by Dane Hartman
“You think this is the Mission Street Knifer?” Owens asked.
“I don’t know about that, but he’s the leading contender for the role. Whatever he is, or was, the world’s better off now that he’s not around.”
“Amen,” said Owens with the reverence of a man who has witnessed a miracle. A perverse and horrible miracle but a miracle all the same.
C H A P T E R
N i n e
The establishment that Teddy was taking Martha to was located on Folsom. Though it was open twenty-four hours a day and did not require any reservations, non-members were admitted only on Tuesday and Sunday evenings. This qualification made no difference to Teddy who was a dues-paying member and was, in any case, well known by the management from previous visits.
Friday nights had become known in this place as “hot and nasty nights,” but even though it was still Thursday much of that hotness and nastiness was already present. Of course, the fact that it was Halloween occasioned a certain libertine spirit in excess of the usual.
And what went on here was practically anything. In front, there was a large public area where several people were immersed in a hot tub equipped like most hot tubs in town with a Jacuzzi. To the rear there were any number of saunas, but the hot tubs and saunas were not what one came here for.
The facilities were advertised as the most extensive in the city, though no doubt other entrepreneurs were busy running around trying to establish clubs more elaborate still. At any rate, an explorer, who was single-minded enough not to get distracted before completing his odyssey (and there was plenty to get distracted by), would also find a pinball room, with some of the latest video games installed, a snack bar, a porno-movie lounge, and for those with a longing for a good roast beef sandwich between excitements, even a delicatessen.
But again, all these features were just so much icing on the proverbial cake, for in addition to such public rooms there were thirty-six private rooms and three private “party” areas. And that was where the true business of the club went on. Whatever one’s proclivity and taste, whether one was straight or gay or merely straddling the fence, one was almost certain to find someone suitable to provide satisfaction, at least for the duration of an hour, an hour being as long as you could rent a room.
As soon as Martha and Teddy entered the club, Martha understood at once just what kind of place it was. Because she had spent most of her time in the L.A. area, she had scant knowledge of San Francisco’s nightspots, allowing Teddy and Jim and other members of the cast and crew to escort her around town. So she had no idea in advance of what she was getting into, and while she did not regard herself as the least bit prudish, she was not at all sure she wished to indulge herself in the public eye.
She was also, and quite justifiably, thinking of her reputation, though, as Teddy was quick to point out, there were so many people, so many bodies, that there was little likelihood that anyone would recognize her. Her flesh might surely interest them, but not her face.
“I thought we could just be alone,” she said petulantly.
“Alone? Later we’ll be alone. I have rented the Sun Room, and we can meet there in an hour or so and have all the solitude we want.”
It was not this reassurance or the implication that she was free to do what she wanted in the intervening hour that silenced her but the recognition that it made no sense to argue with Teddy.
All she said was, “There’s no sun. Why the Sun Room?”
“What’s in a name?” Teddy said. “Remember, it’s now eleven-thirty. Say by quarter to one meet me there.”
“How will I find it?” She gazed around, and all she saw was flesh blurred by lots of steam.
“Ask anyone,” Teddy said brusquely and then disappeared into the steam, anxious to try his luck with the anonymous free-spirited and impatient women who awaited the attentions of a man. Any man.
Martha, so abruptly deprived of Teddy’s company, wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Still keeping her clothes on, she wandered from one room to the next, feeling strangely embarrassed by the exposure of flesh all about her and the unrestrained passions exhibited by couples of all sexes, clutching, moaning, fucking out in the corridors presumably because none of the thirty-six private rooms was available or maybe just because they felt like it. She stumbled into the porno-movie lounge. Marilyn Chambers was writhing frenetically on the screen, but from the strangled, fitful sounds that welled up from the audience Martha suspected that no one was paying too much attention to the film.
Pinball seemed like the safest bet, and Martha assumed that she could pass the remainder of the hour with “Mata Hari,” and such compulsive electronic games as “Asteroids” and “Space Wars,” watching lights light up and hearing bells ping and chime. But this was not to be. Evidently, several men had come to the pinball room on the assumption that they could pick up a girl, and some girls had come here, too, on the same assumption.
“You want a little competition?” said one sidling up to her.
“No,” she answered, dropping several more quarters into the machine she was standing in front of.
He would not give up until she told him in no uncertain terms that she wanted him to leave.
Just as he suddenly retreated she observed out of the corner of her eye a familiar figure entering the packed room. Not Teddy. It was Jim Corona. Somehow he had managed to slip by the doorman.
“Oh shit,” she muttered to herself, “he followed us, and he’s looking for me.”
He had abandoned his pirate costume, probably leaving it in his car. There was no question that he was wholly dedicated to finding Martha; he passed half-naked nubile women without blinking an eye. The look on his face was hard and defiant.
For an instant, Martha froze, her only thought was how to escape. The alternative—a confrontation, recriminations, a public scene (even in a place where public scenes assumed a whole new definition)—was unpalatable to her. And then there was Teddy. She did not want to see what would happen if the two of them clashed.
Because Jim was taking his time, studying the face and figure of every woman who materialized in his visual field, Martha was able to slip out just before he caught sight of her. But she knew that he would not abandon his search, that once he got obsessed about something (and he surely seemed to be obsessed about her) he would not give up.
Well, she concluded, there is no choice; the best way to hide is to surrender to the anonymity of the hot tub where she would be surrounded by dozens of others, equally naked, equally submerged in water and steam.
She rented a locker, hurriedly disrobed, and clad only in a towel wrapped as decorously as possible, she sauntered into the public area, hesitated for a moment, then dropped the towel and took the plunge.
Sinking into the burning water was such a shock that Martha felt as though she’d been thrown into an oven. But then her body relaxed, succumbing to heat-induced lassitude. She noticed that her skin was turning pinkish in color. For the moment she forgot about Jim, forgot about Teddy, was aware only of the others who occupied her sector of the tub. Their nakedness interested but did not arouse her. In her soporific state nothing seemed to matter. Half the night had been spent running about with costumed people, in disguise herself, the other half was apparently to be spent in the company of those without any clothes at all. There was, she thought, kind of a delicious irony in this.
The man who approached her, clinging to the side of the tub as he worked his way around to her, was not bad-looking, with moist black hair tumbling over his brow and eyes that were accustomed to deciphering the mysteries of a woman’s face. He reminded Martha of Jim. He had Jim’s body and Jim’s smile and when he tried to put the make on her he was exactly like Jim.
“You’re somebody famous,” he said, so carefully appraising her body that she felt suddenly ashamed.
She gave him a nervous laugh. “Somebody famous? Where would you get an idea like that?”
“You’re an actress. I’ve seen you
in something. Weren’t you at the Mark Taper Forum last year in the Doll’s House?”
Martha admitted that she was. Flattered that anyone would remember that performance, she fell into conversation with the man, who said that his name was Rick and that he was an out-of-work actor (what else?). She was no longer conscious of her nudity or of his for that matter. When he first suggested going with him back to the room he’d rented to “continue our talk,” she balked, saying that she really didn’t have the time—she really didn’t, maybe just twenty, twenty-five minutes before she had to meet Teddy in the Sun Room—but then she spotted Jim, stalking the area around the tub, looking like a wild beast about to pounce.
“Wait, I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “But I’m warning you I can’t stay longer than half an hour.”
“No problem,” Rick said agreeably.
But once he got her into the room he didn’t waste a moment in getting out the cocaine and the amyl nitrite he’d stowed away in his clothes.
“I don’t do snow,” Martha said, adding a qualification: “As a rule.”
“Rules are made to be broken.” Rick handed her a slender metal straw. “Why don’t you do a couple of lines? Relax.”
She was wearing only the towel, and it was obvious that she was in need of relaxation.
With the introduction of the cocaine into her system she no longer felt so apprehensive, and not just of Rick but of Teddy and of Jim. She kept asking Rick for the time, and he continued to assure her that they had plenty of it left and not to worry. She began to suspect that he was deceiving her, but while she told him repeatedly that she would have to go any second now she made no move to do so. And when he reached forward and in one deft movement untied the towel so that it slipped down on her thighs, carelessly draping them, she put up no resistance. All she asked was, “Do you do this all the time?”
“No,” he answered, “only Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, the rest of the week I recover.”
All she said was, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” But whether she meant by “this” that she shouldn’t be fucking a man she’d met fifteen minutes before or that there simply wasn’t time enough to indulge herself she didn’t quite know. It was all very confused in her mind.
He started out gently, aware that she was still a bit jittery, but as she began to respond, he grew more aggressive, dropping his head down into her lap, causing her to assume a supine position on the double bed. With a calculation that could only have come from a great deal of practice, he used his tongue with uncanny precision and little by little he elicited from Martha the responses he wanted, expected, delighting in the way her pelvis lurched, the way her whole body rocked, the way she threw her head back so that her hair was strewn over her eyes, obscuring them from view. This had gone off better than he had hoped. The truth was that he had never seen her on the stage of the Mark Taper, had merely seen an advertisement for the show in the daily Hollywood Reporter, but he had a good memory and a better rap so what difference did it make?
Martha gripped his head fiercely with her hands and pulled him suddenly up to her so that their heads abutted. They kissed. He moved into her because he, too, was a little anxious about the time. There were others he wanted to make it with tonight, and he didn’t want to let too many opportunities pass him by.
The two were so entangled and so otherwise preoccupied that neither one of them noticed that the door had opened and that someone was there watching them in a manner not unlike that of a zoologist observing a couple of baboons in heat. The expression on his face was one of curiosity and also perhaps one of puzzlement, as though he wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it.
Quietly, he shut the door behind him and from out of the satchel he’d brought with him he removed a cleaver. Then, with timing and speed that were remarkable in circumstances others might find somewhat daunting, he sliced off Rick’s head at the base of the neck.
The head rolled off Martha, leaving surprisingly little blood behind, and bounced once on the floor before coming to a stop, face up. There was a certain astonishment reflected on that face, Teddy thought, but mostly there was passion. He had not died at a bad time really.
Martha’s eyes could not have gotten any wider. The terror that held her in thrall would not permit her to cry out. But for just a brief moment she no longer concerned Teddy. He was still looking at the face of the man he had just decapitated. He realized that he’d erred, that having spotted Jim Corona earlier in the night he had assumed that this was he. Were it only an anonymous male whom Martha would have obliterated from her memory by tomorrow morning that would not have disturbed him. But when he suspected that she had taken up with Jim, right under his very eyes, as it were, well, that had gotten him rather aggravated.
He regretted having to kill Martha. This was not how he had planned the evening, and he had truly meant it when he invited her to accompany him to Acapulco upon the culmination of the shooting.
But there was no getting around it now; decapitating somebody—without provocation yet—was hardly the sort of thing one forgives and forgets.
Though Martha actually bounced from the bed with considerable speed she felt as though she wasn’t acting nearly fast enough, that she was imprisoned in a dream in which all movement, both hers and Teddy’s, was occurring in slow motion. And even as she grabbed hold of a towel as though it could protect not only her modesty but her imperiled flesh as well, she could not believe that this was happening. It was so far removed from anything in her normal experience, so utterly unprecedented in her life that she still had the feeling that all she’d have to do was open her eyes and it would all disappear. But her eyes were open, of course, and the head of the man who’d just been making love to her was right in the middle of the floor, and his eyes too were open though they were glazing over quickly.
Martha backed away from Teddy but this was not much help since the room was so very small.
Finally, she got out a word, and the word was “No!” delivered in an enfeebled voice. And again: “No, no, no!” Appealing to Teddy, she recognized the futility of prevailing upon him. For the man who faced her now scarcely resembled the man who had charmed and excited her all this time. He was someone deranged, a man who could not be reasoned with the way the Teddy she was acquainted with could.
And while she wanted to scream, she could not bring herself to, fearing that at the instant she alerted anyone outside the door to her plight, Teddy wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.
So she did the only thing she could think of to save herself, or at least to stave off the inevitability of death, which was to drop to her knees, a gesture so unexpected that Teddy stared at her in amazement, his cleaver frozen in mid-air. Then, swallowing back the vomit that rose to the back of her throat, she quickly unzipped his fly and drew out his tumescent organ. It was the violence that had made him hard, she thought. And she opened her mouth to receive him, at the same time shutting her eyes, hoping that by distracting him in this manner she might gain a few precious seconds in which to escape.
Teddy arched his back, stiffening as the pleasure began to overwhelm his impatience at getting this whole thing over with. One more time, he was thinking, what difference would it make? He ran a hand through her hair, occasionally pulling hard at it and causing her to cry out even as he continued to work her mouth along the base of his penis. But he retained hold of the cleaver. And then when he felt that he could hold back no longer, he shuddered, releasing himself into her. It was precisely at that instant that Martha drew back and in one agile motion scrambled for the door. Teddy did not move. His eyes popped open, but he did not move. He watched her as she took hold of the handle to the door. It was then that he leaned forward and swung the cleaver so that it collided with her neck.
But because her tangled hair was in the way, and because the blade itself was somewhat blunted from the first beheading, the cleaver failed to achieve the objective Teddy had intended for it.
Instead of a clean cut,
which was what Teddy always hoped for, the cleaver penetrated only partway into the neck, and though it severed the spinal cord and was certain to prove fatal eventually, it did not succeed in killing Martha right off.
She screamed, but the sound she produced was so weak that Teddy doubted anyone outside the door could have heard it. Blood gushed from the wound while Teddy struggled to extract the cleaver caught in the bone. And as he did, she was convulsed in pain, grappling at the door as though by escaping out into the corridor she could escape her fate as well.
Failing to free the cleaver so that he could strike again, Teddy decided to apply further pressure so that he would in effect saw through what remained of his victim’s neck. In this he enjoyed more success.
Little by little Martha ceased flailing, ceased squirming. Little by little her head with all its lovely hair, now soaked through with blood, came away in Teddy’s hand, and at last her body crumpled to the floor.
Teddy awakened to the fact that he could not go out into the public area looking like this, not with so much blood covering him. He thereupon removed his gloves and all his clothes, and these he stuffed into the satchel. Into it also he placed the murder weapon.
The satchel might identify him, he knew, and he could not risk taking it out of the premises. But he had prepared for this eventuality, having brought with him a small alarm clock that came equipped with an ingenious little bomb. He set it to detonate in an hour and a quarter on the assumption that by then the police should have initiated their investigation.
Quickly, peering out of the small gap he made in opening the door, he waited until he was certain the hallway was empty, then hastened out. A few minutes later he had, unobserved, inserted the explosive satchel in a locker that he secured with a combination lock.