After the segment was over, she rewound the tape and watched it again.
What was going on?
She got out of bed, pulled on her clothes, began to pace the loft. If Dietz had been stabbed with, say, a pair of scissors, she might have cause to worry that she'd done the deed, perhaps in the amnesic dream-sister trance-state into which she sometimes slipped after taking down a mark.
But she distinctly remembered hearing Dietz snore when she wished him sweet dreams from his door. So, whatever had happened to him had occurred after she'd left the room. She had left it neat, too-she remembered that. Yet the reporter had referred to it as "ransacked."
That meant that someone had gone into it after she had left. Which meant, again, that whatever had happened to Dietz had had nothing whatever to do with her.
Except… They were looking for her now. The detective's searching eyes told her he was a hunter. She knew the sort of man: quiet, sometimes gentle, but relentless in pursuit. He was a hunter and she was his quarry.
Another thing she knew about him: He was serious-he was no Leering Man.
That night she didn't sleep. She had a painting to finish, her latest version of Leering Man-and this time she was determined to get him right.
At three in the morning, still haunted by Dietz, she thought of a way to put him out of her mind. She went to the drawer in which she stashed the loot she took off marks, pulled out the gizmo she'd found inside Dietz's money belt and brought it over to her workbench.
She centered it carefully, picked up a steel ball hammer, raised it above the object, then brought it down with all her might.
The object jumped but didn't break.
She hammered at it several more times, but to no avail. Determined to destroy it, she set it lengthwise in her steel vise, then screwed the jaws closed. It buckled beneath the pressure. The transparent material, some sort of resin or plastic, split apart and fine metal tracing broke out. After that, by a combination of hammering and crushing, she was able to reduce it to irregular jagged pieces, which she added with glue to the other debris attached to the ground around Leering Man's face, and then covered with thick gushes of paint applied directly with a palette knife.
At dawn, exhausted but satisfied, she flung off her clothes, crawled into her bed, pulled the covers over her head and fell asleep.
Three days later she sat nervously in Dr. Zimmerman's office wondering what he was going to say. She had just delivered her confession. She was, she had just admitted, a species of poisoner, a thief and, worse, a destroyer of men's egos. Now she gazed at the empty eye holes in the masks on Dr. Z's wall and imagined eyes slowly appearing in them-twenty pairs of eyes that would glare at her in moral judgment until she bowed her head in shame.
"So… Dr. Zimmerman's soothing voice cut through her reverie. She tightened her elbows against her sides, fearful of his indignation.
"So… perhaps," he continued, "now you would like to tell me a little bit about ''?"
Is that what he wants now? God!
"Sure, Doc," she said in her best tough-girl voice, pleased at least that he had not condemned her. "What can I tell you?"
"Whatever you want, Gelsey," he answered kindly.
"And if you prefer not to talk about it-that will be all right, too."
What a gracious man. He deserves something nice, anything for sparing me a sermon. And his question relieved her of having to discuss her fear of being connected to the Dietz murder-a fear that had filled her life the past three days, ever since she'd seen the report on TV, "Playtime," she said, "-it's not all that unusual from what I've heard.
My father… well, you know… he'd make suggestions. And then we'd go down to the maze." She stared at the masks again. The eyes were gone from the eye holes.
She felt alone.
She continued: "We'd never enter through the outside door. We'd always descend to it from the loft-open the trapdoor, climb down the ladder to the catwalks, then shinny down the rope to the floor."
"Then?"
"Then… you know, we'd do it. Play."
"That was his word for it?"
" ',' '." That's what he always called it. Like: ', honey bunch-it's a rainy day. Let's go down the rope and play."
"He called you ' bunch'?"
More questions! Why can't he just leave it alone? "That and 'sweetheart." Sometimes '." Lots of different things." She smiled, a forced little smile. "Affectionate names."
"And then?"
"Then what?"
"What would he do?"
She glared at him sharply. "Christ, Doc! What the hell do you think?"
She was sweating, she realized. Her armpits were wet. But not her crotch. That part of her, she noted with grim satisfaction, was bone-dry.
She turned to Dr. Z. Was he titillated by all this? Was there an erection sprouting in his baggy trousers? She didn't look. Better, she decided, not to know. Her thoughts turned to the tired detective she'd seen interviewed on TV, the detective with the searching eyes. The hunter. Her enemy.
"You're angry with me now," Dr. Zimmerman said.
"Yes," she agreed, "a little."
"I think more than a little, Gelsey."
"What do you want me to do? Describe it to you blow-by-blow?" "Were there blows?" he asked gently.
"No!" Now she was angry. "He was sweet about it. Really sweet.
That's what's so maddening. He was tender. He didn't throw me on the floor and… force himself. He always tried to make it..
"What?" "Fun," she said.
She turned to face him. Dr. Z was stretched out in his chair, eyes half-closed, the point of his goatee aimed straight at his shoes.
Perhaps he was trying to imagine what she was describing, not only to visualize it but so he could feel it as well. Perhaps he was being careful not to look at her, out of consideration, so she wouldn't feel ashamed.
"It was mostly with our hands anyway," she said. "We didn't do, you know … the whole thing. He wasn't a beast. He never did anything that hurt me."
"But he did hurt you."
"Yes," she agreed, "he did."
"Did he-?"
She interrupted. "He always wanted me to ask for it. Ask him to do this or that. Whatever. He wouldn't do it unless I asked."
"Did you?" "I asked." It pained her terribly to say it. "I don't know why. I guess I felt I had to. That was part of the game, you see. I would ask and then he'd grant my wish." She paused. "I think I know why he did it that way."
"Why do you think?"
"If I asked for it, that would mean he wasn't doing any thing wrong.
Against my will, you know. It wasn't abuse. It wasn't forced. It was… by consent."
"How does that make you feel?"
"The same way it made me feel then." She knew that very soon she was going to cry.
"Which was?"
"That I really did ask for it. So I had it coming to me, didn't I?"
The tears were welling. "I wish you could understand. It wasn't all that … bad. It really didn't hurt. It was really sweet.
Afterwards I would feel as though I had dreamed it, you know. Like it hadn't really happened. The mirrors made it seem like that. I would watch what we were doing in the mirrors, and it would seem like I was watching other people. Maybe that's why he always wanted to play down there. So I could sort of… float away… "
The tears were streaming down her face now. It felt good to cry, so she didn't bother to wipe them even when Dr. Z offered her a box of tissues.
Crying was better than feeling afraid.
"… float away from it, into mirror space. It's another land, Doc.
Everything's the opposite there. Right is left and vice versa. It wasn't me anymore. It was… the other girl."