It was Friday. Not a good day to start back to Body Time, considering my interrupted night. Nor a good day to resume karate. But I had to work today… Deedra, the peculiar Mookie Preston, the Winthrops, another afternoon appointment… I waited expectantly, but I couldn’t summon the surge of purpose I needed to feel at the onset of the working day.
What I felt instead was a surge of hormones. Jack Leeds had woken me the night before, beating on my door. Now he was waking me in an altogether different way. Jack was stroking my back and hips. I sighed, hardly knowing if it was one of exasperation or sheer desire. But I certainly didn’t feel apathetic any longer.
I knew he could tell I was awake. When I didn’t speak, he scooted closer, fitting his body to mine. His hand circled around, cupped a breast, resumed the rhythmical stroking. I had to bite my lip to keep silent.
“What happened to ‘after this job is over’?” I asked finally, and my voice was more like a gasp.
“Waking up in a warm bed with a beautiful woman on a rainy day in winter”-and while he was speaking his hand never stopped-“has overcome my business instincts.” His voice was breathy and low. His mouth began to deliver little sucking kisses to my neck, and I shivered. He began to ease up the pink nightgown. It was now or never. What did I want? My body was about to take over from my brain.
I turned toward him, putting up a hand to press against his chest and hold him at a little distance-I think-but at that moment his fingers slid between my legs and instead I wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled him close for a kiss. It was so dark and private in my room, like a quiet cave.
After a while, his mouth descended to cover my nipple through the nightgown. I reached down to touch him. He was swollen and ready. It was his turn to do a little moaning.
“Do you have…?” he asked.
I reached across him to grope in the night-table drawer for protection.
Jack began to whisper to me, telling me about what we were going to do and how it was going to feel. His hands never stopped.
“Now,” I said.
“Wait a little.”
I waited as long as I could. I was shaking. “Now.”
And then he was in me. I arched against him, found his rhythm. My pleasure was instant, and I cried out his name.
“Again,” he said in my ear, and kept on going. I tried to keep pace, once again matched him. I began urging him on, gripping him with my inner muscles, digging my nails into his hips. At last he made an incoherent sound and climaxed, and I did, too.
He collapsed on top of me and I put both my arms around him for the first time. I ran my hands over his back and bottom, feeling skin and muscles, planes and curves. He nuzzled my neck gently for a minute, withdrew from me, and rolled onto his back. The white gauze was spotted with red.
“Your shoulder!” I raised up on an elbow to look. My bedroom was getting a little lighter; the dark and secret cave had opened to the world.
“I don’t care,” he said, shaking his head from side to side on the pillow. “Someone could come in here and shoot me again, and right this moment I wouldn’t care. I tried to stay away from you, tried not to think about you… if they hadn’t been so close, I wouldn’t have come here, but I can’t be sorry. Jesus God, Lily, that was absolutely- wonderful. No other woman… God, that was sensational.”
I was shattered myself. Even more than by the physical sensations Jack had given me, I was a little frightened by the urge I had to touch him, hold him, bathe myself in him. In self-defense, I thought of all the women he’d had.
“Who are you thinking about?” He opened his eyes and stared at me. “Oh, Karen.” I was frightened that he knew so much about me that he would read my face that way. His own eyes lost their glow, flattened, when he said the name Karen.
Jack Leeds had become a household reference right about the time Lily Bard had, in the same state, Tennessee; and in the same city, Memphis. While my name became linked with that of the crime committed against me (“Lily Bard, victim of a brutal rape and mutilation”), Jack’s was always followed by the trailer, “alleged lover of Karen Kingsland.”
Karen Kingsland, from her newspaper photos a sweet-faced brunette, had been sleeping with Jack for four months when catastrophe wiped out three lives. She was twenty-six years old, earning her master’s degree in education from the University of Memphis. She was also the wife of another cop.
One Thursday morning, Walter Kingsland, Karen’s husband, got an anonymous letter at work. A uniformed officer for ten years, he was about to go on patrol. Opening the letter, laughing about receiving it, in front of many of his friends, Walter read that Karen and Jack were having sex, and having it often. The letter, which Walter dropped to the floor as he left, was quite detailed. A friend of Jack’s called Jack instantly, but he was not as quick as Walter. No one called Karen.
Walter drove home like a maniac, arriving just as Karen was leaving for class. He barricaded himself and his wife in the bedroom of their east Memphis home. Jack came in through the front door moments later, hoping to end the situation quickly and privately somehow. He had not been thinking well. He stood at the door of the bedroom and listened to Walter plead with his wife to say Jack had raped her, or that it was all a malicious lie on the part of some enemy.
By that time, the modest Kingsland home was surrounded by cops. The phone rang and rang, and finally Jack picked it up in the living room and described the situation to his coworkers and superiors. There was not going to be any private or amicable solution, and it would be fortunate if all three involved made it through alive. Jack wanted to offer himself as hostage in exchange for Karen. His superiors, on the advice of the hostage negotiation team, turned him down. Then Jack revealed to them what Walter did not know yet, what Karen had only told Jack the day before: Karen Kingsland was pregnant.
At that point, it would have been hard to find anyone in the Memphis Police Department who wasn’t, at the very least, disgusted with Jack Leeds.
From the living room, Jack could hear Karen scream in pain.
He yelled through the door that Walter should exchange his wife for Jack, since torturing a woman was nothing a real man would do.
This time Walter agreed to swap his wife for his wife’s lover.
Without consulting anyone, Jack agreed.
Walter yelled that he’d bring Karen to the back door. Jack should be standing on the sundeck, weaponless. Walter would push Karen out and Jack would come in.
Detective Jack Leeds went outside, took off his jacket, his shoes and socks, his shirt, so Walter Kingsland could tell Jack wasn’t carrying a concealed weapon. And sure enough, out of the bedroom came Walter and Karen. From inside the kitchen, Walter yelled to Jack to turn around, so Walter could make sure there wasn’t a gun stuck in the back of Jack’s slacks.
Then Walter appeared, framed in the open back door holding Karen by one of her arms, his gun to her head. Now there was tape over her mouth, and her eyes were crazed. She was missing the little finger of her right hand, and blood was pouring out of the wound.
“Come closer,” Kingsland said. “Then I’ll let her go.”
Jack had stepped closer, his eyes on his lover.
Walter Kingsland shot Karen through the head and shoved her out on top of Jack.
And this part, media hounds, was on videotape. Jack’s yell of horror, Walter Kingsland’s screaming, “You want her so bad, you got her!” Walter’s taking aim at Jack, now covered with Karen’s blood and brains, trying to rise: a dozen bullets cutting Walter down, bullets fired unwillingly by men that knew him, men that knew Walter Kingsland for high-strung, hot-tempered, possessive; but also as brave, good-natured, and resourceful.
Jack had been a plainclothes detective, often working undercover. He had a stellar work record. He had a rotten personal life. He drank, he smoked, he’d already been divorced twice. He was envied, but not liked; decorated, but not altogether trusted. And after that day in the Kingslands’ backyard, he was no longer a Memphis cop. Like me, he sank to the bottom to avoid the light of the public eye.
This was the chronicle of the man I was in bed with.
“I guess we’ll have to talk about that sometime,” he said with a sigh, and his face looked immeasurably older than it had been. “And what happened to you.” His finger traced the worst scar, the one circling my right
