Hard Fall

by Pascal Scott

  “Do you mind?” The woman picked up the pack. “It’s a bad habit I’m trying to break.”

  “No,” Stone said.

  She lit a cigarette. “I’m Gina, by the way. Gina Hunter. But you probably already knew that.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Stone said. “I’m…”

  And now Stone wavered, wondering if she should use her real name. She decided to be honest. “I’m Kathleen.”

  Gina waited for more, and when nothing more came, she took a puff and held it and then blew out blue smoke.

  “Well, Kathleen No-Last-Name, nice to meet you. So tell me, how do you know Elizabeth?”

  “We used to date.”

  “Oh? You don’t seem her type.”

  “Then you did know her.”

  Gina picked at her lips to remove a bit of tobacco. “Yeah, I knew her. I found Elizabeth, oh, let’s see, it must be seven years ago now. She was a street urchin. Seventeen years old, green as grass. But pretty. And malleable.”

  “Malleable, how?”

  Gina squinted her puffy eyes at Stone. “You say you dated. I’m assuming you fucked her.”

  Stone felt herself wince. She steadied her voice. “You could say that.”

  “We taught her how to fuck, my husband and I.”

  She took a long drag and then exhaled. “You don’t approve, I can see it in your face.”

  “I don’t approve or disapprove. I’m just trying to understand.”

  She set the cigarette, still burning, in the shell ashtray. “I need a drink,” she said abruptly and stood. “And then I’ll tell you everything you need to know about Elizabeth Taylor Bundy.”

  After she had poured a Stoli on the rocks and asked Stone if she cared to join her—she didn’t—Gina set the tumbler on the table.

  “Excuse me for a minute. I’ll be right back,” she said and left the room.

  A few minutes later, she walked back into the living room with a shiny black binder. Setting it on the table, she opened it.

  “When Elizabeth was my slave, I kept her papers in this binder,” she said, flipping through the book. “Her contract, her hard limits…oh, here it is. Her story.”

  She popped open the three rings and removed several pages.

  “After she left us the first time, when she went off to college, I had her write her story for me. Her personal journey, how she had grown. I received this, oh, it was maybe two weeks after the semester started at UC-Santa Cruz. That would have been the fall of 1983, if memory serves.”

  She picked up her cigarette and took a puff before snubbing it out in the shell. With the tumbler in one hand and the story in the other, she sipped her Stoli and read aloud.

  “‘The Girl.’ That’s what she called it,” she began.

  Chapter Forty-four

  One hot summer day in 1966, the landlord of a low-rent apartment building in Hollywood called Social Services to complain about a baby crying in the unit rented to a B-movie actress with a known addiction to prescription drugs, sherry, and melodrama. At a court appearance in downtown Los Angeles, the unwed mother lost custody of the baby girl temporarily and was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. The Girl was placed in foster care, and as she grew into childhood and then adolescence, she was shuffled from home to home while the mother tried to get her act together. The mother never did, remaining a shadow in the background of The Girl’s life until the mother disappeared completely when The Girl was twelve.

  “When she was fourteen, The Girl’s foster father took her into his garage, lowered the door, pushed her against a workbench, and raped her. When she reported him to the social worker on a routine visit to the home, The Girl was removed from his care, deemed hard to place, and put in a group home. The father’s case was dismissed on a technicality, but because he had been charged with a crime, after fostering more than a dozen girls over the years, he was no longer permitted to be a foster father.

  “In the group home, The Girl said little, keeping to herself and reading the novels and the books of poetry she found in the home’s small ‘library’—a single three-shelved bookcase—while avoiding the male counselors who, like all men, had begun appreciating her model-thin figure and pretty face. At seventeen, she learned about self-emancipation from a female counselor, and so, after seventeen years of hard luck and a hard life, The Girl became an independent adult. She borrowed money from that same counselor and caught a Greyhound to San Francisco.

  “After a brief stay at the YWCA, The Girl found an apartment with another new arrival to the city and then a job as a bicycle messenger. Life as a rookie messenger was not a bad gig for The Girl. She learned to appreciate the easy nature of her work and the steady rhythm of her days, up early with the crisp morning air, walking from her apartment in the Tenderloin to Market Street and taking Muni down to the office of Zippo Courier. She was assigned zone four, the Mission.

  “One of the businesses in her zone was a feminist sex shop called Sexquakes. Her first delivery there was eye-opening. As the Girl surveyed the colorful displays of vibrators, dildos, and imaginative sex toys, her eyes grew wide with interest. The woman at the counter noticed and smiled. Her ID badge said her name was Gina and identified her as the store’s owner and resident ‘sexpert.’

  “‘You should come back on your time off,’ she told The Girl, after signing for a letter.

  “The Girl was too unsure of herself to do anything more than nod.

  “But she did, she went back, and that was how Gina Hunter—a married, kinky, bisexual sexpert—became The Girl’s first lover.

  “‘If I had your body, I’d know what to do with it,’” Gina said once, and The Girl had puzzled over the meaning of that remark for days before she finally got it.

  “The Girl became Gina’s best student, absorbing every lesson her mentor provided. For her part, it seemed to The Girl that Gina appreciated her sexual naivety and vulnerability, while The Girl felt lucky to have been given this unexpected ticket into a new world of relationships. Under Gina’s protection, The Girl felt surprisingly safe and soon accepted her role as Gina’s sex slave. Gina and her husband, Buddy, invited The Girl into their home in the Sausalito hills, to live not only as their sex slave, but also as their house slave. To The Girl, this was like being a maid in exchange for room and board and sex.

  “Before long, The Girl found herself agreeing to be shared with other kinksters—Gina’s term for her circle of friends. It was women at first, and then men. Surprisingly, The Girl found she didn’t mind being used as Mistress Gina’s sex toy in this way, and in fact, for the first time in her life, she felt both desirable and beautiful. It was not at all like her experience with her foster father or the creeps at the group home.

  “But there were things that still puzzled The Girl. She couldn’t understand, for example, Gina’s frustration with her other lovers, who were jealous of one another. The Girl felt no jealousy. In fact, she felt nothing but curiosity, and at the moment of bringing someone to orgasm—Mistress Gina or someone else—The Girl felt a satisfying sense of control and accomplishment. Within a few months, The Girl had evolved from idolizing Mistress Gina as a sex goddess to realizing that she, herself—unwanted foster child and ward of the state of California—was capable of becoming a sex goddess in her own right.

  “It was Gina who encouraged The Girl to think about college. The world was a battlefield, Gina said. A college degree provided a woman with some ammunition. Gina suggested UC-Santa Cruz, where she herself had matriculated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. There was a new program offered there that would be good for The Girl—women studies, an academic field with a real future. At the San Francisco Library in the Civic Center, Gina and The Girl researched scholarships, finding one that looked especially promising, provided by a private charity for former foster children. Gina helped The Girl with the paperwork for scholarships, financial assistance, and her application to UCSC. To The Girl’s utter amazement, she was accepted. Scholarships would cover half
of the annual cost; student loans, the rest.

  “On the weekend before the fall semester began, Buddy drove the three of them down the Pacific Coast Highway to the Cowell Residence Hall on the UCSC campus. The Girl stepped out of Buddy’s restored Buick Riviera and stretched her long legs. She looked up at the building that would be her new home for the next four years, a red-roofed dorm on the edge of a forest of pine trees. Then she looked west to the breathtaking view of the Monterey Bay.

  “Thanking the Hunters, The Girl kissed first Buddy on his scratchy cheek, and then Gina on her soft mouth. After Gina’s kiss, The Girl lowered her head as Gina unfastened the thin leather collar she had placed around her neck nearly a year before.

  “‘Elizabeth Taylor Bundy,’” Gina said. “‘I release you.’”

  Chapter Forty-five

  Gina drained her vodka and set down the tumbler. Then she gathered the pages of the story that she had let fall on the glass tabletop and placed them back in the binder, snapping the rings shut and closing it.

  “That was the last time I saw Elizabeth, the day we dropped her off at college,” she told Stone. “And then suddenly last October, she showed up at our door, asking to be collared. She wanted to be our slave again. I said, what happened to your education? What happened to Santa Cruz? She said she’d run out of money and dropped out. She said she had couch-surfed around California, even gone back to L.A. before returning to the Bay Area. She begged me to take her back. I talked it over with my husband, and we did. She became our slave again.”

  “Your slave,” Stone repeated. “I don’t get that. We fought a war in this country over slavery. Why would anybody in 1990 want to be a slave?”

  Gina sighed. “You have to understand relational power dynamics, the Dominant/submissive dyad,” she began patiently. “I can’t speak for people on the ‘s’ side of the slash because I’m a Dominant, but slaves have told me that they feel an incomparable power in surrender. One slave of mine called it the ‘ultimate power trip.’ A slave who freely chooses to surrender her will completely to me is exercising more power than someone in an egalitarian relationship. And there is an unrivaled feeling of release in letting go, I’m told, in letting a strong personality take total control. That may seem counterintuitive to you, but that’s what happens. It’s the mystery and the pull of the D/s dynamic. Does that make sense to you at all?”

  “I guess,” Stone said. “You called her your house slave.”

  “Mm-hmm. A house slave functions like a personal assistant in the vanilla world. Or a maid. Elizabeth cleaned our house, shopped for our groceries, kept our vehicles filled with gas, all the usual chores.”

  Stone hesitated. “What about sex?”

  Gina’s gaze darted up and down, running along Stone’s body in a quick assessment. “Yes, there was sex. That was part of the contract.”

  “The contract.”

  “Elizabeth signed a contract with me. Many Mistress/slave relationships include a written contract that clarifies the terms of their agreement. We had two contracts, the first when she was in slave training, and this second contract, when she returned to us as my slave.”

  “She lived here with you. Both times?”

  “Yeah, it was a twenty-four/seven arrangement. I allowed her free time each Saturday from 10:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night. Otherwise, she was here in our house or out running errands for us or with us at a play party. That was in the contract.”

  “What did she do on Saturdays?”

  “I think she went to the Castro in the city. I know she liked to watch the old films at the Castro Theatre. Honestly, I thought she was happy with us.”

  “So, what happened?”

  Gina shrugged. “She stayed until May and then she vanished. Just like that. No goodbye. Nothing. Although looking back, I can see I should have expected it. These kids you bring in off the street, they’re unstable. Even when you try to show them love, they don’t know how to accept it. And they can’t give love. They’ll lie and say they love you, but they don’t. They can’t help themselves. They’re too wounded to love. You have to bond when you’re an infant. You have to have a loving human to bond with. If you don’t connect that way, it doesn’t matter what happens later.”

  Gina looked at Stone more sympathetically.

  “I’m not saying Elizabeth is incapable of loving someone, but there was always something missing in her. I studied psychology when I was in college. Psychologists would say that Elizabeth’s development was arrested, her emotional growth was stunted. She was beautiful, and she had an incredible mind. But she was just too damaged. We tried. My husband and I really tried with her.”

  By turning her into your sex slave? That’s how you tried? was what Stone was thinking, but she said nothing.

  “Now I have a question for you,” Gina said. “Do you know where Elizabeth is?”

  This time, Stone saw no reason to be honest.

  “I don’t,” she lied.

  “Too bad,” Gina said. “I’d like to have my collar back.”

  Chapter Forty-six

  The public’s perception of life as a PI was all wrong, Zoe thought idly as she followed Elizabeth’s Taurus to the Doll Crib. Moonlighting, Magnum, PI, Hart to Hart; during the eighties, there had been a whole slew of TV shows that glamorized the profession. But that was la-la land. Not much that came out of Los Angeles bore any resemblance to reality. Most of the work of a real PI was brain-numbingly monotonous. It was sitting in a parked car drinking coffee, trying not to doze off and miss something exciting, like Elizabeth going shopping at Kroger that afternoon or taking her blouses to a dry cleaner, as she had done earlier.

  The Doll Crib had been busier than usual that night because it was Saturday. Elizabeth left the club late, nearly 2:30 a.m. Zoe followed her to Briarcliff, wondering if she would be joined for another late-night date by Laura Sterling. Zoe had waited a few minutes out of curiosity, but when no BMW appeared, she had left.

  Now at the Michelangelo, she shut off the engine of the rental car and sat in her parking space for a moment, allowing herself to feel how really tired she was. A glass of Pinot Grigio to unwind and then clean sheets and a big soft pillow—that was what sounded good right now. She picked up her handbag and opened the door. The garage was deserted. Apparently, all the players and patrons of strip clubs stayed at other hotels, not the Michelangelo, whose guests seemed to turn in early. When she reached the elevator, she pressed the button for up. She was tired, bone tired.

  “You’ve been following me.”

  Zoe felt the unmistakable force of hard, cold metal at the back of her neck. “You’ve got a gun.”

  “This is Georgia. Everybody’s got a gun in Georgia.”

  Zoe tilted her head down and sideways enough to see a pair of jeans, bare ankles, and white running shoes. Elizabeth. She must have followed her from Briarcliff. The tail got tailed.

  “This way,” Elizabeth ordered, pushing her into a dark corner. “You’ve been following me. I want to know why.”

  “And I’d love to tell you, but I’d really feel more talkative if you could get that pistol out of my collar.”

  Zoe surprised herself by her composure, especially considering that she’d never had a gun pulled on her before. Maybe it was exhaustion. Everything was suddenly feeling very unreal.

  “Why?” Elizabeth repeated. “Why have you been following me?”

  Zoe felt the barrel pushed harder against the sensitive skin beneath her hair. What would Rich do? she asked herself.

  “I’m working a case,” Zoe admitted. “I’m a private investigator from California. I’m looking into the death of Emily Bryson.”

  Elizabeth hesitated for just a moment. Then she demanded, “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Probably nothing,” Zoe lied. “Your name came up as one of her friends in college. At UC-Santa Cruz. I’m just following up on leads. That’s all I’m doing.”

  The gun went away.

  “May I
turn around?” Zoe asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Up close, Elizabeth was more attractive than from a distance. Her eyes were an unblinking blue-gray, large and intense, with pinhole pupils. Elizabeth slipped the black semi-automatic into the waistband of her jeans, struggling a bit as if this were a motion she was unaccustomed to making.

  “That’s got nothing to do with me. I haven’t seen Emily since college.”

  “And I’d like to hear more about that,” Zoe said. “Is there somewhere more private we could go to talk?”

  “I’m not talking to you,” Elizabeth snapped. “I’m not saying another word. And if I see you following me again, I’ll…I’ll…”

  You’ll what? Zoe wondered. Kill me the way you killed Emily?

  “Just leave me the fuck alone,” Elizabeth threatened.

  She walked away. Zoe let her go.

  ****

  In her hotel room, Zoe pulled a dewy bottle of wine from the mini-fridge. She poured a glassful and downed it in three swallows. Then she poured the rest of the bottle and drank that, too.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  “Is Detective Washington available? I want to report a crime.”

  Zoe was standing in the lobby of the sixth precinct, talking into a call box to a female voice that came from somewhere behind a bulletproof glass wall. It was Monday, July 16, her seventh day in Atlanta and the sixth day of surveillance on Elizabeth.

  “He’s out on a case. Wait a minute, please, and I’ll see who’s available,” said the voice.

  Zoe waited. A few minutes later, she heard a loud buzz followed by a door opening partway. A uniformed officer poked his close-shaved head out.

  “You’re the one with the crime to report?”

  “Yes,” Zoe said.

  He handed her a lanyard with a badge that identified her as a visitor. “Follow me, please.”