Mortal Lock (11 page)

“Darwinism is all about evolution,” I said, mildly. I say
everything
mildly—at least that’s what my wife, Tammi, is always telling me. “And part of human evolution was getting past the rule of fang and claw, wasn’t it?”

“Superficially, I suppose that’s true,” Mark Chilton said, holding his pipe like a college professor, the way he does when he pontificates. “But, in the final analysis, it still comes down to power, doesn’t it? Power and dominance, isn’t that the goal of each nation?”

“Self-defense isn’t the same thing as dominance,” I protested. Mildly.

“Maybe not,” Roger said, his resonant voice reflecting off the walls of the big room. “But, bottom line, if you can’t stand up to a bully, you’re
going
to be dominated. I don’t care if you’re some kid with his lunch money or an entire country. The point is, individually or collectively, we’re all going to be tested, and we can’t make that natural process disappear just by passing some stupid liberal ‘rule’ against it. Trying to legislate human nature never works. You might as well tell teenagers not to have sex.”

Tammi giggled when he said that. You don’t have to be all that clever to make her giggle, as long as you’re a man. Unless you’re a mild one.

She’s not much of a conversationalist, my wife, but she doesn’t have to say a lot to get people to look at her. Especially the way she dresses. It’s a little … embarrassing. To me, anyway. Tammi’s thirty-seven, not nineteen. She shouldn’t be wearing outfits like she does, even in this climate. But every time I bring it up, all she ever says is: “I’ve still got the body for it, don’t I?”

There’s no arguing with the attention she draws. And Tammi loves attention; she always did.

Roger’s wife never says much. She’s Asian—from Thailand, I think, but I don’t know for sure. She looks a lot younger than him, but Tammi says that’s just because she’s so small and skinny.

I always think of Saturdays as kind of belonging to Roger. They start in the early evening, with him at the helm of a huge stainless-steel outdoor grill. He has it positioned at the far corner of the veranda-sized flagstone patio he had custom-built. After we eat, the gatherings go on until all hours of the night. There’s always music playing through his full-house sound system, but not many in our crowd are dancers. Mostly, we spend the time talking and drinking.

Listening, actually.

After the first time at Roger’s, Tammi couldn’t stop complaining the second we got back home. “You’d think, with all the money he’s supposed to have, there would have been some live entertainment. Or at least a sit-down dinner. It was just so … boring.” She was still carrying on when I fell asleep.

The next time Roger invited us, I thought we’d just make up some excuse. But when I told Tammi, she suddenly decided she was all for it. And she really got into the spirit of things, too. Instead of the little black cocktail dress she had worn the first time, she put on a pair of jeans—the kind the kids wear, cut way too low—and a little T-shirt that showed her navel. And, once we got there, she had a few things to say, too. Nothing I’d call profound, but she
was
participating.

Since then, it’s become kind of a regular thing. By now, so many people come that we tend to break up into groups. Some of the men play cards—nothing radical, not for big stakes—nobody ever gets upset if they lose. Roger has a beautiful billiard room, too, and that always gets some action. Some even use the swimming pool; although not too often, unless it’s the middle of summer.

But even with a dozen things going on at once, Roger never leaves his spot in front of the fireplace. It takes up a whole wall of what he calls the “great room.” Anyone who wants to talk to Roger has to come in there to do it.

2

Usually, Tammi just leaves me alone after supper. So when she came into my study one evening, I knew there was going to be some kind of argument.

“Do you have to spend so much time building those stupid models of yours?” was the first thing out of her mouth.

“They’re not models,” I told her, patiently. “They’re miniatures.”

“What’s the difference?” she said. I recognized the signs: her jaw was set and her voice was already edgy.

“Models are prefabricated. All you have to do is put them together, whereas—”

“Paul! I
meant
, what’s the difference
what
you putter around with? I was talking about all the time you spend at it.”

“Well, you’re always on the computer and I just—”

“You’re pathetic,” she said. She turned and walked out of my study, wiggling her bottom extra hard to make sure I knew it was meant to be taunting, not tempting.

3

Tammi doesn’t work, but that’s not her fault. The way we planned it, she would be staying at home with our kids. But kids never came. Every time I mentioned maybe seeing a fertility specialist, Tammi gave me one of her looks—the kind I didn’t even know she had until we had been married for over a year.

So I went on my own, without saying anything to her. “I can’t tell you more without examining your wife and running additional tests,” the doctor told me, “but we can definitely rule out any … impediment at your end. Both motility and viability are more than adequate for.…”

I’m not one of those men who doesn’t want his wife to work. But Tammi never found anything she really likes to do. She’s not stupid; in fact, she taught herself a wide variety of computer skills.
And she’s certainly not lazy; her exercise regimen would exhaust a professional athlete. She once told me that keeping a small waist is the key to a woman’s shape. “If you’ve got it down, it makes everything else kind of stick out, see, Paul?” she said, turning so her body was in profile.

I suggested she might want to go back to school. That’s where I met her, in college: she was a freshman and I was a grad student. But Tammi wasn’t interested in formal education, except when she got excited about some new thing. Then she would take all kinds of classes—yoga, tai chi, photography, things like that. She’s always wildly enthusiastic at first, but then it just goes flat for her, somehow.

Like we had.

4

“Do you think Roger was really a mercenary in the Congo?” Tammi said to me one night, as we were getting ready for bed.

“Where did you hear that?”

“Oh, Carla’s husband, Larry—he was in the army, himself—told her. And she told me.”

“In the Congo? When would that have been?”

“What difference does that make?” she said, sharply. “That’s just like you, Paul. Always nitpicking, checking every little detail. I mean, he
seems
like the kind of man who could have been a soldier of fortune, don’t you think?”

“A ‘soldier of fortune’?” I said, with maybe just a trace of sarcasm.

“What, I didn’t use the proper term?” Tammi said, hands on her hips. “Are you going to correct me, Paul?”

“I wasn’t trying to do that,” I said.

“No,” she said, the sneer thick in her voice. “I can’t imagine you would.”

5

I know Tammi cheats on me. Not in the flesh—well, maybe that’s not the right way to put it, considering what I found out. Once I installed the spyware on our computer, it was easy enough for me to reconstruct how she spends her days when I’m at work, especially since we’re on the same wireless network.

Maybe sending nude photographs of herself over the Internet doesn’t meet the legal definition of adultery, but some of her e-mails were … well, they were considerably more than cyber-flirting. Still, no matter how diligently I checked—even after I installed the recorder on our phone lines, and the fiber-optic cameras in the house—I never uncovered any evidence that she actually met any of those men in real life.

I call her from work sporadically, so she can never know when to expect it. But she always answers when I call. She never even sounds out of breath. I guess she doesn’t know forwarding our home number to her cell phone shows up on the bill every time she pulls that trick. Or maybe she doesn’t care.

I use my sick days to maintain surveillance, too. I tell her I’m going to work, but I spend the day watching the house. Or following her, when she goes out. I guess I could have paid a private detective to do all this, but it’s not the kind of thing I want to discuss with other people. Or even admit.

Besides, I’m not sure I could trust someone I hired. I’m the kind of man who likes to do things himself—that’s the only way I can make certain it comes out properly.

6

“Sure, they’re good enough to catch some moron holding up a liquor store, or a wife who poisons her husband,” Roger said, one Saturday night. “But the police haven’t got a chance against a highly evolved killer.”

Bobby Williams started to say, “There’s been plenty of murderers who thought they were geniuses until—”

“No, no,” Roger interrupted. “I didn’t say ‘smart’; I said, ‘highly evolved.’ There’s a big difference.”

“What?” Marcy Chilton asked. She’s the opposite of her husband, very parsimonious with her words.

“The highly evolved killer is one who makes a statement,” Roger said. “Not some animal who guns down a shopkeeper in a holdup.”

“You mean, like Ted Bundy, someone like him?” Tammi asked, breathlessly.

“Exactly!” Roger replied.

Tammi arched her back like a cat who had just been stroked.

“Ted Bundy was a sex fiend,” Theresa Wright said, sharply. She’s married to Sam Wright, a church deacon. The two of them generally agree with Roger on everything, especially when he starts ranting about liberals, but the idea of seeing a rapist as highly evolved apparently was too much for her to swallow.

“I’m not so sure that’s true,” Roger said, judiciously. “Certainly, there was a sexual … aura to his killings—there often is, I believe—but he was successful for a very long time before he was caught. And we
still
have no idea how many women he actually raped and killed.”

“
That’s
your idea of highly evolved? A killer who gets away with more murders than the authorities find out about?” Mark said.

“Well, isn’t it yours?” Roger challenged him. “Isn’t that the way we evaluate
any
activity: by whether you’re successful at it? Look at the most famous murderer in history, Jack the Ripper. Do you think, if he had ever been caught, he’d still be in the public eye centuries later? Do you think people would still be writing books about him? Making movies? Speculating about his identity?”

“People are still speculating about who shot JFK, too,” Sam Wright retorted.

I don’t like the Wrights very much—I can smell their disapproval of Tammi like heavy perfume in an elevator. But I do admire the way they’re always on the same side, backing each other up.

“Conspiracy buffs,” Roger said, dismissively.

“But you just said—”

“The highly evolved killer is the one who kills at
random
,” Roger said emphatically, veins swelling in the muscle of his voice like those in his flexed biceps. “It doesn’t matter who he kills, it’s just his way of making a statement. Look at the Zodiac,
another
killer they never caught. Do you think the newspapers would have published his letters if he hadn’t proven himself?”

“Proven himself?” I said.

Tammi gave me one of those looks she specializes in.

“Proven his expertise,” Roger said, not missing a beat. “Like providing your credentials. He killed
when
he wanted,
where
he wanted,
who
he wanted … and there was nothing the cops could ever do about it.”

“The papers published the Unabomber’s manifesto, too,” Mark Chilton said, toady that he is.

“And he got caught,” I rejoined, catching another look from Tammi.

“He would
never
have been caught,” Roger said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “Not by all the law enforcement in America. It was his own family that turned him in.”

“So he wasn’t as highly evolved as the Zodiac?” I said, keeping my voice neutral.

“That’s right!” Roger said, pointing his finger at me. I was glad I wasn’t standing closer. Once he had made a point with that same finger, jabbing it into my chest. It felt like a piece of rebar—I had the bruise for days. “The ultimate killer never leaves himself vulnerable to the weakness of others.”

“Morality isn’t weakness,” Sam Wright said, his voice as strong as his convictions.

“It’s a good thing the military doesn’t share your philosophy,” Roger delivered his knockout punch. “Or we’d all be having this conversation in German.”

7

“You don’t even try anymore,” Tammi said to me, later that night. She was wearing the black teddy she likes to pose in for her webcam.

“Try what?”

“Sex,” she said, almost spitting out the word.

“You’re joking,” I said, disgusted. With her and myself, both. “What’s the point of asking for something when you know the answer’s going to be ‘no’?”

“That’s your problem, Paul. Can you imagine
Roger’s
wife saying ‘no’ to him?”

“Not with him holding her green card,” I said, not so mildly.

“You’re disgusting,” Tammi said. She rolled over, her frozen back doing the rest of her talking for her.

8

That Monday, I called Roger’s house from work. His wife answered the phone. Her name is Kanya, something like that.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was like a child’s.

“Good morning,” I said, speaking through the harmonizer that transformed my voice into an elderly man’s. “Is Mr. Kenworth at home?”

“Oh, yes, sure. I get him, okay?”

I hung up.

That night, Tammi asked me if I wanted to watch a movie with her. I was a little surprised. Usually, she spends the whole evening on the computer. I asked her, what did she want me to go out and rent? But she already had a DVD loaded.

It only took a minute before I realized what kind of movie it was.

“I don’t want to watch that stuff,” I said, getting off the couch.

“Oh, don’t be such a little wimp
all
the time,” Tammi snapped at me. “I thought, if we watched it together, maybe you’d get some ideas. Besides how to build bridges or whatever it is you do at work, I mean.”