Crimson Joy

CHAPTER 2

Susan was wearing black leather pants and low black cowboy boots with blue patterns worked into the leather. She had on a cobalt blouse and some gold chains and two large gold earrings and was sitting in my living room with her feet up on my coffee table, sipping very slowly at champagne with a splash of Midori liqueur. "And what does Quirk want you to do?" she said. The Midori gave the champagne a delicate tint a little greener than chartreuse. Susan spoke with the under rim of the champagne flute resting on her lower lip. Her big dark eyes looked over the top rim.

"He wants me to be someone he can trust," I said. I came around my counter and put a small silver tray on the coffee table in front of her.

There was beluga caviar on the tray and a small spoon and some Bremner wafers and six wedges of lemon.

"Yum yum," Susan said. She moved the champagne glass away from her mouth and tipped her head up at me and I kissed her on the mouth.

"No French-kissing," I said. "It muddles the palate."

Susan sipped another gram of champagne and looked at me without comment.

I went back to the kitchen and began to pound a couple of boneless chicken thighs with a heavy knife.

"Takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," I said.

"Is Quirk making up a kind of special squad of his own?" Susan said.

"Belson called it a posse. Quirk's own posse," I said.

"Because the killer may be someone in his department?"

"And because his department is going to get eaten up by the circus," I said. "Quirk wants an alternative. He wants someone not on the payroll. He wants somebody the mayor can't boss, and the city council can't threaten. Somebody who's not bucking for captain. He wants someplace to go where it's quiet and he can think."

"Will it be that bad?" Susan said.

"Yes, very soon," I said.

"Have you been involved in something like this before?"

"I was around the Strangler case," I said. "We had psychics and movie producers and dancing chickens in every corner."

I sprinkled some rosemary on the flattened chicken thighs and put them in olive oil and lemon juice to marinate.

"Everyone uses it," Susan said.

"Yes," I said. I poured a little of the champagne into my glass. "To get promoted, to get famous, to get rich, to get excited." I drank my champagne and poured some more, and went around the corner to have some caviar.

"How do you afford caviar?" Susan said.

"Low overhead," I said. "I weave my own blackjacks."

"He seems as if he wants to be caught," Susan said.

"The letter. Yeah, probably. But he didn't write it until after the second killing."

"So if he drops clues it may be very slowly," Susan said.

"And a lot of women may die before he drops enough for us to catch him."

I said.

Susan took maybe two sturgeon eggs on the tip of the spoon and ate them slowly.

"While we eat caviar," she said.

"And drink champagne," I said. I poured some for her and added a touch of the Midori.

"Shamelessly," Susan said.

"If we drank Moxie and ate Devil Dogs, they'd still die," I said.

"I know."

We each sipped champagne. The leather pants were smooth over Susan's thighs.

"What we know basically is that it's a white guy killing black women.

Certainly sounds like a racial crime," I said.

"And the semen traces?" Susan said.

"Certainly sounds like a sexual crime," I said.

"A dysfunctional one," Susan said.

"Because there's no penetration," I said.

"Except with a gun," Susan said. "Think how frightened of women he must be, to tie them up and gag them and render them helpless, and still he cannot actually connect. He can only find sexual expression the way he does."

"Expression?"

"In the original sense," Susan said.

I nodded. "Why black women?" I said.

Susan shook her head. "No way to know," she said. "Psychopaths, and we must assume that we've got one here, have their own logic, a logic rooted in their own symbolism."

"In other words, just because he's white and they're black is not enough reason to assume he's killing them for racial reasons," I said.

"That's right. What the women represent to him, why he needs to treat them as he does, may be a function of their blackness, or their status on the social scale. Or it may be that there is some idiosyncratic association for him that no one else can imagine."

"Like he was traumatized as a child while reading Black Beauty?" I said.

Susan smiled, which was always lovely to see. When she smiled her whole self went into it and the tone of her body changed and her coloration livened. "It's usually not that simple, but you have the idea. Given the fear level that must be operating, it could even be that they are so unlike what they symbolize."

"The guy's killed three women; it's hard to sympathize with his fear," I said.

"Yes," Susan said. "But it's worth understanding. Might be worth looking at the bondage. Is it the same in each case? Might it be ritualistic?"

"Is there any way to predict what he'll do next?"

"It's what shrinks do worst," Susan said. "We're pretty good at explaining human behavior but we're an embarrassment at predicting it."

"He'll probably kill another black woman," I said.

"Probably," Susan said. "And he'll probably write more letters and eventually you'll catch him."

"Maybe," I said.

"You will," she said. "You're smart and you're tough and your will is absolutely inexhaustible."

"Well," I said, "that's true."

"And I'm going to help you," Susan said.

The timer rang in my kitchen and I got up and went and took the rice out of the oven. I cracked the cover on the casserole so steam could escape, and shut off the oven and turned toward Susan across the counter.

"We are faced with a decision," I said. "I can have supper on the table in ten minutes and we could eat heartily and then fall into bed. But knowing how, as you age, you are inclined toward torpor after a meal, I was wondering how you wished to deal with the question of me jumping on your bones."

Susan had half a glass of champagne and Midori left. She raised it toward the light and gazed through it for a moment and then she drank half of it and lowered the glass and looked at me thoughtfully. Her eyes were so large and dark that they seemed all pupil, as if the iris had disappeared.

"What's for supper?" she said.

"Grilled lemon and rosemary chicken, brown rice with pignolias, assorted fresh vegetables lightly steamed and dressed with Spenser's famous honey-mustard splash, blue corn bread, and a bottle of Iron Horse Chardonnay."

Susan drank the rest of her champagne and leaned forward and put the glass on the coffee table and stood up. She stepped out of the cowboy boots, and unsnapped the leather pants and wiggled out of them and folded them neatly across the back of the wing chair. Then she turned and looked full at me and smiled with all of her energy and said, "I believe it would be best if you jumped on my bones now."

"I knew you'd say that," I said.

"When did you first suspect?" she said. a "When you took your pants off," I said.

"Yes," Susan murmured, her face against mine, "that would be suggestive."

I put my arms around her. "You know what I miss?" I said. "I miss the old days, before pantyhose, when there were garter belts and the flash of thigh above a stocking top."

"Ah, sweet bird of youth," Susan said with her mouth against mine.

"But I'll manage," I said.

And I did.

Later we ate dinner, Susan in one of my blue oxford shirts and me in a pair of stretch-fabric workout pants, the kind with the drawstring at the top. We looked dashing.

"How about therapy?" I said. "Should I start checking shrinks?"

She shook her head. There was a drop of vegetable dressing on her chin and I leaned over and daubed with my napkin. "He probably wouldn't seek therapy," Susan said. "He wouldn't need to, his needs are being fulfilled by the crime. People seek help when they are frustrated, when the pressure is too great to bear."

"Just like me," I said. "Whenever the pressure of tumescence becomes intolerable, I seek you out."

"How lovely to think of it that way," Susan said.

"Well, I'm also motivated by the fact that I love you more than it is possible to say."

"I know," Susan said. "I feel the same about you."

For a moment we were silent, and the connection between us was shimmering and palpable and more changeless than the universe. I raised my wineglass slightly. "Forever," I said.

Her eyes glistened as she looked at me.

"Probably," she said.