Conjugal Rites (Kit Tolliver #7) (The Kit Tolliver Stories)

by Lawrence Block

  She picked up a carton of Marlboros—undoctored, this time—and paid him a last visit to tell him through the pane of glass that he wouldn’t be seeing her for a while. “I’ll be in California,” she said. “In fact I should have been there all along. I have an aunt in Yreka who’s not in good health, and I’ve been splitting caretaker duties with my sister, and I’m long overdue to get out there and take my turn.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “You probably didn’t know about the aunt, either. I don’t know how long I’ll have to stay, and I’m not sure where I’ll be staying.”

  “You can’t stay with your aunt?”

  “Even if I could,” she said, “I wouldn’t.” And she riffed on what a pigpen the aunt’s house was, and then went on to explain that there was someone else she had to see, not in California, because there was a conversation she had to have, and it really ought to be face to face.

  “See, I’ve sort of been in a relationship,” she said. “And, well, I don’t know what the future’s going to hold for us, Peter, but I’d like to make room for us to give it a chance. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I didn’t know you were seeing anybody.”

  “I know, I’m full of surprises. A sister, an aunt, and now a boyfriend. Except he’s not exactly a boyfriend, and I’ve been ready to break it off for a while now, and this is the right time.” She put her palm on the glass, and once he’d matched his palm to hers she said, “Peter, no strings. You’re not under any obligation, and how can we possibly know where this is going? But I want to give it a chance, and I hope you want to, too.”

  “There’s nothing I want more.”

  “I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you again,” she said, “but I’ll want to keep in touch, and of course I’ll want to know what happens with your hearing, and how that goes. I suppose I could write to you, but—”

  “I’ll get a cell phone.”

  “They’re allowed in here?”

  He nodded. “I never bothered getting one,” he said. “I never saw the point. Who would I call?”

  “It’s pronounced Why–reeka,” she said, “and it’s supposed to be a Shasta Indian word meaning white mountain, but I haven’t run into any Shasta Indians who can say one way or the other.”

  “Isn’t there a Eureka as well?”

  “There is,” she said, “and my own theory is that they were trying to call it that and found out there already was one, so they changed how they spelled it. I mean, they were both Gold Rush boomtowns, right? But Mark Twain had another explanation.”

  “Oh?”

  “Something about a sign for a bakery, and it was reverse-printed on glass so it read backwards, Y–R–E–K–A, and the B was worn off. But that seems farfetched to me.”

  “Because the letters would be backwards,” he said. “The R and the K, anyway.”

  “What I think happened,” she said, “is Mark Twain noticed that the town’s name spelled backwards was Akery, and he just made up the story from there. I mean, he made things up, didn’t he?”

  “You mean A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court didn’t really happen? Another illusion shattered. But you’re getting along all right in Yreka? Your aunt’s not driving you around the bend?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “And that’s really great news about the board. That’s a lot more important than how this place got its dumb name.”

  Of course she wasn’t in Yreka, or anywhere in California. She was in Baltimore, in a three-story house on the edge of Fell’s Point, where she’d managed to rent a room. She got a part-time job clerking in a copy shop that doubled as an Internet café. One of her perks was free use of a computer during her off-hours, and she spent a lot of time free-associating her way from website to website. That was how she’d come by all that information about Yreka, which she’d passed on to Peter the next time she spoke with him.

  And the following day she looked up A Connecticut Yankee. That led her to Bing Crosby, who starred in one of the film adaptations, and that led her somewhere else. The Internet, she thought, was like life itself. One thing kept leading to another.

  There were singles bars nearby, and shops and restaurants that drew out-of-towners. But she kept a low profile and didn’t wander far afield. She worked and surfed the net, she took her meals at a cafeteria around the corner from the copy shop, and she watched TV.

  Now and then she used the phone.

  “A halfway house,” she said. “And it’s in New York City? Oh, in the Bronx? Well, that could be a good thing, Peter. And that’s just where you’ll be living, isn’t it? You can come and go as you please.”

  They talked about it as a way of easing the transition from imprisonment to freedom, but what she liked was the coincidence of the location. All of this had started in the Bronx, in the Riverdale section, and it was fitting that it should end there.

  “I wish I could be there when you walk through the gates,” she said. “But maybe it’s better that you’ll have a week to settle in at the halfway house first.”

  Just a few more weeks now . . .

  She picked up her phone, keyed in the number she’d looked up earlier. Four rings, and then the machine picked up, and clear across the country in Kirkland, Washington, Rita’s voice invited her to leave a message.

  She broke the connection.

  She found the halfway house on Laconia Avenue at 225th Street, somewhere around the border between two Bronx neighborhoods, Williamsbridge and Edenwald. It was an unprepossessing four-story building, its crumbling brick exterior imperfectly sheathed in aluminum siding. Four men sat on the front stoop, smoking cigarettes, and it wasn’t hard to believe they’d done time upstate.

  The three-story building to the right housed a bodega, its window filled with neon beer signs. There was an empty lot on the other side, rubble-strewn, girded with a cyclone fence. To keep the rubble in? To keep the rabble out?

  Well, she supposed the place had a certain raffish charm. But she didn’t figure it would be hard to coax Peter away from it.

  The apartment she chose was in Riverdale, and just blocks from the one where Peter Fuhrmann had fed her a Roofie, and she’d returned the favor by spiking his vodka. There was a certain symmetry that appealed to her, but she picked the neighborhood because it was easier to find a nice anonymous sublet there than in Williamsbridge or Edenwald. Riverdale was filled with Yuppies, and they were forever moving in and moving out and moving on, losing their jobs or getting better ones, breaking up with significant others, finding new lovers to move in with, and otherwise keeping the real estate market humming.

  The man she sublet from was a junior executive with one of the major accounting firms, on his way to a new post in Wichita. Their deal was simple, and ideal for her purposes; it was unofficial, with no paper signed, and he’d continue to send a monthly check to the landlord while she’d send money orders to him at his new office.

  Meanwhile, she gave him cash for a month’s rent, and they shook hands, and that was that. By the time he started wondering where the money order was, she’d be out of the apartment, the city, and the state.

  He suggested going out for a drink to seal the bargain, and it was clear that he had more than a drink in mind. He’d been checking her out since she walked in the door. And he was cute, and she wouldn’t have minded, not in the least. Take him out for a drink, bring him home to what had just become her apartment, take him to bed and fuck his brains out, and then what? Kill him and look for another sublet?

  “I really wish I could,” she said. “But these days my life’s complicated enough as it is. But some other time, huh? I mean, you never know when I might find myself in Wichita.”

  There was probably a shop in Riverdale that sold sex toys, the potential customer base was certainly present, but she remembered the Pleasure Chest on Seventh Avenue, and it was just a subway ride away.

  She picked out a batch of items, and as she was paying for them she set one asi
de and asked if the store could ship it for her. She wrote out the name and address.

  It would be no problem, the clerk assured her. And would she like to enclose a card?

  She shook her head. “She’ll know who it’s from,” she said.

  She’d been staying on the cheap in a Jersey City rooming house, but once she’d sublet the Riverdale apartment she moved right in. The furniture was generic, but everything was new and neat and clean, and it would be comfortable enough for the week or two she’d be using it.

  Every few days she called Peter, and was pleased when they released him right on schedule. “I’m in the van now,” he said. “It seats ten, but there’s just me and the driver. He’s taking me all the way to the halfway house.”

  “In the movies,” she said, “they give you ten dollars and a cheap suit and you’re on your own.”

  “They gave me the suit I was wearing when I got here. Got there, I should say, because I’m not there anymore. It doesn’t fit as well as it used to.”

  “Still, I bet you look nicer in it than in the orange outfit.”

  “Jesus, I hope so. They give you a ride to the halfway house because otherwise too many guys don’t make it that far.”

  “They lose their way?”

  “In a manner of speaking. And I can understand why. All I am right now is outside the walls, maybe thirty miles down the road, and already it feels scary.”

  “Being free.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” she said, “if you miss it too much, all you have to do is find some sweet young thing and kill her. They’ll take you back in a hot second.”

  The silence was profound. Had she gone too far?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was supposed to be a joke, but I guess it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”

  “It just came out of the blue,” he said. “Took me by surprise.”

  “I can see where it would. Forgive me?”

  “Nothing to forgive, Audrey.”

  “Well, I intend to make it up to you,” she said. “I got a place for us to be together. I know you have to spend nights at the halfway house, but that leaves a lot of hours in the day. It’s a nice modern building, and the apartment’s all furnished and there’s even a view. Plus I went shopping.”

  “Oh?”

  “I bought us a nice bottle of wine,” she said. “Nuits-Saint-Georges. And I bought some toys for us to play with. You’ll see. We’ll have fun.”

  She gave him two days to settle in at the halfway house, then met him around the corner. He was wearing a flannel shirt and well-worn jeans, and she had the feeling he wasn’t the first person to own them, that they’d been picked up at a thrift shop or handed out at the halfway house. Whatever the source, he looked good in them. They were an improvement on the orange jumpsuit, and a better choice than any suit he might have worn.

  “That’s some place,” he said.

  “Better than where you were? Or worse?”

  “Well, all I had to do just now was open the door and walk out. That wasn’t an option upstate, so that makes this a big improvement. But it’s the same people, you know? We’re none of us wearing orange jumpsuits, but outside of that we haven’t changed all that much.”

  “Oh?”

  “A lot of the guys are drinking,” he said. “That’s a violation of the house rules, but nobody makes you take a Breathalyzer test. Still, if you’re a falling-down drunk they’re gonna throw you out. And there are a few I’m pretty sure are using.”

  “Drugs?”

  He nodded. “A neighborhood like this, how hard can it be to find somebody to cop from? And that’s not just against the house rules, it’s a parole violation and a quick ticket inside. You said something about a bottle of wine.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, it’s fine with me if you have some, but I think I’m going to pass. I was never in that much of a rush to get out of there, you know, but then you came along, and all of a sudden I couldn’t wait to breathe free air again. And drinking was never a problem for me, at least I never thought it was, but if not drinking gives me a better shot at staying out, well, I think I’ll give it a try. At least as long as I’m at the residence.”

  “How do they feel about Coca Cola?”

  “They’re fine with Coke,” he said, “as long as it’s not the powdered variety.”

  “Then screw the wine,” she said. “I’ve got Coke in the fridge and clean sheets on the bed. And there’s a gypsy cab. He’s not allowed to pick up fares on the street, but I bet he will. See? What did I tell you? This is our lucky day.”

  The sex was sweet. They started kissing, and things proceeded from there at a dreamy pace, and there was never an opportune time to show him the sex toys. Easier to scrap that script, just as she’d abandoned her plans for the wine. It was a nice bottle, a slightly pricier version of what she’d brought to Rita’s dinner table, but it could remain unopened. She wouldn’t need it, or the toys.

  Sweet kisses, sweet stroking and petting. He was quite obviously in love with her—or, perhaps more accurately, he was in what he thought was love with what he thought was her. He’d got it all wrong, but while it lasted she might as well go with the flow.

  And maybe, she found herself thinking, just maybe the flow she was going with was there to bring her full circle. Maybe she had done what she had to do, maybe she’d killed enough lovers to wipe the last of her father’s touches from her flesh. Maybe the relentless cycle of couple and kill and couple and kill had finally run its course.

  Maybe the love he felt for her was real, and maybe it had somehow given birth to that same emotion within her. Maybe she’d punished him enough, poisoning his playmate and sending him to jail for her murder, saddling him not only with a prison sentence but with a double burden of unwarranted guilt.

  And maybe she was even now responding to his love, and what stirred her now was not an itch being scratched, not the excitement of sex wedded to the anticipation of another killing, but, well, love. Her own love for him, and her anticipation—incredibly—of a life free from the need to bring an endless line of men to her bed, and from it to their graves.

  Maybe she could have a life, a real life, being lover and, yes, wife to this man. A good man, a man who loved her, a man whom she could love.

  Maybe—

  Her climax was surflike, waves rolling and rolling, tossing her, drowning her, hurling her onto the shore. For a long moment she was somewhere else entirely, lost in space and time.

  And then she was in her bed, in her sublet apartment in Riverdale, with the perspiration cooling on her skin and a man lying spent at her side.

  She reached out for that last thought, a thought that cried out for violins in the background, and a visual that was all pastoral fantasy out of an Irish Spring commercial.

  Maybe—

  Then again, she thought, maybe not.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “Don’t go away.”

  The thing about Coca Cola was it had a good strong taste. You could add almost anything to it and it would still taste like Coca Cola.

  That was the good thing about it. The bad thing was that if you dropped a pill into a glass or can or bottle of Coke, it did its Old Faithful imitation and fizzed like crazy.

  She knew this because of a pre-teen experiment. The word at school was that you could get high by dissolving an aspirin tablet in a can of Coke, and she’d tried, and what you got was a geyser that bubbled all the Coke out of the can. After a couple of attempts, she figured out that the carbonation had something to do with the reaction, and that all she had to do was let the Coke get flat, and then add the aspirin. So she did, and the tablet dissolved without generating a burst of bubbles, and she drank the resultant mixture, and, of course, nothing happened. You didn’t get high. You didn’t even get sick. A big nothing all around.

  But, if she’d gained nothing else from the experience, she’d learned not to drop pills into carbonated beverages. Happily,
her pharmaceutical score had included a couple of little bottles of chloral hydrate, and Google had led her to all anybody needed to know about that marvelous substance. It was the active ingredient in the legendary Mickey Finn, invented a century and a half ago in San Francisco. A few drops of chloral hydrate in a beer or a highball, and the next thing you knew you were part of the crew of a clipper ship in the China trade. You’d been shanghaied—that’s where the word came from—and you were stuck there, at least until you got to the next port.

  A few drops in a glass of Coke? Well, let’s see.

  “Here,” she said. “Coca Cola, with just a little lemon juice for flavoring. Come on, drink up. We’ll toast our future, Peter.”

  Perfect.

  “It could be a lot worse, Peter. Like, you wake up on the heaving deck of a ship bound for Hong Kong, and the last thing you remember is knocking back a glass of red-eye in a Barbary Coast saloon.” She frowned. “But maybe this is worse. It’s hard to say.”

  He didn’t say anything, but how could he? He had a six-inch length of duct tape across his mouth. He was on his back, spreadeagled on the bed, held there by restraints from the Pleasure Chest. (Gentle! Will leave no marks!)

  And she’d used other toys as well.

  “You were sleeping so nicely,” she said, “and I thought I’d just let you sleep forever, you know? Smother you in your sleep, or give you a shot of something lethal. The good thing about that is you’d never know what happened, but that’s the bad thing, too, because, well, you’d never know what happened.”

  God, the look in his eyes. He was trying to make sense out of this, and how could he? Nor was she helping, her words wandering all over the place.