Gumshoe, page 31
“It was early summer the year I came to Reno. I roamed this house from top to bottom, with no specific purpose at first, other than boredom and loneliness. I missed Jacoba so very much. But in time it occurred to me that she had once lived in this house, that somewhere in here I might learn the secret of who my father was.
“So I began to look. Down here”—she indicated the room with a wave of her hand—“in all the rooms, every closet, through the dust and spiders and heat of this place. Finally, up in the attic, I found a trunk. It was locked. I broke into it with a hammer when Edna was away and inside I found papers, signed confessions. Sjorgen’s and Milliken’s, witnessed by attorneys and their fathers and a few others. In the documents I found the concessions and payoffs that had been made to keep it all quiet, every last detail.”
And then she’d gone nuts. Snapped. Something in that already unsettled mind had torn loose, frayed bloody neurons whipping in the hurricane force of her fury. Jacoba, her beloved mother, had been raped, and she, Victoria, was the result of that rape.
“Raped!” Victoria said, her voice shrill. “By savages!” Spittle flew from her lips. “By vermin, by filth, by sickening, pampered scum.” For a moment she lost it completely. Her eyes jittered. Her hands trembled. She looked down at them and curled her fingers into hooks, then slowly, with much effort, she got herself under control again, more or less.
“I found the two of them,” she said, and the memory seemed to calm her further. “Hunted them. It was the easiest thing in the world. They stayed right here in Reno where they had connections—college educated, untouched by what they’d done. All had been forgotten, buried. Jacoba was dead, but they didn’t know, nor would they have cared if they had. I was alive, but they didn’t know that either, didn’t even know I existed. They’d had their fun, shot their sperm into my mother, and there’d been a moment of trouble, possibly a few days of concern, quietly handled by their daddies, and their lives were perfect again, untainted. Jonathan was a businessman, on the city council. Milliken was a lawyer, a rising star in the district attorney’s office.
“Jonathan was my father, I knew. It was obvious the instant I saw him. I decided to kill him. I made plans to kill him, detailed plans. I very nearly carried them out. It was so close. But then—” Something filled her eyes, a memory perhaps, a feeling. Whatever it was, its reflection in her eyes was a thing of perfect evil—or perfect madness.
“I provided him the opportunity to rape me,” she said. “As he raped my mother.”
“Nutso, schizo, whack job,” Jeri said.
Victoria whirled on her, then turned and glared at Kayla. “Call it inspiration. It seemed so wonderfully fitting. I made myself available. Do you think your father rejected me, Kayla, dear? Do you think he made the slightest effort to put me off, evade me, walk away, tell me no? Me, every bit as much his own daughter as are you?”
Kayla stared at her, horrified.
“Answer me!” Victoria screeched.
“No,” Kayla said.
“No. That is correct. He did not.” Her eyes glittered murderously. “He pursued me, in his way. His eyes hungered for me, swallowed me. I was fifteen. I looked fifteen. I wore a short skirt and smiled at him, spoke to him, stuck out my chest, and he flirted with me right there on the street in front of the old courthouse on Virginia Street, cautiously perhaps, but he unquestionably knew exactly what he was doing. He was in his mid-thirties at the time. He was an adult. With little more than a word I let him know he could have me. He didn’t know who I was, didn’t sense it. Would it have mattered to him if he did? I doubt it. It was dusk. I asked him if he’d give me a ride in his nice new car, and he literally jumped at the chance. In the car he touched my thigh, rubbed it. I let him. There were a few words during which we reached a kind of understanding, then he drove me up to Truckee on I-80, then to a motel in Tahoe City. That vile monster practically tore his clothes off in his eagerness, my clothes too, then he fucked me in the darkness in a cheap room, grunting, sweaty, sick with fear for his precious career, afraid for his life, knowing exactly what he was doing.
“I wanted to tell him who I was right after he climaxed and then kill him—God, how I wanted that! It’s what I’d intended all along. No one knew I was in that room with him. I even had a .38 revolver within reach in my purse that I’d found when I searched the house. It belonged to Edna’s husband, Herman, my grandfather. I found it in an old trunk with a bunch of his things.
“I could have killed him. I wanted to tell him who I was and gut shoot him while he was inside me, watch him die slowly, miserably, knowing he’d just raped his own daughter, knowing who had killed him, and why. But right then, at that moment, I realized it was exactly the right time of the month for me, that I might become pregnant as my mother had, that without consciously thinking about it, I might have planned it that way all along. And in that instant I knew—if I were to kill him and then find out I was pregnant, he could never be confronted with his child who was also his grandchild—Winter.”
For how long had I suspected it? Only minutes? Or much longer? Perhaps I’d caught a whiff of it in Myrtle Beach. I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that this revelation came as no big surprise. It might have been the dementia circling in Victoria’s eyes like smoke, a feeling that nothing she’d ever done had the power to surprise me. She’d captured us, stripped us, tied us up in this dank, modern-day dungeon. She’d killed Jonnie and Milliken and Greg—horribly. Beheaded them all, hacked off sex organs, removed brains. In her madness she was capable of anything.
“Oh, how I wanted that, as soon as the idea came to me,” Victoria went on. “I wanted it so much…my God, you wouldn’t believe. The rapist and bigshot city councilman knocking up his own daughter! The thought was amazing, fantastic. He came in me three times that night, then drove me back to Reno and let me out a block from the bus station at four in the morning, begging me not to tell, shaking with fear. He gave me three hundred dollars to keep me quiet, the same way he’d treated my mother—the Sjorgen solution to everything. And it wasn’t long before I knew I was pregnant, less than a week. I knew. I told Edna. I said I wanted to go back East again, back to Jewel’s.”
“After murdering Wendell Sjorgen,” I said.
She smiled. “Yes. Oh, yes-s-s-s. Granddad. Another monster. To protect his beloved son, he abandoned my mother—and me. He paid tens of thousands of dollars to rid himself and his son of us. He buried my mother’s rape, turned it into something that never happened.”
“As did Milliken’s father,” I reminded her.
“Victor Milliken died when I was ten years old. But David Milliken paid for what he did. You found his head. He got what he deserved. But Wendell was Jonathan’s father, my grandfather. He bought Edna’s silence like he bought everything that was inconvenient, without so much as a passing thought about Jacoba and me. But he knew who I was at the end, in that alley. He knew exactly who I was, and he very much regretted what he’d done. It wasn’t murder,” she added. “It was an execution. Slower, messier and more painful than the state would have done, I must admit, but nothing he didn’t deserve.
“I gave birth to Winter, Jonathan’s child…and his grandchild. My daughter, and my baby sister.” She put an arm around Winter’s waist and drew her close.
No wonder they’d looked so much alike when I’d first seen them. Not only were they mother and daughter—they were also sisters.
Kayla stared at them in horror. Jeri, however, was sizing up the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the ropes that held her, everything. She gave me a grim smile, still tough, still searching for a way out. Something in her eyes said don’t you dare give up.
In Conway, South Carolina, Victoria raised her daughter-sister, told her who her father was, taught her to hate, to loathe beyond all reason, to want to kill, and finally to want to hold steaming loops of Jonnie’s intestines in her hands, to hear him scream as she pushed red hot nails into his eyes. All that by the age of six. By the time she should’ve started first grade, she was already a monster, destroyed. She couldn’t go to school, couldn’t be around normal children. If the authorities had found out, they would have locked her in a juvenile detention facility and tried to save her with years of therapy. They would have tossed Victoria in prison. Keys would have been thrown away. In order not to lose Winter, Victoria had to keep her isolated at home, away from the rest of the community, watch her every second while she continued to teach her to hate. With Jonnie in mind right from the start, she taught Winter how to fence, starting at age four. And she taught her all about men, their bodies, their weaknesses, their wicked goatish lusts.
“You came back,” Jeri said to Victoria. “You had Winter rape Jonnie, didn’t you?” She’d been paying attention, even as her eyes were taking in every detail of the room.
“Jonathan raped Winter,” Victoria hissed. “His own grandchild.”
“Yeah, right,” Jeri said.
“Dressed up like a hot little whore, no doubt,” I added.
She whirled. “She was his granddaughter. That inhuman beast climaxed inside his own grandchild. How she was dressed was of no consequence, none at all. She was fifteen years old and looked it.”
She paced for half a minute, then fixed her eyes on me. “Jonathan hadn’t changed. He was still a vile beast. He was fifty-one years old when Winter approached him in a parking garage downtown. She was a ninety-pound schoolgirl, extremely pretty, but young, obviously too young. She barely spoke to him and he was ready, salivating in his desire to be with her.”
Divorced from his first two wives, unaware of the satanic soul burning brightly in the girl sitting next to him in his new Jaguar convertible, Jonnie had driven her not to Lake Tahoe but over Donner Summit and all the way to Auburn, a town in California a hundred miles away. He’d grown more sophisticated over the years, more discreet, or maybe more frightened, more aware of how far off the reservation he’d strayed and what would happen if he were caught. He pulled into a motel off the freeway, paid cash for a room, sneaked Winter inside under the cover of darkness. He stayed with her most of the night and got her pregnant, as he had Jacoba and Victoria.
“Believing she was only fourteen,” Victoria said, “which is what she told him as soon as he’d entered her. Knowing it was statutory rape, he kept going, finally coming in her with no thought that his sperm might live on, creating new life.”
“Miranda,” I said. The story was recycling itself, becoming as tiresome as it was horrible, Jonnie’s unwitting multigenerational rape of his own offspring, choreographed by Victoria’s insanity.
“Yes,” Victoria said. “Yes-s-s-s, Miranda.”
“Then the two of you went back to Myrtle Beach again,” Jeri said. “Back to your lair, talk about complete raving fucking lunatics, Jesus H. Christ.”
“To have Jonathan’s great-grandchild,” Victoria said.
“Fuckin’ loonies,” Jeri muttered, scanning the walls, yanking on her ropes.
Victoria’s emphasis of the word “great” was an indication of the depth of her psychosis. She’d grown obsessed with Jonnie’s rapes and with the awful, tangled lineage he was creating. Miranda was a living, breathing symbol of Jonnie’s turpitude. Miranda was his daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, all in one. She was Victoria’s sister and her grandchild. In Victoria’s deranged mind it was all Jonnie’s fault. But the endless layering of Jonnie’s genes had finally caught up. Genetically, Miranda was fully seven-eighths Jonnie. She was retarded, but for a vastly different reason than was Jacoba.
“I waited too long,” Victoria said. “We should have come back to Reno sooner, but I’d hoped Miranda would be a little older when we finally went public. At least six years. And Winter was growing more skillful with the foil every day, all the better to deal with Jonnie when the time came, and…well, I simply waited too long.”
“So which was it?” I asked. “What was the big plan? Were you going to expose these so-called rapes of his, or kill him?”
“So-called?” Victoria screeched. Cords stood out in her neck.
“Actual, then,” I said in a caustic tone, fed up with this obscene woman and her sick machinations. “Sure-enough, honest-to-god, boy-howdy rapes, have it your way.”
She stared at me, hands clenching and unclenching, as if trying to decide which of my body parts to cut off first. “We were going to crush him publicly,” she said at last. “Utterly, thoroughly, crush him, the great mayor, so handsome, so admired. DNA tests would have proved what he’d done. Everyone was going to know what kind of an animal he was, and I mean everyone. The entire world was going to look at him in disgust, spit on him. People were going to recoil at the sound of his name. And after he’d acclimated to that, as he would in time, we were going to kill him.”
“But you didn’t do that,” I said. “You didn’t expose him, you didn’t humiliate him. You murdered him right away. And Milliken.”
“We couldn’t. I found out I couldn’t let the world know about him the way I’d intended. The statute of limitations on statutory rape hadn’t run out. Not with Miranda. If his rapes were reported, it was all but certain that Jonnie would’ve gone to prison.”
“Out of reach,” Jeri said.
Victoria nodded. “Yes. And, well…there were other reasons.”
“Like little psycho Winter getting loose one night with a sword and killing a boy not far from where you lived in Conway,” Jeri said. “Exposing Jonnie would have focused national attention on you and Winter. Her fencing skill might have been discovered. She might have been found guilty of murder. You couldn’t risk that.”
“My, aren’t we the quickest little genius on the block?” Victoria said, staring at Jeri.
I stared at her, too. She’d picked that up from the little Kennedy had told us? Or had she somehow put two and two together, being an actual PI while I was just a pretend PI?
“We killed him,” Victoria replied slowly. “Jonathan. We watched him, hunted him, then captured him, let him know what he’d done, then killed him.”
“We didn’t just kill him,” Winter said, speaking for the first time in twenty minutes. Her voice was like arctic wind hissing through old canted tombstones. “And that other guy, Milliken.”
“No,” Victoria responded. “No, we didn’t. It wasn’t that easy for them. Killing is what one does to flies. Death will take us all one day. Jonathan owed us much more than that.
“Grabbing them was no trick at all,” she went on. “Milliken was still a pig, and he lived alone. I took him myself. Nothing could have been simpler. Later that evening, Winter took Jonathan. He didn’t recognize her after all that time, five years, and she wore a wig. She took him to a motel room. He trailed along like a horny ape. I was inside, waiting. He woke up in this room, naked—like you.” Her eyes passed over me. “And every bit as unhappy. We drove their cars to a hotel by the airport and left them there, while Reno’s honorable mayor and district attorney”—Victoria smiled wickedly—“hung around.
“Jonathan found out who we were, Winter and I. He became terribly eager to please us. After all these years he finally called us what we were—daughter and granddaughter.” Victoria paused. “And lover. He called us that too, with a little encouragement.” She smiled at the memory. “We had him recount what he’d done to us in great detail. Made it into a little video. A documentary, if you will. Which will be revealed to the public sometime in the future. I’m still thinking about how to do that. Toward the end, Jonathan shared his thoughts with us, what was going on inside his head as he fondled us, groped us, climaxed inside us, mere children, fifteen years old. He watched his good friend David Milliken die, with the knowledge that he would die the same way. And in the end…well…” She held up the digital camera. “These things are amazing, so versatile. We made a fun little movie. Watch.”
She hit the play button on the DVD player.
As images jerked to life on the screen, words Fairchild had spoken earlier went through my head again: Family. The ones who know you best…
* * *
Jonnie was barefoot, nude, standing slump-shouldered and wary at one end of the room we were now in. He held a sword awkwardly in one hand—a deadly looking number with an ornate, cuplike guard at the hilt. He was untied, free to move about. He was staring at something in front of him but off camera, eyes wide, hunted.
The camera zoomed back, sliding Winter into frame. She was topless, wearing the black thong she’d been wearing the first day I’d seen her. She was barefoot, a slender waif of a girl holding the twin of Jonnie’s sword in one hand, facing him at a forty-five degree angle, nothing the least bit awkward about her stance.
Jonnie coughed once, nervously, facing his murderous daughter-granddaughter. The sound was hollow, echoey, but the picture was clear enough.
Victoria paused the action. “In some countries their swords might be called rapiers, a most appropriate term under the circumstances, wouldn’t you say? These were imported from Italy. Unlike a classic foil or epee, the rapier has both a point and a single razor edge. Forty-five hundred dollars apiece. Beautiful weapons, perfectly balanced.”
She hit the play button. The action moved forward again.
Winter held her rapier at an angle in front of her face, said, “En garde,” then lowered the tip until it was pointed at Jonnie’s heart. She took a step forward. The camera was behind her, off to one side. In that thong and nothing else, she looked entirely naked. All I could see was the slender black strap of the thong around her waist.
Jonnie lifted the point of his sword uncertainly. Winter flicked his tip aside with the middle portion of her blade, spun his blade away with a deft circular motion, and stabbed him in the torso, inches from his belly button. The whole thing took less than two seconds. She stepped back as Jonnie stumbled backward and slammed into the wall behind him. He lowered his sword in shock, staring at his stomach, at blood running down into his pubic hair. Winter lunged forward and stuck the tip of her sword half an inch deep into his left biceps.
