Body Language

by James W. Hall

  “You’re a very good waitress,” he said, turning his head to stare out the window. “You’re excellent at what you do.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I’m happy and privileged to be served by you.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  She stood there a few seconds more, then swiveled on her squeaky tennis shoes and marched away.

  Rape was about wanting a woman you couldn’t have. One woman. An image in your mind that was bright and clear and never wavered or varied. Her face, her body, her voice, the way she swayed and stood. One woman above all others. The craving gnawed at you, a longing, a pang, a slow burn hidden so deep inside your body, there wasn’t a name for the place where it resided.

  Rape was about having to settle for another woman, a lesser version of the one you truly wanted. Rape was about walking up the steps of that woman’s Coconut Grove apartment, a woman smiling in her doorway, her hip cocked, making herself available to you, letting you inside, letting you come into her intimate quarters. It was about walking up those steps, legs weak, the blood leaving them, the twist in the stomach, the heart scudding. Walking up those steps, watching her open the door and stand aside, admitting you to the intimate place that was hers, that dark, small space where she lived, and it was about what happened next, the next hour, those thousand little winks and wiggles and obscene softenings in the voice and flutters of lashes and come-hither gestures and smiles and how she was dressed, her face made up, all of it planned for your benefit, to create the seductive effect, to transmit her sexual willingness. To lure you.

  It was about sex. It was about the need to pour yourself out of yourself. It was about the urge to replicate, duplicate, repeat and repeat and repeat until everything got quiet. Until there was relief. Sweet satiation. Everything was still and empty and perfect. The gong in the heart no longer ringing. The shimmer gone. Everything flat and quiet and serene.

  That’s when he killed them—when the static was silent. He looked down at them and he could see it in their eyes: they hated him because he was stronger and took what he wanted, and that hate was so ferocious that he knew if he didn’t kill them, they would kill him. So he did it to save himself, so he could go on. So he could live.

  Murdering them wasn’t crazy; it wasn’t sick or illogical or sociopathic or any of that psychoanalytical bullshit. It was simple baseline self-preservation. It was one animal looking at another animal and seeing that the other animal would kill him if it got the chance, so he did what he had to do. Instinct. Survival of the fittest. Oldest law there was. Buried in the blood a million years. Kill or be killed.

  They didn’t know shit about rape.

  FIVE

  By three o’clock, they were carrying somewhere near $4 million. Five sacks of cash, two smaller satchels of coins. A bag of food stamps. Typical day. Savings and Loan, Publix supermarket, NationsBank, a check-cashing joint, another supermarket. Stan driving, Benito riding shotgun. The Winchester in the rack beside him. Following procedure, same shuffle at every stop.

  Benito, the courier, wearing his Kevlar vest, carrying a .38, hauled the empty canvas bags from the truck at every stop, brought them back full, while Stan stayed in the truck with the doors locked. Benito got seventy-five cents more an hour for taking that risk. Which brought him up to eight bucks per. Stan could’ve had the job if he’d wanted it, and, God knows, he needed the money. But he passed. He had something better in mind. Something that required him to stay behind the wheel.

  Usually, they made a little chitchat between stops, though today Stan wasn’t feeling conversational. His Kevlar vest was tight, lungs unable to expand. Felt like a hot wire was wriggling in his left armpit.

  “Your father-in-law driving you crazy again? Talking his bullshit?”

  Stan said no, the old man was fine.

  “Then it’s your wife,” Benito said. “What happened, she find out about your little sugar on the side? Jennifer what’s-her-name?”

  “Shut up about that.”

  “Hey, I got no problem with adultery. Just because I’m faithful to my wife, it don’t mean I can’t appreciate a man chasing pussy. Wife like yours, I understand completely. Pretty, but no interest in sex. Hey, I’ll take an ugly one any day. Ugly and horny, those are the best. That’s the mistake you made, Stan—you married a pretty one. She looked hot, but she’s dry where it counts. Ham and cheese without mayo. Those are the worst. I don’t blame you for screwing around, man. Makes perfect sense to me.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Benito.”

  “Oh, I got it. I know what it is. This is the fucking day you’re leaving, running off with her, your little sugar tit. It is, isn’t it? I guessed it.”

  “Wrong again, asshole. Just another day in paradise. Nothing special whatsoever.”

  “Don’t lie to me, man. I can see it in your face, like something crawled up your ass and died. Looks like maybe it was a porcupine or something. That what it is, man, a porcupine up your ass?”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Stan said. “A porcupine.”

  “Hey, you don’t want to confide in your partner, okay. We ride together five years, tell each other every sad story, expose ourselves down to the bottoms of our hearts, sure, that’s okay. You’re hurting about something; your mouth is all twisted up, bones sticking out from your flesh where I can see them. Then you just turn your back on me, shut me out, slam the frigging door in my face. Hey, I can deal with it. I got my own thoughts. I know how to amuse myself.”

  “So do it.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll just sit here and play back all the women I slept with this past year. Picture their naked bodies. Put them up on the big screen in my head. Remember how they smelled, what they tasted like, all the details. I don’t need to talk to you, man. You just drive and be quiet and let me picture my women.”

  “Fine,” Stan said. “Let’s see how long you can keep your mouth shut. Maybe you can beat your personal best of eleven seconds.”

  Benito was quiet for a moment, then said, “You’re not thinking of doing something stupid, are you?”

  Stan kept his eyes on the back of a red Cadillac in his lane.

  “’Cause if you are, you should tell me, so I can get out right here.”

  “What the hell’re you talking about, you nimrod?”

  “That look you got, it’s the same way my old man looked the night he stuck his freaking pistol in his mouth. I don’t want to be riding with no guy has suicide on his mind.”

  Stan looked over at the little man. Curly black Cuban hair, dark complexion. Might be a mulatto, for all Stan knew. Long eyelashes. Kind of guy you’d see on the street, you’d say he was queer, only Stan knew Benito was married, with four bambinos. Big roly-poly wife, twice Benito’s size. There couldn’t be any naked women in his head because his wife took up the whole damn movie screen.

  “I’m fine,” Stan said. “I just got things on my mind is all. Just drop it.”

  Benito snapped his fingers, then thumped the side of his skull several times.

  “Shit, of course. Now I remember. It’s the Bloody Rapist. He killed another girl and now your old lady’s all wound up, gonna start working all her freaking overtime again. Stomping around, pissed off. And old Stan’s gotta catch a bunch of shit for what some other guy did, gotta stay home every night with the shit-for-brains father-in-law, can’t get away to suck on his sugar tit. Am I right? Huh? Do I know you through and through, or what?”

  Stan shot him another look.

  “Eleven seconds, remember? Why don’t you see if you can set an all-time record, Benny? Maybe the rest of the fucking day, for instance. That would truly impress me.”

  Benito pouted for a moment, then pressed his lips together, made a zipper sign across them, then twisted a key for good measure and tossed it away, and sat back in his padded seat.

  Stan steered them out onto Biscayne Boulevard. They were way the hell up in Aventura. All the condo commandos out in their Cadillacs and Mercedes, prowling fo
r bargains. He got into the right lane, laid in behind a slow-moving Buick stuffed with blue-haired discount hunters, and worked through the gears from stoplight to stoplight, traveling south toward 151st Street, where they’d pick up Dixie, then 135th, and head west over to I-95. Twenty minutes, fifteen if the traffic was light, and they’d be at the spot. Ground zero. And it would all go down. He was crossing over the line from a normal law-abiding citizen to a major-league felon. That is, if Stan’s goddamn nerves held.

  You tried to set up a perfect crime, you were doomed to fail. That’s how Stan saw it. Crimes got fouled up by little things that came zooming in unexpectedly—some microscopic dust particle that got in the gears and caused them to grind to a halt just at the exact moment you needed to go forward. Or a stray electron misfires and fries the circuitry at the crucial second. No such thing as a perfect crime. Never was, never would be.

  Stan knew what he was talking about. He’d read crime books all his life, ever since one afternoon when he was a little kid dumped at the library by his mother while she went off to the bar with one of her soldier boyfriends. Stan snooped around for a while and, what do you know, first book he pulls off the shelf, flips it open, on page one there’s a naked woman’s body found in a field. Who was she? How’d she get there? Why would anybody kill her? Eight years old, he takes the book over to a corner, sits down, and starts reading, ears getting hot, heart quivering. Trying to picture himself walking through a field, coming upon a naked woman’s body. The whole thing grabbing him, not letting him go till his mother showed up an hour or two later and hauled him off. Soon as he could get back, he was in the library, hunting that book down. He found it, read the rest and was still hungry. Finally, working up his nerve, he asked the librarian if she might have anything else like the book he’d just read. “So, you like the crime field, young man?” she said. It felt like a trick question, but finally he said, yeah, he guessed so. “Oh, so do I,” she said. “I just adore a good murder mystery.” Old woman, could be his grandmother. She wore the same dress every day, dark blue with white flowers, and she’s taking him under her wing, steering him around the room, raving about this murder book and that one.

  From then on, he was hooked. True crime, crime magazines, crime stories in the paper. All the other kids were watching TV, playing their video games, but Stan’s inside reading about the Lenox Avenue Gang, Herman Webster Mudget, murderer, robber, and arsonist, nicest man you’d ever meet, except that he killed over two hundred women. All-time American record holder. Or Dillinger or Frankie Carbo, or Al Spencer, the great bank robber of Oklahoma, the first guy to use souped-up cars for his getaways.

  Twenty years later, Stan’s head was stuffed with crime facts. Going to school, there hadn’t been a teacher who could get him to study or memorize dates or any of it. But here he was, a grown man, and, without even trying, he’d committed to memory a few thousand names and dates, famous mobsters, legendary bank robbers, and a million and one lesser-known people, the ones who got only a paragraph in the Dictionary of American Crime. He loved those guys, brash and ballsy, high-wire walkers, guys with passports stamped from every country in the underworld.

  Hell, if he’d picked up a Bible that afternoon in the library, the whole thing might be different. Today, he might be studying theology or some shit. Be one of those door-to-door idiots who wanted to talk about Jesus, some weird gobbledygook name for their church.

  Stan Rafferty had never even shoplifted a wooden pencil at the dime store, but he knew the mind-set of a big-time robber, a guy with twenty banks under his belt. Some mornings after a night of dreaming about robberies or other mayhem he’d committed, he’d wake up glowing with excitement.

  When he finally decided to play around with a plan of his own, first thing he did was make up a list of the natural laws of the criminal universe. He came up with three. Easy to remember, not necessary to write down.

  The first law was: The crime itself is less dangerous than what you do with the money later. Most crooks got caught from doing something dumb after the fact. Spending their money in lavish ways. Drawing attention to themselves.

  The second one said: Don’t give your wife the littlest hint about what you are up to. He couldn’t count the number of famous crooks who’d been turned in by their wives after they got jealous or pissed off about some little thing the guy had done entirely unrelated to the crime itself. And with Alex working at Miami PD, it was even more important he didn’t let the smallest thing slip. Somehow, it made it all the more exciting, Stan pulling off a major crime while married to a cop.

  And yeah, he guessed Benito was right. If it wasn’t for Alex, all his plans would’ve just stayed right there in his head. Alex and her goddamn job. Coming home night after night with the stink of death on her. That sour metallic reek of blood and vomit and gunpowder that didn’t wash off. She couldn’t hide it with soaps or perfumes. Over and over, Stan had tried to put the smell out of his mind, reach out, touch her skin, stroke her breasts, try to get himself hard and horny, but the best he could do was half-mast. A limber-dicked lover. Getting little flashes of corpses as he touched her, as they kissed, his dick wilting.

  And if that wasn’t bad enough, then her old man came to live with them. Overnight, the house got crowded. The old man always underfoot. Like having a kid in diapers, only he’s 150 pounds and won’t shut up. That’s why Stan started fooling around, sneaking out, leaving the old man locked in the house while he hung out at a couple of neighborhood bars till he’d met the girl. Cute, young Jennifer, who smelled like flowers and cinnamon, with flesh as soft as fresh-baked rolls. Innocent and clean. Jennifer thought Stan was strong and complicated. That’s what she said to him once. Strong and complicated. A father figure, she’d said. Fucking-A.

  So that’s where he was. Ready to chuck nine years of marriage—make his score; then a month or two from now, when things had cooled down, he’d walk out on Alexandra and just flat disappear.

  Rule number three, that was Stan’s favorite, his triumph, the one with his own personal stamp on it. It said: When it comes to crime, chaos is a thousand times better than order.

  Like the others, it was an idea he’d distilled down from a book. At a bookstore a month ago, totally random, he’d flipped it open and started reading. Though it wasn’t about crime, he got hooked immediately.

  It was part quantum physics, part philosophy, with some psychology and religious bullshit thrown in. Mainly, it was about chaos. How everything, even the most orderly systems in nature, even the man-made machines that ran the world—computers, internal combustion engines, turbines, generators, radar, all the things we think are operating neatly and efficiently—is actually full of all kinds of chaos.

  Fat, expensive book. He started on it that night while Alexandra was off at work. He didn’t understand it for shit. You needed a college degree to read the flap copy. But he forged on anyway, feeling himself absorb some of the material, bit by bit, though later on when Alex asked him what it was about, all he could think to say was, “It’s about chaos. How everything’s chaotic.”

  “That’s it?” she said. “A whole book about that?”

  “Yeah, a whole book.”

  “Seems to me,” she said, “you could get that on the first page, then go off to other things.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” he told her. “Stuff you wouldn’t understand. I barely understand it myself.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That complicated?” Giving him her smart-ass college smile. Stan with only a year at Dade Junior College, and Alex lording it over him all the time. Very subtle about it, so someone standing right there wouldn’t even notice what she was doing, but Stan saw it. Yes sir.

  Even though Stan didn’t understand but maybe a tenth of what was in that book, the idea he got from it was that chaos was the answer to the perfect crime. You had to throw everything into the blender. Your goal was total disarray, complete and utter confusion. You even took the chance that the whole goddamn thin
g would get so cock-eyed crazy that you couldn’t even steal the money at all. There was an excellent chance of that.

  But that was the beauty of the plan. If it failed, he could just walk away. Because no one would ever believe there was a plan to steal money in the first place. Nobody would be able to see a plan through all the craziness.

  But on the other side of the seesaw from that low-risk potential was the high fuckup possibility. One goes up, the other goes down. If he went ahead with his plan, it was conceivable he could do absolutely everything right and things would get so incredibly fucked up that the money wouldn’t wind up where he wanted it to.

  That was the trade-off. Low risk, high fuckup potential.

  Most bank robbers and heist guys were basically nineteenth-century types. Still back in the Newtonian universe. Gravity, mechanized thinking, gears clanking against gears, all that. Wanting their capers to run with greased efficiency, all the clockwork meshing, all the balls dropping in the right holes, bing, bing, bing.

  But Stan Rafferty was going to be the first of his kind, a post-Einstein robber. A totally brand-new thing coming down the pike. So innovative in his thinking, he could even have a chapter dedicated to him in the next set of the Encyclopedia of Crime. Except no one was ever going to know his name, since Stan wasn’t going to get caught.

  Because even though Stan Rafferty could easily walk off with somewhere near $2 million, there was an excellent chance no one was even going to know a crime had been committed.

  “Man,” Benito said, “you’re thinking so hard, it’s getting noisy in here.”

  Stan glanced at his watch.

  “You made it exactly three minutes and fourteen seconds, you dumb shit. Now, let’s try it again, see if you can break five.”

  “I don’t believe you, man. Everything I confided in you, all the shit I opened up and revealed. My wife, all her medical problems, and when something finally comes along, it bothers you a little, you get lockjaw.”