Frank Georgalis – Writer

An Eye For A Tooth: (Book; Part II)

dead

His First Murder?

By Frank Elias Georgalis

“Leave me now? Leave me? Nobody ever left me, but you can leave.” said McCord softly, “I won’t even ask you where you’re going.”

“I will leave peacefully and you won’t see me again or hear from me again as long as we both shall live.”

“Leave which ever way you want to leave, and I will be proper with you,” said he, a little louder than before.

“I will leave, I will even change my name from Angela Chiolis to something else where nobody will find me;” said Angela, shuddering, as she pressed her hands upon her eyes.

The tone in which the last words were spoken seemed to produce a deeper impression on McCord than the wild and rigid look which had preceded them.

“Where will you go?” asked McCord, drawing towards her.

The girl, because of fear, lack of confidence and air, made no reply she only bent her head downward.

“You remind me of your father,” said McCord, going back to his desk and taking his seat, making himself comfortable, smiling ironically and looking at the girl, “Good old Charlie Soulos. Every time things got rough he’d run away. Do you know this building belonged to him? He lost it because he was a coward.”

Suddenly the front door was heard to be jerked open and was closed softly. His ears perked out of curiosity, “Who can that be, so early in the day?”

A thread of long silence lived in the room. They both waited. McCord gazed at the girl and the girl gazed at the floor. When footsteps weren’t heard approaching, he said, “Go and see who it is.”

The girl darted out of the room, visibly overtaken with some anxiety, unrelated to her chore. McCord seeing that altered change in the girl’s attitude, impelled by curiosity stood up and drew closer to his office door, looked towards the front door, and saw the girl bending outward to see who had just gone out of the office. Observing nothing, she closed the door carefully and headed back to his office.

“I didn’t see anybody near the door, “replied the girl, taking her original position, before McCord drew a long breath.

“Jerky kids do that sometimes. One of these days I’ll catch one of them and I’ll step on one leg pull the other and make a wish,” said McCord, as he sat on his highchair and looked at the girl, without any significant thought behind his eyes.

“I know you don’t have any use for kids.”

“I find most kids to be, selfish, violent, noisome, loud, annoying, thieves and liars, simple, they grow up to be like their parents. W.C. Fields said that anybody who doesn’t like kids and can’t stand dogs can’t be all that bad,” said the man with a smile.

“What ever,” remarked the girl, looking away as if to terminate that unwonted topic of discussion.

“So you have decided to leave. Can I ask you a question?”

“You may ask,” replied the girl. “And I will answer to the best of my knowledge and ability.”

“What I was going to ask you, the answer does not require any amount of ability or knowledge,” said McCord, with some show of surprise.

“I know one thing about you, you don’t ask people questions without you having the answer already in your head,” returned Angela.

“It may very well be what you say, but this time, I don’t have the answer, so I’ll ask, why you are leaving after two years of…”

“Two years of what, Don?” interrupted Angela, with a hint of anger in her voice and tone, “After two years of being you mistress, or your cook, your clean up lady, or your punching bag, which of those words you want to put first?”

“How about a lover, or sexual partner? Why don’t you put that first or is it that sex means nothing to you like means nothing to any whore?”

“I am not a whore,” declared the girl angrily.

“A woman who has sex with someone and it means nothing to her, she is then doing it for favors or money or for mere soup and  shelter , is a whore,” said McCord with an ironic smile.

“I did it for love; if you can understand that word,” said Angela, without taking any time to consider her answer.

“Hem, then lover should be your first word.”

“A slave to love.”

“Everybody who is lucky enough, to have a heart that can love, becomes a slave to love, one time or another,” replied the man.

“I would call it unlucky rather than lucky, for all the sacrifices and tears that go along with it,” said the girl sullenly.

“It’s all in the game.”  He replied casually.

“I know,” said the girl, turning away from him. She stopped and turned to face him again, “You have more games up your sleeve than the Las Vegas casinos.”

“What games are you talking about?” said McCord, with of a sudden stroke of interest.

“The game I heard you plotting with your fat friend Peewee,” said the girl with an amazing smile of discovery, “Who is Mattie and what is she doing here? I know Mattie was you girl friend a long time ago. Why have you brought her here from Chicago? Why did your friend, or your partner in crime, wanted me to call Alice Fellow to come here? Is it because she inherited a fortune and you and Peewee found a way to take it? So I have a few demands for myself; you can call it a severance pay. I don’t want to be a player in your game. To me it’s too disgusting to even think about it.”

“Tell me that again—once again, just for me to understand what you are saying to me,” said the man, drawing towards her and pointing to himself.

“Tell you what?” asked the girl, shaking from top to bottom.

“Tell me what I am plotting, bitch,” yelled McCord again, with many grumbling oaths, wrapping his fingers around her hair and pulling, “Speak will you. Open your mouth and say what you’ve got to say in plain English, you two-bit-bitch.”

“What do you want me to say?” replied the girl, with her head tilted and held backwards by his hand with tears in her eyes from pain, fear and stress.

“Your demands. Your claims, your commands,” he said, jerking her hair with every word he uttered, “They are all the same; aren’t they? College drop out, bitch. I heard that you were talking to one of your girl friends about me and my past.” McCord cried out with clench teeth and hateful eyes. “Tell me what you’re plotting against me.”

“Don,” she said, striving to place her head upon his breast, wrapping her arms around his for support, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been good and faithful to you for the last two years.”

McCord freed one arm and grasped the pistol from his belt. Placing the barrel on her forehead and pressing hard let go of her hair. To fire and kill her at that moment flashed across his mind, but even in the midst of his fury he realized the sound of the pistol going off could be heard from next door.

He stood there regarding her for a few seconds with dilated nostrils and heaving breast. And then, grasping her by the hair again brought her in the middle of the room.

“Don, Don, my dearest Don, I don’t deserve this treatment from you. You love me. You told me last night that you still love me. You told me so, before and after we made love. After you hit me. Stop you’re hurting me, can’t you see? Can’t you feel my pain, Don?”

“I tried to teach you to be proper but you refused. At this point letting you live,” said Don McCord, looking around for something to killer with, “I would be killing my plans for ever. You had to open your mouth, you dumb, bitch. You couldn’t keep your tongue in your mouth”

“Don,” cried the girl, striving to get away from his grasp, “Let me speak, please, my love. I still love you and I will be good to you.”

Don’s eyes fell on the rope around the bull’s horns. He pulled her towards the bull freed one arm and grabbed the rope.

“Don, for the love of God let me go. I will not bother you again. I promise you on my father’s soul. My dear Father’s soul whose heart I broke so many times,” cried the girl, trying hard to sooth his temper; however he took no time nor the inclination to listen to her pleading, thus the wild eye man, whose usual character was easily troubled with subtle misgivings and resolved himself into a dogged roughness of behavior towards everybody, continued to finish what he thought at that time.

Without saying a word he fought, struggle, and won and managed to put the looped end of the rope around her neck, the other he held in his hand and after pausing to satisfy himself that there were no other eyes looking at him except the girl’s; he then threw it over the beam. He placed his left hand around her mouth to stop her screaming and with the right that held the pistol, grabbed the end as it came down from around the wooden beam. He paused and looked at the girl’s flushed face for one long second, then with distorted face, jerked and pulled the rope until her feet were off the floor and her body was swinging and her beautiful legs were kicking back and forth. She struggled with her hands for a few seconds to remove the rope from around her neck, but she shortly lost strength, will and conscious. Standing there with the rope tight around his hands, he watched and saw a shivering chill gone over her body and everything stopped except the swinging. He tied the end over the horses neck, pulled to test its ability to withstand her weight, and satisfied with his findings went, took a chair placed under her feet. Surveying the surroundings for a split second, he went back to the horse and he slowly and carefully lowered her body until the feet touched the chair. Breathing heavily from anxiety and fatigue, with quick moving hands he secured the rope again. He then rushed to the chair, kicked it from under her feet, and the chair rolled for a moment or two and it finally settled on its side a few feet from her unconscious hanging body.

The evil man sat there gazed at her

with a clear eye and clear conscious

as if he were marveling his good deed of the day

It was a ghastly scene to look upon. The pretty girl’s head tilted to the left and downwards, her eyes closed her mouth was ajar and her face was deep and dark pink as the blood stayed confined to her head. She looked as if she were dreaming and while she was dreaming she looked as if she were wearing a timorous smile.

The murderer staggering backwards to the wall and shutting his eyes to avoid seeing her, he slowly sat on the floor with his eyes closed. Although he had tried to convince himself of being the Angel of Death, his fear of death made him cognizant, but not conscious. He remained in that state of mind and stance, as if he were waiting something to happen; and it did happen, as a flash of lighting shot in the room, brightening everything for a split second and suddenly all the lights went off and the lighting was followed by a sheet of darkness, as the light of day was consumed by night fall, and incredible peel of thunder, then the wind roared, groaned and screamed, shaking the building to its core and abruptly and unexpectedly the back door blew open.

McCord, guided by a feeble light that came in from the parking lot lamppost, rushed to shut the back door and once he did that, the wind stopped as fast as it had come to pass and the stillness took over again. He looked around not knowing what was taking place.

That silence was broken, by the closing of the front main door. He rushed to the door, opened it, thrust his head out to see who had come in or gone. The darkness was chased away by the light of day had come back again.  Seeing nothing unusual, he brought back in his head, pushed the door to close but five long fingers of a man’s hand suddenly wrapped around the edge of the door quickly from the outside pushed the door to open. At that time a murmur of voices was audible in the back parking lot. Confused by the hand that came from the outside, the human voices, the sudden gust of unnatural wind that had passed and sheet of darkness, McCord reached a sort of a panicking point. If there were five times in his life that he felt scared and turned pale, this indeed was one of them. Jerking the door open, in a daring manner of do or die, he came face to face with the countenance of a tall lanky man that appeared at the doorway, looking at McCord with a serious a keen eye.

“ Hello, Don,” said the man, “Have you seen that unnatural phenomenon? Thundering in the middle of the winter accompanied by an autumn gust of wind?”

“Oh, yes,” replied McCord, seeming to gain back some of his face hue, holding the door open with both hands and blocking the man’s entrance.

“A tree came down in the back parking lot. Thank God, nobody got hurt,” said the man attempting to walk in.

“Oh yes, thank God,” returned McCord, “Were you here before, doctor?” continued McCord, recognizing the tall man’s face.

“No.”

“Did you see anybody coming out of my office a few seconds ago?”

“No,” replied the doctor again.

The doctor was surprised to see that McCord was not about to invite him in, and being taller that McCord, looked over the man’s shoulder, with a curious and surveying glance.

“I wouldn’t alarm you if I could avoid it“ started the doctor, “But indeed I have tried very hard and can’t help it, I’m afraid I have some disturbing news for you.”

“What is it, doctor? Tell me,” said McCord.

“Let me come in and chat in your office for a while.”

“I am sorry, doctor Snyder, I am in a hurry,” said McCord, becoming very uneasy seeing the doctor looking over his shoulder. A horrible thought flashed through McCord’s mind that made him turned pale once again; the thought that if the lights should go on at that moment the shadow of the hanging girl would appear at his office doorway. He grabbed the doctor, almost violently and pulled him in, but he gently guided him to the side away blocking the doctor’s view of his office door.

“What is it, doctor?” asked McCord, drawing back as he spoke.

The doctor became startled by the sudden abrupt manner and firmness in McCord’s