“ ‘ Intermittent pain, worse in the evening,’ ” she said. “I have this herbal doctor, I started to tell him about it and he was finishing my sentences for me. If you drink this it should cure it completely.”
“ What is it?”
“ A mixture of Chinese herbs, and it doesn’t taste great. But if you can get it down your troubles are over.”
He took the bottle from her. “How much are you supposed to take?”
“ All of it, if you can.”
He uncapped the bottle, shrugged, tipped it up and drained it. His face twisted. “Jesus, that’s terrible,” he said. “Anything tastes that bad, it must be great for you.”
“ He said it tasted pretty bad.”
“ Well, he got that right.”
“ And at first it may make you feel worse,” she said. “That’s a sign that it’s working. But after fifteen minutes you should feel great, so by the time our little blond friend gets here…”
“ She’s not so little. Pretty big in the tits department.”
“ Well, you’ll be ready for her.”
“ I’m ready for her right now,” he said. “Oh, shit.”
“ What’s the matter?”
“ I think this shit is working, that’s all.” He clutched his middle. “Oh, shit, that’s pretty bad. What’d you say it had in it? Chinese herbs?”
“ That’s what he said.”
“ Jesus, if chop suey tasted like this nobody’d eat it. I fucked a Chinese girl once, did I ever tell you about her? She was so scared I thought she was gonna have a heart attack. And it ain’t sideways, in case you were wondering.”
“ What’s not sideways?”
“ Her pussy. That’s what they say about Chinese women. You never heard that? Anyway, her pussy was the same as anybody else’s. Oh, Jesus, that’s bad.” He sprawled on the bed, rolling from side to side, wracked with spasms. “Jesus, it’s working. You sure I’m gonna be all right by the time the blond cunt gets here?”
“ She’s not coming.”
“ Huh? What do you mean?”
“ She was just a woman I pointed out to you,” she said. “I don’t even know her name. She’s not coming. It’s just the two of us.”
“ What are you-“
“ And that wasn’t Chinese herbs in the bottle. It was the same thing you’ve been getting in your cocoa every night, and it came out of a bottle marked ‘Rat Poison.’ ’’
He stared at her. She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I was giving you small doses,” she said, “but this is one big dose, enough to kill a hundred rats. But all it has to kill is one big rat, and you can puke your guts out but it’s too late now. It’s in your system. You’ll be dead in fifteen minutes, half an hour tops.”
“ Where are you going?”
“ I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I’m just getting comfortable. You can’t even get off the bed, can you? So I don’t have anything to worry about. You’re dying, and I’m going to stick around and see the show.”
“ Susie…”
“ Maybe I’ll touch myself,” she said. “Maybe I’ll make myself come while you’re busy dying. You want to watch me? Do you think you’d like that? Maybe it’ll take your mind off what’s happening to you. Maybe it’ll get you hot.”
The policeman was the first to speak. “I suppose she got away with it,” he said.
“ She was never apprehended,” said the doctor. “Never even questioned by the authorities. No one could connect her to Dekker, and the only risk she ran, aside from being discovered in the act, lay in the possibility that he’d left something incriminating among his effects. A diary, for instance, with entries detailing their relationship and their planned rendezvous at the motel. But that seemed unlikely, the man was functionally illiterate, and in the event nothing turned up to draw her into what investigation there was. And that was minimal, as you might suppose. Gregory Dekker’s death was ruled a suicide.”
“ A suicide?”
“ He checked in alone at a rundown motel and drank a bottle of rat poison. His prints were on the bottle, you know, and while it was unlabeled, one couldn’t down it thinking it was a fine Cabernet just reaching its prime. The stuff tasted like poison. Dekker, of course, thought it tasted like medicine.”
“ She planned it,” the soldier mused, “from the first cup of cocoa. It masked the taste of the non-lethal doses she fed him, which gave him the stomach aches.”
“ And probably accumulated in the soft tissues,” the doctor said, “if the lethal ingredient was in fact arsenic, as I suspect it was. And the stomach aches made him quick to down a larger dose of the poison, in the hope of a cure. Oh, yes, I’d say she planned it. And got away with it, if in fact anybody ever gets away with anything. That would be more in your line, Priest.”
The priest stroked his chin. “An undiscovered sin is a sin nevertheless,” he said. “One is hardly absolved by the temporal authority’s failure to uncover the sin and punish the sinner. Repentance is a prerequisite of absolution, and to repent is to acknowledge that one has not gotten away with it. So no, Doctor, I would hold that no one gets away with anything.”
“ A thoughtful answer, Priest.”
“ Long-winded, at least,” the priest said. “But I find myself with a question of my own. Yours, like all our stories, is a story of lust, and the lust would seem to be that of the ill-favored young man, whom you call Gregory Dekker. And Susan Trenholme’s sin, if we call her a sinner, would be a sin of wrath or anger. Blood lust, if you will. And yet…”
“ Yes?”
“ I wonder,” he said. “When did she decide to kill her rapist?”
“ When?”
“ After the initial act, certainly,” the priest said. “But would it have been before or after she arranged a second meeting? Did she at first plan to call the police and trap him, or did she know all along that she meant to kill him herself?”
The doctor smiled. “You have an interesting mind,” he said. “But who can say exactly when the idea presented itself? Her first concern was self-preservation. She feigned a physical response to save her own life, then made a date with him to give him further reason to let her live. At first she must have thought she’d have policemen at hand when he came knocking on her door, but somewhere along the way she changed her mind. Why, if she reported the crime at all, she’d have no end of unwelcome attention, and there was even the chance the man would evade justice. And, as she planned her revenge, yes, we can say that blood lust came into it.”
“ And was that the only sort of lust she felt?” The priest put his palms together. “She faked one orgasm to save her life,” he said, “but when she determined to punish the man herself, she drew up a scenario that called for her to engage in all manner of sex acts, and to simulate passion on several more occasions, and to fake a good number of orgasms. And was that passion simulated? Were those orgasms counterfeit?”
“ What a subtle mind you have,” said the doctor. “That’s what bothered her, you know. That’s what led her to tell me the story. In the parking lot, with his foul breath in her face and his body upon and within her, all she felt was revulsion. Her response was a triumph of an acting ability she had never dreamed she possessed, in or out of bed.
“ He never doubted the sincerity of her response. He thought he had indeed turned her on. But he hadn’t-she had turned herself on, and the experience, while profoundly disgusting to her on one level, was undeniably exciting on another.”
“ Awful and wonderful,” murmured the policeman.
“ Later, when she weighed her options, she knew that she would have to repeat her performance if she were to seek her own revenge. And the idea was at once distasteful and appealing. She had sex with him that second time, in her own apartment, in her own bed, and if anything she loathed him more than before. But it was not difficult to pretend to be aroused, and in fact she found she was genuinely aroused, though far more by her own performance and her own plans than by anything he was doing to her.”
“ And did she fake that orgasm, too?” the soldier wondered.
“ I can’t answer that,” the doctor said, “because she didn’t know herself. Where does performance leave off and reality begin? Perhaps she faked that orgasm, but faked it with her own being, so that he was not the only one taken in by her performance.” The doctor shrugged. “From that point on, however, her response was unequivocal. She looked forward to his visits. She was excited by their lovemaking, if it’s not too perverse to call it that. She was excited by him, and her excitement grew even as her hatred for him deepened. By the time she killed him, her sole regret was that she would no longer have him as a sexual partner.”