“You look like you’d be a match for anything that came along, mister,” Scottie said brusquely. “We’re here to talk to the ladies, all right? You and the other gentlemen needn’t concern yourselves.”
“You there,” Blackman said softly, “Angel.” The slim form stiffened, the head went up like a dog’s head scenting a sudden wind. But she didn’t say anything. Dixie took a step toward her. “Angel,” Blackman said gently, “where’d you get that broken cheekbone?”
“Come on, Easy, he’s not even a woman. And he’s Puerto Rican—he sure as hell isn’t blond.” Dixie stepped to put an arm around Angel’s shoulders. “Honey?” she said softly.
“He’s so out of it he doesn’t even know we’re here,” Scottie said disgustedly.
“Leave her alone,” said Dixie, “she don’t need no attention from you. Last time you said he’d go for blondes. So it’s still blondes, right?”
“We’re acting on that assumption, yes,” said Blackman. He was still looking at Angel’s cheek.
“We are looking for the Slasher,” he said suddenly, turning from Angel to the women. “And we need to know if any of you have noticed any peculiar behavior from any of your clients. I mean behavior out of the ordinary. We’re particularly interested in any episodes of asphyxiation—if any johns have tried to strangle the girls.”
“I’d like to fixiate—” one of the whores began; another cut her off. “You mean a guy who chokes the girls to get his rocks off?”
“Yes, that is what we mean,” said Scottie with exaggerated patience.
“We got the one guy, he’s Spanish. That what you looking for?”
“No. No,” said Blackman.
“We’re not going to get anything here,” said Scottie.
“Wait. Have any of you seen a van? A dark van, recent make. It might have tape across the front door panel.”
“We get vans,” said Dixie. “We get vans, Range Rovers, Coupe de Villes. And we get guys want it rough—guys want a golden shower, guys want to haggle the price. We get everything there is to get here. And all for the price of a meal at that fancy steakhouse up the block there. You know I never been to that fancy steakhouse. Four years. I’ll be twenty next week. You want to take me to that fancy steakhouse for my twentieth birthday, Blackman?”
“We’ve got girls dying,” Blackman said matter-of-factly. “We’ve got five dead already—”
“The papers say four.”
“Five. And the body count is going to rise.”
“What’s dead don’t want our help,” said Angel suddenly from the shadow. “You think you know so much, Mister Man. Well, you don’t know nothing. Do we see a dark van? This is our life, here.
“You don’t want to catch that man. You want to come up here in your uniforms and make yourselves feel like you’re doing something. Well, we’re doing something.
“You’re not going to find him. Maybe he’ll find you someday. Ain’t none of us going to live a long and happy life here.” She stopped as suddenly as she’d spoken, and walked away out of the shelter of the awning into the pouring rain.
Blackman watched her go. He sighed. “We’d appreciate it if you would call me or my partner at this number,” offering a card, “if any of you think of anything, or remember anything.”
“That your private number, handsome? Any special time you want me to call?” Twinkie was looking at the card over the shoulder of the young blonde; he was smiling hugely.
“I don’t want you to call—” Scottie snapped.
Blackman put his hand on Scottie’s arm; as they turned to leave he watched the slight form of the Puerto Rican transvestite, Angel, as she leaned in the front window of a blue station wagon. She listened, said something, listened again, then shrugged and got in the front seat. Blackman watched the car as it cruised slowly up the block through the pouring rain and disappeared around the corner.
25
Diapers and wipes and talcum powder and zinc ointment. Zelly was crying. Extra sheets for the crib and socks and six of the little Onesies Mary wore for underwear—she would have taken more but the rest were at the laundry. The stuffed pink poodle. Where had the panties come from? She had been crying all afternoon. On the phone with her mother when she could only say, “I need to leave him, Mama.” He was gone almost every night. Blankets and her eye-makeup remover and underwear. Only jeans and T-shirts; she would get the rest later. Later didn’t exist. She cried while she was changing Mary’s diaper; that wasn’t a good idea, because Mary cried too. Zelly kept seeing the images of women hidden underneath the mattress, vulnerable, excited, afraid. A few times she stopped crying but she would pass by the closet or she would see the picture of herself in her wedding gown that hung over the sofa and she would start crying again.
Twice she heard footsteps in the hall. When the wind blew through the back windows the front door rattled a little bit; she thought she was used to it but now it frightened her. It kept rattling while she packed her bag on the living room sofa. All morning long she heard his fist hitting the wall next to her head. Pat never came home in the afternoon—but he had come home the afternoon after that girl got away.
She was weak from the adrenaline running through her hands. Once when she picked up the baby she almost dropped her. She had washed her face over and over again and redone her mascara, her foundation. At some point she stopped trying to stop crying. Her eyes were racoon-ringed and they hurt.
The baby was finally asleep: she had picked up her mother’s anxiety and become fussy and difficult. It had taken her a long time to fall asleep. He wore the same pair of black leather driving gloves no matter how hot it was. Now Zelly looked at the two bags on the sofa. Only the baby’s crib toys were left to go into the blue bag. And when she put the book she was reading—Wasted: The Preppie Murder—on top of the clothes in the gray bag she was done packing. She tried to remember when he’d started staying away at night. January; Belinda Boston was murdered in January. She stood for a long time over the open bag. The baby woke up and started to cry again. “There is a certain elegance to using a knife. A certain appropriateness.” Outside there were sirens, police going by. When Zelly closed the bag it shut with a sound like a gunshot.
26
Madeleine was drinking steamed milk; it made her think of her childhood even though they’d never had anything like that on the farm. She put whipped cream from a can in her milk and thought about cream from cows. Winter mornings and cream on the milk: her father would milk a bucketful by hand and give her the cream that rose to the top. The Slasher had written a letter to the Post, and he had mentioned her name. It was a long letter, surprisingly poetic. THE PATTERN HAS BEEN BROKEN BUT THE MASTERWORK WILL NOT BE LEFT UNFINISHED, it read in part. ONE DISCORDANT NOTE DOES NOT DESTROY A SYMPHONY. WHAT IS BEING OFFERED IS NOT A SACRIFICE TO THE MOON BUT A TRUE AND BEAUTIFUL MUSIC PLAYED UPON THE THROATS OF THE GUILTY INNOCENTS. I SPARED HER, BUT I AM NOT A LACKADAISICAL KILLER. THE BITE OF MY TOOTH IS THE VIOLIN OF BEETHOVEN. THE STORM OF MY POWER HAS YET TO BE UNLEASHED. THE RIVER THAT SEPARATES ME WILL RUN MELODIOUS WITH BLOOD. They were calling him the Symphony Slasher now.
The letter had been pieced together from newspaper print, words in Times Roman, words from the Post, words from Newsday. The newspaper said, “The killer made reference to the latest victim, the twenty-seven-year-old woman who escaped an attack in the West Village in May, by name, apparently cutting her name from an article run in this paper the day after the attack.” That part of the letter, the paper reported, was heavily stained with brown liquid, most probably coffee.
He was an intelligent man, a poetic man. He was a handsome man. He drank coffee. He had sat somewhere and put together this letter, painstakingly, out of newspaper print, while drinking a cup of coffee. He knew her name.
The fact of his existence was overwhelming. She was breathing and he was breathing. John’s sister was not breathing; if Madeleine had died, what state of decomposition would her body be in now? He knew her name. There w
ere thousands of people and how could he find her again? But he had found her once. And now he haunted her like an absent lover. Even John—the night they’d met for dinner he’d walked toward her down a crowded street and he’d been the man, the motion of his innocent swinging arm the prelude to the tightening iron grasp. All that in a moment and then it was just John, and her heart had lifted toward him and she had discovered something about herself.
Madeleine didn’t want to fall in love. She knew that she could separate the grotesque thing that had happened to her from the simple act of loving or being loved—a kiss is not, she knew emphatically now, just a kiss. But she was in no way ready to take on the absurd responsibilities of love: the awkward striptease of the clumsy heart, the opening of the self to hurt—or even to happiness. In a very short time Madeleine had learned how to live without happiness. She didn’t know if she could so quickly give up a certain, safe numbness for any real feeling at all; she thought that virtually any emotion might hurt her now.
It was her boyfriend who had inflicted the blow that left her numb. His own unanticipated pain had been so great that two days after the rape, when Madeleine still could not close her eyes to sleep without the man being there, her boyfriend had asked her, “Did you feel anything?” And three years together came down to four words.
She had been unable to answer him. Not for her soul would she have answered him. What she could not forgive was that he had made her ask herself the same question. Not that she was afraid of the answer, but her mind grabbed the question like an idiot dog with a bone, and it could not let it go. What had it felt like? The space between her legs, the secret, once-inviolable space: what had it felt like?
It hadn’t felt like anything; not anything she could put a name to. Certainly not sex. A soundless bludgeoning of incredulous flesh, nerve endings refusing even to answer the indignity. A well of pain that she became aware of having felt only later. It was the thought of him that seared her, then and now. The thought of his unasked presence inside her—where even a lover has only the momentary rights we choose to bestow. She had felt nothing, and she would feel him inside her until the day she died.
When Madeleine first came to New York she needed at least the reassuring illusion of love to gird her against the indifference of the crowded streets, the sheer weight of restless, inanimate energy given off by the buses, the cars, the subway trains, and the endless circling jets. When her boyfriend asked the question she had told him to leave. He had packed and gone in the space of an afternoon, and he had not fought to stay. Madeleine had felt curiously little watching him ready his things; it had not seemed to matter. He did not love her; she was not surprised to find that she had never loved him at all.
She spooned whipped cream off the top of the milk. The letter was “untraceable.” The man made a promise: THE SYMPHONY SEASON IS ABOUT TO BEGIN. MUSIC UNDER THE MUTILATED MOON, WITNESSED BY THE EYES AND THE SILENCE OF THE TREES. WITNESS TO THE PERFECTION OF MY VIRTUOSITY. WHAT WOMAN IN THE CROWD IS WAITING TO DIE? WHAT WOMAN WILL FOLLOW THE MUSIC TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION? THE CODA WILL COME BEFORE THE FINAL NOTE. THERE WILL BE NO MISTAKES. THIS TIME THE KNIFE WILL NOT FALTER. THE MUSIC WILL BE SWEET. IF YOU TRY TO STAY MY HAND YOU WILL MAKE SCHUBERT ALL THE SWEETER. The Slasher Task Force released a statement that interpreted the killer’s words as a direct threat to murder someone at the next New York Philharmonic concert in the Concerts in the Parks series, in Queens’ Cunningham Park on Friday, June nineteenth. Every year the Philharmonic gave a tour of free concerts in New York City’s parks. Schubert’s Quartetsatz was scheduled to be played, along with Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and two pieces by Delius and Sibelius, composers Madeleine had never heard of. SYMPHONY SLASHER PROMISES HARM AT PHILHARM, read the News. KILLER AT THE CONCERT? asked the Post. SERIAL KILLER THREATENS TO COMMIT MURDER AT OUTDOOR CONCERT, said the Times.
Madeleine liked Schubert. She found Beethoven too heavy. She was thinking things idly, stirring her canned whipped cream: Beethoven, Schubert. The particular shade of brown of John’s eyes. It was going to happen again: it had to. She had watched the cut on her thigh heal; of course she’d known it would happen again. The cut was clean and small and it healed quickly. When it was gone it left a red mark, like a brand. Once the murders began they didn’t stop until the murderer was captured or dead. She and John were simpletons. This man was not a man he was a force, like a hurricane or plague; you cannot kill a hurricane.
Her steamed milk was getting cold. Her father had gone back to Idaho three days ago. “I’m okay, Daddy,” she’d said, and it had been so hard to lie. She had never lied to her father before. The Slasher was not a force of nature. If you cut him he would bleed. The symphony season is about to begin, is it, buddy? she thought grimly. As she finished her milk she saw John’s face again, dear, and accepted it. I don’t care how crazy John and I are (“The killer made reference to the latest victim”), it’s open season on bastards like you, that’s what it is. And she smiled, and felt something giving way, deep down, like seismic activity beneath a quiet surface: a shifting of plates. And she pushed her hair away from her face and got up to call John.
27
Zelly sat with red eyes in her mother’s sun room, cradling a cup of tea. The tea was cold, but the heavy mug felt good in her hands. She looked at her mother; there was a sewing pattern—half lying on the sofa next to her, it made soft crinkly sounds every time she moved. There was a pile of threads on the pattern, different shades of purple. Her sewing scissors caught the light and sent it back in a bright beam that hurt Zelly’s eyes. Mrs. Thuringen had been talking about other things, Zelly’s sister Linda’s upcoming wedding in St. Louis, her brother-in-law Jack’s new podiatry practice in New Mexico. As she talked she hemmed a dress she was making for Zelly’s sister Emmy. Two shades of purple. Now she sat quietly, waiting for Zelly to start.
“I guess Mary’s finally down,” Zelly said. She was biting her lip. She wanted a cup of hot chocolate.
“I would cry too if my mother hauled me out of my house and took me to Grandma’s and stuck me in some playpen and expected me to go to sleep,” said her mother. She put down the purple dress. “What happened, honey?”
Zelly breathed deeply. “I think—of course I don’t know, but I think—that Pat may be involved in something pretty terrible.”
“What something, honey?” Her mother’s voice was gentle and all-accepting: there had never been any fear or any sin or any monster that she could not understand. In spite of having so many brothers and sisters Zelly had never felt neglected or unloved; her mother’s love was a high-powered beam that shown with equal intensity on whatever child it happened to fall. And Zelly was still the baby. “You haven’t been at all like yourself lately,” her mother said, running her finger unconsciously over the smooth steel of her sewing scissors, and Zelly felt a child’s tears welling up. She looked up from her cup. “Mama, I want a cup of hot chocolate,” she said suddenly. She didn’t want to talk about it in the sun room, where there were a thousand fragments of happy memory.
Here in the womblike comfort of the house where she’d grown up, Pat’s recent actions seemed less sinister, and more humiliating. The house stood next to the Stevens College campus; most of the other old Victorians had been converted into dorms long ago. Mrs. Thuringen’s ten children had grown up in a warren of nineteen rooms; there was a servants’ staircase that they’d all thought was secret, there was an old pool table in the attic, there were endless halls and doors and closets to hide in. Every room had three doors, or four, and every room led into every other room or into long, off-white halls. When it rained all the children played hide-and-seek for hours at a time.
Zelly knew every corner. Her favorite place to hide was behind the heavy curtains that hung over the bay windows in the sun room, a bright circular room that faced the backyard on the first floor. Behind the curtains were child-size window seats, where Zelly and her sisters had curled up with books: Jane Eyre, Half Magic, the Narnia series. It was
a different land behind the curtains, it was every land they read about and it was very far away from the dining room next door or the sewing room or the pantry down the hall. Zelly had overlapping memories, from all the times she’d hidden there, layers of sun and snow and rain together, and the smell of old brocade, looking at motes floating in sun or not able to see at all for the gloom, cold or too hot and sweating, a hundred times, five hundred times, like a chrysalis safe in a cocoon.
She’d shown all her hiding places to Pat one Thanksgiving afternoon, she and two brothers and a sister, flushed and full of turkey and pulling Pat from one insignificant site to another—over here, remember? Under the great old wooden table, behind the northeast-corner door. Until Pat begged off for the football game.
What could she say to her mother? I think Pat is having an affair, or—what? At the table where she’d had five thousand breakfasts. He’s got another woman’s panties in the closet? To her mother. He tried to strangle me to get his rocks off? The father of her child. The red-brown curtains hung at the windows as they had hung for thirty years. “I’m just tired,” she said.
“That’s nonsense,” Mrs. Thuringen said genially, “but you’ll either tell me or you won’t,” and Zelly felt again the unbearable comfort of this house, the unbridgeable distance she was from it now. She was not a child; she had lost the child’s right to unexamined safety.
They went into the kitchen, Mrs. Thuringen carrying her sewing. They were silent as she made the chocolate, one cup for Zelly and one for herself. Zelly stared at the black-and-white linoleum floor until the perfect squares swam out of their boundaries and leaped up toward her eyes. She promised herself she wouldn’t cry and took a sip of her chocolate and started to cry.
Mrs. Thuringen busied herself about the stove. If her back were turned maybe that would make it easier for her daughter to speak. “Well,” said Zelly, “at dinner a few weeks ago he said some really disgusting things.” That wasn’t where she wanted to start.
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