Skin Deep

by Gary Braver

  According to Steve, someone had wrapped a stocking around her neck and snuffed out her life. Being married to a homicide cop for so many years did not mitigate the horror that someone could do that to another person. The woman had gotten up that morning, fixed her hair, dressed, made plans for the day, totally unaware that hours later she would die a hideous death. And here Dana was anguishing over her eyelids.

  She folded the paper.

  It was a little after ten when she finished doing her grades, wondering if it was the last time—a thought that made her a little sad. She would miss the kids. She still had another few weeks to give notice, but word had gotten out that she was considering resigning, because two students had left notes at the end of their exams, wishing her good luck but hoping she’d change her mind. One girl said that she was not only the best teacher she had had at Carleton but was her role model and wished she could take another course with her next year when she was a senior. The note was sweet but only added to Dana’s anxiety.

  As she got ready for bed, she suddenly felt vulnerable. Maybe it was the Farina story and being alone in the house, but as she went through the rooms turning off the lights she felt an irrational fear rise up. When she and Steve were living together, the place felt safe, even with the constant reminders of the violence of life. Maybe it was Steve’s status as a cop that made it seem as if a protective field surrounded their home, especially out here in the proudly boring suburb of Carleton. But with Steve gone, the place felt cavernous and menacing, especially at night.

  She was not interested in television and she was too distracted to read, so she put a Sinatra album into the CD player and poured herself a glass of Chardonnay. She turned the lights back on and settled in the family room. In a few minutes, she began to wonder what Steve was doing. Probably poring over crime scene reports. The more she wondered, the more she began to miss him.

  He had supported her in nearly all of her major decisions—taking the teaching job at Carleton, sending job applications to pharmaceutical companies when she thought she had had enough. Even her decision to consider cosmetic surgery, in spite of his claim that he didn’t think she needed it. If it was something that would make her happy, he supported her. It was his guiding code. And he was steadfast in all but the inability to commit himself to having a family. Like a mental blockage, he simply could not get himself to make the move to parenting. Nor would he talk about it. As she stared at the phone, it struck her that no matter how much you think you know your partner—even after twelve years of marriage and five of courtship—there are small pockets of unknowns, little black holes in the soul where you cannot go. Where even he cannot go.

  But the good news was that she had called Dr. Monks earlier in the day to say that she had made up her mind and wanted to get a lid lift, a nose job, and Restylane treatment for her smile lines. Her definitiveness apparently impressed him, because he said he could see her this Friday. That was an incredible break, thanks to pressure from Lanie.

  The thought of ridding herself of her nose made her tingle.

  She took her wine to her computer and went on Dr. Monks’s Web site. There was a photograph of him smiling, also shots of his office facilities. Below those was a list of all the professional organizations he belonged to and his medical training. Also a summary of awards for innovations in surgical procedures and his pioneering work in transplant surgery as well as commendations from cosmetic institutes all over the world—Sweden, France, Korea, the West Indies, and elsewhere.

  A welcoming note explained how Dr. Monks and his staff were committed to excellence in surgical results and patient care. He offered advice on choosing a plastic surgeon, the necessity of getting second opinions and references, and the importance of finding someone with whom you felt comfortable. The site also asked if you were a candidate for cosmetic surgery—if you had the proper motivation to make the changes, stressing that cosmetic surgery could deeply impact a person’s confidence and self-esteem. There were links to television interviews as well as many impressive before-and-after photos.

  Patient testimonials raved about the personal care and commitment shown by Dr. Monks and his staff. One woman said, “I am beautiful and you are brilliant.” Another thanked him for the great care he had taken. “You took to heart all my needs.” Another said, “You could not have shown more personal commitment to my appearance. You’re the best.”

  Perhaps it was her cynical nature or catechism-class guilt, but she told herself that in spite of the mighty expertise and glowing tributes, she’d be his one failure and end up on awfulplasticsurgery.com, right under the split-screen photos of Courtney Love.

  At around eleven o’clock, she climbed the stairs and got into bed.

  “I am beautiful and you are brilliant.”

  Let’s hope, she thought, and snapped out the lights.

  21

  At one thirty Steve lay in the dark, still trying to compose his mind to sleep. The pills had done nothing, yet part of him was grateful. At least he didn’t have to risk another Terry Farina nightmare fest.

  He got up and went into the kitchen to do some work. His first impulse was to pour himself a double scotch. Instead he had a glass of warm milk and went to his laptop at the kitchen table. If and when he felt sleepy he’d give the bed another try.

  He opened the Farina file and flipped through her photographs from the Mermaid. In some earlier shots she was a cropped brunette, in others a full and flaming redhead. In all she was naked or nearly so, sometimes gaping big-eyed like a schoolgirl startled by the cameraman, sometimes panting in false heat. He wondered if she’d gotten any pleasure from making canned love to fifty guys sucking Bud Lights. He had heard that strippers just zoned out, clicked into autopilot, and ran through the mechanics—the self-fondling, the groans, the humpy-bumpies—as if a programmed toy. He didn’t think any real harm was being done. But it seemed a cheesy way to earn tuition.

  “Did you ever kill anyone?

  “What was it like?”

  Terry Farina had performed for guys who paid to watch her nurse fantasies—some dark, some dangerous, some even deadly. The working theory was that she had befriended a Mermaid customer—

  (Not you, never been there. Uh-uh, just ask Mickey DeLuca.)

  —some sexual psycho that girls made fun of in high school, who stayed home on prom night. They got close, maybe went out a few times. Then last Saturday night he showed up, and because of whatever lunatic logic that fired his synapses, he killed her.

  After having accepted her death as murder, Neil speculated that she might have been turning tricks, using the Mermaid as a place to recruit johns. If that were the case, she must have made house calls, because Mrs. Sabo said she had never heard anyone coming over to visit her. Her bank statements gave no indication that she was making deposits out of line with her earnings as a trainer and dancer. Thus far, the investigation produced no evidence that Terry Farina was turning tricks. But for Neil French, stripping was just a gutter away from prostitution.

  As for Steve, he had no working theory. Only a pea under the mattress, now the size of a baseball.

  But he wasn’t going to deal with that because he couldn’t reach it, only squirm. Meanwhile, he would dutifully pursue the working theory.

  More than one hundred names made up the list of subscribers that DeLuca had given him. Another two hundred and seventy had paid by credit card over the last month.

  He scanned both lists into his computer and reduced the overlap to seven: Tyler Mosley; Luis Castillo; Richard Maldonado; Walter Priest; Earl Pendergast; Thomas O’Sullivan; and Angus Q. Schmentzel. Seven regulars who had paid by credit cards over the last month. Of course, cash-paying customers would have slipped through, but this was a start.

  He did a Google check on each, restricting the search to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Two of the names yielded no hits. The others yielded several, especially Walter Priest at ninety-four because the name was not uncommon. For two hours he
scanned the sites for any clue that cross-checked with strip clubs, sexual fetishes, sex offenses, or anything that directly or indirectly connected to Terry Farina.

  At about two fifteen, he began to grow sleepy in the middle of his scan of Earl Pendergast. The guy was an English professor at Hawthorne State College in Hawthorne, Massachusetts, and an active scholar who had written articles on English Romantic poetry. Steve’s eyes were crossing as he went down the list of publications, including a book on John Keats and several articles with long tortured titles. One that caught his eye was called “Femme Fatales Disrobed: Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ v. Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’” His home page listed in Google had expired. The online syllabus for his Romantic lit course was two years old. But what set off a small charge in Steve’s veins was an entry from the Hawthorne Student News from last year: PROFESSOR SUSPENDED FOR SEXUAL HARASSMENT CHARGE. “Professor Earl Pendergast…”

  Steve was instantly awake. But when he clicked on the article, that posting had also expired. With his password, he got into the NCIC database, but Pendergast had no criminal record. The same with ViCAP. Apparently the harassment charge stayed with the college.

  It was nearly three A.M. when he finally logged off and headed for bed, buoyed by his discovery, and making a mental note that most college newspapers have archives.

  “Femme Fatales Disrobed.”

  The phrase lulled him into a deep dreamless sleep. His first in days.

  22

  SPRING 1971

  Because of the headaches he continued sleeping with Lila when his father was away.

  Lila had enrolled him in a Saturday catechism class that also included his fourth-grade classmate Becky Tolland. Sister Susan McConnell taught the classes, which studied stories from the Bible. He especially liked those from the Old Testament such as Noah’s ark and Moses parting the Red Sea.

  Every Saturday at noon Lila picked him up and brought him to a park where she let him sit on her lap and drive the car. It wasn’t real driving because he couldn’t reach the pedals, so he just steered as she controlled the gas and brakes.

  One warm Saturday in early April, Lila asked him what they had talked about in catechism. That day it had been about Adam and Eve. “Was the Garden of Eden a real place?”

  “Well, I think so.”

  “Where was it?” He was sitting high on her lap and maneuvering the wheel around the serpentine blacktop that wound through the park.

  “Far, far away in the Holy Lands. Israel or Egypt or someplace out there.”

  “Were Adam and Eve real people?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And they were naked all the time?”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s kind of dumb. Didn’t they get cold?”

  “Nope. It was paradise, and paradise was always warm and sunny. And God was there to protect them.”

  They continued riding as he tried to imagine such a place—maybe a beach with lots of trees so they didn’t get sunburned. He remembered from the story that Adam and Eve had picked the forbidden apple from the middle of the garden although there were plenty of other apple trees around, and that got God mad and He kicked them out of the garden into the wilderness, and He stopped talking to them, which he thought was really mean. Lila did that sometimes when she got mad at him. They drove on a little more. “So where did all the people come from?”

  “Adam and Eve made them, or at least the first few, then everybody else came from them.”

  “But how?”

  “But how what?”

  “But how did they make people?”

  “Uh-oh,” she muttered. “Well, the way all people make people.”

  Becky Tolland had boasted once that she knew where babies came from, but she wasn’t going to tell him because her mother told her to keep it to herself.

  “But how?”

  “Well…watch the road.”

  “I am watching the road.”

  “Well, a man plants a seed in a woman, and together they grow a baby just like a farmer does with fruits and vegetables.”

  He was silent for a long moment because his head filled with picture-book images of farmers with hoes and rakes and packages of pumpkin seeds—images that confused him. “But how? What’s the seed, and where does he get it?”

  “Oh, boy,” she said.

  While she turned something over in her head, he continued steering down the narrow tree-lined road. On the right was a golf course and ahead was a small playground area with slides and swings and picnic tables. When Lila didn’t respond, he said, “Becky Tolland knows.”

  “She does? Well, good for her.” Then she pointed to an opening in the road ahead. “Maybe you should pull in here.”

  “Okay.”

  He steered into the parking lot and they stopped under a copse of oaks. They got out and she led him to a small picnic table where they sat. Nearby some kids played on the swings. “Well,” she began, “everybody in the whole world was made the same way. So it’s not like what I’m going to tell you is weird. Except let’s not tell Dad I told you, okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, when a man and woman love each other they make love. Know what that is?”

  He didn’t understand but sensed she was walking him onto forbidden territory, big people stuff. “They kiss?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s where it starts. They kiss. But it usually happens in bed when a husband and wife sleep with each other.”

  He still didn’t see how sleeping with each other made babies. “They go to sleep?”

  “Not really, they take their clothes off and get in bed. Then…well, how should I put it? Then the man enters the woman.”

  And in his mind he had impossible images of the man trying to crawl into the woman’s mouth or somehow her body opened up like a jacket and he squeezed inside. “Huh?”

  “God, I wish the nuns taught you something,” she said offhandedly. In a sudden decisive move she pushed the hair out of her face and looked at him. “Did you ever get hard down there?”

  He froze in shock. She had nodded at his pants. Was she really asking him that?

  “You know, your peepee,” she whispered.

  Good God, she was. He had, but he didn’t want to admit it, especially since it happened mostly when he slept with her.

  “Come on, I know you do. It’s only natural. Nothing to be ashamed of.” She cupped his face with her hands and smiled. “It’s all right, Beauty Boy. Every boy has that happen. And thank God, otherwise there wouldn’t be any people around.” She gave him a kiss on his nose.

  He began to fidget because he sensed this was something that lay ahead of him—milestone stuff that was part of growing up like his voice changing and getting a driver’s license, drinking beer.

  She smoothed down his hair. “Well, do you know what girls have down there?”

  He shook his head. But he had some vague notion because one day Becky drew a crude figure of a girl with a big hole below her belly and above where her legs came together. It was gross and made no sense. Wouldn’t her guts fall out?

  “Well, it’s where babies come from. You’ve seen pregnant women. Mrs. Maloney up the street, in fact.” She made a big belly with her arms. “That’s a baby growing inside her. Pretty soon she’ll go to the hospital so the doctors can remove it.”

  He said nothing, but his heart was racing, knowing she was sharing big truths.

  She studied his face, probably detecting his confusion. “Do you know where it comes from? How the baby comes out?”

  “The belly?”

  She shook her head. Then she uncrossed her legs and spread her knees. “From down there.”

  He shot a fast look down at her yellow hip-huggers. He still didn’t understand and wanted to change the subject.

  She crossed her legs again. “It’s where the man passes his seed into a woman, and then the baby begins to grow and grow until nine months later it’s so big it has to come out. That’s when she go
es to the hospital where the doctors remove the baby and she becomes a mother. Get it?”

  “I guess.”

  “There, that wasn’t so bad now, was it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Any questions?”

  He said nothing for a short while. Then he asked, “Why didn’t you have a baby?”

  Her face clouded over. “I did once, but he died.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He just did.” He could tell that she didn’t want to go into that.

  “How old were you?”

  “Let’s just say I was too young to understand.”

  “Who was the daddy?”

  She just shook her head. “A man.”

  “How come you didn’t have another one?”

  She looked at him and smiled. “I do. You’re my baby.” And she gave him a squeeze.

  “Did Jesus have babies?”

  “No. He was perfect.”

  “Like you.”

  She kissed the side of his head. “You’re a sweetie. No, I’m not perfect.”

  “I think so.”

  She gave him another kiss on his face and stroked the back of his neck. They were silent for several moments as birds filled the air with twitters.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Does what hurt? Having a baby?”

  “No. Planting the seed.” All he could think was of the tender flesh being torn and split.

  “No, in fact, just the opposite. But you’ll learn that for yourself when you grow up.” She looked at her watch. “But that’s Babies 101 for today.”

  She put her arms around him and pulled him to her chest. The sun was beginning to burn through the underbelly of clouds and warm him. His face was up against her breasts and he was staring straight down to where her legs joined, thinking about the dark secret things she told him.

  “Time to go. I’ve got to put the dinner on or your dad will holler.”

  He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to get up. And it had nothing to do with breaking the magical coziness of the moment or being alone with her at the playground. He didn’t want to get up because the moment he did she’d notice that he was hard.