Zelly held up the panties. They definitely weren’t hers. Even before the baby her hips had never been that small. She gingerly held the panties up. Lilac satin, white lace. She turned to the inside tag, feeling like a voyeur, feeling horrible: size five. Not Zelly’s size. Zelly wore a seven. And not new.
Pat hadn’t made love with her in two weeks. He wasn’t normally an adventurous lover; even when they made love more often, before the baby, he had seemed content with ordinary touch and gesture, fashioned over the years into their own comfortable ritual. Before he tried to strangle her she would never have expected him to initiate anything kinky, in spite of his pornography. If he wanted spice he had never shown it. If Zelly wanted spice she had never dared tell him. With Pat some silences were inviolable, and his silence surrounding the sexual act was sacrosanct. Zelly never knew whether Pat’s silence came from Pat or from Zelly’s own sympathetic imaginings—that some woman had hurt him terribly, that he had been duped by tragedy and that sex was for him not a joyous act but a field of intimated betrayal. He seemed almost afraid, even after eight years, to let himself go, to experiment. Some perfunctory cunnilingus, a few missionary thrusts, and Zelly with the wet spot on her side of the bed. The only time she had attempted to perform fellatio on him he had shoved her away brusquely. But there was pornography in the closet, pornography stuffed between the mattress and the box spring. He didn’t want her but he wanted those paper women. He didn’t buy lingerie for her, but he had lingerie hidden in a bag on top of his filth.
Zelly began to cry as she stuffed the panties back in the bag. She’d heard about things like this. The baby looked at her, startled, and started to cry herself.
“Oh, Mary,” Zelly said, scooping her up and hugging her against her breast. “Daddy’s sent away for this stuff in the mail, I’ll bet. I’ve heard about this, honey. Mommy’s okay. Sometimes men send away for things like this at the back of girlie magazines.” She pushed angrily at the pile of slick-shiny books. Mary started to really wail. “You don’t know what a girlie magazine is, do you, honey? Come to Mama. Mama needs a hug. We won’t say anything to Daddy, will we?” Zelly rocked the baby and cried. Mary grew quiet.
“Unless—” She looked inside the bag again. There might have been a reptile in there. She reached in; she didn’t know that she closed her eyes when she did it. Lavender silk, a white-lace bow. They could have come from one of those places at the back of the magazines. But they could have come from someplace else, too.
The late nights. Size five—she must be a slim woman. Lavender—a romantic color. The whole scene came to her, like a memory: a slim-hipped woman, half turned away, pulling the lavender panties down her hips, her thighs. Under the garish impersonal light in a motel room.
The emergency calls Pat just had to answer. The slim woman reclining (was she blond? brunet?) on anonymous hotel sheets. Zelly’s imagination lent the scene an orange neon sign blinking outside the window. A brunette? Younger than Zelly, slimmer.
He talked in his sleep. What had he said? “I will.” The panties lay in her hand and she couldn’t stop looking at them. Lavender silk, white lace. So he had another woman. What else had he said, that night at dinner? Something about the greatest love. He was gone all the time and he had another woman and he had tried to strangle her the day after one of the Slasher victims had escaped, he talked in his sleep he hit the wall, but he had another woman that was why he was never home.
A loner, probably divorced. But Ted Bundy had a girlfriend until she called the police.
Marginally employed. But there was John Wayne Gacy in Chicago.
So busy driving from place to place. But he had another woman.
Has an excessive love of pornography. A slim-hipped brunette.
The late nights. The distance. The odd, disjointed things he sometimes said. I will.
An adulterer. A murderer. Zelley stared at the panties in her hand. My God.
23
Madeleine expected him to have a plan. “You know that the only way you’re going to catch him is if something preposterous happens,” she said over dinner at the same restaurant a few days later. June first, and it was pouring rain outside. “So you’re going to have to put yourself into preposterous situations. You don’t have any kind of training, do you? As a private investigator or anything?”
“I’m an accountant.”
“I forgot.”
“That’s how you know somebody’s an accountant. If you forget.” She smiled; Madeleine Levy didn’t seem so angry tonight. She was able to smile—but when the waiter’s arm crossed in front of her face as he reached to pour the wine, Madeleine started and began to cry. John liked it that she didn’t apologize. He wanted to touch her arm, as her father had done, but of course he didn’t.
Now she expected him to have a plan. “You are aware,” she said, “of the ridiculousness of our position?” The papers had printed Madeleine’s description of her attacker, and a police artist’s sketch. Caucasian male, twenty-six to thirty-two years of age, six foot two to six foot four, approximately two hundred pounds, dark hair, brown eyes, no distinguishing marks or scars on face. The sketch showed a surprisingly handsome face with a thin nose, large black or brown eyes, a mobile mouth.
“That isn’t him,” she said now. “There was something about the eyes, I can’t describe it. See how they’re almond-shaped here? So that they look almost Asian? Well, that’s not right. His eyes did look almost Asian, but it wasn’t the shape. He’s definitely not Asian, or even part Asian. It always seems to be you white boys who do these serial rapes and killings, if you don’t mind my pointing that out. But there was something . . . and the mouth. The artist got the shape right—the lips were that full—but we couldn’t decide on the expression. The artist tried cruel and he tried angry and he tried petulant even, but he didn’t get it. We couldn’t find implacable, and that’s what it was. It didn’t come to me until after. And that set of the mouth is characteristic, unconscious, I know it is. It determines the entire cast of the face. This is not the man. I wish it were, but I couldn’t bear to tell the police artist how unlike him it really is. He was really wonderful, he tried so hard.”
“Those sketches don’t usually look like the real guy, anyway,” said John. Her face looked so pretty across the table. She had been so used. “When they catch the real guy I never think the sketch looks like him. When they caught Berkowitz they had, what? Two, three sketches that all looked completely different.” She had not asked him anything about Cheryl, and he didn’t ask her anything more about the attack. Every man who walked by their table looked at Madeleine. John saw her flinch under their looking, and he felt such guilt for his sex. But he was careful also not to not look at her; he stood on the thin line between her shame and her rage.
He was overwhelmed with the knowledge that this woman had been raped. He had read a statistic that said that one out of every four American women will be sexually molested during her lifetime. He knew now that hundreds of women he passed on the street—thousands that he had passed in his lifetime—had been raped. Horror need not be tattooed on the arm, need not turn the hair white or the eyes old.
But John and Madeleine were comfortable together, really; they were like children conspiring under the dining room table. She didn’t seem to be interested in what he might be thinking.
“You don’t know a thing about the West Village, do you?” And he gladly ceded his ignorance. “Well, you’re going to get to know it.” She was like a ten-year-old: this was her house and her toys. “You’re going to get to know it as well as he does. I’ve been reading about serial killers.” John nodded; so had he. The Stranger Beside Me, The Boston Strangler, The Nightstalker. Some of it was sensationalistic pulp and some of it was riveting, terrifying. “These people,” she went on, “tend to drive around the same area again and again and again, looking for targets. And they all seem to be into pornography and hookers. A lot of these guys kill hookers, and when that’s the case the police go to th
e hookers themselves and ask them which of their johns—” here she smiled—“their clients, are particularly kinky. Sadistic, like they beat up the girls or they need something special, violent. Of course in this case the guy doesn’t go after prostitutes, but he may go to them anyway, for whatever kind of sex he wants when he isn’t killing. We know he probably can’t—perform—very well in a normal domestic setting. And the books say he’s unlikely to have a lot of steady girlfriends.”
“Ted Bundy had a girlfriend.”
“And she turned him in to the police. This guy’s not going to have a wife or girlfriend. Who could live with that kind of weirdo and not know it?”
“The books say that this kind of sociopath appears to be completely normal. That it’s almost impossible to tell by his everyday behavior.”
“Do you believe that? While he buries twenty-nine bodies underneath the kitchen floor. I think a woman would have to be awfully stupid not to figure something out. Anyway, the books say he probably doesn’t have anybody. And I’ll wager he doesn’t get a lot of dates. So where does he go? The meat-packing district.”
“The what?”
“Where were you born?”
“Queens.”
“That must be a lot farther away than Idaho. That’s where I was born. Funny place for a nice Jewish girl to come from, isn’t it?” Madeleine had grown up on a farm, where there was no such thing as rape. Her father had grown up in New York City and didn’t want that life for his family, his children. Two boys, two girls. All blond, like their Swedish mother. Her father used to say that he had sired a bunch of Nazis. It always surprised Madeleine that he could joke about that. He had fought in the Korean War. She adored him, and by extension she had always liked and trusted men. She was by no means a fool or an innocent, but she had always found women quick to judge and quick to talk, and she was comforted by the predictability and trustworthiness of men’s silences. She was a woman who claimed not to understand women, whereas men had never been a mystery. Now they were a mystery and a terror.
“Anyway”—John kept loosing the thread of what she was saying in the music of how she was saying it—“the meat-packing district is just above the West Village. It’s where most of the beef that comes into the city is processed.” Maybe her voice was ordinary, but it didn’t seem ordinary to John. “I’ll take you there,” she said, “it’s kind of neat. But the thing is, at night it’s what’s known as a ‘haven of prostitution.’ There are hookers all over the place. It’s right next to this guy’s turf. There’s a twenty-four-hour deli up the street from me that nobody goes to after about ten at night because all the hookers and transvestite hookers and their buddies and their pimps and their johns are there. I’m really sorry about that word.”
“It is an unfortunate name.”
“No, it’s not,” she said, and she smiled again, and John knew that for that moment she forgot that she had been raped. Then she looked down at her wine and he knew she had remembered. “The hookers,” he prompted.
“The hookers. There are hookers all along the West Side Highway, too. That’s all right around this guy’s stomping ground. You’re going to have to take some time off from work.”
“I have time coming.”
“I’m on vacation already. I’m a teacher. Third grade. The kids think I’m in Yellowstone National Park.” She was quiet a moment. “You’re going to have to go places I can’t go, so I’m going to have to show you those places during the day. I won’t walk alone in the meat district anytime, but during the day I can go with you and show you where the hookers go. And we can drive through at night—you have a car. You’re going to have to get to know this whole part of town as well as he does. You’re going to have to talk to anyone he might talk to. You’re going to have to ask the hookers if they’ve got a kinky john who fits the description. With a peculiar set to the mouth. He might beat them—and he probably goes for blondes. You think you can do it?”
“I think you’re wonderful, Madeleine.”
“Do you think you can do it?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re a nice guy, John. Maybe if I didn’t find men revolting right now—all men—I’d like to get to know you better. I had a boyfriend. Three years. He wanted to know if I felt anything. I knew what he meant. So right now I think you’re all kind of disgusting, okay? It’s nothing personal.”
“Sometimes I think you’re right.”
“I wish I had known your sister,” she said suddenly, and at that he could not speak. “Now I’m sorry. Do you pray?”
“Yes. I don’t like to talk about it, but I do.”
“Well, I never did before. But you’ve got to know we don’t have a chance in hell of actually finding this guy. So I think I’m going to start praying, John.” She held up her glass: an apology, an acceptance of an apology.
“To prayer,” he said, and they smiled at each other over the garnet in their glasses.
24
Blackman and Scottie sat in their patrol car at Little West Twelfth Street and Greenwich. Manhattan’s notorious meat-packing district. The windshield wipers hit the bottom of the window with a magnified, repeated thud. The cement island across the street blurred and came clear, blurred and came clear. The neon sign of a restaurant shone eerie orange beyond the island, up the block. Across from the island a line of hookers waited on a loading dock under an old wooden awning. The force of the rain sent a line of little stars exploding up off the pavement in front of them.
“I hate coming down here,” Scottie said.
“You know the drill. This is Slasher turf. Our man operates out of the West Village, the meat-packing district borders on the West Village. If he uses prostitutes, he’s likely to use them here. And he may like to rough up the girls, if they’ve met him they’ll remember him.”
A gray car appeared out of the sheeting rain and slowed at the island; a tall woman in bondage heels skipped across the cascading street, her shoes making little fountains of flashing silver on the shiny asphalt. She leaned over the passenger-side window and then disappeared inside the car, carefully shaking each foot before closing the door.
“We’ve already been here twice. I’ve got a bed at home, you know,” Scottie said, looking dubiously at the hookers across the street.
“This is police work at its finest,” Blackman said dryly. “Dogged determination, strict dedication to every particular—”
“Bullshit. A real bed, with pillows.”
“Pussy.” Blackman got out of the car.
There were eight hookers. Most of them were smoking. Two big transvestites stood apart, their heads close. Five white women leaned across one another in animated conversation. They wore tight, short skirts, and the tops of their stockings showed. One of them had very high hair. Another’s eyes were all but closed by false lashes and liner. One was younger than the rest, with straight blond hair parted in the middle, the way girls wore it in the seventies. Her face was without makeup; her eyes were dim with drugs. She saw the policemen and smiled, completely without subterfuge or feeling.
The big whore who’d gotten into the car had been talking to a little blond-wigged black woman, who stood now as if unplugged, a cigarette in midair. A little way away from the others stood a slim woman, leaning against the wall; her back was directly under the edge of the awning, and rain hit her buttocks but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Evening, ladies,” said Scottie as he and Blackman walked up. “And gentlemen,” nodding to the big transvestites.
“—mother,” one of the transvestites muttered without malice, turning away. She took a cigarette out of her bag and made an elaborate ritual of lighting it.
“Don’t worry,” Blackman said briskly, “we’re not out to roust anybody tonight. We just want to ask a few questions.” The whores looked down, looked away. The young blond one was still smiling vacantly at Scottie.
“We’d like to know,” Blackman went on, “whether any of you’ve noticed any of your johns ac
ting strange lately.”
“You know, Officer,” said the blond black woman, coming a step closer out of the dark, “it’s the oddest thing you should ask.” She was shaking her head, all concern. “Every man who comes by here seems to want to get his dick sucked.”
Blackman sighed. “Don’t bust my chops, Dixie.”
“You’re looking for the Slasher again,” said one of the transvestites in a bored voice.
“This is just a routine investigation,” Scottie said. Dixie squealed with pleasure. “Oh, I love it when you say that! Hey, Angel, honey, it’s just a routine investigation: Come on out, honey.”
The girl over at the edge of the awning turned an indolent swan’s neck and looked at Dixie. For a moment there was no recognition in her eyes. “Dixie?” she said, but the voice was male. As she moved toward the light her delicate face seemed to shift and split: one cheekbone was higher than the other, and swollen, and the white of one eye was red. “Huh?” she said; again the male voice. But the wounded face was wholly feminine.
“We got a Spanish guy likes to beat up on the girls,” one of the white whores was saying. “We don’t nobody go with him anymore.”
A car door slammed and the big whore stepped away from the gray car. “Hey, Twinkie,” Dixie called, “we got company. These guys want to know if we’ve seen any rough stuff lately.”
“Hell,” said the big whore affably, “we got people here specialize in the rough stuff.” She laughed, and nodded hello to the cops. “It’s all done with mirrors,” she said to Scottie, who was staring at her feet.
“Where do you guys go for shoes, anyway?” Scottie asked disgustedly; Twinkie laughed again. “There’s a place to buy anything, honey. Anything.” Then, to Dixie, “They want to know about the rough trade? What for, they going to arrest them for assaulting innocent women?”
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