The man hurt the woman. The boy wanted to grow up so he could make him stop. “When you grow up,” she said, “you can take care of me.
“When you grow up,” she said, “we’ll go to London to visit the Queen.”
10
He was driving on the Long Island Expressway. It was six thirty-five in the morning; he’d just stopped at a 7-Eleven off Exit 25 and bought the papers. He had a Styrofoam cup of coffee propped up next to the shift bar; he shook it with the top on and pried a triangle out of the plastic top. Lots of sugar, that was good.
It was still night in his head. The ride last night past the old train yards on the Jersey side, the hypnotic yellow lights in the tunnel, the low ceiling. There had been another ceiling, it was the last thing she saw. For some reason he always thought of that in the tunnel. His wife was at home sleeping; he had come in at two-fifteen, just before the baby woke his wife. The baby ate at nine and again at two thirty-five. Every night, two thirty-five. He had lain beside his wife and then he had left before dawn.
After the tunnel the dark streets. Park the van on Perry, two blocks in from the water. He never planned his kills, but he was always ready. The tarp laid out in the back of the van. The hunting knife in its holster on his belt. Mud on the license plates, tape across the logo on the front doors: Wyche Electric.
Should he go to the hookers tonight? The moon was full above him as he parked the van, white through the crazy silhouette the maple branches made. The hookers were always a risk. Some of them weren’t even women. That one who blew him a week ago, then it was a boy. Young—sixteen, seventeen. With a black eye and a busted cheekbone after he got through with him.
So lovely she had been, high fine cheekbones like blades; a man could slice his tongue on them. Slanted Latin eyes, rich dark hair. Blond could never put its mouth on him—a sacrilege, an obscenity. But her—heavy makeup, red red lips, slim-hipped. She was small, so small, he could have broken her back with one hand. And then, in the van, her mouth. Expert forgetfulness, mechanical—he liked that. The whores’ professionalism pleased him, their lack of sentiment. Their knowledge of their place. The whores down by the Holland Tunnel would do it for five dollars; they were a sorry lot of crackheads, old by eighteen, by twenty dead and gone. The small Latin one had worked him professionally; he caressed her dark hair, held her neck, and found some surcease from pain.
And when it was over she had smiled with blotched lips and offered him horrible things. Had cupped a delicately clawed, red-fingered hand to her own crotch and outlined the bulge hidden there, and had offered things no woman can offer.
A sickening, a tightening in the belly, sharp disgust. Screaming, DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? not seeing anything, a fist slamming into the soft eye socket, the sharp deceptive bone in the cheek. He had not sliced his fist on that bone; he had heard the bone break.
He had not gone back there for a long time after that, until last night when he had heard the call of the shadowed loading docks. He always wanted the hookers dark. Dark, black hair and dark, dark eyes. Dark for inconsequential pleasure. But last night he had wanted light.
After he parked the van he walked and waited. Not far, if it was meant to be she would walk right up to him. Sometimes he couldn’t wait, last night he’d relieved himself right on the street, facing an old brownstone wall.
When he saw her he knew she was meant to be his. The papers said every full moon, but he didn’t really think so. There were nights and nights when no blond woman passed by.
This one was walking alone, north, on Washington Street. Eleven-twenty. There was a passage—hardly a passage, an intimation—in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastorale, just before the thunderstorm starts, a three-note intimation. He found himself humming it now, da-da-de, as the girl walked toward him up the block, now in shadow, now her hair lit yellow under the yellow light from the street lamps. Just before the full fury of the thunderstorm hit: what had Beethoven waited for that made him able to write that phrase?
She was close now, just two houses away. He couldn’t see her face. Only the blond hair stirred him. He could remember this much: the knife falling through the air had looked enormous.
Just one house away now. He waited, perfectly coiled, unaware that he was smiling. He wished women had never started wearing sneakers everywhere they went, he missed the romantic echo of high heels on cement. He would have liked to hear that lonely, fragile clack along the sidewalk. But she made no sound. Da-da-de.
As she passed him he rose, silent, inexorable, and in two steps he was upon her, one hand over her mouth, the other around her waist, lifting her back and down to the shelter of the basement enclosure.
They almost never tried to scream. His wife had told him a story once, about how when she was eleven she went into the bathroom at the neighborhood library. The bathroom was down a flight of stairs at the end of a long corridor in the basement. As she went down the steps she saw a man standing by the front door—a big man, dirty, with construction boots. She slipped past him down the steps.
When she was in the stall she heard footsteps coming down the hallway. She was not surprised when they came into the ladies’ room, not surprised that they headed toward her stall, not surprised to see a pair of construction boots stop underneath the stall door. A large, veiny hand came over the top of the stall, shook it, disappeared. The boots did not move. She scrambled in her little eleven-year-old’s pocketbook for a weapon. A nail file. If he tries to go under the stall I can poke his eyes, she thought. If he tries to go over I can poke his hands first, then his eyes. The big hand came back over the top of the stall door. The door shook, held, shook and held. After a long time the hand disappeared, the boots disappeared, and the boots’ heavy tread receded away along the corridor.
She had not thought of screaming. She had had the presence of mind to arm herself, to form a plan of defense. But she had not thought of screaming. Even when she opened the stall door and instantly found herself running full-tilt up the stairs to the lobby (having lost forever the time it took her to leave the ladies’ room and run down the hall), she didn’t think of screaming. And she told no one. Every woman had a story about terror. It was part of them.
He had pulled the woman down the steps and wrapped his hands around her throat. As always he loved the smoothness of a woman’s neck. A woman’s skin was always softer than his memory of skin.
She had lost consciousness so quickly, and he had been seduced by her motionlessness. He had forgotten her.
She kicked him. Just before the moment of ecstasy, just before the knife. She rolled away and flung her leg like a javelin; she brought her knee up and butted his stomach. In his shock the knife had hung lifeless in his hand. He had not thought she would act. She had kicked him then, hard, between the legs, and pain as exquisite as an orgasm had rocketed from his groin to his brain.
He could not imagine how she’d gotten away. To have broken the tableau, to have moved out of step—his head hurt and he thought of the same thing over and over. His uncle, who had raised him after his parents died, slapping his face again and again and saying, “Lazy, stupid, lazy, stupid,” again and again, and his own head turning with comic jerks, like the head of a marionette.
Days before the urge to kill came upon him he saw the highway lights behind his eyes, the tunnel lights, the letters on the wall of the tunnel, NEW JERSEY/NEW YORK, the way he’d seen them the day his uncle drove him from the town to the city after his parents had died.
His uncle had beat him. Not for any offense—for every offense, for the mud on his shoes or the expression on his face. For doing or not doing. The garbage wasn’t taken out, the television was on. The whole of his childhood he saw as through a black screen; in some places the screen obscured everything: he did not remember his parents. In some places the screen was relatively light: baseball, his bicycle, anything outside that stucco house. The ceilings there were high, the long windows let in a lot of light. But still in his memory the rooms were dark.
His aunt was a shadow only, a tentative pat, a rare furtive embrace. He saw her always recoiling from words or blows. Even as a child he suspected that she was relieved to see some of the pain deflected from her body to his. That her love and her shame were the same thing.
He had left that house as soon as he could, and when he left he forgot. He remembered almost nothing now of his childhood. The smell of summer, the sound a fist makes. He remembered no love. He remembered only the first love. The first kill.
He was a big boy for thirteen, big hands, long legs. The girl was nine years old. He sometimes played with her in the deserted train yards on the other side of Yellowstone Boulevard in the middle-class neighborhood where he lived with his uncle and aunt. The girl was from some other street, some other neighborhood on the other side of the yards. He didn’t have any friends his own age.
He didn’t remember her name anymore. They played together through the long summer afternoons; the tracks were live tracks: a train would come. He went with her to everywhere. Trains to Paris, trains to Guadeloupe. They never planned to meet; he found her under the weedy trestle, she discovered him hidden in the brush watching boys his own age play baseball.
One afternoon his uncle beat him again. He never knew why, a rage out of the clear blue sky. His aunt watched. He saw again the near-unconscious relief, the barely perceived, ill-hidden survivor’s joy: it isn’t me. Her hair was mousebrown.
His uncle hit him until he was tired of hitting him. His uncle was not a big man, nor particularly strong; to the boy he seemed strong. The boy did not fight back.
He escaped at last into the summer afternoon, cheekbone bruised and lip bitten in unconscious humiliation. The deserted fields lay hazy under the sun. The girl was under the heavy stone bridge that held the only really live tracks to run through these fields. Sometimes they put nickels and pennies on the tracks and waited for a train to come and transform their offerings into fantastic shapes, currency for a dream world.
The girl had a pocketful of change. She had blond hair; it reminded him of something. He watched her kneeling to place pennies on the gleaming track, and he called her name, the name he had not yet forgotten, called her to come down into the shadow of the waiting bridge.
So far he had only dreamed of sex. A nascent warmth, a suspected pleasure. When she turned her trusting face to his he exploded in a fury wholly unexpected even to himself. While he took her he saw his aunt’s face. When he put his hands around her throat he saw his uncle’s hands. He did not know whether he was inside or outside. She did not cry out.
At the moment of orgasm he knew that he had pressed too hard: her eyes were pupilless, her lids fluttered and stopped. And the moment was more than the moment, it was a continuation of something long lost, the final piece of a forgotten puzzle.
He looked at the girl’s dead face and he felt such love. For a moment there was only the girl’s dead face and the unmoving sun and the anonymous buzz of the summer field. Then the enormity of what he had done crashed down around him. He shook her; he could not comprehend his power. She did not move. He had acted, and she did not move.
He left the girl where she lay, in the weeds under the train bridge. As he moved away from the body a train went by overhead, monstrous, a noise without boundaries. It sucked up all thought, like air in the wake behind its echo. He wanted to cry out his power but he only turned away.
A group of teenagers found the body two days later when they went down to the train yards to split a couple of six-packs. Nobody ever found the killer. For days the papers were full of the murder, and for weeks mothers kept their girls close to home. There were no clues. A size-ten sneaker print in the trampled grass. Dark hair on the body. Everyone thought there was a crazed killer on the loose but then he must have moved on.
For years that single act served as the basis for a thousand fantasies. It was so easy to kill. He felt the equal of his uncle at last; he alone knew what he was capable of. A week later when his uncle hit him he saw something in the boy’s eyes that made him never hit him again.
He didn’t understand how this one could have gotten away. They lay still, they waited to be killed, immobilized by his power.
For the first time his rage was unextinguished. His love had been denied.
When she ran screaming he did not follow her. Better to fade into the shadows up on Little West Twelfth Street, the scream like a single note from a violin string reverberating in his head.
11
SLASHER VICTIM LIVES! Zelly sat at the table with the New York papers spread out in front of her. The Times, the Post, Newsday, and the Daily News. Whenever she looked up she could see Mary napping like a cat in the puddle of sun that came into her playpen through the late-afternoon windows.
This was Zelly’s quiet time. Pat had worked late last night, and he’d taken off again very early in the morning; he hadn’t spoken a word. There were always jobs, jobs that took him away all hours of the day and night, but payment was slow, and equipment and supplies ate up every bit of the potential profits. Zelly’d had to ask her mother for a four-thousand-dollar loan just to make ends meet for another three or four months.
Zelly read all four accounts. Raped and strangled but she struggled free: Zelly felt a thrill of empathetic horror. Why had she been walking alone on Washington Street? Zelly didn’t even walk on her own safe Washington Street by herself after ten at night; when he was home she had Pat go out for anything they needed.
Of course there was some doubt. The woman had been strangled, not slashed. The Post said there was a knife, the Times didn’t mention a knife. The Daily News screamed knife. Newsday was noncommittal. A flash of steel, a possible knife.
The paper listed the characteristics of serial killers. Zelly had read them a hundred places: The Only Living Witness, The Green River Killer, The Stranger Beside Me, The Shoemaker, Killer Clown, The Man with the Candy. But she read them again now.
He was a loner, probably divorced, if he’d ever been married at all. A man like that would never be able to sustain a relationship. But Zelly had read about one in England who was married, and Ted Bundy had a girlfriend until she called the police.
Marginally employed, meaning that he couldn’t hold a job; serial killers are generally so involved in their fantasies, and so busy driving from place to place looking for victims, that they’re unable to hold down a full-time job. But John Wayne Gacy in Chicago headed a thriving construction business while he tortured and killed thirty-four young men, and Dean Corll in Houston had a candy factory.
Has an excessive love of pornography, particularly violent pornography, which he uses to fuel his murderous fantasies. But all men liked pornography, Zelly suspected, and all of it looked violent to her.
There was a strong possibility that the killer was someone marginally involved with police work: a security guard, someone who had tried and failed to become a policeman. But the police always said that, invariably, as though they couldn’t believe that anyone could elude them without the benefit of their own training.
The killer was a victim of severe childhood abuse, physical and probably sexual in nature. It was a given that sexually abused boys grew up to be abusive, possibly murderous, men. But every woman Zelly had ever asked—every woman—had a story about childhood sexual abuse, from a relative or a stranger, one time or a thousand times. Every woman. We should be killing them faster than they can kill us, she thought.
The killer wanted to make a statement to the world with these murders: that was why he left the bodies naked, or half-naked, on the street to be found. But what was the statement? It was one of the tragedies of these cases that no one but the killer ever really understood the killings.
There were footsteps coming up the stairs. The thin sound of whistling, just three notes: da-da-de. That would be Pat. He wasn’t usually home in the afternoon. Suddenly she felt as if she were doing something wrong, like a child caught reading by flashlight after lights out. She pushed the papers i
nto a nervous pile as the door swung open.
The baby started to cry as Pat came in the door. It was always that way. Zelly kept telling Pat it wasn’t him, and it wasn’t, he just woke up the baby and the baby woke up crabby.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” she said as he came in the door. “Is everything okay?”
“I can see the whole family is happy I’m home,” he said. He pulled off his black leather driver’s gloves, which he wore even in warm weather, and put them down on the table next to the newspapers. Something was wrong. Zelly got up to go to the baby but he blocked her way.
“Let her cry,” he said.
“Pat, I have to go to her.”
“What about me?”
“Would you like me to get you some coffee? She’s just crabby, you know she cries when she’s woken up. I’ll get your coffee in a minute.”
“I don’t want a cup of coffee. Come into the bedroom.”
“The baby—”
“Fuck the baby.” He grabbed her arm, up and painfully away from her body, and pushed her toward the bed. Zelly could see the baby sagged crying against the playpen netting as Pat threw her on the bed.
She was not afraid. She was extremely shocked—“Fuck the baby”—but she was not afraid. He threw her down and unzipped the pants of his blue workman’s uniform and he seemed almost unaware of her. She wanted to say, the baby, but she knew he wouldn’t hear her. He didn’t hear the baby crying. He was smiling.
He didn’t ask her to take off her clothes, and he didn’t help her take them off. He stood there smiling. Zelly pulled her sweatpants down over her hips; there was a baby screaming inside her head. It was another woman here pulling down her pants, another woman listening to another woman’s baby screaming. My husband is raping me, she thought incoherently.
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