Bill Pronzini: Vixen

Runyon said to him, “Why didn’t you wait for me at the factory, Ken?”

“Cory.”

“You called her after we talked? Or did she call you?”

“She did.”

“Did you tell her you’d talked to me, that I was on my way there?”

“No.”

“But you told her you couldn’t do what she wanted.”

“She said if I didn’t, she didn’t want anything more to do with me... I wasn’t her brother anymore. But I couldn’t go back in there. I thought if I could just make her understand...” He shook his head, a wobbly, broken movement. “Cory,” he said then. And again, twice, like a half-whispered lament, “Cory. Cory.”

“Where is she?”

“I’m sorry. Oh God, Cory, I’m sorry!”

“Where, Ken?”

Nothing for several seconds. Then Beckett lifted one hand in a vague gesture toward the rear of the apartment, let it fall back bonelessly onto his lap. Closed his eyes and sat there mute.

I moved first, with Runyon close on my heels. The kitchen and dining rooms were empty. So was the first bedroom, hers, that opened off a central hallway. The adjacent bathroom was where we found her — a luxury bathroom with gold-rimmed mirrors set into baby-blue tile, a sunken tub, and a glass-block shower stall. The air in there was moist, as if a bath or shower had been taken not long before, and thick with the odors of soap and lotions.

And bodily waste.

And blood.

I smelled the waste as soon as I entered the bedroom, in time to gird myself before Runyon and I crossed over far enough to see the body. She lay sprawled on her back on a fuzzy black rug in front of the shower stall, a bright yellow robe covering her from neck to ankles. Alive, she’d been beautiful; dead, she was a torn, soiled, ugly travesty. The bullet had gone in under her chin at an upward angle, ripped through the side of her face and opened up her head above the temple. The stall door and glass blocks were streaked and spattered with blood, bone splinters, brain matter, the blood still wet and glistening. Dead less than half an hour.

Runyon said between his teeth, “Goddamn it, why didn’t he stay at the factory?”

There was nothing to say to that. My stomach was kicking like crazy; I’d seen dead bodies before, the bloody, twisted aftermath of violence in too many forms, but I had never become inured to the sight. The reaction was always the same: sickness and disgust mingled with sadness and an impotent anger at the inhumanity of it.

The gun was on the floor next to the body, a short-barreled .25 with pearl grips. Neither Runyon nor I touched it. We backed out of there, returned to the living room.

Kenneth Beckett was still sitting in the same rigid posture, but his face was no longer impassive. Muscles rippled beneath the skin, making his features shift and change shape like images in a kaleidoscope. Tears leaked now from the burned-out eyes, mixing with the blood from the scratches to form a reddish serpent line on one cheek. Soundless weeping.

Runyon went to him, said his name twice to get his attention. “Did you call the police?”

“No. I couldn’t. I thought you’d come, so I just... waited.”

My cue to make the 911 call. But even as I spoke to the police dispatcher, I watched the two of them and I could hear what they were saying to each other, Beckett responding in that same hollow voice.

“What happened, Ken?”

“I killed her.”

“Not deliberately. You wouldn’t do that.”

“No. Never. Never.”

“Tell me what happened.”

It was a few seconds before Beckett answered. Then, in an agonized whisper, “So pissed at me because I didn’t shoot Chaleen. Madder than I ever saw her before. She wouldn’t listen, just kept screaming that I betrayed her. ‘Give me the gun,’ she said, ‘I’ll go do it myself.’ I... I didn’t want to. She hit me, scratched me. That damn gun. She yanked it out of my pocket. I tried to take it back and... I don’t know, it went off and she... she...”

His eyes squeezed shut, then popped wide open like eyes in a Keane painting. He made a low animal-like noise in his throat; swallowed to shut it off, and stumbled on. “I killed her. I loved her and I killed her. I wish I was dead, too. The gun... I put it under my chin and I tried... I tried, but I couldn’t make myself do that, either.”

Death wish already granted, I thought as I put down the phone and moved over to where they were. In a very real sense he’d died, too, the instant the bullet tore the life out of his sister.

“It was an accident, Ken,” Runyon said. “It’s not your fault, it’s hers.”

“No. Mine, and that stupid pig Chaleen’s. That’s what she called him. ‘Stupid pig deserves to die.’ Then why did she let him fuck her all that time? Mr. Vorhees, sure, but why him ?”

Because she needed the kind of man he was, I thought. Read his character correctly, with that innate sense some corrupt individuals have for spotting one of their own, and knew he could be maneuvered into committing murder for her. But he would not have lasted long even if he hadn’t been responsible for Andrew Vorhees’ death; she’d have found a way to jettison him sooner or later. That could be the reason she’d bought the automatic.

“I tried to tell her I couldn’t do it,” Beckett was saying. “She wouldn’t take no for an answer. She never took no for an answer. I loved her so much, I always did what she wanted me to. In the light or in the dark. But not that. Why didn’t she understand, not something like that?”

Runyon said, “What do you mean, in the dark?”

“At night. In bed together.”

“So you were sleeping with her.”

No response for three or four beats. Then, “It wasn’t wrong. She said so the first night she came into my room. It wasn’t wrong because we loved each other.”

“How old were you that first night?”

“Fifteen.”

The queasy feeling in my stomach was stronger now. Runyon’s expression said he’d had intimations of this just as I had. Held out hope that it wasn’t so, just as I had — the reason neither of us had brought up the possibility in open conversation. The kind of woman Cory Beckett had been, the screwed-up mess Kenneth was. Sex had been her primary weapon, always, and she’d wielded it mercilessly with all kinds of men. But sweet Jesus, her own brother!

“But I wasn’t enough for her,” Beckett said. “She had to have all those others. I didn’t mind so much until Hutchinson. It... it wasn’t the same with her after him. Because she wasn’t the same.”

Hutchinson. The biker felon she’d taken up with in Riverside, the one who’d been shot and killed by police.

“He talked her into it. She said it was her idea, but it couldn’t have been. He made her do it.”

“Do what?” Runyon asked him.

“I hated looking at her after that. But I couldn’t stop doing it to her, she wouldn’t let me stop.”

“Ken. What did Hutchinson make her do?”

“But only in the dark. Only in the dark. I couldn’t stand seeing her the way she was in the light. That’s why I covered her in the bathroom after I killed her. I... couldn’t... stand...”

Runyon asked the question again, but Beckett was no longer listening. His facial muscles quit jumping and twitching, his tear-stained features smoothed out so that he looked about the age he’d been when his sister seduced him — a battered, crippled, very old fifteen. He sat staring sightlessly, his mouth moving but no words coming out. Lost now somewhere deep inside himself. Lost, probably, for as long as there was breath left in his body.

But Jake and I could not just stand there and wait for the police. I wish we had. It would have been better for both of us if we hadn’t let Beckett’s last words send us back into that bloody bathroom.