Twenty
Bertha thrashed in the water in a panic, not certain
of up or down, but convinced of imminent death. She had seen the knife.
She had caught a glimpse of the cold flash of reflected light when he
grabbed her ankle. Opening her eyes beneath the clear bathwater, she had
seen Dimitri’s disheveled, blood-smeared face.
And then came the howling that could only have come
from Gabby standing behind the mirror, because as surely as her name was
Bertha Ruse, her bath in a tub of clear water had been a ruse of another
kind.
In response to Gabby’s bellow of anguish, the hand on
her ankle opened spastically, sending her sliding back along the bottom of
the tub and banging her head painfully against the chromed faucets.
Anger rather than fear got the best of her. Once she
had regained her footing and escaped the tub, she backed to the sink,
grabbed the glass bottle of bubble bath with its plastic rose inside, and
hurtled it into the mirror with all the force she could muster.
She needed Gabby on her side of the mirror.
The mirror fractured, imploded, cascading into the
water in deadly shards of glass half the size of her body. The gaping
hole revealed a dark passage beyond, and Gabby staggering back against the
onslaught, already cut and bleeding on his arms and face.
Bertha sucked a lungful of air.
“Emily, help me!”
Emily had been enroute. It took a fraction of the
second for the taller woman to come bounding into the bathroom with her
Magnum clutched in both hands and pointed at Gabby’s head.
“Not Gabby!” Bertha shrieked. “Dimitri! Dimitri was
here!”
Emily’s face drained of color. She looked back at
the trail of blood on the hardwood floor, guessing now the sequence of
strange events. She whirled about and followed the trail at a dead run.
Sally screamed a terrified protest of confusion from the hallway. Emily’s
retreating footsteps could be heard on the stairs and in the downstairs
hall.
Bertha stood shaking, chilled and frightened,
barefoot and surrounded by broken glass. Gabby crunched his way through
the glass, scooped her into his arms and carried her into the bedroom. He
set her down gently, and stood weeping, his eyes filling with blood from
cuts on his face, unable to see well enough to flee.
Bertha rose to her knees and tugged at his arm until
he seated himself on the edge of the bed. She forced his hands away from
his eyes in search in serious injury. Glass fragments glittered in his
hair and on his shirt. If he had cut his eyes, she’d call 911 regardless
of consequence.
He looked up at her like a terrified child,
mercifully uninjured. She brushed a sliver of glass from his face, then
inspected his hands.
“Off with the shirt,” she ordered, and unbuttoned the
blue denim shirt, amused by the thought of having to strip this helpless,
albino grizzly bear in retaliation for his voyeurism. When his mouth
dropped open and Bertha took notice of where his eyes were roaming, she
sidestepped to the bathroom entrance, tossed his glass-contaminated shirt
aside, fetched a bath towel, and whipped and secured it about her hips with a half knot and a tuck. He had been staring at her breasts.
So be it. Her
bare breasts would serve as an effective leash on the man.
Gabby stuffed his hands in his lap and stared at the
floor in front of her, at least now and then.
“Have you told Leroy about us?” Bertha said.
He shook his head emphatically. “I said nothing to
no one yet.”
Bertha sighed with relief. “What’s with the mirrors,
Gabby?”
He looked up at her in abject misery. “I’m sorry!”
he wailed. “I was just looking!”
“So I figured.”
“You were doing that on purpose!” he accused. “I
know you were!”
“Sex isn’t a spectator sport, Gabby. If you can’t
touch, you only torment yourself by looking.”
“You already knew!” he cried, his accusation
confirmed.
“I found out quick enough. I’ve got one of your
video tapes in my VCR.”
Gabby adolescent petulance turned again to bald-faced
fear. “They were Leroy’s idea! Honest!”
“Maybe I’ll believe you if you tell me the story in a
nutshell, but make it a really short story.”
Gabby forced himself to relax enough to collect his
thoughts. “I told you. He’s always scheming and horse trading. He buys
apartments. He’s got about fifteen of them. He’s got girlfriends, too.”
“He’s into pornography, I take it.”
Gabby nodded enthusiastically. “Maybe it ain’t that
bad. He tapes the girls. He found somebody who buys them. He’s got
peepholes in some of the old apartments. . .”
“And you went along with it?”
Gabby looked up at her, drowning in the depths of his
guilt. “I’ve been with Leroy twenty years, not two. I don’t know what
else I’d do for a living. He couldn’t make it on the apartments alone.”
“You were spying on me.”
Tears gushed from his eyes. He made no effort to
stop the flow. “You’re so pretty. I didn’t mean no harm.”
You could have asked, Bertha was tempted to say.
What kind of girl would say a thing like that? “Gabby, you adolescent
shit, you’ll go to prison if you get caught.”
Gabby stared hollow-eyed at the floor. “He gave me
fifteen thousand dollars to redo this place like he wanted. I’ve got to
retire soon. I can’t go on like I used to.”
“Every business proposition has its risks. Is that
it?”
“Yeah,” Gabby said. “I guess so.”
Emily came rushing back into the apartment, radiating
panic.
“You sure it was Dimitri?” she said with her eyes on
Gabby and an intense frown of displeasure on her face.
“I’m real sure,” Bertha said. “He was a mess, and he
had a big knife, and he was going to use it on me. Gabby scared him off.”
“He’s out in the trees somewhere. I flattened the
tires on a van parked down along the highway. Without a hospital, he’s
going to bleed to death pretty quick. What do you want to do with this
old coot?”
“I’ll take care of him,” Bertha said. “If Leroy
finds out about us, we’ll have the cops on our ass, so be nice to him.”
Emily shrugged. “Well, then take especially good
care of him.”
Gabby risked a glance at Emily as she went out the
door. Then he looked back up at Bertha, his expression filled with
longing and sorrow.
“Miserable old bastard,” she murmured at him. She
let the towel fall away. “Is this what you want?”
Gabby gawked at her in confusion.
“Go ahead and take it,” Bertha said gently. “You
saved my life. I owe you one.”
Gabby reached out for her, more to console than to
grope, hardly with the greed or passion of a young man. He dropped to his
knees, embraced her about the hips, put his face to her bare stomach, and
burst into tears.
“So I figured,” Bertha said, running her fingers
through his shock of thinning white hair. “You’re a real menace to
society, aren’t you, Mr. Gunther Wernhauten?”
