The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  Douglas Jeffers smiled to himself and paused beneath the dark branches of a tall oak tree. He stared across a green lawn at a white two-story wooden house, set back twenty yards from the sidewalk. Two teenage girls exited the wide front door as he watched, and he averted his glance, turning to look across the street until they passed. They were laughing together, and he doubted if they realized he was there. He looked back at the white house, studying the front. The house had many windows and a side exit. On the front lawn was a sign with two Greek letters. He read the letters twice to himself, then smiled inwardly.

  Chi Omega.

  Here we are, he thought. Here’s where it happened.

  His mind’s eye envisioned the picture with professional swiftness.

  Straight-on, he thought. Catch the light as it hits the left front quadrant. Simply a scrapbook shot, make it quick. Don’t get noticed. He would have liked to wait for someone to walk down the path, or come through the door, which would have given the building a size perspective in the shot. But the person might notice, and that would be difficult. He framed the shot visually, so that a large oak tree on the edge of the closely cropped green lawn would provide a vertical measurement on one side. He moved a few feet to put himself slightly on angle. Quickly he checked up and down the sidewalk. Then he bent to one knee, as if tying his shoe, opened his briefcase, and grabbed the camera. He adjusted the speed and the aperture before removing the camera. Then, in a single, fluid, quick movement, he brought the camera up to his eye, pivoting toward the sorority house, focusing as he turned. He twisted the lens and snapped off a shot. The motordrive whirred and he punched the trigger again. Then again. Then, satisfied, he slid the camera back into the briefcase, actually tied his shoe, and stood up. He glanced about to make certain that no one had seen him and paced quickly down the street.

  He walked swiftly for a dozen blocks, onto the campus, not stopping until he spied an empty bench beneath a tree. He settled on the bench, realizing suddenly that he was breathing hard, which he recognized came from excitement, not exertion.

  “Did you get the shot?” he asked himself. In his imagination, his voice had the edge-of-desperation sound of a harried editor.

  “I always get the shot,” he answered himself.

  “But did you get this shot?”

  “Have I ever failed you?”

  “Please, just tell me, did you get the shot?”

  “No sweat.”

  He laughed out loud.

  What a tourist, he thought. While everyone else who comes to Florida heads to Disney World or Epcot Center or treks to the Keys, you visit the site where . . . where what? He considered. Most people would look at a picture of the Chi Omega House on the campus of Florida State University and think of it as the location where two young women had been brutally murdered as they slept in their beds and a third badly injured. For a moment Jeffers considered the phrase: brutally murdered. It was journalese, a language with only the slightest connection to English. Murders were always brutal. So were beatings, except when they were savage. The clichés of the newspaper world created a type of safe shorthand—readers could absorb the words “brutally murdered” and not have to know that the killer was in such a frenzy that he’d severed one girl’s nipple with a bite and clubbed another with an oaken branch like some berserk prehistoric man. Douglas Jeffers thought of the young women he’d seen walking from the house, laughing. He wondered for an instant whether at night they and their sorority sisters double-locked their doors, throwing solid deadbolts on memory. Jeffers pictured the house. He thought: They think of it as a place to stay, camaraderie for four years of college, but it’s more, it’s really a monument to something much more important: it marks the site where a prolific murderer started really to lose control and bring on his own end.

  Jeffers remembered the short, wavy-brown-haired man he’d first seen on assignment in a Miami courtroom many months after the terrible night at the sorority house.

  Idiot! he thought.

  His mind segmented the memory into pictures. Click! The killer turned. Click! The killer eyed him. Click! They stared at each other, locking eyes. Jeffers wondered if the man could see past his own little stage-show. Click! The killer’s mouth opened as he started to voice a word which evaporated into a slightly skewed, wry smile. Click! The killer turned back, smirking, glibly commenting on the trial work in front of him, angering the judge, alienating the jury, ensuring the inevitability of the result. Click! Jeffers caught that smirk, that dark edge of madness and fury, just before it was covered with sarcasm and arrogance. That was the picture he’d kept for his own file.

  What a fool! he thought again.

  Jeffers’ stomach twisted with the memory. The papers had called him intelligent!

  Jeffers shook his head sharply back and forth. What kind of intelligence can’t control his own pasions? Where was the self-­discipline? Where was the thoughtfulness, the planning, the invention, in bursting in the dead of night into a crowded sorority house and savaging the occupants? Out of control. Enthralled by desire. Weakness, Jeffers thought. Silly, schoolboy indulgence born of conceit.

  He remembered his own inner fury when his colleagues on newspapers and television had breathlessly marveled at the incongruity of an articulate, educated man who was a mass murderer. He looked like one of us. He talked like one of us. He acted like one of us. How could he be what the police said he was?

  Jeffers spat, angry.

  The truth was, Jeffers thought, he wasn’t.

  How simplistic. How foolish. So he was bright. So he was likable.

  Well, does he like death row?

  He deserves it, Jeffers thought.

  First Degree Stupidity.

  He rose from his seat, aware again of the increasing heat of the day. He decided to go over to the student union to eat some lunch before making his final reconnoiter and executing his plans.

  The cafeteria was crowded, noisy, anonymous. Jeffers took his tray to a corner table and ate slowly, his map and course list spread before him, occasionally daring to look up and survey the melee of students. He thought that there was a nice symmetry in his behavior; he remembered the few months that he’d spent in college before dropping out to begin his career as a photographer. His time had been spent in much the same way as he was spending his time now. Alone. Quiet. Keeping to himself, watching, rather than joining. Listening rather than speaking. He remembered the awkwardness he’d felt, alone in his domitory, separate from the easygoing welcome of the college community. It had been winter in the North, a frozen, regrettable day, gray-pitched and damp with the threat of snow, when he’d thrown his few clothes into a duffle bag, loaded his cameras, and stepped out to the edge of the campus, saluting freedom with his thumb, hitchiking west across the nation. The memory of that trip made him smile: He’d sold his first photograph a week after starting out. He remembered sitting at a table in a soup kitchen in downtown Cleveland. He was alone, as always; one old derelict had tried to sit next to him, rubbing a knee against his beneath the table while spooning great gobs of greasy stew into his mouth and trying to behave with an ancient, encrusted nonchalance. Jeffers had hooked the man’s leg beneath the table with his own feet and pulled suddenly back and to the side, twisting the derelict’s brittle knee angrily. The leg creaked as the man grasped the table, about to shout out in pain, but stilled by Jeffers’ quiet warning: “Say a word, scream, shout, anything, and I’ll break it and you’ll die out there this winter, huh?”

  The man had swiftly crabbed away when Jeffers released him. A few moments later, just as he was sopping the last of his stew with a piece of doughy white bread, Jeffers had heard sirens, many of them, swoop down the street and come to a stop a block away. He’d grabbed his camera bag and jogged down to the scene of a two-alarm in a tenement. The families were passing children out the window to firemen, screaming, panicked,
and Jeffers had shot all of it. But it was a picture of a fireman, icicles hanging from his coat and hat, clutching a terrified six-year-old in a blanket and carrying her to safety that he’d sold. The photo editor of the Plain Dealer had been skeptical, but had allowed Jeffers to use the darkroom. It had been a slow news day and he was anxious for a piece of art for the local break page. Jeffers remembered how careful he’d been, locked alone in the darkroom, mixing his chemicals with an abundance of caution, slowly souping the print until the image began to form. It had been the eyes that sold the picture, Jeffers thought, the benign mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration in the look on the rescuer’s face in counterpoint to the accumulated terror in the child’s. It was a very powerful picture and the photo editor logged it for the front page.

  “Helluva shot,” the photo editor said. “Fifty bucks. Where do we send the check?”

  “I’m just passing through.”

  “No address?”

  “The Y.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “California.”

  “Everyone wants to go to lotus land.” He sighed. “Free speech, free love, orgies and drugs, Haight-Ashbury and acid rock.” He laughed. “Hell, doesn’t sound so damn bad.”

  The editor pulled out his own wallet and handed over two twenties and two fives. “Why don’tcha stick around a little bit, take some more shots for us? I’ll pay.”

  “How much?”

  “Ninety a week.”

  He thought: Cleveland’s cold. So he said it.

  “Cleveland’s cold.”

  “So’s Detroit and Chicago. New York’s a bitch and Boston is out of the question. Kid, you want warmth, head for Miami or L.A. You want to work, give it a ride right here. Hell, it’s winter. Tell you what, I’ll make it ninety-five and I’ll buy you a parka and some long johns.”

  “What’ll I be shooting?”

  “No flower shows. No Chamber of Commerce meetings. Just more of what you did already.”

  “I’ll give it a try,” Jeffers said.

  “Great, kid. One thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m gambling. This picture today, well, it turns out to be a lucky shot—I mean, I don’t get more of the same—and well, bingo, you’re back on your way to California. Catch my drift?”

  “In other words, show me.”

  “You got it. You willing, still?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Kid, with that attitude you’ll go far in this business. And, one other thing. Cleveland’s a blue-collar town. Get your hair cut.”

  He spent eleven short-haired months in Cleveland.

  He remembered: An antiwar protester clubbed over the back by a hardhat carrying a two-by-four. Shot at 1/250, f-16, with a telephoto, from a block away. The grainy quality had accentuated the violence. A mob funeral, with a bodyguard exploding in rage at the collected bank of photographers and cameramen. He’d shot fast, ducking at the last minute, catching the black-suited muscleman swinging, teeth bared, 1/1000 at f-2.4 with high-speed film. Another funeral, flag-draped, a flyer who’d taken too much flak over Haiphong and nursed his F-16 all the way back to the Oriskany and safety in the Gulf of Tonkin, only to lose power on his approach and die in the warm choppy waters before rescue could scramble to his side. The family had seemed resigned, Jeffers thought; there had been few tears. He’d caught them in a line, staring down into the grave, as if on parade, 1/15 at f-22, leaving the print a little long in the mix so as to bring out the grayness of the sky. He remembered, too, the stiffened, frozen body of a junkie, warmth found from a needle, who’d braved a February night outdoors and simply died. It had been by the waterfront; his shot had grabbed light from the Cuyahoga, reflecting an icebound world, 1/500 at f-5.6. But, as always, when he remembered Cleveland, he thought of the girl.

  He had been in the darkroom, a small transistor radio that he’d purchased with his first paycheck playing in the corner, filling the room with the Doors’ harsh lyrics and sound. Every time he switched on the radio, “Light My Fire” had flowed out. He had spent two blistering summer days walking an early beat with one of the city’s last foot patrolmen. He’d found the photos routine, too filled with softness. The policeman was popular, outgoing. Everywhere he went he was greeted, applauded, welcomed. Jeffers had snarled at the pictures. Where was the edge? Where was the tension? He wanted someone to take a shot at the cop. He prayed for it, and decided to spend another day on the street. Lost in the music, the darkness, and his plans, he’d barely been aware of the voice of the photo editor yelling for him.

  “Jeffers, you lazy slug, get out of there!”

  He’d carefully put his things down, moving deliberately. Jim Morrison was singing, “I know that it would be untrue . . .” The photo editor, he had swiftly learned, existed in two states: boredom and panic.

  “What?” he’d asked, stepping from the cubicle.

  “A body, Jeffers, one hundred percent dead, right in the middle of the Heights. A nice white teenage girl in a rich neighborhood very goddamn dead. Go, go, go. Meet Buchanan at the scene. Go!”

  He had paced, oddly nervous, on the edge of the police perimeter, standing apart from the other newsmen and television cameramen who were waiting in a knot, joking, trying to learn a little, but mostly willing to wait until a spokesman or a detective came over to brief them en masse. Where’s the shot? he’d demanded to himself. Moving right, then left, in and out of afternoon shadows, finally, when no one would notice, swinging up into a large tree, trying to get some clear vision. Stretched out like a sniper on a tree limb, he’d fixed a telephoto lens to his camera and peered down at the policemen working meticulously around the body of the young girl. He swallowed hard at the first sight of a naked leg, tossed haphazardly aside by the killer. Jeffers had strained to see, feverish, snapping off pictures, pulling the camera tightly on the victim. He needed to see her breasts, her hair, her crotch; he adjusted angle and focus and continued to fire the camera like a weapon, twisting it, manipulating it, caressing it to bring him closer to the body. He wiped sweat from his forehead and fingered the trigger again, swearing every time a detective moved into his line of sight, the motordrive whirring every time he had a clear shot.

  He’d kept those pictures for himself.

  The paper had run three others: a shot of fire-rescue personnel bringing the body-bagged-wrapped victim out on a stretcher, a ground-level long-lens shot of the detectives kneeling over the body, which was obscured by their position save for a striking thin young arm, flung back from the torso, gently held by one of the policemen, and a picture of a tittering gaggle of teenage girls, drawn by fear and curiosity to the edge of the crime scene, staring out in tears and surprise as the body was carried out from the underbrush. He had liked the last shot the best, carefully approached the girls to get their names, sweet-talking the information out of them easily. The shot, he thought, spoke of crime’s effect. One girl’s eyes were wide in semishock, while the girl next to her had thrust her hands to her face, the eyes just peering over the edge of fingers stiffened with fright. A third girl’s mouth hung wide, while a fourth was turning away from the vision. It was, the photo editor said, the best of the bunch. It ran outside, page one. “There might be a bonus,” the photo editor said, but Jeffers, still suffused with excitement, thought that his real bonus remained developing in chemicals back in the darkroom, and, as soon as he’d seen the crop and the layout, he’d hastened back to his solitude.

  He smiled.

  He still had those pictures, almost twenty years later.

  He would always have those pictures.

  He heard laughter and turned toward a group of students sitting close by. They were teasing one of their own, who was taking it all good-naturedly. Jeffers could catch only snatches of the conversation, but it was about a term paper that the student had tu
rned in, nothing of great import, a small, typical moment. Jeffers looked at his schedule and his map and decided it was time to start.

  He cut rapidly across campus; it was just before one p.m. and he wanted to be in his seat before “Social Awareness in 19th Century Literature” started. He bounced up the short flight of stairs to the classroom building, sliding his sunglasses off as he entered the darkened hall, striding purposefully into Lecture Room 101 with a steady stream of students, some marching in singly, others in pairs. The lecture hall was filling rapidly; he quickly found a seat on the aisle, near the back. He smiled at the young woman sitting next to him. She smiled back, not breaking her conversation with a boy next to her. He looked about swiftly; there were a dozen or so conversations such as the one he was next to, just enough noise to crack the silence of the hall. To his right he spied a student reading a newspaper, another flipping through the pages of a paperback. Others arranged notepads in front of them. He did the same, trying to read something into some piece of behavior, a small movement that displayed an attitude which would signal to him a person’s candidacy.

  He spotted one girl, sitting alone, across the aisle and several rows down. She was reading Ambrose Bierce, bending head down over In the Midst of Life. Jeffers felt his eyebrows rise, thinking, What an extraordinary combination: the writer who may have sold his soul and a nineteen-year-old girl. Interesting, he thought. He determined to watch her during the lecture.