“Wait a second,” she said. “I want to have a good time, Mike, but absolutely everything is not in the picture, do you hear me?” What he had here, Till realized, was a clear, straightforward case of a specific fragrance emerging from a sentence as a whole, instead of blooming into the foreground of a lot of other, lesser smells. And in this case, the fragrance was that of a fresh fruit salad, heavy on the melons but with clean, ringing top notes of lime, just now liberated from the grocer’s wrapping. Dazzled, he felt momentarily off-balance, as if his weight were on the wrong foot.
“Loud and clear. I don’t have those kinds of designs on you.”
“You don’t?” In spite of everything, it was a kind of shock. He could smell it too: the fruit salad had been topped with a layer of thin, dark German pumpernickel. From two words. He was going to kill this wonderful girl, but part of him wished he could eat her too.
“Just wait at the bottom of the stairs. There’s another door, and I have to get the light.”
The habit of obedience rooted her to the floor as he squeezed past and pushed a third key into a third lock. Again Lori took in the heaviness of the mechanism, the thunk of precision-made machinery falling into place. Whatever made Mike happy, he had taken pains to keep it safe. Mike grasped her elbow and drew her after him into the dark room. The door closed heavily behind her, and Mike said, “Okay, Lori, take a gander at my sandbox, my pride and joy.”
He flipped up a switch and in the sudden glare of illumination she heard him relocking the door. In all the sparkle and shine she thought for a moment that she was actually looking at a metal sandbox. When her vision cleared, she glanced over her shoulder to see him tucking a key into his pocket.
“Oh my God,” she said, and stepped away from him through a briefly hovering cloud of old saddles and baseball mitts.
“Lori Terry. Here you are.”
“You’re him.”
“I am?”
“You’re the Ladykiller guy. Goddamn.” (Concrete sidewalks. Steel girders, plus maple syrup. She imprinted her own odors upon the words that issued from her, and she had the strength of character to shape entire utterances within that framework. He was still reeling.)
He spread his arms and summoned a handsome smile. “Like what I’ve done with the place?”
“I’d like you to take me home, please.”
He stepped toward her. “In all honesty, Lori, this could go either way. Whichever path you choose, you’re gonna end up in the same place. That’s the deal here.”
She moved about three inches backward, slowly. “You like blowjobs, Mike? I’ll make you come like a fire hose.” (Oh, exquisite, in fact almost painfully exquisite: when she must have been dropping into terror like a dead bird, her sentences came swaddled in clove, and ginger, and yet again the kind of maple syrup that came from trees bleeding into pails way up in Vermont and Maine, that area.)
“I always come like a fire hose. Of course, most of my partners aren’t alive anymore. I like it that way. Come to think of it, they probably do too.”
“You think a woman would have to be dead to enjoy making love to you? Let me prove how wrong you are.”
He was inching toward her, but the distance between them remained constant.
“You’re an unusual girl, Lori.”
“What makes me ‘unusual’?” (Marshmallow and chocolate: s’mores!)
“You’re not cowering on the floor. Or sniveling. All the other girls—”
She took one fast step backward, spun around, and sprinted toward the center of the room. Amused by this display of nerve, he lunged for her playfully and almost deliberately missed. Lori ran around to the other side of the second steel table and leaned on it with stiff arms, her eyes and mouth open, watching him closely, ready to flee in any direction. For a couple of seconds only, she glanced into the corners of the shiny basement.
“To get out, you need my keys,” he said. “Which means you ain’t gonna get out. So are you going to make a break for it or wait for me to come get you? I recommend the second one. It’s not in your best interest to piss me off, I promise you.” From across the room, he gave her the openhearted gift of a wide, very nearly genuine smile.
She kept watching him with the close, steady attention of a sailor regarding an unpredictable sea. On every second inhalation, she bent her elbows and leaned forward.
“Because right at this moment? Right at this moment, I admire the hell out of you. All kinds of reasons, honest to God.”
He waited for her to break for either the right or the left side of the metal table so that he could at last close the distance between them and finish the gesture he had begun at Lou’s Rendezvous, but she did not move. She kept on leaning forward and pushing back.
“You remind me of something I can’t really remember. That fubar enough for you? Doozy of a story. About someone who won’t stay dead but doesn’t live.” He lifted his arms, palms up, and all but uttered an involuntary sigh. “People keep telling me this shit, like they want me to remember! My brother, that stupid Henry James story . . . It’s no good. It doesn’t actually mean anything . . . but shouldn’t it mean everything? A person who won’t stay dead? Plus . . . someone else, a boy? An old boy?”
He shook his head as though to clear it. “Say something. Say anything. I love what happens when you talk.”
“Oh?” Not enough to be measured: something about peanuts in a roaster . . . peanuts rolling in an oiled pan . . .
“You know how words have these smells? Like ‘paycheck’ always smells like a dirty men’s room? You know what I’m talking about, yeah?”
“You smell what I’m saying?” Without relaxing her attention, Lori leaned forward and narrowed her eyes. “How would you describe the smell of what I’m saying now?”
“Like butter, salt, and caramel sauce. Honest to God. You’re amazing.”
Lori exhaled and straightened her arms, pushing herself back. “You’re a crazy piece of shit.”
The Ladykiller kept looking at her steadily, almost not blinking, waiting for her to move to the right or the left. He told himself, This resurrection stuff is all bullshit to lull her into breaking away from the autopsy table.
Unless . . .
Something dark, something unstable flickered in his mind and memory and vanished back into the purely dark and fathomless realm where so much of the Ladykiller was rooted. Once again he shook his head, this time to rid himself of the terror and misery that had so briefly shone forth, and after that briefest possible moment of disconnection saw that Lori had not after all been waiting to bolt from the table. Instead she had jerked open the drawer and snatched out a knife with a curved blade and a fat leather handle wrapped in layers of sweat- and dirt-stained tape. He loved that knife. Looking at it, you would be so distracted by its ugliness that you’d never notice how sharp it was. You wouldn’t fear what it could do until it was already too late.
“Oh, that old thing,” he said. “What are you going to do, open a beer can?”
“I’ll open you right up unless you toss me those keys.” (The worse it got, the better it smelled: a bank of tiger lilies, the open window of a country kitchen.)
He pulled himself back into focus. “Jeez, you could have picked up one of the scalpels. Then I might be scared.”
“You want me to swap it for a scalpel? It must be really lethal.”
“You’ll never find out,” he said, and began slowly to move toward her again, holding out his hands as if in supplication.
“No matter what happens, I’m glad I’m not you.” (Dishwashing liquid in a soapy sink, a wealth of lemon-scented bubbles: in his humble opinion, one of the world’s greatest odors.)
Lori Terry moved back a single step and assumed a firmer grip on the ugly handle. She was holding it the right way, he noticed, sharp side up.
“You’re a funny little thing.” He straightened up, laughed, and wagged an index finger at her. “You have to admit, that is pretty droll.”
“Y
ou have the emptiest, ugliest life I can imagine. You look like you’d be so much fun, but really you’re as boring as a cockroach—the rest of your life is a disguise for what you do in this miserable room. Everything else is just a performance. Can’t you see how disgusting that is?” This whole statement emerged clothed in a slowly turning haze of perfumed girl neck gradually melting to a smellscape of haystacks drying in a sunstruck field. This was terrible, somehow shaming.
“I thought I heard you trying to talk me into a blowjob.”
“That’s when I was scared. I’m not afraid of you anymore.” (Spinach, creamed, in a steakhouse.)
“Oh, come on.” He moved across the room on a slanting line, trying to back her into a corner. “I know you’re scared.”
“I was afraid when I thought I had a chance to get out of this cockroach parlor. But I really don’t, do I? I’m going to die here. At best, I’ll cut you up a little bit. Then you’ll kill me, and it’ll all be over. You, however, will have to go on being a miserable, fucked-up creep with a horrible, depressing life.” (Who knew what that was—horses? A rich man’s stables?)
“At least I’ll have a life,” he said, and felt that he had yielded some obscure concession, or told her absolutely the wrong thing.
“Sure. A terrible one, and you’ll still be incredibly creepy.” (Astonishingly, this came out in a sunny ripple of clean laundry drying on a line.)
“I believe you might be starting to piss me off.”
“Wouldn’t that be a fucking shame.” An idea of some kind moved into her eyes. “You thought I might change your life? I think you were right, I think I will change your life. Only right now you have no idea how that’ll happen. But it’ll be a surprise, that I can tell you.”
Amazed, he said, “You think you’re better than me?” (And you just said four or five sentences that smelled like cloves and vetiver.)
“You’re a disgusting person, and I’m a good one.”
She feinted and jabbed with the curved blade. It was enough to push him backward.
“I see you’re afraid of this knife.”
He licked his lips, wishing he were holding a baseball bat, or maybe a truncheon, a thing you could swing, hard, to knock in the side of someone’s head. Then, before he could think about what he was going to do, he ducked left and immediately swerved to his right. Having succeeded in faking her off-balance, the Ladykiller rushed forward, furious and exulting, eager to finish off this mouthy bitch.
Before he could get a proper grip on her, Lori surprised him by jumping left and slashing at him. The blade, which had been fabricated by a long-dead craftsman in Arkansas and honed and honed again a thousand times on wet Arkansas stone, opened the sleeve of his nice tweed jacket and continued on to slice through the midriff of his blue broadcloth shirt. In the second and a half it took him to let go of her shoulder and anchor his hand on her wrist, blood soaked through the fine fabric of the shirt and began to ooze downward along a straight horizontal axis. As soon as he noticed that the growing bloodstain had immediately begun to spread and widen, he heard blood splashing steadily onto the floor, looked for the source, and witnessed a fat red stream gliding through the slashed fabric on his sleeve.
“Damn you.” He jerked her forward and threw her to the ground. “What am I supposed to do now? Hell!”
She looked up at him from the floor. Crimson stains and spatters blossomed on her opened skirt and splayed legs. “The sight of your own blood throws you into a panic,” she said. “Figures, I guess.” (Tomato soup, no surprise, with garlic. Was she actually controlling the smells she sent out?)
“You hurt me!” He kicked her in the hip.
“Okay, you hurt me back. Now we’re even,” she said. “If you give me the keys, I’ll bandage you up. You could bleed to death, you know. I think you ought to be aware of—”
Both her words and the renewed smell of laundry drying in sunshine on a backyard clothesline caused rage to flare through all the empty spaces in his head and body. He bent over, ripped the knife from her loose hand, and with a single sweep of his arm cut so deeply through her throat that he all but decapitated her. A jet of blood shot from the long wound, soaking his chest before he could dodge out of the way. Lori Terry jittered a moment and was dead.
“Bitch, bitch, damn bitch,” he said. “Fuck this shit—I’m bleeding to death here!”
He trotted across the room to a pair of sinks, stripping off his jacket as he went and leaving bloody footprints in his wake. Though his wounds bled freely, and when first exposed seemed life-threatening, a matter that made him feel queasy and lightheaded, soon he was winding bands of tape around a fat pad of gauze on his arm. The long cut on his stomach proved less dangerous but harder to stanch. While simultaneously stretching toward his spine with one hand and groping with the other, he found himself wishing that Lori had not been such a colossal bitch as to make him kill her before she could help him wrap the long bandage around the middle of his body. Of course, had she not been such an unfeeling bitch, she would have obliged him by curling up in whimpering terror even before he explained in free-spending detail precisely what he was going to do to her. The tramp had escaped the punishment she had craved, down there at the dark center of her heart. She got to fulfill her goal, but she had cheated herself of most of the journey toward it! And cheated him of being her guide!
While he was mopping the floor with a mixture of bleach and soapy water, the Ladykiller remembered his admiration of Lori Terry—the respect she had evoked in him by being uncowed. Instead of bursting into tears and falling down she had offered him a blowjob! He had approved the tilt of her chin, the steadiness of her voice. Also the resolute, undaunted look in her eyes. And the odors, the odors, the odors, in their unfathomable unhurried march. In farewell to her spirit, he dropped to his knees at the edge of her pooled blood, pursed his lips, and forcefully expelled air, but although he managed to create a row of sturdy little ripples, for only the second or at a stretch maybe third time in his life as the Ladykiller he failed to raise up even a single bubble. He nearly moaned in frustration, but held back: she had refused to speak in Cockney, she had held to her dignity.
For the first time in his long career, the Ladykiller came close to regretting an obligatory murder, but this approach to remorse withered and died before the memory of her ugly dismissal of his life. Why, he wondered, should a sustained, lifelong performance be disgusting? Couldn’t the cow see how interesting, how clever, his whole splendid balancing act had been? After this consoling reflection, his pain, which had been quietly pulsing away, throbbed within his lower abdomen and left forearm. This was a sharp reminder of her treachery. When the floor shone like the surface of a pond, he rinsed and stowed the mop, reverently washed the curved knife in a sink, and approached the long, cold table where Lori Terry’s naked body, already cleansed and readied, awaited the final rites.
Two hours later, with everything—tables, walls, floor, switches, the dismembered body—rescrubbed and doused yet again in bleach, he stacked Lori’s remains in a cardboard steamer trunk: feet and calves; thighs; pelvis; female organs from which his traces had been washed; liver, heart, lungs, stomach, and spleen in one bag, the long silver ropes of her intestines in another; hands and forearms; upper arms; rib cage; spine; shoulders; and as in life the open-eyed head atop all in a swirl of bleached hair. At the end she had smelled of nothing but washed corpse. He locked the trunk, lugged it up the stairs, dragged it to his car, and with considerable effort wedged it into the car’s trunk.
On his journey back into the city, he found that the care he had given her body, the thorough cleansing, the equally thorough separation of part from part, its arrangement within its conveyance, brought back to him now the respect he had learned to feel for her once the final key had turned in his serial locks. For respect it had been, greater and more valuable than admiration. Lori Terry had displayed none of the terror she, no less than his other victims, felt when she saw the pickle she was in: instead s
he had fought him from the beginning, with, he saw now, offers of sex that had actually promised something else altogether. She had wanted him exposed and vulnerable, she had wanted him open to pain, in grave pain—she had intended to put him in agony. It was true, he had to admire the bitch.
A momentary vision of the dismembered body arrayed like an unfolding blossom in the cardboard trunk popped like a flashbulb in his mind. He heard words begin to flow through his throat before he realized that he was talking out loud—talking to Lori Terry.
As he spoke, he had been removing the girl’s remains from the cardboard trunk and placing them this way and that on the cobblestones of backstreet downtown Milwaukee. It took a while to get them right. By the time he was satisfied, gray, early light had begun to wash across the cobbles and the garbage cans behind the clubs. Lori Terry’s porcelain face gazed up at him like a bust in a museum. Then he was gone, yessir, the Ladykiller was right straight outta there, clean as a you-know-what and on to pastures new.
WALLACE STROBY
Night Run
FROM The Highway Kind
Later, Kirwan would think about how it started, when he might have stopped it. What he could have done differently. But by then it didn’t matter.
He’d just crossed the Georgia-Florida line on I-95, running south, the lights of Jacksonville in the far distance ahead. Two a.m. and his eyes watery, his legs jumpy. The Volvo had nearly 300,000 miles on it, and its suspension was shot. Every pothole or patch of uneven blacktop jolted his spine.
Still, he felt himself drifting, eyelids heavy. He’d need to sleep soon but wanted to make it as far south as he could. The meeting at Marco Landscaping, to show them the new brick samples, was at ten a.m., and New Smyrna Beach was still about a hundred miles away. He’d give it another hour on the road, then find a motel.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2017 Page 40
