When She Was Bad: A Thriller

by Jonathan Nasaw

“Your mother and I were talking the other night about whether you were old enough—or I should say, mature enough—for us to start initiating you into the proper enjoyment of the, ah, fruits of the vine. So I was thinking, maybe I’d set out an extra glass tonight—if you’re feeling well enough to join us for dinner, that is.”

  She nodded, slowly, responsibly, maturely. “Sure, okay.”

  “Good, good—I’ll set a place, we’ll call you when dinner’s ready.” He patted her ankle and stood up, thinking that he’d surely kept his promise not to act like a psychiatrist. Making a unilateral decision—yes, he and Cheryl had talked about letting Allie have a glass of wine at the dinner table, but they hadn’t exactly reached a conclusion—not to mention bribing an underage kid with alcohol: that was about as unpsychiatrist-like as it gets.

  But Cheryl let him off the hook with a raised eyebrow, while Alison was the picture of condescending adolescent maturity all through the meal, chatting politely with her parents just as if they weren’t hopelessly retarded. The only down note came when Corder told them about Ulysses Maxwell’s visitor that morning.

  “What do you think’s going to happen to him?” asked Alison. Her father had first brought Lyssy over for Sunday dinner—along with one of his attendants, whom they made a pretext of treating as just another guest—when Alison was thirteen. The two had hit it off famously, not least because at that point Lyssy was more or less a boy of thirteen in a thirty-year-old body. Since then, he’d been invited to the director’s residence for dinner every few months or so—always with an attendant in tow, of course.

  “Life without parole, at best. At worst, lethal injection.”

  “But that’s not fair! Lyssy’s so gentle—he wouldn’t hurt a fly—you know he wouldn’t.”

  “That’s true—but in a way, that’s also a function of his former disorder.”

  “The DID, you mean?”

  Corder nodded. “When a child’s psyche dissociates—that just means it breaks apart—it splits off, not into lots of other complex personalities, but into its own component parts. Each of the alter identities represents a particular, ah, aspect of the original personality—so far we’ve identified sixteen classes of alters”—administrators, analgesics, autistics, children, cross-genders, demons/spirits, handicapped, hosts, imposters, internal self helpers, MTPs or memory trace personalities, persecutors, promiscuous, protectors, substance abusers, suicidals—“that work together to help the child deal with traumas he or she has no other way to deal with.

  “And many of these alter identities embody or express the character traits that the original identity finds disturbing. Sexuality, anger, feelings of aggression, and so on. In Lyssy’s case, all the anger he felt at having been abused, along with the desire to strike out, to avenge himself, all those feelings that if expressed would only have resulted in even more abuse, were, ah, segregated into alter identities.

  “So while it’s true that Lyssy, as Lyssy, the original personality, couldn’t hurt a fly—or protect himself from one, for that matter—his psyche manifested at least two alters, Max and Kinch, who gloried in violence.”

  “But they don’t exist anymore, right? Because you helped him get rid of them.”

  “Well, yes. Unfortunately, though, no jury has ever bought DID as a defense in a criminal case.”

  “But couldn’t you convince them?”

  “I’m going to try, sweetheart.”

  “You better.” Alison sipped thoughtfully at her wine, trying not to pull a sour face, then looked up brightly. “I just remembered—doesn’t Lyssy have a birthday coming up this month?”

  Corder nodded glumly. “On Wednesday.”

  “Are we going to have a party for him again?”

  “I don’t know—it’s a stressful time for Lyssy, and—”

  “Please? You know how much he loves coming over—and if what you said is true, it could be the last birthday party he ever gets to have.”

  “That’s true enough.” Corder glanced over to his wife. “What do you say, hon?”

  She shook her head dubiously. “Wednesday’s a bear for me. I’m getting my hair done in the morning, my book club meets in the afternoon, I’m not sure how I’d—”

  “Please, Mom? I’ll bake the cake.”

  “That I have to see,” said Cheryl Corder—and so the family’s fate was decided.

  7

  For three years, Irene Cogan had been nursing an unlikely crush on the man who’d risked his own life to save her from Ulysses Maxwell’s hellhole. Or perhaps not so unlikely, despite his unprepossessing (well, okay, downright homely) appearance—she didn’t need her Stanford degrees to understand how a damsel in distress might develop an affinity for the knight in shining armor who’d ridden to her rescue, or to recognize the resemblance between Pender and both her father and her late husband—big, easygoing men in whose strong arms a gal couldn’t help feeling safe and protected.

  At the time, though, Irene had been too traumatized by Maxwell to trust her feelings for Pender, never mind acting on them, and any remaining chance of a relationship developing between them seemed to have dissolved entirely when instead of moving out to California following his retirement from the FBI, as he’d once thought of doing, Pender had accepted a law enforcement job on the island of St. Luke, a U.S. protectorate in the eastern Caribbean.

  Irene told herself it was just as well, that it would never have worked out for the two of them anyway. Then a few months ago Pender had called Irene out of the blue to tell her his plans had changed, that things hadn’t panned out for him on St. Luke, and that he was thinking about moving to the central coast after all.

  So much for just as well. Irene had helped Pender find a cottage to rent only a few blocks from her place in Pacific Grove, and he’d quickly been assimilated into her circle of friends and acquaintances. He’d grown particularly close to the DeVries family—Lily had taken to calling him Uncle Pen, and he’d become golfing buddies with both her real uncle, Rollie DeVries, and her grandfather Lyman.

  But when it came to reciprocating Irene’s romantic feelings, nothing had changed—their relationship was platonic, and in dire peril of remaining so. Then, a little over a month ago, Irene and Pender had each been contacted by The People’s Posse, a Portland-based basic cable show on the order of America’s Most Wanted, and asked to appear on an upcoming episode featuring the Maxwell case.

  The offer—an all-expense-paid trip to Portland and a modest emolument—wasn’t all that tempting until the two compared notes and discovered they were scheduled to be interviewed on consecutive days. To Irene it had seemed like a perfect opportunity to take one last shot at upgrading the relationship. She’d suggested to Pender that they make a joint vacation out of it; when he agreed, she booked them adjoining rooms at an upscale hotel advertising romantic midweek getaways.

  She’d nearly lost her nerve a dozen times since then. As late as the previous Saturday she’d been on the verge of calling the whole thing off; instead the business with Lily had brought them to Portland a full day ahead of schedule.

  Luckily there’d been no problem checking into their hotel a day early, Pender told Irene when he picked her up at the Institute in the white Toyota he’d rented at the airport. “Not only that, I talked to Marti Reynolds at TPP, they’re going to move our interviews up a day apiece—mine’s tomorrow now, yours is Wednesday.”

  “And the airline tickets?”

  “I cancelled the round-trip reservations, got us seats for the last flight to San Jose on Wednesday evening—we can take the shuttle home from there.”

  Irene shook her head in admiration. “Pender, if I’d ever had a secretary that good—well, I’d still have a secretary.”

  “I always knew I had to be good at something,” he said—receiving compliments, even left-handed ones, was never his strength. “How’d it go with Lily?”

  Irene shrugged. “It went.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Hey, th
at’s my line,” she told him.

  The hotel proved to be a standard chain affair—nothing particularly romantic about it. But the adjoining rooms were large and comfortable, with enormous beds and a handsome view of the Willamette. Upon arriving, Irene took a long hot shower to wash off the hospital vibes. She could feel her nerve starting to fail her again—she’d never seduced a man before, and wasn’t sure she’d be able to manage it.

  Fortunately, the restaurant Irene had selected with the help of the hotel concierge was both romantic enough for her purposes and informal enough to accommodate Pender’s tragic wardrobe, which tonight consisted of a madras sport jacket, a boldly striped sport shirt, and rumpled polyester slacks; the only items that didn’t clash were his brown Basque beret and his beige Hush Puppies.

  Irene herself wore a green frock that showed off her best feature, her long slender legs. Emboldened by an unaccustomed in-take of alcohol—she’d polished off most of a carafe of house red while Pender stuck to his Jim Beam on the rocks—she contrived to rest her hand on his more than once during the meal. And in the backseat of the cab on the way back to their hotel she edged closer and closer to him, until their thighs were touching—any closer and she’d have been in his lap.

  But still he seemed clueless. In the elevator on the way up to their adjoining rooms he kept plenty of space between them. When they reached his door and she turned her face up to his for a good-night kiss, closing her eyes expectantly, all she got for her brazenness was a platonic peck on the cheek.

  So what’s a gal to do? Persuading herself she was drunker than she actually was, Irene took another shower, changed into a slinky, nearly transparent black negligee, and knocked on the door that communicated between her room and Pender’s.

  “Pen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I come in for a sec?”

  The door opened. Pender, wearing a too-small hotel bathrobe—one size fits almost all—looked down at Irene, standing in the doorway with her arms at her sides. “Oh, shit, oh dear,” he said.

  Irene wanted to sink through the floor—or failing that, die on the spot. Instead, feeling stunned and foolish, she began backing away, her arms crossed over her chest. Pender, realizing the enormity of his gaffe, took her by the wrist and drew her back into his room. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “No, it’s my fault,” she heard herself say. “I shouldn’t have just…I mean, I had no right to…. “

  “Ssshh,” he murmured, wrapping his arms around Irene and pulling her tightly against him. “It’s not your fault—there’s no way you could have known.”

  “Known what?” she said, in a tiny voice.

  “Long story,” Pender replied gently.

  After six months, either the pain was beginning to subside or he was growing inured to it, Pender explained to Irene a few minutes later. The two were sitting side by side on the edge of his bed; he’d fetched her the monogrammed hotel bathrobe from her room, filled an ice bucket, and fixed them each a glass of Jim Beam on the rocks. Rare now were the body blows, he told her, the attacks of grief so visceral the sobbing literally doubled him over.

  The trouble was, said Pender, he wasn’t so sure he wanted the pain to subside. Except for his memories and a few trinkets, it was all he had left of his second wife, who’d died from pancreatic cancer only a few months after their wedding. So perhaps it had been a mistake to leave the tropical paradise where the two had met, wed, and lived happily ever after—if three months qualifies as ever after.

  But at the time, the reminders had been too plentiful and too painful to bear. Every Caribbean sunset broke Pender’s heart all over again, and with booze duty-free on the island and a bar on virtually every corner, it didn’t take him long to realize that you can’t drown your sorrows in alcohol, you can only pickle them. So he’d opted for the geographical solution instead, resigning his post as St. Luke’s chief of detectives and moving nearly four thousand miles west to the golfing mecca of the Monterey peninsula to take another stab at retirement—and at lowering his handicap, which after twenty years on the links still hovered around the drinking age.

  Not that there was any shortage of either booze or bars on the peninsula, he told Irene. But at least there nobody felt sorry for him—largely because he’d told no one of his loss. “So you can see, it’s nothing personal,” he concluded. “You’re an attractive, intelligent woman, Irene—with legs to die for, don’t think I haven’t noticed. And I’m flattered as hell you’d even consider…well, you know. But it’s too soon—I’m just not ready yet.”

  Irene raised her head—she’d spent the last few minutes studying the carpet—and cocked it to the side, looking up into Pender’s pained eyes. “Yet being the operative word?” she asked him.

  “Oh, definitely,” said Pender.

  She smiled. “Well that’s going to be a little awkward, isn’t it? Waiting for yet, I mean.”

  Pender thought it over. “Tell you what. When the time is right, I’ll show up at your door in a slinky negligee,” he said, just as Irene raised her glass to her lips.

  And so what was to have been an evening of romance dissolved into a spit take. But afterward, alone in her room, when her mind insisted on exploring her moment of humiliation the way a tongue explores a broken tooth, up popped the image of Pender knocking on her door in a see-through negligee, carrying a box of candy and a floral bouquet, and she found herself smiling instead of weeping.

  Pender too, had a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, he told himself, when he was alone in his room again. Turning down that elegant trim at your age—good God, man, you must have lost your mind.

  8

  “Anything else before I go?” inquired the chunky, bespectacled night nurse. She had already brought Lyssy a glass of water, given him his sleeping pill, helped him take off his leg and change into his pajamas, and tucked the covers around him.

  “Yeah, could you move my crutches closer to the bed? In case I have to go to the bathroom?” Lyssy, who’d been trying to postpone the inevitable, began to sense the nurse’s growing impatience. The problem was, he wasn’t just afraid of the dark, he was afraid of anybody knowing he was afraid.

  “There you go. Anything else?” She waited by the door, her finger poised at the keypad, ready to punch in the security code.

  “I guess not.”

  “Good night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  The heavy door slid open, then closed again behind the nurse, locking automatically. The ceiling panels dimmed gradually; soon the only illumination in the room was a faint trapezoid the color of moonlight, cast onto the carpet by the recessed night-light in the bathroom.

  What a roller coaster of a day, thought Lyssy, slipping one hand under his pajama bottoms and closing it around his penis, which was already satisfactorily heavy with anticipation.

  To make it hard, he thought about the girl he’d met this afternoon, then plugged her image into his standard masturbatory template, which always involved a rescue. Tonight he would save Lily from a fire—another night it might be Miss Stockings whom he saved from a flood, or the pretty black nutritionist who had to be rescued from one of Lyssy’s neighbors on the locked ward. And after the fire (because for Lyssy the idea of even taking the initiative in a sexual encounter, much less resorting to coercion or violence, was a brake-screeching turnoff), Lily became the grateful aggressor. I know what you want, she whispered as she began to undress herself at the foot of the bed, I know what you need….

  Another feature common to Lyssy’s sexual fantasies was that the actual sex tended to be indistinct, breast-oriented, and R-rated—he rarely got as far as the nitty-gritty before reaching orgasm.

  Tonight, though, strange things started happening. Lyssy had stroked himself into a sort of trance state, picturing the girl turning her back to him while she slipped off her bomber jacket. But when she turned around to face him again, she was no longer Lily—ins
tead, she had turned into Dr. Al’s wife.

  Nothing too unusual there. Though she was in her midforties and starting to spread a little in the waist and rear, Cheryl Corder was still nice and bosomy up front, and had a sort of Martha Stewart ice-queen thing going: frosted hair, knowing eyes that crinkled at the corners, and a wry, crooked smile.

  Nor was there anything unusual about the way the fantasy played out at first. Stripped down to her panties, Mrs. Corder sashayed around the bed until she was standing directly in front of Lyssy, then cupped her breasts in both hands for him to nuzzle, kiss, tongue, and suckle.

  Most nights, that would have been enough to bring the furiously masturbating Lyssy to orgasm. If not, he’d picture her climbing onto his lap and lowering herself onto him—that would generally do the trick. But tonight, instead of waiting passively, he grabbed the woman roughly by the hair and threw her facedown onto the bed—not his own narrow twin, but a big double bed with satin sheets.

  Frightened now, whimpering, No, please, she tried to crawl away. Unable to stop himself—it was as if someone else had hijacked his fantasy—Lyssy threw himself on top of her, jerked her panties down roughly. His cock was huge, red-knobbed, and throbbing, a real two-hander. You like it rough, don’t you, he said as he spread her cheeks and thrust himself into her hard. She screamed; the more she screamed, the better he liked it. Humping, driving, crushing her down, feeling the dark tightness enveloping him as one scarred hand gripped her hair for control while the other snaked under her to play with her fat, white, heavy-hanging breasts.

  Gone was any semblance of control over his own fantasy—Lyssy wasn’t even surprised, when he turned his head, to see Dr. Al and young Alison tied to chairs at the foot of the bed, both naked, bound and gagged, forced to watch. Don’t worry, your turn’s coming, he hissed to Alison in a voice that was no more his own than was the fantasy. And you’ll get yours too, he confided to Dr. Al.

  And as he began to come, a succession of disconnected images flashed before Lyssy’s eyes—a knife being drawn across a throat, blood spattering a wall, a lolling head, a slumping body….