A Winsome Murder (12 page)

No you won't.

The heavy back door of the bar slammed shut when he walked out after her.

“Hi,” she said, turning away to light a cigarette.

“Hi.”

And he knew then that this was right. It was as if she had turned her back to him just to allow this moment to occur,
her
moment, as if she knew what was to come and had accepted it. Then the dark numby thing rose up in him, and he listened to it. It told him to put his arm
around her neck. So he did. And then he just started to squeeze, and kept squeezing, harder and harder and harder and harder and he heard the sound of her cigarette lighter clink on the pavement and he felt her body begin to twist and squirm in a kind of bewilderment, and then in a panic, and then she started to make little-girl noises and spit and kick and squeak and he carried her away from the back door deeper into the darkened alley.

And then she stopped kicking.

And he let go.

He stared down at her. He dragged her behind a Dumpster and pulled on his powder-free exam gloves and took out his knife and cut off her shirt and cut the straps of her bra away and then he did things to her face and body with the heel of his boot. He stopped a moment to see what he had done. Then he cut off her hand. He let it drip-drip a little and put it in the pocket of his jacket. He took out the message he had written and placed it into what was left of her mouth.

Back in his truck, he took out the other note he'd written. He put it in the fat envelope he'd addressed to the editor. Then he put the hand in. Then he dropped it inside the lobby doors of his apartment building.

It was all so very easy.

He had done better this time. The first time was very sloppy. If he was too sloppy he would get caught and he would not be able to punish them and make them feel what he had felt, back when he could still feel, before he became the dark numby thing. He didn't care what happened to himself, no, he knew how that would end, that had been rehearsed a billion years before the oceans rolled.

But before then, he had much to do.

J
illian pushed her kitchen window up higher. The night was bright with moon and mist. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke through the screen. A police car was stationed in front of her house. Michael was in his room packing. Mara Davies was dead.

Jesus God. Jesus God.

Wesley Faber had called and explained to her what had happened.

What have I done?

Nick McClay, tan and aging too well for fifty, walked into the kitchen. He'd flown in from Florida right away. She hadn't known who
else to call. He had less hair than the last time Jillian had seen him, but he kept it groomed and full of product so that it seemed stylish. He looked out of place in Wisconsin, too bright and thin, like his shirt.

“Hey,” he said. “How you doing?”

Jillian tossed her cigarette out the back door. “I just—I keep seeing her, sitting out here. Just a few days ago she was in my backyard.”

“Jill, I really don't think you should stay here. You should come with us.”

“No.”

“Just till they catch this guy. I've got plenty of room.”

“I can't, I …” The only thought on Jillian's mind was keeping Michael safe, and for Jillian that meant getting him as far away from her as possible. “The police need to talk to me, and Mara's funeral is this week. After that I'll come down. Okay? I'll book the flight tonight.”

“All right. Well, call your dad, at least. He can get out here in a day.”

“Yeah, I, I hadn't even thought about that. It's just—everything's happening so fast.”

“Let me do it, I can call him right now.”

“No, I'll do it. I should be the one to tell him what's going on.”

Michael came walking down the hallway toward the kitchen. He'd been very quiet since Jillian told him what had happened. He seemed unsure of what to say or do, or even where to look.

“Hey, honey,” Jillian said to him. “Did you pack shorts?”

“What?”

“Did you take shorts? It's really hot down there.”

“Yeah, um … I got the blue ones.”

“You need more than one pair.”

“I couldn't find any more.”

Michael looked to the floor and Jillian could tell that he was hiding whatever it was he was feeling. He always looked away or stared at the floor when he was upset, not wanting to make any kind of eye contact. She walked over and as soon as she touched him, the tears came, the inconsolable kind, like a child's. She held him tightly. It had been so long since she'd held him like that, so long since he'd let her into his private fourteen-year-old life. Despite the horrible thing that had happened, she couldn't help cherishing a brief moment of feeling like a mom again.

“It's okay,” she said. “Everything's going to be okay.” She looked over Michael's shoulder to Nick. “You're going to stay with your dad and I'll be down as soon as I can. Just a couple of days. I'm going to call Grandpa and have him come and stay with me. Okay?” She gently broke the embrace and held him at arm's length. “I need your help with this, buddy.”

Michael nodded.

“All right. Go find your other shorts.”

He walked away.

Nick checked the time. “We should hit the road if we're going to make our flight.” He touched Jillian's arm, as if asking permission for something. “I'll put the bags in the car.”

Jillian nodded, distracted. “Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.”

He walked away and Jillian couldn't help feeling a tug of longing for him. She remembered his laugh. There hadn't been much laughter in her house over the last few years. She remembered his body and the long weight of him on top of her, the pressure, what it felt like to be covered by him and feel safe, pinned beneath and protected.

She opened the back door and lit another cigarette. Sat on the step. The moon was so bright that the yard seemed to float in the vapory haze that had settled low across the ground. In the far corner of the yard, through a veil of mist, Jillian could just about make out four skinny giraffe-leg-like shadows: Michael's swing set, from an eon ago, when he'd played on them for hours and hours and hours. She gazed up at the old carriage house on the edge of her property, where her writing studio was. The window on the second floor glowed golden. She'd left her office light on. She wanted to be in there, writing. She always felt better when she was writing.

Nick called from the front room. “Jill, we have to get going.”

Jillian stubbed her cigarette out on the steps and hurried in. Michael was standing at the front door, his suitcase in his hand. He looked lost. Like a lost little boy. The one who used to wake smiling and carry bad breakfasts out to her office.

She wanted to say something to him, something profound and reassuring, but all she could think to say was, “Make sure you wear sunscreen, okay?”

Michael nodded.

“I'll be down in a couple of days.”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

She kissed him good-bye and watched them leave. She waved to them when they got in the car. She waved to them as they pulled away. She waved until they were out of sight. She stared out her front door for a long time. She saw the police car parked in front of her house, and began to feel restless, a simmering anger rising in her, angry at herself for feeling so afraid, angry for having to send her son away, angry that she had ever started this whole goddamn thing.

She slammed the door shut and locked it and went into her bedroom.

Rummaging through the closet, she found her black enameled safe box, punched in the code, opened it, and pulled out a Beretta M1934 .380-caliber pistol. Her father had given it to her when she'd moved away from home. It was a stubby little thing, lighter than she'd remembered. It felt good in her hands, the rough notched grip, the way her thumb rested neatly on the grooved safety, the oily smell of steel. She reached in and took out the box of 9-millimeter cartridges. The pistol's magazine was empty, and she'd forgotten how to load it. She fumbled with the bullets, dropping them on the floor as she tried to thumb them into the mouth of the magazine.

“Damn it …”

She grabbed her laptop, first Googled, then YouTubed, and in two clicks she was watching a dentally challenged man with a mullet and tattooed forearms instruct her how to load seven rounds into a Beretta. She followed his instructions, smacked the magazine into place, and thumbed off the safety. To the kitchen next and out the back door, hurrying to her writing studio. She ran up the stairs, pushed open the office door, and sat herself in front of the computer. She was going to write. The police had told her about the note the killer had written, warning her to stop. Well, fuck him, Jillian thought.

I am the writer.

She put the gun on the desk and took the digital recorder out of her drawer. She hit the Play button and heard her own voice whispering “massive blunt force trauma to the face and skull.” She threw the recorder against the wall. No. No! That's not what she wanted to write. Not that.

What then?

She looked at the quote she kept taped to her wall.

Do not worry.

You have always written.

You will write again.

Just write one true sentence.

She couldn't think of a single true sentence.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.”

Was this even really happening? It was an actual nightmare, she felt, she was living in a nightmare and needed to wake up. It had all sounded so easy at first. She'd thought it was going to be fun and she'd make some money. She would write something really shocking and try to make it controversial, and maybe if it were gruesome and raunchy enough people might even buy it. She would put a hot sex scene in it and violence, and use words like
fuck
and
Jesus
and
cunt
, and if she got really lucky, maybe the church would ban it—and oh, God, if she could only get the pope to denounce it, she just might make a fortune. And why not? Other writers did it all the time, laughing all the way to the bank.

Jillian wasn't laughing now.

She wiped her eyes, wishing she'd never had the idea to write about Deborah Ellison. She tried to stop thinking about the murders, but she couldn't. Horrid, horrid images kept running through her head, like a movie reel looping the same gruesome shots over and over again—hacked and mutilated bodies, shattered skulls oozing brain matter and—

So she stopped.

She changed her mind and just stopped.

And decided to start over.

Jillian grabbed all the research books stacked around her desk and her notebooks, and she threw them in the garbage. She opened the files on her computer and deleted everything that had anything to do with Deborah Ellison's murder, every draft, every piece of research, every saved image. She deleted all of it and emptied the trash folder—
click
—gone. She never had to look at another word of it again. Ever. She opened a new document. It snapped up fresh and clean and white.

She stared at the blank screen.

She waited.

She waited longer.

Nothing.

She read the quote on her wall again.

Just write one true sentence.

She wrote, “I don't know what to write.”

And that was true …

And that truth led to another.

And that led to another, and the ideas began to come to her, and she started writing about the fact that she wished she'd never written about this poor girl's murder, and that she wanted to be writing children's books again where the bad guys always got caught, and children always survived, and she wrote and wrote and wrote, and she couldn't stop, no, no, she couldn't stop, because she knew what she had to do now. She had to write herself out of this horror.

She would write herself clean again.

D
etective Mangan and Detective Eagan watched Lachlan through the two-way mirror. He was sitting in the interrogation room. Eagan had interviewed him at the
American Forum
building, asking about Mara Davies and how well he'd known her. Lachlan had seemed completely forthcoming, but then Eagan stumbled across something while interviewing the other employees, information that Lachlan had failed to disclose. He'd had an affair with the murder victim, Mara Davies.

They let Lachlan squirm another five minutes.

“You ready?” Mangan asked Eagan.

“Let's do it.”

“I'll take the lead.”

“I'll listen.”

He and Mickey Eagan walked into the room.

“Well, we meet again,” Mangan said, coming through the door. “Mr. Lachlan, this is Detective Eagan.”

Eagan nodded at him.

“How long are we going to do this?” Lachlan asked. “I've done everything you've asked. I canceled the series in the magazine. I've told no one about the note. I've told you everything I know. I've been—”

“Well, now, now, you didn't quite tell us everything, Mr. Lachlan,” Mangan said. “I've come to realize that you have a habit of doing that. First the prostitute in your apartment, then this little thing about Ms. Davies.”

“Yes, I—all right, you're right, I didn't. Okay, you're right, I didn't tell you. I'm sorry. I didn't think it pertinent.”

“Didn't think it pertinent?” Mangan said. “Having an affair with a woman who winds up murdered would be the
definition
of pertinent.”

Mangan sat at the table and read through Lachlan's statements again. He took his time. He looked up afterward and studied the man a moment, as the phrase
an infinite and endless liar
, came to him,
an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of not one good quality
. There was still something Lachlan wasn't saying. He was hiding something.

“So,” Mangan said to him, “one more time. Why didn't you tell us about this affair?”