The Anatomy of Violence Read online

  I left the sidewalk and called softly, “Hey, George.”

  A fat Dalmation bounded from beneath a fir shrub and sniffed the hem of my dress. I rubbed his neck. “Don’t give me away, Georgie.” George waddled back and lay down beneath the shrub as I peered through the living-room window.

  Gwen, the woman daddy married a year after mother died, sprawled in an armchair and watched the late late show. The screen highlighted her pretty oval face as she drank from a beer can, drew on a cigaret, then let the smoke trickle through her nostrils. Gwen was thirteen years older than I. We shared the house like two unfriendly workers assigned to the same bench.

  I watched daddy through the study window as he worked on the skeleton of the Indian he’d dug up on his last vacation. His big knobby hands gripped a tiny shellac brush, and his head bent so low that a bush of iron gray hair nearly touched his shellac. I could reconstruct the evening from the adding machine and pile of sales receipts on a desk, work, then escape into the hobby-world of anthropology.

  He wouldn’t even know the time. I slipped off my shoes, crept silently upstairs and undressed as I walked down the hall. I grabbed a terrycloth robe from my room and raced for the bathroom.

  I stepped out of the shower ten minutes later and began toweling my hair. My fingers touched the throbbing lump where my head had struck the sidewalk. I began blotting gently, aware that my entire body ached.

  Bruises … my flesh would never keep my secret; within a day each bump would look like a carbon smudge on white paper. I looked in the mirror. My right jaw already had the swollen, velvet sheen of a ripe plum. My throat was milky blue, and three dark shadows formed a triangle around the nipple of my left breast.

  I stepped back for a full view. A fiery welt curved down my stomach, lost itself in black hair, then continued down the inside of my leg. I turned and looked over my shoulder. My back was clear except for pimple like blemishes where dirt had punctured the skin and a half dozen dime-sized bruises that mottled my buttocks.

  Lord, he must have been insane.

  Make-up would cover the jaw and throat. I didn’t plan to display the rest. I pulled on my robe and returned to my room.

  Daddy came in as I was sitting down to my vanity.

  “Trying to sneak in?” He laughed before he spoke to show he was joking. He folded himself onto my bed. “After this afternoon, I expected you to be carried home on the shoulders of admirers.”

  I held the robe tight around my throat and turned my face so he couldn’t see the bruise. The overhead light was bright, but at least he’d left off his glasses.

  “My admirers probably need to be carried home themselves, right now.” My voice sounded strange to me.

  “Yes. Well, I have a consolation.” He fumbled open a long, flat box and I saw the dull gleam of pearls as he walked toward me. “These were once a source of considerable irritation to the bivalve mollusk, but you may like them. Stand up.”

  I couldn’t let him see my throat. “Could we do it later?”

  “Well …” I saw a flicker of disappointment in his eyes.

  “I mean, shouldn’t I wear them against a dress?”

  “You’ll go well with pearls all by yourself. Your mother did. Just let go of your collar—”

  “Ben.” Gwen was in the doorway, standing straight and faintly belligerent, the way short people seem to do around taller people. “Ben, if it rains, I opened your study window. That stinking shellac gives me a headache.”

  “All right,” said daddy.

  Her bright green eyes darted around the room, then lit on me. “You should wear a bruise often, Laurie. It does things for you.”

  “I … fell.” Get out, Gwen.

  “Must have been quite a fall.” Gwen’s voice was flat and toneless. “I see you tore your bra.”

  I looked down. The damaged bra was on the floor beside the piled clothing. “Daddy—”

  Too late. He picked it up, then the dress. Dirt sprinkled the floor as he shook it. He dropped it and asked through tight lips, “Where’s Richard?”

  “I don’t know. Home, maybe.”

  “I’ll find him.” His jaw muscles jumped as he started out.

  “Wait. It wasn’t Rich.”

  He turned. “What wasn’t Rich? What happened?”

  “I can’t tell you.” I felt my eyes burning.

  “I’m waiting, Laurie.” His voice was low and toneless.

  I put my hands on his shoulders and leaned my head against his chest, but he was rigid. “Don’t ask me, please.”

  He held me away from him, and his thumbs dug into my shoulders. “Laurie, you came in with your clothes torn and your face bruised. You’ve had some trouble. I can’t just close my eyes and forget it. Tell me.”

  If I didn’t tell he’d probe for weeks, or months as he did for his skeleton, unearthing a bone here and there until he had it all. “I was raped, Daddy.”

  For an instant the color left his face. “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His expression remained frozen. “Tell it from the beginning.”

  I told the story without inflection and watched the lines deepen around his mouth. When I finished he rubbed his hand across his face and ran his fingers through his hair. Then he got up and strode out without a word.

  Gwen and I found him in his room rummaging in his dresser drawer.

  “What is it, Ben?” asked Gwen. “Where are you going?”

  He took out the .38 pistol he used when he carried station receipts. “To the ballpark.”

  “He’s gone, Daddy. I heard him drive away.”

  “Which direction?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He lowered himself to the edge of his bed, his fingers white around the gun butt. “There must be something …”

  “There’s nothing you can do, Daddy.”

  Gwen spoke. “Yes, there is. You can put away that gun before it goes off.”

  He looked down in surprise, then dropped it in the drawer as a man might dispose of a dead rat. I wondered if it would fit my purse.

  “Do you realize, Laurie, that I was prepared to take a man’s life just then. Without a trial?” He laced his hands over his forehead and squeezed. When he looked at me again his face was smooth. “Thank God he wasn’t here. This is something for the police to handle.”

  “No!” Gwen and I spoke at once. Gwen continued. “It’s done now. Why let the whole town know?”

  It was the wrong thing to say. I saw his lips set and knew he’d made up his mind. “Gwen, does privacy matter now?”

  “It matters to me!” Her eyes blazed. “You know what kind of law we have in this town. Did they find Eileen’s murderer? No, but her folks had to leave town to lead a decent life again. Well, this is my town and I don’t intend to leave.”

  “Gwen …” He adopted the tone of an adult telling a child why he shouldn’t cross the street. “You’re complicating what is to me a simple decision. Rape is socially accepted among the Australian aborigines as part of the marriage ceremony. In our society it is a crime. Crimes must be reported to the police.” He strode out and his feet clattered on the stairs.

  I caught him before he started dialing. “Daddy, let’s think about it a little more.”

  He paused and looked up. “It’s a thinking man’s misfortune that he knows so many ways to do a thing, and never decides which course to follow. We haven’t much time. Do you want the man found?”

  “We can find him ourselves.”

  He shook his head. “We aren’t detectives, Laurie. We can’t afford to hire detectives. The police may be heavy-handed, but maybe that’s what we need. I don’t care if they rip this town open like a sack of garbage. Maybe the stink will attract this … beast!” He started dialing, and I saw his hand trembling.

  I was getting dressed when the police came. They left again at once and took daddy with them. I lay down to wait and fatigue hit me like a sandbag dropped from the ceiling.

  I awo
ke to a rustling noise. Gwen was stuffing my chiffon formal into a laundry bag with quick, angry thrusts. She gave me a sullen look as I stood up. “You should be doing this, not me. That detective found your panties in the ballpark and wants the rest of your clothes. He wants to see you, too.”

  I rolled the sleep from my mouth with my tongue and went to the mirror. I looked terrible.

  “Laurie, did you take a shower?”

  “Of course I took a shower, Gwen.” I spread powder on my jaw and throat. “Why?”

  “That detective said he’d get fingernail scrapings— skin, you know, and hair? Well, I said you’d taken a bath and he said it wouldn’t be any good then.” Her tone was triumphant, then penitent. “Honest to God, Laurie, I didn’t know this deal was so serious, or I’d never given you away.”

  “It’s done now, Gwen.” I got up and took the laundry bag she held out. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “No.” Her mouth turned down at the corners. “I’ve had all of that detective I can stand.”

  Daddy met me downstairs and took the bag. He looked haggard. “I wanted to let you rest, Laurie, but Lieutenant—”

  “Koch is the name,” said a voice that seemed to come from a cave. Lieutenant Koch overflowed an easy chair. His face was in shadow. “We checked on your car, Miss Crewes.” Koch leaned forward and light struck his face. Fat cheeks and a vast billowing chin threatened to inundate his oddly delicate features. “The rotor cap was missing.”

  “Really?” He made the statement sound like an accusation, and I felt an urge to say I hadn’t taken it. But I had no idea what a rotor cap was. “Does that mean something?”

  “A rotor cap isn’t lost accidently.” He paused to draw on a cigaret stuck in his mouth and exhaled without removing it. “You take off the distributor cap to get to it.”

  I filled up another pause. “Yes?”

  “Somebody—” he leaned on the word, “made sure you walked home. Somebody wanted you. Not just any girl.”

  “I gathered that, Lieutenant. He used my name.”

  He leaned back. “You’re very astute, Miss Crewes. What else did he say?”

  I told him all I remembered. But there was a mental numbness around parts of it.

  “So you didn’t see him,” he said.

  “No.”

  “And he disguised his voice.”

  “Yes.”

  Lieutenant Koch studied me while the ash of his cigaret grew long and dropped off. Didn’t he believe me, or was this an effect he used to make witnesses tell more than they’d planned? My toes curled inside my moccasins. Lieutenant Koch was a strong man; a smart man, I thought. He could find the man for me—if he wanted to.

  “It was like a boy reciting,” I said finally. “If I heard him do that—”

  “Good idea!”

  He slammed his hands on the arms of the chair and levered himself erect with surprising speed. He moved toward the door and his great buttocks rolled under his trousers. The suit fit like a laundry bag. “Let’s go to the station and hear them recite.”

  Daddy stood up. “You already have suspects?”

  Koch edged gingerly through the front door. “I never drag out a case, Mister Crewes. We started bringing in drunks right after you called. Now we’ll haul them out of the tank for your daughter to see.”

  They hauled them out and stood them in the police garage, and their sour breaths mingled with oily, dusty auto smells.

  Koch told me to point out those I’d seen earlier that night. I saw the man with the postage-stamp moustache who’d grabbed me as I left the club. Now both hands were busy holding up his beltless trousers.

  “Lieutenant,” he said when Koch came up, “I have a right to know why I’m being held.”

  “Why, sure you do.” Koch turned to me. “Howie wants to know why he’s being held.”

  “I don’t think he’s the one, Lieutenant. He’s … not big enough. And he was in the club when I left.”

  We passed two men who stood with their eyes down, then a pair of bold, green eyes met mine. I saw the angry, flaring nose and the lock of waxy hair that hung on his forehead. A policeman held each arm.

  “He was with Ann tonight,” I told Koch.

  “Who’s Ann?”

  “A girl who used to be a friend of mine.”

  Koch pushed his face close to the boy’s. “Where you from, blondie? You’re not local.”

  The boy knotted his jaws and didn’t speak. Koch turned to the sergeant. “Is he a tiger?”

  “A rabbit, Lieutenant. Keeps wanting to run.”

  “What about him, Miss Crewes?”

  I saw the ridged stomach muscles through his torn tee-shirt. His hands were broad and thickly calloused on the palms; scarred and reddened on the knuckles. “Well … he wasn’t in the club when I left.”

  Koch nodded. “Cuff him and bring him into the office.”

  The office held a massive table and two chairs. Koch half-sat on the table and waved daddy and me to the chairs. “Maybe Miss Crewes would rather wait outside for a minute. He may be difficult.”

  Daddy cleared his throat. “Yes, I think you’d better, Laurie.”

  “No! I want—” I caught myself. “It’ll be simpler if I stay.”

  Koch gave me a slow, heavy-lidded smile and I began to dislike him. They brought in the boy with his big hands cuffed in front of him and pushed him before Koch.

  “Now listen, lad.” Koch’s voice was soft and sounded faintly amused. “You fought the police officers when they tried to put you away. All you got for your trouble was a bruise and a red nose. Now if you fight me—” He tapped his knuckles on the massive table. “You may not have a nose. Ever watch them stretch out a slab of meat and pound it to a pulp in a butcher shop?”

  The boy stared straight ahead, his lips tight. Koch seemed hardly to move his hand, but I heard a sharp crack and saw the boy’s head jerk. His nose dripped blood.

  “I asked,” said Koch in the same soft voice, “if you ever saw them pound meat in a butcher shop.”

  “Yes.” The voice barely reached me.

  The hand lashed out again and the boy staggered. Blood fell from his chin in big, bright drops. “Louder,” said Koch. “And slowly. Say: Yes, Lieutenant, I have watched them pound meat in a butcher shop.”

  “Yes … Lieutenant. I … have watched them pound meat in a … butcher shop.” A red mist sprayed from his lips with each word.

  Koch turned to me. “There, Miss Crewes. He recited for you. Could this be the man?”

  I felt sick. “I … can’t be sure.”

  “Never mind being sure. Would you be willing to point this boy out to a jury and say, ‘This is the man who raped me’?”

  “Hey!” The boy’s eyes flew wide. “I didn’t rape anyone. Lieutenant, you know damn well—”

  “Shut up.” To the policeman, Koch said, “Put him back in his cage.”

  As they went out the door, the boy protested to his escort in a whining, frightened voice. “Jesus, I wouldn’t rape anyone. What the hell good is that?”

  When the door closed, Koch spoke to me. “I asked, Miss Crewes, if you would identify the boy in court as your attacker?”

  “Not unless I were sure. I’m not sure.”

  “Suppose he confessed?”

  I glanced down at the bright trail leading to the door and met Koch’s eyes. “I don’t think that would mean anything.”

  Koch studied his fingernails with exaggerated care. “Some girls, when they meet the man face to face, aren’t so sure they hate him.”

  “Lieutenant,” daddy said, speaking in the precise, even tones he used when he was holding himself under control, “May I ask if there’s any point in this? Have you any evidence on this boy?”

  “Ummmm, no.” Koch looked thoughtful as he lit a new cigaret from the butt of an old one. “Actually the boy told the truth. He wouldn’t rape anyone. His type—they pick out the easiest girls in town. They regard themselves as great lovers. I don’t know wha
t kind of girl Ann is, but …” his voice trailed off and he shrugged. “There’s another reason the boy couldn’t have done it. He was in the station at the time yelling that his car had been stolen.”

  Daddy’s voice was taut. “You knew this, and went through that interrogation charade?”

  “For a reason, Mister Crewes. You said your daughter tried to hide her assault. That could have meant she knew who it was and wanted to protect him. Naturally she’d jump at the chance to pick a substitute.”

  So the poor guy was beaten because of me. But it could have been worse. “Lieutenant, what if I’d picked him?”

  “I like closed cases, Miss Crewes. That’s why the council brought me in last year. We’d have booked him, and your word would probably have been good in court.” He fumbled a pad from his pocket and gripped a pencil in a dimpled fist. “You’ll have other chances. Let’s dig into your past—old boy friends, boys you dated, boys you refused to date and why.”

  I’d dated perhaps a dozen fellows besides Richard, and refused at least twice that many. It was hard to remember names and faces that hadn’t even mattered at the time. It was still harder to tie boys to dates.

  I told all I could remember. Sometimes I wondered if Koch were listening. He kept his eyes on the pad and looked up only when I mentioned Jules Curtright.

  “You turned down Jules Curtright?”

  “I told him to call tomorrow. He asked as I was leaving the club.”

  Koch scribbled something. “That gets him off the suspect list, if he was in the club when you left.” Then he started laughing. It was silent laughter, all inside him, swelling his cheeks and shaking his belly. “I just thought what a good spot you’re in to shake-down Jules Curtright.”

  “What?”

  “It’s been tried before. Girls figure he’ll pay just to keep his name clear.” He gave me a long, hooded look. “I’m glad you’re not that kind.”

  Then the sergeant came in and gave him a note. Koch glanced at it, nodded, then looked at me as the sergeant left. “This Richard you were out with tonight, where is he now?”

  I felt my stomach tighten. “Home, I guess.”

  “Guess again. We’ve had his trailer staked out since your dad called. He isn’t in yet. I’ve ordered him picked up.”