Robert Walker - Final Edge

"You want rationalizations, Arthur? Will a good rationale help you get past your part in murder, Arthur, sweetie?"

"You promised. You said that you had a lifetime of reasons for what you've done, remember? And you promised to share them with me."

"I remember telling you I'd tell you, Arthur, when the time came…when conditions were right, when I was good and ready. Do you remember that, Arthur, do you?"

"I need to know why, Lauralie, now! Why am I doing this?" How could I have agreed to this? Arthur wondered, but did not say. Arthur looked down over Mira Lourdes's armless torso and breasts, where he stood directly across the dissecting table from Lauralie. He imagined die eerie picture it must make, this meeting of the three of them, together again-Mira not entirely present physically, Lauralie not entirely present mentally, Arthur not entirely present emotionally-a strange bizarre twist on the eternal triangle, he thought.

Lauralie was angry with him, but she appeared to have calmed. Arthur had balked at her orders once again, balked at any further mutilation of the body. He dared voice his wish now. "We should end this thing now, bury what's left of Mira in the desert, and be done with it."

Lauralie only laughed, and between laughs, she said, "Mira, Mira on the slab, who's the prettiest of the hags? You talk about her as if you knew her, Arthur. Get over it. Look at what she is for what she is, an unfeeling and empty shell."

"She was a human being, Lauralie."

"Was being the operative word! Look at her now! We've excised her eyes, her teeth, a hand, and her head, not to mention the finger I left at the convent, and now you're going soft on me, Arthur? Don't be a wimp!"

Arthur again looked down at the upper torso of Mira Lourdes lying before them. Lauralie had operated the circular bone saw to sever torso from lower abdomen and legs. With Arthur's guidance, she had done all the cutting this time, and she'd done it with a kind of gusto. In fact, she took a kind of otherworldly delight in carving up the frozen corpse, while Arthur again questioned her reasoning and motivation.

Lifting a scalpel now, she asked Arthur how best to remove the breasts.

"Why do that?" he asked.

'To gross them out. The idea is to gross them out as much as I possibly can. Now tell me how to begin and where to go with the scalpel." Arthur did as instructed, swallowing his inner quaking and the sense of regret infiltrating his heart.

He forced one of the still-hard, cold breasts upward and using a red marker, made a line beneath and around the globe. He then did the same for the second breast. "Begin at the bottom and follow the line up from the center, here, on either side."

Holding the surgical scalpel against the marks he'd made, Lauralie carefully followed the ink path against Mira's flesh, soon removing the left breast. She smiled, her eyes delighted as it came away. "That was easy, Arthur. You're an excellent teacher. Like slicing off a ham."

Arthur was not surprised at the lack of blood, and the ease with which the breast came away. Seeing there was no stopping Lauralie's gleeful play, Arthur said, "Give me the scalpel and I'll finish for you."

"Call me Dr. Blodgett!" she teased, swinging the scalpel in the air like a Roman candle. "No, Dr. Belkvin, sir, young Dr. Blodgett needs the experience and will finish the procedure." And she did, severing the right breast with even more fanfare, and even less blood.

Lauralie had earlier prepared the box meant to receive the torso and breasts, but she hadn't planned well for the size of Mira's Joan Crawford shoulders and the girth of her torso. The fit was so snug and tight that Arthur had to help Lauralie force the torso into the Styrofoam-lined, colorful blue and green FedEx box. He then lifted the two breasts in his gloved hands, turning to take them back to the freezer.

"Now the severed breasts," Lauralie ordered.

"What?"

"In the box. Stuff them into the box too."

"But there's no room."

"Make room!"

He tested the possibility, shaking his head, saying, "How, where?"

"Squish them in, Arthur! You can do it."

"Why not send them separately?"

"Separately?"

"You know, to…to this Meredyth Sanger person instead of to Stonecoat?"

"It's a thought, would be freaky for the lady doctor, wouldn't it? But no…no, I want her to get the heart next, and I want him to get all of this area at once," she replied, her hands going to her own breasts, the scalpel in one hand, her other hand caressing her breast area.

"Everything is about what you want, isn't it, Lauralie?" he asked even as he worked the severed breasts into the tight area left him. "Well, what about what I want?" he demanded.

"Oh, Arthur, you can be so commanding when you try. What you want? I know what you want, Arthur," she said in her most coquettish voice, her smile a flirtatious snake as she bared a shoulder with the tip of the scalpel.

"Damn it, I want to know why we're doing all this, Lauralie! I want to know why we're not on a plane for someplace safe!"

"Some island in the Pacific, Arthur? Tahiti's full of tourists this time of year. It may's well be another state in the goddamn union."

"You saw the newspaper!" He held up the late edition of the Chronicle, waving the image before her. "They've got my likeness on the front pages! It'll be flashed on the tube by now. My clients will all see it. They'll fucking have me on America's Most Wanted."

"It's a lousy likeness, Arthur. Quit your worrying. It doesn't look anything like you."

"The mole, Lauralie. They've got the mole on my face. My black eyebrows, the thick glasses, my hair. It's close enough to nail me, I tell you. We've got to get out of the jurisdiction, to someplace where I'm not known."

"Christ, the mole's on the other side of your face," she said, slapping the newspaper into free flight and ripping through his likeness in a zipping Zorro strike of her scalpel. "Don't you go wimping out on me, Arthur! Don't do it."

"But we've got to be reasonable. What the hell're we going to do? What kind of escape route do we have? None. Can you imagine what will happen when I go back to the office, to the campus? I could be picked up, arrested at any moment for questioning."

"Fool, they don't arrest you for questioning…can't arrest you until they have absolute, certain proof. You've got rights. They can only ask you to come in for questioning. It's called an interrogation…custody, question and answer, then arrest, if you fail their litmus test for telling the truth."

"A lie detector? I don't think I could pass, not after what-"

"Yes, you can, Arthur. It wasn't you who did all this. It was me, my plan, I drugged her…I killed her. What'd you do? You cut into a cadaver. What can they do to you for that? Suspend your license?"

Lauralie had laid aside the scalpel and stood squeezing a set of black rosary beads. "I took these off a dead nun at the convent…long time ago," she said, her eyes dreamy, as if reliving the moment. "She took an unfortunate spill down a nasty flight of stairs, and at her advanced age, I didn't think she'd miss the beads."

He stared at the black beads, picturing her leaning over the dying nun. As if reading his mind, she added, "She was our mother superior. Believed in the old saying 'Spare the rod, spoil the child.' I took a lot of crap from that old bat for a lotta years." Her eyes had roamed about the room as she spoke of Mother Orleans, but now they settled on him. "Look, Arthur, I understand your worries, but we can take steps, Arthur…"

"Such as?"

"We'll have the mole surgically removed."

"And who's going to do that?"

"How hard can it be? With just the right tools and your guidance, hell, I just removed two hot-air balloons from the cadaver." She replaced the beads in her hand with the scalpel. Its stainless-steel blade shone under the tensor lamp over the operating table.