Therapist Ch. 08

George doesn't kidnap another prostitute Thursday night as he promised himself he would. Nor does he get one Friday night or Saturday night. The main reason is because Linda hasn't pressured him for a lunch date. However, on both Thursday and Friday morning she does remind him that there is a piece of King Cake waiting for him upstairs.

After he eats his lunch, he walks up the two flights of stairs and dutifully eats his piece of cake. He is glad when he does not get the little plastic baby hidden inside the cake.

Another reason he does not kidnap another prostitute on Thursday, Friday or Saturday night is because he gets involved in his personal studies. He frequently spends Thursday and Friday after work and Saturday morning at the Jefferson Parish Library main branch on West Napoleon Avenue researching and checking out books on the Louisiana Purchase and the history of New Orleans and Louisiana.

He loves to go to the second floor Louisiana room and read the books there on Louisiana, for he loves studying about his favorite city New Orleans. He spends Saturday afternoon reading the books he checks out. But by Sunday he wants a break. So he decides to indulge himself and gets himself a yogurt.

By a sheer coincidence he meets Linda at the yogurt shop. They sit and talk for over an hour. George is uncomfortable the entire time. Linda uses the opportunity to ask him about his personal life which only increases George's discomfort. She tries to be subtle but George is able to evade most of her intrusive questions.

He does however tell her that his mother died when he was in college and that he had her cremated. When she asks him why he has never been married he tells her that he just hasn't found the right girl.

He feels the pressure from her questions. He hates her for intruding into his life and he silently curses his misfortune at meeting her here. He wants her to leave him alone but he does not know how to tell her this; his mother never taught him how to politely say no to a lady. He is frustrated.

When night falls he goes to the French Quarter and kidnaps another prostitute.

As soon as he gets her chained up he brands her. He beats her and tortures her for three days before strangling her. But he is careful not to rape her with the broom stick. He throws that away and instead rapes and beats her with a piece of led pipe he picks up at a construction site. He does however hit her in the mouth with the pipe, breaking three of her front teeth and her nose.

After removing the rope from around her neck, he dumps her naked body under the Interstate 10 Bridge near the Louisiana Superdome, displaying her as he did the others. He throws her clothing in a dumpster on Washington Avenue near Xavier University. Her displayed body is found Thursday morning by a homeless man searching for empty aluminum cans.

Mardi Gras comes and goes. George does not kidnap any more prostitutes. He loves Mardi Gras. Every year he dresses up as a mime and goes to the French Quarter to watch and to join in the festivities. He spends every Ash Wednesday writing a letter to Donna telling her about what he did on Mardi Gras Day. But after he finishes his letter on this particular Ash Wednesday he goes to the French Quarter and kidnaps another prostitute.

He beats her and tortures her until Saturday night at which time he brands her with the word WHORE across her chest as he did the others. Then he strangles her and dumps her nude body at the end of Tchoupitoulas Street, where it runs into Audubon Park. Her displayed body is found Sunday afternoon by a young married couple horseback riding through the park.

For the next six months Linda is constantly bringing desserts to George. She brings him chocolate and pastries of all kinds. Mostly they are treats she picks up at a bakery but occasionally she bakes something herself.

George begins to watch for her coming and tries to look busy so that he does not have to talk to her. He is very circumspect in accepting her gifts. He tries to evade her as much a possible while at the same time trying not to let it look like he is avoiding her. But this only increases the pressure he is under.

When she cannot find him in the physical therapy department, she just leaves the treat on his desk. She frequently leaves a note asking that he meet her for lunch in the hospital cafeteria or at a fast food restaurant or some place. Either way, George is under tremendous pressure to acquiesce to her.

In the evenings he tries to relieve himself by masturbating but this only exacerbates the problem. He is still plagued by his mother's warnings that masturbating will cause him to go blind. He tells himself that it is a myth but still the thought plagues him. He is also plagued by his mother's warning that she will 'cut it off' if she catches him. When he masturbates in the shower he makes sure the door is closed and locked so his mother will not be able to come in on him as she used to do when he was in high school.

He tries to retreat further into his studies, writing love letters to Donna or driving around the city in order to find relief. Frequently this helps him but it also just as often fails him and he ends up kidnapping and killing another prostitute each time it does fail him.

The failures usually come after he loses at chess to Robert. Where he used to lose maybe one game in the three games they play on Wednesday evenings, now he loses two and sometimes all three games. Robert believes that it is because he has finally learned George's style. George does not realize that he is losing the chess games because he is preoccupied with trying to avoid Linda. He silently blames his mother and then goes and gets another victim.

Each Wednesday evening while they are playing chess, George subtly queries Robert for information about the rapist plaguing New Orleans. Although Robert is careful in divulging classified information, George is able to use what information he receives to his own advantage.

Olivia believes that the rapist is closely following the news reports and is altering his style based upon what he hears in the news media. She suggests that they become more closed lipped with information that is given to the press. Robert agrees. She is unaware that Robert plays chess every Wednesday evening and talks about the serial killings with George.

Obtaining information about the serial killings from Robert becomes George's new competition with the detective. He begins to pride himself in the fact that he can outwit the New Orleans police lieutenant in his own game. He has become a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He is evil incarnate when torturing his victims but the embodiment of grace at work at the hospital or when talking with the lieutenant.

From Robert he learns how to dispose of the body while leaving as little evidence as possible. But he still displays them with their legs spread wide open. He learns to use a different kind of knot when strangling his victims and to wear gloves when punching them, which he does more often. He makes sure to knock out some teeth and break the nose of each victim while punching them.

He learns that the police examined two of his victims under an ultraviolet light, looking for possible fingerprints or other identifying marks. They didn't find any but the information causes George to handle his victims more carefully.

After this, George only handles the dead bodies with latex gloves on. He makes sure to dispose of their clothes as soon as he rips them from their bodies. George further learns that the police believe that there is only one whip involved, so he buys a second whip and alternates their use on the prostitutes. He makes sure to pay cash for the whip.

He also begins to beat his victims with a plastic ball bat that he found in his front yard one day. But he still rapes them with the same led pipe. He also continues to brand them with the same letters. He is unaware that the leg of the H is slightly bent.

Robert comments to George after several victims have been found about how the bodies are positioned, telling him that the women seem to be positioned so that everyone can see their vaginas and so everyone can see the word WHORE branded across their chest. George is elated to hear this. He promises himself that his future whores will be even more acutely displayed. He wants to degrade the women as much as possible, so he then begins to spread their legs even wider apart so that everyone can see their sex.

After positioning one of his victims he sees a broom stick handle nearby and rams it into her vagina. He props it up with a rock so that it is sticking up in the air. This prostitute is found as soon as daylight dawns the next morning.

He is more careful when he dumps the victims always picking his spot a day before he murders them. He tries to place his victims where he will not be seen when dropping their bodies but where the corpse can be easily found. The areas he picks are not necessarily secluded.

He dumps one victim on Franklin Avenue where it crosses the railroad tracks near I-10. Another victim is dumped in City Park in the grass along the side of Robert E. Lee Boulevard near Marconi Drive and a third is dropped off along the side of Zachary Taylor Drive near where Golf Drive goes under the interstate. He displays a fourth prostitute next to some bushes near the Fair Grounds Race Track. He also places another victim in Audubon Park behind some bushes across the street from Loyola and Tulane Universities.

George gets really bold with one of the victims and places her corpse in the cemeteries at the end of Canal Street. She is found before dawn the next morning by some men who came to open a crypt. He also gets bold in placing a victim in Palmer Park on Carrollton Avenue, just down the street from Notre Dame Seminary.

He sits one of his victims on a park bench along Lakeshore Drive looking out toward Lake Pontchartrain, her legs spread wide open and her arms draped over the back of the bench. He is particularly joyous over this victim as the Times Picayune mentions that he must be getting brave in placing his victims.

He tries to dump a body near the Xavier University Campus but is unsuccessful; he sees a young black couple standing nearby. He chooses instead a vacant lot on Orleans Avenue near Louis Armstrong Park.

He displays one victim under the Pontchartrain Expressway along side the railroad tracks across from the New Orleans Arena.

He contemplates dumping a victim under the Huey P. Long Bridge on the river side of the levee but after talking with Robert and discovering that he would not be the lead investigator for any bodies found in other parishes he rejects that idea. George wants Robert to be the only one investigating the murders so he does not dump his victims in any other parish.

He does not place any bodies in the Vieux Carre. He believes that the neighborhood is of historic importance to his beloved city and he does not wish to desecrate it. Nor does he dump any bodies in Algiers because he does not wish to cross the Crescent City Connection over the Mississippi River with a body in his trunk. He is afraid that someone might want to search his trunk at the toll booth.

Other neighborhoods such as Carrollton, Midcity, Lakeview, the Garden District and the Central Business District are not so lucky. Each of these neighborhoods receives at least one victim. Gentilly, the Irish Channel, Faubourg Marigny and the Lower Ninth Ward receive the most bodies.

In the months since The Rapist has started he has killed 21 prostitutes so far. All but the first one was found within a day or two of his disposing of them and all except the first one was strangled. The police are baffled in their pursuit of him. Crime Stoppers has offered a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for his arrest and capture, most of the reward coming from pledges of local businessmen.

The police are unaware that he captures his victims by placing a rag soaked in ether over their mouths. They believe that he just picks them up from the streets and then takes them somewhere to torture and kill them.

Vice squads are constantly warning the ladies of the night to be very careful when picking up tricks from strangers. They further advise the women to stay with their regular customers. In an attempt to save them the mayor demands a crack down on prostitution. Arrests of women on prostitution charges are up.

The mayor also wants to put a two a.m. curfew in place in the French Quarter but the tourist industry and the business establishments in the area all balk at this. The mayor rescinds his idea.

A local conservative minister praises him for ridding the city of prostitutes; he is immediately denounced by the rest of the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic community.

The police tell the news media that they believe that they are closing in on The Rapist but cannot tell them why as it is classified information. Robert tells George that it is only public relations that they are no closer to finding him now than they were when the killings started. George tells him that is what the WDSU-TV reporter surmised and reported when the district attorney's office originally made the announcement.

He then checks Robert's king with his knight, forking his queen. Robert concedes and they call it a night. It is the first game George has won in two weeks. As he gets ready to leave, Darlene gives George a large piece of fudge brownie that she baked earlier. George thanks her, takes it home and eats it before writing another love letter to Donna. After he finishes the letter he gets a shower and then goes to bed in the nude.

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Roberta Livingston does not know where she is going to get the money to pay her rent. It is due in two days and she is flat broke; she barely has enough cash to buy a hamburger and a drink. As a salesclerk in Lakeside Shopping Center she isn't paid much, just barely enough to pay her share of the expenses.

She knows what happened to her money. That snake of a boss she works for stole it from her purse. He pays her in cash every week. This week half an hour after he pays her, the money is gone. She wonders if that is why he always paid her in cash.

He told her that a customer must have stolen it and that she shouldn't leave her purse where it can be gotten to easily. But customers are not allowed in the storeroom and he is the only other person who knew where she kept her purse.

True, there is only a curtain separating the sales floor from the storeroom but she has never seen a customer enter the storeroom in the eight months she's been working at the gift shop. She is positive that he stole her money soon after she put it in her purse.

As Bobby sits on the edge of her bed in the small apartment she shares in Fat City with Juliet Quinn she knows that she'll have to start looking for another job. She cannot work for someone she cannot trust. She contemplates on whether to hock her wide screen television or to follow the advice of her roommate and turn again to prostitution.

She knows better than to ask her roommate for the money. She knows exactly what Juliet will say. 'Bobby honey, why don't you do as I do? Turn a couple of tricks. I don't need to tell you that if you're good at it you can earn enough money in one weekend to pay your bills for a whole month.'

It's not that she has anything against prostitution; she did it for several years in her late teens and early twenties. It wasn't a bad profession and it saved her from having to sell drugs to earn a living. It saved her from starving to death too.

She also has to consider the fact that Juliet makes enough money to pay her share of the bills plus pay her college expenses at the University of New Orleans and only works a couple of nights a week. But her days as a prostitute are also a part of her life Bobby wishes she could forget.

At sixteen she ran away from home to get away from her stepfather. Soon after she turned fourteen her mother had taken a second, part-time job to help out with the bills. It only required her to be away from home for a couple of hours on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. But that was all it took.

She had been working for about two months when he first approached her. At first he only wanted her to sit with him while he watched a movie. After a while he started to watch pornographic movies. Then he started to masturbate while the movies were on. Eventually he demanded that she have sex with him.

It wasn't just sexual intercourse either; it was all kinds of sex that he demanded of her. He raped her from every different angle and position he could think of. He told her that she shouldn't complain and that she ought to look at his sexual advances towards her as butterfly kisses. He also told her that if she ever said anything to anyone, he would kill both her and her mother.

She took it for two years then she ran away after he tied her up one night and beat her before raping her. She waited until the next night and then got him drunk. While he was asleep, she stole 175 dollars from his wallet and headed for the bus depot. But not before she left her mother a note explaining why she was running away and giving her mother a full description of the wart just above his pubic hair to prove her story. She's been on her own ever since.

Growing up in Jackson, Mississippi she had heard stories about Bourbon Street and how the prostitutes earn money turning tricks. So she came to New Orleans in hopes of making enough money to live on. It didn't take her long to learn just how to please a man; her stepfather trained her well.

In a couple of months she earned enough to get herself a small efficiency apartment just off Oak Street in Carrollton. She told the landlady that she was a college student at Tulane University studying marine biology. The apartment wasn't much but it was a thousand times better than the flophouses she had been living in since she arrived in New Orleans.

Tall and mature for her age, she demanded that her johns always use a condom. She did not want to get pregnant or catch some kind of sexually transmitted disease, so she always kept a couple stuffed into her brazier.

She told the men who objected that she had gonorrhea. She told them that although she had gone to a clinic to have the disease taken care of, she was only looking out for their interest. If they questioned her concern for their health, she told them that she was trying to build up a clientele. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Whenever it didn't she'd just let the john go and found herself another trick who was more understanding.

She had been working for about six months when she met a guy who helped her obtain a fake identification. Bobby paid the man 100 dollars and instantly she added two years and four months to her age. Then instead of being sixteen and ten months she was nineteen and two months.

There's a lot that a nineteen-year-old can do that a minor at sixteen can't. She was able to put her money in a bank savings account and when she had enough saved she bought a used Mustang.

The air conditioner didn't work too well and it needed a muffler. But it only cost 1800 dollars and it got her where she needed to go. She celebrated her seventeenth birthday driving around the city of New Orleans looking at the sights, glad that she had a place to live, food in the refrigerator and a set of wheels to get from place to place. Her life was finally looking up.

She thought about going back to night school and finishing her education but somehow just never found the time to register. Also, she never seemed to have enough money to juggle work and school. But she promised herself that if she ever came into a lot of money, then the first thing she would do is register for adult education and get her high school diploma.