Black Leather

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  “I’m not a psychologist.”

  “I know. But you’re good at this stuff. And you’re here. When I find out what kind of an expert witness we need, I’ll hire one.”

  She reached over and gathered up the photographs that were strewn about her. Her t-shirt rode up her back as she did that, and Joseph couldn’t take his eyes off that stripe of smooth, pale skin.

  What did she look like under those pink sweatpants?

  She handed him the sheaf of photographs. It took all he had to rip his attention away from her and direct it toward the task at hand. The unpleasant task at hand.

  The photographs were grisly. He’d seen things like this in the movies, but that was Hollywood. That was make believe. This was real. This was brutal and ugly. “What was the actual cause of death?” he asked.

  “Suffocation. His blood alcohol level was past the point of consciousness. Conjecture is that he brought some woman home with him, kept drinking, passed out, she got overly frisky with a razor blade, and then smothered him with his pillow when she was finished.”

  Joseph looked up. “She didn’t do this after he was dead?”

  Irene shook her head, picked up her wine and took a gulp.

  “How do you think his skin got into Cynthia’s luggage?”

  “I think we’ll find that answer when we find whoever killed him,” Irene said, her cool blue eyes looking into his with a feminine innocence.

  Joseph tore his eyes away from Irene’s. Cynthia was accusing Irene of committing this murder. Did she? Was the woman who skinned a man alive and then murdered him—smothered him, for God’s sake—sitting a few feet away from him?

  He shuffled through the awful photographs until he could get a grip on his professionalism. This was a professional consultation. He needed to get his mind right.

  He stopped at a close up of the work on Warren Begay’s back. “This is very precise work,” he said. “This woman—this person—has done this before.” He said it before he realized that he’d taken all those Polaroids of Irene’s blade-inspired artwork. Proof that he knew. Too late. He decided to keep on, giving her the benefit of his professional experience. Chances are, she’d never know he took those photos. He looked up at her, his face feeling warm. “I guess we shouldn’t presume it was a woman,” he said.

  Irene shrugged, her attention focused on him in an intense beam.

  He felt his shirt stick to his back as perspiration oozed out of him. “It took her a long time,” he continued. “This wasn’t done in anger, nor was it done in sexual heat. This is more like... I don’t know... afterglow. She’s marking her territory. It’s a feral thing.”

  “A control thing,” Irene said.

  Joseph looked up and met her eyes. Crystal blue. “Exactly. Only this is not necessarily control over this one person, it’s more of a territorial claim-staking.”

  “The city of Los Angeles?”

  “Maybe. Maybe deeper, more personal. Maybe it’s a statement to the world in general, or to one person in particular.” He set the photographs on the couch between them. “If she were an ape, she’d have stood up and beat her chest when she finished.”

  “She,” Irene said.

  “Hm?”

  “You said you didn’t want to presume the killer was a woman, but you keep saying ‘she.’”

  Joseph, stumped for a reply, just looked at her. “Yes,” he said.

  Irene raised an eyebrow in amusement. “I think that calls for more wine,” she said, and picked up the empty bottle. “Would you get me a fresh legal pad?” She tipped her head toward her office. “On the shelf behind my desk.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen, muscled buttocks moving fluidly beneath the loose sweatpants, and Joseph walked across the thick vanilla colored carpet into the second bedroom. A stack of yellow legal pads, their cellophane wrapper carelessly ripped open, sat on a bookshelf right behind the desk. He grabbed two, then reached across the desk to the black leather dice cup that held an arsenal of sharpened pencils.

  His hand passed over a floppy disk marked “Quicken Backup.”

  Joseph kept his own financial data on Quicken, so he knew that this was exactly what Owen Crowell was looking for. Irene probably kept all her credit card records right here.

  Without thinking about it for another second, he slipped the disk into his pants pocket, grabbed a couple of fresh pencils, and went back to the living room.

  His face burned with the heat of subterfuge, but he’d seen the photographs. If Irene did that to the Los Angeles guy, she needed to be behind bars.

  He traded her pad and pencils for the bottle of wine, opened it and poured while she made notes.

  “She’s strong,” Joseph said, continuing his professional consult. “Physically strong. She had to roll him over several times, and he’s a big guy.”

  He sipped his wine then shuffled through the photographs again. “This is in large part about skin. This all has something to do with the guy’s skin. The color of it, maybe.”

  “Maybe you’re just sensitive to skin color,” Irene said.

  “Could be, but she didn’t pull a Lorena Bobbitt here, did she? She didn’t cut off hair or fingers, stab him or remove internal organs. She took skin. A long strip of skin, almost surgically removed.” His mouth was getting dry and cottony. He gulped more wine, then leaned a little closer to Irene and trailed his fingers across the photograph. “She’s into his skin. She enjoyed this. She enjoyed this very much.”

  Irene put her pencil down.

  “She took her time,” Joseph said, “slicing down both sides, then lifting the skin up in a continuous stripe. She liked the feel of the skin, she liked the feel of the blood oozing from the precise wound, she liked pulling it up off of him slowly, like peeling off a Band Aid.”

  He looked up at Irene. Her lips were parted, and her eyes were focused on his lips. She looked aroused, and that made him desperate to continue.

  “She’s used to having control, used to having her way, used to success.”

  Joseph stopped for another drink. Irene made no move toward either her pencil or her wine. “She wants him to know,” he continued, “she wants the world to know, that she isn’t to be messed with. She’s a powerful woman, choosing her partners with a very specific agenda.”

  Irene leaned in toward him just a touch, but he didn’t want to push it. He leaned back, away from her. “There you have it,” he said, then he put his arms up and stretched, shattering the spell.

  Irene picked up her wine, drained the glass, then wrote furiously on her pad for a few minutes. Joseph waited. “That’s really good, Joseph,” she said, a little bit too fast. “Give it some more thought, okay? If you come up with something else, let me know. I’m going to type up all your notes and give them to her new attorney.”

  “New attorney?”

  “She’s going to Los Angeles. I can’t defend her in Los Angeles.”

  “Why not?”

  “First, because she doesn’t want me, and second, because I have a case load here.”

  “Who will she get?”

  “I don’t know, Joseph. It depends on her resources. You have money?”

  “She can’t go with a public defender, for Christ’s sake.”

  Irene shrugged, shook her head. “I don’t know what to say.”

  They sat in silence for a long moment while both of them thought about Cynthia’s situation.

  “What about the other one?” Joseph finally asked. He poked at the photographs. “This guy’s brother?”

  Irene looked at her watch. “That’s a topic for a different night.”

  “Tomorrow?” Joseph asked too quickly. He was asking her for a date, and he knew there was no question in either of their minds about that.

  Irene looked up at him with mild surprise, then smiled. Joseph felt the electricity spark between them. He knew they were on a dangerous collision course, but he felt powerless to stop it.

  He didn’t want to stop it.

&
nbsp; “Sure,” she said, but without conviction. “Tomorrow would be good.” She looked down at her hands, searching for something. Not finding it there, she looked up again, searching his face, searching his eyes. Searching. He wondered if his anxiety showed as much as hers. “Yes,” she finally said.

  ~~~

  Joseph drove directly from Irene’s apartment to Harvey’s apartment. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. Did Harvey sleep at night? That didn’t matter. Joseph needed him.

  He rang the doorbell. No answer. He rang again.

  “Okay,” he heard Harvey say from inside. A moment later, the locks were thrown and a tousled, redheaded Harvey, wearing only dingy pajama bottoms, opened the door.

  “Hey, Joseph,” he said.

  Joseph held up Irene’s floppy disk. “I need the password,” he said.

  Harvey took the disk. “Quicken, eh? No problem,” he said. “C’mon in.”

  Harvey’s apartment looked like the typical computer geek bachelor pad. The place was knee-high in computer parts, disks, books, software documentation, and Internet magazines. It had a musty, moldy odor. Harvey and his apartment both needed to be aired out.

  He plugged the disk into his computer and started tapping the keys. “This’ll only take a second,” he said. “These passwords are nothing. They’re just a deterrent, not really a safety code. They’ll keep the average guy out.”

  “But not you.”

  “Not me.” He tapped the last key with a dramatic flair and gobbledygook began scrolling up his monitor screen. Harvey adjusted his glasses and peered in at it. His skinny chest was absolutely white, as if it had been years since Harvey had seen the sun.

  When the screen stopped scrolling, he tapped a few more commands. “Ha. There it is. Veneer.” He looked up at Joseph, tapped a few more times, popped the disk out and held it out toward him. “The password is Veneer.”

  “Veneer.” Joseph shook his head.

  Everything pointed to Irene. Everything pointed to her.

  “Thanks, bud. I owe you.”

  “You divorced that babe yet?” Harvey got up from his computer terminal and walked Joseph toward the door.

  “She doesn’t want you,” Joseph said, smiling at the old joke. “She’d be more interested in somebody with... you know, a personality. A life.”

  “Hey,” Harvey said, feigning hurt. “If I had a life, I wouldn’t be here in the middle of the night to pry out your passwords.”

  Joseph shook his hand. “Thanks,” he said.

  “You just tell me when she’s available,” Harvey said, grinning, as he opened the door. “I’ll do the rest.”

  Chapter 13

  Cynthia could see something different in Joseph’s face as soon as he sat down on the far side of the prison glass partition. She couldn’t identify it; she had already been apart from him too long. There had been a time when she could gauge his mood, empathize with his emotions, know, or at least guess fairly accurately, what he was thinking. Immediately. Instantly.

  But that was then and this was now, and his unreadable expression broke her heart all over again as she realized yet one more time that she had lost him.

  If only she had paid attention to him. To them. Tried harder in their marriage. Tried harder to be a better person, and not been such an ass.

  She picked up the black telephone handset. It had something sticky on it. “Hi,” she said.

  “I’m working with Owen Crowell,” Joseph started out, “the Assistant DA. We may be on to something.”

  Excitement bubbled up in Cynthia. She held it down, not wanting to appear childish in front of Joseph. That had been one of his complaints, that her behavior was so childish. But she had to impress upon him how desperately she needed to get out of there. If this was just the county jail, she couldn’t imagine what real prison must be like. Good God.

  Stay cool, Cynthia, she told herself.

  “So I have a few questions,” he said.

  She didn’t chatter, but she did allow herself a grin. She had to grin, he was so full of good news, and yet so serious. This was wonderful news that they may be on to something. It made her want to laugh. It made her want to dance. There was hope. “Okay,” she said, sitting up and paying attention. She hadn’t felt this good, this full of optimism since she’d been thrown into this hell hole.

  “Every month Irene sends a check for four hundred and forty-five dollars to a place called CP Associates, and the notation reads ‘Rent 2020’,” Joseph said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Twenty-twenty? She still pays rent on that dump?”

  “What is that place?”

  “It’s where Myron’s mother lived for about a million years. It’s down in the Mission District. I can’t believe Irene still keeps that place.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Myron’s mother died, and before he had a chance to go through her things... well, the airplane crashed and he and mom died. Irene was executrix of Mom and Myron’s wills, and I guess she just kept his mother’s place. Pretty weird.”

  “She also pays two American Express bills every month.” Joseph said. “Any idea what that’s about?”

  That hot blood flush began creeping up Cynthia’s neck. Joseph was looking down at his notes, and she hoped he didn’t see it. She hoped this greasy glass that separated them was dirty enough to disguise her discomfort. She cleared her throat, then spoke back into the telephone. “Two? Hmm. Well, she’s been helping me out a little bit.”

  Joseph looked up, his dark eyes daring her to tell the truth. “She pays your American Express bill?”

  “Well...” The familiar shame shredded her good humor, put to bed the idea that she might be getting out of there, that Joseph was doing something to help her. But maybe she had gone over the edge in ways she hadn’t even considered. Who’d have thought that letting Irene pay her AmEx bill would some day come back to haunt her in jail?

  Playing the cutesy way out crossed her mind, but she didn’t look cutesy, not in jail, and she’d worn out that approach with Joseph long ago anyway.

  “For the past year? Or more?”

  The flush was now a full-blown blush, and Cynthia’s heart banged loudly. At least he couldn’t hear that through the phone. “Well...” she said, but she was out of breath, and she knew he heard that.

  Joseph set his notebook down on the peeling Formica ledge and sat up straighter, confronting her directly. “That’s the whole of it, Cynthia. This secretiveness. This little girl naughtiness in you. You were buying things while we were married, charging them and not telling me about it? Having Irene pay your bills? What was that all about?” He paused, then detonated the bomb in a soft, quietly horrible way. “Did Irene pay for the recliner?”

  Cynthia looked down, the flush bringing tears with it. She didn’t want him to see her crying. Again. The old I’m sorry song came back to her, but she couldn’t see herself saying it to him even one more time. She was out of options.

  “Did you think I’d be mad? Did you think I couldn’t afford whatever it was you were buying? These amounts were not horrendous, Cynthia, it wasn’t the shopping that you wanted to do, it was the secret. Keeping it a secret drove the wedge between us.”

  She saw him lay the phone down and lean back in the chair. She knew he’d take a couple of deep breaths and be back with her again. She just had to keep her goddamned mouth shut. Cynthia couldn’t tell him that she always needed somebody to take care of her. She couldn’t tell him that once he volunteered for that job of husband and caretaker, she was unwilling to let go of Irene, who had always taken care of her, especially when their mother could not. Letting Irene pay her American Express bill every month was something Irene was willing to do and it kept some sort of foot in the door, just in case.

  Just in case Cynthia needed Irene in a big way, Irene was still used to taking care of her. But Cynthia couldn’t tell Joseph that. She could never tell Joseph that she had hedged her bets in case their marriage didn’t
work out.

  Maybe that’s one of the reasons why it didn’t work out. She didn’t give it her all. She didn’t trust herself. She hadn’t trusted him.

  A tear fell onto the knee of her prison jumpsuit. She blinked the rest of them out of her eyes, then sneaked a look at him. He had his arms crossed over his chest. He was looking at the ceiling.

  A moment later, he picked up the phone. “That’s the bottom line, Cynthia. That’s why I couldn’t live with you any more. That, right there, was the downfall of our marriage. If you don’t trust, you can’t love.”

  “I do love you,” she said, but it sounded weak and shallow, even to her.

  Joseph shook his head.

  Tears tripped out of her lids and ran freely down her face.

  “Those who don’t trust can’t be trusted,” he said. He ran a hand over his face, then looked at her again. “Did you want me to catch you? Punish you? Did you want me to... ground you? I’m not your father, Cynthia.”

  Cynthia put her hand up against the glass, wanting to touch him, wanting so desperately to touch him. “I need you.”

  “I’m not abandoning you,” Joseph said, his voice smaller, even more detached than it was when he first arrived. “I just feel bad about all of this. About you and me, about... about you. I hope you’ll see somebody about this trust issue. See a professional. See if there’s somebody inside there who’ll give you some counseling.”

  A sprig of hope sprouted in Cynthia. “If I get some treatment, can I come home?”

  Joseph looked at her, his face completely expressionless.

  She’d never seen him look like that before. Panic welled up inside her.

  “No, Cynthia,” he said. “You’re in jail.”

  Chapter 14

  Joseph didn’t want to ask for trouble by parking his new car in a bad area, so he took a taxi instead. He felt like he was looking for trouble as it was, getting out of a taxi in this neighborhood wearing a suit.

  The building with 2020 over the door turned out, as he expected, to be an old, run-down, three-story walkup.