She calmed down, slumping back on the bench, and briefly closed her eyes. The woman on the next bench finished her hero, leaned over to Neela, and said, “Oh, dump that boy, honey. Cancel his ass today. You don’t need no relationship with nobody’s pet poodle.” Neela turned to her as if greeting an old friend. “Ma’am,” she said, seriously, “you’ve got milk in your refrigerator with a longer life than that relationship.”
“Let’s walk now,” she commanded, and Solanka rose to his feet. When she was sure they were out of earshot, she said, “Look, I’m pissed at Jack, that’s one thing, but I’m scared for him, too. He really needs a true friend, Malik. He’s in a pretty bad jam.” As Solanka had guessed from his phone call, Rhinehart was depressed, and not only about the collapse of his perishable milk carton of a love affair. The Sara Lear encounter, which had begun as an interview for an article about the power divorces of the age, had rebounded badly against Jack. Sara had taken against him, and her enmity had hit him hard. After the loss of the Springs place to Bronislawa, he’d found himself the tiniest of shoe boxes in the middle of a golf course way out toward Montauk Point. “You know his thing for Tiger Woods,” Neela said. “Jack’s competitive. He won’t be happy till Nike—the other Nike, I mean,” she said, flushing with undisguised pleasure, “the Nike he hasn’t disgusted yet, starts sponsoring his game too, right down to the swoosh on his cap.” After Rhinehart’s offer for the little house had been accepted by the seller, two things happened in quick succession. On Rhinehart’s third visit to the place, to which the broker had handed him the key, the police showed up less than ten minutes after he did and invited him to assume the position. Neighbors had reported an intruder on the property, and he was it. It took him close to an hour to persuade the cops that he wasn’t a burglar but a bona fide purchaser. A week later the golf club blackballed his application for membership. Sara’s arm was long. Rhinehart, for whom, as he said, “being black’s just not the issue anymore,” had rediscovered, the hard way, that it still was. “There’s a club out there that got started so Jews could play golf,” Neela said contemptuously. “Those old Wasps can sting. Jack should’ve known the score. I mean: Tiger Woods maybe of mixed race, but he knows his balls are black.
“That’s not the worst of it.” They had reached Bethesda Fountain. Double takes and slapstick routines continued all around them; they walked on until they reached a grassy slope. “Sit,” said Neela. He sat. Neela lowered her voice. “He’s become involved with some crazy boys, Malik. God knows why, but he really wants in with them, and they’re the dumbest, wildest white boys you could imagine. Did you ever hear of a secret society, it’s not even supposed to exist, called the S & M? Even the name’s a bad joke. ‘Single and Male.’ Yeah, right. Those boys are twisted way, way out of shape. It’s like that Skull and Crossbones thing they have at Yale?, right?, where they buy up stuff like Hitler’s mustache and Casanova’s dick?—only this one’s not school-specific, and it doesn’t collect memorabilia. It collects girls, young ladies with certain interests and skills. You’d be surprised how many, especially if you knew the games they’re expected to play, and I’m not talking strip poker now. Zips, nips n’ clips. Saddles, reins, harnesses, they probably end up looking like the surrey with the fringe on top. Or, you know, lash me with lashes and tie me with strings, these are a few of my favorite things. Rich girls. I swear. Your family owns a horse farm, so you get turned on being treated like a horse? I wouldn’t know. So much that’s so desirable comes so easy to these kids”—Neela couldn’t be more than five years older than the dead girls, Solanka thought-”that nothing turns them on. They have to travel further and further in search of kicks, further from home, further from safety. The wildest places of the world, the wildest chemicals, the wildest sex. That’s it, my five-cent Lucy analysis. Bored little rich girls let dumb rich boys do weird stuff to them. Dumb rich boys can’t believe their luck.”
Solanka reflected about Neela’s use of the word “kids” to describe what were, after all, members of her own generation. The word seemed honest in her mouth. Compared to, say, Mila-Mila, his own guilty secret—this was an adult woman. Mila had her charms, but they had their roots in a childlike wantonness, a greedy whimsicality born of this same crisis of dulled response, this same need to go to extremes, beyond extremes, in order to find what she needed in the way of arousal. When forbidden fruit has been your daily diet, what do you do for thrills? Lucky Mila, Solanka thought. Her rich boyfriend hadn’t understood what he might have done with her, and had let her go. If these other rich boys had ever heard about her, how far she was willing to go, what taboos she was willing to ignore, she could have been their goddess, the child-woman queen of their hidden cult. She could have ended up in the Midtown Tunnel with a smashed-in skull. “The affectless at play,” Solanka said aloud. “A tragedy of insulation. The unexamined life of the folks who’ve got their units.” He had to explain that, and was happy to hear her laugh again. “No wonder so many of those horny gorillas those Stashes, Clubs, and Horses—want in, no?” Neela sighed. “The question is, why does Jack?”
Professor Malik Solanka felt his stomach tighten. “Jack’s a member of this S & M thing?” he asked. “But aren’t these the men…’—“He’s not a member yet,” she butted in, driven by her need to share her terrible burden. “But he’s hammering on the door, begging to be let in, the stupid bastard. And that’s after the evil shit in the press. Once I knew that, I couldn’t stay with him. I’ll tell you something that wasn’t in any of the papers,” she added, dropping her voice even further. “Those three dead girls? They weren’t raped, they weren’t robbed, right? But something was done to them, and that’s what really links the three crimes, only the police don’t want it in the papers because of the copycat problem.” Solanka was beginning to be genuinely frightened. “What happened to them?” he asked weakly. Neela covered her eyes with her hands. “They were scalped,” she whispered, and wept.
To be scalped was to remain a trophy even in death. And because rarity created value, a dead girl’s scalp in your pocket—O most gruesome of mysteries!—might actually possess greater cachet than would be conferred by the same girl, alive and breathing, on your arm at a glamorous ball, or even as a willing partner in whatever sexual antics you cared to devise. The scalp was a signifier of domination, and to remove it, to see such a relic as desirable, was to value the signifier above the signified. The girls, Solanka in his revolted horror began to understand, had actually been worth more to their murderers dead than alive.
Neela was convinced of the three boyfriends’ guilt; convinced, too, that Jack knew a great deal more than he was telling anyone, even her. “It’s like heroin,” she said, drying her eyes. “He’s in so deep he doesn’t know how to get out, doesn’t want to get out, even though staying in there will destroy him. My worry is, what is he ready to do, and who is he ready to do it to? Was I being lined up for those assholes’ delectation, or what? As for the killings, who knows why? Maybe their little sex games went too far. Maybe it’s some insane sex and power thing those rich boys have. Some blood-brother manhood shit. Fuck the girl and kill her, and do it so damn cleverly that you get away with it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just expressing class resentment here. Maybe I’ve just watched too many movies. Compulsion. Rope. You know? ‘Why do such a thing? “Because we can.’ Because they want to prove what little Caesars they are. How above and beyond they are, how exalted, godlike. The law can’t touch them. It’s such murderous crap, but Mr. Lapdog Rhinehart just goes on being loyal. ‘You don’t know jack shit about them, Neela, they’re decent enough young men.’ Bullshit. He’s so blind, he can’t see that they’ll take him down with them when they go, or, worse still, maybe they’re setting him up. He’ll take the fall for them and go to the chair singing their praises. Jack Shit. Good name for that weak little fuck. Right at this moment, that’s about what he means to me.”