Mind of an Outlaw (50 page)

We passed through several rooms, and one had knives and guns on the wall, and another with zebra stripes for wallpaper, and then a room with nothing but filthy pictures all nicely framed, and the last room was big and had a photograph and a table with drinks, and a lot of couches on which guys and girls, and guys and guys, were lying around in a very dim purple light, just enough to see that there was a lot of purple nakedness in this neck of the woods, worse—I couldn’t believe it. This was the first Hollywood party of the sort I’d grown up hearing about. I was used to walking in on a roommate who was under the covers with a fellow, but never anything like this. There were twenty people.

Then I saw our host. Bobby was naked except for cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, and he was walking a Doberman
pinscher on a leash around the room, a huge female I suppose, because she had a diamond collar around her neck. But as the dog came up to one couple, it tried to mount, and I saw my mistake. She had a lot of male in the rear. Bobby was giggling like a two-year-old, because the dog kept jumping forcibly into all these lovers’ midsts, if you can say such a thing. There were screams and shouts galore—“Bobby, get Romulus away! Bobby, you’re a madman.”

I would have thought our host was horrible, but when he came up to me, he gave the sweetest smile I’d seen in a year, as if he’d spent his childhood eating nothing but berries and grapes, and when he kissed me, his mouth was tender. I couldn’t get over that, his mouth was as good as Edward’s, who had the best mouth I’d ever kissed, but Bobby was also strong. I’d never been introduced to a man who was naked before, you learn so much that way, and his skin felt smooth as a seal and terrific to the touch. I couldn’t keep my hands off. It was as if he was one boy who everybody had been rubbing love into since he was a baby. Oh, did his lower lip pout.

“Come on,” he said, “you and me are going to leave these people.”

He handed Romulus’s leash to Rod and took me down the tunnel to a room at the other end that turned out to be another apartment. I didn’t have time to look around; it didn’t matter. We were on the floor. I was embarrassed for a little while, for I reeked of Rod, but Bobby de P. loved smells, I think he had a nose instead of a brain, and besides, he had his own aroma, as I have said. Maybe something in him had the answer to my secret, or maybe I had just been prepared for Bobby by that crazy ride with Rod, and so had kept nothing, absolutely nothing, with which to protect myself, but it was as if the very inside of me was pushing to get over to him as desperate as the feeling you know in a dream.

We went on all night. Somewhere in the middle I
said, “Oh, you’re the best, I never knew anything like this before,” and I hadn’t, I felt things start in me and go flying off into the universe or somewhere, they were sensations going out to far space, so I meant what I said, except even as I opened my mouth, I knew I had always had the same thing to say to any fellow who was any good at all, in fact I had said it to Rod as soon as he could hear me after the motorcycle stopped. I had even been tempted to compliment Mr. Farnsworth (after all, Farnsworth would say to himself, “Nobody sits in a chair like me!”), it was exactly the remark to make if you wanted to keep a fellow happy and on your string. I once had eight great lovers on eight strings. Three more and I would have run out of fingers. Saying it to Bobby was true, however, I meant it, maybe I meant it for the first time since I’d begun to say it, and Bobby just roared with a crazy kind of laughter. Then we just started reaching into one another as if we were really going to catch something never caught before.

After a while, we moved over to the bed, and later he even turned on the lights, and there were a lot of mirrors. The room was full of antiques who sat there like rich and famous people, and I could see the Persian rug we had been doing it on, red and gold and purple and green. The bed was the largest I’d been in till then. We must have used every inch of it; he was one rich boy who wouldn’t stop. All through the night, there were knocks on the door and people yelling, “Bobby, where are you?” or “Join in the fun, for God’s sake,” but in the morning, when we wandered out (and by then I was so comfortable I wore nothing but high-heeled shoes, and Mr. de P. was back in his Stetson hat), we came to the dead smoky smell of old reefers and cartons of cigarette butts in ashtrays and nobody around but the dog. Romulus was lying in the middle of the floor with his diamond collar gone and his throat cut. His eyes were open, and he had the peculiar expression of a young
pup learning to sit on his hind legs. A simple dog look. Plus all that blood on the carpet which you couldn’t see at first it was such a dark carpet.

Bobby started to blubber like a five-year-old kid. He cried and his belly shook a little and his big jaw looked really prominent the way a five-year-old kid with a big jaw can impress you with how mad they are going to be when they grow up. Then he came to a stop and knelt by the dog and got a little blood on his fingers and touched it to himself and to me, but so softly that I wasn’t offended, as if that was a nice way to say goodbye to Romulus, and then we went back to the bedroom and made love, which turned out to be sweeter than anything because it was full of sorrow, and I cried for the baby in my stomach who would soon be gone and the dead dog and for myself, and felt very sweet toward Bobby.

Later that day I asked him, “Do you know who killed Romulus?” and he nodded.

I asked, “Are you going to do anything about it?”

“You bet,” he said.

[The defendant reads Exhibit B, page 92 to page 95]

Then I began to have this ferocious headache. When we weren’t making love, I felt nauseated and wondered if it was morning sickness, and slowly, day by day, Bobby de P. and me began to fight. Except they weren’t quarrels so much as savage displays, you might say, of bad nerves, after which we’d be off once more. All the while we’d
talk about getting married. Only it was like we were flipping a switch. Maybe it was the benzedrine. He kept feeding us pills until I couldn’t sleep, and every time I came near to something fabulous, my chest also came near to exploding.

On the fifth day Bobby said to me, “You want to get married?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll get married.”

“Let’s,” I said.

“We can’t,” he said. “I’m married already,” and he bit me on the lip. I flung him off. “You said you were divorced.”

“She won’t give it.”

His wife was living with Rod. Rod, he told me, had killed the dog and then stole the collar. Of course, that diamond collar had used to belong to Bobby’s wife, except that Bobby had taken it back from her the day they broke up and put it on the dog.

“Rod is away now,” he said, “on location in Utah. Let’s go over and visit my old lady.”

“And tell her you want a divorce?”

He squeezed my arm so hard I could feel the bruise instantly. “No,” he said, “we’ll finish her off like the dog.”

What I couldn’t believe was the excitement it gave me. I was nearer to myself than I ever wanted to be. I saw inside myself to the other soul, the one that never spoke. It was ready to think of murder. In truth, my headache went away.

“Let’s drive up to her house,” he said. “I’ll do it and you watch. Then we’ll come back here. If we stick together, nobody can prove a thing. We can say we were in bed.”

I could see us looking at each other forever, one year into the next. I could see my pictures in the newspapers.
STARLET QUESTIONED IN MURDER CASE
. The pictures would be printed in all the newspapers over the world.
A candle could burn in a dark church at such a thought. The idea that everyone would talk of me was beautiful. Killing Bobby’s wife felt almost comfortable. Maybe if I hadn’t seen Romulus with that funny expression on his face where he was dead but still seemed to be learning to sit on his paws, maybe if I hadn’t seen something in that animal lying there so calmly after his throat was cut, I might have worried about Bobby’s wife, but now I just felt as if it was all fair somehow. Maybe Bobby would even let me keep my baby. I remember thinking of how I felt when I first saw my face on film in
Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!
and decided I was very interesting, except I had what you might call a space in my expression. There was something in me that didn’t show itself to others. Like: I’m ready to commit murder.

We got into Bobby’s car and drove across Bel Air into Beverly Hills, and in one of the houses off Rodeo Drive was where she lived. It was dark, and there were no cars outside, and the garage was locked, so Bobby and I went to the back of the house. He found the wire to the burglar alarm and cut it and cracked the latch on the window. There we were standing in her kitchen. He looked in the rack for the carving knife and found one. Then we went up the stairs to her bedroom. I remember it was on the side that would have a view of the hills above Beverly Hills, and all the while he was doing this, despite the benzedrine, I never felt more calm as if, ha ha, I was on
This Is Your Life
, and they were talking about me looking for the woman’s door. I even held Bobby’s hand, the one that did not have the knife.

There was no lock to the master bedroom. By the light of the street lamps coming through the window, we could see that there was also no woman in the bed. The house was empty. We went through every room, but it was empty. Bobby’s wife must have gone on location with Rod.

We went home. Before the night was over, Bobby beat me up, or at least he started to, but he was too drunk to
catch me. I was awful sick of sex. I grabbed up my clothes and ran out the door and had the luck to find a taxi on those lonely streets and went home to Hollywood. I didn’t even cry in the backseat. It just occurred to me that Bobby didn’t even know my phone number or address, or even my last name, just my first, and maybe he would never try to find me, and he never did.

Two days later, I had the abortion. Whenever I looked into my mirror now in my apartment in the Waldorf Towers, on the thirty-seventh floor, I could still see how something ended in me that day, I don’t know what, but it is still in my expression.