Serpent's Kiss (5 page)

    "I know."

    "Just because I'm two months behind in my rent and because Gil pawned my colour TV set…" Gil was her ex-boyfriend, a would-be actor.

    "He did?"

    "Yeah. He needed a new suit for an audition."

    "Tell him you want your money or your set right now."

    "Can't."

    "Why?"

    "He's moved in with some new girl named Ricky."

    He smiled with magnificent malice. "Gil looks like the kind of guy who'd end up with a Ricky."

    She slumped in her chair again.

    He said, "You all right, Holland?"

    She said, "Any cut in pay?"

    "In the
On the Town
thing?"

    "Yeah."

    "Huh-uh."

    She sighed. "God, I'll have to take it, won't I?"

    "If your finances are in their usual state of disrepair, yeah."

    She sighed even more this time. " 'And on Friday evening, ladies, don't forget our city's first all nude bake-off.' "

    He laughed and added his own lewd comment.

    "I'm too goddamned old, Walter? I can't believe that. Aren't I attractive anymore?"

    He smiled and reached across the desk. She put her hand in his. "You're a damn good looking woman, Holland, and you know it. But these consultants-" He shook his head.

    She thought back to her audition reel. She automatically updated it every six months, which is what she'd been doing earlier. Now there was a good reason to box up several dubs and send them out. She'd just been demoted and was lucky she hadn't been outright fired.

    "Too old?" she said again, her ego and her self-esteem both reeling at once.

    He grinned, looking as he always did when he grinned, like a sarcastic little kid. "Haggard, Holland. Absolutely haggard."

    

    

    When Chris got back to her cubicle in the newsroom, one of the Channel 3 sales reps was standing there putting the moves on one of the young studio production women. Like most TV reps, his high opinion of himself oozed from every pore in his body. Also like most TV reps, he was chunky, not very bright, and assertive enough to make most people cringe. O'Sullivan hated TV reps. They were always coming to him and seeing if he couldn't somehow plug one of their clients on the news show somehow; or if one of their clients was involved in some bad publicity, if O'Sullivan couldn't go easy on the guy. All this was particularly galling to news directors because station general managers were invariably chosen from the ranks of reps-meaning the same stupidity, the same used car dealer ethics that kept them in money as reps had now got them ensconced in the general manager's chair.

    The TV industry was jam packed with former reps who'd taken over the management reins. This said a lot about why the level of programming was so low. (O'Sullivan's favourite joke was, "Know what the three lowest forms of life are? Wife beaters, child abusers, and TV reps." He never tired of telling this particular gag.)

    Chris went to her desk and tried to read the morning paper. Thanks to her tears, she almost smeared the type. Also thanks to her tears, her lower lip was trembling. She sat scrunched up tight to her desk so nobody could see her face. When somebody would walk by and say good morning, she'd mutter something that sounded like
"Mmwffffr"
and hoped they wouldn't ask her to translate it.

    She sat this way for fifteen minutes. Or mostly she did. Every other minute or so she'd have this little flurry of optimism and then she'd sit up straight, shoulders thrown back, and make a fist and say (to herself) Fuck TV news consultants; they're little no dick no brain wimps anyway. (She'd recently read one of those books that told you how to
Take Charge of Your Life
, and this was one of the 'Seven Dramatic Lessons' the back cover copy had promised-Lesson Three to be exact, 'Getting Pissed and Getting Even.')

    And then the phone rang.

    Her first inclination was not to pick up.

    She'd just sound sniffly anyway.

    So she let it ring.

    Six, seven, eight times.

    "Jesus Christ, Holland, are you fucking deaf or what?" somebody shouted over her cubicle.

    Those were the dulcet tones of Mike Ramsey, Ace Reporter. He sat in the cubicle next to Chris's. He was living proof that men indeed had periods. Chris estimated that Ramsey was on the rag approximately twenty-nine days per month.

    So she picked up.

    "Chris Holland. Channel 3 News."

    There was a slight pause, then an intelligent-sounding female voice said, "I guess I don't know how to start exactly."

    "Start?"

    "With my story."

    "I see."

    "So is it all right?"

    "Ma'am?"

    "If I just start in, I mean."

    "Sure."

    "It's about a murder."

    And right then and right there, Chris forgot about all the morning's misery.

    "A murder?" She was drooling.

    "Several murders actually."

    "Several murders?"

    
My God-several murders!

    "But the man they accused-he wasn't really responsible."

    "He wasn't?"

    There was a pause again. "I'd really like to see you in person."

    "In person?"

    "I couldn't make it till this evening. And even then I'm not absolutely sure about that."

    "Ma'am?" Chris said.

    "Yes."

    "Is this all on the level?"

    "Why, of course."

    "You know something about the man they accused of these murders?"

    "Yes," the woman said.

    "Would you tell me who this man was?"

    "Of course. He was my brother."

    "I see."

    "Do you know where the Starlight Room is?"

    "In Shaffer's Mall?"

    "Right."

    "Sure."

    "Could you meet me there at six-thirty?" the woman asked. "Of course."

    "In the lounge. We could have a drink."

    "That would be nice," Chris said. Then, "Oh, wait."

    "Yes?"

    "How come you called me?"

    The woman laughed softly, sounding almost embarrassed. "I like Channel 3 news best and I… I guess I just like your face. You don't look like a Dallas cheerleader. And that's nice."

    "Believe me, there are days when I wish I did look like a Dallas cheerleader."

    
Like when no dick no brain TV news consultants are conducting focus groups,
she thought.

    The woman was back to sounding sombre again. "Tonight then. About six-thirty."

    "About six-thirty. Right."

    After she hung up, Chris called over the top of her cubicle wall, "Hey, Ramsey."

    "Yeah?" he shouted back. "What?"

    "Thanks for telling me to answer my phone."

    "Huh?"

    "Never mind."

    She sat there exultant. Several murders, she kept saying to herself over and over again, thoughts of herself as the On the Town girl fading fast.

    Several murders.

    Wasn't life grand sometimes?

    

    

    

    

    ROB HAD ALWAYS FELT that he would have been more popular in his college days if he'd been a Democrat. Unfortunately, he had inherited his political outlook from his father, a large, blunt Swedish immigrant who had come to these shores with nothing, and who now owned two department stores. Rob's conservatism came naturally.

    Rob entered college just as the student movement of the late sixties was beginning to take over campuses. His first night in the dorm, he watched the ROTC building on the east edge of campus go up in flames. With all the smoke and the screaming and the sirens, the university resembled a war zone. Rob watched all this from his window. He was afraid to venture out.

    Rob's political opinions didn't change until senior year, which was when he met Lisa. She was a dazzling blonde from New York. She was everything Rob wasn't-Catholic, sophisticated, and unafraid to try new experiences. While hardly a heavy doper, she did introduce good ol' Lutheran Rob to the pleasures of marijuana (or 'Mary Jane' as she mockingly liked to call it), New Orleans blues, dawn as seen from the dewy crest of Stratterhom Park, oral sex (the notion of a clitoris had pretty much been an abstraction to him), and Democratic politics. Lisa's father was a congressman who had been a good friend of Adlai Stevenson's, a man who had always reminded Rob of a greatly respected child molester.

    Lisa changed virtually everything about Rob. His hair got long, his grade average went from a 3.8 to a 2.1, he started wearing the same shirt two days in a row, he started seeing the humour in the Three Stooges, he began experiencing vastly shifting mood changes depending on how things were going with Lisa, and he became a Democrat.

    He even went to one SDS meeting with Lisa, though when he met the leader afterward he was totally put off. The leader- a fierce, bearded, crazed looking kid who carried a Bowie knife in his belt-complained that "since I joined SDS, my old man has cut my monthly allowance in half." The kid saw no humour in this. Had Lenin or Trotsky got allowances while attempting to overthrow their government? While Rob's opinion of mainstream liberalism had changed, his feelings about campus radicals hadn't. They still seemed like self indulgent children to him.

    Lisa had changed one other thing about Rob: his plans for the future. His father had just assumed that after college, Rob would come back to Minneapolis and start work at one of the department stores, learning the business from the lowliest position to the most exalted. Eventually, of course, Rob's father would pass the management of the stores over to Rob.

    But as graduation approached, Rob began to share Lisa's fantasy of heading for Mexico after college, and "living near the water somewhere and having lots of dope and getting away from all the hypocritical bullshit in this country. You know?"

    So those were their plans anyway. But then Lisa met Michael.

    Michael Blumenthal was a federal civil rights lawyer who was at the university giving a lecture to pre-law students. At this time, Lisa's plans-after returning from her eyrie in Mexico- were to become a lawyer. So she was in Michael Blumenthal's audience.

    As she later told it to Rob, she just couldn't help what happened. There seemed to be an inevitability about her reaction to his dark good looks, his curious mixing of anger and compassion, and his intense desire to make the world a better place. After the lecture, she went up and introduced herself, and they became so engrossed in their conversation about his civil rights work in the South that they continued it in the student union over coffee, and then in a little bar several blocks away over beers, and finally in her apartment where, after pizza and ungodly amounts of marijuana, they climbed into her rumpled bed and made love.

    And three days later ran off to Missouri to elope.

    She told Rob all this the day after she got back from Missouri. She had only two weeks to go till graduation and then she and Michael were moving back to New York, him working for the government and her going to Columbia.

    She hoped Rob would understand, crazy as it all was. She was sure Rob would find the exact right woman for himself very soon now because there wasn't anybody sweeter or more deserving anywhere on the planet than Rob Lindstrom and she'd never forget him or all the wonderful times they'd had.

    But right now she had to run. (A quick wet kiss on the cheek- the goddamn cheek-and then she was gone from his life forever.)

    Just like that.

    So Rob went home to his father's stores. He dealt with the 'Lisa problem' as his mother had taken to calling it by reverting to his former self (at least externally). He cut his hair, he began wearing ties and sports jackets again, he spent Sunday afternoons watching
Firing Line
with William Buckley and savouring the way Buckley thrust and parried and ultimately destroyed his liberal guests, and he dated any number of young women who were eminently right for him in most of the ways that mattered to his parents. He tried to convince himself that he had survived something that more resembled an illness than love.

    His sister, Emily, was his only confidante. Only Emily knew what Rob was really going through. The killer depressions. The crying jags. The inability to eat (or at least hold anything down for long). The disinterest in sex.

    He would lie for hours on his bed, going over and over his relationship with Lisa, trying to determine if he'd done anything wrong to cause her running off with Michael that way. He hated her and loved her, missed her and never wanted to see her again, lusted after her and wanted to beat her to death with his fists.

    And then came the night when he took the Norpramin.

    Dr. Steiner, the shrink whom Emily had secretly arranged for him to see (Rob's father seemed to believe that shrinks were part of the communist conspiracy he saw evidence of everywhere), had given Rob pills that worked as both antidepressants and sleeping pills. He was to take three of them at bedtime.

    This one particular night, Rob took sixty.

    Emily, out on a late date, decided to stop by his room on her way to the late night bath she liked to linger in, and when she got no response, she decided he was asleep and she'd go in and give him a little sisterly kiss.

    She found him sprawled on the floor of his room and barely breathing.