Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence (22 page)

“You with the big fat purse,” said Eton Jr., looking at me and ignoring all talk of terms and negotiations. “Open it up and put it here by my foot.”

I did what he said.

“Your jewelry. All of it. Off and into the purse.”

I did what he said.

“Now you two dudes. I want wallets and watches and, hey, that’s a fine-looking belt you wearing there, white boy. Lizard?”

“Lizard,” said Jeff.

“In the purse.”

Jeff and Louis did what he said. Vivian, after protesting, did so too. “And now it’s your turn,” Elton Jr. told Billy.

“Hell, kill the hostage,” Billy replied. “Ain’t gonna bother me.”

“Ain’t gonna be the hostage who gets it,” Elton Jr. told Billy.

Billy, like the rest of us, anted up.

Pointing his gun at the four of us now, Elton Jr. released his grip on Vivian and used his free hand to scoop up the loot at his feet. “Catch you all later,” he said as he backed down the hall and out the front door. “Catch you all later,” said Billy, who followed soon after. Before disappearing, however, he turned to Vivian and said, “Hey, Mama, he was skimming off the top.”

•  •  •

We tried to phone the police from one of the first-floor Kovner apartments, but there were no apartments, exactly, on the first floor. There were two what once were called crash pads but what I guess you’d now have to
call crack pads, and they lacked not only telephones hot furniture, intact windows, and other niceties. What they didn’t lack was people, a Dante’s Inferno collection of people, semireclining on the filthy floors—so drugged, so wrecked, so out of it that they barely could lift up their heads when we four E.T.’s pushed open their unlocked doors. As for the other units, four were vacant and triple-bolted, and two belonged to tenants who demanded a warrant before they would let us in, and one appeared to belong to a foreign student who informed us—through the keyhole—that he was too busy studying for an engineering exam to be disturbed.

“We’ll go to
my
house,” Vivian said, showing her leadership qualities. “We’ll call the police from there and then we’ll have tea. Unless”—she turned to Jeff—“your other buildings are more . . . ah . . . together than this one is.”

We went to Vivian’s house.

It was clear that the trip to Harmony House, though on
our
side of the Anacostia River, had been scrubbed for the day, and—in Vivian’s case—forever. Pouring tea in her paneled and chintzed and English-antiqued library, she characterized our adventure in Anacostia as “an enlightening experience which shall, I believe, suffice me for a lifetime.” (Kind of the way I felt about sex with Philip.) When we pointed out that Jeff’s buildings could be turned into eight more Harmony Houses if someone like her would make—I repeated the phrase I had used with her earlier—a “substantial contribution to a good cause,” Vivian briskly noted that in surrendering her jewelry to Elton Jr. she already had made a substantial contribution.

“We all feel real bad about that,” Louis said.

“It’s my fault,” moaned a deeply demoralized Jeff.

“Vivian,” I began, winding up for one of my no-holds-barred abject apologies, “I can’t begin to tell you how unspeakably, inconsolably sorry I am, how an guished, appalled, incredibly sick at heart. Anguished that you were robbed. Appalled that you were put in physical danger. Incredibly sick at heart that you were exposed to—”

Vivian stopped my words with an impatient wave of her hand. “You don’t have to apologize, my dear. And I”—she cocked her head to one side and gave me a shrewd smile—“don’t have to buy any buildings in Anacostia. Yes?”

I swallowed a miniature blueberry tart and wiped the crumbs from my lips. “Of course yes,” I said with false heartiness. “Of course yes.”

Vivian turned to Louis and Jeff. “My passion, you know, is music. It has always been one of my chief philanthropies. If you get your new homeless houses set up, I’d be happy to give each one a nice CD player.”

Driving away from Vivian’s house, Louis tried to cheer up the kvetching Kovners, who had banked a whole hell of a lot on a positive outcome. When he failed to dispel our gloom he began to beat out a rhythm on the steering wheel, pecking his head and chanting, “Get ’em. Go get ’em. Go get ’em. Go get ’em,” and then swinging into a vigorous “So we come across the river from the other side . . .” He gave Jeff a nudge.

“Now we got no place to run,” said Jeff, “and no place to hide. Mom?”

“Gonna make tomorrow’s paper. This is where—uh huh!—we died.”

And all of us, laughing hysterically, screamed out, “Get ’em, go get ’em,” all the way home.

•  •  •

The swordfish was marinating and the salsa was freshly made when Jake returned around eight on Sunday night I had set the dining-room table with candles and flowers. I had also—in the interest of privacy—managed to ease glum Wally into going out for a meal and a movie with Jeff. Dressed in a dark-green hostess gown with a gilt-edged plunging neckline, I looked like what I was: a woman whose game plan for the evening was seduction.

My mood was positive.

Jake strode into the house as if he’d only been gone for ten minutes. “I assume you got my note,” he said, dropping his overnight bag onto a chair. Then Mr. Never Explain-Never Apologize-Never Justify took off his jacket and grabbed himself a beer, waiting for me to do what he was confident I would do—zap him with bitter where-were-you’s and how-could-you’s. I had a surprise for him.

“Go sit down with your beer,” I said. “I just need a moment to toss the angel-hair pasta. Oh, and sweetie”—I knew for sure he wasn’t expecting any “sweetie” from me—“would you please take these matches and light the candles.”

Before I tossed the pasta, I put on the music of Nat “King” Cole, whose songs could soften the heart of a Saddam Hussein. “Oh, how the ghost of you clings,” I sang along as I popped the cheese bread into the oven. “These foolish things”—I took off my apron, smoothed my hair, and got ready for action—“remind me of you.”

Having a cozy and vivacious conversation that omitted,
among many otter burning subjects, all of what Jake had teen doing since Saturday morning, much of what I had been doing since Saturday morning, and can this marriage be saved?, was something of a challenge. I rose to it. I told Jake, in a moving but not-at-all-maudlin manner, that Wally and Josephine seemed to be going through a difficult time, obliquely making it clear that I in no way was advising—or interfering with—them. (The reason for this, of course, was that they wouldn’t let me advise—or interfere with—them, but why trouble Jake with all the boring details?) Next I told Jake, in a really quite charming and entertaining manner, about my sister’s early-morning phone call, making many wry observations on sister-sister and sister-dog relationships. Halfway into the swordfish, I actually got him to laugh. And then I moved on to how wonderful he was.

“You’re being so nice about Rose coming down to stay with us,” I said warmly. “A lot of brothers-in-law would not be that tolerant.” In the background, Nat “King” Cole complemented my words with, “Unforgettable, that’s what you are. Unforgettable, though near or far . . .” Jake kicked off his shoes. The man was relaxing.

“Rose isn’t all that bad,” he said. “It’s actually kind of exciting to see who she is going to be this week.”

“You mean like her Melanie Griffith wild-thing phase?”

“I was thinking more of her Mother Teresa phase.”

This led to some funny recollections of Rose in her assorted incarnations, which led—by associative leaps—to Great Danes, to great Danish, to a new production of
Hamlet,
to “O death, where is thy sting?” (which I
insisted, incorrectly, came from
Hamlet
), to a recent D.C. police department sting operation, to the hernia operation Jake had performed on two-month-old Claire on Friday morning.

“Tell me all about it,” I urged, as I served the apple crisp with the frozen yogurt. “The shore was kissed, by sea and mist, tenderly,” crooned the legendary Nat “King” Cole. Jake, while I listened closely, told all about it.

“I like how you look in that thing you’ve got on,” Jake interrupted his story to observe. “Especially the part that isn’t on.” He traced a path from the base of my throat to halfway down to my wrist, which was where the plunging neckline finally stopped plunging.

“ . . . lipstick’s traces . . . romantic places.” The tapes were on their second time around. Leading Jake to an open space in our long front hall, I put my arms around him and said, “Shall we dance?”

•  •  •

I once wrote a newspaper column which, opposing conventional wisdom, was called I
T’S
S
OMETIMES
B
ETTER TO
S
HUT
U
P
. It starts by noting that though married couples are deluged with advice to say what’s in their hearts and on their minds—to ventilate, to communicate, to share—this may not always be a great idea. It goes on to observe:

A full and frank disclosure of every stupid (or worse) thing we’ve done could lead to alienation instead of to intimacy. An utterly truthful description of exactly how we feel about each other’s mother could leave us feeling bruised instead of informed. And must we really tell our mate that last night’s performance in bed
was down three points from Friday’s 8.9? And couldn’t we—instead of rehashing every painful detail of our last argument—sometimes use our mouths just to kiss and make up?

Though I don’t necessarily follow, my own advice, I was, in this instance, enthusiastically doing, so. And though Jake hadn’t read my column, he was enthusiastically doing so too. At least that’s what I thought as, without any full and frank disclosures, we danced our way upstairs and into bed. It wasn’t until . . . after . . . that Jake was moved to move into the confessional mode.

“Nothing major happened,” he said, “but I have to be honest with you.” (Who told him he had to?) “I spent . . . I spent last night with Sunny Voight.”

“Ain’t misbehavin’, I’m savin’ my love for you,” sang Nat “King” Cole, the words floating into our bedroom as honest Jake delivered himself of that wonderful news.

I didn’t—not for a moment—believe either of them.

•

A
lthough, as I’ve already mentioned, I do not believe in God, I nonetheless believed that God was punishing me. I believed that God was punishing me for sleeping with another woman’s husband by letting another woman sleep with mine. Jake had denied this, of course, but I knew he was lying—just as I, in his place, would have lied. I furthermore knew that Sunny and Jake had gone to bed together for just one reason: Because, on Wednesday morning, March 18, I had gone to bed with Joseph Monti.

•  •  •

Actually the bed we shared on the morning of March 18 was the unfolded seat of his chauffeured stretch limousine, the very limousine in which he and I, just eight days before, had already dallied. I had not been aware at the time that with a simple flick of a switch the back of the limo converted into a bed, although I had observed that—thanks to the smoked-glass windows and the stereo system—we could do and say whatever we wished, while driving all over town, in perfect privacy.

That morning, a busy surgery day, Jake had left for
Children’s at 6
A.M.
At 6:45 I was down on Connecticut Avenue. At 6:48 the limo glided slowly to a stop and picked me up in front of the Cleveland Park Library. I had dressed for my first adultery in leather cowboy boots, a long brown woolen skirt, and hacking jacket, a Waspy Western Ralph Lauren look that contrasted, I felt, quite charmingly with my down-and-dirty peach bustier and peach panties.

Which, as soon as I closed the car door, Joseph Monti reached under my skirt and removed.

After which his head vanished under my skirt.

Shortly after which I found myself trilling
eee-eee eee-eee-eee eee-eeeeeeeee,
and revising a view I had once espoused in a column I had entitled S
EX
W
ITHOUT
L
OVB
—N
OT
R
EALLY
A
LL
T
HAT
T
ERRIFIC
.

“You thought we didn’t do that,” Mr. Monti said accusingly, after I had finally quieted down.

“Do what? You mean, engage in or—”

“I know what I mean. You know what I mean. You don’t have to say the words. You thought we didn’t do that fancy stuff, right?”

“Who’s we?” I asked, as I tried to return to reality, where, I now noticed, the two of us lay naked (except for my leather cowboy boots) on the car-seat bed.

“Italians. Blue-collar backgrounds. Lowbrow types. You figure that we’re all a bunch of animals.”

“Certainly not,” I said, the word “animals” getting me excited all over again.

“Yeah, you do,” Joseph Monti persisted. “You think we only care for our own satisfaction.”

“How could I think that, Joseph?” I said, “when you” just finished giving me the most glorious org—”

“I would like you, Brenda, please, to watch your language.”

“I was only trying to say,” I started to say and then forgot what I was saying. Joseph Monti was stroking me, he was melting or was it igniting me, he was even—though with a disapproving frown at such female forwardness—wearing the Ramses condom he had received from me. And then, having made some exquisite incursions into (could this be?) hitherto unexplored territory, he once more had me crescendoing
eee-eee eee-eee-eee eee-eeeeeeeee,
and once more retracting a view that I had expressed in an earlier column, this one with the title T
HE
M
YTH OF THE
G
-
S
POT.

“You think that because we didn’t go to some classy Ivy League college, we don’t know about those parts of a woman’s body.” Joseph Monti, his weight on his elbows, his eyes boring into mine, waited for me to catch my breath and reply.

“Joseph,” I told him, “believe me when I say even
I
didn’t know. I mean, what you just did, it was a new and whole different kind of orgas—”