The Murderer Next Door

by Rafael Yglesias

  Ben was on the phone.

  My heart leaped—for a second. But after a moment or two, I could hear he was talking about the stock market, not to Varney. I sat next to Naomi and put my arm around her shoulder. She slid easily into the crook, a perfect fit. I kissed the top of her head.

  “I love you,” I whispered.

  “Hmmm,” she hummed, and snuggled in.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” I said.

  “Great.” Ben’s volume went up a notch, just enough to be clearly heard. His tone had a bluffer’s bravado: “Buy one hundred Index Puts at the market. I’ll get the money transferred tomorrow. Call me back with the price so I’ll—Yeah—I’ll give it to you in cash, you stupid fuck—”

  “Ben!” I scolded, nodding at Naomi.

  “Sorry.” He rung off. I could feel his eyes on me. The tension of his wants, his dissatisfactions, was palpable. How had we failed Ben Fliess that day? Let me count the ways:

  I failed him in bed.

  Naomi failed him at breakfast.

  I failed as a swimming instructor.

  She failed as a swimmer.

  I failed to show public loyalty.

  She failed to take criticism well.

  I failed to take criticism well.

  She failed to walk quickly.

  I failed to keep my temper.

  Now I was about to fail again.

  “Uh, Molly.” Ben cleared his throat awkwardly. “Molly, I need your advice about business. I want to show you some figures. Could you come over?”

  Naomi raised her body with a weary sigh and a groan that seemed to suggest my departure was a mistake. I had learned the code to her noises—she understood another quarrel was coming.

  He pretended to show me some notes on the hotel stationery (I guess for Naomi’s benefit) while he whispered his mad idea.

  “I think the Index Puts look to be a good buy here. The Japanese market took a big hit their last two sessions. I believe that’s a signal it’s coming, that it’ll crash our market again. Bigger this time.”

  “Ben, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Let me explain,” he began pompously, adjusting his glasses, a brilliant professor lecturing his student’s unripened mind.

  “No. Don’t explain. Just tell me what you want. Is it money?”

  Oh, but that was too naked for him. He flinched, was wounded (I could feel myself ready to apologize), settling finally on outrage. “Okay,” he said in a tone that was anything but okay. “If that’s the way you feel. You don’t want to help, I don’t see why—” He shut his mouth and didn’t finish.

  It was like some stupid reflex. I knew I shouldn’t ask, but I did: “You don’t see why what?”

  “Nothing.” He lifted off the chair, ready to walk away, but then turned back, hands on the table, talking down at me. “Then why should I do what you want?”

  “You shouldn’t, Ben,” I said to his face, not bothering to conceal my dislike. “You shouldn’t do a goddamn thing for me.”

  Naomi’s head glanced in our direction. Although I was quiet, she had heard a new music in the familiar duet of husband and wife: a woman’s anger. Her mother had never played that note. Tearful rage, perhaps, but not this cold fury, this Maine woods ice.

  He reacted (and I noted it, understood its implication for the first time) like an actor presented with an unfamiliar cue. His emotions stopped—his eyes scanned one way and another, trying to remember—and then he revved up again, feeling back in his face, his tone and manner whole again, game for improvisation.

  “Fine,” he said, concealing hurt beneath coolness. He turned and called out to Naomi, the indulgent father, “Want to play some video games?” It was all strategy, all a performance.

  “Okay,” she moaned sluggishly, half rolling off the couch.

  Ben hadn’t understood the formation I presented, so he retreated. Later, scouts would appear and attempt to discover my weakness, or simply hope that my will to win would weaken and he would get his way. That was his strongest muscle after all, vigilant and inexhaustible.

  “Come on.” Ben pulled at Naomi, who remained limp, slumped at the foot of the couch. “What’s the matter with you? Are you sick?”

  “No,” she answered too quickly, springing up. I tried to get a view of her as they left: she was pale.

  Alone, I had another collapse of faith. I gave up all my schemes, from Ben confessing (which I knew in my heart would never happen) to cohabiting with him throughout the trial (which I knew would end in death for one of us). I felt my will go, abandon me. I had to let civilization take over, inept and unfair though it was.

  I searched for the number the lieutenant had given me—tucked away behind a fold in my Filofax—and called it. I told the male who answered my name and asked for him.

  “Well,” the lieutenant came on without a hello, “how did he react?”

  “React?”

  “To the magazine article.”

  “What magazine article?”

  “You haven’t seen it? In Town? His first wife has written an article, ‘Men Who Kill and the Women Who Love Them’” He chuckled, unable to resist, then cleared his throat to sound grave. “You’re mentioned—”

  “Is it out?”

  “On the stands—”

  I hung up without having told him my information and left the room. There was a shop in the lobby. I found it immediately. Joan’s story wasn’t on the cover, thank God, but there was a headline along the bottom announcing its presence inside. I carried it off to the women’s room in the lobby and read it in a stall.

  It was tasteless and stupid and factless and a little dull. Joan gave a sanitized and brief account of her marriage to Ben, told the alleged facts of the murder, and quoted anonymous parents at the school. She mentioned that I was Wendy’s closest friend and had maintained contact with Ben and Naomi.

  “My main concern is the little girl,” she quoted me as saying. The magazine hadn’t checked this with me (obviously), but I guess they assumed no one would or could sue for that remark, although I can’t believe I actually said it, certainly not the way it came out, a bureaucrat announcing a departmental policy.

  Amelia Waxman and a coterie of Wendy’s colleagues were also quoted, saying good things, nice things, impossible and untrue things.

  Harriet was a featured player, contemplating legal action to get custody of Naomi. She had two long quotes and was portrayed as worried and warmhearted. None of her eccentricity or vanity or lack of fitness was detailed.

  What bothered me most was that Joan had managed to prettify Ben. Although the article’s point of view was that women are victimized by men, she left out his gambling, his intellectual arrogance, his selfishness, his award-winning combination of manipulativeness, self-pity, and self-deception, and instead portrayed him as sexually tormented, somehow also a victim of “society’s rigid role models.” Then, having stripped Ben of what made him compelling, her portrait of Wendy was absent the depth of my friend’s passions and ambitions, her greed to get what she wanted out of life, including a model husband and father, whether or not one existed. Ben had understood that much about my poor dead friend, that she wanted to win also, wanted life to be lived her way and would have used his cross-dressing against him. Joan wound up claiming we all had kinship with Ben and Wendy, that they were “reflections of ourselves, no matter how distorted or dimmed by their special circumstances.”

  Obviously I am not as smart as I thought I was before Wendy’s murder, and there is a great deal I do not know, but I do have this expertise: we may all be killers and victims, but we kill and die very differently, each one of us, and evil is still evil and good is still good, no matter how thoroughly you understand motivation. On that I will allow no disagreement. Perhaps all men have Ben in them: all men do not kill. Perhaps all women have Wendy in them: all women are not murdered.

  NAOMI COMPLAINED OF A SORE THROAT BEFORE DINNER and she had no appetite. She allowed h
er smooth scoop of chocolate ice cream to melt untasted. I touched her forehead; it warmed my palm like an open fire.

  “She’s got a fever,” I said to Ben.

  “I don’t!” Naomi whined, and ducked away from his probing hand.

  “Stay still!” Ben shouted. All day he had used an irritated tone with her, a subtle (not so subtle) blackmail for me to give him what he wanted. I couldn’t figure out which one he wanted more—sex or money. Given that it was Ben, probably both. He felt her brow. “We’ll go home. Take her to the doctor in the morning.”

  In the nineteenth century, before antibiotics, people died of heartbreak. She should die, I thought, of some beautiful illness, while she was still good, only good, with no adult vengeance or guilt to taint her. Instead, with our medicines, she would have to live to fill therapist’s waiting rooms, appear on talk shows, and found groups. Children of Murderers Anonymous.

  I had said nothing about Joan’s article, although I didn’t fear his reaction. My quote was so innocuous I doubt even Ben could have made anything out of it. Besides, none of that mattered now. At long last I had come to the inevitable decision, the one you knew I was sure to make.

  I would kill him.

  My problem was how. Not the difficulty in concealing that I did it, but to make sure that I succeeded, and that Naomi wasn’t exposed to the event.

  “I don’t want to go home,” Naomi croaked at the table. She held her neck and swallowed deliberately, pained. “I want to stay.” She was reduced to a whisper.

  We ignored her. Back in the room, she continued to moan, “I don’t want to go home.” She sounded almost delirious. We gave her Tylenol and parked her in front of the television while packing up. Within a minute she passed out, breathing heavily through her nose.

  Ben sat down beside her prone figure and stroked her hair. “Maybe we should let her sleep here until the morning. Then drive straight to the doctor.” He went to the telephone. “I’ll see if I can reach him now and make an appointment.”

  Shooting Ben would be the surest thing. He could fight off a knife attack; poison was grotesque; setting him on fire, all of that, was part of his madness, the desire to hurt, confusing passion with death. I couldn’t trust the justice of the world. I couldn’t even trust the judgment of the world: people either wanted to make Ben into an alien or embrace him as a brother. I wanted him eliminated because I couldn’t defeat him. I was no victim. I had hoped to redeem him through love, but love was power to him. Like Wendy, perhaps like all women (I hesitate to claim wide kinship), I lose power when I feel: only through action can I regain it. Do you understand?

  Doesn’t matter.

  I didn’t hate him; really, once I decided he had to die, I felt sorry for him. I listened to Ben fight his way through the answering service, demanding they reach her pediatrician immediately; he paced while waiting for the return call and then dealt coolly and competently with the doctor. Ben liked actions and decisions. He was efficient, concerned, and sensible. If only the world had appointed him dictator then he would have been a happy man.

  “It’s probably strep throat,” Ben reported to me. “The spiking fever, painful throat. We can bring her in at seven-thirty and he’ll take a culture.”

  “Then we can’t leave in the morning,” I said. I wanted to go back right away. I had to plan the killing; I could think better at home alone.

  “I need to relax,” Ben snapped at me in that harassed tone, as if I had been personally responsible for everything that had contributed to his tension.

  He carried Naomi into the other room and put her to bed, still clothed. I packed her clothes and mine.

  “You’ll pack your things?” I asked him.

  “I’m not a baby,” was his response. He unlocked his huge suitcase (barred from casual entry because of the women’s things still inside) and dumped his clothes from the drawer in.

  I stared at the box which contained the cross-dressing outfit. He noticed my glance.

  He lifted his eyebrows lasciviously. “When we get back home tonight, okay? She’ll sleep soundly.”

  I looked blank, pretending I didn’t know what he meant.

  “Okay?” he prodded.

  If I said no then there would be more ugly moods, probably more talk about the money for the options.

  He whispered: “You enjoyed it that way, remember?”

  “I might be tired,” I said lamely.

  “I’ll drive,” he said grandly, as if that answered any possible objection. He shut his bag and locked it again. “I’ll go downstairs and check out so we can leave anytime.”

  “It’s on my credit card,” I reminded him.

  “I still have one that works,” he said in a bratty way, competing with me. “I’ll have them switch it.” He came over and gave me an awkward buss on the mouth. “I love you,” he said.

  I nodded noncommittally (I hoped); he smiled back, implying I had shown reciprocation, and blew me another kiss as he went out.

  I checked on Naomi. She panted in her sleep like an exhausted dog. Her eyelids fluttered from the activity of her dreams. Could she be dying? I wondered. Waiting until the morning to have her checked suddenly seemed too casual.

  I had an uneasy feeling—give me that much credit. While Ben was gone, I walked about the two rooms, convinced I had forgotten something (I certainly had) but unable to figure out what. You must remember I was not myself, otherwise I would never have made such a mistake.

  Ben returned very quietly, ominously. I knew something had changed. But I still hadn’t realized my error.

  He focused on me immediately. He leaned against the wall and asked, “What do you think Varney can bargain for?”

  “I don’t know, Ben, I’m not a criminal lawyer.” I was nervous: I sensed he was prowling for something. “But maybe, depending on the psychiatrists, it won’t amount to jail.”

  “I bet Stefan would help. He’d be glad to say I’m nuts.”

  I relaxed. So that was it. He had cooked up a conspiracy between me and Stefan. “He isn’t going to help.” I smiled at the thought. “Believe me—he’s furious at me.”

  Ben nodded thoughtfully. He shoved off from the wall and came toward me. “Sit down,” he said, and nudged me onto the couch. He faced me, a knee on the cushion to prop him up, an arm against the backrest barring exit. He had me cornered. “Let’s say we get that. I’m in a booby hatch—”

  “It won’t be bad—”

  “It’ll be great. The vacation I always dreamed of.” Ben put his face right up to mine and roared: “What happens to Nommy?”

  I tried to remain calm. I swallowed with difficulty. I attempted to shift away from his blocking presence, but he caught my head in his hand. I jerked it free. “Ben!”

  “Answer me!”

  “I’ll take care of her!” I squeaked. “What do you think?”

  He nodded, not at me, to himself. “That’s what you’re after,” he muttered. “I’m a fucking idiot,” he whispered harshly, his eyes glowing with tears. He shut them for a moment. When they opened, I saw something amazing, something I had never seen before in my life, something that robbed me of breath.

  Hate. Pure hate.

  He hit me. The back of his hand—knuckles hard and sharp as thick nails—punctured my cheek. I fell over, my face slid on the scratchy fabric. I tasted blood. I wanted to rub myself in it: I wanted to stay down, loathed and hated.

  “You called the fucking cops. Are they coming now! Answer me!” He gathered my hair and pulled relentlessly. If he didn’t stop my scalp was going to come off any second, my brains were going to spill out.

  “Let go!” I begged. I kicked at his legs to get free.

  He hit me in the stomach. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to inhale, but my belly was gone, I couldn’t work my mouth.

  I was dying.

  “Are they coming!”

  I tried to tell him no. But I had no voice. I shook my head.

  “You think I’m a fucking idiot, don’t
you? It’s on the goddamn hotel bill! You called the cops! What for? What the fuck for?”

  I wanted to tell him anything he liked—that was what all my bravery and strength and courage and hate amounted to: pitiful submission. But I couldn’t talk, couldn’t even breathe.

  He hit me again. Across the mouth.

  I would be black-and-blue for weeks. Everyone would know. There could be permanent scars on my face.

  He hit me again.

  Please stop! I begged him in my head because I couldn’t talk. I wanted to tell him anything, anything at all to save myself.

  “You faked it! You just want to put me away so you can have her! You’re a fucking monster!”

  He punched me in my vagina. I couldn’t make the moans of my pain. My sex went numb, my legs radiated with hurt. He wasn’t satisfied. He aimed very deliberately, lining up the target with his big fist (I remembered how she had tried to hide her hands), and then he smashed my groin again.

  My pelvis cracked. It was broken: I was a cripple.

  I was dying.

  I didn’t want to live anymore, not after how he had ruined me, proud me, proud stupid vain me.

  And he was right. I had lied: all along, all I had wanted was to care for Nommy, to fulfill my duty to Wendy. My pleasure at our sex was a fluke. He was evil and he was killing me, but you see, don’t you, that he was right.

  I was his enemy.

  He took my throat in his hands. I wriggled in his fingers to free my face, to lift my consciousness up. He squeezed my throat like a butcher grabbing hold of a chicken. I squirmed in the grip of slaughter.

  This is it, Molly. This is the moment of your death.

  Please let me go, let me escape! I asked the Lord and tried to wriggle out of the murderer’s hands, to rescue my mind, my soul, the shrunken part that is free of the body, of all the selfish wants of living, the sexless essence of me yearning not to die. But I crashed down into myself, dying.

  I spoke into his eyes, since I couldn’t give it voice: Please Ben, let me go. I’ll leave you to your daughter. Let me go: I want to live.

  You see, I am not good. I am bad, so terribly, terribly bad. And the worst thing was I was dying that way, cornered in my worst self, the one that cared only for me, the evil Molly.