That first week, she told him her daddy had bought the island for her when she was sixteen, a birthday present; you're the only sixteen-year-old girl in the world who has her own private island, Daddy had told her. Santo pictured him as some kind of asshole rich guy with white duck pants and a double-breasted blue blazer, white yachting cap on his head, "Here you are, darlin, here's your own private island"-while people all over the world were digging in garbage cans for food. Built her a house on the island when she got married, told his daughter she ought to have a little place where she could get away from it all, little seaside hideaway half an hour from the mainland, only it wasn't so little-there were four bedrooms in the place, not to mention the playroom in the basement and the guest room that used to be the psychiatrist's-
That was the first time he caught her lying. That was during the first week; he wasn't even her prisoner then, they were still, you know, making it day and night and promising undying love to each other. He caught the lie, and he said, "Hey, how come if your daddy bought you this island when you were sixteen, and then he built this house for you when you were twenty-one and got married-then how come you told me you bought this house from a man who used to be a psychiatrist and who put those big double doors in downstairs so nobody could hear his patients yelling they're Napoleon, how come, huh?"
So she admitted then that she hadn't bought the house from a psychiatrist at all, she had in fact been
married
to the psychiatrist who'd put in those big double doors downstairs so that his patients could feel free to divulge the deepest secrets of their labyrinthine pasts without being overheard by anyone. It still sounded very fishy to Santo, and he told her so. This was on the fourth day, he guessed it was. This was when they were still eating, drinking, and making merry. She finally told him the truth the next day, or at least he
guessed
it was the truth, he couldn't really say for sure. They were walking on the beach. He was wearing an old sweater she'd loaned him, said it had belonged to her psychiatrist husband, who wasn't a psychiatrist at all-but of course he didn't know that until after she'd told him the truth. There were gulls circling a dead fish that had washed ashore, raising a terrible racket, white and gray against the clear September sky, their beaks a more intense yellow than the pale gold of the sunshine in which they floated. The ocean was very calm. Her voice was very calm, too.
She told him it was true that her father had bought the island for her when she was sixteen, and she told him it was further true that he'd built the house here for her and her husband when they got married. "When I was twenty-one," she said, "I'm twenty-eight now," which was another lie, but he didn't discover that one until he looked at the back of the graduation picture in the living room and saw the date. Anyway, the way she was telling it now, her husband left her after they'd been married only six months, just picked up and left her one day, and she'd had this, well, what you might call a nervous breakdown. Her father refused to have her committed to a hospital, so he arranged for private care in the house here on the island, which was when he had the double doors installed, both of them with locks on them. So that she wouldn't hurt herself. She became suicidal, you see. When her husband left her. She tried committing suicide several times. The double doors, securely locked, were for her own protection. A nurse sat outside them day and night. This was when she was still twenty-one, and her husband left her.
Santo listened to all this and thought. Well, I hooked onto a real bedbug this time, but he expressed sympathy for all she'd been through, poor kid, and asked her how she was feeling now, and she said, "Can't you
tell
how I'm feeling? I'm feeling marvelous!" He supposed that was true, she certainly looked healthy and strong and she fucked like a jackrabbit, but he'd once known a mentally retarded girl in Diamondback who everybody on the block used to fuck, take her up on the roof and fuck her, and whereas she didn't have all her marbles when it came to arithmetic or spelling, she sure knew how to jazz a man clean out of his mind. Which might be the same with this girl, this
woman
really, said she was twenty-eight, but he knew she was thirty-two-she might be somebody who still ought to be kept behind locked doors except when she was fucking her brains out, which if she had her way she'd have done day and night through Christmas, except he told her he had to get back to the mainland.
Took him thirty seconds to realize he was a prisoner. If she hadn't told him that story about the breakdown and the locked double doors, he'd have maybe thought, Well, the woman's havin a little sport with me, she's got me locked in here, but she's gonna come down here in just a little while wearin only a black garter belt and mesh stockings and high-heeled patent-leather pumps, and she's just gonna squirt whipped cream all over me and eat me up alive and beg my pardon for playin such a bad joke on me, makin me think I was a prisoner here. That's what he
might
have thought if she hadn't just two days earlier told him the story about going bonkers when her husband left right after they got married. She might have been lying about
that,
too, but he didn't think somebody lied about having a mental breakdown. No, this room he found himself in-this prison, this cage-used to be
her
prison, her cage with a nurse sitting outside it, maybe ready with a straitjacket or a shot of something to knock her out, who the hell knew? And now
he
was the prisoner, and she was outside there, putting dope in his food whenever she wanted to, and coming to the room to pass the time of day with him, and showing him the big mother German shepherd the very day she bought him, which was three days after she locked him in-this was after she'd doped his food the first time, and he was lying bound hand and foot on the bed. The doors opened and she brought in the German shepherd, fuckin thing looked like a
grizzly
bear, he was that big. Santo backed away from him, and she smiled, the bitch, showing her even white teeth, tossing her long blond hair. "Don't be frightened, sweetie," she said, "Clarence is the gentlest human being on earth." Clarence! And Clarence growled deep in his throat the way gentle human beings
never
do, man, he growled and those black lips of his or whatever you call them, that soft black flesh around the mouth drew back to show teeth that had to be six inches long, each and every one of them. The gentlest human being on earth looked like he was ready to tear a big fat hunk of meat out of Santo's leg or maybe leap for his throat and rip out his windpipe. And she smiled. She smiled, the bitch. "Clarence is going to be on the island from now on," she said. And later, after he tried to escape that first time and the dog came after him, later she told him that Clarence was going to be sitting outside his room from now on, just the way her nurse used to sit out there when she was having the trouble that time. "If there's anything you need," she said, smiling, "you just ask Clarence." Smiling.
At first, Santo thought he could hold out on her. Okay, you bitch, you want to keep me prisoner on this fuckin island with a fuckin German shepherd roaming the grounds, okay, you know what you're gonna get from me? You're gonna get
this.
sister, that's what you're gonna get, you're gonna get nothin, zero, zilch, nada, bubkes,
that's
what! But when she came in to make love that first time-this was maybe two or three weeks after she bought the dog-she locked the doors behind her, both doors, and then hung the keys on Clarence's collar, and said, "Sit, Clarence," and the fuckin mutt sat just inside the door, and watched her as she walked to the bed. She was wearing a pale blue nightgown, nothing under it, he could see her body through the thin nylon, a beautiful body, it was her body that had attracted him to her in the first place, tall and slender, with good breasts and long legs, she came to the bed and sat on the edge of it and said, "Don't you want to make love, Santo?" and he told her he didn't want to make love, he wouldn't make love to anybody who kept him prisoner with a goddamn dog named Clarence ready to bite him, get the dog out of here, get out of here yourself, I don't want to make love to a bitch like you!
But… you know… it had been almost three weeks already, three weeks since he'd had
any
woman at all, three weeks since they'd been going at it day and night, and here she was now, crawling onto the bed beside him, and wriggling out of the gown, and then taking him in her hands, and then in her mouth, and then suddenly moving away from him, rolling onto her back and throwing her legs wide the way she had that night in the kitchen, and suddenly he was on top of her and not caring whether he was her prisoner or her slave or whatever, only wanting her, wanting her, and hating himself for wanting her.
He dreamed constantly of escape. He held back a fork from his tray one time-she never let him have a knife, the bitch, his food was always cut for him when she brought it in-kept the fork and tried digging a hole in the bathroom wall, get out of this fuckin room into the basement, get around the dog somehow, but the fork broke on the cinderblock, and when she found it missing later, she punished him again, there was always the punishment when he did something wrong, something she thought was wrong. Another time, he pretended he was sick, stuck his finger down his throat and vomited all over the floor, told her he thought he had appendicitis or something, figured if he could get her to call a doctor… but no, she told him no doctor, she made him wipe up the vomit, he said he was going to die, she said, "No, you're not going to die." Always dreaming of escape. Get out of here, get to the boat. Get free.
He heard a key turning in the inner door. He waited. The door opened. She stood there holding Clarence's leash in one hand. She smiled, led Clarence into the room, said, "Sit, Clarence," and then went out into the corridor for Santo's tray of food. She carried it to the coffee table in front of the couch, put it down, and-still smiling-said, "Are you hungry, sweetie?"
He did not answer her. He sat immediately and began eating.
"Did you miss me?" she asked.
He still said nothing. He continued wolfing down the food. From across the room, just inside the door, Clarence sat on his haunches and watched.
"I had some business to take care of in the city," she said.
"I'm not interested," he said.
"I thought you might be."
"I'm not."
She shrugged, went to the door, and took the dog's leash in her hand again. "I'll be back later," she said.
"You ever wonder what would happen if you should die?" he asked suddenly, looking up from the food on his tray. "I'd starve to death in here, do you realize that?"
"Yes, I do," she said. "But don't worry, sweetie, we've got a good long life ahead of us."
He said nothing.
"What shall I wear later?" she asked.
"I don't care what you wear," he said.
"What's your favorite? I want to make you happy tonight."
"You can make me happy by leaving me alone."
"I don't believe that."
"Believe it, it's true."
"Shall I wear the black wig?"
"I told you I don't care."
"Finish your dinner," she said. "I'll surprise you, all right? I'll wear something you've never seen before."
"If you want to surprise me, you'll come in later and tell me I'm a free man."
"No, I can't do that."
"Why not?"
"I need you, Santo."
"I want to leave here."
"Yes, I know that."
"I'm going crazy here. If you keep me here any longer, I'll go out of my mind. I'll
die,
do you understand? I'll die in this room."
"You won't die," she said, and smiled again. "Not unless I
want
you to die. Please remember that, Santo." She looked up at the clock. "I'll be back in an hour. Will you be ready for me in an hour?"
"No."
"Be ready," she said.
"I hate you," he said softly.
"You love me," she answered, and smiled again. She was leaving the room when she seemed to remember something. She turned, looked at him, and said, "Oh, by the way-C. J. won't be visiting us anymore."
8
Monday morning, September 18, while Meyer was on the phone checking with both the Muscular Dystrophy Association and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in an attempt to determine whether either or both had sponsored a benefit ball early in September seven years ago, Carella took a call from a man named Henry Gombes at Ballistics.
"On these spent bullets found at the scene," he said.
"This the Chadderton case?" Carella asked.
"Chadderton, Chadderton," Gombes said, obviously consulting a sheet of paper in front of him, "yes, Chadderton, Culver and South Eleventh, September fifteenth, that's right."
"That's right," Carella said.
"I'll send the report on later," Gombes said, "but meanwhile, do you want to take some of this stuff down?"
"Shoot," Carella said.
"No ejected cartridge casings found at the scene, which indicates the weapon wasn't an automatic pistol. Five bullets were recovered, though, three of them badly deformed-"
"Those would've been the three that hit the victims," Carella said.
"Two victims, were there?"
"Yes."
"One still alive from what I understand."
"That's right."
"Did he say how many shots he'd heard?"
"He couldn't remember."
"The reason I ask… the fact that only five bullets were found at the scene doesn't necessarily indicate the revolver had only a five-shot capacity."