Once Bitten, Twice Dead Page 10

  When Sidney said the word, “pants,” a little gleam came into his eyes. I was beginning to think that Sidney had visited those pants and didn’t want anyone else intruding on what he owned. Possibly I was being too harsh. I decided on a test.

  “How did Carla seem to feel about you?”

  The question caused Sidney to turn away. “What do you mean?”

  “I know you were her father and all, and you would give her total love, but did she reciprocate your caring for her?”

  “Of course she did. She was my daughter. She loved me very much.”

  When I had checked with Sibbi Prentis before I left for Syracuse, she said to her knowledge Carla, once she left home after high school graduation had never contacted her father again in the fifteen years before she died. There were gaps in Sibbi’s relationship with Carla, like she had told me, but even when they had been apart Sibbi and Carla had occasionally written each other. Never once had Carla referred to her father in those letters, Sibbi said.

  I kept it up. “So you’d say, Mr. Pramp that you and Carla were very close?”

  For one of the first times Sidney looked straight at me. I could tell I had gone too far. However, the look in his eyes at that moment told me everything I needed to know. Her father had hollowed out his own daughter by forcing her to have sex with him.

  Of course I could never prove this, but it did help me understand Carla’s offering her body to others so freely to try to regain the “approval” she got from her father. It was maybe the only kind of affection that she knew. Carla was old enough in high school to know how twisted that kind of father-daughter relationship was, and maybe her giving away sex so freely from then on was her attempt to rub out that bad feeling.

  However, when I talked about Carla with Ted Davis, her long-time agent, I found maybe the one person who didn’t have sex with her. I asked him right away about it, and I think he answered truthfully.

  “I know Mr. Davis, that you had been associated with Ms. Strand through all her movie and business dealings. Did it ever get more personal than that?”

  The question did seem to surprise him, but I had to give the guy credit. After a couple of eye-blinks, the doe-eyed, mop-haired look-alike to “Potsie” on the old TV sitcom, Happy Days, gave me a straight answer.

  “After awhile I did become attracted to Carla, and I tried to get to first base, but I couldn’t even get into the batter’s box.”

  “She resisted your advances?”

  Ted’s eyes flashed a little, and his voice suddenly got gruff. “She was a prick teaser. She would play up to me and be nice, but then when I wanted to take it further she would back away. Every time. It was very frustrating. It got to be torture to be with her because there was no satisfaction for me. I guess I ultimately wanted more than just to be her agent. I wanted to be her boyfriend, but Carla didn’t want that. That last year of her life we argued a lot over silly things like contracts and other business arrangements, but I think the real conflict was personal.”

  I didn’t think Ted knew anything about how Carla’s father had corrupted her. The truth might have been that Carla cared so much about Ted that she didn’t want to sleep with him. In her mind their relationship could be a pure one, not what she had as a teen-ager in her own home.

  A large irony would be if Ted, after many rejections, became so frustrated that in a fit of rage he killed Carla, whereas she could have cared about him more than for any other man she had ever met. She might have felt that she and Ted had a future together, and she didn’t want to spoil it like her father had by having sex.

  I didn’t have any evidence that Ted had killed Carla, but he had seemed to be the last best hope for her straightening out her life. However, that chance went out the window when Carla went over the railing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Before I left him, Ted told me that Carla had an older sister who still lived in the Philadelphia area, so the day after I got back from New York I made an appointment to see Carol Pramp.

  “Carol is a funeral director,” Ted had said, which did surprise me, but the biggest surprise came when I actually saw Carol. She said she could meet with me at the funeral parlor itself, located in Kennett Square, a small community about forty miles west of Philly. Like most funeral homes this one was white on the outside, but three stories high with a steeple on its top. It looked like a church which Carol eventually told me it had once been.

  “There was a fiery Methodist minister who came to a church about five miles from here and his popularity took most of the parishioners away from this particular parish,” Carol said. “They had to close the church and put the building up for sale. I got a good deal, especially since God might have once resided here.”

  When I first walked into the hallway of the Harmony Funeral Parlor, the attendant told me that “Sister Carol” was in the ceremonial room making some last minute arrangements. I entered the red-draped room first seeing about twenty rows of chairs facing an open coffin at the front. Apparently none the mourners had arrived because the rest of the room was empty except for a tall woman clad in black bending over the coffin smoothing out some linen inside it. As I got closer I saw that there was a body inside.

  “Ms. Pramp?”

  She turned slowly toward me enabling me to catch the full force of her disfigured face. Blotches almost as vivid as the paisley curtains, covered especially one side, intermixed with purple welts. I hoped the yellow in the middle was not pus. A person could not have designed a Halloween mask as scary as what I saw.

  Carol saw me looking, but she didn’t comment. Instead she got right to the reason I had called. “You wanted to talk about Carla. Here, let’s sit in this first row. The viewing won’t be starting for another half hour—I have time.”

  I was glad to move away from the body inside the coffin. Carol’s face looked like death itself, and for an instant inside my mind my mother and father died again. It was as if both of them were in that coffin.

  When I sat and turned toward Carol I saw that the other side of her face was pretty smooth and normal. From that side, Carol Pramp could have passed as attractive: a firm cheekbone, pointed chin and graceful neck. Her flowing auburn hair rested comfortably near her shoulder. She took a deep breath. “I hated my sister.”

  It seemed that was all she was going to say, but after a pause Carol took another breath and continued. “I hated her success in the world, but my feelings began much earlier with the attention our father gave her. Sidney never cared about me, but he doted on Carla. She was his ‘sweet angel,’ who could do no wrong.”

  Right away I thought that it was good that Carol’s father wasn’t drawn to her—that might have saved her from the incest that Carla had to endure. Maybe it was lucky for Carol that she was the disfigured one. However, I was soon to learn where Carol’s “face” came from.

  “I saw you looking, Detective Stolle. You couldn’t look away, could you? In a perverted way, it’s fascinating, isn’t it?”

  Another pause. “I got that from my father.”

  “He did that to you?? Your father? How could he possibly. . .?”

  “It was the only advantage I ever had over Carla. I was eight years older than she and gone from the house by the time she was starting high school. You don’t have to ask me. Yes, I knew about Sidney’s constant raping of Carla. I knew because Carla told me. She came to me to try to get pity.”

  “Maybe she just wanted you to help her.”

  “Help her? What could I do against that monster?”

  “Couldn’t you have gone to the authorities?”

  “Carla said she wouldn’t testify against him. She was afraid he would get back at her in some way if she told. For my part, I didn’t want to ever again involve myself with Sidney because, you see, he had tried to come after me when I got to those same teen years. Mother had died when I was eleven, and it seemed that Sidney couldn’t establish a relationship with any other woman. So by the time I got to be fourteen, I guess
he figured it was a lot easier to just have sex right there at home.”

  “Did you tell Carla? Did she know?”

  “She was only six at the time. I didn’t want to involve her. Besides, there was nothing to tell. Sidney never got to me.”

  “He never raped you?”

  “That’s right. Carla and I had separate bedrooms. One night Sidney appeared at my door. He sat on the edge of my bed and told me how he hadn’t had sex since mom had died. I knew what was coming, and I quickly got out of bed. He grabbed me, but I kicked him right between the legs and ran.

  “I didn’t know where to go. I was in my nightclothes and it was freezing outside, so I ran down into the basement. I could hear him coming down the steps. I tried to run past the furnace into a storage room, thinking maybe that door had a lock on it. I forgot about the furnace pipe that hung low. I ran smack into it. To this day, I’ve never had anything hurt as much. I thought I had burnt my whole face off.” She smiled a wry smile. “But I guess I had burnt only half of it off.” She rubbed her smooth side.

  “That saved me. Sidney was all apologetic, calling for an ambulance right away. The doctors were skillful, but they told me they had done all they could—the burns were too deep, and I would be scarred forever.

  “Sidney never touched me after that, not because he didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t bear looking at me. Maybe that’s why later I began to hate Carla so much. Even though Sidney was doing bad things to her, I didn’t feel any sympathy for Carla because she was getting the attention I never got. After that incident with the furnace, Sidney completely ignored me—it was as if I were dead.

  “And then when movie actress Carla was getting all that attention from her adoring public, I couldn’t even get a date once the guy saw what I looked like. I thought about getting a blind date, but I knew when the guy saw my disfigurement, the date would be over. Maybe I went into the business I’m in as a kind of masochism because I knew the only kind of people who would accept me would have to be dead. And I was right: all those people in all those coffins have never once complained about my face.

  “It’s a terrible thing to say about my own sister, bit I was glad when Carla died because I knew she would soon stop getting attention. As sick as it is, only when a person is dead, do I feel on an equal basis with them.”

  “Did you hate Carla enough to kill her?”

  “I was there that day.”

  “What?”

  “The day Carla died, I was at her apartment.”

  “Did the police know that?”

  “I had an alibi for the exact time she died. But I’ll tell you the truth, Detective Stolle, I wanted to kill her that day. She told me she was so happy because she thought she had found the right man for herself. Can you imagine me never able to have a date, and my sister telling me she had found the man of her dreams?? Also, I thought she would be bitter about those years when I did nothing to help her escape from Sidney’s clutches, but she was so nice to me—I hated her all the more then. However, I swear to you, as I told the police, Carla was alive when I left. She had been drinking, and she was a little tipsy, but we didn’t even venture out onto the balcony. The medical examiner, I guess set the time of death at about six o’clock, and at that time I was in a bar drinking my troubles away.”

  “Could anyone verify that?”

  “Definitely. I had picked up a guy at the bar; we checked into a nearby hotel to have sex. My face is hard to forget, and he remembered.”

  “I thought you said you never had a date.”

  “There was one aspect to my life I didn’t tell you about. Before my run-in with the furnace I had been popular in school. The year before my accident, I was the Queen of the Frosh Hop, and I had three or four guys I dated regularly. But after they saw the effect of my burns they all dropped me like a hot potato, which is what my skin looked like. Maybe a peeled hot potato. I never had another real date after that, but I still had a yen for some kind of social interaction.

  “After I got out of school, and my depression got worse, I decided on the profession where I knew I could get guys. I became a hooker. What better sadistic thrill would there be for a guy to do it with a disfigured person? All I had to do was stand on a street corner with a short shirt and a bare midriff, and in no time I would be in a guy’s car. I do have a good figure. When some of the guys saw my face they hesitated, but at least half of them went through with the sex. Some seemed to relish doing it with this horror whore. I did this for two years, and made good money. I got beat up a couple of times, but I did feel good because the guys were sticking their prized possession inside me.

  “After my second beating, though, I decided to try to get myself some safer employment; and so I got into the funeral business, first as an apprentice and then owning this place here. The short of all this was that during my two years on the street, I had gotten adept at picking up guys, so after I left Carla’s I ‘hooked’ another one. We checked into a fleabag down the block with hourly rates, but I had underestimated how much the guy had drunk. As I was getting my pants off, he threw up and then went to sleep.

  “He woke up an hour later, and we ended up talking for the next little while. Even sobering up, he didn’t seem to mind what I looked like, and that made me feel better. He gave me his phone number, and I gave it to the police when they questioned me after my sister’s death. After they talked to the guy, the police told me I was no longer ‘a person of interest’ in Carla’s murder.”

  The first thing I thought of was, could Carol have snuck out while the guy was asleep and gone back to kill her sister?

  Carol kept talking. “There was one thing I didn’t tell the cops, though. I guess I can tell you now since my daughter’s already in prison.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Yeah, the first year of my hooker holidays I wasn’t too careful. I got pregnant. I didn’t exactly keep track of the johns I had during the month before, so I had no idea who the father was. I don’t know why I kept the baby. Maybe I wanted more constant companionship. But anyway I raised her all by myself, and she was the most important reason I quit the streets.

  “As a joke I named her Winnie because I was such a loser, but actually she did turn out to be kind of a win for me. We did develop affection for each other, and she really wasn’t such a bad kid. But then she got mixed up with a bad group.”

  “Is that why she’s in prison?”

  “Exactly. She just got sentenced a month ago into the Chester County Prison, not too far from here. I visit her three times a week.”

  “Why are you telling me all this? Is Winnie connected at all to your sister?”

  “When she got older, I told Winnie how I felt about Carla, and Winnie would always say I’d be better off if Carla was dead. Winnie knew I was going to New York that day, and why I was going. Maybe she followed me and did what I couldn’t do.”

  “What’s your daughter in prison for?”

  “Murder.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  Winnie Pramp could have heaved a large man off that balcony. She was a hefty girl who was doing arm curls with a heavy-looking weight in the prison yard when I approached her. A guard had told me that this was Winnie’s hour of exercise once a day.

  She saw me coming directly toward her. “Don’t tell me this is really my lucky day and I get a visitor other than my mother.”

  Winnie had no facial mar, but she just wasn’t good looking. Her hawk nose stuck out from her chubby face. If God had been a thoughtful architect he might have given her full lips, but they were pencil thin. It looked like all the wrong parts had gotten put together.

  She put down the barbell, and when she stood up she towered over me. Her wide shoulders were about at my head level.

  I explained who I was and why I was there.

  “Oh, yeah, that bitch, Carla.”

  “You didn’t like your aunt?”

  “She was scum. She always caused my mother grief.”

  �
�Could some of that have been due to your mother’s way of thinking?? Did Carla ever do anything to your mom?”

  This seemed to be a new thought for Winnie. “No, I guess she didn’t, but my mom always seemed to be in pain when she talked about her.”

  “Why are you in jail?”

  “It was an accident. I didn’t really do anything.”

  “Pardon me, Winnie, but don’t almost all the people in jail say that they’re innocent?”

  “I’m telling you the truth. It was all because of that Pharm Party.”

  “Farm Party?? Like at someone’s farm, with cows and chickens?”

  “No, ‘Pharm,’ like in ‘Pharmacy.’ It’s been in vogue for awhile with our crowd. One of my friends would call up four or five of us, announcing the party. The prerequisite was that the parents had to be away. Then we’d all meet at the host or hostess’ house. This time it was Claudia. Her parents lived in a high-rise apartment. Before we came over, she’d raid her parents’ medicine cabinet and put all the pills in a jar. Also we’d bring alcohol. Then we’d drink and pop pills until we dropped.”

  “Sounds like a real blast.”

  Winnie didn’t think I was being sarcastic. “It was always a blast until that day.”

  “What happened on ‘that day’?”

  “Claudia’s brother wanted to join us for the party. He was a couple years younger than us, but we said O.K., the more the merrier. That was our mistake.

  “After a few hours of partying, Simon—that was her brother’s name—started ragging at us for getting wasted. He was participating, but not as much as we were. He kept it up, and we couldn’t take it anymore. We decided to teach him a lesson.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We hung him out the window.”

  “Say again.”

  “Simon was a little guy. My friend, Cody, and I grabbed him and hung him out the window head first until he stopped ragging at us. Cody and I each had one leg, while the others cheered.”