The Seduction - Art Bourgeau

by Art Bourgeau

  "lt's so dark in here. Please turn on the light over the stove. It's only a little light. No one outside can see it, honest."

  Missy smiled. Better and better. The lady really wanted to

  enjoy it.

  The soft light brought everything into sharp relief for Missy's cocaine-sharpened senses. Moving behind her, Missy raised Cynthia's skirt and gently lowered her pantyhose and panties. She really was very pretty, waiting like that, so open to Missy's desire. It was easy to see why Felix could fall under her spell, because she felt it, too.

  As she unzipped her trousers and brought out the dildo she looked around the room. Someone had left the window over the sink cracked, and a slight breeze rustled the brown-and-white cafe curtains decorated with old-fashioned coffee grinders and weathervanes. Watching them stir gave her a sense of peace. The tableau was sort of like a Norman Rockwell painting. What a nice setting.

  NOVEMBER

  CHAPTER 20

  PINE STREET was sleepy in the chilly morning air. Two gays still in Halloween costume made their way home arm in arm, the last celebrants from the last party. Near Thirteenth the swampers for Dirty Franks and the Pine Street Beverage Room wrestled out to the street huge garbage cans filled with empties and swabbed down their places with pine-smelling mop water. In the ten hundred block a couple of early-bird antique dealers cast a weather-eye about whether to entrust their valuables to the sidewalk or to keep him inside for the day. One chose to take them out; one chose not to. The one who chose to soon had his sidewalk cluttered with a wooden Indian, a rocker, two trunks, and a mirror decorated with deer antlers. The one who chose not to watched all this activity and quietly wondered how his competitor could make a living selling such junk. Near Twelfth the ice cream place was making waffles and coffee for its breakfast crowd, and across the street, in front of the Pine Street Charcuterie, an old Buick 225, known in some circles as a "deuce-and-a-quarter," pulled up and stopped.

  At the wheel of the Buick was Claude Washington, a black man some sixty years of age who made his living cleaning offices and stores. He had been working since long before dawn, and the Pine Street Charcuterie was his fifth job of the morning. His back was bothering him some as he opened the trunk for his cleaning supplies. Forty years of industrial cleaning could do that, but Claude was not complaining. His had been a good life. He had lost one son to a rocket attack in Vietnam, but he still had a loving wife and two other sons, one a lawyer, the other a dentist. The sons were always after him to retire, take it easy, let them support him, but outside of a little high blood pressure Claude was in good health and intended to stay that way by continuing to get up early and work hard, as he had done all his life.

  He carried the first load of cleaning supplies to the door and put them down. Going back for another he too cast a weather-eye and, without knowing, agreed with the second antique dealer: rain was on the way. He only hoped it would hold off until lunch when he was home with his wife, resting his back and watching "All My Children".

  With this load he slammed the trunk lid and fished in his pocket for the keys to the store, but when he used them, to his surprise, he found the door was unlocked. That had never happened before, not here anyway, but he guessed that whoever had closed the night before was a little too eager to get to a Halloween party and had forgotten. Still, he would have to leave a note, just in case. He didn't want there to be any possibility that Miss Cynthia would think he had stolen something. He opened the door and set his brooms and mops inside. Before he could go back for the bucket filled with rags and cleaners he saw the debris on the floor from the smashed display of crab pots and Old Bay Seasoning. That wasn't right. None of Miss Cynthia's sales people would go off and leave a mess like that, and the idea of a burglar came immediately to mind.

  The idea held no fear for him. If it was a burglar he would be long gone by now. More likely, some kid high on dope, but

  still sixty years of living told him to be a bit more cautious than usual.

  He brought in the bucket, set it next to the brooms and mops and proceeded to look around the room. Only the one display seemed to have been disturbed. Everything else looked all right. lf it was a burglary, at least it wasn't by a bunch of vandals. Moving toward the center of the room, he was careful not to touch anything. He had no illusions about the police fingerprinting the place over a simple burglary; they would not do it, but that was their business. His was not to get in the way. Deeper in the room, the only sign of an intruder was still the smashed display. The stereo hadn't been touched and everything else in the place was either food or cooking utensils. Not even a dopehead would be stupid enough to try to sell a set of pots and pans on the street.

  All that was left was the counter and the cash register. He walked behind the counter. Everything seemed normal there, too. Like most stores, the Pine Street Charcuterie left the drawer of the cash register partially open at night as an incentive to keep a burglar from smashing a machine worth more than what was inside it. Using a cleaning rag, he pulled the drawer out a little more. The change inside, about twenty-five dollars from the look of it, seemed intact, and he decided that he had been wrong about the burglar and right in the first place about the careless employee and the Halloween party.

  Muttering to himself about the quality of help today, he crossed the room and began his cleaning. He did not go into the kitchen. First he cleaned up the broken display and put things into order as best he could. The rest of it would have to be done by Miss Cynthia and her troops because he didn't know how they would want it. Then he wiped down all the shelves and counters as he did each day. It was only when he neared the end of his sweeping that he rounded the small partition separating the kitchen area from the store.

  There, still draped across the table, was Cynthia Ducroit. Her dress had been pulled down in the front to expose her breasts and pushed high over her buttocks in the back. Her hands were cuffed behind her back, and her pantyhose and panties had been pulled down.

  "Oh, my Lord . . ."

  When he saw her face he could barely recognize her. The collected blood had turned it to a vivid dark purple. Her eyeballs were bulging, the veins in them broken from the pressure of apparent strangulation. Her mouth was open, her tongue partially out. There was a trail of blood across her cheek from her nose.

  His hands shaking, Claude fumbled with the chain deeply embedded in the flesh around her neck. "Don't die on me, please, don't die on me," he said over and over as he pulled and tugged until the chain finally came free.

  Gently as possible he turned her on her back and pulled up the front of her dress to cover her breasts. "Just rest easy. Claude's got you. Everything's going to be all right." He couldn't absorb, or accept, that she was already dead.

  He began to administer the CPR he had learned at the Mount Zion Baptist Church auxiliary. As he worked her chest to get her heart going as he'd been taught, he could hear his wife's voice telling him, "Claude, you better take that course. You don't know when someday that stuff might come in handy." He had been a good student and he did everything right. Not a move was wasted. He held her nose closed with one hand, put his lips over hers and began to blow air into her mouth. Some of the blood from the nosebleed had congealed on her lips and was sticky, but he ignored it.

  Cynthia's chest rose and fell in time to his efforts, and he settled into a rhythm. Breathe, blow; breathe, blow . . .Unaccustomed to such effort, he soon was lightheaded, even dizzy, but he refused to stop for a second. After about ten minutes he looked at her face between breaths, and felt rewarded. By loosening the chain around her neck, the blood collected in her face had begun to drain, and the vivid purple color was gone. Her skin had a more natural tone. Encouraged by this change, Claude doubled his efforts, trying his best to save a life that was already lost.

  The pain in his back grew worse from the strain of being bent over the table so long, but he would not give in to it. Old man, you can rest in that easy chair of yours all you want later. Right no
w, take care of business . . .

  Around nine, an early arriving employee found him still at it. When she saw him bent over Cynthia she screamed and ran out. He knew he was in trouble now, a black man in the room with an unconscious white woman, he would have a lot of explaining to do, but that would come later. Right now he was needed here, and he kept on—breathe, blow; breathe, blow . . .

  Some five minutes later the hysterical clerk returned with two burly policemen. They took in the situation at a glance, and one of them relieved him while the other called for help.

  Claude sank down in a chair, tears on his face. He had been at it for over an hour.

  The rescue squad arrived and took over. They worked on her for at least fifteen minutes more, but it was no use.

  Cynthia Ducroit was gone.

  CHAPTER 21

  IT WAS late when Missy padded barefoot into her bathroom, groggy from the Valium and alcohol she had used to slow the cocaine and help her sleep after the excitement. She had missed work again without calling in sick, but with the way things were going for her there, she no longer cared.

  Her bladder was filled to bursting but she did not attend to it right away. Instead, making a game of the sharp pains from holding back, she inspected her face in the mirror for bags and circles, then slowly brushed her teeth, relaxing her muscles several times until her water almost forced its way out but stopping it at the last moment each time.

  Near the sink on the counter was a small test tube holder and a plastic tray containing what appeared to be lab paraphernalia. On the tray was a decal showing a spray of flowers followed by the word "Essence," the name of a popular ovulation predictor kit, and a color chart that went from white to light blue to medium blue. She picked up from the tray a small plastic cup a little smaller than an old-fashioned glass and carried it with her to the toilet.

  She raised the hem of her floor-length black nightgown until it was past her waist, then straddled the toilet. Holding the cup between her legs, she relaxed and let her urine flow. Its warmth, seeping through the thin plastic sides of the specimen cup, felt good to her fingers.

  She dropped the hem of her nightgown and carried the specimen cup to the counter. Even though she had been doing this for several days, she first consulted a blue-and-white instruction booklet provided with the ovulation predictor kit before she began the test for luteinizing hormone.

  Satisfied now that she remembered the proper steps she took an eyedropper of urine and squeezed it into one of the small tubes, then filled a second tube with the developer, set the timer for fifteen minutes and took a shower. While the water beat down on her she thought about how it had been with Cynthia. The gun, the terror from the attack and the idea that her beloved Felix wanted her dead made her wonderfully passive, not resisting anything she was ordered to do. She had kept her eyes closed almost the whole time, even though at first she'd asked that the small light over the stove be turned on.

  The couple of times she did open her eyes they had a faraway, glazed look in them, like she was trying to retreat into a never-never land where none of this was happening.

  It hadn't done her any good, not one damn bit . . .

  Missy turned off the water and dried herself. The timer had gone off while she was showering. She returned to the counter, where she rinsed the test stick in cold water, then inserted it into the second tube filled with developer. Five minutes to kill. She went to the kitchen to make herself a Bloody Mary. This waiting was the worst part, but it also gave her some time to come to grips with what she was doing—getting ready to get pregnant. No one was forcing her to do it. And she was doing it of her own free will as a present to Felix. Something that would cement their love and eventual marriage.

  The sound of the timer going off made her grab her drink and hurry back to the bathroom. The developer in the second tube had turned a deep blue that she compared to the color chart. No doubt about it. This was the fourth stage. Today she was fertile. And she was the one who would decide what would happen. No more terrible look from her father that made tears stop. Her father . . . she was shocked to realize she was glad he was gone. He didn't deserve to share in this, in her child, not after what he had made her do . . . What? She still couldn't remember.

  She looked at one of the pictures on the bathroom wall. It was a small framed photograph of her and her father and her first horse. He was much younger then, his hair was still dark . . . which helped make him look so much like Felix . . .

  She took a ten-milligram Valium to keep her rising excitement in check and began to dress, stopping only long enough to telephone Felix and ask that he stop by immediately after work. When he claimed a previous engagement she pressed until he agreed to stop by "for just a few minutes." She smiled, knowing that for the rest of his life he would thank her for those "just a few minutes."

  She drove into town. Choosing the exit off Delaware by the Sheraton, she took a left and a right on the cobblestone street around Society Hill Towers and in an effort to avoid the heavy traffic on Walnut went west on Spruce past block upon block of restored townhouses. Near Tenth the neighborhood changed to brownstones with apartments inhabited by singles, especially art students. At Fifteenth it turned into a male hustler's paradise.

  As she drove on she thought about how the evening would go. It would be their first time in bed together. She decided she'd been too willing, too forward. Felix wasn't Carl, not yet anyway. He was a romantic Southerner. Well, he would be pleased. He would arrive to find her dressed in something simple with a full skirt. They would have champagne, caviar and oysters . . . Louisiana men always liked oysters, she'd heard somewhere. They would sit close and talk. She would carefully lead him into talking about his feelings for her. They would kiss. She would allow him liberties, and when he saw how bare she was under her skirt he would have to have her. Who could resist it?

  But then she would resist, exciting him even more, until they would go to her bedroom where a small fire would be burning in the fireplace. She would lie back and offer him the missionary position. And when it was over, there would be no doubt about them being together. Thinking on it, she was at Eighteenth Street and her turn almost before she knew it.

  She parked in a garage on Sansom and set out on foot. Her first stop was Treadwell & Company, a men's furnishings store in the same block on Walnut with Nan Duskin. During his lifetime her father had often raved about their superior selection. What better way to recognize her bond with Felix than with a present: something simple in gold, something to mark her territory. What she really wanted was to give him a wedding band. Later. Too bad men don't wear engagement rings.

  At Treadwell 8: Company she was waited on by a tall, cadaverous man who, except for his discreetly striped suit, could have been the male half of "American Gothic." She told him she was looking for a chain. Something in gold. He led her down the aisles past umbrellas and scarves, past wallets and briefcases, past bowlers and skimmers to the jewelry section. Once behind the counter and leaning on it with both hands like a preacher in a pulpit, he said, "A watch chain?"

  "No, a waist chain."

  "I beg your pardon," he said giving her precisely the same look he would give a hostess who tried to serve him saltwater taffy for dessert after a full meal.

  "A waist chain. I want a simple gold chain to go around my"—she hesitated, and then used the word—"husband's waist."

  "Madam, I'm afraid we do not carry such an item."

  Normally if a salesperson—man or woman—dared to speak to her like this she would have had his guts for garters, as her old roommate used to say, but today she felt so at peace with the whole world she took no notice of it.

  "Hmm, I see. Well, show me something nice in an ankle bracelet."

  The salesman's knuckles whitened as he squeezed the edge of the counter. "I'm afraid you've found the wrong shop. Perhaps you should try one of those on Market Street"—and to himself added, "One with an Italian name"—"I'm sure they would be able to help you bett
er—"

  "No, I want it to be from here . . ."

  In the end she settled on a gold bracelet with no ornamentation, over the salesman's suggestion of a set of gold-and-diamond cufflinks, feeling that the bracelet was more personal and therefore more symbolic of their future.

  She had two more stops to make before returning home to wait for Felix: the first at Kaleidoscope, her hairstylist, on Nineteenth Street, and the second at Bonwit Teller, whose bridal department was her first stop in the intricate process of choosing a wedding gown.

  She arrived at Kaleidoscope unannounced, but with the aid of a fifty dollar bill passed with a hand squeeze she was able to get the receptionist to juggle the appointments around and take her right in. As she entered the private cubicle a look of surprise crossed the face of Kelly, her stylist, a striking blonde in her early twenties whose Vanity Fair looks made her seem more like she belonged on a tennis court at the Germantown Cricket Club than working for a living.

  Kelly recovered quickly, straightening her clothes slightly and running her fingers through her streaked hair. "Missy, I didn't know you were coming in today. We only did you last week. You're not due for at least two more weeks."

  Missy closed the door and crossed the small space to kiss Kelly lightly on the cheek. "I know, but I woke up this morning sadly in need of you."

  The intimacy of the remark did not seem to fluster Kelly.

  "How sweet. But I want you to know you're throwing off my whole schedule."

  To appease her, Missy reached into her purse and pulled out a small vial filled with white powder and a coke spoon.

  "That's why I brought this. After a couple of toots you'll race through everyone else."

  "Oh, all right. Get undressed," she said, taking the vial and spoon from Missy's outstretched hand.

  While Kelly lit the small burner and put the wax in a pan to melt, Missy quickly undressed, shedding shoes, slacks and panties but leaving on her blouse.