Leather Maiden

  “I got all my lessons on it,” he said. “All my history work.”

  “You should have thought of that before blackmailing me,” Jimmy said.

  “You can’t go to the police,” Ernie said, “not with those DVDs around. That’ll nail your ass.”

  “You’re going to give them to us,” I said.

  “And if we don’t?” Ernie said. “What then? There’s nothing you can do to us.”

  “Except put a bullet in your heads,” Jimmy said.

  Ernie went quiet and put his hands between his legs.

  Jimmy was starting to pull at the computer, like he was going to run off with it. I said to him, “Hold on. We’re not going anywhere yet.”

  He stopped pulling, looked at me. I had taken one of the folding chairs and was sitting in it. Jimmy took one of the others and sat down. He still had the girl’s revolver and he laid it on his knee.

  “Don’t hurt us,” Tabitha said. “You can take the computer. We just thought it would be fun. And I needed the money. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

  “Sure,” Jimmy said.

  “How did you come by the DVD?” I asked. “You said you found it, but I’m thinking you didn’t go out in the yard and it rained down on you like manna from heaven.”

  “We’re urban explorers,” Ernie said. “That’s how we found it.”

  “You’re what?” Jimmy asked.

  “We like to prowl at night. Get into places that are locked up, preferably without anyone knowing we did it. We go in and take pictures. Used to be several of us. You learn locks, and you watch places to learn where all the ways of getting in are. It’s a big game.”

  “What happened to the other explorers?” I asked.

  “They graduated, moved off.”

  “The original ones,” Tabitha said.

  There was something in that, but I let it go for the moment.

  “I see,” I said. “Only thing throws me is, around here, we’re sort of short on urban.”

  “Technically that’s right,” Ernie said. “But there are plenty of places you don’t think about. That’s how we came up with the DVD. All the DVDs. We found them.”

  “All the DVDs?” I said. “You just found them?”

  Ernie nodded.

  “Where?” Jimmy said.

  Before Ernie could answer, Tabitha looked at Jimmy, said, “You killed her, didn’t you?”

  “What?” Jimmy said.

  “Caroline. You killed her.”

  “Shut up,” Ernie said.

  “You’re out of your mind,” Jimmy said. “You killed her.”

  “No they didn’t,” I said.

  Jimmy looked at me.

  I said, “Trust me, they’re too stupid to have killed her and set all this up. They’re stumblers, and they stumbled on what they thought was good.”

  “That’s right,” Ernie said, liking the fact that I seemed to be taking his side; stupidity had its merits.

  “If you didn’t kill her,” Tabitha said, looking at Jimmy as if truly surprised, “who did?”

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “I still like you two for it.”

  Tabitha became bold. “Well, I think you did it. I think you maybe planned it all along. Maybe you and your brother did it. You look like someone who would be mean to girls. You hit me with that stick.”

  “Asp,” Jimmy said.

  “It hurt.”

  “Hush, Tabitha,” Ernie said.

  Tabitha stopped talking. I said, “If we did do it, murdered Caroline, you’d be smarter not to let on you think we did. You consider that, Tabitha? You’ve been quiet most of this time, and now you’re talking, and you’re not thinking. You were smarter quiet. We were the murderers, you’d be next. You and him. We’d kill your asses right here. Do you really want to die on that filthy couch?”

  I could see fear move across her face, and it made me feel small.

  “We aren’t the murderers,” I said. “Listen up. We won’t turn you in because that just brings up the DVD, and that hurts my brother. You’re right about that part. But you’d be better off not to do anything either. We maybe got all the copies when we take this hard drive, but we don’t, you’d be better off just letting us be. You don’t want to stir us up.”

  “That’s right,” Jimmy said. “We’re not for stirring.”

  I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, thought: We’re not for stirring. What kind of comment was that?

  “We got you two on audiotape and film,” I said. “Someone shows up with a copy we don’t know about, it’ll cost them. And when I say someone, I mean you two mental giants. Blackmail, that’s no small crime. And, kids, it’s going to look more like you did Caroline in than Jimmy. Jimmy here, he gets in the deep end for wetting his willie, but you two…I don’t think you’d like how it turns out. You might be finishing out your education online in prison. They have that now. So you got that going for you.”

  Ernie and Tabitha looked at each other. “We didn’t mean any harm,” Ernie said.

  “Sure you did,” I said. “And you’re not off the hook on Caroline’s murder yet.”

  “We haven’t really said anything that matters,” Tabitha said. “There’s nothing you taped that hurts us.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “There’s a device in my brother’s pocket, and it’s on, and I’ve got the receiver and everything you’ve said since we started dealing with you is recorded.”

  “Everything you’ve said too,” Tabitha said.

  “Yeah, but we’re saying things to trick you. We say what we need to say. And besides, we get in trouble, so do you. It’ll be a big cluster fuck.”

  “I don’t know,” Ernie said. “You keep saying it, but I don’t know you have squat.”

  I took the recorder and the receiver out of my pocket and put it on my knee. I let him look at it. Jimmy took his part of it out of his pocket. “Surprise, motherfuckers,” he said.

  “By the way,” I said, “I need to change cassettes.”

  Jimmy grinned at me.

  I slipped another cassette in the recorder. I said, “And, we have you on film.”

  “We had on ski masks,” Tabitha said.

  “You sure did,” I said. “But you weren’t skiing. Won’t help you a bit. We got too much on you.”

  I wasn’t really sure about that, but I tried to sound confident. “Okay. How well did you know Caroline?”

  “We didn’t know her well at all,” Ernie said.

  “Bullshit,” Jimmy said. “You already said you knew her.”

  “We saw her around,” Ernie said.

  “I’m going to call bullshit again,” Jimmy said. “Bullshit.”

  Ernie looked at Tabitha. She nodded.

  “That’s better,” I said.

  I put the recorder on the floor by my chair. I said, “It’s very sensitive, but it would still be nice if you didn’t whisper. Tell us everything, and make it snappy. I’m starting to crave breakfast and a good cup of coffee.”

  21

  There was a noise at one of the windows. I turned to look. Through a part in the curtains I could see a huge golden moth beating its wings against the pane, trying to work its way to the light. I sympathized.

  I turned back to Tabitha and Ernie. I didn’t say anything. Ernie just started talking.

  “We’ve been doing the snooping thing something like a year now,” he said. “There were several of us at first, all university students. We read about it, about snooping, urban exploring. We thought we’d give it a try. There aren’t as many neat places here in Camp Rapture as, say, Houston, or Dallas, but there’s more than you think. We scoped out places. We watched to see who had a night watchman, who didn’t, what their weaknesses were. We even read about picking locks, which I’ve gotten pretty good at. We went all over. You’d be surprised the places we’ve been in.”

  “All I’m interested in,” Jimmy said, “is where you were when you found this DVD, and what’s your connection with Caroli
ne.”

  “There wasn’t just one DVD,” Ernie said. “We got a bunch of them.”

  “Of me and Caroline?” Jimmy asked.

  “No,” Tabitha said. “Of a lot of men having sex with Caroline.”

  A moment of silence settled on the room. Jimmy looked stunned, as if he’d just discovered one of his legs belonged to someone else and they had asked for it back.

  “You’re lying,” Jimmy said, standing up from his chair, pointing the gun at Ernie.

  “Goddamnit, Jimmy,” I said. “Put that thing away or I’m going to jam it up your ass. Sit.”

  Jimmy looked at me, saw I meant it. After a moment he dropped the gun to his side and sat back down in his chair, an angry man with bullets and no place to shoot them.

  I said to Ernie, “So there are a bunch of DVDs?”

  “Yep,” Ernie said.

  “Did you get them all?”

  “What we could carry,” Ernie said. “There were some left. You see, we didn’t know what we were getting. Just trying to take a souvenir. We took a look at the DVDs, saw what we had. Figured we could make a little money. We’ve talked about going back for the others, but we didn’t see any real reason. I mean, we weren’t even sure the rest of the stuff was the same kind of thing, and besides, we didn’t want to be greedy. We had enough here to work up a pretty good head of steam, you know, ten thousand or so a pop.”

  I studied Ernie’s face, looking for any lies there. It was a pretty bland face. I said, “A man once told me he believed in coincidences. I feel the same way. I can accept a lot. But this? Just two college kids who happen to know Caroline find a bunch of DVDs of Caroline screwing people in a building where they are snooping? And even more precious is the fact you left some there, didn’t go back to get them when you saw what kind of gold you had. Hell, Ernie. You’re going to commit a crime, might as well go the whole hog.”

  “We didn’t want to be greedy.”

  I let out a laugh. “Now that’s choice. That’s special. Did you know the others on the DVDs?” I asked.

  “History professors. Prominent men about town. Some we didn’t know, but we recognized a lot of them.”

  “Were you blackmailing them?”

  Ernie nodded. “Most. We weren’t blackmailing the girl, though. We knew her, and knew she didn’t have any money.”

  “What girl?” Jimmy asked.

  “Ronnie Fisher,” Tabitha said.

  “Wait a minute,” Jimmy said. “Caroline was on some DVD with a girl?”

  “That’s right,” Tabitha said.

  “Making out?” Jimmy asked.

  “If eating her snatch like it was a hot taco is making out,” Ernie said, “then, yes, I would say they were making out. Also Caroline had one of those big rubber dongs—”

  “Dildo,” Tabitha said.

  “Yeah,” Ernie said. “Thanks, hon. One of them. With knots on it. They were putting that in a lot of places. So I guess they were making out, and then some.”

  “Oh, shit,” Jimmy said, as if knowledge of the knots on the dildo was the final straw. “Who the hell is Ronnie Fisher?”

  “I know who she is,” I said. “I can fill you in later.”

  “You know?” Jimmy asked.

  “Later,” I said to him.

  “I don’t believe it,” Jimmy said.

  “The DVDs show it,” Ernie said. “We’ve seen her on enough of them we can identify Caroline just by the birthmark on her ass. That ring any bells? A kind of strawberry-shaped birthmark. Almost purple in color. It’s something that really shows up on her skin and that nice ass of hers.”

  “It’s a little too big, I think,” Tabitha said.

  “The birthmark or her ass?” I asked.

  “Both,” Tabitha said.

  “You could have just seen that on my DVD with her,” Jimmy said.

  “Could have,” Ernie said, “but didn’t. Trust me, the girl was a rodeo all by herself. She was the bull ride, the calf roping, and maybe even the rodeo clowns. She was a full evening of fun with a trip to the snow-cone stand afterward. She did it all.”

  “Shut up, punk,” Jimmy said, and he looked as if he might be ready to pistol-whip Ernie.

  “Cool your jets, Jimmy,” I said. “We want the whole story. That’s what we’re here for.”

  “He doesn’t have to be gleeful about it,” Jimmy said. “He likes telling me this shit.”

  “Your brother asked,” Ernie said, pointing at me.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I did. Tell us about Caroline.”

  “We weren’t close,” Ernie said. “She was part of our crew, ones who did the exploring. We called ourselves the Subterraneans.”

  “How many of you were there?”

  “Five, maybe six at first. Then Caroline, couple of others for a while. She added the later ones, two guys. Real odd guys, those two. We met her at school, talked a little, maybe too much, and I got to feeling a little too free with things—”

  “He liked the way she looked,” Tabitha said, and the words were as stiff as a classroom full of boys watching a cheerleader tryout.

  “Anyway,” Ernie said, “I talked about what we did. She wanted in. It all just seemed like fun then.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Jimmy said. “That doesn’t sound like her at all. I would have known if she was involved in anything like that. You’re making this up.”

  Ernie shook his head.

  Tabitha said, “She could sound a lot of ways. She could fit anywhere she wanted to, or had to. Think about it. Was she with you all the time at night? Wasn’t, was she? Slipped away with you at odd moments, am I right?”

  Jimmy didn’t say anything, but I could tell Tabitha had nailed it.

  “Go on,” I said to Ernie.

  “We were just playing like we were flirting with death, sneaking around, taking pretty mild chances. I mean, if we got caught breaking into buildings we could have gotten in some bad doo-doo, but it wasn’t life-threatening if you were careful. I did have a pretty nasty fall once, through the roof of an old rotten building. But I was okay. That was as close as it got. But with Caroline, I got the feeling she was dating death.”

  “How colorful,” Jimmy said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Ernie said. “She had this guy she brought around with her. He was right out of someplace just due south of hell.”

  “More colorful phrasing,” Jimmy said. “Perhaps you should move from history to literature. You could make up these kinds of stories and get paid for them.”

  “He’s not making up anything,” Tabitha said. “We called him the Geek. She called him Stitch. He wasn’t the only guy she brought around either. There was that other one.”

  I turned my attention to Tabitha. “Who else?”

  “Some other guy, a kind of greasy drunk. Always showed up with a six-pack, stinking of liquor, and he had a flask with him. He’d finish off the beers then drink from that. Time it got late, he was feeling no pain.”

  “How did Caroline act?”

  “Exploring for Caroline wasn’t a big enough thrill,” Tabitha said. “She was always trying to find out where the line was, then step over it. Got so we were, like, you know, taking big chances, not scoping things out like before, not preparing. We just started going right at it. We nearly got caught by a watchman over at the fertilizer plant. We started to have like minor accidents, wasn’t as fun as before. We were letting her push us around. She could do it too. Not always directly, but one way or another you found yourself doing pretty much what she wanted.”

  Ernie nodded agreement, added, “The Geek found a dead cat on the road once. He ran it up the flagpole on campus. It was quite a chance he was taking, that we all were taking, because we were with him, in his van. He parked at the curb and just walked up big as you please and hooked the cat to the rising line, and jacked it up. I thought that was pretty weird. The Geek, he thought that was some funny business.”

  “How absolutely normal of you to be off
ended,” Jimmy said.

  “We weren’t like them,” Ernie said. “Not even a little bit. One time we slipped into the Catholic church. Us and Caroline, the Geek and the other guy, the drunk. But when we got inside, they had some explosives—”

  “And inside the church you blew up the Virgin Mary’s statue?”

  “We didn’t,” Ernie said. “They did…You know about it?”

  “It was in the news, Sherlock,” I said. “I heard about the cat too. What about the drunk? Did he have a name?”

  “Caroline and Stitch called him Glug.”

  “Glug?”

  “Like the sound you make when you drink a beer. You know, glug, glug, glug. Least that’s how Caroline explained it.”

  “How do you think she knew these guys?”

  Ernie heaved his shoulders.

  Tabitha said, “She may have picked them up at a bar, for all we know.”

  “I’m pretty sure they all had some kind of history,” Ernie said. “Her and the Geek and Glug. It was obvious they all knew each other.”

  “Were they the same age as Caroline?” I asked.

  Ernie shook his head. “Older. I guess the Geek was forty or so. The other guy, he maybe was in his mid-thirties. I got the impression they were military. The Geek said things now and then made me think he had fought in a war. Maybe not the Iraq war, but something else. Mercenary stuff. But it could have just been bullshit.”

  “They were creepy,” Tabitha said, “way they looked at me, like I was a pork chop.”

  “Yeah.” Ernie said. “Sex was on Caroline’s mind all the time. And not just straight sex, or interesting sex. Caroline was always talking about how it would be fun to have a threesome, talking about me and Tabitha and her. Use all the holes, she said.”