by Kahn, Denise
"You not move.” Conchita brought ice from the kitchen and wrapped it in a towel. Jean tried to sit up.
"No, no. Stay." Conchita gently pushed her back down and put the ice pack on Jean’s swollen face. She took the other towel and soaked it again with cold water and covered Jean with it. "You really bad hurt. You go hospital."
"No, no… just help me to the bathroom.”
Jean was trembling. She ran a cold bath.
Slowly and painfully Jean sat in the bathtub. She let the cold water numb the pain. She started to cry. Why had he done this? Why? It was their wedding night.
Simon Grady got drunk and went to the greyhound track and on a whim, placed a two hundred dollar bet on a twenty-to-one shot. Incredibly, that dog came in first and he netted a quick four thousand dollars. He took his earnings to the Bahamas to gamble some more at the casinos. The money saw him through a week of gambling and sleeping with as many women as he could afford. When the money ran out, he went back to his wife in Miami. This was the woman he owned.
Jean had not heard from him since he left that horrific night. She was still in pain, and now she demanded to know what was going on. “Why did you do that to me, you bastard? Why? Do you know how much you hurt me?”
"While I was out working trying to get some money, you’ve been fucking around, haven’t you, you bitch.”
“You’re crazy! “
He took out a joint from his pocket and lit it. Jean hated the sweet acrid smell of marijuana. It made her dizzy.
"Take a drag," he ordered.
"No, you know I don't like it."
"I said take a drag!" he yelled and forced the joint between her lips. She cried as she inhaled. Simon took another drag and again made her smoke the marijuana. When he was through with the joint, he ripped the buttons of her shirt off, exposing her bare breasts. He took one in each hand and squeezed the nipples between his fingers until she cried out in pain.
"From now on you're going to beg for it.”
“Get away from me!”
He held her down and with his free hand, pulled at his zipper. "Beg!" he yelled, pulling at his zipper.
"Simon, stop this! Please."
"Beg!"
"Stop it!"
"Is this what you do with your boyfriends?"
Not again, she thought, oh, please not again. Jean thought she was going to vomit.
She managed to push him away. "Simon, you're hurting me!” she shouted. “Stop it!" She ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife, the biggest one in the drawer.
Simon laughed.
"Stop!” She warned, the knife between them. “Don't come near me."
He lunged at her. The knife found his wrist but he pinned her down and the knife fell to the floor.
When Conchita heard the screams, she called the police right away. They arrived quickly and immediately handcuffed Simon, who was very calm. He told the police that Jean had started an argument, that she had thrown herself at him with a knife. He showed them the cut on his wrist. His wife could be difficult sometimes. Every month she got like this.
Jean could not defend herself. She was unconscious. The police held Simon in jail overnight but he was out the very next day on ROR, released on his own reconnaissance. Jean was put into custody as well, but not at the police station. She was taken to the hospital at the state penitentiary. When she opened her eyes, she had no idea where she was.
Jean blinked. "Where am I?"
The doctor put his hand on hers. "How are you feeling, Jean?"
"Where am I?"
"You're in the hospital in the state penitentiary."
Jean tried to sit up, but the pain in her side kept her down.
"As soon as you're feeling better you can go home,” the doctor said. “But there are some things I would like to discuss with you."
Jean was confused, terribly confused. Why was she here? How long had she been here? Where was Simon? Simon.
"Jean, you were brought here with a serious concussion. You’ve been in and out of consciousness for weeks. You must have hit your head or someone hit you on the head with something. You were also brought here with a broken nose and broken ribs."
She put her hands to her face.
"You're still beautiful,” the doctor said. “Your nose, too. Do you know you’re pregnant?”
She thought back to her wedding night. “He raped me,” she said quietly.
"The baby is fine. What you decide to do with it is your choice."
“Do with it,” she intoned.
"Jean, you have a blood problem. Your white blood cells are abnormal.”
She tried to get up. The doctor gently pushed her back down. “What blood problem?"
"I'm sorry. You have leukemia.”
"Leukemia?"
"Cancer of the blood."
Jean tried again to get up from the bed. “I’ve got to go.”
“You’ll be discharged tomorrow. You have to make some decisions.”
“What are you saying, that I’m going to die?”
"With the right treatment, usually three to five years…"
"Three to five years?"
"New treatments are always being discovered. There’s always hope.”
“My baby?”
"The sooner you start the treatments, the better, but there will be complications if you keep the baby."
"I'm keeping my baby.”
"Then you have to take your chances. The usual treatment is out of the question until the baby is born."
Jean went home knowing that she had made a terrible mistake. Simon Grady stayed away for more than three months. He spent that time playing the horses. He never slept with the same woman. His new cocaine habit, using it and selling it, got him in trouble. The racing federation suspended him from car racing. When he went home again to his wife, he was penniless.
Jean was sleeping when he arrived. He slammed the door. She woke with a start. "Where have you been?" she asked.
"Who gave you permission to talk to me like that?"
"Simon, I'm pregnant."
Something in Simon snapped. "Whose baby is it?"
"Simon, for God's sake, it's your baby.”
But Simon stopped hearing. When Jean again looked at him, he was holding a knife and a billy club.
When Jean opened her eyes, unfamiliar faces were looking at her.
“I’m a doctor,” one of the faces said.
I'm dreaming, she thought and sat up with a start.
“You’ve lost the baby.”
Jean started to cry.
"You were assaulted. Do you remember?”
Mercifully, she did not remember. But what she didn’t remember, and now discovered, was etched in her body in the ugly cuts around her breasts. Once a model's body, she thought. Once a mother’s body.
Jean divorced her husband without his even being aware of it. He was nowhere the courts could find to tell him and she did not try to find him. But Simon Grady came back eventually. This time he held the barrel of a gun to Jean’s head and pulled the trigger, but he was so high that he forgot to load it. He then passed out.
Jean left her home. She carried all she owned. In her purse she had a passport, which she had obtained the last time she determined to leave Simon. She also had her medication—pills that somehow were suppose to keep her alive, at least for a while.
She went to the airport. It seemed the most appropriate place to go. She had no other plans, only to get away. She had ten dollars in her purse. The thought of what lay ahead exhausted her.
Painted palm trees on a pink wall beckoned her into a café at the airport. She bought a vodka, straight up. If she could get through this drink, she thought, things would be clearer. Moments later, a young woman wearing an Australian bush hat sat down at her table. Simon Grady had followed his wife to the airport but lost sight of her in the crowds. He was sure he would see her again. He did not miss her.
♫
MIAMI, 1980
CHAPTER 18
>
Simon hardly thought about his wife, that is, until he saw Davina’s picture on the cover of a magazine. He stopped dead in his tracks. He quickly bought the revue from the newsstand and sat down on a bench. It was the middle of summer, and Miami was hot and humid. The temperature high in the nineties was suffocating, but Simon never noticed the perspiration running down the small of his back, or the wet clinging of his clothes on his body as he read the article on Davina.
...Davina Walters, after performing in the European capitals, will end her tour in Miami's Orange Bowl in September...
He read through the article a while longer and then to his horror saw a picture of Jean. She was standing next to Davina and two other men in some town called Pamplona, in Spain. One of the mother-fuckers had his arm around Jean. Simon ripped the picture out of the magazine. He was going to teach her a lesson. He needed a plan. He would contact the man they called B.A. It was said on the streets that he had whatever you needed. He was fried from ‘Nam, they said, but he was dependable. The bitch, he thought, wait 'till you get back. I'll fix both of you, you and your girlfriend, permanently, he said to himself tearing up the magazine violently.
Simon left his bench and started walking, his anger culminating as he devised his plan. He contacted the man they called B.A. who would be able to supply him with the materials he needed.
Simon Grady and the man they called B.A. agreed to meet in Coconut Grove at ten o’clock. It was easy to get lost in the crowds. B.A. said he would be wearing a pink macramé bracelet. Otherwise, he was a big black dude and you couldn’t miss him. Grady saw the face before he saw any bracelet. They walked along the marina. "Hey, man, how would you like to make some fucking money?" Grady asked.
"How legal is it?" The man they called B.A. asked.
"So, so," Simon snickered.
“Sounds good to me," he grinned, "what do you need?"
Simon told him. .
Simon left the war vet two thousand dollars as a down payment for the supplies. He would need another five thousand. He would have to pull off another job to get the rest. He was obsessed and Simon intended on having everything he needed. Nothing was going to go wrong, and he would get both Jean and Davina in one single coup. He paced the streets of Miami, wandering for hours thinking about his plan. Although he was tired and it was late he did not want to sleep. He was meticulously thinking out every detail, from the first step to the last. Nothing could fail, it would be perfect, like fireworks on the fourth of July. Yes, fireworks. That's how they would go—up, into the sky, victims of an explosion. He was going to blow the bitches to pieces. He smiled to himself at the thought. He was picturing them being torn apart, little pieces of them, like the cars on the track after an accident. It would be a celebration. His most precious moment, his revenge, his ultimate triumph.
He wanted revenge and he wanted it bad. No bitch was going to get the best of him, of that he would make sure. Not him, not Simon Grady
He remembered his last victim. She had been walking down Biscayne Boulevard just as he was now...
"Hey good lookin', want some fun?" She had asked.
Simon didn't answer. He walked past the hooker. He wasn't interested. All he wanted was his property, Jean.
"How 'bout a hot time Mister?" She asked again.
"It's already hot, can't you tell?" What an idiot he thought as he kept walking.
"How 'bout just a quick blow job? Only twenty bucks."
He stopped and looked at her. She was on the heavy side with bleach blond hair with black roots coming through as if someone had painted an uneven line on the middle of her scalp. Her black eyes smeared with heavy eye liner matched the ugliness of her hair. She wore a dirty T-shirt, an imitation leather mini-skirt and stiletto heels.
"What'll it be buster. Screw's fifty, blow's twenty."
Women, Simon thought. Nothing but sluts, whores, prostitutes. Just like his mother, just like Jean. He had to make them pay. This one too.
"Where?" He said flatly.
"Up the street. there's a hotel."
“He followed her through a dark garbage filled alley. It reeked of rot. The heat of the night, making the smell unbearable, sent a nauseating stench to Simon's nostrils. They entered a run-down hotel. The neon sign was only half lit, some of the bulbs having burned out months before, never having been replaced. They checked in and went to a back room. It was hot and musty. Simon hit the switch on the overhead fan. It slowly started to turn noisily not doing much for the asphyxiating heat of the small room. The hooker opened the window but there was no breeze. Cockroaches scurried everywhere. They had been rudely awakened by the intruders. After all they lived there. Another fucking hot night, she thought, but at least she would make some money.
"Get undressed," Simon ordered.
"Money first, Mister."
Simon was already furious. He always was whenever he thought of Jean. Take it easy, he thought, you're going to get your money back anyway. Play it cool.
"Here's a hundred, show me what you can do," he said handing it to her. She went to take it from his hand but Simon grabbed her by the neck instead and held her against the wall. With his other hand he pulled out a knife, the kind the fishermen in Miami used to cut bait with, sharp and flat with a blade curved into an almost half moon.
"Do what I say and you won't get hurt," Simon said, tightening his grip on her.
"Sure, anything you say."
He took his hand from her throat and grabbed her by the hair and pushed her down to her knees until her face was in front of his fly.
"Give me fucking head, bitch! And don't even think of doing anything or I'll cut your throat."
She did as she was told. The closer Simon came to climaxing the tighter he pulled on her hair. The hooker was completely terrified. She had a weirdo on her hands and there was nothing she could do about it. Would he leave her alone once he finished?
Simon came in her mouth. As he did he slit her throat. Sooo sweet, he thought, almost like a double climax. Nothing could top that. The girl fell to the ground like a heavy sack, her eyes still open, blood gushing from the opening in her neck. She hadn't even had the time or pleasure of a last scream. Simon stabbed her again and again and again. He had to. He had to teach her a lesson. His clothes were so blood stained they had changed color. They were now a deep dark red.
After leaving the Flamingo Hotel, Simon Grady made his way into a neighborhood of the city. It was still before dawn and the lights were out at the Thorntons. He knocked several times.
“Who is it?” a sleepy voice asked.
“Simon.”
The door opened slightly. The young woman behind the door saw who it was. Mr. Bad News, the man she hoped she would never see again. She knew that she should not let him inside. He was dangerous, but she owed him.
“Well, hello, Gina.”
She did not reply.
“I need some clothes and a place to crash for a couple of days. Any objections?”
“There’s the couch,” she said. “Johnny’s clothes are in the closet.”
“You got a beer?”
Gina Thornton went to the refrigerator and returned with a can of beer.
“I have to work in a few hours,” she said.
He took the beer from her.
“You’re welcome,” she said and went back to her room. But she could not sleep, not while Simon Grady was in her house.
♫
CHAPTER 19
It was pouring. It always came down hard in the summer. At the Flamingo Hotel Sergeant Ernesto Martinez repeated his questions to the woman at the reception desk. "Who did she come in with?"
The receptionist shrugged for the third time. She did not want to get involved. She had seen Simon and the prostitute last night and she would have recognized him immediately. He was not the average John. He was good looking, but there was something about his eyes that wasn’t right, something that silently but clearly announced itself: Peligro! Malo! Danger! And she did not need
any bad trouble. She had a sick mother and a younger sister to feed, and if she got in trouble, there would be no one to look after them. The three of them had come over from Cuba. They left the island with nothing except a few small personal articles and what they wore. The Cuban government had killed her father. Her mother never recovered from that.
They had struggled in Cuba and were still struggling, but at least in the United States, no one looked over their shoulders and harassed them. If she volunteered any information, she knew there would be trouble. She worked two jobs, one at the hotel at nights and another during the day at a hamburger joint. She made enough to put her sister through school and pay her mother’s medical bills. She could not afford to lose this job.
Martinez cursed quietly. "What is your name?" he asked her in Spanish.
“Isabel Gonzalez."
She was a pretty woman, but she looked so very tired. He knew she saw the mother-fucker who cut up the girl. "You saw him, didn't you, Isabel?" he asked gently.
She didn't answer. She did not dislike policemen, and this one seemed nice enough.
Ernesto Martinez was in his mid-thirties with dark hair and dark eyes, and a thick trim moustache. He was tall and strong. His parents had come to Florida from Cuba when Batista was overthrown. He grew up in Miami and was fluent in both English and Spanish, a definite asset in his profession in this city.
Martinez arrived on the scene in the early morning hours after a cleaning woman called in the murder when she went to make up the bed. The room was sealed off now. Police cars, an ambulance, a coroner's car and the homicide squad surrounded the area. The prostitute lay under a fluorescent orange police tarp.
"Isabel, por favor, this girl was stabbed fifteen times and her throat was cut. I know you saw them. Do you want this to happen again? It could happen to anybody. We have to catch this animal. Please help me."
"I'm sorry. No puedo, I can’t. I don't know anything."
But he was certain that she knew and he could not leave without getting her to talk. He went back to the room where a policeman was dusting for fingerprints.
