Martin Misunderstood (8 page)

'I fought the fishes,' he told her, trying out his
jail-house lingo.

She turned skeptical. 'Fought them on what?'

'Well, you know, jail is very divisive. I had to
hook up with the whites, you see. Immediately,
you have to choose a posse.'

'Posse?'

He leaned on the edge of her empty desk.
'Peeps, you might have heard it called.'

She dumped a box full of invoices on the floor
and started filling it with Post-it notes from
Martin's desk. 'Did you really kill Sandy?'

'Well, I . . .' he fumbled for words. 'She teased
me quite harshly.'

Unique stopped filling the box. 'You was mad
after the dildo, huh? I saw it in your eyes when
that rubber melted into your thumb.' She
chuckled. 'I knew there was something more to
you, Martin.'

Martin. She had called him Martin. Not Fool.
Not Doughboy. Martin.

'She pissed you off, didn't she?'

The only thing he could think to say was, 'Live
by the dildo, die by the dildo.'

Unique's eyes widened in shock. 'Did you rape
her?'

He shrugged again, thinking this was the most
attention she had ever given him. She was
actually talking to him like a human being!

'Tell me what happened,' she whispered,
letting him know that it was just between the two
of them. 'I promise I won't tell nobody. Just for
my own sake, let me know.'

'Well, I—'

'It was all about the sex, wasn't it?'

Martin waved this away with his hand,
slightly queasy by the thought of rape, especially
having just spent nearly a full half-hour in a
cage of savage men. 'I've got a girl who takes
care of those needs.'

She gasped. 'You been paying for sex? Seeing
prostitutes? Martin, that's what Ted Bundy did!'

Having read
The Stranger Beside Me
five
times, Martin was certain her statement was
untrue, but he could not find it in himself to burst
her bubble, so he said, 'Yes, I'm just like Ted
Bundy.'

'Where?' she asked. 'Do you go into Atlanta?
Do you make them do nasty things?'

Martin shrugged again, hoping she couldn't
see how red-faced he was becoming. 'There's a
lady – name'a Glitter. I use her to satiate my
needs.'

'To get your anger out, right?' She took a few
steps toward him. 'You're a really angry man,
ain't you, Pasty?'

'I've got a temper.'

'I heard about you stomping on that briefcase,'
she said. 'Is that what you used to kill her?'

He shrugged for maybe the sixtieth time. Was it
just him, or was Unique standing closer? He could
have reached out and touched her. So he did.

'Oh, baby,' she breathed, as if his touch
brought a tingle to her skin. 'Do it again.'

He touched her bare arm, his creamy fingers a
stark contrast to her black coffee. Suddenly, both
her hands clamped around his head. She yanked
him off the desk and crammed his face into her
voluminous breasts. Martin couldn't breathe.
His feet slid on the tiled floor as he tried to back
away from her.

'Come'ere,' she grunted, her long, red fingernails
scraping against his belly as she yanked
down his pants. Martin didn't plunge so much as
fall into her. She gripped his ass cheeks so hard
between her fists that he felt like his butt was
being molded into a handle. She certainly used it
that way, pushing, pulling, pushing, pulling so
that Martin was jackhammering in and out.

He couldn't stop her, and after a few hundred
thrusts, he didn't want to stop her. His knees
started to go weak. 'Oh-oh-oh!'

'Say it, baby!' she yelled back. 'Say my name!'

'You-knee-kay! You-nee-kay!'

'Say it, Doughboy! Say it louder!'

'You! Nee! Kay! You! Nee! Kay!'

'That's it!' she cried. 'Come on, baby! Fuck
Unique! Fuck that baby!' She tugged and yanked
and slammed him against her. Martin held on to
her shoulders as she jerked his body back and
forth.

'Oh! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!' he cried.

'No, you don't!' she warned him, her hands
stopping the motion.

It was too late. He came in torrents, great
mighty plumes that would rival Old Faithful in
pounds per square inch. His body shook with
manly release, his muscles tensing as wave after
wave shot through him.

'Nuh-uh,' Unique mumbled. 'No way you're
finishing without me, Pillsbury.'

Her hand gripped the back of his head again,
pushing his face down between her legs and into
the cavernous cleavage of her cleft. Unique was
stronger than she looked. Her fingernails dug
into the back of his head, pressing Martin's nose
against her wetness. He struggled to pull back
even as she forced him closer. She started to
grind against his face, his nose sliding up and
down. Martin fought the urge to sneeze, to
choke, to scream for air. He started to
hyperventilate again, his brain spinning in his
head, and still she pressed his face into her
mound like an orange in a juicer, then like
cheese in a grater. She was working on pork in
a meat grinder when he started to see stars, and
not the good kind. His eyelids flickered. Just
before he passed out, she finished, or at least he
thought she did. Either way, Unique pushed him
away from her like he was a dog trying to eat off
her plate. Martin fell back, his hands slipping on
the tiled floor. His face was so wet that he must
have been gleaming. She looked down at him
with renewed disgust.

'You ain't all that,' she noted, tugging up her
underwear. Her stomach rolled over the top like
a muffin over its paper wrapper.

'I was—'

'Shut up, Fool.' She reached into her purse,
checking something. 'All right, then,' she
mumbled.

Martin had managed to stand but he was so
dizzy that he didn't trust himself to reach down
and pull up his pants. He put his hand on the
desk to steady himself. He should do the
gentlemanly thing now, like offer to take her to
dinner or maybe suggest a drink. 'Unique,
perhaps I could—'

'Pull up your pants, Fool. That weenie of yours
ain't nothin' to look at.'

'Oh, sorry.' Martin scrambled to do as he was
told.

'Carry that box out to my car,' she ordered.
'And stop looking at me like that. Just 'cause you
got a taste of the honey don't mean you can keep
buzzing the hive.'

An blew her nose with a tissue even as tears
streamed down her face. She should have known
better than to start watching
The House of Mirth
while she was on her period. Or maybe An was
just sensitive in general. For the life of her, she
could not get Martin Reed out of her mind. The
way he had compared her to Tempe Brennan . . .
the way he had vomited when he'd seen the
crime-scene photos (An had always had a soft
spot for men with weak stomachs. Her father had
suffered from ulcers his entire life). And then
there was that look he gave her when she released
him from the holding cells – part confused child,
part sadistic monster. Would she ever know the
real Martin?

An tried to turn her attention back to the
movie, mindful that thinking about Martin Reed
would never lead her to a good place. The truth
was that after Charlie had died, one of the main
reasons An had never been able to make a
connection with another man was because there
was always a little part of her that was scared of
being beaten. She hated to admit it (it was the
kind of revelation she would only have shared
with Jill) but she had decided a long time ago that
the perfect man for her would probably be one
who could never touch her or get close enough to
harm her in any way.

In short, her ideal mate was Jill, but with a
penis.

'Ugh,' she groaned. She was too old to change
back, and she was pretty certain that she
wouldn't be able to scrape the gay flag bumper
sticker off her car without removing a chunk of
paint in the process.

An tried to concentrate on the movie, holding
the box of tissues in her lap. Gillian Anderson's
Lily Bart was lying in bed, taking that last fatal
dose of laudanum, when An's phone rang.

'Hello?' she sniffed.

'Aw, shit,' Bruce said. 'I knew I shouldn't have
let you go home alone. Not with this being Jill's
anniversary and all.'

An looked at the paused image of Gillian
Anderson lying in bed. Even close to death, she
was still beautiful. An couldn't help but think
that that's exactly how Jill would have looked if
she had really lived and then really died. Wasn't
laudanum a derivative of opium? Surely they
would have given Jill something for the pain.

'An?'

'I'm okay,' she told him, sniffing again.
'What's up?'

'The security guard from Southern Toilet
Supply just called. He found a dead body in the
bathroom.'

'What?' An gasped, shock making her heart
feel as if it had stopped in her chest. Bruce
explained to her what had happened, but An's
brain could not process his words into anything
that made sense. Even as she got dressed, got into
her car, drove to Southern, flashed her badge at
the police blockade and went into the bathroom,
she still could not quite grasp what Bruce had
told her.

And then she had seen the prone body of
Unique Jones and finally understood.

The woman was lying face down on the floor,
her dress hiked up, legs spread. There was a mop
handle sticking out from between her legs. Blood
pooled around her head. Incongruously, the
whole bathroom smelled like flowers.

An asked, 'What happened?'

The coroner supplied his theory. 'I'd say she
was hit with this,' he said, holding up a clear
plastic evidence bag. An saw a wall-mounted
bathroom air sanitizer with blood and hair stuck
to the crushed tip.

'Came from over there,' Bruce said, pointing to
the empty mounting bracket bolted to the wall.
'Lavender scent.'

That explained the smell.

'The blow was fatal,' the coroner explained.

'Was she raped?'

He got down on his knees and craned his neck
to look up between the legs. 'Unless he's got a
penis the size of a mop handle, I'd say he couldn't
perform,' the man noted. 'Typical with sexual
offenders. They can't penetrate, so they punish
the victim, and
then
they get their sexual release.
There's enough jizz here to paint the Capitol
dome.'

An shook her head, trying to clear the image
that had brought. 'Who found the body?'

'Security guard,' Bruce told her. 'He fell asleep
in the booth.' Bruce pinched his thumb and
forefinger together, brought them to his mouth
and made a sucking sound. 'Guy likes his weed.'
He shrugged; half the cops on the force did, too.
'Anyway, he woke up, saw that Jones' car was
still here, went inside and found her like this.'

'Were any other cars in the lot?'

'He pulled the security tape for us,' Bruce said.
'The only other car that came in and out was a
powder blue Cadillac.' He paused for effect. 'We
ran the plates. The car's registered to Evelyn
Reed.'

'Fuck,' An whispered. Martin had promised he would stay out
of trouble.

'He seemed agitated that day when he came to
work,' Daryl Matheson testified in front of the
judge. 'I asked him about the blood on the
bumper, and he got really defensive.'

'He was pounding on the briefcase,' Darla
Gantry stated, after swearing on the Bible to tell
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth. 'I asked him what he was doing and he told
me to mind my own damn' business.'

'Well,' Norton Shaw began, clearly reluctant
to be telling this to the jury. 'Martin was always
complaining about Unique. I didn't pay much
attention to it. He usually complained about a lot
of people.'

'He scared me,' Gloria 'Madam Glitter'
Koslowski admitted. 'I told him to leave. I didn't
want to be alone with him.'

'Unique was always scared of Pasty. He stared
at her all the time, looking at her breasts and
things.' Renique, Unique's sister, was steely yet
composed (she had trouble of her own – it seems
the church where she worked had found some
accounting irregularities).

Evelyn Reed sobbed, 'I didn't know what to do
with him! He was just out of control!'

It must be said that the final nail in Martin
Reed's coffin came from his own words. An had
found a tape recorder in Unique's purse alongside
various purloined office supplies. Cellphone
records had shown she'd made several phone calls
to the local television stations, offering to sell her
story. And what a story it would have been.

On the tape, Unique's voice sounds hurried,
almost excited. 'You been paying for sex? Seeing
prostitutes? Martin, that's what Ted Bundy did!'

'Yes,' Martin replies, sounding cool,
confident. 'I'm just like Ted Bundy.'

Even Max Jergens had looked convinced when
An had played the tape in open court. 'No way,'
he'd said when the judge had asked if he wanted
to cross-examine the witness. 'Dude, did you
hear what he said?'

Through it all, Martin sat passively by his
lawyer. Or, at least, he seemed to be passive –
how could you tell what was going on in Martin
Reed's twisted, sick mind?

To her credit, An had tried to find even the
slightest bit of evidence in Martin's favor. Each
inquiry she made only seemed to dig him deeper
into the hole: His fellow employees seemed to
think he was a cross between Baby Huey and
Charles Manson. Add to that the forensic
evidence – Martin's sperm inside Unique, his
saliva and sperm on the floor in the office and in
his shoe – and there was not much An could do
but sit back and wait for the judge's gavel to fall.
And fall it did.

'Martin Harrison Reed Junior, I hereby
sentence you to death by lethal injection.'

Death! It seemed a bit harsh, but then maybe
An had developed a soft spot for Martin over the
months of interviewing him. They had spent so
many hours together, yet she still felt that she
hardly knew him at all. He had even tried to learn
Dutch (she hadn't the heart to tell him that her
family was actually from Friesland – Dutch was
hard enough; Frisian would have probably
driven him to suicide). Really, if you didn't look
at him or talk to him for very long, he was
actually a rather nice guy.

Of course, people had started to notice at work
that An was acting differently. Bruce had picked
up on it first, noting that she had ironed a shirt or
brushed her hair. Working with a bunch of
detectives, you'd think one of them would have
put together the fact that An only took care of
her appearance on the days that she talked with
Martin Reed. Then again, the thought of her
actually falling for someone who was soon to be
a convicted murderer (the case was a slam dunk)
was fairly preposterous.

Had she fallen for him? Well – maybe. An
tested the waters first, trying to see how it would
feel. She sent herself flowers at work (boy, had
that caused a stir) and took off early one Friday
to get ready for a 'dinner date'. There was teasing
and smiles and pats on the back. Part of her was
a bit hurt that they seemed to have so easily
forgotten Jill, but then Doug, her boss, had called
her into his office one day and said, 'You know,
I'm glad to see you moving on. Jill would've
wanted you to be happy.'

An had felt tears well into her eyes.

'So,' Doug said, a teasing lilt to his voice,
'what's the lucky lady's name?'

'Mary,' she told him, stroking her neck the
way that she imagined Jill used to. 'Her name is
Mary.'