Nice Girls Finish Last (28 page)

Franco had flown below my radar.

“Elroy,” I said.

Elroy said nothing for a long time. After untying my mask and removing it, he gave us each a paper bag from McDonald's, then sat down on the armless sofa, peeled a nicotine patch off his arm, and lit a cigarette. Then he just stared at me.

“Are you going to let us go?” I asked.

Stupid question, but it was worth a shot, anyway.

“No,” he said.

“Are you going to keep us?”

“Yes,” he said.

“For how long?”

He shrugged, continued to stare.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“I just want to make you happy,” he said.

You know, you pray for a man who will see all your finest qualities, and none of your worst ones. A man who will look on you adoringly, treat you like a queen.

Be careful what you pray for …

“I would be so much happier if you'd let me go,” I said. “I can't be happy like this.”

“I know her,” Aunt Mo said. “She's telling the truth.”

“Shut up!” he said, suddenly angry. He pulled out his gun and pointed it at Aunt Maureen.
“You
shut up! I wasn't talking to you.”

Crazy people. They are so unpredictable.

“She's tired,” I explained. “And she's been in leather for a long time. Can't she just take a shower? It would make her feel so much better. She's elderly. Please.”

“Eat first,” he said.

I did eat, but I also took careful mental notes about Elroy. He had keys on his trouser loops. Presumably one of those keys fit the lock on the chains around my hands and feet. He had a gun holster. Black scuffed shoes.

“Okay,” he said to Aunt Mo, suddenly sweet now. He unhooked her from her harness, unchained her, and took her at gunpoint to the bathroom. “Knock when you're ready to come out. Take your time.”

When he heard the shower going, he came back, reholstered his gun, and sat at my feet. The Bible was just out of reach.

“We're alone,” he said, kneeling at my feet, which he began to massage.

Hurry up, Aunt Mo, I thought. It was disgusting. Not that I wouldn't like it if someone else were doing it. He looked up at me, and I smiled politely, pretended I was enjoying it. I just knew at any moment he was going to start sucking on my toes and licking my feet.

He had it all set up now. He could make me spank him. He had my aunt as a hostage, he had me in harness, and he had a gun. By now, the cops had to know who Joey's half-brother Vern was. Maybe they had prints. Maybe they had a photo. Still, all Franco had to do was cover those ears and he could move pretty easily around a big city like New York without detection. The
New York Post
says there are seventy thousand fugitives from justice—most of them felons—hiding out in New York.

They might not find us for months. Years. A happy threesome, me, Aunt Mo, and Norman Bates. I have died. I have gone to hell.

“You have beautiful feet,” Franco said.

I have size ten feet, extra wide. You know, I always wanted a man who would not only overlook my physical flaws, but fall in love with them …

I was trying to figure out how I was supposed to react to all this. You know that old joke? A masochist and a sadist are sitting on a bench. The masochist says, “Hurt me,” and the sadist says, “No”? Did he want me to beat him? I'd beat him all right. Did he go both ways, S
and
M? By killing Kanengiser and shooting at all those others, he'd demonstrated the same corollary violent streak Joey Pinks had. Would he try to beat me?

Before he could suck my toes, Aunt Mo knocked. He took his gun out. When he went to let her out, I inched closer to the Bible, and pulled it toward me.

“You're dressed?” Elroy asked before letting Aunt Mo out.

“Yes.”

She came out and looked at me.

“Back to the wall,” he said, taking her by the arm back to her harness. It took both hands to hook her back up, so he reholstered his gun. His back was to me. I stood very slowly and raised the Bible. Just as he was about to lock her padlock, I brought the Bible down on his head.

At the same time, Aunt Mo punched him right in the balls. She nailed him good three or four times, while I grabbed his gun and held it on him. Aunt Mo threw off her chains and went for his keys.

Once she unshackled me, she said, “Give me the gun, dear. I'm trained in firearms.”

It didn't surprise me in the least that Aunt Mo knew her way around a firearm. I gave her the gun.

Aunt Mo put the gun right to his head, and said, “Up against the wall, you son of a bee.”

“Son of a bee” is about as profane as Aunt Mo gets. Even in times of crisis she'd never say “bitch.”

Except, perhaps, with her body language.

“Didn't anyone teach you that thou shalt not kill? That murder is a mortal sin?” she said.

That's Aunt Mo. Misses no opportunity to give a stern lecture and witness for the Lord.

“Thou shalt not kill!” she said again.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Elroy wept. “I love her. I love her. I'm worthless!”

“I could blow you away right now,” she said. “You know what keeps me from blowing you away right now?”

Unfortunately for Elroy, Aunt Mo wasn't the real forgiving type of Christian.

“W-what?”

“Because it's a sin, you blithering idiot! Didn't you hear a thing I said? Murder is a mortal sin.”

Jeez, give this woman an action movie.

Once I was free of my harness, I chained Elroy's hands. There was nothing to hook the harness onto, though—he was not wearing the convenient angel-of-death black leather number Aunt Mo and I had on, and he wouldn't fit into mine or hers.

“Keep the gun on him,” I said. “I'll look for a telephone.”

“Look for our clothes too, dear,” she said.

There was no phone in the other room. I noticed an electricity cable coming in through a crack in a locked, painted window. A quick check of drawers and the closet produced no rope, no clothes, but quite a few guns. I saw my purse on the table. Next to it was my glue gun. Elroy had apparently examined it, determined it to be useless, and put it aside.

I had an idea.

It took fifteen minutes and a whole big glue cartridge, and Aunt Maureen had to sit on him while the adhesive set, but we managed to glue him to the broken-down sofa. Just to be on the safe side, I hit him several more times with the Bible and knocked him out. Once I got started hitting him, I could hardly stop. I was angry. He wanted punishment, I'd give him punishment. It was Aunt Maureen who stopped me from bludgeoning him to death with the Bible.

“He's out,” she said.

“We'll have to leave like this since I can't find our clothes. Let's grab our handbags and get out of here. Find a phone. Call the cops.”

Beyond this makeshift squat was nothing but a decrepit warehouse. A long hallway led to an exit. It was deadly quiet, until we opened the door and rats scattered.

“Oh good Lord,” Aunt Mo said. “That stairway does not look safe.”

“Come on, Aunt Mo,” I said.

“I can't. I … you don't know this, dear, but I'm terrified of rats. I … I …”

Suddenly, a door opened behind us. I turned. There was a flash of chintz and a gunshot.

It was Elroy, weaving down the hallway, stuck to a sofa, his hands chained, waving one of his other guns.

Aunt Mo was through that door and down that stairwell like God himself pushed her. We had got down one flight when we heard him come into the stairwell above and thunder down. He was a strong boy. It couldn't have been easy to come down those stairs with a sofa stuck to his back. And after that thorough thumping I gave him too.

We came out on the street. I didn't even have time to take note of where we were. It was somewhere on the Lower East Side, judging by the bombed-out-looking buildings. I grabbed Aunt Mo by the arm and we ran down the street.

“He's behind us,” Aunt Mo said.

We were being chased by a man with a sofa on his back. Two women in black leather, being chased by a man with a sofa on his back.

“Can you run faster?” I asked her. We were almost at the corner.

“Surely someone will see this and call the police,” she said.

“Not necessarily, Aunt Mo. We're downtown.”

Elroy took a shot, and Aunt Mo wheeled around and shot back at him, just as I yanked her around the corner, almost giving her whiplash.

We were on Avenue C and Third Street now. Passersby stopped and glanced at us.

“Call the police, call the police!” Aunt Mo screamed.

Nobody made any move to call the police.

Elroy came around the corner shooting. Bystanders hit the sidewalks and covered their heads.

I pulled Aunt Mo into a little Korean grocery. As soon as the guy behind the counter saw us, he whipped out a gun.

“Lock the door,” Aunt Mo said. I did. She turned to the man behind the counter. “Call the police!”

I saw a dark-haired woman slip into the back. She'd be calling the police, I expected. A young man in front of the beer cooler had his hands up.

“Get outta my store,” the man behind the counter said. “I shoot you!”

“Don't shoot! We're not trying to rob you,” I said, huffing to catch my breath.

Elroy was banging on the glass door.

“He's trying to kill us,” I said.

“Holy shit,” said the Korean man. He started screaming in Korean.

The door broke and Elroy came flying through in a shower of shattered glass, roaring like the crazy person he was and waving a gun.

A shot was fired.

Elroy's body slumped and fell to the ground under the sofa.

We looked up. The Korean man put his rifle down on the counter.

“You saw,” he said. “It was self-defense. You're witnesses.”

Aunt Mo and I were both, by this time, hysterical and having trouble getting out an intelligible story, and the store owners, the Lees, were pretty hysterical too. You can imagine this poor Mr. Lee's shock. One minute, he's organizing the ginseng-extract display by his cash register, and the next a man with a sofa glued to his back comes flying through his door brandishing a gun.

When Bigger and Ferber arrived, we were almost coherent. In fact, Detective Richard Bigger and Aunt Mo bonded, and she was able to get out her version of the story, which was riddled with inaccuracies about me that I felt it necessary to dispute point by point. This forced Bigger to split us up, banishing me to an orange crate by the steel beer refrigerator.

I sat down and Detective Mack Ferber put a hand under my right elbow to steady me. It's a funny thing, but my elbows are big erogenous zones for me and I got a thrill when he did that. He smelled good, too, like clean cotton and soap.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

I did. Then I made him tell me everything he knew.

Just as Aunt Maureen had theorized, Elroy Vern had spent the last five years in a series of mental institutions in three states. He'd been committed by his mother shortly before her other son, Joey, tried to kill her.

“Elroy wanted to watch ANN all the time,” the administrator in one institution had said. “Sometimes he became disruptive when other patients wanted to turn the channel in the rec room.”

Just like Louis Levin's monkey, I thought.

A fellow patient had said, “All he talked about was this reporter, a redhead, like his mother when she was young.”

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with extreme sadistic and extreme masochistic tendencies, Elroy Vern had been shuttled about to several hospitals. Then, due to government cutbacks and institutional overcrowding, he had been medicated and released. With forged papers from Joey, he had made his way east and applied for work at ANN, where Pete took a liking to him.

(“I was impressed by his obedience,” Pete said later.)

The cops recovered my Filofax from Elroy Vern's squat in the abandoned building, which he kept in addition to a legitimate address, a small efficiency in Queens with an answering machine and nothing else. The Filofax was mine all right. The only change that had been made were the red X's through the names of men who had come in contact with me.

Hector was an innocent party, Ferber told me, and he was now in a coma after taking a bullet in his neck and then being dumped on Avenue D when Elroy was making his getaway. Poor Hector.

Several hours later, when I got to the office, Jerry Spurdle's first comment was, “See, I told you that doctor's murder had something to do with S&M. Didn't I tell you I had a hunch—”

“Shut up,” I said.

“If you'd just have listened to me—” he said.

“Shut the
fuck
up!” I said. “You
fucking, stupid asshole.”

Jerry and I had argued plenty in the past, before my ill-advised good attitude change, but he'd never heard this tone of voice from me before. This was the tone of voice of a woman one step away from an eighteen-pound turtle.

For a moment, Jerry just stood there, stunned.

I knew my ass was fried for yelling at him this way. But for some reason, saving this sorry job didn't seem so important anymore.

Suddenly, Jerry smiled at me. His usual smarmy smile.

“You are going to be so sorry you called me that,” he said, and walked away.

22

“W
ell, my prayer partners will certainly have a lot to pray for when I get back,” Aunt Maureen said.

We were standing at LaGuardia Airport, outside the metal detectors before her gate. We'd had breakfast together, tried to clear up a few remaining discrepancies between her version of events and mine. Although she had finally accepted my explanation for why she ended up in leather and chains being chased by a man in a sofa, she still believed I was living a dangerous and sinful life, and that I would have been happier, safer, and heaven-bound if I'd stayed in Ferrous, Minnesota, and married Chuck Turner.