Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  Sometimes, in fantasy, it’s fall and I cover her with leaves. But it was the middle of May and the leaves were still on the trees. I could go back for the blanket, or the clothes I’d torn off of her. But might the blanket somehow be traced back to me? And couldn’t the clothes hold a clue? And did I really want to make an extra trip across the road and back?

  I left her uncovered. I closed her eyes, as I’d seen doctors do in films, and I moved her hands so that one covered the other. At the solar plexus—perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not.

  I went back to where I’d left the car. The blanket, along with her purse and everything she’d been wearing, went in the trunk, and I wasted a moment or two tucking her clothes underneath the blanket, as if that would keep a policeman from noticing them.

  Pointless. Unless I was trying to keep myself from noticing them—and still pointless because how could I forget they were there?

  I swung the car around, flicked the headlights on long enough to give me a good look at the spot. The spot where she died, the spot where I’d fucked her and killed her.

  Killed her and fucked her, more accurately.

  HERE’S SOMETHING YOU might not know. I didn’t know it myself at the time, and I mean no disrespect by raising the possibility that you’re as ignorant as I used to be.

  Here it is: Rape and murder, while frequent companions, don’t always take place in that order.

  Which is to say that I was neither the first nor the last man to kill a girl first and fuck her afterward. If you didn’t know this, blame the media; they rarely report it, because it’s a little more graphic and specific than convention would prefer.

  I have more to tell you about this, but it can wait.

  MY HEADLIGHTS DIDN’T show me much. If there was any trace to be seen of what I’d done to her, I certainly couldn’t spot it. What I did notice was that, while she may well have been the first person killed in that location, she and I were by no means the first to have had sex there. I counted five condoms, used and tossed aside, including one that must have been under the blanket while I took my pleasure with her.

  It probably goes without saying that none of the condoms were mine. I wasn’t much worried about getting a dead girl pregnant.

  I FOUND MY way out of there by reversing the process I’d used to find the site in the first place. I didn’t know where I was, but I drove on that dirt road until I had the opportunity to turn onto a paved road, and from that to a more traveled road. And so on.

  I’d spent the seven days in a budget motel with weekly rates, and had checked out that morning because I was ready to quit my job, ready to move on. I stopped at the roadhouse in the hope of finding a woman, and if she hadn’t suddenly snapped out of her wine haze, I’d have found some other motel, checked us in, and had sex with her in a proper bed. She might not remember it later, but she’d still have a pulse when she woke up. But I scrapped that plan when she came to and started making a fuss.

  Blaming the victim? No, not really. Her behavior changed what followed, but that didn’t make it her fault. Driving, eventually reaching a highway, looking left and right for a place to spend what was left of the night, I was wholly aware of whose fault it was.

  Mine. Nobody’s but mine.

  I WAS PROBABLY a hundred miles north of Bakersfield when I found a motel. I paid cash, and was ready to write John Smith on the registration card, but the guy behind the counter never offered me one. If I didn’t sign in, my twenty dollars could go in his pocket and not in the boss’s register.

  Fine with me.

  First thing I did was take a shower. There were rust stains in the tub, and the water pressure wasn’t all you’d have hoped for, but I ran it hot and wanted to stay under the spray forever. Got out eventually, got as dry as I could with the two little towels they gave you, then supplemented them with a pillowcase. I got the air conditioner to make a sound, although it didn’t seem to be cooling the room, and I stretched out on the bed.

  Jesus, sweet Jesus, I’d killed a woman. I was a murderer. And a stupid one at that. Anyone who popped my trunk, anyone resourceful enough to look under the blanket, would find the clothes she’d been wearing. And her purse, too, which almost certainly held some ID.

  They’d catch me. I’d be tried and convicted. In California, that would mean the gas chamber.

  I lay there, waiting for them to kick the door in.

  And then my mind wanted something else to think about, so what I turned it to was not the certain consequences of what I’d done but the act itself. Knocking her out. Putting her in the car, hauling her out of the car. Lying on top of her, pinning her to the ground with my weight. My hands around her neck. Choking her, throttling her, strangling her—all those sweet verbs that worked their will upon her until I’d squeezed the life right out of her eyes.

  Then stripping her, and slipping into her, and rewarding myself for what I had done.

  And I lay naked on that bed, my hair still damp from the shower, and I masturbated not to a fantasy, as I’d done for years, but to something that had actually happened, something I’d done just a few hours ago. Something I regretted profoundly, something I’d almost certainly pay for with my life—and something that even in recollection aroused me beyond my control.

  I had an orgasm, my third of the night. Afterward it seems to me that I felt a wave of unutterable sadness, but I can’t be sure of that. What I do know is that I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept deeply, and without dreams.

  WHEN I WOKE up I took another shower. The towels hadn’t dried from the night before, so I used the bed clothing to dry myself. I thought about what I’d done to her, but I held the memory at enough of a distance to remain unaroused by it.

  Without thinking about it, I put on what I’d worn the night before. I’d washed her scent off my body, but I could smell her on my clothes. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  I thought about the gas chamber. Was there any way to avoid it?

  I drove around, not sure what I was looking for, and in a strip mall I spotted a collection box for Goodwill Industries. No one would look too hard or long at a donation. They’d just launder the clothing and offer it for sale, and some woman somewhere would wear a dead woman’s clothes and never know it.

  I pulled up next to the collection box, opened my trunk, and as I lifted the lid I had the thought that the trunk would be empty, that the clothing would be gone, that all of this was a false memory.

  Yeah, right.

  I dropped her clothes in the box, added the blanket. What about her purse? It was black patent leather, scuffed. I’d have to go through it first and remove her ID, but I didn’t want to do that now.

  Everything I owned was in my duffel bag in the trunk, and I worked the zipper and drew out a change of clothes. With my car screening me from passers-by, I stripped to the skin and put on clean clothes. What I’d taken off—the Buddy shirt, the matching work pants, the underwear—went in the Goodwill box with her clothes.

  Somebody else could be Buddy.

  I got back in the car, drove some more.

  I WAS HALFWAY between L.A. and San Francisco, closing in on Santa Barbara, before it dawned on me that I’d stand a better chance if I got out of the state. For a week or two I circled around—Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, then west again and into Arizona. Most cities had newsstands that carried out-of-town papers, and I bought day-old copies of the two Bakersfield papers, the Californian and the News Observer, looking for any mention of the discovery of a body, or a missing-persons search for Cindy Raschmann.

  I knew her name because I’d finally gone through her purse. I kept the ninety-two dollars I found in her wallet, and burned everything with her name on it. I dropped the empty purse in one trash bin, the empty wallet in another.

  If anyone reported her missing, the Bakersfield papers didn’t know about it. But if someone, single and unattached, just stopped showing up—well, somebody might file a missing persons report, and a name and description
might go out to area hospitals, but why would the press cover it?

  Eight days after I took her throat between my hands, a couple of hikers found the body. A day later, the News Observer reported that she’d been identified, and confided that the police were treating the death as a homicide.

  You think?

  BY THIS TIME I was in a $40-a-week motel outside of Tempe, Arizona. I was getting day work with a moving company and clerking three nights a week at a liquor store in a bad part of town. I figured it was only a matter of time before somebody walked in with a gun, and if he was disappointed enough with what was in the cash register he’d pull the trigger.

  Fair enough. Because another thing that was only a matter of time was a couple of uniformed guys knocking on my door. They wouldn’t have to get her clothes from the Goodwill or her purse from the trashcan in order to put two and two together. Someone would say, Yeah, she walked outta here with this young guy, had some size on him. And someone else could say, Sure, I saw the two of them, he had one of those shirts like you’ll see at a Sunoco station. Kind with his name on the pocket? Buddy, that’s what it said. And after they checked enough Sunoco stations, somebody would remember a guy with Buddy on his shirt pocket. Guy worked regular, and then one day he didn’t show up. Didn’t bring the shirt back, either.

  One thing leading to another, the way they do.

  So I waited for the knock to come, waited for the world to fall apart, waited to start a long walk with a gas chamber at the end of it. When I wasn’t working one job or the other, I sat in my motel room and thought about the gas chamber. All I really knew about it was from watching Susan Hayward play Barbara Graham in I Want to Live.

  There’s an interesting story about Barbara Graham. Can’t swear it’s true, but I’d like to believe it.

  We’ll get to it.

  I KEPT BUYING the Bakersfield papers, as if they’d know about my arrest before I did. But I didn’t see anything about Cindy Raschmann aside from the occasional back-page item reporting that Bakersfield police, assisted by state troopers, were continuing to pursue unspecified leads in the matter. Just a matter of time, they said, and I’d already worked that part out for myself.

  But most of the paper was devoted to the upcoming California primary. The country would be electing a president in November, and California looked to be a swing state for the Democratic candidates. And on the fifth of June voters went to the polls, and within hours of his being declared the victor, Robert F. Kennedy was shot dead by a little guy who liked his name so much he used it twice. Good he did the deed in L.A., and not, say, Walla Walla.

  1968, THIS WAS. Years and years ago, and I’m telling you the story, so you should be able to figure out that the knock on the door never came, that I got away with it.

  Took me a while to believe it. It looked as though I actually had a second shot at life, but how could I trust it? How did I know it wasn’t some celestial joke, some cosmic prankster building me up only to knock me down?

  I mean, I’d killed a girl. You don’t get a pass on something like that.

  Do you?

  DAYS PASSED, AND I could see that was what had happened. The assassination took everybody’s mind off the murder of a woman with no relatives or close friends to pester the Bakersfield cops for updates on the investigation. The case went cold.

  It was hard for me to know what to make of it. I’d come close to resigning myself to the punishment I knew I deserved, and now it looked as though there wasn’t going to be any punishment, and that idea took some getting used to.

  I had a life back. What was I going to do with it?

  FOR THE TIME being, I could just keep on keeping on. Working moving jobs when they called me, working nights at the liquor store. It must have been early July when a customer walked in an hour before closing and spent a long time checking out different brands of whiskey.

  I knew there was something wrong with him.

  I waited on another customer, a guy with a limp who came in every evening around that time to pick up a pint of Schenley’s. He could have bought it by the quart and reduced the wear and tear on his bad hip by fifty percent, but maybe this gave him an excuse to get out of the house.

  He limped out, and as soon as the door closed behind him, Mr. Wrong approached the counter with a fifth of Chivas in one hand and a gun in the other.

  Well, didn’t that just fucking figure? Get off one hook and life comes at you with another.

  I was way too angry to be afraid. “Oh, go ahead and shoot me,” I told him, even as I reached to grab a bottle of wine off the shelf. “Go ahead, you son of a bitch! You think I give a rat’s ass?”

  I marched straight toward him, brandishing the wine bottle and waiting for the gunshot. But what he did was drop the gun, hold on to the bottle of Chivas. And run out the door.

  I DIDN’T KNOW what to do with the gun. Call the cops? No, I don’t think so. I picked the thing up without getting my prints on it or disturbing his, and I put it on the shelf beneath the counter, alongside the billy club the owner kept there. I might have picked that up, instead of the wine bottle, but if I’d been thinking that clearly to begin with I’d have hit NO SALE and let him clean out the register.

  I locked up when I was supposed to, and when I left I had the gun with me, in one of the paper bags meant to hold a pint bottle of wine or whiskey. I didn’t know what I wanted it for, but thought it might be more of a mistake to leave it behind than to take it with me. I drove straight back to my motel, took a shower, got into bed, and waited for the fear to flood in after the fact. But that didn’t happen. Once again I had my life back, and it was up to me to figure out what to do with it.

  I thought about Cindy Raschmann, who hadn’t gotten her life back, and never would. I’d thought of her often, with variable results. Sometimes I was overcome with guilt and shame, and the hopeless desire to undo what I had done. But on other occasions all I could think of was the sheer ecstasy of it all.

  This time, perhaps as a reaction to looking down the barrel of a gun, the eroticism prevailed. I relived the incident, improving it by calling her by her name, which of course I hadn’t known at the time. In fantasy I fastened duct tape over her mouth, and toyed with her by pinching her nostrils shut, then letting her gasp for breath. Over and over again, until her struggles so aroused me that I got my hands on her throat, even as I’d done in actuality.

  And so on.

  Delicious, all of it. The real recollection, the fantasized improvements. No matter how much I genuinely regretted it, it was all a part of who I was.

  And would forever be.

  SO SHOULD I then look for another roadhouse and pick up another young woman who’d had too much to drink? Maybe I’d keep this one alive for a while. Let her struggle, let her know what was coming. Maybe fuck her first and then kill her.

  Maybe not. Maybe stick with what works.

  I imagined myself as a serial killer, although the term itself would not come into vogue for several more years. (The behavior had existed for centuries, and perhaps forever. Who’s to say what Cain got up to after he went off on his own?) But the language took its time catching up.

  I mean, wasn’t that the logical way for me to behave? I’d done the foul deed, I’d enjoyed it and been transported by it beyond all expectations, and I’d gone on to spend many of my waking hours (and God knows how much of my dream time) savoring the experience, relishing the memory, enhancing it in fantasy. Over and over Cindy Raschmann died, over and over I spilled my seed in her insensate body, over and over and over.

  Wouldn’t she, sooner or later, lose her charm?

  A MAN WALKS into a bar.

  A downtown bar, a place to relax after a day at the office. When the office crowd thinned out, the clientele changed. Serious drinkers, men and women looking for a cure for loneliness. The occasional semipro hooker.

  I’d been in there a few times, scouting the place. Always sat alone at the bar, always had a scotch and soda. Never spoke to anyone
, except to order my drink. Never said or did anything memorable.

  Thought about it, though. Took some of the female patrons home, if only in my mind. One was a frequent star in my fantasies, a housewife who’d come in for a quick one before she drove one kid to a soccer game or picked up another from a play date. A MILF, you’d call her nowadays, though no one had yet come up with the term. There were plenty of MILFs, but nobody knew what to call them.

  Like serial killers. Abundant, but not yet labeled.

  Taller than Cindy Raschmann, and a few years older, and with a fuller figure. Unconvincing red hair, so the carpet probably didn’t match the drapes.

  Never mind. She was hot, and she had a restlessness about her that was appealing.

  She’d do.

  WOULD IT HAVE been soccer that her kid played? I don’t think the game had yet caught on, certainly not in Arizona, nor do I think she’d have called her other kid’s afternoon engagement a play date. The boy was probably playing baseball. His sister was doing homework at a friend’s house.

  Like it matters.

  Soccer games and play dates. MILFs—or should that be MILVES?

  Serial killers.

  A MAN WALKS into a bar, and the MILF of his dreams is there, and sitting by herself. Sitting at one of the little tables, the glass in front of her almost empty.

  I got a J&B and soda at the bar. “And let me have another of what Red’s having.”

  He smiled. “Red’s name is Carolyn,” he said, reaching and pouring and stirring. “And what she’s having is an Orange Blossom.”

  I took both glasses to her table, dropped into the empty chair, raised my own glass in a toast. “Well now,” she said, and picked up the stemmed glass that held her Orange Blossom. “What are we drinking to?”

  “To the future,” I said. “May it have Carolyn in it.”