Everyday Psychokillers (21 page)

“Did he touch you hea-h?” she said, and then pointed to my crotch, “Or did he touch you
hea-h,”
as if that then must be the case.

They tape-recorded her, and there was a stenographer on a little chair in the corner the whole time. After the interview, the police called her parents' house once or twice, to ask one more question or to confirm one more detail (So how sure
are
you about the color of that van? Anything, for instance, that struck you as
suspicious?
So again, please name the
items
you remember seeing in the back of that van. You say he hurt his
ankle
. Did it seem to you that he
had
hurt his ankle? You say it was
stratified
sunbursts?), but then she didn't hear from them any more. They just stopped calling.

She figured for sure they'd need her to testify in Miami, where the trial took place. In her diary she wrote out what her testimony would be. She wrote out all the possible ways she could be cross-examined and wrote out her responses to every one. And right about that time—way before I met CiCi, when I was states and states away, complaining to my teacher at recess that retarded John Crumb was sitting in the outfield with the dandelions, hunched over his foot, licking the heel of his sock, and he wouldn't come in, even though I told him it was time to line up—right about that time, when the trial started and CiCi had not been called to testify, CiCi flung herself on the morning paper, reading it and wringing it, weeping in the breakfast nook, and CiCi's mother said, “Thank God it's all over. No more Ted Bundy.” She told CiCi under no circumstances was she to watch the trial coverage on television, but CiCi went to friends' houses or to Dillard's at the mall even, and watched there. “It's true he's good-looking,” she told her friends, “but in real life, he's not as good-looking as everyone says.”

She read about him, she watched him, she imagined him, she remembered him. She felt a pull of greatness. She felt she was on the edge of being unearthed, she felt the possibility of going down in history.

One time CiCi showed me in the paper how they were getting ready to make a TV movie about Ted Bundy, about who might get to play the leading man, the Matinee Idol Murderer, the High I.Q. Killer, the Stranger Next Door, the Promising Republican, the Murderous Prince Charming.

“How do you think you got away?” I asked her.

“I dunno,” she said. “I guess he didn't like me.”

On Ted's balcony, the air remained stiff and so filled with liquid it took effort to breathe. CiCi leaned back in the beach chair. She let the strappy sandals drop to the floor and folded her hands in her lap. She closed her eyes. I looked at the new polish on my toes. It looked dumb. Then I watched her face for a little while, knowing exactly what it's like to sit like that in the dusk, to feel like you've disappeared, like you might as well be anywhere. I could see how tired she was. Her complexion was off a little. A little pale, a little puffy, a little uneven in color. Like she'd been sailing all day. Like she'd come home from that much wind and then washed her face over and over. She looked like she could be sleeping; her face held that extremely peaceful expression that's as close as it gets to no expression at all. Then as I watched, although I swear it didn't change a bit, I could see sadness in there, and pensiveness, and a kind of fear, too. I mean look at a doll's face sometime. It's all there.

“CiCi,” I said, when watching her overwhelmed me. “Will you tell me what happened with the guy in Miami?” And she did.

Heat shone and coated the highway, its pavement, its tin guardrails, its heaving trucks and darting cars. On the bus, CiCi changed from her sneakers into her heels and put the sneakers in a big canvas bag. At the bus station she put her wallet and her lipstick into a white leather purse the size of a grapefruit, locked the canvas bag in a locker, and slipped the key to the locker into her bra. But you could see the key poking at the material, so she took it out and put it in the purse.

Outside, she worked her legs hard to keep her stride long in the shoes and among the people. The city towers felt bottom-heavy, with people on their lunch breaks spinning in and out of lobbies on revolving doors. Higher up, the windows were like closed eyes, and it was hard to imagine anyone in there. The thin upper stories seemed hollow, like metallic husks, and it looked both bright and silent up there. A flock of small birds, the kind of birds you might find anywhere in the world, one version or another, a flock of plain little birds, zoomed in unison in front of one mirrored tower and then behind the next, silvery, each blinking, wings in, wings out, like mirrors turned toward you and then sideways, flashing, full-on bright and then invisible, fast. Dazzling. A shifting shining cloud. They could have been white birds, or they could have been dark birds. It was impossible to tell, each was so alternately shiny and invisible. As a mass they twinkled in the hot sky. When CiCi looked up the flock was there, like the crowd of sparkles that the tips of shallow waves make in a lake. They were like nerve endings, like a cross-sectioned antiseptic limb, the electrode nerve endings pulsing, tongues licking air for what seemed like ages, and within a second the flock was gone behind a wall of pink marble. Her purse bounced at her hip as she walked, so she put her hand on it. The strap crossed between her breasts. Her skirt fluttered at her knees, and her stomach fluttered in her skirt.

As soon as she entered the café the guy spotted her and he gestured to her as he rose from his seat by the window. She'd actually noticed him on her way into the restaurant. She'd seen him in the window as she walked past it to get to the door, and she actually thought it'd be too good to be true if this was the guy, because he was so sharp looking, with a linen jacket and a silk shirt and one gold chain you could just see where his collar opened. He pulled her chair out for her as she approached and touched her arm to guide her into it. CiCi lifted her purse strap over her head. It took her several tries to get the strap to stay on the rounded back of the tippy chair.

The guy introduced himself. His name was Dean, or Daniel, or Dylan, I don't remember. As he was talking, saying, “Wow, CiCi, I'm glad you made it, I'm so glad you agreed,” he took a mini tape recorder from his briefcase and showed it to her with his eyebrows raised, acknowledging to her that he was turning it on, that she could object if she wanted, everything out in the open, on the record, super-professional, all via eye contact, like he did it every day and like she did too. He placed the mini recorder on the café table next to the vase with its one ruffled flower. He said he was so glad they'd be working together, and then he gestured to the menu and said, “Anything you want.” When the waiter came, he ordered her a glass of white wine without even asking.

The vase on the café table was white, and the shape of an egret, of a lean bowling pin. It had a thin blue ribbon around its neck, a decorative noose. The waiters scurried around in black-and-white and the whole room hummed with its mirrors and flamingo pink and aqua everything.

Then she told him. She told him exactly what it was like to be in a van with Bundy, she told him just as she'd written in her journal she'd tell it. How his hair sparkled. How he touched the small of her back. How he held her hand to help her balance as she stepped into the van like it was a gleaming white carriage. Yes, she said, his eyes devastated her. Yes, he seemed truly wounded when he remembered the racket was in the shop. His hands quivered on the steering wheel as he listened to her tell him what she was studying in school. His face turned to something ravaged and rageful when he shoved her from the van. Yes, she was frightened. Like there was a beast inside him, she said. Like Jekyll and Hyde.

The guy shook his head, overwhelmed, it seemed, with sympathy. He was eating bowtie pasta with curled-up shrimps. “And you were just a child,” he said.

“I know,” said CiCi. “I was pretty naïve. But you have to remember, Romeo and Juliet were thirteen, right?” A busboy came by and filled their water glasses. CiCi watched the ice cubes rock to the lip of her glass, ready for water to spill, but water didn't spill and the cubes rocked back into place.

“Funny thing, though,” the guy said. Donny, David, Dominick, whichever it was. “As I'm remembering from my notes it was, what, the twelfth? For your incident? Thursday, right? I mean, look at the dates here,” he said, pulling a small spiral notebook out of his briefcase.

“Yeah,” she said, not quite getting it.

“Well, it doesn't make sense,” he said. “Because, I mean, he didn't get that van until right before he left. So, if he had the van, you know, that'd mean he'd have to be over in Lake City killing Kimberly Leach. Look,” he said and handed her the notebook. She held it in the palm of her hand. He'd drawn a little map in blue ink, showing Tallahassee and the Chi Omega Sorority House and Lake City and the Holiday Inn where they'd come up with a receipt. He'd made little x-marks-the-spot marks in red ink, and put the dates next to each x in purple ink. “Because see that was a Saturday, with Kimberly,” he said, pointing with his fork. CiCi looked at the notebook in her hand and it looked like the map of that day: the tennis court, the parking lot, the stretch of road through the newly constructed stretch of strip malls, the anonymous shoulder where he pulled over, her parents' house, the police station. Change the names and it could be a map of anything.

In the air conditioning, she suddenly felt cold in her sundress and her face got hot. When she looked at him, she couldn't help it, her eyes, as they say, swam with tears. Once, when she was a little kid, she'd rescued a baby rabbit from her cat and held it in the palm of her hand, where it crouched, in shock. She held it, trying to figure out what to do, in wonder at its fur, at its eyes, its immaculate feet. She bent her knees and crouched there, in her backyard, watching the exquisite animal breathe, so caught with it that when the creature stopped breathing it was the first she'd noticed time passing since she'd flung the cat away. In the café, she held the notebook like that, and when she let herself realize what it meant, that it had never been Bundy in the van at all, that it'd been just some guy, any old guy, and that suddenly she couldn't remember what the man at the tennis courts looked like at all, he was nothing but a shadow in the sun, in that moment it was like the notebook died, and she reached her hand across the tippy table, palm up, holding it out for Derek, or Dennis, whatever his name was, to take.

At that point, CiCi told me, well at that point she's just letting it be obvious how upset she is and the guy really slimes up to her. So that's a little better, in a way, she said, to have him be all comforting and sympathetic, especially out there in public where everyone in the restaurant knows how good-looking he is, and they don't have to know he's a fucking slime. But then he does something scary. He says he'll take her by the bus station to pick up her stuff and then take her home, but first he takes her to a hotel. It's a fancy hotel, and he takes her there in his amazing little red convertible, which she'd actually walked by on her way to the café and thought what a cute car it was. But in the room, he gets obsessed with making her come. He says it's
criminal
—no lie, CiCi said to me, his exact words, it's
criminal
, he says—that she doesn't orgasm and then it's all fucking afternoon, he's doing this, and he's trying that, and she tries faking it twice, but he catches her and says, “Relax, relax, baby, it's no hurry,” and then a little while later he says, “Give it to me,” which she heard about guys saying but never thought they actually said. She says finally she thought she maybe did come, but she was so mad she didn't change her face at all and pretended she didn't, and finally he gave up and said she shouldn't worry, with some girls it took them years to learn how to get turned on, but at least she knew now it took a real man to be patient with her and she should expect no less ever again. No lie, she said. He said
real man
.

After the hotel, she's drained, and raw in every way. Her eyes hurt. In his red convertible she can feel the air on her eyeballs. The sun is getting low in the sky and it creeps her out. She makes him stop at the bus station, and she takes the key from her little white purse and unlocks her stuff and it looks damp and sort of rubbed-out. She puts her purse in the canvas bag and looks at it lying on the bottom of the bag, with her tennis shoes. It's a cheap thing, with cheap gold-tone-plated clips that attach the strap to the body.

He drives her all the way back from Miami. “No way you're taking a bus, babe, not on my watch.” He shows her how there's cocaine in a little tube in the glove compartment. At a stoplight, he taps a tiny amount into his palm, licks his finger, dabs his finger in it, and puts his finger in her mouth to rub it on her gums, above her front teeth. He licks his palm and says, “See how it gets all numb? You like it?” When they pull into Ted's apartment complex, CiCi is ready to jump out without saying another word to him. She's careful, of course, to have the guy pull up to this one side of the building, the side without the balconies, but she still feels like she can imagine Ted watching them pull up. The guy stops the car, but then he takes hold of her elbow. He says, “One more thing, CiCi. Really. Look at me.” He takes the mini cassette recorder from the pocket of his linen blazer. He pushes the rewind button with his thumb, and then he pushes play. CiCi listens. At first she can hear only the hushing mechanical sound of the cassette tape moving. Then she can hear herself breathing. She can hear her own noises. “Give it to me,” says the man on the tape. She breathes and breathes, and sometimes she makes little vocal breaths. For a while she sounds like herself, but then she starts sounding like anyone. She sounds like any animal. The closer she listens the less she is listening to herself.