“Tell me about the couple.”
“What couple? Oh, those two time-wasters with no idea what they wanted? There’s nothing to tell.”
“Make something up.”
“What do you mean? They weren’t hot enough to have a fantasy about.”
“So make them hotter. Make her beautiful, make him handsome.”
“And?”
“You’re showing this house, and they put the moves on you.”
“Not those two, but okay, I get it. Give me a minute, let me think, and how am I supposed to think with you inside me? Oh, Jesus. Well, you’re right, she’s a beauty, in a sort of unformed girlish kind of way. And he’s not handsome, in fact you’d have to say he was ugly, but like a dangerous bad guy in a movie, you know? Very sexy, you’re scared of him but there’s something about him that makes you want to fuck him.”
“And?”
“And right away I got a little bit of a tingle from the way he looked, and the way he was looking at me. And I got the feeling he wanted to make a move, but how could he with his wife there?
“So I’m showing them this palatial condo, top floor with a storybook view, and I know it’s out of their price range but I take them there anyway, and he goes to use the bathroom, and the wife comes up and slips her arm around my waist, and in the most matter-of-fact way she says, ‘You know, Barb, my husband would totally love to fuck you.’ ”
“So the move came from her.”
“And I swear I never saw it coming! There she is with her hand on my hip, and she moves it so she’s stroking my ass, real gently, yes, like you’re doing now, that’s right—”
“And?”
“And she says, ‘And I’d like to watch him, I’d like to see his big hard cock going in and out of you, and after he fills you full of cum I’ll get down there and clean you up and make you come all over again.’ ”
“You must have been excited.”
“Crazy excited, and scared at the same time, because I never did anything like this, I was never with a woman and certainly never with a couple and—oh, I wish you would fuck me hard, but you’re just going to keep it inside me, aren’t you, and not move at all, and, and—”
“Did they do what she said?”
“He fucked me really hard. Held my legs up over my head so he could get in really deep, and it hurt me some but I was too hot to care. And she was kissing me all over my face and pinching my nipples, pinching them really hard, and I generally don’t like that, but this time it seemed right. And talking to me while she’s kissing me, all this breathy love talk, ‘Oh, you’re so pretty, you’re so sweet.’ And his cock, hammering away at me, and I came so hard I just about blacked out.
“And the next thing I knew, she had her face between my legs and she was licking my pussy and I knew I wasn’t going to respond because I’d just come so hard. But I thought, well, pay attention, because this is a new experience for you and you might as well see what it’s like. And it was different, you know, a woman’s mouth is different, and knowing it’s a woman doing it, that makes it different, too. And before I knew it I was excited all over again, and not just a little excited but really crazy hot, and I started to come, and she kept eating me and I just kept coming.
“And I’m lying there, and he’s holding my head, turning it so my face is right in front of her pussy. And he’s like, ‘Time to return the favor, don’t you think?’ And she’s all, ‘No, Barb, only if you want to,’ and it hits me that I have to taste her, that I’ll die if I don’t get my mouth on her. And it’s not like I don’t know what girls taste like, I’ve touched myself and sucked my finger a million times, but now I’m licking her and it’s amazing, and then I feel him behind me, and he’s fucking me while I’m eating out his beautiful wife, and—”
“And it never happened,” Lisa said. “She just made it up.”
“Right.”
“I’d say Scheherazade gets to live another night. And you were doing her while she was telling you the story.”
“Uh-huh. It’s not word for word, but it’s as close as I could come without taping her.”
“That might be interesting.”
“What, taping her?”
“Be easy enough, right there in your own house. Then we could actually hear her telling the story. Or is it better with you recounting it to me? Hmmm.”
“Hmmm indeed.”
“And you were inside her while she was talking? Like you’re inside me now?”
“Well, I was in her—”
“Ass, right. Barb’s best feature. Do you want to be in my ass? So we can replicate the experience?”
“I don’t want to move from where I am.”
“Then stay right where you are. I could come like this. Could you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I don’t think I want to, not right now. Is that weird?”
“I feel the same way.”
“Like coming is nice, but it’s sort of beside the point. You know what I like about our love nest?”
“The smell of stale cigarette smoke.”
“Which is something you generally miss out on in a non-smoking room. Though right now the smell of sex is doing a good job of canceling it out. No, what I was going to say is that I’m glad the place is tacky.”
“So you can get to feel lowdown and dirty?”
“No,” she said. “I could feel like that in a palace. No, but imagine if we had a really nice place. And we could, you know. There are a million condos for rent, time shares people can’t give away, and how hard could it be to arrange everything through a third party and keep it all nicely anonymous? We could lie on percale sheets while we were grooving on your girlfriend’s naughty stories.”
“Now I’m beginning to regret bringing you to a dump like this.”
“No, that’s the whole point. If we had a place like that we could stay there forever.”
He thought about it. “Oh,” he said.
“Do you see what I mean? It would be comfortable. I don’t want us to be comfortable.”
“I get it,” he said. “And you’re right. And here’s something to keep you from getting too comfortable.”
“Am I gonna like this?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I took a ride over to Court House Square earlier today. I went and had a talk with your husband, George.”
It was something he’d thought of doing, he told her, but it was the conversation with the sheriff that had changed the thought to action. He had to get more of a sense of the man than you could get by stalking him online. And it made sense to establish himself in George’s eyes, so that when he turned up down the line he was already a known factor, that New York cop scraping by doing odd jobs for lawyers and insurance agents. Miller, his name was, a forgettable name with a couple of forgettable initials to keep it company, and he was certainly nobody to take seriously, nobody to worry about.
There might be some money, he’d told the man. If you’re the right Otterbein.
Which, of course, George had proved not to be.
The legend Doak spun was simple enough. A childless widower in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, had died at an advanced age. The old gentleman, one Elmer Otterbein, had never left the family farm, but he’d worked hard and saved himself rich. Well, seven figures worth of rich. He’d died intestate with a few million in savings and government bonds and acreage worth about as much. There was, in short, enough money involved to spend a small fraction of it looking for legitimate heirs, before it disappeared into the coffers of the great state of Nebraska.
And Otterbein, while by no means a common name, was hardly unique. Two Midwestern cities bore the name, as did the college in Ohio and a residential neighborhood in Baltimore. So if George Otterbein could establish any connection to Otterbeins in Nebraska or South Dakota—
“It bothered him that he couldn’t,” he told Lisa. “He really wanted to be the missing heir, but his father was born right here in Florida to a family with all its connec
tion in Maryland and Virginia. Then he managed to recall a sister of his grandfather’s who’d married a man and moved west, and when I pointed out that a sister wouldn’t have been able to pass on the Otterbein name, he decided that it might as easily have been a brother. I took down his information and we agreed that it was unlikely to lead anywhere, but there was no harm in seeing where it went.”
“God, that’s George. If there’s a nickel looking for a home, he’ll be happy to take it in. He told me once he’s not related to any of the Otterbeins, that his father was the only son of an only son. Of course that was when a young man named Otterbein applied for a job, and went so far as to suggest that they might be related. George didn’t encourage the speculation, nor did he hire the fellow, who he thought was looking to con him.”
“He had the same thought about me.”
“Oh?”
“He’d had a drink or two with lunch, and he took down a bottle and poured himself another. Talked me into joining him, either to be sociable or to loosen me up. I think he was waiting for me to offer to work up some credentials to support his claim. A lot of short cons play off that sort of premise, and most of them wind up asking for some kind of expense money, with the real payoff to come when the legacy comes in.”
“Which it never does.”
“The front money is the payoff, for the con man. And you’d think that’d be it, that he’d take it and disappear, but sometimes a good player can string a mark along for months. Getting an extra hundred here and there, a few bucks to underwrite a search of Cree tribal records in Manitoba, a few bucks more to bribe a vital statistics clerk in Mandan, North Dakota.”
“But you didn’t ask him for money.”
“Of course not. I got a few minutes of his time and an ounce or two of his single-malt scotch, and that was really all I wanted. More than I wanted, because I’ve never been much of a scotch drinker, and it was a little early in the day for me anyway. How old is George? I read it online and it didn’t stick. Well up in his sixties, gotta be.”
“Sixty-seven this past March.”
“He still looks vigorous, but I guess there’s no reason a man his age wouldn’t be.”
“Are we talking about sexual potency here? Because he can still get it up, if that was the question.”
“It wasn’t. He’s big and he looks strong. The drink shows in his face a little. Does he get any exercise?”
“He plays golf, but I don’t know if that counts as exercise. They all use carts, and how much exercise is it to swing a club a few dozen times?”
“They really don’t walk?”
“On some courses you’re not allowed to. You have to use a cart, because otherwise it slows things down too much.”
“I never played,” he said, “but I always thought the one good thing about it would be all that walking in the open air. I’ve seen them playing golf on TV, the different tournaments. I don’t remember them zipping around in carts.”
“Maybe it’s different on TV.”
“Maybe. You were going to tell me what made you cut your hair.”
“Right.”
“It doesn’t have to be now. If you’d rather wait—”
“No,” she said. “Now’s a good time for it. Especially now that you went and saw him. And had a drink with him. Speaking of which, you didn’t happen to bring any whiskey along, did you?”
“It never occurred to me. I could go get some, though I don’t know offhand where the nearest package store would be, but—”
“No, don’t go anywhere. If our love nest happened to have a stocked bar, I’d be a customer. But I’m probably better off without it. I’ve never told anybody this story, but then I’ve never told anybody anything, not really. Until I met you.”
He waited.
“I said I’d need you to hold me. Not now. You’ll know when.”
Twenty
* * *
“The problem was I didn’t get pregnant. If I had his baby it would prove something. Don’t ask me what, but it was very important to him. And we tried and tried and tried, and we went to a fertility doctor and had tests done, and it just didn’t happen.
“His kids hated me before they even met me. I already told you that. They thought I was just interested in him for his money, and they weren’t entirely wrong about that. I was impressed with him, he’s a big powerful man and he has an aura, you know? A magnetism, even.
“But his money was a big factor. I always worked and I always got by, but I was getting tired of the struggle. It was this constant struggle. I was always sweating the rent or the car payment, always a day late and a dollar short.
“And here was this man who wanted to take care of me. He had plenty of money, he’d made something for himself on top of what his daddy left him, and his kids were grown and he wanted someone to take care of, someone to spoil.
“So I looked at what cards I was holding and I played them carefully. I wouldn’t fuck him because I was just scared to death of getting pregnant, that’s what I told him, which turned out to be ironic when my period showed up right on time every month. Instead I would give him hand jobs, until I let him talk me into using my mouth. I had to act like I didn’t know what I was doing, and bit by bit little miss virgin mouth figured out what to do, and even learned to like it.
“Maybe I should have been an actress.
“So he married me, and I finally let him put it in, and I think what ruined it all for me was the acting. I was never in love with him, but I think maybe I could have come to love him if I hadn’t sabotaged it. But when you play somebody that way you wind up having contempt for him, because he’d have to be a moron to buy your act. And because the number you’re doing on him is only justified if you tell yourself he’s an asshole and he deserves it.
“Anyway, it was okay on the surface for a while. I learned how to shop, and that was fun until it wasn’t, until the novelty wore off. Some women get addicted, they can spend their whole lives shopping, but it didn’t do much for me once I got the hang of it.
“I got tired of it. We got tired of each other. Trying to get pregnant was part of it. Having to do it on schedule, and in positions that were supposed to facilitate conception, that turned it into a job. And it was my job, you know, except I’d been trying to avoid facing up to the fact.
“Then we quit trying, and I was tired of his dick and he was tired of my pussy. And I thought, okay, the honeymoon’s over, and maybe that’s all right. I can still be a wife. I can run the house, I can show up with him at social functions and look good on his arm, I can remember the names of his friends and flirt just enough to make them want me but not enough so that they think they’ve got a chance.
“I thought we were okay. And in the long run, well, he was thirty years older, wasn’t he? More than that, he was exactly twice my age when we got married, sixty-two to my thirty-one, and he wasn’t a drunk but he was a man who drank, and you probably noticed the bloom on his nose and cheeks, the broken blood vessels. His daddy taught him to drink Kentucky bourbon, and he switched to single-malt scotch when someone let him know that was classier, and he didn’t get drunk but he pretty much always had a drink in him, and according to the charts the insurance men show you, he was thirty pounds overweight. He carries it well, but it’s there, isn’t it?
“So how long could he expect to live? Eighty years is a lot and seventy-five’s probably more like it, and when he’s seventy-five I’ll be forty-four, and I won’t get everything or even close to it, but the pre-nup that’s got me locked in, it locks him in, too. He can’t give it all to the kids. They get most of it, but I get the house, and I get the insurance money, and I get—well, I wind up okay.
“So I’m letting myself get used to it, this life I’m living, and he’s drinking more than usual. Which is a bad thing when he gets ugly drunk and talks mean to me but a good thing when he goes to bed right after he’s had his dinner.
“Then one night he brings a man home with him.
?
??A younger man, one of those Mexicans who queue up every morning at the turnoff in Perry, looking for day labor. ‘This is Nando,’ he says. ‘He’s gonna fuck you.’
“I told him he was drunk and crazy, and I told Nando to get the hell out of my house, but they didn’t pay any attention to me. I figured out later that he’d explained to Nando that I’d be playing a part, that I’d pretend to fight, and that what I really wanted was to be forced. And that’s what happened. Nando raped me.
“He hit me. I don’t think he wanted to, I don’t think violence toward women came naturally to him, but George was there urging him on. ‘Go ahead, slap her! That’s what the bitch wants, that’s what gets her motor running. Give her a good one!’
“I don’t know what would have happened if I fought back.
Maybe they would have stopped. But I just went numb.
“George made him wear a condom. If he couldn’t get me pregnant he didn’t want some Mexican doing it. It may have been Nando’s first time with his dick wrapped.
“So we’re in bed and Nando’s on top of me. And, you know, inside of me. And I’ve got my eyes closed and I’m just waiting for it to be over.
“And smelling him. Nando. I suppose personal hygiene is hard to prioritize when you’re a day laborer sharing a shack on the highway with eight or ten other men, sleeping in shifts on sheets that never get washed. And living on chili and garlic, stuff that comes out of your pores, and if you’re not able to bathe regularly, it builds up.
“And at one point I open my eyes, and George is on a chair pulled up next to the bed, and his pants are down and he’s got his dick in one hand and a gun in the other. He owns a lot of guns and he keeps one in the drawer of the bedside table and that’s the one he’s got now, a little pistol, blued steel with swirly green grips. Malachite, that’s what they were.
“And I know somebody’s gonna get killed, me or Nando or both of us. ‘Sheriff, I caught them together and I did what I had to do.’