If you use one or more of these links to go to a Product Page for DEAD GIRL BLUES, you’ll find a dozen stirring quotes from writers and critics. But why should I expect you to let people like David Morrell and Joe Lansdale make up your mind for you?
Why don’t I give you a look at the first 7500 words? That’s almost 15% of the complete novel. DEAD GIRL BLUES is an unusual book, and clearly not everybody’s cup of tea. Here’s your chance to find out if it’s yours.
###
DEAD GIRL BLUES by Lawrence Block
A man walks into a bar.
Isn’t that the way it generally starts? Except there’s something essentially urban about the word. A neighborhood bar, a dive bar, a downtown bar. A sleek hotel bar. An airport bar, to curb pre-flight jitters. A commuters’ bar, conveniently located right across the street from the train station.
This was more what you’d call a roadhouse, maybe a mile outside of the city limits of Bakersfield. That’s in California, or at least this one was. There may be other Bakersfields in other states.
I suppose you could look it up.
##
Picture a squat building of concrete block, set on a one-acre lot. Plenty of room for parking. Plenty of neon, but I couldn’t tell you what it said.
Country and Western music on the jukebox. Guys with Stetsons, women with big hair. Everybody wearing boots.
I walked in and my pulse quickened. No hat on my head, no boots on my feet, but I looked like I belonged. Still wearing my work clothes—dark navy pants, a matching shirt with a name embroidered in yellow script on the breast pocket.
A bad job of embroidering, so the name was hard to read, but if you gave it some study you could see that it read Buddy. Not my name, not what anybody ever called me, except the occasional stranger who wanted me to move my car. The shirt had been left behind by the last man who’d had the job at the Sunoco station. I didn’t mind. It fit me okay, and if I was going to pump your gas I’d as soon answer to Buddy as to my own name.
I went to the bar and ordered a beer. My usual order was Miller’s, Miller’s High Life, but it seems to me I didn’t see it on the row of beer taps and ordered something else instead. Lone Star? Maybe.
Whatever it was, the bartender brought it. Took my money, put my change on the top of the bar. A few years since anybody thought about carding me. I was what, 25? 26?
I suppose I took a sip of beer. Then I looked around, and I saw her right away.
Only person there who stayed with me. I couldn’t tell you if that bartender was old or young, fat or skinny. I couldn’t even say for sure that it wasn’t a barmaid. But I think it was probably a man. I think I’d have remembered otherwise.
But maybe not.
But the woman. Her hair, a medium brown with blond streaks, was the biggest thing about her. She was a little thing, with a slim figure. Wore a scoop-necked blouse and didn’t fill it out all that much. Tight jeans. High-heeled boots that maybe got her clear up to five-three.
Drunk.
“Buy you another of those?”
She looked at my face, trying to figure out if she knew me. Then squinted at my pocket. “Hey, it’s Buddy,” she said.
***
Who am I and why am I telling you all this?
I am a man sitting at a laptop computer and tapping its keys, groping for the right words even as I work to keep my recollection in focus. I am the man in the present, observing and remembering, even as I am the man in the past, starring in my little drama.
Who, then? And why?
If I persist in this effort, and I’m by no means certain that I will, those questions will be answered in the telling.
***
I had no business buying her a drink, and the bartender had no business selling her one. She was already well-oiled.
Well-oiled. Good term for it.
She drank her drink. Was it a glass of wine? A mixed drink? I couldn’t tell you, any more than I could report on our conversation or say exactly how we got out of there. I’d parked at the farthest corner of the parking lot, and we were suddenly there and in the middle of an open-mouthed kiss.
She’d been drinking wine. Red wine. I remember now. Her mouth tasted of it.
I took hold of her butt, gave it a squeeze. Nice tight little ass. She reached for the front of my pants, held on to what she found there.
Then we were in the car, kissing again, and then I keyed the ignition and got out of the lot.
There was probably a lover’s lane nearby, there always is, but I was too new to the area to know where to look for it. But I took this road and that road, turning whenever the road I came to was narrower and lonelier than the one I was on, and without knowing where the hell I was I managed to find a place to park. A grassy patch a few yards off the road, unlit except for what came down from the sky.
Was the moon full, or just a crescent? Was the sky clear enough to see it? You could look that up, too.
A lot I don’t remember.
And a lot she wouldn’t remember, because around the time I started driving, her eyes closed and she let the wine take her.
She stirred when I cut the ignition, but didn’t wake up. I found a blanket in the trunk and spread it on the ground. It wasn’t clean, but it had to be more comfortable than the bare ground.
Considerate of me. Always the gentleman.
Neither of us had bothered with seatbelts. I opened the door on her side, gripped her under her arms, and drew her out of the car. I’d walked her halfway to the blanket before she came awake, and the look she gave me made it clear that she couldn’t remember ever laying eyes on me before.
She said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Buddy,” I might have said, but I’m not sure I did. I’d never learned her name and she’d forgotten mine, and it wasn’t my name in the first place. And I didn’t care about either of our names. I just wanted to get her down on the blanket and fuck her.
Back in the roadhouse parking lot, I could have shoved her down on the blacktop and done her six ways and backwards, and she would have been fine with it. But that girl was gone, her place taken by a mean-mouthed bitch who wasn’t having any.
What I thought: Oh, good.
I grabbed her right shoulder with my left hand, and I made a fist of my right hand, and I hit her as hard as I could, hit her in the stomach, hit her maybe three inches north of her belly button, high enough up to keep from hurting my hand on her oversize belt buckle. Hit her in the solar plexus, I guess you’d call it.
The breath went out of her and she doubled up. I thought she was about to puke, but she didn’t, and I hit her again with my closed fist, this time on the temple.
Down and out.
##
This is where a person would say, And then everything went black. Or maybe red, like looking at the world through blood.
Or, And that’s the last thing I remember.
Maybe they’re telling the truth, maybe everything goes black for them, maybe that’s really the last thing they remember.
Different for me. You could say it’s the first thing I remember. Pulling into the roadhouse lot, ordering the beer, buying her the drink—those are hazy memories, filled in with my knowledge of what must have happened.
But the minute the lights went out for her was the minute they came on for me.
***
Who are you and why am I telling you all this?
Now that’s a subtly different question, isn’t it? A knee-jerk response might be that I’m writing this for myself, to illuminate a life for the man who has lived it all these years, and of course that’s true.
But not the whole truth, not the sole truth. If I were the only intended audience, why relate and explain that which I already know? Why show off with turns of language?
Why find oneself hesitating before uncomfortable revelations, only to steel oneself and write them down?
And so I envision you, Dear Reader, without devoting too much energy to wondering who you might be. And this seems appropriate, in fact, because there’s every chance that what I’m writing will go forever unread. At the moment it’s no more than a string of electronic impulses, stowed somewhere on the laptop’s hard drive when I hit Save and stop for the day, summoned up anew when next I find the file again and open it.
At the end of any session—or even in the middle, even right now if I make the choice—I have the option of dragging the file into the trash and sending it off to Pixel Heaven. But of course if I understand the technology correctly, Omar’s observation about the writing of the moving finger applies as well to anything one composes on a computer. “Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it…” It’s ineradicable.
Still, I could remove the hard drive and take a hammer to it. I could chuck the whole laptop in the river.
But assuming I don’t, and assuming I finish this and resign myself to its being read, who’ll be my reader? I don’t really know that. Someone in authority? Someone who knows me, even cares about me? Someone I care about?
And, again, why am I telling you all this?
Perhaps we’ll answer that together, you and I.
***
She wasn’t unconscious for long. By the time I’d positioned her on the blanket and got her blouse unbuttoned, her eyes were open and she was looking at me. She was angry and she was terrified, in about equal parts.
I was lying on top of her, and I was rock-hard, the blood pounding in my ears. I was trying to get her jeans down over her hips and she kept twisting, trying to get away from me, and this was at once exciting and infuriating.
And I wanted to fuck her, and I would, but what I really wanted was to kill her. More than anything else, I wanted to kill her.
I got my hands around her throat.
Now her eyes went all the way wide. It seems to me they were blue, and they might have been, but I doubt there was enough light to tell.
She knew what was coming. She tried to cry out but she couldn’t, she couldn’t make a sound, and I lay full length on top of her and felt her little body trying to move beneath me, and my hands tightened and I squeezed her throat with every bit of strength I had, and I watched her face throughout.
And I got to see the light go out of her eyes.
##
God, what a feeling!
It was like an orgasm of the mind. It was that feeling like when you come, but not in the genitals. I was still hard as granite, I was still desperate to penetrate her and empty myself into her, but in my mind I already felt something close to pure ecstasy.
And now she was mine to use as I wanted. I yanked the boots off her feet. I got her out of her jeans, peeled her panties down and off, got rid of her blouse and bra.
Sweet little tits. A flat stomach, and I dug my fingers into her solar plexus, where I’d struck her, but she was past feeling it.
Past feeling anything.
I forced my way inside of her and I fucked her, and she couldn’t have been hotter or more delicious if she’d been alive. No need to control her now, no need to keep her from crying out. No need to care what she thought of me.
All I had to do was use her body to pleasure myself.
##
It’s not hard to remember. In fact I probably remember it too well. I’ve gone over and over it in my mind, letting it play on the screen of my memory like a favorite movie.
I do this not because I forget how it ends. I do it because the memory, like the occasion itself, is richly exciting. The past incident has become a present fantasy, still eliciting a sexual response, and like any fantasy one allows it to change form over time. One tries to improve it.
Perhaps she cries out and begs. Perhaps, in an effort to save herself, she volunteers to provide oral sex; she’s good at it and one hesitates to make her stop, but it’s just so much better to wring her neck.
And so on.
But to trim the trimmings and hew to the truth, I fucked her dead body until I reached an orgasm more powerful than any I had ever experienced. I collapsed on top of her, still inside her, and I was unconscious for two minutes or twenty, and when I awoke I was still in her and still hard and, yes, God help me, I fucked her again.
##
And then, finally, I realized what I’d done. I’d turned something alive into something dead. I’d taken this life, an innocent life—and whatever experience she’d had in her years hadn’t changed her essential innocence.
A man walks into a bar, and an hour later a girl is dead.
Now what?
The urge for self-preservation took over. There was a shovel in the trunk of my car, and in my earlier fantasies, all unfulfilled, I sometimes used it to dig a grave. But now I rejected it as soon as it came to mind. It would take hours, and I didn’t have the time. This was a lonely stretch of road, but it wasn’t the dark side of the moon, and a couple of cars had swept past me while I lay on her and in her.
She deserved a proper Christian burial, and sooner or later she’d get one, but not now and not from me. I stood up and looked around, and on the other side of the road was a wooded stretch. I picked her up and slung her over my shoulder and crossed the road, and no headlights came swooping out of the darkness while I did so, and then I was in the woods, visible only to owls.
Did an owl hoot? Once, but only in my imagination, on one of the occasions when I replayed the fantasy. But not when I was there, with her weight on my shoulder. A body is said to be heavier after death, though I can’t think why this should be so, but dead or alive she was short and slender and didn’t weigh very much. I walked twenty or thirty yards into the woods and set her down gently, placing her on her back with her arms at her sides and her legs together.
Sometimes, in fantasy, it’s fall and I cover her with leaves. But it was the middle of May and the leaves were still on the trees. I could go back for the blanket, or the clothes I’d torn off of her. But might the blanket somehow be traced back to me? And couldn’t the clothes hold a clue? And did I really want to make an extra trip across the road and back?
I left her uncovered. I closed her eyes, as I’d seen doctors do in films, and I moved her hands so that one covered the other. At the solar plexus—perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not.
I went back to where I’d left the car. The blanket, along with her purse and everything she’d been wearing, went in the trunk, and I wasted a moment or two tucking her clothes underneath the blanket, as if that would keep a policeman from noticing them.
Pointless. Unless I was trying to keep myself from noticing them—and still pointless because how could I forget they were there?
I swung the car around, flicked the headlights on long enough to give me a good look at the spot. The spot where she died, the spot where I’d fucked her and killed her.
Killed her and fucked her, more accurately.
##
Here’s something you might not know. I didn’t know it myself at the time, and I mean no disrespect by raising the possibility that you’re as ignorant as I used to be.
Here it is: Rape and murder, while frequent companions, don’t always take place in that order.
Which is to say that I was neither the first nor the last man to kill a girl first and fuck her afterward. If you didn’t know this, blame the media; they rarely report it, because it’s a little more graphic and specific than convention would prefer.
I have more to tell you about this, but it can wait.
##
My headlights didn’t show me much. If there was any trace to be seen of what I’d done to her, I certainly couldn’t spot it. What I did notice was that, while she may well have been the first person killed in that location, she and I were by no means the first to have had sex there. I counted five condoms, used and tossed aside, including one that must have been under the blanket while I took my pleasure with her.
It probably goes without saying that none of the condoms were mine. I wasn’t much worried about getting a dead girl pregnant.
##
I found my way out of there by reversing the process I’d used to find the site in the first place. I didn’t know where I was, but I drove on that dirt road until I had the opportunity to turn onto a paved road, and from that to a more traveled road. And so on.
I’d spent the seven days in a budget motel with weekly rates, and had checked out that morning because I was ready to quit my job, ready to move on. I stopped at the roadhouse in the hope of finding a woman, and if she hadn’t suddenly snapped out of her wine haze, I’d have found some other motel, checked us in, and had sex with her in a proper bed. She might not remember it later, but she’d still have a pulse when she woke up. But I scrapped that plan when she came to and started making a fuss.
Blaming the victim? No, not really. Her behavior changed what followed, but that didn’t make it her fault. Driving, eventually reaching a highway, looking left and right for a place to spend what was left of the night, I was wholly aware of whose fault it was.
Mine. Nobody’s but mine.
##
I was probably a hundred miles north of Bakersfield when I found a motel. I paid cash, and was ready to write John Smith on the registration card, but the guy behind the counter never offered me one. If I didn’t sign in, my twenty dollars could go in his pocket and not in the boss’s register.
Fine with me.
First thing I did was take a shower. There were rust stains in the tub, and the water pressure wasn’t all you’d have hoped for, but I ran it hot and wanted to stay under the spray forever. Got out eventually, got as dry as I could with the two little towels they gave you, then supplemented them with a pillowcase. I got the air conditioner to make a sound, although it didn’t seem to be cooling the room, and I stretched out on the bed.
Jesus, sweet Jesus, I’d killed a woman. I was a murderer. And a stupid one at that. Anyone who popped my trunk, anyone resourceful enough to look under the blanket, would find the clothes she’d been wearing. And her purse, too, which almost certainly held some ID.
They’d catch me. I’d be tried and convicted. In California, that would mean the gas chamber.
I lay there, waiting for them to kick the door in.
And then my mind wanted something else to think about, so what I turned it to was not the certain consequences of what I’d done but the act itself. Knocking her out. Putting her in the car, hauling her out of the car. Lying on top of her, pinning her to the ground with my weight. My hands around her neck. Choking her, throttling her, strangling her—all those sweet verbs that worked their will upon her until I’d squeezed the life right out of her eyes.
Then stripping her, and slipping into her, and rewarding myself for what I had done.
And I lay naked on that bed, my hair still damp from the shower, and I masturbated not to a fantasy, as I’d done for years, but to something that had actually happened, something I’d done just a few hours ago. Something I regretted profoundly, something I’d almost certainly pay for with my life—and something that even in recollection aroused me beyond my control.
I had an orgasm, my third of the night. Afterward it seems to me that I felt a wave of unutterable sadness, but I can’t be sure of that. What I do know is that I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept deeply, and without dreams.
##
When I woke up I took another shower. The towels hadn’t dried from the night before, so I used the bed clothing to dry myself. I thought about what I’d done to her, but I held the memory at enough of a distance to remain unaroused by it.
Without thinking about it, I put on what I’d worn the night before. I’d washed her scent off my body, but I could smell her on my clothes. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
I thought about the gas chamber. Was there any way to avoid it?
I drove around, not sure what I was looking for, and in a strip mall I spotted a collection box for Goodwill Industries. No one would look too hard or long at a donation. They’d just launder the clothing and offer it for sale, and some woman somewhere would wear a dead woman’s clothes and never know it.
I pulled up next to the collection box, opened my trunk, and as I lifted the lid I had the thought that the trunk would be empty, that the clothing would be gone, that all of this was a false memory.
Yeah, right.
I dropped her clothes in the box, added the blanket. What about her purse? It was black patent leather, scuffed. I’d have to go through it first and remove her ID, but I didn’t want to do that now.
Everything I owned was in my duffel bag in the trunk, and I worked the zipper and drew out a change of clothes. With my car screening me from passers-by, I stripped to the skin and put on clean clothes. What I’d taken off—the Buddy shirt, the matching work pants, the underwear—went in the Goodwill box with her clothes.
Somebody else could be Buddy.
I got back in the car, drove some more.
##
I was halfway between L.A. and San Francisco, closing in on Santa Barbara, before it dawned on me that I’d stand a better chance if I got out of the state. For a week or two I circled around—Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, then west again and into Arizona. Most cities had newsstands that carried out-of-town papers, and I bought day-old copies of the two Bakersfield papers, the Californian and the News Observer, looking for any mention of the discovery of a body, or a missing-persons search for Cindy Raschmann.
I knew her name because I’d finally gone through her purse. I kept the ninety-two dollars I found in her wallet, and burned everything with her name on it. I dropped the empty purse in one trash bin, the empty wallet in another.
If anyone reported her missing, the Bakersfield papers didn’t know about it. But if someone, single and unattached, just stopped showing up—well, somebody might file a missing persons report, and a name and description might go out to area hospitals, but why would the press cover it?
Eight days after I took her throat between my hands, a couple of hikers found the body. A day later, the News Observer reported that she’d been identified, and confided that the police were treating the death as a homicide.
You think?
##
By this time I was in a $40-a-week motel outside of Tempe, Arizona. I was getting day work with a moving company and clerking three nights a week at a liquor store in a bad part of town. I figured it was only a matter of time before somebody walked in with a gun, and if he was disappointed enough with what was in the cash register he’d pull the trigger.
Fair enough. Because another thing that was only a matter of time was a couple of uniformed guys knocking on my door. They wouldn’t have to get her clothes from the Goodwill or her purse from the trashcan in order to put two and two together. Someone would say, Yeah, she walked outta here with this young guy, had some size on him. And someone else could say, Sure, I saw the two of them, he had one of those shirts like you’ll see at a Sunoco station. Kind with his name on the pocket? Buddy, that’s what it said. And after they checked enough Sunoco stations, somebody would remember a guy with Buddy on his shirt pocket. Guy worked regular, and then one day he didn’t show up. Didn’t bring the shirt back, either.
One thing leading to another, the way they do.
So I waited for the knock to come, waited for the world to fall apart, waited to start a long walk with a gas chamber at the end of it. When I wasn’t working one job or the other, I sat in my motel room and thought about the gas chamber. All I really knew about it was from watching Susan Hayward play Barbara Graham in I Want to Live.
There’s an interesting story about Barbara Graham. Can’t swear it’s true, but I’d like to believe it.
We’ll get to it.
##
I kept buying the Bakersfield papers, as if they’d know about my arrest before I did. But I didn’t see anything about Cindy Raschmann aside from the occasional back-page item reporting that Bakersfield police, assisted by state troopers, were continuing to pursue unspecified leads in the matter. Just a matter of time, they said, and I’d already worked that part out for myself.
But most of the paper was devoted to the upcoming California primary. The country would be electing a president in November, and California looked to be a swing state for the Democratic candidates. And on the fifth of June voters went to the polls, and within hours of his being declared the victor, Robert F. Kennedy was shot dead by a little guy who liked his name so much he used it twice. Good he did the deed in L.A., and not, say, Walla Walla.
##
1968, this was. Years and years ago, and I’m telling you the story, so you should be able to figure out that the knock on the door never came, that I got away with it.
Took me a while to believe it. It looked as though I actually had a second shot at life, but how could I trust it? How did I know it wasn’t some celestial joke, some cosmic prankster building me up only to knock me down?
I mean, I’d killed a girl. You don’t get a pass on something like that.
Do you?
##
Days passed, and I could see that was what had happened. The assassination took everybody’s mind off the murder of a woman with no relatives or close friends to pester the Bakersfield cops for updates on the investigation. The case went cold.
It was hard for me to know what to make of it. I’d come close to resigning myself to the punishment I knew I deserved, and now it looked as though there wasn’t going to be any punishment, and that idea took some getting used to.
I had a life back. What was I going to do with it?
##
For the time being, I could just keep on keeping on. Working moving jobs when they called me, working nights at the liquor store. It must have been early July when a customer walked in an hour before closing and spent a long time checking out different brands of whiskey.
I knew there was something wrong with him.
I waited on another customer, a guy with a limp who came in every evening around that time to pick up a pint of Schenley’s. He could have bought it by the quart and reduced the wear and tear on his bad hip by fifty percent, but maybe this gave him an excuse to get out of the house.
He limped out, and as soon as the door closed behind him, Mr. Wrong approached the counter with a fifth of Chivas in one hand and a gun in the other.
Well, didn’t that just fucking figure? Get off one hook and life comes at you with another.
I was way too angry to be afraid. “Oh, go ahead and shoot me,” I told him, even as I reached to grab a bottle of wine off the shelf. “Go ahead, you son of a bitch! You think I give a rat’s ass?”
I marched straight toward him, brandishing the wine bottle and waiting for the gunshot. But what he did was drop the gun, hold on to the bottle of Chivas. And run out the door.
##
I didn’t know what to do with the gun. Call the cops? No, I don’t think so. I picked the thing up without getting my prints on it or disturbing his, and I put it on the shelf beneath the counter, alongside the billy club the owner kept there. I might have picked that up, instead of the wine bottle, but if I’d been thinking that clearly to begin with I’d have hit NO SALE and let him clean out the register.
I locked up when I was supposed to, and when I left I had the gun with me, in one of the paper bags meant to hold a pint bottle of wine or whiskey. I didn’t know what I wanted it for, but thought it might be more of a mistake to leave it behind than to take it with me. I drove straight back to my motel, took a shower, got into bed, and waited for the fear to flood in after the fact. But that didn’t happen. Once again I had my life back, and it was up to me to figure out what to do with it.
I thought about Cindy Raschmann, who hadn’t gotten her life back, and never would. I’d thought of her often, with variable results. Sometimes I was overcome with guilt and shame, and the hopeless desire to undo what I had done. But on other occasions all I could think of was the sheer ecstasy of it all.
This time, perhaps as a reaction to looking down the barrel of a gun, the eroticism prevailed. I relived the incident, improving it by calling her by her name, which of course I hadn’t known at the time. In fantasy I fastened duct tape over her mouth, and toyed with her by pinching her nostrils shut, then letting her gasp for breath. Over and over again, until her struggles so aroused me that I got my hands on her throat, even as I’d done in actuality.
And so on.
Delicious, all of it. The real recollection, the fantasized improvements. No matter how much I genuinely regretted it, it was all a part of who I was.
And would forever be.
##
So should I then look for another roadhouse and pick up another young woman who’d had too much to drink? Maybe I’d keep this one alive for a while. Let her struggle, let her know what was coming. Maybe fuck her first and then kill her.
Maybe not. Maybe stick with what works.
I imagined myself as a serial killer, although the term itself would not come into vogue for several more years. (The behavior had existed for centuries, and perhaps forever. Who’s to say what Cain got up to after he went off on his own?) But the language took its time catching up.
I mean, wasn’t that the logical way for me to behave? I’d done the foul deed, I’d enjoyed it and been transported by it beyond all expectations, and I’d gone on to spend many of my waking hours (and God knows how much of my dream time) savoring the experience, relishing the memory, enhancing it in fantasy. Over and over Cindy Raschmann died, over and over I spilled my seed in her insensate body, over and over and over.
Wouldn’t she, sooner or later, lose her charm?
##
A man walks into a bar.
A downtown bar, a place to relax after a day at the office. When the office crowd thinned out, the clientele changed. Serious drinkers, men and women looking for a cure for loneliness. The occasional semipro hooker.
I’d been in there a few times, scouting the place. Always sat alone at the bar, always had a scotch and soda. Never spoke to anyone, except to order my drink. Never said or did anything memorable.
Thought about it, though. Took some of the female patrons home, if only in my mind. One was a frequent star in my fantasies, a housewife who’d come in for a quick one before she drove one kid to a soccer game or picked up another from a play date. A MILF, you’d call her nowadays, though no one had yet come up with the term. There were plenty of MILFs, but nobody knew what to call them.
Like serial killers. Abundant, but not yet labeled.
Taller than Cindy Raschmann, and a few years older, and with a fuller figure. Unconvincing red hair, so the carpet probably didn’t match the drapes.
Never mind. She was hot, and she had a restlessness about her that was appealing.
She’d do.
##
Would it have been soccer that her kid played? I don’t think the game had yet caught on, certainly not in Arizona, nor do I think she’d have called her other kid’s afternoon engagement a play date. The boy was probably playing baseball. His sister was doing homework at a friend’s house.
Like it matters.
Soccer games and play dates. MILFs—or should that be MILVES?
Serial killers.
##
A man walks into a bar, and the MILF of his dreams is there, and sitting by herself. Sitting at one of the little tables, the glass in front of her almost empty.
I got a J&B and soda at the bar. “And let me have another of what Red’s having.”
He smiled. “Red’s name is Carolyn,” he said, reaching and pouring and stirring. “And what she’s having is an Orange Blossom.”
I took both glasses to her table, dropped into the empty chair, raised my own glass in a toast. “Well now,” she said, and picked up the stemmed glass that held her Orange Blossom. “What are we drinking to?”
“To the future,” I said. “May it have Carolyn in it.”
“And may it be better than the past,” she said, and took a sip. “You know my name.”
“And all it cost me was the price of a drink.”
“But I don’t know yours.”
“You’re better off that way,” I said. “I tend to forget it myself. People generally call me Buddy.”
“Then that’s what I’ll call you,” she said.
And we talked, and she found excuses to touch me—the back of my hand, my arm. I put a hand on her knee and she didn’t pull away. I looked a question into her eyes and she answered with a slow smile.
To the future, I’d said, and I could see it all right there in front of me.
“Back in a minute,” I said, and headed for the men’s room. And walked past it, and out the back door. I’d already checked out of my motel, and everything I owned was in the trunk of my car.
Along with a new blanket, a roll of duct tape, and an icepick.
Drove to the closest on-ramp, got on the Interstate. Kept it just under the speed limit, just as I’d have done if I’d left Carolyn with a crushed windpipe and a belly full of semen.
Instead I’d left her with half an Orange Blossom, most of a J&B and soda, and all the time in the world to wonder what she’d said that turned me off.
Hard one for either of us to answer.
Crossed a state line, found a motel. Checked in, had another shower. Got in bed.
Thought about my MILF. This time we left the bar together, and drove to her house, which I chose to situate in a suburban cul-de-sac. Immobilized her with the duct tape, but left her mouth untaped because I wanted to be able to hear her scream.
I made sure the houses were far apart. No one would hear her screams.
And so on.
##
I was going to tell you about Barbara Graham.
Not the part you can read on Wikipedia. Mother a prostitute, Barbara in the game herself early on. The company of career criminals, and three or four or five of them heard of a woman who was supposed to keep a lot of money around the house. And they broke in, and the woman wouldn’t give up the money, and Barbara pistol-whipped her and suffocated her with a pillow.
Or she didn’t. She said she didn’t but what would you expect her to say?
The crime went down in March of 1953. On June 3, 1955, after an appeal and a very brief stay of execution, they led her to the gas chamber. Somebody told her it would make it easier for her if she took a deep breath as soon as the cyanide pellets were dropped. Her response: “How the hell would you know, you silly rascal?”
You really think she said silly rascal? The woman’s last words, and some city editor felt the need to clean them up. “How the hell would you know, you fucking moron?”
Sounds more like it.
But none of that is the point. It’s all background, and most of it probably true, for a story that’s far less verifiable. There was this man, his name lost to history, who boasted that he was the last man ever to fuck her.
She had been locked up in the women’s prison in Chino, but they transferred her to San Quentin, where she spent a single night on Death Row before they gassed her. And there was this trusty, a man doing straight life in San Quentin for who knows what, and he was tasked with cleaning the lethal chamber after the execution had been carried out. Which I suppose involved hosing down this and wiping up that, after he’d removed the dead body.
Well, you see where this is going. Here she was, not merely hot-looking but something of a celebrity, and she’d been dead for what, ten minutes? Fifteen minutes?
Still warm and still fresh, so he took a few minutes to fuck her.
No way she could fight him off, not once she’d taken that deep breath. No way anyone else would be around to watch, because it was an unpleasant task they’d been eager to palm off on a prisoner. A couple of minutes of in and out, and after he’d made a deposit in her cashbox, he’d move the body where they’d told him. And then he’d hose down this and wipe up that.
And afterward he could tell all his friends about it. “You know what I did, man? Think you can’t have any pussy in prison? Well, think again.”
Maybe he did it, just like he said. Maybe he never did it, but got off on telling the story. Or maybe he never existed in the first place, maybe a couple of prison guards carried her out on a stretcher, and someone else made up a story a month or a year later. Once somebody told it, you can see how it would tend to get repeated.
So buy it or not, as you prefer, and I don’t see how anyone could prove it one way or the other. Certainly not at this late date.
Still, I like to think it’s true.
##
Of course I remembered the case. I was in my early teens when they gassed her, and it was years later before I heard the story about the upstanding citizen who’d been her last lover. But I knew what they printed in the papers, and a couple of years later I got to see Susan Hayward play her in the film.
A fine-looking woman, Susan Hayward. Judging from the photos, you could say as much for Barbara Graham.
##
I don’t know what it was that saved my MILF. Possibly our conversation, which forced me to reclassify her from object to person. Or perhaps it was in the cards. Perhaps, like college basketball stars opting for the NBA draft, I was one and done.
I can certainly see how it could have gone the other way. I’d gotten away with murder, and not because I was a criminal genius, always a step ahead of the police. I’d blundered into a crime, blundered through it, and blundered out of it, with nothing beyond dumb luck guiding my footsteps.
Another man—or my own self, on another day—might have decided if I’d gotten away with it once I could get away with it twice, and three times, and four.
And so on.
What I decided was the reverse. Don’t push your luck, I told myself. Take what happened and tuck it away, out of sight but not out of mind. Enjoy it in memory, for as long as you can. Transform it into fantasy if you will. But don’t do it again.
How many men can take that advice? How many of us can cross a forbidden line once and never step over it again?
That might as well be a rhetorical question, because how could anyone possibly answer that? No one’s keeping stats on those of us who are one and done.
And if we relive those moments, if we take other victims in the privacy of our own minds, well, that won’t put us on any lists, either. So I don’t know how many men commit such an act once and never repeat it, don’t know if our numbers are many or few.
But I know this much. I managed it.
##
I spent a few days driving, heading generally north and east, staying in budget motels, entertaining myself with poetry.
I’m thinking of Wordsworth’s definition, of which I was entirely ignorant at the time: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” In the tranquility of my motel room, with the TV off and the door locked and the shades down, I would recall what had happened with Cindy, and what might have happened with Carolyn.
Powerful feelings, to be sure. Not to mention spontaneous overflow.
Each morning I arose and got behind the wheel, each evening found myself another motel. One night outside of Peoria I checked in and walked across the road to a Denny’s. Breakfast any time! the menu proclaimed, and I sat at the counter and tucked into their Hungry Man’s Breakfast, only to discover I didn’t have appetite enough to finish it.
But I lingered over a second cup of coffee, not out of a desire for it but because I liked the looks of the waitress. A brunette, and on the plump side, but with something saucy about her.
Aside from ordering my meal, I never said a word to her. Not even to order the coffee, or later to ask for the check. I pointed to the cup and she filled it. I scribbled in the air and she brought the check.
Later that night, she was the unwitting star of my little movie.
Worked fine.
###
Still with me? If so, you’ve read about fifteen percent of Dead Girl Blues. If you want the rest, that’s easy enough:
