Falling in Love (4 page)

“
Whatever you want is fine
with me.” He owned her, but then he owned everyone and everything
around here. “Thank you, Mister Chauncey.”

With his most charming smile, he
nodded politely and tugged at his forelock. That defiance was what
made her. Again, he just stared at her. He could not think of a
single thing to say and finally shrugged. He bowed out at last with
a final word and an inclination of the head.

“
Adieu, my fair
lady.”

Scene Two

After several weeks she thought he had
forgotten about it, but that wasn’t Chauncey’s way.

He was putting some thought into it.
Buying her a dress and delivering it to her room. Sending flowers,
making a mockery of courting her, winking at her, being solicitous
of her comforts, paying her little flatteries in front of every
employee and all the customers, it was all a bad business and her
fear built. It was his way of telling her.

He was showing her off.

They had dinner at the finest
restaurant in town, far away in the brilliantly lit uptown area,
Chauncey’s bodyguards relaxed and confident as they stood in an
alcove off to one side. He plied her with compliments and
champagne, and she forced herself to smile, and to be flattered,
and to eat and to drink. She remained polite but aloof.

After drawing it out for hours,
peering into her eyes and trying to read her every thought and
feeling, he seemed satisfied with her discomfort. Calling for the
check, the boys came and escorted them, not out the front doors as
she expected, but around the back of the kitchen, down several
crooked alleys and then into the back of a barn-like red brick
building. Her fears mounted. They climbed an impossible number of
stairs past smelly male bodies and the reek of beer and
tobacco.

The light above was bright but the
stairs were dim and her flesh crawled as Chauncey held her hand and
assisted her. She climbed the stairs with ladylike grace, in her
ridiculously high heels and tightly-constricting red silk dress,
her cleavage exposed to leering faces peering down from
above.

He stood and beckoned
proudly.

They were in an amphitheatre, square
in plan, with rows and rows of white-painted plank benches plunging
down into a centre well. The noise was horrendous, with hundreds of
people smoking and drinking, all of them speaking at once. The room
was brightly lit, except for the mysterious hole in the middle of
the room, which was dark.

Chauncey’s boys cleared a way, and he
led her to a small door along a passage on the right side of the
hall.

“
Private box.” The
boastful tone annoyed Chauncey for a second, and his face
darkened.

“
Very impressive.” She did
her best, and his face cleared up in a beatific smile.

They sat as an announcer barked and
nattered at the people from a long brass megaphone. The lights over
the audience began to dim as the lights over the centre well went
on one by one.

There was a man in there, a huge man
with a sword hanging in his right hand. From behind, she made out
the head and shoulders of another man, but he was obscured from the
neck down by the intervening heads of people in the front row. The
noise began to abate.

Her hand flew up to her
mouth.

“
No!”

Olaf’s head came up and the great chin
lifted and their eyes locked.

His mouth opened but no sound came
out.

The sword dropped from his hand just
as the bell rang and with a snarl, the smaller man stepped forward
quickly, perhaps sensing his only chance at life, and with a wild
swing of a heavy scimitar, stuck Olaf in the side of the neck with
all of his strength and a grunt of exertion.

Olaf’s head fell to the sand, staring
off straight along the sandy floor as she gasped. The magnificent
body tottered and then fell as his opponent stepped back and then
flung his arms upward in a wild gesture of triumph and
relief.

“
Damn!” Chauncey was
furious.

She would be lucky to survive the next
few minutes.

His eyes turned and locked on
hers.

“
I had a lot of money
invested in him.” He grimaced and then spat out the front of the
booth, drawing a curse from someone out there who glared until the
bodyguards glared back and showed signs of restlessness.

“
Still, I suppose it’s not
your fault.”

She tried to pull herself away from
Olaf’s dead eyes as the victor strutted around the ring and
Chauncey marveled at his bad fortune in the foulest
tones.

Scene Three

The night ended as she knew it must.
Chauncey had all the power and his mood was artificially boisterous
one minute and then bloody murderous the next. Chauncey hated
disappointment, and he’d had a big one tonight.

She knew she was in for it when he
dismissed the boys outside of his bedroom.

She had made no protest, simply
clinging to the purse and maintaining her dignity.

“
Well, come in. Come in.”
The lights were always on in Chauncey’s room.

She stepped through the door. Chauncey
flung his jacket over a chair and went to the side table where
decanters stood.

He came over with wine and helped her
out of her wrap.

“
Are you all right, old
girl?” He lifted the glass to his mouth and stepping back, looked
her over from head to toe as she desperately tried to look bold and
brassy, and not wither under his gaze from disgust.

“
You, are a very beautiful
woman, Selena.”

She swallowed wine, to numb
herself.

“
Thank you. You’re very
kind, sir.”

The prim formality was a lucky
impulse. He smiled, drinking again, and then putting down the
glass.

Taking the glass from her, he set that
aside too.

Selena’s heart began to throb in her
chest and she was afraid he would feel it within her as he drew her
in close.

He kissed her, long and deep and hard,
and she tried to respond as best she could.

His feet rocked from side to side as
his hands crept ever so slowly down to her buttocks. Her arms came
up and she held him lightly by the shoulders as they rotated in a
half circle. He kneaded her bum firmly, the breath noisy through
their noses and the sound of light music coming in through the open
window from half a block away.

She kept her eyes closed and feigned
unbridled passion.

He walked her in reverse until the
backs of her knees hit the bed.

He pulled his mouth away. Looking
down, he took the dress in two hands and ripped it down, until the
thing fell away and dropped past her knees. She lifted her feet and
it fell away. She stood stock still, wearing nothing but her shoes
and a string of artificial pearls, waiting.

He stared at her breasts, taking them
in his hands and then he forced her back onto the bed, with their
eyes locked the whole time.

She wiggled, and he crawled, mouths
locked, until they were higher, with the pillows under her
head.

She gasped and stroked his shoulders
and his head. As he bent to kiss her tummy and then came up again
to suck on her left nipple, her right hand went up to her hair,
elegantly curled and coifed and perfumed just so. Chauncey was
paying and cost was no object. Her fingertips found what she
sought.

As he lifted and straightened up, they
were face to face. Her legs spread and wrapped around him. He
grinned, licking his lips and then his full weight was coming
down.

Stroking his chest, popping the
buttons on his blue silk shirt, she found the ribs.

Chauncey came in for another kiss and
she inserted the sturdy three-inch hatpin between the ribs and into
the heart with a furious shove.

His eyes bugged out and he raised up,
and she pulled the needle out and plunged it down again just above
the collarbone with all of her force, as Chauncey’s right hand in
pure reflex pulled back to punch her.

He never finished the move. A
spreading black stain soaked his shirt and his mouth opened and he
stared at her in puzzlement. Blood bubbled up from the back of his
throat.

He looked like a lost little
boy.

“
Why?”

She gave a hard shove and Chauncey
went face-first onto the carpet beside the bed, legs trailing
behind but still on the edge of the mattress.

Selena got up from the other side and
went around and stood over the body. She spat on Chauncey
Mifflin.

“
Because I liked
him.”

She gave the inert form a slight kick
but he was clearly gone. Whirling decisively, she went to where
Chauncey’s wall safe stood habitually unlocked.

He always bragged that he was the only
schmuck in town who never had to worry about locking the safe.
Outside the room she heard vague mutters from the bodyguards,
probably drinking on their hard kitchen chairs, and not paying much
attention. They knew all about it by now, of course. Chauncey’s
habits. Chauncey’s tastes. His appetites.

Sure enough, there were stacks of
greenbucks and a half a dozen bags of heavy coins, with the door
hanging open two inches. Selena made do with the bills, as it was
bulky but at least silent in the carrying. She wrapped herself in
her shawl after quickly pinning her dress together with paper clips
from Chauncey’s desk drawer. The blood stains were all up high,
hidden by the shawl. She checked herself in the mirror.

Going to the window, she stepped over
the sill and onto the fire-escape.

She spared one last look into the dead
eyes.

“
Because I liked him. You
bastard.”

She pulled a lever and the steps
dropped down with a screech that split the night.

She tap-tapped down the stairs with
her chin up and an air of quiet calm, her bulging purse clutched
firmly under her arm.

The hulking figure of Hal loomed at
the mouth of the darkened alley.

“
Evening, Hal.”

His jaw dropped and he tipped his hat.
He watched her walk by. She smiled sweetly, for he had once been a
good man and more than most, he was polite. Big, strong and not
particularly gifted in the head, Hal was just misguided, even
genuinely kind at times, a victim as much as anyone else around
here.

“
Good evening, Miss
Selena.”

He stood there with a bottle of beer
in one hand and a battered clay pipe in the other and watched with
mournful, lonely thoughts as Selena walked up the street into the
darkness that covered a multitude of sins.

The Logic of Love

Scene One

Twenty-six years old and still not
married, according to her mother. Constable Laine Barrett left the
station after shift change and briefing. Her first call was a minor
roadside incident which turned out to be nothing much. Pickup in a
shallow ditch. That was on Brittelsfield Road, and then dispatch
wanted her somewhere else.

The next incident was just some old
fellow who had pulled off to answer his cellular phone and got
sucked in by the dense snow, plowed off to one side. He couldn’t
get it going again. He was another one with no snow tires. He and
the wife were very apologetic. She was legally blind or maybe she
would have been able to answer while they kept going. They’d been
meaning to get around to buying snow tires.

Two in a row.

She’d seen a few of them
lately.

Dispatch advised her to hold up in a
central location.

Proceeding north on Pontiac Road, a
north-south gravel side-road with no houses for several kilometres
in each direction, there was a car coming towards her. She kept
well to the right in the blowing, drifting snow flurries, checking
her rear-view mirror as the oncoming car passed her patrol vehicle.
It was all open fields out here, and there was nothing to stop the
snow from drifting across the road. Her car punched through the
small drifts with ease.

The other vehicle seemed to be going
pretty slow, and with a quick look in the side-mirror, she noted
the light over the rear license plate was burned out.

There were no houses and hence no
driveways along this stretch. What were they doing there at all? It
was the middle of nowhere. She backed off and slowed down. She
managed a three-point turn, keeping it on the hard surface, which
with gravel sticking out and frozen into it, had pretty good
traction. She set off in cautious pursuit.

The small silver car stopped at the
next intersection. He signaled and then turned left. There was
nothing down there for at least a couple of kilometres.

Again, the vehicle didn’t seem to be
going very fast. It was an eighty kilometre per hour zone. Most
people did go a bit faster than that, even in the worst conditions
sometimes. They knew what they could get away with consistently.
Laine gradually came up close behind the vehicle and then hit the
lights.