THE LADY KILLER: intense, suspenseful, gripping literary fiction

by LEE OLDS

  “Don’t answer it,” Hartwig called down to Sandy, who by this time had jumped up and put on her coat. “Here,” he said, urging her up the stairs. “I’ll get it and you go up there.” In the faint night lights of the surrounding boats, which filtered in through the windows, she scrambled up the stairs as though her life depended on it, followed by the dog who scratched for its footing on the flimsy stairs.

  There was a clicking of the latch, an opening of the door; then a lot of heated arguing which was muffled for evidently Hartwig’d stepped outside and closed the door behind him to confront this invader whoever it might be…” I paused.

  “Ah, yes, by the way,” said Hammond. “And who was it pray tell?”

  “Who do you think?”

  It was the other girlfriend. She’d gone to a party, stayed out late, drank a little too much for her and decided to drop by. It hadn’t been the first time she’d come over there like that in the middle of the night. After fifteen minutes or so of explanations and excuses, Hartwig managed to get rid of her. The gangplank creaked between the steady sobs of someone walking up it, became silent and he returned to the loft where he found Sandy snuggled comfortably under his down quilt.

  “Who was it?” She asked him. “Oh, no one. It wasn’t important; just a friend. I wish they wouldn’t come over here so late at night is all. However, I believe, you’d better spend the rest of the evening up here.” See how he used the incident to get closer to her. He didn’t suggest driving her home or anything like that even though it was a late hour for by that time he was sober. They both were and he could’ve …

  “So, now he’s got her in bed, fully dressed or not; no problem for some lovers who’re so excited they’ll do it with all their clothes on. How’d he fare with this virgin then?”

  How do you think, though that didn’t happen until morning as the sun had just begun to creep over the East Bay mountains hanging in the sky like a glistening orange. She was groggy and he was just too impetuous to take no for an answer … as if she had a choice … and, of course, in short order so was she.

  “So, that was it, shotgun wedding, eternal bliss and the couple lived happily ever after.”

  “Hardly. This was just the beginning of a thorny and tortuous path. But what’s life anyhow? And who’s to say it can’t end well. God? I doubt it.”

  After humping the maiden for two or three hours, Hartwig took her out to breakfast with the left over money that we’d given him.

  “Ha,” said Hammond. “Knows how to put every last cent to his advantage. Now that’s what I call a real businessman though I think I’d have reservations about the title for him. She, however, seems interesting. I’m beginning to like her the more I hear.”

  “And,” I said, “you’d’ve liked the other too if you’d met her.”

  Her name was Gloria and she was a young one, just about to turn twenty-two; not a thirty-two year old dowager. She’d come to Sausalito from the small seaside town of Santa Cruz to the south of us. You know it, I’m sure. It has an amusement park directly on its boardwalk, roller coaster and all. After the San Francisco complex shut down, my parents took us there. That, of course, was some time ago.

  Gloria’s mother owned a pottery shop there where she made statues and the like. She’d raised her girl in the tradition and when Gloria’d heard of the job here at Heath’s ceramic factory just down the road, she’d jumped at the chance to get out into the world, had taken it, and the factory had also supplied her with a studio out back where she could live. It wasn’t much of a place, with corrugated walls and roof, a few windows, cold as hell in winter though she also had a wood burning stove in there, but the price was right so she moved.

  And she didn’t make bowls or plates all the time there either. They put her in the showroom behind the computer. Funny thing, sales picked up almost immediately upon her arrival, but it was no wonder if you’d seen her …

  “Really, was she that nice? You say a redhead?”

  “Yes, with brown eyes and a milk white complexion, a tiny compact figure and the most glowing smile you’d ever seen.”

  “So, she was pretty choice?”

  “No, not choice. She was easily the prettiest woman in Sausalito according to our consensus … oh, there were some others, but they didn’t rival her.”

  “And she picked out Hartwig?”

  Yes, sad to say. That is he picked her out. Then the more interested she seemed to become, the less did he. He still slept with her but he was attempting to part with her and move on. It was a touchy situation. These emotional involvements are. You don’t want to hurt someone but what can you do? You have no other choice so you move on. Feelings are irrevocable. Believe me there were any number of wolves out there waiting for her to give Hartwig the boot so they could take over but she was one of those modern oddballs, a faithful wench who wanted to get married and raise children and she had her heart set on ‘yours truly’.

  “It … it happens every time,” said Hammond. “Want something and the other doesn’t want it. Or at least it seems that way. Had Hartwig promised her anything?”

  “The usual, I believe. But the date’d long passed. The sound of wedding bells, which even Hartwig’s crotchety old mother’d approved of, for with all the people she disapproved of Gloria was one of those she did, had faded. Yet Gloria clung on. Even after their recent interruption and embarrassment which Hartwig managed to explain away to her as nothing.”

  “He could do that, of course, because she was still smitten enough to let herself be deceived.” I shrugged my shoulders.

  When we saw Hartwig the next day after that night, of course.

  “Thank you guys,” he’d told us, “that was really great of you. I didn’t know what I was missing.”

  What’d he mean exactly? You didn’t know. He liked to rub it in and he could be extremely exasperating at times. Then he disappeared for a week or so. No one’d seen him, and even Gloria came inquiring.

  “Have you guys seen Louis? He’s not at home. His car’s there and Stanley’s missing.”

  She wore one of her old fashioned suits she’d purchased at the flea market, with shoulder pads and a ruffled blouse. She looked extremely cute in it. The top was light brown almost the color of her eyes and her long reddish hair draped over it like molten gold poured out of a crucible. Or steel for that matter. Just something bright and shiny.

  With hang dog looks, we told her we hadn’t seen him, which was true, providing alternative suppositions to what might’ve happened to him, that, of course, were bogus. He’d gone to Sandy’s beach house with his dog. Believe me that was how fast this guy worked. When he moved in it was like a steamroller’d come down the street and flattened everything in its path. We didn’t find any of this out for certain until a week later although we’d expected as much.

  Chapter Three

  But then what’d Sandy Hightower have to do in her life anyhow except hang out, go through the motions of trying to raise her recalcitrant son and both those pastimes are better undertaken with a companion. Preferably one of the opposite sex, personable and physically attractive if not wealthy, of good stock that could one day provide an inheritance; one who was willing to go to bat for you, which, of course, was Hartwig’s object for that’s how the con man works. He makes you feel better about yourself, not worse, otherwise what’s the use.

  She wanted a trophy and, I believe, she figured immediately she’d found it in him. The fact that he was five years younger than her meant nothing. She considered herself a physical dynamo and in fact had proved it by working on the ranch of her ex-husband. Sandy had nothing to do; millions in the bank besides other investments and an older mother over the hill who lived in Redwood Grove that she sometimes catered to.

  This woman was far wealthier than her daughter and substantially more cultured. It was difficult to understand how one’d raised the other under the same roof, but such is the way mismatches sometimes transpire. Then to think one of them’d develop a h
ealthy relation with a derelict psychopath who’d nearly killed you, to say nothing of visiting them in captivity, is just perhaps too outlandish, although rebellion can lead one into very troubled areas. One has only to look into the associations of some of our greatest tyrants of history to witness such bizarre alignments.

  When Hartwig arrived at the beach house, however, he had a far different surrounding to inspect than just a few oddities in an old houseboat in a run-down area. And this gave him pleasure. Convinced him he was somebody just to be able to feel part of amenities like that if I’m correct. First of all you know how the small town of Oceanview is oriented.

  A long densely forested ridge slopes gently down to the ocean where the little settlement lies at the foot, a regular cluster of homes and businesses in its center, which gradually thin out along the white sandy beach. It’s a wild community where everyone knows everyone else, what they do, how they are and who they’re sleeping with. According to Sandy that was everyone with everyone else, hyperbole I’m certain though with a reasonable amount of substance until one was reminded of Peyton Place. Remember that book. Lousy as it was it’s hard to forget

  “The notion,” Hammond remarked, “would be broached by her, naturally, to rationalize her own promiscuity …”

  “If true … if true,” I reminded him.

  Sandy’s home, by the way, was a ranch style wooden structure with beamed ceilings, hardwood floors and a walk in fireplace. Windows faced the ocean side where stood a weather-beaten deck and a hot tub. The furniture, while adequate, showed gauche taste as though the person who lived there had little time to spend but was somehow rushing through life and what’s more would rather have it that way.

  “As you can see,” she’d said to Hartwig while the two sat at the round oak table in the kitchen before the ocean, “I don’t have a lot of books like you have at your place but I’m very interested in reading what’s current. If you …”

  “Why yes,” said our predator taking her hand. “I’m sure I can help you there. I do a lot of reading …” A true statement, of course, since a man in his position has the free time to do whatever he wants. Naturally he has to want to. Hartwig had always read extensively. As I said he was well educated.

  The two walked hand in hand over the beach, spread out a blanket and lay next to one another in the sun behind a clump of bushes out of the wind. She in her white bikini, he in his navy boxer trunks. As beautiful as that beach was the weather was generally foggy and cold. On certain days you might be comfortable in a bathing suit, those were exceptions. After a quick swim, the ocean was literally icy, and a rapid trot to the bedroom where a warm shower awaited, the two headed right back to the bedroom, remained there until dusk, watched the sunset whereupon Sandy’d barbecue something outside, enter the living room with a platter of steak or chicken and the two’d settle down to a meal by candle light, the churning of the waves crashing outside, not unsimilar to the convulsions within their digestive tracts. Pleasant but violent like our universe.

  For Hartwig it was a far different setup from his houseboat where he and his dog ate mostly alone in his small cramped up kitchen. He’d met her boy, Benjamin who they called Benji, and several of his friends. The kid was tall, wiry, quite nervous like his mother with regular features. His entire life was surfing as his mother’d indicated and she had a difficult time just getting him to drive over the mountain to attend high school where he was to graduate in the fall.

  Though amenable, the kid in long Hawaiian trunks, brown-eyed and very tanned like his mother, kept to himself and his end of the house. He seldom ate with them but took his meals on the run, mostly leftovers from the refrigerator. Only gradually after Hartwig’d been there some time did he begin to join them for dinner. By then too, Hartwig’d declared the dire importance of going to school no matter what one did after it, and he had the kid commuting daily though it’d taken a motorcycle bought by his mother to get him to that point. And all too because of Hartwig’s insistence. She had been censoring that idea for some time simply because she thought if he got one, with the reckless way he conducted himself, he’d soon end up a statistic on a highway.

  “So,” said Hammond. “Hartwig was at least able to do someone some good even if … it was bad.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and quite a great deal of good I might add for someone like that.”

  He appeared to’ve moved right in and taken over. He’d found, in essence, a new household, which consisted of two dogs besides her son. One was her old golden lab named Suzie, who was so crippled from hip dysplasia she had to sidle down the beach like a crab. Her face was hoary and her coat interspersed with grey hairs much like an older human’s. You know, despite what Descartes said about such creatures, they’re being discovered to have moods and emotions just like our own, or greatly similar anyhow. Either nothing can be defined by such exact coordinates or we’re not as complicated as we think we are. I prefer to think the latter.

  The other dog of Sandy’s was an umber colored Dachshund named Shotzee, a feisty little devil who went after everyone or anything if it meant to protect his mistress, though strictly speaking it wasn’t hers.

  “Not hers …? Whose then if it was so loyal to her?”

  “You won’t believe this. It was Brochowitz’s. She’d bought it for him when he’d been living at the beach house. When he’d been taken to the funny farm she vowed to keep it for him until he was released rather than turn it over to the pound. Evidently the one love of the madman’s life besides her (his mother, which he firmly believed), was this dog she’d bought him. He claimed he couldn’t live without it.

  “I understand,” she’d told him. “I’ll bring him when I visit.”

  I don’t know whether to somehow deflect his strong attraction for her, for she’d also made it plain when he did get out he could no longer visit her, or so he’d feel he’d still have something she’d done for him so as to somehow relieve the man’s desperate loneliness. For, you see, as animals apparently have feelings, the mad can also be desperate for affection, or approval for if the two’re not the same thing they’re very close to it. And it’s (they’re) something we all need.

  “And so,” said Hammond, “did Sandy explain all this to Hartwig?”

  “All,” I expostulated, “exactly as I told you.”

  His attitude, of course, was as it almost always was with most things, wait and see. If by the time Brochowitz got out he and Sandy were strongly together he felt it’d be no problem. Like a scarecrow he could keep the madman away. He wasn’t as far as I could detect particularly angry then with the madman and he certainly didn’t disapprove of the little dog. He treated it with special kindness even if it meant to the disfavor of his own pooch that they’d hauled out there with them. The three dogs were soon fast friends, the old lab, the beagle and the Dachshund. They shared not only the beach house with one another but also both masters’ affection.

  After a week, of course, Hartwig came back over the hill to his houseboat as though moonstruck … what am I doing here, what planet is this, sort of thing … to check on its seepage level; make certain his bilge pump was in working order for its hull was wood, it leaked, and if not pumped out they sank. There was any number of them sunk at a time.

  “In this case from what you’ve told me,” said Hammond, “probably no great tragedy if they did sink.”

  “Probably, but unlikely people become attached to strange things. You’d have to take that up with Hartwig and unfortunately he’s not around.”

  “Perhaps not so unfortunately.”

  Once back at the houseboat, of course, Gloria naturally found him alone; not so naturally by then even (just one week) but more by happenstance for Sandy’d just left him off and driven home. I don’t know whether back to the beach or merely uptown to her condo with a view of the islands, but Gloria’d been keeping constant surveillance on his place, walking the short distance back and forth from her workplace to the area in heated expectancy. When she’d
discovered from one of the regulars in the parking lot he was back (from wherever), her heart naturally thumped overtime.

  Before the little outdoor wash basin she pulled down her scarf, fluffed up; her hair, washed the clay from her hands and face and made herself as tempting as possible though she didn’t have to do that for as I said, she was naturally beautiful and you can’t disguise that no matter what state of disarray you’re in. Sometimes you even enhance it. She hadn’t had sex since he’d gone and quite frankly was starving though she had to be back at work promptly and would have little time for that right then if …

  Her main emotion, however, was anger. She intended to lambaste him, curse him out properly for not at least having told her where he’d been or phoned. It’s my guess Hartwig hadn’t done that on purpose even though he wanted her upset. She was easier to control that way and not only that he was trying to dissolve his ties to her but was afraid to say no. Out of pity, of course.

  “A … a rake has pity? Oh, come on, Johnson, be ingenuous.”

  “At least this was one who did, or claimed he did though that didn’t always turn out to be true either.”

  Stanley, who was waiting at the head of the gangplank, his gate where he always sat, was instantly glad to see her. It’s my guess the dog knew. Or at least knew something. After all, he’d seen everything. If only he could talk. Though he’d just met Sandy and loved her he’d known Gloria, who’d brought him bones from the butcher, for some time. The dog whirled around in a circle like Sambo, jumped up at her and whined. It was as though there was so much emotion in him just upon seeing her again he couldn’t get it out. Maybe he was trying to talk, who knows.

  “Oh, you darling little creature,” she said via greeting; then, pulling a rib bone from her draw bag, she carefully put it between his snapping jaws. The bone wasn’t fresh, for it too had had to undergo numerous disappointments, drying out in the process.

  “There you are,” she said as she came in on Hartwig, who was puttering about at something. Then the anger in her voice suddenly subsided. “I‘ve been looking all over for you,” she said in a whimper.