Genesis of Evil (5 page)

“What are you up to?” she asked. Her brows were knitted together and her mouth was a straight line.

“Regarding what?” he replied, puzzled.

“This,” she said, taking an envelope from behind her and waving it in the air. He reached up, took it from her and read the letter inside. When he finished he raised his gaze to meet hers, not knowing what to expect. Virginia smiled. She stepped forward and slipped her arms around his neck.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the job?” she asked.

“I didn’t want to say anything until I had an answer. I didn’t really think I had a chance.”

“According to that, you’ve got a chance. They want to talk to you.”

They drove up the coast to Trinidad on Saturday. While Gerhart was in the city hall talking to the Mayor and various councilmen, Virginia drove around looking the town over. She wound up on Heron Key. Virginia climbed from the car and stood looking out over the Gulf of Mexico for a long time.

A week later Gerhart was offered the position of Chief of Police of Trinidad, Florida. With a glance sideways at his wife, he accepted the offer. He was baffled by Virginia’s positive attitude toward the move. He had conveniently forgotten to tell her, however, that, as the Chief of Police, he could assign himself street duty any time he pleased.

Virginia’s grandmother always said it was better to be a big frog in a small pond than a big frog in a big pond. In this instance, it was the wife of a big frog, but the results would be the same. Being married to the Chief of Police would permit her to mingle with the local VIPs as an equal. According to her mother, who had been right all along, this was her true position in society. Virginia was beside herself.

She went at it hammer and tongs. She joined the Trinidad Junior Women’s Club, the Hospital Auxiliary, Daughters of the Confederacy—she qualified, just barely, as the first Leland Ripley Chalfont had fought at Antetum—and founded the Association of Wives of Active Police Officers with herself as chairperson. She took a leading part in the cancer fundraiser, the county Democratic Party and Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. When Gerhart celebrated his fifth anniversary as Chief of Police, Virginia Chalfont Morgan Kable was named Trinidad’s Woman of the Year.

Gerhart could safely say that Virginia would never make Wife of the Year.

They had lived in Trinidad only six months when she moved into the spare bedroom. She claimed that the calls he sometimes received in the middle of the night kept her from her proper rest. It was as good an excuse as any. Truth be known, Virginia had never been the world’s best in bed anyway. Now, after a day of giving her all to the community, Virginia was too pooped to pop. Gerhart quit caring. He occupied himself with the job he loved and pushed thoughts of sex aside.

During the first few years of their marriage he had wondered why Virginia didn’t become pregnant. He wondered if she had a physical problem. But after finding the diaphragm in a drawer one evening he finally realized that she just didn’t want children. It was just as well. She didn’t have time to raise them, anyway. Besides, he was now forty-six years old. Children were out of the question.

Gerhart got on with running the Police Department, and Virginia did her best to run the rest of the community.

Chapter Six

August — 2002

Norbert Hicks had been the fool of his class. Short, overweight and loaded with zits, he endured every joke and prank invented by any high school kid anywhere in the free world. His clothes were never cool, his luck with girls was nonexistent and his unending efforts to fit in were met with disdain by his peers. His numerous attempts to engage in sports programs were rejected. The baseball coach said it best.

“Hicks!” he screamed after the hapless youth dropped an easy fly ball, stumbled over it and fell on his face. “You look like a bear cub fucking a football!”

In the summer of Hicks’ twelfth year his parents decided to send him to camp for two weeks in an effort to expose him to a different environment. As luck would have it the boy was housed with seven other lads who had all attended the camp at least once. Norbert Hicks was, as one of the seasoned veterans put it, fresh meat.

By the time the sun sank at the end of the third day, Hicks’ cabin mates agreed among themselves that he was an insufferable klutz.

After the campfire was extinguished, the counselors retired to their own cabin for the night. The boys were tucked in, metaphorically speaking, and left to their own devices. Inevitably talk turned to sex. Dickie Parks was the oldest boy in the cabin by two years and didn’t hesitate to let the other kids know it. They were in bed twenty minutes when Dickie’s bunk began to squeak.

“Hey, Dickie. You whacking off?” asked Billy Donahue from the bunk beneath him.

“Yeah. So what? You don’t even know how yet,” was Dickie’s reply.

“He does so,” said Junior Kershaw, coming to his friend’s defense. “I seen him do it yesterday.”

The cabin shook with laughter. During the verbal banter that followed, somebody produced a flashlight and spotlighted Dickie’s activities. He stopped and sat up on the edge of the bunk. “Okay, all you smart asses, let’s have a contest,” he said as he grinned down at the other boys.

“What kind of a contest?” Junior Kershaw asked in his squeaky voice.

“A jack-off contest, dummy. You guys with me?”

“What we gotta do?” asked Billy.

“We all get in a circle, see, and beat off. Whoever shoots first is the winner.”

Hicks didn’t quite understand. “How do we know who wins? He can just lie about it.”

Dickie sighed with exaggerated disgust. “No, shithead, it works like this. The first guy to shoot hollers ‘Cummo.’ That’s how you know who wins. Give me that flashlight.” Dickie jumped down to the floor and switched the light off. “Everybody in a circle. Peckers out. Ready? Go!”

The pitch-black cabin filled rapidly with the rasp of rubbing flesh accompanied by a great deal of heavy breathing. It sounded like a kennel on a hot day in August. This continued for several minutes. The activity in one corner became frantic.

“C-C-Cummo! Cummo!” babbled Norbert Hicks between spasms.

Somebody flipped on the flashlight.

Hicks was on his knees next to his bunk, his withering penis still dripping as he attempted to catch his breath. He looked up and smiled broadly. Then the smile slowly faded as he looked from one boy to the next.

His cabin mates, all clothed fully in pajamas, stood around him in a large circle rubbing their hands together and panting loudly. Dickie took one look at Hicks’ face and could contain himself no longer. He sagged to the floor and rolled back and forth laughing raucously. Norbert Hicks turned red and made a belated attempt to cover himself. Then he jumped up and ran from the cabin. As the laughter died the boys could hear him sobbing in the woods behind the tiny building. His father, who never found out what had taken place, picked him up early the next morning and took him home after receiving a call from the camp director.

Norbert Hicks spent the next few weeks contemplating suicide.

But he was far from stupid. He attended Florida State University in Tallahassee on a scholarship, earned a degree in business administration and moved to Pensacola. There he spent the next twelve years learning the real estate business. Between buying and selling houses he found time to marry Sheila Grant. She was somewhat nearsighted and had been rejected by every male in town due to her attention span. On the odd occasion it reached an incredible seven minutes. But she didn’t care that Hicks was a klutz, tended toward obesity and was starting to grow prematurely bald. She would have married a shaved ape in order to get away from her parents. As for Hicks, he discovered that Sheila gave the best head he had ever experienced. Besides, he told himself, she couldn’t talk with her mouth full.

At the age of thirty-four, he returned to Trinidad with his relatively new wife. He had something to prove to his old classmates and, perhaps, to himself. Armed with $74,000 of his own and a bank loan, Hicks opened an office and launched an aggressive advertising campaign. During the next six years he sold more property in Trinidad and the surrounding area than anyone else in recorded history. He became Trinidad’s first self-made millionaire.

Most of his old school classmates remained unimpressed. Their most vivid memories centered around him falling down or wetting his pants or doing almost anything to prove that he was, after all, Norbert Hicks. Like Rodney Dangerfield, he got no respect.

But then, at 2:47 one morning, Norbert Hicks had a vision. It came to him in a dream and made him sit straight up in bed, instantly wide-awake.

“Yes!” he yelled joyfully.

Sheila, who had been dreaming about something totally different and was somewhat damp between her thighs, raised her head and looked in the direction of the sudden noise.

“Bert? Is that you?” she asked with her usual acute grasp of the obvious.

“Of course it’s me. Who do you think it is, Fabio?”

“That would be nice,” she mumbled. Then she rolled over and looked at the digital clock with the two-inch letters, which had been purchased so she could see it without her contacts. “Bert, what the fuck are you doing? It’s almost three in the morning. Are you nuts?”

“Go back to sleep, Sheila. And I’ve told you before to stop using that kind of language. I had an idea, that’s all.”

“An idea,” she said, frowning. “About what?”

Hicks settled back on the pillow and grinned broadly into the darkness. “Never mind, I’ll explain it tomorrow.”

He spent the rest of the night in a state of agitation, thinking about his idea.

The next morning, over breakfast, he told her.

“It’s a mall,” he said. “But, really, it’s more than that. Picture a mall, a boatel, a marina and a fancy restaurant all in one, with a commercial beach and all the concessions that go with it. Out on the cove across from Heron Key right where that soggy ground is. Of course, we’ll have to do some back filling or the whole thing will sink, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Just think of it!”

Sheila was doing her best. “Bert,” she said as she concentrated myopically on stirring her coffee, “what’s a boatel?”

Norbert Hicks had made few friends in college. One of that few was a handsome young man from Miami named John Birrell. John was everything Hicks wasn’t. He was handsome, witty and clever and seemed to get along with just about everybody. It was a mystery to Hicks why John Birrell hung around with him. But one night when they were headed for the dorm sloshed with Mad Dog 20/20 and beer, it all became clear. About a block from home, Hicks put a hand on John’s arm.

“Jus’ a minute, ol’ buddy,” Hicks said carefully. “I’ve got to take a leak.” He turned from the sidewalk and stumbled into a stand of brush.

John followed close behind. As Hicks shook himself off, he felt a strange hand cover the one holding his member.

“Let me help you,” John whispered.

Oddly enough, Hicks was aroused by John’s advances and they spent close to a half hour side by side in the bushes.

The next morning Hicks awoke feeling as if the entire Ukrainian Army had marched barefooted across his tongue. He rolled over and looked around the room. John was asleep on the couch. The events of the night before rushed at him like an express train. Hicks leaped from the bed and ran into the bathroom to throw up. Whether it was the hooch or the hand-job, Hicks didn’t know. He did know, however, that he had made a terrible mistake and spent the next hour hoping that John would die in his sleep.

John was made of stern stuff. Although rebuffed in the cruel light of day, he understood. All he asked was that Hicks keep mum about the whole thing. He didn’t want his father to know he was gay. He apologized to Hicks and promised to keep his hands in his pockets in the future. John kept his word and Hicks kept his silence. The two became fast friends.

During their senior year, John invited Hicks home with him for Thanksgiving. John lived with his father, Mark Birrell, in a ten-room condo in Surfside. Hicks had never seen anything like it outside of the movies. The entire weekend was filled with the comings and goings of some of the most fascinating people that Hicks had ever seen. Mark Birrell shook hands with Hicks and welcomed him warmly enough, but was obviously too busy with his more important guests to pay much attention to the two students. Hicks knew he had seen several of the other guests on TV and in the movies. He left Miami extremely impressed.

So when the question of financing entered Hicks’ mind it occurred to him that Mark Birrell might be interested in the project. From what he had seen on his brief visit to the man’s home there seemed to be enough money in the family to keep them in beans.

Hicks picked up the phone and called Miami.

Mark Birrell had been born Marcello Birrelli in Trenton, New Jersey in 1934. His father, Guillermo, started out running numbers in Brooklyn at the age of fifteen. When he turned twenty-one he moved to Trenton and took up bootleg booze, prostitution and large-scale gambling. Due to his insistence that he was only involved in victimless rackets, those in the know dubbed him Willie No-Fault, although few dared call him that to his face. When Mark was fourteen—and still Marcello—Willie No-Fault and three of his soldiers left the house one spring afternoon to try out Willie’s brand new 1948 Lincoln Continental convertible. Willie had read in the paper that the Erie Railroad had just taken delivery of a brand new locomotive the previous week. Being something of a frustrated engineer, he pointed the Lincoln toward the railroad yard with the hope of getting a look at the new machine.