Small Town

by Lawrence Block

Page 54

 

  He wished he could figure out what the Carpenter was trying to accomplish.

  Because if you could do that, maybe you could figure out what he was going to do next. And he was going to do something. The nail in the forehead, if it did nothing else, served notice that the Carpenter wasn’t ready to hang up his tools.

  Until then, he’d thought the man might be done. He wasn’t a lifelong career psychopath, had lived an apparently blameless life until 9/11 unhinged him, and it had seemed entirely possible that the level of carnage he’d achieved in Chelsea might well have shocked him out of his madness. Buckram had half-expected the man to turn himself in, or kill himself. They might recover his body from the river, or scrape him off the subway tracks.

  Or he might just stop what he was doing and disappear. The common wisdom held that pattern criminals and serial killers never stopped until they were caught or killed, that what drove them continued to drive them to the end. But he knew this wasn’t always so. Sometimes the bad guys seemed to lose interest. When they’d achieved a degree of notoriety, like the Zodiac nut job in San Francisco, the speculation about them went on forever. When their tally was lower and less publicized, their retirement went unnoticed; if, say, three prostitutes are abducted one after another from truck stops in Indiana and Illinois, and found brutally murdered in Interstate highway rest areas, it’s news; when it doesn’t happen a fourth time, it stops being news, and people forget to wonder why the guy stopped.

  They wouldn’t forget about the Carpenter, but he could have stopped. He could have wiped up his fingerprints and left the hammer and nail in the hardware drawer and gone off into the night, and no one would have linked this latest killing to him. And the next time he went to ground he might have worked out a way to do it without killing anybody.

  But he’d used the hammer, used the nail. He wasn’t done. He had something planned, something that would dwarf the Chelsea firebombings. Buckram could think of all sorts of possibilities.

  The city had no end of icons—the skyscrapers, the bridges, the great statue in the harbor. Anyone could compile a list, and, after 9/11, nothing seemed off limits to madness. But what good was a list when you couldn’t read the bastard’s mind?

  He couldn’t think his way to a solution, nor could he think of anything else. He wished to God there was something he could do.

  He’d thought of offering his services to the cop who was running the case, but realized what an embarrassment that would be all around. Even if he did it quietly, who could avoid the assumption that he was grandstanding, positioning himself for a 2005 run at Gracie Mansion? And, if he somehow convinced everybody otherwise, what possible help could he provide? As far as he could tell, they were doing everything there was to do, and doing a reasonably good job of it in the media hothouse that was New York.

  He thought of the drawing room mysteries of the twenties and thirties, with the gifted amateur sleuth who volunteered his services to the baffled police and solved intricate murders for them.

  And here he was, all set to present himself as a latter-day version of that amateur sleuth. Because that was all he was now, his professional experience notwithstanding. He was a private citizen, and nothing changed that—not the awards and commendations boxed up in his closet, not the courtesy cards in his wallet, not the monthly pension check he drew after twenty-plus years of service.

  Not the revolver in a locked drawer in his desk, or the carry permit for it.

  So he sat around reading about the case, and calling old friends to talk about it. And he thought about it, and tried to figure some useful way he could play a lone hand, somehow out-thinking the Carpenter and tracking him down on his own. It was an appealing fantasy, but that’s all it was. A fantasy.

  Yet he stayed with it. Because, for some goddamned reason that, like the Carpenter’s scheme, he hadn’t yet managed to figure out, there didn’t seem to be anything else he could do.

  I T W A S T H E W O M A N , of course. Susan Pomerance. Seeing her at Stelli’s, remembering her from L’Aiglon d’Or, he’d seized his opportunity and picked her up.

  Right, like a moth picking up a flame.

  Next thing he’d known he was spread-eagled facedown on her bed and she was calling him by a girl’s name and treating him like a girl. He thought she was going to rip him open, thought he’d bleed to death shackled to her bed and hooded like a trained falcon. And then he came so hard he thought he’d die of that.

  Afterward, dismissed and sent home, he took a long shower, then drew a hot tub and soaked in it. He tried to put the evening in some sort of perspective, but couldn’t get a handle on it, swinging back and forth between excitement and revulsion. He’d sleep on it, he decided. A lot of things made more sense after a good night’s sleep.

  He wondered if he’d be able to sleep, but dropped off almost immediately and didn’t stir for almost nine hours. He awoke with a sense of having dreamed throughout the night but no recollection of any of the dreams. He ached physically, not only where she’d penetrated him but in muscles throughout his body that he’d tensed in unaccustomed ways. And he winced at the memory of what he’d done, or rather of what he’d allowed to be done to him.

  And at the recollection of his own response.

  Come see me Friday, she’d said. Yeah, right, he thought. The only question in his mind was whether he should call and let her know he wasn’t coming or just not show up and let her figure it out for herself. With her looks and her morals, she wouldn’t have trouble finding another partner; with her toy chest, she wouldn’t be hard put getting along without one.

  Maybe he’d send flowers, with a note saying he’d decided not to see her again. Once, a philosopher . . . the note could say.

  Would she get the reference? A professor at Colgate had loved to tell the story. Voltaire had accepted an invitation from a friend to go to a specialized brothel—young boys, something like that.

  He’d gone and had a good time, and the friend invited him again a few weeks later. Voltaire declined. But you had such a good time, the friend said. Mais oui, said Voltaire. Once, un philosophe.

  Twice, a pervert.

  Flowers and goodbye. That would be nice, the sort of mixed message that might even appeal to the dizzy bitch. Or, to keep it simple, he could skip the flowers and skip the note and just never see her again. She’d get over it, and so would he.

  He checked his book, and saw that it was moot. He couldn’t go Friday anyway, he had to speak at a dinner in Connecticut. That would be his second speech of the week—he had to fly to Richmond Tuesday morning to talk at a luncheon.

  He spent the weekend at his apartment, letting the machine take his calls. Monday morning he called the lecture bureau and said something had come up, to cancel his appointments for the week. Both of them, the lunch in Richmond and the dinner in Hartford. The woman he spoke to was clearly rattled and obviously wanted him to be more specific about his reasons for canceling, but he didn’t have the energy to invent something, and she evidently couldn’t bring herself to press him for a reason.

  Wednesday he was supposed to get together with a writer who came highly recommended. They were just going to have lunch and explore in the most general fashion the possibility of their working together to develop a book proposal. Tuesday he called the writer to cancel. Did he want to reschedule? Not now, he said.

  He had the writer’s number, he’d call him when things cleared up a little.

  Wednesday he had lunch alone at a diner in the neighborhood, then walked in Central Park for hours, pausing now and then to sit on a bench and stare off into space. Thursday he went to the gym, gave up on the treadmill after five minutes, gave up on the weight machines halfway through his cycle. Sat in the steam room for longer than he should have, and was dizzy and dehydrated when he got out of there. Went home, drank a whole bottle of Evian water, and went to bed.

  Friday he picked up the phone to call her and tell her
he wasn’t coming. He had her number at the gallery and dialed six of the seven digits, then hung up. Picked up the phone again, dialed three digits, quit.

  Jesus.

  At eight that night he gave his name to her doorman, praying that she wouldn’t be home. The doorman called upstairs, then nodded to him and pointed to the elevator. He knocked on her door and she called out that it was open.

  He went in. There was no one in the living room. He walked on through to the bedroom and found her dressed in a black leather garter belt and black mesh stockings and high-heeled black shoes.

  Nothing else. The outfit should have looked absurd, but didn’t.

  “Hi, Franny,” she said, almost gently. And smiled.

  “Susan. ”

  “No, don’t talk. The hood will come later, but for now I don’t want you to speak. Do you understand?”

  He nodded. She was crazy, he thought, and he was crazy to be here, he ought to leave right now. And he was getting a hard-on, and who the hell was he kidding? He wasn’t going anyplace.

  “I waxed myself, Franny. ” She touched herself, showing him. “It was starting to grow back, so I took care of it. You use hot wax, you pour it on and let it cool and rip it off. It’s painful, and very erotic. But it’s pretty. ” She held herself open for his inspection, asked him if he didn’t think it was pretty. He nodded, and she told him to get undressed.

  “Look at you, Franny, you’re hard as a rock. What’s a sweet little girl like you doing with such a gorgeous cock? One of these times I’m going to wax you. Everything, your chest, your armpits, your cock and balls and ass. Everything. You’ll be so silky smooth everywhere, and you’ll wear silk underwear and you’ll be hard all the time. Get on your knees, Franny. I’m all sensitive from the waxing and I want you to lick me. I want you to make me come. ”

  When she sent him home later that night he felt at once gloriously alive and determined he would never see her again. He went home and had another night full of unremembered dreams, waking with a furious erection and a strong urge to relieve himself, which he resisted.

  Sunday night he had a sandwich and a beer at a good deli, and around eleven he went over to Stelli’s for a drink. He joined some friends at a table but hardly said a word, and didn’t stay long. Early night, Stelli told him on the way out. Big day tomorrow, he said.

  But all he did the next day was read the papers and watch TV

  news. Tuesday after breakfast he called his lecture bureau and told them to cancel all his scheduled engagements and not make any future bookings for him. He wasn’t surprised when the phone rang ten minutes later and it was the head of the bureau, demanding to know what was the matter. Was he disappointed with their service? Was he going with a competitor? And, even if he was, didn’t he realize he had to honor the bookings they’d made for him?

  He said it wasn’t that, he’d lost his taste for public speaking, he just couldn’t do it anymore. He fended off further questions, and noted that she didn’t close by telling him to give her a call if he changed his mind.

  When he got off the phone he went through his book and canceled everything but a dentist appointment. Then he got out of the house and went for a walk in the park.