The Ties That Bind

by Warren Adler

  "You'll do exactly as I say, won't you, Fiona?" he asked as he emptied the tote bag on the bed.

  A surge of excitement pulsed through her as she saw the items laying helter-skelter on the bed.

  "Without question," she told him, eagerly. "Anything you ask of me."

  "You'll be my absolute slave. Like I was last week."

  She nodded.

  Their eyes met. Then he barked out a name.

  "You filthy bitch."

  Had she been shocked, despite her expectations? She would never be certain.

  "You've been an extremely bad girl, Fiona. Haven't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Did I give you permission to talk?" he asked.

  She shook her head.

  "You talk only when I order you to. And when you do, you call me 'master.' Do you understand, bitch?"

  "Yes."

  "Yes, what?"

  "Yes, master."

  "Whatever I say, you will do. No matter what. Your will is mine. Slut."

  She nodded.

  "And you must never look me in the eye. Do you understand? Speak."

  "Yes, master."

  He ordered her to undress him, which she did without a word, not looking him in the eye. Then he ordered her to take off all her clothes and stand in the corner facing the wall.

  She felt her excitement surge. A spear of adrenaline moved through her, penetrating, giving her obscene, moist pleasure. She had loved it. She heard him moving around behind her, but she felt safe, trusting him. She was exhilarated by this trust. She felt unburdened, totally in his power.

  She could not remember how long she had stood there, except that she enjoyed being there, loved being there, loved obeying.

  "You've been a filthy whore, Fiona," his voice boomed. "A terrible disgrace. Haven't you?"

  She nodded.

  "And because of that I have to punish you. Come here."

  She turned. He was completely nude with a huge erection. She remembered that she could not take her eyes off of it. She wanted desperately to kiss it.

  He ordered her to lie on the bed on a high nest of pillows and he tied her wrists tightly, achoring her to the legs of the harvard frame. Then he did the same thing with the ankles.

  She was spread-eagled on the bed. She felt happy, she remembered. Happy!

  "This is just the beginning, Fiona. You've been a pig, a slut, a cunt."

  He printed words on her arms, then on the inside of her thighs. She could not tell what he was writing, except that the movement of the cold lipstick on her thighs caused her to climax. She shuddered with pleasure.

  "Did I tell you to do that?" Farley asked.

  She shook her head.

  "You don't deserve to have pleasure, bitch," he said. "Do you understand?"

  She nodded.

  He sat watching her for a long time, still naked, tumescent. He wrapped his hand around his penis and shook it.

  "You want this, don't you?"

  She nodded, then whispered, "Oh, yes."

  "What did I tell you about speaking?"

  She remembered how delicious she felt in the face of this implied threat.

  "You don't deserve this," he told her, standing up, coming closer to her. He bent down over her and whispered in her ear.

  "You are a filthy slut, aren't you? Well, aren't you? Speak."

  "Yes, master."

  There were other words he used to describe her and she nodded her consent. Then he took the riding crop and made her kiss it. Suddenly, he slid it across her breasts, then struck her with it. It stung and she cried out.

  "Did I tell you to cry out?"

  "It hurt."

  "It hurt, what?"

  "It hurt, master."

  "You really need to be taught, you cunt."

  Again he hit her sharply across the breasts. Again she cried out. He took the leather blindfold and put it around her eyes. Then he stuffed a gag in her mouth. Deprived of light and speech, she felt herself becoming disoriented, confused. It was not what she had expected.

  She felt him untie her ankles. Then he drew her legs over her head in a kind of somersault position and anchored the rope at the head end of the bed, where he had fastened her arms. Her legs hung in the air, her hips partially raised, her underside and genitalia exposed. It was impossible to be more physically vulnerable. Still, despite the discomfort, she begged herself to trust him. This was a test. Wasn't it?

  "You need this, you filthy whore."

  She felt the hollow whack of the paddle on her buttocks and across her vagina. Then another. It seemed to go on forever. At each blow he called her another filthy name. At first, her arousal accelerated and she expected it to increase. But the pain, contrary to her expectations, was actually starting to diminish any arousal. The game was losing its allure.

  But she could not tell him this. She could not speak and she struggled against the bonds. When the blows stopped, finally, she listened as he moved behind her. Then she heard a whirring sound. Some sort of electrical device. She heard his voice.

  "You've given me no choice, whore."

  The sound grew louder. The device was coming closer. When it touched her skin, she realized it was a vibrator.

  "If only you had obeyed me to the letter, Fiona," Farley said. She felt the vibrator press against her body, then waves of excruciating pain. He was pushing the device into her anus.

  All pleasure had vanished. The pain was ghastly. She felt herself choking as she squirmed helplessly against the bonds that held her. The gag prevented her from crying out, although she tossed her head from side to side in agony.

  "You deserve this, you whore," he shouted above the now grating sound of the vibrator.

  His words cascaded in her head. The pain permeated her, filled her, tortured her. She heard her own screams in her head, but no sound as she struggled. She wanted to disappear, lose herself. She seemed to have remembered wishing for death.

  Stop, her mind screamed, her head swinging wildly from side to side as he pressed the vibrator deeper into her body. He was oblivious to her struggles, her pain, her agony and her desperate but silent entreaties. He spoke, but she could not hear him above the sound of the vibrator as it shuddered inside her body, spreading its excruciating pain.

  She might have lost consciousness. She would never be certain. Nor could she ever be sure what had really gone on in her mind at the time, except that she knew she was experiencing the ultimate mortification. This was not trust. This was not love. This was fearsome, a shocking and painful abuse of her body. It crossed her mind that he was trying to kill her with agony.

  It had been a long time since she had dipped into that rusty vault of memory, but she was certain that her recall was accurate.

  "You were wonderful," she remembered him saying sometime later, his voice silky. Had she lost consciousness? Was it really his voice? Did he have no memory of the pain he had inflicted? Was this suffering supposed to prove something to him? She felt him releasing her bonds.

  "You've made me very happy," he said.

  Was he really saying that or had her hearing become impaired? He had brutalized her. Hurt her. Hadn't he seen that? He removed the gag. She recalled trying to talk, but, at first, she thought she had lost the power of speech. She felt paralyzed. Her body ached from the aggressive violence he had waged against it.

  She saw stains on the sheet. She was bleeding from her rectum. Lying beside her on the bed, she saw the instrument he had used, stained with her blood. She remembered pulling up the sheets to hide herself, more out of deep shame than modesty. He pulled the blanket up to her neck, as if he were tucking in a child, and put his lips to her forehead. His lips felt like ice. She cringed and pulled the blanket over her head.

  What she wanted was to hide under the covers for the next millennium. She was too humiliated and horror-struck to meet his gaze.

  "Rest, my darling," he said, patting the blanket. "You were wonderful." Wonderful? Was it possible? Was she dreaming?
<
br />   "I'll leave you to rest," he whispered. "I'll get back by taxi."

  She must have grunted some response, remembering that when she heard the door close behind him, she had staggered to it and fastened the chain lock. Then she had dropped to her knees and cried hysterically for what must have been hours. Love? No way. In her mind love was beautiful, full of care and trust and wonder. Not this.

  The room was dark when she had finally found the strength to rise. The pain was still excruciating. She managed to make it to the bathroom, flicking on the lights. She looked in the mirror, appalled by the sight of herself.

  He had covered her body with filthy words written in cherry lipstick. The word "pig" was written across her forehead and on one thigh the word "suck" and on the other "whore." He had also painted her nipples and had drawn an arrow beginning at the base of her neck and leading down to the edge of her pubic hair where he had written the word "trash."

  She stood observing herself with disgust. Her shame and mortification had not yet turned to anger. Had she really been a willing participant in this disgusting exhibition of sadism. What had possessed her to consent to such terrible physical abuse? Was there something flawed in her own psyche? As for him, she could not bear the idea that she had loved such a monster.

  The pain would not go away. She turned on the bath taps full blast, then crawled into the tub. The sting of the water made her cry out with pain. Eventually, as she soaked in the hot water, it diminished somewhat. She spent a long time in the tub, trying to assemble her thoughts, wondering if she should see a doctor or call the police.

  By sheer will power, she managed to dress and drive herself home, sustained, she later realized, by her anger and hatred for him.

  Feigning a flu, she spent the next few days in bed, suffering through the uncertainty and agony of self-treatment. She made her unsuspecting mother call Farley to tell him that she was ill. The next day she wrote him a terse letter of resignation. He made no attempt to respond in any way.

  * * *

  As soon as she was able, she left town on the pretext that she needed to attend summer school, a decision that surprised her parents but did not stir their curiosity. It took every bit of her inner resources to cope with the memory of the incident, especially at the beginning. Was she that naive, that malleable, that weak? Was Farley that sick that he had no insight into his own predilections?

  Even in the subsequent research she did into this type of practice, the dictum of the bondage-and-discipline subculture was that no physical harm should be inflicted. He had gone over the edge. Worse, he had enjoyed her pain.

  There was no way that she could face Farley Lipscomb ever again. What had been love, certainly infatuation and desire, had turned into raw hatred.

  But not only was this hatred generated against Farley but against herself for allowing herself to become a tool for his perverse acts. Only later, after years of self-therapy and reading numerous studies of this aberration, was she finally able to let go and forgive herself, although never in her heart could she ever forgive Farley.

  But the idea that, if the act had remained a pleasurable game, she might have accepted it was still troublesome. With Farley the game had turned nasty, beyond the pale. Nor did knowing that totally mitigate the shame, the awfulness of it.

  For a long time after that incident her desire for sex had simply disappeared. She dated no one during the remainder of her time in college. Only gradually did the trauma dissipate although psychic scars remained. Eventually she reached a point where the memory itself became a kind of fictional imagining far removed from what had become the reality of her life.

  In time she had stopped thinking about it, perhaps even denied that it ever happened. It was never again part of her menu of fantasies. It was as if her psychic immune system had kicked in and flushed out all visible symptoms of the aberration. Nonetheless, she knew that it had had a profound effect on her life. Giving up her free will, the power over her mind and body, became her most frightening nightmare. Any hint of such an event occuring provoked a strong negative reaction. Perhaps this was why she was never able to sustain a long-term relationship with a man.

  In learning about herself, Fiona recognized her own powerful sexuality. She did not need to have the envelope pushed that far to find pleasure and she invariably rejected those who did. Indeed, she had developed a sixth sense to screen any potential lovers. The slightest revelation of a similar tendency was enough to abort a relationship without guilt or explanation.

  Ten years after the episode, she had actually been in the company of Farley Lipscomb and his wife at a dinner party given by one of Washington's most active hostesses. She had greeted both him and his wife with politeness. Little was exchanged between them. She was suprisingly indifferent to his presence, as if he, too, had become a fictional character in someone else's play. Indeed, she savored the indifference as proof positive of her psychic wellness.

  As for him, he gave no hint that the incident even lingered in his memory. He smiled, acknowledged her with sentiment and nostalgia as would be appropriate to the daughter of an old friend. Not a gleam, not a single iota of subtle recognition of what they had shared that afternoon was apparent in any visible expression or body language on his part.

  As time went on, she hardly thought of him as being the same man who had abused her that day. Nor did his constant coverage in the media trigger any response that affected her in any emotional way.

  Until she saw the body of this woman in the Mayflower Hotel, she had no reason to let the events of that fateful day resurface in her mind.

  But the image of that poor unfortunate woman spread-eagled on the hotel bed, with similar block-lettered graffiti on her body, had brought back the memory with hurricane force.

  Her detective's mind could not reject the notion that this woman was victimized by a perpetrator with an MO that seriously matched that of her long-ago lover. The effect on her had been profound, setting off shock reactions that took all her inner resources to control.

  The details of that afternoon, she had always felt certain, were etched into her memory. But how accurate were they really? The pain, the horror of the experience, her embarrassment, the assault on her self-respect, the roller coaster ride of her emotions ... had all occurred. Had time rendered them anecdotal? Nevertheless, it felt like a memory match but she couldn't be certain.

  Unfortunately, she had no photographs to validate the similarities of the assault. The physical style of the lipstick graffiti, the words themselves, the knots used to harness the woman, the type of injuries, the way the woman was positioned, the specifics of her wounds were all disturbingly familiar. And the most puzzling question of all. What had caused her death? She would have to allow her mind to meander through the maze of memory before giving herself permission to validate the similarities.

  In her heart, she wanted, badly wanted, the perpetrator to be Farley Lipscomb. With the onrush of memory had come the desire for revenge. Professionally, she knew, this was a dangerous and highly unethical position to take.

  But she did allow herself to hope that it might be Farley Lipscomb and to secretly create a scenario in which his aberration had grown more uncontrollable and dangerous with the years. Perhaps, too, a search of data banks would reveal the occurrence of a regional patch of cases with the same MO. In good faith, she assured herself, she could not eliminate Farley Lipscomb as a prime suspect, at least in theory. Could she?

  And if he was the perpetrator? Even the possibility was a double-edged sword. First, she needed to find some physical connection, some compelling evidence that linked him with the crime. Only then could she dare reveal what had occurred to her so many years ago, a detail that might compromise the accusation, whatever the evidence. A personal motive was dangerous baggage for a detective to carry. If revealed it could be raw meat for a defense lawyer.

  Such a personal confession had negative career ramifications as well. It would mark her as someone who participated in w
hat the police culture would characterize as bizarre sexual practices. She could become the butt of the kind of ridicule that undermined respect and corroded working relationships.

  But there was still another wrinkle that filled her with dread. Suppose there was no hard evidence, no connective tissue? Suppose she felt it necessary to confront him directly. She dared not speculate on how such a confrontation would play.

  He was no longer Farley Lipscomb, lawyer, but Farley Lipscomb, associate justice of the Supreme Court.

  5

  "Jeez," the Eggplant exclaimed, looking over the pictures of Phyla Herbert's much abused body that were scattered over the surface of his desk. He shook his head and clucked his tongue in a genuine reaction of resignation and despair. "Sick bastard," he wheezed.

  "Very," Fiona said, exchanging glances with Prentiss, who nodded her head in agreement.

  They were sitting in the Eggplant's office, the dust-laden window behind his desk darkening. Beyond his closed door she could hear the ceaseless ringing of the telephones, blaring out their cacophony of death.

  Prentiss sat beside her in one of the chief's mismatched office chairs, her notebook on her lap. Throughout the day, she had been a whirlwind of activity, scribbling furiously in her notebook, her head cocked to one side, her shoulder bracing the phone against her ear.

  "Give him the rundown, Gail," Fiona said, turning to Prentiss.

  Gail's eyes met hers, somewhat surprised. She had, of course, expected Fiona, as the senior detective in charge of the scene, to make the first report to the chief. But Fiona felt drained. It had taken all her energy to cope with her recollections.

  Worse, she feared that she would not have the strength to keep her secret hidden, that some errant word or phrase would spark their suspicion that she was keeping something from them. Above all, she did not want them to know that she was pursuing a private agenda. She had made calls, worked the computer feverishly looking for similar cases in the area.

  She had met with some success in ferreting out some similarities but there was always just enough of a difference in modus operandi to reject the possibility of a match. She wondered if she secretly enjoyed these rejections, as if each elimination brought her closer to what she really wanted ... that the finger of suspicion be pointed directly at Farley Lipscomb.