Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (12 page)

Fear is an aphrodisiac
, she thought.

What are you afraid of, Liza?

Testing … testing. You ask your questions and you wait for answers.

Darkness. Rustling sounds in the bushes. Scrape-scrape of trowel in cellar. Find the common denominator! Okay. The unknown threat.

So … the less you know the more you fear? Not so. If I stood on the sidewalk while a safe was falling down toward my head, I wouldn’t be afraid, even though a second later I’d be crushed like a stepped-on tomato.

Let’s say then, Incomplete Knowledge. You know something is falling but you don’t know what it is? YES!

And the dreams dated from the beginning of her treatment of Dan Bollinger. The thought caused a sprouting of goose pimples on her body. She ran her hand up her forearm and felt the stiff, risen hairs tickle her palm.

She carried her drink into the living room and sat down on the couch. She was supposed to have dropped her investigation after the staffing, but her curiosity had been aroused. Never, in any of the studies she had read, had one twin been found to have a psychosis which was not shared, at least partly, by the other twin. With Dan back at the county jail, it seemed logical to look at Debra. But Debra was never at home in her three-story brick house with its four white pillars in front. Neither were her children or husband. Easy to explain, though, in view of the tourists who came during the first week, their eyes like flypaper, sticky and wet. Elizabeth felt a loathing toward them, and it annoyed her when people thought she was one of them. The Bollinger family doctor refused to let her in until she showed him her hospital ID. But then he took her into his dim musty study, sat in a worn horsehair swivel chair, put his feet up on his ancient roll-top desk, and seemed to rock himself back into the past. “Ee-yusss. The Bollinger twins. Usually the male is born first. Possibly the extra weight of the penis drags the male down during nine months of being swished, gurgled and rocked in the same sac of fluid. But in this case it was the girl-child who first saw the light of day. If you ever got to know the two of them you wouldn’t find it hard to believe that Danny persuaded Debra to go out first and see what it was like. Danny never took risks. He used to
talk Debra into getting her shots first. He wanted to be sure it wouldn’t hurt …”

The schoolteacher had gold teeth in place of her canines. When she talked they flashed and reflected in her gold-rimmed spectacles. Mrs. Bass was retired, so Liza interviewed her at home, in her small studio apartment. “A strange girl. I never knew what to say to her. I often got the feeling she was smarter than Dan, but she didn’t want to outdo him. I don’t think it was fear. She was like a shadow, you never knew she was around until you saw Danny. The family had only one car, and Danny took Debra along on dates. Not many, a few. The boys dated her, once, twice, seldom more. If you asked why, they’d shuffle their feet and throw their hair back from their eyes and look off into the distance. Danny was a popular boy, but Debra was a loner. I don’t know how to describe exactly what it was about her …”

Liza tried to find some of their schooltime friends, but was met by a community-wide epidemic of amnesia. Nobody remembered being close to either of the twins. The drowning death of Debra’s playmate was another area where questions had earned her vague mumblings and foot shufflings. Colleen’s parents had moved away, nobody knew where.

A small town guards its own skeletons
.

She sipped her drink and looked at the telephone. Warm, reassuring human voices were locked up inside the gleaming beige-plastic body; a few quick twitches of the finger would bring her Jeff’s wit and breezy egotism. And what can I give him? A warm form to work out on. An exercise mat with boobs. A way of discharging his body electricity through the insertion of a simple fuze …

Well? So?

She got up and walked out through her kitchen, stepped out on the rear landing. Duplexes stretched away on either side, like chunks of gingerbread laid out in a row. On the asphalt parking apron four doors down, Jeff’s fiberglass sloop squatted on its four-wheeled trailer. Beside it gleamed the roof of his purple Mercedes. She wondered
if he was alone. Since the staffing he’d been eating lunch with the music therapist; to walk in and find Marilyn’s ash-blonde hair spread out on his pillow was a thrill she didn’t need …

He picked up the phone on the third ring. “Jeff, I saw your light and wondered—are you entertaining?”

He laughed. “That’s a matter of opinion. Why don’t you come over and find out? There’s something I want to talk to you about, anyway.”

Jeff stood behind his homemade bar of split bamboo and fixed her a planter’s punch of dark Martinique rum, melted sugar, soda and a slice of lemon, with fresh grated nutmeg scumming the surface. She felt her tension uncoil as she watched his movements reflected in the time-fogged yellow mirror. Old postcards had been stuck into the frame, along with photos of seafaring types. A fan blew on beaded portieres, and she had a feeling she could turn and see sinister men in white linen suits sitting at little round tables …

“They identified another body today,” he said.

Her stomach tightened convulsively. The prickly, musty taste of death had been lodged in her throat since the day she’d visited the cabin. Reluctantly, unable to stay away from it, she asked: “Which one?”

“Magda Roberts, the traveling nurse.” He lowered his glass, moisture sparkling on his lower lip. “It was one of those fluke leads. They turned up a stolen-car ring over in the next county, they had a workshop back in the woods where they switched engines and repainted bodies. The cops found an Olds Cutlass registered in her name. The girl had been missing from her job for almost a year, she had pay coming, her parents had been trying to find her. Sheriff Talbot dangled a murder rap in front of the ringleader and he led him to the place where he’d found the car covered with brush in a ravine about two miles from Bollinger’s cabin.”

She looked down into her drink. “Another neat bit of circumstantial evidence,” she murmured.

Jeff shrugged. “True, but the circumstances keep piling up. I talked to the husband of Christina Weber yesterday. He brought down her dental records and they matched one of the corpses. He showed me a letter she’d written him from Dan’s cabin. Pure flipsville. The girl was obviously on drugs.”

Liza raised her head and looked at him narrowly. “Why were you talking to him?”

“The sheriff called me.”

“Since when are you working for the county sheriff?”

He looked down, making interlocking wet rings on the counter with his glass. “It’s like this. We’re involved in a news event. I’d prefer that the whole thing had never happened—God knows I prefer live girls to dead ones—but since it has, I’m in a better official position to deal with the pressure we’re getting.”

“What are you saying, Jeff? You want me to quit interviewing Dan’s friends and relatives?”

“Yes, for your own protection.”

“That makes me feel like I’m evading …” She looked at him closely. “Protection from
what?”

Jeff shrugged. “Who knows? These cult murders are tricky. Instead of one warped mind you have several, and you never actually find out who they all are. I’m not saying Bollinger’s guilty; that’s the court’s domain. But we’d be fools to assume he isn’t.”

Elizabeth felt her stubbornness take root. “If it’s up to me I’d rather carry on with it.”

He tilted his head and looked at her. “You’ve surely learned by now that the only way to keep your sanity in this business is to leave your work at the hospital.”

“I’ve never felt that patients should be treated as a lower form of fife.”

“Who’s saying that? I just think you’re over-involved. Bear in mind that drug users are psychologically akin to alcoholics.”

Elizabeth felt a flush burn her cheeks. “What does Bollinger have to do with the fact that my husband was a lush?”

“Well, look—you attract dependent men. You see people hurting and you want to help. Okay … that’s a fine and noble instinct. But when it’s a man hurting, your motives get confused; the mother fights against the female who wants to get laid. Would you rather have it in psychological terms?”

“No, your jargon is fascinating. Now let me do a thumbnail on you. You’re goal oriented. You’re so damn busy looking for the pot of gold that you never see the colors in the rainbow—”

“Ah, that’s beautiful, Liza. Really lovely.”

“You’ve got your eye on the carrot at the end of the stick and anybody that gets between you and the carrot gets stepped on.”

“Who am I stepping on? Whom?”

“I’ll answer that when you explain your interest in Bollinger.”

He looked at her a minute, then picked up her glass and turned his back, bending over the counter. She felt an urge to poke her fingers down into the back of his white duck trousers, where his shirt bunched up in a fanlike array of wrinkles. A moment later he swung around and set a dew-sparkling amber goblet on the bar. He lifted another in his hand and smiled at her over the rim. “Here’s to literature, Liza.”

Slowly she lifted her glass and sipped, frowning. “I’m not sure I should drink to this. You doing a paper on Bollinger?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, smiling. “Not a paper, dear. Not a dignified, scholarly monograph. I’m shooting for a million or two. Best-seller, paperback rights, films. Why should I let some fatheaded journalist get all the gravy? Look at what we’ve got here. An absolute Svengali. Rasputin. He’s got some kind of power. This we can’t deny—some kind of power over women. You feel anything?”

“No,” she said.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Liza, you’re lying. You’re usually quite frank in your evaluations of patients, in fact there are those who maintain that you consistently overstep your authority. But about Bollinger you’ve given me nothing. Nothing. What is it? Something private between you two?”

“Why should you think that?”

“That’s his way, isn’t it? To get something private going—you-and-me against the world sort of thing?”

“He hasn’t tried it with me.”

“No? What about his Rorschach—all that talk about cunt? Don’t tell me that wasn’t directed at you.”

“If you noticed that, you also noticed that I discontinued the test soon after it became apparent. Give me credit for a little insight, please.”

“I do, Liza. More than a little. That’s why I want your help with the book.”

She turned the round goblet between her hands, feeling its coolness against her palms. “Jeff, I don’t want to get involved in any exploitation of a patient …”

“Exploitation?”
Jeff sputtered. “Look, the kid’s in jail. I didn’t put him there. He’ll get a cut of the profit, maybe it’ll be enough to get him off, who knows?”

“Have you talked to him about it?”

“No, but I will. I’m pretty sure he’ll see it’s the only way to go.”

Yes, she thought. Jeff can talk anybody into anything. He had convinced her two years ago that an affair with him was exactly what she needed. But it was too much like a prescription. She’d never really assessed it before, but their relationship had somehow gone past the stage of being liberated. Now it just seemed rather . . uncommitted. Otherwise why should she fantasize about other men when she had sex with Jeff? The only part of him that really touched her was his penis …

He hunched his shoulders and brought his face close to hers. “What do you say? I’m talking about a partnership—any kind you want.”

Marriage
. The unspoken word hung in the air between them. His face began to warp, like a reflection on wet
glass. His left eye swelled out and fixed upon her with a glittering intensity. The moment hung poised, all the clocks in the world stopped, while her mind ran on …

My dear, you are experiencing schizophrenia
.

Time, PASS!

But it would not. Inside she screamed, writhed, clawed at the walls of her tomb. Her mouth opened. Words emerged from her lips. She was amazed at how calm and conversational they sounded.

“I don’t know, Jeff. I feel as though I’m suddenly plunked down in the middle of a maze. There was a time I could look over the walls but now they’re up on all sides of me, and they’re full of sudden sharp turns—” She looked directly into his eyes. “Jeff, you’ve got to believe in something.”

“Okay. What?”

“Something
. Anything.”

“Okay, I’ll believe in … salt shakers. Put me down under religious preference as salt-shaker worshipper. Three times a day I sit down before the salt shaker and perform a sacrifice of food—”

Laughing, she swung off the stool and stood on her feet. Jeff’s music was keyed to his lighting system; the room went dark and colors drifted across the ceiling; mauve, indigo, chartreuse, lemon, avocado, burgandy … She walked loose-limbed across the glowing carpet, sat down on the couch, lay back her head and closed her eyes. She felt his hand close around her instep, his fingers kneading her calves. The alcohol had sensitized the erotic zones of her body. She pulled her sleeveless denim dress over her head and dropped it on the floor. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her lilac mini-bikini and pushed it down over her hips, feeling a tingle of anticipation as Jeff pulled the garment off her feet. Too bad, she thought, that the only place we get together is on the couch.

A week later Debra came to her office. She walked in unannounced, and stood on the burnt-sienna carpet looking at Elizabeth across the polished surface of the desk.
Her eyes were hidden by octagon-framed dark glasses which reached from the middle of her forehead to the lower curve of her cheeks. But the double crescent of her hairline and the small pointed chin were enough to identify her. She was, in the face at least, a feminine copy of Daniel.

“Debra. Have a seat.”

She sat down in the brown leather upholstered chair beside the desk and smoothed her powder-blue skirt over dark nylon-sheathed legs. She picked up a horse-head paperweight carved out of soaps tone and rubbed it between her hands. She gave off an electric tension which made Liza uneasy, aware that she was holding her stomach taut.