Punish Me with Kisses (38 page)

She dabbed on some
Amazone
, inhaled the strong, erotic aroma, and checked herself in the mirror. Her gray eyes shined with passion. She looked sexy, in full bloom. She glanced at her watch. It was time to go. She stepped into the hall.

While she waited for the elevator she chatted with her security man. He wasn't one of those Chapman oafs; he was ex-Secret Service, accustomed to guarding presidents and kings. She never was afraid anymore, never took the subway, never walked alone. She went to work by limousine. When she jogged he trailed just behind.

The elevator man smiled. "Up or down?" he asked. She pointed up as he closed the door. He waited at the penthouse while she let herself inside.

She looked around the apartment. His briefcase was on the entry table, his raincoat thrown across a chair. The dining table was set. Dinner was waiting. Cold poached salmon and a salad. A bottle of white Burgundy and fresh raspberries for dessert.

She could hear him in the bedroom whistling to himself, knew he was getting dressed. She smiled, sat down, thought back over the last few months, how wonderful he'd been that wild night she'd called, how helpful and understanding, how he'd straightened things out so fast. The way he'd taken care of Dr. Bowles, for instance—sent a couple of his men around to see her and have a little talk. Just a few words about her license and malpractice litigation. The psychiatrist had crumbled right away.

He'd set her up in the apartment a few floors below his own. They'd started seeing a lot of each other then, lunches and dinners but not like the ones they'd had before. These meetings were different—outwardly serene, emotional underneath. They reappraised each other, parried and thrust. She could tell he was discovering things about her he'd never noticed before.

She realized what was happening before he did, knew she was reaching him by the way he responded when she threw back her head. Her gestures, her laugh, her tone—she seemed to do everything right. And they were her gestures,
her
tone, like Suzie's perhaps, but her own, still her own.

Suzie had used Jamie
Willensen
and Cynthia and her college jocks to divert herself, exorcise the memory of her unhappy love affair. But her own parade of lovers, her own experiences with Jared and Mac, Jamie, Cynthia and the boys in Aspen were a recapitulation in reverse. So she hadn't really been imitating Suzie—not really imitating her at all. She'd been doing the opposite—Suzie had been heading down toward death while she'd been heading for the sky.

"Kiddo?" He called her from the bedroom. "Want to put some music on?"

She went over to the stereo, looked through his records, chose a Cole Porter album she knew he liked.

"That's nice."

"Dinner looks great."

"Be out in a minute. Can really use some chow."

She filled their wine glasses, then wandered over to the window. It was dark, the river looked romantic and mysterious. There'd been an early evening rain, and now she could see soft reflections of headlights as cars streaked along the FDR.

"Hi," he said. She turned around. He stood there grinning at her, so handsome, so marvelously groomed and dressed.

They sat down and began to eat, and he told her about his day. It was like that now most nights of the week. They dined together and talked. He rarely went to Greenwich anymore. On nights when he was busy or out of town, she got in bed and read manuscripts. One weekend they flew out to Vegas and he handed her ten grand to throw away. She won some money and he was proud. "Riverboat gambler," he called her. "Godfather," she whispered back.

"Whatever happened to Suzie's old apartment?" she asked when he was finished recounting the day's events.

He glanced at her, a careful glance. "You knew about that?" he asked.

"Oh, sure. I followed you there." His eyes were wide open now. "Yeah, it was me who slashed it up." She met his eyes straight on.

He looked at her stunned for a moment, then he shook his head.

"Wow—kiddo. What a move that was! Scared the
beegeezus
out of me. Thought one of my enemies did it, maybe someone downtown on the Street." He grinned. "Closed the place down right after that. Laid on all this security we've got. You really spooked me pretty good." He raised his glass to toast her. "Didn't figure you for a move like that. Guess I underrated you, kiddo. Sure won't do that again."

After dinner they sat listening to music, and then, when she couldn't control herself any longer, when the desire built up inside of her so much she couldn't stand it anymore, she looked at him very hard in a special way that was her signal, and then whispered "Powerful One" softly, sensuously under her breath.

She'd said that the night when she'd first made it happen. It had all come so naturally to her, the way she'd comported herself, the moves she'd made, the things she'd said, that she'd marveled afterwards at her facility—it was as if she'd known just what to do.

Now they made love, wonderfully, and afterward, when they were playing around the way they liked to do, kissing and stroking, she started kidding him with the mocking tone he liked.

"You're going to kill me now, aren't you Daddy-O?" she teased. "You do that to your women, don't you? Kill them after making love."

He laughed, stroked her thigh. "Still think I killed her, kiddo? Still believe that?"

"Course I don't, silly. But I bet you know who did."

He smiled, nipped her ear. "You, too, kiddo. You know as well as I."

"Do I?"

"Sure you do."

"Jared?"

He laughed again. "No, not that loser, for Christ's sake. He never had the balls."

"Who was it then?"

"You saw the intruder."

"Come on. Tell me." She tickled his ribs. He squirmed. "It wasn't any old intruder, was it? Tell me who it was."

"Guess," he said. "Think real hard. Use that old noggin of yours." He kissed the back of her neck.

"How about—Cynthia!"

"Not poor old Cynthia." He began to chew her ear.

"Tucker?"

He rolled his eyes. "Now that's really dumb," he said.

She
slid
her tongue across his lips. "I give up. Can't think of anybody else."

"
Think. Think
,
dammit
. I spent enough
moolah
on that education of yours."

"There isn't anybody."

"
Oh, yes there is.
" He laughed, brought his head down, kissed her on the mouth five times hard. This was a little ritual they had. Usually she'd say: "Punish me with kisses," and he'd do it, kiss her hard like that—
bang, bang, bang, bang, bang
.

"Figured it out yet?"

She reached down, took hold of him. He was so big, so thick, so magnificent down there, so powerful and delicious. Just to touch it made her go weak inside.

"Well?—"

"I'm just dumb, I guess."

"You want to know, don't you?"

She nodded. "Of course I do."

"Won't make much difference now. It was a crime of passion, you see. Jealousy, envy—all that sort of stuff."

"Really?" She was dying of curiosity.
A crime of passion
. He made it sound romantic.

"It's so obvious you'll kick yourself. The motive's so crystal clear. She knew what was going on and hated it, used to berate me about it all the time. That's why I called it off, but I never told Suzie that. Yeah, she told me she'd do something if I didn't put a stop to it, and if I didn't stop all her wild screwing around, too. Didn't believe her. Should have. Said Suzie was evil and had to be destroyed. She's cuckoo mad, you know. Going to have to put her away one of these days, I guess."

"You're saying—mother? Is that who you mean?"

He looked at her, nodded. "That's the ticket. You got it now, kiddo."

Sure, it made sense when she thought about it. There were even some clues in the diary, she guessed, though she couldn't concentrate too well just then. The Powerful One was touching her in a special place, in a way that always made her lose her mind. Mother—well of course—

Then Penny began to scream—mostly in ecstasy but a little in horror, too.

Q.
Punish Me With Kisses
is very different than the two novels you wrote just before,
Visions Of Isabelle
and
Tangier.
Less serious
,
less ornate in terms of style, and --

A. Is "a bit trashy" the phrase you're looking for?

Q. That seems a little rude. Maybe "slick" would be more appropriate.

A.
 
Punish Me
is very different, and, indeed, the title is kind of trashy. It's also a lot more slickly written. I was working toward what I call a "transparent style," a style that draws no attention to itself, prose that moves fast and doesn't distract the reader from the storyline. Some background: the other two novels you mentioned, both set in North Africa, where I used to live, garnered some nice reviews and a modicum of attention, but very little in the way of remuneration. So I was faced with a choice: take on some kind of day job, probably teaching creative writing, or try to make a decent living writing fiction. I chose the latter. I definitely did
not
want to be one of those literary-type writers who publish a couple of serious novels, then repair to a comfortable existence at a university…and produce a new book every decade or so usually set in academe. I decided to do just the opposite by turning blatantly commercial. I'd always enjoyed reading what people called "psycho-erotic crime fiction," so I decided to give that genre my best shot. And, indeed, though
Punish Me
didn't receive much in the way of reviews, it did earn me a good deal more money and a totally different kind of attention than the earlier books. Though it didn't make the
New York Times
best seller list (that would come later with
Switch
and
Pattern Crimes
), it did appear on several other national bestseller lists, and sold very well, especially in New York. There were film options and foreign rights sales (UK, France, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Japan, etc.), media interviews, and also attention from editors at publishing houses looking for up-and-coming commercial novelists. I got a big kick out of the publicity campaign. When the paperback came out,
PocketBooks
produced a song entitled "Punish Me With Kisses" that was played on the radio, there were lots of radio commercials, and for several weeks most of the North-South running buses in Manhattan carried big posters on their sides hyping the title. I remember walking down Fifth Avenue with my teenage step-daughter. "Hey!" she yelled, "here comes another
Punish Me
bus!" I liked that! I also liked seeing young women on their way to work immersed in reading my novel on the subways. On the other hand, there was some backlash. I remember browsing in a mystery bookstore whose owner had been very supportive of my previous novel,
Tangier
. We started talking, and she confessed she'd decided not to carry
Punish Me
because she didn't like novels in which young women were knifed to death. I was offended. I told her: "Fine, if you won't carry my book here, then I won't shop here anymore." She apologized, said she understood it was hard to make a living writing fiction, and we left it at that. But since her store was filled with murder novels, books about people being slaughtered with axes, bashed with fire pokers, shot in the head, etc., my feeling was that it wasn't the knifing that bothered her in
Punish Me
, but the sex.
 

Q. So no regrets?

A. None. I'm proud of my craftsmanship in
Punish Me
.

Q. Yet you didn't continue writing in the same vein?

A. I decided to stay with crime fiction, but to take the genre a lot more seriously. I wanted to stay commercial, but still maintain a high level of quality in my writing. My next book
Peregrine
, ended up winning the coveted Best Novel "Edgar." Looking back, I doubt I'd have been able to extract a decent advance for it based on just an outline from a mainline publisher if
Punish Me
hadn't made such a splash.