9 More Killer Thrillers

by Russell Blake

  If she had slept even a little last night she might have picked up the subtleties in the reporter’s tone. A warning bell might have alerted her that Betsy knew something that she shouldn’t have.

  Ten

  My daughter was having dinner with her father that Tuesday night and I was home going through my office mail. Not exactly an exciting evening. Not social or illuminating or edifying. I had finished with everything but the manila envelope from Shelby Rush that had arrived that afternoon. Inside was a videotape cassette and a cream-colored note card.

  Dear Dr. Snow,

  It was good meeting with you. I’m sure that you are the right therapist for us and know you will be able to help us get through this troubled time. In the meantime, enclosed is a letter of agreement between you and the Scarlet Society. It’s a confidentiality agreement. I’m sure you’ve been asked to sign something like this before. As I explained when we met, the society is very concerned about opening up to anyone on the outside. We’re simply asking you to keep everything that we talk about in our group-therapy sessions in the strictest confidence—

  I put the letter down and stood up. I didn’t walk into the kitchen so much as stomp in. Well no, Shelby, I was saying to her in my head. No one, in the six years that I have been in private practice as a sex therapist with the Butterfield Institute, has ever asked me to sign any kind of confidentiality agreement. I couldn’t even give her—or the society—the benefit of the doubt; I knew several of them had been in therapy before. They had to know that what happens between a doctor and her patients is privileged. Besides, I’d explained it to her. Damn, I’d almost gotten killed keeping the confidence of a patient last June, not going to the police when I thought she might be in danger.

  My hand was shaking as I poured myself a glass of wine. I breathed in the fruity aroma as I took my first sip and, carrying the glass, went back to the couch in the den to reread the letter, finishing it this time.

  We are all grateful that you’ve agreed to help us and we are looking forward to our first meeting this coming week. By way of introduction, I’ve included a video. Like everything else about us, we are asking that you view it in private.

  I trust you, Dr. Snow. Just meeting you once, I know we’ve made the right decision.

  Sincerely,

  Shelby Rush

  There was another sheet of paper in the envelope. The confidentiality agreement. I put that down without even glancing at it. I was intrigued by the Scarlet Society and by Shelby, and had been looking forward to the challenge of working with them, but I wouldn’t sign legal papers for any patient. It was insulting.

  Trying to let go of my resentment, making an effort to figure out why their request was making me angrier than it should have, I grabbed the video and slammed it into our VCR. Obviously, I wasn’t letting go of the feelings.

  A few seconds into the tape, the black screen gave way to a shot of an elaborate living room. Crystal sconces glittered, gilt frames glinted in the light. The room was filled with lush velvet couches, oversized chairs and exquisite Oriental rugs in subtle shades of blues and yellows. Opulent bouquets of roses and rubrum lilies sat on end tables. I could almost smell their sweet vanilla scent.

  Loud rock music blared in the background. The harsh, driving beat of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was antithetical to the genteel decorations of the grand room.

  The camera held steady until the French doors opened and a crowd flowed in.

  It’s funny how you see what you expect to see. I knew right away that I was looking at a tape of a costume ball—everyone was wearing elaborate masks that covered the upper parts of their faces. The women were ornately dressed, well coiffed and draped with brilliant jewelry—real or not, it didn’t matter. Rubies and emeralds and diamonds glittered on ears and necks, fingers and wrists.

  I was conscious that there was something different about what I was looking at, but it took a few seconds for me to realize that the women’s gowns were not just cut low but designed to bare their breasts. Nipples were rouged, skin was powdered and often sprinkled with sparkles.

  As the women continued making their way into the room, the camera moved in on them. Many of the gowns had slits up the front, revealing that they weren’t wearing underwear.

  The mood at the party was joyful. They greeted one another with air kisses, often whispering and then laughing.

  The music segued into a Beatles song, “Love, Love Me Do,” as tuxedoed male waiters furrowed through the crowd offering canapés and flutes of champagne.

  Two women—one wearing a cat mask, the other wearing one decorated with peacock feathers—took drinks and then walked off together, arm in arm. While the waiter was wearing a tuxedo coat, white shirt, cummerbund and bow tie on top, I now saw that he was naked from the waist down and sported a semierection.

  All the waiters were pantless. The camera focused on one in his thirties, trim, medium height, dark-haired, with a strong but ordinary face. A woman wearing a silver mask, with sapphires outlining the holes for her eyes, took a glass of champagne from him and then reached down and cupped his testicles, giving them a little squeeze.

  I reached for my wine without looking away.

  What was I watching?

  In a hushed tone, almost as if she had been anticipating my question, a woman’s voice started the narration and a title appeared over the scene:

  The Scarlet Society’s 40th Annual Gala

  February 10, 2002

  “Since 1962, the Scarlet Society has had a yearly gala to raise money. Both active and inactive members from all chapters are invited to attend, as are all of the men that the society has invited to play with us over the years.

  “For some of us, who have moved away or for some other reason stopped attending the regular soirées, this is a chance for us to see old friends and slip into our dreams for one more night.

  “At the 2002 gala, more than 130 members and 150 male guests were in attendance. We raised close to two million dollars, which will go far in helping us keep the society an active and vital organization. All of this money was given anonymously.

  “This tape is a small thank-you for your contribution and a memento of the evening we shared. As we all know, it’s not often that a camera is allowed into a society event, but since we were all so well disguised, the board thought it would be a wonderful record of our night of utter delight.”

  The narration faded, the music returned to its previous level and I realized what I’d missed up until then: the voice-over had said there were 150 men present, but other than the dozen half-naked waiters, I hadn’t seen any men mingling with the female guests.

  After thirty seconds more of the same footage, the camera zeroed in on a group of women and followed them through an open passage into a large ballroom.

  I took ballroom dancing lessons when I was twelve. Krista, my father’s second wife, insisted. Even though she was an iconoclastic sculptor who showed at a SoHo gallery, she thought the lessons were a rite of passage.

  “If you don’t learn, what will you do when some fabulous guy asks you to dance and a waltz is playing?”

  Since I trusted and liked her—partly because she was smart enough not to try to replace my mother—I agreed to the once-a-week classes at the posh Pierre hotel on Fifth Avenue, just across from Central Park.

  The girls were required to wear dresses and the boys to wear jackets and ties. The beginning of each session was the same: we stood on one side of the room and the boys stood on the other and we waited for them to walk across the parquet floor and ask us to dance. We learned more than the fox trot that year—the lesson of male power and female submission was reinforced for all of us every Thursday at five-thirty.

  At the Scarlet Society’s gala, the same paradigm was now playing out on the video: women were on one side, and men were on the other. But it was the women who were the aggressors here, gliding across the floor and choosing their partners from among the men in
evening dress—none of whom stayed dressed for long.

  The camera stopped on a tall blond woman. With her mask on, it was impossible to tell her age, but she was dressed in a stunning, low-cut lavender gown that was slit up the front to show off her long legs. She walked away from the group, champagne glass in one hand, smiling to herself and moving seductively to the music. When she arrived at the swarm of men, she stopped and looked them over.

  Walking back and forth, sipping her champagne, assessing, examining, she looked for something about one of the men that spoke to her.

  Finally, she stopped.

  He was taller than she was, with wavy hair almost as blond as hers. He was fully and immaculately dressed in a black tux. As she looked, he lowered his head. Then she stepped forward until she was only inches from him, reached out, cupped his chin with her hand and lifted his face up to hers. Like her, he was wearing a mask, but a simple black one. Although his eyes, nose and cheekbones were obscured, his jawline was strong and his neck was muscular.

  The woman nodded once at him and he began to strip for her.

  I’d never seen a man undress so slowly, so seductively. There was something almost feminine in the way he took off his tie and his jacket and let them fall to the ground. His shirt, socks and shoes followed.

  He interrupted the show for a moment once his chest was bare, and almost as if he was challenging her, he looked right at her, watching to see how she was reacting. Reaching out, she unbuckled his belt, pulled at the button on the waistband of his pants, undid it roughly, yanked down his zipper, and then took a step away from him. At that point, he continued undressing, until all of his clothes were in a puddle on the floor.

  Naked, he waited and watched her from under partially lowered eyes, behaving like an obedient subordinate.

  Ignoring his erection, the woman traced the muscles on his arms with one of her fingernails, delineating the sinews slowly. Dropping her hand to her side, she turned and abruptly walked away.

  She must have said something to him that was inaudible over the music, or there must have been some sign from her that I didn’t recognize, or there were rules in place for the proper behavior, because the man followed after her, like a loyal dog, out to the middle of the dance floor and then, making his second aggressive move, took her in his arms and danced with her.

  I shut off the tape and sat in the den, staring at the screen, hugging my torso. We’ve all seen pornography. This was not that. Many people have videotaped themselves making love and then used the images to get turned on. Thousands have even released those X-rated home movies on the Internet. As a sex therapist, I often enter into the dark and secret places inside my patients’ heads where I explore their imaginations and fetishes with them. What one man finds arousing troubles the next. What one woman craves disgusts another. Rarely can anyone articulate why one scenario stimulates and another disturbs. Nothing is normal or abnormal. In the folds of your brain, where your sexual fantasies form while you lie half awake, symbols, actions and activities come to you from a nether place that has no name and where there are no rules. I know those places.

  I can be surprised by what I hear—I can even be shocked by it—but I cannot be undone. Passion has its own peculiar pathways and I had walked them with my patients. I’d studied them. I’d heard about them every day for the past six years.

  And yet, I had just watched something not in my lexicon of psychological knowledge. I was unaware of any group of women who acted en masse sexually. Men? Yes. But women? No. Women did not gather in groups to engage in erotic activity for their own pleasure, just as traditionally women do not rape.

  Scientific evidence presents a theory that the hormonal makeup of men and women is what causes aggressive or passive behavior. Women have more estrogen, which is the hormone that drives us to be nurturers. As a result of survival of the fittest, we are hardwired to be mothers. The best breeders—the more faithful women and those with the highest levels of estrogen, and the men who impregnated the greatest number of women and had the highest levels of testosterone—were the ones whose genes were passed on.

  In the 1960s and ’70s, feminists tried to raise boys who played with dolls and were not aggressive, and to raise girls who were aggressive and played with trucks. But it didn’t work. Yes, yes, in individual cases it did. But not in general.

  We are our hormones.

  Except I was watching a video of women who were acting out male-pattern sexual behavior, and as a sex therapist, that interested me more than anything I’d heard about in quite a few years.

  I clicked the tape back on and watched the ritual of other women picking out their dance partners. Their actions were not shy. The only bashfulness I saw was on the faces of the men who were on display, lined up, stiff in their tuxedos, waiting to be chosen and stripped.

  If I had not met Shelby Rush, I would not believe that I was watching a real event, but rather an erotic film written and directed by women for the delight of women.

  What was so stunning was the total reversal. Not one movement had been out of character for the aggressor. And there were more than a hundred of these women. Some tall and lovely, some short and round, others older, not beauties at all. But there was a freedom and lack of self-consciousness that graced each one’s bearing.

  It was a sexual dance of daring that I did not have the information to process.

  It took courage to be that open about your desires. It must take enormous self-esteem and a willingness to act the fool. It takes a burning need to be satiated. I would not have been capable of walking into that ballroom, choosing a man and telling him what I wanted.

  What must it feel like to not wonder if you are desirable? Not to consider what the other person was feeling or thinking or needing sexually, but simply to know that the act of demanding gave a man pleasure, and that his desire to please made him hard.

  What would it be like to know that the fact of being in charge—no matter what I looked like or said or thought or did—was enough to make me desirable?

  The tape was still running, but I shut it off and picked up the confidentiality agreement and read through it, looking at the blank space that was waiting for my signature. The first time I’d looked at it, I’d been furious that my professionalism had been questioned. Now I wasn’t sure how I felt. And I didn’t have any idea what to do.

  Eleven

  Paul Lessor was sitting in his apartment staring at the news on the television with the sound turned off, the light from the monitor the only illumination in the pigsty that used to be his living room. On the coffee table in front of him were piles of newspapers and plates of untouched food. Dried-out English muffins, butter congealed on the plate. Three-quarters of a banana now brown and rotting.

  He had no appetite. That was one of the side effects of the medication, and was the least of his problems with the drugs.

  What a fucking mess his life was. He was thirty-three. One of the most talented art directors at any publishing house in New York City, with more award-winning covers to his name than anyone else in the business. He’d gotten scholarships to Cooper Union and then the Yale School of Art. He’d had his photographic collages in four group shows. He got offers every year to jump ship from Pigeonhole Press, the small but prestigious publishing company where he worked, and move to the bigger houses, but he didn’t go. He couldn’t go. His boss, Maria Diezen, the fifty-two-year-old editor in chief, had told him that he couldn’t. She told him often. He loved Maria. He loved how strong she was and how tough she was and how angry she could get at him when he didn’t get it right.

  And so he listened to her.

  She’d been through twenty-four senior art directors in a dozen years when he’d started working for her three years ago. Now he held a record that other graphic designers in the city were in awe of. Everyone at Pigeonhole knew that Maria was a bitch: aggressive, demanding and crazy half the time. But Paul loved her. Worshipped her. Would do anything that she asked of him. Because when
a woman like that, with that kind of temper and those kinds of standards, smiles on you, it’s like the whole fucking world is yours.

  There was nothing better than their lunch hours, when together they’d walk into the big, noisy, crowded Barnes & Noble superstore on Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, near the office, to look at one of his covers on the new fiction table. Nothing like getting a report back from the head of sales that the big buyers at B & N, Borders, Amazon and all the independents had upped their orders because “with a cover like that, there’s no question the book is going to walk itself out of the store.”

  And more times than not, it had.

  But as good as his work was, as much as he loved what he did and lived off the high that he got from it, he was fucking falling apart.

  He’d gone to the psychiatrist six months ago for the crazy things that were happening in his head: manic mood swings—elation, depression, the sense that he could do anything, the realization that he was powerless.

  They’d tried cocktail after cocktail of drugs to get him into some kind of chemical balance. The only thing that worked at all was Thorazine. Except for one little side effect.

  He wanted to be able to live with it. Wanted to not care. Anxious to rise above the problem, he told himself that soon he’d get chemically balanced and then the doctor would be able to change the medication and find one that didn’t make him impotent. He had to trust that.

  Paul looked at the clock before closing his eyes. A year ago he would not have been home on a Tuesday night at eight o’clock, sitting on his couch, bored out of his brain by television. He would have been naked and fucking some Amazon who shouted out orders, telling him exactly where to put his cock and how to move his hands and what to do with his tongue.

  Damn. Damn. Damn.

  Not even reliving any of those incredible nights gave him half a hard-on. Not with the Thorazine coursing through his blood, softening his mind and his equipment.