Lethal Fetish

by Jeffrey Alan Lockwood

  “Which place is your venue?”

  “It’s the one farthest from the street. There’s a painting of an Orange Crush can on the door.”

  “Crush, eh? Cute. So I just go in and find a seat?”

  “No, there’ll be somebody at the door. I’ve paid your membership fee and dues for the month—”

  “What did that cost you?”

  “Plenty, but it’s worth every penny to have your help.”

  “So, do I flash a membership card?”

  “No, just give the password. Tonight it’s ‘grape.’ We rotate among the flavors.”

  “Clever. No reason why brutalizing animals has to be humorless.”

  “Nobody was into hard crush until Eunectes took over. People step on insects all the time without being judged or labeled,” he said.

  “Relax pal. We’re in this together, possibly to keep a kid from being killed. I grant you it’s a long way from mashing crickets to crushing people.”

  “I was grilled by Redbug, so I had to give him some information about you. I figured it would be best to keep things close to the truth.” Luis’s leg had stopped shaking and he appeared to focus on our plan. Maybe there was hope after all. “I told him you were an exterminator who I met at the shop and you get off on watching insects being crushed, but you’re open to anything. I also said you were the quiet sort. So you don’t need to say much, which should keep you from blowing your cover.”

  “Good thinking for a guy who looked ready to melt down a minute ago.”

  He gave a cockeyed grin. “I do okay when I’m in the moment. It’s thinking about what’s coming that gets me nervous. Speaking of which, you should prepare for the possibility of a test. They’ve started doing this recently to make sure that we’re not being infiltrated by Grant Roberts’s morality goons.”

  “Meaning I’m supposed to know some inside secret about crushing?”

  “Nothing so easy. You might be challenged to prove you’re legit by assisting the crush mistress on stage.”

  “On stage? What the hell, is this a theater?”

  “We’ll be in a room at the end of a hallway. When you go in, there will be floor lamps so you can find a chair or a place on a couch. Then, the room is darkened and a spotlight shines on a low stage. If asked, you’ll need to go up there and do what the crush mistress tells you. She’ll whisper commands to you, while she talks dirty to the animal, like it was a man.”

  As I contemplated this bizarre scenario, there was an electronic beep indicating the arrival of a customer. Luis told me to slip out the back door “just in case,” and he headed to the front to provide advice on latex, leather, and lace.

  ~||~

  Nob Hill and the Castro might as well be on different planets. And in keeping with this cosmic separation, Dr. Chen’s office had absolutely nothing in common with the Pleasure Palace—other than a shared interest in abnormal psychology. The receptionist was curt and suspicious, probably because: I wasn’t a patient, she didn’t like my having deceived her earlier, and she was protective of her employer. All good reasons.

  I read a Time cover story about video games which furthered my belief that the end of western civilization was on the horizon, just in case the perverts didn’t manage a takeover. I was, however, impressed that the magazine was less than a month old—a remarkable accomplishment for a doctor’s office. When I was told that Dr. Chen would see me, I headed into an elegant, minimalist office exuding calm confidence.

  “Nice digs,” I said. Dr. Chen rose from her chair behind an uncluttered, glass-topped desk to shake my hand. I settled into a surprisingly comfortable, sleek chair. She was wearing a floral print dress that didn’t quite reach her knees and I admired a pair of taut calves beneath the see-through desk.

  “My office reflects the principles of feng shui, a thirty-five-hundred-year-old discipline. The selection and arrangement of objects facilitates the flow of ‘chee’ or what might be called energy.”

  “I could use some of this vibe in my shop. I don’t suppose that steel filing cabinets and Army surplus desks are part of the formula, eh?”

  She smiled patiently and said, “Chinese scholars recognized earth, fire, water, wood—and metal. So perhaps your furnishings are not beyond redemption.” A little fountain burbled beneath a window with half-opened lacquered shades. “But you’re not here for interior design guidance. You said that your investigation indicated the possibility of an imminent murder. That’s a very serious matter and perhaps you should be speaking to the police rather than a psychologist.”

  “The case involves one of the deviancies we discussed at lunch.”

  “If so, you may be in over your head, assuming your information is reliable.”

  “That’s why I wanted to talk with you.”

  “Go ahead.” She leaned back and crossed her legs. Nice thighs, as well.

  “I have good reason to believe that there’s a group of men who meet in secret to watch women step on various creatures. My source doesn’t look like a pervert, and he sounds on the up and up.”

  “So, he doesn’t wear a raincoat and offer candy to school children? Riley, perfectly normal-looking people engage in what society deems to be abnormal behaviors. The crush fetish is unusual, but it’s not dangerous.”

  “Unless you’re a cricket or a kitten—or maybe a kid,” I said. She cocked her head and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desktop.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Let me back up to get a handle on whether what I’m about to tell you is believable. Just what is this fetish? Why do men get turned on watching animals being crushed?”

  She sighed deeply and ran her fingers through her lustrous black hair. The woman reflected the calm confidence of her surroundings. She leaned back and went into professorial mode.

  “Our best theory is that the men, and it’s always men as far as we know, desire domination. When they are watching a performance, they imagine that they’re the ones being crushed—and the woman adds to the fantasy by talking as if it is a man under her foot.”

  “And that gets them off?”

  “For them, being powerless to the point of death is erotic. The proximity of sex and death in the human psyche is profound. Perhaps you’re familiar with la petite mort—the little death?”

  “No.” But I was learning that my sexual education had been sadly neglected. The football coach at St. Teresa’s had warned us about the clap and pregnancy, not little deaths.

  “It refers to the likening of orgasm to death or to the post-orgasmic state of unconsciousness that some people experience.”

  I decided my bedroom technique needed work. Or maybe not. “Okay, so the guys want to be totally dominated and substitute animals for themselves. Is it like a drug? Do they need more and more to get aroused?

  “More?”

  “More realistic performances. You know, first a few grapes, then a handful of crickets, next a couple of mice, and then?” She fell silent, seeing where this was heading.

  “Perhaps. From what we know, the vast majority of fetishists are satisfied with soft crush—the use of invertebrates. From there, a small proportion go on to hard crush, using higher animals. But this practice is kept far underground, so researchers know little beyond anecdotal accounts.”

  “Do the two groups mix?”

  “Generally speaking, the soft crush community is critical of hard crush practitioners.”

  “Why? Seems odd for cricket crunchers to be judgmental of mouse mashers.” She didn’t appreciate my analysis and gave me the Sister Mary Leon look that I used to get when being a smartass in junior high. “Isn’t soft crush a gateway to the hard stuff?” I asked, trying to regain professional decorum.

  “As I said, not usually. I know this is hard for you to understand, and even professionals such as myself struggle with the notion of abnormality. But think of it this way, as a soft crush fetishist who visited my graduate seminar explained. Killing insects for sexual gratifica
tion is a choice, a way of finding pleasure at the cost of a living creature. But, he asked, what about those who choose to eat beef or pork? Sentient animals are raised in factory farms and brutally killed so that meat eaters can derive sensual fulfillment. Nobody needs to see worms crushed or to consume cattle flesh. We do it because it’s enjoyable. But who has the moral high ground—the fetishist or the carnivore?”

  I thought about my juicy Whiz burger from last night, but there was no way I could see how my meal was the same as asking Nina to skip sex and crush a roach. Not wanting a philosophical argument, I returned to the topic we’d been avoiding.

  “Here’s what I meant when I talked about kittens and kids. Is it possible that for someone on the hard crush track, the ultimate high would be to watch a woman smash a human being?” There was a long silence as Dr. Chen closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.

  “I’ve never imagined that the fetish could lead to murder,” she said. “But yes, it’s conceivable.” She stopped rubbing and leaned forward. “So what’s your next move?”

  “I’ll go to a crush performance tonight and try to determine if the whole story is just the anxious imaginings of a scared guy ... or whether there’s actually a plan to kill someone.”

  “Riley,” she said, fixing me with her deep, brown eyes, “what you’ve described is beyond anything I’ve studied—probably beyond anything in the literature. This is ...”

  “Evil?” I suggested.

  “If there is such a thing, then perhaps yes. Or madness, which also isn’t a term I would use professionally.”

  “Call it whatever you want. If it’s real, then I need to stop it.”

  “Not the police? You might be dealing with a very dangerous, psychopathic individual.”

  “I’m in touch with a detective, but I can’t share the details with him. I made a promise to my source. And besides, the cops are likely to blunder in and flush the suspect, who’ll scuttle like a rat into some other filthy alley where he’ll start over with a new batch of twisted followers. This is on me.” I stood up and Dr. Chen escorted me to the door. Before she opened it, she turned and took my hand.

  “Be careful. I know we haven’t hit it off, but I sense you’re a decent, even a good, man. Maybe violent, but caring ... a strange combination.” She gave my hand a gentle squeeze and said, “And that pair of qualities could be dangerous ... for you.”

  “My plan is to make it dangerous for the bad guy,” I said returning the squeeze. I released her hand and reached for the door knob and then turned back to her. “It’s true what George Orwell said. People sleep peacefully at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

  She laughed softly and said, “I suppose in a way, cops and exterminators are society’s sleeping pills.”

  I opened the office door and smiled at the good doctor to convey my gratitude and express my confidence. The former was genuine, the latter was not.

  CHAPTER 32

  The upper floors of the skyscrapers in the financial district were shrouded in clouds like a gauzy lampshade. The city lights reflected back onto the streets and bled into the South of Market district to provide an artificial, unending dusk. I parked around the corner from the warehouses, turned my collar against the cold and damp, and waited for Luis. After a few minutes, he came walking down the other side of the street, threw a glance in my direction and kept going. I fell back a half block and followed him.

  Luis turned down an alleyway, passed a couple of warehouses, and then stopped. He looked around, as if to assure he wasn’t being followed when, in fact, he wanted to be sure I hadn’t lost him. He pulled open a metal door with a crudely painted image of a soda can. This was the place.

  I waited a minute, then walked to the entrance and went inside. There was a guy standing in the dimly lit entryway. His chest and gut were so big he couldn’t quite cross his arms over his metal studded leather jacket. I gave the password. Nothing. So I handed him twenty bucks. He flicked his bowling ball head toward a hallway illuminated by a series of fluorescent fixtures with half the bulbs dark and the other half flickering like stroboscopes. At the end of the passage, a Grape Crush can was duct taped to a door.

  Inside, a few torchiere floor lamps cast their light upward into blackness. The walls were also black, making it difficult to get a sense of the size of the room, which was furnished with flea market rejects. My heart skipped a beat when I saw, on the far side of the room, Jason—the lanky redhead who’d been working in Dave Rider’s laboratory at the Cal Academy. Luis had told me about Redbug’s connections to “some insect laboratory” but I was too focused on the unfolding tale of perversion to make the connection.

  Jason being Redbug could go a long way to explain the missing funnel web spider and the mislabeled tarantula. I couldn’t be sure exactly how this piece fit into the twisted puzzle, but my first priority was to avoid being identified. Redbug’s knowing I’d been at the Cal Academy could’ve been problematical, but it seemed unlikely he’d recognize me in the dim light after our brief encounter in Dave’s laboratory. However, I wanted to have the upper hand with respect to identities.

  Luis was sitting in a rocking chair on the near side of the room, keeping to himself while some of the dozen or so men chatted in clusters reminiscent of an audience awaiting a concert or a play. I sidled over to Luis and plucked the knit cap from his head. He looked up at me with startled curiosity, and I raised a finger and shook my head to preempt any question. I pulled the cap over my ears and selected a floral print armchair next to him. My disguise wasn’t brilliant, but oftentimes even a small change in appearance is sufficient.

  Settling into the chair while trying not to think about who had been sitting there previously and what they’d been doing, I took in the ambiance: the grassy sweet smell of pot smoke and the background music of hard rock. The volume didn’t preclude conversation, although if it had that might’ve made it easier for me. Most of the lyrics were impossible to understand, although I did catch “let’s get it up” which struck me as apropos if lacking in subtlety. A few minutes later I picked out the lead singer—using the term loosely— screaming about evil walking and talking and sleeping and arousing you, as if anticipating the evening’s events. Amid the pounding jumble of electric guitars, I actually caught some of the lyrics admonishing fans to break the rules, and I started wondering if a contact high accounted for my newfound capability to understand rock musicians. My reverie was interrupted by a tall man dressed entirely in black, who managed to approach with such graceful movement that I failed to notice him. Or maybe what seemed like a catlike arrival was also attributable to the secondhand smoke.

  “Is our newest member an AC/DC fan?” he asked, directing his question into the space between Luis and myself. I assumed that the reference was to the rock band, not electrical systems, although I knew nothing of the former and fair amount about the latter.

  “Eunectes,” Luis said, rising from his rocker, “this is the guy Redbug approved.”

  I stood up and remembered Luis telling me the crush freaks didn’t use their real names. On the spot, I decided to use a shortened version of my middle name.

  “Vlad,” I said, extending my hand. Eunectes’s grip was strong and lingering, which matched his appearance. The man had the physique of a dancer, with elongated musculature and not an ounce of fat. I figured him for six-three, maybe six-four. His lush, black hair was perfectly trimmed, and a hint of stubble along his strong, unblemished jawline provided an aura of sophistication. Thick, arching eyebrows perched above intense, green eyes evoked a sense of cold calculation.

  “A perfect name, chosen, I assume, from the fifteenth century Romanian prince.” I must have looked perplexed because he continued graciously. “A darkly sensuous tale, as you surely know, although for Maso’s sake, will you allow me a brief explanation?” ‘Maso’ wasn’t the most original alias for an S&M fan, but Luis didn’t seem prone to linguistic creativity.

  “By all means,” I
said, feeling as if I was at a swanky cocktail party rather than awaiting a revolting, sexual performance.

  “You see, Vlad was orphaned, betrayed, and exiled, before he regained control of his former kingdom. To assure that his enemies would think twice before attempting to invade, he tortured and executed captives by impaling them along the road to his castle. As the story goes, when an advancing army encountered a forest of twenty thousand skewered and decaying corpses, they quite reasonably decided to return home. Vlad the Impaler was also called Vlad Dracula and became the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s classic horror story.”

  “He impaled his enemies on sharpened poles? Alive?” Luis asked.

  “Exactly. Just like mounting insects on pins, although I gather that most collectors kill their captives before impaling them. But penetration can be so erotic, however it occurs. Don’t you agree, Vlad?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, trying not to think of my collection as a Lilliputian forest of impaled six-legged corpses.

  Eunectes glanced at his watch. “I think it’s time to start,” he said and started to walk away but then turned back to Luis. “Vlad knows what we have planned for our ultimate event, right?” Luis nodded and Eunectes headed to the front of the room. On his signal, the floor lamps dimmed and a spotlight illuminated a wooden stage about a foot above the cement floor. Toward the back of the platform was a card table with several boxes. At center stage were sheets of blank newsprint. The music faded away and murmured conversations fell silent, as Eunectes glided into the circle of light.

  “Good evening, my friends,” he said with a smile and a sweep of his arms, ending with his hands clasped in front of his chest. “We have a new member joining us this evening, but we’ll see more of him in a bit.” I assumed that this was reference to the upcoming test of my legitimacy, as Luis had warned.

  Eunectes continued. “Before we begin the show, let me provide an update on our progress toward the triumphant culmination of our journey.” He made it sound like everyone was on board, a nice move when a leader senses his followers are uncertain.