by Jeff Povey
“I’ll have to see some identification before I do anything like that.”
“I can only show you if you open the door.”
I’m not going to fall for that one. No way. But five huge and silent seconds pass, and I crack. I open the door a tiny bit and peer out. Agent Wade leans forward, then holds up his ID. It’s a nice picture, and it does him justice. I go from his photo to the real thing, and our eyes meet. His are a penetrating blue, whereas mine are a deep velvet brown. Another difference is I can’t seem to get mine to blink. They just stare out, bulging, expanding, revealing every ounce of my fear and guilt.
“Can it wait till morning? I’m really tired right now.”
Agent Wade gives a solemn shake of the head. This guy is very commanding and not the sort of person I find it easy to say no to.
After several more huge and stifling seconds, I open the door, step aside, and let Agent Wade in. He’s wearing a very heady aftershave, and I wonder if it’s anything I could afford.
I close the kitchen door behind him. I wait, gathering my confidence, and then turn to face him. He is looking at the scattered floor tiles.
“I’ve got mice.” Agent Wade nods but doesn’t really seem to care that much.
The room falls silent. I’m not sure what I’m meant to say, and Agent Wade also looks like he is having trouble finding his voice.
“So . . . what’s this all about?” I try desperately to sound calm and dignified.
Agent Wade starts to say something and then stops. He smiles, more to himself than me, and then he tries again.
“This is a little hard to get across. . . .”
I study Agent Wade, and he is making me curious. I can’t get a handle on him.
“How do I put this? I uh . . . well . . . I know what you do.” He looks me straight in the eye when he says this. “I know what you do.” He repeats it, in case I didn’t get the gist of what he’s saying.
“You mean cleaning out cages?”
“No. I don’t mean that.”
I knew he didn’t, but I can’t say anything now that will implicate me, especially when I notice that a calmer and more penetrating look has returned to Agent Wade’s face.
“Sorry, but that’s all I do. Clean out cages.”
“No. That’s not all that you do. Mind if I smoke?”
Agent Wade is already tapping out a filterless cigarette for himself, and all I can do is offer a mild shrug. “Sure . . . go right ahead. . . .”
Agent Wade lights his cigarette with a silver-plated lighter that isn’t unlike the one I own. He exhales upward and studies me for a long moment. “I have a still from a security camera.”
He fishes in his pocket, unbends the photograph, and hands it to me. And there I am, in grainy gray and white, three years younger and ramming a knife into Errol Flynn’s groin. I’m standing in a darkened basement, and although it is hard to make out exactly who is doing what to whom, I know the FBI have some incredible technology at their disposal, and even if it doesn’t look exactly like me, they have ways and means of altering the picture so that it does.
Errol worked as a security guard in a tenement block. He had killed nine fat guys by stabbing them repeatedly in the groin, but only after he had shaved their bodies and fastened a bra around their flabby chests. His mother had terrified him all his life, ritually beating him and locking him in their cellar for days on end. It was only when he got to fifteen that he realized his mother was really his father in drag. I for one absolutely understand why he decided to go out and start butchering guys who could pass for women. To his credit, he never made the mistake of killing a woman who looked like a man, and I, for one, salute that sort of clarity.
“It’s taken three years to find you.” Agent Wade looks at me, expressionless. “I’ve been on the case from day one. Been all over the country, covered practically every square inch of it.”
I try to give Agent Wade a steely, no-nonsense look. “I never saw that photo before in my entire life.” This is delivered with more than a nod toward defensive outrage—and I imagine for a moment that I’m in court. I think I’m on to a good case for the defense and decide to run with it. “Never, I tell you. Never.”
“’Course you haven’t. It wasn’t released. Not publicly.”
I feel a swell of inner triumph, smell the sweet scent of victory. “Well, there you go, then. There’s no way I could have seen that photo.”
Agent Wade stands his ground, cool and determined. “Pardon me, but it’s not the actual photo itself that brought me here. This is more about the content of the still. Of what it represents.”
I pause as a huge hole in my defense starts to open up before my eyes. I decide the only way out of this is to ride roughshod over everything Agent Wade is saying.
“As far as I’m concerned, all that matters is whether or not I have seen that photo, and I state, hereby and categorically, that no, I have not seen this photo. Now good day to you.”
Agent Wade looks at me with a faint expression of amusement. Or at least it looks like amusement. He remains where he is, not about to move, and we both know he is not going anywhere tonight. His voice remains even and rich and solid, and it is starting to grate on me.
“We’ve had over forty agents looking for you. I guess I lucked out. It’s because I had a head start. I’d compiled my own profile on you.”
Profile? On me?
“I clean out cages.” I don’t know why I keep repeating this. It’s hardly something to boast about.
“I know that—but you clean other things as well.”
Agent Wade says this in such a way as to add a secret knowing, an almost sexy undertone, trying to entice an admission from me.
The kitchen falls silent as I try hard to think of other things I clean. I look at the sink, and although it sparkles I don’t truly believe I could get away with telling Agent Wade I also scrub my sink religiously, if that’s what he’s alluding to. I then think of offering a guided tour around my home, pointing out my fastidiously spotless world to him. These thoughts seem to careen around my head, and I can’t make any sense of them. I then realize that I am having a panic attack and it is giving me a migraine.
“Would you like an Alka-Seltzer? I’m going to have one.”
Agent Wade gives a small assured movie-star shake of the head.
“No one knows I’ve found you.” These words, which should be a huge relief to me, fill me with dread. “I’ve spent six days agonizing over this. I wanted to call in, to tell the boys I’d got you . . .”
But he didn’t. Even after six days. He didn’t call for backup, and now I’m feeling very, very scared. My mouth has gone completely dry.
“When we realized what you were doing, there was a real big brouhaha. . . .”
A what? What’s that? I want to ask, but I seem to have developed lockjaw.
“Most of us, despite our training, couldn’t help but revert to our natural instinct for justice. We argued long and hard that you should be allowed to carry on. That you were doing the right thing for both president and country. . . . But of course we came slap bang up against the moral majority, and I for one couldn’t sit in the same room as them. They tried to tell us you were evil and that you had to be stopped. At that I just got up and walked out of the building. Some of the guys came with me. We hung around in the car park, trying to cool off. We just couldn’t believe an institution as great and as powerful and as well-meaning as the FBI would want you arrested and dumped on death row.”
The thudding in my head is quickly outpaced by the thudding in my heart.
“Anyway, my superior came and found us. He was as cut up as we were. He was sorry, but the official line was we were going all-out to catch you. But not in an overt or public way; after all, they didn’t want copycats springing up.” He says this with a real hateful sarcasm. “Can you believe that? They didn’t want the public fighting back. I nearly handed in my badge right there and then.”
And I stand
there thinking, Why didn’t you, you bastard? Why didn’t you?
“My superior had a plan, though. He reasoned that we could at least let you squeeze in a few more kills before you were caught, and he tied red tape all over the show, buying you as much time as possible. He felt it was the least he could do.”
I walk to the sink, pick up a tumbler, fill it with cold water, and then mix in an Alka-Seltzer, watching it fizz. I take a long sip before it is even a quarter dissolved.
“How long did you think it would take to finish your crusade?”
Agent Wade’s words, aimed at the back of my head, somehow manage to dodge round it and hang in the air before my eyes. I pause. Crusade? What crusade?
“How long did you figure?” Agent Wade asks this gently, prodding a response from me.
“I don’t understand.”
Agent Wade mistakes this for modesty on my part, smiles gently. “Sure you do.”
“’Fraid you’ve lost me.”
“C’mon—it’s obvious what you’ve been doing. Killing serial killers.”
I hesitate. “I have?”
He smiles again, showing his even white teeth. “Have you ever.”
In a way, I guess he’s right. But it was never a crusade, more just a way of staying in the Club.
“I can give you two months.”
“For what?”
“To finish your crusade.”
I pause. My lips feel like they are stuck to the tumbler; I am neither drinking nor not drinking. Eventually I turn round to face Agent Wade. “You mean kill the other members?”
He smiles again. His teeth are dazzling. “You catch on quick.”
“But they’re my friends.”
Agent Wade’s smile evolves into a quick-fire laugh. “You are one funny guy.”
“I’m not kidding. The Club is my life.”
Agent Wade straightens, looms over me, searching my face, wondering if I’m joshing or telling the truth. “People don’t tend to kill their friends.”
“I had to in order to keep the other friends.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I admit it doesn’t sound like it does, but in fact, from where I’m standing, it makes a lot of sense. Besides, they would’ve killed me if I’d let them.”
Agent Wade suddenly looks tired—bored even—of the conversation. “Listen, I don’t really care about your logic. You’ve got two months to off the rest of them.”
“And what if I refuse?”
“You fry.”
The words are blunt, delivered like a mallet to the head.
“But there are, uh . . . there are nine other members. I can’t just start slaughtering them. They might finally figure out what I’ve been doing all these years. Things could turn nasty. One slip and I’m a dead man.”
“They haven’t rumbled you so far.”
I try to fight the growing desperation in my voice. “Listen, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not a killer.”
“Even though you kill people.”
“It may seem like that, but no, sir, a killer is the last thing I am.”
Agent Wade offers no riposte, just stands there imposingly still. I try another plea.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if you just came with me to the Club one night and arrested them?” It breaks my heart to say this. I’d do anything to save the Club.
Agent Wade pauses to think this over; he glances up to the ceiling and sees I have cobwebs up there. Maybe I’m not as clean as I think.
“The thing we like—or at least the thing I like—about what you do is the fact that the killers die anonymously. No books get written, no TV movies get made, no big news reports get splashed all over the country, there’s no trial, there’s no nothing. Apart from their anonymous little deaths. I see it as being kind of ironic, if I can use that word. No one ever cares about the victims, they only ever care about the killer. This way you make sure no one cares about anyone. They die, their killing sprees stop, and no one’s the wiser.”
I can see Agent Wade has put a lot of thought into this. He has presented his case logically and with a controlled amount of passion. He hasn’t come at it like a slavering vengeance seeker; instead he is approaching it like a good and honest man with a good and honest ideal.
“There aren’t going to be any arrests.” This sentence drips with complete authority.
I think about asking for time to mull his offer over, but in truth I know I have no other option. He has the power to send a thousand volts through me.
I start nodding my head, slowly, as if I’m weighing the options, making up my mind, acting like I have a choice. “I’ll definitely get the chair if I don’t cooperate?”
“I’ll pull the switch myself.”
I stop nodding and in a clever show of consternation chew my lip instead. I realize I have little or no choice and thrust out my hand—as if to shake. “Two months. No problem.”
Agent Wade is surprised to see my hand thrust out like this, and he shakes it instinctively. I know he feels uncomfortable with this, his grip weakening as soon as his fingers touch my hand. But I carry on pumping his hand and even start beaming at him.
“I’ve always admired the FBI.”
THE NON-PLAN PLAN
THERE’S A CLUB meeting tonight, and I hurried home early from the zoo, showered and shaved, ate a quick TV dinner, and put on a hooded sweatshirt and jeans. But when I opened the front door to leave, I was shocked to find Agent Wade standing there waiting for me. He looked me up and down and then tutted loudly. “You can’t go to the Club dressed like that.”
Rather than get into an argument—I was running late anyway—I did as he requested.
I am now wearing a black sweater over a dark blue shirt and tie with dark gray slacks, and Agent Wade is waiting at the bus stop with me. We shelter from the rain under the thick plastic roof of the stop. He lights a cigarette, and as I watch him I realize I am a lot more nervous than usual. I want the bus to come early so I can escape Agent Wade’s unnerving glare.
“Got a good plan?”
“I tend to make it up as I go along.”
Agent Wade has a slight recoil at this. “You do?”
“It’s worked so far.”
“Jesus.” He sighs. “You’ve got to have a plan. Everyone has a plan of some sort.”
“I don’t.”
“Then make one. Now.”
I feel myself getting a little defensive. “Who’s the one with experience here?”
Agent Wade sighs hard. His eyes challenge me. “So which one you gonna kill?”
“I dunno yet.”
“Christ.”
I don’t like the contemptuous look he gives me. “You’re the one who dropped this on me.”
“I thought you’d at least have some method—”
“Just trust me, okay?”
Agent Wade nods slightly as he breathes smoke out of his nostrils. He then runs his tongue around his teeth as he studies me. “Will the victim suffer?”
I fall silent for a moment.
Agent Wade gives me a warmish smile. “Just for the report.”
“Oh . . . I hadn’t realized this was going to be so official.”
“That’s the FBI for you.”
I see the bus appear at the top of the street. It stops at a red light some hundred yards away, and I am forced to look at Agent Wade as he looms up close. He fingers my lapel, straightening it as he talks. “You’re sure it’s going to work? This non-plan of yours?”
I don’t mean to, but I snap at Agent Wade. “I have been doing this a few years now.” His presence is really making me tense.
Agent Wade tightens the knot in my tie. “Just checking.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the traffic lights turn green; the bus changes gear and heads for my stop.
“There’s really no need.”
Agent Wade finishes straightening my tie, makes a small fist, and playfully “punches” my chin, or rather pushes it a
couple of times with his knuckles. “Don’t mind me. I’m the new kid on the block.”
The bus pulls up and Agent Wade steps away as the doors open. I glance at him, can offer only a weak nod and a half-smile. “See you later.”
Agent Wade gives me a hard pat on the back as I start up the steps. “Give them hell, Dougie, give them hell.”
I pay my fare, and only when the doors close behind me do I feel in any way relaxed. I take my seat as the bus pulls away, and I catch sight of Agent Wade standing to military attention and saluting me as the bus goes past. I find myself saluting back to him and don’t really know why.
CAROLE LOMBARD
HI, BETTY
I CAN HEAR SOMEONE TALKING, but I’m not really listening.
I can’t believe the predicament I’m in. I can’t eat I’m so disheartened, and I’ve smoked eight cigarettes in half an hour.
I cast my eyes around Grillers Steak House, which is more wooden than ever, as the management has covered the ceiling in beech paneling. I search out the hazy faces of the Club members, partially veiled by the incessant smoke from their cigarettes. I whisper a sad and plaintive apology to them all. I’m really sorry I have to kill all of you, but that’s life, I guess.
I still can’t believe that in two months’ time there isn’t going to be a Club anymore. That hurts more than anything. I honestly don’t know how I’m going to cope afterward.
The woman sitting at the broad table directly opposite me gives a weak but hopeful smile to no one in particular, bows her head, and talks down to her plate of liver, onions, and hash browns.
“I know it’s a terrible way to get famous, but I really have no real talent for anything else. If you can call murdering people a talent, that is.”
I immediately realize that the nine people I have to kill is about to become ten.
Which is great. Just wonderful. Thank you, God, really appreciate it.
When the woman turned up tonight, she asked everyone to call her Betty, after Betty Grable. I can’t see Betty’s legs, but I don’t imagine for a minute they would turn her into a Forces Sweetheart, though I do pretend to drop my napkin so I can bend down and look at them—just in case. I discover there are twenty legs crammed together under the tables, and I’m not altogether too sure which are Betty’s, so I sit back up again and try my hardest to concentrate on what she is saying.
