Chapter 7

It was not the Stork. It was not Twenty-One or El Morocco or Danny's. It was not Toots Shor's or the Little Club or Car-roway's or La Guarda. It was Rita's Roost, and it was a dive. Outside, there was a lot of neon, a fly-specked window, a few beer signs. Inside there was not much light at all, just a few shaded bulbs over the back bar. The bartender was a forty-three year old Sicilian with opaque brown eyes and a fixed half-smile, who polished endless glasses with a dirty towel. A jukebox rocked with blues and houserock and torchy stuff. There was a little sawdust on the floor and there was a picture of Ralph Bunche, unsigned, on the wall over the cash register.

Half the hustlers in the world were at the bar. There were big ones and small ones, fifty-year-old ones and jailbait ones, chesty ones, fat and thin ones, white and brown and black ones. Forty of them at least, Pallon thought. More than you could shake a stick at, although there were a few he very definitely wanted to shake a stick at.

They flowed toward him the way sharks drift in when you drop a corpse overboard into the ocean, floated in like buzzards coming for a fresh kill. Damn, he thought, it had been a mistake to come here. The competition was too keen. The damn tramps would be fighting over him.

"Hey, man, you want company?"

"Why, hello, lover. Let's have a party, lover."

"Want to meet a girl can speak French, sugar? I talk a good game of it, baby. I swear I'll make you one happy man."

"Oh, mister, come with me. You come with me, baby. The price is right, baby."

He pushed them all aside, got through to the men's room and ducked into a stall, more because he wanted to get away from them than out of any physical need. He sat down on the pot and took a breath and lit a cigarette to kill part of the noxious odor of the place. He reached into a pocket and took out the knife he had taken from the boy in Central Park, the boy he had ripped up the gut. He pressed the button and the-blade flashed out and his eyes stayed on its sharp tip.

He had left the gun in his room. The knife would be enough. jfore than enough.

He took a breath-which was no pleasure, not in that bathroom-and tried to clear his head. The outer door opened and he heard two men come in and close the door. They were using the mirror. One of them scratched a match and lit a cigarette, smoking in short and intense drags. Fallon recognized the acrid smell of marijuana. The two of them passed the cigarette back and forth while Fallon sat down and listened to the two of them talking about some tramp in the other room. One of them was the tramp's manager, and the other was trying to see if he could get to the girl for free. The pimp thought he ought to pay his way.

"Man," the pimp said, "she's my sister. I can't put you to my own sister for free, man."

It was a nice world, Fallon thought. A solid-gold world front to back and top to bottom. The two clowns finished their pot and left. Fallon got out and went to the bar and ordered a shot of rye. No point in ordering good stuff at Rita's Roost, he knew. He would get the same slop anyway and would only manage to pay a higher price for it.

He threw the shot down and turned aside to light a cigarette. He ordered a refill. A girl's hand came at him and played with the front of his pants. He let her go on playing but didn't pay any attention to her, and after a few minutes she left him alone. She had gone and done a good job on him, though. He was filled with need now, full of passion and ready for action.

Carmen.

Carmen and Lily.

The sister act sounded kind of cute, but that wasn't what he wanted. You had to be a real mark to go for a routine like that, and half the time the girls didn't even exist in the first place. He didn't know Harlem, but he knew tramps and pimps and hustlers in big towns and little towns, and he could recognize a pitch when it came his way and could see the curve break a mile off. And the Carmen-and-Lily pitch was an obvious one, a very slow-breaking curve at that.

They had worked a wrinkle like that in Dayton once, him and another guy and two girls. The pitch was that the sucker would get to watch the two girls put on a show, and then would take his turn with each of the girls, and all of this for twenty bucks. That was big money in Dayton, so it wasn't too far out of line, but it was still a big come-on all the way. It worked neat, too-the other guy would rope the sucker, and the two girls would do nothing, just sit in a bar where they would be visible. Then Fallon would get half the money in advance from the sucker, or ten bucks. While the sucker was waiting for the girls, all four of them would disappear. They only pulled it a few times because by the time the ten was cut four ways it wasn't worth it, but it had gone off nicely every damned time.

And it would be the same sort of thing with Carmen and Lily, whether they existed or not. He didn't want two girls, anyway. One was plenty, one nice warm one who would be very good to him until it was time for him to be very bad to her. He patted his pocket and felt the switchblade knife and thought how very bad he would be to her, how very evil he would be.

The same girl's hand came for him again. He couldn't even see who the hand belonged to, because people were all bunched up at the bar and the hand was sort of coming from the middle of a crowd. It reached around and stroked him fondly, and then a thumb and a forefinger caught the zipper of his pants and drew it down, opening his pants for him. He looked at the chocolate-colored hand, at the scarlet polish on the long fingernails.

The hand slipped into the opening it had created and searched around. A slender hand, its fingers pleasantly warm. The polish on the nails was the approximate color of blood. The hand caught hold of what it had been looking for. The hand played, and the hand knew all the fine points of the game.

Okay, girl, he thought. You'd better slow down or you'll finish everything before it gets started. And, almost as though she had been able to read his mind, she gave him one final squeeze and moved her hand.

He zipped his pants shut, took hold of her hand, and drew her over to him. If his luck ran the way it generally did, he thought, she would wind up being a fat ugly pockmarked flat-chested pig with her hands the only attractive thing about her.

But his luck was running better. She was no pig, not by a long shot.

She was a doll.

She was smiling hugely as she stepped in next to him. She had skin with the color of good milk chocolate and the texture of velvet. Her eyes were very large and her nose was small and tip-tilted. Her mouth was as red as her nail polish and a thousand times more obscene. She wore a very tight sweater with nothing under it, and her huge breasts looked as though they might tear the sweater in two. He could see the outlines of her nipples.

Her voice didn't have the harsh hard cynicism of hip Harlem in it, either. It was liquid, the tones properly pear-shaped, the huskiness beneath it a promise and a temptation. This was a live one, he told himself. A nice combination of frank love and a cultured quality that made the lusty part just that much lustier. This was the right one.

"I think you want to play," she said softly. "Am I right?"

"Play for pay?"

"The best things in life are not free, dear."

"How expensive are they?"

"They are twenty dollars worth, sweetness. With the hand job thrown in free. Call it a sample."

"What do I get for a twenty?"

"Whatever you want." Her eyes promised the moon. "Except no dumpings. No beating up, or any of that, because I won't play those games. I don't have to, not with my looks, and the money just isn't worth it for me."

Did she know something? He wondered. Maybe she could tell, just by looking at him, that his kick was sadism, that he got his thrills that way. But probably not. If she had known that she would not have approached him in the first place, would have left him alone and would have let the other girls have him. But she was sounding him, so the stuff about no beatings was probably just a throw-away line she handed to every trick.

"Now why would anybody want to hurt you?" he said.

"Well," she said. "Twenty dollars?"

"Yes."

It was funny how little difference the price made. He would get the money back afterward, he thought, just as he had gotten the money back from Shirley after he stopped her heart with her carving knife. There was really nothing to worry about in that department. If she wanted twenty he would give her twenty. If she wanted a hundred he would give her a hundred. He was going to take the money back anyway.

Along with her life.

"You're on," he said.

And she reached out and rubbed the front of his pants again, cooing softly to him all the while, telling him that she was certain, very certain, that he would not be sorry.

She was right. He wouldn't be sorry. But she would.

She lived in a pretty rank place. If she lived there at all-he had the feeling, looking around the barren little room, that it was just a place she used for turning her tricks, just a room rented for encounters that danced to the tune of a timeclock. A bed, a bureau, a straight wooden chair. A mirror, cracked in two places to provide some poor louse with a total of fourteen years of bad luck, and fogged in some other places so that you had to look into it very carefully if you wanted to get anything resembling a true reflection. He didn't care what he looked like, though. And maybe, he thought fleetingly, he had gotten to the point where he could not be reflected by a mirror. Like a vampire.

The girl told him her name was Dorothy. She closed the door of the room and slid a bolt into the latch, then arranged an iron bar police lock against the door. The iron bar fitted into a special plate in the floor and locked into a catch on the door, thus bracing the door so that it could not possibly be opened from outside. Police locks are common in neighborhoods like Dorothy's. So are burglars, and housebreakers, and unwelcome detectives.

"Now it's just us two," Dorothy murmured. "Us two and twenty dollars, if you please."

He gave her a twenty. She put it in a drawer of the bureau and closed the drawer. Then she moved up to him, moving very slowly, and she tossed her arms around his neck and brought her mouth very close to his.

She was wearing a lot of perfume but it was not the drug store variety. It smelled good. She pushed her waist into his and rubbed her cheek against his cheek and put her lips to his ear, nibbling the lobe. In a whisper she asked him how he wanted to have his party.

"Take off your clothes," he said. "Do it real slow."

She smiled and stepped back. Her body swayed in time to some imaginary beat and she began to strip. It wasn't much of a job. She was wearing a tight sweater and a tight pair of slacks, an un-likely costume for a prostitute at that, but she had not complicated matters by wearing anything beneath either of those garments, so disrobing was easily accomplished.

Still, she did it slowly, the way he had asked her to do it. She started by taking off her shoes and socks. Her toenails were scarlet with the same blood-red polish. She stood before him, barefoot, her hips swinging from side to side. She bent over a little and put her hands on her knees, then straightened up slowly and let her hands run upward along her body until they cupped her own breasts. She gave herself a cute little squeeze and wiggled playfully before him.

Then her hands hooked on the sweater and lifted it up and off, but slowly, very slowly, so that he saw first her bare brown midriff and then got a tantalizing peek of the underside of her large breasts. Slowly, slowly, and then the nipples came into view, and then the whole of the breasts, magnificent in their entirety, and then at last the sweater was up off her shoulders and over her head and off of her arms and tossed, casually, upon the wooden chair.

Her breasts were a little lighter in color than the rest of her. Their nipples were a deep reddish brown, more red than brown, already suffused with the response to the tactile stimulation she had given them earlier. The breasts were very large and very firm. He saw that he had picked a winner. With the sort of treatment hustlers got, they rarely had especially good boobs. But Dorothy's were flawless and lovely.

His brain reeled with the though of what he would do to those breasts. It was hard holding back now, hard controlling himself. But he managed it because he had to manage it. The longer he waited the better it would be, and he wanted it to be very good now. He had the feeling that there would not be many times left for him, from here on in, and he wanted to make every opportunity count for something. It was as though he was a cardiac patient who had been told by his doctor to give it up. Every time he did might be the last time, and you could bet he would make each as good as possible.

And this would be a good one for him.

She was wriggling out of the slacks now. They were a deep brown, much darker than she was. There was a zipper on the side, and she unzipped it. Then, breasts bobbing and hips still sashaying back and forth, she began to squirm out of the slacks. She got them down over her hips and turned around to let him see her, then turned to face him again. She squirmed slowly but surely until the slacks gave up and dropped down around her ankles. A quick kick-one third down-put the slacks on the chair with the sweater.

And she was naked.

Very naked.

She moved toward him like lava down the side of a volcanic mountain, and he stood waiting for her, and her breasts and arms reached for him and she threw her arms once again around his neck and pressed into his chest. He could feel the firmness. He put his hands around her and touched her buttocks. With a firm motion she moved against him and he felt lustfulness.

"Now what?" she whispered. "Now move around a little," he said. "Touch yourself."

"Fool with myself?"

"Yes."

"With my hands?"

"And anything else you think of."

"Sure," she said. She chewed her lower Hp. "This is an awful lot for twenty dollars," she said.

What difference did it make to him? "I'll give you twenty more," he said. He fished out another bill and handed it to her. "I want to have a good time, a nice slow good time. I don't mind shooting another twenty."

She smiled gratefully and took the bill from him. Grinning, she rubbed it against a special part of herself, then turned quickly and put it in the same drawer in her bureau. She closed the drawer and began to move her body for him, touching herself and letting him watch her. She cupped her breasts, handled them, played with the nipples. He asked her if she could get them to her mouth. She answered by lifting each breast in turn and pressing her lips to the tip. They just reached. She took each nipple with her mouth and kissed it, and when she stopped there was a glowing circle of blood-red lipstick around the tip of each perfect breast.

Then she began to stroke her stomach, and her buttocks. She assumed extraordinary positions and let him watch the clever things she did. At one point she went to the bureau and got a special gadget, a thing she kept around for her occasional Lesbian customers, and she did some exercises with it.

It was something to watch.

He thought about Jan, his Lesbian partner. In three days they were going to pull the first of their jobs together. He wondered how it would go, and how well they would work together. And he wondered if he would still be alive then, or if they would have caught him or killed him by that time. "More, honey?"

She was waiting for further instructions. And he was burning up now, too eager to wait any more. No love with her, not now. And no quick and brutal murder. He knew what he wanted to do.

He wanted to hurt her.

He had her turn around. She did, waiting. He wanted to see her squirm in pain and writhe in agony and twist in desperation. That was what he wanted, and that was what he was going to have, and he was going to do it all just right.

He had her turn around. She did. waiting. He reached out, touched her shoulders, reached around, touched her breasts, released them.

And then he brought back both hands and interlocked their fingers and raised his hands high over his head and brought them down on the very base of her skull, full force, all his strength. She never knew what hit her. She went down like the ship Titanic, out cold, and he stooped down beside her and looked hungrily at the glorious flesh that was his to ruin.

When she came to fifteen minutes later she could not move and could not make a sound. The bed was an old brass one with footboard and headboard, and he had spread her upon it, both pillows underneath her rear end. He had torn the bed's top sheet into long strips and had lashed her ankles to opposite ends of the footboard and her wrists to opposite ends of the headboard. A thick gag in her mouth kept her from making any noise whatsoever. She came to and she looked up at him with eyes that simply did not understand. She tried to move and she tried to cry out and all she did was wiggle a little and say nothing at all.

He touched her. Gently at first, touching her breasts and her middle. He was naked himself now and his clothes were piled on the same chair that held her sweater and slacks. He touched her a little lower and this time he was not gentle. He hurt her and he felt her muscles go tense and rigid with the pain. But that pain was nothing in comparison to what was coming. He was barely getting started.

"No beatings," he told her. "Just like you said, no beatings. I wouldn't hit you with my fists. I wouldn't do a thing like that, Dorothy, not to you. I just want to hurt you a little."

She looked as though she could not believe it. He let her see the knife, and he thumbed the blade open, and then she had to believe it. A dozen kinds of fear winked through her eyes and he could see a vein on her forehead standing out and throbbing with the realization of what was coming next.

With the precision of a surgeon, he made a three-inch cut down her middle. The knife barely pierced the skin, merely scored it, so that a thin rivulet of blood flowed from the cut. It was a sharp knife, and the small cut did not hurt her very much, but the sight of the blood welling from the cut sent shivers of passion coursing through Fallon. His eyes fastened on it and he breathed in heavy gasps. He bent over her and kissed the blood from the cut and his head swam.

He straightened up, fighting off the wave of dizziness that swept over him. He could take his time now, he knew. The door was bolted and the police lock would keep the whole world at bay. The room's sole window faced out on a blank wall, and the window shade was drawn anyway. The girl could neither move nor cry out.

He had all the time in the world.

He used the knife again. He made little cuts on her calves, on her legs, and on her arms. He stabbed her lightly in each armpit and watched the blood seep from the cuts. He cut her breasts, just one tiny cut on the underside of each. The scarlet blood matched her nail polish perfectly and stood out in glossy relief on her brown skin.

And it was hurting her now. She was not losing enough blood to matter but the multiplicity of the cuts was in itself enough to cause pain. Each time he let her see what he was going to do, and each time she would try to squirm away from him, to keep that part of herself that he was going to cut away from his knife. But she could not move far enough, and each time the knife cut her and each time a little more pain ran through her.

He closed the knife, set it aside. He took a cigarette from his pack, tore out a match and lit it. He blew out the match very carefully, testing it with the ball of his thumb to make sure that it was out, and dropped it onto the floor. He took a long drag on his cigarette. He inhaled and exhaled.

Then he jabbed the glowing cigarette to her.

It was something to see. The burning was a lot different from the cutting. It was a sharp and fiery pain that jabbed into her middle and spread through her like wildfire. Every muscle in her body tightened up and her face was torn with agony. She screamed against the gag but no sound came out. Blood rushed to her face. Her arms and legs were taut as tightly-stretched bands of wrought iron.

A tramp could fake passion. But no one on earth could fake pain and make it this convincing. She felt it and he knew she felt it and his whole being trembled with the full realization of her pain.

He wanted her now, wanted to throw himself upon her and ravish her, wanted to take with fury what he had already bought and paid for. The pillows beneath her offered her charms to him like some sacrifice to a pagan god, and he looked at the offering and trembled with need. But he had to wait, had to bide his time.

He lit three more cigarettes, one at a time. He butted one on the very tip of each breast, grinding them into the soft-firm flesh and shaking violently as she shook with pain. Her pain was his pleasure, and she had a great deal of pain and he had a great deal of pleasure.

You can guess for yourself what he did with the third cigarette.

And that was the crowning touch. That sent her into orbit, and she twisted and writhed, bringing into play muscle that may never have been used before, not even in the practice of her profession. She did everything possible to move the cigarette but it stayed where it was, burning away, and the room was filled with the smell of burning flesh, and the smell raced through Fallon's nostrils, and he knew that it was time, now it was time, and waiting any longer would only make the taking of this woman anticlimactic. Now was the time to strike.

And he struck.

It was rape. It might seem incredible that anyone could actually rape a body he had already bought and paid for, and any prostitute who was the plaintiff in a rape case would probably find herself getting laughed out of court. But this was rape and their was no other word for it. He threw himself down and took her like the Roman Army taking Carthage. Rapidly he surged to her with an unprecedented fury. He did not have to hit her or bite her or tear at her now. Her body was a boiling ocean of pain, and all he had to do was ride the crest of that ocean while his own passion played itself out. More-

And it happened harshly and furiously and wildly, a quick action that said everything in the space of a single second.

Afterward he let her lie on the bed, tied and gagged and sobbing, while he washed her blood from his body at her sink, drying himself with her discarded clothing. He took back his two twenty-dollar bills from her drawer, took also three twenties and a ten and two fives that she had earned earlier that night, before him. It seemed to be the ultimate violation, he thought; after everything else, he was stealing from her. He dressed himself and then, leaving her where she was, he went to the window and smoked four cigarettes in a row and thought things over.

He did not burn her with the cigarettes. He had done enough, and anything else now would be superfluous and silly. He put out each cigarette in turn by dropping it to the floor and grinding it out beneath the heel of his heavy shoe. After the fourth cigarette he went over and stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at her ruined body.

Aside from the pain, she was not in desperate shape. Three thin cuts on her middle, four on her legs, two on her armpits, one on each breast. The cuts had stopped bleeding long ago. They would very probably leave thin scars, but, they would be otherwise healed in two or three days at the most. There was a burn on each nipple, and there was another burn that did not show. But that was all the real damage he had done to her body. Otherwise she was all right, physically if not emotionally, in body if not in mind.

"I'm not going to kill you," he told her. She looked at him as though she did not believe a word he had just said.

"I'm not going to kfll you," he said again.

She looked at him as though it did not much matter whether he killed her or not.

"I'm not going to kill you," he said a third time. And he took a deep breath and looked her over once more, his eyes finally locking with her eyes. "I told you I wouldn't kill you and I won't," he went on. "There wouldn't be any point in it."

He turned away from her and walked to the window again. He started to take another cigarette, then changed his mind and shoved it back into the pack. He took a breath and went back to her, stood again at the bed, filled his eyes one more time with the sight of her bare body.

"But there's one thing," he said. "You could identify me. You know who I am, what I look like, and you could tell them about me and have them find me, and then identify me, and that wouldn't be any good. No, it wouldn't be any good at all."

Her face was almost calm now. She did not understand and did not want to understand. Maybe she wanted to die. He could understand that. If someone did to him as he had done to her, it would be completely understandable if he wanted to die, to have an end to all of it.

But he wouldn't let her die.

"You got to admit it's a problem for me," he said conversationally. "I mean, everybody knows the best way to make sure there's no witness is to take them, whoever the witness is, and kill them. You know, dead men tell no tales, or dead women either, so that's the easy way. I killed a tramp a while ago but that was something different, and I didn't have to kill her, I only felt like it. But I don't feel like killing you and you got to admit that it's a problem, keeping you from being a witness without I kill you."

She didn't seem to hear. But he went on, saying the same words over and over, telling her again and again about the problem he faced. And then, his own face brightening, he told her that he had found the solution.

"It's simple," he said. "You live, but you're no witness. It's so simple that it's beautiful."

He scratched his head. Then he leaned over and put his hands on the sides of her face and stared down into her eyes. His fingers stroked her cheeks. They were oddly gentle.

"The only drawback is it might hurt," he said. "But what the hell."

His hands shifted slightly. His thumbs moved to cover her large brown eyes. He told her that he was sorry if it hurt, but there was no other way.

And then, with quick and sudden violence, he pushed at both her eyes with his thumbs. But it was no good-he hadn't saved her anything-because when he did that, her heart stopped.

For three days nothing happened.

Oh, hell. Face it-that's an exaggeration. Something always happens. There were baseball games, and international crises, and summit meetings, and stock market ups and downs. A Hollywood couple got a divorce, his third and her fourth. Police busted a wife-swapping ring in Westchester County. A man in Klamath Falls, Oregon, killed his wife and his six kids and then shot himself in the face with a .22-caliber pistol, and lived. Let's face it-things happened, here and there and everywhere.

But nothing much happened for Fallon.

He stayed close to home, spending almost all of the time in his room at the King William. He smoked a little and drank a little-but never quite managed to eat stoned-and he went out for meals and saw three 42nd Street movies and otherwise kept himself amused. Twice Jan Lawler came to his room and they sat drinking lightly and talking seriously about what they were going to do, going through all the details of the scheduled job. Jan wanted him to go with her to have a look at things, but he wanted to stay where he was. He didn't have to case the job, just so he got it all right in his head.

Sometimes it was hard to concentrate, harder to think. Sometimes he caught himself just sitting motionless in a chair or lying motionless on a bed, doing nothing and seeing nothing and, amazingly, thinking nothing, literally having not a thought in his head. It was not merely that his mind wandered at those times but that his mind did not seem to exist at all. It was slightly frightening, but he didn't dwell on it too deeply.

"You're hung up," Jan told him once. "An emotional malaise, to put it more brightly. Weltschtnertz, which means world-weariness and for which there is no suitable English term. Pretty soon we shall get ourselves into action, Lee, and all will be well."

But she didn't know. She had told him her little secret, that she was a girl who liked girls, but he had not told her his little secret and he had no intentions of telling her. She saw him as a direct and fairly rough robber type, and that was a type she could use. A lust killer was not a type she or anyone else could make much use of, and that was what he was-with a string of four corpses to prove it. Shirley, the boy, the girl, and Dorothy. One on the West Side just off the park, two in the park, and one uptown in Harlem. He spread himself around a little, anyway.

Great.

Terrific

He spent money during those days, spent it often without getting anything he either wanted or needed, spent it as if under some compulsion to get rid of money which he had so easily come by. He bought himself a new watch and threw away the stolen one. He bought an expensive alligator wallet and threw away the old billfold that had served well enough until then. He bought a ring, a star sapphire, then decided that he did not like the ring and turned around and sold it to another jeweler at a fifty per cent loss. It was almost as though he wanted to get rid of the money because it was not real for him, just chips with which you scored the drastic game he was playing.

There were sudden flashes of desire during those days. But the spasms were brief and not overly intense, and there was never any question as to his ability to subdue them. He played it cool and coolness prevailed, and the days went by one at a time. Which, of course, is what they always do and all they ever do.