"Most of them were movies he taped off the TV," Thurman said. "Old black-and-white classics, mostly. A few were porn, and some were old TV shows." Stettner screened them himself and wound up throwing just about everything out. Thurman had never seen the tape he helped recover, the one that had cost Arnold Leveque his life.
"I saw it," I said. "It shows the two of them committing murder. Killing a boy."
"I figured that's what it was, or why would they pay that kind of money for it? But how could you have seen it?"
"Leveque had a copy that you missed. It was dubbed onto a commercial cassette."
"He had a whole lot of those," he remembered. "We didn't bother with them, we left them there. That was clever of him." He picked up his glass, put it down untouched. "Not that it did him much good."
Boys were a part of Stettner's life, and one Thurman was never interested in sharing. "I don't like homosexuals," he said flatly. "Don't care for them, never did. Amanda's brother is a homosexual. He never liked me and I never liked him, it was right out there from the jump. Stettner said he was the same way, he thought faggots were weaklings and that AIDS was the planet's way of grinding them under its heel. 'It's not a homosexual act to use these boys,' he would say. 'You take them as you take a woman, that's all. And they're so easy to get, they're all over the place begging to be taken. And no one cares. You can do as you please with them and no one cares.' "
"How did he get them?"
"I don't know. I told you, that was an area of his life I made it my business to stay out of. Sometimes I would see him with a boy. He would take up with one sometimes, the way he did with the one you saw at the fights last week. He would treat him like a son, and then one day you wouldn't see the boy anymore. And I would never ask what happened to the boy."
"But you would know."
"I wouldn't even think about it. It was none of my business, so why should I think about it?"
"But you had to know, Richard."
I hadn't called him by his first name before. Maybe that helped the words get through his armor. Something did, because he winced as if he'd taken a hard right to the heart.
"I guess he killed them," he said.
I didn't say anything.
"I guess he killed a lot of people."
"What about you?"
"I never killed anyone," he said quickly.
"You were an accessory to Leveque's murder. According to the law, you were as guilty as if you'd used the knife yourself."
"I didn't even know he was going to kill him!"
He knew, just as he had known what happened to the boys. I let it pass. "You knew he was going to commit assault and robbery," I said. "That made you a participant in felony, and that's enough to make you fully culpable if the felony results in a death. You'd be guilty of murder if Leveque had died of a heart attack. As far as the law is concerned, you're guilty."
He took a couple of deep breaths. Dully he said, "All right, I know that. You could say the same thing about the girl he went back and killed, if he killed her. I suppose I was guilty of rape. She didn't resist, but I didn't exactly have her consent." He looked at me. "I can't defend what I did. I can't justify it. I'm not going to try to say that he hypnotized me, although it was like that, it really was, the way the two of them set me up and… and just got me to do what they wanted."
"How did they do that, Richard?"
"They just-"
"How did they get you to kill your wife?"
"Oh, God," he said, and put his face in his hands.
MAYBE they had planned it from the beginning. Maybe it had been part of a secret agenda all along.
"You'd better take a shower," Olga would say. "It's time for you to go home to your little wife." Your little wife, your darling wife, your charming wife- always said with a hint of irony, a touch of mockery. You have spent an hour in the world of the brave, the bold, the reckless, the daring, she was telling him, and now you may return to the black-and-white humdrum world and the Barbie doll who shares it with you.
"A shame she has all the money," Stettner said early on. "You give all your power away when your woman has more money than you do."
At first he'd been afraid that Stettner would want Amanda sexually. He had allowed Thurman to share Olga, and would want a quid pro quo. Thurman hadn't liked the idea. He wanted to keep the two lives separate, and was relieved when the Stettners did not seem to want Amanda included in their relationship. The first meeting of all four had not been a success, and, on the two subsequent occasions when both couples had drinks and dinner together, the conversation was stilted.
It was Stettner who first suggested he increase his insurance coverage. "You have a child coming, you want to protect that child. And you should have the mother covered as well. If anything happened to her you'd have a nurse, you'd have a governess, you'd have expenses for years." And then, when the policies were in force: "You know, Richard, you're a man with a rich wife. If she died you'd be a rich man. There's an interesting distinction, don't you think?"
The idea grew gradually, little by little.
"I don't know how to explain this," he said. "It wasn't real. We would joke about it, we would think up impossibly farfetched ways to do it. 'It's a shame microwave ovens are so small,' he said. 'We could stuff Amanda in with an apple in her mouth and cook her from the inside out.' It's sickening to think of now, but then it was funny because there was no reality to it, it was a harmless joke. And, because we went on joking about it, it began to have a kind of reality.
" 'We'll do it next Thursday,' Bergen would say, and we'd plan some ridiculous black-comedy scenario, and that would be the end of it. And then when Thursday came Olga would say, 'Oh, we forgot, today was the day we were supposed to kill little Amanda.' It was a joke, a running gag.
"When I was with Amanda, when they weren't around, I was a normal happily married man. That sounds impossible, doesn't it? But it was true. I guess I must have had this idea that someday Bergen and Olga would just disappear. I don't know how I expected this to happen, whether they would get caught for some of the things they had done or whether they would just drop me or move out of the country or, I don't know. Maybe I expected them to die. And then the whole dark side of life that I was leading with them would vanish and Amanda and I would live happily ever after.
"One time, though, I was lying in bed and she was asleep next to me and I started having images of different ways of killing her. I didn't want to have those thoughts but I couldn't get them out of my head. Smothering her with a pillow, stabbing her, all sorts of murderous images. I had to go into the other room and have a couple of drinks. I wasn't afraid I would do anything, I was just upset by the thoughts.
"Right around the first of November I mentioned that our downstairs neighbors would be spending the next six months in Florida. 'Good,' Bergen said. 'That's where we'll kill Amanda. It's a natural site for a burglary, with the owners in Florida. And it's convenient, she won't have to travel far, and it's better than doing it in your apartment because you wouldn't want police parading in and out of your place. They make a mess, sometimes they even steal things.'
"I thought it was a joke. 'Oh, you're going to a party? When you come home we'll be waiting in the Jews' apartment downstairs. You'll walk right in on a burglary in progress. I hope I can still remember how to break in. I'm sure it's like swimming, once you learn it you never forget it.'
"The night of the party I didn't know if it was a joke or not. This is hard to explain. I knew but I didn't know. The two sides of my life were so far apart it's as if I didn't really believe something on one side could touch something on the other. It's like I knew they would be waiting there for us but I couldn't really believe it.
"When we left the party I wanted to walk home because I wanted to delay getting there for fear that they'd be there, that it would be real this time. And on the way home she started talking about her brother, how she was worried about his health, and I made a nasty crack. So we had an argument, and I thought, all right, bitch, in an hour you'll be history. And the thought was exciting.