Getting Off hcc-69

by Lawrence Block

  “You sensed that something was wrong,” Rosemary’s mother said. “That’s why it was so easy to get you to stay for dinner, and why you wanted to sleep over.”

  “They were fighting,” she said, “and there was something different about it. Not just a normal argument. God, it’s my fault, isn’t it? I should have been able to do something. The least I could have done was to say something.”

  Everybody told her that was nonsense.

  After she’d left Lucas’s brand-new high-floor apartment, she returned to her own older, less imposing sublet, where she brewed a pot of coffee and sat up at the kitchen table with a pencil and paper. She wrote down the numbers one through five in descending order, and after each she wrote a name, or as much of the name as she knew. Sometimes she added an identifying phrase or two. The list began with 5, and the first entry read as follows:

  Said his name was Sid. Pasty complexion, gap between top incisors. Met in Philadelphia at bar on Race Street (?), went to his hotel, don’t remember name of it. Gone when I woke up.

  Hmmm. Sid might be hard to find. How would she even know where to start looking for him?

  At the bottom of the list, her entry was simpler and more specific. Douglas Pratter. Last known address Bowling Green. Lawyer? Google him?

  She booted up her laptop.

  Their room in the Detroit Avenue Holiday Inn was on the third floor in the rear. With the drapes drawn and the door locked, with their clothes hastily discarded and the bedclothes as hastily tossed aside, it seemed to her for at least a few minutes that she was fifteen years old again, and in bed with her first boyfriend. She tasted a familiar sweetness in his kisses, a familiar raw urgency in his ardor.

  But the illusion didn’t last. And then it was just lovemaking, at which each of them had a commendable proficiency. He went down on her this time, which was something he’d never done when they were teenage sweethearts, and the first thought that came to her was that he had turned into her father, because her father had done that all the time.

  Afterward, after a fairly long shared silence, he said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered.”

  “What it would be like to be together again?”

  “Well, sure, but more than that. What life would have been like if I’d never moved away in the first place. What would have become of the two of us, if we’d had the chance to let things find their way.”

  “Probably the same as most high school lovers. We’d have stayed together for a while, and then we’d have broken up and gone separate ways.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or I’d have gotten pregnant, and you’d have married me, and we’d be divorced by now.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or we’d still be together, and bored to death with each other, and you’d be in a motel fucking somebody new.”

  “God, how’d you get so cynical?”

  “You’re right, I got off on the wrong foot there. How about this? If your father hadn’t moved you all to Bowling Green, you and I would have stayed together, and our feeling for each other would have grown from teenage hormonal infatuation to the profound mature love it was always destined to be. You’d have gone off to college, and as soon as I finished high school I’d have enrolled there myself, and when you finished law school I’d have my undergraduate degree, and I’d be your secretary and office manager when you set up your own law practice. By then we’d have gotten married, and by now we’d have one child with a second on the way, and we would remain unwavering in our love for one another, and as passionate as ever.” She gazed wide-eyed at him. “Better?”

  His expression was hard to read, and he appeared to be on the point of saying something, but she turned toward him and ran a hand over his flank, and the prospect of a further adventure in adultery trumped whatever he might have wanted to say. Whatever it was, she thought, it would keep.

  “I’d better get going,” he said, and rose from the bed, and rummaged through the clothes he’d tossed on the chair.

  She said, “Doug? Don’t you think you might want to take a shower first?”

  “Oh, Jesus. Yeah, I guess I better, huh?”

  He’d known where to take her to lunch, knew to make a room reservation ahead of time, but he evidently didn’t know enough to shower away her spoor before returning to home and hearth. So perhaps this sort of adventure was not the usual thing for him. Oh, she was fairly certain he tried to get lucky on business trips — those oh-so-lonely New York visits he’d mentioned, for instance — but you didn’t have to shower after that sort of interlude, because you were going back to your own hotel room, not to your unsuspecting wife.

  She started to get dressed. There was no one waiting for her, and her own shower could wait until she was back at her own motel. But she changed her mind about dressing, and was still naked when he emerged from the shower, a towel wrapped around his middle.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a glass of water. “Drink this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Water.”

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “Just drink it, will you?”

  He shrugged, drank it. He went and picked up his undershorts, and kept losing his balance when he tried stepping into them. She took his arm and led him over to the bed, and he sat down and told her he didn’t feel so good. She took the undershorts away from him and got him to lie down on the bed, and she watched him struggling to keep a grip on consciousness.

  She put a pillow over his face, and she sat on it. She felt him trying to move beneath her, and she watched his hands make feeble clawing motions at the bedsheet, and observed the muscles working in his lower legs. Then he was still, and she stayed where she was for a few minutes, and an involuntary tremor, a very subtle one, went through her hindquarters.

  And what was that, pray tell? Could have been her coming, could have been him going. Hard to tell, and did it really matter?

  When she got up, well, duh, he was dead. No surprise there. She put her clothes on, cleaned up all traces of her presence, and transferred all of the cash from his wallet to her purse. A few hundred dollars in tens and twenties, plus an emergency hundred-dollar bill tucked away behind his driver’s license. She might have missed it, but she’d learned years ago that you had to give a man’s wallet a thorough search.

  Not that the money was ever the point. But they couldn’t take it with them and it had to go somewhere, so it might as well go to her. Right?

  How it happened: That final morning, shortly after she left for school, her father and mother had argued, and her father had gone for the handgun he kept in a locked desk drawer and shot her mother dead. He left the house and went to his office, saying nothing to anyone, although a coworker did say that he’d seemed troubled. And sometime during the afternoon he returned home, where his wife’s body remained undiscovered. The gun was still there (unless he’d been carrying it around with him during the intervening hours) and he put the barrel in his mouth and blew his brains out.

  Except that wasn’t really how it happened, it was how the police figured it out. What did in fact happen, of course, is that she got the handgun from the drawer before she left for school, and went into the kitchen where her mother was loading the dishwasher.

  She said, “You knew, right? You had to know. I mean, how could you miss it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her mother said, but her eyes said otherwise.

  “That he was fucking me,” she said. “You know, Daddy? Your husband?”

  “How can you say that word?”

  How indeed? So she shot her mother before she left for school, and called her father on his cell as soon as she got home from school, summoning him on account of an unspecified emergency. He came right home, and by then she might have liked to change her mind, but how could she with her mother dead on the kitchen floor? So she shot him and arranged the evidence appropriately, and then she went over to Rosemary’s.

  Di dah di dah di
dah.

  You could see Doug’s car from the motel room window. He’d parked in the back and they’d come up the back stairs, never going anywhere near the front desk. So no one had seen her, and no one saw her now as she went to his car, unlocked it with his key, and drove it downtown.

  She’d have preferred to leave it there, but her own rental was parked near the Crowne Plaza, so she had to get downtown to reclaim it. You couldn’t stand on the corner and hail a cab, not in Toledo, and she didn’t want to call one. So she drove to within a few blocks of the lot where she’d stowed her Honda, parked his Volvo at an expired meter, and used the hanky with which he’d cleaned his glasses to wipe away any fingerprints she might have left behind.

  She redeemed her car and headed for her own motel. Halfway there, she realized she had no real need to go there. She’d packed that morning and left no traces of herself in her room. She hadn’t checked out, electing to keep her options open, so she could go there now with no problem, but for what? Just to take a shower?

  She sniffed herself. She could use a shower, no question, but she wasn’t so rank that people would draw away from her. And she kind of liked the faint trace of his smell coming off her flesh.

  And the sooner she got to the airport, the sooner she’d be out of Toledo.

  She managed to catch a 4:18 flight that was scheduled to stop in Cincinnati, on its way to Denver. She’d stay in Denver for a while, until she’d decided where she wanted to go next.

  She hadn’t had a reservation, or even a set destination, and she took the flight because it was there to be taken. The leg from Toledo to Cincinnati was more than half empty, and she had a row of seats to herself, but she was stuck in a middle seat from Cincinnati to Denver, wedged between a fat lady who looked to be scared stiff of something, possibly the flight itself, and a man who tapped away at his laptop and invaded her space with his elbows.

  Not the most pleasant travel experience she’d ever had, but nothing she couldn’t live through. She closed her eyes, let her thoughts turn inward.

  After her parents were buried and the estate settled, after she’d finished the high school year and collected her diploma, after a realtor had listed her house and, after commission and closing costs, netted her a few thousand over and above the outstanding first and second mortgages, she’d stuffed what she could into one of her father’s suitcases and boarded a bus.

  She’d never gone back. And, until her brief but gratifying reunion with Douglas Pratter, Esq., she’d never been Katherine Tolliver again.

  On the tram to Baggage Claim, a businessman from Wichita told her how much simpler it had been getting in and out of Denver before they built Denver International Airport. “Not that Stapleton was all that wonderful,” he said, “but it was a quick cheap cab ride from the Brown Palace. It wasn’t stuck out in the middle of a few thousand square miles of prairie.”

  It was funny he should mention the Brown, she said, because that’s where she was staying. So of course he suggested she share his cab, and when they reached the hotel and she offered to pay half, well, he wouldn’t hear of it. “My company pays,” he said, “and if you really want to thank me, why don’t you let the old firm buy you dinner?”

  Tempting, but she begged off, said she’d eaten a big lunch, said all she wanted to do was get to sleep. “If you change your mind,” he said, “just ring my room. If I’m not there, you’ll find me in the bar.”

  She didn’t have a reservation, but they had a room for her, and she sank into an armchair with a glass of water from the tap. The Brown Palace had its own artesian well, and took great pride in their water, so how could she turn it down?

  “Just drink it,” she’d told Doug, and he’d done what she told him. It was funny, people usually did.

  “Five,” she’d told Lucas, who’d been so eager to be number six. But he’d only managed it for a matter of minutes, because the list was composed of men who could sit around that mythical table and tell each other how they’d had her, and you had to be alive to do that. So Lucas had dropped off the list when she’d chosen a knife from his kitchen and slipped it right between his ribs and into his heart. He fell off her list without even opening his eyes.

  After her parents died, she didn’t sleep with anyone until she’d graduated and left home for good. Then she got a waitress job, and the manager took her out drinking after work one night, got her drunk, and performed something that might have been date rape; she didn’t remember it that clearly, so it was hard to say.

  When she saw him at work the next night he gave her a wink and a pat on the behind, and something came into her mind, and that night she got him to take her for a ride and park on the golf course, where she took him by surprise and beat his brains out with a tire iron.

  There, she’d thought. Now it was as if the rape — if that’s what it was, and did it really matter what it was?Whatever it was, it was as if it had never happened.

  A week or so later, in another city, she quite deliberately picked up a man in a bar, went home with him, had sex with him, killed him, robbed him, and left him there. And that set the pattern.

  Four times the pattern had been broken, and those four men had joined Doug Pratter on her list. Two of them, Sid from Philadelphia and Peter from Wall Street, had escaped because she drank too much. Sid was gone when she woke up. Peter was there, and in the mood for morning sex, after which she’d laced his bottle of vodka with the little crystals she’d meant to put in his drink the night before. She never did find out how that played out, so she didn’t really know whether Peter deserved a place on her list.

  It wouldn’t be hard to find out, and if he was still on the list, well, she could deal with it. It would be a lot harder to find Sid, because all she knew about him was his first name, and that might well have been improvised for the occasion. And she’d met him in Philadelphia, but he was already registered at a hotel, so that meant he was probably from someplace other than Philadelphia, and that meant the only place she knew to look was the one place where she could be fairly certain he didn’t live.

  She knew the first and last names of the two other men on her list. Graham Weider was a Chicagoan she’d met in New York; he’d taken her to lunch and to bed, then jumped up and hurried her out of there, claiming an urgent appointment and arranging to meet her later. But he’d never turned up, and the desk at his hotel told her he’d checked out.

  So he was lucky, and Alvin Kirkaby was lucky in another way. He was an infantry corporal on leave before they shipped him off to Iraq, and if she’d realized that she wouldn’t have picked him up in the first place, and she wasn’t sure what kept her from doing to him as she did to the other men who entered her life. Pity? Patriotism? Both seemed unlikely, and when she thought about it later she decided it was simply because he was a soldier. That gave them something in common, because weren’t they both military types? Wasn’t she her father’s little soldier?

  Maybe he’d been killed over there. She supposed she could find out. And then she could decide what she wanted to do about it.

  Graham Weider, though, couldn’t claim combatant status, unless you considered him a corporate warrior. And while his name might not be unique, neither was it by any means common. And it was almost certainly his real name, too, because they’d known it at the front desk. Graham Weider, from Chicago. It would be easy enough to find him, when she got around to it.

  Of them all, Sid would be the real challenge. She sat there going over what little she knew about him and how she might go about playing detective. Then she treated herself to another half-glass of Brown Palace water and flavored it with a miniature of Johnny Walker from the minibar. She sat down with the drink and shook her head, amused by her own behavior. She was dawdling, postponing her shower, as if she couldn’t bear to wash away the traces of Doug’s lovemaking.

  But she was tired, and she certainly didn’t want to wake up the next morning with his smell still on her. She undressed and stood for a long time in the sho
wer, and when she got out of it she stood for a moment alongside the tub and watched the water go down the drain.

  Four, she thought. Why, before you knew it, she’d be a virgin all over again.

  EIGHT

  Four.

  Four men who’d been with her. Four men, each of whom could see her walking down the street, nudge a friend, and say, “You see that one? Nice, huh? Well, I had her once.”

  There’d been others, of course, who could have made that claim. You couldn’t say there’d been too many to count, but it was true that she could no longer count them, because they weren’t there to be counted. They no longer existed. They were dead, and their successes with her — if you wanted to call them that — had been expunged from the record books.

  Her pattern for a few years now had been simple enough. She found a man, or was found by one; she went to his bed or took him to hers; she left, and left him dead. If he had money, she took it with her. It let her live with a degree of comfort and paid her way from one hunting ground to the next. She’d take a job now and then, but she worked only when she wanted to.

  And the jobs never lasted. Because sooner or later she’d hook up with one of nature’s noblemen, and she’d give him what he wanted, and then take it all back with interest. And then, of course, it would be time to get out of Dodge. Or Philadelphia, or Toledo, or Louisville, or Kansas City, or — well, wherever. The places all tended to merge in her memory. So did the men. And why make an effort to bring their images into focus? They were gone, and once they were gone it was as if they had never existed.

  In Toledo she’d erased a man from her past, and even as his body was approaching room temperature she was on her way to Denver. She stayed a few days at the Brown Palace, where she flirted with a few suits — a corporate lawyer, a real estate guy, a venture capitalist — but didn’t let any of them get any further than a little conversational double entendre.