Murder One

by William Bernhardt

  Without warning, Loving swung around and jabbed the sole of his shoe into Matthews’s backside. Matthews screamed, clutching his rear.

  “Consider that payback,” Loving said. He started moving away before any of the others felt honor bound to intervene.

  “That hurt like hell!” Matthews shouted, still holding himself. “What are you wearing?”

  Loving lifted his foot and turned his heel up so they could see. “Cleats, you sorry son of a bitch. Didn’t I tell you I was on my way to a baseball game?”

  19

  “LEARNING ANYTHING?”

  Ben felt delicate fingers light on his shoulders and give him a tender squeeze. “Christina, I’m glad you’re—”

  He turned. The woman standing behind him was not Christina, but his client, Keri Dalcanton.

  He immediately stiffened, embarrassed. “Sorry. Didn’t recognize your voice.” He closed the Catrona file, which he’d been pouring through since he returned to his office.

  He pushed away from the conference table. “I didn’t know you were here. Kind of late, isn’t it?”

  She gave a little shrug, which did interesting things to her close-fitting white T-shirt. “I don’t know. I guess I was feeling lonely and … well, worried. Thought I’d see how the case was going.” Her eyes were hooded and her voice strained. She struck Ben as being troubled, and unhappy, and … vulnerable.

  Ben reached out sympathetically. Like a typical lawyer, he sometimes got so wrapped up in the difficult and time-consuming business of preparing a case for trial that he forgot there was another person to whom the case was more important than it ever would be to him—the defendant. “This must be awfully rough for you.”

  She didn’t argue. “I—I just miss having someone to talk to.” Was it fear, Ben wondered, or uncertainty, or simply pervasive sadness—the strain of carrying an almost impossible burden for far too long. “You know I lost my job, and after all the publicity, none of the girls wanted to have anything to do with me. They were afraid the cops might go after them if they stood behind me, which was a real possibility. My parents are dead and Kirk has disappeared and I don’t know my neighbors and … and … it gets lonely sometimes.”

  “I can imagine. I remember when I first moved to Tulsa. Didn’t have a place to stay, didn’t know anyone. Couldn’t stand my job, not to mention most of my coworkers. I was pretty lonely. I only had one friend. Fortunately, it was Christina, and she came over about three times a day.”

  Keri smiled a little. “What’s with you two anyway?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Are you … close?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Intimate?”

  “Me? And Christina?” Ben pressed a hand against his chest. “Oh, no. Just friends. Very good friends. We’ve been through a lot together.”

  “Is there … someone else in your life?”

  “Sure. There’s my mother, and my sister, my staff, my tenants …”

  She laughed, then sat down in the chair beside him. “You know what I mean.”

  It felt to Ben as if the temperature in this small conference room was rising sharply. He decided to change the subject. “How did you end up in Tulsa?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear about me. It’s so boring.”

  “You’re wrong. I do. Please.”

  Keri cast her lovely blue eyes up toward the ceiling. “Well, you know I came from Stroud originally. You know where that is?”

  “Sure. I see the signs every time I cross the turnpike.”

  “Just a little flyspeck, compared to Tulsa anyway, but that was my hometown. My parents were killed in a car wreck while I was still in high school.”

  “That must’ve been horrible for you.”

  “It was. My daddy and I were close. I loved my mother, too, but—she was not like other mothers.”

  “How do you mean? “

  “She had a—a—mean streak, and for some reason, she always took it out on me. She liked to do cruel things to me. Even—nasty things. Ugly. Even when I was barely old enough to walk.”

  “Keri—I—”

  “It’s all right. It’s been a long time. Anyway, after they died, my brother Kirk and I got a job at the outlet mall. Probably half the town worked at the outlet mall.”

  “Till the tornado came.”

  “Right. I guess you’ve seen the pictures.”

  Ben had. They looked as if a giant hand had swept down from heaven and ripped the guts out of the entire mall. He had never seen such horrible damage from a natural phenomenon.

  “I guess we’re just lucky the tornado didn’t come during working hours. After that, there were no jobs anywhere in Stroud. I didn’t have anything to live on and neither did my brother. So we made our way to the ‘big city.’ Tulsa. Packed up everything I had in one suitcase and boarded a Greyhound. Except, as it turned out, there weren’t many jobs in Tulsa, either. Least none my daddy would’ve approved of.”

  “How did you end up in that, um, gentlemen’s club?”

  “Well, it seemed better than becoming a hooker, which is what happens to most of the sweet young things that come to Tulsa and can’t find work. I’d rather be bumping and grinding in a nice air-conditioned building than turning tricks on Eleventh Street.”

  “Good point.”

  “And to tell you the truth, I’ve always liked dancing, though I would’ve preferred to keep my shirt on. I love the music, the lights. It’s exciting.”

  I’ll bet it was, Ben thought. Especially when you were on the stage.

  “The guy who ran the joint was basically a sleaze, as you might expect, but at least he kept his hands off the girls. And he paid regular. I got a tiny place on the south side where Kirk and I could live. He’d fallen in with some church group, which was fine for him, but it didn’t bring any money home, so I was basically on my own.”

  “Till you met Joe McNaughton?”

  Her eyes turned downward. “Yeah.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “Oh, pretty much like that cop was saying in court. He came to the club one night with a bunch of his buddies.”

  “Must’ve been a rowdy bunch.”

  “Oh, me and the girls always liked cops. They do tend to hoot and holler, but they don’t get vulgar and they keep their hands to themselves and they tip well. Especially if you let ’em slip it under your G-string.” Her face suddenly colored. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Relax. I’m your friend.” Ben placed his hand reassuringly on the side of her face and felt the warm smooth flow of her silvery hair. “So you met Joe at the club? “

  “Outside, technically. After the show, after closing, he was waiting for me by the back door. I was almost out when I saw him in the alley.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I slammed the door shut and locked it, that’s what I did. Some of the other girls had had problems with stalkers, creeps who fall in love with them during the show and follow them around everywhere. I didn’t want to end up on a slab at the morgue.”

  “But you must’ve changed your mind later.”

  “Yeah, I did. Stupid me, huh?” She looked down, and Ben saw a glistening in the corner of her eyes. “He talked to me through the door, assured me he didn’t want to harm me. I opened the door a crack and he showed me his badge. Said he just wanted to get some coffee and talk. Said he’d meet me at the coffee shop if that would make me feel safer. Basically, he told me everything I needed to hear. Except for the minor detail that he was married.”

  “He left that out?”

  She nodded. “That was my big mistake, see. I thought he wanted a girlfriend, maybe even a wife. But what he really wanted was …” She turned away and didn’t finish her sentence.

  “So you met him at the coffee shop?”

  “Yeah. Denny’s, actually. Gross, I know, but nothing else was open.”

  “What did you talk about?”r />
  “Oh, he spun me some stories. Joe was a slick talker when he wanted to be. Knew how to charm a lady.” She almost smiled, but the impulse faded.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Oh, you can imagine. Said I had a lovely smile.”

  Yes …

  “Told me I had the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen.”

  Which, actually, you do …

  “Said I had a perfect figure. Perfect! Can you imagine?”

  Ben felt the inside of his mouth go dry. He’d had the same thought himself on many occasions.

  “And here I was, still just eighteen, listening to all this sweet talk, seeing how strong and handsome he was, knowing he had a good job, knowing the thing I needed more than anything in the world was just—just a friend, you know? Someone I could … be with. So I wouldn’t be alone all the time.”

  Ben felt an aching in his heart. All those lawyers, all those reporters, all those who had spilled so many words about this case—none of them had the slightest idea what this case was really about, or who Keri Dalcanton really was. She wasn’t a shady harlot or a manipulative hussy or any of that crap. She was a poor lonely girl forced out on her own who made the mistake of trusting someone who was not worthy of her trust.

  “How long before you started seeing him … regularly?”

  She lowered her head. “Not long. He didn’t make any bones about the fact that he wanted a—a—physical relationship. You know. And he wasn’t talking about holding hands, either.”

  Ben’s eye twitched.

  “He explained to me that he was a special man, and a special man had special … tastes.” She spoke the word as if it left an unpleasant residue in her mouth. “And slowly but surely, he started introducing me to his world of kinky sex. He liked it rough. Rough and weird. Raw. He wanted all the perverted stuff he couldn’t get from his wife, although I didn’t know about her at the time. Bondage. Whips and chains. Black leather.”

  She had to avert her eyes to continue talking. “And what did I know? I was just a little girl from Stroud. I didn’t know anything about that stuff. I kept wondering: Is this what everyone does behind closed doors? He’d set up little plays, you know, and we’d act them out. Like, we pretend we’ve never met each other before. Or we pretend we’re in some exotic locale. Didn’t really matter—they all ended up the same place. I’d be the master and he’d be the slave. He’d be on his knees in front of me, begging for mercy. And I wouldn’t give him any. We’d pretend that he’d been bad and had to be punished. That was the part I hated most. But he loved it. He needed it. It was the only thing that got him …” She closed her eyes. “You know.”

  Ben leaned closer. “Keri, you don’t have to tell me this …”

  “No, I want to. Really. I’ve kept so much locked up for so long, it feels good, in a strange way. To get it all out. To try to make someone understand. Those reporters and the D.A., they insinuated that I was the sex fiend, like I led him down the road to degradation. But it wasn’t me. I hated wearing those costumes and … doing those things.” Her head fell, and it seemed to Ben as if all the life had gone out of her. “But I loved Joe. I needed him.”

  “When did he finally tell you he was married?”

  “He never did.”

  “What? But he must’ve—”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t find out until his wife, Andrea, showed up at my door.”

  Ben looked aghast. “No.”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” A silver tear trickled down her cheek. “I had no idea it was coming. I was just watching television, doing my daily exercises. Believe me, when you have to take off your clothes in front of a crowd of guys every night, you have serious motivation to exercise. I went to the door and there she stood. Andrea. Full of fury and outrage, ready to tear me apart—and I didn’t even know who she was or what she was talking about. She came over wanting to fight me, started hitting me and hurling insults, and all I could do was stand there and cry. Just stood there like a little baby and cried. I felt so betrayed, and so … used. Used up. She really wanted to hurt me, but she soon saw there was nothing she could do to me that would hurt me any worse than what Joe had done. Nothing in the whole world.”

  “What did she say?”

  Keri brushed a tear from her eye. “Well, eliminating the profanity, what she basically wanted was for me to agree never to see her husband again. But I couldn’t do it. I mean—I hadn’t had enough time. Before that night, I’d been fantasizing that Joe would ask me to marry him. I’d only just found out he was married, and I still didn’t quite believe it. Or didn’t want to, anyway. I suppose I was in deep denial. Anyway, I wouldn’t give the woman what she wanted. So she slugged me a few more times and made some ugly threats. Finally my brother Kirk showed up and pulled her off me. She left after that, when he wouldn’t let her use me for a punching bag anymore.”

  She pressed her hand against her pink-blotched face. “I was a mess. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I didn’t have much of a life, but what life I’d had was totally turned upside down. I tried to call Joe, but he wouldn’t answer the phone. My brother was yelling at me, telling me what a tramp I was to be messing around with this married man. Kirk hadn’t been happy when he found out I was stripping, but when he learned about this new wrinkle, he just flipped. I had no place to go and no one to talk to. I was all alone, even worse than before, with not even my brother to help me.”

  “When did you see Joe again?”

  “I never did. Not unless you count the pictures in the paper the next day. And you can imagine how I felt then. After that, it didn’t matter if he was married or not. He was gone forever—gone from me, gone from Andrea. Gone from everyone.”

  “How did his badge and ID get under your bed?”

  She shrugged. “I assume he left them the last time he was over. The cops kept saying that wasn’t possible, but how else could it have happened? “

  A disturbing question, and one to which Ben didn’t know the answer. Yet. “And the bloodstained clothes?”

  “I can’t explain it. I mean, I can explain the leather suits—that was part of our regular routine. But the blood—I don’t know how that happened. And I don’t know how it got under the bed, either. I would never have put them there, blood-soaked or not.”

  She wiped away her tears, which fell on her blouse, dampening it. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I rattled on so long. You don’t need to hear my sob story. It’s my problem, not yours.”

  Ben reached out and took her hand. “You’re wrong. It is my problem. It’s our problem. And I—I care very much … about what happens to you.”

  Keri’s head lifted, and once again her tears began to flow. “You’re so kind. I could see that from the first moment I met you. I knew you were more than just a lawyer. That you wanted more than a paycheck. That you cared.”

  “I do,” he said quietly.

  “I need … someone. Someone who cares. I’ve been so alone. So scared.”

  “I’m here,” Ben said, and standing, he pulled her into his arms.

  “Oh, Ben. I’m so … I know I shouldn’t, but … but …” A moment later she pressed her lips against his. Ben responded in kind, kissing her with an urgency he had never felt before. He pulled her close to him, feeling the warm press of her bosom against his chest.

  This is wrong, a voice inside his head told him, but a thunderous throbbing throughout his body told him it couldn’t possibly be wrong when it felt so right. When she needed him so much, and he so desperately needed her.

  20

  BARRY DODDS TOOK IT slow and easy as he made his way home from Scene of the Crime. He was a short man, short and pudgy, to be honest about it. He hadn’t always been that way. Back when he’d had a street beat, just after he finished college, he’d been downright buff. But after four years of that he accepted a promotion and a desk job downtown. Better for his blood pressure, if not for his waistline.

  Dodds had a tend
ency to waddle when he walked, and never more so than when he’d had a bit too much to drink. And tonight he’d had much too much to drink. That seemed to be happening more and more of late, and the scary thing was, he had no idea why. He wasn’t under any more stress than usual, he wasn’t any busier than usual, and he hadn’t had any traumatic incidents in his life. None that he recalled anyway. But something seemed to be bothering him. Either that, or he was slowly but surely becoming an alcoholic.

  Ah, what the hell, he told himself. All this serious thinking was making his head hurt. Come to think of it, his head was throbbing, although he wasn’t sure that could be blamed entirely on thinking. There was another possible explanation, and it rhymed with thinking, but …

  He chuckled, then steered himself through Manion Park, the shortcut to the nice two-story he shared with his wife and three kids. A cool breeze caught him, easing his tension, and he felt himself relaxing, drifting into that lovely post-booze presleep quietude that could do a man a world of good …

  “One too many, Barry?”

  Dodds froze in his tracks. It was dark in this park. The lampposts shut off at nine o’clock.

  “Who is it? Who’s there?”

  “Who do you think? The bogeyman?”

  Dodds spun around in a circle, tripping over his own feet. “Where are you, damn it! I’m warning you—I’m a cop and I’ve got a gun!”

  “No, you don’t. Harry doesn’t let people bring guns into the bar, and you didn’t pick one up on the way out. I watched very carefully. So don’t feed me any more baloney, okay?”

  This time, he’d heard enough of the voice to get a fix. “Loving? Is that you?”

  Loving stepped out of the shadows. “It is. Nice park you got here, Barry. Wanna play on the teeter-totter?”

  Dodds wiped his brow. “You stupid fool. You had me scared to death.”

  “I don’t know why,” Loving replied. “I didn’t do anythin’ scary. Maybe you’ve got a guilty conscience.”