Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

“Bluto?”

He smiled. “It’s what I call Cassandra’s costar in Four.”

I’d thought of him as Sunburn, for his vivid tan line and the skin peeling off his beefy shoulders, but Monroe’s name was a better fit. I thought about the squat, hirsute body, and about the things he said to Cassandra, and did to her, and I shivered again.

“What do you mean by ‘prompting’?”

“I mean that in some of her later works, Cassandra encourages the men to their extreme behavior. Or maybe ‘goads’ is a better term.” Monroe shook his head. “As if she weren’t taking enough risk.”

More images of Cassandra and Bluto ran through my head: his thick hands on her supine body, the melting wax, the plastic bag stretched over her face, the green cord around her neck. I felt another chill.

Interview Four began no differently from Two, with e-mail messages and hidden camera footage of a first meeting in an unidentified bar. Where Skinny had worn a sedate blue suit, Bluto was dressed in a checked sport coat and chocolate-colored trousers, and where Skinny had been full of stipulations, Bluto was all accommodation, rendered in a high-pitched, synthesized voice.

“Sure, whenever you want- my schedule is flexible and I’m easy…” “Uptown, downtown, it’s all the same to me…” “Around the corner, right now? Hey, I’m good to go.”

Things changed in the hotel room. The colors were more vivid than in Interview Two, and so was the sex, which started out edgy and quickly went over the edge. Each of their encounters began with Bluto explaining- in graphic detail- what he intended to do, and with Cassandra acquiescing.

“Will it hurt?” she asked.

“It won’t hurt me a bit, baby,” Bluto said, and laughed.

“Will it hurt me?”

“Probably. Do you care?”

“Not much,” she said. Her voice was soft and without affect.

Cassandra’s pursuit of Bluto played out differently, too. Her first phone calls elicited only derisive laughter from him, and following him yielded only distant shots of a bulky man getting in and out of a black Town Car. It took a threat to visit his in-laws, somewhere in the wilds of New Jersey, to get his attention.

Unlike Skinny’s, Bluto’s anger didn’t falter into fear. His was instead slow burning and rumbling, and when Cassandra wouldn’t fuck off as ordered, he seemed almost to welcome the prospect of meeting her one last time. He swaggered into the hotel room, shoulders rolling, and stood by the bed with his hands on his belt. He barely waited until she’d shut the door to speak.

“Okay, bitch, you wanted me and here I am. So drop your drawers and bend over and we’ll get to it quick.”

Cassandra’s laugh was small and tight. “That’s not what I had in mind this afternoon.”

“It’s not your mind I’m talking about, bitch,” Bluto said, and he grabbed Cassandra’s arm and threw her on the bed. He stood over her and unfastened his belt buckle. “Now bend over.”

Cassandra shook her head and pointed to the clock on the nightstand. “What time does that say?” she asked calmly.

“What?”

An edge came up in Cassandra’s voice. “Are you going deaf? I asked you what time was on that clock.”

“What the fuck-”

“Because at three o’clock exactly, and every twenty minutes after that, I have a call to make. And the party on the other end gets very nervous if I’m not prompt. Very antsy.”

“What are you talking-”

“Knowing where I am and who I’m with isn’t enough, I guess. This party still wants to hear from me. Every twenty minutes. Promptly. My voice.”

Bluto was quiet, and it was almost possible to see the calculations playing across his pixilated face. When he spoke again his voice was softer. “What? That’s supposed to scare me?”

Cassandra laughed again and got off the bed. She smoothed her jacket and tucked in her blouse. “Not you, tough guy. Now sit down.” She pointed to a chair and after a brittle moment Bluto sat in it.

He was hardly pleasant after that, but he didn’t raise a hand to Cassandra again. She worked him for what seemed a long time, pausing periodically to step into the bathroom and make her calls. Bluto was more familiar with his own appetites than Skinny was with his- more fond of them, and certain that they required no explanations or excuses. So there was no hemming or hawing when he finally ran out of obstinacy and decided to answer Cassandra’s questions, no heavy sighs or tears, and but a single regret.

“No, I didn’t think about my wife and kids- and why the hell should I? What business is it of theirs? I thought about fucking you six ways from Sunday, and nothing else. You had a lot of promise and I’m only sorry you turned out to be such a freakin’ headcase.” It was impossible to say whether that satisfied Cassandra, but she seemed to know that she’d gotten all she was going to get.

Images of Bluto’s blurred face, looming above her, were insistent, and they made my jaw ache. I heard Monroe’s voice from far away. “You’re sure about that drink?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Are the others as bad as Bluto?” I asked.

Monroe thought about it. “He’s the most brutal, I think, but there are tense moments in all the interrogation scenes.” He drank some scotch and ran a hand over his chin. “Of all the dangerous things she does in her videos, I think those segments are the scariest.”

He was right. Alone in a hotel room with an angry, scared, and cornered man- she was juggling chainsaws. There’d been just a hint of danger with Skinny, a moment when her back was turned and his hand went up, but it went no further than that. There’d been more than a hint with Bluto.

“Does she always get them talking at the end?”

Monroe bumped ice around in his glass and looked up at me. His eyes were blurry and his little beard was dusted with salt. His words were nearly lost in the din of the place. “Always,” he said. “They posture and threaten and evade and lie, but in the end they answer.”

It didn’t surprise me. From what I’d seen, Cassandra was good at getting people to talk, very good. She was patient and firm and seemed to have an innate understanding of the theater of interrogation- of the fragile chemistry of power, fear, and empathy that drove it along, and the cocktail of guilt and vanity and fatigue that could bring it to confession. She would’ve made a good cop that way.

I paid off Chaz Monroe and poured him into a taxi, and I walked up Smith Street in the general direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Besides some bar stragglers and a few late diners, I had this stretch of Brooklyn to myself. But if the cold and wind had cleared the sidewalks, they did nothing for my head, which was still full of Holly Cade. Holly, Wren, Cassandra- the equation played and replayed, cut with lurid images from her videos and snippets of dialogue from her bad plays, a bleak and desperate loop. I’d completed one part of the job David had hired me for: I’d found out who Wren was, and what it was that she wanted from him. Now if only I knew what the hell to do about it.

The sky was freighted with heavy clouds on Tuesday morning, and the local news was freighted with snowstorms, churning up the East Coast, driving down from Canada, and colliding all over New York. The timing was uncertain- maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day- but the predictions were dire.

“Bullshit,” Clare muttered, and tore a piece of toast in half. “They get all hysterical but they never get this stuff right.” She smeared some strawberry jam on the bread and went back to the Times.

She’d arrived early this morning, as I was getting back from my run, and we’d been sitting in amiable silence since, she leafing through the paper and I writing a report for David. I drank some orange juice and read it over.