The Closer

by Donn Cortez

  “Oh, you know your father,” his mother said, dropping into an armchair. “Made us leave an hour early, just in case.”

  “Good thing I did, too,” Mr. Salter said. “The main routes are all right, but we almost got stuck a few times on side streets. Slow going, I can tell you.”

  “Well, they say it’s supposed to warm up by tomorrow,” Janine said.

  “Yes, and then we’ll have to deal with the slush,” Mr. Salter grumbled.

  “Anybody want a drink?” Jack asked.

  “I wouldn’t mind a hot chocolate,” Mrs. Salter said. “Take the chill out of my bones.”

  “How about you, Dad?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Me, too!” Sam piped up from under the tree. He was rooting through the boxes, looking for his name and saying, “Yes!” every time he found it.

  “I’ll make some for everyone,” Janine said.

  DEATHKISS: I recognize this.

  PATRON: I assume you mean the painting and not the photo.

  DEATHKISS: Yes. By an artist named Salvatore Torigno, isn’t it?

  PATRON: Very good. Yes, Torigno is one of my successes.

  DEATHKISS: I didn’t know he was dead.

  PATRON: He isn’t. His dear mother, though—as you can see by the photo—has attended her last Easter Mass.

  It was late afternoon when Jack got the call. Janine and his mom were in the kitchen fixing dinner and his dad was in the middle of a serious debate with his grandson: “No, Sammy, I don’t think Batman could beat Spiderman in a fight. Not a fair one, anyway…”

  Jack picked up the cordless on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Jack?” The voice had a German accent as thick and heavy as a Black Forest cake. Jack recognized it immediately.

  “Mr. Liebenstraum—merry Christmas,” Jack said.

  “Jah, Jah, merry Christmas to you, too. I am sorry to be bothering you at home, Jack, but it seems I will not be returning after the holidays, not for some time. I have pressing business concerns.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Liebenstraum was a wealthy German art collector who’d bought one of Jack’s pieces through an intermediary. He’d apparently been impressed enough to contact Jack about a European exhibit, maybe even a tour; it was the kind of opportunity that could make an artist’s career.

  Jack had never met the man in person. The German had been in town for the past two weeks, but so far had been forced to cancel appointments twice because of business. The last time, he’d said he’d be busy until he left on Christmas Eve— but that he’d be back in town shortly after New Year’s.

  “I am so sorry, Jack,” Liebenstraum said regretfully. “I wanted so much to see your studio, your pieces. Now that I finally have a few spare moments, it is too late.”

  A few spare moments. “What time does your flight leave?”

  “Not until ten.”

  “Well, if you wanted, we could still get together,” Jack said. “It’d take me about an hour to get to my studio. As long as the cabs are running again, you could meet me there.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t mind, I have nothing to do but drink schnapps in the airport bar, but you—you must be home with your family, nicht wahr?”

  “It’s okay. They’ll understand.”

  “Well, then—I would like that very much. And this time I will be there, I promise.”

  “Great!” Jack gave him the address, thanked him, and hung up.

  Now all he had to do was tell everybody else….

  DEATHKISS: I don’t understand your definition of “success.”

  PATRON: My objective was not to kill Torigno. It was to find the person he loved the most, and destroy that person in the way that would resonate most deeply in his soul. Torigno is a devout Catholic; I chose the religious symbology carefully. The Easter bonnet was a nice touch, don’t you think?

  DEATHKISS: Yes.

  The sun was already starting to set when Jack set out for his studio. Under normal driving conditions he would have been able to get there in half an hour; now, he knew it would take him at least twice as long.

  He drove through a surreal landscape. Almost three feet of snow had fallen within forty-eight hours, turning his neighborhood into alien terrain: vehicles that had been parked for the last two days were completely encased, white bulges lining the street like the foothills of a glacier. Hedges, bushes and trees were coated so thickly they were only shapes, globes and ridges and cones of sparkling white. It felt like staring at a blank page and seeing half-formed ideas pushing their way up through the paper.

  As Jack had expected, Janine and his mother had been supportive, while his father had grumbled. The senior Salter had never been crazy about his son’s chosen field; he had tried to convince Jack more than once to pick something “with a little more stability in it.” Jack had long ago learned to simply change the subject, rather than defending his point of view. Art wasn’t something Jack had chosen; it had chosen him. That was the closest thing to an explanation he could give his father, and Jack knew his father didn’t understand.

  Despite that, they had come to a kind of truce, a treaty unknowingly written by Sam. He had seen them get into an argument once, started crying and refused to stop until Jack and his father had hugged each other. After that there were no more loud disagreements, not when Sam was around.

  In the end, his father had insisted Jack take their car. “It’s got snow tires on it, and you won’t have to dig it out. Just don’t leave the radio on that junk you listen to.”

  Jack lived in Burnaby, while his studio was on the east side of Vancouver, just off Main and Terminal. He took Hastings Street, but even that was moving at a crawl; there’d been some sort of chain-reaction accident on the long downslope just past Boundary Road. At least three tow trucks and five police cars blocked the road, turning the snow into a strobing rainbow of yellow, blue, and red.

  By the time he got to his studio it was just past six, and full dark. Liebenstraum wasn’t there yet, so he unlocked the door and went inside. He puttered around for a few minutes, pulling out a few pieces he had in storage and arranging them nervously. Jack worked primarily in mixed media, combining elements of painting, sculpture, and text; his stuff tended toward pop culture and the three-dimensional, like the bust of Madonna he’d made out of condom wrappers, Styrofoam, and white glue.

  Fifteen minutes passed, then half an hour. No Liebenstraum. Jack wondered if he’d been able to get a cab. He thought about making some calls, seeing if taxis were available, but there were too many cab companies in Vancouver—besides, what if Liebenstraum were trying to call him?

  Finally, there was a knock at the door. It wasn’t Liebenstraum, though; it was a cop. “We got a call about a prowler,” she said. She was in her twenties, with short dark hair and brown eyes. She was amazingly cheerful for someone working on Christmas Eve.

  Jack showed her some ID, told her what he was doing there. She wished him a merry Christmas and left.

  He waited for another half hour, then called home.

  No answer. He got voice mail after four rings, and hung up on the sound of his own voice. He tried again and got the same thing. Weird; he chalked it up to the snowstorm and the fact it was Christmas Eve. Overloaded lines, probably.

  He waited another thirty minutes before he accepted the fact that Liebenstraum wasn’t coming. Either he couldn’t get a cab or he’d just been jerking Jack around the whole time; Jack didn’t know whether to be pissed off or disappointed.

  Neither, he decided as he got into the car for the long ride home. It was Christmas Eve, goddammit, and he was going to spend what was left of it with his family, drinking eggnog and listening to his father’s bad jokes and having a good time. Poor Liebenstraum would be stuck thirty thousand feet in the air, eating rubber chicken and watching Home Alone 4 while a stranger snored on his shoulder.

  He turned on the radio, found a local station that was playing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and
started singing along. He made excellent time on the way back, and by the time he pulled into the driveway at home he was in a pretty good mood.

  The front door was slightly ajar.

  PATRON: What creates great art?

  DEATHKISS: Great artists.

  PATRON: Precisely. But what creates great artists?

  DEATHKISS: Training. Perseverance. Talent.

  PATRON: Sadly, no. There are many artists with all of the above qualities who produce merely goodart. Something more is needed to make that leap from the competent to the sublime, from the ordinary to the inspired. If you don’t know what it is, I’m sure your prisoner does.

  DEATHKISS: Pain.

  Jack knew, even before he stepped inside.

  He had that kind of paranoid flash everyone gets from time to time, especially when hearing about a car accident or plane crash in the news; the utter conviction that a friend, a lover, a parent is now dead. It strikes the brain like lightning—and then rationality takes over, soothing the nerves, taming the fear.

  Jack went through this entire process in an instant, but this time the fear would not be tamed; it snarled and leapt and devoured logic whole.

  Hand trembling, he pushed the door open slowly. He could hear Bing Crosby crooning “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” inside.

  His mother was the first thing he saw. She hung from the stairwell that led to the second floor, suspended by a string of Christmas lights that wound around her neck and lashed her wrists to her ankles. The lights blinked off and on, turning his mother’s bulging eyes and protruding tongue blue, green, red, yellow. She turned slowly in the breeze from the open door.

  PATRON: Pain. Exactly. Such a simple word to encompass an infinity of variations. On a biological level, it’s nothing more than a warning system—but when we consider the emotional realm, it becomes something else entirely. Emotional anguish is a fuel, one that can power many engines: fear, lust, rage, ambition.

  Creativity.

  He ran forward blindly, down the short hallway, past the living room and into the kitchen. When questioned by the police later, he couldn’t tell them why he went into the kitchen first, or how he’d gone right past the living room without noticing what was in it.

  His father was sprawled on his back on the kitchen table. He’d been dressed in a Santa Claus suit, the front left unbuttoned to expose his disemboweling. Blood dripped off the fake white beard and the ropy loops of intestine hanging over the edge of the table. Jack could smell blood, shit, and roast turkey.

  DEATHKISS: You’ve mentioned Easter twice. Is that when you killed her?

  PATRON: Yes. The photo doesn’t show it, but there’s a pot of milk chocolate bubbling on the stove. Smell is such an important component of memory; I wanted to fix the experience of Easter morning firmly in Salvatore’s mind. He will never see the crucifix again without seeing his mother’s corpse, nor will he take a bite of chocolate. I have entwined the two events together in the very depths of his being….

  Jack was in shock. He moved through a world he did not understand, could not comprehend.

  There seemed to be no urgency, just a disjointed kind of momentum that kept him moving forward.

  Janine was in the living room. She’d been used to decorate the tree.

  Jack was starting to see everything in tightly focused snapshots, single details in frozen bits of time. A severed finger, balanced on the halo of one of his silverware angels. A bare foot, still wearing the red nail polish he’d applied himself, hanging near the base. Her heart, wrapped in bloody tinsel, resting on a branch.

  Her head, impaled on the very top where the star was supposed to go.

  Everything suddenly went very far away, without moving at all. It was the strangest feeling.

  DEATHKISS: What, no Easter Bunny?

  PATRON: One can only take a metaphor so far.

  DEATHKISS: You said Torigno was a success.

  Why?

  PATRON: Because he survived. I have struck twenty-one times, each time choosing someone I believed had potential and destroying the person or persons nearest to him. Of the twenty-one candidates I selected for this process, five have committed suicide, three are alcoholics, one is addicted to heroin, four are in psychiatric hospitals and two are in prison. Five have channeled their pain into their art, with varying degrees of success; one of them won a Turner Prize two years ago.

  Many members of The Pack claim that what they do is art. I do not create art.

  I create artists.

  He came back to himself slowly, by degrees. He was sitting slumped in the hallway, his arms around his knees, staring at the wall in front of him. He couldn’t remember how he got there. He could hear Mel Torme singing about chestnuts on an open fire.

  There was something he had to do, something that nagged at him. Something he dreaded.

  He had to go upstairs.

  In the end, it was hope that made him edge past the slowly twisting body of his mother and up the stairs. Hope that maybe the killer had spared Sam. That maybe Sam’s body wasn’t waiting for him up there, that somehow his son had gotten away or even been kidnapped. It was a very small, fragile hope.

  It didn’t last.

  His son’s bedroom had been turned into a nativity scene. Life-size cardboard cutouts of the wise men, Joseph, and Mary were grouped around Sam’s bed, which had a small wooden manger placed on top of it.

  Sam was inside. His arms and legs had been amputated to make him fit. They were never found.

  DEATHKISS: Your list only totals twenty.

  PATRON: One is still undecided. Of them all, I thought he had the greatest potential; while many of my subjects lack focus in the beginning, he never did. With him, it was simply a matter of redirection.

  DEATHKISS: But he’s turned out to be a disappointment?

  PATRON: I’m still not sure. He may yet live up to my expectations.

  DEATHKISS: Careful. Expectations are dangerous.

  A neighbor finally came over to check on the wide-open door. She took one look inside and screamed.

  The police found Jack inside, kneeling beside his son’s bed. He didn’t resist when they took him away in handcuffs; he didn’t say anything at all until they asked him to give a statement. Then he told them what had happened in an emotionless monotone and exacting detail.

  The same neighbor that called the police, Mrs. Krendall, had received an odd phone call at just after seven o’clock. A man claiming to be Jack’s brother had asked her to come over to the Salters’ house right away; when she’d knocked on the door, there had been no answer.

  Another neighbor, out shoveling his walk, had seen Janine wave good-bye to Jack from the front door at five. Jack had talked to the female officer at his studio at around six-thirty, and the coroner put his family’s time of death between seven and eight P.M. There was no way Jack could have committed the murders; he was released.

  No hard evidence to support the existence of “Mr. Liebenstraum” was ever discovered.

  DEATHKISS: With such a distinctive style,

  I’m surprised the police haven’t linked any of your crimes together.

  PATRON: Art is not something the constabulary appreciates—thus, my motives are invisible to them. My kills are spread across the country, done with a different technique every time, and my victims are of every gender, race and age. While I have a certain fondness for holidays—the rituals are so firmly ingrained in our society that they continue to resonate year after year in my artists’ minds—I do not always go after the candidate’s immediate family. I have killed lovers, best friends, teachers, and students. I have killed aunts, uncles, cousins, and even a long-lost twin.

  The police see only who might benefit from a murder; no one notices the bereaved artist in the background.

  DEATHKISS: I’d like to see what else your candidates have produced.

  PATRON: Certainly. Here’s a piece by the Turner

  Prize–winner I mentioned—and then you can share
what you’re doing to your captive, hmm?

  The Patron tapped a key, sending a file of a painting he found especially moving. It depicted a child lying in a meadow, head pillowed on his arms, staring up at a blue sky alive with his daydreams; knights on winged horses jousted, while cartoon monsters played baseball in the clouds.

  Below his smiling face, the child’s body was vivisected: bones and muscles and organs clearly visible, hungry insects already burrowing into the exposed flesh.

  Yes, the Patron thought. The Closer should appreciate this….

  INTERLUDE

  Dear Electra:

  I need your advice. Let’s say a certain hypothetical boy asked out a certain hypothetical girl. Not on a date, exactly, but not on not-a-date, either, if you know what I mean. Am I making any sense here?

  Oh, screw this, Electra—if I can’t be honest with you, who can I be honest with?

  Bobby Bleeker asked me out. Kind of.

  I guess I should tell you about Bobby. He’s my age, has short blond hair, and blue eyes with really long lashes. He’s got a nice smile, and he’s tall. He’s sort of cute.

  Okay, he’s really cute. And he asked me if I was going to the mall later, because his friends were going to do a pizza and he wanted me to come because he knows I like pineapple and so does he but his friends never let him order it because they think pineapple is gross, so he wanted me there to vote for pineapple.

  That’s a date, right? Electra?

  MORE DATA REQUIRED.

  Okay, so I asked Jessica to ask Belmont (that’s Bobby’s friend) if he thought Bobby liked me, and Belmont said he didn’t know, but Jessica thought he was covering up.

  INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION.

  No kidding. Anyway, I didn’t say yes or no, and now I don’t know what to do. Or what it means if I do go, or if I don’t. I don’t anything, Electra. Help me out.