knife yourself.'
'I didn't even know he was going to kill him!'
He knew, just as he had known what happened to the boys. I let it pass. 'You knew he was going to commit assault and robbery,' I said. 'That made you a participant in felony, and that's enough to make you fully culpable if the felony results in a death. You'd be guilty of murder if Leveque had died of a heart attack. As far as the law is concerned, you're guilty.'
He took a couple of deep breaths. Dully he said, 'All right, I know that. You could say the same thing about the girl he went back and killed, if he killed her. I suppose I was guilty of rape. She didn't resist, but I didn't exactly have her consent.' He looked at me. 'I can't defend what I did. I can't justify it. I'm not going to try to say that he hypnotized me, although it was like that, it really was, the way the two of them set me up and… and just got me to do what they wanted.'
'How did they do that, Richard?'
'They just-'
'How did they get you to kill your wife?'
'Oh, God,' he said, and put his face in his hands.
MAYBE they had planned it from the beginning. Maybe it had been part of a secret agenda all along.
'You'd better take a shower,' Olga would say. 'It's time for you to go home to your little wife.' Your little wife, your darling wife, your charming wife- always said with a hint of irony, a touch of mockery. You have spent an hour in the world of the brave, the bold, the reckless, the daring, she was telling him, and now you may return to the black-and-white humdrum world and the Barbie doll who shares it with you.
'A shame she has all the money,' Stettner said early on. 'You give all your power away when your woman has more money than you do.'
At first he'd been afraid that Stettner would want Amanda sexually. He had allowed Thurman to share Olga, and would want a quid pro quo. Thurman hadn't liked the idea. He wanted to keep the two lives separate, and was relieved when the Stettners did not seem to want Amanda included in their relationship. The first meeting of all four had not been a success, and, on the two subsequent occasions when both couples had drinks and dinner together, the conversation was stilted.
It was Stettner who first suggested he increase his insurance coverage. 'You have a child coming, you want to protect that child. And you should have the mother covered as well. If anything happened to her you'd have a nurse, you'd have a governess, you'd have expenses for years.' And then, when the policies were in force: 'You know, Richard, you're a man with a rich wife. If she died you'd be a rich man. There's an interesting distinction, don't you think?'
The idea grew gradually, little by little.
'I don't know how to explain this,' he said. 'It wasn't real. We would joke about it, we would think up impossibly farfetched ways to do it. 'It's a shame microwave ovens are so small,' he said. 'We could stuff Amanda in with an apple in her mouth and cook her from the inside out.' It's sickening to think of now, but then it was funny because there was no reality to it, it was a harmless joke. And, because we went on joking about it, it began to have a kind of reality.
' 'We'll do it next Thursday,' Bergen would say, and we'd plan some ridiculous black-comedy scenario, and that would be the end of it. And then when Thursday came Olga would say, 'Oh, we forgot, today was the day we were supposed to kill little Amanda.' It was a joke, a running gag.
'When I was with Amanda, when they weren't around, I was a normal happily married man. That sounds impossible, doesn't it? But it was true. I guess I must have had this idea that someday Bergen and Olga would just disappear. I don't know how I expected this to happen, whether they would get caught for some of the things they had done or whether they would just drop me or move out of the country or, I don't know. Maybe I expected them to die. And then the whole dark side of life that I was leading with them would vanish and Amanda and I would live happily ever after.
'One time, though, I was lying in bed and she was asleep next to me and I started having images of different ways of killing her. I didn't want to have those thoughts but I couldn't get them out of my head. Smothering her with a pillow, stabbing her, all sorts of murderous images. I had to go into the other room and have a couple of drinks. I wasn't afraid I would do anything, I was just upset by the thoughts.
'Right around the first of November I mentioned that our downstairs neighbors would be spending the next six months in Florida. 'Good,' Bergen said. 'That's where we'll kill Amanda. It's a natural site for a burglary, with the owners in Florida. And it's convenient, she won't have to travel far, and it's better than doing it in your apartment because you wouldn't want police parading in and out of your place. They make a mess, sometimes they even steal things.'
'I thought it was a joke. 'Oh, you're going to a party? When you come home we'll be waiting in the Jews' apartment downstairs. You'll walk right in on a burglary in progress. I hope I can still remember how to break in. I'm sure it's like swimming, once you learn it you never forget it.'
'The night of the party I didn't know if it was a joke or not. This is hard to explain. I knew but I didn't know. The two sides of my life were so far apart it's as if I didn't really believe something on one side could touch something on the other. It's like I knew they would be waiting there for us but I couldn't really believe it.
'When we left the party I wanted to walk home because I wanted to delay getting there for fear that they'd be there, that it would be real this time. And on the way home she started talking about her brother, how she was worried about his health, and I made a nasty crack. So we had an argument, and I thought, all right, bitch, in an hour you'll be history. And the thought was exciting.
'Walking up the stairs I saw the door to the Gottschalks' apartment was closed and I felt relieved, and then I saw that the doorframe was splintered and there were jimmy marks around the lock so I knew they were there. But I thought if we were quiet we could get past the closed door and upstairs to our own apartment and we'd be safe. Of course we could have turned around and gone back down the stairs, but I didn't even think of that at the time.
'Then we got to the top of the flight of stairs and the door opened and they were waiting for us. Olga had on a leather outfit she wears sometimes and Bergen was wearing a long leather coat. They looked as though they'd stepped out of a comic book. Amanda didn't recognize them at first. She was just staring at them, not knowing what to make of it, and before she could say anything Bergen said, 'You're dead, bitch,' and punched her in the face. He was wearing thin leather driving gloves. He made a fist and hit her full force in the jaw.
' Bergen grabbed her and dragged her inside with his hand clamped over her mouth. Olga got Amanda's hands behind her back and handcuffed her. They taped her mouth and Olga tripped her and kicked her in the face when she fell.
'They stripped her and dragged her into the bedroom and threw her on the bed. Bergen raped her and turned her over and raped her again. Olga hit her in the face with a crowbar and I think that may have knocked her out. I don't think she was conscious for most of it.
'I hope not.
'They told me I had to have sex with her. And this is the worst part. I thought I was going to be sick to my stomach, I thought I was going to puke, but get this, I was excited. I was hard. I didn't want to have sex, I didn't want to, but my cock wanted to. God, it makes me sick to think about it. I couldn't finish. I was on top of her and I couldn't finish and I just wanted to come so I could stop but I couldn't.
'Then I was standing over her and Bergen had her panty hose wrapped around her neck and he made me take an end in each hand. He told me I had to do it and I just stood there. Olga was on her knees blowing me and Bergen 's gloved hands were holding my hands, and I was holding the ends of the panty hose, I couldn't let go because of his grip. And he pulled his hands apart, and that pulled my hands apart, and her eyes were staring up at me, staring, you know. And Olga was doing what she was doing, you know, and Bergen was holding me very tight, and there was the smell of the blood and the leather and the sex.
'And I had an orgasm.
'And Amanda was dead.'
Chapter 16
