Lynn had passed her driving test less than two months after she had turned 16. Yet, she took no interest in cars. I did. Don’t ask me why or what started it. At one time during summer, the summer which had seen both of us turn 17 and the last summer to see Lynn around, we drove out to the beach in her brother’s car. Tiny strands of smoke started coiling into the cabin through the dashboard, clearly the result of a short circuit in the wiring somewhere. Only God knew what essential function it might have disabled.
– What’s that? Lynn asked.
– It’s a smoke signal, I answered. It means: No good. Stop. Call car medicine man. I know it’s offensive. But I didn’t at that age, in that era.
My friend pulled over. She called road service on her mobile. She turned to me with a hint of panic.
– They’re asking what car I’m driving.
I was stumped. The Mercedes signature star in the middle of the wheel was staring her in the face.
– A Studebaker, I said, and only God knows what made me say it.
– What?
– A Studebaker, I repeated, and, for whatever reason, I couldn’t stop myself from adding: Tell them it’s one of the last they produced. As a matter of fact, Studebaker may already have gone bankrupt when this car nose-dived off the assembly line. It may have been sold with parts missing that subcontractors had refused to supply to Studebaker any longer. I retrieved my smartphone from my tote and started checking for feeds and messages. I guess, at the time, I was that kind of girl.
– Is that relevant at all? I heard Lynn doubtingly ask. Without looking up I said (and I have no idea why I kept going down that path, entirely irrational considering my impatience to get to the seaside):
– It may explain why we’re parked out here having narrowly escaped death by poisonous gas inhalation with the beach nowhere in sight. My friend passed on the information to whoever was taking her call. It took a while before she turned to me again, keeping the mobile away from her face.
– The woman’s asking stuff about this Studebaker that I draw a complete blank on. She sounds rather confused. You think you could take her? I stopped working the smartphone.
– I was joking, Lynn. For Chrissake. You’re driving a Mercedes. It’s a 190E. It’ll be about 25 years old.
– Oh, thank you. She’s definitely going to roll over laughing and die.
– Just tell her you knew it was some foreign brand with a long name and that Studebaker was the first you could think of. You see, I had still not come off it completely. Lynn shot me a rather disgusted side-glance as she moved the phone back to her ear again.
– I’m sorry. It was my friend here trying to be funny. It’s a Mercedes uh… Hissing at me:
– Mercedes what again?
I was getting riled up. Taking her right arm by the wrist, I wrested the mobile down to her seat.
– A 190E, about 25 years old. Tell her it’s old enough to be smoking. And tell her we have an urgent appointment, or we could just as well start thumbing our way to the beach. I turned back to my smartphone. I have come to see that I could have communicated with Lynn about the car problem much more efficiently. A small road service van arrived an hour later. The need to get the car into a garage was soon established. It took another hour for a tow truck to arrive and take the car to the nearest one. We were seated next to the driver.
– Abe, he introduced himself. Where’re you girls headed?
– Dump, I said. Right, Lynn? It must have been a car dump you were taking that rusty old bum to when you decided to pick me up for a drop-off at the beach? I will not argue with anyone that lashing out to Lynn like that was uncalled for.
– She’s pissed, Lynn said to the driver. We were going to the beach. What happens when we’re at the garage? It’s my brother’s car. He let me have it for the day.
– Very generous, I said (when I shouldn’t have). Convenient timing. Are you sure this wasn’t Bob’s way of avoiding the trouble of getting the car in for repair himself?
– You girls get along well?
– She’s pissed, Lynn said again, and it seems I was, for no good reason. Then she said, looking down on her hands, which lay loosely folded in her lap, I have a photoshoot tonight.
– Wow! Abe said. On the beach?
– Oh no! It’s down at Henderson’s. It’s for a new washing machine they’ve started selling. Front-end technology. I’m not sure what that is, though – something to do with where you put in the laundry, I guess. You should go and see it. They just need my legs. I’m not allowed recognizable shots of me anyway.
– You have got great legs. I’d recognize you by your legs!
– What happens at the garage? She stared out of the driver’s seat window now, across of Abe, as if to intercept his straying gaze without having to meet it and force it to change direction.
– You’ll be on your own, the driver said. That car is going to sit at the garage for a coupla days at least. But, you have the constitutional right to make one call. He laughed. Better make sure it’s your brother picking up the phone!
– Look, Abe, I said, I’d say you’re an altogether likable guy. Why don’t you give us a lift to the beach after my friend here has arranged the business with the garage?
– Oh, SHE wants to go TO–THE–BEACH, so BADly!, the driver merrily exclaimed. Sure, I’ll take you girls there. But will you be able to make it back home?
– What time you’re off duty, Abe?
– I like your style, baby! Let’s put it this way. My schedule today says I’m done hauling at any time happens to be convenient to you girls. Just call me when you feel that time is approaching. Dividing his attention between the road and the content of a compartment at his side, he managed to produce a card of his towing company with a handwritten mobile phone number on it. He held it out sideways, eyes on the road now, not allowing the thrill of the conversation to trump professional responsibility. Lynn, sitting closest to him, took the card, forewent studying it and passed it on to me.
– You’re the best, Abe! When you take us back, you can drop us both off at my place. I’ll be taking Lynn to the photoshoot in my car tonight.
– Ah, no, Lynn said. The photographer said he would pick me up. We’ll be driving to Henderson’s together.
– Look , Lynn, Abe said, eying her briefly, as he was making a turn, you sure you’ll be doing an ad for a washing machine? I thought Henderson scaled back to doing audio and video just a couple o’ months ago – economy and all?
– Well, it’s what the photographer told me. I guess he knows what the shoot is about. He knows what the machine is about. Front-end technology, he said; saves great on energy and water.
– Lynn, I said, who is this photographer anyway? When you told me about the shoot, you didn’t mention the whole thing running through him. How’d you meet him?
– He’s called Jim something. I have his card at home. He’s self-employed. He’s from out of town. I met him just after springterm ended.
– How? I demanded.
– I was out doing some errands when he passed me in his car and pulled up and called out to me. He said he was looking for the Henderson store. I said I knew the store but that I’m no good at finding my way, let alone giving directions to someone else. Then he said he was doing pics for a local ad campaign that Henderson had planned on and that he was still looking for a model. He said he could not begin to believe his luck to have met just the girl he needed and did I mind taking his card. Back home, I discussed it with my Mom and Dad. I could tell Dad was rather proud, but my Mom would not hear of it and we ended up settling on absolute anonymity. I called the number on the card, and Jim said not to worry about privacy. We’ll take everything from the waist down, he said, and …
– Oh, but I’d… Abe started.
– …we arranged for Jim to pick me up where we had met on the street, Lynn, ignoring Abe, finished her comprehensive yet beautifully succinct account.
– Why not at your place? I asked.
– Why, because I’d have to give him an address. You know how my Mom is when it comes to giving private information to strangers.
– Did you call Henderson, did your Dad, or your Mom? Didn’t they insist on meeting Jim first?
– Henderson’s closed for holidays. They’re back open on Wednesday. We’ll be doing the shoot tonight at 6.30. I’d say it all neatly fits in with the campaign for the new washing machine, don’t you…
Didn’t your folks want to see Jim first? I repeated.
– My Mom did. Dad said he would give him a call.
– Did he?
– I guess so. He said he would come down to Henderson’s after work to see how we’re doing.
– Can I come?
– Sure! But you’ll have to get there on your own. Jim’s car loaded with this photographer’s stuff. I saw it. Gosh! There’s just the seat aside of his to take a passenger. He said I could bring anyone I wanted, as long as they’re not in the way when he’s setting up and taking the shots, and that they’d have to get there by themselves.
Beautiful Lynn, in her tight little print skirt, her cropped white tee, the spurious Calvin Klein sandals she had bought in a shop, a pop-up that was there the day we went in and had gone two days later when I had decided they were close enough to the real thing to want them too. It all had made such perfect sense. In a conversation in a situation like we were in, with Lynn providing all the answers straightforwardly, stating facts, nailing down (one would say, if she were a girl to ever nail down anything), fact for fact for fact, in the logical order of my questions, the image of the overall innocence of a small town adventure, nailing down, in fact, the near perfect run-up to the hideous crime to come down on her, who would even think of pressing Lynn beyond the all but conclusive statement on her father’s getting to drive down to Henderson’s to see how his daughter were doing at the photoshoot? I would. Because even if Lynn had unwittingly come full circle in her recount, depicting her father’s joining the party at the home appliances store straight from work, me being invited to it, invited even, as it were, by the photographer himself, so I was nonetheless undeceived of a space left unchartered: the blank between the pick-up at the agreed venue on the street and the supposed ride to Henderson Home Entertainment and Appliances. But I didn’t. Never had I been trailing a murder so closely. And it is unlikely I will ever again be in a better position to prevent murder from happening than I had been to save my best friend Lynn from it happening to her.
Abe collected us at an agreed point near the seaside road overlooking the beach strip, where we had enjoyed the sun, the waves, the warm sand, the admiration from boys, their drinks and their cigarettes, the heat we, the young, the girls and the boys, bathed in right up to the point when everything melted down into a somniferous white light, when only running then diving into the waves seemed adequate action to save us from harm; where Lynn had spent the bigger part of what were fated to be the last unencumbered hours of her life, so utterly devoid of portent of that hour which would bring her the momentous realization that death was as inevitable as it was near.
Leaving her a 15-minute window to make it in time to the spot where the photographer was to collect her, Abe dropped Lynn off at her place. We headed to his. In his neat little apartment we ate the food that we had stopped to buy at a take-out, we had sex after we had eaten, we ate again, we fucked after we had finished what had been left of the food; we dozed, he roused me and we fucked, I washed up in Abe’s tiny tidy bathroom. I dressed. I knelt by the bedside and blew him. I had completely forgotten about Lynn’s photoshoot.
It was near 10 pm when I asked Abe to drive me home. By that time, by the calculation of the time of her death as reported when the news broke, Lynn had been dead for at least three hours. She had been butchered. Her body was found in a backstreet near Henderson’s delivery entrance. It looked as if it had been dumped there with cavelier neglect. A cigarette butt flicked out a car window. There had been no attempt to hide it or cover it with anything to delay discovery. There were no signs of rape. Which is how I know, a detail the papers were unable to provide, that Lynn had died a virgin.
The murder had happened a long, long time ago, when my smartphone was an iPhone 2G. They have not, in any ensuing device generation, managed to track down the man who had presented himself to Lynn as Jim something, that photographer. Henderson had told the police he didn’t know about a photoshoot and that he had not ordered one. He had said he had stopped selling major appliances months ago, economy and all. Abe was questioned. I provided the alibi that I should not have been able to provide. The car had been found deserted, completely useless finger prints blatantly all over the wheel and handles and glove department and dashboard and gear shift, a few miles out of town along a much travelled road. It was filled with scrap metal junk and boxes stuffed with rags and more junk, leaving room for just the driver and a front seat passenger. It was one of those big, nondescript cars. I think I remember it was on the news that it was a Chrysler such and so. I’m not sure. I hate cars.
And sex, but experts say that is bound to change.
Hard Nosed Women 