He was a CIA assassin who made people die of “natural causes.” He knew better than to fall in love with a civil rights attorney. Now one of them must die.
Dangerous Bedfellows is a true story from 1980s Los Angeles. Finally, after forty years, it’s safe to tell.
If you want to learn about Rachel and McKenna’s forbidden love, and how the U.S. government recruits and trains assassins, then read Dangerous Bedfellows.
Available now on Amazon.com.
EXCERPT
༺ CHAPTER 1 ༻
Was it fate, or merely a random chain of events that caused my path to cross with that of a man trained from birth to be an assassin? I will never know. I only know that I cannot unwash the memories from my soul.
The chain of events that caused me, an anti-Vietnam War demonstrator, to meet and fall in love with Thomas Blaine McKenna, an American National Security assassin who specialised in making people die of “natural causes,” started the night I overheard a gruesome sexual murder.
It was New York City in 1982. As I walked home from my job as a legal secretary, the heat made me miserable. When I got home at 7:30 p.m. I found the elevator was broken, so I was forced to walk up six flights to my apartment. Once home, I triple locked my front door, tossed my high heels and pantyhose, and turned on a cop show on TV.
It was a muggy night, so I slid up my windows and propped open the door to my bedroom balcony. Then I squeezed into my kitchenette to fix dinner. While making dinner, I didn’t pay attention to the tv show, so as I walked back into my living room I wasn’t sure why one of the police officers was putting muscle on a frightened snitch.
In the next moment, a bloodcurdling human shriek shook my living room, rattling the pictures on the wall.
A second piercing scream. With nervous fingers I dialed the police. “A woman is being raped in my apartment building.”
“Can you see her.”
“No.”
“Ma’am, we don’t have the manpower to search an entire apartment complex. If you can’t pinpoint where the screams are coming from, we can’t come out.”
There was another scream. This time it wasn’t as strong and it was choked off in the middle. I rushed to a bedroom window craning to see into the other windows of the apartment complex.
There was one last weak scream, more like a man’s, but that was choked off too, before I could figure out where it was coming from. Still, for some reason, my attention was called to a third floor apartment whose balcony door was shut. I caught the shadowy form of a man closing a window. “Guess he doesn’t want to get involved,” I thought to myself. Only later did I learn the man closing the window was the killer.
I was discouraged, but there wasn’t much I could do. I felt like I was always the person who heard screams in the night no one else noticed.
Sunday morning, two days after the screams, I put on my pink bikini and went up the stairs to the apartment complex roof. My neighbour Keith, a 28 year old blonde lawyer so good looking that most burned out New York women wrongly dismissed him as gay, was busily doing push ups. He was wearing nothing but tiny clinging black nylon shorts, and I enjoyed watching his muscles expand and contract as he raised and lowered himself. Keith and I shared the same bedroom balcony and I was terribly fond of him. For various reasons, however, we were more confidants than lovers.
Keith lowered himself as two pretty girls from the apartment on the third floor came up and spread out their towel. I always liked watching the way women went nuts over him. Keith was painfully shy and although I used to offer him my busybody “assistance” in meeting women, he rightly condemned me for it. So I figured I was in for a nice late morning’s entertainment, sunning myself and watching the girls tempt Keith into conversation — seeing which girl would get the nerve to be more aggressive and how they planned to divvy up their catch when they got him.
The girls had just scored Keith into leaning over their blanket to help them with their suntan lotion when a man in a business suit walked onto the roof. He was carrying what appeared to be a secretary’s shorthand pad and had a pen ready to take notes. We all looked at him. He was clearly not from Manhattan proper, most likely Queens.
He was a middle aged man with a gut. He was hungrily eyeing me in my bikini, and I was flattered that given a choice between the two blond girls in their early 20s and brunette me in my mid 20s, I was his favourite. I figured it was my DDD breasts and small waist. Keith noticed the attention being paid to me and ambled over.
The man introduced himself as a Detective Cerrutti from the New York City Police Department. He explained that he and several other detectives were going door-to-door investigating a murder committed last night. A young attorney had been killed in our building, and it was about to hit the papers. I told the detective I knew nothing about a murder committed Saturday night. No one else on the roof had heard anything either, nor did we know the lawyer who had just moved back to New York City after trying his fortune in Texas.
After the detective left, my next door neighbour Leah came up with her friend Richard.
Everyone discussed the murder. Then Richard, Leah and Keith turned to me in unison. They all wanted to know the same thing. “How is it,” Keith asked, “that given the fact that you always seem to be around when something weird is happening, you missed this one?” That’s when I remembered the blood curdling screams on Friday night.
“I did hear the murder,” I said. “I’ve got to go down and tell the detectives it was on Friday night, not Saturday.” Richard and Leah laughed at how I always had to be part of the action, even if I needed to imagine it, but Keith had a little more faith in me. They followed me as I went to search for the detectives who were going door-to-door.
I found a female detective and told her the murder was on Friday night. She assured me it wasn’t and didn’t seem interested in taking my testimony. I went back to my apartment. A few minutes later my doorbell rang, it was Det. Cerutti with another slightly younger male detective. At this point, I decided that the two detectives had shown up, not because they believed in my story, but because one had told the other that I looked good in a bikini. My friends watched amused as I explained about the screams, said where I had been standing as I heard each scream.
The young detective took notes and suggested to Det. Cerutti that maybe I heard screams bouncing off the side of the church that were coming from the third floor apartment. This got me excited. “Then I did hear the murder on Friday night,” I said. “Just because you found the body this morning doesn’t mean he was murdered last night, or can you tell?” The younger detective admitted the police were still waiting for the coroner’s report, but Det. Cerutti confided there was no way I heard the screams from the third floor apartment across the way, because the apartment was on the other side of the building facing the street, not the courtyard. I sensed Det. Cerutti was angry at the other detective for revealing the murder had been committed in an apartment on the third floor.
A week passed. I went to work every day knowing I heard the murder, and feeling no one believed me. It was like being in the twilight zone. Then Det. Cerutti contacted me again. According to the coroner’s report, I probably did hear the murder on Friday night. The description of the screams and the way they were choked off fit the way in which it appeared the attorney had been murdered.
The police detective told me they suspected the attorney had been murdered by a kinky psycho who castrated him. The detectives had lied to me about the exact location of the apartment to test my story. Apparently I had actually seen the killer closing the window. Det. Cerutti asked if I would testify at the trial despite the fact there might be some danger. I agreed.
It was growing dark as I hung up the phone, and the walls of my apartment were closing in. I felt my eyes starting to sting and knew on this night, when I was particularly tired, the old tears wanted to come back.
Although for months I had resisted doing it, I used the potential danger I was in as an excuse to call my old boyfriend, Brett Lorimar, and ask that we get together again. Brett was my ex-finance, a man for whom I moved to New York City and compromised my own career as a lawyer to be near.
I turned on the living room light and punched in his phone digits from memory. As I listened to the call starting to ring, my throat constricted. Brett picked up the phone on the first ring. Apparently he was no longer leaving his answering machine on to avoid me.
“Hi, Brett.”
“What’s up?” he didn’t seem surprised to hear from me.
I explained I had become a witness to a murder and babbled about how strange life can turn out. Unspoken were the words “Isn’t it funny we’re not together now?”
To my delight, Brett was impressed that I’d overheard a murder. He agreed with me that life could be strange in the unexpected twists it took, and yes, that real love was a rare and special thing between two people.
“I’m not going with my secretary anymore. She was a nicer girl than you, but she wasn’t as bright.” By ‘nicer’ he meant the Italian Catholic girl was less sexually experienced. My being technically Jewish meant to him I was wanton because I was having sex with an Irishman instead of a Jewish man, and he was very old fashioned about feeling one should marry their own kind, at least in terms of religious beliefs.
“Was I so awful?” I wanted to ask. “What difference does it make that you aren’t the only person I ever slept with? After all, there were so many times when you broke up with me and I was completely alone in New York. He’d never forgiven me after finding out there had been a couple of one night stands to fill in the empty times. I forged on nervous that he might hang up.
I explained that in a few days I was going back to California to visit my family for a week, to see if we could work out an arrangement for me to live near them again.
“The reason I called — my grandmother’s dying and she’s asking me to come back to be with her. She says she wants to make sure I’m taken care of before she dies, and that I can start over.”
“I’m sorry you moved to New York to be near me. That was my weakness, letting you do it.”
“Maybe we should get together before you go”
“I’d like that.”
“I’m checking my calendar. What’s a good date for you?”
Brett mentioned he didn’t think he’d be available for a week or two since he had some job interviews. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, except that I remembered he’d been planning for years to associate with a law firm that had Mideast connections, so he could become a specialist in the area and eventually be a State Department advisor. Obtaining a job with the State Dept. was an ambitious goal for Brett, as he was the son of a mailman from a small town who had no political connections, but I always had absolute faith in him.
“How about after I get back?” I suggested. Then we can share what’s happening with your job and my moving.”
He agreed that when I came back from California, we should try to get together for dinner. As I hung up the phone I prayed Brett would still want to see me then.