“He humps anyone he wants, eighteen or older, but he has to be home by midnight, his curfew.”
That statement was so ludicrous that it sounded like a joke, too, but David no longer assumed that apparent humor was the real thing. “And he didn’t come home Sunday night?”
“Or last night. And he didn’t call. There are certain times he calls, checks in. That’s part of our arrangement, too. He’ll hump anything that moves. I told him a thousand times, sooner or later he’s going to stick his dick in some psycho bitch, and she’s going to stick a long knife in him. If he staggered in here right now, bleeding, I’d half want to finish him off, the idiot, risking everything he’s been building in partnership with the university and with his company, his patents, risking it all for another piece of tail. Part of that ‘everything’ was mine. Now what do I have?”
Evidently, something had gone badly wrong with academia since the last time David had been on a college campus.
“How much success?” she asked.
“What?”
“You said you’re a writer. You said you’ve had some success. How much success?”
“Several bestselling novels. A few were number one.”
Wolfman got to his four feet, shook himself, and slunk across the room to the poker table.
“You think there’s a big book in my story?” Linette asked.
“Well, I don’t know your story.”
“Being married to the eccentric super genius with the permanent stiffie.”
None of this had gone in any way as he expected. However, he had come here to learn whatever he could, so he adapted, pretended that he saw nothing peculiar about this place or she who ruled it. He drew her out. “It probably depends on how outrageous his sex life was. There’s always a market for that kind of thing.”
“As outrageous as it gets. He was a narcissistic bastard, a sex addict, an encyclopedia of fetishes.”
Wolfman sniffed around the poker table, apparently hoping to find a bit of dropped potato chip or pretzel previously overlooked, but paused now and then to glare across the room at their visitor.
David almost apologized for the question he was about to ask, but then he decided that apologies would seem quaint to this woman, who could so easily speak in the crudest terms of the most personal things to a stranger who came to her door. “If he’s so obnoxious, why did you marry him?”
“I could see how smart he was, above the rest, how he was going to make billions if he didn’t self-destruct. I’m not stupid. I’m the farthest thing from stupid, whether you believe that or not. I could see his potential. He was my ticket, and I was the control that he needed. He couldn’t hold it together without me, and he knew it.”
“Control?”
“He was a sick sonofabitch. His ideal sex goddess was like thirteen, fourteen.”
The disorder of the house apparently reflected the disordered morality of the man who lived there. “A pedophile.”
“He could have been. He got himself in some bad trouble once and barely squeezed out of it. I’ve got this perfect body if you’re really into adolescent girls, and I’ve got this face like I’m still in middle school. When Lukas couldn’t keep his Humbert Humbert under control, we did a little role-playing. Sometimes he seduced little Linette, sometimes he tore my clothes off and forced himself on me and I fought and he made me do the most humiliating, disgusting things he could think of. He could be tedious, really, a crushing bore, but you wouldn’t have to write it that way.”
Wolfman returned from the poker table and stood six or seven feet from David, staring intently, as though he might attack if the slightest expression of distaste was addressed to his mistress.
“We had rules,” she said. “He accepted and obeyed them. He was a year, two at most, from the big breakthrough, the thing that would have made us billionaires when he took the company public. Then he goes out and hooks up with some psycho bitch who slits his throat or cuts his dick off. I hate the selfish asshole. He was so brilliant and so stupid at the same time.”
“Maybe you’re wrong about what’s happened. He might show up.”
“Yeah, and maybe there’s life on Mars with good pizza shops and bowling alleys and everything.”
Wolfman’s hackles were up, and he growled low in his throat, as if he could read David’s mind. His mistress called him to her. With some reluctance, the dog went to sit beside her chair once more.