Dead Girl Blues Read online

  More by Lawrence Block

  NOVELS

  A DIET OF TREACLE • AFTER THE FIRST DEATH • ARIEL • BORDERLINE • CAMPUS TRAMP • CINDERELLA SIMS • COWARD’S KISS • DEADLY HONEYMOON • GETTING OFF • THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART • GRIFTER’S GAME • KILLING CASTRO • LUCKY AT CARDS • NOT COMIN’ HOME TO YOU • RANDOM WALK • RONALD RABBIT IS A DIRTY OLD MAN • SMALL TOWN • THE SPECIALISTS • STRANGE EMBRACE/69 BARROW STREET • SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS • THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL • YOU COULD CALL IT MURDER • THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES • DEAD GIRL BLUES

  THE BERNIE RHODENBARR MYSTERIES

  BURGLARS CAN’T BE CHOOSERS • THE BURGLAR IN THE CLOSET • THE BURGLAR WHO LIKED TO QUOTE KIPLING • THE BURGLAR WHO STUDIED SPINOZA • THE BURGLAR WHO PAINTED LIKE MONDRIAN • THE BURGLAR WHO TRADED TED WILLIAMS • THE BURGLAR WHO THOUGHT HE WAS BOGART • THE BURGLAR IN THE LIBRARY • THE BURGLAR IN THE RYE • THE BURGLAR ON THE PROWL • THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS • THE BURGLAR IN SHORT ORDER

  THE MATTHEW SCUDDER NOVELS

  THE SINS OF THE FATHERS • TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE • IN THE MIDST OF DEATH • A STAB IN THE DARK • EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE • WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES • OUT ON THE CUTTING EDGE • A TICKET TO THE BONEYARD • A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE • A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES • THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD • A LONG LINE OF DEAD MEN • EVEN THE WICKED • EVERYBODY DIES • HOPE TO DIE • ALL THE FLOWERS ARE DYING • A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF • THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC • A TIME TO SCATTER STONES

  KELLER’S GREATEST HITS

  HIT MAN • HIT LIST • HIT PARADE • HIT & RUN • HIT ME • KELLER’S FEDORA

  THE ADVENTURES OF EVAN TANNER

  THE THIEF WHO COULDN’T SLEEP • THE CANCELED CZECH • TANNER’S TWELVE SWINGERS • TWO FOR TANNER • TANNER’S TIGER • TANNER’S VIRGIN • ME TANNER, YOU JANE • TANNER ON ICE

  THE AFFAIRS OF CHIP HARRISON

  NO SCORE • CHIP HARRISON SCORES AGAIN • MAKE OUT WITH MURDER • THE TOPLESS TULIP CAPER

  COLLECTED SHORT STORIES

  SOMETIMES THEY BITE • LIKE A LAMB TO SLAUGHTER • SOME DAYS YOU GET THE BEAR • ONE NIGHT STANDS AND LOST WEEKENDS • ENOUGH ROPE • CATCH AND RELEASE • DEFENDER OF THE INNOCENT • RESUME SPEED AND OTHER STORIES

  BOOKS FOR WRITERS

  WRITING THE NOVEL FROM PLOT TO PRINT • TELLING LIES FOR FUN & PROFIT• SPIDER, SPIN ME A WEB • WRITE FOR YOUR LIFE • THE LIAR’S BIBLE • THE LIAR’S COMPANION • AFTERTHOUGHTS

  WRITTEN FOR PERFORMANCE

  TILT! (EPISODIC TELEVISION) • HOW FAR? (ONE-ACT PLAY) • MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS (FILM)

  ANTHOLOGIES EDITED

  DEATH CRUISE • MASTER’S CHOICE • OPENING SHOTS • MASTER’S CHOICE 2 • SPEAKING OF LUST • OPENING SHOTS 2 • SPEAKING OF GREED • BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS • GANGSTERS, SWINDLERS, KILLERS, & THIEVES • MANHATTAN NOIR • MANHATTAN NOIR 2 • DARK CITY LIGHTS • IN SUNLIGHT OR IN SHADOW • AT HOME IN THE DARK • FROM SEA TO STORMY SEA • THE DARKLING HALLS OF IVY

  NON-FICTION

  STEP BY STEP • GENERALLY SPEAKING • THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES • HUNTING BUFFALO WITH BENT NAILS

  Contents

  Part 1

  A man walks into a bar.

  Part 2

  A man walks into a bar.

  Part 3

  He couldn’t have been more sympathetic, or more apologetic for having read grief as forbidden desire.

  Part 4

  Waiting was easy. I’d been waiting for years.

  Part 5

  “Dad, I was thinking.”

  Part 6

  Christmas came, and Alden’s gift to me was a pair of driving gloves—which, I couldn’t help thinking, . . .

  Part 7

  There were perhaps a dozen customers, all of them from age groups a good deal younger than my own.

  Part 8

  “Dad? Have you got a minute?”

  Part 9

  Alden Wade Shipley Thompson.

  Part 10

  We talked for a long time. At one point she got up and showered, . . .

  Other Works by Lawrence Block

  About the Author

  Dead Girl Blues

  Lawrence Block

  A Lawrence Block Production

  DEAD GIRL BLUES

  Copyright © 2020 Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover and Interior by QA Productions

  For PAUL VLACHOS

  A MAN WALKS into a bar.

  Isn’t that the way it generally starts? Except there’s something essentially urban about the word. A neighborhood bar, a dive bar, a downtown bar. A sleek hotel bar. An airport bar, to curb pre-flight jitters. A commuters’ bar, conveniently located right across the street from the train station.

  This was more what you’d call a roadhouse, maybe a mile outside of the city limits of Bakersfield. That’s in California, or at least this one was. There may be other Bakersfields in other states.

  I suppose you could look it up.

  PICTURE A SQUAT building of concrete block, set on a one-acre lot. Plenty of room for parking. Plenty of neon, but I couldn’t tell you what it said.

  Country and Western music on the jukebox. Guys with Stetsons, women with big hair. Everybody wearing boots.

  I walked in and my pulse quickened. No hat on my head, no boots on my feet, but I looked like I belonged. Still wearing my work clothes—dark navy pants, a matching shirt with a name embroidered in yellow script on the breast pocket.

  A bad job of embroidering, so the name was hard to read, but if you gave it some study you could see that it read Buddy. Not my name, not what anybody ever called me, except the occasional stranger who wanted me to move my car. The shirt had been left behind by the last man who’d had the job at the Sunoco station. I didn’t mind. It fit me okay, and if I was going to pump your gas I’d as soon answer to Buddy as to my own name.

  I went to the bar and ordered a beer. My usual order was Miller’s, Miller’s High Life, but it seems to me I didn’t see it on the row of beer taps and ordered something else instead. Lone Star? Maybe.

  Whatever it was, the bartender brought it. Took my money, put my change on the top of the bar. A few years since anybody thought about carding me. I was what, 25? 26?

  I suppose I took a sip of beer. Then I looked around, and I saw her right away.

  Only person there who stayed with me. I couldn’t tell you if that bartender was old or young, fat or skinny. I couldn’t even say for sure that it wasn’t a barmaid. But I think it was probably a man. I think I’d have remembered otherwise.

  But maybe not.

  But the woman. Her hair, a medium brown with blond streaks, was the biggest thing about her. She was a little thing, with a slim figure. Wore a scoop-necked blouse and didn’t fill it out all that much. Tight jeans. High-heeled boots that maybe got her clear up to five-three.

  Drunk.

  “Buy you another of those?”

  She looked at my face, trying to figure out if she knew me. Then squinted at my pocket. “Hey, it’s Buddy,” she said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Who am I and why am I telling you all this?

  I am a man sitting at a laptop computer and tapping its keys, groping for the right words even as I work to keep my recollection in focus. I am the man in the present, observing and remembering, even as I am the man in the past, starring in my little drama.

  Who, then? And why?

  If I persist in this effort, and I
’m by no means certain that I will, those questions will be answered in the telling.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I HAD NO business buying her a drink, and the bartender had no business selling her one. She was already well-oiled.

  Well-oiled. Good term for it.

  She drank her drink. Was it a glass of wine? A mixed drink? I couldn’t tell you, any more than I could report on our conversation or say exactly how we got out of there. I’d parked at the farthest corner of the parking lot, and we were suddenly there and in the middle of an open-mouthed kiss.

  She’d been drinking wine. Red wine. I remember now. Her mouth tasted of it.

  I took hold of her butt, gave it a squeeze. Nice tight little ass. She reached for the front of my pants, held on to what she found there.

  Then we were in the car, kissing again, and then I keyed the ignition and got out of the lot.

  There was probably a lover’s lane nearby, there always is, but I was too new to the area to know where to look for it. But I took this road and that road, turning whenever the road I came to was narrower and lonelier than the one I was on, and without knowing where the hell I was I managed to find a place to park. A grassy patch a few yards off the road, unlit except for what came down from the sky.

  Was the moon full, or just a crescent? Was the sky clear enough to see it? You could look that up, too.

  A lot I don’t remember.

  And a lot she wouldn’t remember, because around the time I started driving, her eyes closed and she let the wine take her.

  She stirred when I cut the ignition, but didn’t wake up. I found a blanket in the trunk and spread it on the ground. It wasn’t clean, but it had to be more comfortable than the bare ground.

  Considerate of me. Always the gentleman.

  Neither of us had bothered with seatbelts. I opened the door on her side, gripped her under her arms, and drew her out of the car. I’d walked her halfway to the blanket before she came awake, and the look she gave me made it clear that she couldn’t remember ever laying eyes on me before.

  She said, “Who the hell are you?”

  “Buddy,” I might have said, but I’m not sure I did. I’d never learned her name and she’d forgotten mine, and it wasn’t my name in the first place. And I didn’t care about either of our names. I just wanted to get her down on the blanket and fuck her.

  Back in the roadhouse parking lot, I could have shoved her down on the blacktop and done her six ways and backwards, and she would have been fine with it. But that girl was gone, her place taken by a mean-mouthed bitch who wasn’t having any.

  What I thought: Oh, good.

  I grabbed her right shoulder with my left hand, and I made a fist of my right hand, and I hit her as hard as I could, hit her in the stomach, hit her maybe three inches north of her belly button, high enough up to keep from hurting my hand on her oversize belt buckle. Hit her in the solar plexus, I guess you’d call it.

  The breath went out of her and she doubled up. I thought she was about to puke, but she didn’t, and I hit her again with my closed fist, this time on the temple.

  Down and out.

  THIS IS WHERE a person would say, And then everything went black. Or maybe red, like looking at the world through blood.

  Or, And that’s the last thing I remember.

  Maybe they’re telling the truth, maybe everything goes black for them, maybe that’s really the last thing they remember.

  Different for me. You could say it’s the first thing I remember. Pulling into the roadhouse lot, ordering the beer, buying her the drink—those are hazy memories, filled in with my knowledge of what must have happened.

  But the minute the lights went out for her was the minute they came on for me.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Who are you and why am I telling you all this?

  Now that’s a subtly different question, isn’t it? A knee-jerk response might be that I’m writing this for myself, to illuminate a life for the man who has lived it all these years, and of course that’s true.

  But not the whole truth, not the sole truth. If I were the only intended audience, why relate and explain that which I already know? Why show off with turns of language?

  Why find oneself hesitating before uncomfortable revelations, only to steel oneself and write them down?

  And so I envision you, Dear Reader, without devoting too much energy to wondering who you might be. And this seems appropriate, in fact, because there’s every chance that what I’m writing will go forever unread. At the moment it’s no more than a string of electronic impulses, stowed somewhere on the laptop’s hard drive when I hit Save and stop for the day, summoned up anew when next I find the file again and open it.

  At the end of any session—or even in the middle, even right now if I make the choice—I have the option of dragging the file into the trash and sending it off to Pixel Heaven. But of course if I understand the technology correctly, Omar’s observation about the writing of the moving finger applies as well to anything one composes on a computer. “Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it . . .” It’s ineradicable.

  Still, I could remove the hard drive and take a hammer to it. I could chuck the whole laptop in the river.

  But assuming I don’t, and assuming I finish this and resign myself to its being read, who’ll be my reader? I don’t really know that. Someone in authority? Someone who knows me, even cares about me? Someone I care about?

  And, again, why am I telling you all this?

  Perhaps we’ll answer that together, you and I.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  SHE WASN’T UNCONSCIOUS for long. By the time I’d positioned her on the blanket and got her blouse unbuttoned, her eyes were open and she was looking at me. She was angry and she was terrified, in about equal parts.

  I was lying on top of her, and I was rock-hard, the blood pounding in my ears. I was trying to get her jeans down over her hips and she kept twisting, trying to get away from me, and this was at once exciting and infuriating.

  And I wanted to fuck her, and I would, but what I really wanted was to kill her. More than anything else, I wanted to kill her.

  I got my hands around her throat.

  Now her eyes went all the way wide. It seems to me they were blue, and they might have been, but I doubt there was enough light to tell.

  She knew what was coming. She tried to cry out but she couldn’t, she couldn’t make a sound, and I lay full length on top of her and felt her little body trying to move beneath me, and my hands tightened and I squeezed her throat with every bit of strength I had, and I watched her face throughout.

  And I got to see the light go out of her eyes.

  GOD, WHAT A feeling!

  It was like an orgasm of the mind. It was that feeling like when you come, but not in the genitals. I was still hard as granite, I was still desperate to penetrate her and empty myself into her, but in my mind I already felt something close to pure ecstasy.

  And now she was mine to use as I wanted. I yanked the boots off her feet. I got her out of her jeans, peeled her panties down and off, got rid of her blouse and bra.

  Sweet little tits. A flat stomach, and I dug my fingers into her solar plexus, where I’d struck her, but she was past feeling it.

  Past feeling anything.

  I forced my way inside of her and I fucked her, and she couldn’t have been hotter or more delicious if she’d been alive. No need to control her now, no need to keep her from crying out. No need to care what she thought of me.

  All I had to do was use her body to pleasure myself.

  IT’S NOT HARD to remember. In fact I probably remember it too well. I’ve gone over and over it in my mind, letting it play on the screen of my memory like a favorite movie.

  I do this not because I forget how it ends. I do it because the memory, like the occasion itself, is richly exciting. The past incident has become a present fantasy, still eliciting a sexual response, and like any fantasy one allows it to change form over time. One tries t
o improve it.

  Perhaps she cries out and begs. Perhaps, in an effort to save herself, she volunteers to provide oral sex; she’s good at it and one hesitates to make her stop, but it’s just so much better to wring her neck.

  And so on.

  But to trim the trimmings and hew to the truth, I fucked her dead body until I reached an orgasm more powerful than any I had ever experienced. I collapsed on top of her, still inside her, and I was unconscious for two minutes or twenty, and when I awoke I was still in her and still hard and, yes, God help me, I fucked her again.

  AND THEN, FINALLY, I realized what I’d done. I’d turned something alive into something dead. I’d taken this life, an innocent life—and whatever experience she’d had in her years hadn’t changed her essential innocence.

  A man walks into a bar, and an hour later a girl is dead.

  Now what?

  The urge for self-preservation took over. There was a shovel in the trunk of my car, and in my earlier fantasies, all unfulfilled, I sometimes used it to dig a grave. But now I rejected it as soon as it came to mind. It would take hours, and I didn’t have the time. This was a lonely stretch of road, but it wasn’t the dark side of the moon, and a couple of cars had swept past me while I lay on her and in her.

  She deserved a proper Christian burial, and sooner or later she’d get one, but not now and not from me. I stood up and looked around, and on the other side of the road was a wooded stretch. I picked her up and slung her over my shoulder and crossed the road, and no headlights came swooping out of the darkness while I did so, and then I was in the woods, visible only to owls.

  Did an owl hoot? Once, but only in my imagination, on one of the occasions when I replayed the fantasy. But not when I was there, with her weight on my shoulder. A body is said to be heavier after death, though I can’t think why this should be so, but dead or alive she was short and slender and didn’t weigh very much. I walked twenty or thirty yards into the woods and set her down gently, placing her on her back with her arms at her sides and her legs together.