Murder — His and Hers

Seeing Red

It seemed to Deborah that every cell in her bloated body was about to burst. If her period didn’t start soon, she was going to kill somebody!

She sat back in the leather chair and tugged viciously through her red silk dress at the tight elastic waistband on her pantyhose. Then she leaned forward and opened the top right drawer of her mahogany desk and pulled out a pair of long, silver scissors, which she dropped into her open purse on the floor by her feet. She got up from the desk, taking the purse, and walked briskly, tensely, to the closed office door. But as soon as she opened it, she forced her body to relax, and changed her cross expression to one of pleasantry.

“I’ll be back in a minute, Shirley,” she said sweetly to the secretary who sat behind a desk in the outer room.

The secretary, a rather homely woman with short hair and big, round glasses, looked up briefly from what she was doing. “Yes, Ms. Nova,” she said, then returned to her work.

Deborah walked down the plush-carpeted corridor toward the executive’s washroom, nodding and smiling at a few people along the way... but once inside the bathroom, behind its thick bronze-colored door, her expression changed back to one of annoyance as she marched across the marble floor, her high-heeled shoes click, click, clicking.

She threw open a stall, entered, then slammed it shut.

She got out the scissors and yanked up her dress.

“I’d like to get my hands on the son-of-a-bitch that designed these pantyhose,” she snarled, sliding one of the silver blades down between her stomach and the hose, cutting away savagely at the binding band. “You can bet it wasn’t a woman!”

Her discomfort somewhat relieved, she held up the scissors in front of her face. Snip! snip! went the blades, glinting in the overhead light. “I’d take this to his...”

Water ran in a sink.

Composing herself, Deborah exited the stall.

A younger woman in a dark tailored suit stood at one of the shell-shaped basins washing her hands. Her blonde hair was pulled back from an attractive face and held at the nape of her neck by an ornate barrette. Expensive earrings clung to delicate ears.

“Hello, Deborah,” the woman said.

“Heather,” Deborah responded, noncommittally. She moved to an adjacent basin and turned the crystal knobs on the faucet. The two women, standing side by side, eyed each other in the mirror. They looked similar, despite their difference in age, which was almost a decade.

Deborah thought she herself looked better.

“I need your help,” Heather said, breaking the silence.

Deborah, wiping her hands on a paper towel, turned to face the woman. “Oh?” she smiled.

“I understand the second chair hasn’t been filled yet for the Owens case. I’d like a shot at it.”

Deborah continued to smile.

“I would do a good job,” the woman said confidently.

“Yes, I believe you could.”

“Then you’ll recommend me?”

Deborah, finished with the towel, wadded it up. “Certainly, I will,” she said.

Heather smiled and thanked Deborah, and left the bathroom.

Deborah stared after the woman, nerves strung out as tight as pantyhose in a strangler’s hands.

“Certainly, I will,” she repeated. “Not!”

She reared back and threw the wadded-up paper towel angrily at the wastebasket. “I didn’t claw my way up this good-old-boy network just to hand you a plum position on a silver platter!”

Deborah turned back to the mirror and got lipstick out of her purse and applied the blood-red color to her collagen-injected lips.

“You’d better go home,” she warned her reflection, “before you blow it. Remember Laura.”

The thought of that woman, and what happened to her, brought a new rush of heat to Deborah’s already flushed cheeks.

It was fifteen years ago that Deborah, fresh out of law school and new to the firm, was an associate to Laura. The woman was her idol, a Harvard graduate of distinction, a talented and brilliant lawyer... and the first female certain to become a partner in this all-boys-club.

But it never came to pass. Because Laura made a fatal mistake one day: she showed some emotion.

Mr. Laroma, a senior partner in a pin-stripped suit, looked at Laura from across the conference table and smirked, “Maybe we should discuss this later... after you’ve had your period.”

Though a stunned silence hung in the air, Deborah would never forget the collective look on the men’s faces: one of masked approval. Laura fled the room, and a short time later, the company.

The incident was a turning point for Deborah; after that, she told herself, she would be a man in drag.

And now, with partnership so close she could almost reach out and touch it, she’d better not show any female weakness. Especially hormonal.

Deborah walked back to her office.

“If Mr. Laroma should need me,” Deborah informed her secretary, “he can reach me at home.”

Deborah packed up her briefcase, then took the elevator down to an underground garage where she got in her gray BMW and drove out to the street. After a few blocks, she pulled into a “No Parking” zone in front of a dry-cleaners, got out of the car and entered the store.

A thin young man with a bad case of acne stood behind the counter. She stepped up and set her purse down, then rummaged around in the bag for her dry-cleaning ticket. She stopped, realizing she’d left it at home.

“Damn,” she said irritably. “I don’t have the ticket... but it’s a white silk blouse and blue suit.”

“Sorry,” the kid said flatly, “I need the ticket.”

Deborah softened her expression and voice, “Can’t you make an exception?” she asked sweetly.

“Nope. Those are the rules.”

Deborah studied him for a moment, then sighed deeply. “And I so wanted to wear them to the AIDS benefit tonight.” For a second the kid seemed to reconsider. But then he said, again, “I need the ticket.”

Deborah slammed both fists on the counter making her purse jump. “Listen, you pimply-faced faggot,” she growled, “give me my clothes or I’ll...”

“I’ll call the cops,” he said firmly, and moved toward a nearby phone to make good his threat.

Deborah turned in a huff and stomped out to the curb where she found a different kind of ticket on the windshield of her car.

She grabbed the pink parking violation, nearly dislocating the wiper, and looked up and down the street. She spotted the policewoman who had given her the ticket.

“I was just in there a minute!” Deborah shouted at her.

The cop ignored Deborah.

So Deborah screamed, “Why don’t you get a real job!” and tore the ticket into tiny pieces, scattering them to the wind.

She got in her car and, without looking, pulled out from the curb, nearly causing an accident. Brakes squealed as the other motorist honked his horn.

She gave him the finger.

Weaving recklessly in and out of the downtown traffic, Deborah caught the north-bound expressway that would take her out to her home in the suburbs. But before long the expressway slowed, congested with commuters, and Deborah, behind the wheel, fumed, then found some classical music on the radio to calm herself down. But after a while, the violin concerto sounded like fingernails on a blackboard and Deborah shut off the radio with a click.

Now the traffic was at a near standstill, and Deborah, crawling past an exit, got off. She’d wait out the rush hour at a nearby mall, and besides, she thought, shopping always made her feel better. And she could use the time to find a present for her mother’s birthday — though it didn’t matter how carefully Deborah picked out the gift or how expensive it was... nothing ever pleased her mother.

It seemed to Deborah that she spent her entire life looking for affection; though she got it, briefly, from her father — until she was eight years old. That’s when he left her. He didn’t have the decency to wait until she had gone off to school that morning. She stood crying at the window — just a little girl — watching him get in the car with his suitcases. He didn’t even look back.

She didn’t see or hear from him again until a few years ago. He called her at the office, out of the blue... said he was sorry he had dropped out of sight. He’d like to make it up to her.

She wanted — so badly — to reach out to him, to know him, to love him. But the little girl wouldn’t let her.

She told him to go fuck himself.

Deborah pulled her car into the parking lot of the mall, which was full. She drove around and around looking for a place to park. The third time she passed the empty handicapped spaces up at the front, she complained, “How many do they need? They get all the breaks!”

Then two heavy-set women in jogging clothes — obviously on their way to use the mall as a track, a trend Deborah hated — stepped out in the cross-walk, and she had to slam on her brakes and let them pass.

She watched the women disdainfully, envisioning elephants, and rolled down her window and hollered, “It’s not working!”

Around she drove again, when suddenly, up at the front, and very close to the mall, brake lights went on.

“There is a God!” Deborah cried, and zoomed ahead, putting on her turn signal to lay claim to the spot.

Impatiently she tapped her fed nails on the steering wheel, waiting for the Chevy truck to back out, its body perched precariously up on big wheels.

“Come on, come on,” she muttered. “Show me a jacked-up truck and I’ll show you a man who wishes his dick were bigger.”

Slowly the Chevy backed out and started to leave, but as soon as it did, a black Porsche roared around the corner and stole the parking space.

Behind the wheel of the Porsche was a businessman in a suit. And a smirk on his face.

Shouting a string of obscenities, Deborah exploded, slammed her accelerator to the floor and aimed the front of her car for the back of his ass!

Steve was depressed. Up until six months ago — that’s when it started — the feeling had been foreign to him.

An outgoing, up-beat, aggressive man, he’d enjoyed a damn near perfect life. Nurturing and supportive parents, attending the best schools, more friends than he knew what to do with... Steve seemed blessed from birth. After graduating from college, he had married the prettiest woman on campus, and landed a good job with an insurance company.

Now, fifteen years later, walking out of that company into a cold, gray, overcast day, Steve felt the jaws of depression tighten their grip, pulling him down, down, into a dark abyss out of which he could see no possible escape.

He got into his black Porsche, kicking a small handgun that had slid out from under the front seat; he had bought the weapon last year when there was a rash of smash-and-grab car thieves terrorizing the city.

That’s all he needed, he thought, was to shoot himself in the goddamn foot. Shaking his head, he tucked the gun back under the seat, started the car and roared off, catching the south-bound freeway that would head him toward the city to an apartment where he lived alone.

But traffic was snarled, at a near stand-still, giving Steve nothing to do but think. And finally, he allowed something that had been eating away inside of him to gnaw its way out...

It was last May when Steve went back to his hometown for his twenty-fifth high school class reunion. His wife, Kathleen, decided not to go; their three kids were busy with their own activities, and she would be needed. And besides, Kathleen had said with a smile, he’d have more fun by himself.

Steve hadn’t been back to Iowa since he graduated from high school. Over the years, the tenth, fifteenth, then twentieth class reunion forms found their way to him as he moved around the country for his company. And each time he sat down at his desk and filled out the paper — until he came to the part that asked his occupation. Insurance salesman. Not very befitting to the boy voted most likely to succeed. No, he told himself, until he could write that he was president of the company, he wouldn’t attend.

But this time Steve made an exception. He was now a vice-president, with the presidency certain to be his.

The night before he left, he dug out his old high-school yearbook and pored over it, so he would remember his classmates. Then he got out the booklet that came with his banquet ticket; it told what everyone was presently doing. He studied it, as if there would be an exam, smiling as he did so, until he reached the last page. Fifteen names filled a memorial page. It upset him to know that these people were dead...

Yet, it would be great to see old friends. Especially Rob. He grinned, thinking of all the rebellious scrapes he and his best friend had gotten into.

Steve shook his head, his smile fading. How could he have lost touch with Rob? They were like brothers, for Christ’s sake! He made a promise to himself that at the reunion he would renew that friendship. After all, he thought, looking again at the memorial page, life was just too damn short.

Steve thumbed back through the booklet, and noticed that his old girlfriend, Melissa, listed no spouse...

Okay, so he envisioned making it with Melissa. So what. Like no married woman ever had thoughts about another man. It was just a harmless fantasy that helped pass the time on his long drive back to Iowa. Yes, he knew he had a great job, a wonderful wife, and three terrific kids. He wasn’t stupid. And yet, memories of Melissa — a love almost consummated — seemed more and more like unfinished business in his mind.

After arriving in town, Steve checked in to a hotel, taking a suite — in case anyone might want to come back and party. Then he showered and shaved, and carefully combed his recently dyed hair. He put on tight, white Bermuda shorts and a pale yellow polo shirt that showed off his spa-tanned skin. A leather Rolex was strapped to his wrist.

He stood at the mirror — looking more like a thirty-three than forty-three year old man — and, satisfied with his appearance, he left the room, and went out to his Porsche.

Indianola was a small town in a rural community with a population of about ten thousand. Driving around the downtown, which was built in a square around a quaint little park, Steve thought things hadn’t changed much in twenty-five years. Oh, sure, there were some new shops, but the old, gothic theater with its great marquee, and Pasquale’s Pizzeria — where everyone hung out — took him zooming back in time.

Steve felt a lump in his throat.

He turned down a side street and pulled his Porsche into a parking lot next to a big, three-story brown brick building, which was the old YMCA where they used to have sock-hops. Vacant for some time, the reunion committee re-opened it for this Friday night dance — for old time’s sake.

Steve parked his car and got out.

As he opened the door to the building, loud talking and laughter floated down from the second floor parlor. He smiled as he climbed the short flight of steps, nervous in a way he hadn’t felt since high school.

But when he entered the parlor, he became confused and disoriented, like a kid who’d wandered into the wrong classroom. Looking out over the sea of faces he recognized no one. He must be at the wrong reunion; these people were old. And yet, some reached out and grabbed at him and called his name. With a frozen smile he moved through the crowd, as if in a slow motion picture.

Then behind him he heard a low, soft voice.

Melissa.

He sighed, relieved to know someone, and grinning, he turned.

But the grin collapsed like a fat lady in a folding chair, for Melissa was short and dumpy. Beneath curly gray hair lay a wrinkled face where here and there skin-tags clung like tiny particles of forgotten food. The bright orange dress she wore (Christ on a crutch, why would she want to draw attention to herself?) was shaped like a tent.

Steve’s thoughts must have registered on his face, because Melissa had a hurt look on hers. Quickly he turned on the charm and told her how nice it was to see her again and how pretty she looked.

She perked up, and latched onto him, and launched into her life’s history since high school... which was a nightmare. Listening to her babble on and on, Steve never realized it before, but the woman had the IQ of a gerbil! When she started to show him pictures of ugly grandchildren, he got away from her, and moved to the other side of the room.

What happened? he thought. Was this the generation that was going to change the world? It didn’t seem possible! Had they just given the fuck up? Turned into their parents — but worse?

Was this old man in plaid polyester pants, now boring him to death with talk of aluminum siding, the same Rob from high school? Steve stared at his old friend.

Hello! Hello! Is anybody in there?

Steve fled the parlor, hurrying up a flight of wide, wooden steps that creaked and moaned with their age, and went into the gymnasium where the dance was being held.

It was dark in there — mercifully — the only source of light coming from the band on stage, and a large glittering ball that revolved on the ceiling; the ball sent a million white spots swirling around, making it look like the room had some contagious disease. The gym itself was small, just the size of a basketball court with no room for bleachers. Crepe paper hung from corner to corner, while a hundred balloons clung to the walls.

Steve took a chair at one of the long banquet tables, and watched the couples out on the floor, holding each other, dancing to a slow song, seemingly content with their lives...

He felt miserable.

Then the band — five guys who were also no spring chickens — began to play a song by the Association he hadn’t heard since high school.

...enter the young...

Slowly Steve rose to his feet.

He started to weep.

He bolted from the room and down the wooden steps and out the front door, to his car, where he drove to an all-night liquor store, bought a bottle of bourbon, went back to his hotel room and drank it, until he passed out, on the floor, in his own vomit.

And now, crawling along the expressway, it occurred to Steve — in a revelation — that it was just a few weeks after returning from that class reunion that the anxiety attacks began.

The first one sent him rushing to the emergency room in the middle of the night, certain he was having heart failure. But an EKG and follow-up tests showed nothing was wrong. After that, he suffered them in silence.

The next indignity was Kathleen accusing him of being obsessed with sex. He’d always felt he had a satisfying love life — hell, better than satisfying. He was damn lucky to have such a sexy and obliging wife — and with three kids in the house! He supposed he had been hornier than usual — as if in the mass production of his sperm there somehow held the promise of immortality — but he never foresaw the night when, in a tearful confrontation, Kathleen told him she had had enough, and to get it someplace else.

So he did.

Kathleen kicked him out, of course. He couldn’t blame her. His life was out of control, like a child’s top spinning wildly on a table, heading straight for the edge... and he had neither the ability nor the desire to stop it.

Then came the coup de grace. Somebody else got to be president of the company. A younger man. Suddenly, as if overnight, Steve was perceived — or so he thought — as “too old.” What depressed him more than anything else was knowing the finality of what lay before him: too late to start over with another company, he would go no further up the ladder of success.

Steve needed a fix... in the form of Jennifer who worked at an Orange Julius at a mall. She was dumb as a post, but young and pretty. And between her creamy white thighs was the only place he could get away from his demons.

He left the crowded expressway, and drove to the mall. He’d treat Jennifer to an expensive dinner, he thought, then she would make him feel better... sad pathetic excuse for a man that he was...

He smirked, hating himself, and pulled into a parking place. He turned off the engine and was undoing the seatbelt, when a tremendous force from behind drove him into the windshield, his head cracking up against the glass. While he didn’t lose consciousness, Steve was so stunned he remained motionless for a moment, slumped over the steering wheel.

Then dazed, his head throbbing, he leaned back against the seat, and saw, in his rearview mirror, the car that hit him roar off. Suddenly he sat up straight, given a jolt of electricity in the form of vengeance, and started his car and took out after the BMW.

He caught up to it, after the fourth stop light, but there was another car between them. He wheeled into a corner gas station, came out the other end and went into the intersection, in front of the BMW, to cut it off; he could not see inside the car’s tinted windows.

When the light changed, car horns blared at him blocking the way, and the BMW accelerated, slamming his left backside, spinning him around, leaving him in the dust.

Now nothing mattered to Steve — not his life or the lives of anyone else — in his pursuit of the bastard in the BMW, over curbs and through red lights on their mad race out of the suburbs and into the country.

After a while the BMW swerved off the highway onto a secondary road. On a straightaway, Steve tried to overtake it, but the BMW was just too powerful. He pulled back a bit, saving his engine for the upgrade just ahead as the road began to wind up a steep hill that lead to a quarry.

Was this maniac luring him to some desolate place in order to kill him? Steve wasn’t about to wait and find out; he reached under his seat for the gun.

On a curve up the hill he buried his accelerator on the floor and sped up as close as he could to the other car, rolled down his window and fired. Blam! The back window of the BMW exploded, glass shards flying back onto his windshield and hand.

The BMW careened violently to the left and then to the right, skittering along a metal guardrail that bowed out as if it were a rubber band, straining to keep the car from going over the edge of the cliff. The BMW spun around and came to a halt, hung up on the rail.

Steve pulled his Porsche off to the side and waited.

Operating on adrenaline, legs feeling weak, Steve shielded his eyes from the sun that peered out from the clouds, an interested spectator, as he carefully approached the BMW. He yanked open the car door on the driver’s side, gun ready to use.

But it didn’t seem necessary. A woman in a red dress was slumped over the wheel, blond hair covering her face.

Steve didn’t know what to think; he’d expected a man.

Carefully he pushed the woman back against the seat, revealing her face, which he did not recognize. She didn’t appear to be badly hurt; the only sign of blood was a thin trickle down her left leg.

Steve relaxed his grip on the gun. Was she someone he picked up in a bar for a one-night stand? he wondered. Was that what this was? Some kind of fatal attraction?

On the front seat, next to the woman, lay a purse, opened. He leaned in, past her, to look for some identification.

His fingers were on a wallet when he felt a burning in his side that made him scream out with pain. He pulled back, out of the car, and saw scissors sticking out of his side.

Now the woman came at him, with a wild look in her eyes, and he brought up his hand with the gun and shot her. The force threw her back on the seat, but after a second she sat up like some superwoman and threw herself on him and they stumbled backward, doing an awkward little dance like a pair of marionettes, and tripped on the mangled guard rail and went over the cliff’s edge together in a stunned embrace.

Below, a pair of frightened eyes watched.

He’d been out in the stream, fishing, looking for food to feed his family, when the violence erupted. It forced him back to the bank where he hid in the brush, fearful of repercussions, shivering in his brown fur coat.

After a while, when the sun began to set behind the cliff, its long rays winking goodbye, he ventured out. Cautiously he slid into the stream, and swam toward the humans that lay twisted on the rocks, their limbs entwined like the briar bush he had just crawled out of.

Halfway across, he stopped, sniffing, his head bobbing on the water’s surface. He need not go any further: death hung in the air.

He turned and swam downstream a ways, then dove under and entered a hole in the bottom of the bank that then led upward to his house.

Inside the dark, dank chamber, lined with grass, the female muskrat waited; nestled against her warm body were four tiny babies.

He lay protectively next to her and she snuggled up to him. Tomorrow, he would hunt for tadpoles — but further down stream, away from the vile humans. And she would clean the house and take care of the babies...

Yes, tomorrow would be another glorious day.