The Man Who Loved Women to Death

by David Handler

“Was that you, Merilee?” I called out, louder this time. “Are you all right?”

  Still no response. She was, possibly, out cold. Actresses. Stay away from them if you can help it. And if you can’t, make sure you have good health insurance. I threw on my dressing gown and went searching for her, stopping first in the nursery just to make absolutely sure that Tracy hadn’t somehow managed to tumble out of her crib and hit the deck. She hadn’t. She was in there, all right, inspecting her toes. Lulu elected to hang there with her, commandeering the rocker. Not one of her usual haunts, but I didn’t press it. I was just happy she’d stopped barking.

  “Merilee?” I started down the hallway toward the dining room, plunging headlong into the complete and total blackness she had created. “Merilee, are you all right? Hellooo?”

  “Psst, in here, Hoagy,” she whispered at me from the dark, her strong hand grabbing mine, tugging at me urgently.

  It was to be the powder room again, near as I could tell.

  “Merilee, I have this really kinky idea. There’s a large, soft bed in the master bedroom. Just for the sake of variety why don’t we—?”

  “Shhh!”

  And then we were in there with the door closed and her breath hot on my face and her lips on mine. Hands flinging my dressing gown open. Legs wrapping around me tightly.

  “Oh, God, Hoagy,” she moaned. “This is so right.”

  Only it wasn’t right. Not the lips. Not the legs. Not the voice. I pushed her away, violently. I groped for the light and flicked it on.

  It was Tansy Smollet who was in there with me. It was Tansy Smollet who was up on that bathroom sink with her bare white legs clutching me, her shapeless designer smock flung half off her, her eyes bright and cunning as a wild animal’s in the firelight.

  It was Tansy Smollet who had a Smith & Wesson Ladysmith pointed directly at my stomach.

  It was Tansy.

  “What have you done with Merilee?” I gasped, my chest heaving.

  “Tied her up to a dining chair,” she replied, her voice incredibly calm. Eerily calm. “Stuffed a sock in her mouth so she couldn’t scream. I’m very good at doing that sort of thing in the dark. I’ve had a lot of experience, you know. The doorman let me up. I told him I was Merilee’s long lost sister and it was a surprise and would he please not spoil it. When she opened the door—”

  “She got a surprise.” That explained why Lulu had started barking. To alert me. And that was why she had stayed behind in the nursery. To guard her baby sister. Protecting Tracy was her job.

  “We’re almost there now, Hoagy,” Tansy said softly, letting the gun fall casually to her side. “She’s all that’s stopping us now. He’s not here anymore. We made sure of that.”

  “We did?”

  She nodded her head slowly, like a good, obedient child. “Now we just have to take care of Merilee. Once she’s gone we’ll have what we’ve always wanted.” Her hand reached inside my dressing gown, playing with what she found in there.

  I grabbed her hand and held it. “Which is what, Tansy?”

  Her eyes widened. “Why, to be together, of course. We’ve been pretending for too long, Hoagy. We won’t have to pretend any longer. Oh, God, this is going to be so good. And I swear I’ll be a good mother to Tracy. You’ll see.”

  My eyes were on the gun. The Ladysmith has a slimmer grip than the standard issue. Not that she needed one. The hand that gripped mine was big and strong. Someone with strong hands. That’s what Mrs. Adelman had said about the typing sample. She never said a man with strong hands. Just someone.

  I thought about lunging for it, wrestling with her for it. But there was no telling what might happen. She might shoot me. And there was my family to think of. Merilee, who was tied to a chair out there in the dark somewhere. Tracy …

  “We’ll make it look like a break-in, Hoagy. Before we go we’ll make it look like she was the tragic victim of a random break-in.”

  “We’re not going anywhere, Tansy. You’ve killed five women. You’ve driven Tuttle to suicide. You’re sick, Tansy. You’re very, very sick.”

  She shrugged this off, her smock falling to her waist. I looked at her small, firm breasts, the nipples rosy and taut. There was a time when the sight of Tansy Smollet’s naked breasts would have stirred me to a frenzy. There was a time. Now there was no time. She looked at me looking at her. “Listen to you,” she said. “You make it sound like I did all of this for no reason. I did it for us.”

  “Lulu knew it was you,” I said. “It was your hand cream. She smelled your hand cream at Cassandra’s apartment. That’s why she was howling—not because Cassandra was dead, but because she realized that you were her killer. She adores you, and this meant she’d be losing you.”

  Tansy let out a laugh. “Losing me? She’ll be gaining me.” She glanced down at the gun in her hand. “All we have to do is finish what we started.”

  I said, “Feldman was so wrong. He insisted serial killers are never women. He had all the statistics and the facts and the case studies. He had everything but the exception to the rule—you. And it all makes so much more sense this way, too. How the answer man was able to pick up bright, attractive single women so easily. How he was able to convince them to take him home—even in the midst of a citywide scare. How come no one ever spotted any of the victims with a man shortly before they died. How come he didn’t sexually assault them. Because the answer man wasn’t a man. He was you. No reason for a woman to be worried about you. You with your concentration-camp haircut, the better to leave no samples behind. You with your short, unpainted nails, the better to leave no scratches or traces of polish behind.… Madelyn Horowitz, the sales clerk at Bergdorf, spotted you, you know. She saw a woman ask Cassandra for her autograph. Madelyn lives in Mineola. I spoke to her late last night. She described the autograph seeker as a tall, leggy Amazon type wearing a Zoran.” I smiled at Tansy. “That’s what Cassandra was trying to tell me on the phone when she was dying. She wasn’t saying, ‘It’s raining.’ She was saying, ‘Zoranian.’ You told her you knew something about the answer man’s identity, I suppose. That’s how you convinced her to take you home.”

  “I could have sworn she was dead when I left,” Tansy said blithely. “I guess she just had more fight in her than the others.”

  “She was desperate to be the one to break this story. That’s what kept her alive long enough to dial that phone. She was a reporter to the end, always a terrific eye for detail. Of course, that’s true of you as well, isn’t it? You filled those chapters with one incriminating detail after another—E as in Ezra, T as in Tuttle. Ring Lardner, Yushies, Tuttle’s penchant for leggy, toothy women. His loathing of computers. His old sign-off—‘Just think how much fun I’d be having if I didn’t have to work.’ You used all of those things. You knew all of those things.”

  “And I know you,” she added, gazing deeply into my eyes. Hers burned as if there were a fever inside of her. “I knew you’d figure out that the answer man and Tuttle were one and the same. I knew you’d agonize over it for a few days. And I knew that when push came to shove you’d turn Tuttle in.”

  “I’m glad I’m so predictable.”

  “You’re not predictable. You’re a dear, sweet man who is way too decent to ever hurt Merilee, even though she’s been tormenting you for years. Throwing you out. Taking you back. Putting you through that awful pregnancy scandal in the tabloids. You deserve better, Hoagy. You’ve always deserved better. And now you’re going to get what you deserve, only we have to move fast.”

  I gripped her hand tighter, holding her there. I didn’t want any of what she had in mind for outside of this room. “What about the novel, Tansy? The auction, the movie sale—was all of that just pretend or was it for real?”

  “Why, of course it was for real,” she replied, her manner turning bright and cheerful. “Because I also knew you’d never, ever be content to live on my money. You’re too proud. You’d have to have your own. That’s why I made up the answer man. I
’ll have you know I made a thorough study of the matter. Nothing sells better these days than books about serial killers. Especially when the victims are young and pretty. Especially when the killer is a cold, merciless stalker who hunts down his innocent victims and numbers them. That’s why I put the question marks on their foreheads. Because I knew the New York tabloids would have a field day with it. Just as I knew New York book publishers would be reading about him every single day and growing more and more desperate to buy the book. Nothing gets them more excited than a hot story in their own backyard. That’s why I did it the way I did, Hoagy. That’s why I put the city through all of this. I did it so you’d have a bestseller.” She raised my hand to her lips and kissed the knuckles softly, one by one by one. “I did it for you.”

  “Tansy?”

  “Yes, Hoagy?” Now she was rubbing her unfeeling cheek against my hand, rather like a cat.

  “Why didn’t you just kill Tuttle?”

  “No fucking way,” she snarled savagely. “That wouldn’t do. No, no. I wanted him to know what public humiliation feels like. I wanted him to lose his restaurant, lose his name. I wanted him to go to jail for life. And find out for himself what it means to lie in fear, night after night, waiting to be violated and abused and tortured. This was my revenge, Hoagy, for what he did to me. Thirty-one. That’s how many bones he broke in my face. All because I committed the unpardonable sin of getting upset that he was fucking other women behind my back. I went through months and months of unbearable pain. The operations. The healing. This was how I got through it. I lay awake, night after night, planning my revenge. I planned it and I took it. I pursued the kind of women he always liked to fuck, the ones with the big smiles and the good legs and the pretty hair. I befriended them. I killed them. And I framed him. He wanted to be a writer. I made it look like he was one. I still had his typewriter—never did throw it out. I constructed the perfect frame, in my opinion. Of course, I wasn’t figuring he’d commit suicide. Men like Tuttle, men who beat up on women, they generally don’t have the nerve to take their own lives. But I’m okay with that. Because it’s over now. And because I was getting tired.”

  “So you said in your last letter.”

  “It took so much work, Hoagy. The planning, the doing, the writing. I had to be so careful. No slips, not one. I left no fingerprints, no hair samples, no fibers, no nothing. Do you have any idea how hard that is?”

  “Something of an idea.”

  “The first one was the hardest, you know.”

  “Diane,” I said. “Her name was Diane.”

  “I-I almost blew it. I actually brought her back to my own apartment, which was just so stupid. Only, well, I needed a safe place to hide her body while I wrote the first chapter.”

  “You kept her in your apartment? How cozy.”

  “I had to,” she insisted. “I wanted to make sure you got Chapter One before the body was found. You know, for maximum effect. The downside was that they might find something on her body that they could somehow trace back to me.”

  “Only they didn’t, your apartment is so spotless. No rugs. No pets. Nothing but bare surfaces. Plus you have the perfect setup for disposing a body. Your own private elevator down to your own private garage. So you stuffed Diane in a blue garment bag, knowing Tuttle had one just like it—”

  “They were ours, from when we were married.”

  “—and you put her in one of your Garden Lady vans, took her to the park in the middle of the night and dumped her there. Diane was little. You had no problem carrying her.”

  “I was such a nervous wreck,” she said with a shy laugh, as if she were an ingénue talking about her opening night performance. She seemed relieved to be talking about it. She hadn’t been able to talk about it. Possibly she’d even be smiling, too. If only she could smile. “That’s how come I bashed her head in. I panicked. But I got better at it after that. Went to their place, not mine. And I did it neat and tidy. It got easier after that. It gets easier.”

  “Score one for Inspector Feldman,” I said. “Next came Laurie …”

  Tansy was growing impatient again, pulling away from me. “What about her?”

  “You made such a big deal about that Band-Aid on her foot. You even took it with you. Why? How did that point to Tuttle?”

  “That was just me getting into it. This guy I used to work with was always staring at my feet. Drove me nuts.”

  “I’ll say. But you knew what you wanted to do. You were cool. You were calculating. You were everywhere. You followed me from the outset—that first time I met Lieutenant Very at Barney Greengrass.”

  “I felt closer to you that way.”

  “How long did you follow Luz? She thought it was Tuttle. Tuttle swore it wasn’t him. And it wasn’t. It was you.”

  “Tuttle had written me all about her,” Tansy said. “How she’d dumped him. I intended to make her one of the answer man’s victims. I figured this would tighten the noose around Tuttle’s neck for sure. He was a jilted lover, violent past. My problem was opportunity. The stupid bitch slept all day, had an attentive new boyfriend. The cow was never alone.”

  “Lucky her. So you played it safe and you moved on. But then you panicked all over again with Francie, the flute player. It got ugly between you two in Riverside Park. You got ugly. What happened, Tansy? Why did you do that to her?”

  “She kissed me,” Tansy replied simply.

  I considered this a moment. “Francie was gay?”

  She nodded her head in that little girl way of hers again. “She came on to me, big-time. And it threw me, big-time. Believe me, Hoagy, this was not something I was expecting. And she was so insistent. W-We struggled. I hit her with a rock and … It happened just the way I wrote it, really. Only, she scratched me.”

  “I saw scratches on your hands that night I visited you. They were from her?”

  “Yes. My skin was under her nails. And she bit my lip when she was kissing me. Not terribly. Not so anyone would notice. But what might they find in her mouth when they did their DNA tests? Would they find a trace of my blood? My saliva? I didn’t know.”

  “Score one for Lieutenant Very. So you went back and you hacked off her head and her hands with one of your Garden Lady axes before you buried her. Thus making the story ten times hotter than it had been.”

  “The publicity wasn’t in my thoughts at all when I did it,” she confessed. “Although I was glad about it, for your sake.”

  “What did you do with Francie’s head and hands, by the way?”

  “I stopped off in Central Park on my way home and buried them there. I improvised.”

  “Like the way you improvised when you found out Tuttle had gone and ended it,” I said. “The police had sealed his apartment. Only, there was one vital piece of evidence missing—the typewriter. It was nowhere to be found. Because you had it. A troubling loose end. So, once again, you improvised. After the police had searched the place from top to bottom you slipped over the garden wall in the night and you planted it in the woodshed. You knew about the back way in from Sixty-sixth Street. You did live there once, after all. No one saw you. And of course no one suspected that the typewriter had been put there after the search. They had no reason to. They had their man and he was dead. They just figured they did a sloppy job first time around. You’re smart, Tansy. And you’re a gifted writer.”

  This seemed to startle her. “W-Why, thank you, Hoagy. That means a lot, coming from you. I always kept a journal. At Miss Porter’s, at Vassar, at Cornell. I got in the habit of scribbling. I’d fill notebook after notebook lying on my bed at night. I guess that’s how I was able to do it—just kind of churned it out.” This was vintage Tansy. She always had been modest about her many accomplishments, no matter how remarkable they seemed.

  “Well, you caught your character’s voice perfectly. Who was he, anyway?”

  “Just someone lonely and angry and hurting. He was me, I guess.”

  “I loved that whole random-act-o
f-kindness thing. It was so convincing. You had everyone believing that this guy actually existed. You even fooled a panel of shrinks.”

  “Shrinks believe what they want to believe.” She said it bitterly. “I’ve been fooling them for years.”

  “You fooled me, too, Tansy. Almost.”

  She stiffened. “What do you mean, almost?”

  “You made one mistake. It was in the third chapter, when you were watching Bridget swim laps at the health club. A small detail, really. But it gave you away.”

  “What was it?” she demanded angrily. “What did I say?”

  “You said, and I quote, ‘I just stood there in my own swimsuit watching for a minute, transfixed.’”

  “What’s so wrong with that?”

  “Not a thing. Except that there isn’t a man alive who would have written it. Men say swimming trunks or swim trunks or just plain trunks. Men never, ever say swimsuit. Only a woman would use that word. But don’t get down on yourself about it. Writers always nitpick each other’s work.”

  She was edging toward the door now. Time was running out.

  “You put me through hell, Tansy. You do know that, don’t you?”

  “I do, Hoagy. But I couldn’t let you know the truth. That would have spoiled everything. You understand that, don’t you? It’s going to be worth it, I swear. I’ll make it worth it.”

  She reached over and flicked off the bathroom light. I didn’t know why. Now there was only blackness. And silence. I could hear her breathing. It was warm in there. I could smell her, a humid, pungent scent that tweaked my nostrils.

  “Hoagy?” she whispered at me in the darkness. “Are you feeling the way I’m feeling right now?”

  “I doubt it, Tansy. How are you feeling?”

  She showed me how. Guided my hand down between her legs, gasping when my fingers made contact with the wetness that they found there. “It’s the anticipation, Hoagy. I always feel this way when I’m about to do it. Afterward—you won’t believe how it feels afterward. And now that we’re together, God, it’s going to be so good.” Now she was in the bathroom doorway, tugging me out into the great sea of blackness. “Come on, darling. Let’s go for it.”