His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

  Using water from the other bottle, he started to clean his hands. Then stopped. He stared down at his fingers, feeling stupid. He had not worn gloves. His fingerprints were everywhere: all over the clown’s house, on the pipe at the top of the chain-link fence, on the door and toilet of this Porta Potti.

  Did that matter, though? His prints weren’t on file anywhere. So unless he was caught and fingerprinted, there would be no way to identify him.

  He finished washing his hands, then threw both bottles and the shirt he’d been using into the toilet, shutting the lid. Putting on the new pants and shirt, he walked out to the car.

  Maybe the old fuck on the lawn chair had seen his vehicle. Maybe someone else had. But he was going to assume that no one had turned him in, that the police were bogged down at the clown’s house and the little girl’s backyard and were combing the streets looking for a bloody lunatic running around with a machete.

  He drove past the university entrance and turned left when he reached the highway, staying well within the speed limit as he passed a Hastings bookstore, a Burger King, an Olive Garden.

  Outside of town, the highway turned into a freeway and the speed limit went up to seventy, then seventy-five. Within minutes, he was flying south through the pines toward Phoenix, caught in the flow of traffic.

  He smiled to himself as he signaled and pulled past a semi truck.

  He’d made it.

  Thirty-five

  Promising to see her tomorrow, Steve said good-bye to Sherry and hung up the phone, breathing a sigh of relief.

  She’d bought it. Hook, line and sinker.

  He’d arrived home that evening to find not only twenty messages from Sherry on his answering machine but a note from her taped to his door. When he turned on his cell phone, he found that his voice mail was full—with messages from Sherry. She’d obviously been desperate to reach him, and he sat down and tried to come up with the most plausible explanation for his absence, one that would account for his refusal to answer his cell.

  After leaving Flagstaff, he’d been too tired to drive all the way through to California, so he’d stopped in the small town of Goodyear, on the western desert edge of the Phoenix metropolitan area, and pulled into the parking lot of a Days Inn. He’d already cleaned up a bit more in a rest area just past Sedona, and while he didn’t look like the world’s most dapper man, he was presentable. He’d gotten himself a room, taken a real shower and crashed.

  He’d slept for fifteen hours.

  It was nearly six in the evening when he finally reached Southern California. He’d been more than a little nervous coming back. What if Arizona investigators had pieced things together and figured out it was him? What if he arrived back at his apartment to find a contingent of cops awaiting his return with drawn revolvers?

  There’d been nothing like that, though.

  Only the messages from Sherry.

  He’d ended up telling her that he was up for a promotion and had been whisked away after work on Wednesday and flown on AlumniMedia’s private jet to the corporate headquarters in New York, where he’d been given a tour of the offices and interviewed extensively. He hadn’t been able to call her, he said, because he’d had no time. And she hadn’t been able to call him because his cell phone had not been charged, although he had not realized it at the time.

  That was all a lie. There was no AlumniMedia jet. There was no corporate headquarters in New York. They were a small company based here in Irvine with a staff of probably fifty. He was banking that her trust in him would keep her from researching the subject and verifying his story.

  Which reminded him: He needed to come up with some sort of explanation for his absence at work as well. He hadn’t shown up, yet hadn’t called in sick, so they were going to wonder where he’d been.

  So . . .

  What next?

  Where did he go from here?

  As hairy as it had gotten in Flagstaff, the experience had left him energized and invigorated. He was anxious to get out there and do it again. This was what he had been made for; this was what he was meant to do, and it felt wrong to be back in his normal life, cooling his heels, when he should be out there taking care of business.

  It seemed to Steve that he should have some type of plan or agenda, a method by which he could determine whom he needed to take care of, and how and where and when.

  Some people needed killing.

  At work, he had that entire CD filled with photos and information for the clown college alumni, as well as hard-copy listings of other names he could use, as long as he was able to track those men down. That would be a good start.

  And there were probably other clown schools out there as well that he could draw from.

  He’d read an article in the paper the other day about a priest accused of child molestation whose victims could not sue for damages because the statute of limitations for the crime had expired. That man certainly deserved to die.

  Maybe he should just quit his job and roam around the country, killing clowns and priests and . . . whomever. That would be perfect. How would he make a living, though? Doing odd jobs in the various towns in which he found himself? Steve smiled. Who was he kidding? He couldn’t do that. He had neither the skills nor the aptitude for manual labor. No, the best thing would be for him to remain where he was and use his vacation time to hunt down those who preyed upon children.

  But he liked killing children.

  He pushed that thought aside. That wasn’t important right now. He was on a mission. He had been charged with this duty, and it was his responsibility to fulfill it, to rid society of the undesirables that the law and polite society were not willing to remove. He was a dragon slayer, a man uniquely equipped to solve this problem.

  Like his father had been.

  How had his father gotten started on such a path? Steve wondered. He had no idea. He’d gotten started because of his father, but what was it that had made his old man embark on this course of action? What had first led him to kill his wife?

  And how had he moved on from there?

  Steve knew from experience that it got easier each time, but he yearned to understand the emotional and intellectual journey his dad had taken in order to get to the point where he was uprooting his family, taking new jobs, moving to different states, all so he could find the people he needed to kill. Steve wished, not for the first time, that his father had written everything down, had kept some sort of diary and recorded all that had happened.

  The clock on the DVD player said that it was nearly eleven. Eleven! He’d just called Sherry only a few moments ago. The clock then had said it was seven fifteen. What had happened to the time? Frowning, he stood and walked into the kitchen to check the clock on the microwave. Its lighted display read: 10:57.

  How was this possible? Had he somehow dozed off and not known it? Had he gone into some sort of trance and zoned out?

  Was he crazy?

  Feeling unnerved, Steve opened the refrigerator and took out a beer. He downed it quickly, the coolness of the liquid smooth and soothing in his throat. Afterward he felt better. He walked from room to room, restless, unsure of what to do. He couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to read and wasn’t in the mood to write. Sitting down on the couch and turning on the television, he flipped through the channels, stopping finally on TCM . . .

  Where a young Robert Wagner is doing research in a university library on toxic substances. He sneaks into a school lab and steals a chemical, but his girlfriend, Joanne Woodward, steadfastly refuses to take any of the “medicine” he provides for her.

  So Wagner decides to dispose of her in a different way. He gets an idea after seeing her stand up from a bench and fall. For a brief, hopeful second, he thinks she’s been injured or killed, but then she struggles to her feet and he offers her a hand.

  Wagner realizes that he would be the primary suspect should anything happen to her, so he has her translate, in writing, a vaguely worded paragraph that could be interpreted as
a suicide note. He places the note in an envelope and mails it to her parents.

  Then he lures Joanne Woodward up to the roof of the bank building. It is the lunch hour, so the bank and the offices within the building are closed. There are very few people inside, but he cannot afford for the two of them to be seen with each other—one sharp-eyed witness could unravel the entire plan—so he walks ahead of her, pretending they are not together. It is not until they are in the stairwell, walking up the concrete steps, that he slows and takes her hand.

  On the roof, they walk about, strolling along the bordered edge, admiring the view of the town from every angle. “I love you,” he tells her. “You’ll never know how much.”

  Then he pushes her over the low wall, and she falls off the building, screaming in terror until she hits the sidewalk below.

  Steve watched, the blood ice-cold in his veins. It was the same scenario as the one his father had told him about. Exactly the same. As though his dad had watched the film and then decided to follow it to the letter when he killed his first wife, Ruth.

  That made no sense, though. How could his father have arranged things so perfectly? And why? Had he been that impressed with the movie, or had he merely thought that the filmmakers had come up with a situation that could be easily duplicated? Could it all have been some impossibly bizarre coincidence?

  He watched the television, feeling disturbed and uneasy. Nothing seemed right all of a sudden. It was as though he’d been transported into an alternate universe where he was a character in a movie and was only discovering it now. He was in his own apartment, surrounded by furniture he had bought and picked out, but he felt disoriented, as though he were sitting on a stage set designed by others.

  He needed to call Jessica Haster, Ruth’s aunt, in Copper City. She knew all the details of his father’s early years. She would be able to sort things out for him. Maybe there was a logical explanation why the reality of Ruth’s death hewed so closely to the plot of an old movie. Steve had no idea how that was possible, but he held on to that hope and went into the other room to find the old lady’s phone number.

  It was an hour later in New Mexico, which meant that it was already after midnight, and the phone rang for a long time before Jessica Haster picked up. “Hello?” she said. Her voice was groggy, but there was an edge of anxiety to it. No call coming this late could bring good news.

  “Hello,” he said. “This is Steve Nye.”

  “Who?” She sounded confused.

  “Steve Nye. Joseph Nye’s son. I came to Copper City a few months back to talk to you about my dad and Ruth, his first wife?”

  “Oh, yes. Now I remember.” There was a clicking sound and some static, as though she were adjusting something on her phone. When she spoke again, her voice was clearer. “Do you realize what time it is, young man?”

  “I do, and I’m sorry,” Steve said. “I just got back from a . . . trip to London, and my body’s not yet adjusted to the time difference. I apologize for disturbing you. I just wanted to ask you a few more questions about my dad and Ruth.”

  There was a long pause. “Why don’t you call back tomorrow. It’s late.”

  “This’ll only take a minute or two. I swear.”

  “All right.”

  “When Ruth fell off the building—”

  “Building?” Jessica said, and there was a note of genuine surprise in her voice. “Ruth didn’t fall off any building.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Land sakes! You thought she fell off a building? No. She fell off the turtle rock in Collins Park. How could you think . . . ? I thought we told you what happened. She was in the park, on the rock, and she fell and hit her head on the concrete path below.”

  “But you said it was a suicide.”

  Jessica was wide-awake now. “That’s what some people thought. But only because it didn’t make any sense that she was up there in the first place. They thought the only reason she’d be there would be to kill herself. ‘They.’ ” She snorted. “Me. I thought that too, for a long time. But then Hazel reminded me that Ruth always used to sit up on the turtle rock to think whenever she was worried or troubled. And, of course, being pregnant, she probably had plenty to concern herself with. Remember, she was only around nineteen or twenty when it happened, practically a child herself. It was only natural that she’d want to be alone to think and sort things out. And, like Hazel said, it would’ve been real easy for her to slip off.”

  “This ‘turtle rock . . .’ ”

  “It’s in the center of Collins Park. They built the park around it. Or at least the picnic and play areas, not the baseball diamond. It’s a big boulder that’s shaped kind of like a turtle’s shell. There’s a cluster of four or five boulders, as you probably saw coming into town. Kids like to climb on top of there. The turtle rock is the one on top and it . . . looks like a turtle.”

  “But why would she be up there?” His voice sounded whiny to himself, and Steve realized that he was grasping at straws, trying to think of some way that his father could still be responsible for his first wife’s death, though it was pretty clear by now that that was not the case.

  “That’s why a lot of people thought it was suicide. They thought she jumped. But, like Hazel said, she’d always gone up there to think, to be by herself, and that’s probably what she was doing. She probably just fell trying to get up or trying to get down, and she happened to land the wrong way and . . . died.” Ruth sighed. “Everything would have been different if she had lived.”

  Everything would have been different.

  Steve was filled with a feeling of rising panic. “Thank you,” he said hastily. “You’ve been a big help. I’ll let you go now. Bye.”

  He hung up.

  His father had not killed his first wife. She had fallen off a boulder in a park. The description his dad had given was from an old movie he had seen.

  And the two had nothing to do with each other.

  Steve began pacing the room. It was only a surface similarity in the broad contours of the stories that had made him think that one described the other, that the fictional murder applied to the real-life death.

  But if his father hadn’t killed Ruth . . .

  Steve’s mind leaped to the next logical question: Had his father killed anyone?

  He thought back over what he knew, desperately trying to determine what honest-to-God facts he possessed. Almost none, he realized. The evidence he had was all circumstantial. A handful of unsolved deaths that had occurred in the same cities in which his family had lived and that vaguely resembled the murders—no, movies—his stroke-victim father had described to him.

  For he realized now that the old man had not been talking about people he had killed. He had not even claimed to be doing so. That was an asumption, an intellectual leap that Steve had made himself. His dad had only been describing scenes from old movies. His favorites, perhaps. Ones he’d seen, enjoyed and remembered. His addled mind had latched on to memories of the past, and those memories had not been of actual events but of old films. He had merely related their plots in a manner that made it seem as though the information was highly important, and Steve had automatically assumed that was the case.

  But on some subconscious level, Steve must have known the truth, because the killings his father had not described, the ones for which he had deduced the details on his own, had all come from movies as well. And aside from that first recounting of the Robert Wagner film, even the ones his father had talked about had been only roughly sketched, because he no longer had the capacity for intricate description. It was Steve’s own mind that had filled in the blanks, that had made the events conform to preexisting narratives in his head. The Mexican prostitute—who had probably just left town and not died at all—had been poisoned like Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. The pimp in Tucson had been strangled like the crime-lord Uncle Joe in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. The single mother in San Diego had been stabbed and dumped in the wate
r like Shelley Winters in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter.

  They were all familiar to him, he realized now. The reason he had understood them so thoroughly and bought into them so quickly was because he already knew those scenes. He had visualized the murders so clearly in his mind because he had seen them on-screen.

  They probably hadn’t happened that way at all.

  He thought of Don Quixote, the old knight-errant seeing the world through the prism of his own melodramatic taste in fiction, turning windmills into giants and flocks of sheep into enemy armies. He’d done the same thing, albeit on a much smaller, less grand scale. He’d converted his memories of old movies into accounts of his father’s murders.

  And that had given him permission to start killing people himself.

  But his father had had nothing to do with any of it.

  It was him. It was all him.

  Steve stopped pacing and stared past the window at the darkened world outside. Now he was trapped in this nightmare of his own making, with no way out.

  That wasn’t true.

  There was a way out.

  He could tie up all of the loose ends, get rid of everyone who might know or suspect what he had done, starting with Jessica Haster in Copper City. After he had dispatched them all, he could retire, like his father had, and lead a normal, average life from here on in.

  His father hadn’t retired, though. His father had never done anything like this. His father had not been a serial killer.

  It didn’t matter. That was what he needed to do. Take out, one by one, the peripheral people who might be able to finger him until he was at last totally safe.

  No. That was exactly what he shouldn’t do. He needed to quit cold turkey. To stop now, never kill again and never look back.

  But there were people who could trip him up. He needed to silence them.