Seven Suspects

by Renee James

  Albert is wearing workout clothes, a skintight sleeveless top that shows off his massive upper body, skintight Speedo shorts that make his manhood look like a robin’s nest, a do-rag on his head. It’s powerlifter garb.

  “Do you understand me, bitch?”

  I shrug. I can’t answer with a rag in my mouth. He removes it and pinches my cheeks with both hands, hard enough to bring more tears to my eyes. He’s telling me he owns me. Somewhere in the cloud of terror that fills my mind, a lightning bolt of anger burns.

  “Understand?”

  “It would help if I could use the toilet,” I say.

  He smacks me again. “Speak when you’re spoken to, skank.”

  “That’s what I did, Albert.” It just comes out. I regret it as soon as I say it.

  He smacks me again. I cry. He sneers, a king-of-the-mountain sneer. He stretches and flexes like an Olympic powerlifter as he goes over to the bench press apparatus and puts plates on the bar, no collars. He has the mass of a sumo wrestler, but he’s no powerlifter. He has a round, soft belly. His arms and chest are huge, but a lot of it is fat. He’s powerful enough to crush me into dust, but his powerlifter getup is a fantasy costume, someone he’d like to be.

  Albert starts to sit on the bench, then looks at me. He walks past me to the pole where my tether is attached. My tether is a steel cord, like a chain for a bike lock. It’s looped through the plastic ties on my ankles, then around the steel pole that runs from floor to ceiling. A padlock secures the cord to the pole. It gives me a few feet of movement, which is not enough to reach any wall.

  Albert unlocks the padlock and jerks me to my feet. He wields the tether line like a leash and starts toward another corner of the basement. I can’t turn fast enough to follow. The bindings on my ankles only allow short, shuffling steps. I crash heavily to the floor, my face banging hard against the concrete. My nose feels numb. I can feel blood trickling down my skin.

  “Clumsy bitch.” Albert laughs, a mean, humorless laugh. He picks me up from behind as easily as he would a child and places me on my feet. I glimpse his face as he starts to lead again. It’s a stern, tense face. He’s not having fun. He’s releasing demons.

  Albert leads me to the part of the basement I couldn’t see before. The far wall has a continuation of the weight-lifting area on one side and a small bathroom on the other. The workout space has another bench, a large mat, and racks of dumbbells. A cabinet that houses a sound system sits at the end of the sofa bed, against the wall of the bathroom. Two speakers sit on top. Albert leads me to the bathroom. There is no door, just a curtain that has been pulled to the side, leaving an open frame. He locks my tether to an exposed pipe in the ceiling.

  “Don’t pull the curtain or I’ll smash your face,” he says. He stands at the threshold, watching me with a grim smile.

  The thought of him watching me brings convulsive sobs. I feel weak and exposed. Him watching me pee feels almost as debasing as him penetrating me with a foreign object.

  “Don’t be so shy, bitch,” he taunts. “I’ve already seen what you’ve got. It ain’t much.”

  He returns to his weights. I sit on the toilet and pee and try to collect myself. The bathroom is ultra-compact. The curtain opens to the toilet. The rest of the room has a sink and mirror on one side, and a shower area on the other. When you stand at the sink, you stand in the shower area. The floor of the shower tapers down to a drain. The showerhead is a handheld device that perches at shower height.

  I finish peeing and face my next problem. My hands are bound behind me. I can’t wipe.

  “Albert,” I call. I try to sound like a helpless, brokenhearted bimbo whose body has been violated by a powerful man who rules the world. That’s what he wants, and I need to make him confident. Plus, it’s not that hard because that’s the reality right now. “Can you free my hands so I can clean up?”

  His hulking form fills the doorway. A smile spreads across his face like a kind of leprosy, altering his oafish features into a portrait of malevolence. I catch my breath.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he says. He pulls toilet paper from the roll on the wall.

  “Please, no.” The words squeak from my mouth amidst more sobs. I can’t stop. The thought of his horrid hands on my body makes me feel ill.

  “No trouble,” he says. He puts his hand between my legs and rips the paper upward, as roughly as he can. I fake pain. It’s what he wants. My act makes him smile.

  He slaps me hard enough to snap my head around. I begin to fall to the side of the toilet, unable to use my feet and hands for balance. He catches me like a father catching his child. My mind sees this, but the rest of me is crying like a pathetic weakling.

  “That’s for talking,” he says.

  His phone rings. He picks it up, mumbles a greeting, grunts a few times. His demeanor makes me think it’s a business call.

  “Help!” I scream it as loud as I can. My voice has a wailing, panicky quality. “Help. I’m being held here!” I scream “Help” over and over again. It’s not much, but I stay with it. He’s going to kill me anyway. For a moment, Albert gapes at me like a stunned dimwit, then says something into the phone and puts it in his pocket. He’s on me in a heartbeat. I watch his fist come at me with an eerie clarity that slows everything down to slow motion. His fist is the size of a sledge hammer, it is going to kill me, I can see the hair on his fingers, I have plenty of time to duck, but strangely, I can’t move. I stand in perfect stillness as his fist comes to my face, blocking my view of everything else, knocking me off my feet. I’m hurtling back into the bathroom. The world goes black.

  28

  THE WORLD STAYS black. My eyes are open, but there’s no light. It left with Albert. He is my Lord and my Master. He can do anything he wants with me. Use me, kill me, beat me. Take away my light.

  I swallow the self-pity and take inventory. I’m lying on my stomach on the concrete floor. It’s cold and hard. My shoulders ache from my hands being immobilized behind my back for so long. I can taste blood in my mouth. My lips are sore. I run my tongue over them. They are swollen and caked with blood. My nose shrieks with pain. It is most certainly broken. Albert may not be a powerlifter, but he hits hard enough to splatter my face and knock me senseless. He’s also strong enough to carry my carcass out of the bathroom and plant me wherever it is that I am. I use my tongue to check my teeth. They’re all there. Good news at last.

  I roll on my back, even though it makes my shoulders scream with pain. I pull my knees up to see how much play I’ve got in the tether. I can’t take up all the slack, not lying down.

  I roll onto my front again and plant my forehead against the concrete so I can pull my knees under my torso. I struggle to stand, and fall. I try again, and fall. Again. Balance is hard to find in total blackness. I finally get to my feet; I start to fall again. I try to catch myself by moving my feet, but the bindings don’t let me. I crash to the floor.

  I sob for a few minutes. Deep inside, I know it’s useless, but I do it again anyway. It’s not like I have an option. I make it to my feet, totter, then steady myself. I get no sense of victory from it. I still can’t do anything to save myself, surrounded by complete darkness, my hands and feet bound. I shuffle in the direction I think the tether goes and bump softly against the pole. It’s what I expected. Albert seems like a creature of habit. He seems like someone who planned this out, planned that I’d be leashed to the pole in the room and the pipe in the bathroom. Maybe that’s why he was so angry when I wet the bed. He hadn’t taken into account that bladder control can be tenuous when you torture someone.

  I try to reconstruct the room from memory. The pole was near the foot of the sofa bed. I shuffle backwards, trying to feel the sofa bed. When I feel it, I shuffle backwards alongside it until I reach the end of the tether. I have some degree of orientation. I’m facing the pole. The sofa bed is on my left, the bench press set up on my right. Beyond the pole on the right are the stairs, on the left, the utility room. The bathr
oom and dumbbell area are behind me.

  I need to get into the utility area. Albert might have a shop there with sharp tools. If I can get out of my bindings, I might have a chance.

  I drop to my knees and grope at the framework of the sofa bed, looking for a sharp metal edge. It’s a tortuous struggle to explore the entire frame in total darkness, squirming on my knees and butt, feeling with hands bound behind my back. I find nothing but round edges. Albert wouldn’t make a mistake like that.

  The blackness closes in on me. I lie on the floor and sob. When the self-pity passes, I stare into the dark and await my death. My mind flashes to the memory of a neighborhood cat that was left broken and bloody by some nasty kids who tied it down and ran their bikes over it one day. I was too little to intercede. When they left, I ran to it, knowing, even as a child, that it was beyond help. As I approached, the cat tried to move its head but couldn’t. When I crouched beside her, she rolled her eyes to see me, then stared blankly into the distance, her eyes soft and hurt and liquid. I touched her, her fur as smooth as a melody, her body still warm, her ribs rising and falling with each shallow breath. She no longer acknowledged me. She was waiting to die. I put a hand on her head and cooed to her, tears welling up, hoping my father didn’t see me showing emotion over a cat, more proof that I was not manly. The cat died before I could decide whether or not to pick her up.

  The cat’s image gives way to a vision of Betsy and Roberta and Cecelia at my grave, crying tears of loss and heartbreak. I want to cry with them for a life so badly ended, for dying to stupidly, for suspecting decent people of doing what this deranged monster has done. I replay my encounters with Lover Boy and Greco and the rest of the six suspects.

  I wish I had been kinder to Lover Boy. I should have seen the goodness in Greco. I remembered his generous hug. I wish I’d been more patient with Victor Grassi. I shouldn’t have blamed Mark for being who he is, I should have been more vigilant about who I am. I wish I had tried to find a way to help Joey Swidell. I shouldn’t have taken revenge on Andive.

  My last thought before drifting into sleep is that I was right about the law of sevens.

  My prison is so dark and silent; I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or awake. I don’t know how much time has passed since Albert left. I’m hungry and thirsty. My stomach growls and my mouth is so dry it feels like it’s coated with paste. My consciousness drifts away from the here and now, back to where it all started, to the murderer John Strand.

  He was toying with me, the way a cat plays with a mouse before killing it. He wanted to seduce me, just for sport. I played along, hoping to find proof he was the one who bludgeoned Mandy Marvin to death. He won, but in the end, we both lost. I was an isolated, love-starved wretch, still struggling in the early months of transition, lonely, wanting acceptance with a kind of desperation that bordered on the pathetic. He laughed at me, at how easily I surrendered my body to his will. His contempt, that was what set me off. That’s what made me ask him, point blank, if he killed Mandy.

  He was stunned for a moment. People like me, marginal people, didn’t talk to him like that. That’s when the gates of hell opened in his eyes. They were eyes, but they had an aura, an eerie energy, like a bucket of snakes oozing around each other. He wanted to kill me then and there, but he managed to control himself. He denied killing Mandy, but he denied it in a way that said, yes, he killed her and he enjoyed it and he liked that now I knew. That’s when our dance of death started. His goons following me. Andive and his accomplice raping me. The flowers sent with veiled messages that seemed harmless but were his way of telling me he would strike when he felt like it and I would be dead when it was his pleasure to kill me.

  Me putting together a harebrained scheme that couldn’t possibly work: kill the killer.

  My world explodes in blinding light and nightmare noise, jangled and louder than cannon fire. My body seems to rise off the ground with shock and fright. As loud as the music is, I can hear Albert’s heavy footsteps as he pounds down the stairs. I try to breathe normally and peek through the narrow slits of my eyelids into the glare to watch him descend. He is surprisingly light on his feet, dancing down the stairs as nimbly as a dancer, albeit in the body of a hippopotamus. His face wears that look of his, the dim-witted imbecile who doles out torture with no conscience. He approaches me with a malicious smile, runs his hands over my body, deliberately toying with my breasts and rubbing my labia. He’s not trying to be erotic, he’s showing me that he can do anything he wants to me. He wears skintight, black vinyl gloves like the ones we use in the salon for color services, as if to protect himself from a diseased body.

  I squirm to avoid his touch. He laughs. He stands, grabs a handful of my hair in one hand, puts the other in my crotch, and in one motion lifts and throws me on the sofa bed like I was a bag of leaves. I’m rigid with terror. This will be my final beating. He will do to me what John Strand did to Mandy Marvin—smash my weak, vulnerable body with fists and boots until there is no life left in it, until it has been turned into a pulp of crushed bones and devastated flesh, basted in blood and body fluids, a formless, lifeless lump that once had dreams and could embrace others and could sing songs of love and passion.

  Nothing happens.

  I open my eyes and position myself on the sofa bed so I can see Albert. He’s in his weight lifter garb again, sitting on the bench press apparatus, getting ready to finish the workout that was interrupted by his phone call. He looks like a fat slob, but I have just witnessed his strength. I recall him dancing down the stairs and realize he has hidden athleticism, too. I wonder how long he’d been stalking me. Was he the man I saw from the El station platform? The photographer in Oak Park? Probably. I wouldn’t have thought so until I saw how strong he is and how well he moves. He was definitely the one who defaced my salon and apartment. He must have been the evil presence I kept sensing. God, why didn’t I recognize his evil intentions when we met?

  He takes off the gloves, staring at me with a smile on his face that seems almost friendly.

  “You have nice tits,” he says. “For a queer.”

  He lies down on the bench and starts pressing out reps. I wonder if he’s having libidinous thoughts about me, if maybe I can use that to get my bindings undone, convince him that I’d be a great fuck without the lashings, or that I could give him the greatest blow job of his life if my hands were free. Then find a moment where I can deliver a crippling blow, a karate fist to the throat, maybe, or biting down on his penis with all my strength, then sticking a thumb in his eye deep enough to kill him.

  I realize my aggression is coming back after countless hours of playing the helpless sap, waiting to die. I realize, too, that I must hide this emotion from Albert. Maybe he’ll extend my worthless life a little longer if he thinks I’ve given up, just like John Strand decided to play with me for a while instead of killing me outright when I got close.

  Albert finishes his set and sits up on the bench. “My dad told me you had nice tits,” he says to me.

  I raise my eyebrows in question.

  “Yeah. He was my dad. Not my uncle, you stupid skank.”

  He drops his gaze to the floor, deep in contemplation. “I went through my whole life without him.”

  He shakes his head slowly from side to side. “My mother told me he was dead. Skank whore! She hated him. She hated me, too. Fucking bitch. Nagged me every minute of the day. ‘Albert, you’re such a pig.’ ‘Albert, you’re so stupid, just like your dad.’ ‘Albert, no girl is ever going to want a fat slob like you’.”

  That sick smile comes back on his face, taut, thin-lipped, angry. “She never said a nice thing to me, in my whole life. Not one.”

  He lies down on the bench again and pumps out eight more reps. I try to imagine myself getting him erect and taking him in my mouth without gagging. If I can get that far, I know I can bite him hard enough to disable him for long enough to finish him off. As he finishes the set, I try to think of a way to offer the blow job, a way that m
ight convince him to unfasten my hands.

  He sits up again. “She’d never tell me where he was buried,” he says. “She said he was a bad man and best forgotten, that I was bad enough without knowing him.”

  “When I got older, I asked her why his name wasn’t on my birth certificate. She said he didn’t deserve to be on the birth certificate, but the truth was, she got knocked up and I was a bastard. She let me think that my whole life. The kids teased me about it. They called me ‘Albastard’ and said I was too stupid to have a father.”

  I actually feel sorry for him, even though he’s going to kill me. I can picture what he’s saying. My own mother was indifferent to me, and my father hated me for being queer, even though it wasn’t that obvious back then. I didn’t fit in at school either. I passed as a boy, but I always felt like an alien, and the other kids picked up on it. I was alone a lot.

  Albert rubs his hands together. “After she died,” he says, “I found her marriage license. Turned out, they got married after I was born, but it didn’t even last a year. She changed her name back to Larson after the divorce.”

  Albert lies down again and cranks out his third set of reps, just six this time, and the last one comes hard. He’s getting tired. When he sits up, I ask him if I can talk, my words almost unintelligible because of the gag in my mouth. He cocks his head for a minute, then picks up a loose weight and approaches me. I see it again. He moves like an athlete. That half-invalid fat boy lurch that identified Albert as a nerdy, knock-kneed slob who could barely walk is gone. In his place is a fat man who can run and hit, a cunning, angry man who can kill. He crouches in front and looks me in the eye.