Richard ordered a sandwich that he didn’t eat. He became enamored of the way in which the little fairy licked the tips of his fingers.
“I still love you,” he thought he heard Gillespie say at one point.
“What’s that?” Richard asked, serving his friend more tea. “I didn’t hear you.”
He had honestly missed it. He thought the fairy had said “I still love you,” but he couldn’t have said that, could, he? Fairies love no one. And Gillespie didn’t repeat it.
“So, are you not going to ask me about her?” the fairy said suddenly, after every other subject had been exhausted. “Aren’t you curious about how she’s doing?”
“She? Who?”
“Your goddaughter.”
“What goddaughter?” Richard asked, his chin resting on one hand, hypnotized by the delicate features of the fairy.
“Your ugly goddaughter,” Gillespie laughed. “Antonia’s youngest daughter. Lina’s murderer.”
It took a moment for Richard to realize about whom he was referring. He pursed his lips with disenchantment. “What about her?” he asked.
“She had a stroke. She spent nine weeks in a hospital, completely paralysed on her left side. She couldn’t speak—not that she spoke much before,” the fairy giggled. “She couldn’t walk; she couldn’t even go alone to the bathroom.”
Who cares? Richard’s expression of mild disgust seemed to be saying. He looked sideways, like a child who has been told that dessert had been cancelled.
“She got better, but to this day, she can’t say an intelligible word and she cannot walk without a cane. Each step takes an eternity. She trembles all the time,” Gillespie shook his hands, imitating a cripple. “The left side of her face twitches constantly. It’s hilarious!”
Richard couldn’t help but laugh with the fairy.
“You should see her,” Gillespie licked his fingers, “seated by the window, drooling. ‘What do you need?’ asks the nurse. ‘Is it this? Is it that? Do you need to go poopy?’”
“You’re so evil.”
“Evil? I got her a nurse!” Gillespie took a sip of tea. “What did you get her? I’ve been paying for her, with my own money. Remember that coloured girl at the conscience-awareness meeting? The one who went there with her husband. You don’t, probably. Cora is her name. She needed a job, after that good-for-nothing abandoned her—just like her mother told her he would.”
“I remember her,” Richard lied.
“She brings the child with her.” Gillespie smiled. He bit his lip and shrugged coquettishly, like a young girl who’s been caught lying. “He’s getting so chubby.”
His eyes multiplied for a brief second, and you could see fangs coming out of his mouth.
Richard laughed again. He refilled Gillespie’s cup. “And what happened to Josie?”
“Bah, I knew you were going to ask about her. They let her go, of course. They couldn’t prove anything.”
“Well that’s fantastic news,” replied Richard.
“It takes a load off your back, doesn’t it?”
“It certainly does. But then, Miss Dudu…”
“Miss Dudu? What a stupid name for a witch. To me she remains nameless. Do you name a cloud? A grain of sand? Every star in the firmament? After all she went through, the poor thing, killing all those women, I realised I had to protect her. I was a major witness at the girl’s trial. I dressed like an old woman and pointed at her with this finger. ‘She murdered them!’ I cried. ‘She murdered them in cold blood!’ You should have been there to see her face! It was so funny! The boyfriend, Russell, he was a witness, too. It broke my heart. Torn between the woman he loved and the memory of his best friend—from whom my protégée made soup!” he laughed again; some tea came out of his mouth. “He looked so sad giving testimony. It broke my heart to see him crying. It truly did. Those beautiful eyes. No wonder the girl was infatuated. His teeth, though—a total mess. Ruined by all the crap he ingested. Constantly sweating. He didn’t do the girl any favors. He repeated some of the things that Josie had said, about the Polish girl. You cannot say things against Jews in Venice. Of course everyone thought she was guilty.”
“But you said she was let go.”
“She spent a year or so behind bars. Until they found who the real murderer was.”
“What do you mean by the real murderer? You said my goddaughter wasn’t accused.”
Gillespie giggled. He enjoyed making Richard impatient. “There were a lot of things that remained unclear. Josie kept mentioning you, but you had abandoned her. Your driver, Jeremy, testified; he said he had taken her to your house, and they found the cabbie who gave Josie a ride that morning, although their testimony didn’t change much. The autopsies showed that she couldn’t have killed the two sisters. Alas, they had no one else, so she remained the main suspect. Josie kept blaming it on the old ladies, but two of them had disappeared. Then they arrested my protégée at the hospital. I had to hire a lawyer.”
“You did?”
“I had to. And he wasn’t cheap. Medical bills, the nurse, the attorney fees…it all kept adding up.” The fairy took a bundle of papers out of his pocket. “These are the bills. I was expecting that you would reimburse me.”
Richard took a look at some of the bills. The amounts were considerable.
“But don’t worry,” Gillespie continued, cleaning his mouth on the tablecloth. “She was too sick to be put in jail and they couldn’t prove a thing. She almost ruined it: she confessed! Not once, but twice—can you believe it? First to the lawyer.” The fairy started laughing: “Because the left side of her face was paralysed, and the sound of her voice was so low, the poor man had to keep asking what she was saying: ‘What was that? What did you say?’ It was so funny! Then to a priest. A priest! That infuriated me. The little shit thought that she was going to be executed and wanted to die in contrition. I must say I was disappointed in her. Stepped upon the whole of her life. Beaten, abused, and insulted. You would have thought that her heart was full of rage, not contrition. You would have thought that she would rebel, that she would cry vengeance and refuse to give in. ‘You did this to me!’ I would have cried to the priest. ‘You made me become a murderer, BUT YOU ARE THE REAL MURDERERS, YOU AND YOUR DOCTRINE OF HATE!’ But no, she wept and wept and wept and then begged for forgiveness. She repented. She truly repented, Richard. She said she didn’t want the girl to be executed. What was wrong with that family? They had no spine, no dignity. A pact is a pact. Thank God everyone thought she was crazy, mentioning demons and fairies and even a vampire,” he laughed again, “otherwise all of my efforts would have been in vain. She got acquitted and that silly girl, Josie, stayed in the can.”
“But what about all the satanic things she had in her shed?” Richard asked. “That would have been enough to incriminate her. What about the book I gave her?”
“I hid it. And I cleaned the room. I spent hours scrubbing the wax off that floor. My hands peeled from using so much ammonia.”
“And the real murderer?”
Gillespie had pulled out a compact and was reapplying makeup to his face. “The real murderer was her, stupid. She confessed to you the day you gave her the book and the chicken, didn’t she?”
Richard snorted. “No, you said that they caught another ‘real’ murderer.”
“Oh, yes, I did say that. Well, you will never guess who he was. We were all in the room waiting for the jury to come back with the verdict. I left your goddaughter waiting at home; it would have been too emotional to take her again into the courtroom, but everyone else was there. All the beatniks, including the boyfriend, and half of the Civic Union. Not everyone knew the girl, but with five murders, she woke up people’s curiosity. I was in the front row, dressed to impress, new pantyhose and perfectly applied makeup. The jury came into the room. They took their seats. It was suspenseful. Then, an officer entered the room and deli
vered a note to the defender. He read the note and passed it to the judge; he read it too and called for a recess. One hour later, we all entered the room again and were informed that, due to new evidence, the judge had granted both parts a continuance… ”
“You have me in tenterhooks. Who murdered them?”
“The octogenarian gravekeeper at Woodlawn Memorial—Harris. The werewolf. Remember? He had just died of stomach congestion. They found him on his bed, naked, covered in his own vomit, still holding somebody’s guts in his hands. And they found the parts of almost two dozen different people wrapped in brown paper inside his freezer, including the legs of Heather, his first victim, and parts of Lina, God rest her soul.”
“I can imagine the grim spectacle.”
“Grotesque. Blood, guts, and fat tissue. Humans smell worse than cattle. And he let them marinate a few days in their graves before he dug the corpses out… I know you had a crush on Harris. I did too. It is so sad when a beautiful man grows old.”
“But how come he was related to the murders?”
“They found a written confession. I know what you’re thinking. I didn’t write it: he did. Throughout his years at Woodlawn, he had eaten pieces from a few hundred bodies, and he felt the need to write down the names in his diary. Why? Chi lo sa. Some people can’t handle conscience. He didn’t admit to having killed the girls, mind you, but the cops assumed he did. I guess they already knew that that Miss García wasn’t guilty, but they couldn’t let her go before they found a more plausible suspect.”
Richard put a hand to his chest. “Poor Josie. All those months alone in prison. She must have suffered terribly. And I could have helped her. It all could have been solved so easily. I could have been a witness, too, if I hadn’t been such a coward.”
“Nobody blames you.”
“You have to understand. That place was horrendous. I can’t believe I used to read so much erotica set in prison.”
“It’s all in the past. She should have been released months before. There was not enough evidence against her. In any case, she’s now so much better. She learned a profession.”
“Did she?” Richard asked.
“She’s a hairdresser. She rents a chair and all. And she got married.”
“To Mr. Simpson, I suppose.”
“No. To Detective Parson. The man who arrested her. Can you believe it? He waited outside for her the day she was released. Josie pretended not to have seen him. She walked straight to the bus stop, but he stopped her. ‘Do you a place to go?’ Parson asked. She looked at him with hate in her eyes. Then she broke down. She had nowhere to go. They have a child now. They moved to Mar Vista.”
“My! I would have preferred to see her die in prison. What happened to the musician then?”
Gillespie chuckled.
“You killed him?”
“Of course not!” Gillespie exclaimed, offended. “He’s sick. Not my fault. Why does everything bad that happens have to be my fault? Well, it sort of is.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and adjusted his position.
Richard rested his head on one arm anticipating a long story.
“After the storm,” Gillespie reapplied his lipstick, “things returned to a dead calm. Cora came a few hours every day to clean the house, prepare the meals and take care of the last of the Riveras. Make sure she took a bath, make sure she ate—things like that. I pretended to be a cat. Sometimes a spider. Cora didn’t speak much either. I got bored. I should have returned home, but I had a contract, and the weather in Yorkshire is rubbish. Winter in California is so nice. I tried to keep myself busy, make some friends.
“I hung out with Ms. Cummings. Christians, they never know who they work for. We fought and fought and got the Gas House Café to close. They turned it into an art gallery for a while, but eventually it was declared unsuitable for human habitation and it was demolished. Ms. Cummings was so proud. Mr. Roberts, too, it goes without saying. He started courting Ms. Cummings. I thought I’d hear wedding bells any moment, but she never responded. Then the city declared most of the buildings in Venice unsuitable too and they started demolishing everything else. The Grand Hotel, the Venice West, most of the buildings on Windward are gone. The ones that survived lost all the upper floors. Mr. Roberts lost his house, too. Venice, my dear Richard, looks like a war zone now, full of debris and empty lots.”
“I should invest in land,” Richard responded.
Gillespie smiled. “It’ll never go up in price. The ‘undesirables’ that they expected to get rid of remained in Venice, because the city ran out of money. The Hamms still live on Broadway. Cora and Russell kept their place too. They had been living under the same roof for quite some time, so it didn’t seem odd that, after his friend disappeared, Russell stayed with her. Her mother had an opinion on that, though. ‘It is not good that you live alone with a white man,’ she said. ‘We don’t live alone,’ Cora responded. ‘Dorothy’s Angel lives with us. And he likes Russell very much.’
“It was a good arrangement, believe or not. Cora and her son kept the bedroom, Russell kept the couch. And in Venice, nobody cared. In Venice, no one cares if a man and woman living together are husband and wife, or if they are of the same color. It doesn’t matter as long as they pay the rent. And the rent is cheap. Cora got a second job behind a cash register. Russell was most of the time on unemployment, but on and off had a few good gigs.”
Gillespie paused to take a sip of his tea.
“How do you know all these things?” Richard asked.
“We fairies know everything. Little hummingbirds fly to our ears to share everyone’s secrets… Russell often disappeared, too. A couple of days here and there. Sometimes a whole month. He was a man. A man has his needs. Cora worried, but she never asked where he had been. He liked to ride buses. One night he took a bus to get to a bar in Culver City, but he ended up in downtown. He didn’t fall asleep. He had been thinking, staring out through the window without really looking at the buildings outside. It was a pleasant surprise. He hadn’t been in downtown Los Angeles in over a decade. The last time had been when his friend Eva took him to the Orpheum. He spent the rest of the night wandering through the old district. He did it again the following day, and then again, on the following day, but on a different route. He did it again on the next, and kept doing it until he had traveled every single bus route in Los Angeles. I started following him… Actually, that’s not so; he started following me.”
“What do you mean, following you?”
Gillespie giggled. “I sat at the front of the bus, holding my purse with two hands. Blonde and blue-eyed, I suppose I reminded him of Eva. I got on every bus that he took. And I didn’t get off until the next to last stop. I pretended to be his muse.
“We could have continued doing this for years, if it wasn’t for the drivers who started to say hello to him with a smirk, with that same conceited smug look they give to the mentally ill. He wondered if they had been referring to him with a nickname. What do you call a man who rides buses for a hobby, following a lady that doesn’t exist?
“We saw Miss García once, in Disneyland. Russell was wearing a blue velvet uniform with a big hat, and he was clean shaven. He was playing with the band. A summer gig. She didn’t recognise him, but he recognised her, I could tell. Dressed in the latest fashion, a printed long-sleeved blouse with a miniskirt, boots and a headband with a matching print. She looked tired; a full day dealing with two horrible children.
“‘Do you think I’m pretty?’ she had asked him one time, tears in her eyes.
“‘Do you think I would put up with all your nonsense if you weren’t?’ Russell had responded. ‘You’re the prettiest girl in the world.’”
“It must have felt nice to see that the one you once loved was doing fine,” Richard intervened.
Gillespie sighed. “Love. Why does it have to be so complicated? It had been complicated back then
, and it was complicated with Cora. Much less complicated, though. Russell learned to love Cora. Not the way she loved him, perhaps, not as desperately, not with the same urge. It didn’t pain Russell every moment he didn’t spend next to her, not as it pained Cora, but he cared for her. He liked her smell, the touch of her skin, hugging her under the blankets, listening to her raspy voice ask questions about his art. He cared about the child, too. He had nothing to offer, but she never made any demands, none other than to always keep the lights off, and to never kiss her in front of the boy.
“She wasn’t his true love. Josie never was, either. His true love was art. Cora cleaned the house. He wrote poetry. She took care of him when he was sick. He wrote her songs. She bathed him, she dressed him, she cut his hair, she paid most of the bills. He read aloud to her. He let himself be loved. His true love was his muse, the angel that appeared to him every once in a while, to whisper words of affection in his ears. Cora knew about her, but other than a painful smile every time he mentioned this angel, she had no commentary. She sat down and listened eagerly to his words: ‘Yesterday, she described to me the delights of paradise: blue skies, miles and miles of emerald green tall grass. A warm breeze that caresses your body… We made love.’”
“You have great imagination,” Richard interjected.
Gillespie went on with his tale. “The muse visits always make him feel weaker. That’s why Cora takes care of him so attentively, because she knows that he’s ill. At first the visits from the muse were only sporadic; but then he demanded more. He needed her words. She sneaks in through an open window, sometimes from underneath the door. She sits next to him. She swipes the hair from his forehead with her hand. She combs his eyebrows with the tip of her fingers. She kisses his eyelids, his nose, his lips. She bends down to whisper a question in his ear. ‘Did you miss me?’ The sicker he gets, the less of her he can see; but he knows she’s in there. After an hour of two of exchanging sweet nothings, she pulls off his shoes, unbuttons his pants, and makes love to him. Gently, wildly, the way no woman ever made love to him before. She puts his hands to her breasts, to her mouth, to her waist… I am in command. He’s my prey. And when I get what I had gone to get, I leave.”
Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle Page 43