“No,” Star says, so quickly the word must squeeze through a choking cough.
“Sorry,” Max says, standing and tapping the counter twice. “I know better than to ask. It’s just that, sometimes, it’s hard to control—”
“I know.”
“Have a good night,” Max says and heads for the door. The blonde cringes slightly at his passing.
Star opens his mouth to say, “Good hunting,” but the words are too frightened to emerge.
NESTS
Helen finally answered the door after Brad had stood outside for fifteen minutes, ringing the bell and pounding on solid oak. He had considered withdrawing to the anonymity of his silver BMW parked a few houses up the block and waiting for dusk to deepen into night, when he could break into his in-laws’ home with some vestige of discretion and confront his wife.
But a cold front had chilled the late Fall air too much for him to sit in a car and wait. He also did not want to look at the bare trees, like armies of the dead, lining the quiet road and gathered along property borders, guarding the paths and territories of the Connecticut community’s well-to-do residents. Their skeletal limbs veined the reddening western sky, and bowed under the weight of nests resembling dark, cancerous lumps bulging in the fine latticework of branch and twig.
The trees, the nests, the cold and the eternal stillness broken only a sighing breeze all reminded Brad of his own home, and all that had happened in it over the past six months. Laying active siege to the house provided him with a way to keep warm, a reason to focus his attention on the door rather than the neighborhood, and a means of venting feelings trapped in the labyrinth of fears and guilt within him.
He had wished the neighbors a merry trip to hell if they didn’t like the noise. His wife stared at him through an alcoholic daze as she swayed in the entrance, holding a tumbler filled with amber liquid. He was shocked for a moment by what she wore—a pink, stained satin night shirt, too small and short for her thick body, with lacy frills and white puff-ball buttons. His gaze lingered for a moment on the soiled panties the nightshirt did not manage to cover. Then Helen turned on her bare heel and sauntered back into the house, leaving the door open for him to enter.
Brad hung his trench coat in the entrance closet, and received another momentary shock when he found coats belonging to Helen’s parents still on their wooden hangers. A twinge of anxiety twisted his stomach as he anticipated Helen’s father emerging from his den, her mother calling out from the kitchen. Then he relaxed, leaned his head against his own coat’s shoulder, and took a deep, steadying breath.
Almost four months, he thought, looking at the fur beside his own coat, and she still hasn’t gotten rid of this stuff.
He closed the closet door and searched the house for Helen.
He found her in the living room. The lacquered bar was open, and her father’s extensive collection of bottles lay across the marble-top coffee table. She had even found his secret caches of exotic, expensive liqueurs.
“What the hell took you so long?” Brad spat the question out with contempt as his gaze moved over the dust on the wide screen television and the stereo, the stains spotting the rug, the balled up papers and bags and piles of fast-food Styrofoam containers.
“I was waiting for the fucking butler to answer the door,” Helen answered, slurring her words. She looked up at him from the couch, her legs folded under her and head resting on the sofa back, and rolled her eyes. “What’s your goddamn problem?”
Brad started to sit on the recliner, saw the pillows with ancient indentations shaped to her father’s body, and chose instead to stand beside the potted rubber tree by the front window, hands in trouser pockets, and stare side long at his wife. “The social worker from child welfare came by again,” he said. The sentence came out flatter than he had intended, sounding too casual.
Helen blinked, then looked away. She drained her glass and sat up so she could select a bottle of Scotch from the cluster on the coffee table and pour herself another drink. “What happened? They find something?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.
“No, I checked with the detectives about the case yesterday, and they had nothing new. She just had some more questions for us. Apparently, she got a hold of Jennifer’s third grade teacher. She heard about Jennifer’s crying jags in the classroom. She wanted to talk to both of us, so I told her you were staying up here for a while. Getting your folks’ things together, getting the house ready for sale.”
Helen snorted. “The detectives. Yeah.” She opened her mouth as if to say something, met his gaze, then took a sip of her fresh drink, closed her eyes and sighed. “She’s not coming up here, is she?”
“I doubt it. Those child welfare people have got killer caseloads, and we’re not under suspicion…for anything.”
“No, we know who lost Jennifer, don’t we?”
Brad took his hands out of his pockets and took a hold of the drapes. With one swift motion, he tore them down. Then he slammed the heel of his fist into the wall. His rage ebbed slightly, but he could still feel the pounding blood in his ears. His knees shook. Tears burned the corners of his eyes.
“Yes, Mister Health Administrator, Mister Big-Fucking-Albany Deal, Mister I-Don’t-Deal-With-the-Sick-Fucks-No-More-Just-the Bucks,” she continued, pausing for a moment to take a gulp from her glass, then fixing Brad with a frown. “Who the hell would suspect us of child abuse? We just can’t hold on to our own fucking kid, that’s all. That’s not abuse, that’s not murder or kidnapping or anything that’s our fault, is it? Somebody just snatched our daughter from under your stupid nose. Probably a patient one of your hospitals let escape so they could keep the census down, lay off staff, save money. You save money for those asshole politicians, but you couldn’t save our own fucking kid, could you?”
She popped up from the couch, eyes widened and hands shaking, mouth working soundlessly for a moment before she put the glass to her lips and finished her drink with a defiant flourish. Then she threw the glass at him.
He ducked, and the glass sailed past his shoulder, crashed into a glass pane. A cold gust of night wind blew in through the jagged hole and caressed the back of his neck. He straightened up shivering and brushed tiny glass fragments from his sweater and hair. He glanced at the broken windowpane, then looked back at Helen.
“Daddy wouldn’t like you wrecking his beautiful little house, would he?” he asked her sweetly. He cocked his head to the side, giving her a mocking smile. “Mommy would punish her precious little only daughter, wouldn’t she?”
Helen’s angry expression melted into a pout, then broke into a weeping tragedy mask. She collapsed back on to the couch, face turned down into the crook of her arm that was braced against the sofa back, and wept.
Brad moved away from the window, circled the couch once in a tightening spiral, then stopped and took a step back. He remembered how it had been; how he had gone to her during her moods, comforted her with an arm around her shoulders, a hand on her breasts, fingers kneading her soft flesh. He had taken up the role her father had played throughout the years of her childhood, keeping her from sinking too deeply into the melancholy that never seemed far below the surface of her personality by providing her with the attention and affection she could not do without.
In exchange, she had fallen into the part of his devoted child-wife, a creature he had not realized held such fascination for him until his graduate social work school days, when he had uncovered his pattern of seeking out such women in his brief foray into analysis with a therapist.
Things had started to change when their daughter surprised them, and Brad wondered if Helen had not deliberately manipulated him so she could become pregnant and have the child-sibling she had always craved. When Jennifer came, he found he had to play father to two girls, as well as pursue his career with renewed vigor because Helen had opted to resign her advertising job and stay home to raise their daughter.
But still, it had not been bad. The money had come in, from the State’s rigid s
alary structure as well as contractors’ more flexible incentive inducements. With a little help from her parents, Brad had managed to get everything Helen had wanted, for herself and her daughter: clothes, vacations, the right pre-schools and private grade schools. And he had discovered the peculiar pleasures of parenting. His life, he thought as he looked down at his wife, her shoulders heaving slightly, faint moans escaping from under the slightly bobbing mound of hair, had been blessed with varied satisfactions.
But that was before they had lost Jennifer, and then Helen’s mother and father.
“Why did you bother coming?” she asked suddenly, the question barely audible.
“You wouldn’t answer the phone. I had to tell you about the social worker.” The question forced Brad out of his reverie, and the mist of remembrance dissipated before a brisk, cold gust of the here and now. The anger that had blossomed, seemingly out of nowhere, when Helen had left him shortly after her parents’ death filled him once more. His throat tightened around the names and curses straining to burst out and rain down on her. “You wanted to see me, didn’t you?” She turned her tear-stained face to him. “You wanted to see if I was ready to go back to the apartment, to you?”
Brad’s anger softened as he heard the vulnerability in her voice, the delicate, crystalline structure of her neediness. “Yes, that too.”
“Well, fuck you, Brad,” she said in a provocatively sexy whisper. “I don’t have my daughter, and I don’t have my folks. That just leaves me with you, and I sure as hell have no use for you. Get out of this house.”
She turned away and poured herself another drink. Shaken, Brad left the living room, put on his coat, and opened the door to leave. Her faint voice drew him back into the house. He followed the voice through the darkened house, past the living room with its cold breeze blowing through shattered glass, and continued along a hall way decorated with family pictures, until he stopped beside the door to his father-in-law’s den. He heard a little girl’s voice inside. A chill ran up his spine, until he realized it was Helen speaking, in a voice that might have been hers when she had been Jennifer’s age. She was talking to someone, pleading for that person to take her with him. Then he heard the word Daddy.
He pushed the door open wide enough to see through the crack. Helen was kneeling in front of her father’s roll-down desk, her body bathed in the light of a desk lamp. She was hanging on to the arm of a wood frame chair, and staring up at an invisible face.
She started to cry. Her hand reached up to phantom shoulders. Brad opened his mouth to speak, to pull her back to reality. But the sound of her voice brought back memories. He saw her as the little girl she had once been, the shadow of their own daughter. He wanted to sit in the chair, to look down at her face, take her matted hair in his hands and pull her head down against his lap. He remembered…beautiful acts of love. And he remembered how ugly those beautiful acts were, to others.
He left her begging to the ghosts inside her head.
On his way back to the city, he called Vanessa on his cellular car phone and arranged for a meeting. He drove carefully, observing the speed limit and staying in the middle lane, as if he were carrying a trunk loaded with cocaine and feared the state troopers might pull him over. When he reached Manhattan, he stopped in front of an automated teller and pulled out his cash limit, which he combined with the money in his bill fold. He charged a bottle of champagne and a dozen red roses on his Platinum card, and then left the BMW in a West Side garage and walked to Vanessa’s building.
The first thing he gave her when she opened the door was the lump of money in his fist. Then he gave her the champagne and roses, and walked past her straight to the bedroom.
She came in after he had undressed and settled himself on the edge of her bed. She sipped champagne from a tall glass, pushed long strands of golden blond hair from her eyes while holding a long-stem rose in her other hand. Her long, slim, naked legs were crossed so that her high heeled shoes clicked as she leaned back against the door frame. She gave him a coy smile. The soft light from the floor lamp to her left slid a radiant mantle of youth over her features. He could almost see the down on her cheeks and thighs, the glint of an innocent trust in her eyes.
“Feeling needy tonight, aren’t we?” she asked in her small, high voice. She let the short silk Japanese-print robe she wore slip from her shoulders and fall to her feet, then daintily stepped out of the pile. The heels tapped against the bare wooden floor until she reached the plush throw rug on which the bed rested. She passed the rose across his down-turned face. “I like the ones with thorns better,” she told him.
“That store isn’t opened at this time of night.”
“They’ll do.” She let the rose fall at his feet and walked to the night table, where she sat on the pillow bench, crossed her legs, and sipped more champagne while watching him. “What happened to you?”
Brad sighed. “It’s Helen. Things haven’t changed.”
“Did you expect them to?” Vanessa spoke into the glass. Her voice sounded hollow.
“She hasn’t forgiven me for…Jennifer, for being there when they took her. I wasn’t looking, it was my fault, I guess, but there was no one else around… Do you understand? They just drove up to the park entrance and took her. I didn’t even know until I heard the car drive away. so sorry…you don’t know…” His voice cracked and air wheezed through his throat, as grief and guilt tightened its grip on him. He cleared his throat.
“Does she know about us, and what you do with me?” Vanessa asked, still studying him closely.
“She’s too self-absorbed, spoiled. She didn’t know when I first started seeing you, after Jennifer. She sure as hell didn’t find anything out when she moved up to her parents’ house after they died.”
Vanessa put the glass down on the vanity and pushed her hair away from her brow. Her small breasts flattened as she raised her arms, and her stomach sank back under her ribs, forming a small cavity of soft, shadowed flesh. He could smell her talcum powder, and see faint white traces of it between her breasts, by her armpits, on her abdomen.
His gaze lingered on the crotch of her sheer panties. “Did she—did you ever do with her, what we do together?” Vanessa asked in a whisper.
“With Helen? No—well, not quite.” He looked up at her, and was surprised to find that he had slipped off the bed and fallen to his knees before her. His arms hung limply at his sides. “No one’s ever been with me, the way you have.”
The faint trace of a smile touched the corners of her lips. She stood up, opened a wardrobe two steps away from the vanity, and drew her hand across the hanging garments of latex and leather, the whips and gags, the jangling chains. “What’s your pleasure?” she asked, drawing out a gag with a black, banana-shaped dildo emerging from the mouthpiece. She looked down at Brad with a raised eyebrow.
He shook his head and peered into the closet, finding at last a white dress with a red ribbon around its cinched waist, its hem and neck trimmed with flowery embroidery.
“The usual, I see,” she said, punctuating her words with a sigh. She took out the little girl’s dress and sat back down on the cushion chair. “OK, but first, why don’t you crawl across the floor on your belly, Brad, and kiss my toes for a while? That’ll put the both of us in the mood, and I think it’ll make you feel better, too.”
Brad did as she suggested, and felt the tension melt from his shoulders as soon as he lowered himself before her. He took the smallest of her toes in his mouth, ran his tongue over and under it, gently sucking, feeling her nail and the grit of floor dust rub against his gum, teeth, tongue and the inside of his cheeks. He tasted nail polish and skin cream, bitter and sweet. The faintly sour aroma of her foot mingled with odor of dry cleaning chemicals not thoroughly removed from the rug.
He closed his eyes, and all the rage and frustration he had been keeping within him seeped away, like water spreading from the base of a melting block of ice. Memories floated up through the murky depths of his mind,
pushing aside his life’s foul detritus from the past six months. Hazy images glowed before him, warm, shimmering, lit by gentle fires of innocence.
She changed and brought him over to the bed, filling the bedroom with her girlish laughter. They played and laughed together, his bellowing drowning out her own gasps. Then she stopped suddenly as she straddled his stomach.
“Tell me, Brad, that book you told the detectives you were reading while your daughter was playing in the park…what was the name of it?”
He gasped for air, but she forced buttocks down against him, keeping him breathless. Her fingers toyed with his erection. The question startled him, but he could not summon enough reason to give her a coherent answer.
“I…don’t remember… Vanessa… please…”
She leaned forward, relieving the pressure on his diaphragm, and cradled his face in her hands. She licked her lips, and her face was flushed. “It wasn’t Lolita, by any chance, was it?” She giggled as he gasped for air.
Then they went on with their games.
His heart was still beating excitedly as he pulled into the condominium’s garage. Instead of going straight up to the apartment, he went out through the garage door and took the half-block walk to the neighborhood park. The trees spread their bare limbs over him, and street lamps projected a latticework of shadow branches across his path. He looked at the patterns before him, glanced up to investigate unsightly blotches of darkness among the limb shadows. Looked away as he found only squirrel nests belonging to the troop that had invaded the neighborhood last Spring.
His steps created a rustling wake through small mounds of dead leaves. A breeze, its chill edge blunted by the city’s warmth, picked at his hair and stung his bruised lip. He picked a bench along the path leading to the small playground set among a stand of tall, strong oaks, and sat down, hands thrust deep into his trench coat pockets. The acidic stress from evening’s undertakings had burned a hole through the strata of his memory, and sleep was far away as layers of reminiscences fought for his conscious attention.
A Blood of Killers Page 31
