Six Strokes Under (25 page)

 I woke from a restless sleep, splayed out crossways on the motel bed. I was fully dressed, though wrinkled and sweaty, with a dry mouth and a heaving stomach. The alarm clock read four o'clock. The drapes were pulled shut and the room was dark. Was it afternoon or middle of the night? Damn. I had a bad feeling I'd missed my plane.

The details from my lunch with Gary began to take fuzzy shape in my mind. I was immediately grateful that he'd been gentleman enough to deposit me in the motel room and leave me here, alone. I remembered informing him that his mother would have made a logical murder suspect. How embarrassing was that? Next came the memory of teasing him about who actually perpetrated the abuse of Kaitlin. God help me. He had not been amused.

Someone pounded on my door. I stumbled across the room and peered through the peephole. Gary leaned against the door frame, looking fresh and cheerful, with damp hair and clean clothes. I cracked the door open.

"I came to give you a lift back to the club. Are you feeling any better?"

I opened the door wider. "I made an ass out of myself, didn't I?"

"Don't be silly. You're just as charming drunk as sober." He smiled. "Ready?"

"Come in just a minute. I need to wash my face." I retreated to the bathroom and tried to repair the damage done by too much wine and a hard nap. I took a big slug of chalky pink Pepto-Bismol, brushed my teeth, and splashed my face with cold water. I looked in the mirror. There was no quick fix for the hair.

As I stepped out of the bathroom, Gary grabbed both my hands and drew me uncomfortably close. He smelled of mint toothpaste and stale alcohol.

"Gary, please. I'll miss my plane." I laughed. "Besides, I'm in no shape for a romantic encounter."

I tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip on my wrists and leaned in to kiss me. I turned my head. "I'm not ready for this. Maybe later..."

He pushed me onto the bed and lay sprawled across me, stroking my hair. "There isn't going to be a later, Cassandra. So it has to be now." He ground his lips and teeth into mine, making hoarse sucking noises as he kissed me. I could feel the hard shape of his erection through the thin khaki shorts. The sharp taste of bile rolled up the back of my throat. The unformed thought that had hovered in the back of my mind since waking took its full and frightening shape: Gary had killed his sister.

I pulled my mouth away from his face and tried again, summoning my firmest voice—the one I used at the driving range to correct wayward junior golfers. "I'm just not ready for this, please, Gary. I can't believe you're ready either, with all that's happened this week."

He began to massage my chest through my blouse.

"Please, Gary. Let's take it slow, get to know each other, spend time together back in Myrtle." At this point, I had no intention of spending any time with him, ever. But neither did I want to throw gasoline on the fire of his madness.

He rolled over and rested on one elbow, his other hand still clutching both of mine. He brushed a matted curl out of my eyes. "You couldn't leave things alone. Theories about my mother, analysis of Kaitlin's motives, you couldn't let it rest. My mother, a murderer?"

"I'm sorry," I said, now summoning my most earnest and reassuring inflection. "I had too much wine. I promise you I will never bring the subject up again."

"You and that fucking Harding." He leaned in and kissed me again, hard. Then he stroked my bruised neck with an unexpected tenderness. Both wrists ached from the tightness of his grip. "Why did he come to your room the other night?"

"He said he wanted to apologize for dumping me. I told him it was too late. That's it, really, that's all we said."

"Did he show you the photo?"

"What photo?" I was really confused.

"You're a lousy actress, but beautiful anyway. I regret to have to break this pretty neck," he said. "God, that sounds like dialogue from a bad movie." His laugh seemed almost normal. "What I mean is, if the Smith bar had finished you off, I would be spared the trouble. Though we'd have missed this fun."

"You set up the Smith bar to fall on me?" I was first furious, then very afraid.

"Of course not. It would have been a convenient, though unfortunate, end." I began to struggle to get away from him. Despite his pudgy, unathletic build, he was very strong. He rolled on top of me, pinning my hands under his weight. He fastened his teeth around my upper lip and sucked gently. "Don't fight me, Cassie. I don't want to hurt you more than I have to."

He ran his tongue across the contour of my cheekbone and into my left ear. I suppressed a sudden urge to gag. "It doesn't have to be this way. You don't have to force this. Let's take it slow."

He shook his head. "Too late for that. You had to keep pushing." He shifted into a falsetto impersonation of me at lunch. "Why did Kaitlin think your father molested her? My brother and I don't believe it." He nuzzled my neck and chest, then rested his head on the bedspread just inches from my face. "I asked you to stop with your stupid questions. They'd arrested Walter. He'd take the fall and it would all be over. Yes, there were still problems. I would have had to keep a close eye on you. What did you see in Bencher's office in those files? I didn't know. My name in his appointment book? The file on Kaitlin? Did you see me leaving? Did Bencher tell you my name? I didn't know."

I realized then that Deputy Pate had been right—Gary had been very worried about me stumbling into that crime scene.

"I didn't see anything. Just papers everywhere. I told you that on the first night we met down here. I was only joking about the dream, Gary. You can let me go; I didn't see or hear anything."

"I can't," said Gary. He unbuttoned my shirt, pulled it open, and began to lick the exposed skin. "You know I killed her, so I can't."

I felt a new rush of horror at his confirmation. Keep him talking, Cassie. Buy some time. Act nonchalant. The air-conditioner compressor lurched on, sending a blast of musty, frigid air across my stomach and chest.

"Why did you kill her? You must have had a good reason."

He stopped rooting at my neck and stared at me. "After Kaitlin went to see Bencher, she thought she started to remember things about being molested by our father. I couldn't let it go on. Sooner or later, they would have blundered into the truth. I thought if I got rid of the shrink, the whole thing would fade away. But she was obsessed."

"So you did molest her."

He squeezed my wrists together harder. "It was harmless. Just kid stuff. But she made such a big deal out of it. She filed a goddamned lawsuit, for Christ's sake. I would have been ruined once she remembered it was me. My father would have seen to that." At the mention of his father, his voice dropped to an angry hiss. "I felt sorry, but there wasn't a choice. She forced it to happen. Same as you have. But we'll have some fun first, too." He began to kiss my face, then my neck and chest, all the while grinding his hips into my pelvis.

"Gary, stop!"

"What's the matter? I know you're no virgin. I saw you and Max on the beach that night. I even took pictures."

"You took pictures?" I was confused, then furious. Though under the circumstances, the news of this intrusion was hardly meaningful. "Why?"

He laid his head alongside mine and smiled. "I wanted you for a long time." He trailed his fingers between my thighs, then squeezed my crotch. "We would have been good together."

I squeezed my legs closed and struggled to push his hand away. "It wasn't going to happen, Gary. I was in love with Max."

"That's why I persuaded him to dump you."

I'd had a lot of theories about why Max quit calling me, most of them related to my shortcomings. Or his, with Dr. Baxter's nudging. This new information boggled my brain. "You made him break up with me? How?"

"I told him about the pictures. Your private little after-prom party. I said they would be posted on every bulletin board in the school unless he dropped you. The guy had no backbone, Cassie. He wasn't good enough for you."

He ripped the button off the top of my shorts and tugged at the zipper. I inched toward the edge of the bed.

"Don't fight me, baby," he whispered, still grinding his weight into my pelvis.

As he rolled his body slightly left to get better leverage on my zipper, I dropped my arm over the edge of the bed. My fingers closed around the training grip of the Ben Hogan nine-iron. I might have one shot. With no weight shift and a poor angle of approach, it would have to be more of a pitch shot than a full swing. And no do-overs.

As Gary yanked down the zipper of my shorts, I held my breath and swung the club. It bounced off the side of his head with a dull thump. He went limp. I rolled his body off the bed and ran for the door, gulping for air, zipping my shorts, and buttoning my shirt as I went. I rushed out into the hallway and slammed into Max Harding.

"Am I too late? Are you all right? The cops are on the way."

"Your timing has always been lousy," I said, scowling at him. "That scumbag Rupert is in there. I think I knocked him cold, but I'm sure not waiting around here to find out."

Max followed me downstairs to the lobby and sat next to me on a bench across from the reception desk while we waited for the police. He reached down between us, his hand brushing my thigh.

"Don't even consider touching me." I glared at him, my eyes and voice as cold as I could make them.

"I wasn't," he said. "I wanted to show this to you before the police come. I wanted to finally explain." He pulled a Polaroid from his hip pocket and offered it to me. "This is why I stopped calling."

I accepted the photo. It was faded and creased, the white borders yellowed with age. The dark shadows of two figures barely materialized from what appeared to be sand dunes behind them.

"Hello, Max. This could be anyone. This could be anything."

He pointed to a white splotch in the center of the picture and cleared his throat. "I don't know how to be delicate about this. That's your bum."

I looked again. "It doesn't look like anything. No one would have known it was me and you."

Max looked sick. "I didn't know that. He said he had others. He said he would ruin your reputation permanently if I didn't back off. I believed him. I didn't know what else to do."

"Couldn't you have discussed it with me? Maybe I would have liked to have some input on being dumped."

"He told me not to. He threatened to hurt you. I'm sorry. Then it got to be too late...."

"Not too late to come on to me the other night, right, Max?"

Two sheriffs' deputies burst into the motel lobby before Max could answer. Not that I would have allowed him another word.

"Gary Rupert's in my room," I said, scrambling to my feet.
"He
killed his sister, not Walter Moore. I knocked him out—nine-iron to the parietal lobe, if you want the technical terminology. I'd be careful, though, he might be coming around about now. And plenty pissed, I would imagine."

They drew their guns and raced up the stairs, me and Max trailing behind. One of the deputies knocked on the door to my room. "Come out with your hands up!" one deputy shouted. There was no answer.

"Stand back," said the second deputy to me and Max. "Get out of the way. We're going in."

Fifteen minutes later, Gary regained consciousness. He spat at us and swore as they wheeled him out of the room, handcuffed to the paramedics' gurney. Max and I were transported to the sheriff's department to give statements.

"How did you become involved in this, Mr. Harding?" inquired the sheriff.

"Cassie and I go back a long ways with Gary," Max explained, meeting my eyes with an embarrassed shrug. "I talked to him earlier today at the golf course. I couldn't put my finger on it exactly, but I had the feeling he was losing his grip."

"What were you doing with him Saturday night?" I asked.

"Saturday night?"

"I saw you chatting with him in the bar at Chili's."

Max looked confused. "I was in Myrtle Beach on Saturday." He shrugged again. "Anyway, when I saw you drive away with Gary, I got worried." He extracted a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. "So I followed you."

"You followed
me?"

"Go on," said the sheriff.

He turned deep red and swallowed. "I waited outside the restaurant and tailed you back to the motel. I was going to leave after he left—I could tell you were a little tipsy and I figured you needed to sleep it off."

Deputy Pate, who'd skulked outside the interview during Max's questioning, broke into a wide grin. I scowled as hard as I could in his direction.

"When Gary came back a second time, I decided I had fooled around long enough. So I called these guys. And well, you know the rest."

"Where are you headed now?" asked Max once we'd been cleared to leave the sheriff's department.

I looked at my watch. "I missed my plane hours ago. I guess I'll just drive the rental car home. I can stop in Daytona on the way and look over the golf course where I'll be playing the second round of Q-school in October."

Never mind that useful reconnaissance of the golf course features would be impossible by the time I got there in the dark. Truth was, I needed friendly faces around me—not the kind that would hover over me saying, "I told you this was a bad idea"—like my mother. Or the kind who would hang around saying, "I really messed up, how can I make it up to you?"—like Max.