“I can only wish,” the clerk said, slightly envious.
“Maybe someday,” Ricky added. He cleared his throat to deliver the message for the classifieds. He had it run under the modest headline: seeking mr. r.
“Don’t you mean ‘Mr. Right ’?” the clerk asked.
“No,” Ricky said. “Mr. R. is fine.” Then he launched into what he hoped would be the last rhyme he would ever need to concoct:
Ricky’s here. Ricky’s there.
Ricky could be anywhere.
Ricky maybe likes to roam,
Ricky maybe has gone home.
Perhaps Ricky has gone to ground,
But Ricky likely can’t be found.
Someplace old, someplace new,
Ricky will always elude you.
Mr. R. can search high and low,
Still he will never know,
When Ricky might return again,
As an adversary, not a friend,
Carrying evil, toting death,
Ready to steal someone’s last breath.
“Intense,” the clerk said, with a long, slow whistle. “You say this is a game?”
“Yes,” Ricky answered. “But not one too many people should be eager to play.”
The ad was scheduled for the following Friday, which gave Ricky little time. He knew what would happen: The paper actually hit the newsstands the evening before, and that would be when all three of them would read the message. But this time, they wouldn’t respond in the paper. It will be Merlin, Ricky thought, using his brusque and demanding lawyer’s tones and obliquely threatening manner. Merlin will call the ad supervisor and work his way rapidly down through the paper’s hierarchy until he finds the clerk who took the poem over the telephone. And he will question him closely about the man who called it in. And the clerk will quickly recall the conversation about the Cape. Maybe, Ricky wondered, the young man will even recall that Ricky said it was where he wanted someday to be buried, a small desire, in a way, but one that will trigger much in Merlin. After he acquires the information he will pass it to his brother. A modest act of insulation, to be sure, but a necessary one. Then the three of them will argue once again. The two younger ones have been frightened, probably more frightened than they have been since they were children and abandoned by self-murder by the mother they loved. They will say they want to join Mr. R. on his hunt, and they will say they feel responsible for the danger, and guilty, too, he thought, for making him take care of them once more. But they will not truly mean it, and the older brother will have none of it, anyway. This is a killing he will want to handle alone.
And so, Ricky thought, alone is how he will proceed.
Alone and wanting to finish once and for all what he had been led to believe had been completed. He will hurry toward another death.
He checked out of the cheap room, scouring it first for any signs of his existence. Then, before departing the city, he performed one other series of tasks. He closed out his domestic banking accounts at New York branches, then went into a midtown office for a bank located in the Caribbean. There he opened a simple checking and savings account for Richard Lively. When he’d completed the transaction, depositing a modest sum from his remaining cash, he exited the bank and walked two blocks up Madison Avenue to the Crédit Suisse office that he had passed many times back in the days when he was merely another New Yorker.
A low-level bank official was more than willing to open a new account for Mr. Lively. This was merely a traditional savings account, but it had a single interesting feature. On one day, each year, the bank was to transfer ninety percent of the accumulated funds directly, by wire, to the account number that Ricky provided for the Caribbean bank. They were to deduct their fees from the remainder. The date he selected for this transfer was chosen with a rough sort of haphazard care: At first he’d thought to use his birthday, then he’d thought of his wife’s birthday. Then, he’d considered the day that he’d faked his own death. He also considered using Richard Lively’s birthday. But finally, he’d asked the executive opening the account, a rather pleasant young woman who had taken pains to reassure him of the complete secrecy and compelling sanctity of Swiss banking regulations, and asked her what her birthday was. As he’d hoped, it had no connection to any date that he could remember. A late March day. He liked that. March was the month that actually saw the end of winter and suggested the beginning of spring, but was filled with false promise and deceptive winds. An unsettled month. He thanked the young woman and told her that was the day he selected for any transfers.
After finishing his business, Ricky returned to the rental car. He did not look behind once, as he slid through the city streets, up onto the Henry Hudson Parkway heading north. He had much to do, he thought, and little time.
He returned the rental car and spent the day killing off Frederick Lazarus. Every membership, credit card, phone account—anything having to do with that particular persona was shut down, canceled, or closed out. He even swung around the gun shop where he’d learned to shoot, and purchasing a box of shells, spent a productive hour on the firing range squeezing off shots at a black silhouette target of a man that was easily configured in his imagination to be the man he knew who would close in on him swiftly enough. Afterward, he made a little small talk with the gun shop owners, dropping on them the news that he was expecting to move away from the area for several months. The man behind the counter shrugged, but, Ricky realized, still noted the departure.
And with that, Frederick Lazarus evaporated. At least on paper and in documents. He departed, too, from the few relationships that the character had. By the time he had finished, Ricky thought that all that remained of the persona he’d created was whatever murderous streaks he had absorbed within himself. At least, that was what he hoped still weighed within him.
Richard Lively was a little more difficult, because Richard Lively was a little more human. And it was Richard Lively who needed to live. But he also needed to fade away from his life in Durham, New Hampshire, with a minimum of fanfare and little notice. He had to leave it all behind, but not appear to be doing so, on the off chance that someone, someday, might come asking questions and connect the disappearance with that particular weekend.
Ricky considered this dilemma, and thought that the best way to disappear is to imply the opposite. Make people think your exit is only momentary. Richard Lively’s bank account was left intact, with only a minimum deposit. He didn’t cancel any credit cards or library memberships. He told his supervisor at the university maintenance department that family trouble on the West Coast was going to require his presence for a few weeks. The boss understood, reluctantly told Ricky that he couldn’t promise that his job would wait for him, but told him he would do everything he could to see that it was left open. He had a similar conversation with his landladies, explaining that he wasn’t sure how long he would be absent. He paid an extra month’s rent in advance. They had become accustomed to his comings and goings, and said little, although Ricky suspected the older woman knew he would never return, simply in the way she eyed him and the manner in which she absorbed what he said. Ricky admired this quality. A New Hampshire quality, he thought, one that accepts on the face what another person says, but harbors an understanding of the truth hidden within. Still, to underscore the illusion of return, even if not fully believed, Ricky left behind as many of his belongings as possible. Clothes, books, a bedside radio, the modest things he had collected while rebuilding his life. What he took with him was a couple of changes of clothing, and his weapon. He thought that what he needed to leave behind was evidence that he’d been there, and might return—but nothing that truly spoke about who he was or where he might actually have gone.
As he walked down the street, he felt a momentary pang of regret. If he lived through the weekend, he thought, which was really only a fifty-fifty proposition, he knew he would never return. He had developed an ease and a familiarity with the small world he’d participated in, and it sadd
ened him to walk away. But he restructured the emotion within himself, trying to re-form it into a strength to carry him through what was about to happen.
He caught a midday Trailways bus to Boston, retracing a familiar route. He did not spend long in the Boston terminal, just long enough to wonder whether the real Richard Lively was still living, and half thinking that it might be interesting to head toward Charlestown to see if he could spot the man in any of the parks or alleyways where Ricky had once trailed him so diligently. Of course, Ricky knew he had nothing to say to the man, other than to thank him for providing an avenue into a questionable future. Regardless, he did not have time. The Friday afternoon Bonanza bus was heading to the Cape, and he slid into a seat in the back, excitement picking up within him. They have read the poem by now, he thought. And Merlin has questioned the ad clerk.
At this moment, they are talking. Ricky could imagine the words flying back and forth. But he knew he didn’t actually have to hear them, because he knew what they would do. He glanced down at his wristwatch.
He will take off soon, Ricky thought. He will be driving hard, compelled to find a conclusion to a story that was written differently than he’d expected.
Ricky smiled. He saw one immense advantage he had. Rumplestiltskin’s world was one accustomed to conclusions. Ricky’s was the opposite. One of the tenets of psychoanalysis is that even though the sessions draw to a close, and the daily therapy finally finishes, the process never is completed. What the therapy brings, at its best, is a new way of looking at who one is, and allowing that new definition of one’s life to influence the decisions and choices that come with the future. At best, then those moments are not crippled by the events of the past, and the selections made are oddly relieved of the debts everyone owes to their upbringing.
He had the sensation that he was reaching the same sort of non-end ending.
It was either dying time, or continuing time. And whichever it was would be defined by the next hours.
Ricky accepted the coldness of his situation, and stared out the window at the scenery. As the bus droned on toward the Cape, Ricky noted that the trees and shrub bushes seemed to lessen in stature. It was as if life in the sandy soil not far from the ocean was a little harsher, and that it was harder to grow high when pummeled by the sea winds in the winter.
Outside of Provincetown, Ricky spotted a motel on the strip that is Route Six, that hadn’t already blinked on its no vacancy sign, probably a result of the desultory weather forecast. He paid cash for the weekend, the desk clerk taking the money in a bored and disinterested fashion, assuming, Ricky guessed, that he was nothing more than a confused middle-aged Boston businessman, finally giving into fantasies, descending upon the town with its gaudy summertime nightlife for a few days of sex and guilt. He didn’t do anything to discourage this presumption, and, in fact, asked the clerk where the best clubs were in town. The types of places where single folks went searching for companionship. The man gave him some names and left it at that.
Ricky found a camping goods store, and purchased more bug repellent, a powerful flashlight, and an oversized olive drab pullover poncho. He also bought a wide-brimmed camouflage hat that was clearly ridiculous in appearance, but which had one critical feature: Attached to the brim was a shroud of mosquito netting, which could drop over the head and shoulders. Once again, the weather forecast for the weekend helped: humid, thunderstorms, gray skies, and warm temperatures. A sickly sort of weekend. Ricky told the man behind the counter that he was still going to be doing some gardening, which made each of the purchases establish perfect and unforgettable sense within that context.
He walked back outside and saw the first of what he suspected would be a line of huge thunderheads building up in the west. He listened for a distant rumble of thunder and surveyed the graying skies above him that seemed to usher in the arrival of evening. He could taste the coming rain on his tongue, and he hurried to make his preparations.
The day was stretched long by light that lingered, as if contending with the sweep of weather heading toward him. By the time he reached the road that led to his old house, the sky had taken on an almost crippled brownish hue. The bus that traveled Route Six had dropped him a couple of miles away, and he had jogged the distance easily, his backpack crammed with his purchases and his weapon riding comfortably on his back. Ricky remembered running the same route nearly a year earlier, and he recalled the sharpness in his breath, the way the wind was sucked out of his lungs by panic and the shock of what he’d done and what he still had to do. This run was oddly different. He felt a sense of strength, and at the same time, a sense of isolation tinged with complacency, as if what he was racing toward wasn’t so much a place where he had parked so many memories, as much as a place that spoke of change. Each step of his route was familiar, yet surreal, as if it existed on a different plane of existence. He picked up his pace, pleased that he was stronger than he was when last he’d run the race, eager that no onetime neighbor would come rolling out of a driveway and spot the dead man running toward the burned-out home.
Ricky was lucky, the road was deserted at this the dinner hour. He pulled in to the driveway, slowing his pace to a walk, and was immediately concealed by the stands of trees and shrub brush that spring up quickly on the Cape in the warmer months. He did not know exactly what to expect. It half occurred to him that whatever relative had managed to seize hold of Ricky’s property might have cleared the area, even started construction of a new place. His suicide letter had designated the land be turned over to a conservation group, but he expected that when the members of his distant family had caught wind of what the actual value of a prime slice of buildable Cape property was worth, that it had been tied up in lawsuits. The thought made him grin, struck by the irony that it was likely people he barely knew who were fighting over his estate, when he’d died the first time months earlier to protect one of them from the man Ricky believed was hurrying toward him that night.
When he came out from beneath the trees, he saw what he’d hoped for: the still-charred remains of his home. Even with the growing season upon the land, the earth was still blackened for yards around the gaunt skeleton of the old farmhouse.
Ricky walked up to where the front door had once stood, passing through the weeds of what had once been his garden. He stepped inside, moving slowly midst the ruins of the home. Even after a year, he could still smell the gasoline and burnt wood, but then, realized that was nothing more than his mind playing tricks on him. There was a roll of thunder in the distance, but he ignored it, and maneuvered as best he could through the spaces, allowing his memory to fill in walls and furniture, artwork and carpets. And when all those recollections had built his old home up around him, he allowed his memory to paint in moments with his wife, long before she sickened, and before she was robbed of strength, vitality, and finally life, by disease. It was both pleasant and eerie for Ricky, as he wandered through the wreckage. It was, in an odd way, both a return and a departure, and he felt a little as if he was embarking that night upon something that would take him somewhere far different, and that finally, he was able to say goodbye to everything that had been Dr. Frederick Starks, and ready himself to greet whatever person emerged from the night that was falling swiftly around him.
The spot he’d hoped to find was waiting for him, directly to the side of the center chimney that had graced the fireplace in the living room. A slab of ceiling and thick wooden beams had tumbled to the side, making a sort of decrepit lean-to, almost a cave. Ricky donned the poncho, seated the bug hat on his head, and removed the flashlight and semiautomatic pistol from his backpack. Then he crawled back into the darkness of the wreckage, concealed himself, and waited for night, the approaching thunderstorm, and a killer to arrive.
He saw some humor in it: What had he done? He had behaved like a psychoanalyst. He had provoked electric, runaway emotions in the person he wanted to see. Even the psychopath was vulnerable, Ricky thought, to his own desires. And now, just
as he had for so many years of his own analytic practice, he was waiting for this last patient to come through the door, bearing with him all the anger, hatred, and fury, all directed at Ricky the therapist.
He fingered the trigger guard on his weapon and clicked off the safety. This session, however, wasn’t intended to be quite so benign.
He leaned back and measured every sound, and memorized every shadow as they lengthened into darkness around him. Vision was going to be a problem that night. The moon would be obscured by clouds. The ambient light from other homes and distant Provincetown, would fade beneath the coming rain. What Ricky expected to rely upon was both certainty and uncertainty: The ground where he’d selected to wait was the most familiar tract in his life. This would be an advantage. And, more important, he was relying upon Rumplestiltskin’s uncertainty. He won’t know precisely where Ricky is. He is a man accustomed to controlling the environment in which he operates, and this, ultimately, Ricky hoped, was the least-controlled situation he could be placed in. A world the killer was unfamiliar with. A good place to wait for him that night.
Ricky was supremely confident that the killer would arrive, and soon enough, searching for him. As the man drove east from New York, he will understand that there were really only two potential locations for Ricky’s presence. The beach where he’d faked drowning, and the home he’d burned down. He will come to these two spots, hunting, because despite what he might have learned from the clerk at the Village Voice, he will not really believe that there was any business other than the business of dying planned for the trip to the Cape. He will know that everything else was merely illusion, and that the real game was simply about one set of memories facing off against the other set.
The Analyst Page 49
