I
was in the hospital again, same waiting room, same emergency wing, same goddamn hospital. Next, I knew, it would be me in here.
I was with Ellen, holding her hand. Or maybe she was holding my hand. I was numb, she was shaking. “He’ll pull through, he’ll pull through,” she kept saying, nodding her head; maybe she was praying. She didn’t ask me any questions, like why was a man with a gun at the Paynes’, breaking and entering and shooting her husband?
It’d certainly been a busy week on my block. “The Cursed Neighborhood” one TV newscaster called it. Aside from the sensationalist value, there was truth to this.
In the wee hours of the morning, a doctor came out and told us that Bryan was alive, but in critical condition.
“Will he pull through?” Ellen asked.
“It’s hard to say. We have to wait and see,” said the doctor. “He’s a fighter, your husband.”
“Yes he is.” She smiled.
“He’s conscious. He’s been asking for you both.”
He didn’t look too good, in the
ICU
, tubes and wires coming out of his arms, nose, and mouth. Ellen wept, and carefully embraced him. He told her he would pull through and she told him
you better,
as if there would be some sort of punishment if he’d died.
“Honey,” he said, straining each word, “I—need—to—talk—to—Philip—private. Please—give—us—five—minutes.”
“No,” she said.
“Please.”
“Why?”
“We—have—to discuss—the case,” he said.
“Damn you, Bryan,” she said. “Couldn’t you leave things alone?” She looked at me. “The both of you?”
“Ellen,” he said, weakly.
She nodded, and left us alone, wiping her eyes.
He looked at me. “She knows—what we′ve—been up to. Can′t—keep any—secrets from her.”
“Oh Christ, Bryan,” I said, “this is all my fault.”
“Don’t—go—putting—world’s—burden—on—your—shoulders—” and he coughed: “kid.”
“I have to be honest with you.” I pulled up a chair alongside him. “I was having … intimate contact with Cassandra Payne.”
“I know,” he said.
“You did?” I wasn’t surprised.
“You—think—you—had—some—big secret?”
“Shit.”
“That’s,” he coughed. “That’s what—I wanted—to—talk to—you—about. Last—few days.”
“
Shit.
”
“Was—gone—tell—you. Fucking—up. Fuck. Up.”
“You got that—”
“Listen. Dangerous woman.”
“I know.”
“You—not the only one—she—she fools—with.″
“What?”
“Stay away—from her.”
“I will. But I think she’s gone.”
“Philip,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m—I’m not going—to—make it.”
“Don’t
say that. You’ll make it.” It almost felt like I was going to get beyond that numb feeling, have an outburst, but it quickly retreated inside me.
“No,” he coughed.
I said softly, “You’ll make it.”
“You—must. You—do something for me.”
“Anything,” I said. “Anything.”
“Find my daughter,” he said, strength returning to his voice.
“Find Rachel. Listen. I want—find her—tell her.” He breathed hard, trying to gain his voice. “Ellen will never look for her. Afraid—Ellen—afraid to. Of rejection. Find Rachel—tell her I forgive her. I—love her. Her mother—loves her. I die—Ellen will have—no one. She—will—need—Rachel. Tell—Rachel—what happened to me—and—I—never—stopped loving—her.”
Then it came out. I was crying now, thinking of my own dead daughter. I was looking at Bryan like a father—and I guess he was. We were men who had much in common now. He let me cry, and I turned away.
“How will I find her?” I asked, after I had composed myself.
“Few years ago—I did—some looking,” he said. “Last—I I know—she was in—Chicago.”
“Is she married?”
“Don’t know. Will—you—find her—when I’m—”
“If.” He was getting me angry with this talk.
“Not going—to—make it—kid.” His expression was sincere.
I was defeated. “I’ll find her, I promise.”
Bryan died several
days later in the hospital from an internal hemorrhage. I wouldn’t know about this until later, because at the time I was in Las Vegas close to my own death.
I went home
after my talk with Bryan. I left Ellen with him. It was still dark out, and the sun was starting to rise as I drove.
Tina was home, packing things into two suitcases.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I didn’t think you’d be home,” she said. “Were you across the street balling the Limey bitch?”
“I was at the hospital. Bryan was shot.”
She stopped what she was doing. “I saw it on the news. What the hell is happening here? What have you done, Philip?
What the hell have you done?
Bryan’s a good man, a very good man—and you got him into something very bad.”
She was right, of course.
“We think Mrs. Payne murdered her husband,” I said. “We think a certain man was involved, but not the man who shot Bryan.”
“We?”
“I don’t know what’s going on but it is bad,” I said.
“But you were
fucking
her?” Tina said. “What was that? Part of your amateur detective work? Undercover? Playing James Fucking
Bond?
”
“I can’t explain myself,” I said. “I didn’t—” I wanted to tell her the truth, but what did it matter?
“Our daughter is dead,” my wife went on, “our son is a pyromaniac, your friend is in the hospital, and I’m going to divorce you.” She started packing again.
“Don’t do this,” I said, moving toward her.
“
Don’t you fucking come near me!”
I backed away, hands up, scared and sad.
“Where’s Matthew?” I asked after a moment.
“At Janet’s. He’s going to need psychiatric care, you realize this?”
Numb again, I said, “Yes.”
She said, packing, “We’re failures as parents. This
marriage
is a failure. I want to get out of San Diego. I want to divorce your ass, take my son, move far far away, and never see you ever again.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I never meant anything more in my life.”
“Marry the construction worker,” I said, and wished I hadn’t.
“Jessica is dead!”
she screamed. She turned and punched the wall. I knew it must’ve hurt.
We stood there, staring at one another.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“The fuck you are,” she said, grabbing her two suitcases. She lugged them out to her car and drove away.
I was alone again.
I sat in front of the TV and watched it for hours. I had no idea what I was watching.
The phone rang. I stood, walked into the burnt kitchen, and picked it up. “Tina?”
“It’s me,” Cassandra Payne’s voice said.
“So it is,” I said. I knew she’d call, sooner or later.
“I heard about what happened to Mr. Vaughn.”
“Yeah, and it happened on your property.”
“I know.” Her voice was very distant.
“Some man broke into your house.”
“He was there to kill me,” she said. “Most likely.”
“Oh yeah? And why would he want to kill you?”
“It’s a long and complex story.”
“I like long and complex stories.”
“I called to say … I’m very sorry.” She sounded sincere.
“How sweet of you.”
“I should hang up,” she said.
“Why did you really call,” I asked, adding, “you coldhearted bitch?”
“I’m not as coldhearted as you think,” she said. “Maybe I am. But I am sorry. I never meant for anyone to get hurt. I didn’t want this. I’m so sorry about your sweet little girl. It’s my dream to have children but I never can. And I’m so sorry about Mr. Vaughn. He’s injured because of me.”
“It’s because of me,” I said.
“Good-bye, Mr. Lansdale.”
“Wait. You’re not coming back?”
“No. I imagine the police want to talk to me, yes?”
“Did you kill your husband?”
“You asked me that before,” she said.
“You told me no.”
“The answer is still no.”
“So who was the bald man in the trench coat? Did he kill your husband?”
“I have to go now. We’ll never see each other again, which is for the best. We should never have seen each other in the first place.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“You know why, I believe you know,” she said. “You don’t want to admit it.”
“Stop being so cryptic.”
“Bloody Philip,” she said, and hung up.
I looked at the Caller ID. The area code was 727. Nevada. I called the number.
“Stardust Hotel,” a man said.
“Can I have Cassandra Payne’s room, please?”
“Just a moment, sir.” Then: “Transferring, sir.”
After two rings, her voice: “Hello?”
Impulsively, I spoke in a really bad Brooklyn accent: “Yuh, this is the kitchen. Just double-checkin’ an order for two cheeseburgers.”
“I didn’t order anything,” she said.
“What? Youse didn’t? Is this room one-two-six-six?”
“No,” she said, “four-one-one-three.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am. Someone musta messed up the ticket here. I’m really sorry.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “But while you’re at it, send up a bottle of Wild Turkey.”
“Youse got it, lady.” She bought the phony voice. Maybe I should’ve been an actor.
I called back, asked for room service. I ordered a bottle of Wild Turkey for room 4113.
I called Southwest Airlines. Their next flight to Las Vegas was in an hour and a half. I booked a seat on my MasterCard.
I took a quick shower, tossed some clothes in a bag, and drove to the airport.
The flight to Vegas took forty-five minutes.
The cab ride to the Stardust Hotel took twenty minutes.
I figured there’d be plenty of bourbon in that bottle when I got there.
I took the elevator to the fourth floor.
Room 4113. I knocked on the door.
Cassandra was wearing white slacks and a blue, see-through blouse, holding a glass of bourbon.
She looked me up and down. “Mr. Lansdale.”
“Please,” I said, pushing her aside and walking in. “After all we’ve been through,
Cassandra,
you can call me
Philip.”
“G
ood God,” she said, and I could tell she was close to a good drunk, “you’re the last face I expected to see when I opened the door.”
“Did you expect Boyd Urick?” I asked, sitting on the bed. I looked around the room. “Nice room?”
“Boyd?” she said. “I wish.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I can’t bloody believe you’re here in Las Vegas.”
“Believe it, baby.”
“You’re really pissing me off.”
“Live with it.”
“Did you come here thinking you’d fuck me?”
“That’s the last thing I want from you,” I said. She looked surprised. She started to pace.
“How did you know I was here?” she asked.
I told her about the caller ID, my phone call, my ordering her the bottle she had in her hand.
“Funny story,” she said, sitting next to me.
“Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”
She handed me the bottle.
“I’m all ears.”
“I like your ears.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
I didn’t touch her. I had no desire to touch her. I wanted the truth, and she gave it to me.
She grew up in Sussex, the United Kingdom and had a sister, Beatrice. The summer of her seventeenth birthday, after she graduated high school, her parents thought it might be nice if she and her sister took a one-month trip somewhere. Beatrice wanted to go to the United States, so the U.S. it was. Cassandra just wanted to go somewhere. “I was a real wildcat,” she said. “My first boyfriend, his name was Charles. He broke my heart. I wanted to marry him. He didn’t want to marry me. He said it was impossible. Then he turns around and marries a rich girl.”
She and Beatrice went to New York City first, staying at a moderately priced hotel. Beatrice entertained herself by going to plays and coffee houses and Cassandra picked up a small newspaper focusing on sexual fetishes. She saw ads for certain bars. When Cassandra was sure that Beatrice was asleep, she got into a short, tight skirt and a cut-off top and took a cab to one of these bars.
This is where she met Boyd Urick, and Boyd Urick was why she was in Las Vegas right now.
Boyd spotted Cassandra in the bar and made his move. He was slick, persuasive, but he didn’t know Cassandra was easy and that her intention in coming here was the same as his: to find a sex partner for the night. They went back to his hotel room, which was shoddier than the one she was staying at. They smoked crack cocaine, which Boyd had a lot of, and had sex all night. Boyd didn’t want her to go, and so she didn’t. She forgot about her sister—she didn’t care about her sister. All she wanted to do was get high and fuck Boyd.
He was from Las Vegas. She didn’t know what he did, or why he was in New York. He seemed to have money and a lot of drugs.
Later—much later—she′d discovered what Boyd was doing in New York: he was moving counterfeit money for a third party. He delivered the fake bills to a buyer, who purchased it at fifty cents on the dollar, and Boyd delivered the real money to the printer of the fake money, taking a small cut for himself.
Cassandra liked Boyd, but it was Boyd who said he loved her. He said he loved her the moment he set eyes on her.
“No one had ever said they loved me,” Cassandra told me, “so that was the magic key to my young, innocent heart.”
Boyd suggested she go back to Las Vegas with him, live with him, be his girlfriend and lover and wife. Cassandra didn’t hesitate. She had nothing to return to. She could start anew in the US of A.
She sent a note to the hotel where Beatrice was. She knew her sister was probably very worried.
Don’t worry, I’m safe, the note said. I’m not going back home. I’ve met someone and we’re in love and I’m staying in the States. I’ll write home now and then. This is best for everyone.
So began her new life.
“The first month in Vegas was heaven,” Cassandra said. “Boyd had a nice one-bedroom apartment, he had money, and we had sex all the time. He took me out with him, I met his friends, they all knew what I was, and no one sneered or criticized.
“Boyd was a small-time crook, and it didn’t take long for me to figure this out. He didn’t have a real job. He ran the counterfeit bills, he dealt in stolen property, but mostly he gambled. He was a professional gambler. He was reasonably good at it, too, because he always had enough money for us to live on. While he’d make a big score now and then, most of it was lost when he tried to make an even bigger score, when he tried to ‘break the bank’ at the casinos. But I have to say, he at least was smart enough to put a third of every big win into the bank.
“I’d been living with him five months when he was arrested. He’d been in a stolen car with two other men. He called from jail and said his bail was fifty thousand dollars. ‘Cassy-cass,’ he said—he always called me that, ‘Cassy-cass, go to the bank, withdraw five grand, and take it to this bail bondsman. He only needs ten percent. Do it now. Get me the fuck out of here!’”
She sighed. “So I went to the bank, got the money, and bailed him out. There had been seven thousand dollars in the bank, and now there was two.
“Boyd was facing a grand theft charge, and I was terrified he’d go to prison, but the district attorney dropped the charges not long after the arraignment. Something to do with a man whose car they’d stolen—a criminal himself—and that the cops who’d arrested them screwed up the facts in their reports.
“Boyd and his friends had a huge party to celebrate their exoneration. It was that night, very high on coke, that Boyd talked me into having sex with him and a friend.
“I felt very dirty the next day, believe it or not.”
“I don’t,” I said.
She took the bottle from me. “Well, I did. Anyway, Boyd started going downhill after that. He began losing more than winning, drinking more. He also started hitting me. It was horrible.
“He was arrested again. Two detectives came to the door one morning to take him in. He nodded and complied. The detectives looked at me and one shook his head.
“There wasn’t enough money in the bank to bail him out this time, and the charges, he told me, would probably stick. ‘What I did was stupid,’ he said, ‘and I have to do some time for it.’ He got a year in county jail.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“I have no idea. He wouldn’t tell me. I didn’t want to know.” She drank, and went on with her story:
Alone now and she didn’t know what to do. There was twelve hundred in the bank. Boyd told her to put two hundred on his jail books, so he could buy candy bars and sodas, and to keep the thousand to live on. A thousand wasn’t going to last, she knew this. She waited until the end of the month, moved out of the apartment and into a cheap studio.
The move left her with four hundred dollars. She would need to find a job. She had no idea how she would do that. It occurred to her that she would have to have sex for money.
She met Lawrence Payne at a hotel bar.
Lawrence Payne heard her order a whiskey sour from the bar, piqued by her accent. He was drinking a beer. “Hello,” he said.
She, too, was startled by that familiar accent, an accent she hadn’t heard in almost a year. Since her stay in America, she hadn’t once crossed paths with a fellow British citizen.
“Liverpool?” he said.
“Sussex,” she said.
“London, myself.”
“You live in London?”
“I live in California.”
He was a handsome older man in his mid-forties; she was attracted to him and Cassandra knew he felt the same way, or maybe they just both liked hearing a familiar accent. He offered to buy her another drink and she accepted and then there was a third drink, a fourth, a fifth. He was drunker than she, and starting to be a bit more bold—touching her hand as they talked. She didn’t remember what they talked about and it probably wasn’t important. He did tell her that he’d been married before, divorced for almost seven years, and he had no one in his life. He mentioned he had a room in this hotel and she suggested they go there and order some room service, so they did.
She wasn’t going to ask him for money. She liked him too much to do this.
Once in the room, he wanted to kiss her. She kissed him. They ordered room service—more alcohol, some food. Lawrence Payne was more interested in kissing her and touching her. She let him remove her blouse, but not her bra. Every time he tried to put his hand between her legs, she would stop him.
Finally, after the fourth or fifth time she blocked that wandering hand, he said, “If you’re afraid I’ll find a penis, I already know it’s there.”
“What?” I said.
Cassandra smiled at me.
I stood up. I looked down at her. She kept smiling and then stopped.
“You didn’t know?” she said.
“What?” I said again.
“Oh come on, Philip,” she said, “I used to be a man.”
I sat down on the chair.
“You didn’t know?” she asked.
After everything that had happened to me, how could I be surprised by anything? She could have told me she was an alien from another dimension and it wouldn’t have fazed me. Yeah, I was numb and in denial, here looking for order, for vengeance. I had thrown my life away for this woman, and she wasn’t even a woman. It was par for the course. I deserved this. I deserved every fucking bit of this.
“Give me that bottle,” I said.
Cassandra handed it over.
I drank. “But you don’t have a dick.”
“I had an operation,” she said. I knew she was going to say that.
I didn’t want to hear any more of her story, but she went on. “To cut to the chase, he was smitten with me. I spent the night with him. I left, but I came back the next night. He was happy to see me. I told him I wanted money for the sex and he laughed. I told him about my predicament. He suggested I come to California and live with him, so I did. Just like that, story of my life—I meet a man, the next thing I know I’m sharing a life with him. I counted my lucky stars, because Lawrence had money, being a banker, and being quite prudent with investments. But I didn’t love him.”
“Then?” I said.
“Or now,” she said. “I never loved him. I was fond of him. I cared for him. But I found I wanted him out of my life. He wouldn’t let me go, and I needed a new life.”
“So you killed him.”
“I’ll get to that.”
“Jesus, you did kill him.”
“Not quite,” she said.
Despite her cool feelings toward Lawrence Payne, and the fact that she was using him for security, he fell deeply in love with her, or so he said. He gave Cassandra the financial security she desperately needed, at which time she started thinking about having a sex change.
Their one-year anniversary—of the day they had met—Cassandra was nineteen and Lawrence said he’d give her whatever her heart desired as a gift. She said, “I want a sex change.” He nodded, figuring that would be her request, and informed her that he’d looked into the matter, and that he did indeed have enough funds in an account in the Cayman Islands to give her this gift.
It was done in Switzerland.
She was made a woman.
They were married in Switzerland, too.
“For two years, we played the game of domesticated husband and wife very well,” she said. “Our sex life was a normal one, but I suspected Lawrence missed the old me, in a way.
“It was building up, it was only a matter of time that I’d break my fidelity with Lawrence. I was proud of my cunt and wanted to put it to some good use. It happened, first, with a business associate of my husband’s, and next with a stranger I chanced to meet in a bar. I started meeting more strangers. It started to become a habit, a very addictive habit, picking up strangers, mostly in hotel and airport bars. Lawrence being away a lot gave me much freedom.
“You were watching me, spying on me,” she said, “you noticed I left the house and returned at all kinds of hours.”
“Dressed to kill,” I said.
“I was on the prowl for men,” she said.
“Was I just another one? Am I?” I said. “Another man to fool?”
“Yes,” she said plainly.
As I allowed that to sink in, she watched me, and continued.
“I didn’t want to be married to Lawrence anymore. There was another life out there, I’m in my twenties and Lawrence was closing in on fifty and I
didn’t
want to be a suburban American housewife. I told Lawrence this, but he refused to grant me a divorce.
“I started to think about Boyd Urick and what had happened to him, how he was doing. I made some calls to old acquaintances in Las Vegas, and was given his number.
“Boyd was ecstatic when he received my call. He thought I’d gone back to England.