by Otto Penzler
Plus, Jim genuinely liked Susan. He liked the tough, working-stiff jazz of her and the chip-on-the-shoulder wisecracks with the vulnerability underneath. He wanted to get to know her, be with her a while, maybe a long while. And if this was where they started, he wondered, where exactly were they going to go?
But any awkwardness, it turned out, was all on Jim’s side. Susan seemed perfectly comfortable when she woke in his arms the next morning. “It was nice last night,” she whispered, stretching up to kiss his stubble. And she held his hand as they hailed a cab to take her home for a change of clothes. And she wowed and charmed him with her office etiquette, giving not a clue to the world of their altered state, giving even him only a single token of it when they passed each other, nodding, in the hall, and she murmured, “God, we are so professional.”
And they had dinner together up on Columbus at the Moroccan and she went on, hilarious, about the management types in her department. And Jim, who usually expressed amusement by narrowing his eyes and smiling thinly, fell back in his chair and laughed with his teeth showing, and had to wipe tears out of his crow’s feet with the four fingers of one hand.
That night, she wanted him to thrash her with his leather belt. Jim demurred. “Don’t we ever get to do it just the regular way?” he asked.
But she leaned in close and smoldered at him. “Do it. I want you to.”
“You know, I’m a little concerned about the noise. The neighbors and everything.”
Well, he had a point there. Susan went into the kitchen and returned with a wooden spoon. They don’t make quite the crack, apparently. Jim, always the gentleman, proceeded to tie her to the bedposts.
“The woman’s killing me, I’m exhausted,” he told me a couple of weeks later.
I put my hand under my shirt and moved it up and down so he could see my heart beating for him.
“I mean it,” he said. “I mean, I’m up for this stuff sometimes. It’s sexy, it’s fun. But Jesus. I’d like to see her face from time to time.”
“She’ll calm down. You’re just getting started,” I said. “So she digs this stuff. Later, you can gently instruct her in the joys of the missionary position.”
We had this conversation at a table in McCord’s, the last unspoiled Irish bar on the gentrified West Side. The news team does tend to drift down here of an evening, so we were already speaking in undertones. Now, Jim leaned in toward me even closer. Our foreheads were almost touching and he glanced side to side before he went on.
“The thing is,” he said, “I think she’s serious.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m all for fantasy stuff and all that. But I don’t think she’s kidding around.”
“What do you mean?” I said again, more hoarsely and with a bead of sweat forming behind my ear.
It turned out their relationship had now progressed to the point where they were divvying up the household chores. Susan had doled out the assignments and it fell to her to clean Jim’s apartment, cook his dinner, and wash the dishes. Naked. Jim’s job was to force her to do these things and whip, spank, or rape her if she showed reluctance or made, or pretended to make, some kind of mistake.
Now there’s always an element of braggadocio when men complain about their sex lives, but Jim really did seem troubled by this. “I’m not saying it doesn’t turn me on. I admit, it’s a turn-on. It’s just getting kind of . . . ugly at this point. Isn’t it?” he said.
I wiped my lips dry and dropped back in my seat. When I could finally stop panting and move my mouth, I said, “I don’t know. To each his own. I mean, look, if you don’t like it, eject. You know? If it doesn’t work for you, hit the button.”
Obviously, this thought had occurred to him before. He nodded slowly, as if considering it.
But he didn’t eject. In fact, another week or so, and for all intents and purposes Susan was living with him.
At this point, my information becomes less detailed. Obviously, a guy’s living with someone, he doesn’t go on too much about their sex life. Everyone at the net knew the affair was a happening thing by now, but Susan and Jim remained entirely professional and detached on the job. They’d walk to work together holding hands. They’d kiss once outside the building. And after that, it was business as usual. No low tones in the hallway, no closed office doors. The few times we all went out drinking together after work, they didn’t even sit next to each other. Through the bar window, when they left, we’d see Jim put his arm around her. That was all.
The last time Jim and I talked about it before he died was in McCord’s again. I came in there one night and there he was sitting at a corner table alone. I knew by the way he was sitting—bolt upright with his eyes half open, staring, glazed—that he was drunk as God on Sunday. I sat down across from him and he made a sloppy gesture with his hand and said, “Drinks are on me.” I ordered a Scotch.
If I’d been smart, I would’ve stuck to sports. The Knicks were getting murdered, the Yanks, after a championship season, were struggling to keep pace with Baltimore as the new season got under way. I could’ve talked about all of that. I should’ve. But I was curious. If curious is the word I want. “Prurient,” maybe, is the mot juste.
And I said, “So how are things going with Susan?”
And he said, as you will when you’re serious about someone, “Fine. Things with Susan are fine.” But then he added, “I’m her Lord and Master.” Sitting bolt upright. Waving slightly like a lamppost in a gale.
Susan had scripted their routines, but he knew them by heart now and ran through them without prompting. This was apparently more efficient because it left her free to beg him to stop. He would tie her and she would beg him and he would beat her while she begged. He would sodomize her and grab her hair, force her head around so she had to watch him while he did it. “Who’s your Lord and Master?” he would say. And she would answer, “You’re my Lord and Master. You are.” Later she would do the chores, naked or in this lace-and-suspender outfit she’d bought. Usually she’d fumble something or spill something, and he would beat her, which got him ready to take her again.
After he told me this, his eyes sank closed, his lips parted. He seemed to sleep for a few minutes, then woke up with a slight start. But bolt upright always, always straight up and down. Even when he got up to leave, his posture was stiff and perfect. He wafted to the door as if he were one of those old deportment instructors. He was a funny kind of a drunk that way, even more dignified than when he was sober, a sort of exaggerated, comic version of his reserved, dignifed sober self.
I watched him leave with a half-smile on my face. I miss him.
Susan stabbed him with a kitchen knife, one of those big ones. Just a single convulsive jab but it went straight in, severed the vena cava. He bled out lying on the kitchen floor, staring up at the ceiling while she screamed into the phone for an ambulance.
Jim being a bit of a muck-a-muck, it made the news. Then the feminists got ahold of it, the real bully girls who consider murdering your boyfriend a form of self-expression. They wanted the case dismissed out of hand. And a lot of people agreed they had a point this time. Susan, it was found, had bruises all over her torso, was bleeding from various orifices. And Jim had pretty clearly been wielding a nasty-looking sex store paddle when she went for the knife. According to the political dicta of the day, it was an obvious case of long-term abuse and long-delayed self-defense.
But the cops, for some reason, were not immediately convinced. In general, cops spend enough time in the depths of human depravity to keep a spare suit in the closet there. They know that even the most obvious political axioms don’t always cut it when you’re dealing with true romance.
So the Manhattan DA’s office was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Susan had gotten a good lawyer fast and had said nothing to anyone. The police suspected they’d find evidence of consensual rough sex in Susan’s life but so far hadn’t produced the goods. The press, meanwhile, was starting
to link Susan’s name with the word “ordeal” a lot, and were running her story next to sidebars on sexual abuse, which was their way of being “objective” while taking Susan’s side entirely, Anyway, the last thing the DA wanted was to jail the woman and then release her. So he waffled. Withheld charges for a day or two, pending further investigation. And, in the meantime, the prime suspect was set free.
As for me, all was depression and confusion. Jim wasn’t my brother or anything, but he was a good buddy. And I knew I was probably the best friend he had at the network, maybe even in the city, maybe in the world. Still there were moments, watching the feminists on TV, watching Susan’s lawyer, when I thought: How do I know? The guy says one thing, the girl says something else. How do I know everything Jim told me wasn’t some kind of crazy lie, some sort of justification for the bad stuff he was doing to her?
Of course, all that aside, I called the police the day after the murder, Friday, the first I heard. I phoned a contact of mine in Homicide and told him I had solid information on the case. I think I half-expected to hear the whining sirens of the squad coming for me even as I hung up the phone. Instead, I was given a Monday morning appointment and asked to wander on by the station house to talk to the detectives in charge.
Which gave me the weekend free. I spent it anchored to the sofa by a leaden nausea. Gazing at the ceiling, arm flung across my brow. Trying to force tears, trying to blame myself, trying not to. The phone rang and rang, but I never answered it. It was just friends—I could hear them on the answering machine—wanting to get in on it: the sympathy, the grief, the gossip. Everybody craving a piece of a murder. I didn’t have the energy to play.
Sunday evening, finally, there was a knock at my door. I’m on the top floor of a brownstone so you expect the street buzzer, but this was a knock. I figured it must be one of my neighbors who’d seen the story on TV. I called out as I put my shoes on. Tucked in my shirt as I went to the door. Pulled it open without even looking through the peephole.
And there was Susan.
A lot of things went through my mind in the second I saw her. As she stood there, combative and uncomfortable at once. Chin raised, belligerent; glance sidelong, shy. I thought: Who am I supposed to be here? What am I supposed to be like? Angry? Vengeful? Chilly? Just? Lofty? Compassionate? Christ, it was paralyzing. In the end, I just stood back and let her enter. She walked into the middle of the room and faced me as I closed the door.
Then she shrugged at me. One bare shoulder lifted, one lifted corner of her mouth, a wise-guy smile. She was wearing a pale spring dress, the thin strings tied round her neck in a bow. It showed a lot of her dark flesh. I noticed a crescent of discolor on her thigh beneath the hem.
“I’m not too sure about the etiquette here,” I said.
“Yeah. Maybe you could look under ‘Entertaining the Girl Who Killed Your Best Friend.’”
I gave her back her wise-guy smile. “Don’t say too much, Susan, okay? I gotta go in to see the cops on Monday.”
She stopped smiling, nodded, turned away. “So—what? Like, Jim told you everything? About us?” She toyed with the pad on my phone table.
I watched her. My reactions were subtle but intense. It was the way she turned, it was that thing she said. It made me think about what Jim had told me. It made me look, long and slow, down the line of her back. It made my skin feel hot, my stomach cold. An interesting combination.
I moistened my lips and tried to think about my dead friend. “Yeah, that’s right,” I said gruffly. “He told me pretty much everything.”
Susan laughed over her shoulder at me. “Well, that’s embarrassing, anyway.”
“Hey, don’t flirt with me, okay? Don’t kill my friend and come over here and flirt with me.”
She turned round again, hands primly folded in front of her. I looked so steadily at her face she must’ve known I was thinking about her breasts. “I’m not flirting with you,” she said. “I just want to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“What he did, that he beat me, that he humiliated me. He was twice my size. Think how you’d like it, think what you would’ve done if someone was doing that to you.”
“Susan!” I spread my hands at her. “You asked him to!”
“Oh, yeah, like, ‘She was asking for it,’ right? Like you automatically believe that. Your buddy says it so it must be true.”
I snorted. I thought about it. I looked at her. I thought about Jim. “Yeah,” I said finally. “I do believe it. It was true.”
She didn’t argue the point. She went right on. “Yeah, well, if it is true, it doesn’t make it any better. You know? I mean, you should’ve seen the way it turned him on. I mean, he could’ve stopped it. I’d’ve stopped. He could’ve changed everything any time, if he wanted to. But he liked it so much . . . And then there he is, hurting me like that, and all turned on by it. How do you think that makes a person feel?”
I am not too proud to admit that I actually scratched my head, dumb as a monkey.
Susan ran one long nail over the phone table pad. She looked down at it. So did I. “Are you really going to the cops?”
“Yeah. Hell, yeah,” I said. Then, as if I needed an excuse, “It’s not like they won’t find someone else. Some other guy you did this stuff with. He’ll tell them the same thing.”
She shook her head once. “No. There’s only you. You’re the only one who knows.” Which left nothing to say. We stood there silent. She thinking, me just watching her, just watching the lines and colors of her.
Then, finally, she raised her eyes to me, tilted her head. She didn’t slink toward me, or tiptoe her fingers up my chest. She didn’t nestle under me so I could feel the heat of her breath or smell her perfume. She left that for the movies, for the femme fatales. All she did was stand there like that and give me that Susan look, chin out, dukes up, her soul in the offing, almost trembling in your hand.
“It gives you a lot of power over me, doesn’t it?” she said.
“So what?” I said back.
She shrugged again. “You know what I like.”
“Get out,” I said. I didn’t give myself time to start sweating. “Christ. Get the fuck out of here, Susan.”
She walked to the door. I watched her go. Yeah, right, I thought. I have power over her. As if. I have power over her until they decide not to charge her, until the headlines disappear. Then where am I? Then I’m her Lord and Master. Just like Jim was.
She passed close to me. Close enough to hear my thoughts. She glanced up, surprised. She laughed at me. “What. You think I’d kill you too?”
“I’d always have to wonder, wouldn’t I?” I said.
Still smiling, she jogged her eyebrows comically. “Whatever turns you on,” she said.
It was the comedy that did it. I couldn’t resist the impulse to wipe that smile off her murdering face. I reached out and grabbed her hair in my fist. Her black, black hair.
It was even softer than I thought it would be.
ED MCBAIN
Improvisation
FROM Dangerous Women
“WHY DON’T WE kill somebody?” she suggested.
She was a blond, of course, tall and willowy and wearing a sleek black cocktail dress cut high on the leg and low at the neckline.
“Been there,” Will told her. “Done that.”
Her eyes opened wide, a sharp blue in startling contrast to the black of the dress.
“The Gulf War,” he explained.
“Not the same thing at all,” she said, and plucked the olive from her martini and popped it into her mouth. “I’m talking about murder.”
“Murder, uh-huh,” Will said. “Who’d you have in mind?”
“How about the girl sitting across the bar there?”
“Ah, a random victim,” he said. “But how’s that any different from combat?”
“A specific random victim,” she said. “Shall we kill her or not?”
“Why?” he asked.
&
nbsp; “Why not?” she said.
Will had known the woman for perhaps twenty minutes at most. In fact, he didn’t even know her name. Her suggestion that they kill someone had come in response to a standard pickup line he’d used to good effect many times before, to wit: “So what do we do for a little excitement tonight?”
To which the blond had replied, “Why don’t we kill somebody?”
Hadn’t whispered the words, hadn’t even lowered her voice. Just smiled over the rim of her martini glass and said in her normal speaking voice, “Why don’t we kill somebody?”
The specific random victim she had in mind was a plain-looking woman wearing a plain brown jacket over a brown silk blouse and a darker brown skirt. There was about her the look of a harried file clerk or lower-level secretary, the mousy brown hair, the unblinking eyes behind what one had to call spectacles rather than eyeglasses, the thin-lipped mouth and slight overbite. A totally unremarkable woman. Small wonder she was sitting alone nursing a glass of white wine.
“Let’s say we do actually kill her,” Will said. “What’ll we do for a little excitement afterward?”
The blond smiled.
And crossed her legs.
“My name is Jessica,” she said.
She extended her hand.
He took it.
“I’m Will,” he said.
He assumed her palm was cold from the iced drink she’d been holding.
On this chilly December evening three days before Christmas, Will had no intention whatever of killing the mousy little file clerk at the end of the bar, or anyone else for that matter. He had killed his fair share of people a long time ago, thank you, all of them specific random victims in that they had been wearing the uniform of the Iraqi Army, which made them the enemy. That was as specific as you could get in wartime, he supposed. That was what made it okay to bulldoze them in their trenches. That was what made it okay to murder them, whatever fine distinction Jessica was now making between murder and combat.
