Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

“Come on, Gene, we can be grown-ups, right? We can at least not waste each other’s time.”

Werner forced a smile. He smoothed his shiny hair and tugged on his little ponytail. Then he sent his blade through a series of blurring, humming arcs, and finished with his arm extended and the sword pointed at me. Somewhere along the line, the plastic button had come off the end, and the bare, wicked tip was motionless and level with my eye. Werner smiled wider and chuckled. He whipped the foil down.

“There’s nothing like the feel of a blade,” he said. He walked toward me, stopping when he was two arm’s lengths away. He pointed with his foil at my splints, and smiled.

“Fucked up your hands, huh?”

“A run-in with your pal Jamie Coyle,” I said. Color drained from Werner’s face. He opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t. “I saw the video, Gene.”

Werner frowned. He backed away two steps and began practicing lunges at half speed. He coiled and uncoiled himself- precise, flowing, and graceful each time. Each time, the tip of his foil came to a quivering halt twelve inches from my chest. “What video is this?”

“You never answered her question- whether or not it was just about money.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.” He took the lunges up to three-quarter speed. The blade became a blur again.

“Holly made a backup, Gene. I have you on disk, confessing to her that you lifted unedited copies of her videos from her apartment, and that you tried to blackmail Mitchell Fenn with them.”

Werner stopped lunging and stood very still. His head was tilted as if he were straining to hear something. After a minute, he smiled in a way he might have thought was ingratiating. “Backup,” he said quietly. He tapped the sword against his leg and paced in a slow circle at center stage.

“It was a prank,” he said. “The whole thing with the videos and Fenn- the blackmail- it was just a prank.” I raised an eyebrow, and Werner chuckled ruefully. “It was stupid, I admit, but I wasn’t thinking straight at the time. I was…” He looked down at the stage and then up at me, his lower lip all but quivering. “I was heartbroken over her, for chrissakes. Can you understand that? I went a little nuts then, and I wanted to get even somehow.”

“And blackmailing Fenn seemed like just the thing?”

“That wasn’t serious- I would never have taken his money. I just…” Again his gaze dipped to the floor and back up. “Look, I’m not proud of this, but…I wanted it to come back at Holly. I wanted her to see what she was doing was crazy. That it had consequences.”

Consequences. I nodded, as if it made any sense. “And, what- you counted on Fenn tracing it back to her?”

Werner was eager. “Yes, exactly. And when he did, it scared the hell out of her.”

“And then Holly figured out that you were behind it- that you’d kept a set of her house keys, and you’d stolen her disks.”

More nodding. “And I was glad she figured it out. I wanted her to know what she’d done to me. And I wanted her to know the risk she was taking. She thought she was immune somehow. She thought she could control everything- but she couldn’t.”

“Apparently not,” I said. “So you weren’t surprised when Holly called you- when she wanted to see you?”

“Not surprised,” Werner said. He stopped pacing and assumed a splay-footed stance. He bent his legs and raised the foil, and his face was a picture of concentration as he carved long shapes in the air.

“The reason I ask is that, on the video, you seemed surprised when she told you what she wanted to talk about.”

Werner frowned. “I wasn’t surprised.”

I shook my head. “Definitely surprised, Gene, and nervous toosweating, pale. There were times I thought you might puke.”

Werner’s brow wrinkled. “I wasn’t sweating.”

I shook my head some more. “And you say that you wanted her to know what you’d done, but that isn’t true, is it? I mean, you didn’t own up to anything at all; you made Holly work to get it out of you.”

“I was nervous. It was a stupid prank, and I knew it. I was embarrassed at first- flustered. But then I told her all of it.”

“You certainly did,” I said, and Werner’s eyes narrowed. “When did Holly tell you she’d recorded it?” I asked.

Werner’s frown deepened. “What are you talking about?”

“Come on, Gene- it’s a simple question: when did Holly tell you she’d recorded your conversation? Did she tell you on the spot, or after the fact? Or maybe she didn’t tell you at all; maybe it just dawned on you at some point.”

“I don’t know-”

“Don’t play games, Gene- when did you find out?”

Werner windmilled his sword arm, like a batter in the on-deck circle. The blade whistled through the air. “I’m not playing games, and I don’t see why I have to tell you a goddamn thing.”

I smiled to myself. “You don’t have to say shit to me, Gene, but the police are another story. I imagine they’ve been around to see you already, and maybe you’ve already gone over this with them. Or maybe not. In which case, I’d be happy to mention it.”

He walked toward me, his arm still spinning. He stopped maybe six feet away, with a nasty grin on. “You know the cops pretty well, huh?”

My eyebrows went up. “What do you mean by that, Gene?”

Werner colored, and waved an impatient hand. “Nothing.”

“Then why’d you say it?”

“No reason,” he said, and turned away. “And if you must know, Holly told me about the video. She told me she’d recorded it.”

I smiled. “When was that?”

“I don’t remember- a week later; maybe longer than that.”

“The date on the file was December twenty-seventh. A week or so later puts it in January. Was it in January when she told you about it?” Werner shrugged. “And she played it for you?”

He made a show of thinking about it. “Yeah, she played it for me.”

“When was that?”

He hesitated. “After she called. After New Year’s, I guess.”

“And that was the last time you saw her?” Werner nodded. “You remember the date?”

He scowled and made an elaborate check of his watch. “I have to leave,” he said.

“Of course you do. Just let me go over the facts once more, to be sure. Holly recorded your confession on December twenty-seventh. Sometime after that- in early January, say- she told you about the recording, after which, on the Saturday before she was killed, you went to her apartment, beat the crap out of her, and walked off with her computer and her video equipment. Is that about right?”

Werner’s mouth fell open, but no sound came out. “What…what the fuck are you talking about?” he said finally.

We were getting there. I took a deep breath, and smiled big at Werner. “I have the video of you confessing to blackmail, Gene, and of Holly throwing you out of her apartment afterwards. It’s plain how pissed you were when you finally figured out she wasn’t taking you back. I can only imagine how you stewed over that, and all the more, I expect, when you found out she’d recorded the whole episode.”

Werner straightened his shoulders and shook his arms out. He ran a hand over his chin, as if to make sure it was still there. He hung a lopsided smile on his face. “You can make what you want out of that video, but I was there. I know what really happened. And as for that other stuff, it’s bullshit and you know it, and you can go fuck yourself. I never touched Hol-”

“You have a history of knocking her around. She told people.”

“Who’d she tell- Krug? Coyle? I told you that faggot has it in for me, and so does that fucking ape.” Werner’s face burned. He swung his arm in a big figure eight. A little bit closer now.