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AHMM, Jan-Feb 2006

Page 25

by Dell Magazine Authors


  Mort carefully plotted every detail. On Tuesday night, he drove into Manhattan, dressed in his pizza delivery uniform, which made him virtually invisible. He even found a legal parking space, which he took as a sign that God had smiled on his mission. He saw Hannah leave at eight o'clock. At eight fifteen, the bored doorman buzzed in Mort. He went up to the twenty-first floor and knocked on Decameron's door.

  "Pizza!” he said.

  Decameron came to his door and looked out the peephole at the balding, mild-looking man holding the pizza box.

  He opened the door and said, “I didn't order—"

  Mort had been made ox-strong by months of carrying pizzas in heavy insulated bags up to fourth-floor walkups. He hit Decameron with the full force of his rage and misery.

  A stunned Decameron landed flat on the floor. Mort slammed the door and pulled out the tire iron from the pizza box. He broke Decameron's arms and legs with swift strokes. Decameron screamed in pain and terror.

  Mort could taste his fear. It was bitter. Very bitter. And sweet. So very sweet.

  "At the trial, the pathologist said your wife fought like a wildcat to live,” Mort said. “You won't be able to fight me off. You can't kick me, either. And these broken bones won't be noticed at your autopsy, because all your bones will be broken in another moment, Decameron. You're going to join your wife."

  Mort flung open the living room window while Decameron tried to scoot toward the door. He didn't get far. Mort dragged him across the polished wood floor toward the open window. He was careful to hold Decameron by his shoes, so there were no drag marks on the parquet.

  Decameron moaned. “Why are you doing this?” he said, sounding like a dead man already.

  "Because when your wife went out the window, so did my career,” Mort said. “I was the man on the street when Patricia landed. The innocent bystander who was drenched with her blood. The horror that I saw cost me my job, my marriage, and my house. There was no justice for me in court. But I will have justice now."

  He flung Decameron out the window. Mort heard him scream all the way down. Then he heard the splat! It was such a satisfying sound.

  Mort looked out the window to see his triumph, twenty-one floors below. He saw a man standing on the sidewalk. An ordinary man. Drenched with Decameron's blood.

  Mort was horrified. It was as if he was watching Patricia's death all over again, from a different, more terrible view—the same way God must have seen it.

  "I didn't check to see if anyone was walking down the street,” Mort wept. “I forgot to look."

  But he would not forget now.

  Copyright (c) 2006 Elaine Viets

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Devil's Girlfriend by Brendan Dubois

  Her name is Patti Barnes and she is forty-nine years old, lives in a small town in New Hampshire, and in her entire life she has lived in nine states across this great land. She works as a hairdresser and rents a four-room cottage with a rear deck that overlooks a slow-moving river and has a small fireplace. Through her years of living and accomplishments and travels, she is only certain of one thing: If she were to die right at this very moment, the first line of her obituary would read, Patti Barnes formerly of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and one of several girlfriends of Ted Bundy, notorious serial killer...

  There. And won't that make people reading their morning papers sit up and take notice when that day comes, though she hopes it doesn't come too soon.

  Right now all she cares about is getting through her life, day by day, making a quiet and comfortable living wielding scissors and combs. Maybe not much of a career, but one that was recession-proof and depression-proof, especially in this time when hi-tech jobs are being streamed overseas to Calcutta and Lahore and Djakarta. People will still need to have their hair cut. That was something one of the parlor owners told her, out there in Seattle one year, back when the dot-commers saw their bank accounts and five-bathroom homes melt away like frost on a spring lawn. You can outsource everything from data processing to customer service, but no bright young boy with the dream of a million stock options by the time he was twenty-five was ever going to come up with a way to outsource haircutting.

  The parlor owner—Katie, that had been the woman's name—was heavy and wore too much makeup and cracked a lot of un-PC jokes. A nice boss, but one day, like the others—the so very many others—when she found out that Patti had dated Ted Bundy, had once briefly been his lover, she whispered two things to her:

  "Oh, you poor girl."

  And, later, almost hesitantly, “What was he like?"

  This day starts off like so many others: up whenever she feels like it, for she hates having to get up at a particular time. She had grown up in a trailer in a place outside Steamboat Springs—laughingly called a park, though the scrub grass never grew more than three or four inches, and the wind whistling at night through the cracks in the sheet metal would sometimes keep her up at night, trembling in her small bed. Living there meant getting up at six twenty-five a.m. Monday through Friday to catch the bus, which meant walking down a dirt road for nearly a half mile. Saturdays and Sundays meant a whole ten or fifteen minutes more of sleep; there were always chores to do and sunlight was wasting, as her mom would tell her, coughing and wheezing after another three-pack-a-day habit burned through.

  So today, she gets up at 8:11 a.m. for no particular reason, dresses in sweatpants and sweatshirt, and goes out to the small yard behind the cottage to start splitting wood. It's a cool morning in late May, and though there's no reason to be cutting wood—the cottage has a nice little oil furnace and the nights aren't cold enough anymore to start a fire in the woodstove—she still loves the exercise. She buys the wood in eighteen-inch-long chunks, and loves the sound of the axe whistling into the wood, the solid chunk when it lands, and the satisfying crack when the wood splits open. The yard, with shrubbery on two sides, is hidden from prying neighbors, and at the rear is a small stream called the Wonalancet. She breathes hard as she splits wood, and when she's done she goes back in and eats breakfast and showers up. As she dresses, she wonders if this will be the day when the whispers start up again.

  She has told this story over and over again, to police detectives and attorneys general, and a judge or two, plus a number of newspaper reporters. Once an older woman researching a book—never written, Patti was sure, for she had never seen it listed on one of those bookselling Web sites—came to Colorado to talk to Patti about Ted Bundy and his crimes. She was a journalist and had brought with her a large notebook and even larger cassette recorder, which she delicately balanced on a coffee table that Patti had bought at a yard sale for ten dollars. Grace was her name. Sympathetic, yet she had been a slick and easy one. She starting off asking Patti about her background and her history, and Patti had enjoyed the attention, for Grace had been different, that's for sure. Quiet and nodding at all the right places. Patti told her about growing up in Steamboat Springs, an only child of a single mom, dad dead and unknown, living in that damn trailer that creaked and groaned when the winds came down out of the Rocky Mountains.

  She had been young and poor and had hung around the resort, working odd jobs as a lift attendant and waitress and feeling an aching hunger when all the rich and successful people came through the resort, like phantoms, but giggling and living and treating her as if she didn't exist, except when it came to taking drink orders or cleaning out a hotel room or helping some forty-ish New York woman who wore a ski outfit that cost more than Patti's clothing budget for the year onto a ski lift.

  Then Ted sailed in. He had been charming, and she had fallen under his spell. After only a week of knowing him, she moved in with him.

  He was a graduate student, studying law. At night, in their tiny apartment, he would mesmerize Patti with his tales and dreams of being a successful lawyer, then a state representative, and then maybe a congressman ... who knows? With Ted, anything was possible. He wasn't like the rich phonies who came in and out in seven-
or fourteen-day chunks of time; he had a hunger too. A hunger to succeed, to do great things, to be rich and be somebody.

  And Grace, breathing softly, asked Patti gingerly, “And you didn't suspect?"

  No, of course not, she had replied. Who would? And this was back in the 1970's, before the Internet, before the cable news channels, before the media-driven obsession with serial killers. There had been some stories about women being reported missing around the ski area, but Come on! she protested. This was an innocent time, a time when you were still coasting from the fired-up sixties, when all things seemed possible. Except that the bright and handsome and charming Ted who shared your bed most nights, the Ted who had all these wonderful dreams that he shared with you, this was the same Ted who drove out with his white VW Beetle at night, with handcuffs and wooden club, to stalk and attack young, longhaired women, fracture their skulls, cuff them to his car, and drive off someplace to rape and strangle them.

  And then, tired and exhausted, Ted would come home and crawl into bed, laughing and alive, kissing you and kissing you, and you would think all things were possible, indeed, save for the possibility that your man, your Ted, was the one responsible for those chilling lists of disappeared women.

  That's what it had been like, she told Grace, who breathed and nodded in all the right places, as the interview sort of dribbled off as evening progressed. Then Grace got up to leave, and at the door, Grace had gently touched her cheek and said, “You poor, poor, girl,” and kissed her full on the lips.

  Now she's at the hair shop, Kut & Kurl, in a small strip mall just outside of a town that boasts a pretty downtown and a prep school that is famous around the world for its age and its teaching. Not that Patti has anything against the prep school, but she's sure that the faculty and students there go someplace further up the food chain than Kut & Kurl for their hair needs. And nothing against the ladies who run this place, but good God, let's try for some originality at least, right? How many Kut & Kurls are there in the country? Dozens? Hundreds? She had even worked at a Kut & Kurl near Venice Beach, California, and that had been a blessing for two years—working in such a magical place, with the wide beaches and sunsets and the winters that weren't even winters. A special time, until that awful day, when she had to pack up and move East.

  This particular Kut & Kurl is busy this morning, with the old ladies lumbering in, dropped off by sons or daughters or grandchildren. Most of the poor dears didn't have enough hair left to fuss over, but they came to the salon as regular as church. It was a chance to gossip and talk and get out of the house and the painless drone of the televisions. Patti is envious of their steady lives.

  The morning goes by fairly fast, with three regular appointments and one walk-in, all male, and she talks just a bit as she works, not overwhelming the men, whom she knows mostly wanted to get a good haircut and then get the hell out. They didn't tip as well as the women, but then again, they didn't need nor demand much, so she is able to churn more of them through than women.

  After the walk-in leaves, she goes out for a break as well, just to get out of the salon and the chatter and the soft rock station playing in the background and the smells of the hairspray and chemicals. She sits on a concrete planter, stretches out her legs, and lets the May sun warm her face. As much as possible, she wonders if this was what it meant to be at peace with oneself.

  Peace.

  Such a wonderful concept.

  She looks across the parking lot to the street, and beyond the street, to a small pond rimmed with park benches where she likes to spend her lunch break in warmer weather. She wonders if this will be one of those days, if the sun gets high enough and those clouds don't move in and—

  A car comes into the parking lot. A dented light blue Ford Escort.

  A young woman steps out, hesitant at first. She is in her mid twenties, it looks like, with long, dark brown hair down her back. She has on pressed jeans and a short leather jacket. A camera is slung over her shoulder. She holds a notebook in her hand.

  Something heavy starts to press against Patti's chest.

  The woman comes over, a shy smile on her face.

  The weight gets heavier.

  Patti wants to stand up and run, but she can't.

  God help her, it's time again.

  And her feelings for Ted were mixed, right after he got arrested, as she remembered telling a police detective working on the case.

  At first, of course, she believed in his innocence, had to believe in his innocence. The detective had nodded politely and had taken notes in his cluttered office, and she had gone on saying, you don't understand, and when he just grunted a reply, she had kept quiet. For it was hard to say that she had to believe in Ted's innocence in order to believe in herself. For how could it have been otherwise? How could a woman be so dumb and dopey to live with a man who was accused of being one of the worst serial killers in the United States? Who had supposedly started his dark arts back in Washington State?

  So she had kept the faith.

  Even when the newspapers started reporting stories about what Ted did in Seattle.

  Even when the newspapers started reporting stories about what Ted was suspected to have done in Colorado and Utah.

  And even when she appeared at a court hearing, crowded up front along with the other spectators, she wanted to let Ted know that she was there, that she supported him, and that she wanted to talk to him. But it never happened. Not once. His lawyer refused to let her see him, and even after he had interviewed her, over and over again—trying to set up alibis for Ted, she was no dummy—she never got a chance again to talk to Ted face to face.

  Only once did she ever catch his eye.

  At one of the court hearings, when it was clear that the evidence against Ted was mounting, Ted looked back from his conference table with his lawyer, to look at the crowd of spectators look upon him, and she caught his eye. Patti and Ted. Looking at each other. His look was ... it was cold. Unyielding. Emotionless. And then he looked away.

  She had stumbled out of the courtroom and puked in the hallway outside, knowing that for a fair number of women, that expression on that man's face had been the last thing they had ever seen.

  So in New Hampshire, the young lady is now upon her. She looks over at the hair salon and then at Patti, and she says, “Excuse me?"

  "Yes?” Patti is amazed at how hard it is to hear her own voice.

  "This ... this is where Patti Barnes works, am I right?"

  What to do, what to do, what to do. Deny all you want, she thinks, and this young girl—yes, Patti knows it's not PC but she can't help herself, she is just a girl—will keep on sniffing around and around. By now she knows reporters, knows how they work. Knows how tireless and ruthless they can be when they feel like they're being snowed. Better to end it now, she feels.

  "Yes,” she says. “And I'm Patti Barnes."

  A quick, nervous nod. “My name is Beth Hanley. I'm a reporter for the Sentinel. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions."

  She tries a smile, knows it's not much of a smile. “Questions? About what?"

  The reporter looks down to her open notebook, like she's embarrassed to look Patti in the face. “I'd like to do a story about you."

  "Me? Why?"

  The face is still down. “I ... I understand that years ago, you used to date Ted Bundy. The serial killer. Is that true?"

  The heavy sensation in her chest increases.

  "Yes,” Patti finally says. “Yes, it's true."

  Reporters.

  When they were finished interviewing detectives, police officers, district attorneys, the judge, neighbors, and everybody else, they fell upon her, like a horde of locusts descending upon a solitary cornstalk. They followed her from her apartment to the police station, from her apartment to the courthouse, from her apartment to anywhere else.

  At the very first, because it felt like the polite thing to do, she did talk to the reporters, but they were insatiable. Over and ov
er again, the very same questions:

  What was Ted like?

  Did you ever suspect he was a killer?

  Were you ever afraid?

  And most of the reporters were men, tall men, short men, bearded and clean-shaven men. Some dressed in suits, others in jeans and dress shirts with neckties. All with their little notebooks or cameras, or tape recorders and microphones, all pushing and prodding and trying to drag out one little bit of information that no one else had gotten yet. It was as if they were incessant suitors, demanding to know if any previous suitor had gotten to “first base,” and couldn't she go just a little bit further this time, please, please, Miss Barnes. We'll never tell anyone; your secret will be safe with us.

  There were always the unasked questions from the men, as well, questions she knew that they wanted to know:

  How was Ted in bed?

  Why did you think he hooked up with you?

  And...

  Honey, no offense, but why didn't he rape and murder you as well?

  Well?

  Well?

  So just before Ted was going to trial, it had proven to be too much, so she had fled home to Mom, back to the same trailer in the same park, the same wind whipping down from the mountains. Mom had put on thirty pounds since she had last seen her, had picked up another pack of Marlboro Lights in her daily habit, and after Patti settled back in, Mom came right out and said it: there was a lawyer friend of hers, a nice fellow who had helped probate Dad's will and who had come to her with a powerful suggestion: there was money to be made, good money, if she just came out and told the real story behind the story. Now was the time, when the interest was there, and—

  Patti had changed the subject. She looked at her mother, saying, Mom, please. I just want to get away from it for a while. All right? Away from everything. Here. I just want to be home. I just want to be your girl for a few nights. I have some money saved up. I can pay some room and board.

  Crying then, she had said, Mom, please take care of me for a while. All right?

 

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