Dead Girl Blues Read online

  Enough.

  I was long done with the life of the homicidal rover. Increasingly, I found it hard to imagine myself in that role. And I wanted nothing so much as to establish myself as the person I would hope others would believe me to be.

  Is that too abstract?

  Let’s try again. I wanted my fellows—my neighbors, my fellow Rotarians, my business associates, my clientele—to see me as a quiet but sociable middle-class gentleman, a tad conservative in politics and demeanor and dress, indeed a pillar of the established order.

  And, more to the point, I didn’t want it to be an act. I wanted genuinely to be that person.

  So I wanted a wife. Children. A house—it didn’t have to be very grand, but ought to be an attractive and welcoming house, nicely landscaped, with flower beds and a well-kept lawn.

  The dates I had—dinner and a movie, more often than not—started out as façade and changed without my conscious intent into auditions. Before I even knew it, I was looking for a woman to join me in that cozy little house, someone to plant bulbs in the garden while I raked the lawn. Once I realized as much, I understood why I rarely saw any of the women a second time, and none of them more than twice.

  They were pleasant company, presentable and even attractive. Most had been married at some point, though a few had not, but I had the feeling throughout that none of them would be averse to a trip to the altar, should the right man be so inclined.

  Or a trip to bed, for that matter. More than one evening concluded with an invitation to come in for a cup of coffee. More than one woman managed to find an excuse to touch my arm or the back of my hand, at once establishing intimacy and inviting further intimacy.

  I left the invitations unaccepted, and hoped I managed to seem oblivious to what was on offer. “Oh, I had too much coffee earlier,” I might say. Or otherwise invent a reason why I had to go home.

  And did I end such evenings by casting my dinner partners in fantasies? Curiously, I did not. Most evenings I read myself to sleep, and with something far less inflammatory than my books on Ed and Ted and their fellows. An English mystery, perhaps, or one of those enthusiastic volumes that would tell you how to grow your business by visualizing success, or developing a positive attitude, or making a list each evening of five steps you’d taken that day to bring you closer to your goals.

  Whatever they might be.

  LOUELLA SHIPLEY.

  She was a customer at the store, and the first time I spoke with her—the first time I remember—was when she bought a pressure cooker. I was ringing up the sale when she said, “For the rhubarb.”

  “For the rhubarb?”

  “Oh, did I actually say that out loud? It was running through my mind, and I guess it ran out my mouth, too. I’m sorry.”

  There was no need to keep the conversation going, but I did. “Now you have to tell me about the rhubarb.”

  “My grandmother grew it in her garden,” she said. “In a shady spot way at the back. Do you know what it looks like?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Deep green leaves and dark red stems. The leaves are supposed to be poisonous.”

  “Supposed to be?”

  “Well,” she said, “I can’t swear to their toxicity. I never ate one.”

  “And a good thing, from what I hear.”

  “And I never knew anyone who ate one, or even heard of anyone who ate one. But all the books warn against eating rhubarb leaves.”

  “All the books?”

  “Not Peter Rabbit,” she said. “Or The Power of Positive Thinking. Or—well, I could go on.”

  “I imagine you could.”

  “All the books that mention rhubarb,” she said, “warn you about eating the leaves.”

  “Are there many books that mention rhubarb?”

  “Cookbooks. And gardening books. It’s very easy to grow.”

  “And easy to cook?”

  “As long as you remember to get rid of the leaves.”

  “Because they’re poisonous.”

  “Allegedly poisonous,” she said. “It’s the oxalic acid that makes them dangerous. Of course spinach contains oxalic acid, and beet greens, and swiss chard, and, oh, a good many vegetables.”

  “Several of which I’ve eaten,” I said. “And lived to tell the tale.”

  “But no rhubarb leaves?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Wise of you. It’s the high concentration of oxalic acid in rhubarb leaves that makes them lethal. If indeed they are.”

  If there had been a line at the register, the conversation would have long since come to an end. But there was no one within fifty feet of us, and neither of us seemed at a loss for words.

  I hefted the pressure cooker, still in its box. The manufacturer was West Bend. I’ve no idea why I remember that.

  “Rhubarb,” I said.

  “Granny’s secret. I assume you’ve had rhubarb at one time or another.”

  “Mostly in pie.”

  “Rhubarb pie.”

  “And strawberry-rhubarb pie. And once or twice as a side dish.”

  She nodded. “It’s like applesauce,” she said, “except it’s completely different. One thing, though. It’s green.”

  “While applesauce is—”

  “Oh, forget applesauce,” she said. “I don’t know why I mentioned applesauce. Rhubarb is red when you pick it, or buy it at the market. Green leaves, of course, but forget the leaves.”

  “Forgotten. Along with the applesauce.”

  “When you cook rhubarb, it sometimes winds up green. I’ve no idea why.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not, but there’s a point to it. My grandmother’s rhubarb was always red when she brought it to the table, and can you guess her secret?”

  “She made it in a pressure cooker.”

  Her eyes widened. “How on earth did you know that?”

  “Just a lucky guess.”

  “Well, I’m impressed.”

  She took her wallet from her purse, counted out bills for the pressure cooker. I said, “Would you like to have dinner with me this evening?”

  Did it come out sounding rehearsed? It may well have. I’d been running it through my mind for several minutes, trying out different arrangements of the words.

  “I’d love to,” she said, without hesitation. Then she said, “Oh, you mean at a restaurant.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Not ordinarily,” she said, “but my regular sitter is recovering from what I’m not supposed to know is breast enhancement surgery. There are others I could call, but it might be tricky on short notice. Oh!”

  “Oh?”

  “Come over to my place. That way I won’t need a sitter, will I?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I’ll cook,” she said. “I’ll make rhubarb.”

  SHE DIDN’T MAKE rhubarb. I don’t remember what she did make, and didn’t really pay all that much attention to the food. I’m sure it was good, because cooking was something she was good at.

  Putting me at ease was another.

  She was easy to be with, easy to look at, easy to envision as a wife and partner. I don’t suppose she was a beautiful woman, not model-beautiful or starlet-pretty, but she was certainly attractive. Looking at her, I felt no urge to fix this or change that. I found her perfectly acceptable just the way she was.

  After dinner she poured us glasses of iced tea—neither of us wanted coffee—and we sat on the front porch in straight-backed rocking chairs, sipping our tea. We talked, even as we’d done throughout dinner, and when the conversation eased up we shared the silence. The time when we didn’t talk felt oddly more intimate than when we did.

  She was thirty-two, the widowed mother of Alden, a nine-year-old boy, who thought he was old enough to stay home alone. “I’m proud of him for thinking so,” she said, “but not daft enough to indulge him.”

  She’d married at twenty-three, given birth at twenty-five
. Her husband, three years her senior, had a congenital heart condition that nobody knew about, and died in his sleep less than a month after his son’s second birthday.

  “I woke up, “she said, “and he didn’t.”

  A rising insurance agent, Duane Shipley had been his own best customer, as members of his profession often were. She received enough money so that she was able to pay off the mortgage on their modest house, because she liked the idea of owning her home free and clear. She put what was left over in a mutual fund and got a dividend check every month. It wasn’t a lot, but it helped, and her expenses were low.

  And she worked. As a substitute teacher early on, but after she paid for child care she barely came out ahead, and she wanted to be home with her son. So she taught herself bookkeeping, let her friends know she was looking for clients, and it wasn’t long before she had all the work she wanted.

  “And the bookkeeper is the one person who never has to worry about getting paid,” she said, “since she’s the one who writes the checks.”

  I told her a little about myself, and most of what I told her was true. A little about my family, a little about my childhood. I told her I’d had a love affair that ended badly, and it left me just wanting to get away. “So I got in the car and headed east,” I said, “and I’d get to a town and find work, but before I was anywhere near settled I’d get the urge for going.”

  “I always liked that song.”

  “ ‘But I never seem to go.’ Except as soon as I got the urge I would act on it. Pack my bags, get in my car, and look for the next place.”

  “Which turned out to be Lima.”

  “Eventually,” I said. “Don’t ask me why I stayed here.”

  “Is it a sensitive subject?”

  “No, but it’s a question I don’t have the answer to. I stuck around, and before I knew it I was settling in and putting down roots. I guess whatever made a nomad out of me used itself up and lost its force. Whatever the explanation, I never did get the urge for going.”

  “And when you do?”

  I took a moment to look at her. “No,” I said. “That’s not going to happen.”

  HAD I FALLEN in love?

  Hard to say.

  When I left her house that night, I did so with the certain knowledge that this was the woman I was going to marry. For a while now I’d been shopping for a wife, but not in any kind of desperate way. The dates I had were auditions of a sort, in that I would imagine each dinner companion as a marriage partner, and knew before the dessert course arrived that the woman across the table from me was not the one.

  Louella was entirely different. I was stimulated by her presence, and at the same time I was able to relax in her company. Driving home from her house that first night, I found myself imagining being her husband. Coming home from work, sitting down at the dinner table. Being a father to her son.

  I hadn’t even met him yet, and I was picturing myself as his father. Alden Shipley—or would I adopt him? He’d never known his father, and if his mother was going to become Louella Thompson, then why shouldn’t he be Alden Thompson?

  How eager I seemed to be to pass on a name that was not my own in the first place.

  AND SO I courted Louella Shipley. Except the verb suggests a campaign which one might seek to win, and looking back I can see that no such campaign was ever required. From that first evening at her house, it was clear to both of us that the future was essentially preordained. By the time I drove away and she headed upstairs to her bed, we had already become a couple.

  And yet the courtship proceeded at a measured pace, which is to say that its sexual aspect inched forward in a positively Victorian fashion. And this was not her doing but mine. I don’t know that I could have taken her to her bedroom that first night, but it’s not inconceivable; we’d bonded, we were taking delight in each other’s company, and if I had put an arm around her and given her a kiss and suggested we go upstairs, I’m not sure she would have denied me.

  But I can’t speak with assurance, because of course I did no such thing. It was our third or fourth date before I kissed her, and that was not without calculation. We were on her porch, and she was about to go in and pay the babysitter, whom I would then drive home. So we kissed warmly, and I tasted the sweetness of her mouth, and then we had to let go of each other. I waited, and she went into the house, and the designated babysitter, a high school girl liberally dusted with freckles, came out with a backpack slung over her shoulder.

  I drove her home, and then drove myself home. And called Louella, to tell her how much I’d enjoyed the evening, and that I’d driven straight home after dropping Jennifer, because I was exhausted and had an early day tomorrow. And made arrangements for us to try a new Mexican restaurant two nights hence.

  And so on.

  IT SHOULDN’T BE hard to figure out why I was taking my time. Not because I thought it was essential to my long-range purpose. It may be that there are fair ladies who are best won with a faint heart, but Louella was not one of them. She was plainly waiting for me to take her to bed, and even signaled as much when she rested her hand on mine at the dinner table, or gazed at me in a certain way.

  What held me back?

  Fear, of course. I was afraid. Not of Louella but of myself, of what I might be capable of, of what I already knew myself to be capable of.

  Suppose I had the urge to strike her. Suppose my hands, quite of their own accord, found their way around her throat. Suppose everything I did served only to increase my excitement.

  Suppose I killed her. Suppose I fucked her dead body.

  I had to force myself to think the thoughts, powerless though I was to avoid them. And they turned my stomach.

  You are not the man you used to be, I told myself.

  An inner voice replied: The leopard doesn’t change its spots.

  And so I waited.

  WAITING WAS EASY. I’d been waiting for years.

  Cindy Raschmann, you see, was the last woman I’d been with.

  I suppose that sounds difficult, and unlikely in the bargain. But the last time I’d had sex with a partner, she’d been dead. Dead at my hands. Pure luck had enabled me to get away, and more luck had led me far away from my prior life.

  And what a transformation the years had seen! I, who’d been a drifter, had turned myself into a businessman, with a credit rating and money in the bank, with three suits and as many sport jackets in my closet, with memberships in a couple of service clubs and an upscale gym.

  I was free and clear now. At worst, the Bakersfield police would have written off Cindy’s murder as a cold case, and one that could only get colder with every passing year. Or they may very well have listed it as solved; men in California do keep on killing women, and now and then one gets caught for it, and who knows how many unsolved murders get conveniently if incorrectly attributed to the son of a bitch? And what could the sorry bastard do about it? No, no, that’s one cunt I never laid a hand on. She’s a fucking redhead, right? What kind of a man would fuck a redhead?

  Yeah, right.

  So I’d long since ceased worrying that someone with a badge was going to turn up on my doorstep. I wasn’t afraid of the Bakersfield cops, or the FBI, or Interpol.

  The past was not the problem.

  The problem was what might happen . . . if I allowed anything to happen.

  The prospect of losing everything—her life, my reinvented life—seemed to me to be a real possibility, and a greater risk than I felt prepared to take. Better to end evenings with a hug and a kiss, and head for home.

  STILL, THAT COULD only go on for so long. The embraces, light though they were, stirred me. Back in my own apartment, in my own bed, I’d find myself with thoughts of Louella. Sexual urges rose in me more strongly than they had in longer than I could remember. I found myself imagining her in my arms, in my bed, and I was unwilling to allow myself the fantasies for fear that they would turn violent.

  It seems curious, thinking of it now. I was afraid
to imagine having sex with Louella for fear of the turns my imagination might take.

  Impossible to sustain such a state forever. How long before Louella came to the same conclusion as Myron? He’d assumed I was gay and made a pass. If she made the same assumption . . .

  Enough. In the morning, on the way to work, I stopped at a pharmacy and bought a packet of condoms.

  DINNER AT HER house. I brought wine. Alden joined us at table, and in front of the television set until his bedtime. Louella went upstairs to tuck him in, and I moved from a chair to the couch, and when she returned she joined me there.

  We kissed, held each other. There was a point when she seemed to be on the verge of inviting me upstairs, but she didn’t, and I guessed she was afraid I might decline.

  And so, at a convenient moment, I told her that she’d never shown me the rest of the house. Something in her face relaxed, and without a word she took my hand and led me to the stairs.

  Her body was very nice. She was built, as they say, more for comfort than for speed. Lovely breasts, full hips, just a bit of a belly. I kissed her and stroked her, and I liked the feel of her and the smell of her and the taste of her, and it wasn’t long before I was hard and she was wet, and I entered her.

  I’d forgotten about the condom, and when I remembered she read my mind before I could draw away. “I’m on the pill,” she said.

  There was something inexplicably exciting about the way she said that. I fucked her with long probing strokes, slowly at first, then faster and with more urgency, and a sense of surpassing relief came upon me. This was going to be all right after all.

  She had an orgasm. My mind slipped off into the past, or perhaps into an alternate present, and I was with some imaginary woman, some fusion of Cindy and Carolyn and God knows who else, and I cried out and came.

  AFTERWARD WE WENT downstairs. There must have been six or eight ounces of wine left in the bottle, enough for each of us to have a small glass. I’d dressed and she had put on a robe, and I went home after we’d finished the wine.