Lady Slings the Booze Page 14

  “Better,” she said.

  “We’ve avoided Joe’s central question,” Lady Sally said. “Does anyone here object to the cold-blooded murder of Christian Raffalli?”

  She insisted on conducting a voice vote. When it was done we met all the legal requirements for a conspiracy to commit murder.

  “Can I ask what you’ve got in mind for the corpus derelicti?” Mike asked. “Layman’s interest.”

  “There are only two good ways to get rid of a body in the city,” I said, “and I don’t think the cafeteria has two bottles of relish. Can I assume that somewhere in that basement, near the secret stairs, there is a bathroom? By which I mean, a private room with both a bathtub and a toilet in it?”

  “Yes,” Lady Sally said. “A large bath. Quite near the stairs.”

  “And you’ve got carving knives and a hacksaw in the House?”

  Mike and Arethusa paled slightly. Lady Sally just nodded. “Doctor Kate has just about everything a hospital OR would have. Bone saws and such. And there chances to be a heavy-duty grinding wheel in the basement.”

  “That’ll save time,” I said. “Still, it’ll be about a six-hour job all told. I want people to notice me in the Parlor about every fifteen minutes or so throughout the night. And we do not want that toilet backing up on us.”

  Arethusa surprised me. “I can help you, Joe. And still be visible to everyone in the Parlor all night long, playing the piano.”

  So I surprised me. “Will you marry me, Arethusa?”

  Her eyes widened, but she answered steadily and at once. “No, Joe. Not at this point. But I will live in sin with you indefinitely. And you can keep asking.”

  You can’t ask for a better offer than that, can you? Can you?

  Well, I could. But I wasn’t going to get one now. And it was certainly a good offer. No: a great one, better than most men ever get. The distance between one and a hundred is nothing compared to the distance between zero and one. “Done,” I said without hesitation, went and sat in the empty chair between her, and kissed her both.

  There was a brief smattering of applause.

  Twenty-four hours earlier I’d have bet the rent that I would say, “Please, God, could I have brain cancer?” long before I ever said the words “Will you marry me?” All I can say is, it had been a long twenty-four hours.

  And how many of the girls you’ve known do you think would have volunteered—after one date!—to help you reduce a warm corpse to pieces small enough to flush down a toilet? You find one like that, you fire your grappling hooks and pray.

  She hadn’t said no…

  MIKE cleared his throat. “All right, folks,” he said, his voice as commanding as Mary’s and an octave deeper. “We’re engaged in conspiracy to commit assault, murder one from ambush, mutilation, desecration of a corpse, petty larceny, B&E, vandalism, unlicensed burial and public health violations regarding sewage disposal. Shouldn’t we give some thought to raping the guy? Just to round things out, like?”

  “In more ways than one,” both Arethusas chorused. “But aren’t the sewers intended for human waste?”

  “Not if it’s known to be diseased,” Mary said. “I think we should get serious and listen to these tapes, like Joe suggested in the first place.”

  “Quite right,” Lady Sally agreed. “‘Know your enemy,’ I believe you said, Joe. Sorry I sidetracked us.”

  “I’ve cued up the relevant sections,” Mary said, swiveling her chair to face her console. “I had to splice a dimmer into the power supply to get the tape to run slowly enough. I’ll start at half speed.”

  Ordinarily there were no speakers in the room, only headphones. I guess so you couldn’t play back tape aloud and thus into the intercom mike. But Mary had fetched in a little sugar-shaker-sized speaker for this meeting, and handwired an adaptor so it could run off the headphone jack. Kloss Experimental was stenciled on its side, and I later learned it was a superb speaker for its size and weight. But the quality of the sound we first heard wasn’t much better than a clock radio. It took a few seconds to identify it as the sounds of Sherry exercising, alone in her Studio, at half speed. The loudest single component was her breathing.

  “Sorry about the quality,” Mary said apologetically. “It’s recorded at real low speed to start with, and I don’t demagnetize my heads as often as I really ought to. That constant surf sound you hear is tape hiss at half the normal frequency.” Sherry’s voice on the tape made what must have been a momentary grunt of effort in realtime, but sounded like a comical belch in slow motion. “Wait, it’s coming up now—” She spun a dial on her board, and the tape slowed drastically, like a comedy effect. Just as everything reached the range where the bass capacity of that speaker really started to shine, all sound ceased except the rumbling grey-noise of tape hiss. Mary turned the dial to the limit of its travel and raised a hand for stillness.

  Nothing but rumble for perhaps five seconds. Then we heard an opening door. And then there was a long, lingering chuckle that made my hair stand on end. The fidelity was worse than an answering machine, with no high end at all; the hiss noise was as loud as the signal, or louder. But the menace, the confidence, came through clearly. It was a happy chuckle. A jolly chuckle.

  “‘…and finished her off in mid-air…’” he said jovially, quoting an old limerick. He had a pronounced Brooklyn accent. “But maybe not literally. That’s a perfectly nice bed…and there’s no reason to tire my legs out. Come—unh!—with me, sweetheart…” There were further sounds of effort. “Why pretend to resist,” he asked rhetorically, “when you still have your legs open? Ah, that’s better…flip you—oof!—over…in for a landing…there! My, you look charming…nice the way they still stick out even though you’re on your back…charming expression…eyes…mouth…” There were sounds of hasty undressing. Then there were other sounds. Apparently penetration required considerable effort. Which he seemed to enjoy.

  He talked to her as he raped her. Jocularly, if a bit breathlessly. He spoke for instance of the comparative advantages, as exercise, of the jumping jack and of jumping dick. A funny guy. He chided her good-naturedly for her lack of response. Happily his patter didn’t last long. As I had deduced from the start, he was a premature ejaculator.

  He said things as he climaxed that I don’t think I could repeat under hypnosis. I erased them from my mind as I heard them. Then there were only the sounds of him manhandling her back into her original location in mid-air, the barely audible sounds of clothing being collected, and the sound of the door closing behind him. He had left it open throughout. He said nothing after orgasm, as though Sherry had ceased to exist for him as even a make-believe person at that instant.

  Mary stopped the tape.

  After perhaps five seconds of blessed silence, Lady Sally said formally, “I identify that voice as Christian Raffalli. And I am very glad I committed myself to his murder before hearing that tape.”

  “It’s an emotional button-pusher,” Mary agreed savagely. “But I don’t think that makes it unfair evidence.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Mike said. “But it doesn’t make me want to kill him any more than I already did. Which is just barely enough. Once a man makes the decision to rape, having a good time doing it does not compound his guilt a whole lot.”

  “But he was so cheerful,” Mary said. “So fucking smug.”

  “Given what he can do, he has a right to be smug,” Mike said. “I don’t think many men, given Raffalli’s watch, could resist trying a spot of rape, at least once anyway. Not forever.”

  Mary clouded up. I wished I was armed with something more substantial than a blackjack. “You sound like you approve!”

  His voice was a match for even hers. “Which you know perfectly well I don’t. Darlin’, all men think about rape, at least once in their lives. Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we’ve got to have, more precious to us than heroin…and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, sh
opping or talking about feelings. Or you go to great lengths to seem like you do—because that’s your correct biological strategy. But some of you charge all the market will bear, in one coin or another, and all of you award the prize, when you do, for what seem to us like arbitrary and baffling reasons. Our single most urgent need—and the best we can hope for is to get lucky. We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishin’ thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot, for some reason. Peculiar, considering how often you insist we only see you as objects placed here for our gratification. Rape is always a brutal and uncondonable crime—but so is any act of terror. I didn’t condemn Christian Raffalli to death because he’s a rapist, and I won’t do it because he’s a happy one with a rotten sense of humor.”

  “Then why have you condemned him?” Lady Sally asked.

  “Several reasons. Because he knows how to stop Time, and that power should not exist. Because there’s no other way to be reasonably sure that power will stop existing. Because he rapes here—where he not only could have enthusiastic cooperation from just about anyone he wants, but has already paid for it. Because he’s a repeat rapist, who’s found nothing better to do with his magic power for several nights running now. And because his pattern shows he’s degrading, rather than getting it out of his system. He does more each time, his jokes get progressively nastier, and he’s taken to adding gratuitous attempted murder. If Joe hadn’t been Irish, we might all be somewhere else right now, saying how natural he looks. Any of those reasons would do it for me. But not the simple fact of rape.”

  “What would you do to a rapist?” Priscilla asked seriously. “A one-time rapist, say, who doesn’t kill.”

  “If I ruled the world, you mean? Rape him,” Mike said flatly. “Like I suggested earlier—I wasn’t joking. With just as much violence and/or terror as he’d used. But I’d want to be certain of the facts first—and if I wasn’t, I’d turn him loose. I’d like to see the same punishment for false accusation of rape, by the way. Rapists who murdered their victims—them I’d execute, after they’d been raped the correct number of times, selecting a method so as to give them at least ten painful minutes’ dying per victim. I’d read their names to him as he died. And I suppose for chronic non-murdering rapists I’d go as far as, say, breaking kneecaps.”

  “Not castration?” Priscilla asked. “Surgical or chemical?”

  “Hell, no!” he said. “I’d a lot sooner kill him, or put him in a wheelchair. And I think that’s too drastic as a general rule. Besides, I’m not sure rape has a lot to do with testosterone or seminal pressure. And despite that crack about two million years of rapists, I don’t really think the tendency to yield to the basic instinct is hereditary. Though I’m sure a boy can learn it from his father. No, I’m for the Law of Talion in most things. Now, if a rape caused the victim to need a hysterectomy—”

  “Gee, Mike,” Mary said sarcastically. “It’s a damn shame you don’t rule the world.”

  “Well,” he said, “I do have a terrific idea for women who’ve been raped in the real world.”

  Lady Sally had just put a hand up to interrupt him and get us back on track—but at this she checked herself. “I rule this digression intriguing enough to allow it,” she said. “If you make it short.”

  “You’ll love it,” he promised. “I read it in a letter a lifer wrote to the Co-Ev Quarterly a few years ago. The key to vengeance is simple and elegant. Don’t charge the bastard with rape. Charge him with indecent exposure.”

  “I don’t get you,” Mary said. “How does that help?”

  He grinned wolfishly. “Let me count the ways. It is much easier to get a conviction for that charge than for rape. The defense is not allowed to ask anything about your sexual history or how you were dressed at the time. Forensic evidence is unnecessary. The total public embarrassment to you is cut more than in half. In many states, a man convicted of indecent exposure will actually draw more prison time than a rapist. And whereas rapists are sort of prison folk-heroes, weenie-waggers do harder time than anybody but a short-eyes. In fact, the plan sort of incorporates my own suggested punishment.”

  Mary’s grin now looked so much like his that I almost wondered if they could be related somehow. “Oh, I like it, Mike! And the best part is, you don’t have to make a single false statement. You just don’t volunteer extraneous information. What’s the guy going to do, leap up in court and say, ‘It’s a filthy lie, Your Honor: I raped that bitch!’?”

  “It is elegant,” Lady Sally interrupted, grinning in a very similar way herself. “But let’s discuss it another time. There are other tapes to hear, and plans to finalize. I don’t imagine it makes a great deal of difference why we kill him as long as we’re all agreed.”

  “It makes a difference to me,” Mike insisted.

  “Table it. Mary, next tape.”

  I agreed with Mike. I don’t like to kill a man without walking around it a little and kicking the tires. But women are more practical than men.

  9. Dick Sees Spots

  …t’were best done quickly…

  —SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

  WE listened to more tapes. To all the tapes of Raffalli during his interludes as The Flash—or as he signed himself on Ellen, The Phantom. I won’t reproduce any of it. We learned a few more things about Raffalli, but nothing relevant and more than you probably need to know about the infinite possibilities of the human spirit.

  I lost the last of my hesitation about killing him, if that’s any help. I don’t think I’m as merciful a man as Mike Callahan.

  I managed to keep my cool during the replay of Arethusa’s rape. She held my hands tightly throughout that segment, and for as long after as it took me to relax my grip.

  Then we listened to a total of about half an hour of Raffalli in the Parlor, in normal conversation with other clients and artists, and watched him approach the front door five times. Enough to give a sketchy picture of him as a human being. His heavy Brooklynese accent bespoke lower-class origins, but he dressed and spoke and carried himself with urbane grace and a high degree of apparent self-confidence. If you had to describe him in a single word, you might pick “dapper.” He bounced a little when he walked. He had a tendency to start arguments and win them, to issue small challenges and then back them up, so smoothly that he never provoked any open confrontation or lasting animosity. The one time I’d seen him, I recalled, he’d been arm-wrestling a biker—and winning.

  I had Mary play the Parlor tape for that time, cuing from the song “Huggin’ and A-Chalkin’.” The playback indicated strongly that he’d won by cheating. He used his watch to stop time, got up, and pitted his whole weight against his opponent until he had him past the point of recovery. Then he resumed the match with it already won. In other words, during that one flash glimpse I had of him, I probably actually saw—or rather, failed to see—him work his trick, in plain sight and in good light. The two hardest parts must have been getting his wrestling hand untangled from the biker’s frozen grip, and resuming his original position near-perfectly afterward. What a cocky bastard! With pun intended.

  Lady Sally informed us that during his interview with her at the time he’d joined the House, Raffalli had given his occupation as “mathematical physicist.” That sounds redundant to me, but what do I know? He had stated that he taught part-time at Long Island University. He had politely declined her standard suggestion that he could choose a House name to give to artists and other clients, saying he had nothing to hide—doubtless chuckling inside as he said it. She confessed to us that she had rather liked him. “I have an unfortunate attraction to cocky men,” she added, carefully not looking at her husband.

  “Really, darlin’?” he said. “You’ve never introduced any of them to me.”

  “I try not to introduce them to anyone,” she sai
d. “They last longer that way. My point is that I find it odd a man so personable should need to rape.”

  “Ted Bundy,” Priscilla said briefly.

  “Touché. Shall we consider the details of Mr. Raffalli’s murder? I suggest that the key to the whole matter is to instantly immobilize his free hand. The right one, assuming he continues to wear that damnable watch on his left wrist…”

  NOTHING else of significance happened before the balloon went up. Unless you want to count me and Arethusa—both of her—celebrating the new plateau our relationship had reached, as soon as we could be alone. I certainly do. And the event had aspects so interesting I could go on at length. But it has no real bearing on the story. Except to indicate that Arethusa and I all went into combat exercised, rested, sexually satisfied and freshly bathed. For all I know, so did all our teammates. That’s the way I’d bet, anyway.

  I do recall some of the conversation afterward. I had just had very convincing empirical proof that Arethusa was a single person with two bodies at her control. So I finally got around to asking her, had she been telepathic as far back as the womb, or what? “No,” she told me. “I have a few—very few—vague memories of life as two separate children. My parents were…well, pretty eccentric. Wonderful parents, but strange. They belonged to a religious sect you’ve never heard of. You’ve heard of sects that don’t believe in medicine? Well, my folks didn’t believe in twins.”

  I couldn’t help it; I giggled. But it was all right: she smiled with me. “I know, it sounds funny. But religion often makes people refuse to believe in things that are right in front of their face. My folks refused to believe that God could allow a soul to be bisected or copied, and they just couldn’t see any other way a single act of procreation could produce two people. So it hadn’t happened. They insisted on giving me a single name, and treating me as a single person. The observable fact that there were two of me they just…ignored. Pretty soon I did too. I think I was six or seven before I really got it through my head that other people could only do one thing at a time, and that other kids all went to school every day.”