“What are you planning to do, interview him in the gas chamber? Make a nice blurb for your book, eh?”
“Oh now come on, Liza. You don’t think I’d let it go that far, do you? As a matter of fact I’ve just had a call from the judge. He’d like to see us both in his chambers, right now.” He dropped a coin on the table and stood up, resting his hand on her shoulder. “Now you just follow my lead. He’s got the idea we’re adversaries—like lawyers, you know, one representing the state and the other the defendant. Anyway I’ve got it pretty well wired together, so all you need to do is not tip him over in the wrong direction.”
The judge was not exactly pacing, but sort of jiggling up and down in front of the bench. He had seemed a towering presence up above; now she was surprised to see that he was two inches shorter than herself, about five-five. With a nervous smile and an odd little heel-clicking bow, he shook her hand and led them back into an oak-paneled office. He seated them in heavy wooden armchairs, sat down in his leather upholstered swivel chair, and took a thick black cigar from inside his robe.
“It’ll be another hour before the jury brings in a verdict.” He clipped off the end of the cigar with a pair of scissors. “They’ve got one holdout but she’s coming around.” He pressed his desk lighter into flame and leaned into it. The acrid smoke stung her eyes. “I’ve been considering the points that Doctor Kossuth brought up and yourself, Doctor Bodac—” Thank you, you reactionary old fart. “And I’ve decided to defer sentencing until I get a complete psychiatric examination. Normally this would be—”
“Excuse me, Judge,” said Liza. “What if he’s found innocent?”
Jeff shot her a warning look, but the judge shrugged and puffed smoke at the ceiling. “Well if he’s innocent that’s it. You never know what a jury’s gonna do these days. In that case I’d have no more jurisdiction. But in the other eventuality—normally I’d send him up to the state hospital for the criminally insane, since they’ve got the maximum-security facility. But Dr. Kossuth tells me you have a closed ward where he can be adequately guarded, so …”
The lady foreman read the verdict in a loud, quavering voice: “We find the defendant … guilty as charged.”
“You bitch!” screamed Debra.
Danny, his face like polished ivory, glanced up at his sister and then looked at Liza. Elizabeth closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the back of the seat in front of her, hard … hard.
Liza was not the last to leave the courthouse. She knew, because she sat in her car and watched the doors while darkness fell and neon glimmered on the rain-wet sidewalk. At last Debra came out, walked down the steps and stood looking at Liza through the streaked window.
Liza pressed the button which lowered the glass. “Can I take you someplace?”
“I have my car.”
Still Debra stood, her face devoid of expression. Elizabeth told herself to turn the key and start the engine and drive away …
And build the wall a little higher …
“Where will you be, in case I should want to reach you?”
“Why should you want to reach me?” asked Debra.
“I don’t know.” Liza waited a minute. “If you don’t want to see me, just say so.”
“You have my address. I’m listed as next of kin.”
Debra turned and walked away. The air was like syrup, it seemed to flow around her. Elizabeth realized her eyes were tired and gritty. She wished she knew what made the night air so pungent, so vibrant and full of hidden meaning, as if the dark shadows were splotches of guttering sentience …
Ten
Boots sat watching tv, drinking beer. The announcer was saying: “… So it appears that the latest court test of capital murder will be deferred, at least until the psychiatric study ordered by Judge Halstead is completed. Meanwhile the property where the cabin slayings took place is still up for sale, and there are still no bidders …”
Boots crushed his beer can with a spasmodic clench of his fist, lurched to the set and switched it off. He walked into the kitchen, high-heeled cowboy boots muffled by the cork-tiled flooring. He opened another beer and stood staring at the window above the sink. The rain-streaked glass gave back the image of a tight truculent face with high Magyar cheekbones, and blue-black hair slanting across a broad forehead.
Yeah, they told me, you get a girl who’s that pretty and you’re always gonna be having trouble. But it hadn’t been the kind of trouble Uncle Ivor envisioned, where you couldn’t go off to work without wondering if some dude was sniffing around your wife. He couldn’t complain on that score, Debra was never one to encourage hanky-panky. In fact it would have been better for his business if she did. Sometimes she wouldn’t even answer the phone, even when he told her specifically there was a big deal hanging fire. She didn’t understand why you had to promise a little—not that you’d ever deliver, but you had to hold out the possibility. It may be legal, she’d say, but it isn’t honest. Things were so damn simple for her, but put her out on the line bringing in the bread he bet She’d change her damn tune. It’s one thing to be idealistic when you stay home and mind the baby and watch soap operas, but it’s another when you have to go out and grab with one hand and fend off the competition with the other. The money he’d put into the lake development now … a Chicago outfit was moving in, smothering all his little ads with full-page spreads and tv spots. They had a bankroll big enough to squeeze him right out of the project—and he’d even built some of the units with his own hands. He’d tried to persuade Danny to study up and subcontract the fireplaces, there was a lot of money in that—and Danny could have done it, look at the work he’d done in the cabin, when he got into laying stone you’d think he was cranked on speed. But when Boots mentioned work he would only smile and say, “When I am hungry, I eat, when I am thirsty, I drink.” And Boots asked: “Whaddaya do when you’re horny? Jerk off?” And Danny said: “Let’s begin the confession period with yours, shall we?”
But actually Dan seemed to have no trouble getting women. Boots had gone out once and found two foxy chicks sunbathing nude by the pond. They’d invited him to join them but when he went inside and undressed he looked at his white skinny legs and his paunch and his scrawny chest and knew that even if they didn’t laugh out loud he’d hear it anyway. So he had a few drinks to loosen up, and wound up making an ass of himself …
Sombitch always had it too easy. He’d wanted to ask Dan about his sister, What the hell was the matter with her, how did she act when she was a kid? But it was not the manly thing to do, best to pretend he was keeping her happy in bed and the fact that he messed around with whores was just a result of his excessive virility. He blamed a lot of people for it, but mostly he blamed Debra. If she only loved him more he wouldn’t have to go to so damn much trouble proving himself. She had the quality of an aristocrat which awed him and made him feel like a thick-headed peasant. Not that he had much sympathy with her upbringing. His most vivid memory of his own youth was a run in the darkness with machine guns spitting fire overhead. In his teens he was one of the activists of the Hungarian revolution, and when he first came to this country he felt himself swell up with the realization that nothing could stop him here but his own weakness. He determined then never to be weak. He joined the army to earn his citizenship and learned the secret of success was doing dirty jobs nobody else wanted to do. He saved his money and opened a salvage yard, just kitty-cornered across the street from where Debra lived with her father. Boots bought him drinks and loaned him money but never did more than smile and nod at Debra because he thought she deserved something better than a junk dealer—even a rich one whose cards read Salvage Engineer. Probably he should have gotten a life-sized doll and put it in his living room, then he could have picked it up and carried it to bed in the evenings. But he decided to improve himself.
The day he got his real-estate certificate he bought a new suit and new black high-heeled western cowboy boots, scrubbed the grease off his knuckles and bought
a box of orchids flown in from Hawaii. When Debra came to the door he couldn’t see anything but the white speck in her eye and the shape of her body under an old-fashioned flannel nightgown. She took the box without saying a word and closed the door. Later he wondered what he’d done wrong, why her old man quit stopping by his office, why she never answered her telephone. People he asked about her eye just lifted their brows and shrugged. Some said she’d been born that way, and others said Danny had plunked it out with a bb gun. Everyone agreed that the main reason Debra never had dates was that her old man had a habit of kicking them down the front steps.
That problem ended when her father hung his mouth over the end of a double-barreled twelve-gauge and added his brains to the floral design of the kitchen wallpaper. Boots thought he should probably wait a few months, but three weeks later she called him up and asked why he never brought any more flowers. A week later, with Boots hardly able to believe his own good fortune, they were bride and groom with a week’s reservation at a honeymoon cabin on the lake. The first night at dinner she asked him to have the band play her favorite song, which she said was Tchaikovsky’s “Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld.” The band thought he was putting them on; they were noisy, sunburned and drunk. When he got back to the table she was gone. He stood outside the door of their darkened cabin and heard her talking on the telephone in a crooning seductive voice which seared his pride like a hot branding iron. She hung up as he walked in, and when he asked whom she’d been talking to she said, “My Lover”—then she got up and went into the bathroom. He undressed and lay down on the bed, wondering what kind of sexual instruction she’d been given, assuming without question that she was a virgin. But no matter, he would treat her like a fragile doll …
The door of the bathroom opened, and she stood with the light behind her, the nightdress like a misty shroud of darkness. He saw the taut thrusting points of her breasts, the neat black wedge of her pubic hair, the slanting gleam in her dark eyes—and knew that whatever else she was, she was not a frightened virgin.
The light clicked off and almost at the same moment a white shape flew through the air. Her knees landed on his stomach with a force that nearly brought up his supper. He tasted the shrimp cocktail in his throat and wondered, Where was she hiding that strength all this time? But it was only a flash of thought in the back of his mind, because her nails raked his cheeks and her teeth clamped like a skunktrap in the flesh of his shoulder. He tried to disengage her gently, but became entangled in the great cloud of chiffon which was her nightdress. Finally he had to rip it off in order to seize her wrists and clamp her windmilling legs between his own. He whispered, What the hell are you trying to do? and wished he could see her face. Only the whites of her eyes were visible; he finally ignored the gouging elbows and flashing teeth and pried her legs apart with his knee, groped between them and found the downy slit with his finger, held it open while he humped himself between her thighs and prepared to invade this bit of nothingness which he had bought with great sweat and patience …
But he had nothing, only a limp appendage of tissue. He tried to cram it in and heard derisive laughter come from deep inside her chest, rising higher until it became a shrill cackle of hysteria. He felt his rage rise up and overflow, he swung his hand and remembered just in time to open his fist so that his palm cracked against her jaw. There was a gasp, silence, then a flood of subterranean filth. Words he had never expected her to know spewed from her mouth, mocking him, insulting him, until he stopped her voice with his hand. She caught his finger between her teeth and bit down with all the force of her jaws. He swung his fist again, but she moved her head as quickly as a mongoose, and his knuckes sank into the pillow. She sprang from the bed and slid open the door of the closet. He thought, She’s getting ready to leave, and felt a panic of despair. But she’d only been getting a wire-coat hanger. He heard it whistle through the air, felt the stinging fire as it ripped his bare chest. He clutched in the darkness, found her wrist, and twisted. He heard a whimper of pain, then a hollow pop! and thought: Oh for God’s sake, how can I ever explain this? I’ve broken my wife’s arm. In his moment of shock he lost his grip on her wrist. He lunged for her in the darkness, thudded against the wall, turned and charged again at a leaping wraith of white, stumbled over a suitcase and fell headlong. Someone hammered at the door: “Hey, what the hell’s going on in there?” Boots threw back his head and bellowed: “WHO THE FUCK WANTS TO KNOW?” A muttered, half-apologetic voice replied: “Well, there’s some folks trying to sleep.”
Hearing the feet shuffle away, Boots turned on the light and saw Debra lying on the floor beside the bed. The upper part of her nightdress still clung to her shoulders, but most of it had been torn off and lay twisted beneath her. Her thin nostrils flared in rapid breathing, her eyes were wide and fixed, with white showing all around her pupils. Her nipples stood out from the aureoles, her hips rotated in clockwise cycles, while her lips murmured a name he couldn’t hear and didn’t care to learn. He didn’t bother to turn off the light, but knelt between her legs and presented his meat to the furry mouth, felt it seized and drawn in to the root. He pressed himself down upon her as pain reached the point of ecstasy, and in the back of his mind he heard a chortle of self-congratulation …
But nights like these were like rare jewels strung on the gray thread of his life. She never focussed her attention on him. At first it was Danny, fighting for his life over in Nam. “What the hell,” he told her, “we’ve got the longest logistical tail in history. We use twenty men to keep one fighter on the line, and if your brother hasn’t got brains enough to be one of the twenty—”
But then he would see that she wasn’t listening, had tuned him out with some dial inside her head. He could never understand what turned her on sexually; he’d be working on contracts in his office, and she would walk in and sit on his desk, with nothing on under her dress, and lift her feet to the arms of his chair. Next day she’d snarl and slap his hand if he patted her ass. She insisted on separate bedrooms, and many were the nights when she wouldn’t unlock her door. “This isn’t right,” he’d say next morning. “Why did you marry me in the first place?” She’d smile and slide her eyes sideways. “I had my reasons,” she’d say, and then an invisible screen would drop down behind her eyes, and he would yell and stomp and wave his arms, and get nothing back but the echo of his own voice.
His greatest frustration was knowing she could turn it on and off at will. When she wanted cash to go down and bail Danny out of Mexico, she was honey and spice until he signed the check. She was away two weeks, and when she got back it was like fucking a rubber duck.
Since Dan’s latest arrest—and probably his last, Boots thought with a guilty sense of relief—Debra had gotten more strung out than ever. Each day she’d park the kids with her old housekeeper and go buzzing off in her MG. He knew she didn’t go far—he checked her mileage—but he never learned where she went. Lately he’d taken to watching her face, looking for signs of the break-up, wondering what he would do when it happened.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was past midnight. He crushed the beer can, flung it into the sink, and grabbed the white kitchen telephone.
“Certainly the children are asleep,” said the house-keener in a clipped impatient tone. “Are you calling about Debra?”
“Well … I thought she might be there.”
“No. Maybe you should try the Hilltop.”
“Oh Christ.” He looked at the window, saw the rain slanting across the glass. “Shit,” he muttered, and hung up the phone.
He found the MG parked in the open gate of the cemetery, top down, water standing in the bucket seats. He took out his flashlight and started trudging up the rutted drive. Wind moaned through the pinebreak which bordered the crown of the hill. Raindrops stung his face and peppered his poplin jacket. He kept veering off the track, spilling on wet grass, stumbling over stunted mounds, stubbing his toes on low monuments hidden in the turf.
F
inally he stopped and flashed his beam upward. Debra stood in the hollow between two graves, arms outspread and face tilted up toward the sky. Her hair was plastered flat against her head, clinging in wet strands to her face and neck. On each side of her stood a pink granite headstone, one marked: PAUL BOLLINGER, the other: DENISE BOLLINGER, his wife.
He strode up to her and slapped her cold wet cheek with his open palm. Anger and fear made his voice harsh: “You’re getting worse than your stupid brother!”
She twisted her head toward him, teeth bared, eyes rolling back like a wolf’s. He thought she was going to attack him, but instead she took a stumbling step and fell into his arms. “Take me home now, Daddy. Please?”
He lifted her in both arms, sliding his hand under her water-logged skirt, feeling the damp steamy warmth of her thighs. Her head lolled on his shoulder and her lips nibbled his neck as he carried her down the hill.
Elizabeth woke up shivering.
The dream.
The silver pylon behind her head speared upward toward the … what was it, sky? Glittering pinholes in black velvet. Yes, it must be the sky. And that round silver object must be the moon. She sat up and looked around. She was frozen on a wide expanse of glimmering quicksilver …
Yacht. I remember now. Jeff was waiting at the apartment when I got home from the trial. He thought it would be a good idea if we both got away and took a look at the problem—meaning I should see his side of it, of course. The sheriff wouldn’t release Dan until he got the court order, anyway, which wouldn’t be until Monday—and even then it wouldn’t be my problem, since Jeff planned to take over the case …
Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die Page 13