THE LADY KILLER: intense, suspenseful, gripping literary fiction

by LEE OLDS

“Christ,” said Harper with his Dracula like pose against the crepuscular backdrop. “I can hear it tumbling down there, can’t you?” From the bottom came the dim plash of the waves.

  “I certainly can. And what happened to him? He seems calm. He always tries to appear that way. But did you notice how he looked, his color? Why that can’t fool anybody. He was trying to commit suicide because of all the grief he’s caused everyone.”

  “Are you kidding, him, never. He doesn’t look at life like that. Remember to him everything’s a mere accident. No one’s responsible. He’s just a very sad man. And,” Harper went on mischievously, “he doesn’t even know it. There’re no mirrors around. I suppose he could always look at his hand.”

  “But,” I remarked as we walked back to the others, “would he recognize it then? Or in a hall of mirrors? Like a monochromatic world that denies things themselves. I believe he’s just seen it.”

  Before Hartwig could come over and show us what happened and tell us what he did, Harper hustled us all back into the car. Hartwig sat next to me with Stanley on his lap.

  “We’ve got to get the hell out of here before a patrolman comes along, believe me, or he’ll take us all in for drinking,” said our driver.

  “That’s fine with me,” came from our victim. “I don’t want that old wreck anyhow. Let’s head for home.” Harper drove off; we left the coastline and turned up the hill

  Hartwig told us this. Half-drunk he’d been racing out to Salinas to meet us when he misjudged the turn, realized he was spinning out towards the precipice, he never could’ve braked in time to keep the thing from going over so he turned it on its side deliberately and the friction between the car and the road stopped it right where we saw it.

  “I then opened the passenger door, put the dog out and followed him. It was like crawling out of a conning tower of a submarine,” he exulted as he ran his hand through his stringy blond hair.

  “Benji,” I remarked, “certainly would’ve appreciated the story.” Hartwig didn’t comment. Obviously I’d hit a sore spot.

  We just listened. It was hard to believe a sober man could’ve reacted that fast let alone one who’d been tight. But there … there was the car on the side of the road about to tumble into oblivion. And you knew he hadn’t parked it and maniacally tipped it over. He wasn’t that sort of goon. Nor was he suicidal. Just a grownup playing ‘chicken’.

  “You were lucky,” someone said, and we all agreed to that including ‘yours truly’.

  “I was, I really was.” And you sensed in those few seconds a real humility before things and that he’d seen something a living person’d rather not see. Instead of attending Sandy’s funeral he’d had to experience it his own way and he just had.

  “Perhaps,” said Hammond, “you’re giving him too much credit. It was no more than an accident after all, as he’d stressed. Then a color change like that in a person is no more than a natural reflex in a stressful situation. Certainly no grandiose revelation. The heart slows momentarily and the lack of blood flow changes the pallor. How long had he been there? I’m sure his color returned quickly.”

  “You could be right,” I said, “but don’t we all like to think differently. That there must be some feeling behind such reckless behavior.” Hammond did nod his head.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It was right after that, of course, Hartwig moved back to the city. He’d sold his boat so he had a little money.

  “And he didn’t have to pay rent either, I imagine, as with so many grown-ups lately who’re moving back in with their parents since they can’t afford the exorbitant prices of the landlords. He moved in with his mother. With Gloria in fact. Didn’t she have his old room at the mother’s house? Those two’d been waiting for one another. They married and the three of them, husband, wife, mother lived happily ever after. Kiddies popped out, stockings were hung, carol’s sung.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “Though he did have free rent that was because his grandmother supplied him with a place, a tiny basement apartment in the neighborhood with a yard in one of her buildings that’d accommodate Stanley for he still had the dog and to tell the truth, if something happened to it, the way he adored that creature I don’t think he could’ve been so stoical.”

  “Really. You think he loved it?”

  “Probably more than anyone else. Certainly more than his women.”

  “But,” said Hammond, “why didn’t the guitarist move home? Why this opposing offer even though it was in the same neighborhood?”

  “Shall I tell you why?” I said, “simply because Hartwig and his mother were no longer on speaking terms, nor were he and Gloria either. He’d renounced them both if you can figure that out. And it was just as well if having a healthy relationship with someone had anything to do with it for Gloria’s health took a sudden turn for the worse and believe me that was no joke.”

  Remember the afternoon she’d left work and stolen over to the vet’s hospital to spirit away Barth’s car and her friend’s physician, who she’d seen there every time she’d visited, had called out to her something like,

  “Gloria, be sure and get tested.” At the time she’d scarcely been able to comprehend the words since she’d been driving away and he’d been at a distance from her. In fact they hadn’t been identifiable relative to her own person until about six months later when she’d been living at the mother’s and doing very well. In a short time she was able to master paralegal status in Sylvia’s office and demonstrated so much acumen in six months, the two, mother and friend, had planned for her to enter law school. You talk about June’s proclivity for adoption. It would almost seem the same thing was occurring here. Gloria was to attend school at night and work part time in the day. When she finished she’d have a job right where she was. Partnership in a firm of two.

  “A helluva schedule for a young woman I must say,” Hammond made the comment. “Too bad we don’t have more like her. She really must’ve had some drive and so pretty, it’s a shame…”

  “Well then,” I said, “what was a shame. Nothing was a shame. She knew, of course, Hartwig’d moved back into the neighborhood and was avoiding their presence. She, naturally, figured it was because Hartwig and his mother didn’t get along. In all likelihood she didn’t surmise the ostracization had anything to do with her. And in this way, I believe, she still put herself in a position of hope that he’d come back to her and the two’d once more be reunited. This time for good.”

  “Poor thing,” said Hammond. “Still, after all this.” He was shaking his head.

  “Oh,” I said. “It wasn’t all Hartwig either by then.”

  Darcey, the young DA the mother’d introduced her to was around plenty to keep the two women company. He, matter of fact, had informally become the chaperon. He’d take the two to lunch on their downtown breaks and meet them after at the Iron Horse in Maiden Lane where the three’d sit, have cocktails and discuss the legal issues of their day. They’d formed some trio in that short time and when one also saw them at the opera (for fall opera’d just then begun in the city) or symphony you assumed there was a bond developing between the two youngsters. They liked the same things, music and books and both seemed to have a fair outlook on life and towards the people who surrounded them. While they made a handsome couple they weren’t as striking as she and Hartwig’d been. Nonetheless, if the physical attraction is at least tolerable the heart can overcome a lot of obstacles. Feelings, of course, are our strangest emotions. Ever vague at times, at others capable of the most absolute certainty that anything can be to us. Let’s just say the young woman’d been smitten by the charming young man who expressed all the kindness and attentiveness to her that Hartwig hadn’t. I don’t think she was quite in love with him but that was soon to come. She knew Hartwig was nearby, exactly where he lived in fact. It was on the lower street of a hilltop that was a park. You remember it I’m sure. It was called Alta Plaza or ‘high place’. In walking through it she even spied the old Victorian
flat and the alleyway door down below, which was Hartwig’s and his dog’s entrance. She might’ve wanted to’ve gone by and knocked she told herself, at least to see the dog, but she hardened her stance and didn’t, thinking it’d be better for both of them as things stood.

  Hartwig’d then taken a job with one of his uncles, who was going to introduce him into the bond business. Their office was also in the financial district … God forbid Gloria and his mother run into him there… And this had been at his grandmother’s behest, the one who was supporting him.

  “And always had been if I’m right,” said Hammond, “all the time he was in Sausalito, wasn’t it? This was the lady who had her grandson cut out to marry a rich woman?”

  “Yes correct. And … I won’t tell you now but some woman that turned out to be. I’m not aware that you knew her.” By Hammond’s silence I assume he hadn’t though he might’ve known of her.

  Then, of course, came Gloria’s realization or wakeup call as we like to say, though how things like that happen without forewarning is beyond our ken. They just do. The plasma that permeates our universe, it seems, acts quite randomly without regard to ‘our planning’ except by coincidence, and this is a feature of it we have to accept though at times we find ourselves fighting it tooth and nail with all the strength our minds and bodies can muster.

  That winter, towards the end of it I might add, Gloria came down with a flu that just wouldn’t go away. She became so sick she couldn’t go out and she couldn’t work. She was confined to her room. The mother had engaged the old maid, Buelah who’d practically raised Hartwig. She came in during the day and sat as nurse with the girl while she watched over her at night after work.

  And you knew it was a room Gloria hadn’t planned to get sick in either. It was her room now as Sylvia put it (oh how these women sometimes devise things), the very one Hartwig’d grown up in. It was on the third floor with an actual ‘widow’s walk’ that served as a working balcony one could use, for that’s how houses were made in those days. The two women, I’m sure, had planned that location in anticipation of Hartwig’s return. Sylvia’d even let Gloria replace her son’s old commonplace bed with Gloria’s four-poster. The bed, of course, added to the antiques in the house, which were the hobbies of both women. They could talk about them for hours as they sat in the living room sipping tea or perhaps each with a glass of wine as they stared up at the large family paintings over the fireplace mantle.

  It was certainly a far different purview that Sandy’d had of the house when she’d visited. She’d been shocked by the ‘oldness’ of that haunt while Gloria lived and breathed it …

  “Yes,” said Hammond. “I can see it all. Gloria lying in bed, in fact her bed that she’d brought over from the Sausalito shed, one which Sandy hadn’t slept in, the very one indeed that Gloria’d shared with her ‘true love’ who was supposed to come home. Though both women, of course, had shared the original if not the man.”

  “And that wasn’t all either,” I said. “Hartwig’s block letters as well as his college diploma hung on the wall. She had those. It was like walking into the doctor’s office and observing his credentials. And with the new hospital that’d just been rebuilt down the street, very convenient. She was certainly in the right place for something like that to happen as though that really means anything to someone in that condition. But that, she swore she’d never go to.”

  “Why on earth?” said Hammond. “If her condition required it.”

  “Because, my friend, like most people figure when they become ill she didn’t believe she’d ever become sick enough to need one. I knew. I’d been over there to see her several times since this thing started. It was the least I could do. Then she’d always pump me about Hartwig. How was he? His health mainly. ‘Did he like his new job, and what’d you say happened to his car again? Wrecked it, how horrible and with Stanley in it’. I mean it wasn’t easy sitting there and listening to her especially when one day she’d appear all better and ready to leap out of bed. Another she’d be so ill she could scarcely raise her eyes to look at you.”

  “Then what about Darcey or whatever his name was, her new interest, the DA?” Said Hammond.

  “He was there a lot. If I was up with her he’d wait downstairs in the living room. Usually the mother’d be absent and I’d chat with him on my way out before he went up. Many was the time he’d spend the night in Hartwig’s old leather easy chair watching her. Especially as she got worse.”

  “Got worse?” Said Hammond. “You haven’t even told me what she had except the flu. That my man is treatable nowadays. At least most strains are.”

  “That’s right, most strains,” I said shaking my head “Well if you haven’t guessed by now, she’d acquired HIV. Hartwig’d been right. Not in wishing it on her certainly but in alerting her about the company she kept, which was, of course, the old gay newspaperman, Barth, her confidante who she’d gone to, to receive solace from in her breakup with Hartwig. At least now (then) one assumes that’s where she got it and that he was gay. One’s certainly not going to exhume the body, wherever it was if it still was, to find out whether that was possible though I’m sure the hospital had his blood sample. It’s not a murder case or one of mistaken identity,” I paused, “though it can turn out to be one if one has it and doesn’t tell his partner. Whatever else he was, Barth was an honest old geezer. Chances are if he had it he didn’t know himself until the end…”

  “So that old reprobate,” said Hammond. “He… And I rather liked him, certainly over Hartwig, yet Hartwig had his number. But the girl. How’d all this come about and how’d she find this out?”

  Finding out was easy, I said. All she had to do once her symptoms didn’t seem to improve was to get tested. As to how it came about, did anyone have an idea? Do doctors in random progressions of a complicated disease like that? Do you think she wasn’t aware of the possibility? And especially being with him and his cups of blood, which in this case appeared to be poison by contact somehow. She’d worn protective gloves whenever she’d handled the discharge. She hadn’t cut herself and she certainly hadn’t kissed the geezer except perhaps on his cheek like one might one’s old grandmother Still … molecules hide things from our pitiful senses despite the fact that they’re not out to kill us like the poison in the emperor’s soup. They’re just trying to flourish like we are.

  “You’re kidding, of course?” Said Hammond.

  “No, she somehow got it. How do you get it when you wear a condom? We assumed it was him. Even she thought so, though she couldn’t imagine how. Think how she felt after falling ill like that when his last words ‘be sure and get a test’ came back to her as a pistol shot after she realized what they applied to. She was God damned shocked. And those tests take so long, several weeks during which time her flu got progressively worse. Still, until the very day the lab results came back she was so sure of herself and that nothing was wrong. Her little ashen face by then, a very beautiful face as you know, looked at me and said,”

  “You know I can’t possibly have a retrovirus. It’s just not me. I’ve done nothing to deser…” And she broke down in tears sitting up against the pillows, her red hair streaming down over them and the comforter shielding her wormlike body. It was like she was decomposing before your eyes almost. A pitiable sight. When the results came in, of course, she took them like a real trooper.

  “It’s only HIV. It’s certainly not AIDS. They’ve got all sorts of drugs nowadays to treat that. They keep you alive for years.” She was ebullient or at least tried to be cheerful but for someone as smart and sensitive as that it’s not easy. She saw the long-range result of her condition. You couldn’t (don’t) marry. You don’t have kids. Your future’s essentially ruined and you spend your time (useful or not) waiting to die. Maybe not as bleak as all that but it certainly wasn’t a way she’d intended to live…

  “Of course,” said Hammond, “a way none of us want to live. Just like a third world war with atomic weapons that left
our atmosphere contaminated with radiation poisoning, who’d want to live? A way Sandy wouldn’t’ve wanted to live. Yet look what happened to her.”

  “Yes look,” I said, “you look,” in utter frustration.

  The flu that she’d caught before knowing about her ‘other condition’ was viral as adverse to bacterial, which in itself is more difficult to treat. There are chemicals, certain inert chemicals but no antibiotics. Then imagine the invasion of the g-4 or white blood cells by the retroviruses themselves. The leucocytes as you know are the marshals of our immune systems that call the other defenders into play. Without them the immune system’s rendered virtually useless and allows all sorts of diseases that the body’d ordinarily repel to invade it. Hideous cancers, skin diseases, kidney failure, you name it. Like a parasite the deadly virus attacks the productive cell and uses its material to rapidly multiply at the same time it kills its host. Imagine a hundred deadly cells released into the body at the same time as one protective one is killed. It’s not so long before the deadly ones overwhelm the body if the process is not halted or at least slowed down. It’s like the ratio in some of our so-called modern wars. I kill a hundred of yours for every one I lose. You know the kind. Pretty soon the enemy’s pretty much gone. They call it genocide or something like that. What was for some reason deemed to be a war was in fact a slaughter. Soon the enemy, let’s say the ‘good cells’ for the sake of analogy, is pretty much gone. The viruses have won. Of course, in winning they also lose for they kill the host that they thrived on and unless they can find another victim they also die. If they do find another victim, of course, we have another victim. That’s what an epidemic’s all about and the world’s constantly striving to avoid. Maybe it can, maybe it can’t. A deadly enough virus could wipe man from the face of the earth. It depends upon how elusive the thing is and how qualified we are to find methods to eradicate it. That’s our science.

  “Yes,” said Hammond. “And we can be thankful for it.”