Chapter Ten:
Nine days passed. All of the lurid fantasies I’d conjured up in my life about living with two women had died quick, heartbreaking deaths. Where should I start? Let’s try Gina. First off, her behavior became more and more suspicious with each passing day. She skulked and tiptoed around the house like a cat creeping through a minefield of large sleeping dogs.
Unlike Alexandria, though, whose light feet could somehow avoid the groaning of the floorboards, Gina found every one of them. She wouldn’t have lasted twelve seconds with those sleeping dogs, but she didn’t think she needed to be cat quiet. She purposely picked times for her brief excursions to be in the early a.m. when Alexandria and I were supposed to be sleeping.
Whether Alexandria was a light sleeper before she started drinking again, I don’t know. But she certainly was one after. Her bouts of sleep were shorter and more fitful than mine. And like me, she’d often just lay in the dark, awake and unmoving. So when Gina went on one her little middle of the night walks she was usually heard by at least one of us. Sometimes both.
What exactly was the goal of these excursions neither Alexandria nor I could figure out. Dresser drawers would be opened, examined for their contents, and closed back up again. Papers were rummaged through. Obviously, Gina had an intended prey in mind. But what? There was nothing of any real value in the entire house. No vaults filled with cash. No gold bars painted over and hidden in the basement. No painted over Van Gogh’s or Picasso’s. Even if these things had been in the house, I doubt Gina would’ve touched them. What she was looking for didn’t have any monetary value. She was interested in something else.
And if these strange wanderings through the house weren’t enough, there were two occasions when she took the matter one step further and left the house. She even went so far as to use Alexandria’s car for transportation. I can’t remember which two nights they were exactly, but I do remember Alexandria each time coming out into the living room and proclaiming in a low, calm voice:
“The bitch took my car. The bitch took my car. That mountain sized, muscle loaded bitch took my car. If she scratches it, I’ll harpoon her ass to the grille.”
Each time I’d come stumbling down the stairs and say something like:
“Getting a little excite, aren’t you?”
“It’s my car. I’ll get excited if I want to.”
“She’s not stealing for Christ’s sake. She’ll bring it back.”
“She had a car, remember? She rented one. Or, at least, she said she did. What
Happened to that car?” That was a good question.
“It’s just a thing, Alex. A dead inanimate thing.”
“What else do I have but dead inanimate things? Where are all of the live animate things for me to get excited about? Where are they, huh? Where? Do you see them?”
“What about me?“
“What about you?”
“I’m a live animate thing.”
“You are? No fooling?“
“I’m going to turn on a light.”
“Leave it dark.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I said leave it dark!“
I ignored her request and turned a light on. She was standing less than three feet away from me. Her eyes were half wet with tears and half fired with anger. And, oh yes, she was as naked as a newborn babe.
“You did that on purpose,” she said. “You knew I didn’t have any clothes on.”
“How could I know that?”
“Because I know you. You have better night eyes than some cats. You just wanted a better look and humiliate me at the same time. Well, is that all? Or do you want to pinch my tits and finger my cunt too?”
“Jesus, Alex.”
“How about, Neal? I’ll lay on the floor and spread my legs for you. You’d like that, wouldn‘t you? Yeah, you’d like that. You like watching, don’t you? You like watching better than actually doing it.”
“That’s enough! Go back to bed. Go back to bed and shut that cruel fucking mouth of yours.”
“More cruel than yours?”
“Make that cruel with a pinch of bitter.”
“More bitter than yours?”
A staring silence fell heavily across both of our faces. Something was on her mind. No, it was more than one thing. It was three things to be exact. The first one had her arms pinned behind her back. The second one had grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head so far back she thought her neck would snap. And the last one had cracked open a bottle of Kahlua , warmed up a mug full and poured it right down her throat. The three, working together as a team, then shoved her to the floor and left.
This was all symbolic, of course, but Alex refused to explain it to me any other way. There were three things bothering her. That’s the only specific detail she told me. Everything else would be guess work/ And I had too many disturbances going on inside my head to spend an excessive amount of time wondering what was going on inside of Alex’s.
The entire situation at my house was like a stark, loveless play. A play about a bottomed out man being slowly driven to madness. Step by step, turn of the screw by turn of the screw, my will was becoming less and less resistant to the cold, detached realities of life.
Neither Alex nor Gina were helping with any of the small, routine household chores that pop up everyday. You know, all of the things everyone hates doing, but have to be done. Dusting, sweeping, laundry, cleaning dishes, making coffee, and cleaning up after yourself. You know, that kind of stuff. I had to do all of them. And I had to do them for three people. I guess the old saying ,‘Little things mean a lot’ is true. I just didn’t think it’s supposed to mean a lot of bullshit. Which is exactly what it means in this case.
The investigation wasn’t going well either. Alex and I went out and interviewed a lot of people we hadn’t interviewed before. People who knew the Winters’ family socially, co-workers at the Winters’ family business, and, a couple of off the record cops. I went through Donna’s diaries a second and third time. I listened to my tape recorded interviews. Alex listened to her recorded interviews a second time. None of it added to what we already had. Which wasn’t much. We couldn’t even locate the hotel Donna had been staying at when she died.
A lot of effort was being put into this case with little result. Sonny Winters was a whale sized asshole, no doubt. But can’t arrest people and put them in jail for that. If you could, there just might be more people in prison than out. And hell, we didn’t need to do an investigation to know that Sonny Winters was a monumental asshole. We already knew that.
There was no proof that Sonny had murdered Donna. There was no proof that anyone had murdered Donna. Most of the evidence in this case, in fact, pointed to suicide. The investigation, to put it mildly, was going nowhere. Then, as if all of this nowhere news wasn’t hard enough to take, my own house started to rebel against me. A crack in the ceiling was getting worse by the day and leaked every time it rained. The toilet leaked. The microwave and the clothes dryer died about three and a half hours apart. Oh yes, I almost forgot to put this down on paper. A campaign was initiated to persuade me to drop the case. First came the slashed tires(All four of them). Then came the shattering of the rear window and the windshield. After that, the words ‘Stupid Pollock’ were spray painted across the hood and trunk. What really upset me about having ’Stupid Pollock’ painted on my car wasn’t the intended insult directed at me. It was the fact that the author couldn’t even get the spelling right.
Polack is the proper spelling for a slur aimed at a person of Polish descent. Pollock is the proper spelling for a slur aimed either at deceased painter Jackson Pollock or a well known commercial fish of the North Atlantic. So, assuming the author meant to slur me and not a dead painter or a fish, then he misspelled the slur. I was mad. I mean really fucking mad. If some asshole is going to go to all of the bother of slurring you, at country coming to. I don’t think it’s too much to ask ignorant bigots to be literate. Isn’t it enough that they’re ignorant? Do they have to be illiterate too?
Can’t some enterprising person start school and help these people out? There’s just no excuse for having such a high ignorant/illiterate rate in this country. Have we no standards at all anymore? Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and Vishnu what is this country coming to?
If you think everything I just told you was a mess and then some, wait until you hear this: I was kidnapped. No joke. No playing around. I was kidnapped. The ploy they used was terribly old fashioned and unimaginative, but I fell for it. I never saw it coming. Not even after he arranged the tire slashing, glass smashing, and graffiti slandering on my car. I knew he wasn’t the type to physically come after me himself. I knew if really wanted to hurt me, or even kill me, he would pay someone else to do it. Yet, I never expected the kidnapping.
I don’t know why, but I didn’t. I guess I expected a more overt, outward approach. Run down by a car. Shot. Stabbed. Beaten. Something along those lines I was fully prepared for. But not kidnapping. And certainly not the means Winters used to pull it off. Here the way the entire episode played out:
I was leaving the office by way of the back door. I was alone. My car, as usual, was the only car at the curb. My eyes and head were both cast down. This day, like every other day since this case started, had gone as well as pissing into the wind. All I wanted to do at that point was go home, go to bed, and avoid contemplating the stress relieving capabilities of suicide.
I was outside, stepping around the front of my car, when I heard a noise coming from my right. The sound had an odd metallic tinge to it, meaning it involved the large metal garbage bin sitting almost fifteen yards away. At first, I just ignored it. Times were difficult for a lot of people in the area and sometimes people will rummage through it looking for anything they can use. Clothes, food, recyclables, you name it. They’re desperate. Otherwise they wouldn’t be such acts of public degradation and humiliation. Then, there’s the plaza’s occupants. They dump all their unwanted stuff in the bin. So, figuring the noise was the result of one of these two scenarios, I kept moving.
But then came the muffled sounds of a struggle. I heard voices. Two of them, one male and one female. I stopped. The struggle became louder. Then came more disturbing sounds, Clothes being torn. Hard slaps to the face. Cries of pain. I looked up towards the direction of the sounds. I saw nothing. The garbage bin was blocking my view.
Something is wrong, I thought, so I started toward the bin. Concerned, and more than a little cautious, I gave the bin a wide berth. Quickly and quietly, I move out into the street. When I finally could see around the bin and to the source of the noise, I stopped and took in the scene playing out in front of me. There were two people pressed tightly against the wall. One was a tall, fat twenty something male, the other was short, bone thin teenage girl. Both were white. Or should I say peachy?
The twenty something fat guy is mauling the bone thin girl with a very precise sort of violence. She is whimpering and fighting back in roughly equal measures. I move in, like a goddamn fool, with no sense of danger to myself anywhere in my head. The only I saw was for the girl. Which is exactly what I was supposed to see. I rushed in.
The fat man’s back was to me so I figured I could disable him without too much trouble. I continued to move in. The first I wanted to do was grab him by the hair and pull him off of the girl. But he didn’t have any hair, damn him. Twenty something years old and he’s bald. On purpose!(Whoever thought bald could thought of as cool. This just shows you how fucked up cool can be.) Unable to go for his hair, I decided to run at him hard and hammer him on the back of the neck. I hit him. I hit him again. Again and again. Finally, the fat man went down and stayed down.
Swelling with quiet pride, I stepped over the fat man toward the girl. She was a real mess. Her jacket had been ripped open and thrown to the ground. As had her white, button down blouse. She wore no bra. Her small, flapless tits laid cold, bruised, and exposed to the world. Her brown, salon curled hair lay straggled across her face. The girl’s body shook as if it had been attacked by a bad case of malaria. I bent down, picked up the blouse and jacket, and slowly handed them to her.
“Put these on,” I said.
“Thanks,” she answered while catching me in her fearful eyes.
“What happened?”
“I was shortcutting behind the plaza. He was hiding behind the bin. I didn’t see him.”
“You don’t have to explain it to me. You can do that later if you want. Let’s just get out of here, okay?”
“Okay.“
She put her blouse and jacket on slowly, seemingly to buy herself some time to regain at least a small part of her composure. She took a step or two forward as if to let me lead her away. But then she came to a quick terrifying stop. A trembling right forefinger pointed to where her fat assailant lay on the ground.
“He’s moving!,” she screamed. “He’s moving!”
Still having no inclination of where the real danger happened to be, I turned around to face the fat man. But hell, he wasn’t moving like the girl said. He wasn’t moving at all. Not a finger, not a toe, nothing. Was the girl suffering from shock I wondered. Did she just imagine seeing him moving due to hysteria? It would be understandable under the circumstances I said to myself.
Then, as quickly as a long jagged lightning bolt flashes down from the sky, it hit me. Or, to be more precise, injected itself into the back of my neck. It was a harsh, bitter sting. A needle. A hypodermic needle. It felt as if I’d been stung by a three hundred and twenty pound bee. It was some sort of homemade hand delivered mickey juice. The dose was heavy because it dropped me to the ground in less time than it takes to sneeze. Sprawled out on the ground and about to lose consciousness, I recited a well known verse in a mumbled, staccato voice:
Row, row,
Row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
A dream.
A dream.
Life is but a dream.
Then I closed my eyes, laid my head gently on the sidewalk, and went to sleep.