Chapter 8 - Lunch

Red led me back to the holding cell and brought me a tuna sandwich on stale white with a Sam's Choice cola and an outdated bag of Golden Flakes – all placed carefully with a napkin in a box. It was actually a corrugated board box from soda cans the vending machine guy left. Flagler County deputies decided to recycle the case bottoms as trays for the inmates so they could take the plastic ones home to be used as TV trays to hold Buds and Dominos Pizza while they watched their favorite college football team, Gators or Seminoles or Bulldogs.

As crappy as lunch was I finished every morsel. Is this to be my future? I wondered if long term prisoners get Prozac. Maybe I would have to act a bit crazy and get in a psych jail to get drugs so that I could try to forget where I was. I was really having a bad time conceiving a defense in my head. I knew what happened but the only other person who knew was dead, and she tried to make sure that all guilt pointed my way. I sat on the hard bench, the steel making a stamped indent in my ass. No books or electronic stimulation. It was just me and my mind. No music from my iPod, not even another conscious prisoner to talk to. I would almost welcome a conversation with Red or Junior at this point, but that would be a mistake, besides not reality. What did I know of reality anymore anyway? Was this morning real? Did Rachel chase me down, or did I chase her. Did I really kill her and my mind was telling me she set me up so I could cope?

Let's assume my mind is tricking me, what would be my motive? Then again what was hers? Why the fuck did she do this? And why did she do this to me? Fuck!

I was having a difficult time with my anger. I knew if I couldn’t contain myself during the interrogation I would be screwed. I tried to calm myself but couldn’t seem to redirect on something serene.

As much as she hurt me, my thoughts focused on Rach and what we had. I met her at the office. She sold high end computer software and our company was growing. We hadn’t quite gone public at the time but were in the process. The Internet “dot-flops” had filtered off the big board and the Enron scandal was at its height. Congress began to investigate and Sarbanes-Oxley started to get some teeth. Clearly the rules of corporate engagement would be different for me. I always held my head high as a CFO, but as I watched my peers go to trial for falsifying financial statements, I realized nerd white collar criminals were no longer exempt. I certainly would have been more concerned to be the fall guy for a CEO and go to jail for something only related to cash. Never would I have dreamed that I would be behind bars for murder.

So there was Rachel, one of the new breed of power female sales superstars. They usually appealed to married overweight balding executives and middle managers who enjoyed the time spent privately in their office with a flirtatious sales woman. It was very safe. Safe for the executive, whose family pictures on the credenza and wall were a reminder that the flirtation can be no more than a fantasy. Safe for the power suit chick, who knew the same, and therefore could flirt endlessly with her eyes and body language, the only sale to be that of equipment – or software – or services, but not the kind that required removal of clothing other than what may have passed through the mind of her opponent across the desk.

If she could flirt enough for him to convert the cleavage and possible nipple bulge if the office was cold enough to a naked visual in his mind, she could use the trance to get him to remove the cap of his Monte Blanc and place the tip of his pen to ink the contract. That was her thrill. The “thrill of the kill,” as salespeople well know. For many it was better than sex. If the contract was large enough the reward more lucrative than a five thousand dollar a day call girl. There was little difference between the two except for one sold her body and the other her soul. She would say anything to get the contract – they were both whores, only one was legal and the other not.

So there was Rachel, at my door – the eight foot mahogany door of a single up and coming power executive’s top floor corner window office. From the moment we met, she cared little about selling me the software her company represented. Our eyes connected and spoke without words – we both knew that by the end of the day, after our libations consumed, Cosmopolitans and Belvedere martinis – we would share intimacy without meaning. The only thrill for the power sales bitch that could top the long drawn out foreplay of software sales that could take six months was a six hour meet to heat engagement, consummated with meaningless sex. Followed by six hours of passion – the kind that only first encounters could produce.

The sex was good and we became friends. Fuck buddies actually. Rachel or I would return from a business trip high on the juices of our sale and need to share conquests and release our libidos building frustrations. She sold software; I sold the merits of our company that was going public. I would return from a meeting in New York with investment bankers, Goldman Sachs, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch – all courting me to make a deal. I would return home to the Jacksonville Airport, walk to the parking garage, get in the Boxter, and take out my cell, ready to share the courtship, the flattery with a friend. Not just a buddy to listen over beers at a sports bar, I needed a buddy who would listen to my glorious corporate courtships and conquests while on my elbows, my wilting passion still inside her, my total world complete – and without commitment. That my friend is what a fuck buddy is all about.

I sat in the cell, taken away by the thought – a woody in the making, then broken by the sawmill snore of my cell mate, his wreaking breath careening across the cell as his wide opened mouth shared years of cigarettes and Jack Daniels that had embattled the pink God given tissue of once pure internal organs. Damn this place sucks!