Defiled

by Mike Nemeth

  I continued to shake and wave the bunny, but the dog wouldn’t budge from its perch. It had been trained to guard the house and not chase outdoor varmints, but I had another inducement for “Fido.” I extended the rabbit over the fence and pulled its cord, prompting it to wriggle and squirm and squeak. That got a reaction. The dog sauntered down the steps and then stopped on the deck, growling at me. I pulled the bunny’s cord again and again, but the shepherd wouldn’t charge. In desperation, I pulled the cord one last time and threw the toy as far as I could across the yard. That provoked him. Instinct caused Fido to leap off the deck and chase the fleeing prey. I turned in the opposite direction and ran for all I was worth.

  It was now a race—man against animal—to reach the doggy door. I ran around the house, through the garage, and into the kitchen. Despite my repeated advice to the contrary, Carrie never locked the door that led from the garage to the kitchen. Like most people, she was convinced the garage door was all that was needed to keep intruders from her home. Panting, I ran through the kitchen and took the front stairs two and three steps at a time. The dog would have to sense the ruse, abandon the bait, run back across the yard, across the deck, up the stairs, and across the balcony to its doggy door. I felt I had the advantage, but the shepherd beat me to it. As I reached the gallery, he was already shimmying through the doggy door that was two sizes too small for him. At that point, I had only one option. I leapt across the hallway, grabbed the media room door handle, and threw myself back into the hallway, slamming the door shut as the massive animal exploded into it from the other side. I leaned on the door with all my weight, shaking with fear, but the dog did not jump against it. He raised a racket, barking and crashing into things, but he did not attempt to break down the door. That is one well-trained animal. I wasn’t concerned about the barking—the nearest neighbor was a squatter’s shack half a mile away.

  Assuming the door would hold, I ran down the hallway to Carrie’s office and knelt in front of her filing cabinet. I used the little silver keys I had lifted from the home goods store to unlock it and pulled the top drawer open. It contained correspondence with retailers, credit card companies—applications denied—and home warranty companies and, in the middle of that junk, a folder marked “legal.” It wasn’t what I was looking for, but I pulled the file from the drawer and replaced it with Carrie’s medical, mental health, and home equity files I had taken from her bedside table on moving day.

  The middle drawer was stuffed with files holding bank statements, receipts, and cancelled checks. Hopeful I might find evidence of the secret account where she had hidden the stolen equity account money, I pulled all the manila folders out of the drawer only to find that all of the records pertained to our joint checking account, our savings account (balance of zero), and the investment account I had liquidated and deposited into my CD. The secret account was most likely a joint account with her momma. I wondered if we could get a search warrant for her momma’s house.

  In the bottom drawer, folders standing in file separators buckled over the top of an obstruction lying beneath them in the drawer. I pushed the standing files to the back of the drawer and uncovered a bonus—the infamous “rape tape.”

  After we had dated for a couple of months, Carrie said she wanted to test her sexual boundaries but wanted me to “force” her to do it. In particular, she liked fake rape scenes. The tape was a record of one long afternoon of scenes you wouldn’t want your mother to see, all staged so it appeared Carrie was the victim of a dominant husband. Years ago, I had tossed the tape in the tote of old financial records under the workbench in the beach house garage and hadn’t thought about it since. Carrie had remembered. Her murder plot hinged on a claim of rape, and the tape would be evidence that I had done it before.

  I stuffed the tape into the satchel along with the legal file and flipped through the other files. At the very back, I found an unlabeled manila folder, and a glance confirmed it was Carrie’s cell phone records. I took them, closed the drawer, and relocked the cabinet. I didn’t feel bad about the burglary; Carrie should have moved her precious possessions to a bank safe-deposit box. Phil Simmons probably had one she could have used.

  Back on my feet, I rushed down the hallway and took the stairs three at a time. As I hurried toward the ground-floor master bedroom, the flashlight beam illuminated the hallway enough for me to see that Carrie had hung pictures of her past lives with Dickson and Simmons. Another picture I had never seen caught my attention. A tall, fit man with short dark hair and a heavy beard draped a proprietary arm around my wife. I didn’t have the time to do it, but I moved closer, angled the beam of the flashlight to eliminate the glare, and examined my doppelgänger. His face was long, while mine was angular, and his complexion was darker—Mediterranean—but the resemblance was uncanny. Puralto.

  In the master suite, I walked around the bed and checked the bedside table for my pistol. It had to be in the house somewhere. The sleazy paperback lay in the top drawer along with Carrie’s reading glasses, but the middle and bottom drawers were empty, the vibrator hidden somewhere else.

  I moved to the dresser, opened the miniature chest of drawers that served as Carrie’s jewelry box, and was surprised to find it nearly empty. She had moved her collection to a safer place. All that remained were a few pieces of everyday costume jewelry and the yellow-diamond pendant and earrings that she often wore to taunt me. She wouldn’t taunt me any longer. I took them.

  Wondering if my pistol might be hidden in the dresser, I opened several drawers and pushed underwear and sleepwear around. In the middle drawer, under pantyhose, bras, and camisoles, lay her diary, a leatherbound notebook the size of a family Bible with a strap to hold it closed. Carrie wrote compulsively in the diary, but she never let me read it. I hefted it in my hand, wondering how I could get it into the hands of the authorities without incriminating myself. I decided to figure that out later. I stuffed it into my overflowing satchel.

  In a hurry, I went to her closet and grabbed her furs, encased in storage bags, and three designer purses in their protective boxes. Then I staggered up the staircase and dumped the valuables in the closet in the guest bedroom. If she reported them stolen, the cops would find them and realize she’s wacko.

  My heart pounding, I raced toward the staircase, glancing into my former bedroom as I passed by. From there I could hear the angry animal clawing at the media room door, but that’s not why I pulled up short. I crept into the room and marveled at what I saw in the beam of my flashlight, the way tourists creep into caves and marvel at the prehistoric drawings on the walls. Carrie had used a magic marker to draw a crude stickman on one wall and had then bashed in its head with a hammer, leaving huge holes in the sheetrock. On the opposing wall, she had hung my official AMA portrait. It had been defaced with an angry red “X.”

  I knew it was unconscionable to be thrilled, but I couldn’t help it. More evidence of her madness. On my smartphone I turned off the feature that tags photos with a date and time stamp and took half a dozen pictures of the walls. Then I hurried out of there, back down the hallway, and back down the stairs. On my way out of the house, I checked hiding places in the family room and kitchen but could not locate my pistol.

  I put the diary, the files, and the sex tape in the car. Then I climbed back into the attic, reconnected the phone line, and plugged in the security system. I refolded the ladder and let it close into the ceiling. Back in the car, I pushed the “open” button and waited for the garage door to rise. It had taken less than twenty minutes to neutralize the dog and move and steal items, but I had the crazy sensation that a hundred cops were waiting on the driveway, in riot gear, guns raised and ready to annihilate me with a hail of bullets like the scene at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  If any cops were waiting for me, they were hiding. I pulled out of the garage and immediately hit the “close” button. When I was certain that the door was down, I zoomed out of the driveway and turned to the right, away from
I-75 and the obvious escape route. There were no other cars on the rural road. Miles from the house, I threw the garage door opener and the little silver keys out the window. I took a circuitous route to the rental agency, avoiding high traffic streets and expressways, speed traps and patrolling cops. After two hours, I arrived at the rental lot, wiped down the car, removed my cargo, and locked the keys inside. Then I set out on foot, walking up Thirty-Fourth Street North in St. Petersburg. It didn’t take long for the files to feel as heavy as boat anchors. At a Publix grocery store, I borrowed a shopping cart and put the files in it. Then I pushed my belongings along the street like a homeless person.

  Glenda’s car was waiting for me in the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour diner. It took another fifteen minutes to drive to the Don CeSar Hotel on the beach and take the elevator to Room 410, rented in Glenda’s name.

  At four a.m., I flopped into bed, exhausted. I wondered how thieves withstood the stress and the exertion. Working for a living was far easier.

  Glenda had constructed a burrow of blankets, but when I rolled next to her she made sweet little murmurs, as though she were humming an old Southern spiritual.

  Sunday morning we took the diary with us to breakfast and paged through it together. Carrie had recorded her suspicions about my behavior when I wasn’t at home, descriptions of unpleasant encounters with sales clerks, imagined slights, and run-ins with her family. Page after page was filled with dated and coded entries that made cryptic references to drinks and dinners at secret places with “friends.” Most of the entries were easy enough to decode—girlfriends, family members, favorite restaurants, and watering holes. One frequent location was coded “WW,” but I knew of no restaurant or hotel with those initials. One person she often met had the code name “MD.” I knew no one with those initials. The latest entries, made in tiny, cramped writing with a pen pressed hard into the paper, railed against me, the judge, and her lawyer. In several places she had written, “I’ll kill him.” “Him” referred to me, I’m pretty sure.

  Glenda pushed the diary over to me and gave me an angry look. “Were you so drunk with lust that you didn’t notice she was nuts?”

  I hadn’t expected that reaction. “You’re right; I made a huge mistake. But she wasn’t this crazy while we dated. Her mental health has deteriorated over the past two years.”

  She exhaled loudly through her nose. “I have to get over the fact that you dumped me so you could chase trash like her. It might take a little while, so be patient with me.”

  “Sure.” I doubted she’d have complimented me on any selection of a successor but got her point; in retrospect it was glaringly obvious that Carrie was a poor choice.

  After breakfast, Glenda went to the front desk to check out and I went back to our room to read the other files. Most of the documents in the legal folder were bills and account statements. De Castro charged Carrie nearly twice as much per hour as Tony charged me and had billed 50 percent more hours. A few pieces of correspondence documented the fact that they had no real evidence of impropriety against me—no naked pictures nor hotel receipts. In her latest communication, de Castro asked if Carrie wanted to name Glenda and Susanne as witnesses if the case went to trial. There was no response from Carrie in the file.

  Her cell phone file was even less useful. It contained the call history for her current number, the one she obtained to hide from me when she filed for the divorce, but not for the one she had when she was seeing men in the winter and spring. Now most calls were to or from her momma, and all the text messages were between her and her son, Travis. There were no calls to or from Connie.

  There were two calls to numbers I didn’t recognize. I was hopeful as I looked up the unfamiliar phone numbers using the Whitepages reverse phone lookup feature, but a number in Largo belonged to Roberta de Castro and a number in Plant City was for a wholesale food company. That call was a mystery, but it didn’t seem to be relevant.

  I wrapped all the stolen property—the diary, copies of Carrie’s medical files, a copy of the home loan file, her legal file, her cell phone bills, and the sex tape—in plain brown paper and sealed it with packing tape. It looked like something the Unabomber would mail.

  When Glenda returned from paying the bill, I took the bundle off the desk and handed it to her. “This is all the evidence I have on her. Can you store it in a safe place?”

  “I’ll hide it at my mother’s.”

  “Good. If anything happens to me, give it to the Pinellas County DA.”

  She held the package away from her as though it were indeed a bomb. “I’m nervous now, Randle. Stay with me at my mother’s house.”

  As attractive as that arrangement sounded, I couldn’t entangle her in the rest of the plan. “I can’t yet,” I said. “I have some more business to take care of. In the meantime, I’d like you to have these.” I held out the yellow-diamond pendant and matching earrings.

  Glenda’s eyes widened. I hadn’t earned enough money while we were married to give her expensive gifts. “Did you steal these from Carrie?”

  “She didn’t deserve them, but you do.”

  She put the jewelry in her purse and said, “I’ll hold them until this is over and you can give them to me legally.”

  “Alright.”

  I retrieved the loaner car from the self-park and made the long trek back to Atlanta. I drove carefully. Although I carried no contraband, a speeding ticket along the route would be damning evidence against me.

  That evening I was sitting in the hotel bar watching a pro-football game when Connie called. I walked out of the bar so I could hear what she was saying. From the sound of it, she was hopping mad again.

  Out in the lobby I could finally hear well enough to understand her. “You stole Carrie’s furs and purses and jewelry!” They’re home from the beach.

  “What are you talking about? I’m in Atlanta.”

  “Where were you yesterday?”

  “I’ve been in Atlanta since Friday. Company meetings.”

  “Someone broke in while we were at the beach and stole all her jewelry.”

  That’s a lie. “Did they get the Rolex watch, the wedding rings, the chocolate diamonds?”

  “Everything, Randle. They took it all.”

  Carrie probably stored her jewelry at her momma’s house. She’s lying to make it a big enough deal for the cops to investigate. “How did the thieves get in?”

  “She doesn’t know. The doors were locked, the alarm was set, and the dog was on guard.”

  “Did they harm the dog?”

  “No, they tricked it with a stuffed toy.”

  I broke out laughing. “Your sister is quite a comedienne. No, she’s the joke.”

  “She says it was you. How is stealing from her going to convince her to come see you? She’s going to call the cops and tell them you did it.”

  “I hadn’t heard from you or Carrie, so I stayed in Atlanta over the weekend instead of driving back and forth.”

  “Tell the cops when they knock on your door.”

  “Tell Carrie I’m ready to negotiate now. See if she can do it next weekend.”

  Connie grunted something like “Awrrhaw” and hung up on me, so I went back to the bar and resumed my deliberations. Every time I reviewed my plan, it worked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  In the morning, we explained our time-saving designs to Bob Platt and the executive team. We were ready for an independent board of doctors to use the technology to review closed medical cases and give our little startup the blessing it needed to convince investors to buy into our IPO offering. While we were presenting the design, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I looked and saw that it was my attorney. I didn’t answer; this wasn’t the time or place for a chat about the divorce.

  The executives were pleased with our progress, and several wondered if we couldn’t reestablish a November or December IPO date. I couldn’t allow that to happen, so I deftly shot the idea down like a bird hunter bagging a pheasant. On
the other hand, I was quite confident we would have a successful February launch and I’d reap the monetary benefits.

  I found Jerry Louks in the communications room with his arm buried up to his elbow in a wall of electronics. Without being asked, he pulled a small square ticket stub out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. It felt like another CIA spy operation, the two of us hiding in an equipment closet to exchange secret material.

  “Enjoy the game?” I said.

  “My niece went with her boyfriend. Braves lost.”

  Waving the Braves ticket stub at Jerry—a stub for the game Saturday night—I said, “I owe you one, buddy.”

  As I walked to my car, I peeked at my phone, which had continued to vibrate in my pocket. Tony had left me a text message: call ASAP, cops looking for you. I slipped the phone into my pocket and drove to the hotel. Back at the Hilton, I changed clothes, packed my bags, and checked out. When I was on the road to Florida, I called Tony.

  Without preamble, he said, “There was a break-in at your wife’s house on Saturday.”

  “I’m really tired of people referring to it as my wife’s house. That’s yet to be decided.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “I have dozens of witnesses in Atlanta, so stop stressing.”

  “They suspect it was you because files that went missing when you moved out are back now and the legal file is missing. A thief wouldn’t steal her legal file.”