IGMS Issue 9 (11 page)

"Well?" she said, impatient, seeming to read my thoughts.

I forced myself into motion, crossing to the chair opposite hers, willing myself to inhale, exhale. As I sat, I pulled a digital recorder from my jacket pocket.

"You mind?" I asked. "I've always been terrible with notes."

At first Cassie just shrugged, but then a subtle change came over her, as if she had decided something. "Sure," she said. "Go ahead."

I switched the recorder on and placed it on the table.

"Thursday, September fourteenth." I glanced at my watch. "Nine forty a.m. I'm with Cassidy Sloan at the Fuller Correctional Facility. Cassie, why don't you --"

"I don't think it's working." She stared at the recorder. "Shouldn't there be a light or something?"

I leaned closer, checked the LED. She was right. Nothing was happening.

"Damn it." I picked it up, moved the switch to "off", then back to "record." Nothing. I took out the batteries and put them back, though they were already loaded correctly.

"Looks like you're stuck taking notes. Just as well. They say writing things down helps you remember them better."

Our eyes met for an instant. There was something in her expression . . . a hint of amusement.

"All right." I put the recorder back in my pocket and pulled out a pad and pencil. I jotted down the date, time, and location before looking up at her again. "Why don't you start with your husband?"

A reflexive grin touched her face and then vanished as quickly as it had come. "I did."

I shuddered, and she grinned again.

"Why do you think everyone's so fascinated by this, Eric? Is it me? Is it the way I look?" She paused. "Is it the way I did it?"

"How did you do it?"

She eyed me briefly. After a moment she reached for the cigarettes. "I'd ask if this was going to bother you, but I don't really care. It's pretty much the only vice I'm allowed." She lit up and took a long, deep pull, closing her eyes. After what seemed a long time, she exhaled through her nose, a billowing cloud of blue-grey smoke enveloping us both like a mist.

"My husband." She opened her eyes. "You met him, didn't you?"

I nodded. "At one of the office parties, I think."

"That sounds right. It would have been several years ago. He stopped coming after my promotion." She took another pull, rested her elbow on the table so that the hand holding her cigarette hovered just beside her head. "Kenny was . . ." She shrugged. "I think I was drawn to him because we were so different. I wasn't looking for cerebral; I got enough of that at work. I liked him because he was physical -- muscular, broad, like an action movie hero."

I jotted down notes, avoiding eye contact, feeling weak and small.

"The first time he hit me, I was . . . shocked, you know? But I figured it must have been my fault."

"When was that?" I asked.

"April 22, five years ago."

I frowned and looked up.

"It was our anniversary." She smiled faintly. "A girl remembers. We'd just finished dinner and were . . . well, the evening was moving along as you'd expect. And then I said something. I don't even remember what it was, but it made him angry and before I knew it we were arguing. Finally, he got so mad that he hit me. His hand was open. It didn't even hurt that much. But it was . . . We crossed a line, you know? I knew it immediately, though I didn't admit it to myself.

"Kenny said he was sorry about twenty times. He got real tender. We went to bed a little while later and he was so gentle -- more than he'd ever been. I tried to put it out of my mind, but the whole time we were making love, I kept thinking to myself, 'He hit me. Kenny hit me.'"

"How long was it before he hit you again?"

Cassie took another drag. "Not long. A couple of months maybe. Another argument. We were at home again. We were always at home when it happened. This time he hit me hard, with his fist." She pointed to a spot high on her cheek. "Right here. Really rattled me. For a couple of minutes I could barely see, like I'd been staring into the sun too long. You might remember the bruise. I said I'd gotten it rollerblading; that Kenny and I had been trying some silly trick and we bumped heads."

I did remember. Hearing this now, I was ashamed that I'd believed her.

"When was that again?" I asked to mask my discomfort.

"I don't know exactly. Early summer. After that . . ." She shrugged again and smiled, though it looked more like a grimace. "The hits just kept on coming. A black eye that I blamed on an inadvertent elbow during a basketball game; a swollen jaw that I blamed on my dentist; another bruise on my cheek that I couldn't explain, so I just stayed home for a week until it faded enough that I could cover it over with makeup. I think I pleaded flu on that one.

"I once did a piece on battered women," she said, looking at me. She took one last pull from the cigarette, dropped it on the linoleum floor, and ground it out with her foot. "Were you at the paper yet?"

"I don't think so," I said.

"Maybe not. I remember thinking that their stories were sad, but also a little pitiful, you know? I mean, he's hitting you, so leave him. I might have even said as much to some of them. 'Why don't you just leave?' As if it were that easy. And a few years later, there I was, just like them, trapped in love with a guy who knocked me around every now and then.

"Women like me -- professionals; strong, bright, educated women -- we're not supposed to be victims of abuse. Turns out that's horse shit."

I wanted to ask her why she didn't leave him, just as she had asked those women. Because I didn't understand. I couldn't get past what I knew about her. Cassie was beautiful and smart and strong. She should have been able to walk away and make a new life for herself. But I didn't ask her about it. Instead, I kept to the story. "When did you decide to kill him?"

She cast a hard look my way. "You know that's not how it happened."

"I know what you said. But I'm still trying to understand. All of us are."

Cassie reached for the cigarettes and lit up again. She'd once been such a health nut; it was hard to believe this was the same person. But I kept that to myself, too.

"It got really bad," she finally said, each word emerging from her mouth as a puff of smoke. "He'd gotten his contractor's license not long after we were married, and for a while business was pretty good. Not great, but he was getting by. But then he had a problem with a client -- some rich guy up in the Crescent area. The guy sued and suddenly the rest of Kenny's clientele began to shy away. Pretty soon, he had nothing. No clients, no prospects, no way of paying his crew. I was making enough for both of us, but that just made things worse, you know?

"He was angry all the time, and he started drinking." She closed her eyes and winced. "God. Listen to me. Somewhere along the way my life turned into a damn soap opera cliché."

I didn't say anything. I simply watched her, my pencil poised over the paper.

"One night he came home drunk and was yelling at me before he'd even closed the door. It wasn't just the beatings I was afraid of at this point. For a couple of months I'd been thinking that it was just a matter of time before he killed me. And this was the night. I was sure of it. If I hadn't --" Cassie looked away and lifted the cigarette to her lips. "I would have died that night," she said softly.

"Instead he did."

She nodded. "I'm still not sure how I did it. One minute he was coming at me, his fist raised. The next he was on the floor by the table, a gash on his forehead. You wouldn't have believed the blood."

Actually, I'd seen pictures and I'd been appalled. You always hear that head wounds bleed like mad, but good God. There was blood everywhere. The police investigated it as an accidental death and concluded that Cassie had called 9-1-1 as quickly as anyone could have expected. But Kenny never had a chance. And as to her killing him -- a man that big? The lead detective said it was impossible. The coroner agreed. Case closed, at least for a time.

"How did you do it, Cassie?"

"I just told you, I don't know."

I stared back at her, silent, waiting.

"It felt . . ." She stopped, shook her head, took another smoke. "You'll think I'm nuts."

"That would make me stand out in a crowd."

She looked startled for just an instant. Then she burst out laughing. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, you have a point."

"You started to tell me what it felt like."

Cassie nodded. "Right. It felt like I . . . like I pushed him. But with my mind, you know? I knew what I wanted to do to him. I was scared and angry and sick to death of feeling that way. Of being afraid of the man I was supposed to love. Just once I wanted him to feel what it was like to be weak and helpless. I wanted to hurt
him
for a change."

She puffed fiercely on her cigarette. "So it was like I took hold of him somehow. I grabbed him and threw him at the table. Not with my hands, but with my mind." She shook her head. "I know how it sounds, but it's the truth. I was trying to make him hit his head. He . . . he did just what I wanted him to."

"You mean the way he fell?" I asked.

"I mean the way he died."

I wasn't sure what to say. I cleared my throat and Cassie grinned, seeming to enjoy my discomfort.

I forced myself to meet her gaze. "Then what happened?"

"Very good, Eric. For a second there I thought you were going to leave."

I looked down at my pad and realized that I'd stopped taking notes several minutes ago. Not that I was likely to forget any of this.

"What then?" I asked a second time.

Cassie shrugged. "I convinced myself that it hadn't happened. I'd never done anything like that before, and I couldn't explain how I'd managed it this time. The cops all said it was an accident, so that's what I told myself. I went back to living my life. I wrote. I slept around."

I felt my face turn red.

"Our night together came, what? Two months after Kenny died? Didn't that strike you as odd?"

"I didn't really think about it," I said.

She gave a short, harsh laugh. "Right. And afterwards you avoided me like I had the plague. Or was it the clap?" She grinned. "What was the matter, Eric? Wasn't I any good?"

I felt the panic rising in me again. "That had nothing --"

"Don't," she said. "It was a joke. That's all."

I wasn't sure if she was referring to what she had said, or to sleeping with me. She was right, of course. I had avoided her, but only because it had been an incredible night for me and, I was quite certain, far less than that for her.

"How long after that until you killed the second guy?"

"All business, huh?" she asked, a crooked smile on her face. She puffed on her cigarette for a few moments. "It was probably six months after I killed Kenny. It was a late night at work and I wasn't ready to go home yet. I went to the Oasis, instead. You know the place? Over on Sixth, near Woodbine."

I nodded. "Yeah, I know it."

"I was drinking white wine at the bar. Nothing very good. But I was chatting up the bartender, this pretty college girl, and wondering if I was ready to try taking a woman home for a change. And then I heard them." She shook her head. "It was like being pulled back in time to a part of my life I thought I'd escaped forever. I heard them arguing, I heard the way he was talking to her, and I knew. I just
knew
that he was beating her. Not there, of course. But at home. He was Kenny. She was me. I knew it.

"I listened to them, and when they left I followed. I was lucky, I guess. They lived nearby and they covered the distance on foot. They went in and I watched them through a window. And sure enough, as soon as they were inside the house, he started screaming at her and slapping her around. I don't know what he thought she'd done, but he was pretty pissed. She was crying, and she was bleeding from her nose. I could see it all. I could tell that she hated him, that she wanted to be rid of him, just like I'd wanted to be rid of Kenny."

She'd sucked her cigarette down to the filter and she mashed it out on the table. Immediately she reached for the pack again, but then seemed to reconsider. Eventually she just looked at me.

"I did it pretty much the same way. He'd smacked her, and she'd flown across the room. She was this tiny thing -- that asshole must have had a hundred pounds on her. He was stalking her now and she was cowering against the wall next to the television. Before he reached her I pushed, hard this time. I knew what I was doing and I did it good and hard.

"He hit his head on the set and landed next to her. And then for good measure I made the TV fall on him. For a while she didn't move. She just sat there crying, staring at his body, saying, 'Oh no, oh no,' over and over again. I thought maybe she was upset that he was dead, you know? But pretty soon she pulled herself together and called 9-1-1. Then she got herself a glass of water. I figured she was okay, so I left. I didn't want to be there when the cops showed up."

"That was when you started going to the bars?"

Cassie nodded. "At first I wasn't sure why I did it. I mean, I knew what I was listening for, and I guess I knew what I was going to do when I heard it. But it wasn't like I decided, you know, 'Okay, now I'm going to start killing guys who beat their wives and girlfriends.' A part of me just wanted to hear those conversations. In a way it made me feel better. I wasn't the only one, you know? There were all these women out there who were just like me, who were afraid of their Kennys. They just didn't know how to do this . . . this thing that I did."

She stared at the cigarettes for several seconds before finally giving in and lighting up another.

"Pretty soon I was noticing other stuff, too," she said, breathing out a haze of smoke. "I could tell when guys were cheating. It didn't matter if they were with their wives or their mistresses, I always knew. After a while I could tell with the women, too. But I left those folks alone -- the men and the women. That was . . ." She shook her head. "I didn't want any part of that; it's just normal relationship stuff, you know? But then there was a night when I saw this guy slip something into his date's drink. Them I followed. And when he tried to rape her, I killed him. I don't even think she noticed that he was dead -- that's how out of it she was."