The Love Potion Murders In The Museum Of Man Part 19

She shook her head to indicate incredulity. "You wouldn't believe it."

"Too much for you?"

She sipped her tea. "I don't mind doing a joint, you know, like, to get things going or slow things down, but he is really into heavy stuff."

"Like?"

"Cocaine. H. Ecstasy. Meth. You name it. It was everywhere."

"So when did things start to go...bad?"

"Some friends showed up. Business a.s.sociates, he called them. Real scaggy types. They had like these girls with them. I think they were hookers. That's when the handcuffs and the whips came out. You know, dog collars and chains."

"Was Celeste Tangent there?" I tried to sound casual.

"Yeah..." Her voice got wistful. "They have a thing."

"They?"

"Freddie and Celly. We all had a thing."

"The three of you?"

"Yeah. But it was too druggy to be real. Sixy would have loved it. You know, like his cut, 'Orifice Rex.' But it's not my scene. I mean they were putting d.i.l.d.os on dogs and trying to get a chain going. And then they had this mock wedding between a midget ballerina and one of the German shepherds. I'm so sick of that stuff. It's all fizz and no wine. And..."

"Yes?" I prompted after a pause.

"I think Freddie's starting to lose it." She pointed to her head.

"So you decided to leave?"

She sighed, as though it had cost her something. "Yeah. He wasn't going to let me go, though. He said no way, not now."

"How did you do it?"

"I took a walk and called a cab."

"With your walkaround phone."

"Yeah. The cabbie had a tough time finding it. Freddie was really p.i.s.sed when he found I had called one and given it directions. He's like a dictator. He didn't want to let me go. But he knew you knew I was up there. It's like he owns people. And everyone's a slab of meat."

"He's a criminal, you know," I said.

"I can believe it."

"I don't say that just because he thinks Adolf Hitler was a great artist. I mean he's a real criminal. He's part of organized crime."

Diantha stuck out her lower lip and nodded, but skeptically.

I related to her then what Agent Johnson and Sergeant Lemure had told me about his background. I went into some detail. One has to be careful these days in talking to young people. Criminality has taken on such glamour. But Diantha listened as though taken with my seriousness.

She got up to rinse her cup, and I noticed the way she wore her slacks, just like her mother had so many years ago. She turned to look at me. "Hate to rain on your parade, Dad, but I know firsthand that Freddie's not circ.u.mcised."

What is it about that kind of detail that cuts to the heart? Because I suffered then a keen and entirely inappropriate stab of retrospective jealousy. I can't explain it. Was I that smitten by my own stepdaughter? Was I to live in torture now until she found some suitable young man and went off to start a life of her own?

"Perhaps he faked that when he went through his 'conversion,'" I said, trying to keep my voice neutral.

"It wouldn't surprise me. Reality to him is what he says it is. The guy really is..."

"Solipsistic...self-absorbed."

"Yes. You always know things, do you know that?"

She smiled at me then, melting my heart, touching me in ways I'm sure she couldn't imagine. I was looking again at a young vibrant Elsbeth, and again experiencing a kind of temporal dislocation.

We decided we would go Christmas shopping together for some last-minute things. We would dine out first, shop, and then go to the midnight carol service at St. Cecilia's, the rather High Episcopal church I attended with some regularity before Elsbeth arrived on the scene and changed my life.

I managed to get us a table at the Oriole in the Miranda, an old-fas.h.i.+oned place that serves excellent, old-fas.h.i.+oned food. Diantha had wild goose and I had tame steak, and we finished off a bottle and demi-bottle of decent wine. She couldn't quite stop talking about Freddie Bain, at the same time reaching over to touch my hand, as though clinging to me, as though torn between a rollicking life on a sybaritic if sinking pirate s.h.i.+p and austere survival on an odd bit of eroded rock jutting from the water.

We shopped halfheartedly for an hour or so, mostly walking off the wine, before making our way to the incensed interior of St. Cecilia's. There, for more than an hour, we lifted our voices and our hearts, bracing hope and beauty against the solstistial darkness. Elsbeth and I had come here each of the last three years, and my eyes watered when we sang the verses of one of her favorites: In the bleak midwinter, frosty winds may moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago.

G.o.d is good, I thought. Had He not sent His only son as a rea.s.surance? Of course, we had nailed Him to a tree and left Him to die. And we've celebrated His death ever since. I put such thoughts aside and thanked fate that Diantha was with me and safe.

Afterward, outside, I noticed that Diantha had tears s.h.i.+ning in her eyes. I tried to comfort her.

"Oh, Norman," she cried, clinging to me again. "I don't know what to do."

"About what, darling?" I said.

"About Freddie. I know he's a creep. I know he's crazy. I know he's a monster. It doesn't matter. I can't help it. I love him."

35.

Something horrific has happened, something so personal, so shattering, and yet so poignant, I scarcely know where to begin. Indeed, I would not begin at all were it not pertinent to account for the strange happenings that have rocked our little community to its very foundations.

I have just returned from the Seaboard Police Department headquarters. (I'm sorry if this seems disjointed, but I am agitated beyond words.) We've finally had a real break in the case, but at an awful price. I sit here in my high study, my father's .38-caliber Smith & Wesson at the ready, my hands afflicted by a telltale tremor.

Let me start at the beginning.

Earlier this evening Diantha and I returned from a meeting with the Reverend Lopes and Father O'Gould to make arrangements for Elsbeth's memorial service at Swift Chapel. Such matters are draining. They take an emotional toll the worse for not being expected. What order of service? What hymns? (For instance, one of Elsbeth's favorites was Mendelssohn's "Why Do the Heathens Rage?" But it didn't seem appropriate to the occasion.) Who speaks? What about the reception?

At any rate, upon returning home, we felt simply too tired to cook anything for ourselves. Indeed, we were too drained even to contemplate going out for a quick bite. Ordinarily I do not enjoy sent-out food, the kind that arrives in white cardboard containers with plastic accoutrements and little pouches of condiments. But to indulge Diantha, whose spirits had ebbed woefully low, I agreed to call the Jade Stalk and order from a veritable laundry list of Chinese food. We ticked off black bean shrimp, some kind of shredded beef, sweet-and-sour something or other, and rice, of course.

I presently poured a gla.s.s of chilled white wine for Diantha and made myself a martini of lethal potency with at least three shots of good gin and a fair dollop of vermouth, which I chilled briefly over ice before pouring it into a frosted gla.s.s with an unpitted olive. I had just had the barest sip when the bell rang. I opened the door to find a young man of Asian aspect holding a white bag stapled shut with the cash register printout attached. I paid him the requisite amount, gave him a generous tip, thanked him, and closed the door. I took the bag of food and my drink into the television room, where Diantha was arranging plates and silver on the ample coffee table between the couch and ma.s.sive screen of the television.

"Smells good," she said, smiling at me. "I'm famished."

"Yes," I agreed. "It's quite appealing when you present it on a dish." We were each ladling generous amounts onto our plates. Some sort of police drama from the big city was on the television, one of those improbable tales of murder and mayhem with people yelling at one another and exchanging significant glances in between scuffling with criminal types. I never really pay much attention. To me most of what's on television const.i.tutes a kind of moving wallpaper with noise.

"The black bean shrimp is divine," I remember Diantha saying. In one of those endearing, almost intimate gestures that occur between two people who are close, she held over a heaping forkful for me to take. We ate in greedy silence for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. Diantha had switched the channel to what's called a situation comedy, a low form of humor in which people make wisecracks about their bodily functions, contort themselves like idiots, and mug for the camera, all to the sound of canned laughter. Yet I was glad to see Diantha respond even to this meager fare, because of late she had become withdrawn and moody. I had taken just the merest sip of my martini, saving it for a postprandial. I remember thinking I should have made tea instead when Diantha turned from the television, let out a low moan, put down her plate with a clatter, and turned to me. "Norman, Norman," she said breathlessly, her eyes going wide, her mouth opening. In one quite amazing gesture, she reached under her skirt and peeled off her panties and nylon tights. She leaned back, opened her legs to me and implored, "Norman, please, Norman, please."

I might not have resisted even if, a minute or so later in time that had gone out of focus, the most powerful erotic sensation I have ever experienced had not rocked my entire body. I cried out a futile "no" but was already unbuckling myself, had turned into a veritable satyr, engorged as I have never been in my life. I was in the grip of a pa.s.sion too urgent to allow for anything as basic as pleasure let alone the more tender delights of lovemaking. We conjoined with a thrusting, uncontrolled violence, a frenzy beyond pa.s.sion or love, a kind of injuring madness as we pounded at each other, snarling and biting like panicked animals.

Don't ask me what made me do what I did to save us. In the midst of the madness, as I pummeled Diantha and she pummeled back, our voices shrieking and groaning like two demented demons, some minuscule particle of ordinary sense remained intact in what was left of my mind. Because, on some inexplicable impulse, springing no doubt from that tiny remnant of normalcy, I reached over, grabbed my martini, and, before much of it spilled in the heave and shove of our frenzy, managed to swallow it down, nearly choking on the olive, which lodged for a moment in my throat before I managed to swallow it.

Mirabile dictu, it worked. Not right away, but a minute or so later, I experienced a prodigious, prolonged emission. I immediately lost the insane compulsion I was under, but detumesced only slowly. I was then able to subdue Diantha enough to get her to swig from the gin bottle that I hastened to bring her. She convulsed o.r.g.a.s.mically as well, then fell weeping into my arms, her tears dampening the top of my s.h.i.+rt. When she lifted her swollen eyes to mine, she said, "They're trying to kill us, aren't they?"

"Trying to kill me, at any rate," I said, treading between the risk of sounding self-important and the need to rea.s.sure her.

"It's horrible, horrible," she cried, ready to weep again. Then she said something that startled me. "That's not the way I would have wanted it to happen..."

"I know," I said placatingly.

We were silent for a moment as acknowledgment registered. Neither of us, I think, was sorry that it had happened - only how.

She gave a tearful little laugh. "You're quite the stud, Norman, you know that?"

I stammered something about overplaying the part. By then I had made myself presentable. Before I left her so she could do the same, I told her to stay in the television room while I checked the doors and windows.

"You mean they could still be around?" She pulled on her panties without any false modesty. It seemed as though, in some strange way, we were already a couple.

I went then and fetched the revolver. I loaded it carefully and put it in the holster, which I had strapped on under my arm. The holster still smelled rea.s.suringly of new leather. I went downstairs and, on some instinct, opened the front door to check outside.

Surprise, strangely enough, is often sharper when you expect something rather than the reverse. I all but jumped at the sight of the deliveryman coming up the front walk carrying what looked like a video camera. But I wasn't nearly as startled as he was. He turned immediately and ran out the gate and up the street. I pursued, drawing my revolver, and calling for him to stop. I saw him climb into one of those truck-like station wagons and drive away. I suppose I could have, as in the films, fired at him, making him skid out of control and crash dramatically into an abutment. But I lack the killer instinct, or whatever it takes to do that. I did manage to get the first four numbers on the license plate.

I rushed back into the house and quickly explained what had happened to Diantha. She stood by calm and collected as I telephoned Lieutenant Tracy on his private line. I gave him as dispa.s.sionate an account of what had transpired as I could muster, telling him about the suspect, where he worked, the kind of car he was driving, and what I had of the license plate number.

The lieutenant was most sympathetic. He asked if there was anything we needed. He said he would call headquarters right away and then call back in a few minutes.

Diantha and I sat on the couch holding hands for a while. Though we were both scared and excited, I think we were both thinking about what had happened, about the intimate aspects of it, and how that might change our lives. It might mean, for instance, that she would no longer be able to live in the house with me. As though intuiting my thoughts, she touched my face. "Norman, I don't want this...to come between us. I mean it doesn't have to start anything or stop anything. I don't want to move out."

I nodded. I said, "I don't want you to. I know Elsbeth is hardly gone from us, but..."

Diantha laughed. "She would mind much less than you think. She told me to take care of you."

"But not like that."

"Who knows?"

Just then the phone rang. It was Lieutenant Tracy. He said he would come by to drive us down to Keller Infirmary to have blood samples taken. He said not to touch any of the leftover food. He would bring a crime scene crew to go over everything. He said they also had a safe house where Diantha could spend the night if she felt threatened.

When I related the lieutenant's offer she shook her head. "No way. I'm staying with you."

Well, to make a long story short, we went to Keller, gave blood, and then went with Lieutenant Tracy to the home of the deliveryman, which the police had ascertained through his employers. I counted no less than five cruisers on the scene, some of them with their lights flas.h.i.+ng. It turned out to be a lavishly appointed condominium in one of the better downtown neighborhoods, certainly not the kind of place one would expect to be inhabited by a delivery boy from a restaurant.

The lieutenant told us, on the way over, that the restaurant owners had been very cooperative. They said Bob Fang, the deliveryman, had worked for them nearly a year, had been reliable, but had wanted to remain a delivery boy even though they offered to make him a waiter, which pays much more.

Sergeant Lemure was already there with another crime scene crew. There were signs of a hasty departure, with drawers pulled open, items strewn about, the back door ajar.

"He looks like he was searching for something to take with him," the lieutenant remarked. "Perhaps we'll find it instead."

After a few moments there, he drove us home. He arranged to have a cruiser drive by every hour. I carefully locked all the outside doors. I have left the door to my attic eyrie open to keep an ear, so to speak, on Diantha. She finally drifted off into a deep sleep in her room, which is down the corridor from mine. What a night this has been.

I can only be thankful there was no one else here to join us for supper, say Alfie Lopes or one of the neighbors. It boggles the mind what might have happened.

36.

It is New Year's Day and I am in a h.e.l.lish quandary. Diantha has gone back to that ridiculous gangster and that absurd pile in the woods, and I don't know whether she has been kidnapped or not. She may simply be suffering from the common illusion that love conquers all. There must be some evolutionary advantage to self-deception. How else to explain its prevalence among the human species? Especially when it comes to love. Especially among women.

Well, not just women. Since the incident with the doctored food, I have harbored the hope, however unrealistic, that Diantha would take Elsbeth's place in my life. Several times I have been on the point of declaration, suggestion, even action. But I have not been able to turn myself into a gallant suitor, bringing her roses and lighting candles. I have been, as I should remain, hamstrung by scruple. I am in mourning for my beloved wife. The figurative black band is around my heart as well as my arm.

At the same time, I fear that in temporizing with Diantha I have lost her as I lost her mother so many years ago. For courting too slow, as the song has it. Not that Diantha has been open to any real advances had I made them. She has been in turn flirtatious, gay in a semi-hysteria, drawing me on then laughing me off when I have reciprocated in the slightest way; and then silent, her eyes avoiding mine. I have heard her talking at length on that little phone of hers behind the closed door of her bedroom.

All the while I have been subject to a kind of sensual haunting. Diantha did love me, after all, if only under the sway of that pernicious potion. And I almost willingly delude myself that, despite the grotesque circ.u.mstances, we had made love rather than merely raped each other.

Our coexistence without Elsbeth here would not have been easy in any event. It is difficult and soul trying to stay vigilant. It was a strain to be cooped up, especially given the way things were developing between us. I did go to work, impersonating myself as museum Director. When absent from home I made sure that a cruiser drove by the house at regular intervals. I called to check on Diantha to the point, I'm afraid, that I annoyed her. But what else could I do? An attempt had been made on our lives.

Indeed, Lieutenant Tracy called yesterday at the museum with some preliminary results on the food brought to us from the Chinese restaurant. It was saturated with the compounds that had been given to Ossmann and Woodley, Bert and Betti, and probably Sp.r.o.nger and Jones. It had been, in short, nothing other than attempted murder.

Something had to give, and it did. About midmorning the day after New Year's, Diantha called me at the office to let me know that she was driving over to the supermarket at Northgate Mall to shop for groceries. And, in fact, we had run quite low on things. I cautioned her to be careful. I told her to park as close as she could to the door of the store, even at the risk of getting a ticket. She said she would be very careful, and I believed she would be.

I came home in the early afternoon to find she hadn't returned. I called her pocket phone number several times. It rang and rang, the last time in sync with a faint echo coming from upstairs. I went up and found it on her bureau. I didn't know what to do. I perhaps should have called Lieutenant Tracy then, but Diantha is, as they say, a free agent.

I finally took a cab down to a car rental outlet and obtained the use of a small inconspicuous sedan. I drove over to the mall and searched every conceivable parking place for my little car, but to no avail. Then, with my heart lurching, I drove out to that monster's lair in the woods, all the while rehearsing my reb.u.t.tals to his provocative remarks about G.o.d, art, Hitler, and history. I composed stinging ripostes that sent Freddie/Manfred Bain/Bannerhoff reeling.

Until, arriving there, I found I really had no words. Because what could I say, I wondered, as, through a gap in the trees some distance from that ludicrous bastion, I could clearly see my little Peugeot docilely parked next to an expensive English car. I suppose she could have been carjacked, as they say these days. Mostly, I hate to admit, I was fearful of appearing like some old besotted fool, knocking on the door, hat in hand, a beggar for love. Because however trenchant my speech to him, what claims, really, could I make on her?

Perhaps I should call Lieutenant Tracy, but I have no real proof of anything. I would be loath to tell him what may be the truth: that Diantha prefers that ogre to this ogre.

Because now my imagination works in feverish double time conjuring all sorts of debauchery out at that ridiculous place where Sir Walter Scott meets the Third Reich. Manfred Bannerhoff aka Freddie Bain is not circ.u.mcised. Why does her knowing that torture me? Why can I visualize so acutely her fondling, her submission, her hunger for that p.r.i.c.k's p.r.i.c.k? There, I have, finally, been reduced to vulgarity. I want to take my gun and...I am nearly mad.

37.