THE LADY KILLER: intense, suspenseful, gripping literary fiction

by LEE OLDS

  “So, I’ve heard.”

  The handsome gentleman stood before her. Quite frankly she didn’t know whether to rush into his arms or not. She’d planned to. Now everything seemed so different. She sensed something but couldn’t tell what it was. A change or not. One thing, he appeared very calm to her, calmer than usual.

  As he moved about arranging things and installing a new tank of poison (propane), he told her he’d met a friend who lived at the beach. He’d been staying there and working for that friend. He pulled several large bills from his wallet to back his story for, as I said, he never had money.

  “Oh, a friend, eh.” Gloria sat on the couch as the dog jumped up beside her. “What sort of friend?” She, of course, was asking him the same thing she’d asked us when we couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell her. He didn’t either, evidently. A friend was all he’d say, take it or leave it.”

  “So did she?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” she did.

  For all her intentional bravado to lambaste him she suddenly became quite afraid, afraid, naturally, if she pushed him too far he’d tell her something she didn’t want to hear. After her year’s investment in this creature she, quite frankly, wasn’t ready to do that. She loved him, her long-range plans were still firmly entrenched and she believed enough in his honesty to take him, by the sound of it, as a business arrangement.

  “Just be here tonight when I get off work,” she said, “not like the last time …”

  “But that was two in the morning.”

  At any rate, he promised he would and she rushed back to work joyously. She went from worker to worker spreading what enthusiasm she could. A mood she wielded naturally so no one knew the difference. When her shift ended she bathed in her little tub out back, donned one of her flouncy dresses and after purchasing some fresh fish she intended to cook and a bouquet of roses at the nearby market, she followed her destiny.

  So, she stayed there all night with him, got up early to make breakfast before she had to go to work. Then with one last effort she climbed again to the loft, aroused the lazy devil’s sleeping head on the pillow, kissed him on the lips and said,

  “Your breakfast’s in the oven warming. Don’t wait too long to get up; and eat it. I’ll see you tonight.”

  Then she left, bouncing up the gangplank quite happily following the dog that led her to the ceramic factory, and saw her inside before returning home.

  “Bye, Stanley,” she called, “see you tonight.” And with a long sigh she entered the powder blue building whose chimneys were already smoking from the fiery kilns.

  She, of course, didn’t get a real dose of Hartwig’s mysterious friend until that night when she’d come up to the café after work before she was to go to his houseboat and saw them through the large plate glass window walking down the opposite side of the street. Sandy, obviously, had come back into town, picked Hartwig up, taken him to her condo and the two were out walking the three dogs. I was there when this occurred. The two pointed to us in the Trieste and waved.

  “There. Why there’s Stanley, isn’t it?” She gasped and turned white as a sheet, which was very white for her because she had a milky complexion as it was.

  “So it is,” I said turning away.

  And you know she was out of there in a second, walking down Bridgeway in the opposite direction towards the little bayside park where some of the kids were playing volleyball. One of these was young Johansson, a Swede who also worked at the factory. His father was harbormaster at the coast guard station on the point and his mother a teacher at the elementary school. They were a respected family in the community though their son had had his problems with wild behavior. He’d been arrested twice for intoxication, once in a car, but with the job he’d settled down to where he was at least tractable. He, of course, had been after Gloria since the first time he’d seen her. She’d always felt him too young and unruly and had, quite frankly, been afraid of him. Now that she knew she suddenly changed her mind or decided to give something a try.

  There were eight of them batting the ball back and forth over the net. The invisible smell of food wafted from the outdoor barbecue and beers were set out on the picnic table full of people. She came and sat on a grassy knoll just in front of the Cruising Club, the old riverboat at the park by the bay. It was a warm summer afternoon, clear to the city. The seagulls were out circling their mysterious loci in the empty sky like they usually do when she went over to the large blond with the blue eyes, stopped the game for a minute, that is it stopped itself at her appearance, and asked Johansson if he could walk her back to the Trieste when he was through. She’d buy him an espresso or a glass of beer or wine, whatever he wanted.

  “Of course, my lady,” said this gallant. “But no need for that. I’ll buy you one,” for he’d been trying for months and here’d finally come some sort of breakthrough though he had no idea what had caused it. Only that she’d been tied up with Hartwig whom he liked and didn’t like for some time.

  So, she waited; every time Johansson’d spike a ball over the net he’d acknowledge her with a smile, and just before dusk the game ended, the Swede took her hand and led her along to where we still were for I’d been joined by the boys. Those two left, and shortly thereafter, Hartwig showed up. I can only surmise that Sandy knew who Gloria was by that time for Hartwig’d told her he had a girlfriend and she’d already been pointed out. I was sure Gloria knew who Sandy was for everyone in town had at least heard of her and that she had a house at the beach. And then Gloria’d seen her with Hartwig just a short time ago. Gloria was very good at putting these logical puzzles together, too much one might think at times for her own good.

  We told Hartwig what we’d just witnessed. He didn’t seem unduly disturbed as he joined us for a bottle of beer. But why should he be.

  “Maybe,” he said, “something’ll come of it. The kid’s a good-looking boy.”

  Pretty soon we heard a honking outside the café and turned to see who it was. Sandy, in her little Black Mercedes convertible with the top down was beckoning over the windshield. Hartwig stood up and said,

  “Sorry fellows. Got to go. Mother’s calling.” He gave us a knowing wink, joined her and she drove up the street towards her condo to which Hartwig hadn’t yet been. He claimed it was magnificent, almost nicer than her beach house.

  Not only did it have a view of the bay from west to east, but her brother – an interior decorator who’d retired to the Napa Valley with his lover who was the same sex as he – had furnished it. This man had installed Persian rugs, Chinese screens and shiny teak furniture. Various jade statues stood here or there. One with his arms outstretched over his enormous belly girdled by a loincloth was Ho Ti, God of plenty. A God certainly strange to most of us, though we do have our cornucopia.

  “Who … who did all this?” Asked Hartwig upon exposure for the mode obviously wasn’t her. It didn’t suit her whatsoever.

  “My brother?” Was all she’d tell him then.

  She emerged from the kitchen with two glasses of wine, the good stuff this time, a hundred dollars a bottle and it did make a difference. She turned out the lights and the two sat on the bamboo couch before the bay window. The rising moon like a pointer on an enormous dial had cut a swath on the bay between shores. Hartwig asked her where she’d gone in such a hurry when she’d left him that afternoon, and she confessed she’d been to Hussong’s, the Mexican restaurant in Tiburon.

  “Over there,” she pointed, and though not resolvable there was something there, a pinpoint of light, something. And you could see it all that way from her apartment. Impressive! He listened with interest as she described the old girlfriend she’d been with for kicks, a real estate broker.

  “She’s got more money than I have so she certainly doesn’t need to work but it seems she can’t help herself. She always needs to be competing at something. We were at the same private school together in the city. You know it, Mrs. Lawson’s Academy.” Hartwig nodded.

&nbs
p; “It was right down the street from us.”

  Then as she described more about this June, Hartwig said he’d like to meet her. She was single, divorced and lived in Tiburon with one of her adopted daughters.

  “One?”

  “Yes, the other is married and lives in Salinas. She …” Sandy stuttered a little. “She might be just right for you. She’s very smart.”

  Hartwig smiled and shrugged the suggestion off, but don’t think he’d dismissed it. If one rich woman could lead him to another, like a hound on a scent, every bound makes it stronger, the prize at the end, greater. Isn’t that the way our society’s run?

  Just before they went to bed in a room hung with strange nature paintings, Sandy said she’d seen his pretty girlfriend that evening, walking down the street hand in hand with a young blond fellow. She wondered if he knew about it.

  “Oh, that’s Johansson,” he quipped. “They work together. They’re just friends.”

  “And if they’re not?”

  Hartwig shrugged his shoulders.

  “Then they’re not.”

  She liked his lack of jealousy and his nonchalance. It definitely gave her hope. Then she clasped him like one would a doll for that’s how she gauged her boyfriends, as dolls to be pampered and petted before you became bored and discarded them.

  Chapter Four

  Hartwig, of course, had little trouble making himself indispensable in his new community though not all the residents there accepted him at face value, but thought they smelled a rat who was a little too smooth for his own good in his willingness to take over the socialite’s affairs. In other words, to use her, which was his exact intention. There’s always somebody around who’ll be certain to detect a con man. And as is so often the case this is just liable to be another con man himself. As the old sayings go, ‘takes one to know one’, many indeed are based on experience. That’s what anecdotes are all about.

  Two of his main detractors lived in a small white Cape Cod cottage on the hill. They were regulars at both of the bars there, and also at the several eateries though one wonders how …

  “Really,” said Hammond. “Why anyone who can afford to live out there should be able …”

  “No, not anyone,” I assured him.

  Though the largest segment of people out there were well off, there was also a community of bums. I guess you could call them beach bums. They lived in cars or various rag tag RVs that they parked on the side streets or anywhere out of the way where they were less likely to be hassled by the sheriffs. A smaller but no less salient group, which was far more sinister, lived in a swamp by the lagoon. Here they pitched their tents or slept in lean-tos made out of driftwood … you might’ve seen such things from the cliffs as you drove up and down the coast … made their campfires over which they cooked and, of course, their main occupation – as with most dwellers out there – was the beach. They didn’t surf but some of them swam and they all drank, all day and all night. Whenever a home was broken into or something went missing, the suspicion naturally turned to them. The sheriffs had to go in after them and time after time they came away with nothing. If indeed they were thieves they did an awful good job of hiding evidence.

  They basically lived off welfare or odd jobs they took now and then. They circulated in the community just like everyone else though they stood out by their shoddy attire, trivial pursuits and their salty smell for most of them bathed in the ocean. The main townspeople talked about getting rid of them and their ringleader, who lived on the hill and though a part of the settlement out there was a gated community, you can’t just kick people out of town because they’re not rich enough or don’t share your tastes. At least not yet anyway though the authorities are certainly trying.

  Well, wouldn’t you know it, the ringleader who lived on the hill was the one I was talking about who’d gotten onto Hartwig. Almost right away too. His girlfriend and Sandy’d evidently been female rivals out there for some time. They hated one another fiercely but there was more to it than that.

  “What more?”

  “Want to hear it. You’re sure …?” Hammond nodded.

  The son of this woman, Marcus, was Benji’s best friend. The two hung out together constantly though the friend didn’t surf whatsoever, but rather sat on the beach with his nose in a book while Benji and his clique were out riding waves. It just so happened Hartwig took a real liking to the boy for … he claimed … he’d at last found someone he could talk to out there, declaring the kid was brilliant and should be in Harvard or a similar institution where he could put his brains to work.

  “It … it’s a God damned crime,” I can hear him say. “That someone with that much talent has to come from a family situation that does nothing but stifle it. More than stifle it.”

  He’d pound his fist into his hand. Then he’d shake with rage though it was always a controlled anger with him and that’s what made him such a good fighter. You see, this man Barney the rascal, as he was called and who was living with the mother, persecuted the kid something terrible. Though a bonafide alcoholic himself and not that old, perhaps in his early forties, he was of a generation and locale that hadn’t grown up on grass, and that was the kid’s offense. Or at least most of the time. Benji, Marcus’s best friend, and his surfer buddies smoked too. It left them with a perpetual high and a cool towards life they maintained they just couldn’t get anywhere else with all the trouble they saw in the world. They, to the contrary, scorned booze. And except for a beer or two now and then they rarely touched it. They claimed,

  “It’s the sloppy man’s high. For slobs only.”

  And both you and I know in a way they were right. If you have to take something (and that seems to be man’s forte since he doesn’t appear to be satisfied with ordinary reality), you become far mellower, less aggressive and able to control your life under grass than alcohol. If only it weren’t for the a-motivational factor and short term memory effect, it might well be considered a legal palliative as indeed it is for some terminally disabled and is becoming so for other venues. That, of course, is neither here nor there.

  Barney, or the giant in the beanstalk as he was called, hated the stuff and anyone who used it. Any minor that is, for his followers, the swamp dwellers, all used it and they fed it to their children such as they were. So when he’d come home to the little cottage after work at his sometimes carpenter’s job, and smell the sweet, sickly stuff anywhere in the vicinity, he knew right whom to contact.

  “Marcus,” he’d call at first, sweetly in a distended voice like the big bad wolf just outside the house. “Where are you? You’re smoking grass again dear boy, aren’t you. The smell is disgusting. Where are you?” And he’d work himself up into an uncontrollable rage. It was like he was talking to a dog he wanted to punish. He’d then enter the house in his coveralls, going from room to room until he found him, usually in one of the hall closets. Then he’d grab the kid by the neck. He’d struggle.

  “But Barney, God damn it. I didn’t do anything, honest. It must’ve been the neighbors. It’s not in here.” With a frightened face, he’d try to worm his way out of his shirt Barney had a hold of.

  “God damn it, kid. Why don’t you get a job? You don’t do anything ‘cept stay at the beach with that rich kid. Dammit …” And having worked himself into a state of self-righteous wrath, he’d cold cock the kid who didn’t even know so much as what it was to fight or defend himself, then knock him down or just choke him until he cried uncle and promised never to smoke again before he’d let him go whereupon the kid’d run upstairs and lock himself into his room where he’d stay and wouldn’t come down for dinner. He’d then cry himself to sleep.

  “And you know why this man really did this, don’t you?” I told Hammond.

  “No, why?”

  He was extremely jealous of the boy’s intellect though he was no dummy himself and fairly well read. It seems even a smart man can penetrate the superior distance genius maintains and be stung by it. Barney had bee
n. The incidences (beatings) had become worse for Marcus wasn’t about to give up his ambrosia as he called it. And who’s to say at that point he could. Modern studies have after all proved marijuana as addictive as any other drug. And who was the mother to stop either Marcus’s habit or the beatings. She was a dipso herself, who’d run away at the first sign of commotion, retreat to her own room (which was also upstairs) and lock herself in where she had a little help (gin bottle) to get her through the ordeal before she could once again open her door or just plain pass out. I understand many times she did just that.

  Then you couldn’t call the sheriff for domestic violence if you could get someone who would, for what was he going to do but most likely bust the kid for grass rather than the boyfriend for domestic violence. No, it was one hell of a dilemma the kid was in and it’d been going on for some time before Hartwig arrived on the scene. Matter of fact, lately the conflict’d become so bad Marcus’d run out of the house and down to Sandy’s where he’d cry on her shoulder, and spend several nights before he went home. At least that’s where he’d find sympathy. And now Hartwig was there. A male sensibility, which, of course, wanted to do more than listen. He, the rugby player, wanted to go out and put an end to the bullying once and for all if it entailed sending the man to the hospital, preferably that …

  “You … you stay out of it,” Sandy’d come put her arms around him from behind where the three sat in serious discussion. Benji was down in his room where Marcus’d presently join him. “I don’t want my prize hurt. That man’s downright vicious. He’s an ex con, you know.” She referred to him as a prize, can you believe it.

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Hartwig’d answer her. “How many times do you have to tell me?”

  Then he’d turn to his ‘new sibling’ or little brother as he called him and observe the bruises or a discolored eye perhaps and his stomach’d curdle.