Punish Me with Kisses

by William Bayer

  The elevator man smiled. "Up or down?" he asked. She pointed up as he closed the door. He waited at the penthouse while she let herself inside.

  She looked around the apartment. His briefcase was on the entry table, his raincoat thrown across a chair. The dining table was set. Dinner was waiting. Cold poached salmon and a salad. A bottle of white Burgundy and fresh raspberries for dessert.

  She could hear him in the bedroom whistling to himself, knew he was getting dressed. She smiled, sat down, thought back over the last few months, how wonderful he'd been that wild night she'd called, how helpful and understanding, how he'd straightened things out so fast. The way he'd taken care of Dr. Bowles, for instance—sent a couple of his men around to see her and have a little talk. Just a few words about her license and malpractice litigation. The psychiatrist had crumbled right away.

  He'd set her up in the apartment a few floors below his own. They'd started seeing a lot of each other then, lunches and dinners but not like the ones they'd had before. These meetings were different—outwardly serene, emotional underneath. They reappraised each other, parried and thrust. She could tell he was discovering things about her he'd never noticed before.

  She realized what was happening before he did, knew she was reaching him by the way he responded when she threw back her head. Her gestures, her laugh, her tone—she seemed to do everything right. And they were her gestures, her tone, like Suzie's perhaps, but her own, still her own.

  Suzie had used Jamie Willensen and Cynthia and her college jocks to divert herself, exorcise the memory of her unhappy love affair. But her own parade of lovers, her own experiences with Jared and Mac, Jamie, Cynthia and the boys in Aspen were a recapitulation in reverse. So she hadn't really been imitating Suzie—not really imitating her at all. She'd been doing the opposite—Suzie had been heading down toward death while she'd been heading for the sky.

  "Kiddo?" He called her from the bedroom. "Want to put some music on?"

  She went over to the stereo, looked through his records, chose a Cole Porter album she knew he liked.

  "That's nice."

  "Dinner looks great."

  "Be out in a minute. Can really use some chow."

  She filled their wine glasses, then wandered over to the window. It was dark, the river looked romantic and mysterious. There'd been an early evening rain, and now she could see soft reflections of headlights as cars streaked along the FDR.

  "Hi," he said. She turned around. He stood there grinning at her, so handsome, so marvelously groomed and dressed.

  They sat down and began to eat, and he told her about his day. It was like that now most nights of the week. They dined together and talked. He rarely went to Greenwich anymore. On nights when he was busy or out of town, she got in bed and read manuscripts. One weekend they flew out to Vegas and he handed her ten grand to throw away. She won some money and he was proud. "Riverboat gambler," he called her. "Godfather," she whispered back.

  "Whatever happened to Suzie's old apartment?" she asked when he was finished recounting the day's events.

  He glanced at her, a careful glance. "You knew about that?" he asked.

  "Oh, sure. I followed you there." His eyes were wide open now. "Yeah, it was me who slashed it up." She met his eyes straight on.

  He looked at her stunned for a moment, then he shook his head.

  "Wow—kiddo. What a move that was! Scared the beegeezus out of me. Thought one of my enemies did it, maybe someone downtown on the Street." He grinned. "Closed the place down right after that. Laid on all this security we've got. You really spooked me pretty good." He raised his glass to toast her. "Didn't figure you for a move like that. Guess I underrated you, kiddo. Sure won't do that again."

  After dinner they sat listening to music, and then, when she couldn't control herself any longer, when the desire built up inside of her so much she couldn't stand it anymore, she looked at him very hard in a special way that was her signal, and then whispered "Powerful One" softly, sensuously under her breath.

  She'd said that the night when she'd first made it happen. It had all come so naturally to her, the way she'd comported herself, the moves she'd made, the things she'd said, that she'd marveled afterwards at her facility—it was as if she'd known just what to do.

  Now they made love, wonderfully, and afterward, when they were playing around the way they liked to do, kissing and stroking, she started kidding him with the mocking tone he liked.

  "You're going to kill me now, aren't you Daddy-O?" she teased. "You do that to your women, don't you? Kill them after making love."

  He laughed, stroked her thigh. "Still think I killed her, kiddo? Still believe that?"

  "Course I don't, silly. But I bet you know who did."

  He smiled, nipped her ear. "You, too, kiddo. You know as well as I."

  "Do I?"

  "Sure you do."

  "Jared?"

  He laughed again. "No, not that loser, for Christ's sake. He never had the balls."

  "Who was it then?"

  "You saw the intruder."

  "Come on. Tell me." She tickled his ribs. He squirmed. "It wasn't any old intruder, was it? Tell me who it was."

  "Guess," he said. "Think real hard. Use that old noggin of yours." He kissed the back of her neck.

  "How about—Cynthia!"

  "Not poor old Cynthia." He began to chew her ear.

  "Tucker?"

  He rolled his eyes. "Now that's really dumb," he said.

  She slid her tongue across his lips. "I give up. Can't think of anybody else."

  "Think. Think, dammit. I spent enough moolah on that education of yours."

  "There isn't anybody."

  "Oh, yes there is." He laughed, brought his head down, kissed her on the mouth five times hard. This was a little ritual they had. Usually she'd say: "Punish me with kisses," and he'd do it, kiss her hard like that—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

  "Figured it out yet?"

  She reached down, took hold of him. He was so big, so thick, so magnificent down there, so powerful and delicious. Just to touch it made her go weak inside.

  "Well?—"

  "I'm just dumb, I guess."

  "You want to know, don't you?"

  She nodded. "Of course I do."

  "Won't make much difference now. It was a crime of passion, you see. Jealousy, envy—all that sort of stuff."

  "Really?" She was dying of curiosity. A crime of passion. He made it sound romantic.

  "It's so obvious you'll kick yourself. The motive's so crystal clear. She knew what was going on and hated it, used to berate me about it all the time. That's why I called it off, but I never told Suzie that. Yeah, she told me she'd do something if I didn't put a stop to it, and if I didn't stop all her wild screwing around, too. Didn't believe her. Should have. Said Suzie was evil and had to be destroyed. She's cuckoo mad, you know. Going to have to put her away one of these days, I guess."

  "You're saying—mother? Is that who you mean?"

  He looked at her, nodded. "That's the ticket. You got it now, kiddo."

  Sure, it made sense when she thought about it. There were even some clues in the diary, she guessed, though she couldn't concentrate too well just then. The Powerful One was touching her in a special place, in a way that always made her lose her mind. Mother—well of course—

  Then Penny began to scream—mostly in ecstasy but a little in horror, too.

  SPECIAL AUTHOR'S EDITION SUPPLEMENT

  "PUNISH ME WITH KISSES"

  Q&A WITH WILLIAM BAYER

  Q. Punish Me With Kisses is very different than the two novels you wrote just before, Visions Of Isabelle and Tangier. Less serious, less ornate in terms of style, and --

  A. Is "a bit trashy" the phrase you're looking for?

  Q. That seems a little rude. Maybe "slick" would be more appropriate.

  A. Punish Me is very different, and, indeed, the title is kind of trashy. It's also a lot more slickly written. I was working toward what I
call a "transparent style," a style that draws no attention to itself, prose that moves fast and doesn't distract the reader from the storyline. Some background: the other two novels you mentioned, both set in North Africa, where I used to live, garnered some nice reviews and a modicum of attention, but very little in the way of remuneration. So I was faced with a choice: take on some kind of day job, probably teaching creative writing, or try to make a decent living writing fiction. I chose the latter. I definitely did not want to be one of those literary-type writers who publish a couple of serious novels, then repair to a comfortable existence at a university…and produce a new book every decade or so usually set in academe. I decided to do just the opposite by turning blatantly commercial. I'd always enjoyed reading what people called "psycho-erotic crime fiction," so I decided to give that genre my best shot. And, indeed, though Punish Me didn't receive much in the way of reviews, it did earn me a good deal more money and a totally different kind of attention than the earlier books. Though it didn't make the New York Times best seller list (that would come later with Switch and Pattern Crimes), it did appear on several other national bestseller lists, and sold very well, especially in New York. There were film options and foreign rights sales (UK, France, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Japan, etc.), media interviews, and also attention from editors at publishing houses looking for up-and-coming commercial novelists. I got a big kick out of the publicity campaign. When the paperback came out, PocketBooks produced a song entitled "Punish Me With Kisses" that was played on the radio, there were lots of radio commercials, and for several weeks most of the North-South running buses in Manhattan carried big posters on their sides hyping the title. I remember walking down Fifth Avenue with my teenage step-daughter. "Hey!" she yelled, "here comes another Punish Me bus!" I liked that! I also liked seeing young women on their way to work immersed in reading my novel on the subways. On the other hand, there was some backlash. I remember browsing in a mystery bookstore whose owner had been very supportive of my previous novel, Tangier. We started talking, and she confessed she'd decided not to carry Punish Me because she didn't like novels in which young women were knifed to death. I was offended. I told her: "Fine, if you won't carry my book here, then I won't shop here anymore." She apologized, said she understood it was hard to make a living writing fiction, and we left it at that. But since her store was filled with murder novels, books about people being slaughtered with axes, bashed with fire pokers, shot in the head, etc., my feeling was that it wasn't the knifing that bothered her in Punish Me, but the sex.

  Q. So no regrets?

  A. None. I'm proud of my craftsmanship in Punish Me.

  Q. Yet you didn't continue writing in the same vein?

  A. I decided to stay with crime fiction, but to take the genre a lot more seriously. I wanted to stay commercial, but still maintain a high level of quality in my writing. My next book Peregrine, ended up winning the coveted Best Novel "Edgar." Looking back, I doubt I'd have been able to extract a decent advance for it based on just an outline from a mainline publisher if Punish Me hadn't made such a splash.

  Q. Any background on the murder story?

  A. There were a number of so-called social register or debutante murders that inspired me, not so much in terms of the details and who-done-its, but because of the setting. There was one particularly famous case in the Mid-West in which one sister was murdered in her bedroom on a grand estate owned by a very prominent family, supposedly by an "intruder," while the other sister slept soundly in the next room. I knew a reporter who'd covered this case, and though there'd been no arrests, (and, for that matter, never have been) he mentioned casually that the police were looking very closely at certain family members. It struck me as impossible that the sister, father or mother in this family had been involved, but this reporter's comment sprung an idea. I started researching incest murder cases, and from that premise worked out my plot.

  Q. You mentioned that the title is a bit trashy. How did it come about?

  A. My editor back then considered himself a master at thinking up titles. He was the guy who came up with the title "Jaws" for Peter Benchley's white shark attack novel. One day he said to me: "Your story is great, but you need a riveting title. I came up with one over the weekend. It just flew into my head: Punish Me With Kisses." At first I was appalled. I hemmed and hawed, and at one point even suggested that we play with his title turning it into "Punish Me (With Kisses)", thinking that adding parentheses would make the title sound more intelligent. He shook his head. He wanted me to use his title exactly as is. I went along. Considering what I was trying to do, it didn't seem worth fighting about, and, in the end, by embedding the phrase several times in the text, I felt, and still do feel, that I made it work.

  Q. You seem to have caught what it was like to live in Manhattan during those years.

  A. We lived there when I was writing the book. I used a lot of things I knew about: jogging around the reservoir in Central Park; office politics at publishing houses; the singles bar scene; etc. It was the early 80s, and rereading the book, I feel I caught the spirit of that time fairly well.

  Q. The cats! Where did they come from?

  A. There actually was a shrink, a Dr. W, who owned a commercial building in the heart of the West Village most of the floors of which were used to house her huge collection of cats. I knew a couple of people who'd been her as patients. One recognized she was running a cult and quit; the other, sad to say, evidently stayed on until Dr. W died. . . at which point, I heard, that when the authorities went in there they found a nightmare scene, more than a thousand cats, many dying or already dead. Her patients totally believed in her and her bizarre notions concerning "cat therapy," and they organized "maydays" much as described in the novel. One patient rented a storefront in her building where she operated a yarn shop; this young woman, sadly, was murdered in her store by a drugged-out street person or robber. This murder had nothing to do with the cult, but it brought attention to it and that was more or less the beginning of the end. I used what I knew about Dr. W and her cat cult, because it seemed so very weird and at the same time so very particular, a strange underside to life in the big city.

  Q. There seems to be a novel out titled "Punishment With Kisses." Know anything about it?

  A. Just what the author, Diane Anderson-Minshall (who, it turns out, is quite prominent in gay magazine publishing), wrote on her acknowledgements page. She wrote that she read excerpts from my book aloud to her eighth grade classmates at Payette Junior High in Payette, Idaho, and for that despicable act was sent by her English teacher to the principal's office. She goes on: "Ever since I read Punish in the early 80s, I dreamed of a lesbian revisioning. There is very little in common with the original but inspiration, born from my hormone fueled adolescent fantasies and Bayer's warped words." I'm not sure that there's very little in common: she has a sister carrying on in the poolhouse of a palatial estate while another sister watches from the shadows. There's a murder, and the surviving sister starts immersing herself in the dead sister's life, even finding her sex diary, and going on a sexual odyssey of her own. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so let's just say that I'm moderately flattered and leave it at that.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Many of William Bayer's novels are available in e-editions from Crossroad Press: his Janek series (Switch, Wallflower and Mirror Maze); his two Kay Farrow novels (The Magician's Tale and Trick Of Light); his foreign detective series, (Tangier and Pattern Crimes); and his noir novels, Blind Side and The Dream Of The Broken Horses.

  Bayer's books have won several literary awards including the Best Novel Edgar. He and his wife, food writer Paula Wolfert, live in the California wine country.

  For more information, please check out his website: www.williambayer.com. You can also write him directly at crimenovelist@hotmail.com.

  SPECIAL SNEAK PREVIEW

  THE MAGICIAN'S TALE

  A Kay Farrow Novel

  CHAPTER ONE

&
nbsp; The sun is about to set. I check myself in the mirror—glowing eyes, dark brows, small triangular face, medium-length dark hair parted on the side. I brush down some wisps so they fall across my forehead, then dress to go out—black T-shirt, jeans, black leather jacket, sneakers, Contax camera around my neck.

  I wear black to blend in. My hope is that by dressing dark and with my face half concealed by my hair, I can slink along the streets, barely seen, covertly stealing images.

  I pause at my living room window. Dusk is magic time, the sky still faintly lit. Streetlamps are on and lights glow from windows, making the city look mysterious and serene. The view's so spectacular it's hard to tear myself away: North Beach, Telegraph Hill, the Bay Bridge sharply defined, all still, silent, glowing behind the glass.

  I move to my telescope, set the crosshairs on a penthouse terrace just below Coit Tower. The image is so clear I feel I can touch it if I reach out. Garden chairs, pots overflowing with geraniums, sliding glass doors leading to an art-filled living room behind. No lights on inside.

  The Judge must be working late. I know him well. I have no lover now.

  I take another moment to take in the view. I'd like to stay, watch the sky turn black, perhaps wait until the lights come on in that living room across the valley. But it's time to go out; I have an appointment with a friend.

  It's chilly tonight. I turn the collar of my jacket up, peer around. A cable car is poised at the top of Lombard. Tourists disembark to descend the famous crooked street. I enter the park in front of my building, named for George Sterling, poet of the city. He composed some good lines, was eloquent on the fog, wrote "its touch is kind," described San Francisco as this "cool gray city of love." He also wrote: "At the end of our streets are stars." Not bad. Unfortunately, Sterling was no Carl Sandburg, but then San Francisco isn't a "city of the big shoulders" either.