Dangerous Women

THE LAST KISS by S. J. ROZAN

Washing her blood off his hands (sticky and clinging, then hot and slippery, red trails swirling, pink clouds rushing away), he thought of their first kiss. Not until then, and strange, that was: He’d burned for her so, and that kiss had ignited him. Different from all the others after, because unfamiliar; electrifying not just with her heat and the spicy salt taste of her but with newness, the nearly uncontainable excitement of the threshold.

The softness and sting of that kiss had returned at odd times in the past months, when he was not with her but also when he was, sometimes even as he was kissing her, that kiss overlaid on others; he could summon the memory, and often did, but the thrill was far greater when it ambushed him, as now. Sometimes its impact was so great that he stumbled, had to reach out and hold something to keep from falling.

“Not tonight,” she’d said that first night, butterfly fingertips inflaming his skin, lips grazing his, then flitting away; then melting into him with a rush so urgent he thought she’d changed her mind and it would be tonight. But she released him and smiled and didn’t say, “No,” only, “Not tonight.”

She thought she was denying him, that she had control. No. He’d waited not because she wanted it, but because waiting tightened the wire, drove the fever up.

And it must have been waiting that made this happen: that kiss-for a few days, all he had-flowed through his memory and flesh, saturated him. And then, at moments he couldn’t predict, it concentrated, rose and crashed over him like a wave.

Moments like this.

With it now, for the first time, came an ache. Not entirely unpleasant, it added sweetness, softened the edges. The ache was regret: Memory, all he’d had at first, was all he was left with, now that she was gone.

As she had to be.

As she’d wanted to be.

That was what he’d seen, though none of the others had. She’d declared it clearly, and if to him, then surely to each. But he’d thought it wild exaggeration, and no doubt they thought the same. Only later, when she’d pulled the single string that dropped the web over him and stood back smiling, did he realize who the true quarry was intended to be.

Not him, but she herself.

He wished he’d seen it earlier, but he couldn’t claim that. He was smarter than the others, and certainly smarter than she was, but he was only a man. When she’d come to him, he’d wanted her. When she’d leaned into him for that first kiss he’d felt only promise and pride.

She’d come to him as a client. The way, he’d understood later, she’d come to them all, but at the time he hadn’t known that.

“Jeffrey Bettinger’s been my attorney until now.” She’d spoken crisply, settling in his office chair. She wore a soft wool suit the mahogany color of her hair, a blouse a shade darker than her ivory skin. Her cheeks glowed from the cold. As she crossed her legs, a gem of melting ice slid from her boot to his carpet. He molded his features into a mask of polite interest, his true attention riveted by the wool and silk, the mounds and hollows and the darkness beneath.

He’d noticed her with Bettinger, of course, been as amazed as anyone to see the oil-painting richness of her sharing a drink with the faded snapshot that was Bettinger. He hadn’t known she was a client and he hadn’t known about Cramer or Robbins or Sutton, then, either. He hadn’t known what she wanted, or what she’d done. Though when he discovered the truth of that, he couldn’t honestly say he’d have done anything in any different way.

With her to that first meeting she’d brought a kidskin portfolio with a tiny silver lock. Valuable papers, she told him. As her new attorney, he need not execute any of the papers, except in the event of her death, in which case she was hereby instructing him to break the lock and follow the wishes expressed inside. Right now he need merely lock the portfolio in his office safe. He did have a safe, of course?

Of course. He’d taken the portfolio, allowing his fingers to linger on hers, breathing slowly her rich summery scent.

From the first he’d been a completely professional lawyer. What happened between them-first in his imaginings, then, soon, in nights and days-never distracted him from his duties, as it would a weaker man. Probably, he told himself, that was why she’d left Bettinger: The man was a wimp. He’d likely never advised her, just let her lead him around with a ring through his nose. Himself, he wasn’t like that: He’d objected, argued, offered alternatives each time she’d instructed him to sell a property at a hopelessly low price, to draft a codicil to her will leaving a bequest to some suspect cause. She was a rich woman, he told her, but there was an end to wealth if unhusbanded.

The phrase unexpectedly drew from her a bitter laugh: the word “husband,” she explained. Hers had been a lawyer, a cold, vile man who’d forbidden her children or friends, beaten and bound her, made living an unending hell. More than once he’d threatened to kill her if provoked, and she despised herself for the cowardice that stopped her from forcing his hand, or from performing the act herself. She’d plotted against him in dark, secret fantasy; she thought, she admitted without blinking, that she might have actually been insane for a time, driven mad by isolation, pain and fear.

“Did you try?” he asked, feeling desire grow as she spoke, seeing behind his eyes visions of her shivering and bruised, cowering below a looming shadow.

“To kill him? He died.” She spoke contemptuously. “Before I worked up the courage to kill either of us.”

Her husband’s sudden death, she said, had been a surprise, and the wealth she was left with was her only source of pleasure. (When he heard that his face blazed, his mind racing to the night before, the heat of their kisses, the crescendo of their rocking, together, together.) She paused a deliberate moment. With a smile, and with no amendment or exception to her statement, she went on to say that she would spend his money how and where she liked.

He didn’t answer. He crossed the room and closed the door, and took her right there on his office carpet.

When their flesh intertwined she did whatever he asked, however odd, painful or humiliating. In the light of the business day, on the other hand, he was entirely unsuccessful in persuading, cajoling, insisting. But he tried each time, because there was no ring through his nose.

Now, as he worked, the memory of that first kiss flooding through him, he found himself awash in other memories also, unlooked-for but welcome. Swaddling her body in blankets for the trip to the hillside where he’d leave her, a place she’d shown him and told him she loved, he heard her voice, the breathy whisper that slithered like ice along his spine. The coppery smell of blood metamorphosed to the jungle blossoms of her perfume as he cleaned the room. No one would look here for her, or come here for any other reason, to this gloriously isolated, derelict house across the river. But he was by nature careful. He washed away the bloodstains, turned the mattress over.

They’d had no need to slip away to this secret spot, except for the shiver it gave them both. They were single, they were adults, they could have carried on their affair at high noon on Main Street. But she’d found the house, and when she told him about it over a roadhouse table, her stockinged toes trailing along his calf, they’d agreed to agree that it was best to be seen together only as attorney and client.

The heat in his palms as, his work finished, he toweled dry, made him think of her skin, pale velvet always warmer than his, as though she lived in a feverish cloud, a torrid private tropics out of which she reached for him.

At the time he’d thought, to him, she was reaching out to him. But he was mistaken.

Last week she’d come to his office unannounced, and, sitting in that same chair (glowing this time with sweat: the day was damp and hot), declared she was not satisfied. Not satisfied? Then what were the moans, the crashing heartbeat, the soft sighs?

“I’m firing you,” she said. “Your services are no longer required.”

“What’s wrong with you?” he hissed fiercely, striding across the room to close the door.

She rose immediately and opened it again. “I’ll take my papers, please.” She remained standing and nodded pointedly at the safe.

“Are you-?”

“I have an appointment with Mr. Dreyer. Of Dreyer and Holt.” Ice dripped from her words; he thought of her boots, that first morning. She looked at her watch. “If you choose not to return my papers I’ll have no choice but to add that to my complaint to the police and the Ethics Commission.”

He tried to grasp hold. “Complaint?”

“Yes, and retaining my papers will compound it. I imagine there’s a distinction, even among lawyers, between taking sexual and professional advantage of a client, and outright theft.”

Astonished, he stood mute.

She raised her eyebrows. “Making love to a widow to distract her from bad advice bordering on malfeasance? That’s grounds for complaint, wouldn’t you say? Some of the transactions you handled for me lost thousands. I’m firing you. I’ll be filing professional and criminal complaints a week from today.”

In their nights she’d cooed obscenities. The filthy words her hot breath tipped into his ear had exhilarated but never shocked him. But the abstract phrases she coolly spoke now stunned him with their indecency.

“Those deals. They were your idea, all of them. I objected every time. I have memos, letters in the file-”

“Postdated, no doubt.”

“No! You know-”

“What I know is, regardless of whether you’re convicted of anything, no wealthy widow will ever come to you again, after I’m through with you.”

The intercom buzzed; his secretary told him his ten o’clock appointment had arrived. Bewildered, disoriented, he opened the safe and gave her the kidskin portfolio.

She turned and left.

He slept badly that night and the one that followed. Longing for her, confusion about her, and this new fear of her roiled his attempts at oblivion. Two days later he was still in shock.

And lucky, that had turned out to be.

He’d done something rare, left the office in the early afternoon-on what could he possibly concentrate?-to head to the oak-paneled tavern where lawyers met to bargain, to dispute and to forget.

“You don’t look good,” Sammy, the bartender, had said, as though he needed to be told. He’d shaken his head, given no explanation. Sammy knew his job: he poured a drink and proffered consolation. “At least you’re not Bettinger.” Sammy lifted his chin toward a crumpled form in the corner. “He’s being investigated, did you know that? The Ethics Commission, and the police.”

A long look at the unmoving Bettinger; the slow fire of scotch burning his way to clarity. He slid his second drink from the bar and crossed the room. He bought Bettinger a drink and another, and morose Bettinger, in slurred and garbled half-sentences, staring into his gin, muttering “black widow bitch,” cast light on his darkness.

She’d set them up. Bettinger was the one before him, but before that had come Cramer, and Robbins, and Sutton. Every one her hero, saving her from the incompetence of the attorney before (the formal complaints and charges she’d filed being something she mentioned to none). Every one instructed to make bad business deals, to sell low and buy high. Every one’s objections quieted with the generosity of her body, in the deserted house.

Every one ruined.

Bettinger, sloppy with brotherhood, offered him sympathy, claimed revulsion, pretended to fury and swore revenge. But he could see-anyone could see-that if she walked in right then to the tavern where they sat, Bettinger would follow her out on his hands and knees.

He left Bettinger in his pool of self-pity and walked through the fading day to think. The gray of the sky went to black and he considered this: Each complaint had been filed, as she’d said the one against him would be, a full week after she’d dropped her bombshell and changed attorneys. Stars pricked holes in the sky and he thought about this: the self-loathing in her voice when she talked about her failure to rescue herself from her husband’s brutality by taking her own life. The city streets quieted around him as he heard her say spending her inheritance was her only pleasure.

And he saw what the others hadn’t: who the trap was really set for, who the intended victim was.

So he did as she wanted. He called her, and asked her whether she had filed the charges and complaints against him yet. She had not. He asked her to meet him at the house that was theirs, across the river. “To talk about it,” he said. And he heard a shiver of anticipation in her voice as she agreed.

And now, tonight, he’d given her what she’d hoped for, fulfilled her desire.

Desires. The sweep of her car’s headlights had brought him to the door. As she stepped onto the porch where he waited, he felt her heat. They stopped still and time stopped with them, until, without speaking, she pressed her body, her lips, on his. He led her to the bed. He undressed her slowly, her blouse, her skirt, her silken slip, and tethered her to the bed with the silver handcuffs she’d brought him in their first days. With his hands, with his lips and tongue he took time, made slow love to her, built her toward the peak and reached it with her. After, he didn’t unlock the cuffs, nor did she ask him to. He held her gently, stroking her hair as she lay motionless, eyes closed, lips parted.

Then he rose, and blindfolded her. She smiled softly. He kissed her a last time. The tastes, the scents, the thrills of the first kiss rushed in and rolled over him like a wave. Then they subsided, revealing the satin finality of this last one.

The last one.

She’d tried, he understood now, to drive each of them, Bettinger and the others, to this, hoping for one to release her. The disasters that befell them were punishment for being weak.

He was strong.

The blade glittered as he slid it into her heart.

She arched toward him as in pleasure. She didn’t scream, but gave the same small cry he’d heard not long before, at the height of her joy.

He burned her clothes in the fireplace, wrapped her purse with her body, laid her across the rear seat of her own car. He drove to the hillside overlooking the town, dug her a grave among the trees, and, under a sky dotted with stars, he said farewell.

Abandoning her car far into the woods, he hiked back to the house for his own, drove home and slept soundly.

At the office the next day his morning was productive and his afternoon was the same. He decided to go down to the tavern and buy Bettinger a drink. Bettinger, after all, had done him a great favor. Of course, he’d done Bettinger one, Cramer and Robbins and Sutton, too, though they’d never know whom to thank. With the complainant gone, the cases against them would never be made. He’d freed them, too.

He was about to leave when the police arrived. They wasted no time, but arrested him for her murder.

“We got a call from her attorney.”

He searched for his voice. “Paul Dreyer?”

The lead detective explained. She’d left Dreyer a message last night that she’d call in the morning, before ten. If she didn’t, he was to open a kidskin portfolio in his safe. She hadn’t called, so, acting on instructions, Dreyer had broken the lock. Inside were directions to the house and the hillside, and a note asking that the authorities examine transactions her previous attorney had conducted for her. She wasn’t sure, the note said, but she believed she’d been cheated. She was going to confront the attorney, who’d also been her lover. And, the note said, she was afraid.

The attorney was not named.

But she had told the attorney she was using now who her previous attorney had been.

The cops had had a busy morning. They’d found the house, her body, her car. They’d found her blood on the turned-over mattress. They’d found his fingerprints.

They led him away.

As he stepped onto the sidewalk, the tastes, scents, thrills of their first kiss waited in ambush. They crashed so hard over him that he stumbled, and because he was handcuffed and could not reach out to hold anything, he fell.