Totally Killer

by Greg Olear

  “I told you, I was in Missouri.”

  “Bullshit. How could you do this to me? How could you fucking do this to me? You fucking bitch.”

  My anger was a flamethrower, zapping white-hot flames right at her. But Taylor’s heart was made of asbestos, apparently; the fire had no effect on her. Her eyelids were barely open. She seemed not to be aware that I was upset. “Can you get me some water?”

  Taylor teetered through the living room and fell onto the sofa.

  “Sure thing,” I said, with as much sarcasm as I could muster, which was quite a bit. “Coming right up.” I made a big show of the operation, filling a glass with ice, topping it with water from the tap (bottled water was unheard of in those days), and presenting it to her like Marcel would a fine Burgundy. “Here you are, Your Majesty.”

  The sarcasm, like the anger, while radioactive to me, did not seem to register on her inner Geiger counter. “Thanks.” Taylor took a sip and coughed violently.

  Now I was really pissed. The only thing worse than rage deferred is rage ignored. One wrong word and I don’t know what I would have done. Hit her, probably, although I’ve never hit anyone before in my life, much less a woman. I am not, by nature, a violent man. “Well? Talk, damn it!”

  With some effort, Taylor forced her eyelids open and met my angry gaze. Her voice was a whisper, faint and faraway. “Asher and I broke up.”

  Forget placation—this had the effect of a horse tranquilizer. “You broke up?”

  It got better.

  “We broke up because of you.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Because of you.”

  Instantly my anger evaporated. Everything that I had planned to say, the monologue I’d spent all week preparing, fled my brain. None of it mattered now. Not with this bit of news. Completely disarmed, I sat down next to her. My voice took on its usual soft, avuncular tone. “What happened?”

  “He said if you didn’t do your pink slip by the end of the week…” Taylor paused here for another sip of water, and again wretched violently. “He said if you didn’t do the pink slip by the end of the week, I’d have to kill you.”

  You know the expression “my blood turned cold”? Well, mine did. Really. It felt like every ounce of hemoglobin in my veins transmuted to ice water. Not just my veins—every synapse, every nerve ending in my body was chilled to the…well, to the bone. “Is that why you’re here? To kill me?”

  “Retard.” She punched me in the leg. “That’s why I broke up with him. You’re my best friend. You’re the only person in this whole stupid town who doesn’t treat me like shit. I would never do anything to hurt you.”

  “Why are you so drunk?”

  “I’m not drunk, Todd. I’m drugged. The fucker tried to poison me.”

  “What?”

  “He slipped me something. The date-rape drug, I think. That’s why I’m so out of it. Fortunately, I realized it before I took the full dose.” That explained the bloodshot and watery eyes, the heavy eyelids. “See? I’m barefoot. I didn’t even have time to put my shoes on.” She wiggled her toes at me. “I can’t believe I fell for a fucking psychopath.”

  All things considered, the fact that Asher was a professional murderer should have tipped Taylor off to his warped psychopathology months ago, when the secret first came out, but I didn’t press the issue. Taylor Schmidt was having her Saul of Tarsus moment, and better late than never. That was enough for me.

  I didn’t have time to savor my victory, though, because I realized that this was far from over. “But won’t Asher try and kill me?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  Taylor smiled a wicked smile purloined from Lydia Murtomaki.

  “You didn’t…”

  The wicked smile vanished, and her voice got curt. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  “Okay, we won’t talk about it.”

  “All I did was buy us some time. Lydia will send someone for you…unless Donna Green gets her P.S., and soon.”

  I thought of my ex-boss, her bad clothes, her Gospel singing voice, her struggles with her weight. I didn’t like her particularly, but I didn’t want her dead, and I certainly didn’t want a hand in her murder.

  “I won’t do it,” I said. “I can’t do it.”

  “I know that,” Taylor said, “and I respect that. That’s why I’m going to do it for you.”

  This was touching and all, in a reverse-chivalrous kind of way, but it didn’t exactly solve the larger problem, i.e., Donna Green getting offed. “But…”

  “All you need to do is keep it secret. Lydia and the others will never know.”

  “The others? What others? Who are the others?”

  Taylor continued as if I hadn’t even spoken. “Understand one thing, Todd—Donna Green is a goner, no matter what you decide to do. She can’t be saved now. Your choice is simple: preserve the lives of your parents and friends, as well as your own, or don’t. There is no third option.”

  It was like a game we used to play in college. Someone would propose two undesirables—Barbara Bush and Marilyn Quayle, say—and you have to decide which of the two you’d rather get jiggy with. Death Is Not an Option was the name of the game. In the Quid Pro Quo version, death was the only option.

  “I understand.”

  “I can see your mind spinning. Just stop. There’s no way out of this.”

  “I said I understand.”

  “I got you into this mess, and I’m going to get you out. Just trust me, okay? Will you do that? Will you trust me?”

  There is an old adage about how you’re never supposed to trust people who ask you to trust them. That old adage doesn’t apply when the speaker is as lovely as Taylor Schmidt—not when the listener is Todd Lander.

  “Of course I will.”

  “Good.” Suddenly and without warning, Taylor rested her hand on my thigh, well above the knee. “I missed you, the last few weeks. I really missed you.”

  The stirring down below began anew. I liked where this was going. “Me, too.”

  “The day I moved out…those things you said, about us…about us being together…did you really mean them?”

  “With all my heart.”

  Before I could say another word, she kissed me. Oh, my! As our tongues danced, her dexterous hand slid from my thigh to more exigent regions. The more we made out, the more she got into it. At last, I could hear her moaning without the sound being muffled by the bedroom door, or the whir of the pocket rocket!

  Where is this going? I wondered. Should I make a move?

  But I didn’t have to.

  “Todd,” she said, “I want you.”

  In case of emergency, break glass.

  It took me as many uncondomed thrusts as it took licks for that cartoon owl to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop. The thrill of consummation completely overrode any lingering negative emotions I may have still been feeling. Put simply, sex with Taylor Schmidt was the best thirty seconds of my life.

  I awoke with a jolt, as if zapped by Jovian lightning. It was almost dawn—I’d been out cold for three or four hours. Taylor was still asleep, her breaths tortured. I held her closer, stilling her myoclonic jerks, hoping she’d come to. Batteries fully charged, guns reloaded, I was ready for more. I caressed her hair, kissed her forehead, rubbed her butt—did what I could short of pouring cold water on her face to wake her up—but she remained unconscious. Damned Asher and his damned roofies!

  Sex and sleep, both of my preferred options, would have to wait. I was wired, plus I had to pee something fierce. I disentangled myself from Taylor’s naked body—What sublime contour! Like fine sculpture!—and headed for the can. On the way, I stubbed my fucking toe on the fucking leg of the fucking sofa. In my subsequent throes of pain, I noticed the corner of a familiar faux-marble writing tablet peeking from Taylor’s bag. Could it be? It was. The latest installment of her diary, right there in front of me—and its author passed out
cold in the next room!

  The way I looked at it, as I went into the bathroom with the diary, was that Quid Pro Quo, and her dealings with it, proved that Taylor really loved me. The evidence was all there. For me, she broke up with, and possibly whacked, Asher Krug. For me, she was going to murder Donna Green. Where most people would see a slut and a murderess, I saw a saint and a savior. Taylor Schmidt loved me. Surely the diary would confirm this…

  The final installment of Taylor’s diary covered everything that happened from her initial meeting with Lydia Murtomaki at Quid Pro Quo through the final meeting with her at Asher’s kitchen table that morning—everything that had happened except her final rendezvous with Asher. For all of the shocking developments in those pages, for all of the gruesomeness and death—it was like I’d popped Pretty Woman into the VCR, but on came Rambo—I couldn’t help but be a tad disappointed. In the entire journal, some fifty some odd pages, there was not one mention of Todd Lander. Not one. If she really did dig me, if I were really the love of her life, it must have just occurred to her on the cab ride downtown.

  A normal person would have pegged Taylor right then and there as an irredeemable maniac and fled the country. In fact, a normal person would have done so as soon as he learned the truth about Quid Pro Quo. Me? I was under her spell, no two ways about it. I was able to gloss over, and to rationalize away, the inconvenient truths. Cognitive dissonance, they call it. So what if Taylor poisoned Bill Steward? He had it coming. So what if she wasted both Andrew Borden and his wife? It’s not like she had a choice. So what if Taylor was tapped by Lydia Murtomaki to assassinate Little Check? She was impressionable, my old roommate; always had been. Even her astrologer said so—she was a double Pisces, a watered-down water sign. And the Asher hit? Hey, she was just following orders.

  The last entry snapped me out of my haze of lusty delusion, albeit too briefly. My eyes scanned the words in her girlish, almost cartoonish hand. The pink ink. Dying pink ink, replaced by indelible black midway through the almost Shakespearean final paragraph:

  Three words are all you need to make a guy putty in your hands. Say I love you and he will blush, he will glow, he will cringe, he will even freak out, but what he won’t do is fear you. Men say I love you all the time to get what they want. When he is at his weakest, I will strike, and the job will be mine!

  She wrote this that afternoon, before her quarrel with Asher, which meant that (a) she had, in fact, killed him, and (b) she’d planned on doing so, in order to appropriate his job. Tayor’d gone Macbeth on his ass! Only there was no obsessive washing of hands with her. Her conscience was clear.

  A normal person—back to him again—would have made the obvious leap and asked himself, If she killed Asher…what does she have in store for me? This thought never crossed my mind.

  In my defense, I’d just had sex with her, like, a few hours before. I was on Cloud Fucking Nine, my happy state of mind augmented by what we used to call PFG, or Post Fuck Glow. Rational thought had no chance in the face of such unbridled bliss. I was in la-la land, deluded to the point of temporary insanity. There’s no other way to explain it.

  I mean, it’s not like I was completely in the dark, even before I read the latest diary. I knew that Quid Pro Quo was a front for a squadron of assassins. I knew that it was scary and evil and not to be fucked with. And now, I knew that Taylor was an integral part of it. I knew she’d killed at least four people—her own pink slip, plus Borden, plus Little Check, plus Asher Krug—and that my old boss, Donna Green, was next. Furthermore, I knew that Taylor enjoyed the hits. Or, at the very least, the hits had no discernible effect on her psyche. I knew, in short, that she was dangerous…except for the fact that I didn’t. On some deep-seated, subconscious level, I refused to recognize the bloody writing on the wall. I was like that pope who condemned Galileo—my faith was stronger than my reason.

  Faith is always stronger than reason.

  And Fate is stronger still.

  I replaced the diary in her pocketbook, climbed back into bed, and slept until three in the afternoon. It was after dark when Taylor finally got up.

  CHAPTER 22

  S

  ketchy as Union Square was in 1991, it was the Emerald City compared to the stretch of Fourteenth Street to the west, a Yellow Brick Road of subway stations, parking lots, wholesale clothing stores, and junk emporia hawking New York baseball hats and T-shirts and coffee mugs. Head west along Fourteenth Street, past the PATH station, and past Seventh Avenue, and you came to a nebulous neighborhood on the borderlands of Chelsea, the Meatpacking District, and the NYU environs. Here, in a building that used to be an electronics store, was one of the hottest nightclubs in town—Nell’s. With its chandeliers and velvet couches and gilded mirrors, Nell’s looked like the drawing room of a Garden District mansion the morning after Lestat took possession. The eponymous owner, Laura “Little Nell” Campbell, was best known for playing Columbia in The Rocky Horror Picture Show—the cult classic Village Cinema played every Saturday at midnight for twenty-some-odd years. Little Nell may have been a white girl from Australia, but her nightclub, with its pulsing R&B upstairs and hip-hop on the basement dance floor, catered to African Americans, particularly African Americans celebrities. Prince was a frequent guest, as were many visiting NBA players. In 1993, Tupac Shakur—whose debut album was released in 1991—would bolster Nell’s thug-life bona fides by partaking of oral sex on its dance floor.

  On Monday nights, Nell’s had an open mic. This wasn’t the usual bit, where fops in ponytails meandered through “Blowin’ in the Wind” on slightly-out-of-tune Ovations, nor was it Lach’s hipster antifolk scene at Sidewalk. Nell’s had a house band that specialized in reggae and R&B, and it was world-class. If you were going to get up and sing, you had to be good, or someone might take your ass out.

  Donna Green, my former boss, had come to Nell’s that Monday, as she did more or less every Monday, to strut her stuff with the band. (I didn’t care for her rendition of the “Happy Birthday” song in the office, but she was obviously talented, or the crowd would have eaten her for lunch—and a plentiful bounty she would have made.) A walking tent of teal taffeta, she ended her short set with a rollicking performance of “I Will Survive”—forget Nell Campbell; Donna had channeled Nell Carter—and afterwards was sweating profusely. Her braided hair extensions intensified the heat. She needed some air. So she waddled off the stage and made for the downstairs lavatory.

  Her gown cascaded behind her. There was enough material to enclose a yurt. Donna made it down the staircase, across the downstairs dance floor, and was almost to the bathrooms when the train of the dress caught beneath her squat legs and tore along the waist, exposing her ample buttocks.

  “Shit,” she muttered, hoisting up the skirt. “Shit.”

  “Everything okay?”

  Looking up, Donna saw a girl in a slinky black and white polka-dot dress—a pretty young white girl with dishwater-brown hair, a crooked nose, and a Midwestern twang to her high-registered voice. There was always a plentiful supply of white girls at Nell’s, but relatively few white guys.

  “I tore my gown,” said Donna.

  “I think I have some safety pins. Let me help you.”

  The girl with the dishwater-brown hair and the crooked nose gathered up the excess yards of taffeta and followed the hefty diva into the bathroom.

  “Stand there. By the wall.”

  As Donna followed the instructions, she spaced out, thinking about the performance. She had been happy with it, but was now having second thoughts. Had she hit the right note at the end? Or did it fall flat, as her voice sometimes did when she got tired?

  Meanwhile the girl with the dishwater-brown hair and the crooked nose squatted behind Donna, busy with the gown. The swoosh of fabric muted the rumble of hip-hop from down the hall.

  “Almost there.”

  And then—

  “Ouch!”

  Sharp pain in Donna’s meaty left rump. Like a bee sting, or an acupunc
ture misadventure. One of the safety pins, probably.

  “Oh, shit. Sorry about that.”

  Donna rolled her eyes, gritted her teeth, but said, “It’s okay.”

  A few minutes later, the gown was repaired. Thanking the girl with the dishwater-brown hair and the crooked nose, but without really looking at her, Donna quit the bathroom as quickly as her dachshund legs would carry her. Once on the dance floor, her nose began running, mucus pouring like water from her cavernous nostrils. As she wiped her nose with the back of her hand, Donna felt a tightness in her chest. Oh shit, she thought. I’m having a heart attack. The room got blurry, the lights and the clubgoers fading from focus, turning into an Impressionist painting. She cried for help but her stentorian voice failed her. She was gasping for breath now. Sweat oozed like lava from her pores, and drool from her mouth, frothy, like a rabid dog. Not here, she thought. Not now. Then the nausea hit, wham! and cramps like PMS on steroids. She fought back the urge to vomit. People had gathered around her now. They realized that she wasn’t dancing, that these were not choreographed moves. As Donna fell to the floor, smacking down hard like a felled sequoia, she lost control of her bodily functions. She began to twitch, to jerk, to convulse. The music stopped cold, the room, so raucous a second ago, now funereally silent.

  “Somebody call an ambulance,” someone said.

  Her eyes went white. Bile trickled from the side of her mouth. Donna lifted up her head—it was as difficult as anything she’d ever attempted—but before she could say a word, her body went slack, her head banged against the hardwood floor, and brightness overwhelmed her.

  While Taylor was out padding her homicidal résumé, I was scouring East Village jewelry shops, in the middle of a cold November rainstorm, for an aquamarine ring. See, aquamarine was her birthstone. I wanted to buy her a present, a humble token of my gratitude for the transfiguring sex that I was sure would lead to better things—something more than the mix tape I’d already put together.