Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence (32 page)

It was time to go home.

The next morning, as I considered—and rejected—lethally injecting Mr. Monti, another fax message warned that the end was near.

NO MORE DELAY
DEATH’S ON ITS WAY
THANKSGIVING IS EXECUTION DAY
THANSSGIVMG DAY THE TURKEY TURNS INTO DEAD MEAT

I realized that I was reading an ultimatum.

I needed a murder plan, and I needed it soon.

I went to Potomac Video and rented
And Then There Were None,
where many people are killed—one by one—on an island. No useful ideas.

•  •  •

During the second week of November, Wally returned to school, having made a fast and full recovery. He also seemed to be making his
peace
with Josephine’s “trial separation,” especially since—to his thrilled surprise—she actually was attending conversion classes.

As Jo explained it to Wally in one of their occasional phone conversations, all she was really doing was keeping her options open. “I could convert and marry you,” Wally told me she told him. “I also could
not
convert, and still marry you. I also,” she continued, “could neither marry you nor convert. And I also could even convert and still
not
marry you.”

She did, however, warn Wally that if she both converted and married him, he’d damn well better know about Tu B’Shevat and Tisha B’Av, not to mention Brith Milah and Pidyon Haben.

“I think it’s looking good,” said Wally who—with no Jo to turn to—found himself turning back to his faithful ma. “And I think I’m going to look up Tisha B’Av.”

•  •  •

I went to Potomac Video and rented
Monsieur Verdoux,
where many wives are killed by Charlie Chaplin. No useful ideas.

•  •  •

On Wednesday, a gray and drizzly day, I walked over to Carolyn’s house for some biking and bitching, beginning with my complaints about Jeff as we pedaled side by side in her sumptuous bedroom.

“Everyone else in our family,” I said, “feels some duty to mankind. But Jeff’s always been this wheeling-dealing hedonist.” I wiped my brow with the back of my hand. “I was hoping these real estate problems of his would have prompted some agonizing reappraisal. But he’s still dating women with hair twice as long as their skirts. And he changes the subject whenever I bring up the Peace Corps.”

Carolyn laughed indulgently. “I’ve always loved your
Jeff. But he always gets into trouble. And he never agonizingly reappraises.”

“Then it’s time, for him to start,” I said. “I wish the were more like—”

“Wally. And that,” said Carolyn, puffing hard, “is the problem. Wally’s already the designated saint in the Kovner family. Why would Jeff even try to compete with that?”

The timers dinged, releasing the two of us, sweating and wheezing, from our metal steeds. “Anyway,” I said, “he’s not sitting still for advice from me. And Jake, well, you know Jake. He says our kids aren’t kids anymore and we have to let them make their own mistakes.”

Having mentioned Jake, I moved on to assorted complaints about him, while Carolyn showered and I emery-boarded my nails. “He’s expecting me to forgive and forget and to keep on working on being less controlling. I’m the one who’s supposed to do all the changing. But what exactly do I get in return?”

“Love and sex and companionship,” said Carolyn, shouting through the stall-shower door. “And he’s basically one of the good guys. And, you’ll never meet anyone else who owns a gorilla suit.” She laughed. “So he’s still having trouble finding your G-spot. Hey, nobody’s perfect.”

Carolyn and I have always been staggeringly frank about our sex lives, frank in a way that men—I’m convinced—can’t even begin to imagine that women can be. But then Carolyn and I have always been staggeringly frank about virtually everything. Everything, that is, with one recent exception.

For although I had told her plenty about the Kovner
difficulties with Mr. Monti, I had never Set her know that I believed he was homicidal or that I intended to be homicidal first. Supportive, though she could be, I knew she’d undoubtedly try to stop me, as she always tried to stop me whenever I planned to do something that she deemed deeply dumb.

“We’re trying to make up,” I said, “but every time things improve, I get to brooding about that night with Sunny.” I closed my eyes and sighed. “I mean, I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.”

Pearly Carolyn stepped from the shower, wrapped herself in a towel, and cleared her throat to prepare for a pronouncement.

“And here’s what I think, Brenda,” she said, her blue eyes opened wide. “Get over it.”

“Get over it?”

“Yes, like right away.” Carolyn shook out her glorious hair. “Look, you’re the one who kept telling me that you only had twenty-three—now it’s fewer—years left. You don’t have any time to waste. So, get over it.”

•  •  •

I went to Potomac Video and rented
Kind Hearts and Coronets,
where Alec Guinness dies many unnatural deaths. No useful ideas.

•  •  •

On Thursday, November 12, I got a call from Birdie Monti.

“I met with Joseph last night,” she said. “We had an interesting talk.”

“Anything you’d like to share with me?’

“Not at the moment,” she said. “Except I heard about all those real estate tricks and also about Jake’s two
malpractice suits. And I’m calling to apologize for the not-nice things that Joseph has done to your family.”

Not-nice things, I said to myself. What about vicious? What about reprehensible? Aloud I merely inquired, “Is your husband joining you in this apology?”

“Not at the moment,” she said, “but we’ll be having another interesting talk real soon.”

•  •  •

I went to Potomac Video and, just to relax, I rented
Mary Poppins.

•  •  •

That weekend Jo told Wally that among the options she was keeping open were becoming a rabbi, becoming a psychotherapist, becoming a lesbian, and/or applying to medical school. She said she was calling to tell him all this so he wouldn’t be taken aback if he heard that she was dating Vanessa Pincus.

Wally, quite agitated, brought me this news on Sunday morning, while I was setting the table for a dinner party we were throwing next Friday. (As I often tell my readers, one certain way of making a dinner party go smoothly is to do as much as you pan well in advance.) “I’m worried about that shrink,” Wally said, as he helpfully placed two forks on each cream-colored napkin. “I think she needs to set some limits with Josephine.”

“Maybe,” I said carefully, laying a cream-and-green plate beside each napkin, “Josephine needs to learn to set her own limits.”

Wally, stormy-eyed, threw down the rest of the forks. “You don’t think she’s overdoing it with these options of hers?”

“She probably is,” I told him. “But she’ll calm down. And when she decides who she wants to be and what
she wants to do, she’s going to feel that they’re
her
decisions—not yours and not her father’s and not her psychiatrist’s.”

“And I’m just supposed to wait around and hope she decides on me, not Vanessa Pincus?”

“Don’t think of yourself as waiting around,” I told him. ‘Try to think of yourself its poised for action. I mean, things happen. Jo could hit a rough patch, a disappointment, a loss—even a serious loss. And then you’ll be there, coming through for her, providing support and comfort in her grief.

Wally gave me a baffled glance. Her grief? What kind of grief?”

“I haven’t any idea,” I replied, stepping back to admire my gorgeous table. “But it wouldn’t hurt a bit to be poised for action.”

I wasn’t telling the truth when I told Wally I had no idea. I had two ideas. My first idea was that Jo would turn to Wally in her grief when she lost her father. My second idea—which had come to me as the result of a major new insight into myself—was how to arrange for Jo to lose her father.

•  •  •

The next day, in addition to making my soup for Friday night and writing a column entitled P
OISED FOR
A
CTION
, I swung into action on my murder plan. I rented a P.O. box. I purchased a dowdy tweed suit and a dowdy brown hat and a dowdy brown wig that curled just below my ears in one of the less felicitous styles of the 1940s. Dressed in my matronly duds, I hailed a cab, went off to Jeff’s block of buildings in Anacostia, and stopped at the one I had visited back in September. There I reached into my purse, where I had placed a
note and two thumbtacks, and tacked up my note on the badly splintered front door.

“Dear Billy or Elton Jr.,” the note said. “Your talents are sought for a short-term, high-paying job A.S.A.P. Time is of the essence. If you are interested, write immediately to”—here I provided my P.O. box information—“with the day and the hour you can meet me at”—here I named the location—“to work out our business arrangements.” I read my note over and added a P.S. “You won’t know who I am, but fear not, I will know you.” Then I added a P.P.S.: “Dress discreetly.”

That evening I borrowed ten thousand dollars from Carolyn (for such a small sum she does not have to ask her trustees), making up a fib about how I needed it to pay off one of Jeff’s debts. I certainly couldn’t tell her that I needed it in order to hire a hit man.

I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, ‘This woman has lost it.” I recognize how you could see it that way. For, tossing caution to the winds, I was planning to violate my cardinal rule: Never use an accomplice in a murder.

Billy and Elton Jr.? What was I, crazy?

No, not exactly.

I wasn’t crazy because I’d decided I couldn’t do this alone—that I’d never kill Joseph Monti without assistance. This astonishing conclusion flowed from the aforementioned major new insight into myself. I had been watching
Mary Poppins
when I suddenly under stood that my failure—three times!—to murder Mr. Monti was due not to ineptitude but to some kind of stubborn psychological block. Hadn’t I pulled that radio plug from the socket—a Freudian slip—when I’d tried to electrocute him in the tub? Hadn’t I failed to poison
him by means of a
strawberry
Daiquiri because I unconsciously knew (he had pushed them aside when he ate my lemon sorbet back in August) that he didn’t eat strawberries? And hadn’t I
deliberately—
though unaware I was doing so—wound up stuffing the wrong Monti twin in the closet? I mean surely, when I had looked at my victim’s feet instead of his face, I had seen that he was wearing something that Joseph Monti would never wear—shoddy shoes!

In other words, while my mind was screaming, “Kill the s.o.b.,” my superego was Whispering, “Murder is wrong.” In other words, I unconsciously was sabotaging my efforts to kill Mr. Monti.

And so I wasn’t crazy to seek an accomplice to help me outwit my superego. Nor was I crazy to seek Elton Jr. and Billy. Look, I desperately needed a hit man, and how many people with hit man potential does a woman like me get to meet in the course of her life? It struck me that my September hallway encounter with these two bad dudes was, if not preordained, a stroke of good fortune.

Nor—final point—was I taking the major risks that most people take when they use an accomplice. I wasn’t risking blackmail or betrayal. Why? Because my accomplices were never going to know that I was me.

On Wednesday I went to my P.O. box and found a letter from Elton Jr.
and
Billy. Having forgiven each other for past transgressions, they were happily working together once again. They wanted to hear my proposal and would meet me where I requested—on Thursday, November 19, at 10
A.M.

On Thursday, at 10
A.M.
, Prudence Gump was waiting for them.

Our meeting place was Union Station, surely one of the world’s great railroad stations, a grand historic pile that had gone from beauty to schlump to ravishingly renovated, a building I always do the honor of pausing to admire—even on my way to confer with hit men. I love its combination of columned majesty and mall, its stately halls and bustling buy-me shops, its arching ceilings and movie theaters and sleepers to Chicago, its statues and fountains and restaurants galore. I’ve had dinner there. I’ve bought blouses there. I’ve seen a couple of movies there. I’ve taken Metroliners from there to New York. I once met Rosalie there—she was coming to visit for the weekend—and we got into such a fight before we even left the station that she turned right around and took the next train home. A few times a year I lunch there with Nan, who works for a senator known as The Fool on the Hill, and decide what she can do to help him along. The fact that Union Station is so versatile, vast, and anonymous, plus so easy to get to by Metro from Cleveland Park, made it, in my opinion, the ideal meeting place at which to plan a murder.

And there, as instructed, were Billy and Elton Jr.—in pinstriped suits! with attaché cases!—browsing among the hats at The Proper Topper, and quick to follow me, when I had identified myself, to one of the station’s less populated locations.

With my dowdy duds, droopy hair, and splendid upper-class British accent, I made a truly persuasive Prudence Gump, briskly describing to an attentive Billy and Elton Jr. the kind of high-paying job I had in mind for them.

“So how come,” Elton Jr. inquired when I had finished my spiel, “you know about us?”

“Yeah, right,” said Billy, “Like, who told you our names?”

“I say, that’s a jolly good question,” I said. “You chaps are veddy clevah. It’s immeedjitly cleah that you chaps are too clevah by hahff. I’m teddibly pleased to be working with a criminal element of such high caliber.”

(I won’t belabor the point, but I hope you’re hearing Queen Elizabeth and Julie Andrews, with just a little Winston Churchill thrown in.)

“However,” I continued, the rule of Her Majesty’s Secret Service is to never identify another agent.”

“You’re doing a job for Her Majesty’s Secret Service?” Billy inquired.

“Not this time,” I answered. “This is personal. It’s a seamy private matter involving financial as well as sexual indignities.”

Billy nodded knowingly. “He dissed you.”