Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  “I’ll tell you,” he said, “the place is a real boomtown. Ethel and I moved there when the kids finished college, and we love it. If you’re fixing to expand, you ought to consider it.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me to expand. I had the one store, I made a fair living from it.

  “A nasty divorce went and put a good auto parts store out of business, and as a result there’s a beautiful retail site looking for a tenant. And if you don’t want to sink a lot of dough into it, well, I’ve done real well over the years as a silent partner. It’s a role I enjoy.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Something to think about,” he said. “Why stay small when it’s so easy to grow? And if Louella has a boy, won’t be too many years before he can be your manager. Or was that something I wasn’t supposed to know?”

  LOUELLA.

  Outside of the privacy of my own mind, there’d been no women in my life.

  By the time I got to Lima, I had closed that door and locked it. Now and then, at work or away from it, I might find myself in casual conversation with an attractive woman. Or I’d see someone—a diner at another table in a restaurant, a customer at the store—and I’d be drawn to her.

  I kept the door locked. I had a sufficient understanding of my inner self to know I didn’t dare open it. I had already been through as much as I ever wanted to go through. I’d had the great misfortune of acting on my impulses and the result had been the death of an innocent woman; then I’d had the astonishingly good fortune to get away with it.

  I’d been given a second chance. I wouldn’t get a third.

  And, you know, temptation got easier to resist with the passage of time. The incident in Bakersfield kept slipping further into the past. It became less and less a part of my essential self.

  Besides, let us not forget, I was growing older, one day at a time. The urges that drive a man, for better or for worse, tend to subside with time.

  Oh, I could still be stirred by the sight of an attractive woman. And I still took my memories and fantasies to bed, though with a good deal less urgency. Memories tended to dim with time, and increasingly I gave myself over less to what I remembered and more to what I could only imagine.

  A woman glimpsed from a car window, playing an unwitting role a night or two later in an event of pure imagination. The young mother of a childhood friend, conjured up out of the past, and when I thought of her now I found myself endowing her with some of the attributes of Carolyn—she who drank Orange Blossoms, she who could never have known how close she came to pain and death.

  There had been a time, it seemed to me, when I thought of little else. Hard to apportion credit for the change—or blame, as you prefer. Age would certainly account for some of it, but so it seemed would habit. I’d made it a habit to hold that part of myself in check, and now I no longer needed a tight grip on the reins.

  Then Myron Hendricksen changed things when he put his hand on my thigh.

  HE WAS A few years younger than I, a few pounds heavier, an inch or two shorter. He was a pharmacist who owned his own drugstore. He belonged to Rotary, and to one or two other clubs as well. He lived—

  But it doesn’t matter where he lived. It doesn’t really matter who he was. What does matter is that I was in the steam room at the gym, sharing the space with two other fellows, when Myron Hendricksen came in and took a seat next to me on the wooden bench.

  All was wholly unremarkable until the other men left. Then Myron broke the silence by starting a conversation. I don’t remember what it was about, I didn’t pay much attention to it, but I did note that he seemed a little nervous, a bit uneasy.

  And then he laid a hand on my thigh. I had a white towel wrapped around my waist, as did he, and before I could react to the presence of his hand, or begin to grasp what was going on, it moved upward a few inches.

  “What the hell!”

  He withdrew his hand. I looked at him and watched his face fall. “Oh God,” he said. “I thought, oh dear God, I don’t know what I thought.”

  Whatever it was, he’d have to wait to voice it, as right around then the door opened and two other men entered, talking about the relative merits of the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals.

  I stood up and got out of there. Stood under the shower for a minute or so, then went to my locker. I was in no hurry, and by the time I was dressed he had emerged from the steam room. I took a step in his direction and saw him recoil in fear.

  I said, “We have to talk.”

  He nodded.

  “In the coffee shop on the corner.”

  I went there myself, took a booth off to the side. A waitress brought me my coffee and I let it sit. It was still untouched when Myron came in, looked around, and forced himself to come over. He stood at the side of the booth and said, “Please don’t hit me.”

  “Sit down,” I said. “Why would I hit you?”

  “Because I groped you. I honestly thought—”

  “That I would welcome it?”

  “I thought you were—”

  “Gay? I’m not.”

  “That became very clear,” he said. “God, the look on your face. Like you couldn’t believe it.”

  “Well,” I said, “I couldn’t.”

  There was a silence that lasted until the waitress came over. He ordered something. When she left he told me more than I needed to know about him. How he was respectable, how he was married, how he loved his wife and adored his children, and how he was attracted to men and sometimes felt compelled to act on this attraction.

  “I’m very careful,” he said.

  “So you must have thought I’d be receptive.”

  “Well—”

  He considered his response. “I suppose the wish was father to the thought,” he said. “You’re a very attractive man.”

  “If you were to make a pass at every man you found attractive—”

  “I’d be dead or in jail.” He drew a breath. “John, there was nothing about you to announce that you were gay, nothing in your manner or your dress. I never saw you look at other men with desire.”

  “I’ve never been attracted to men.”

  “But there were other signs to read. I thought, you know, that you were in the same boat I’m in. Deeply closeted, keeping a dark secret and desperate that no one find it out.”

  Which was not untrue, I thought. But it was not the secret he wanted it to be.

  The waitress brought him his sandwich. Did I want a refill on the coffee? I assured her I was fine.

  He said, “In all the time I’ve known you, all the time I’ve been aware of you, I’ve never seen any indication that you’re interested in women.”

  Really?

  “You’re not married, you don’t have a girlfriend, and I’ve never seen you in a woman’s company. If a man’s not interested in women—”

  “Then he must be interested in men?”

  “Well, what else is there?”

  “Sheep,” I suggested, and it took him a moment to realize I’d just made a joke. Once he did, he gave it a heartier laugh than it deserved, more out of relief than amusement. If I could make a joke, then perhaps all of this was less likely to end with him exposed to his friends, or punched in the mouth.

  “For the record,” I said, “I’m exclusively heterosexual. And you’re quite correct, I haven’t been involved with anyone since I turned up in Lima.”

  He waited, while I considered how to go on.

  “There was a woman,” I said. “We were very much in love. It ended badly.”

  “She broke it off with you?”

  “In the worst way possible, Myron. She died.”

  Well, that part was true.

  HE COULDN’T HAVE been more sympathetic, or more apologetic for having read grief as forbidden desire. And, after I’d assured him that his secret was safe with me, he begged me not to hate him.

  “Hate you? Why on earth would I hate you?”

  “Because—”

  “Because you found me attra
ctive? That’s a compliment, not an insult. If anything, I’ve got reason to be grateful to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’ve helped me realize something,” I said. “My mourning, my devotion to a lost love, all of that was genuine enough. But over time it’s ossified into habit. It’s time I got back in the game.”

  AND SO I did. Cautiously, tentatively. I’d ask one woman out to dinner, take another to the movies. I took pains to appear at ease on such occasions, and to a certain extent I was, but a part of my mind was always busy taking my emotional temperature. Did I like this woman? Did I find her attractive? Was conversation with her difficult or easy? Interesting or tedious? Did I want to see her again?

  More to the point, did I want to fuck her? Did I want to kill her first and then fuck her?

  Sometimes I asked myself what the hell I thought I was doing. My life in Lima was pleasant enough. I was making decent money, and my prospects were good. I had a growing circle of acquaintances with whom I could contrive to spend as much or as little time as I wanted.

  I wouldn’t say that I had any friends. But then I had never had a friend, and how could I be expected to make one now?

  I’d seen this bit of doggerel in a souvenir shop, burned into a wooden plaque:

  A friend is not a fellow who is taken in by sham

  A friend is one who knows our faults and doesn’t give a damn

  So there you have it. My acquaintances could only be fellows taken in by sham, as I did not dare to let anyone know who I really was. Because they’d certainly give a damn. How could they not?

  Did any of them assume I was homosexual?

  Myron had made that assumption, and risked a great deal to act on it. “I suppose the wish was father to the thought,” he’d said, and it very likely was. But, its paternity notwithstanding, the thought itself had sprung too from an observation of the way I lived my life.

  Perhaps other men, and women as well, were wondering if I might be gay. As far as I could tell, there were no signs pointing actively in that direction. I didn’t utter sentences with every fourth word italicized, I didn’t dress flamboyantly, I’d never argued the superiority of ballet to baseball. You could search my apartment from top to bottom and never turn up so much as a single Judy Garland record.

  Still, aside from business, I was never seen in the company of women. I was a bachelor, and my lifestyle was less that of the eligible bachelor (which is code for a single man who pursues women) than that of the confirmed bachelor (which is code for one who eschews their company entirely).

  Did it matter what they thought?

  I couldn’t think why it should, and yet it seemed beyond dispute that it did.

  I wondered why.

  WAS I GAY? Some version of gay?

  If so, I’d gone an awful lot of years without even entertaining the thought. I tried without much success to entertain it now. I couldn’t begin to conjure up a fantasy involving Myron, or indeed any of the local businessmen and professionals of my acquaintance. So I made up a young man out of the whole cloth—or perhaps out of the whole flesh is a more suitable phrase. Tall, well built, blond hair, blue eyes, skin lightly tanned by the sun. Slim waist, broad shoulders.

  A large penis, a small penis? Circumcised? I couldn’t really bring that subject into focus, so I let it remain vague.

  I tried to imagine the two of us in a motel room, performing various acts upon one another. The fantasies were at best unconvincing, at worst faintly distasteful. I couldn’t even maintain them in my mind; my thoughts kept drifting away to wholly asexual topics.

  So much for that, I thought.

  Then one night, after a not unpleasant evening with a divorced woman—dinner at an ostensibly Italian restaurant, then a movie, finally a near-kiss on her doorstep—it struck me that I wasn’t giving my fantasy a fair chance.

  I took myself home, had a shower, poured a drink. Went to bed.

  And now I willed my imaginary partner to be younger and smaller and less muscular. Just a boy, really, somewhere in his mid to late teens, standing by the side of the road with his thumb out. A hitchhiker.

  Hitchhiker fantasies were always good. A girl on her way home from college. Cut-off jeans, a blouse with a couple of buttons unbuttoned. A quick move, a choke hold to put her to sleep. A detour, ending in a spot not unlike the lovers’ lane where Cindy Raschmann sacrificed her life for the greater good.

  And so on.

  So this was my fantasy, an experiment, and I gave it a fair chance. I let it play out in detail, let the boy come to the awful realization that this man who’d given him a ride intended to give him a ride of another sort.

  A hard fist in the solar plexus, a quick choke hold, and a moment where I took his chin in one hand and gripped his hair with the other, ready to snap his neck.

  But no, let it wait. Drive him to that predetermined location, drag him out of the car, get him out of his clothes. Wait for him to wake up, penetrate him, and then choke the life out of him. Gaze into his eyes. Watch the light die in them.

  No, I couldn’t sustain it, not even in fantasy. If I felt anything, beyond a faint sense of revulsion, it was a great disconnect of self from the scenario I was compelling myself to envision.

  It was like watching television and sitting through a deodorant commercial, waiting for it to be over.

  A JOKE, AND I don’t know where or when I heard it. I recall it as having been told in an English accent, although I don’t know that it would have to be.

  “I say, did you hear about Carruthers?”

  “Carruthers? No, I can’t say I have.”

  “It seems he’s been caught buggering a giraffe.”

  “A giraffe!”

  “A giraffe.”

  “Buggering the beast, you say?”

  “So it would appear.”

  “How could he—”

  “I’m told a ladder was involved.”

  “Extraordinary. Um, I say—”

  “Yes?”

  “Male or female giraffe, do you happen to know?”

  “Oh, female, of course. Nothing queer about Carruthers.”

  LOUELLA, THEN.

  After a few months as an eligible bachelor, it began to dawn on me what I was doing. I was looking for someone to marry.

  It seems obvious now. I didn’t need a woman’s company to hide my homosexuality from the world, and for two reasons: I wasn’t homosexual, and it didn’t really matter if people were to wonder, and draw their own conclusions. I could largely spike that, if I wanted, by letting a few other people in on the confidence I’d shared with Myron Hendricksen, that I was mourning a lost love and staying true to her memory. That sort of word gets around, and while it might lead some of Lima’s widows and grass widows to set their caps for me, it would make it easy for me to smile a sad smile and disengage.

  He’s not ready yet, they’d say. He must have really loved her, they’d say. And oh, what a lucky woman she must have been!

  Ah yes. The luck of Cindy Raschmann . . .

  Never mind. Cindy Raschmann was a long time ago. Cindy Raschmann was long since buried or cremated, and whatever people had known her would by now have trouble remembering what she looked like, or much of anything about her.

  More to the point, I was no longer the man who had killed her. He and I may have had the same fingerprints, the same DNA, but how could you argue that we were the same person?

  I’d been a drifter, an accident looking for a place to happen. A man wearing somebody else’s work shirt with somebody else’s nickname on the pocket. Was there ever a guy named Buddy, a guy who walked into a bar and walked out looking for trouble?

  If there was, he was long gone.

  Otherwise there would be more bodies. That’s what guys like Buddy Shirt-Pockets did, they kept doing what they got off on, sometimes recklessly, sometimes carefully, but they didn’t stop. How could they stop? Why ever would they want to?

  I would read about them, you know. I’m not sure who
buys books about serial killers. Women looking to be either frightened or somehow reassured? Men who want to explore from the safe distance of the library what they secretly yearn to do themselves?

  And so I read about them, Ted Bundy and Ed Kemper and no end of men whose names you wouldn’t know, unless your bookshelf had the same volumes on it as mine. Ted and Ed—and how curious that we know them by their nicknames—were particular favorites, although that may not be the right word for it. I mean, of course, that I devoured books about them, read everything I could find.

  Sometimes, I’ll admit, prurient interest played a role. Sometimes I found their behavior exciting, and took their exploits to bed with me, in a manner of speaking. But it was more a matter of wanting to know what they were about. Not the childhood trauma that got them started, but how they’d lived after they’d evolved into monsters.

  Bundy and Kemper (or Ted and Ed, as you prefer) were two who reversed the usual order of sex and murder. The act of murder was a means to an end, a method of obtaining a sexual partner. (Again, that may not be the right word.) The killing was aphrodisiacal, even thrilling, but the payoff came post-mortem.

  Someone—and it may have been Ted or it may have been Ed or it may have been someone else—confided that the absolute best sex consisted of anal intercourse with a woman whom one had strangled within the past half hour. Vaginal intercourse, he contended, came a close second.

  Then again, sex with the dead can be dictated by circumstance. A spur-of-the-moment decision, if you will. An impulse purchase.

  A pair of cousins, known collectively as the Hillside Strangler, were sadists, torturing their victims while having sex with them. And on at least one occasion (unless this was the writer’s invention) ten minutes or so after they’d capped off a couple of hours of rape and torture by wringing the woman’s neck, one of them remarked, “Jesus, she’s still hot!”

  And fucked her again.

  LOUELLA.

  I keep starting to tell you about her, and seem incapable of following through. Instead I continue wandering off on tangents. Not that these side roads are without interest, to be sure, but—