The gun was on the floor next to the body, a short-barreled.25 with pearl grips. Neither Runyon nor I touched it. We backed out of there, returned to the living room.
Kenneth Beckett was still sitting in the same rigid posture, but his face was no longer impassive. Muscles rippled beneath the skin, making his features shift and change shape like images in a kaleidoscope. Tears leaked now from the burned-out eyes, mixing with the blood from the scratches to form a reddish serpent line on one cheek. Soundless weeping.
Runyon went to him, said his name twice to get his attention. “Did you call the police?”
“No. I couldn’t. I thought you’d come, so I just… waited.”
My cue to make the 911 call. But even as I spoke to the police dispatcher, I watched the two of them and I could hear what they were saying to each other, Beckett responding in that same hollow voice.
“What happened, Ken?”
“I killed her.”
“Not deliberately. You wouldn’t do that.”
“No. Never. Never.”
“Tell me what happened.”
It was a few seconds before Beckett answered. Then, in an agonized whisper, “So pissed at me because I didn’t shoot Chaleen. Madder than I ever saw her before. She wouldn’t listen, just kept screaming that I betrayed her. ‘Give me the gun,’ she said, ‘I’ll go do it myself.’ I… I didn’t want to. She hit me, scratched me. That damn gun. She yanked it out of my pocket. I tried to take it back and… I don’t know, it went off and she… she…”
His eyes squeezed shut, then popped wide open like eyes in a Keane painting. He made a low animal-like noise in his throat; swallowed to shut it off, and stumbled on. “I killed her. I loved her and I killed her. I wish I was dead, too. The gun… I put it under my chin and I tried… I tried, but I couldn’t make myself do that, either.”
Death wish already granted, I thought as I put down the phone and moved over to where they were. In a very real sense he’d died, too, the instant the bullet tore the life out of his sister.
“It was an accident, Ken,” Runyon said. “It’s not your fault, it’s hers.”
“No. Mine, and that stupid pig Chaleen’s. That’s what she called him. ‘Stupid pig deserves to die.’ Then why did she let him fuck her all that time? Mr. Vorhees, sure, but why him?”
Because she needed the kind of man he was, I thought. Read his character correctly, with that innate sense some corrupt individuals have for spotting one of their own, and knew he could be maneuvered into committing murder for her. But he would not have lasted long even if he hadn’t been responsible for Andrew Vorhees’ death; she’d have found a way to jettison him sooner or later. That could be the reason she’d bought the automatic.
“I tried to tell her I couldn’t do it,” Beckett was saying. “She wouldn’t take no for an answer. She never took no for an answer. I loved her so much, I always did what she wanted me to. In the light or in the dark. But not that. Why didn’t she understand, not something like that?”
Runyon said, “What do you mean, in the dark?”
“At night. In bed together.”
“So you were sleeping with her.”
No response for three or four beats. Then, “It wasn’t wrong. She said so the first night she came into my room. It wasn’t wrong because we loved each other.”
“How old were you that first night?”
“Fifteen.”
The queasy feeling in my stomach was stronger now. Runyon’s expression said he’d had intimations of this just as I had. Held out hope that it wasn’t so, just as I had-the reason neither of us had brought up the possibility in open conversation. The kind of woman Cory Beckett had been, the screwed-up mess Kenneth was. Sex had been her primary weapon, always, and she’d wielded it mercilessly with all kinds of men. But sweet Jesus, her own brother!
“But I wasn’t enough for her,” Beckett said. “She had to have all those others. I didn’t mind so much until Hutchinson. It… it wasn’t the same with her after him. Because she wasn’t the same.”
Hutchinson. The biker felon she’d taken up with in Riverside, the one who’d been shot and killed by police.
“He talked her into it. She said it was her idea, but it couldn’t have been. He made her do it.”
“Do what?” Runyon asked him.
“I hated looking at her after that. But I couldn’t stop doing it to her, she wouldn’t let me stop.”
“Ken. What did Hutchinson make her do?”
“But only in the dark. Only in the dark. I couldn’t stand seeing her the way she was in the light. That’s why I covered her in the bathroom after I killed her. I… couldn’t… stand…”
Runyon asked the question again, but Beckett was no longer listening. His facial muscles quit jumping and twitching, his tear-stained features smoothed out so that he looked about the age he’d been when his sister seduced him-a battered, crippled, very old fifteen. He sat staring sightlessly, his mouth moving but no words coming out. Lost now somewhere deep inside himself. Lost, probably, for as long as there was breath left in his body.
But Jake and I could not just stand there and wait for the police. I wish we had. It would have been better for both of us if we hadn’t let Beckett’s last words send us back into that bloody bathroom.
We stood looking down at what was left of Cory Beckett. One fold of the yellow robe, I noticed then, had been draped over the other, the belt untied. I could not quite bring myself to reach down and open the robe. It was Runyon, after a few seconds, who did that.
It takes a lot to shock men who have been in law enforcement as long as we have. Beckett’s incest revelation had rocked us some, but what we saw revealed now, the reason why Cory had always worn clothing that covered her to the neck, was like a body blow. Runyon was not given to emotional outbursts; his whispered “Christ!” was a measure of how affected he was. All I could do was stand there gaping in silence.
Cory Beckett, femme fatale. The incestuous relationship with her brother was one of the new and terrible twists she’d brought to the role. This was the other, and in a way it was worse, much worse.
She was tattooed.
One single massive tattoo, the entire front of her torso used as a canvas to portray a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.
In intricate detail the upthrust breasts had been turned into a pair of erupting volcanoes, the nipples so violently colored they resembled volcanic cores. And spilling down over both globes, down over her belly to meet at her shaved pubis and disappear into the hollow between her legs, was a trail of molten fire.
It was the kind of voluntary sexual mutilation that could drive some men wild with lust, make them easier to manipulate and control.
And easier to destroy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Pronzini has been nominated for, or won, every prize offered to crime-fiction writers, including the 2008 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. It is no wonder that the Detroit Free Press said of him: “It’s always nice to see masters at work. Pronzini’s clear style seamlessly weaves [story lines] together, turning them into a quick, compelling read.” He lives and writes in California with his wife, crime novelist Marcia Muller.
