James Conway - In Cold Blonde

“Cliff!” Betty said.

“You don’t like it either, admit it.”

“No, but I’m not going to call my daughter a slut.”

Cliff looked like he was about to say something else, then his eyes cut to Syd, and he thought better of it and shut up.

“Have you seen the news today?” Syd asked.

“I never watch the news. It’s all way too depressing for my taste. Cliff watches the news sometimes, though.”

A light bulb seemed to go off in Cliff’s head. He took the picture from his wife, looked at it. “Oh, no… Is this that surveillance photo from TV? The Lady in Red, that’s what they called her, she’s killing people, right?”

“That’s right,” Syd said

“Dear God,” Betty said. “But I thought she was finally getting better. That the new therapy was working.”

Hallelujah, thought Syd. Now for some answers. “I know something happened to Alice in high school, something involving Colin Wood and Adam Devlin, both killed by the Lady in Red. And I know there was some kind of financial settlement handled by Zachary Stone. He also killed by the Lady in Red. What I don’t know is what happened. Could you tell me, please?”

Cliff’s face hardened at the memory and he leaned back on the couch, his body language shutting down. Tears ran down Betty’s face now and she turned away from Syd.

“I’m not here to judge,” Syd said. “For Alice to act the way she has after so many years is a testament to the horrible things that must have been done to her. I’m just trying to understand why she is doing what she is doing.”

Betty reached across her husband for the box of tissues. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose. Then her eyes met Syd’s. “Do you have children, Detective?”

“No.”

“There is no greater joy, or burden.”

“We got little of the former and a more than our share of the latter,” Cliff said.

Betty ignored her husband with practiced ease. “Alice was such a delightful child. We didn’t have much money when she was growing up, but we spent a lot of family time together. Cliff always wanted a son so Alice was raised a tomboy; she loved sports and they would go hunting together every fall. And she was smart. She got into Camden Hall on a full scholarship. We’d talk about how one day she’d go to an Ivy League college and make a name for herself in corporate America. She promised us a ride on her first corporate jet.

“But things started to change when she turned fourteen. Boys suddenly became very important to her and Alice became very critical of her own looks. To be honest, Alice took a while to get pretty. She was a bit heavy, a little awkward and just didn’t seem to fit in.”

“This country’s obsession with looks and sex is disgusting,” Cliff said. “You want to blame someone for all this, blame Britney Spears, blame Paris Hilton, blame Lindsey Lohan. Blame all those bubble-headed, big-boobed, empty-headed teen queens on the cover of all the magazines and flaunting their skinny asses on TV. How’s a normal girl supposed to compete with that?”

“Alice and I are about the same age,” Syd said. “And I know the feeling. I grew up in suburb of Kansas City but was nuked by the culture bomb, too.”

“Alice used sex,” Betty said. “That’s how she competed. I didn’t know at the time, but later she told me.”

“Do we have to talk about this?” Cliff asked, clearly uncomfortable with the conversation.

“The more I know, the better chance I have of helping her,” Syd said.

“You mean catching her, don’t you,” Cliff said. “You want to catch Alice and put her in jail.”

“She’s killed three men already; I’m trying to stop her before she kills anyone else.”

“Even if they deserved to die?” Cliff asked.

I’ve been asking myself that same question, Syd thought. But gave the answer she was trained to give. “That’s for a jury to decide. She’s also in danger. She could be hurt or killed. The sooner I catch her, the safer she’ll be.”

Cliff didn’t like it but he settled back in the couch, a scowl on his face.

Betty Waterman took that as permission to speak, and she did. “When Alice was fourteen, she discovered that giving boys sexual favors made her more popular. And if a boy paid attention to her, she flew to cloud nine, but the slightest inattention would send her spiraling down. In hindsight it was so clearly manic-depressive behavior, but kids act out, right? We now know she was sick, bi-polar the doctors say, but who imagines their little girl is mentally ill.”

“I did,” Cliff Waterman said. “I used to say there had to be something wrong with her, that she was just like your loony sister, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Cliff, please.” Betty Waterman turned back to Syd. “What Alice didn’t realize, of course, was that her sexual behavior gave her a certain reputation and boys started taking advantage of her. They would be nice to her, she would reward them with sex, but once the boys got what they wanted, they’d dump her.”

“And she’d go into a depression.”

Betty nodded. “Then her senior year of high school she got this huge crush on a boy, Adam Devlin. They’d shared a bus ride on a school trip and he’d been very nice to her. He was very popular and she convinced herself that he’d ask her out and she’d suddenly become one of the popular kids. And then one day he asked her to a party. It was a dream come true for Alice. She went there with such high expectations, but there was no party. Just Adam and a couple of his friends playing pool and drinking.”

“ She was the party,” Cliff said.

“That’s right,” Betty said. “They gave her a drink; it must’ve been spiked with something because Alice passed out. When she woke up hours later, she was on the pool table, naked. She had pain in her vagina and… well everywhere. And Alice realized they had drugged and had sex with her.”

“They drugged and raped her,” Syd said, anger burning inside her. “Make no mistake Mrs. Waterman, sex without consent is rape.”

“But as bad as that was,” Betty said, “for Alice, it wasn’t the worse part. A couple of days later dirty pictures of Alice were emailed to all the kids at school. You couldn’t see the boys’ faces, but you could clearly see Alice, naked and having sex.”

“And that’s when the lawyer showed up,” Cliff said. “They were suddenly worried Alice would go to the police and file charges so the lawyer basically threatened us. Take his money or he would ruin Alice’s reputation. So we took the money.”

“Our single biggest mistake.”

“It was not a mistake,” Cliff snapped and Syd realized she had stumbled into a well-worn argument. “If we hadn’t taken the money, how would we have paid for all those doctors and that damned institute?”

“If we hadn’t taken the money she may not have needed the doctors and institute.” Betty turned back to Syd. “Three days after we agreed to the settlement Alice tried to kill herself.”

“And you think humiliating herself in court, having the world find out what a slut she was would have been better?”

“I didn’t then, I do now.” Betty’s eyes found Syd. “Alice hates us; she thinks we sold her out.” Betty turned back to Cliff and added pointedly, “And we did.”

Cliff shook his head, defensive, angry and frustrated. “Well, we can’t go back in time, so get used to it.”

The friendly couple act was just a veneer, there was such obvious rancor between the two that Syd wondered how their marriage had survived. “Tell me about the suicide attempt. What did she do?”

“I had some sleeping pills, I’d have trouble sometimes, and she took them, all of them, a brand new prescription of twenty pills.”