Punish Me with Kisses (14 page)

We all grin at each other, then Dave and I go up to the balcony. 'Look,' I say soon as we're alone, 'I can see you're really not too keen about sex with chicks.' 'Well,' he says, 'he and I did have a date.' 'He had a date with me, too,' I tell him. 'Obviously he was planning all along to get in the sack with us both. That's his screwy thing. He's into these bi scenes, and he manipulated both of us to set this one up. We can't let him get away with it. We have to teach him a lesson, so he doesn't pull this kind of crap again.'

He loves it—he's a bitch just like me. 'I'm going to fix HIM,' he says, standing up, loosening his belt. 'I'm going to jerk off right now onto this lovely suede couch. Thing must have cost him a couple of grand.' 'Thirty-five hundred,' I tell him, 'AT LEAST!' I discreetly disappear into the powder room, then take a quick peek back. He's standing there, this dreamy expression on his face, pants down around his ankles, pumping away. Then this stuff starts spurting out and a mass of it goes spurt right onto the center of the couch. He moves a little and keeps pumping and shaking until he's got a pattern of drops going from one end to the other. Just then I hear Jamie coming up the spiral stairs. I move fast, get down on my hands and knees and start sucking away. It's PERFECT! 'What the hell is this?' Jamie screams. 'And look at my couch. What have you animals done to my couch?' Dave pulls up his pants and zips up with great dignity. 'Sorry, Jamie,' he says, 'guess we just got carried away.'

Jamie's completely freaked, still can't believe his eyes. 'But my couch,' he screams, 'it's all wet, for Christ's sake.' And thus he sets himself up. 'Right,' I clamor in, 'that's the way you like things, isn't it? Wet—right Jamie Sweets? Wet! WET! WET!!!!'

And then I start to cry. Can't stop, just gushing on. Everyone's solicitous. 'It was just a gag,' says Dave. 'Just a stunt.' But I weep and weep—can't control myself. Jamie hugs me. It'll be all right,' he says. 'Whatever it is, it'll be all right—'

S
he was enraged at the way Jared responded when she told him what her father had said at lunch.

"Don't you see—he never had people looking for the guy. He had them watching you all these years. He says he's still 'betting' on you. You've been spied on.
Spied on
. It's as if they're waiting for you to kill again so they can catch you and have you put away."

She was sitting in her window seat. He was on the floor, his arms wrapped around his knees.

"Kind of a waste of time," he said.

"But the point is no one's looking for the creep."

"I never thought they were looking for him anyway."

"Didn't that bother you?"

He shrugged. "Everybody does his thing. Your father does his, and I do mine. That's the way things work."

She just couldn't fathom him, the resigned way he accepted things. She looked at him now, saw how different they were. He lived day to day, he didn't suffer and smolder the way she did.

"Maybe someday they'll catch him," he said.

"Sure," she said, "like they're really trying. The police, the FBI, Chapman security—they're out there conducting this big manhunt. They know who he is and there're wanted posters and now it's just a matter of time. Meantime you can't keep a job."

"Well, babe," he said, "Jesus Christ! We'll just have to live with it. Why get so riled up?"

"Because I don't
want
to live with it. For three years I
lived
with it. I walked around like a zombie, afraid of being recognized, afraid of people and what they thought. Then you came along. I didn't feel numb anymore. Now you say we've got 'to live with it' and 'everyone does his thing' and 'maybe they'll catch the guy' when you know damn well they never will." She wondered if he were moved by what she was saying. "How can you be like that? It's your life, too. You can't go around acting like a victim, getting fired because of some lousy column item, letting people say you got off on a technicality, or whatever they seem to think."

He was smiling. "Never seen you so upset before."

"Surprise you I'm so upset?"

"A little. You want to play hardball, don't you—play hardball with your old man?"

"I'd like to prove to him you didn't do it."

"How do you expect to do that?"

"I don't know."

"Play detective maybe?"

"No, Jared, not play detective."

"Well—sounds like the Hardy Boys to me."

"You're mocking me. Don't you care at all?"

"Not really. I got caught in the middle of something, and I almost went to jail. Now I don't give a shit what your father thinks, or anybody else." She wanted to scream at that. It was so dense, so self-absorbed.

"I'll tell you something else," he said after a pause, his voice taking on an edge. "I think you're hung up on your dad."

"What do you mean by that?"

"You care too much what he thinks. He says something crummy and you really care."

It was true. She
did
care. She knew that, knew she wanted to break through to him and inspire the warmth he and Suzie used to share.

"I'd like to show him he's wrong. That's important to me."

"I think it's more than that."

"What?"

"You think he really thinks I'm going to kill you, and there's a side of you that thinks he's just waiting for that to happen because when it does it'll prove that he's been right. You're so hung up on that it's pathetic. Then there's this thing you have about Suzie being his favorite and him thinking it was you who should have been killed since you were the one who had the relationship with me. That's bugging you, too."

She was stunned. "Maybe," she admitted, "maybe that's part of it."

"Sure it is. And he's got you on this guilt trip, making you almost wish it had been you, making you think you deserved it and Suzie didn't. That's what's so crazy—that somehow he's got you thinking that. Probably he doesn't mean to. I can't imagine him deliberately trying to put that in your head. But whatever the reason it's total bullshit, because the truth of the matter is that, in a way, Suzie
did
deserve it. She brought it on herself." He stopped, gazed at her. She sensed he had said more than he meant to. "Hey, let's get out of here. I feel all cooped up."

They decided to run even though it was late in the afternoon and she'd already played squash. Running seemed the only way to clear their heads. They changed and went outside. It was a good autumn day. In Central Park there were mothers wheeling baby carriages, youngsters walking dogs, old people bundled up in sweaters feeding pigeons or sitting on benches reading carefully folded copies of the
Times
.

"One thing I know," he said as they warmed up. "It wasn't any damn intruder. I never believed that. I told Schrader, but he said forget that part of it and concentrate on getting off. But it wasn't some stranger or a burglar or someone who just happened to stop by. Burglars don't walk into
poolhouses
, discover somebody sleeping there, pick up a pair of shears and stab a girl eighteen times."

She looked at him. He was talking about it at last. He had always avoided the subject when she brought it up; he had always said he didn't want to talk about it, or wasn't in the mood. Now, it seemed, he wanted to talk; she found that an encouraging sign. If he'd just tell her what happened that night, everything he could remember, then, maybe, she could begin to fill in the blank spaces that made her own recollections so vague, so like a dream.

"No," he said as they started to run, "the way I see it, whoever killed her had to know that she was there. He probably came by to see her, then something happened and set him off. That's what I always thought. I never thought it was premeditated. But whoever did it knew her, knew she'd be in there and knew his way around. He knew the house, the woods, all the ways on and off the place—otherwise he couldn't have slipped in and out without a trace."

They ran in silence for a while. She felt her perspiration begin to rise, the rhythm of her heart increase. She was dying to ask him why he thought Suzie brought it on herself but was afraid he'd stop talking if she did.

"Sex," he said, "it had to have something to do with sex. That's what Suzie was all about anyway. The way she was carrying on that summer, the stuff she was doing, the way she treated us—like shit, you know—like we were all shit, and she was. . .well. . . whatever she thought she was. Maybe someone couldn't take it, and got really pissed." He glanced at Penny. "It had to be a sex murder. Nothing else makes sense. It was someone who knew her, someone who was jealous or crazy or whacked out completely by what she was doing, what she'd done to him. Too many taunts. Too many humiliations. Couldn't take it finally so one night he steals in there thinking she might be alone. He didn't see me on the diving board, had no idea you were
dozing
by your window upstairs. So he creeps around the lawn and first thing you know he stumbles on those lousy shears. There were a couple of pairs of them around, remember? That fishy gardener, Tucker, with his iron-clad alibi—he was queer for shears. He had all these sets of them, remember, and he left them out all over the place even at night because he said your father was rich, and it didn't matter if they got rusted because your father could always buy some more."

She remembered that—Schrader had brought it out. He'd been trying to throw suspicion on the gardener in order, he'd explained, to muddy up the jury's mind.

"So he finds those shears, OK. Maybe he stumbles on them by accident in the dark and reaches down to see what's biting against his shoe. He picks them up, but then what's he supposed to do? Can't heave them away—might wake somebody up. You see I'm guessing he just came by to gaze at her. He's in love with her, so that's not so strange. But if he wakes up the dogs or someone in the house he might get spotted, and that wouldn't be too cool. So what's he supposed to do with those shears? He doesn't want to drop them back on the ground because he might stumble on them again when he leaves. In the end he just picks them up and carries them toward the cottage thinking maybe he'll set them down on the concrete or someplace out in the open, out of everybody's way. Or maybe it just feels good to have some protection in his hand in the dark. OK, he's creeping around the cottage now, the shears in his hand, and then he's gazing in at her through the door. He watches her sleeping in there with that weird angelic expression she always wore when she wasn't putting on her act."

He was getting angry, she could see. His face looked tormented. She reached out, touched him, and that seemed to calm him down. He shook himself as if he were shaking off his anger. They ran like that for several paces, hand in hand.

"He's gazing in at her for a while, a few seconds maybe or twenty minutes—we don't know how long. I was stoned and you were dozing, so we don't know how long it was between the time she went back inside and the time she moaned." Penny nodded.

"OK, he's gazing in, and then he starts to react. Suddenly there're all these conflicting feelings rising up inside. Like the way she treated him. The way she made him feel special, made him feel she cared. Then the way she kissed, the soft way she'd bring up her lips, the cushioning of them, the warm slow teasing lapping of her tongue. Jesus, she was something! Not like you—not at all. You're real. You're a person. She was just this thing, this hot teasing cunt. It's an ugly word but that's really what she was.
Cunt. Pure cunt
. Just oozing sex, oozing it out all over us. We saw her, felt her, kissed her, fucked her and then we were blind to everybody else. It wasn't that I ever consciously sat down and decided I was going to dump on you. There wasn't any choice. Suddenly she was there. I stopped thinking; everything was centered on my cock. She could lead me around and there wasn't anything I could do about it. We were her victims. That's the way I felt." He sighed. "So this guy, this creep in the bushes, he's the same way. He's staring in at her, gazing at her incredible angelic sleeping face, and he's thinking about all the things she's done to him, the way she's led him around, what a cock-teasing cunt she is, and all the pleasure he got out of it, too, and then the way she treated him afterwards, after she let him stick it in her a couple of times, the shitty way she made him feel. And he feels like such an asshole now, and what the hell, he asks himself, what the hell am I doing out here creeping around her
cunty
cottage, hiding in the shrubs at night, gazing in on her—I mean what kind of weird power does she have over me anyway?
Why am I doing this? Why am I being such a jerk?
And then something happens. He starts getting really mad. He starts hating her because she's turned him into such a jerk, and there's nothing he can do about it. And the worst part, the part that hurts the worst, is that he knows he's acting like an asshole, and if he knows it then, he knows, everybody else knows it, too, and it's all her fault, it's all the fault of that fucking little cunt in there. So he starts to move in. He's not thinking 'I'm going to murder the bitch.' No, nothing like that. It's not a conscious, premeditated thing. It just starts happening to him, this weird crazy blend of fury and lust and lust for blood. Maybe he thinks he's just going to pounce on her. Like he's thinking 'I'm going in there and rape her. I'm going to fuck the shit out of her, then I'm going to slap her around a little and walk out of there and that'll be the end of it. Then I'll be free.' Maybe that's what's in his head—I don't know. Maybe he just wants to scare her or something innocent like that. Anyway he starts in, and he's still got the shears in his hand, and he's not thinking anymore, just crazy with this wild lust. Then before he knows it he's standing over her, and he can't control it anymore. It gets too powerful —I don't know why. Maybe the anger just gets too big. Something happens, though—something snaps for sure. Instead of his cock he plunges at her with the shears, and then it's all confused, he doesn't know what he's doing. It's just blind rage, hatred, lust, the whole bit combined, and he stabs her—again, and again, and again—"