Leather Maiden

21

There was a noise at one of the windows. I turned to look. Through a part in the curtains I could see a huge golden moth beating its wings against the pane, trying to work its way to the light. I sympathized.

I turned back to Tabitha and Ernie. I didn’t say anything. Ernie just started talking.

“We’ve been doing the snooping thing something like a year now,” he said. “There were several of us at first, all university students. We read about it, about snooping, urban exploring. We thought we’d give it a try. There aren’t as many neat places here in Camp Rapture as, say, Houston, or Dallas, but there’s more than you think. We scoped out places. We watched to see who had a night watchman, who didn’t, what their weaknesses were. We even read about picking locks, which I’ve gotten pretty good at. We went all over. You’d be surprised the places we’ve been in.”

“All I’m interested in,” Jimmy said, “is where you were when you found this DVD, and what’s your connection with Caroline.”

“There wasn’t just one DVD,” Ernie said. “We got a bunch of them.”

“Of me and Caroline?” Jimmy asked.

“No,” Tabitha said. “Of a lot of men having sex with Caroline.”

A moment of silence settled on the room. Jimmy looked stunned, as if he’d just discovered one of his legs belonged to someone else and they had asked for it back.

“You’re lying,” Jimmy said, standing up from his chair, pointing the gun at Ernie.

“Goddamnit, Jimmy,” I said. “Put that thing away or I’m going to jam it up your ass. Sit.”

Jimmy looked at me, saw I meant it. After a moment he dropped the gun to his side and sat back down in his chair, an angry man with bullets and no place to shoot them.

I said to Ernie, “So there are a bunch of DVDs?”

“Yep,” Ernie said.

“Did you get them all?”

“What we could carry,” Ernie said. “There were some left. You see, we didn’t know what we were getting. Just trying to take a souvenir. We took a look at the DVDs, saw what we had. Figured we could make a little money. We’ve talked about going back for the others, but we didn’t see any real reason. I mean, we weren’t even sure the rest of the stuff was the same kind of thing, and besides, we didn’t want to be greedy. We had enough here to work up a pretty good head of steam, you know, ten thousand or so a pop.”

I studied Ernie’s face, looking for any lies there. It was a pretty bland face. I said, “A man once told me he believed in coincidences. I feel the same way. I can accept a lot. But this? Just two college kids who happen to know Caroline find a bunch of DVDs of Caroline screwing people in a building where they are snooping? And even more precious is the fact you left some there, didn’t go back to get them when you saw what kind of gold you had. Hell, Ernie. You’re going to commit a crime, might as well go the whole hog.”

“We didn’t want to be greedy.”

I let out a laugh. “Now that’s choice. That’s special. Did you know the others on the DVDs?” I asked.

“History professors. Prominent men about town. Some we didn’t know, but we recognized a lot of them.”

“Were you blackmailing them?”

Ernie nodded. “Most. We weren’t blackmailing the girl, though. We knew her, and knew she didn’t have any money.”

“What girl?” Jimmy asked.

“Ronnie Fisher,” Tabitha said.

“Wait a minute,” Jimmy said. “Caroline was on some DVD with a girl?”

“That’s right,” Tabitha said.

“Making out?” Jimmy asked.

“If eating her snatch like it was a hot taco is making out,” Ernie said, “then, yes, I would say they were making out. Also Caroline had one of those big rubber dongs—”

“Dildo,” Tabitha said.

“Yeah,” Ernie said. “Thanks, hon. One of them. With knots on it. They were putting that in a lot of places. So I guess they were making out, and then some.”

“Oh, shit,” Jimmy said, as if knowledge of the knots on the dildo was the final straw. “Who the hell is Ronnie Fisher?”

“I know who she is,” I said. “I can fill you in later.”

“You know?” Jimmy asked.

“Later,” I said to him.

“I don’t believe it,” Jimmy said.

“The DVDs show it,” Ernie said. “We’ve seen her on enough of them we can identify Caroline just by the birthmark on her ass. That ring any bells? A kind of strawberry-shaped birthmark. Almost purple in color. It’s something that really shows up on her skin and that nice ass of hers.”

“It’s a little too big, I think,” Tabitha said.

“The birthmark or her ass?” I asked.

“Both,” Tabitha said.

“You could have just seen that on my DVD with her,” Jimmy said.

“Could have,” Ernie said, “but didn’t. Trust me, the girl was a rodeo all by herself. She was the bull ride, the calf roping, and maybe even the rodeo clowns. She was a full evening of fun with a trip to the snow-cone stand afterward. She did it all.”

“Shut up, punk,” Jimmy said, and he looked as if he might be ready to pistol-whip Ernie.

“Cool your jets, Jimmy,” I said. “We want the whole story. That’s what we’re here for.”

“He doesn’t have to be gleeful about it,” Jimmy said. “He likes telling me this shit.”

“Your brother asked,” Ernie said, pointing at me.

“You’re right,” I said. “I did. Tell us about Caroline.”

“We weren’t close,” Ernie said. “She was part of our crew, ones who did the exploring. We called ourselves the Subterraneans.”

“How many of you were there?”

“Five, maybe six at first. Then Caroline, couple of others for a while. She added the later ones, two guys. Real odd guys, those two. We met her at school, talked a little, maybe too much, and I got to feeling a little too free with things—”

“He liked the way she looked,” Tabitha said, and the words were as stiff as a classroom full of boys watching a cheerleader tryout.

“Anyway,” Ernie said, “I talked about what we did. She wanted in. It all just seemed like fun then.”

“I don’t believe that,” Jimmy said. “That doesn’t sound like her at all. I would have known if she was involved in anything like that. You’re making this up.”

Ernie shook his head.

Tabitha said, “She could sound a lot of ways. She could fit anywhere she wanted to, or had to. Think about it. Was she with you all the time at night? Wasn’t, was she? Slipped away with you at odd moments, am I right?”

Jimmy didn’t say anything, but I could tell Tabitha had nailed it.

“Go on,” I said to Ernie.

“We were just playing like we were flirting with death, sneaking around, taking pretty mild chances. I mean, if we got caught breaking into buildings we could have gotten in some bad doo-doo, but it wasn’t life-threatening if you were careful. I did have a pretty nasty fall once, through the roof of an old rotten building. But I was okay. That was as close as it got. But with Caroline, I got the feeling she was dating death.”

“How colorful,” Jimmy said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Ernie said. “She had this guy she brought around with her. He was right out of someplace just due south of hell.”

“More colorful phrasing,” Jimmy said. “Perhaps you should move from history to literature. You could make up these kinds of stories and get paid for them.”

“He’s not making up anything,” Tabitha said. “We called him the Geek. She called him Stitch. He wasn’t the only guy she brought around either. There was that other one.”

I turned my attention to Tabitha. “Who else?”

“Some other guy, a kind of greasy drunk. Always showed up with a six-pack, stinking of liquor, and he had a flask with him. He’d finish off the beers then drink from that. Time it got late, he was feeling no pain.”

“How did Caroline act?”

“Exploring for Caroline wasn’t a big enough thrill,” Tabitha said. “She was always trying to find out where the line was, then step over it. Got so we were, like, you know, taking big chances, not scoping things out like before, not preparing. We just started going right at it. We nearly got caught by a watchman over at the fertilizer plant. We started to have like minor accidents, wasn’t as fun as before. We were letting her push us around. She could do it too. Not always directly, but one way or another you found yourself doing pretty much what she wanted.”

Ernie nodded agreement, added, “The Geek found a dead cat on the road once. He ran it up the flagpole on campus. It was quite a chance he was taking, that we all were taking, because we were with him, in his van. He parked at the curb and just walked up big as you please and hooked the cat to the rising line, and jacked it up. I thought that was pretty weird. The Geek, he thought that was some funny business.”

“How absolutely normal of you to be offended,” Jimmy said.

“We weren’t like them,” Ernie said. “Not even a little bit. One time we slipped into the Catholic church. Us and Caroline, the Geek and the other guy, the drunk. But when we got inside, they had some explosives—”

“And inside the church you blew up the Virgin Mary’s statue?”

“We didn’t,” Ernie said. “They did…You know about it?”

“It was in the news, Sherlock,” I said. “I heard about the cat too. What about the drunk? Did he have a name?”

“Caroline and Stitch called him Glug.”

“Glug?”

“Like the sound you make when you drink a beer. You know, glug, glug, glug. Least that’s how Caroline explained it.”

“How do you think she knew these guys?”

Ernie heaved his shoulders.

Tabitha said, “She may have picked them up at a bar, for all we know.”

“I’m pretty sure they all had some kind of history,” Ernie said. “Her and the Geek and Glug. It was obvious they all knew each other.”

“Were they the same age as Caroline?” I asked.

Ernie shook his head. “Older. I guess the Geek was forty or so. The other guy, he maybe was in his mid-thirties. I got the impression they were military. The Geek said things now and then made me think he had fought in a war. Maybe not the Iraq war, but something else. Mercenary stuff. But it could have just been bullshit.”

“They were creepy,” Tabitha said, “way they looked at me, like I was a pork chop.”

“Yeah.” Ernie said. “Sex was on Caroline’s mind all the time. And not just straight sex, or interesting sex. Caroline was always talking about how it would be fun to have a threesome, talking about me and Tabitha and her. Use all the holes, she said.”

“Nasty bitch,” Tabitha said. “She talked about getting pissed on. Golden shower stuff.”

“I don’t believe that,” Jimmy said. “We never talked about doing anything like that.”

“She knew who to play with and how to play with them,” Tabitha said. “I told you that. Sometimes she played rough. I saw the Geek slap her once. She kept egging him on, jacking with him. I don’t remember about what, but all of a sudden he was mad. He slapped her hard enough to drop her to one knee. Rest of the night, they acted like nothing had happened. She practically had her hand down his pants the whole time.”

Jimmy made a noise like air going out of a tire.

“I think the Geek was daring me to get mad at him,” Ernie said. “He would look at me funny. He was a big guy, had a kind of squint in one eye, like he was always winking. He’d do things that bothered me. Way he touched Tabitha. Always made it seem like there was nothing to it, just an accident as he lifted her through a window, got hold of her ass.”

Tabitha continued. “He knew what he was doing, and he knew I knew, and he knew Ernie knew. I told Ernie to just let it go. I think that guy would have killed him.”

“It made me mad,” Ernie said, “and I did tell him not to do it. It took some real nut gathering to tell him, but I did. But I won’t lie to you. I was afraid of him, and I knew Tabitha was right. He had a big clip-on knife and he’d take it out sometimes, flip it open and swing it around, grinning like some kind of idiot. Just slashing at the air. Warning us, I guess. He looked like he might have served some time.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“He had that look, way he carried himself, and all the tats.”

“Tabitha called him the Geek,” I said. “Why?”

“Reminded me of those old-time carnival geeks,” Tabitha said. “Ones you put down in a hole and tossed a chicken, rat or something down there, and they’d catch them and bite their heads off, suck the blood out of the stumps of their necks. He looked like that. He had a lot of silver in his teeth.”

A train went by and it was as if it were running right through the room. The house shook, the windows vibrated like cold teeth. The moth kept beating at the glass.

“Anything else you can tell us about Caroline, these guys?” I asked. “Anything else at all?”

“They talked about black magic and witchcraft and satanic stuff,” Ernie said. “At first I thought it was kind of cool, but then I got the idea they meant it. Not that they believed it, but that they liked the idea of rituals and sacrifice.”

Ernie paused for a moment, thinking. “Our group got whittled down to just us, Caroline and the Geek, sometimes Glug. The others didn’t want anything to do with them…It got to be like a bad dream. One night we slipped inside this Mexican restaurant, the Hot Taco, the new place, and we decided wouldn’t it be funny to go in there and fix us a big Mexican meal, eat it in the kitchen. Clean up after ourselves before we snuck out. Thought it would be funny when they went looking for something the next day and we had eaten up some of the supplies. That night it was me and Tabitha, Caroline and the Geek. That’s all. We were slicing up some jalapeño peppers. In the back with the lights on, taking a chance, and the peppers were hot and it was causing my nose to run, and I saw Caroline’s was running too, ’cause she was helping me while the Geek fried up ground meat and Tabitha did something or another.”

“I was dipping taco shells in hot grease,” Tabitha said, just so we’d know she wasn’t a slacker.

“So I see some paper towels, and I get one for myself, one for Caroline. She takes it and wipes her eyes. She says, ‘The milk of human kindness. That’s not hard, being kind. You know what’s really hard?’ And I said no. And she says, ‘Killing someone that hasn’t done anything to you, and maybe even someone you like or love a little. All the better if they love you.’ She thought killing them, not on the spur of the moment, but planning it, was best. Making it a surprise. She thought that was a sign of strength, and she wanted to be that strong. I knew right then I wanted us to get away from her for good.”

Jimmy’s face had gone ashen and he was slumping in the chair. The gun was in his lap. He was no longer holding it.

“So after that, you cooled it with her?” I said.

“We’d see her at school,” Tabitha said. “And there she was all prim and proper and shiny and acting like she was just perfect. Last time I spoke with her I tried to just be friendly, you know. No hard feelings we weren’t doing the exploring anymore, and she just smiled and touched my cheek, and all that smooth personality stuff melted away, and that face of hers, it was like, you know, like it was from someplace dark and weird. She said, ‘You’re not forgotten.’”

“What did you think that meant?” I asked.

“How would you take that?” Tabitha said. “Especially after that little speech she gave Ernie.”

“Anybody else you can think of she hung with?”

“The girl on the video,” Tabitha said. “I saw them together at school. I don’t know if they were any more than fuck buddies or not. I got the impression she was running a game on Ronnie, same way she did with your brother and everyone else.”

“Can you describe the Geek?” I asked. “Maybe more about the tattoos?”

“He had a kind of slinky way of moving,” Tabitha said. “Like maybe not all his bones were connected. He was big, but lean, and long-legged, and wore long sleeves no matter what the weather, and loose pants. Shaved his head. He had a squint, and all that silver in his teeth. Very pale skin; white as toilet paper. Usual jailhouse tattoos, done crude-like. The only one I really remember well was this blue one. Wasn’t like the others, was professionally done, looked like fingers on the back of his neck. You know, like a dead hand was reaching up out of the collar of his shirt and grabbing him by the back of the neck.”

“What about Glug?”

“He had a kind of bad eye,” Ernie said. “I don’t know it was dead or not, but it was discolored, milky blue. The other eye was brown.”

I nodded. “Anything else about Caroline you can think of?” I said. “Anything at all?”

Tabitha shrugged. “She liked to read. And she liked puzzles.”

“That’s true,” Jimmy said, almost causing me to jump. “She loved mysteries, true crime books and puzzles.”

I thought: My hobbies are urban exploring, being peed on and hinting that I might be a murderous Satanist, reading mysteries and working puzzles in my spare time.

“She liked Edgar Allan Poe,” Tabitha said. “And this obscure poet and writer Jerzy Fitzgerald. She quoted him sometimes. Another thing she did, and I suppose it’s related to the puzzle and mystery stuff she liked: She was always taking a souvenir when we went out, which is something we did too, but she wanted to leave something that showed we had been there. Some subtle clue. We’d slip into an office, and she’d turn someone’s name plate around. Put, like, you know, a paper clip in their chair. One time she put a ballpoint pen up herself.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“Not the sharp end,” Tabitha said. “It was one of those fat pens, with a lid on it. She thought it was funny. I kept thinking, maybe even hoping, the cap would come off inside her. She put it back on the desk, placed the pen next to the guy’s photograph of his wife and kids. She called it a statement.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” I said. “You think the Geek had anything to do with her going missing?”

Tabitha shrugged. “I wasn’t surprised she disappeared, her and the Geek. I was relieved. That put them out of our hair.”

“Was the Geek on the DVDs?”

“Not on any we looked at,” Ernie said.

“Do you know where this Geek, Stitch, lived? Anything about them that you might not have told us?”

“No idea where they lived. But the Geek had a weird accent, like it was Southern and Northern both…I mean, he mixed words, phrases. Had a kind of eloquent way of speaking, mixed it with thug’s talk. Always seemed to have some kind of plan going the rest of us didn’t know about.”

“That’s an odd feeling to have,” I said.

“Might not be anything to it,” Ernie said. “But I felt that way.”

“Can you tell me any more about Ronnie?” I said.

“Not really,” Tabitha said. “We knew her through school. She seemed nice. Like we said, we think Caroline duped her too. She went home.”

“Went home?”

“Dropped out, went home. Least I think she did. That’s what I heard.”

“All right,” I said, “some of the coincidence is down. Let me ask this. You went and you got the DVDs, but you say you didn’t know they were there. That sounds like too much.”

“She mentioned she was making them,” Ernie said. “So I knew there were DVDs.”

“Why do you think she told you?” I asked.

“I think it was part of her chance taking,” Ernie said. “The Geek, when she told us that, he said something like, ‘You wouldn’t want to mention that to anyone.’ There’s a part of me that thinks it was all some kind of game, like he was just wanting us to screw with those DVDs, or say something about them.”

“Do you think Caroline was planning to blackmail all along?” I asked.

“She never said that,” Ernie said. “She just said she had a way to make some people pay, so I think she might have had plans like that. It’s where we got the idea.”

“Where were the DVDs?”

“The big Baptist church,” Ernie said. “It has a big gold dome on top. You probably know it.”

“No shit?” Jimmy said. “North Baptist Church?”

“No shit,” he said.

“What led you there?” I said.

“That’s where Caroline went to church,” he said.

“Church,” Jimmy said. “She never went to church.”

“That you knew of,” Tabitha said. “That was part of her game, jacking everyone around. She went all right. And you want to know why?”

“Of course we do,” I said.

Tabitha turned theatrical, gave us a long pause and leaned forward, said, “She fucked the preacher. Reverend Gus Dinkins.”

Everything Dad had told me about Dinkins and his League popped into my head.

Ernie continued: “She saw him on TV. Has a Sunday show. He’s not as big-time, rolling in the money as some of the God Squad, but for this town he’s rich, and it’s from milking people with his bullshit.”

“Well,” Tabitha said, and her voice took on a confessional tone, “he is good-looking, and he used to play football at the university. He quit because he didn’t like the idea of showering in mixed showers.”

“I never heard that,” Jimmy said.

“And you never will…openly. But he told Caroline that. Pillow talk. She admired that about him. He was always talking about sin, and about how sinners who cheated on their wives, fornicated without the benefit of marriage, and those mixing races would go to hell.”

“But he did all that, except for the mixing races part,” Jimmy said.

“He thinks he’s doing God’s work,” Tabitha said, “and because of that, it’s okay that he does it. That’s what he told her, or at least that’s what she told me. I don’t know why she confided in me, but she did. And in Ernie. Like we were saying, I think she liked playing it on the edge, liked to see where our loyalties were.”

“And Caroline was all right with this guy?” Jimmy asked.

“She was a racist,” Ernie said. “And big-time.”

“I never heard her say anything like that,” Jimmy said.

“Did you discuss race?” Tabitha asked.

Jimmy took a moment to collect his thoughts.

“No,” Jimmy said. “It never came up.”

“That’s because something else came up,” Ernie said.

I looked at Jimmy. He was blushing, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with Ernie’s comment. I think he was embarrassed about how he had been played.

“She probably would have lied had you discussed race, because she had a good idea where you stood,” Tabitha said. “But, Caroline, she said the N word a lot. She called black people nappy-headed and burr-heads. Especially when she was with Stitch.”

Jimmy shook his head.

“She told me she fucked him,” Tabitha said. “I got the impression he might really mean something to her. Maybe not so much as a lover, but as a mentor. You should be glad she’s gone.”

“I don’t know she cared for Dinkins at all,” Ernie said. “That’s how she played things. Made people think she cared. I think Dinkins was just another chump to her.”

“Okay,” I said, “but how did the DVDs end up in the church? Last time I ask, and then I let Jimmy pistol-whip the shit out of the both of you.”

“We don’t really know,” Ernie said. “We aren’t shitting you on that. We chose the church because Caroline talked about the Reverend. I guess we saw it as some kind of interloping against her, especially since she and Stitch were gone. We found the DVDs by accident. But it’s not such a coincidence. We knew her, she knew Dinkins, and she talked about the church and we liked to urban explore. It all just came together.”

Jimmy said, “How many history teachers were on the videos?”

Ernie looked at Jimmy. “All the men on the left side of the front office.”

“The goddamn whore,” Jimmy said.

“Is the preacher on any of the DVDs?” I asked.

“He’s not,” Ernie said. “Unless he’s on one of those we didn’t get.”

“So you decided to blackmail?” I said.

“It was easy for us to sneak notes into the teachers’ boxes,” Ernie said. “We’re up there all the time. They brought money. All of them. You were supposed to be the last. Though we been thinking about going back, getting the rest of the DVDs.”

“And where is this money you got?” I asked.

“We have it hid,” Ernie said.

“All of these guys, were they ten-thousand-dollar pops?” I asked.

“Mostly,” Ernie said.

“That’s a lot of college money,” I said.

“I thought I could pay for college and get a good car and pay off some credit cards,” Tabitha said. “It wasn’t like we were stealing.”

“No,” I said. “It’s exactly like stealing. You thought you were going to end up farting through silk. You ought to give it back some way or another. I’m not going to be the one to make you, but you ought to.”

Neither Tabitha nor Ernie said anything to that.

“Where in the church were these DVDs?” I asked.

“The attic,” Tabitha said. “Behind the Christmas ornaments.”

I smiled at that. I said, “Tell me how you got in the church, what your method was.”

“Who cares?” Jimmy said.

I ignored him, said, “Tell me.”

“You can’t go in from the front,” Ernie said. “There are lots of lights. The parking lot is well lit up, and so are the front and the sides of the church, bright as a floor show. There’s a little stretch of trees behind it, and a creek. You got to come down the creek, go up from the rear. And you still got to be careful. There are lights back there, but no one is going to see you if you don’t stand around, and they aren’t as bright. That’s where they ought to really be bright, but they aren’t. There’s an angle where you can be seen from the highway, but only if you stand around. You get to the back steps, there’s a stone banister on either side, and all you got to do is duck down.”

“How’d you go up the back way?” I asked Ernie.

“We left our car in the little park behind the fire station. You can walk down to the creek from there. There’s a big culvert, and you can get inside of it and go along until it empties out on some gravel. There’s a little run cut there so the excess water trails off into the woods. Some parts of the year, it wouldn’t be a good trip. Water would be rushing through too high and too fast. You come out, you go to the back door of the church, change shoes, go in the back way.”

“Change shoes?”

“Yeah,” Ernie said. “The idea is for them to never know, or at least not be certain, anyone was ever there. No tracks. No clues. Except for the stuff like Caroline did, the paper clip, that kind of crazy bullshit, but nothing that will lead anyone to you. The back door church lock is pie. All you got to do is stick a credit card in between the door and lock, and that moves it, then you lift up and it’ll open. They got this fancy, expensive church, and it has locks a blind, two-fingered retard could open.”

“Describe where the DVDs were,” I said. “In a little detail.”

Ernie looked at me curiously, then slowly he began to explain.

“There’s a stage up front. There’s a big purple curtain and another stage behind that. It’s elevated. I guess it’s for the choir. You go back there behind the curtain, there’s a little run of stairs and they go up to a landing. It has a rail on it and it looks down on the second stage, the one in the back. If you go along the landing, you find another stairway on the other side, and that one zigzags and makes the platform above. It goes around in a circle inside the dome, and there are three little rooms off the landing. Going up there I felt like that guy in that play, the Phantom of the Opera. It was the center room where we found the DVDs, back by the wall under a window, next to the Christmas decorations. There’s a baby Jesus manger, a plastic lamb and a Christmas tree in a box, you know, an artificial one.”

“I still find it hard to believe,” Jimmy said, slowly shaking his head. “Caroline didn’t seem anything like that.”

“Oh,” Tabitha said, looking right at Jimmy, “she was like that, all right. That’s the kind of girl she was. She farted real hard, only thing that would blow out was shadow.”