The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man (28 page)

I poured hot water into the pot to scald it. Then I ladled in two heaping teaspoons of loose tea before filling it with more water, which I had brought to a boil. I sighed, shook my head. “You really shouldn’t have told him.”

“I know. Yeah, but at first, he comes on like a regular guy. He wanted to know all about you. Then, you know, like, you have a joint and start talking. I was just kind of bragging. About you.”

I smiled, flattered in an odd way. “Does he use drugs?”

“Is the pope Catholic? I mean, he’s into it … big time.”

“Do you think he sells drugs as well as uses them?”

“I couldn’t swear, but I think he does. One night, when I couldn’t sleep, I wandered into this place that leads off from a bookcase that’s really a door on the second floor behind where the fireplace goes up. It was like something out of a movie. I was
looking for something to read. I pulled out
Northanger Abbey
, you know, I’ve always liked Jane Austen, and the bookcase kind of went in. Then it just opened, right into a dark passage. It was really creepy with no lights. I went down to the kitchen and got a flashlight. I went in, I don’t know how far, maybe fifteen feet, and just as I got to this big vault-like door cut into solid rock, lights started flashing. Freddie and two of his creeps showed up with guns and dogs. I couldn’t believe it. Freddie was really pissed. He accused me of snooping. I told him that was bullshit. I told him I went up to the bookcase to look for a book because I couldn’t sleep. I said when I pulled out a book the bookcase started to swing open.”

“Did he believe you?”

“He didn’t have any choice. Besides I was telling the truth. But I think he deals and I think that’s where he keeps his stash.”

“On a large scale?”

“Yeah. Now that I think of it. He was always getting beeped on his cell phone, then he’d go and use a special phone that probably had some kind of scrambler on it. Then some creepy-looking type would show up and they’d go upstairs.”

“And he uses it himself?”

She shook her head to indicate incredulity. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Too much for you?”

She sipped her tea. “I don’t mind doing a joint, you know, like, to get things going or slow things down, but he is really into heavy stuff.”

“Like?”

“Cocaine. H. Ecstasy. Meth. You name it. It was everywhere.”

“So when did things start to go … bad?”

“Some friends showed up. Business associates, he called them.
Real scaggy types. They had like these girls with them. I think they were hookers. That’s when the handcuffs and the whips came out. You know, dog collars and chains.”

“Was Celeste Tangent there?” I tried to sound casual.

“Yeah …” Her voice got wistful. “They have a thing.”

“They?”

“Freddie and Celly. We all had a thing.”

“The three of you?”

“Yeah. But it was too druggy to be real. Sixy would have loved it. You know, like his cut, ‘Orifice Rex.’ But it’s not my scene. I mean they were putting dildos on dogs and trying to get a chain going. And then they had this mock wedding between a midget ballerina and one of the German shepherds. I’m so sick of that stuff. It’s all fizz and no wine. And …”

“Yes?” I prompted after a pause.

“I think Freddie’s starting to lose it.” She pointed to her head.

“So you decided to leave?”

She sighed, as though it had cost her something. “Yeah. He wasn’t going to let me go, though. He said no way, not now.”

“How did you do it?”

“I took a walk and called a cab.”

“With your walkaround phone.”

“Yeah. The cabbie had a tough time finding it. Freddie was really pissed when he found I had called one and given it directions. He’s like a dictator. He didn’t want to let me go. But he knew you knew I was up there. It’s like he owns people. And everyone’s a slab of meat.”

“He’s a criminal, you know,” I said.

“I can believe it.”

“I don’t say that just because he thinks Adolf Hitler was a
great artist. I mean he’s a real criminal. He’s part of organized crime.”

Diantha stuck out her lower lip and nodded, but skeptically.

I related to her then what Agent Johnson and Sergeant Lemure had told me about his background. I went into some detail. One has to be careful these days in talking to young people. Criminality has taken on such glamour. But Diantha listened as though taken with my seriousness.

She got up to rinse her cup, and I noticed the way she wore her slacks, just like her mother had so many years ago. She turned to look at me. “Hate to rain on your parade, Dad, but I know firsthand that Freddie’s not circumcised.”

What is it about that kind of detail that cuts to the heart? Because I suffered then a keen and entirely inappropriate stab of retrospective jealousy. I can’t explain it. Was I that smitten by my own stepdaughter? Was I to live in torture now until she found some suitable young man and went off to start a life of her own?

“Perhaps he faked that when he went through his ‘conversion,’ ” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral.

“It wouldn’t surprise me. Reality to him is what he says it is. The guy really is …”

“Solipsistic … self-absorbed.”

“Yes. You always know things, do you know that?”

She smiled at me then, melting my heart, touching me in ways I’m sure she couldn’t imagine. I was looking again at a young vibrant Elsbeth, and again experiencing a kind of temporal dislocation.

We decided we would go Christmas shopping together for some last-minute things. We would dine out first, shop, and then go to the midnight carol service at St. Cecilia’s, the rather High
Episcopal church I attended with some regularity before Elsbeth arrived on the scene and changed my life.

I managed to get us a table at the Oriole in the Miranda, an old-fashioned place that serves excellent, old-fashioned food. Diantha had wild goose and I had tame steak, and we finished off a bottle and demi-bottle of decent wine. She couldn’t quite stop talking about Freddie Bain, at the same time reaching over to touch my hand, as though clinging to me, as though torn between a rollicking life on a sybaritic if sinking pirate ship and austere survival on an odd bit of eroded rock jutting from the water.

We shopped halfheartedly for an hour or so, mostly walking off the wine, before making our way to the incensed interior of St. Cecilia’s. There, for more than an hour, we lifted our voices and our hearts, bracing hope and beauty against the solstistial darkness. Elsbeth and I had come here each of the last three years, and my eyes watered when we sang the verses of one of her favorites:

God is good, I thought. Had He not sent His only son as a reassurance? Of course, we had nailed Him to a tree and left Him to die. And we’ve celebrated His death ever since. I put such thoughts aside and thanked fate that Diantha was with me and safe.

Afterward, outside, I noticed that Diantha had tears shining in her eyes. I tried to comfort her.

“Oh, Norman,” she cried, clinging to me again. “I don’t know what to do.”

“About what, darling?” I said.

“About Freddie. I know he’s a creep. I know he’s crazy. I know he’s a monster. It doesn’t matter. I can’t help it. I love him.”

Something horrific has happened, something so personal, so shattering, and yet so poignant, I scarcely know where to begin. Indeed, I would not begin at all were it not pertinent to account for the strange happenings that have rocked our little community to its very foundations.

I have just returned from the Seaboard Police Department headquarters. (I’m sorry if this seems disjointed, but I am agitated beyond words.) We’ve finally had a real break in the case, but at an awful price. I sit here in my high study, my father’s .38-caliber Smith & Wesson at the ready, my hands afflicted by a telltale tremor.

Let me start at the beginning.

Earlier this evening Diantha and I returned from a meeting with the Reverend Lopes and Father O’Gould to make arrangements for Elsbeth’s memorial service at Swift Chapel. Such matters are draining. They take an emotional toll the worse for not being expected. What order of service? What hymns? (For instance, one of Elsbeth’s favorites was Mendelssohn’s “Why Do the Heathens Rage?” But it didn’t seem appropriate to the occasion.) Who speaks? What about the reception?

At any rate, upon returning home, we felt simply too tired to cook anything for ourselves. Indeed, we were too drained even to contemplate going out for a quick bite. Ordinarily I do not enjoy sent-out food, the kind that arrives in white cardboard containers with plastic accoutrements and little pouches of condiments.
But to indulge Diantha, whose spirits had ebbed woefully low, I agreed to call the Jade Stalk and order from a veritable laundry list of Chinese food. We ticked off black bean shrimp, some kind of shredded beef, sweet-and-sour something or other, and rice, of course.

I presently poured a glass of chilled white wine for Diantha and made myself a martini of lethal potency with at least three shots of good gin and a fair dollop of vermouth, which I chilled briefly over ice before pouring it into a frosted glass with an unpitted olive. I had just had the barest sip when the bell rang. I opened the door to find a young man of Asian aspect holding a white bag stapled shut with the cash register printout attached. I paid him the requisite amount, gave him a generous tip, thanked him, and closed the door. I took the bag of food and my drink into the television room, where Diantha was arranging plates and silver on the ample coffee table between the couch and massive screen of the television.

“Smells good,” she said, smiling at me. “I’m famished.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “It’s quite appealing when you present it on a dish.” We were each ladling generous amounts onto our plates. Some sort of police drama from the big city was on the television, one of those improbable tales of murder and mayhem with people yelling at one another and exchanging significant glances in between scuffling with criminal types. I never really pay much attention. To me most of what’s on television constitutes a kind of moving wallpaper with noise.

“The black bean shrimp is divine,” I remember Diantha saying. In one of those endearing, almost intimate gestures that occur between two people who are close, she held over a heaping forkful for me to take. We ate in greedy silence for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. Diantha had switched the channel to what’s called a situation comedy, a low form of humor in which
people make wisecracks about their bodily functions, contort themselves like idiots, and mug for the camera, all to the sound of canned laughter. Yet I was glad to see Diantha respond even to this meager fare, because of late she had become withdrawn and moody. I had taken just the merest sip of my martini, saving it for a postprandial. I remember thinking I should have made tea instead when Diantha turned from the television, let out a low moan, put down her plate with a clatter, and turned to me. “Norman, Norman,” she said breathlessly, her eyes going wide, her mouth opening. In one quite amazing gesture, she reached under her skirt and peeled off her panties and nylon tights. She leaned back, opened her legs to me and implored, “Norman, please, Norman, please.”

I might not have resisted even if, a minute or so later in time that had gone out of focus, the most powerful erotic sensation I have ever experienced had not rocked my entire body. I cried out a futile “no” but was already unbuckling myself, had turned into a veritable satyr, engorged as I have never been in my life. I was in the grip of a passion too urgent to allow for anything as basic as pleasure let alone the more tender delights of lovemaking. We conjoined with a thrusting, uncontrolled violence, a frenzy beyond passion or love, a kind of injuring madness as we pounded at each other, snarling and biting like panicked animals.

Don’t ask me what made me do what I did to save us. In the midst of the madness, as I pummeled Diantha and she pummeled back, our voices shrieking and groaning like two demented demons, some minuscule particle of ordinary sense remained intact in what was left of my mind. Because, on some inexplicable impulse, springing no doubt from that tiny remnant of normalcy, I reached over, grabbed my martini, and, before much of it spilled in the heave and shove of our frenzy, managed to
swallow it down, nearly choking on the olive, which lodged for a moment in my throat before I managed to swallow it.

Mirabile dictu
, it worked. Not right away, but a minute or so later, I experienced a prodigious, prolonged emission. I immediately lost the insane compulsion I was under, but detumesced only slowly. I was then able to subdue Diantha enough to get her to swig from the gin bottle that I hastened to bring her. She convulsed orgasmically as well, then fell weeping into my arms, her tears dampening the top of my shirt. When she lifted her swollen eyes to mine, she said, “They’re trying to kill us, aren’t they?”

“Trying to kill me, at any rate,” I said, treading between the risk of sounding self-important and the need to reassure her.

“It’s horrible, horrible,” she cried, ready to weep again. Then she said something that startled me. “That’s not the way I would have wanted it to happen …”

“I know,” I said placatingly.

We were silent for a moment as acknowledgment registered. Neither of us, I think, was sorry that it had happened — only how.

She gave a tearful little laugh. “You’re quite the stud, Norman, you know that?”

I stammered something about overplaying the part. By then I had made myself presentable. Before I left her so she could do the same, I told her to stay in the television room while I checked the doors and windows.

“You mean they could still be around?” She pulled on her panties without any false modesty. It seemed as though, in some strange way, we were already a couple.

I went then and fetched the revolver. I loaded it carefully and put it in the holster, which I had strapped on under my arm. The holster still smelled reassuringly of new leather. I went downstairs
and, on some instinct, opened the front door to check outside.