by Matt Cole
Deena sighed. “Fine.”
“So what have you been up to today?”
Deena looked sheepishly at Arlene. “You’re not going to believe what I’m going to tell you.”
Arlene tilted her head. “About what?”
“Let me talk to Maggie and Willard first so that they can go home,” Deena said. “I don’t want to tell them just yet and I’ll be back.”
“Deena, what did you do?”
* * * *
After his invitation to dinner with his renter, Frank Marsden was edgy and paranoid. He felt as if he was getting too sloppy. But this did not deter his appetite as later that same day he went out hunting again. He added to his cache of women with the addition of Maria Pinella, a petite, soft-spoken eighteen-year-old. Despite her childlike qualities, Pinella was no naïf. At lunchtime that day she had been working the street in front of a seedy Southside hotel, hoping somebody would come along looking for a nooner. That somebody turned out to be Marsden, who was driving his silver Camry.
She went with him, sucking his cock as he drove. Marsden followed his established pattern, and drug Maria Pinella into his basement. As soon as they got downstairs, Pinella saw that she was in trouble and tried to make a run for it. Marsden stopped her and then grabbed a metal rod and began to hit her across the buttocks.
“That’s what you’re going to get if you don’t do what I tell you,” he said.
To impress her and the other women he hit her five more times. When he went to shackle her in the customary fashion, with muffler clamps, he discovered her ankles were far too thin. She could slip right through the devices. So he had to use a pair of handcuffs.
That night Frank was in a merciful mood. He not only had a new recruit, but he saw that Angela was now nearly ready to be put into the hole.
His delight pained Jennifer Raymond as she figured she would be the next to be put into the hole with whatever was down there. Would she be slurped up by that thing? She shivered at the thought and though tears came streaming down her face she knew better than to make a sound.
Willard was at the kitchen table, staring into a mug of fresh coffee.
“She’s okay,” Deena said quickly. “At least I’m pretty sure she is.”
“Pretty sure?” Maggie snarled as she appeared from behind Willard. “What kind of answer is pretty sure?”
“The only one I have at the moment,” Deena said gently. “She wants to handle this on her own.”
Willard hunched his shoulders up around his ears, and started to sigh. He was a big man, almost as tall as Joseph. It was then Maggie started to cry.
“I know…I know…” Willard pulled out a gigantic, white ironed handkerchief and wiped his wife’s eyes.
“I thought this time she’d do something about him…” Maggie said through her sobs.
Deena instinctively looked around for Steve. “Speaking of him…where is he?”
“Gone to the bar, I suppose,” Willard offered.
“I thought this one would change her mind too, Maggie. Apparently she has a plan this time. And I believe her. She had this look of determination. I feel like she has had enough.”
“Do you know how this started?” Maggie asked Deena.
“No.”
“Dinner was late.” Maggie managed a shaky grin. “Doesn’t that beat all? That is not a reason for a man to lay his hands upon that woman. What gives him the right?”
“Now, Maggie, calm down. What’s done is done and as Deena said, Arlene wants to handle this on her own,” Willard said to his wife.
“Perhaps you two could go and leave me to speak with Arlene in private?” Deena suggested.
Maggie looked offended before a look from Willard reassured her that this was the right thing to do.
“Call us if you need anything,” Maggie said as Willard pulled her out the door. “Whatever time you need us, we’ll be by the phone. Okay…then…’bye.”
“They gone?” Arlene asked from the hallway.
Deena turned and smiled at her friend. “How much did you hear?”
“All of it,” Arlene admitted. “Now what did you do?”
“You are amazing,” Deena said. “Here you are after getting…well, you know…and you are more interested in something that I did.”
“You’re stalling.”
“You should know, you taught me well.” Deena couldn’t hide her delight and soon the two women were laughing.
“Spill it.”
“I invited Mr. Marsden to a dinner party at the house tomorrow night,” Deena blurted out.
“You did what?”
“I know.” Deena smiled. “I couldn’t help myself. I ran outside as soon as I saw him and it just came out.”
“Anyone else going to be at this party? I don’t recall any invitation,” Arlene said, mocking hurt.
“You and the Swaders, of course,” Deena replied. “That is if you all will come.”
“I’ll be there but I’m not sure Maggie wants to be around me right now,” Arlene admitted.
“Prove to her that you will handle this and she’ll come around.”
The two women embraced and Deena helped Arlene wash up before getting her ready for bed.
“I’ll take the couch tonight,” Deena said. “You know in case…”
“He won’t be back tonight,” Arlene responded. “If he ends up anywhere it will be in the drunk tank downtown. But I do appreciate the offer. You don’t have to stay. I’m a big girl and I can take care of myself.”
“I don’t mind,” Deena said. “Besides, it gets me away from the smell for a night.”
“Okay, but you sure you’ll be okay on the couch?”
Deena waved off Arlene’s suggestion. “I’ve slept on worse.”
“Okay.”
Even after adding a sixth woman to his horror harem, Frank Marsden was not content. The encounter with Deena Hopping kept him on edge. He went out again later that night. He found a starry-eyed Vietnamese woman named Tuyen Luong who was wandering the streets. Frank was extremely excited, having never fucked an Asian woman before. He was so excited he nearly ejaculated in his pants as he watched Tuyen enter the car.
Tuyen’s English was bad so she resorted to pointing at what he might what from her. Frank did climax then at the excitement of a new and foreign woman.
* * * *
When they got to the house at 1420 South Douty Street, Marsden ushered her into the house, not the basement. He noticed that his tenant was out. He was risking a lot, but this woman was worth it to him. He found the guest bedroom and pushed her inside. Tuyen did not like the rough handling of her and tried to express so. After forcing her to give him oral sex, Marsden slapped Tuyen and turned her over. She screamed and this only excited him more. Soon his massive frame was on her and he sodomized Tuyen despite her screams of pain and terror. Marsden reached a climax like he had never before and when he went to clean himself up noticed blood on his penis.
“What the fuck is that?” he screamed at her. Tuyen balled herself in the corner with a sheet from the bed. “You fucking cunt—you’re going to give me Aids!”
The beating that Tuyen received was severe even for Marsden’s standard. Tuyen weighed perhaps a hundred pounds and he felt several of her ribs break as he punched her. Her cries stopped as she passed out.
Marsden grabbed the girl up and brought her downstairs to the others. No one said a word. Marsden was seething and did not waste any time as he lifted the cover to the hole and threw Tuyen into it. Once he was done he placed the cover back on top and several bags to weigh it down.
The other women scurried with fear from him. Marsden liked it.
He pulled Maria by her hair. He unzipped his pants and his penis slapped her in the face. “I just fucked that little bitch in the ass and came so much that she could probably taste it.”
Maria cried and tried to turn her face away. “What do you think you’re doing?” He slapped her in the face with his hand. “I want you to clean
my dick, bitch. Taste that Gook’s shit.” He forced his penis into her mouth and much to his surprise he reached another climax before he let her go.
* * * *
Steve Balleza shook some Valium from the large bottle he carried.
Ten minutes earlier, Steve had stepped out of his house, leaving his battered wife to the care of his friends, into a tornado of sleet, shuffled down the ice-coated path to his pick-up, and slid into the front seat, drawing his thick, long legs in soaked, icy pants into the truck.
He started the engine, put on the defrost and wipers, and waited for the windshield to clear. He needed time anyway to get hold of himself and figure out what to do next. Was this the time he finally got his ass hauled off to jail? Or was he going to go and self medicate himself down at one of the local bars, like normal?
He’d always known he had an anger problem. The problem was no one understood his anger. Steve considered it an acquired taste. But he’d also thought he had it under control. He was wrong. Little by little, over a span of time, his control has slipped. Of course, Arlene would say it was a result of his drinking. Steve didn’t have a problem drinking; he liked to drink; the problem was no one else appreciated his drinking. Arlene wanted him to go into Alcoholics Anonymous, but Steve was no quitter.
In a spasm of self-loathing, he twisted in the faux leather set, rocking the truck.
He should be a Valium spare-parts cataloger, drink all he wants; eat pizza right out-of-the-box type of guy.
Not the husband of some frou-frou real estate agent who has to attend fancy dinner parties in a dress shirt and tie.
Damn the man who made it so men had to wear such painful adornments.
And on top of the immense screw-up of the night, he’d been so floored by what he’d done to his wife, so perplexed by the outpouring of love from her friends, he’d taken the worse possible course and left. Made a decision he did not think he had a chance of correcting or even if he wanted to.
But he had made it, made it because of Arlene, and he owed her the good will, the bare-knuckle love and respect, to try to correct it.
It was the least he could do, and the second the defroster had cleared a slice of his windshield large enough to see through, he jammed the truck into gear, slid down the driveway to the road, and headed for the nearest bar—no wait he had a much better destination in mind.
Chapter 9
It was a grim spectacle that Deena saw there, in her home, the next morning; all the pictures had their glass punched out; jagged shards of glass still hinged to the frames, like broken teeth in a shattered mouth; the splintered glass vases; the stuffed chairs, gouged and slashed, their innards seeping slowly outwards onto the floor; the floor strewn with glass and stuffing; dozens of pots and pans in the kitchen, overturned, dented, handles broken off, or had been hurled against the walls with such violence as to fracture and perforate the plaster in many spots. And the furniture—the sofa and love seat, the dining room table chairs, all horribly hacked and smashed. And above that, hanging like a haze, the nauseating choking stink coming from the basement. The dehumidifier and her candles were all broken or torn asunder.
But it wasn’t the mere spectacle of destruction that shook Deena so deeply—as total and final as that was. What stunned her was the force of violence in the act. As she stood there she tried to compute in her head the amount of sheer hate a single person, acting alone, had to generate in order to wreak that much devastation. When Deena thought about it, it made her feel a little sick to her stomach and weak in the knees as she stood there in the doorway with the waves of horrendous odor pushing outwards against her.
“Surely you don’t think this was done by just one person? Could it have been a gang?” Deena asked.
Dauphin County Sheriff Lindsey Hill walked at a snail’s pace to a corner of the living room, the sound of crunching glass beneath her heels. Her back was to Deena when she reached a point and stooped over. When Sheriff Hill stood up again and started back toward Deena she was carrying a sodden jacket. She carried it by two fingers as it was quite wet and messy.
“Look familiar?” Sheriff Lindsay Hill asked.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Deena replied.
“I was afraid of that.”
“Are there any fingerprints?” Deena asked.
“Sure,” Sheriff Hill said, with a smile that was a little patronizing. “But I think we have our man in custody already.”
“Are you sure it’s him?”
Sheriff Lindsay Hill sighed. “Pretty sure, Ms. Hopping.”
“Why? Why did he do this to my house?” Deena asked.
Just then a loud belch was heard from somewhere in the back of the house and two sheriff deputies appeared with Steve Balleza from the back of the house as well. His clothes were rumpled and soiled; his eyes were dazed and ringed with red. His tousled hair appeared to have gone gray overnight.
When Steve saw Deena, he stiffened. Then he made a move toward her but was thwarted by the deputies and he stumbled. Still he had managed to come closer to Deena; just then Hill grabbed him by the shirt collar.
Suddenly, Steve Balleza, with both feet set unsteadily on the floor, swaying a bit like an ocean buoy, raised a long, hairy arm and thrust an accusatory finger in Deena Hopping’s direction.
“You know damn well why I did this!” The voice came out a hoarse, raspy whisper. “You know goddamn well why—”
“Steve,” sobbed Deena.
“You goddamn well know why!” Balleza thundered. “You messed up my house, I messed up yours. You both will pay! Hear me? You both will goddamn pay!”
When Sheriff Hill half-guided, half-pushed Deena out of the way as the two deputies escorted Steve Balleza out the front door, he was still thundering, his face the color of ashes, and still trying to turn and yell at her.
“We found him asleep in the back bedroom, I’m guessing the guest bedroom, and there is more,” Sheriff Lindsay Hill said. Deena waited for the “more”, only imagining what it was. “It appears that Mr. Balleza or someone else had sex in the room.”
Deena gasped, covering her mouth with her hands.
“There is semen and blood on the sheets and floor,” Sheriff Hill explained further. “I have CSI coming to process the scene. What I would like you to do is take a look around, trying not to damage the scene any further, and make a list of anything that is missing or damaged beyond repair. This will help your insurance as well.”
“Thank you, of course,” Deena whispered in response.
“I understand that you rent the house, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have the number for your landlord?”
“Um…he lives in the basement,” Deena said, and by the look on the sheriff’s face, revealed her surprise.
“In the basement?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I’ll go and talk to him after we take a look at the house.”
Deena nodded her acknowledgement and the two proceeded in silence around the once fashionable house, avoiding broken glass and other obstacles that had not long ago been Deena Hopping’s possessions.
* * * *
Beverly Dutwin looked like hell. For a nearly a week she had been dangling by her wrist from an overhead beam in a punishment session that began because she had tried to push aside the sheet of plywood covering the “hole”. It so happened to be the same night that Steve Balleza had trashed the house. Frank Marsden was beside himself in panic and rage. The drunken fool had nearly foiled his harem and led the police to him. In a rage, Marsden struck Beverly Dutwin, knocking her unconscious, then gagging the rest of his women to prevent them from alerting anyone above ground to their position. He then began his punishment on Beverly. He shoved live and dead cockroaches into her mouth and then held his hand over her lips until she swallowed.
But she was wearing down. For the last few days she had been vomiting and she complained of a fever. Marsden ignored her and kept the others gagged as he tried to divert
the police from coming to the basement. He knew they would sooner or later, as he was the landlord of the house. Frank scolded himself for renting the house in the first place, yet he knew he needed the income to keep his plan alive.
Angela Quirino knew a crisis was coming when she looked up and saw Beverly had slumped down and showed no signs of rising. She, like the other women, had believed that perhaps their ordeal was finally coming to an end with the police walking all around the house upstairs. Realizing that Beverly’s condition or act, Angela wasn’t convinced it was real, would just make Marsden angrier, Quirino and the other women yelled silent encouragement to Beverly, hoping that Marsden’s anger would force him to slip up and alert the police.
About that time Marsden noticed their quiet screams, took one look at Beverly and ordered her to stand up. She did and he left her. Then again, it was not to be as only a few minutes later she collapsed again. This time Marsden did more than talk to her.
He unconnected her handcuffs and she dropped to the ground in a heap. Marsden angrily kicked her into the hole. “You bitches are going to ruin everything,” he grunted.
Turning his back on Beverly, he walked over to a large chest freezer, a rectangular shaped model, and opened on the top, on the other side of the room, and dished out three bowls of ice cream. He handed one to Quirino, one to Maria Pinella and kept one for himself. He sat calmly in the corner and ate his. After he was through he walked over to the hole where Beverly Dutwin had not moved and unzipped his pants and urinated on her before pulling the plywood sheet over her. He placed the usual bags of materials to hold it down and then took the empty bowls from the women.
The terrible stench was so pervasive it had not only the tenant of his house up in arms, but others in the neighborhood were also starting to complain.
As Marsden predicted, Sheriff Lindsay Hill sent one of his deputies to question him, a rookie cop. The rookie was a godsend for Frank Marsden as he told the deputy he had simply overcooked a roast he was cooking with some exotic herbs, thus creating the horrible odor. He apologized profusely and told him the smell should be cleared out in a day at the most. The rookie deputy believed him and asked Marsden to come to the station when he had a chance to discuss the ransacking of his house. Frank Marsden assured the deputy he would.
