Black Leather

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  “One of the guys was skinned. Skinned alive.”

  That got a bit of a reaction; Joseph saw it in a muscular twitch.

  “If this woman did it, and if she hangs out here, it isn’t going to be long before she’s skinning brothers in San Francisco.” He couldn’t believe he’d used that word brother, but there it was. It had rolled easily from his tongue, and it worked.

  The bartender turned to look at him.

  “I’m no cop,” Joseph said, “but it won’t be long before real cops come in here.”

  “Miss Lillian,” the bartender said as he turned around, and Joseph looked down at the photograph. “I ain’t seen her in about a year, but when she came around, she was real good for business. I don’t know that she killed nobody, but she did like those sharp implements, that’s a fact.” For emphasis, he pulled the cigar from his mouth and gave Joseph the benefit of a big, mirthless smile. He stuck the stub back in. “Now you get your lily ass on out of here.”

  “Tell me who,” Joseph said, pushing it, pushing it, his heart pounding. He had to bite his tongue from wheedling and asking please.

  By the time he left, Joseph was feeling shaky, and perspiration stuck his dress shirt to his back. But he’d been in The Serpent’s Tooth, he’d been black, and he’d confirmed some of Cynthia’s story. Best of all, he had the name of somebody who had seen the sharp edge of Irene’s alter-ego.

  If he were smart, he’d turn that name over to the police and wash his hands of it. But he didn’t have any confidence in the police. They had a prime suspect, and Joseph was cynical enough to believe that once they had a good suspect they stopped looking around.

  No, Joseph would follow through, at least one more step. Cynthia was in trouble, and Joseph was still her husband. He’d do what he could. He could follow up on one name from one bartender and see what happened.

  ~~~

  Fifteen minutes later, Joseph looked down at the address written on the back of a cardboard coaster and matched the number with the number that had been written in what looked like shoe polish on the wooden door frame of the tenement. He looked around him and felt reluctant to leave his car. He didn’t want to be here, and he didn’t want to step foot inside that building.

  He heard neglected babies crying, children yelling, women shouting, music blaring. He looked up and down the streets and saw ugliness. Again, he whispered a prayer of thanks to his parents who did whatever was necessary to keep from having to bring him up in a place like this.

  Joseph stood in the center of the San Francisco’s slum home to Hispanics, mostly the illegals, the migrant workers and those on the skid. This was within blocks of his school, and when these people found their way to a community college, it was his they attended. But he never saw how they lived.

  He took a deep breath, stepped up the broken concrete stairs, pushed open the door and entered the dim building.

  It smelled like cat pee and fried onions.

  He started up the stairs, past a mess of rags in the corner of the landing, no doubt the origin of another prominent odor in the stairwell, no doubt some wino’s bed. The linoleum on the steps was cracked and it flapped as he stepped on it, and on some steps, the wood beneath was rotted completely through. Joseph held on to the banister, although he hated to touch it. It was shaky and wouldn’t help him at all if he fell.

  On the third floor, he walked carefully down the dingy, unlit corridor to apartment 3C. He knocked.

  A small Mexican woman opened the door and looked out.

  “I’m looking for Eduardo Rodrigues,” Joseph said.

  He heard a man inside say, “Who is it?”

  The woman opened the door wider and Joseph looked into a well-kept, tidy apartment. It reminded him of the way his parents lived. With frugal pride. A nice looking, well-groomed Hispanic man came out of the bedroom buttoning a fresh shirt. He smelled like aftershave and looked ready for work.

  Joseph held out his hand. “Eduardo?”

  Eduardo shook Joseph’s hand in a firm grip.

  “My name is Joseph Schneider. I’m a counseling administrator at North Beach Community College, doing some investigative work. Can we talk privately?”

  Eduardo looked at the woman, shrugged, stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him.

  “I’m working on a very sensitive case, and need to know that what we talk about here is confidential.”

  “I can keep a secret.” Eduardo finished buttoning the cuffs on his shirt.

  Joseph pulled the photograph from his pocket. He’d taken a photograph of Irene over to Harvey, the computer wizard that worked on the college computer system. Harvey and Joseph had become friends over the years, and he eventually helped Joseph buy and set up his system at home for his doctoral work. Harvey had digitized Irene’s photograph, altered the hair to the short, black style Cynthia said Irene had worn in the LA bar. Then he printed out a fresh photograph within fifteen minutes. Amazing. Irene looked completely different.

  This was the photograph the bartender recognized.

  He held the photograph up for Eduardo to see.

  Eduardo rolled his eyes. He nodded. “Told me her name was Miss Lillian. How did you know about me?”

  “Bartender at The Serpent’s Tooth.”

  Eduardo barked a small, uncomfortable laugh. “Yeah, a guy I used to work with. I went there a couple of times, but that’s not my scene. I don’t know why I went home with her that night. That was the last night I ever went there.”

  “Home? You went home with her? Where did you go?”

  “Some sleazy place down in the Mission District. Some place a lot like this—” He indicated the hallway with apparent disdain. “But she didn’t live there. During the night, her wig came off, you know what I mean? She was too, I don’t know, uptown to live in a place like that. Plus, it was kind of— I don’t know. It didn’t suit her. No way.” He crossed his arms over his chest and lifted his chin a touch. “She toyed with me.”

  “Why is it that you remember her so clearly?”

  Eduardo scoffed. “Seriously.”

  “Seriously.”

  Eduardo began unbuttoning his shirt, slowly, button by button, his eyes never leaving Joseph’s face. “I had a lot to drink that night.” He took the shirt off and stood confidently in a clean white undershirt. “At least I like to think I wasn’t in control. I’d hate to think I’d voluntarily let a woman... Anyway, I kind of remember telling her at one point that I thought I’d get a tattoo. ‘I can give you a tattoo,’ she said, and later, when I woke up, I had this.”

  He pulled up the sleeve on his undershirt, and a scar, about an inch wide, ran around his bicep.

  Joseph touched it and his blood ran cold. An inch-wide strip of skin had been removed from the man’s arm. It was an old scar, but still very white against the rest of Eduardo’s brown skin.

  “Never thought I needed a tattoo after that.”

  Joseph stood by quietly while Eduardo put his shirt back on. Then he held up the photograph again. “Look again,” he said. “Are you sure it’s this woman?”

  Eduardo didn’t even glance at the picture. He buttoned his shirt, his eyes on Joseph. “It’s her,” he said with certainty.

  Joseph put away the photograph while Eduardo tucked in his shirttail. He was impressed with Eduardo. He was clearly educated and a nice, decent guy. “You don’t mind me asking,” he said finally, “what are you doing in a place like this?”

  “I gamble,” Eduardo said. He gave Joseph a small, wry smile. “That’s how I got this scar.”

  ~~~

  Joseph was on a roll.

  He went back to his office, but he couldn’t concentrate. He couldn’t believe that Irene was capable of doing the things that Cynthia and those men said she was. After an hour of impatient agitation, he faked a dentist appointment and drove directly back to the bar.

  This time when he walked in, it was easier. Joseph was becoming familiar. That was not necessarily a good thing.


  There were a couple of dozen people sitting around drinking their after-work relaxers. A different bartender was on duty. This bartender was a little bit smitten with “Miss Lillian” himself, except that he’d heard how she left her mark, and he had no use for that.

  He gave Joseph three names. Three guys who had gone home with Miss Lillian and had the scars to prove it.

  Three more guys.

  Joseph was having a hard time concentrating on the task at hand. How could he be so close to Irene all these years and not even suspect this? As a counselor, he was trained to detect underlying personality currents, and yet he had completely missed this one. But he hadn’t been looking for it, either. And it was still possible there was some mistake, although the chances of that were growing ever slimmer.

  He picked up a cheap Polaroid and then found each of the three men whose names the bartender had given him, and they all had similar stories to tell.

  A black man who ran a corner grocery store had two parallel strips of skin removed from the calf of his leg. An East Indian guy had what looked like racing stripes down his back, one wide, one narrow, from his shoulder to his waist. Both men were clean, nice guys. The third was a fat, freckled mechanic in a motorcycle shop—the only one Joseph met who looked like he belonged in a place like The Serpent’s Tooth. The only blonde. He was covered with tattoos, and showed Joseph a wavy line that stretched across his back from shoulder to shoulder. “I hated it,” the guy said, shrugging back into his t-shirt. “I had to have my tats redone. She’s a bitch,” he said. “She ought to die.”

  What he saw was enough to give Joseph reasonable doubt about Cynthia’s guilt.

  It was also enough to intrigue Joseph beyond any reasonable boundaries of curiosity about Irene.

  Irene. Good Lord, Irene.

  ~~~

  Joseph sat down on a rickety wooden chair at a dirty, scarred counter and picked up the telephone in the maximum-security visitation room. The phone smelled like cigarette breath. Behind the thick, smeared glass partition, Cynthia sat twisting her hair with one hand, the other holding the black handset to her ear.

  “It’s kinky, it’s twisted, it’s probably prosecutable, Cynthia,” Joseph said, “but these men aren’t going to go up against someone like Irene. And it doesn’t add up to murder, either.”

  Cynthia looked wan in her orange prison jumpsuit. Her hair hung listlessly around her face. “Tell the police, Joseph. Please, for God’s sake, tell somebody.” Tears began to spill down her cheeks. “Please. I want to come home.”

  She looked pitiful. “There’s nothing to tell, Cynthia.”

  Her blue eyes looked up at him, and two tears tripped out of the bottom lids. “It’s what you said, Joseph. It’s exactly what happened to Warren. She just went too far. She got carried away. It’s what she does, Joseph. She skins guys, and now she’s finally gone and killed one of them.”

  Joseph just looked at her. He hated being in this visitation room, he hated seeing Cynthia look like she did, he hated the idea of his wife being involved in something this tawdry.

  He didn’t want to get himself involved more than he needed to. He didn’t know exactly how he felt because he couldn’t separate and identify his feelings. He only knew that he felt revulsion for this place and this situation, he felt an overwhelming intrigue for Irene and her proclivities, and he felt... what? for Cynthia. Precious little, he was disturbed to discover.

  “I just want to come home,” she whined.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Joseph said.

  ~~~

  Joseph ordered a cup of herbal tea and nervously adjusted his tie while he waited, feeling totally out of place in an incense-heavy, vegetarian, hippie coffee shop. The waitress, caught in a ‘60s time warp, wore layers of clothes made out of Indian-print bedspreads and had beads and colored threads woven in her hair.

  He told Cynthia he’d do what he could, and this was it. This was the whole of it. This was the absolute end of it. He’d make this one plea to the prosecution and be done with it. Let the legal system work the way it was supposed to.

  Soon Owen Crowell, looking nervous and paranoid, came through the door. Joseph recognized him from the television news. He waved.

  “I could be disbarred for this,” Owen said as he sat down across the table.

  “Nobody you know is going to come in here,” Joseph said.

  “Let’s hope.”

  Joseph pulled a stack of Polaroids from his inner jacket pocket and set them on the table in front of Owen. They were amateurish—Joseph was no photographer—but the relevance was obvious. They were all photographs of the scars that Miss Lillian inflicted on her lovers.

  “Jesus Christ,” Owen said. “Where did you get these?”

  They were interrupted by the waitress, who brought Joseph his tea and a squeeze bottle of honey. “I’ll have the same,” Owen said, keeping his head down and shielding the photographs from her.

  When she left, he whispered across the table to Joseph, “Who are these guys?”

  “My wife didn’t do those things, and she didn’t kill that guy in Los Angeles, either.”

  “Are all these guys black?” Owen was shuffling through them again.

  “Some. They’re all dark skinned. Mexican. East Indian. American Indian. Black. All except for one, but he doesn’t quite fit the picture. He was... I don’t know... an early experiment, perhaps.”

  Owen ran through them one more time, then squared up the stack and turned it face down on the table as the waitress brought his tea.

  “I’m not your wife’s defense attorney,” he said, and pushed the pictures across the table to Joseph. “I’m the District Attorney. I’m the prosecutor, for Christ’s sake.” He looked around nervously, remembering where he was. He lowered his voice. “Take these to your wife’s attorney.”

  Joseph made no move toward the photographs. He just sat quietly, looking at Owen. He was learning this game, and he liked the subtleties of it. Eventually, Owen met his gaze. AI can’t do that,” Joseph said. He pushed the pictures back toward Owen. “Irene Nottingham did those things.”

  Owen’s mouth fell open.

  “Irene?” He grabbed the stack of photographs and went through them again.

  Joseph was afraid he saw the same sexual intrigue on Owen’s face as he felt in his own gut.

  “You have names? Addresses? Dates?”

  “Cynthia said that Irene goes out after she wins a case,” Joseph said. He nodded at the photographs. “Approximate dates are on the back. I have the names, but I’m not going to give them to you.”

  “I need the names.”

  “I promised them anonymity.”

  “Okay, okay,” Owen said. He looked through the stack one more time, taking it slow, examining each one. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Anonymity,” he finally said. “Does that mean they won’t testify?”

  Joseph picked up the stack of photographs and put them back in his pocket. “I didn’t ask them that,” he said. “That’s your job.”

  “If I can find them again.”

  “You’ve got the whole police department to help you,” Joseph said.

  ~~~

  Joseph went home feeling as though Cynthia had manipulated him into doing something unethical.

  He drove home, took off his suit coat, loosened his tie, poured himself a stout scotch, then sat in his black leather recliner. The headache he had lied about at the office was standing by, just waiting for an opportunity to charge forth, but he wouldn’t let it. He had things to do. He had to deal with his thoughts, with his emotions, with his ethics. He had to come to terms with himself and what he had done.

  And what he’d like to do.

  He sipped the scotch, turned the intensity reading lamp on against the gloom of evening and pulled the photographs of Irene out of his shirt pocket. One with her short blonde hair, a snapshot he had taken of her during some family event. In it, she smiled modestly, a nice photograph. The other one, the computer-enhanced one, wa
s the same photograph, only with that black wig. The wig turned that modest smile into a seductive smirk.

  Joseph reclined the chair and looked at both pictures. He thought he ought to be thinking about Cynthia, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Irene.

  Irene and her “thing” about blades, as Cynthia put it. An art, wielding steel honed to such an edge that she could slice off a strip of a man’s skin.

  But never maliciously. Those men never pressed charges, never went looking for her, never went back to that bar to confront her, to hurt her, to make her pay. No revenge.

  No, Miss Lillian did it lovingly, intimately. The earlier ones were crude, inch-wide stripes, but the later ones had imagination, were far more creative.

  Jesus Christ, Joseph, he said to himself, you’re doing a mental retrospective of her art.

  He swallowed a hefty slug of scotch, then put aside the wholesome picture of Irene and concentrated on the photo of Miss Lillian.

  What she did was more than a little bit vampiric. Instead of nourishing her body with blood, she nourished some psychological need with flesh. There had been a recent resurgence in vampire literature and film, and Joseph, always a fan, had even done a paper on the phenomenon when he was in school. Vampirism was all about intimacy. About people desperate for intimacy in an impersonal world.

  What must she think while she’s doing it? Does she have sex with them before, or after, or does she slit their skin instead, foregoing the sex act completely?

  Joseph felt his lust growing in spite of himself. He snorted with disgust and polished off the scotch. He felt like a stupid teenager looking at a dirty picture.

  Except he hadn’t been looking at a dirty picture.

  He’d been looking at a picture of his sister-in-law.

  He closed his eyes and chased the lurking headache away.

  He relaxed in the opulence of the fine-grained black leather chair, feeling his body release the tensions of the day, but the photograph he held between his fingers felt like it was burning him.

  He opened his eyes and looked at her again. Miss Lillian. Irene. His wife’s sister.

  His soon-to-be-ex-wife’s sister.