Well? So?
She got up and walked out through her kitchen, stepped out on the rear landing. Duplexes stretched away on either side, like chunks of gingerbread laid out in a row. On the asphalt parking apron four doors down, Jeff’s fiberglass sloop squatted on its four-wheeled trailer. Beside it gleamed the roof of his purple Mercedes. She wondered if he was alone. Since the staffing he’d been eating lunch with the music therapist; to walk in and find Marilyn’s ash-blonde hair spread out on his pillow was a thrill she didn’t need …
He picked up the phone on the third ring. “Jeff, I saw your light and wondered—are you entertaining?”
He laughed. “That’s a matter of opinion. Why don’t you come over and find out? There’s something I want to talk to you about, anyway.”
Jeff stood behind his homemade bar of split bamboo and fixed her a planter’s punch of dark Martinique rum, melted sugar, soda and a slice of lemon, with fresh grated nutmeg scumming the surface. She felt her tension uncoil as she watched his movements reflected in the time-fogged yellow mirror. Old postcards had been stuck into the frame, along with photos of seafaring types. A fan blew on beaded portieres, and she had a feeling she could turn and see sinister men in white linen suits sitting at little round tables …
“They identified another body today,” he said.
Her stomach tightened convulsively. The prickly, musty taste of death had been lodged in her throat since the day she’d visited the cabin. Reluctantly, unable to stay away from it, she asked: “Which one?”
“Magda Roberts, the traveling nurse.” He lowered his glass, moisture sparkling on his lower lip. “It was one of those fluke leads. They turned up a stolen-car ring over in the next county, they had a workshop back in the woods where they switched engines and repainted bodies. The cops found an Olds Cutlass registered in her name. The girl had been missing from her job for almost a year, she had pay coming, her parents had been trying to find her. Sheriff Talbot dangled a murder rap in front of the ringleader and he led him to the place where he’d found the car covered with brush in a ravine about two miles from Bollinger’s cabin.”
She looked down into her drink. “Another neat bit of circumstantial evidence,” she murmured.
Jeff shrugged. “True, but the circumstances keep piling up. I talked to the husband of Christina Weber yesterday. He brought down her dental records and they matched one of the corpses. He showed me a letter she’d written him from Dan’s cabin. Pure flipsville. The girl was obviously on drugs.”
Liza raised her head and looked at him narrowly. “Why were you talking to him?”
“The sheriff called me.”
“Since when are you working for the county sheriff?”
He looked down, making interlocking wet rings on the counter with his glass. “It’s like this. We’re involved in a news event. I’d prefer that the whole thing had never happened—God knows I prefer live girls to dead ones—but since it has, I’m in a better official position to deal with the pressure we’re getting.”
“What are you saying, Jeff? You want me to quit interviewing Dan’s friends and relatives?”
“Yes, for your own protection.”
“That makes me feel like I’m evading …” She looked at him closely. “Protection from what?”
Jeff shrugged. “Who knows? These cult murders are tricky. Instead of one warped mind you have several, and you never actually find out who they all are. I’m not saying Bollinger’s guilty; that’s the court’s domain. But we’d be fools to assume he isn’t.”
Elizabeth felt her stubbornness take root. “If it’s up to me I’d rather carry on with it.”
He tilted his head and looked at her. “You’ve surely learned by now that the only way to keep your sanity in this business is to leave your work at the hospital.”
“I’ve never felt that patients should be treated as a lower form of fife.”
“Who’s saying that? I just think you’re over-involved. Bear in mind that drug users are psychologically akin to alcoholics.”
Elizabeth felt a flush burn her cheeks. “What does Bollinger have to do with the fact that my husband was a lush?”
“Well, look—you attract dependent men. You see people hurting and you want to help. Okay … that’s a fine and noble instinct. But when it’s a man hurting, your motives get confused; the mother fights against the female who wants to get laid. Would you rather have it in psychological terms?”
“No, your jargon is fascinating. Now let me do a thumbnail on you. You’re goal oriented. You’re so damn busy looking for the pot of gold that you never see the colors in the rainbow—”
“Ah, that’s beautiful, Liza. Really lovely.”
“You’ve got your eye on the carrot at the end of the stick and anybody that gets between you and the carrot gets stepped on.”
“Who am I stepping on? Whom?”
“I’ll answer that when you explain your interest in Bollinger.”
He looked at her a minute, then picked up her glass and turned his back, bending over the counter. She felt an urge to poke her fingers down into the back of his white duck trousers, where his shirt bunched up in a fanlike array of wrinkles. A moment later he swung around and set a dew-sparkling amber goblet on the bar. He lifted another in his hand and smiled at her over the rim. “Here’s to literature, Liza.”
Slowly she lifted her glass and sipped, frowning. “I’m not sure I should drink to this. You doing a paper on Bollinger?”
He shook his head slowly from side to side, smiling. “Not a paper, dear. Not a dignified, scholarly monograph. I’m shooting for a million or two. Best-seller, paperback rights, films. Why should I let some fatheaded journalist get all the gravy? Look at what we’ve got here. An absolute Svengali. Rasputin. He’s got some kind of power. This we can’t deny—some kind of power over women. You feel anything?”
“No,” she said.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Liza, you’re lying. You’re usually quite frank in your evaluations of patients, in fact there are those who maintain that you consistently overstep your authority. But about Bollinger you’ve given me nothing. Nothing. What is it? Something private between you two?”
“Why should you think that?”
“That’s his way, isn’t it? To get something private going—you-and-me against the world sort of thing?”
“He hasn’t tried it with me.”
“No? What about his Rorschach—all that talk about cunt? Don’t tell me that wasn’t directed at you.”
“If you noticed that, you also noticed that I discontinued the test soon after it became apparent. Give me credit for a little insight, please.”
“I do, Liza. More than a little. That’s why I want your help with the book.”
She turned the round goblet between her hands, feeling its coolness against her palms. “Jeff, I don’t want to get involved in any exploitation of a patient …”
“Exploitation?” Jeff sputtered. “Look, the kid’s in jail. I didn’t put him there. He’ll get a cut of the profit, maybe it’ll be enough to get him off, who knows?”
“Have you talked to him about it?”
“No, but I will. I’m pretty sure he’ll see it’s the only way to go.”
Yes, she thought. Jeff can talk anybody into anything. He had convinced her two years ago that an affair with him was exactly what she needed. But it was too much like a prescription. She’d never really assessed it before, but their relationship had somehow gone past the stage of being liberated. Now it just seemed rather . . uncommitted. Otherwise why should she fantasize about other men when she had sex with Jeff? The only part of him that really touched her was his penis …
He hunched his shoulders and brought his face close to hers. “What do you say? I’m talking about a partnership—any kind you want.”
Marriage. The unspoken word hung in the air between them. His face began to warp, like a reflection on wet glass. His left e
ye swelled out and fixed upon her with a glittering intensity. The moment hung poised, all the clocks in the world stopped, while her mind ran on …
My dear, you are experiencing schizophrenia.
Time, PASS!
But it would not. Inside she screamed, writhed, clawed at the walls of her tomb. Her mouth opened. Words emerged from her lips. She was amazed at how calm and conversational they sounded.
“I don’t know, Jeff. I feel as though I’m suddenly plunked down in the middle of a maze. There was a time I could look over the walls but now they’re up on all sides of me, and they’re full of sudden sharp turns—” She looked directly into his eyes. “Jeff, you’ve got to believe in something.”
“Okay. What?”
“Something. Anything.”
“Okay, I’ll believe in … salt shakers. Put me down under religious preference as salt-shaker worshipper. Three times a day I sit down before the salt shaker and perform a sacrifice of food—”
Laughing, she swung off the stool and stood on her feet. Jeff’s music was keyed to his lighting system; the room went dark and colors drifted across the ceiling; mauve, indigo, chartreuse, lemon, avocado, burgandy … She walked loose-limbed across the glowing carpet, sat down on the couch, lay back her head and closed her eyes. She felt his hand close around her instep, his fingers kneading her calves. The alcohol had sensitized the erotic zones of her body. She pulled her sleeveless denim dress over her head and dropped it on the floor. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her lilac mini-bikini and pushed it down over her hips, feeling a tingle of anticipation as Jeff pulled the garment off her feet. Too bad, she thought, that the only place we get together is on the couch.
A week later Debra came to her office. She walked in unannounced, and stood on the burnt-sienna carpet looking at Elizabeth across the polished surface of the desk. Her eyes were hidden by octagon-framed dark glasses which reached from the middle of her forehead to the lower curve of her cheeks. But the double crescent of her hairline and the small pointed chin were enough to identify her. She was, in the face at least, a feminine copy of Daniel.
“Debra. Have a seat.”
She sat down in the brown leather upholstered chair beside the desk and smoothed her powder-blue skirt over dark nylon-sheathed legs. She picked up a horse-head paperweight carved out of soaps tone and rubbed it between her hands. She gave off an electric tension which made Liza uneasy, aware that she was holding her stomach taut.
“That was made by a patient. Involutional melancholic.”
Eyelashes flickered behind the shades. “What happened to him?”
“He went home one weekend and hanged himself with his wife’s nightgown.”
Debra’s lips twitched in a wry smile. “Doesn’t sound like you helped him much.”
“His wife thought he was getting well. We had no authority to keep him.”
“Can you help Danny?”
The question caught Liza by surprise. “You mean at the trial?”
“At the trial, what else?”
Liza leaned forward in her armchair, trying to penetrate the dark shield of Debra’s glasses. She could see the thin arch of her brows, the faintly sinuous line of her nose. The lower lip protruded, full at the sides. Suggestive of a sensuous, self-indulgent person—yet Debra’s history was that of a church-going, law-abiding housewife. The contradiction was not unusual, Liza reminded herself.
“Why don’t you take off your glasses? I can turn off the light if it bothers you.”
Debra reached up and took them off, then looked at Liza with eyes wide and challenging. For a moment Liza thought she imagined it, then a sudden flash—possibly the sun on the windshield outside—caught the eye just right, and she saw a flare of white in the left pupil. There was a discontinuity layer just under the sclerotic surface. Odd that Dan had never mentioned this stigma of his sister’s. It would have explained a few things …
“Shall I put them back on?”
“If you like.”
Debra settled the frames on her ears with slow, deliberate movement. There was a poised menace in the way she hung a cigarette between her lips, tore out a match, then struck it, flicking the head away from herself and toward Elizabeth.
“About Danny—what do you plan to do?”
“I don’t know.” Liza felt suddenly wary. “We’re not supposed to involve ourselves with the personal affairs of patients, after they leave the hospital.”
The moment she said it she realized it sounded pompous, and pomposity was probably the last thing that Debra wanted to hear right now.
Debra reached out and tipped her burnt match into the ashtray, slowly, as if the gesture were significant. “I’m not talking about a patient.” Her frail lips curled around the word. “That word means nothing to me. Nothing at all.” She gazed upward at Liza, a slanting look that was somehow sly and malevolent. “Are you afraid of Dan?”
“Not at all.”
“Yet you can sit calmly and hear him accused of murdering five women. What is it then? You think he’s some kind of devil-worshipping scum that ought to be put out of the way so decent folks can live in peace?”
It was odd, to hear the local dialect spoken by one who was obviously raised in the county, but voiced with such venom that it was obvious Debra hated her own people.
“I don’t think that at all,” said Elizabeth. Her face felt warm.
“Would you take the stand and testify that he couldn’t possibly have done it?”
“How could I do that?”
“You can give a professional opinion.”
“Doctor Kossuth is giving that.”
“He’s the prosecutor’s witness?’
“He’s an impartial expert, appointed by the court.”
“For God’s sake! It’s the court that’s trying him. The jury’s what we’re shooting at. They don’t care about your credentials. If you believe it, you can say it, and maybe one of the jurors will believe you. Otherwise …” She stood up and crushed out her cigarette with sharp, angry stabs. “Otherwise Dan is going to be led into a little room, and a bunch of cyanide pellets are going to be dropped into a little bucket, and these pellets are going to be dissolved by sulfuric acid, and Dan is going to breath this stuff, and he is going to die, die, DIE!”
She whirled and walked out without looking back. Liza leaned back in her armchair and blew softly through her pursed lips. Well, she thought. Well-well.
Nine
The witness room was stuffy and damp. Elizabeth sat in a straight chair beside an air conditioner which leaked water beneath her feet. The men in the room were compulsive cigarette smokers; the women remained quiet during the first day of the trial, then opened up with the droning humdrum mouth-noises one hears at a quilting bee: “Have you seen Edna’s little girl? My, hasn’t she grown?”
What the hell did you expect? thought Liza. If the child didn’t grow you’d have a midget, then you’d really have something to talk about.
The woman had biceps as big as a man’s thigh; her elbows dimpled the cylinders of fat which hung from her shoulders. It was not the woman’s appearance, but her function in the trial which aroused Liza’s hostility. She and her husband ran a grocery-gas-hunter’s supply store on the highway about four miles from Dan’s cabin. Though the judge had warned the witnesses not to discuss their testimony, Liza had no trouble learning that they were there to verify Dan’s acquaintance with one of the dead girls.
“They used to come to the station for cigarettes and a six-pac,” the woman whispered to Liza. “He called her Chris and sometimes Tina.”
Another witness was a rawboned youth of about twenty, who said he’d read Dan’s electric meter each month for two years. “Seemed like they was always a different girl.
Once I seen seven of ‘em, naked as jaybirds, swimmin’ in the pond. Three of ‘em was men though.”
“How’d you know, if they all had long hair? Haw!” Dwight Coombs a thin, gray-haired chain-smoker, slapped his knee a
nd rocked back and forth until his laughter dissolved into wheezing lung-rattling coughs. Coombs drove a truck for the lumberyard, and apparently while making deliveries had catalogued every pore and eyelash of Dan’s female visitors. “Purty little things,” he said. “It’s a shame they’re all dead now.”
A tall, slim quiet woman sat with her chin resting in her hand and stared out the window. She wore orthopedic hose and a purple dress decorated with yellow flowers. She kept pulling her beige cardigan sweater tight across her chest and turning away when the fat woman tried to engage her in conversation. Finally the fat woman said: “You’re mighty lucky to be here, you know that?”
“Oh crap.”
“Don’t you oh-crap me, Maude Adams. At least I don’t let killer dope addicts hang around my house.”
“No, you let ‘em in your store.”
“That’s business.”
“Crap.”
Miz Adams was not there to help Dan; she was a prosecution witness called to describe her finding of the first bodies. Elizabeth was the only witness for the defense. It gave her a lonely, isolated feeling, and made her wonder what Dan’s lawyer had been doing all these weeks since the sensation had faded from the tube.
She gazed out the window and saw the pennants of a Gulf station hanging limp in the falling mist. Next door stood a movie theatre who marquee read: CLOSED: ATTEND HI-WAY DRIVE-IN. The county seat was one of the dead towns, killed by progress. It was so much like the Indiana town in which she’d grown up that she could almost see the faded striped awning hanging over her father’s drugstore and the old man himself standing behind the plate-glass window with his arms folded over his white pharmacist’s smock. It made her restless to think that there might be someone like her in this town, some slightly overweight sixteen-year-old tending the soda fountain and learning about life from the sex manuals hidden away on the lower shelf of the magazine rack, behind the science fiction.
Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die Page 11