"He's impotent?" Lucas asked.
"He wasn't impotent," she said. She glanced at Del, who nodded, encouraging her. "I mean, sometimes we did, and sometimes we didn't, but he didn't seem driven so much by sex as…"
"What?"
Clark's fear of them had slipped into the background and she seemed to be searching for the right phrase, interested despite herself. "He needs to control things. He'd make me do… you know, oral sex and so on. Not because it turned him on, I don't think, but because he liked to make me do it. It was the control he liked, not the sex."
"Did he ever use drugs while you were around?"
"No… well, he maybe smoked a little marijuana. You know, though, I think he might have used steroids. He has a very good body…" She dropped her eyelashes. "But he had very small testicles."
"Small?"
"Very small… almost like marbles," she said. "You know, he lifts weights, and weightlifters sometimes use steroids. Testicles can shrink with prolonged use of steroids, so I asked him, and he got angry… That was the time he choked me."
"Did you ever see him dance?" Lucas asked.
"Dance? His dance?" Clark pulled back. "You've been watching him…"
"So you've seen it," Lucas said. Del was frowning at him, confused.
"One time, he beat me up," Clark said in a rush, bouncing on the couch. "Not bad, I mean, nothing showed, but I was hurting, and crying, and all of a sudden he started to giggle and jump up and down. I couldn't believe… it was like a dance. It was a dance, a jig…"
"Jesus Christ," Del blurted. "A jig?"
Lucas nodded. "I've seen it. It's gotta be dope. You should talk to your people, see if he's buying on the street."
Del looked at Clark and asked, "Why'd you go along with him?"
She looked up at him and said, "Because he's beautiful."
"Beautiful?"
"He's beautiful. I'd never had a beautiful man." She looked between them, looking for understanding. After a moment, Del nodded.
They left her ten minutes later.
"She knows something else," Lucas said. "She didn't tell us something, and she thinks it might be important."
"Yeah. But there's no way to tell how important it is." Del scratched his head, looking back at the apartment house door. "And if we squeeze, she'll either crack like Humpty-fuckin'-Dumpty or call a lawyer…"
"Which is worse…"
"Yeah."
They were walking along the sidewalk to the car. "Where's your wife?" Lucas asked suddenly. "I heard she split."
"Yeah. More'n a year ago."
"You gettin' laid?"
"Only by Lady Fingers," Del said, with a dry chuckle. "Look at me, man, I'm a fuckin' wreck. I'm stoned half the time and I'm walkin' around with a gun in my armpit. Who'd go out with me? Other'n maybe a couple of hookers?"
"Yeah." Lucas looked at the other man. "You know what? She kind of liked you. Clark did. Talking about bikes and all. I mean, she's a rider and you're… like you are."
Del shook his head. "Man, I can do better'n her."
"You haven't been," Lucas pointed out. "And doing better won't tell us what she knows."
"I'd say twelve or thirteen of them are straight-out nutcases, and we didn't want to bother you," the dispatcher said, handing Lucas a stack of call slips. "I've marked those. Six of them wouldn't identify themselves at all. You can judge for yourself, but they're a waste of time… There are a half-dozen you ought to get back to. People who knew the Bekkers or Armistead and say they might have a piece of information for you. None of them thought their information was particularly urgent."
"All right. Thanks."
"That last one, she said it was personal."
Lucas looked at it. Cassie Lasch.
He thought about not calling. An easy way out, if you didn't call for long enough. He went home and ate a microwave dinner, aware of the telephone out on the edge of his vision. He lasted an hour before he picked it up.
"You didn't call," Cassie said.
"I'm working. Give me a little time."
"How much time does it take to call? Where do you live?"
"St. Paul."
"Why don't I come over?" she asked.
"Ah…" Lucas felt himself freeze for a moment, an impulse to push her away. He was looking at the kitchen table, piled with newspapers and unopened mail, books, some read, some not, a couple of unopened cereal boxes, a stack of unwashed bowls…
He wasn't doing anything. He was barely alive.
"You know where Mississippi River Boulevard is?"
CHAPTER 13
Cassie was muscular and intense, and fought him, wrestling across the bed. When they were done, she lay facedown on the extra pillow, while he lay faceup, sweat evaporating from his chest, chilling him.
"Jesus," he said after a while. "That was all right. I was a little worried."
Her head turned. "About what?"
"It's been a while."
She propped herself up on one elbow. "Ah. A little depression?"
"I guess," he said, curiously ready to talk about it. He'd never talked about problems with Jennifer. "I had all the symptoms."
She crawled over him, reaching, switched on the bedside lamp. He winced and turned away from it.
"Look here," she said, showing her wrists to him. There were two whiter lines on the inside of each, parallel, transverse. Scars to be read as clearly as needle tracks.
"What's this shit?" he said. He took her wrists in his hands and stroked the scars with his thumbs.
"What do they look like?"
"Like you cut your wrists," he said.
She nodded. "You win the golden weenie. Fake suicide attempt-that's what the shrinks say. Depression."
"The scars don't look so fake," he said.
"I didn't think so, either," she said, pulling her wrists away. "Are there any cigarettes around here?"
"No. I didn't know you smoked."
"I don't, except after sex," she said.
"Those were pretty heavy cuts. Tell me…"
She sat up and pulled her knees under her chin, looking down at him. "This was five years ago. I was never in much danger. A lot of blood, and I had to go to counseling for a few months."
"What's fake about that?" Lucas asked, rolling up on an elbow.
"What the shrinks say is, I was living with this guy and he had a gun, and I knew where it was. And our apartment was on the seventh floor, I could have jumped. And I knew the guy was coming home pretty soon. So they say I really wanted to live and this was just an attempt to draw attention to my condition."
"But the cuts…"
"Yeah. The shrinks are full of shit. They can tell you how to talk to someone else, how to deal with personal problems, but they don't know what happens inside your head, unless it's happened to them. I could have jumped out the window. I could have shot myself. But that's not what I thought of. I had this, like…"
"Fixation."
"Yeah. Exactly," she said, smiling at him. "See, you know. The theater's got a whole oral literature about killing yourself and knives are the way to do it. I fucked it up, did it all wrong-I should have cut myself lengthwise, or at the elbow, but I didn't know that. I could have used little pieces of glass, you get a better cut that way, but I didn't know that, either."
Lucas shuddered. "Glass. I saw that once. You don't want to cut yourself with glass."
"I'll keep that in mind," she said wryly.
"So you cut yourself…?"
"Yep. I just hacked and sat there and bled and cried until my friend came home. They didn't even give me a transfusion at the hospital," Cassie said. "Good thing, too. This was back when there was AIDS in the blood supply. Though who'd ever know, with me fuckin' actors, and all."