“‘I warned you,’ she said. ‘I told you to be careful and especially to stay away from boys in your own school. Didn’t I?’ She turned to me and said, ‘Let this be a lesson to you, Clea, and don’t be as impulsive as Alison is.’
“I wish she hadn’t done that sort of thing,” I said.
“What sort of thing?” the detective asked.
“Pit us against each other like that. Alison loved me and still does, but she resents me too.”
“Did she have anything to do with Michael Barrington’s death?” he asked quickly.
“No. Well, I shouldn’t say categorically no.”
“You’re not going to tell me she was jealous, are you? And she talked Richard into doing it?”
As the lights of passing cars flashed on his face, I saw his cynical smirk. I was sure it came from years and years of police work and having to confront all sorts of riffraff. It occurred to me that professions, jobs, the roles we play, all create masks in our faces, masks that fade in and fade out with an automation that dehumanizes us, makes us kin to machinery. Events or words trigger reactions that skip over thought and feeling. One moment he was feeling sorry for me and expressing a sincere compassion, and the next, he was mechanically denigrating me.
“No. What happened between Richard and me and Richard and Michael was different,” I said as we drove in.
“How so?”
I parked the car and turned to him.
“I was falling in love with Michael. It wasn’t just another sexual escapade.”
“So? I don’t understand. Why is that different?”
“Apparently, so was Richard.”
“What do you mean?” He thought a moment. “You don’t mean Richard was also in love with Michael Barrington?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Michael had been his lover too. Actually, I found out very recently,” I added. “At first I did think it was just an incestuous jealousy.” I laughed with a maddening chill that startled the detective. “You see, even Androgyne can be blind when it comes to emotions, especially if those emotions involve other Androgyne. I had thought Richard’s motives were more sublime.”
“Incest? More sublime?”
“In a sense, yes. I thought he was thinking of me; he wanted me all for himself. But no, he wanted Michael all for himself.”
The detective shook his head.
“What happened to this built-in need to share?”
“Yes. What happened to it? I must confess, I didn’t like the idea of sharing Michael with Richard, any more than he liked the idea of sharing him with me. The difference is, I wouldn’t kill Michael over it.”
“Are you sure?” Detective Mayer asked.
“What do you mean? Why do you even ask such a thing?”
He shrugged.
“Maybe you killed Michael after all and now you are concocting this story to cover your own guilt.”
“But when I first came to you, you said it wasn’t possible for me to have committed the murder. You said it had taken great strength to do the physical damage to his body.”
“Uh-huh. That’s because I was convinced then that Richard was not only the killer of Barrington, but had committed other murders too. But I also know that women caught up in some passion have been known to achieve great physical strength.
“Just yesterday, we had a situation. A four-year-old child was hit by an automobile in West Los Angeles and pinned under the rear wheel. The child’s mother literally lifted the car off her body and pulled her out from under. Later, she didn’t recall doing it, but there were witnesses who confirmed she had.
“I’m not saying you killed Barrington. I’m just showing you how everything is possible in an infinite universe,” he added, now smiling coyly. “I’m going to need more concrete evidence that it was Richard who committed the murder and not you, of course.”
“You’ll get your evidence,” I snapped.
“Will I?” He turned from me to the house and then looked at me again.
“You want to come in for an after-dinner drink?” I asked. Actually, by then the drink was a foregone conclusion. I didn’t have to ask. Mayer’s actions, his gestures, the look in his eyes were as good as a road map showing me the way to his motives and thoughts. Most men were like my detective: transparent.
“Sure.”
We got out and walked quietly to the front door. I dug for the key in my purse, but when I put it to the lock, my hand shook. How strange, I thought. Why did I suddenly feel this anxiety?
The detective saw my fingers tremble and put his hand over mine.
“May I?” he asked. I gave him the key and he inserted it into the lock. But just before he actually turned it, a bullet came crashing into the door right between us.
“Down!” he cried pulling me toward the patio floor. He reached up and continued to turn the key so the door would open. A second shot splintered the doorjamb on our right. He pushed the door open and we quickly crawled into the house.
“Stay down,” he said, holding his palm against the small of my back. Then he drew his gun and slammed the door shut. I felt ridiculous face down on the marble floor. He stepped past me, went to the front window, pulled back the curtain in the corner and gazed into the night.
“I don’t see anyone out there,” he whispered, but he kept searching.
I got to my feet and brushed down my clothing.
“Get away from that door!” he commanded. I moved farther into the house quickly. He looked out again. “What the hell…” He turned back to me, his eyes narrowing. “You don’t look all that surprised,” he said.
“I’m not.” I put down my purse and went to the bar. He returned his pistol to its holster and followed.
“What is this? Why aren’t you in some kind of shock? We were just shot at! Twice!”
“We weren’t,” I replied as I took out the Sambuca. “I was and I don’t think they meant to kill me. Although,” I added, looking up at his confused face, “I won’t swear to that.”
“What do you mean they didn’t mean to kill you? Who didn’t mean to kill you?”
“The Androgyne. One of them anyway … whoever Alison put on it, I imagine,” I added. “Rocks?”
“What?”
“Do you want yours on the rocks?”
“Oh.” He looked back at the door. “Yeah, please. Is there a back door, a side entrance?”
“French doors off my bedroom right down this corridor,” I said pointing. “They’re the closest.”
“I’ll be right back. I want to look around.”
“Should I say be careful?”
He found his way in the dark and slipped out of the house through my French doors while I prepared his drink. A few minutes later, he knocked on the front door and I let him in.
“Nothing,” he said. He studied the door, found the hole made by the bullet, and then followed its possible trajectory and went to the wall opposite the front door. I put his drink on the bar and sat down on the stool behind it to watch him. He returned to the bar and came around searching for a knife. After he found one, he returned to the wall and dug out the bullet.
“Nine millimeter,” he said holding it up. “Ring any bells?”
“Sorry.” I shook my head.
He pocketed the bullet and returned to the bar.
“What makes you think whoever it was didn’t mean to kill you?” he asked and sat down.
“I think they just meant to frighten me out of talking to you. Androgyne rarely kill their own kind.”
He sipped his drink and shook his head, smiling. There was a twinkle in his eye.
“But isn’t that what you’re doing in a sense?”
“Not in a sense; in actuality.”
“And you can live with that?” The smile left his eyes and was quickly replaced with an intense look, a delving, searching gaze that made me feel like some kind of specimen being studied under a magnifying glass.
“No,” I said softly. “But I don’t intend to live with it. I int
end to die with it.”
“Oh yes.” He nodded. “I forgot.” He looked back at the door again. “Want me to call this in, get some protection up here?”
“No point. I’m positive that whoever it was is gone by now. Besides,” I added, “you’re here and you’re protection.”
He took another, longer sip of his drink.
“I don’t feel especially protective.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe that wasn’t your Androgyne. Maybe that was just some friend of Michael Barrington’s seeking revenge. Another lover, perhaps.”
“I doubt it.” He had an impish twinkle in his eye.
“What makes you so sure?”
“I was enough for him; I’d be enough for any man, for when men make love to an androgynous female, they make love to every fantasy they’ve ever had or will have. We can be many things to a man. He has no need to go looking elsewhere.”
“Unless he’s looking to make love with another man,” he said dryly.
“So what’s your point?”
“It could have been one of his gay lovers. I just had a case like that. One of the men in a relationship was also heterosexual and in love with this woman. She drew him away from his gay lover, so his gay lover killed her. In this case maybe Barrington’s gay lover thinks you killed him and wants to kill you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I had to admit that he was presenting a feasible possibility.
“On the other hand,” he said, still smiling, “maybe he knew about Michael’s relationship with Richard and was jealous of that and thought I was Richard coming home with you. He was aiming for me.”
“You’re the detective,” I said.
“Exactly.” He dropped his smile. “I find it hard to believe that you didn’t know that Michael Barrington had gay lovers.”
“Why?”
“Any man’s sexual history, sexual preferences must be easily discernible to you. You claim you can provide any fantasy. If I buy that and buy your so-called androgynous powers, it would follow that you look with X-ray eyes at any man and see his sexuality like no one else can. Am I right?”
I scrutinized my detective for a moment. It was as if he were growing, changing, metamorphosing himself. And all because of his short, but obviously influential relationship with me. I shouldn’t be surprised, I thought. I often had a dramatic effect on men and changed them in one way or another. The detective was getting more sophisticated, more perceptive. It was almost as if he were beginning to look at the world through my eyes too.
“Let me say I had my suspicions,” I confessed.
“But you didn’t want to believe them?”
“Probably not and that was a mistake, a weakness,” I added quickly.
“Otherwise, you would have realized earlier that Richard was his lover too?”
“I imagine. You’re getting good, Detective Mayer. Should I begin to worry?”
“About what? You’re confessing everything anyway, aren’t you? Or are you holding back something?”
“We all hold back something.” I searched his face, running my gaze over it like the beam of a flashlight over the dark driveway outside. He didn’t change expression. “There’s something you’re hiding.”
“Yeah, but I’m not the subject here. Let’s get back to you and Richard,” he said quickly. I had plucked a string, touched a tender spot. He recoiled inside his detective’s mask and switched on his investigative eyes as if he literally had a knob he could turn on his body and change channels as one would change them on a television set.
“Was Michael Barrington Richard’s first homosexual experience?”
I smiled. “Hardly.” He raised his eyebrows.
“Not you too,” he groaned.
“I said we can be many things. It’s not particularly my thing, but I won’t deny that I have done it. It’s in our nature to explore every aspect of love, every sexual avenue. Let me assure you, however, that I have never found a woman who excited me as much as a man.”
“Thank goodness for the little things.”
“But Richard’s first homosexual experience was rather extraordinary. Care to hear it?”
“I feel like I’m in one of those twenty-five-cent peep shows,” he remarked. Then he saw the look on my face. “Just kidding. Of course I want to hear it. Anything that’s part of this investigation interests me,” he added.
I went to fetch Richard’s diary and returned.
“Perhaps you would be more comfortable on the sofa,” I suggested.
“Yes. Mind if I have a little more of this?” he asked, indicating the Sambuca. “I think I’m going to need it.”
“Top off my glass too, while you’re at it.” I waited for him to bring our freshened drinks. “Thank you.” He sat beside me on the sofa and leaned back against the thick, soft arm. Then he held up his glass.
“Ready?” he said.
I sat back, turned the page, and began.
“Sometimes I am so disgusted with the hunt because there is little or no challenge. It’s like a group of so-called hunters participating in a shoot-off, a thinning out of a herd. The dumb animals are assembled in some fenced-in area and the shooters just kill and kill and kill and after a while they get satiated and then nauseated. Shooting an animal without going through the hunt is like digesting food without having eaten it.
“I remember in my early days I would put on a pair of tight black jeans, so tight that my testicles were clearly outlined in the material and my phallus pressed against the zipper like some thick snake up against the glass in a cage. I’d slick my hair back and put on a black silk shirt unbuttoned to my navel. I would wear a gold chain and then I would go up to Hollywood and hang out on the streets.
“The parade of endless cars wove down the boulevard like an incessant, run-on sentence, a true circle in which the beginning and the end were indistinguishable. No one was going anywhere. It was the going that counted. Movement meant life, excitement, freedom. I saw from the way the young men and young women gaped and scrutinized other young men and young women on the street that they were all looking for that mythical lay, the ultimate sexual encounter. It was truly going to be like shooting stupid buffalo, oblivious to the sound of the guns and the members of their herd falling around them—fat, easy targets, so ignorant of their vulnerability they took any pleasure out of the kill. One might as well shoot at trees.
“And that was the way I suddenly felt, even though car after car paused near me and young women shouted, pleaded, cajoled, some practically begging me to get into their vehicles. This was not really a hunt in any sense of the word. My all-consuming hunger had driven me to take the easiest path, but something else within me, something superior now demanded more, and a realization came over me with that same intuitive pleasure that had accompanied so many new discoveries, a realization that the deeper pleasure came not from the capture, but the hunt.
“It’s in the hunt itself that we gain our strength, our wisdom. The challenge hones and sharpens our powers. We grow when we overcome adversity.
“There was no sexual challenge here. Sex for these young people had lost its magic. It had been reduced to a form of consuming. The parade of customized automobiles with their glaringly bright colors continued, their rap music thumping, making it seem as if we all stood on the shell of some giant heart, beating beneath us. Periodically, there was a pause in the line and girls or men would be drawn into one vehicle or another, sucked up like debris to be swallowed in a vacuum cleaner. Soon afterward they groped one another in the backs of automobiles, grunting and groaning, rushing to accomplish a sexual experience just so they could make their nights complete.”
“About how old was he here?” the detective asked.
“Fifteen,” I said quickly. Richard’s words held my eyes to the page and I wanted to run them through my eyes and my brain and down the channels to my tongue and lips. I was obsessed with them. I felt my face glow as I read on.
“Disgusted with the sight, I fled to anothe
r part of the city, a quiet, residential area known as Hancock Park. The houses here, some veritable mansions, had been built with old Hollywood money. There were nineteenth-century French styles, English Tudor, colonial, a potpourri of architecture constructed at a time when wealthy people sought individuality.
“I gazed into some of the lit windows and saw, however, that many of these houses were dying from the inside out. The inhabitants, descendants of their wealthier ancestors, were unable to keep them up, yet they couldn’t afford to move out and pay the higher rents or mortgages. Walls now had blanched squares where paintings once hung, paintings that had been sold to meet expenses. The gaping holes made me think of toothless old men and indeed the worn, crinkled rugs reminded me of the dried and wrinkled skin of old women. Many of the large rooms were underfurnished, their open spaces places for ghosts to hover and mourn the old days.
“Two houses down a young man emerged to walk his dog, a gray toy poodle who looked arthritic and waddled like a duck. When it saw me, it barked frantically, the sound dying halfway up its throat. It always amused me how animals sensed the danger in us faster than their inferior masters. Even birds flitted about madly when we approached. Cats raised their backs into humps and showed their teeth. Only snakes seemed unafraid, even friendly.”
“Now why is it that I would have thought that?” the detective said with his usual sarcasm.
“It just so happens that there is a biblical explanation for that,” I replied.
“In whose Bible?”
“Yours. With a different interpretation, however. It wasn’t the devil who tempted Adam and Eve in the form of a snake; it was an Androgyne. We were there at the time, too, you know.”
“So why would they like you if they were blamed for something you did?” the detective asked quickly.
“Because men hate them and they have no one else. They’re lonely.”
He started to laugh, but I raised my long, but graceful right forefinger and leaned toward him, forcing him to stare into my eyes.
“Don’t ever underestimate the importance of loneliness, Detective Mayer. People, animals, will do anything to avoid it. It will drive them even to do things you would consider kinky or at least bizarre.” His smile quickly faded. Had I struck a vulnerable place in his heart? What were his secrets? I wondered for the first time. I smiled. “Something sound familiar?”
The Need Page 10