Winter of frozen dreams (7 page)

Barbara Hoffman's sad, rambling voice was too familiar. Liza lit a cigarette. The hour was late. Tomorrow was a working day that would arrive too soon. At least she wasn't masturbating farmers and lawyers and drunken carpenters for a living. That was behind her, Liza consoled herself; it was in the past. Instead she sat at a desk, in an office crammed with desks and file cabinets in a four-story building crammed with desks and file cabinets—Liza and dozens of other women, none of whom were like her, she decided—and for eight hours each day they rapped typewriter keys and squinted at computer terminals and pretended to ignore the boredom of their labor.

Liza thought of herself as a chicken in a roost. Each day another piece of her life slipped away, slipped into an irretrievable place. She regretted it and she resented it. But it was better than whacking the flaccid penis of a man for money.

Damn, Barbara, Liza cried into the phone; you re giving me nightmares. But Liza didn't hang up. She sucked on her cigarette. If Barbara had been the queen of the massage parlors, then she was the queen of nightmares too.

The rumor was that when Barbara quit the parlors and signed on for a straight job she had taken a couple of lucrative Johns with her and discreetly set up shop at home. Liza had never confirmed the rumor, but it was apparent from her conversation that Barbara had not forsaken her commerce. Barbara liked the money, and in a weird way Barbara liked the power she wielded over men. She also experienced a paranoia concerning its repercus-

sions, both physical and psychological. Barbaras dreams often expressed her fears, and it was a dream episode Barbara was relating now, over the phone.

Liza mumbled to reinforce her presence, although it didn't matter. Liza had known Barbara Hoffman for maybe two months in early 1975 when these calls had commenced. They came without regularity or pattern, except that Barbara always called late at night. Sometimes Barbara cried about her pains and confusions. Sometimes Liza cried with her.

When Barbara left the parlors, several of her steady customers drifted to Liza, who was one of the prettiest masseuses at Jans. Prepped with the proper and discretionary amount of cosmetics, provided with seven consecutive hours of sleep, Liza radiated a natural beauty. A sprinkle of freckles dotted her cheeks. A bucket of blond hair bounced with her walk. She was wholesome, cheerful, with a dose of cynicism that kept her from being a caricature. What she lacked was the charisma that Barbara emanated and the instincts that Barbara had honed.

A wealthy real estate developer chose Liza as a substitute when Barbara retired. I want you to listen, he said, as Liza massaged sandalwood oil into his skin and listened as he talked. The man talked about nothing: a remark concerning his wife, a quip about business, a joke about sex. Liza worked on his cock, coaxed it to stiffen as he palavered. Gradually and gently she brought him to a sustained climax, which she cleaned with her mouth.

The man lay on the massage table insulted and unsatisfied. "You don't know how to listen/' he reprimanded Liza. "You didn't hear a word I said."

Liza could have repeated his mundane monologue verbatim.

You didn't listen like Barbara, the man scolded her. He pulled a dog collar out of his jacket. He explained that he was going to fix the collar to her neck and take her for a stroll, on her hands and knees, of course. Liza ran out of the room.

Barbara had laughed when Liza recounted the story.

Barbara admitted that sometimes she played a game with the men who adored her. She listened and responded so intently, Barbara boasted, that she convinced some of the fools they had orgasmed when they hadn't. She would stroke their pricks and rub their minds with attention, then feign as if they had come sweetly, powerfully, into her hands or mouth or vagina. The tension drained from their bodies, the buttocks softened, the pulse eased. The irony, she had lectured Liza, was that the ones being used, the women, were the ones who held the power, who spun the magic.

Liza blew smoke toward the ceiling, imagining Barbara conjuring illusions to bedazzle the lonely. Who had been tricked? Liza wondered.

A bottle of Valium rested on the middle shelf in the bathroom medicine chest. One for now, to sleep; one for work in the morning, Liza decided.

Frost stained the bedroom window. A street lamp revealed the glittering patterns on the glass. Barbara was exhausted. She had smoked a stick of marijuana, and everything had become so clear. She had called Liza to tell her about the clarity, about how her life was.

She apologized to Liza if she had talked too much. The hour was late, and she needed sleep. She bid Liza good night.

— 17 —

The Kollege Klub is a basement bar where students assemble to drink and carouse. Michelob and Old Style are on tap. Two dozen imported and domestic beers are available by the bottle. Mixed drinks with monikers like 'The Bucky Bash" can be ordered. Chablis and rose are served. The requisite burger and fries, with house variations, can be grilled for the hungry, and for the health-conscious salads have been added to the menu. Whether dictated by a change in management or merely slumping beer sales,

the interior is refurbished periodically. The KK has sported a woodsy, rustic ambience, passed through a glass and glitter phase, and currently could be called just another fun bar.

On Friday afternoons the KK is packed for happy hour, regardless of marketing fashion and collegiate trend. It is frequented by kids from the fraternity and sorority houses that litter Langdon Street, kids who jog every other day, who are in ROTC or business school, who go to Wisconsin football games but have to read the Sunday paper to discover the final score, who have smoked marijuana once, maybe twice, but prefer a six-pack of Bud-weiser, kids who chew Dexedrine like Chiclets during final exam week, kids from Ladysmith and Little Chute and Oconto and Wauwatosa who know their four years in Madison will be unlike any other time in their lives. A football jersey or a plaid button-down shirt, jeans, and a cap that reads skol or Wisconsin or wayne feeds will make you one of the crowd if male. If female, apply makeup so lightly it seems you are wearing no makeup, pull on a crewneck sweater, lace up canvas Tretorns, and you will blend in fine.

Inside the KK the sixties never happened. Social awareness is ogling the incoming freshman girls. These kids think its cleansing for the body to get so drunk once a month that you puke on the sidewalk. Yet they monitor their GPAs like they are the Dow Jones. Unlike their parents, they do not equate success with money but with happiness. Money is a variable in the equation, perhaps the largest single factor, but the kids from the KK will insist it doesn't have to be that way. None of them, however, will take the chance. They mouth platitudes that life is what one makes of it, and they agree that grades measure neither intelligence nor knowledge, but after happy hour on Friday they will sober up and spend Saturday in the library, drinking coffee and eating junk food from the vending machines, studying to ensure entry into an engineering school or an MBA program.

Jerry Davies fidgeted in a booth. The Kollege Klub was not his kind of hangout. College students irked him. No good reason why; they just weren't his kind of people. If Davies had a hangout, it would have been the Pizza Hut on South Park Street, near his apartment.

What upset him the evening of December 27th was not the KK, but the fact that Barbara Hoffman would stride down the cane-matted steps presently. The knot in his stomach felt the size of a gnarled mass of tree root. Beer slid over the tangle and filled his bladder. In an adjacent booth two plainclothes cops sipped Cokes.

The original plan was for Davies to be wired so that the conversation with Barbara Hoffman, along with any threats, recriminations, or admissions, could be recorded. But Lulling and Doyle had watched Davies tremble at the idea, and revised their strategy. His instructions were to keep talking, remain in the bar for as long as possible, and under no circumstances retire to Barbaras apartment. Both Lulling and Doyle had a real concern for Daviess safety, even if Davies himself thought the idea that Barbara might harm him preposterous and irrational. Besides, the surveillance would end once Davies entered apartment 306, and Lulling wanted to know what was said between them.

The foam of his beer was flat. Jerry Davies had expressed doubts about his role in this eavesdropping scenario. It entailed duplicity toward Barbara. Worse, her words, however innocent and unintentional, would be misconstrued and twisted to incriminate her. But his apprehension was overcome by Lulling. If Davies was anxious about Barbara, he was also intimidated by the gruff detective. A customer fed the jukebox. The crash of rock music resounded, and Davies was grateful for the distraction.

The noise caused Russ Kurth to grimace. Dressed in an argyle cardigan, with his black hair stylishly long, the tall, athletic detective could have been a graduate student in marketing and finance. Kurth sat with his back to the

empty seat opposite Davies, the seat Barbara was to occupy. If the blare of the music didn't drop several decibels, he'd need to pull up a chair and join the conversation to hear what was being said. He and his partner were debating slicing the cord or simply pulling the plug when Barbara appeared, looking like a bashful coed in her jeans, blue turtleneck, and tortoiseshell glasses.

"Order me a glass of Chablis, please," she told Davies. She sauntered to the jukebox, stuffed a dollars worth of quarters in the slot, and punched her selections.

"I'll bet they've got you wired to the fucking heavens," she said. Her brown eyes narrowed and were hard as cloves.

Davies flinched. He uttered an apology.

Barbara retorted viciously. Davies stammered, his right index finger readjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. Barbara accused him of betrayal.

The police had jumped to conclusions, Davies said, flustered. The beer and Barbara s acrimony played havoc with Daviess head. He had insisted she was an innocent victim of some awful circumstance.

Barbara scowled.

He didn't want this mess either, he said. He wanted their lives to return to how they had been, or almost how they had been.

Not a chance, Barbara said.

Davies dabbed at his runny nose with a napkin. The flaccid muscles in his neck tightened. He hadn't snitched on her; he had defended her.

Then Barbara mellowed. The accusation and acerbity disappeared from her voice. Her words came in whispers.

The Rolling Stones shouted a rock & roll cover from the jukebox. Snatches of their talk floated past Russ Kurth, but he couldn't fit the pieces together. He strained to listen. Barbara's subdued tone and the blast of the music machine prevented his stealing their exchanges.

Kurth moved to the bar, where he could catch a glimpse of the couple. What he observed was useless as evidence, but it provided a fascinating lesson in human

relations. It was not the talk that held the gist of this meeting; it was the negotiation and manipulation of that silent space that separates two human beings, that area of intimation and gesture, the region between faces where contact is established or deflected. Barbara was an expert in that territory. With Davies she controlled that zone, ruled its interior with the same quiet skill that a grand master employs to control the center of a chessboard. She maneuvered emotion with gesture, not words. A tilt of her head, a petulant curl of her lip, the angle and intensity of her eyes; disappointment, pain, reassurance were conveyed in a murmur, an expression, a fingertip that lightly traced the back of his hand. They whispered intently, and the whispering made the booth their private sphere; it cut them off, sealed them away from whomever else was present. The hushed voices created distance.

For three days a panoply of forces had shoved Jerry Davies around: his conscience, the cops, his doubts, his commitment to Barbara. Davies needed a sanctuary where he could rest and clarify his allegiances. Barbara intuited this. She acted injured and forgiving. A tear skipped out of her eye. Davies brushed it away. She invited him to walk her home.

Kurth trailed them. He feigned a call from a street phone booth and observed the push and pull as Barbara attempted to persuade Davies to come up to her apartment for a cup of hot tea. Kurth expected to lose him.

The couple climbed the stairs as Kurth waited below. Barbaras litany was powerful. "If you love me, Jerry . . ." was her tack, and Davies wavered. He professed his love hastily, as if it were a cumbersome weight that he feared would crush him. His fervent cliches echoed in the stairwell. Barbara whispered, sweet and enticing, but Daviess better judgment and the strict lecture from Lulling held forth.

They did not kiss good night. Barbara stroked his cheek with her fingers, tenderly, and she vanished behind the door to apartment 306.

Davies stood there. It took him two full minutes to

pry his work boots from the terrazzo tiles and to descend the stairs. The nights cold, which had been biting at Kurth's toes, sobered Davies. He paced steadily to his car.

Whatever secrets Barbara had spoken during their moments together Davies refused to repeat to Kurth, who joined him on the Lake Street parking ramp. The confounded lover shrugged his shoulders to Kurths questions, and the cop didn't push. His assignment was to trail and listen and to make certain Davies got home safely.

Before Davies drove away, he rolled down the car window and displayed a weak smile. He looked like a turtle, his neck craning out of the fur collar of his parka. "She said we have to stick together. Tell Mr. Doyle the engagements still on—probably for the spring/'

18

By December 28th police had executed four search warrants for Barbara Hoffman's apartment. They had gathered little evidence for their efforts. Jerry Davies had been subjected to a polygraph exam, which he passed. What he had told Lulling on Christmas and expanded for Doyle the next day seemed to be the extent of his involvement and knowledge concerning Harry Berge's homicide. Al Mackey had appeared at Doyle's office claiming to represent Ms. Hoffman. Her cooperation with police investigators was asked for, but Mackey denied her participation in Berge's death or the disposal of the body. She would make no statements and answer no questions unless subpoenaed.