Totally Killer

by Greg Olear

  She pushed the steak sandwich aside. “What’s the plan?”

  Thirty minutes later, Taylor, in the Chez Molineaux uniform, approached a cozy candlelit table, where nuzzled a bleached blonde of the trophy wife variety and a squat old chap with a pockmarked face and hair plugs. His hand was on her well-exposed inner thigh.

  “Good evening. May I start you off with something to drink?”

  “Bombay martini, please. Shaken, not stirred.”

  “And for the lady?”

  “The same.”

  Taylor went to the bar, where a second bartender was setting up shop. Behind the Don Mattingly moustache and Henry Kissinger specs was the unmistakable mug of Asher Krug.

  “How’s it going?”

  “So far, so good.” She glanced around at the army of waiters and waitresses buzzing around the dining room. “You sure this isn’t suspicious? I mean, none of these people know us. Won’t they think…”

  “Are you kidding? The turnover in this place is ridiculous. New people come and go. Don’t give it another thought.”

  Asher mixed the martinis—shaking and not stirring them, even though that process dissipates the alcohol, thus defeating the purpose of drinking them in the first place—and Taylor presented them to the Stewards on a silver tray.

  “Are you ready to order?” she asked Amber. You were supposed to ask the ladies first, was what she’d learned in her years in food service.

  But it was Bill Steward who answered, in a gruff, but somehow effete, voice. “Porterhouse. Rare. Mashed potatoes—plain, no garlic. And I’ll have the same.”

  “How would you like that cooked?”

  “Rare. Like I already told you”—he looked at her nametag—“Meghan.”

  “Right. Rare. Sorry about that.”

  Taylor relayed the orders to Asher, who gave them to Roland Molineaux.

  “I don’t know if I like having him involved,” she whispered, watching the portly chef tub-thump off.

  “Who, Roland? No, he’s cool. He’s with the CIA and the CIA.”

  “Huh?”

  “The Culinary Institute of America,” he explained. “The other CIA, they call it. Relax. This is almost over.”

  She leaned against the bar and produced a cigarette, which Asher lit for her.

  “I thought you didn’t approve of smoking.”

  “This is a special occasion.”

  “I love the moustache, by the way. It makes you look like Burt Reynolds. You should totally keep it.”

  “Not a chance.”

  Roland brought the steaks out himself. Then Taylor swung by the table to make sure the PDA-happy Stewards didn’t need anything. Other than a room, they didn’t. She smoked another cigarette at the bar while they ate, and watched busboys clear the plates.

  It was time.

  Asher took a piece of flourless chocolate cake—a Chez Molineaux specialty—from under the bar. He screwed a candle into the cake and lit it. Then he produced an eyedropper and squirted a few drops of clear liquid onto the cake’s triangular corner.

  “She’s all yours.”

  Taking the cake, Taylor began to sing, a tad self-consciously, the birthday song. She’d done this a million times at the restaurants where she’d hostessed, and always found it an exercise in humiliation. Those waiters who were in the vicinity joined in with poorly cloaked reluctance. Amber applauded, fake tits bouncing up and down. The pockmarked Bill Steward looked genuinely touched. He laughed, gave his wife a lingering wet kiss, and blew out the candle.

  The waiters dispersed. Amber took a forkful of chocolaty goodness and fed it to her husband. Bill Steward accepted the offering greedily. Three minutes later, he collapsed into the remains of the cake, dead. His wife screamed. The place went ape-shit.

  By then, the two assassins had changed clothes—Asher into the usual suit and tie, Taylor into a long floral skirt, black camisole, and denim jacket—and fled through a back door. They were milling in front of the Miss Saigon marquee across the street when the police and ambulance arrived, sirens squealing.

  “Well,” Asher quipped, as EMTs dashed into the restaurant, “that was a piece of cake.”

  But Taylor was in no mood for Bondian badinage. She’d thought she would be relieved when the act was completed, but no—the poisoning had been so simple, the execution so well-executed, that she didn’t feel like she had done anything at all. “That’s it? That was so…anticlimactic.”

  “I told you it’d be easy.” He kissed her. “You were wonderful.”

  “I took a dinner order. I didn’t do anything.” Taylor watched uniformed men wheel out a gurney. A plastic sheet covered the body. “He’s really dead?”

  “They don’t put a blanket on your face if you’re alive.”

  “He seemed like an asshole. Was he an asshole? He seemed like an asshole.”

  “Asshole doesn’t do justice to what a fucking piece of shit that guy was. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  They walked west—briskly, but not briskly enough to arouse suspicion—out of the Theatre District and into what real estate brokers now call Clinton but what in 1991 was still, emphatically, Hell’s Kitchen. Riffraff filtered up from Port Authority. Junkies worked the streets. Muggers were a-prowl. It was a little piece of Bed Stuy in Manhattan.

  They banged a left on Ninth Avenue, slackening the pace. Passing a derelict bearing an empty coffee can and a cardboard sign that read HOMELESS VET WITH AIDS, Asher was visibly disgusted.

  “Vile,” he said. “Half a block away and I can still smell the guy. Christ, I need a drink. Is there a place to have a beer around here?”

  Taylor pointed to a bar on the other side of the street, with a four-foot-tall statue of a smiling pig stationed at its door. “How about there?”

  “Rudy’s?” Asher loosened his tie as if to take it off, then decided against it. “Fuck it. Let’s go slumming.”

  They went past the pig and the battered wooden door and into Rudy’s Bar and Grill, purveyor of cheap beer and free hot dogs since the Great Depression. There was a crowd of people inside, almost all of them men, and most of them looking like they should be hauling amplifiers for the Allman Brothers. Asher—the only suit in the room—bought two bottles of beer at the bar, while Taylor found a booth in the back.

  “Amstel Light?” Taylor said once Asher sat down. “They don’t have anything good on tap?”

  “The taps in this place probably haven’t been cleaned since the Eisenhower administration,” he said. “I already poisoned one person tonight. I’m not a serial killer.”

  “Actually, you are. Lucky for you that chicks dig serial killers. Ted Bundy got marriage proposals till the bitter end.” She killed half the beer in one swig. “So won’t the police want to, like, question us?”

  Asher waved off this suggestion. “Pfft. The guy had a heart attack. He was fat and out of shape and sixty-three. He was lucky he lived as long as he did.”

  “I guess.” She fired up a cigarette. “It’s weird. I don’t have a sense of closure about this, you know? I just…I don’t feel like I just killed somebody. I don’t feel anything, really. Maybe it’s cuz I didn’t see him die?”

  “Konrad Lorenz,” Asher said, nodding in that pompous-professor way of his. “Are you familiar with On Aggression?”

  Taylor figured that this was the first time that anyone had ever mentioned Konrad Lorenz in the confines of Rudy’s. She shook her head.

  “Lorenz says that the more detached we are from the physical act of killing, the easier it is to kill,” said Asher. “Psychologically, I mean. What makes Othello’s strangling of Desdemona so powerful is its raw brutality. When you strangle someone, it’s a tactile experience. You can feel the other person struggling. You can literally feel him die. The physicality exacerbates the mental trauma. But put a gun in somebody’s hand—or an intercontinental ballistic missile—and you’re distancing that person from the brutality of the murder. With physical distance comes psychological distance. Th
at’s why we use the methods we use. We want our clients complicit; we don’t want them traumatized.”

  Asher held up his beer. He was fond of proposing toasts. “To a job well done. You, my dear, are now officially off the hook.”

  Taylor obliged him, raising her glass and drinking. But she didn’t feel off the hook. She was so untraumatized, in fact, that she felt somehow cheated. The lack of closure gnawed at her…but why?

  “Shall we?”

  Back at the Dakota, they set about making love. This involved Asher lying on his back while Taylor, with hooker-worthy precision, slurped him until he was sufficiently swollen. (Fellatio was compulsory to their foreplay, but Asher, incredibly, never reciprocated. He was so old-fashioned, so traditional, that he operated under the deranged delusion that guys who went down on girls were latent homosexuals. I’m not kidding. When she complained about it one time, he shrugged and said, “I’m no faggot.” If he were a girl, he would probably have believed that you couldn’t get pregnant the first time. And this was the guy Taylor fell for. But I digress.) The sex itself compensated for the shortcomings of the buildup. Through intercourse, Taylor was able to feed, vampire-like, on the feeling of raw power he generated. With each fuck, he injected her (if you excuse the coarse metaphor) with the potency he had in ample supply: charisma, confidence, courage, invincibility, and so forth.

  But this time, on this night, something was different. The pink slip of Bill Seward had changed her. Taylor realized—although she didn’t elucidate it quite this way in her diary—that Asher, virile and vital though he may have been, was not the source of the power she felt while having sex with him. He was merely awakening something she already possessed, something that lay dormant inside her, shut off after years of neglect and abuse. Tonight, she saw that she did not need Asher to get high. She could realize her potential without him—and she had, when she killed Bill Seward.

  There is no more primal expression of potency than taking another man’s life. Why else would the Saddam Husseins and Charles Taylors of the world, the Hitlers and Stalins, the Caligulas and Ivans the Terrible, routinely commit mass murder, if not to feed that sense of power? The ancients knew this; human sacrifice was not just metaphorical, it was a literal attempt to sate the blood-thirst of the gods.

  Most people, of course, don’t have a thrill seeker’s reaction to killing. Konrad Lorenz was right—killing is traumatic. Soldiers have post-traumatic stress disorder. Lady Macbeth washes her hands obsessively (as does Natasha in The Lap of Uxory). Homicides go to jail, repent, find Jesus or Allah. When atrocities are committed in chaotic lands—Sierra Leone, Kurdistan, Darfur—it is always a tiny percentage of the population, social scientists assert, that does the bulk of the killing. Had an abusive childhood left Taylor with deficient empathy? Was she born lacking it? Was it some opposition of the stars that made her the way she was? Look, I wish I could explain why she did what she did, but I can’t. I can only report on what happened. And On Aggression simply did not apply to Taylor Schmidt. She wasn’t traumatized by killing; on the contrary, she was exhilirated. There was no pang of guilt, only a rush of adrenaline. And she wanted to feel that way again. It was a dark inkling, this epiphany she had that night, while going down on Asher Krug of all things—so dark that when she finally gave it voice, she was shocked to hear the words coming out of her mouth.

  “I want to do it again,” she said, pulling away.

  Asher gestured at the unwieldy thing between his legs, which had the bouncy look of a helium balloon tethered to the ground. “Me, too,” he said. “But we need to do it once before we do it again.”

  “I’m not talking about sex, Asher. I’m talking about the pink slip.”

  His enthusiasm began to wither.

  Once her desire had been uttered, it gained momentum. “I need to do it again.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m totally serious.”

  “Well, you can’t. One and done. Those are the rules.”

  “The rules? We just fucking murdered somebody, and you’re talking about rules? What kind of an outlaw are you?”

  “Outlaw? I never said I was an outlaw. I work for Quid Pro Quo in order to effect change. Period, full stop. I’m no outlaw, Taylor. I’m a revolutionary. I’m Patrick Henry. I’m Nathan Hale. I’m George Washington.”

  Her eyes were wide now. She was all Miranda. “Then let me be Betsy Ross.”

  “Taylor, I can’t.”

  “Why not? You think because I’m a woman, I’m not up to the job? Is that it? Or do you get your jollies knowing you’re special and everybody else is shit? You’re a revolutionary. Great. Let me join the revolution.”

  “Taylor…”

  The more she talked, the more attractive the idea seemed. Why not her doing the pink slips? Why not her arrayed in pricey clothes, flitting around Manhattan in a Jaguar, living in Yoko Ono’s building? Why not her playing the Grim Reaper? “Talk to Lydia about me. See what she says.”

  Asher’s face went ashen with what had to be raw fear, and his erection subsided completely. “No, Taylor. No way. The company…this is not something to mess around with.”

  “Whatever, talk to Lydia, don’t talk to Lydia, but let me help you. I have to do this, Asher. I need to do this.”

  “You’re upset. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  Now both of them were sitting up, on opposite sides of Asher’s king-size bed. In the silence, she found a smoke, lit up, and took a few drags. She smoked too much, Taylor. Not that it mattered in the long run—I guess she knew what she was doing.

  “It would be fun, Asher.” With her free hand she caressed his chest. “Do you know how wet it would make me, to do it with you?”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  Asher took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then, with the grace of a gymnast, he bounded out of bed, grabbed the remote on the bureau, and turned on the hi-fi. He pressed the volume button six or seven times, so when the song came on—it was “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” by Culture Club; bizarre, that Asher would like that song, but why else would it have been in the CD changer?—Boy George’s voice was loud enough to wake the neighbors. Or would have been, in our crappy apartment.

  He sat on the bed next to Taylor, caressed away the strand of hair that was over her ear, and whispered. “We need to be careful.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “They have the place bugged,” he explained, his voice so low she could barely hear him. “It’s not safe to talk here.”

  “Why would they bug your apartment?”

  “Lydia doesn’t trust me. She and I…we’ve had some differences lately. Are you serious about joining the revolution?”

  She didn’t give a damn about the revolution. In fact, she had no idea what he was talking about—I had to piece it together myself later. But she would say whatever she needed to say to achieve the rush again. “Totally.”

  “Good. But just so we’re clear, Quid Pro Quo and the revolution are two different things.”

  She had never seen him act this way before—frightened, almost panicky. It did not wholly shatter his cool image, but she could definitely detect a chink in the armor. “Does that mean I’ll get to do it again?”

  “Wait a few days, see how you feel,” he said. “If you aren’t racked with guilt, it’s go-time.”

  “Oh, Asher, you won’t regret this.”

  Although neither of them recognized it at the time, the subsequent lovemaking—which was well-documented in her diary and which I’ll gloss over—represented the zenith of their relationship. It was all downhill from there.

  When I came home from work the next day, I was surprised to find Taylor in. She was sitting at the kitchen table, poring over some thick hardcovers and a few pieces of paper, pencils at the ready. She looked like she was studying for an exam.

  “Hey, Todd.”

  “Taylor. What a pleasant surprise.”

  But the surprise was n
ot entirely pleasant. See, her absence had been so predictable lately, I had gotten a mite careless with her diaries, which she had had the decency to leave in her closet when she moved the rest of her stuff to Asher’s. There were three or four of them on the nightstand by my bed (the sex scenes made for pre-sleep masturbatory fodder). Had she found them?

  “Where’s Asher?”

  “Work,” she said. “His hours suck.”

  Nothing in her tone suggested that she’d found the diaries, and I relaxed.

  “You have some mail,” I said. “Let me find it.”

  I darted into my room, collected the diaries, and jammed them under the mattress. Then I found the stack of her mail and brought it into the living room.

  “Anybody call?”

  “Just your mom. Here. Junk, mostly.”

  “Throw it in my bag, would you?”

  I did what she asked, and took a seat on the couch.

  “Todd,” she said, “have you ever wanted to kill someone?”

  Having just committed murder the night before, this was, for Taylor, a perfectly logical question. But I was not privy to her felonious activities. The diaries she’d left in the apartment covered the time between junior high and the morning after her Rainbow Room date with Asher Krug. The current installment of said diary she continued to keep either in her office or on her person. Thus, I did not discover the dread secret of Quid Pro Quo, or anything that happened subsequently, until later.

  “Well, sure,” I said. “Jerry Jones. Motherfucker fired Tom Landry.”

  “Who?”

  I am from South Jersey—Eagles country—but I rooted for the Cowboys, mostly because I hated Eagles fans.

  “Thomas Wade Landry? Creator of the 4–3 defense?”

  Apparently they didn’t watch football in Warrensburg. Taylor wrinkled her nose at me. “I’m serious.”

  So I gave the question serious thought. While there had been moments in my life when my ire was sufficiently piqued to fantasize about homicide—usually when I was driving—I couldn’t think of a single instance of wanting to kill someone, nor could I name anyone whose demise I eagerly desired, the Dallas Cowboys owner excepted. I told her so.