Blood Royal (21 page)

His doting mother, whom he had bled for money on a regular basis, was having health and financial problems and was only too happy to turn management of her son over to his new wife. Marlowe paid his back rent and he moved into her Marina condo.

Something had happened at work during their first month together, she wasn’t sure what because he wouldn’t discuss it with her.

She also discovered that he had a short fuse.

It happened when she suggested they drive over to Sausalito for dinner. Coming down the hill from Highway 101, Barry got angry when a driver behind him honked his horn as Barry came to an almost dead stop on the roadway to point out a house he said he’d like to buy someday. The house was worth more than what she and Barry would earn over the next twenty years, but it was nice wishful thinking.

Marlowe was stunned when Barry slammed on the brakes, nearly causing the other car to rear-end them. He got out of the car and confronted the other driver, grabbing the middle-aged man by the throat.

“Don’t fuck with me, asshole.”

Marlowe half stood in the convertible Corvette. “Barry! Barry, for God’s sake, stop it!”

He came back to the car and they left the scene burning rubber. He was still fuming when they came into town a few minutes later at twice the speed limit. “Slow down, Barry, you’re going to get a ticket.”

They pulled into the wharfside restaurant and turned over the car to the valet parker. They hadn’t spoken about the incident. “There’s not a scratch on the car,” Barry told the parking attendant. “Bring it back that way.”

She grabbed his arm and pulled him aside before they entered. “What happened back there?”

“That prick got on my ass.”

“It was just a guy honking his horn because you almost came to a stop on the road.”

“It’s my fuckin’ fault? Some asshole wants to push me around? Fuck you, lady!”

He stomped off. She called his name and stared at his retreating back. She was leaning on a railing, staring at the Golden Gate Bridge, when he came back.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He gave her a hug. “I’ve been told I’ve got an anger management problem.”

Anger management? Back in Modesto, they would have said he was a bully with a bad temper. That’s what bothered her the most. Her father was a bully. Her brother had suffered under the blows of bullies. Had the man he grabbed been a husky young guy, Marlowe would not have been as disturbed.

She didn’t know what to do. She loved him. He fulfilled a need in her life for family. She was already thinking of babies and a house in the suburbs. But she realized she hardly knew him, that she knew her neighbors and co-workers better than her husband.

A week later she witnessed his anger again. He hit a man in the stomach in an argument over a parking space. The man had pulled a small sports car into a parking space as Barry pulled forward and stopped to back into the space.

They left fast, tires screeching again.

“Why did you do that?”

“I was right, fuckin’ right, don’t fuck with me!”

He was going so fast he almost hit a woman stepping off a curb.

“Slow down!”

She leaned over in her seat and held her head in her hands.

He reached over and grabbed her by the back of her neck, squeezing hard. “I was right, that parking space was ours!”

“Take your fuckin’ hands off me!” He pulled to the curb and they stared at each other, breathless.

“I’m sorry, Jesus, I’m really sorry.” He started to sob and beat his head against the steering wheel.

Marlowe collapsed in her seat, her heart racing. “I’m sorry, too.”

“You’re sorry you married me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I heard it in your voice.”

She sighed and closed her eyes. “Can we go home? I think I need to throw up and go to bed.”

Later, in bed, they made love. For the first time she faked both the desire and her orgasm.

Propped up on a pillow, Marlowe said, “That man may have gotten your license number and called the police.”

“Don’t worry, that’s why I gave him a plex shot.”

“A what?”

“I punched him in the solar plexus. When you hit ’em right in the pit of stomach, it’s a crippling blow but there’s no bruising, they can’t prove it.”

“I’ll have to remember that next time I beat up someone. Why did you hit him?”

He shrugged. “I saw red. He took our parking space.”

“But you can’t go through life hitting people who do things you don’t like.”

“Why don’t you give the other guy the lecture? I don’t need it or deserve it.”

*   *   *

“I
MARRIED A STRANGER
,” Marlowe told Deirdre.

“Get a divorce. They’re easy now, no fault.”

“I can’t. It’s crazy, but I love him, I really do. Like in the movies, the first time I saw him, bells rang and music played.”

“What you heard was the margaritas you drank gurgling between your ears. Get a divorce. It’s all just an accounting for the property split now, no emotions involved. And you two haven’t really gathered any assets together.”

It was more complicated than Deirdre’s simple math. She not only loved him, but she felt a need to care for him, to work out his anger problems and the problems that were growing with him. It was the same thing with her brother. She loved him and wanted to protect him. But she didn’t want to end up like her mother, a frightened, bullied woman.

She didn’t tell Deirdre about the single mother with a fifteen-year-old daughter who looked older that had moved in next door. Both mother and daughter were overly friendly toward Barry and he openly flirted with both of them. “Mrs. Robinson and Lolita,” Marlowe called them, after the promiscuous movie females.

“My father always says, you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You want to reform him. He’s the one who has to want to reform before it’ll happen,” Deirdre told her.

A month passed before she found out Barry had lost his job.

“They’re full of shit,” he told her. “They never gave me a chance, always directing the good stuff toward other guys.”

It wasn’t just the loss of a job, but of a career—he admitted to her that it was the second brokerage firm he’d worked for. Stockbrokers were a cottage industry and every one of them would know he had been fired twice.

He talked about going back to school and she encouraged him.

“I don’t want a woman to support me,” he said.

“It’s for both of us. You’d do the same for me.”

They’d been married three months when she came home from work before noon feeling nauseated. She thought she might have a touch of the flu or food poisoning. She was surprised to see Barry’s car out front. He was supposed to be in school until early afternoon.

He had left his keys in the front door of the condo. In a hurry, she thought. She twisted the key in the lock and stopped, nearly stepping on a pair of pink panties.

Barry was on his back on the floor. His pants were down to his knees. Lolita was on top of him, bouncing up and down, her dress up to her waist. She looked over at Marlowe, her tongue cocked out of her mouth. She smiled and shook her head. “Oh-oh.”

Marlowe did something totally unexpected. She calmly walked past them to the bedroom without saying a word. Later, she would realize it wasn’t a real surprise, that it was just par for the course with Barry.

She went into the bedroom and began taking Barry’s clothes out of the closet. He came to the door. He looked ready to cry. “I’m sorry, shit, I’m really sorry.”

She ignored him and began pulling his stuff from a dresser and throwing it on the bed.

He grabbed at her and she spun away. “Keep away from me.”

“Please, I need you.”

“You need a mother, you fuckin’ loser!”

She saw the feral rage in his eyes and stepped back. His fist caught her in the stomach, nearly lifting her off her feet. She collapsed on the floor. He stared at her, gaping. “Oh, my God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Get out! You bastard! Get away from me!”

He ran from the room, flying out the front door, coming back to grab his keys and taking the steps two at a time.

She lay on the floor in terrible pain, trying to breathe. Her guts felt like they were on fire. She vomited over and over on the bedroom carpet, unable to even crawl to the bathroom. When she started dry-heaving she realized she was bleeding from her vagina. She crawled to the bedside phone and called 911.

Marlowe stared up at the doctor who stood by her hospital bed and repeated what the doctor had told her. “I was pregnant?”

The doctor’s statement didn’t make much sense to her. They had brought her in that morning by ambulance. It was late afternoon now and she had been examined, X-rayed, and put on IV. She had been waiting for the results of a scan. She shook her head. “It can’t be, I wasn’t pregnant.”

“You were for the last couple months. It’s not unusual not to notice, especially if it’s not planned. You had a miscarriage.” The expression on the face of the woman, a gynecologist, was grim. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s more, isn’t there?” Marlowe said.

“You’re pretty torn up inside. There’s hemorrhaging, a significant risk of infection. We’ll have to operate, we need your permission.”

“Do what you have to.”

“Marlowe…”

The worst was yet to come. She felt like crying.

“We need to do a hysterectomy.”

Like
pregnant,
the word had little initial meaning to her. She shook her head. “No. You can’t do that. I won’t be able to have children.”

“We have to—”

“No! I’d rather die, no, you can’t do it.” She tried to get up and the doctor gently pushed her back down.

“Marlowe, you will die—”

“No, I don’t care, you can’t do it, I’ll risk it.”

The doctor shook her head. “There’s nothing left to risk. Your womb was torn, it can’t be repaired, we have to take it out. It doesn’t matter now, you will never be able to have children.”

“No! No! That son-of-a-bitch! No!”

Marlowe returned from the courthouse and lay on the bed in her apartment. It had been two months since she had been released from the hospital. She carried home from her hospital stay severe depression, burning anger, and a large scar on her abdomen. She had hardly spoken to anyone, not even returning the phone calls of her friends or answering the door when they came by. She had crawled into herself. It was a cold, dark place.

Barry was charged with felony assault and battery with great bodily injury for striking her. She had gone to the courthouse that morning because she had been subpoenaed by the district attorney’s office. She had to be subpoenaed rather than showing up voluntarily because she had not cooperated with the prosecutor. The deputy DA in charge of the case against Barry thought she was a typical abused wife, refusing to testify because she was either scared shitless of the bastard who knocked her around or was stupid enough to want the guy back.

“Seventy-five percent of the abused-spouse cases we get, the woman refuses to testify,” the deputy told her when she came to the courtroom where Barry was being prosecuted. “We still prosecute if it’s serious, and this one is. You have to come to your senses, Ms. James. This guy really hurt you. He’s a danger to you and other women. If you don’t care about yourself, then think about the next woman he batters.”

Marlowe just stared at him, not speaking. He was wrong, but she didn’t tell him that. She wasn’t afraid of Barry. She’d refused to go to court because she was so depressed she didn’t want to leave the house.

He slammed closed his file. “Fine, be as stupid as you please. You’re under subpoena. If you refuse to testify, you’ll be held in contempt. If you lie and say he didn’t hit you, I’ll prosecute you for perjury. You’re to stay in our reception area until I tell you we’re ready for your testimony.”

She was never needed. Barry pled to a misdemeanor battery, was granted probation, fined three hundred dollars, and ordered to perform a hundred hours of community service.

She returned from the courthouse, went back to her bedroom, and crawled back into that dark place in her mind. The light on her answering machine was blinking and she didn’t bother answering it. It was probably her boss at work telling her she’d been terminated. She had been granted sick leave without even asking for it, but hadn’t communicated with the office since the operation.

The phone rang and the machine went on with the first ring.

“Marlowe.”

She felt a stab of pain in her gut.

“Marlowe, it’s me. I need to talk to you. Honey, I really need to talk to you, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

Marlowe picked up the receiver and spoke in a whisper. “I’m on.”

She heard him take in a deep breath. “Jeez, honey, I’m so sorry, I really am.”

She didn’t respond.

“I want to thank you, my attorney said they offered me a misdemeanor because you wouldn’t cooperate. That means you still love me, baby, I love you, too. I … I need to see you.”

“Okay,” she said.

*   *   *

T
HE GUN WAS UNDER
the bed, still there where Barry had put it after he moved in. He had come back for his things while she was in the hospital, but had forgotten the gun.

She unzipped the leather case and removed the weapon. Turning it in her hands, she stared at it, familiarizing herself with it.

She knew how to point and pull a trigger. Her father had had guns in the house and had taken her and her brother out into the countryside to show them how to use a gun. That had been a 30-30 deer rifle, but her father had two shotguns, and though she’d never fired one, she had seen him shoot them.

Barry called his a duck gun. It was a fancy shotgun with an elegant hardwood stock and silver etchings on the side. His indulgent mother had bought it for him and he had used it only once. But leave it to Barry to screw up—naturally, he left it loaded with even the safety off.

She unlocked the front door and opened it a crack. Then she sat in the living room in a soft chair and waited.

Twenty minutes passed before she heard his hurried footsteps coming up the concrete steps. She got to her feet and held the shotgun at her side, her left hand down the grip, her other hand with the trigger.