Leather Maiden Read online

  I drifted back into town and got a parking pass at the campus police station, drove over to a lot behind the history department. I locked up and walked over to the building that housed the department, turned and looked at the clock tower. I could see the big, ragged gears through the face of the clock; they were silver now, not gold, because the light was different. The dark hands of the clock lay flat against the outside of the glass. I looked at my watch. I was either five minutes fast or the clock was five minutes slow.

  Entering the building, I rode the elevator up to the third floor. When I got off the halls were silent except for a janitor pushing a squeaky trash cart. Summer classes aren’t as busy as spring or fall, so there’s not much excitement that time of the year. The janitor squeaked on by.

  I had no idea if Jimmy was teaching or in his office. Maybe he had another coed locked in there and he was doing with her what he had done with Caroline. Maybe he was filming it?

  There were a couple of hallways and there were offices on either side of the hallways, and I walked along looking at the name plaques beside the office doors, trying to find the one that belonged to Jimmy.

  A man with a nose like a pink cucumber, a beard and about four strands of reluctant hair pasted down across the top of his head was sitting in an office with his door open. Behind him, through the window, I could see the university plaza, and beyond that, the parking garage.

  I introduced myself and Cucumber Nose told me his name was Thomas Burke. I asked him about Jimmy, and he told me where to find him. I went there. It was an office two doors down from Burke’s place. The door was locked. There was a schedule on the wall by the door, but I was so nervous I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. I might as well have been reading Sanskrit, the way my mind was working.

  “Cason,” a voice called.

  I turned. It was Jimmy. He had a stack of books under his arm and was walking toward me, smiling. When he saw the expression on my face, he quit smiling, said, “Mom and Dad okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Trixie?”

  I nodded again. “Brother,” I said. “We have to talk.”

  Jimmy unlocked his office door and went inside and put his stack of books on his desk, turned and looked at me.

  “You look like your dog just committed suicide,” he said.

  “Actually, I think my brother just fucked himself.”

  He gave me a puzzled look. I couldn’t hold his gaze. I turned and looked out his window and took in a new vantage point on the plaza and the parking garage, the clock. I walked over to the window for a better view. It was an old-style window that cranked open. It was part of the original building, constructed back in the 1930s. Back when it was an all-women’s teacher’s college. I felt like I wanted to crank it open and get a taste of the warm fresh air. Anything to clear my head.

  “The clock,” Jimmy said. “All that money for it, and it doesn’t keep good time…What exactly do you want to talk about?”

  “There might be a better place to discuss it than here.”

  13

  Jimmy’s last class for the day was over, so we walked out to my car together. I drove us out of there, on out Highway 7, and then off of it and down a long winding road that had once, many moons ago, been a major highway. The sun was falling into the trees and it looked like a peeled red plum coming apart. A flock of black birds was moving from one tree to the other as my car startled them. They moved so well in tight formation they appeared to be a wind blown cloud of crude oil. Finally they had had enough and broke over the trees and flew into the face of the dying sun, black freckles on a bright red face. Jimmy sat silent, his head turned a little toward me. I could tell he was nervous, and I wanted to relieve him of it, but I hadn’t found a way to say what I needed to say, and a part of me, pissed, wanted to make him squirm. “Jimmy,” I finally said, “what about Caroline Allison?”

  “What?”

  “I can tell by the expression on your face that you know damn well what I’m talking about.”

  “No. No, I don’t. What is wrong with you, Cason?”

  I found myself pushing on the gas a little heavy. I let off.

  “I got something in the mail today,” I said. “It was curious. It was a DVD.”

  “Oh.”

  I glanced at Jimmy. His face had fallen and gone white, and in that one moment, he looked sixty, not thirty.

  “You know then?” I said.

  There was a slight hesitation. “I got one yesterday.”

  “And you’ve seen it?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  I came to a rest stop, and without really thinking about it, pulled in there and parked the car under the shade of some trees, rolled down the windows with the electric switches and killed the engine.

  “Can we cut the crap now?” I said.

  Jimmy nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why you and her?”

  He sucked in some air and let it out heavily. “You saw her. She was a goddess.”

  “That’s it? She was good-looking? You’d throw away everything you’ve accomplished, your marriage, your wife, for someone who was good-looking? It’s not like Trixie is a fishwife. And there’s always someone better-looking somewhere. I mean, for Christ sakes, that’s your reasoning? Trixie is smart as a whip and loyal and everything a woman ought to be.”

  “You think?”

  “Fuck you, Jimmy. You know she is.”

  “Don’t be so sanctimonious. You had some business with a married woman. Not to mention her daughter. That’s pretty goddamn weird, don’t you think?”

  “I’m the idiot in the family. You aren’t. I’m the one that screws things up, and you’re the one that does things right, and that’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it still ought to be. You’re messing up my view of the universe, and I don’t like it one goddamn bit.”

  Jimmy nodded. “I seem to be vying for the title of screw-up now.”

  “Oh, you’ve taken the belt, brother. You definitely have the championship now.”

  Jimmy sat there for a while, blowing out his breath, shaking his head, trying to collect himself.

  “Does Trixie know?” I asked.

  “Of course not. She did, you’d be talking to a mound of dirt and a gravestone.”

  “Anyone else know?”

  “Obviously. But I don’t know who.”

  “Does anyone you know have any idea that you and Caroline had a thing?”

  “I don’t think so. Of course, whoever sent the DVD may have told others. You got this stirred up, you know. You and that column. If you had just left it alone—”

  “Jimmy. Are you nuts? Someone has known this for a long time. The column may have stirred them, but I get the impression they’ve been waiting on purpose.”

  “This long?”

  “All right. Maybe they haven’t been waiting. Maybe he, she, they, whoever, came across the DVD by accident? I don’t know. Maybe it was the column that stirred the blackmailer, or blackmailers, up. But in time, something would have got them on this track. Something like that has a pretty damn good shelf life, Jimmy. Shit, for all we know it’s on the Internet.”

  “Christ,” Jimmy said.

  “Did you know you were being filmed?”

  “No.”

  “How does that happen?”

  “Hidden camera, I guess. We made love at her apartment many times, so it didn’t occur to me she was filming it. Or maybe someone else set up a camera. I don’t know. It seemed innocent enough then. I was just…enjoying. When I was with Caroline I felt special. It was nice. She had a kind of power over me.”

  “Don’t give me that. Power? She had a power over you? What kind of bull is that?”

  “It’s true. I’d do anything she wanted. She was experimental and I liked that.”

  “Don’t tell me she did things you couldn’t get Trixie to do.”

  Jimmy reddened. “It was the way she did it�
�I guess she really had me going.”

  “I think you had a little to do with it, brother.”

  “Sure I did. Back then, few weeks before Caroline went missing, I was thinking about leaving Trixie. We were having a few problems. Nothing big. Just that part where the relationship is moving from romance to something more solid. I missed the romance. I wasn’t mature enough to understand what was going on.”

  “You’ve gotten more mature in a few months?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I just had the hots for Caroline and that’s the long and the short of it. I got the romance with her.”

  “What you got was some humping, so don’t insult Trixie by pretending you were getting romance. Jesus, Jimmy.”

  “When I was home with Trixie, well, it really wasn’t so bad, but it wasn’t…exciting. Still, I couldn’t imagine being without her.”

  “But you couldn’t let go of Caroline?”

  “I couldn’t. And you know what? I’m going to backtrack. It wasn’t just the hots. It wasn’t purely sexual. I was in love with two women. They gave me different things.”

  “That’s pretty clichéd, Jimmy. That’s nothing more than the old bullshit about having your cake and eating it too.”

  “I know. But it’s true.”

  I leaned forward and put my forearms on the steering wheel. It seemed as if I were in a dream.

  “Jesus, Jimmy.”

  “I didn’t mean for me and her to happen. Everyone in the department, all the guys, probably half the women, had a crush on Caroline, even the women who were jealous of her. She was in a couple of my classes. Used to stop by the office, we had talks about history, then the talks went to other things. I couldn’t help myself. That skin of hers, it just needed touching. Cason, she had the softest, warmest, smoothest skin I have ever touched. I was a train going down a steep grade. I could see the tracks were out and the bridge was gone, but I couldn’t stop.”

  “Did you get a note with the DVD?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did it say something like, ‘You will want to see this’?”

  “No. It said, ‘If you don’t want anyone to see this, await instructions.’”

  “Blackmail,” I said.

  “Why would you get a note too?”

  “Wanted you to know there were more copies than one. That you had to watch yourself. Figured your brother would most likely help you out, help you come up with the money, otherwise it gets posted on the Internet. All done with the tap of a finger.”

  “You got to help me, Cason.”

  “I’m not sure what to do. Aren’t you the smart one?”

  “You’ve got connections. You’re a reporter. You can talk to people I can’t. I start talking, pretty quick it’s going to get back I was having an affair with Caroline. That happens, the job is over, and so is the marriage. I might deserve it, but I don’t want it to happen.”

  I let go of the wheel and shifted in my seat. Through the windshield I could see a red bird bouncing about in a tree. The way the light was falling over it, the bird looked as if it were turning dark, transforming into a totally different kind of bird.

  “I got to ask you something, Jimmy, and you got to be straight with me. Not even an inch of the bullshit.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I don’t want to ask this, but I got to. You didn’t…You don’t know what happened to Caroline, do you?”

  “You mean did I kill her? Jesus, man. You know me better than that. No, of course not. Are you crazy?”

  “I had to ask. I been around enough to know shit can happen.”

  “No. A hundred times no. How can you ask me that?”

  “Okay. It’s asked. It’s done. Do you have any idea what happened to her?”

  He shook his head. “We were supposed to meet that night. Out near the Siegel house, at the old abandoned train station. She was doing a paper on the history of the house. About the sisters, you know? She thought she could get something good she could write about for class, modify later, maybe sell somewhere. She was the kind of person that thought ahead. A very clockwork kind of mind. When you assigned reading she could tell you verbatim what the author of the book said. She was a little less good at presenting her own opinion.”

  “But the two of you weren’t meeting out there to discuss her article, were you?”

  “No. At least I don’t think so. I went out there and found her car and she wasn’t there. She had picked up some food for the two of us. Taco Bell or some hamburger joint. I don’t remember.”

  “Seems like a bad place for a sexual rendezvous.”

  “We were going to talk. I hoped it would become sexual after a while, as usual. But she said she had something she wanted to tell me. When I got there she was gone. I looked all over for her, even drove up behind the Siegel house, got out and looked around. I couldn’t find her. Got afraid that if I called anyone on my cell they’d know we were more than student and teacher. I had some idea if I did call, and she turned up, me and her could make a story about her doing a paper on the house, and she asked me to come out and see it, as a teacher, of course. But that seemed too risky, not likely to be believed. So I left. I didn’t think anything had happened to her at first. It was curious. And I was a little worried. But it’s hard to think something like that might really happen to someone you know. I panicked. I drove around a bit. I came back, and she still wasn’t there. Then I got afraid. I still didn’t want to use my cell, but I decided I had to call, so I stopped at a phone booth, called the cops, said there was a car parked where it wasn’t supposed to be and that it had been there for a while. Nothing else. I went home. The cops went out, and next day I learned she was really missing.”

  “And you never said a word?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “No. I took the coward’s way out. I hoped she would turn up, of course. But by then I had come to realize what a fool I’d been. Told myself, she turned up, that was okay, but I was going to break it off. I didn’t want to ruin my life. As time went on, I thought I was safe. I figured something horrible had happened to Caroline, but that it wouldn’t help any for me to let on that we had been having an affair. All that could do was hurt me. In my marriage, which was starting to work again, and in my career, which was going very well. And it’s not like I had anything to do with her disappearance.”

  “Do you have any idea, any kind of idea, what might have happened to her?”

  “You asked that.”

  “And I’m asking again. Think.”

  Jimmy gave it some thought, shook his head. “No. The next day I went over to her apartment. I had a key. I used gloves, so as not to leave any fingerprints. I went over to see if she was there. This was before I learned later that day that she was considered to be missing. She wasn’t there, of course. The place was a mess. It had been tossed. I thought it was the police. But I don’t know for sure. Nothing was mentioned in the paper about her apartment being tossed.”

  “That could be bad reporting,” I said, “or it could be something the police didn’t mention. Maybe on purpose. Did anyone see you there?”

  “I was careful. I don’t think so.”

  “Could you tell if anything was missing?”

  “No. But a lot could have been missing and I wouldn’t have known it. Stuff was spread all over the place.”

  “I presume by now everything in it has been taken out.”

  “Sure. It’s rented. Don’t think I haven’t driven by there, maybe thinking she was gonna show. I don’t know.”

  “What happened to her stuff?”

  “I don’t know. Not really.”

  “She had a friend, Ronnie. Did you know about her?”

  “Just that they had lived together for a while, and then Caroline decided she wanted her own apartment.”

  “What then?”

  “I went home. Got rid of her number. Anything I had written down that had to do with her. I kept thinking she’d show up. But days rolled into weeks, into months. I was sorry f
or her. But I was beginning to think I was home free. Then you mentioned her the other night. And then you wrote the article. And now the DVD arrives. You stirred up the shit, Cason. Whoever sent us the DVDs must be the killer, or know who the killer is.”

  I sat gripping the steering wheel for a moment, just to have something to hang on to. I said, “For now just be quiet about your relationship with Caroline. But I got to tell you, Jimmy, there may come a time when you have to tell the truth, let the chips fall as they may. All this time, all this water under the bridge, that DVD, it makes you look bad, man.”

  “Hell, I know that.”

  “Do you still have the DVD?”

  “I’ve got it hid.”

  “Do one better than that. Destroy it. We don’t know who else has a copy. Let’s not help things out by leaving another one lying around. Trixie might come across it.”

  “If the cops find out I had it, won’t that be destroying evidence?”

  “Let’s hope they don’t find out. I’ll hang on to my copy for a while in case that comes up.”

  “All right, I’ll get rid of it.”

  “I want you to go home and give some thought to the things you’ve already answered. Something that may have seemed unimportant at the time. Remember something, let me know. In the meantime, I guess you wait for the blackmailer. Did the DVD come by mail?”

  “No. It was in a package, stuck in my mailbox at work.”

  “Then it wasn’t stamped?”

  “No. We can get stamped mail there, but this wasn’t stamped.”

  “Mine either,” I said. “It was waiting for me at the newspaper office. Can anyone walk into the history department?”

  “It’s easy. You did it today. All you have to do is ride the elevator up. So many people come in and out it could have been dropped off at any time. Could have been put in with the mail batch, then delivered by someone in the office. The office secretary is the one who does that.”

  “Did she know Caroline?”

  “She’s new. About fifty. Has three kids and a husband and shows us pictures of them and a little brown dog. I can assure you, she’s not involved with a months-old disappearance.”