A Slave to the Fantasy (7 page)

Roberts gazed off into the deep dark night through a
skylight in the ceiling. He could only think to himself in a
humored way that this is some jail with it's glass holes in the
ceiling. Right out of a movie, a daring escape plan is hatched.
Careen through the skylight with rope and daring. Heck, he could
have even used one of those right then he thought.

“Mr. Roberts, you have dozens of American porn
videos, pictures of many Filipino women, including the girlfriend
of the deceased. A girl you admitted to having sex with a couple
hours before she had sex with the deceased,” said the detective.
“Can you see why this all looks so bad?”

“Nope,” Roberts said with defiant deadpan matter of
factness. “Sorry, I don't. Your country is awash in the sex trade.
You can access pornography on the streets basically in any major
city. Manila is the absolute worst. We have a dead body sure, but
this guy was a huge ass hole. He had enemies.

“Plus explain it to me how that would be that I could
find my way over to a strange hotel room where these two were
fucking and kill this man right after I fucked the very same girl
as you noted?” Roberts stated confidently. “I am all ears
here.”

The detective walked slowly to a miniature laptop
computer sitting on the metal table directly in front of the two
chairs which had, until moments earlier, been occupied by the only
two men in the room: Roberts and Detective San Palanco. Now there
was also this previously generic and hardly attention-grabbing mini
laptop.

Palanco glanced back at Roberts for any sign of
nervousness. There appeared to be none. In nearly 18 years on the
force and 10 of them investigating murders, he knew if they were
guilty or not just by the demeanor in these very same
situations.

Roberts was apprehended about an hour after his most
recent meeting with Dr. Blake, the psychologist. The corpus of the
report from the doctor had made it's way to Manila central police
who immediately decided it was time to pressure Roberts to come in
for more questioning. He wasn't under arrest, but he was told he
needed to come in while also being handcuffed.

Plus two pieces of key evidence had been brought to
light just in the past 12 hours regarding the death of Bendato.
First, his lover Tanya Carasco was cleared of any wrongdoing based
on lack of any motive, physical evidence and surveillance tape of
her at local restaurant with an unidentified man around the time of
death. So far she had said nothing to police. Roberts had yet to
talk to her as well.

Second, it became apparent that Roberts had a block
of unaccounted for time after Tanya left his room and he couldn't
properly explain his whereabouts in a way that would be able to
provide alibi witnesses. While no one could say he wasn't resting,
no one could say he was. No one saw it. He called no one and his
hotel did not keep meaningful surveillance footage that would
evidence he never left his room.

Roberts biggest problem was this lost time. He
remembered getting the video of Tanya and Bendato having sex, and
remembered getting the notice that the police were wanting to talk
to him.

He didn't know how much time actually passed from the
time Tanya left his room to meet up with Bendato. Call it shock.
Call it poor memory. Call it being on something which was dulling
his acuity. Whatever, there was no denying he had motive and it was
becoming increasingly clear he lost time during the whole
ordeal.

“Look at the girl for chrissakes... She was the last
person to see the fucker alive,” Roberts said. “or should I say
feel him alive...”

“This isn't funny sir. You realize how close you are
to getting charged here and getting stuck in our legal stranglehold
for a possibility of years?” The detective said. “You don't want
that. Just consider yourself lucky I am not one of the average cops
around here who hate the arrogance of Americans. Stealing our women
left and right to start with. I know in fairness it's all a mixed
bag. There is good and bad. Just be grateful.”

He popped over to the small lap top and inserted a
mini desk in the side. It booted up almost immediately. A very
clear video emerged. It was Roberts leaving the backyard of a poor
area of Manila. There was broken down machinery in this particular
yard, along with two clotheslines, a taller fan palm tree that was
hanging over the wall of the next-door neighbors yard and one
unmistakable man unlatching the back wall entry door.

He had a large nap sack slung over his shoulder, and
he calmly but without hesitation, unlatched the door to leave the
back of the yard. Oddly, the video was more like surveillance than
amatuer home video.

Roberts noticed it right away. This was surveillance
video. Very rare in an area this poor. It didn't follow him (he
knew it was him right away and wasn't even trying to doctor up a
reaction to the contrary).

“Mr. Roberts this video was taken from a security
camera monitoring the backyard of the home of Tanya Carasco,” the
detective announced. “According to her brother, it was taken at the
most 3 days before the death at issue here. Can you explain
this?”

“First of all, can you explain how the brother would
know the date and all that? I don't see any date on here,” Roberts
asked.

“Well he said they just installed the camera a couple
days earlier to support the second hand car parts business they
were running out of the garage. Since the business had just opened
(and testimony from neighbors bears this out), it is apparent his
statement is true.”

“But here's the larger point: forget the damn date.
The larger point is can you explain what you were doing there
sneaking out the back of Tanya's yard with a large nap sack?”
Detective Palanco said. “I see car parts everywhere. Iron, metal,
steel. All kinds of big bulky things like what was used to kill
Bendato.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,” Roberts laughed heartily. “Why
would I have used something taken from Tanya's yard to kill this
prick?”

“Easy. You figured it could be traced back to her or
someone in her family,” Palanco retorted. “You knew she was
sleeping with another man. She wasn't telling you. She was
stringing you along and acting like she wasn't. She was letting you
pursue her and spend money to get her to like you. You knew this
was all a game and it infuriated you.”

“Only one big problem with your theory detective,”
Roberts said “Where's the passion? You think I got pissed or you
think I planned it?”

“We think either or both,” the detective said calmly.
“Mr. Roberts you are in a world of hurt unless you can get some
things straightened out with Tanya Carasco. I'd get with her as
soon as you can. Right now, things aren’t adding up with your
stories. Since we cleared her, all attention is on you.”

Roberts pondered the idea, but wasn't sure how or
when it would happen.

…

Roberts was free. Not free to leave the country. But
free to walk around his will would have to be recovered. But he was
grieving and he had no life inside him. This is a broken heart. It
has never been willed through.

It's only the conceited fool who isn't grateful when
the sickness in his/her heart ends sooner. Because we have no
control. None except for one action that can destroy it.

Give love to someone else. He would try because he
knew it was the only way.

First he took out his phone and scrolled down from
his email list. Sometimes he would hide profound or important
information in draft email.

The 5
^th
draft email contained a peculiar
file. He opened it. It was a picture of Michael Blake and a
distinguished black man provided by Tany'a slightly deranged
brother. Along with a side note:

“The Chinese. They couldn't know. They need to.”

Samuel Roberts was making progress. Letting time heal
it all. All the while he was chasing phantoms. If he told what he
believed to the be the case involving Blake and the short black
man, Tanya would die.

Chapter 9--Unfocused

Looking from the outside,Samuel Roberts had it all.
After college, he went on to law school and landed a great
high-paying job that put him in the upper 1 percent of wage earners
for his age group. He was living in a new city with year round warm
weather and a large swath of beautiful women everywhere. He was on
the front edge of the American dream.

But in reality, nothing had actually changed. The
fundamentals of the issues were the same. He was still thinking
more about porn then real women. He actually spent one his first
weekends at the office exploring the wonders of the internet. He'd
played around with it in law school. He ordered some porn tapes for
his dorm room. (when he sat down and really looked at it he
probably was spending around $100 a month. Money he definitely
didn't have on the non-existent salary of a student)

Now he could grab pictures and videos right off and
keep them on his computer. He could google the name of his favorite
starlet and link to it. Watch it immediately. It was a whole new
world. Between the long hours of a young lawyer and the easy access
to xxx content on the internet, he was spending almost no time
meeting real women.

The old fears never waned. They were still there and
now it was getting worse for one reason. The thing that matters
most in getting women to be attracted to a man, he wasn't
doing.

…

“What do you want to try and tell me again?” Dr.
Blake asked. “I mean about the turning point where you started to
have success with women.”

“You mean besides giving up the porn?” Roberts asked
back.

“Wait, you told me you stopped the porn,” Blake
asked. “But your computer. Never mind. Not important.”

“Doctor Blake it is like this: Porn itself isn't the
problem. It is how we are perceiving it,” Roberts said with a
slightly intellectual bent in his voice. “My internal gut level
uncontrolled reaction to anything sexual is everything. If my
reaction is fear, like with a beautiful woman, it will show in my
behavior. Men should never fear anything when talking to any woman.
It's not natural. Natural is conveying desire with your eyes.”

“Hmm,” Dr. Blake contemplated. “But I remember being
nervous around my wife when I met her at first. She was beautiful
and I wanted it to work. Isn't that a very common universal
experience among men?”

“Well it's all a matter of degree and it's also about
the level of fear and how that affects your ability to take action
and most definitely your unconscious behavior.”

“Yeah but you didn't answer my question,” Dr. Blake
protested. “I was nervous and I got the girl. You often hear
stories of couples after the fact talking about the early days of
the courtship and how the guy bent over backwards to impress the
girl.”

“Well there is a couple things there Doc,” Roberts
said. “I think it's easy to look back after everything turned out
alright for everyone and have a good chuckle over things. My
question always is: what level of success did the guy have with
other women? Or more to the point: did the guy get luckier than he
should have?”

“What do you mean?” Dr. Blake asked. “Luckier.”

“One thing I learned in the process of getting to
where I am now from basically begging girls like Tanya, girls I had
never met, to give me something, anything in the way of attention:
is that you need to be attractive to have choices,” Roberts said.
“Men should want the power of repeatable attractiveness. That's the
power of nature behind them.

“When I look at your situation with your wife, I see
that you had tremendous social power as a doctor in training. This
social power can create attractiveness where it might not rightly
exist. Most men won't have that power. They aren't going to be
doctors or lawyers.”

“Jeez you have some very different ideas, but to me I
think you are a woman hater,” Blake opined.

“I admit there was a time I hated Tanya, and at first
it was because she did things that reminded me of past failures
with women,” Roberts said. “Then I hated her because she was stupid
enough to play me and I felt like I lost time. See you have to
understand that I didn't have the really high-temper motive by the
time this guy died.”

“But you were really hurt. You said so yourself,” Dr.
Blake said.

“Definitely, but I knew I could go get more women. I
had the capability,” Roberts said. “Don't get me wrong, I had
basically all my eggs in one basket with Tanya. The reason for that
is I had so much time invested. But I changed A LOT during the
process of 3 to 4 years getting to know her. I had hatred but I
couldn't murder someone over her.”

…

Tanya was on the phone crying hysterically in a rare
occurrence: she had her house completely to herself. Her mother was
at the store gathering food. No cousins. Her brother had just
started college.

“I have to tell someone. This is all going so wrong,”
she cried into the small smartphone. “I can't let this happen to
innocent people. You have to tell the truth too. I love you. I love
you so much. But I won't be part of this.