“Just drink it, will you?”
He shrugged, drank it. He went and picked up his undershorts, and kept losing his balance when he tried stepping into them. She took his arm and led him over to the bed, and he sat down and told her he didn’t feel so good. She took the undershorts away from him and got him to lie down on the bed, and she watched him struggling to keep a grip on consciousness.
She put a pillow over his face, and she sat on it. She felt him trying to move beneath her, and she watched his hands make feeble clawing motions at the bedsheet, and observed the muscles working in his lower legs. Then he was still, and she stayed where she was for a few minutes, and an involuntary tremor, a very subtle one, went through her hindquarters.
And what was that, pray tell? Could have been her coming, could have been him going. Hard to tell, and did it really matter?
When she got up, well, duh, he was dead. No surprise there. She put her clothes on, cleaned up all traces of her presence, and transferred all of the cash from his wallet to her purse. A few hundred dollars in tens and twenties, plus an emergency hundred-dollar bill tucked away behind his driver’s license. She might have missed it, but she’d learned years ago that you had to give a man’s wallet a thorough search.
Not that the money was ever the point. But they couldn’t take it with them and it had to go somewhere, so it might as well go to her. Right?
How it happened: That final morning, shortly after she left for school, her father and mother had argued, and her father had gone for the handgun he kept in a locked desk drawer and shot her mother dead. He left the house and went to his office, saying nothing to anyone, although a coworker did say that he’d seemed troubled. And sometime during the afternoon he returned home, where his wife’s body remained undiscovered. The gun was still there (unless he’d been carrying it around with him during the intervening hours) and he put the barrel in his mouth and blew his brains out.
Except that wasn’t really how it happened, it was how the police figured it out. What did in fact happen, of course, is that she got the handgun from the drawer before she left for school, and went into the kitchen where her mother was loading the dishwasher.
She said, “You knew, right? You had to know. I mean, how could you miss it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her mother said, but her eyes said otherwise.
“That he was fucking me,” she said. “You know, Daddy? Your husband?”
“How can you say that word?”
How indeed? So she shot her mother before she left for school, and called her father on his cell as soon as she got home from school, summoning him on account of an unspecified emergency. He came right home, and by then she might have liked to change her mind, but how could she with her mother dead on the kitchen floor? So she shot him and arranged the evidence appropriately, and then she went over to Rosemary’s.
Di dah di dah di dah.
You could see Doug’s car from the motel room window. He’d parked in the back and they’d come up the back stairs, never going anywhere near the front desk. So no one had seen her, and no one saw her now as she went to his car, unlocked it with his key, and drove it downtown.
She’d have preferred to leave it there, but her own rental was parked near the Crowne Plaza, so she had to get downtown to reclaim it. You couldn’t stand on the corner and hail a cab, not in Toledo, and she didn’t want to call one. So she drove to within a few blocks of the lot where she’d stowed her Honda, parked his Volvo at an expired meter, and used the hanky with which he’d cleaned his glasses to wipe away any fingerprints she might have left behind.
She redeemed her car and headed for her own motel. Halfway there, she realized she had no real need to go there. She’d packed that morning and left no traces of herself in her room. She hadn’t checked out, electing to keep her options open, so she could go there now with no problem, but for what? Just to take a shower?
She sniffed herself. She could use a shower, no question, but she wasn’t so rank that people would draw away from her. And she kind of liked the faint trace of his smell coming off her flesh.
And the sooner she got to the airport, the sooner she’d be out of Toledo.
She managed to catch a 4:18 flight that was scheduled to stop in Cincinnati, on its way to Denver. She’d stay in Denver for a while, until she’d decided where she wanted to go next.
She hadn’t had a reservation, or even a set destination, and she took the flight because it was there to be taken. The leg from Toledo to Cincinnati was more than half empty, and she had a row of seats to herself, but she was stuck in a middle seat from Cincinnati to Denver, wedged between a fat lady who looked to be scared stiff of something, possibly the flight itself, and a man who tapped away at his laptop and invaded her space with his elbows.
Not the most pleasant travel experience she’d ever had, but nothing she couldn’t live through. She closed her eyes, let her thoughts turn inward.
After her parents were buried and the estate settled, after she’d finished the high school year and collected her diploma, after a realtor had listed her house and, after commission and closing costs, netted her a few thousand over and above the outstanding first and second mortgages, she’d stuffed what she could into one of her father’s suitcases and boarded a bus.
She’d never gone back. And, until her brief but gratifying reunion with Douglas Pratter, Esq., she’d never been Katherine Tolliver again.
On the tram to Baggage Claim, a businessman from Wichita told her how much simpler it had been getting in and out of Denver before they built Denver International Airport. “Not that Stapleton was all that wonderful,” he said, “but it was a quick cheap cab ride from the Brown Palace. It wasn’t stuck out in the middle of a few thousand square miles of prairie.”
It was funny he should mention the Brown, she said, because that’s where she was staying. So of course he suggested she share his cab, and when they reached the hotel and she offered to pay half, well, he wouldn’t hear of it. “My company pays,” he said, “and if you really want to thank me, why don’t you let the old firm buy you dinner?”
Tempting, but she begged off, said she’d eaten a big lunch, said all she wanted to do was get to sleep. “If you change your mind,” he said, “just ring my room. If I’m not there, you’ll find me in the bar.”
She didn’t have a reservation, but they had a room for her, and she sank into an armchair with a glass of water from the tap. The Brown Palace had its own artesian well, and took great pride in their water, so how could she turn it down?
“Just drink it,” she’d told Doug, and he’d done what she told him. It was funny, people usually did.
“Five,” she’d told Lucas, who’d been so eager to be number six. But he’d only managed it for a matter of minutes, because the list was composed of men who could sit around that mythical table and tell each other how they’d had her, and you had to be alive to do that. So Lucas had dropped off the list when she’d chosen a knife from his kitchen and slipped it right between his ribs and into his heart. He fell off her list without even opening his eyes.
After her parents died, she didn’t sleep with anyone until she’d graduated and left home for good. Then she got a waitress job, and the manager took her out drinking after work one night, got her drunk, and performed something that might have been date rape; she didn’t remember it that clearly, so it was hard to say.
When she saw him at work the next night he gave her a wink and a pat on the behind, and something came into her mind, and that night she got him to take her for a ride and park on the golf course, where she took him by surprise and beat his brains out with a tire iron.
There, she’d thought. Now it was as if the rape — if that’s what it was, and did it really matter what it was?Whatever it was, it was as if it had never happened.
A week or so later, in another city, she quite deliberately picked up a man in a bar, went home with him, had sex with him, killed him, robbed him, and left him there. And that set the pattern.
Four times the pattern had been broken, and those four men had joined Doug Pratter on her list. Two of them, Sid from Philadelphia and Peter from Wall Street, had escaped because she drank too much. Sid was gone when she woke up. Peter was there, and in the mood for morning sex, after which she’d laced his bottle of vodka with the little crystals she’d meant to put in his drink the night before. She never did find out how that played out, so she didn’t really know whether Peter deserved a place on her list.
It wouldn’t be hard to find out, and if he was still on the list, well, she could deal with it. It would be a lot
