Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (13 page)

“That was made by a patient. Involutional melancholic.”

Eyelashes flickered behind the shades. “What happened to him?”

“He went home one weekend and hanged himself with his wife’s nightgown.”

Debra’s lips twitched in a wry smile. “Doesn’t sound like you helped him much.”

“His wife thought he was getting well. We had no authority to keep him.”

“Can you help Danny?”

The question caught Liza by surprise. “You mean at the trial?”

“At the trial, what else?”

Liza leaned forward in her armchair, trying to penetrate the dark shield of Debra’s glasses. She could see the thin arch of her brows, the faintly sinuous line of her nose. The lower lip protruded, full at the sides. Suggestive of a sensuous, self-indulgent person—yet Debra’s history was that of a church-going, law-abiding housewife. The contradiction was not unusual, Liza reminded herself.

“Why don’t you take off your glasses? I can turn off the light if it bothers you.”

Debra reached up and took them off, then looked at Liza with eyes wide and challenging. For a moment Liza thought she imagined it, then a sudden flash—possibly the
sun on the windshield outside—caught the eye just right, and she saw a flare of white in the left pupil. There was a discontinuity layer just under the sclerotic surface. Odd that Dan had never mentioned this stigma of his sister’s. It would have explained a few things …

“Shall I put them back on?”

“If you like.”

Debra settled the frames on her ears with slow, deliberate movement. There was a poised menace in the way she hung a cigarette between her lips, tore out a match, then struck it, flicking the head away from herself and toward Elizabeth.

“About Danny—what do you plan to do?”

“I don’t know.” Liza felt suddenly wary. “We’re not supposed to involve ourselves with the personal affairs of patients, after they leave the hospital.”

The moment she said it she realized it sounded pompous, and pomposity was probably the last thing that Debra wanted to hear right now.

Debra reached out and tipped her burnt match into the ashtray, slowly, as if the gesture were significant. “I’m not talking about a patient.” Her frail lips curled around the word. “That word means nothing to me. Nothing at all.” She gazed upward at Liza, a slanting look that was somehow sly and malevolent. “Are you afraid of Dan?”

“Not at all.”

“Yet you can sit calmly and hear him accused of murdering five women. What is it then? You think he’s some kind of devil-worshipping scum that ought to be put out of the way so decent folks can live in peace?”

It was odd, to hear the local dialect spoken by one who was obviously raised in the county, but voiced with such venom that it was obvious Debra hated her own people.

“I don’t think that at all,” said Elizabeth. Her face felt warm.

“Would you take the stand and testify that he couldn’t possibly have done it?”

“How could I do that?”

“You can give a professional opinion.”

“Doctor Kossuth is giving that.”

“He’s the prosecutor’s witness?’

“He’s an impartial expert, appointed by the court.”

“For God’s sake! It’s the
court
that’s trying him. The jury’s what we’re shooting at. They don’t care about your credentials. If you believe it, you can say it, and maybe one of the jurors will believe you. Otherwise …” She stood up and crushed out her cigarette with sharp, angry stabs. “Otherwise Dan is going to be led into a little room, and a bunch of cyanide pellets are going to be dropped into a little bucket, and these pellets are going to be dissolved by sulfuric acid, and Dan is going to breath this stuff, and he is going to die,
die
, DIE!”

She whirled and walked out without looking back. Liza leaned back in her armchair and blew softly through her pursed lips.
Well
, she thought.
Well-well
.

The witness room was stuffy and damp. Elizabeth sat in a straight chair beside an air conditioner which leaked water beneath her feet. The men in the room were compulsive cigarette smokers; the women remained quiet during the first day of the trial, then opened up with the droning humdrum mouth-noises one hears at a quilting bee: “Have you seen Edna’s little girl? My, hasn’t she grown?”

What the hell did you expect? thought Liza. If the child didn’t grow you’d have a midget, then you’d really have something to talk about.

The woman had biceps as big as a man’s thigh; her elbows dimpled the cylinders of fat which hung from her shoulders. It was not the woman’s appearance, but her function in the trial which aroused Liza’s hostility. She and her husband ran a grocery-gas-hunter’s supply store on the highway about four miles from Dan’s cabin. Though the judge had warned the witnesses not to discuss their testimony, Liza had no trouble learning that they were there to verify Dan’s acquaintance with one of the dead girls.

“They used to come to the station for cigarettes and a six-pac,” the woman whispered to Liza. “He called her Chris and sometimes Tina.”

Another witness was a rawboned youth of about twenty, who said he’d read Dan’s electric meter each month for two years. “Seemed like they was always a different girl.

Once I seen seven of ‘em, naked as jaybirds, swimmin’ in the pond. Three of ‘em was men though.”

“How’d you know, if they all had long hair? Haw!” Dwight Coombs a thin, gray-haired chain-smoker, slapped his knee and rocked back and forth until his laughter dissolved into wheezing lung-rattling coughs. Coombs drove a truck for the lumberyard, and apparently while making deliveries had catalogued every pore and eyelash of Dan’s female visitors. “Purty little things,” he said. “It’s a shame they’re all dead now.”

A tall, slim quiet woman sat with her chin resting in her hand and stared out the window. She wore orthopedic hose and a purple dress decorated with yellow flowers. She kept pulling her beige cardigan sweater tight across her chest and turning away when the fat woman tried to engage her in conversation. Finally the fat woman said: “You’re mighty lucky to be here, you know that?”

“Oh crap.”

“Don’t you oh-crap me, Maude Adams. At least I don’t let killer dope addicts hang around my house.”

“No, you let ‘em in your store.”

“That’s business.”

“Crap.”

Miz Adams was not there to help Dan; she was a prosecution witness called to describe her finding of the first bodies. Elizabeth was the only witness for the defense. It gave her a lonely, isolated feeling, and made her wonder what Dan’s lawyer had been doing all these weeks since the sensation had faded from the tube.

She gazed out the window and saw the pennants of a Gulf station hanging limp in the falling mist. Next door stood a movie theatre who marquee read: CLOSED: ATTEND HI-WAY DRIVE-IN. The county seat was one of the dead towns, killed by progress. It was so much like the Indiana town in which she’d grown up that she could almost see the faded striped awning hanging over her father’s drugstore and the old man himself standing behind the plate-glass window with his arms folded over his white pharmacist’s smock. It made her restless to think
that there might be someone like her in this town, some slightly overweight sixteen-year-old tending the soda fountain and learning about life from the sex manuals hidden away on the lower shelf of the magazine rack, behind the science fiction.

Elizabeth had been aware that most of the girls in her class had already tasted the sweetmeat of sex. She was human; she had the same appetites, but told herself that hers were motivated by love for the shy, thin, black-haired mathematics teacher who drank cherry coke each evening before trudging home to his wife. To Liza, hearing a man complain of his wife’s sexual shortcomings was something new. She wasn’t sure what a wife should do, but was sure she could do it better. The sex-mags showed clearly what positions men and women got into when they found themselves naked in bed (oral stimulation was an exciting new idea at the time, at least in the Midwest) but offered meagre clues on how to get a man into that situation. One would think that when one person desired another as intensely as she did Vernon, some magnetic force would pull them together, click! But the currents of the late fifties worked against bringing a married teacher into sexual union with a teenage soda jerk whose father was also on the school board. Only one brief twilight hour each day offered a chance for solitude; this was after her dad had closed the pharmacy section and gone to eat supper at the cafe, and before Vernon shuffled home to his Mary Ellen.

For years afterward Liza had equated sex with the smell of chemicals in the storage room, lysol and aspirin powder. The damn ladder was on wheels, one of the steps gouged the back of her neck and the other cut into the small of her back. (The next time she took a baby blanket out of stock and spread it over excelsior packing.) What she recalled most about their first time was Vernon’s clumsy hurriedness; she was sorry she hadn’t loaned him some sex manuals. But Vernon improved his technique—inevitably, since they made love almost every day during that bleak February—and Liza lived at an emotional level so intense
it was like a physical illness: stomach upset, nails chewed to the quick, sleepless nights while her body tossed and turned. The whole sex thing seemed unbalanced. Twenty-four hours of agony and uncertainty, leading up to a few minutes of ecstasy. What kind of trade-off was that? It didn’t make sense logically—yet she spent hours in the bathroom grooming her body, clipping hairs, rubbing oils and chemicals on her skin, popping out blackheads and cysts, combing her hair and keeping herself in clean underwear in case a sudden opportunity arose to take it off. Of course she expected to be discovered—each evening it was a few minutes later when Vernon dragged himself home. (She visualized the door to the store room opening suddenly, and Mary Ellen standing there, eyes wide in shock and dismay. Vernon would rise and stand beside her and say, ‘I’m sorry dear, I have made my choice, Liza is my beloved.’)

When it finally ended there had been no discovery, no dramatic crisis such as Liza hoped for; only whisperings, averted eyes and a special meeting of the school board. And instead of her lover standing large and proud beside her, she saw a weak-chinned pedagogue sweating over his tenure and begging her to deny there had ever been anything between them. And at that moment she realized that there never had been, that she had used him as an armature upon which she molded her fantasies …

She didn’t like to make the same mistake twice. For a long period she lost herself in books and lectures, trying to understand men through what they said about themselves. Noel was the opposite of Vernon—decisive, quick to act, blonde, clean featured, strong, handsome, sure of himself. She was still choosing her lovers from the education field. Noel taught visual arts, journalism, and served as a non-playing coach. At the time she had an economic motive for a merger of households; she was working on her doctorate, and drugstore profits had dwindled as her father eased into retirement. The fact that Noel spent his evenings with students was fine as long as she had studying to do—
welcome, in fact. But later, when she wanted some kind of home life, it got a bit heavy, playing den mother to a bunch of teenage boys. So what if their parents were divorced, separated, or busy doing their own thing? She wanted her own thing too, yet always when they got ready to go out, Noel would say: “Don’t forget, we’ve got to pick up Jerry, or Joe, or Pete, Mike or Harry.” Rumors started floating in; Noel was gay. She didn’t let herself think about it at first. Noel always held evening confabs in the den after she’d gone to sleep. Supposedly they were talking sports and screening replays. She went in one night and discovered that movies were indeed being shown. On the screen flickered the image of a blonde with her lips around the largest cock Liza had ever seen. In the couch the same scene was repeated, except that it was Noel who had his mouth full. She told herself: I must see the humor in this. But she felt cheated, and contemptuous of Noel for not having the courage to tell her.

Later he had tried to convince her that the urge only hit him when he drank. But it couldn’t work; when he was sober his approaches were hesitant and self-defeating. When he drank his lurching aggressiveness turned her off; she couldn’t help thinking he would have preferred one of the boys. She said he would destroy himself if he kept trying to please her, and told him she’d decided on a divorce. He wept, he blamed his parents, his grandmother, his sisters, society. She had heard the words so often they merely bored her. He said she was domineering and self-centered, the essence of the castrating female, “You’ll get a divorce and a dog and there’ll be no change, except that the dog doesn’t shave in the morning.”

Those had been the last words she heard him speak. The door had slammed behind him, and two hours later the call had come from the state highway patrol. Noel was dead; the boy riding with him had a crushed spine and would never walk again …

So what does it mean? she asked herself. Am I drawn to losers, or do I have a talent for picking winners and
turning them into losers? And where will Dan Bollinger fit into this?

She was called to the stand on the fourth day.

The defense attorney had a thick shock of dark-red hair which he kept brushing back with his hand. He was tall and loose-jointed, his wide tie was undone, and he seemed to work very hard toward no particular purpose—as if, Liza thought, he wanted to be able to say when it was over:
Well I tried my damndest
.

After leading her through some dull background about her education and present duties, he asked her to pick out the defendant in the crowded courtroom.

Danny sat with his hands clasped on the witness table in front of him. He wore no tie, but his white shirt was clean and pressed. With his face clean shaven, his features had a masklike regularity. The planes of his face met in perfect angles, the eyes were level, the nose straight. She glanced at his right hand and saw the sheen of scar tissue on his knuckles. It reminded her that two months had passed since she’d escorted him to the staffing. Since then there had been no words between them, only nightmares and waiting …

She lifted her arm and pointed. The lawyer asked: “Did you see a lot of him at the hospital?”

“I saw him frequently. Not every day.”

“Did he strike you as a violent person?”

“Not particularly.”

“The kind of person who would kill?”

She hesitated a moment, aware that Danny was looking at her with an odd, glittering intensity. She felt a tautness in the air; the green-filtered daylight came through the window and struck the right side of his face,-leaving the other half in shadow. She saw the line running down the center of his nose, dividing his lips and sinking into the cleft of his chin. One side was glowing, radiant, angelic. The other side was sunk deep in shadow; it seemed to be leering at her, fiendishly. She wanted to shudder and turn away, the courtroom seemed suddenly to be only a
transparent membrane stretched over a vast darkness, and out of the darkness came the sound of people shouting and whistles blowing …

The lawyer’s voice jarred her. “Would you like me to repeat the question?”

“No,” she said. “He doesn’t look like the kind of person who would kill.”

“Objection!”

The prosecutor rose from the table and came forward; he was in his early thirties but he looked younger, with a baby-fat face and mouse-colored hair falling straight across his wide forehead. His tone was clipped and supercilious:

“Your honor, this woman is supposed to be an expert witness. Yet she is giving a personal opinion.”

The judge tapped his gavel. “Sustained. Counselor, try rephrasing your question.”

The defense attorney flushed, shoved his shirt under his belt, pulled at his chin a couple of times, then asked: “Ah … while he was under your care, did you conduct any tests on him?”

“Yes.”

“What was the nature of those tests?”

“The Rorschach. The Stanford-Binet. The Rapaport Word Association.”

“And … could you summarize the results?”

“He was intelligent, above average. I thought there were signs of a manic-depressive psychosis.”

“Oh?” The attorney blinked at her. “Would this cause him to kill?”

“It is not normally associated with aggressive violence, no.”

He stood still a minute, nodding his head while uncertainty played on his face. Then he murmured, “Thank you” and walked quickly back to his table. Liza had the feeling she was performing in a play and had been given the wrong script.

The cherub-faced prosecutor lifted his finger and started shuffling papers on the table. Liza raised her eyes and
gazed around the courtroom. The maple-paneled chamber was no larger than the average classroom. A broad center aisle divided it into two sections about ten chairs wide, sloping up toward the back. She saw the sheriff standing just inside the double doors with his hands clasped behind him, his heavy shoulders hunched forward. The corridor outside was thronged with people; clouds of blue smoke swirled in the air above their heads.

She was surprised to note that three-fourths of those inside were women. Of course, she reminded herself, it was women who’d been killed. And most of the spectators appeared to be locals—housewives, probably, killing a slow afternoon. Many were fanning themselves with folded newspapers. For the first time Liza became aware of the stifling, brassy heat which hung in the courtroom. She glimpsed a pair of octagon-framed dark glasses at the end of the back row. From where Debra sat, she could have reached out and snatched the gun which rode the sheriff’s hip.
Where did that thought come from?
Somehow Liza’s gaze looped through the stagnant air of the courtroom and penetrated the curving shield of the dark glasses. The look in Debra’s eyes seemed accusing. What the hell have I done wrong? Liza wondered. Why did
you
hire such a nudnik lawyer?

The prosecutor rose and stepped forward. “Tell me, Doctor Bodac, just what are the duties of a staff psychiatrist?”