Cinnamon Skin (19 page)

"That's really a fairly common form of incest, Travis, and-"

"That's just part of it. After the end of his freshman year, the boy came home from college and they picked up where they left off. The father came home unexpectedly one night, heard them, listened at the bedroom door, got his gun, and stepped in and killed her with one shot to the back of the head, near the nape of the neck. From the evidence at the scene, the woman was on top, her feet toward the doorway. The boy squirmed out from under her, and we do not know what happened next. There was evidence of a struggle. So either he father tried to kill the boy or tried to kill himself. They fought for the gun and the father was shot. He died soon after they found him. A neighbor heard the two shots and saw the boy as he drove away in the father's car. The car was found weeks later at the bottom of a canyon, with nobody in it or near it."

She dropped her soup spoon into her shallow bowl and stared at me. "Good grief! What was the boy's relationship to his father?"

"The boy loved and respected his old man."

"Worser and worser. What kind of boy was he?"

"Standard issue. Athletic. Not a great student. Interested in theater, I guess. He was in the drama club. Reasonably good-looking. Big shoulders and hands."

"Are you quite sure he's alive?"

"It is a reasonable certainty."

"Is the sister alive?"

"Yes. He sends cash to her, secretly. He has a way of keeping track of where she is. He's sent her the better part of a hundred thousand dollars over the last fifteen years or so."

"Does she condone his behavior?"

"She says it was all the fault of the second wife."

"Is he still a fugitive?"

"Technically I guess. Nobody is really looking for him for that early shooting."

"But they are looking for him for something else?"

"I'd rather not say yet. What would it do to a person, that kind of history?"

"I don't think… I don't believe anyone would be strong enough to walk away from something like that undamaged. If he loved his father, then he hated the stepmother. The long history of betraying his father every time they had a chance, that isn't something he could get used to. It would just pile guilt upon guilt, higher and higher. He would have contempt for himself, for being unable to stop. He would feel weak and used and contemptible."

"How would it have ended if the old man hadn't caught them?"

"I don't know. I can guess. The stepmother was turned on by the danger of it, by the 'badness' of it. She was walking a very dangerous tightrope and knew it. One scenario would be for the boy to kill her, to strangle her or beat her to death. That would be an understandable way of seeking punishment for all his sinning. That would give themmeaning society-the excuse to jail him for life, put him away, out of touch with decent people. A less dramatic and probably more plausible reaction would be for the boy to just run away, leave it all behind. Killing himself would be one kind of running away. Killing himself and the woman must certainly have occurred to him as a way of expiating guilt and punishing both the guilty parties. Guilt is a powerful and frightening thing, Travis. He might just have disappeared into limbo. A wander ing migrant worker. A future bum on a park bench somewhere. But when it was all taken out of his hands in such a gaudy brutal way, before he could plan and make expiation, I… I just can't predict the effect. I do have the gut feeling that this might be a terribly dangerous personality, a man completely dead inside. I think he would probably be ritualistic. He… he would want to take revenge on his own sexuality as being the agent that caused the trouble."

"How would he do that?"

"Self-mutilation would be understandable. Or total denial and deprivation."

"How would he react toward women?"

"Oh, God. That would be a bucket of worms: I think he would want to punish them for their sexuality, for being the symbol of the temptress. What are you getting at?"

"Try this. Would this be possible? For him to hunt down women, one after the other, young attractive women, seduce them, enchant them into a very physical and erotic affair, actually seem to love them, sometimes even marry them, and then kill them?"

For a moment she frowned, and then her eyes widened. "It would be ritualistic. He would be punishing her for her sexuality, and he would be punishing himself by depriving himself of her passion. It's intricate, Trav, but I could buy it. Yes. And he would acquire a very special knack of making himself attractive to women, of always saying the right thing, doing the right thing. He would have to keep changing his identity, wouldn't he?"

"I know the name he started with and three more, and know of three dead women."

We were side by side on a banquette. She grabbed me so strongly just above my right knee I could feel her nails through the fabric of my trousers. "My God, tell me about him! Tell me all about him!"

It took a long time. She asked questions. We suddenly stirred ourselves, realizing the check had been on the table for a long time and the waiters were circling at a discreet distance, coughing, and the place was absolutely empty except for us. So, in apology, I overtipped, and she followed me in her car, back to the Busted Flush so we could keep the discussion going.

We sat in the lounge with cold beer in hand, and I said, "Maybe we won't ever find him, Meyer and I. But suppose we do. Suppose we find him and walk up to him. He is going to know us. How will he react?"

She took a long time thinking it over. She said, "You must realize that he has been wondering for years what he would do if that happened, if somebody was able to unmask him. Since you say he is likable and plausible, I think he will give you a totally fabricated account of what actually happened. He will make it sound real. He has depended on charm for a long time. I think you will have to pretend to believe him."

"Why?"

"He's a murderer, Travis. He has developed his capacity for violence. There will be no hesitation in him at all. Believing his story, you will have to maneuver him to a place and time where he can't hurt you and can't get away from you. Then and only then do you start casually dropping the names of the dead. Not accusatory. Affable. Almost laughing at him. Doris Eagle. Isobelle Garvey. He will not know how much you know, and suddenly you will seem to be all-knowing. You will become the God/Daddy here to punish him at last, and I think he will come completely, totally apart, with no hope of ever putting himself together again. I have broken people that way so that I could put them back together again in a better pattern, with their help. The more you look amused at their lies, the wilder the lies become. And quite suddenly they break."

"And if he just denies it? Maybe I didn't get it across to you. This is a very plausible, likable man. If he can hold himself together, no jury will convict."

"If he just denies it, you must edge very very carefully into the Coralita situation."

"Why delicately?"

"There is such a phenomenon as denial. By now he may well have convinced himself that it didn't happen. Confrontation would reinforce the denial. You would have to ask him about little things. What color were Coralita's eyes? Can you think of the unimaginable hell it must have been for that boy when his father was home? To sit at dinner with his father and Coralita. To try not to look at Coralita's breasts and her hips and her mouth for fear his father would guess what was going on between them. To lie in bed and hear his father in another bedroom, perhaps in the same bed where he had had sex with Coralita. It must have been an unimaginable misery for the boy, and then to have it end with the death of both of them…" She shook her head. "It would just be too uncomfortable for him to carry that around. It would be too vivid. And so the brain would wall it off. Be very careful with him if you find him. Don't give him any chance at all. People who are quite mad-a very unprofessional word-have enormous quickness and strength. We see a lot of it in mental hospitals. It will take four or five husky young attendants to overpower some frail little old man who has decided he does not want his medication."

After we had worn out the topic of Cody T. W Pittler, his life and times, she cocked her head and said, "You seem troubled about something else, too."

"I had no idea it showed."

"I'm a trained observer, and once upon a time I knew you pretty darn well."

"I remember. Well, I'm having a little trouble with my old lady, to put it in the chauvinistic pig manner."

"The nice little hotel executive?"

"How do you know about her?"

"Somebody once defined gossip quite properly as emotional speculation. And I am interested in you and your life."

"She is being promoted and sent to Hawaii. End of whatever it is we've been having."

"An arrangement?"

"Good enough word, I guess. There was no abused party in the deal. It seemed okay for both of us."

"Do you think it should be more important to her than moving ahead in her job?"

"I don't know exactly what to think. I just feel sort of depressed about it."

"Do you love her?"

"What can I say? I feel very good being with her. I like to look at her. I like to listen to her talk. We have a lot of dumb little private personal games we play. When I'm away from her I miss her."

"How does she feel about you?"

"Sort of the same. But she says it has never been enough. She says she has never been able to really let go completely with me because I keep a certain distance from her. Perhaps I do. If so, maybe it's a flaw in my character. She says we're a convenience to each other, a handy shack job without complications or obligations, and she says that it is not a very noble preoccupation for either of us. She says that at first she thought it was going to be everything, because each time we were together, we got further and further into each other, into knowing and understanding. But it went only so far and then stopped. I did not stop anything on purpose. The accusation makes me feel… sort of puzzled and inadequate."

"Does she really want the job?"

"As badly, she says, as she ever wanted anything in her life."

"Why don't you follow her out there?"

"I belong right here."

"With all anchors set, all lines made fast?"

"I guess so."

"Want to marry her?"

"I don't want to marry anybody."

She smiled, hitched closer, took my hand in both of hers. "Hey, can you remember back eleven years?"

"Of course."

"We had the same problem, my dear, in a different degree. I really wanted to fall in love with you. I thought it would be good for me. Turned out we could love each other in a physical sense, but we couldn't fall in love. We fell into like, not love. And that isn't ever quite enough. Bawdy as we got at times, we were still, in an unfortunate sense, brother and sister. So we knocked it off. Without rancor. And I confess to a little sense of relief when it ended. I could stop pretending to be in love. Got a feeling of relief about her? Are you tucking it away, as an unworthy emotion? Is that making you a little ashamed of yourself, and is that why you feel depressed?"

"Doctor, you are too damned smart."

"Just be awfully awfully glad you and she had a good run at it. That's all. And be glad for her if she's getting what she wants. And for heaven's sake, don't try to punish her as she leaves, like a little kid who's losing all his candy."

"Am I like that?"

"You poor dummy, everybody is like that!"

So we kissed and I walked the doctor to her car, held the door open, and gave her a proprietary pat on the behind.

When l closed the door, she ran the window down and leaned to look up at me. "I don't want to make you angry."

"Then don't."

"Please, Travis. Don't obstruct. What I want to say, which may make the whole situation easier for you to understand, is that maybe your hotel executive friend has more capacity for genuine maturity than you have."

"Thanks a lot."

"It need not be an insult, if you don't take it as one. You have been living your life on your own terms. You need make only those concessions which please you. There are always funny friends, parties, beach girls, and the occasional dragon to go after. I don't pretend to know any of the circumstances that shaped you. I would guess that at some time during your formative years there was an incident that gave you a distaste for most kinds of permanence. None of us decide arbitrarily to be what we are. We just are what we are, through environment, heredity, and the quality of our mind and our emotions. Are you ashamed of what you are?"

"No, but…"

"And that, dear heart, has to be everybody's answer: No, but… And I can finish your sentence. No, but I wish I were a better person."

"You too?"

She rested her hand on mine. "I've got your disease, Travis. That's why I chickened out on marriage. I didn't think I could handle the role. I know I couldn't. But I do get so awful damn lonely sometimes." Her hand tightened on mine.

"And they tell me it can get even lonelier."

"I know."

"So, Doctor Laura, after my bird has flown, maybe you could offer some physical comfort, and accept some."