Conjugal Rites (Kit Tolliver #7) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) by Lawrence Block Page B

indeed the notorious date-rape drug, and date rape was precisely what happened to Maureen.
    One enterprising reporter turned up a couple of young men who characterized feeding Roofies to Maureen as overkill. Reading between the lines, she got the message that you didn’t have to drug Maureen to get in her pants, didn’t have to get her drunk, didn’t have to swear undying love. All you had to do was take out your dick and wave it at her.
    Well, she thought, why not? The girl’s dead, so let’s all tell each other what a whore she was.
    But she didn’t spend too much time thinking about that part of the story, because there were other more important elements to consider. The drug rendered Maureen not altogether comatose but unfocused and acquiescent, a willing if not particularly active participant in what followed. One of its effects would have been retrograde amnesia, so Maureen very likely wouldn’t have remembered what happened to her, but she never got the chance to find out. Peter Fuhrmann had his way with her, and during a lull in the proceedings he paid enough attention to his silent partner to realize that she was no longer breathing.
    If he’d been the least bit resourceful, she thought, he’d have got her back into her clothes, slung her over his shoulder, and left her under a bush in Van Cortlandt Park. Instead, after an unsuccessful stab at CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he’d picked up the phone and called the police.
    Because it was obvious to him what had happened. He’d dosed the poor girl with a powerful drug, and it had stopped her heart and killed her.

    “You called 911 right away,” she said. “You didn’t even call your lawyer first.”
    “I called a lawyer later on, from the police station. I knew I’d need assistance with the plea bargaining.”
    “You confessed.”
    “I did it,” he said. “How was I going to say I didn’t? It was completely unintentional, I’d never heard of anybody having a bad reaction to Roofies. Maybe a headache and a hangover the next day, but you’d get that from the alcohol, wouldn’t you?”
    “Normally,” she said, “it would just keep a girl from resisting. Or remembering.”
    “If I could go back in time,” he said with feeling. “And wipe it out, the way the drug wipes it from a person’s memory. But you never can, can you?”

    Because he was quick to confess, because he was prepared to enter a plea, the state didn’t have to knock itself out preparing a case. The post-mortem examination went looking for Flunitrazepam, and that’s what they found. They had no reason to look further, and death was accordingly attributed to cardiac and respiratory failure caused by the drug.
    When she read about it, sitting in an Internet café in Ohio, she looked at a photograph of Maureen. She pictured the girl walking home with Peter, pictured her holding a glass of vodka. Pictured her dead.
    I did that, she thought. I killed you.
    Because, if they’d thought to look, they’d have found more than Roofies in Maureen’s system. She couldn’t even remember what she’d used, but she’d emptied the contents of a glassine envelope into a bottle of vodka before leaving Peter’s apartment. She’d hoped it would kill him, but had considered the possibility that someone else might be the first to sample the vodka. A woman, a male friend, even a tippling cleaning woman, raiding the liquor cabinet for a mid-afternoon bracer.
    What did it matter, really? She’d liked the idea of leaving behind something that would kill someone, without knowing—or caring, really—who she killed, or when. A couple of times she ran scenarios in her mind, imagining what might happen, and it was exciting enough, but she’d never felt the need to find out what really did happen.
    And time passed, and she more or less forgot about it.
    She’d been different then. Well, no, that wasn’t it. She’d been the same person, she’d always been the same person, but her