have tapes like that. There's nothing wrong with masturbation. I do it, too. I just don't need videotapes to help me.'
He knew he was blushing. He sat there and smelled the heat of the day dying and heard the nighttime crickets and gazed up at the lemon slice of quarter-moon and wondered just what it all meant anyway.
How did a former altar boy, Boy Scout, and Young Republican ever come to be sitting in a car in which his overweight wife told him masturbation was all right, while in the trunk a little girl waited to die?
How, exactly, did you get here, anyway?
'We'll have some smoked salmon.'
'Huh?' Jeff said.
'You weren't paying attention.'
'Sorry.'
Sorry.
'I said we'll have smoked salmon.'
'When?'
'Tonight. When we're home. We'll have smoked salmon and then we can watch that Candy Dane tape.'
'Together?'
'Sure.' She giggled. 'Maybe it'll give me some new ideas.'
He slumped in the seat. It was as if a giant invisible wrecking ball had just crashed into his stomach. 'I can't do it.'
'What?'
'I can't go through with it.'
'Hon, you're not thinking very straight.'
'I'm not?'
'Hon, she's probably already dead.'
'Oh, my God.'
'You mean you didn't understand that?'
'No.'
'Well, I didn't want to say anything in case you didn't understand that. But I'd bet you a hundred dollars that she's already…well, you know.'
'My God.'
And with that, he flung open the BMW door, leaped into the night, ran around to the trunk of the car, inserted his key, snapped up the lid, and peered inside with the help of the flashlight he'd brought along.
The wooden box had never looked more like a coffin. Cheap pine, unpainted. He opened the lock with such force that he cut his finger. Throwing back the lid, he shined the light inside.
She lay as he recalled, bound, gagged, blinded in her virginal white blouse, her loose jeans, her white anklets, and her new blue Reebok hightops. Blond and slender, she was the daughter every man wanted to have and so few would ever know.
Staring at her now, at her frail, unmoving chest and her tiny pale hands, he could hear her on another gentle Summer night, creaking in her rocker with her doll held tenderly to her beautiful cheeks, a sweet lullaby coming from her perfect pink lips.
'No!' he shouted.
And began undoing all the restraints Mindy had put on her during the day.
Off came the blindfold.
Off came the gag in her mouth.
Off came the cords wrapped around her wrists and legs.
He was just lifting her from the box when Mindy, coming around the car, said, 'Oh, God, Jeff. I really didn't want to have to see her again. I really didn't. It's just going to make it all the harder. For both of us.'
He sat on the ground, Jenny in his arms, as if she weighed no more than an infant. He rocked her gently as he kissed her face and spoke soft, insistent, meaningless words to her.
Finally Mindy sat plumply down next to him and put a soft hand gently on his shoulder and said, 'Hon, I'm sorry but she's dead. She suffocated.'
But far into the night, he rocked the little girl and sang to her, there in the buffalo grass with the crickets, which were later joined by barn owls and Savannah sparrows in crying tribute to the warm, starry night.
Finally, the little girl began to smell and Mindy, quieter than he had ever seen her, took Jenny from Jeff's arms and put her back in the box.
'We'd better get it over with,' she said.
Nodding, numb, Jeff took a brand-new shovel from the trunk and followed Mindy down the hill.
They buried her where they planned to bury her, beneath a stand of heavy scrub pine where nobody would find her for a long time. The grave was four feet deep.
Jeff, exhausted, sat in the car running the air conditioning. He didn't care if he later got a chest cold. He needed relief and now. The digging had been incredibly exhausting.
In the shadow-light of quarter-moon, he saw the lumpen silhouette of his wife as she stood near the grave site. She was talking. To herself or to Jenny, he wasn't certain.
When she came back, she got in the car and quietly shut the door.
'You all right?' he said.
She said nothing.
'Honey,' he said. She had taken care of him. Now it was his turn to take care of her.
'Please,' she said. 'Drive.'
Forty-five minutes later they came to the DQ again. It was an oasis of light against the prairie night.
'You want a DQ?' he said.
'No, thanks.'
'A nice big one?'
'No, thanks.'
'A Buster Bar, then?'
'No, thanks. I don't want to look like Dr. Goldberg's wife,' she said.
And then she started crying.
He had never heard her sob this way. She sobbed all the way back home. Once, he put his hand on her, hoping to stop her. But she pushed it gently away. Another time, he started saying 'honey' there in the roaring highway darkness sweet with the smell of corn and grass and alfalfa, but that did no good, either.
She spoke only once. She said, 'She was my little sister.'
THREE MONTHS LATER
Today Mr. Culhane had a new diamond ring. In case you failed to note this fact, Mr. Culhane made it easy for you by rolling his pinkie finger back and forth and examining the ring the way a jeweler might.
Of course, if you did remark on it (and, by God, you'd better), he'd play coy and say, 'Oh, it's nothing much. Just something my old football team gave me at the University Club last week when Hank…er…I mean the vice- president was in the city.'
This disclaimer conveyed three important pieces of in-formation: 1) the 'nothing much' told you that Mr. Culhane, though a millionaire many times over, still thought of himself as a self-effacing man of the people; 2) the 'old football team' told you all over again that Mr. Culhane had been the star running back of the 1939 team at the U, the one that had gone to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl, and to the record books forever; 3) the 'vice-president was in town' told you that Mr. Culhane knew the vice-president of the United States well enough to call him Hank…er…V. P..
He was fat, pink, bald, usually dressed in a black pin-striped suit that only a Mafioso could love, and an indefatigable user of Binaca breath spray. He was also two other things: 1) the Foster Dawson Agency's largest account; and 2) Jeff McCay's wife's uncle, which, in some people's cynical minds, came to explain how a mediocre
