by John Lutz
48
The bottle or the gun?
Lavern Neeson, badly bruised from last night’s beating by Hobbs, had risen at three in the morning in pain and this time had chosen both.
It was eight o’clock now, getting warmer and brighter outside. The bedroom was dim, though, because the shades were drawn and the heavy drapes pulled closed, so no one could have seen last night what Hobbs had done to her. It was an overly furnished, somewhat worn and chintzy room of the sort that held its secrets. On one of the walls was a discount store print of a flock of birds-crows, probably-rising as if startled from a wooded landscape. Lavern had never liked it, but never considered changing it.
She sat in a small chair near the bed, listening to Hobbs snore, holding the shotgun from the closet on her lap and casually aimed at him. He wasn’t scheduled for work today and would sleep until well past ten. But Lavern liked to toy with the notion that he might wake up, and the first thing he’d see would be her and the dark muzzle of the shotgun. He wouldn’t know it wasn’t loaded, but maybe he’d die on his own, of a heart attack.
More likely she’d simply scare the hell out of him, and then he’d beat the crap out of her for frightening and embarrassing him.
Still, just thinking about it afforded her some amusement.
In a little while, she’d get up from her chair, leave the bedroom, and return the shotgun to the back of the hall closet. Another day with Hobbs would begin. Fear would begin.
The faint noises of the city winding up for another busy day wafted in to Lavern, and she thought about all the women out there who weren’t in any way dependent on husbands or lovers like Hobbs, women leading happy, pain-free lives, not afraid of making a wrong move that would lead to severe punishment.
Lavern envied those women, but joining their number seemed almost impossible.
She could think of only one way out of her predicament, and it terrified her.
If she left Hobbs, he’d surely come after her. It had happened once before, three years ago. If she tried to change him, he would beat her. If she changed herself, he would beat her. She knew that her friend Bess, who kept urging her to go to a women’s shelter, was right. Not about the shelter-she couldn’t stay there forever, even if Hobbs didn’t simply come and get her. And restraining orders-she’d read the papers, seen the news, and knew how ineffective they were. What Bess was right about was that eventually it was almost certain that Hobbs would kill her.
Unless she killed him first.
Lavern thought she might possibly be acquitted if she did that. Other women had killed their abusive husbands and gotten away with it. But so many others hadn’t. And even if she succeeded in avoiding prison, there would be the horrible publicity, the arrest, the trial. Who knew how a jury might find?
Killing Hobbs wasn’t something Lavern actually saw as an option, at least right now. But it was something she could consider, which she did more and more often. It wasn’t illegal to think about it.
She moved the shotgun’s long barrel slightly, so it was aimed at her husband’s head, then traced an invisible line down along his body to his heart, then to his crotch.
Should I shoot him there?
The idea was intriguing. Just sitting there with Hobbs’s life in her hands, without him knowing about it, intrigued her. At the same time, it scared her enough that she no longer could do it without first going to the bottle. If he ever woke up and caught her like this, or found out in some other way what she was doing, he’d be furious. Maybe murderous. He might actually kill her.
Unless she killed him first.
He was alone in the long, maroon-carpeted corridor as he waited for an elevator. Standing easily but alertly, he kept his head moving, glancing up and down the hall. Far down the hall and in the opposite direction from his own room a maid was parking her linen-laden cart near a door. That was all the activity he saw until the elevator arrived.
It was unoccupied but for an attractive blond woman in her forties who had the look and rolling luggage of an airline attendant. He saw by the illuminated button on the elevator’s control panel that, like him, she was going to the lobby. She glanced at Dunn, smiled and looked up at the LED floor numbers as the elevator descended. Dunn moved back and stood where he could also observe elevator etiquette and gaze at the numerals above the door, but at the same time see the woman in his peripheral vision.
He was 99 percent certain she posed no danger, but he’d been conditioned to assume that everyone posed some danger. That was the kind of perspective that would keep him alive.
Dunn wasn’t nearly as nervous as last time, when he’d left his hotel on the first morning. He’d even enjoyed a room-service breakfast of waffles and bacon, with plenty of maple syrup. He’d downed two cups of strong black coffee to make him even more alert and aware.
When the elevator reached lobby level, the woman favored Dunn with another smile as she maneuvered her wheeled suitcase and garment bag out into the lobby. In another time and place he would have smiled back and assisted her with her luggage.
Concentrate! Be in this time, in this place.
He watched the woman begin to walk away and then exited the elevator himself.
The compact Quest and Quarry revolver was a reassuring weight in Dunn’s blazer pocket as he pushed through the hotel’s revolving glass doors and breathed in the warm morning air. He’d studied the company dossier on his quarry and decided on a more aggressive strategy this time. Walking to the next block, so he wouldn’t be remembered by the uniformed doorman, he hailed a cab on his own and gave the driver an intersection near Thomas Rhodes’s address. Then he settled back into the cab’s upholstery and rode alert and mission-bent through the golden morning.
The game was on, his blood was up, and it occurred to him how much he enjoyed this.
Mitzi was still half asleep when she heard the knocking on her door. She reached over and felt a wide expanse of cool linen, and remembered that Mr. Handsome had left sometime after midnight.
More knocking. Not her imagination.
She made herself scoot over on the mattress and then maneuvered her body so she was sitting. The effort caused her head to ache behind both eyes.
Need more sleep. Definitely.
She groaned, explored with her tongue, and found that her teeth were fuzzy. Ah, well…
After drawing a deep breath, she stood up and lurched toward the living room.
When she opened the door to the hall, a man in a gray delivery uniform was standing there holding a long white box. His gaze took a ride up and down her body, and she realized she was wearing only her thin nightgown.
He smiled. “Flowers for a Mitzi Lewis.”
“I am a Mitzi Lewis,” Mitzi said in a sleep-thickened voice. She accepted the almost-weightless box and set it on a table near the door. Then she raised a forefinger in a signal for the man to wait.
It took her a few minutes to find her purse and wallet, then scare up a couple of dollars for a tip. When she turned around she saw that the deliveryman had minded his manners and was still standing politely on the other side of the threshold.
Mitzi handed him the tip, and he smiled again, making an obvious effort this time not to look at her below neck level. He tapped the bill of a nonexistent cap and turned around and began descending the stairs of her sixth-floor walk-up. It was an easier trek down than up, and Mitzi could hear him pick up speed, his shoes rapping out a machine-gun rhythm on the wooden steps.
She closed her apartment door, then carried the long white box over to the sofa and sat down.
When she opened the box she found a dozen long-stemmed red roses. There was a small, plain white envelope containing a white card with a brief message printed in blue ink:
Last night was more than wonderful.
I’ll call.
There was no signature.
Mitzi placed the box next to her on the sofa, then sat slumped forward with her elbows on her knees, her chin resting in her right palm.
No signature…
Christ! I slept with a man and don’t even know his name.
Oh, well, it was an interesting first.
49
Black Lake, Missouri, 1987
Marty had no idea what had awakened him.
He didn’t think he’d been dreaming. But suddenly there he was in his bed, sprawled on his back, his eyes wide open and staring into darkness. It was hot in the room, and he was sweating, the sheet thrown off him and half jumbled on the floor. The luminous green hands of the big alarm clock on his dresser said that it was a little past three o’clock. He could hear katydids screaming away desperately outside.
He stood up, the floorboard creaking beneath his bare feet, and through his bedroom window he saw a yellow glow seeping through the cracks in the barn and spilling out around the uneven edges of its closed doors.
Lantern light. Somebody’s out there.
Off in the distance a dog barked. Maybe that was what had awakened him. Marty couldn’t be sure. What he did know was that something was happening in the barn.
Wearing only his jockey shorts, he crept from his bedroom so he wouldn’t wake his parents. Either one or both wouldn’t take kindly to him nosing around the house at this hour. Between the two of them, he guessed it was his father out in the barn.
He saw that their bedroom door, usually closed at night, was open. From where he stood he had a view of the corner of their bed, and when he moved so he had a better angle, he saw that it was empty.
Something involving both of them must be going on.
His heart was beating fast as he made his way across the creaking plank floor to the porch door.
Here was something else not right. The door was unlocked.
He went outside onto the porch. There was a half moon tonight, sketched on by dark clouds. It gave enough light to cast a glow on the bare yard and rutted driveway, and to edge the ragged line of trees on the ridge beyond the barn. The katydids were louder, and it was hotter outside than in the house.
Marty stepped down off the porch and began walking toward the big barn with its vertical cracks of faint yellow light. He couldn’t hear his footfalls, and the dog was no longer barking in the distance. The only sound was the hopeless riot of the insects. Their ratcheting rasping was a mating call, Marty knew. Most of them would mate, and within a few days would be dead.
The barn’s big wooden doors were closed but for an inch, and the long rusty hasp stuck out like a handle, inviting Marty to open one of the doors and find out about the mysterious light.
Marty gripped the hasp’s rough surface and pulled the barn door open about two feet. It didn’t squeal like it usually did, and he wondered if someone had oiled the hinges.
He held his breath as he entered the barn.
Marty’s father hadn’t heard him and stood continuing his work on Marty’s mother, who was strung upside down so her nude body dangled from one of the barn’s main rafters. On one of the other rafters perched a small barn owl. Without moving anything else, it swiveled its feathered head and stared at Marty as if he was intruding.
His father was shirtless and wearing an old pair of jeans and his leather work boots. He was facing away from Marty, and between his spread legs Marty could see his mother’s upside-down face. Her eyes were open and her expression calm, though she seemed faintly annoyed by what was happening.
As Marty watched, his father raised the gutting knife in both hands and bunched his back muscles for strength. The knife descended and Marty’s mother’s insides fell out into a bloody pile between his father’s widely spread boots.
There were streams of blood on each side of Alma’s face now, and in her hair, but she held her calm expression. Marty saw that her throat had been slit and knew she’d been dead when he entered the barn.
His father continued his task, adroitly slicing here, occasionally hacking with the knife there, making sure the gutting was complete.
Then he stopped, stood very still, and turned around and saw Marty.
For a few seconds Carl Hawk looked embarrassed and ashamed. Then he looked angry and self-righteous.
Marty wasn’t exactly frightened. He loved his father too much to fear him. But what felt from the inside like a poker face must have betrayed him and shown his confusion.
“There wasn’t any choice,” his father said. He was very calm and spoke patiently, in the tone of voice he used when teaching Marty to tie fishing flies. He held the bloody knife at his side, its blade pointing down. “She come at me with that axe an’ tried to kill me.” He glanced at a rusty long-handled axe lying in the litter of straw near one of the empty stalls, then waited for Marty to look in that direction.
Marty did, and nodded, confirming that yes, he saw the axe.
“Woman tried to kill me, son. Hell, she’s been poisonin’ me for months, anyways. You know that. Told you about it last winter and lots of times thereafter. Goddamned roach poison! Guess she got impatient about my dyin’ so she took up the axe. You understand, once she killed me, you were gonna be next. She as much as said that. She went plain crazy. You understand?”
“I understand,” Marty heard himself say.
“We all do what we gotta do,” Carl Hawk said, “an’ then we live with it. That’s somethin’ I thought I taught you.”
“I understand,” Marty said again.
His father stood there, studying him; then he wiped the knife on his jeans and stuck the point of the blade in a nearby wooden support pole, near where a kerosene lantern hung with its handle looped over a long nail. Below the lantern a metal pail, shovel, and a tow chain hung from hooks.
“It’s done for now,” Carl said. “Let’s both of us go back in the house and see if we can sleep. Come mornin’ we’ll put the body down that old well back in the woods. The innards we’ll feed to the hogs.” He sighed and gave Marty a tight, humorless smile. “Then that’ll be that.”
Carl turned down the lantern wick, and the barn was in darkness except for what moonlight filtered in through the cracks and where the door stood open. He laid his hand gently on Marty’s shoulder and guided him outside into the warm night. They began the slow walk toward the house.
“It had to be done,” Carl said. “You know that, Marty. If it hadn’t, you and me’d both be dead right now.”
Marty didn’t answer.
“When she was finished on me with the axe, she was gonna go on back to the house an’ do you.”
His father’s boots made a creaking, leathery sound as he walked. Marty could barely hear it over the noise of the katydids. “You believe me, Marty?”
“I believe.”
“You okay?” his father asked.
“I can do whatever you say,” Marty told him.
His father stopped walking, closed his bloody hand tighter on Marty’s shoulder, then drew him in close and hugged him.
Marty hugged him back.
50
New York, the present
The first thing Dr. Alfred Beeker saw when he opened the door to his office’s anteroom at 9:45 A.M. was Beatrice with her blond head thrown back, laughing so hard that her fillings showed. Quinn was in Beeker’s waiting room, charming the doctor’s middle-aged, attractive receptionist, but he was sitting off to the right and not immediately noticeable to anyone walking in.
Beeker was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his forties, with thinning black hair combed severely sideways to disguise his baldness. His features were sharp, with dark eyes that appeared slightly crossed and lent him an expression of intensity. He was wearing a nicely tailored gray suit and carrying a beat-up black leather briefcase with a large tarnished brass clasp. Quinn wondered if the briefcase was an affectation. Or maybe that was where the good doctor kept his whips.
“Am I missing something?” Beeker asked Beatrice. Then he glanced to the side and saw Quinn.
Beatrice put on a straight, if twitching, face and stood up behind her desk. “This is Detective Frank Quinn.”
Beeker didn’
t seem thrown by finding a cop in his office. He smiled at Quinn and looked at him curiously.
“I thought it best to catch you before your morning appointments,” Quinn said, standing up. “It’s become necessary for you and I to have a conversation. It won’t take long.”
“Am I under arrest?” Still the smile. A joke.
“Not yet,” Quinn said. No smile. A joke, maybe.
“Come in and sit down,” Beeker said, with a sideways glance at Beatrice, who was now engrossed in some kind of paperwork. He stepped past the reception desk and opened a plain oak door, then stood back so Quinn could enter first.
“Wonderful talking to you, dear,” Quinn said to Beatrice, as he entered the office.
It was everything a Park Avenue psychoanalyst’s office should be, restful and hushed. Very much like Zoe’s office. Maybe they had the same decorator. Pale green walls, darker green carpet, lots of dark brown leather furniture, framed modern paintings that would scare no one. Centered in the room, facing the door, was a vast mahogany desk. There were matching file cabinets on the wall behind it. There was one very large window. Pale beige drapes lined in caramel-colored silk extended from the ceiling on either side of it and puddled on the floor.
The desk was uncluttered but for a dark brown phone, a freshly cut long-stemmed rose in a delicate crystal vase, and a gold picture frame. The wall to the right was floor-to-ceiling books, most of them medical journals. An ornate brass floor lamp near the desk was unnecessarily on and softly glowing. Apparently Beatrice had readied the office for her boss. Have a nice day hung in the air.
Beeker motioned for Quinn to sit in one of the sumptuous leather armchairs angled toward the desk. Quinn lowered his weight into the chair, which was even more comfortable than it looked. The seat cushion hissed as if it didn’t like being sat on.
After waiting until Quinn was seated, Beeker walked around and situated himself in the high-backed leather chair behind his desk. He rocked back and forth a few times in the chair, and then sat forward and made a pink tent with his fingers the way Renz often did, which made Quinn distrust him. It wasn’t hard for Quinn to imagine the doctor as his assailant in the dark Seventy-ninth Street office.