The Delilah Complex (27 page)

P
hilip Maur’s wife was sitting by his bedside. The heart attack had been Thorazine-induced and had done only minor damage. She held her husband’s hand and wept silently, muttering the same five words over and over.

“I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead.”

Jordain and Perez stood in the doorway, finishing up their conversation with the doctor.

“We won’t stay any longer than we have to.”

“I’m going in with you, just as a precaution.”

“That’s fine,” Perez said.

“Do you know where you were?” Jordain asked after he and Perez had identified themselves and told Mr. Maur how happy they were that he was alive.

Phil nodded. “At her house,” he said in a hoarse voice. He licked his lips. Once, and then again. His wife handed him a glass of water. He drank from it slowly. All the way down.

Jordain was impatient but didn’t show it.

“You were at her house?”

“We were all at her house.”

“All?”

“Five of us. Tied up like…” His voice cracked and he started to cry. Damn. But he could no more stop the tears than he could let go of his wife’s hand.

“You and four other men. Are all of them dead?”

He shook his head. His shoulders heaved.

The doctor moved in, ready to stop the interview if the monitor showed any change in the man’s heartbeat, but the pattern stayed consistent.

“I know this is terrible, Mr. Maur, and we are very sorry to have to ask you to talk about what happened, but we need to find the house. We need to find the people who did this to you.”

Phil was shaking his head vehemently.

“Everyone is alive. Drugged. But alive…” A sob escaped. “I’m sorry…never meant to…” The tears flowed. His wife was staring at him.

Jordain figured that Phil was not going to say anything with his wife sitting there. He sought out Butler’s eyes and motioned to Mrs. Maur with a slight incline of his head. She walked over, gently took the woman by her arm and said, “Mrs. Maur, could you just come outside with me for a few minutes? I have some questions I need you to help me with.”

Once she was out of the room, Jordain took her place by Phil’s bedside.

“All that matters right now is finding out where you were. Where the other men are. So we can get to them in time. Do you know whose house it was?”

He nodded.

“What is her name?”

“I didn’t mean to…”

“There is time for that later, Mr. Maur. Right now, we need to know where you were and where those other men are being held.”

“I only know her first name. The name she used.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know if it was her real name. A lot of them didn’t use their real names.”

Jordain felt as if he were deep under water, struggling to get to the surface where it was light.

He wrote down the name that Phil gave him. Only a first name. Not much help. “Where was the house? Do you know that?”

“Somewhere in the country. Sorry, I was already groggy by the time I got in the car.”

“Do you remember how long it took her to drive you to the hospital?”

“No. It felt like five years.”

T
he detectives and the local police stood in the parking lot of the Greenwich Hospital discussing how to go about finding the house.

“Big town, small population. We’ve only got 60,000 people living here, but the township covers more than forty-eight square miles, much of it backcountry. Big houses on lots of acres. Canvassing would take days.”

“And all we have is a first name, and we’re not even sure it’s a real first name.”

Butler approached. With her was a uniformed cop from Greenwich along with a man wearing black pants, a white shirt and a black jacket with a hospital insignia on it. She introduced the man to Jordain and Perez.

“We’ve got something,” she said. “Mr. White here saw the woman who dropped off Phil Maur. He noticed the car because of the way it came careening into the lot. And like he does with all the cars that park in Emergency, he took down the license plate.”

“You are a good man,” Jordain said as he took the piece
of paper with three numbers and three letters written in black ink. He looked at it and handed it to the local detective.

“Shouldn’t take me more than five minutes.”

“Make it three,” Jordain said.

D
aphne stood in the shadows of the staircase. Her hair was wild, her blouse was pulled out of her slacks. There were sweat stains under her arms. Her mouth was twisted into an angry grimace. “What are you doing here?” she screamed at me.

I didn’t have much time—only a few seconds while she was still in shock at seeing me—to push past Nicky and then get past Daphne in an attempt to get upstairs and out of there. To get to a phone. To get away.

But before I knew what was happening, Nicky fell on me and the force of his body pushed me to the floor. My shoulder started to throb. Nausea came in waves. I knew from experience that my bone might be broken.

Nicky sat up. “You pushed me,” he was saying to Daphne in a dazed voice.

The pain in my arm was making me dizzy, but I managed to sit up, too.

“Why did you push me?” Nicky asked his wife. He was on overload, trying to work out the meaning of what was happening, not understanding anything.

Behind me, the men were screaming and shouting.

Daphne was standing over her husband and me, staring down at us; in her hand was a gleaming pair of scissors. Her back was to the staircase, blocking it. To get to it, I’d have to push past her.

“Get up,” she said to him.

Nicky did what she asked.

Slowly, despite the pain, I got up, too, keeping my eyes on the scissors. She was three or four feet away from me. I wondered if I could lunge at her and throw her off balance. The scissors weren’t much of a weapon against two of us. Nicky could take them out of her hand in one movement. But he was just standing there, rubbing his chin, staring at his wife.

“Nicky?” I said. No response. “Daphne, please put down the scissors. You need to call the police. I’ll help you. You won’t even go to jail. You just need help. Everyone is still alive. You will be fine. But you have to put down the scissors and let me get to the phone.”

She laughed at me and looked at her husband. “Do you see, Nicky? You have to see. I did all of this for you, not to hurt anyone. I had it all planned out. I even picked Liz to send the photos to because I knew that she hated you all so much she’d enjoy making you cower. I guessed who she was. Saw her at a party. Lucky me. Screw conflict of interest. I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of keeping the story for herself. That she’d do everything she could to feed the police the bare minimum while milking the news. She didn’t want the crimes solved—she wanted power over all of you, and I was giving it to her. I wanted you to live with the fear. Day after day. And have it grow in you. Until the fear was so big it overpowered the lust.”

He was just nodding.

“You have to give it up—you understand that, don’t you? No more going to the Scarlet Society.”

Daphne was talking to him in a more strident tone of voice than she had used before in my presence, and her face was arranged in a mask of power that was the opposite of the sensitive, loving wife I’d met the two previous times. Which woman was real? The wife who only wanted her husband to be faithful to her? Or this aggressive, powerful woman crazed with jealousy?

“Daphne, we have to call the police now.” I was using a calm voice, hoping I could reach her and break through her rage, but she was ignoring me.

“Nicky, do you understand?” she asked.

He nodded his head.

“You have to do what I say from now on, Nicky. All right?”

He nodded.

“Come here.”

He moved closer to her.

She reached out with her free hand and stroked her husband’s groin with her fingertips.

It seemed that we had all disappeared—me and the four naked men strapped to their gurneys. They were talking and shouting, but she was not hearing them. She continued to rub her husband until a smile curved her lips. She’d made him hard. Despite the plight of these men, the stink of the torture chamber, the imminent danger and the shining weapon, he was under her spell.

Her fingers curled around the bulge in his pants, squeezed it, and then unzipped his fly and pulled his penis out.

“See, when you listen to me, when you accept me for who I am to you, when you don’t fight me, it’s fine. You’re
hard, aren’t you? You’re nice and hard. And that’s for me. Because I know how to treat you.”

Nicky had slipped into a sexual fugue state. His eyes were shut. His lips parted. His face muscles went slack. Daphne leaned down and sucked on his penis. Up and down, licking him as she swallowed him.

This was my only chance. How concentrated was she on proving her erotic domination of her husband? How much did she want to show him, or herself, or the other men in the room, that she had the power and could command them all?

Enough so that I might be able to inch away?

I
took one small step forward. Daphne didn’t miss a beat. She raised her head away from her husband’s crotch and pointed the scissors at me.

“You aren’t really serious, are you?”

Nicky was somnambulistic, focused only on his wife’s wet lips. He didn’t seem to know—or, if he knew, didn’t seem to care—that his erection was exposed.

“Nicky, I need you to help me,” I pleaded, surprised at how pathetic my voice sounded.

Daphne’s other hand moved to her husband’s penis and grabbed ahold of him hard enough for her knuckles to turn white. He was not at all aware of me.

I didn’t know how to reach him. Daphne held the scissors in her right hand, continued stroking him with her left and leered at me. “Don’t move,” she said.

I looked right at Nicky, took a breath and in a clear, loud voice said, “Nicky. She’s been lying to you. She’s not agoraphobic. But she is dangerous. She needs serious help. Psychiatric help. And you are the only one who can make sure she gets it. I know you want to help her. You came to me to get help for her.”

His head had fallen back, he was more lost than ever in his sexual stupor. My voice was probably a hiss in the background compared to the sensations he was feeling.

Daphne did not stop her ministrations.

I inched forward again.

Daphne stopped moving her hand.

Nicky’s head jerked back. “No—” he cried. “Please don’t stop.”

“I’ll finish after we deal with her. We have to tie her up. We have to protect ourselves.”

“Please…don’t stop.” He was still reeling from her interrupting his impending orgasm. “Please…” he repeated.

“As soon as we figure out what to do with this little mess.” She was torn between keeping Nicky sexually engaged—knowing that was the key to keeping him on her side instead of the side of reality—and at the same time she needed to figure out how to stop me. The scissors in her right hand shook from her trembling. “Nicky, we have to strap her down on the gurney. You have to get up. You have to help me.”

Nicky turned. His eyes were glazed with lust and need but some of it dissipated as he looked at me.

I knew that the only shot I had was to convince him that his wife needed help and he was the only one who could ensure that she would get it. If he really loved her, whether it was a healthy love or not, I was going to have to bet on the fact that he would want to save her more than he wanted to hurt me. But would he? Or more to the point, could he? I didn’t know enough about their relationship yet to know if he was subservient to her only sexually or in other ways.

“Nicky, we can help Daphne.”

“Shhh…” She leaned closer to him and kissed him behind his ear. “Nicky…” She took his hand, put it up to her
mouth and sucked in his thumb, going down on it and then pulling up slowly.

“We have secrets to keep now, Nicky. Your secrets with the society. My secrets here. We have to bury them. Both sets of secrets.” She went down on his thumb again.

What was she planning to do to keep her secrets? What could I do to stop her? There was no way to protect myself. All I had—all I ever had—was my voice. But how could I compete with her? He was a man addicted to giving up power, who found it sexually arousing. His wife knew that.

“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “I don’t know what else to do. You’re just too big a part of the secret now. You have to get up on that table.”

I didn’t argue. At least I could act as if I were going to obey. The longer I could stall her, the greater chance I had to talk Nicky into helping me.

“I can help you figure out what to do, Daphne. I can help with the police so you don’t have to go to jail.”

“I don’t think so.” She laughed and I cringed. It was a deranged laugh. A power-sick cackle that went through my body like a shot of pain. “I know how to help myself. I’m going to bury the secrets. I’ve known that I could do that all along. This bunker is twenty feet under the house. No one knows it’s here. My grandfather had it built as a bomb shelter. It’s not in any of the plans. Once Nicky and I walk out of here and shut the door behind us, no one will ever be able to find any of you. It wasn’t my plan, but I always knew it was a backup.”

Nicky seemed surprised by what she was saying. I could see that in the narrowing of his eyes, in the way he put his lips together in a tight line.

“Nicky.” I made my voice as authoritative as I could. I
had learned from my session with Paul Lessor what I had done wrong. I was not going to waste the one shot I had left.

He didn’t turn.

“Nicky!”
I shouted at him with as much venom as I could put into the two syllables.

He reacted and turned to me.

“You must listen to me, Nicky.” I kept my voice dictatorial. “Daphne loves you. She loves you enough to kill five people if she has to. You have to take away the power of her love. If you don’t, you’ll allow her to destroy both of you. You’ll wind up keeping her secret for her. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? Yes. Of course you do. I know you do. You’ve had a secret for years. The Scarlet Society has been your dirty secret. And you know how that secret controlled you. You know that, Nicky, don’t you?”

He was listening. Her fingers on his crotch were not distracting him from the tyrannical tone of my voice, or from the meaning of my words. I was ordering him to listen with every single syllable I uttered.

For one moment, Daphne had forgotten the most important thing.

Her husband was not addicted to sex.

Nicky was addicted to a woman overpowering him. To a woman demanding something from him. She was being too soft. Her need for his help was blinding her. She was seeing him as her savior and that was not the role he craved. He wanted to be a slave. If only she had stopped asking him to help her for just one minute and made him obey her, she would have won. But she didn’t do it.

“Listen to me, Nicky,” I commanded. “You bastard. You have to listen to me. Daphne needs you so much. She
wants you. That’s all she wants. She doesn’t control you. I do. She is weak. Like you. I am the one with the power.”

He was completely focused on what I was saying now. “You don’t want to be the big brave man and give Daphne what she needs, what she
needs
, Nicky. You want to give me what I demand.”

Daphne’s hand was urgently racing up and down his erection. “Nicky…help me.”

“No!”
I screamed at him, hoping that Daphne was too far gone to understand what I was doing, that she wouldn’t try to figure out why he was responding to me.

He was completely focused on me now, what she was doing to him might have merged with my voice, but it was my voice more than her actions that absorbed him.

“Nicky, I am ordering you to take the scissors out of Daphne’s hand. NOW!”

He turned to his estranged wife. The fact that she still had her fingers wrapped around his penis didn’t seem to be registering with him anymore. He slapped her hand away as if it were an annoying fly and reached for the scissors.

She was faster than he was. Pushing past him, she ran at me, her hand raised, the scissors pointed at my chest.

“Nicky, stop her!” I yelled. He went flying after her.

I ran in the other direction. Stopped seeing, just blindly moving, racing to find a corner of the room where she couldn’t get at me. All I could think of was Dulcie. That I had to protect myself for Dulcie. I had to get home to my daughter.

Daphne followed me, enraged, ready to do battle with the
other
woman, with all the
other
women whom Nicky responded to when he no longer responded to her.

“Nicky, stop her!” I yelled.

She was a blur rushing me and then she was gone. Nicky had pulled her back. The two of them lay on the floor in a heap.

I heard weeping. Daphne’s sobs. Nicky lay on top of her. He was finally flaccid. “Daphne, Dr. Snow is right. You know she is. We have to get you help. We can’t make this worse than it already is.”

She stared at him. There was an expression of disgust on her face: her lips were twisted into a grimace, her nostrils flared. With a huge burst of energy, she got her arm loose. She still had the damn scissors clutched in her fingers. She raised them over her head.

They came down. An arc of silver light gleamed in the gloomy basement.

The sound was that of a small animal caught in the night.

I cringed.

Daphne stopped moving. The blood leached out, turning her light pink shirt deep red.

Nicky shouted something I couldn’t make out and knelt down to her.

“No. Don’t touch her, Nicky. Go upstairs and call the police. Depending on how the scissors are lodged in her chest, you could hurt her more if you try to pull them out. Just go. Now!”

He stared at me. “I can’t leave her,” he whimpered.

“If you don’t, she’s going to die for sure. Go. Now.”