Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (3 page)

But she did none of these things. She slouched behind her desk, her legs spread out beneath it, heels resting on the floor. She tapped her pencil and gazed at him across the polished surface of her walnut-stained desk.

“Mr. Bollinger is under medication.”

Sheriff Logan let his features settle into the dull implacable mold of a law-enforcement officer doing his painful duty.

“I don’t wanta talk to him if he’s groggy or …” he shrugged, “… messed up to where he can’t answer questions
Could you give him something to straighten him up, just for an hour or two?”

She looked at him for a minute, her eyes unreadable. Then she stretched out her arm without moving any other part of her body, pulled a paper in front of her, glanced at it, and said:

“It’s like this. He came to us in a disturbed state, with bruises, contusions, lacerations and a few other odds and ends—”

“I can explain that. See—”

She cut him off with a chop of her hand. “Never mind. I read the report.” She went on without looking up. “We put him in a crisis-intervention ward. Segregated room, heavy dosages of …” She pursed her lips and gazed up at the ceiling. “Strong tranquilizing drugs. He was informed of your request for an interview. He says he has no interest in being interrogated or … whatever it was you wanted to do.”

“Can he do that? Just refuse?”

“Yes, he can do that. The patient has rights.”

Logan shifted in his chair, fighting an urge to scratch his groin. He wished he’d taken time to shower after coming out of the woods. It didn’t look like the search party would get started before late afternoon; nobody wanted to take off work and crawl around in the brush looking for people long dead.

“I’ll tell you why I’m in a hurry. I’ve found evidence that connects him to a very serious crime.”

She tilted her head and lifted one eyebrow. “How serious?”

“Well—a major crime. I’d rather not voice my suspicions until I get some—” He almost said identification, then realized it would give away the fact that bodies had been found. He couldn’t be sure that she wouldn’t tell the patient; he had a low opinion of hospital security, and he didn’t want his suspect escaping. So he finished: “—some further proof.”

“But you did, you know.”

“What?”

“Voice a suspicion.” She got up and walked around to the side of the desk, resting her hip against it. The move brought him into the aura of her perfume, a fragrance so subtle he couldn’t identify it, though it made him aware of his own sour.sweat smell.

“Well then …” He cleared his throat. “Let’s say I would like to question him about a serious crime which he may or may not have knowledge of. Ten or fifteen minutes would be enough to, uh …”

He broke off, aware that she was looking at him with a mocking half-smile.

“To what?”

To administer a little five-knuckle truth-serum
, he thought, and then wondered if it was his thought or hers. Into his mind floated a half-forgotten fragment of an old movie, some heroine with frizzy hair and mascaraed eyelids, standing with her arms spread across a doorway, breasts heaving against filmy silk. She was one of the stubborn ones, the harder he pushed, the more she would resist. Well, he had plenty of time. The bodies would keep under refrigeration. Meanwhile there was evidence to be gathered, autopsies, microscope slides to be examined …

He stood up, stuffed his shirt into his belt and brushed the curved brim of his felt hat. “You wanta tell me something, Miz Bodac?”

“If I can.”

“You dislike sheriffs in general, or is there something about me in particular?”

Her cheeks dimpled. “You aren’t pleased with the outcome of our interview?”

“That’s right.”

“You ask for cooperation but you don’t give any. You obviously think he might be guilty of some major crime. What kind of crime? Robbery? Rape?” Her eyes searched from beneath arched brows. He saw that they were not gray, but a yellow-green which made him think of oxidized copper. “You don’t react to any of those, so it must be—”

“Don’t put me under your damn glass.”

Her nostrils flared, then she breathed out in a long sigh. “I forgot … your main task is putting people where they don’t want to be. You must run into a lot of resistance, most of it cruder than what I’ve given you.”

“You wanta complain to the governor, go right ahead.”

“What would you do if I did?”

“Hell! I’d hand-carry the letter myself. He didn’t elect me. The people of this county elected me—and that’s who I aim to protect.”

“You think the patient might be dangerous to them, is that it?”

Suddenly wary, Logan said: “I think he might be.”

“Dangerous to me, you think?”

He tilted his head and gave her a sidelong look. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

A tint of pink rose from the collar of her tunic. “I think I deserve an answer to that question.”

“Oh you do? Well you know what I think? I think you hit on a gimmick to get more information outta me, and I’ll tell you something else, it ain’t gonna work.”

“Isn’t gonna work.”

He pulled on his hat and turned, walking toward the door with long rapid strides. He felt the back of his neck burning, his nose stung with anger—self-directed, because she’d hooked his ego like a fish.

Walking across the street, he got in his car and lit a cigarette, smoking and watching the gray limestone office building. Five minutes later she walked down the long sidewalk and turned left without glancing in his direction. Good-looking woman, he thought—but cold. He wondered if the girls they’d dug up that morning had been pretty. He sighed and started his engine. The crime-lab truck would be in the woods by now.

Sitting here in the dining room I can see my fellow inmates straining to keep their masks on straight. Over near the window at a table for four is one we call Gentleman Jack. You wonder why he must sit alone since he is obviously such a well-bred mannerly person, napkin draped over his lap and fork poised gracefully between first and second finger. Then you note that the napkin is trembling and you realize that he is jerking off incessantly. Every week the poor bastard has to get his pecker doctored up by the nurses. Why do I say poor bastard? I’d like to get mine doctored up, it’s something they put in your food. I was never so damned embarrassed in my life as last night, Pat and I tried for an hour to get it on under the honeysuckle hedge. She was willing to anything, suck it or stuff it in her ear if necessary, but old Mr. Long John slept the sleep of the dead. So we wound up rapping about cosmic shit, she digs Shankara who is too damn intellectual for me. Shankara probably couldn’t get it up either. How the hell does the jackoff artist do it? Of course he’s on mellaril which isn’t as bad as the big ? but hell, I’m thirty years younger …

Here comes the medications nurse pushing her cart down the aisle, it’s like communion except that these devotees are not performing the sacrament, no, this is not the symbolic blood of Jesus that these communicants are imbibing with such sour wrinklings of the mouth. This
is the modern way to Blessed Peace, the nurse is looking at me, beckoning me with her white tapered finger, I wonder where she has had it lately, gouging shit out of someone’s spastic colon no doubt, but I rise and shuffle forward like a sheep to slaughter, I throw back my head and down the vile stuff and then I stumble back to my ward and collapse on my narrow monkish cot, while the silent spider spins his web in my brain …

He watched the colors on the ceiling fade to gray. Boredom settled over his body like dust.
Oh brothers, it’s getting dark in here …

Activity was beginning to stir at the periphery of his life. He had felt the tension all through lunch hour; now it entered his body, his muscles drew into a quivering hardness, the kundalini power turned slowly in the pit of his stomach—

“Boln’ger! Quiet room!”

—Up on his feet and standing rigid, he looked down the polished wax corridor between the bunks. The square black speaker above the attendant’s window gave no explanation, admitted no argument. He started walking. The other men turned on their bunks as he passed, grunting, farting, coughing.

It was lighter at this end, the window in the steel door was a square of greasy glass with chicken wire set into it, like the windows in gymnasiums. The smell was gymnasiumlike too: urine, sweat, dirty socks and cheap shaving lotion. He looked through the square glass—set at an angle, to give it a diamond shape (the damn thing infuriated him sometimes, the sheer stupid falsity of it)—and saw the psychiatrist disappear through the green wooden door of the quiet room, carrying a manila folder in her arms. So bland, so neat, so goddamn beautiful … why does she upset me? (Just a creature of the institution. Like me, like Gentleman Jack, like all of us. Can’t hurt anything to talk to her.
Hoo-hoo-ha-ha-hee-hee
.)

The room was small, square, hospitallike: Walls of pale pea-green, white-framed window, scarred desk of
gray painted metal. Behind it stood an armless secretarial posture chair, behind that a movable muslin screen, behind that a narrow cot with canvas straps attached to its steel frame.

Poise
was the word that came into his mind when he looked at her. She stood beside the desk, one hip resting against it. Her hand lay flat inside the patch pocket of her white tunic; her thumb hooked over the edge and extended down in a straight line outside it. She held her other arm behind her, elbow bent in a precise forty-five degree angle. Her hair was neither red nor orange, but an in-between shade of rust-brown, the color of weathered brick. She wore it brushed across her forehead, falling over her right ear and lying in a fluffed mass on the collar of her tunic. He couldn’t get a precise idea of her build—ample, though. His eyes detected a solidity of flesh where the tunic flared out over her hips. There was another roundness of flesh above the knees, where the trousers flared to reach down to her white canvas shoes. White soles, white shoestrings, white-on-white. The unrelieved purity of her clothing made him feel rough, brutal, masculine.

She nodded to him with a faint, friendly smile. “Hello, Dan. How do you feel?”

He sat down in the folding metal chair and looked at the tape recorder. It was an old Akai 4-track, with 7½-inch reels turning slowly. He reached out, lifted the microphone out of its steel cradle, and spoke into the silver mesh: “I’m just fine, machine. And you?”

She sat down and pushed a cigarette packet across the desk. He shook one out and lit it. Apparently he was to be put at ease. He smoked silently, letting the smoke trail out of his nose while she talked about matters of inconsequence, explaining that on slow-play one could get twelve hours on a single reel, which was very advantageous for a private practitioner. But of course the state hospital was a cheapo operation, and she rarely got enough time with a patient to fill a twenty-minute cartridge, but what could one do? “The best solution for everybody is to pretend
they’re normal—which is what the people outside do anyway …”

“I’m all buttered on this side. Want me to roll over?”

“So what’s the matter today?”

“I dunno.” He laced his fingers over the top of his head and squeezed. “I’ve been up on something or other for the last eight years. I just realized why. I don’t like people very much.”

“Why not?”

“I think they’re a bunch of bastards.”

She looked at him for a minute, then reached into her folder and drew out a pack of four-by-five cards. Smoothing the edges with her fingers, she said: “Would you like to try a Rorschach?”

“What can I lose?”

“All right. I want you to look at these cards and tell me the first word that comes into your mind. This is the first card. What do you see?”

“Butterflies.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s it.”

“This is the second card.”

“Two animal figures.”

“What are they doing?”

“Dancing.”

“That’s all? Suppose you turned them upside down?”

“Am I supposed to say I see them fucking?”

“Just say whatever comes to your mind.”

“I dunno. It’s a couple of bears dancing or engaging in mock combat. They could be fucking but I didn’t think bears did it face to face. Do they?”

“I really couldn’t say. This is the third card.”

“It’s an insect of some kind.”

“This is the fourth card.”

“You want me to say what really comes to mind?”

“Of course.”

“Beaver.”

“Just one beaver?”

“It’s a spread beaver. You know … a cunt. Where
she’s got her fingers in it and she’s pulling it apart so you can get your picture taken.”

“That’s an interesting phrasing. Could you explain it?”

“Well I dunno that there’s any deep psychological significance. I had this friend when I was a kid and I remember we were at some basketball game or something and he turned around and said, Wow, I just got my picture taken. I turned around and a couple of seats back there sat this woman without any pants on. She had red pubic hair.”

“Why did you mention that?”

“Just to add a bit of color to the test. No, really … I don’t know. Except that I always have this curiosity when I meet a woman, I wonder what color her pubic hair is.”

“You don’t wonder it about men?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“So it seems to be sexually related. We’ll get back to it later. Here’s the fifth card.”

“Could be two squirrels eating on the same nut.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, it’s another cunt actually.”

“Could you show me the parts?”

“Well, this little spot up here, that’s the clitoris, and here I guess you could say these are the lips curving down around here toward the bottom … and this fuzzy border is pubic hair.”

“What color do you think it is?”

“Red. What color is yours?”

Elizabeth gathered up the cards and smoothed out the edges. “I’d like to get a few facts about your personal background. You were in Nam, I believe?”

“Oh, Christ, you wanta dig through that pile of shit? Look—I don’t feel like getting into it … or anything else right now. The damn medicine … you ever take Thorazine? It’s the distilled blahs. Absolutely. I’d be completely indifferent if you fell out of that chair and went into foaming convulsions.”

“Suppose I had them stop the Thorazine?”

“I might tear out your jugular vein with my teeth.”

“Is that what you want me to tell the doctor?”

“Tell him any damn thing you want. How am I supposed to know what I’ll do? Stop the medicine and see.”

Elizabeth turned off the tape recorder, swung her chair around, and punched out a number on the telephone. “Doctor Birch, please.”

The patient sat facing her on a folding steel chair about two yards away, elbows resting on thighs, hands hanging limp between his knees. The shirt was too big around the collar; it was not his style anyway: white cotton with pin stripes and three mother-of-pearl buttons on each cuff. The faded khaki trousers were too large too; she had noticed when he came in that he held them bunched at the waist.

“Don’t you have a belt?”

“They took my belt away.”

“Why don’t you get some pants that fit, then?”

He shrugged. “I guess I don’t take much pride in my personal appearance. I guess I just don’t give a fuck what kind of impression I make on my fellow kooks.”

She nodded, studying him. He looked steadily back at her. His eyes were brown, flecked with gold. He was tall—she glanced at his card; six-two, weight one-sixty—not much meat to string on that large, heavy-boned frame. He looked emaciated, but wiry. His chin was triangular, his face broadened out into a high, wide forehead. She opened his folder and glanced at his test scores:
Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Solved 58 matrices in 40 minutes. He worked quickly, asked few questions. Conclusion: intelligent, thorough and effective
. Her eyes skipped down to the Wechsler-Bellevue:
Total IQ—135
. She wondered why a bright intelligent person should come on as a crude, unlettered clod. She wondered why she spent so much time with him. Perversity of some kind. The sheriff had called, asking when the patient would be returned to the custody of the court. He acted like the stereotype of a county
sheriff, but his eyes, no-no, they didn’t match his words. He was hiding something …

A male voice broke the eye contact. “Birch here.”

“This is Elizabeth. I have a patient here—Dan Bollinger—who complains that the medicine gives him the blahs.”

“What’s he on?”

“Thorazine—” She glanced at his card and pursed her lips. “Five hundred milligrams, t.i.d.”

“Is he lethargic?”

“Unresponsive. I’m trying to interview him.”

“Okay. D.C. the Thorazine. Make it … eight hundred Mellaril, b.i.d. Write out the order and I’ll initial it later.”

She hung up the receiver, undipped her pen from the pocket of her tunic, and scribbled the notation on his card. “You start Mellaril tomorrow.”

“How much?”

“Eight hundred.”

He winced, hunching his shoulders—then leaned back with a sigh. “Okay. What’ll we talk about?”

She reached out and turned on the recorder. “Let’s start with when you came back from the war.”

“A bunch of us went down to Mexico. Just some dudes who got discharged from the hospital together. We got disability but we could all walk around and had … you know, nothing serious.”

“What did you do?”

“We had a nice scene on the coast north of Acapulco, little place called Las Catas. I left after a couple years.”

“But what did you
do
?”

He looked down, rubbing his palms together, feeling the dead callous roll up in little cordlike strings. Christ, what could you say to her? You sit on the beach and watch the sea giving itself up in long coils of froth, white claws scratching the yellow sand. Wish I was there now, riding my slider down the long tube of liquid glass. The walls are alive and I can put out my hand and touch the smooth power of Mother Sea. I’m inside her now and she’s writhing, twisting, trying to roll me up like an enchilada. Now
I come shooting out of the pipe and it’s like getting born all over again, I rise out of my crouch and stand wet-glistening in the sun and the booming sea wind pulls tears out of the corner of my eyes …

“I did a lot of surfing, mostly.”

“Your friends, what were they like?”

“I dunno. You want ages, hair color? What?”

“Whatever you remember most vividly.”

He looked up at the ceiling and squinted his eyes. He could see Craig strumming his guitar while the firelight flickered on his burn-scarred forehead. The Learned Doctor plunked the African thumb harp and passed the roach, coughing up phlegm from his rotting lungs. And there was Frog, six-feet-four of friendly fat, filling his pipe with cinnamon-red Kona curls. Three puckered scars like rooster’s assholes ran diagonal across his bloated belly and you wondered how the slugs went through without killing him. Lona floated up out of the lagoon with water hyacinth in her hair, I laid her in the warm sand and her skin was cool but inside she
burned …

“Let’s go on to the next question.”

“All right. Why did you leave?”

“Wo got rousted.”

“What?”

“Busted. Popped. The greasers gave us the heave-ho.”

“Do you remember well enough to describe the scene?”

Yes, he remembered. The Mexican Secret Service raided the camp, guns drawn and fingers itching to blast holes in gringo-meat, the L.D. stood in the door of the hut, toking up on a final joint and passing it down, saying, “Make it last, Danny, it’s gonna be a sweaty scene.” And Oh, Man, he was right, sixteen weeks in a potato cellar, you had to stand in a crouch, there was no room to sit down, and every time you breathed you took in a lungful of farts because there was nothing to eat but beans and tortillas. And then Debra came down looking stiff and pale, telling me it cost her husband a thousand bucks and why didn’t I settle down and make something of myself—for mama’s sake if nothing else.
Mama’s dead
, I told her,
and her eyes got that cold oyster look and I knew it was time to quit talking because she’d quit listening …