When it was established that Keith “Club” Medford, last lover of the late Lauren Klein, was the son of the wealthy developer and unionized workers’ bete noire Michael Medford, one of whose companies was handling the conversion of the Spassky Grain Building into a mixture of high-end lofts and townhouse-style residences, and that Keith, who had been asked to plan the project’s opening-night party, possessed a set of keys, it became clear that the killers had made an irretrievable mistake. Most murderers were stupid, and a life of privilege was no defense against folly. Even the most expensive schools turned out badly educated dolts, and Marsalis, Andriessen, and Medford were semi-literate, arrogant young fools. And murderers, too. Club, faced with the accumulating facts, was the first to confess. His buddies’ defenses collapsed a few hours later.
Jack Rhinehart was buried in the depths of Queens, thirty-five minutes’ drive from the bungalow he’d bought his mother and still unmarried sister in Douglaston. “A house with a view,” he’d joked. “If you go to the end of the yard and lean all the way over to your left, you can just catch a what?, call it a whisper, of the Sound.” Now his own view would forever be of urban blight. Neela and Solanka got a car to drive them out. The cemetery was cramped, treeless, comfortless, damp. Photographers moved around the small group of mourners like pollution floating at the edges of a dark pond. Solanka had somehow forgotten that there would be media interest in Jack’s funeral. The moment the confessions had been made and the story of the S & M Club became the society scandal of the summer, Professor Solanka lost interest in the event’s public dimension. He was mourning his friend Jack Rhinehart, the great, brave journalist, who had been sucked down by glamour and wealth. To be seduced by what one loathed was a hard destiny. To lose the woman you loved to your best friend was perhaps even harder. Solanka had been a bad friend to Jack, but then it had been Jack’s fate to be betrayed. His secret sexual preferences, which he had never inflicted on Neela Mahendra, but which meant that not even Neela would finally have been enough for him, had led him into bad company. He had been loyal to men who did not merit his loyalty, had persuaded himself of their innocence—and what an effort that must have been for a natural finder-out and muckraker, what delusionary brilliance he must have employed!—and consequently had helped to shield them from the law, and his reward was to be killed by them in a clumsy attempt at scapegoating: to be sacrificed on the altar of their invincible, egomaniacal pride.
A gospel singer had been hired to sing a farewell medley of spirituals and more contemporary materiaclass="underline" “Fix Me, Jesus” was followed by Puff Daddy’s tribute to Notorious B.I.G., “Every Breath You Take (I’ll Be Missing You)”; then came “Rock My Soul (In the Bosom of Abraham).” Rain looked imminent but was holding off. The air was moist, as if full of tears. Here were Jack’s mother and sister; also Bronislawa Rhinehart, the ex-wife, looking simultaneously devastated and sexy in a short black dress and high-fashion veil. Solanka nodded at Bronnie, to whom he’d never found anything to say, and muttered empty words at the bereaved. The Rhinehart women didn’t look sad; they looked angry. “Jack I know,” Jack’s mother said briefly, “would’ve seen through those white boys in nine seconds flat.” “Jack I know,” his sister added, “didn’t need no whips or chains to have himself some fun.” They were mad at the man they loved for the scandal but even madder at him for having put himself in harm’s way, as if he had done it to hurt them, to leave them with the lifelong pain of their bereavement. “The Jack I know,” Solanka said, “was a pretty good man, and if he’s anywhere at all right now, I’d say he’s happy to be set free from his mistakes.” Jack was right there with them, of course. Jack in the box from which he would never rise up. Solanka felt a hand tighten around his heart.
In his grief’s eye Solanka pictured Jack stretched out in an upscale loft conversion while the whole world gossiped over his corpse and photographers frothed about. Next to Jack lay the three dead girls. Released from the fear of his own involvement in their deaths, Solanka mourned them too. Here lay Lauren, who had become afraid of what she was capable of doing to others and allowing others to do to her. Bindy and Sky had tried and failed to keep her inside their charmed circle of pleasure and pain, but she had sealed her fate by threatening the club’s members with the shame of a public expose. Here lay Bindy, the first to comprehend that her friend’s death had been no random killing but a cold-blooded execution: which comprehension was her own death warrant. And here lay Uptown Sky, game-for-anything sexual athlete Sky, the wildest of the doomed three and the most sexually uninhibited, her masochistic excesses—now meticulously detailed in the delighted press—sometimes alarming even her sadistic lover, Brad the Horse. Sky, who believed herself immortal, who never thought they would come for her, because she was the empress of their world, they followed where she led, and her levels of tolerance, her thresholds, were the highest any of them had ever known. She knew about the murders and was crazily aroused by them, murmured in Marsalis’s ears that she had no intention of blowing the whistle on so much man, and whispered to both Stash and Club in turn that she would be happy to stand in for her dead friends in any way they wanted, just name it, baby, it’s yours. She also explained to all three men, in separate, luridly retold encounters, that the killings bound them together for life; they had passed the point of no return, and the contract of their love had been signed in her friends’ lifeblood. Sky, the vampire queen. She died because her killers were too scared of her sexual fury to let her live.
Three scalped girls. The public talk was of voodoo and fetishism, and above all of the icy ruthlessness of the crimes, but Solanka preferred to ponder the death of the heart. These young girls, so desperately desirous of desire, had only been able to find it at the outside extremes of human sexual behavior. And these three young men, for whom love had become a question of violence and possession, of doing and being done to, had gone to the frontier between love and death, and their fury had worn it away, the fury they could not articulate, born of what they, who had so much, had never been able to acquire: lessness, ordinariness. Real life.
In a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand horrified conversations buzzing over the dead like stench-seeking flies, the city discussed the murders’ most minute details. They killed one another’s girls! Lauren Klein had been taken out by Medford for one last grand night on the town. She sent him home, as he had planned, because of a quarrel he’d deliberately provoked near the evening’s end. A few moments later he phoned her, pretending to have had a car accident just around the corner. She ran out to help him, found his vintage Bentley unmarked and waiting with its door open. Poor babe. She thought be wanted to apologize. Annoyed at the deception but not alarmed, she climbed in, and was hit repeatedly on the head by Andriessen and Marsalis, while Medford drank margaritas in a nearby bar, announcing loudly that he was drowning his sorrows because his bitch wouldn’t put out, obliging the bartender to ask him to shut up or leave, and making sure his presence would be remembered. And then the scalping. They must’ve put down plastic sheeting to make sure the car wasn’t stained. And the body thrown like garbage in the street. The same technique worked on Belinda Candell.