A Killer's Kiss

by William Lashner

  “I didn’t mean to get you into trouble,” she said. “I just told the truth to the police, that’s all. About us. Just like you did the night of the murder.”

  “That’s not what I wanted explained,” I said. “I want to know the truth about why you left me. The truth of why you married Wren. The truth, for once, about us.”

  “I told you that already. You were pulling away, Wren stepped in, I was feeling vulnerable.”

  “But you left out one last player.”

  She stepped forward and tried to stare into my eyes through the darkness. Discouraged, she dropped onto the couch, one leg crossed beneath her.

  “I knew you’d find him eventually,” she said, her voice carefully calm. “He said he told you a story to get you to leave him alone, a story full of lies.”

  “He told me a story, all right, but it wasn’t full of lies. And there it is, right on the coffee table. His story.”

  “You taped him?”

  “You bet I did.”

  She leaned forward, picked up the recorder, pressed play. For an instant, Terry Tipton’s slurry voice filled the room. “—had been sending me money since before their wedding. That was his agreement with Julia, the way he got her—” She clicked him quiet.

  “He’s sick,” she said. “He’s not in his right mind. He’s an addict, addicted to lies as much as to the drugs. And you taped him without his knowing?”

  “I taped him without his knowing.”

  “That was so unfair.”

  “Unfair is the way I play it when my neck is on the line.”

  She clutched the tape to her chest, leaned back, let her head loll on the sofa. “Let’s just go away, let’s just go someplace else. Let’s get on a plane and get the hell out of here and start over. Just you and me.”

  “And the tape.”

  “Stop it.”

  “And Terry, too, when he decides to show up again and infect your life.”

  “He won’t. I’ll make him promise. That will be the price for leaving him out of it.”

  “There’s no leaving him out of it, and there’s no running away. They’ll grab us as soon as we hit the airport. Our attempted escape will be Exhibit One at our trial and add years to our sentences. We have to stay and fight. And the tape is all we have to fight with.”

  “We can stonewall.”

  “That’s what they want us to do. So they can pile accusations on our heads, one after another, while we sit quietly and take it. Pretty soon the pile will be too high to shovel our way out of.”

  “We can find someone else to blame. What about that Miles Cave? I thought we agreed. Why didn’t you tell the police about him? Why can’t he be the one?”

  “Because he doesn’t exist.”

  “All the better.”

  “Except that your lawyer has set up a frame of his own so it looks like I’m Miles Cave.”

  “Why would Clarence do that?”

  “To get me out of the way. Because he loves you.”

  “Oh,” she said, not at all surprised.

  “I’d set up Clarence, and enjoy doing it, but he has an alibi. At the moment Wren was killed, he was at an ATM, getting cash to pay off Terry.”

  “We have to do something, Victor.”

  “Yes, we do. We have to give the tape to the police. On it Terry admits to coming to the house, to demanding money, to being shown the open and empty safe by Wren. He admits to taking the gun and shooting Wren in the head and then dropping the gun on the floor and fleeing. And you know why he did it?”

  “Stop this.”

  “For you. Because he loves you and he wanted for you to be happy. With me.”

  “He’s insane.”

  “Yes, he is. And it’s all here, all his insanity, on the tape. You have to give the tape to the police.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “You don’t understand. I don’t even understand it myself. I loved him so much. With a pure adolescent love that never leaves, that remains like a jagged diamond in the heart. Shakespeare’s poetry seemed to come as naturally to us as our breaths. I would hold him, and he would kiss me, and the words just appeared. ‘My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.’ Just to think of him then can still draw out tears. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, I just stared at my own jagged diamond in the heart.

  “He was so sweet, so sensitive. The part of myself that loved him was the best part of me,” she said. She wasn’t really talking to me anymore, she was talking to herself, her younger self, trying to justify all that she had given up. “When I hear the word ‘love,’ it’s his face that comes to mind.”

  “Then why aren’t you together forever and always?” I said, interrupting her reverie.

  “You sound so bitter.”

  “I’ve been here before,” I said. “I’ve heard the violins.”

  “If only you knew the truth, you wouldn’t feel that way. You wouldn’t act so threatened. He’s not like other men.”

  “He showed me.”

  “What?”

  “I asked him what was keeping you two apart. Why you didn’t just be with him. I asked him if he was gay, and he laughed, and then he asked me if I wanted to see.”

  “So you know.”

  “It’s not that big a deal.”

  “To him it is. And it was to me, then. And the way I reacted.”

  “You were sixteen.”

  “And so was he. Imagine what it did to him. What I did to him. When he wouldn’t do anything, no matter how forward I was, I did something terrible. To push him to action, to make him jealous.”

  “You screwed Sherman, the quarterback,” I said, my voice flat with the matter-of-factness of it all, “and Terry found you backstage before rehearsal.”

  “I wanted him to find me. And he did. But I didn’t know about his condition then. You should have seen his face, Victor, cracked in pain. I can’t forget it. Ever. I can’t stop imagining it. Our love was real and impossible at the same time. I suppose that’s what made it so perfect.”

  “Worth lying for? Worth betraying me for?”

  “Worth everything,” she said. “Still. I have no choice but to save him.”

  “You can’t.”

  “But I can’t stop trying either, don’t you see?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t. Listen, Julia. That tape is our last hope. I don’t know if we could ever make each other happy, but that tape is the only way to find out. Since you’ve come back into my life, we’ve been bouncing like Ping-Pong balls from emotion to emotion. Bitterness to lust to suspicion to fear to paranoia. But now there’s hope, it resides in the truth, the truth on that tape.”

  She tossed the tape player back onto the table. “I don’t want it,” she said.

  “If I turn it in, you’ll hate me forever. If you turn it in, our future opens wide.”

  “Don’t make me.”

  “I could never make you do anything. But I can make you choose.”

  A slight sneer stained her lips. “Between you and him?”

  “Between truth and nothing. From the moment you stepped in this door, you’ve been lying. You’re pretending to care about us, but it’s an act. All you care about is saving him.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Another lie.” I stopped for a moment, thought about that strange room in which Terrence Tipton now lay, that tomblike room concocted solely out of Julia’s fantasies. “In fact,” I said, slowly, as revelation dawned, “everything we ever had was a lie, because the biggest truth, your love for Terry, was always hidden. But now there’s a line. On one side is the end of lies. On the other side is the end of hope, any hope you might have for something, anything, that’s worthwhile in your future. Because if you can’t face the truth now, that hope is dead.”

  “It died fifteen years ago.”

  “Stop it. You and he are both blathering i
diots. So he’s got no cock. Find a surgeon, for God’s sake. You screwed the quarterback to get him jealous. It happens every day—why do you think high school quarterbacks are always smiling? And the tragic dénouement was a stupid high school play, nothing more. Shakespeare being mangled by high school kids is bad theater, but it’s not a tragedy. Get off the damn balcony and move on.”

  She looked at me with something implacable warping her features. Then she stood up and grabbed her bag. “I need to use your bathroom.”

  I waited for her to desperately snatch the tape recorder from off the table. I expected that she would take it to the bathroom, pull out the cassette, yank the tape free, and flush it down the toilet. She eyed me for an instant as if she were calculating the odds of her actually getting her hands back on the tape before I grabbed it. But if she wanted to destroy the tape, I wasn’t going to stop her. All I really wanted was an answer, finally, and her grabbing the tape like that would ring as clear as I could hope for. But she didn’t grab the tape. Instead she glanced at it, glanced at me, and then went off through the bedroom door, leaving me both confused and just the slightest bit optimistic, which in my experience has always proved to be fatal.

  It took her a long time to return. She was thinking it through. I sat in the darkness and thought it through myself. I wondered if possibilities still existed. I wondered if we had a future. I wondered if that’s what I really wanted. As the minutes ticked by, my neck tensed, my heart beat a little faster. What had I gotten myself into? I had been fighting all this time to keep something alive, and suddenly, with the tape still on the table and the possibility for survival rising all the while, I began to think it would have been better to let it die, long ago. Better had it shriveled like a leech covered in salt and suffered an excruciating death than to let it attach back onto my heart.

  I’m not much good at romance, I’m afraid, but I am the master of ambivalence.

  “Okay,” she said, back now, her face clean, her brow strangely untroubled. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Take the tape player,” I said. “Go to the Roundhouse. Ask for Detective McDeiss. He’ll probably be at home, but they’ll find him for you. Give him the tape, along with the address in Kensington where Terry can be found.”

  “McDeiss?”

  “That’s right. He’ll make sure the arrest is done clean, by the book and without any shooting.”

  “And what happens to Terrence?”

  “I’ll find him a lawyer. He’ll make a deal and will have a chance to clean himself up in prison.”

  “You make it sound like I’ll be doing him a favor.”

  “Buying drugs for him, shooting him up when you visited, letting him live like a tick sucking off Wren’s wealth, enabling his self-destruction, and protecting him every step of the way, that was no favor. There is an infection in his body that is chewing him to pieces, and he’s doing nothing about it. He’s killing himself. Prison might be his only chance.”

  She looked at me for a moment, a harsh emotion rolled across her features like a rough ocean wave, and then she smiled wanly. “You’re a bastard.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  She stared down at the tape player on the table, as if she were staring at betrayal itself, and then she picked it up, dropped it into her bag, whirled around.

  “Call me when it’s done,” I said to her back.

  “One step at a time,” she said, and then she was out the door.

  I gave her a minute, in case she quickly changed her mind and came back in, and then I rushed over to the window and watched her leave as I took out my cell phone and made a call.

  “I see her, bo,” said Derek from the other end.

  “Don’t lose her. She’ll be in a dark blue BMW.”

  “She got the tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “What she going to do with it?”

  “Call me when she gets to the Roundhouse.”

  “And what if she goes the other way?”

  “Then keep following.”

  “Just so you know,” said Derek, “I think you got some visitors.”

  “Who?”

  “Two men. They was waiting for her to leave before they popped in.”

  “Okay, thanks for the heads-up. I was expecting them anyway.”

  And I was. Sims and Hanratty, I figured. I had dropped their tail, I had slipped out of town, I had pissed them off. At least I was being consistent. Now they were coming for answers, which worked out just fine, because answers were what I had for them.

  I again took to my chair and waited in the darkness for the knock at the door. And then it came.

  Knock, knock.

  “Come on in,” I called out cheerfully. “The door’s open.”

  And in they came. Not Sims and Hanratty.

  Damn.

  38

  “Where is my money, Victor?” said Gregor Trocek.

  The question was rhetorical, I supposed, what with me flopped on my back and the point of Sandro’s switchblade digging into the soft flesh beneath the point of my jaw. If I had tried to answer, my flapping jaw would have been impaled like a speared fish. So I kept quiet as Gregor wandered around my apartment, raising his hands in mock exasperation.

  “Where could it be? Where, where, where? What?” he said, turning to stare right down at my face. “No answer for me?”

  I guess the question wasn’t so rhetorical after all.

  “I don’t have it,” I tried saying through gritted teeth, my words sounding less like English than a Neanderthaloid grunt.

  “But, Victor, how can I believe anything you say?”

  “I’m telling the truth,” I tried again.

  “Speak more clearly, please,” said Gregor. “I can barely understand a word.”

  “There’s a knife.”

  “Yes, I’ve had enough, enough of your lies, your thievery, the baubles in your apartment.” He walked up to the flat-screen television bolted onto my wall. “Nice. High def?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It is quite gratifying to know my money paid for such quality merchandise. I would have hated for it to be wasted on junk.”

  “I didn’t buy it with your money.”

  “What? I still can’t understand you. Maybe a little more persuasion will clarify your words. Sandro, cut off his nipple.”

  This wasn’t going well. This wasn’t going well at all.

  When I realized that it was Gregor and Sandro coming through my door instead of two cops, I figured I was in trouble, and I became ever more certain when Sandro, instead of hesitating tastefully once inside, charged right at me while Gregor locked the door behind them both.

  I grappled to my feet. Sandro socked me in the eye with a forearm shiver. I reeled from the blow and slammed into the floor.

  Swish-click.

  And just like that, Sandro was on top of me, the point of his switchblade pricking my flesh.

  That was bad enough, that was enough to swell my eye and roil my stomach and leave me clenching my teeth to stop from being impaled. But now, with a simple imperative from Gregor Trocek, it was getting far, far worse.

  Sandro began undressing me with his knife.

  “Such an ugly tie,” he said as he looped the blade between the knot of my loose red tie and my shirt. With a jerk of his wrist, the tie was sliced in two.

  I tried to scuttle backward, but Sandro grabbed my shirt.

  “And now these annoying buttons,” he said.

  A flick of the knife and a button flew off. Flick went another.

  I let out an involuntary wail of fear.

  Flick, flick, flick. The front of my shirt drifted open.

  I tried again to get away, but he grabbed my T-shirt, pulled me forward, and in a quick move plunged the knife into the fabric, ripping upward with the blade until the metal edge snapped by my cheek and nicked my ear. As he jerked the shirt once more, it ripped in two, leaving my chest bared.

  I stared up at Sandro’s face as he
grabbed my hair with one hand and pointed his knife at my chest with the other. His eyes were bright, his lips twisted somewhere between anger and delirium. He was enjoying this entirely too much. Yet another lesson that I was not made for prison.

  “Oh, look,” said Sandro. “A tattoo. Is that your lover’s name? Maybe I deal with her after I deal with you.”

  “She’s already dead,” I said.

  “Too bad.”

  On the coffee table, my cell phone rang. Sandro stopped and turned his face toward it. It rang, rang again, and then went to voice mail.

  “Enough of your games, Sandro,” said Gregor, standing to the side of us, his hands behind his back as if examining nothing more alarming than a mediocre piece of art. “Make your mark.”

  “Can I take the tattoo?”

  “As you please,” said Gregor.

  “Gracias,” said Sandro as he used the point of the knife to painfully scrape a wide circle around my left nipple, which included the tattoo. I tried to pull away, but Sandro held me tight as he worked. Blood began rising through the slices, welling and dripping down my chest, across the shallows of my abdomen.

  “What is he doing?” I yelled.

  “Marking where he will slice when he cuts off nipple. He needs be sure there is enough flesh, so after shrinking in smoke, it will still look like something.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sandro saves pieces he cuts off. He has quite lively collection. Fingers. Ears. The nipples dry nicely with smoke and turn same brown as tobacco.”

  I fought to catch my breath. “Sick” was the only word I could grunt out.

  “Agreed, but I don’t value Sandro for his sanity. We could end this right now, Victor. You could emerge with your measly chest intact, right now. If you are ready to tell me what I need to know.”

  “We made a deal,” I whined as I stared at the blood. “We had an arrangement. Twelve point five percent.”

  “That was before I learned that you have it all. All is better than an eighth in everything but shrapnel.”

  “I don’t…No…I don’t have…your money.”