Sex and Murder Magazine

By Robert White

The bullet entered Robert DeMott just as he had been about to climax, so she slowly shifted her weight to reach for the Beretta where she had placed it under the bed. He drank prodigious amounts of alcohol and that usually made sex difficult, but tonight he expected to be serviced by her mouth; he held the back of her head with one meaty paw and thrust into her. When he was fully erect, she took it out of her mouth and sucked along the side to the head, a porno film trick he liked, and worked back down the other knowing that she would expect him to lick his bag–something else he liked his women to do for him. It revolted her but she was careful to keep him from suspecting anything different tonight. Instead of taking it back inside her mouth as he expected, she brought the gun up behind her back and looked up at him from her knees and said two words. Just a girl’s name. His eyes were glazed slits of pleasure but with the name came a slow recognition and he blinked; then they widened in recognition. Before he could say anything, or even look down at her, she placed the barrel of the gun gently against the bottom of his sac, shut her eyes against the noise and recoil spatter, and pulled the trigger.

A small but mean little gun, it blew his testicles to pulp, punched through coiled intestines and perforated his liver before ricocheting against pelvic bone and coming to rest against the elastic skin of his abdomen wall. Even if paramedics had been standing outside the cottage door, the feces pouring into his bloodstream would have killed him if nothing else. As it was, he was to endure one final, insulting shockwave of pain when she reached over to his writhing mass on the bed and leaned her face into his curly pubic hair. She bit down hard on the glands until her gums and teeth were red. Her face at that moment was beyond anything DeMott had seen. She gazed at him lying there with his face twisted in to the pillow, teeth bared and one incisor cracked from biting down when the pain slammed into his body. He had a moment to live and maybe one animal scream left to erupt from his lungs when she put the gun gently against his temple and squeezed off another round that fluttered strands of greasy black hair. His left eye popped open in reflex action to the turbulence going on inside his brain but he was dead before it finished churning its scorched path through the meat turning pulpy gray matter to a frothy liquid stew inside his skull cap.

She stood wobbling on her legs, an icy bubble welling up inside. She retched once, hard, but nothing erupted from her empty stomach; however, it broke the panic before she was crazed by what she had done. She had now a slow-motion kind of inertia to contend with, the real beginnings of shock, in fact, but she could not break her gaze on the crisscross of surgical scars lacing the fat white flesh of his exposed knee. She forced herself to snap to and tried to wrestle his Levi’s up but it brought forth another spasm from her stomach and she vomited yellow bile across his thighs. She gave it up. Calmer, she gathered her belongings into a neat pile and finished the packing that she had started earlier. It was almost three in the morning. The sky outside was still black but in an hour it would be pewter and then the sun would streak the clouds with pink and lavender frills. The gulls over the lake would shriek with hunger and dive for the shoals of yellow perch and shad. Time, she knew, would be the enemy now. DeMott’s death was just the beginning, not the end. There were forces which would soon move in opposition to her plans, and she knew that she had a long way to go before it was over. She said the name again, a mantra to give herself strength and with the image of four more men out there somewhere, breathing, who would have to be made to stop, she whispered the girl’s name once more, almost as if in prayer, not so much asking God for forgiveness as offering a sacrifice for good fortune.

*****

The call from her came at five in the morning. When she told me about DeMott, I asked her where she was calling from. A payphone on the Strip by Otto’s Miniature Golf. I told her to meet me behind the arcade across the street and to stay away from the light.

On the way over I thought about what she said. You might as well try to shovel smoke as understand a woman who could put a hot lead projectile into a man’s body at that angle. Micah, a crossword nut, once told me that in the pride the female does the killing. Males are good for nothing but sex and death, she said.

She looked exhausted. Her bronzed skin under the bar’s lighting was gone; her face was fishbelly white. She looked older than I realized.

“I can recommend a good criminal lawyer,” I said.

“No. I don’t want a lawyer, Thomas. Help me get away.”

“If I don’t turn you in, I’ll lose my license. I’ll go to jail.”

“I can’t do jail.”

Do jail, convict slang. With some mascara and the right clothes she could lead the discussion at the next Zonta meeting.

“Then why kill him? Why not leave him, walk away?”

“You’re a man. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Don’t give me that feminist bullshit. This is murder two, if you’re lucky. Or manslaughter at the least. The cops aren’t completely stupid. They’ll find him before he’s cold. Get wise. I don’t even know you.”

Then she told me what I figured had to be coming, somehow, the thing that would get me out of bed and here in the street with her instead of dialing in a tip and going back to sleep. I told her we were going back there. We had to get her things. I didn’t tell her that screwing up the forensics was a dangerous and foolish thing to do.

“I’ll show you where he lives,” she said. “He’s got a cabin off by itself near the beach.”

“I know where he lives,” I said.

I had been there before. Last summer the Lake cops were so wrapped up in an FBI corruption sting involving gambling and the Youngstown mafia that the DA’s office didn’t want to contaminate the investigation into Bobbi Rae Phillips’ disappearance and presumed murder if it ever went to trial. Micah was lead prosecutor. I did some discreet B & E at the time of Bobbie Rae’s disappearance--her family was putting pressure on the cops and DA–one of my biker contacts had given me DeMott’ name and told me what he did with some girls who didn’t want to go to the cops. I had no Fourth Amendment constraints at the time, just a little trespass problem if anyone saw me, and so I told Micah I had seen what amounted to a rape kit inside his cabin. No probable cause but it was a lead to follow up. Bobbie Rae had been missing three days by then. DeMott was in jail on a DUI at the time but the Outlaws had rolled into town and were creating their usual havoc. One of the bikers looking at hard time had rolled over four of his buddies to cut a deal so the cops could put a case together. The five of them had drugged and gang-raped the girl after luring her to the isolated cabin.

The case collapsed around Micah when all the evidence was declared fruit of the poison tree. They found Bobbi Rae’s body with a methane probe a couple hundred yards from DeMott’ cabin. DeMott was a derelict academic, a hardcore alcoholic and booze hound, who had wandered into town after some scandal that cost him his reputation and career. He couldn’t remember that he used to teach American novels at Ohio State for twenty-five years let alone recall which booze fog resulted in seeing five men digging a grave on a stormy night. The bikers’ defense attorney shredded his testimony at the stand. That, more than anything, resulted in the bikers’ high-fiving one another while the Judge Sweeney banged the gavel for order and the dead girl’s family wept and moaned. I’ll never forget the look on my wife’s face.

My eyes boxed the squalid room. What I saw was the wretched detritus of someone’s last days: a ratty carpet strewn with beer cans, water stains on the wallpaper, a kit of crescent wrenches on the sill, on the floor a rusty pair of channel locks, copies of girlie mags mixed with some bondage porn, unwashed clothes smelling of must and body odor, urine in the toilet bowl. I found a shoe box of sexual paraphernalia in the small closet–three latex dildos of various shapes and sizes, a box of colored and ribbed condoms and a tube of cream “for the sexually adventurous.” No evidence of a woman except for a tidy pile of clothes in the corner. The mass on the bed was not yet in full rigor. “Help me,” I said to her.

“No,” she said. “Not that, please. Don’t ask me to do that.”

I told her to meet me back at the arcade in two hours.

“Thank you, Mr. Haftmann. You’ll never see me again or hear from me. I’ll take an Amtrak–”

“I don’t want to know,” I said.

It’s always your past that gets you. I was once a hard-charging Cleveland homicide cop. Now I am an existentialist in a shithole. I believe what Sartre said: Hell is other people.

*****

After her disbarment, Micah went to work as a paralegal at a law firm on the Ohio River in Wheeling, West Virginia. She’ll never practice law again but she loves it so much she can’t stay away from it.

I gave Emma $500 and the keys to my car. I told her where to leave it at the bus station in the next town. I didn’t give her much chance.

I went to my office, made some coffee, looked at my past-due bills and decided which to pay and waited for the cops. Lieutenant Millimaki and a sheriff’s deputy knocked at four-forty-five in the afternoon. I was half-asleep at my desk.

In the room Millimaki eyefucked me. “Knock this silent shit off, Haftmann. You called in the tip in the Bobbi Rae case. Everybody knows you wanted him after what happened to your wife. By the way, where is wifey now? She still a lawyer?”

“I told you that I never met DeMott. I didn’t say I didn’t know him. He’s another greasy fuck in this subterranean shit-chute you call a resort town. He drinks himself blind, when his fuck beeper goes off, he’s spun around and pointed at some teenage hooker. His death is a benevolent form of population adjustment.”

“We’re on this case good, Haftmann. You got anything to tell me, you better tell me now.”

“Sounds like professional police work, Chief. Congratulations. May I go now?”

He ignored me. “OK. See what you can do with this name.” He pulled another card from his coat pocket. “Forné, Emma. About twenty-five, thirty. Dancer at Annie’s. Anyhow that dirtball owner says she filled the W2 with that name. Address and phone are fakes. No aliases, no known associates, no priors under that name, no jacket, nada. Zero. Zilch point shit. Prints all over the room but nothing from the computers just yet. Nobody’s seen her.”

“I saw her dance there a couple weeks back. It was late. I was drunk. That’s all.”

“You fuck her?” This from Schroeder, his face screwed up and leering like a gargoyle.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know her except as a dancer. She was–”

“A nice-looking piece of ass, eh, Tommy,” said Schroeder winking at me. “Real good-looking woman. Not a skag like that dump usually hires. Where’d she go–that is, after she did our boy?”

“I don’t know. I never met her,” I said.

“We’ll get her, the psycho bitch,” said Millimaki.

Back home, I was shaking badly. I sat in the dark and waited for time to pass.

Memories kept tickling the corners of my brain. Micah doing a crossword in the kitchen just days before she left me. A word I had never seen: Cimmerian. I looked it up: Very dark or gloomy. One of a mythical people who inhabit a land of perpetual darkness.

I called her house in East Liverpool and left a message with her law firm in Wheeling, a mile away, to call me back. She rang back at my office number.

“Hello, Micah.”

“Hello, Thomas.”

I wanted to choke out the words: Come back to me.

Instead, I said: “You gave her the gun, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

A .765 mm Beretta Tomcat Titanium model. I had given it to her for Christmas, our last one together. As far as I knew, she had never fired it, never even took it out of the box.

“Why?”

“Why ask now, Thomas? She came to me for help. After what those stupid cops did to the evidence in Bobbi Rae, I swore it wasn’t going to happen again, not again, not another little girl raped and murdered by those animals. Sweeney would have killed it in a 404b hearing if we tried to show guilt--”

I thought: Just another runaway, another lost girl in a resort town full of lost teenagers. The country was full of lost kids. They blinked out like stars in the night sky.

“The law, Micah. The law. What happened to it? When did you stop believing in it?”

She sighed. “How do you know when you lose your faith? You just do and then all there is left is to act on it.”

“She killed DeMott,” I said.

“I know.”

“Oh Jesus, Micah, what have you done?”

“Goodbye, Thomas. Don’t call again, please.” Click.

You make choices in this life. Sometimes you’re the chosen. But there are moments when you’re neither the chooser nor the chosen and that’s when nothing makes sense–not your life, your character, your hopes, your dreams . . . not even your nightmares.

*****

I found Emma née Thompson a.k.a. Emma Forné in her office at a community college in the next county. The sign outside her door said Business/Administrative Services. I noticed a small snapshot of Jennifer taped to her computer. It was the same one I had seen on flyers on the strip. The slit in her skirt was a raffish touch. I recalled the night I had seen her nude on stage surrounded by rogue males in a blue haze of smoky light.

“Hello, Emma,” I said.

She knew my voice before she turned toward me. Unfazed, she said, “Hello, Mister Haftmann.”

“That’s a lovely outfit,” I said. “They say anything yellow and black in nature will either eat you or sting you or kill you.”

“Is that true?”

“Where is the gun, Emma?” I asked. “I want the gun,” I snarled.

She stared at me a long while, bemused. “Let’s go talk,” she said, pushing herself away from her computer.

We walked over to the Commons down the hall. Students with backpacks were milling about in clusters, chatting, talking about classes, teachers, papers–normal life. She handed me a cup of black coffee from the vending machine.

I said: “Let’s start with an easy one. Where-is-the-fucking-gun?”

“I have it.”

“I’d like it, please. Now.”

“No.”

I hissed: “It’s registered to me. It’s my wife’s gun.”

“I know that. Micah said you’d come for it sooner or later, once you figured it all out.” Some students at a near table looked our way.

“Micah said--what? What else did she give you?”

“Some court documents. The police files on the other four.”

“She gave you sealed documents?” My God, I didn’t know her at all.
I said: “So you’re going after all of them?”

“Yes. Every last one of them.” She sipped her coffee daintily; her long slender fingers were laced with blue veins. I looked at her face. Her eyes had tawny flecks the color of tea. I had never noticed. She was voluptuous, classically beautiful, except for the hard set of her mouth. “DeMott killed my sister,” she said. “The Outlaws had nothing to do with it.”

She told me how DeMott had fixated on her sister, followed her everywhere, begged and pleaded with her. At first she had brushed him off as a harmless drunken letch. She let him bankroll her crack habit, charged him for her time and nearly always without sex.”

“In her last letter,” Emma said, “she was charging him a hundred dollars for a half hour of her time. They’d meet for coffee in the morning when she was hung over.” She began mocking him when he couldn’t perform. She charged him more money for her time until he–couldn’t take it any longer. He killed her in his cabin.”

“How do you know?”

She unfolded a piece of paper in her hand. I read the faded handwriting, a childish scrawl with loops. It was dated the day before she disappeared. She described how she was going to “get free” of her habit and this “nice older gentleman” was going to give her the money, just a loan until she could get back on her feet.

Then I said: “Somebody will figure you for the killer. You’re her sister, for Chrissake–”

“No one has yet. It wasn’t hard to fool a bunch of drunks at Annie’s, remember? I’ll be leaving here tomorrow. I just have to stay ahead of the police.”

“Which one’s catching the next bullet?”

“Do you care? Did you care when my sister was beaten and kept half-alive in DeMott’s cabin for days on end?”

I had to ask: “When did you decide to kill him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe when I saw him and I knew he was the one who killed her.” She had a wan smile on her oval face.

“Why bring my wife into it?”

“If you’re worried about the gun, don’t be. It’s my insurance until–until I finish. Then I’ll need just one more bullet. She can say the gun is stolen.”

“You won’t do it,” I said, “not with a gun anyhow.”

She smiled and canted her face to me. Her eyes were yellow, glittering with passion. “How do you know what I won’t do?”

“The cops will have you before then,” I said, but I was winding down, fading, beaten.

Suddenly she said to me: “Your wife is smarter than you, isn’t she? Is that why your marriage failed?”

“It’s part of the reason, I suppose.” I remember Micah came home very late once, and I kissed her; I remember the smell of another woman’s sex wafting from her hair.

“You should forgive her,” she said softly, maybe reading my mind.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Love is terrifying,” she said to me or to no one. “What it will make you do.”

“Good luck,” I said.

She paused a moment. “I told DeMott just before I shot him–who I was.”

“Was it worth it?”

She had that same wan smile. She didn’t say anything.

There was nothing left to say and so I said goodbye to Emma Forné or Emma Thompson, whoever this beautiful woman was, and left her sitting there with her thoughts.

I felt as if the ground under my feet had been sprinkled with lime dust and wetted until it turned to slurry. It seemed to take an hour to walk out of the building.

The sky had turned to a mushroom glow in the late afternoon. There was a water fountain outside in the courtyard, and some leaves were drifting down from a gingko tree–bright gold coins falling to earth.

Later, I thought there was something reptilian about Emma’s revenge, not at all like a big cat on the savannah. Something older. Like a crocodile. They say it has a second heart valve that lets it dive deeper and keeps oxygenated blood pumping without a need to come up for air. Was it an old heart or was it the modern heart we will find ourselves evolving toward? I didn’t have an answer then. Besides, I had a more immediate problem. The coroner’s inquest was convening in the morning and I had to have some answers for the prosecuting attorney. Behind him was the glowering Millimaki waiting for his turn.

I drove back to Jefferson on I90 and hooked a left for home on 534. A few stars dotted the horizon. I saw Deneb arcing over the haze from freeway lights, the brightest star in Cygnus, the Swan. Winter coming.

The classical station on my radio played Saint Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. I half-listened while my mind cavorted among bits of flotsam from my past. Too much guilt and shame, I thought, too many disappointments, too many people hurt and too few saved. Too many bad endings to promising beginnings. I was running out of time. The car seemed full of tinny notes bouncing around the car. Fragments nibbled at the edge of my consciousness–some names, mostly, but the usual cognitive farrago of despair’s sad melody.

But it was crocodiles that I thought of finally as I turned off the highway and pointed the car home still undecided about my testimony in the morning. The big ones that lay at the water’s edge with jaws able to lift a water buffalo by the flank or snout—diving deep, twisting in death rolls, snapping at prey, protecting their young–or eating their young—their ancient hearts beating with violence or repose. I slapped my palm in disgust on the steering wheel. The first sign for Jefferson-on-the-Lake flickered past and there I was again, back home, in that cesspit of lust and booze, broken dreams and a bad marriage, a tawdry little place of cheap thrills and commercialized greed like some dying bird with dirty plumage washed up against the sand at a place where melting glaciers had stopped to form one of the Great Lakes.

I fell into an exhausted sleep and dreamed of a brilliant aquamarine and turquoise mountain of frozen water five miles high, something that had scraped its way south from the polar cap thousands of years ago and in its refracted light I saw the faces of the teenagers I had sought in lonely, deserted places. There in the midst of that warped imagery of my dream was Micah. Her beauty still enthralled me, made me raise my arms to her in a hopeless gesture. I saw her turn gracefully and there was another woman emerging from the ragged shadows. The women embraced. I saw Emma Forné holding Micah, their pale faces glowing, yellow eyes boring into me, accusing me.