“This has been a tough time for me. I just hope no one saw that picture in the paper.” She paused. “No one that matters. But I think he’s still snooping around. Benson, that is.”
“I remember,” I said.
“I’m calling from my cell. I’ve been out of town the last day, I’m getting back to Oakwood early this afternoon. I’d like to tell you what’s going on.”
“Go ahead.”
“Not on the phone. Can you come out to the house? At one-thirty?”
I paused. “Here’s the thing, Trixie. Things are not very good right now with Sarah. Personally, and professionally. My dustup with Martin Benson got me moved out of the newsroom and cost Sarah a promotion. You follow that trail back and it leads to you.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t blame you for being pissed.”
“Look, I value our friendship too, but it’s kind of interfering with my marriage these days. Sometimes I think Sarah has the idea that we’ve got something going on.”
Although it might have been slightly humiliating had Trixie laughed then, it also would have been comforting. Instead, she was silent.
“You still there?” I said.
“This’ll be the last time,” Trixie said. “I want to tell you everything. I think you should know everything. I feel like,” she seemed to be catching her breath, “I feel like I have to tell somebody. And you’re one of the few people I actually trust.”
I sighed, closed my eyes. I felt, suddenly, very tired. There seemed to be so much going on. My troubles with Sarah. My career in a shambles. Losing Paul his job. And now Trixie wanted to unburden herself to me. I didn’t know whether I had the energy.
“Zack?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What time did you say, one-thirty?”
“That’s perfect,” she said. “I should be back home by then.”
There was no car in Trixie’s driveway, no sign of her GF300 on the street. Perhaps I had beat her home from wherever she happened to be coming from. I parked in the drive, rang the bell, got no answer, and got back into my car.
Trixie pulled into the drive ten minutes later.
“Sorry,” she said, getting out of her car. “There was a truck rollover on the expressway.”
“No problem,” I said. “I only got here a couple minutes ago.”
She was in jeans and a silk blouse, and her high heels clicked on the pavement and flagstone as she approached the front door, keys out. She put the key in the deadbolt lock, turned it, and cocked her head to one side.
“That’s funny,” she said. “It didn’t feel like the bolt went back.”
“That happens with me sometimes,” I said. “You can’t tell whether you unlocked it or whether it was already unlocked.”
She opened the door, somewhat warily, and stepped inside. I followed. Trixie had a kind of Crate & Barrel look going on throughout the first floor, and the tasteful decorations gave no hint of the “early dungeon” decor of the basement. She headed straight for the kitchen, all white cupboards and aluminum trim with skylights filling the room with light. She tossed her purse onto the countertop, where there was a copy of the Suburban. She handed it to me.
“Check it out,” she said.
It was a pretty good picture of her. Striding from her car to a coffee shop. The wind blowing her hair back so you could get a good look at her face. And under the pic, Lesley Carroll’s photo credit.
“Shit,” I said, putting down the paper. I didn’t bother to read Martin Benson’s accompanying story, which speculated about just what sort of activities this woman engaged in in the fine, morally upright town of Oakwood.
“I’ll start some coffee,” she said. She opened the freezer, hunted around. “Can you do me a favor? I keep my tins of coffee in the freezer, keeps it fresher longer, but there’s none in here. There’s probably some in the fridge downstairs, in the freezer compartment? You want to grab that while I get some cups out?”
“The basement?” I said.
Trixie flashed a smile at me. “You’re a big boy. You go past the rack, around the corner, there’s the second fridge. I’ve got decaf and regular, take your pick.”
“The rack?”
Now she sighed, hands on hips, looking at me like I was six. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll go.”
“No,” I said, already turning for the door to the basement. “I can do this.”
I flicked on the light at the top of the broad-loomed stairs and descended into Trixie’s pleasure palace-or torture chamber. Pleasure and torture seemed so closely linked in Trixie’s world, it was difficult to know what terminology to use.
It had been a long time since I’d been down here. And the last time had not been as a client, but to rescue one who’d been strapped in a bit too snugly to one of Trixie’s restraint devices, a huge wooden X with straps at all the far points.
I found another switch at the bottom of the stairs to light up the whole room, and there was the wall adorned with straps and belts and whips, the kind of stuff that a naive individual like myself might have first thought would be used to secure camping gear to the roof of a car. But then, once you saw the collection of silver and fur-lined handcuffs hanging there, it started to dawn on you that this stuff was not intended for a trip to Yellowstone Park.
The room looked pretty much as it had on my last visit, except this time, the guy strapped to the big X wasn’t doing any struggling.
He was dead.
I froze when I saw him. Stripped to the waist, arms and legs secured, throat cut, blood everywhere.
Martin Benson.
11
“No,” I said, unable to take my eyes off Benson. I don’t exactly have a medical degree, but I was as sure as I could be that there was no urgency to check for a pulse, to get the paramedics here pronto. Martin Benson looked very, very dead.
His head was tilted to the right, resting on his shoulder. The gash in his neck appeared to run right under his thick chin, but with his head slumped slightly forward, it was difficult to tell. But that was where the blood started, and there was a lot of it, smeared across his oversized torso, blackening his trousers, on the floor.
Over in the corner, I saw a shirt and jacket and tie, presumably his.
I think I might have thrown up if I hadn’t heard Trixie coming down the steps. I whirled around, saw her long legs appear first, then the rest of her. “What has caught your interest down here, Za-”
Her jaw dropped, and then she screamed.
I ran to her, held on to her, pulled her toward me so she wouldn’t have to look. “Oh my God!” she said. “Oh God oh God oh God!”
She broke away from me, approached Martin Benson slowly. “Oh God, it’s him,” she said. “The guy. The son of a bitch from the paper.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “It’s him.”
