he caught the odor of freshly spilled blood. And lots of it.

  Before anyone else could connect the dots, and with a speed no one in the club could match, he raced for the women's bathroom. The door opened as he reached it, and Puma Lee stepped out, spattered from head to foot in blood.

  People standing close by saw her like that, and with the sounds that might have been explosions fresh in their minds, began to yell, "Bomb! Bomb!" Panic spread like wildfire through the crowd.

  Chiz took advantage of the general pandemonium and replayed a scene that had appeared in virtually every movie he'd ever made. He scooped the damsel in distress in his bared, bulging arms and rushed her to safety-in this case, the fire exit.

  WITH HIS CREW OF BOUNCERS busy calming and evacuating the crowd, it fell to Pismo Pete to be first to enter the women's bathroom. He didn't want to do it, but he had no choice. Even though there was a possibility of another explosion, the job couldn't wait for the Hollywood cops and the paramedics. If a bomb or bombs had been set off by terrorists or some lunatic fan, somebody had to go in at once and check for survivors. After all, a big-time celeb could be down and hurt, even dying inside.

  As he pushed open the door, the ex-outlaw biker and sometime stunt double thought he was prepared for what he might find, but he was wrong. He'd never seen so much blood. It was spattered everywhere on the white floor and walls, making them look pink. And every toilet-stall partition had been jaggedly breached down the middle, as if slashed by a chain saw.

  What kind of a bomb was precise enough to do a thing like that?

  Equally puzzling was the absence of any lingering odor of explosives, no pall of smoke in the room, no sign of heat scorching anywhere. Glass from the shattered mirrors crunched under the stacked heels of his cowboy boots, but amazingly the lavatory's high, narrow windows remained intact.

  Behind him, the bathroom door swung open a crack, and one of his bouncers said, "Need any help, Pete?"

  "Stay the fuck out," he growled over his shoulder. "This is a one-man job until I say different." Something dripped from the ceiling onto the cuff of his ankle-length leather trench coat.

  "Shit!" he said, wiping off the splat of blood with the heel of his hand. Then he looked up. Beads of red clung to the ceramic-tile ceiling like a nightmare dew. One of the ruby droplets broke free and hit him square on the chin.

  "Jesus," Pismo Pete gasped, quickly rubbing it away.

  "Don't think about it, just fucking do it," he muttered to himself as he hurried down the line of stalls, hoping to find a survivor, expecting to find a body or bodies.

  He found no one, no grisly litter of body parts, either, but he did notice that each of the toilet-tank tops was slightly askew and he couldn't miss the bloody handprints all over them. Water ran in all the toilets, like they'd just been flushed. Or their tank balls were stuck.

  Cautiously, the security chief entered the last stall and, doing his best to avoid the gory smears, he swung aside the tank's heavy porcelain lid.

  Long blond hair swirled in the pink water, momentarily obscuring the pale face that lay beneath, trapped under the arm of the tank float.

  Evidence that sunk the bomb theory, once and for all.

  Chapter 6

  "What would you like, Dr. Smith?" asked the woman behind the serving counter at the Folcroft Sanitarium cafeteria. The clock on the wall behind her read 10:49 p.m., eleven minutes until the food concession shut down for the night.

  "I'd like to be home," Smith told her as he surveyed neatly arranged dishes of orange Jell-O, fruit salad and vanilla pudding sitting on a bed of flaked ice. It was another one of those nights. No home cooking for him. No delightful "Matlock" rerun to settle his meal. And later, as he drifted off to sleep, there would be no wide, warm, wifely backside in a flannel nightgown pressed against his own. Once again, in the name of duty, Dr. Harold W. Smith had been forced to sacrifice his simple comforts.

  "I don't see any prune whip," he complained.

  "If it isn't already s
et out, Dr. Smith, I'm afraid it's all gone until tomorrow."

  Smith scanned the cafeteria case until he located his second choice. "Then I'll just have the shredded beets."

  "That's all you're going to eat?" the counterwoman said, aghast. "Good grief, you're not a caterpillar. You can't live on beets. You need something more substantial under your belt. Look over here, we've still got some of tonight's special beef stew...."

  Smith followed her plastic-gloved finger to the wide stainless-steel serving pan. Embedded in pasty, dark brown sauce were yellow bits that might have been potatoes, orange bits that might have been carrots, green bits that might have been peas and gray, gristly chunks that were most probably meat. The woman picked up the serving spoon and stirred in the shiny golden grease that had floated to the surface.

  "How 'bout a nice big plate of piping-hot stew?" she asked him. "If you're going to work late again, it'll help you keep up your strength."

  The doctor shuddered at the idea. Past middle age, he was a spare-looking man who had given the best part of a lifetime to the enjoyment of Spartan pleasures. His ideal main course was his wife's famous meat loaf, which consisted of five parts uncooked oatmeal to one part ground chuck, all bound together with her own family-secret moistener of corn starch dissolved in warm tap water. Maude precooked this confection in the microwave on high for twenty minutes to fully render the fat and juices. After a thorough draining, which included some manual compression, she baked the loaf in her conventional oven at four hundred degrees until it gave off a noise like a snare drum when she thumped it with the back of a spoon.

  "I'll just have the beets, thanks," he said.

  "You're going to turn into a beet one of these days," the counterwoman warned him as she filled a small ceramic bowl with a heap of dark purple shreds. "Or a puddle of prune whip."