Dangerous Women

Last week she’d come to his office una

“I’m firing you,” she said. “Your services are no longer required.”

“What’s wrong with you?” he hissed fiercely, striding across the room to close the door.

She rose immediately and opened it again. “I’ll take my papers, please.” She remained standing and nodded pointedly at the safe.

“Are you-?”

“I have an appointment with Mr. Dreyer. Of Dreyer and Holt.” Ice dripped from her words; he thought of her boots, that first morning. She looked at her watch. “If you choose not to return my papers I’ll have no choice but to add that to my complaint to the police and the Ethics Commission.”

He tried to grasp hold. “Complaint?”

“Yes, and retaining my papers will compound it. I imagine there’s a distinction, even among lawyers, between taking sexual and professional advantage of a client, and outright theft.”

Astonished, he stood mute.

She raised her eyebrows. “Making love to a widow to distract her from bad advice bordering on malfeasance? That’s grounds for complaint, wouldn’t you say? Some of the transactions you handled for me lost thousands. I’m firing you. I’ll be filing professional and criminal complaints a week from today.”

In their nights she’d cooed obscenities. The filthy words her hot breath tipped into his ear had exhilarated but never shocked him. But the abstract phrases she coolly spoke now stu

“Those deals. They were your idea, all of them. I objected every time. I have memos, letters in the file-”

“Postdated, no doubt.”

“No! You know-”

“What I know is, regardless of whether you’re convicted of anything, no wealthy widow will ever come to you again, after I’m through with you.”

The intercom buzzed; his secretary told him his ten o’clock appointment had arrived. Bewildered, disoriented, he opened the safe and gave her the kidskin portfolio.

She turned and left.

He slept badly that night and the one that followed. Longing for her, confusion about her, and this new fear of her roiled his attempts at oblivion. Two days later he was still in shock.

And lucky, that had turned out to be.

He’d done something rare, left the office in the early afternoon-on what could he possibly concentrate?-to head to the oak-paneled tavern where lawyers met to bargain, to dispute and to forget.

“You don’t look good,” Sammy, the bartender, had said, as though he needed to be told. He’d shaken his head, given no explanation. Sammy knew his job: he poured a drink and proffered consolation. “At least you’re not Bettinger.” Sammy lifted his chin toward a crumpled form in the corner. “He’s being investigated, did you know that? The Ethics Commission, and the police.”

A long look at the unmoving Bettinger; the slow fire of scotch burning his way to clarity. He slid his second drink from the bar and crossed the room. He bought Bettinger a drink and another, and morose Bettinger, in slurred and garbled half-sentences, staring into his gin, muttering “black widow bitch,” cast light on his darkness.

She’d set them up. Bettinger was the one before him, but before that had come Cramer, and Robbins, and Sutton. Every one her hero, saving her from the incompetence of the attorney before (the formal complaints and charges she’d filed being something she mentioned to none). Every one instructed to make bad business deals, to sell low and buy high. Every one’s objections quieted with the generosity of her body, in the deserted house.

Every one ruined.

Bettinger, sloppy with brotherhood, offered him sympathy, claimed revulsion, pretended to fury and swore revenge. But he could see-anyone could see-that if she walked in right then to the tavern where they sat, Bettinger would follow her out on his hands and knees.

He left Bettinger in his pool of self-pity and walked through the fading day to think. The gray of the sky went to black and he considered this: Each complaint had been filed, as she’d said the one against him would be, a full week after she’d dropped her bombshell and changed attorneys. Stars pricked holes in the sky and he thought about this: the self-loathing in her voice when she talked about her failure to rescue herself from her husband’s brutality by taking her own life. The city streets quieted around him as he heard her say spending her inheritance was her only pleasure.

And he saw what the others hadn’t: who the trap was really set for, who the intended victim was.

So he did as she wanted. He called her, and asked her whether she had filed the charges and complaints against him yet. She had not. He asked her to meet him at the house that was theirs, across the river. “To talk about it,” he said. And he heard a shiver of anticipation in her voice as she agreed.

And now, tonight, he’d given her what she’d hoped for, fulfilled her desire.

Desires. The sweep of her car’s headlights had brought him to the door. As she stepped onto the porch where he waited, he felt her heat. They stopped still and time stopped with them, until, without speaking, she pressed her body, her lips, on his. He led her to the bed. He undressed her slowly, her blouse, her skirt, her silken slip, and tethered her to the bed with the silver handcuffs she’d brought him in their first days. With his hands, with his lips and tongue he took time, made slow love to her, built her toward the peak and reached it with her. After, he didn’t unlock the cuffs, nor did she ask him to. He held her gently, stroking her hair as she lay motionless, eyes closed, lips parted.

Then he rose, and blindfolded her. She smiled softly. He kissed her a last time. The tastes, the scents, the thrills of the first kiss rushed in and rolled over him like a wave. Then they subsided, revealing the satin finality of this last one.

The last one.

She’d tried, he understood now, to drive each of them, Bettinger and the others, to this, hoping for one to release her. The disasters that befell them were punishment for being weak.

He was strong.

The blade glittered as he slid it into her heart.

She arched toward him as in pleasure. She didn’t scream, but gave the same small cry he’d heard not long before, at the height of her joy.

He burned her clothes in the fireplace, wrapped her purse with her body, laid her across the rear seat of her own car. He drove to the hillside overlooking the town, dug her a grave among the trees, and, under a sky dotted with stars, he said farewell.

Abandoning her car far into the woods, he hiked back to the house for his own, drove home and slept soundly.

At the office the next day his morning was productive and his afternoon was the same. He decided to go down to the tavern and buy Bettinger a drink. Bettinger, after all, had done him a great favor. Of course, he’d done Bettinger one, Cramer and Robbins and Sutton, too, though they’d never know whom to thank. With the complainant gone, the cases against them would never be made. He’d freed them, too.

He was about to leave when the police arrived. They wasted no time, but arrested him for her murder.

“We got a call from her attorney.”

He searched for his voice. “Paul Dreyer?”

The lead detective explained. She’d left Dreyer a message last night that she’d call in the morning, before ten. If she didn’t, he was to open a kidskin portfolio in his safe. She hadn’t called, so, acting on instructions, Dreyer had broken the lock. Inside were directions to the house and the hillside, and a note asking that the authorities examine transactions her previous attorney had conducted for her. She wasn’t sure, the note said, but she believed she’d been cheated. She was going to confront the attorney, who’d also been her lover. And, the note said, she was afraid.