Beauty and the Beast

13

Bonn.

This has been the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949, its population doubling to 300,000 once it became the seat of government. It sits on one bank of the Rhine, facing the Siebengebirge — the Seven Mountains — on the opposite bank. Adenauerallee, named for Dr. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the new democratic state, runs almost parallel to the river. It is said that Adenauer’s single vote caused this formerly quiet university town to become the new capital, and that his vote was premised on the region’s climate, supposedly genial to aging men.

The climate is rainy.

It rains here almost six months out of the year.

It is a rainy night in November, two years ago.

The setting is a bar in the baroque old quarter of the town, near the Kennedybrücke. Davis is sitting at a table with the blonde cabaret singer who is his date, waiting for Harper to arrive with the young girl he has fallen madly in love with, the nineteen-year-old named Michelle Benois, whom he’d met in a bar earlier this month. She comes in on his arm at a quarter past seven. Her long black hair cascades around a face that is beautiful but a trifle too made up. She is wearing a black cloth coat, and beneath that a clingy red dress cut low over her breasts and hugging her ample hips. He recognizes her at once for what she is: there are enough of them in Bonn. Georgie Harper has fallen in love with a hooker. (In bed with Davis later that night, the blonde singer asks, “Ist das Mädchen eine Hure?”)

He is surprised when Michelle calls him at the barracks the next day. She says she must see him. He thinks at once that business must be slow, too much free stuff being handed out to the servicemen by willing young Fräuleins. But he agrees to meet her later, and in a small bar near the Hofgarten, she tells him that she doesn’t know what to do about Harper. He has fallen madly in love with her, but of course she doesn’t care for him, how could anyone return the love of such a “monstre,” she says in French, such a monster. She is not referring to the brutality Davis later attributes to him. He admits to us now, as the tape relentlessly records his words, that he himself was the one who’d used his billy on any drunks they picked up (“I told you it was Georgie ’cause I figured that’d make him beating her up seem more likely, do you see?”). Michelle is referring instead to Harper’s looks, the apelike appearance of this “monstre véritable,” she says again in French.

They linger in the bar for close to two hours while she pours out her heart to him. He is thinking he would like to score with her, but not on her terms. He has never paid for it in his life, not at home, where his wife Leona is waiting for him to complete his four years of active duty, nor here in Germany either, where it can be had free just for the asking. He knows what her business is, but he broaches the possibility of a freebie, anyway, and is surprised when she readily agrees to it. In a hotel room on Koblenzstrasse, they make passionate love for the first time.

“I didn’t know she was going to get crazy later on,” he tells us now.

He continues seeing her. Harper knows nothing about their affair; Harper is blissfully in love with a girl who’s been hooking in Bonn ever since she was thirteen, when she fled Paris and the bourgeois existence she shared there with her French father and German mother. Davis doesn’t care what she is; in fact, her expertise is something new to him. There is never a moment in bed with her that he isn’t learning something he has never experienced before. On New Year’s Eve in Bonn, she pleads illness to get out of a date with Harper and instead arranges a small surprise for Davis. When he shows up at the hotel room she has booked in advance, she is waiting there with a voluptuous black girl who, like herself, is a hooker. “Bonne année,” she says and introduces Davis to what he will later remember as his first “triad.”

That was the real beginning,” he says now. “The real beginning of The Oreo, the beginning of everything.”

It is Davis, not Harper, who leaves Germany without calling Michelle. He considers her nothing more than what she is: a whore with a splendid bag of tricks. He is eager to get home, not to see his wife Leona, whom he considers something of a drudge, but instead “to feast on some soul food” (words he also attributes later to Harper), “the general black female population.” He does not know at the time that Michelle will follow him to the States in three months.

Nor does he know she is pregnant with his child.

She arrives in Miami shortly before Easter last year. She is wearing the same black cloth coat she’d been wearing when first he’d met her in Bonn. The weather is balmy and mild, but she is bundled inside her coat, trying to hide the swell of her pregnancy from the prying eyes of strangers. She does not have an address for Davis; he had refused to give her one before leaving Bonn. But she knows where to find Harper, who’d been asking her constantly to marry him and come live in the States with him. She goes first to the address Harper gave her in Bonn, but only to find out where she can locate Davis. Harper’s mother will not oblige her. Michelle must ask questions all over town before finally she can present herself on Davis’s doorstep with the announcement of her pregnancy and the threat that she will drown herself if he does not marry her. This will later become an inside joke between the lovers, and Michelle will recount with sly pleasure that these were the exact words she said to Harper when finally she proposed to him in Calusa.

By then, she has already undergone an abortion in Miami.

The abortion is Davis’s idea.

So is the suggestion that she marry Harper.

“I told her he was a hard worker,” he says now. “Told her she’d be getting herself a free meal ticket and meanwhile, you know, we could pick up where we’d left off in Germany. No reason for us to stop seeing each other, I told her. Business as usual. Georgie was a fuckin dunce, he’d never know what was going on between us.”

It might have remained that way, George Harper might never have found out about the continuing love affair between his wife and Lloyd Davis, if “circumstances” (as Davis now defines them) had not changed somewhat.

“It was Michelle’s idea,” he says. “Michelle was always the one with the ideas.”

The idea, as it occurs to Michelle in the month following her wedding to Harper, is that it would be nice to give her lover Lloyd a birthday present. His birthday is on the eighteenth of July; wouldn’t it be nice to arrange a little present for him on the following weekend? She has by now become close friends with Sally Owen, and Sally has confessed to her several extramarital affairs that her husband Andrew is unaware of. Michelle, in turn, has revealed to her the continuing relationship with Lloyd, has shown her secret photographs of Lloyd, has described in detail what a fantastic lover he is, and now suggests — discreetly, to be sure — that it would be wonderful if the three of them could get together sometime, someplace away from Calusa and Miami, just the three of them. In the beginning, it is in fact, just the three of them — Sally, Michelle, and Lloyd, a white layer of icing between two chocolate wafers. This is the true start of The Oreo, as they secretly refer to their triad, and never mind the black hooker in Bonn. The Oreo — their Oreo — begins on the weekend following Lloyd’s twenty-ninth birthday, in a motel room in Palm Beach, where the women have told their respective husbands they will be on a shopping trip.

In August a year and more ago, Jerry Tolliver is shot to death by an overzealous cop, and a black woman married to a white doctor out on Fatback Key decides to form a protest committee. The committee later dissolves, and it is Michelle — again — who suggests at a social gathering one night late that month (her husband George conveniently off on one of his junk-selling trips) that it might be fun if the men present were to be blindfolded in turn and then asked to kiss each of the women in an attempt to identify which one is any given man’s own wife.

“Michelle’s idea,” Davis says again. “She was always the one with the ideas.”

Ironically, the socially concerned couple on Fatback Key join The Oreo several weeks later. Throughout the rest of the summer and fall, The Oreo continues to meet secretly. Kitty Reynolds is a part of the group by now. Sally Owen has begun making paintings symbolic of the sexual activity they share. No one can imagine that — with all this free-and-easy mind-blowing sexual exchange — any pair of partners might commit the unpardonable sin of actually forming a true relationship, actually falling in love! This is what happens to Kitty Reynolds and Andrew Owen. Sally, furious, drums them out of the circle of “friends,” and shortly after that, The Oreo itself begins to disintegrate, the cookie crumbling, the icing melting. It is back to just the three of them now, the way it was in the beginning — Sally, Lloyd, and Michelle. It continues that way for almost a year.

And then—

Sunday morning, November 15.

Harper finds a painting that puzzles him, and when he questions Michelle about it she confesses her love for Lloyd — but delicately manages to avoid the entire subject of the little orgies she herself originated and promoted and, in fact, misses with all her heart. Harper, in a rage, leaves the house at 2:00 A.M. and goes looking for Lloyd — to kill him.

“She called me there at Vero Beach,” Lloyd says, “warned me to watch out, he was on the way. When I got back to Miami, my wife told me he’d already been there. I had to split. I didn’t want to get in a fracas with that fuckin’ ape, he’da crushed my skull with his bare hands. I kept thinking about how Michelle could’ve been so dumb. I mean, we had it all going for us, didn’t we? The three of us? Sally... and her... and me? So why’d she have to spoil it? I figured she had to be taught a lesson. I mean, man, no damn hooker can put Lloyd Davis in danger and get away with it. No way! I went to Calusa...”

He goes to Calusa expressly to teach her a lesson. He lets himself into the Harper house with the key Michelle gave him months ago. He is half hoping he will find her in bed with yet another man, the white doctor from Fatback Key maybe, or anybody else who used to be in The Oreo when it was still in full flower. But she is alone in the house when he lets himself in at eleven-thirty that Sunday night. He hurls invective at her, tells her she’s nothing but a no-good whore, tells her she’s placed him in a position where he has to fear for his life — what the hell is he supposed to do when King Kong catches up with him? How the fuck could she have been so fuckin’ dumb?

“And then I beat the shit out of her,” he says.

The moment his rage cools, he recognizes that he has only compounded the felony. Once George Harper comes home, once Michelle tells him that Davis beat her up, the ape will go berserk. He goes up the street to Sally’s house, and tells her what he’s done. She soothes him, comforts him, and he is surprised to discover that his anger is rekindled in the form of “a raging hard-on” (as he recalls it now) and that he desires Sally with a passion he has never truly felt for her before. It is after they’ve made love that Sally comes up with an idea.

“It’s always the chicks who come up with the ideas,” Davis says.

What if — and this is only an idea, Sally tells him — but what if Michelle was to say George beat her up? What if she was to go to a lawyer, everything nice and legal, and tell him George did it? The cops would put him behind bars, wouldn’t they? I mean, for beating up a woman? Don’t they put you behind bars for that? Gain a little time, anyway, Lloyd, while you figure what to do next, am I right? Meanwhile, you better keep your ass out of sight. If George catches up with you—

It is Sally who calls Michelle early the next morning, to suggest that she first contact a lawyer she knows, and then go to the police to make the false complaint against Harper. By then, Davis — who has been hiding out in a Calusa motel room — is beginning to worry.

“I mean,” he says now, “what if they let Georgie go? Wife-beating isn’t such a big deal, is it? Suppose he got off, suppose he came looking for me again, what then?”

He gives this a great deal of thought. It continues bothering him. He cannot risk George Harper finally catching up with him. He knows what will happen once that gorilla finds him. But how can he possibly avoid him forever? Sooner or later—

And then the idea occurs to him.

What if Michelle was... murdered?

Moreover, what if Harper was blamed for the murder, the same way he was blamed for the beating?

Wasn’t it possible to work it in a way that would make it seem Harper had done it? Make sure Harper was put away for good, or else fried in the electric chair? Either way, Harper would be out of the picture, and Davis himself would be home free.

Monday, November 16.

Harper is still in Miami, searching for his wife’s lover. Davis goes to the Harper house, lets himself in with his key again, apologizes to Michelle for what he did to her the night before, ascertains that she has already been to the police to blame the beating on her husband, and then suggests that they take a little drive out to Whisper Key, make a nice fire on the beach maybe, patch up whatever quarrel’s still between them, just the two of them, like it used to be in Bonn. Little kissy-facey by a roaring fire, okay? Maybe a little kinky sex on the beach, okay? In preparation for the kinky sex he has suggested, he takes from the glove compartment of his Thunderbird a pair of black leather gloves. He is wearing these when he removes the five-gallon can of gasoline from the shelf in Harper’s garage. He is wearing them when he takes a pair of wire hangers from one of Harper’s clothes racks. When Michelle asks him what he needs the hangers for, he replies, “To poke the fire with, honey.”

On the beach at Whisper Key, when he tries to bind her hands with the hangers (“Little kinky sex, right, Michelle? You always were into kink”), she recognizes his full intent at last, and runs from him in fear. She is already naked, their “patching up” of the quarrel between them has already proceeded that far. He chases after her, drags her back up the beach, slaps her until she is limp and can no longer resist, binds her hands and feet with the wire hangers, douses her with gasoline, strikes the fatal match, and runs off into the night.

“Home free,” he says.

At least until Thanksgiving Day.

On Thanksgiving Day, George Harper breaks jail, and Davis is forced to go into hiding again. He comes back to Calusa. But he has not reckoned with Sally Owen. At Sally’s house on Monday afternoon, November 30, she tells Davis she suspects he’s the one who killed Michelle. She says, moreover, that she might just go to the police one of these days to tell them all about it. He does not know whether she is teasing him or not. They are in bed together, she has just given him a blow job worthy of Michelle herself. Is she serious? He simply doesn’t know. But neither can he take a chance. He leaves the house “to go pick up some fried chicken” for their supper. Instead, he goes down the street to the Harper house, lets himself into the garage, and looks for a weapon there, something belonging to Harper, something that will link Harper to the second murder he has already decided to commit. When he finds the hammer with Harper’s initials on it, he grins from ear to ear. He takes out his handkerchief, wraps it around the handle of the hammer, and then goes back to Sally’s house again. She is at the kitchen sink when he comes in, filling a kettle with water for coffee. She does not turn when he says, “Hi, honey, I’m back.” It is his belief now that she never even knew what hit her. The first blow crushed her skull, and the next one — as she was falling to the floor — she probably never even felt.

“I dropped the hammer on the floor,” he tells us. “Another one for Georgie, I figured. My insurance.” He looks up. He stares first at Bloom and then at me, and then he says, “I really blew it, didn’t I? I mean, we had it all going for us, didn’t we? How else in this town can blacks and whites really get together? Except in bed? I mean, Jesus, we’d found the answer, am I right?”

And suddenly, he is weeping again.

The state’s attorney — Skye Bannister himself this time — arrived at the Public Safety Building a half hour after the typed confession had been signed by Davis. Bloom was still there, of course. So was I. He was an exceptionally tall man, Skye Bannister, perhaps six four or five, with the appearance of a basketball player, reedy and pale, with wheat-colored hair and eyes the color of his name. He read the transcript in silence. Then he looked up.

“I never did believe that fisherman’s identification,” he said. “Man with veins on his nose is a drinker for sure.”

“Will the confession hold?” Bloom asked.

“Can’t see why not,” Bannister said. “What are you thinking?”

“Entrapment,” Bloom said.

“No, you were both very clever,” Bannister said. He turned to me. “You thinking of entering the practice of criminal law, Mr. Hope?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

“Don’t,” Bannister advised. “Got enough trouble getting convictions as it is.” He smiled, and then turned back to Bloom.

“I’ll have a man here in half an hour or so, do the formal Q and A. Good-bye gentlemen. You did good.”

We were alone in the office again, Bloom and I.

“So,” he said, “it wasn’t Harper after all, was it? Davis was the beast we wanted.”

“Was he?” I said. “Or was the beast really beauty?”

“What?”

“Michelle,” I said, and then I left for the airport to pick up my daughter and Dale.