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sex.lies.murder.fame.
A Novel
Chapter One
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There's something
. . . about the echo created by steps across a parquet floor. It's not like the sound of typical hardwood. Parquet resonates a bit deeper. Perhaps it's the arrangement of the interlocking wood.
Sound is everything. Intangible power.
Funny thing about sound. The same sound in the same space, all things being unchanged, can seem totally different based upon one important factor: the distribution of light, or the absence of it. A hundred-watt bulb. Looming shadows. The arbitrary flickering of a candle. Each creates a dramatically diverse effect that determines how sound is registered.
It's pure perception. A whisper in the daytime might be missed altogether. That same whisper, uttered the same way in the same space, in the dark, can inspire immeasurable fear.
This was Penn's only thought as he hefted the sack of thigh higher across his shoulder: the perfection of sound in accordance with light. The apartment and the moment were both fairly dark and required a pitch with the appropriate degree of gravitas. He adjusted his walk into a half-dance -- stepstepstepstepstepstep. The cadence filled the entire hallway. He stopped. It wasn't right. The rhythm -- anapestic dimeter, to be precise -- wasn't ominous enough. He started again, this time losing one beat to make it iambic. Stepstepstepstep. That was better. That was more literary.
He wanted this to be a literary moment. And in the world of literature, when it came to beats and measures, the iamb was king. Anyone with half afunctioning brain knew that. One of his professors at Columbia had said that dactylic hexameter was the most important of the classical meters because it was what Homer and Virgil had used. Bullshit. Most people wouldn't know a dactylic hexameter if it bit them in the ass, but everyone had heard of iambic pentameter -- and therefore the iamb -- even if they didn't know what it was. The iamb was a critical part of Shakespeare's meter of choice, and Shakespeare was the ruling god of literature. Not Homer. Not Virgil. Shakespeare. End of subject.
The sack of thigh, a black trash bag stuffed to capacity with meat, slapped against his back.
Hmmm.
Stepslapstepslap. Stepslapstepslap.
Yes.
He began a light whistle. "In the Hall of the Mountain King." It was the fourth movement from Suite no. 1, op. 46, of Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt, incidental music written for Ibsen's eponymous play. Whistling it now, of course, was not very original, but the tune had proven a sturdy classic for moments like this. So what if it had been done to death since Peter Lorre's turn as a murderous pedophile in M?
Ha. Done to death. He laughed aloud and lost his beat.
"Quit fuckin' around," yelled an out-of-view Mercury. "I'm just washing up, then I'm gonna run downstairs. Give me about five minutes, then start throwing them in. And don't fuckin' dawdle. We need to get this done. You hear me?"
"Of course," Penn mumbled, regulating his pace back to something close to normal, although there was nothing normal about any of this. He dropped the sack by the front door alongside four other sacks, each one a trash bag stuffed with a pillowcase filled with rinsed flesh. He wondered how he'd ultimately remember tonight. The objective was for all knowledge of the events transpiring to evaporate like the wind, but Penn had always been a lover of mythologies, and this was clearly the creation of one. How would tonight, this night, go down? Would it become a rumored part of his legend, or an indelible stain on an unfulfilled dream?
He realized the Grieg tune had been a bad choice. It was tacky, clichéd. Penn was a Wagner man, after all. It occurred to him that he knew the right piece, had known it all along, one in line with the tenor of his actions. "Träume," from the Wesendonck-Lieder, that masterful five-part nod to illicit love.
He smiled and began to whistle again. Quick bursts of air this time, blown with gusto.
Ahhh.
Everything was perfect now.
Romanticism:
A literary and philosophical movement emphasizing a belief in the overall goodness of humanity, where emotions are valued over reason and intellect.
She was
. . . late!
Late! Late! Late!
Beryl Unger was never late.
Not ever. Not for anything. She was a stickler for time, order, and precision. Every moment counted in life, none of it to be wasted. But through no fault of her own, she had wasted time, and now she was stuck in the gridlock of crosstown traffic. Her knee was shaking. She peered out the window.
"Let me out here," she squawked at the cabbie. "I'll walk the rest of the way."
"But it's just around the -- "
"I don't have time!"
The cabbie closed out the meter.
"Four-eighty," he said as the receipt printed out.
She flung a fiver at him and jumped out. The cabbie had barely uttered the words "fucking bitch" when she opened the door again and handed him two dollars.
"Sorry," she said. "Have a nice day."
She slammed the door. Her pulse was racing, brow sweating, as she beat it down the street.
"Oh God, oh God, oh God," she said, checking her watch. Five fifty-seven. "Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God."
This was Messier's fault. The bloviating blowhard had sat in her office, babbling on about himself as the minutes ticked by. She'd had no choice but to indulge him. He was one of her top authors, after all, and he'd dropped in unexpectedly, wanting to be coddled for no reason in particular. With every word that fell from his lips, her leg -- the right one, the nerve barometer -- shook a little faster, her mind raced a little more, and the tiny pits of sweat forming beneath her arms began to widen and drip as her eyes kept being drawn to the clock over his shoulder.
sex.lies.murder.fame.
A Novel. Copyright © by Lolita Files. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
