Blood Music (21 page)

“It's in here,” she said, “that fixture there.”

“I'll need a chair or something to stand on.”

“Oh. Okay.” He watched her bend to lift a chair from the table that stood against the wall of the living room. They were always nervous about having a strange man in the apartment. He did nothing to set them at ease; he watched. The woman put the chair down in front of him, her hand drawn back quickly as his reached out. Behind her he could see the newspaper open on the table.
KILLER KEEPS PROMISE AT CONCERT
:
CLAIMS SIXTH VICTIM
. Saturday's papers. None of the papers ever mentioned the one on the Stevens' campus; he wondered why. He was so proud of that one.

The young woman had Sunday's papers too, with practically the same headlines because the media were so pumped up by these killings that they didn't want to let them go in just one day. And today's papers too, with in-depth interviews with psychologists and police experts, analyzing the crimes for the umpteenth time. When he stepped up on the chair, perspective shifted with a bump. Everything looked a little bit smaller. “—gas pipe in the fixture—” the woman was saying. The building was old; the ceiling fixture housed an open gas pipe, from the turn of the century most likely. The woman wanted the gas pipe sealed off and a fan installed. He wondered what she would look like with her head pulled back—but it was idle speculation. He was sated and calm.

He loved what he did. He was still enamored of the stillness of his victims, still enchanted by his anonymity. But something was reaching out now to stay his hand. The vision of the low, dark room? It came more frequently with each fresh kill; since the murder in Cunningham Park it played at the back of his consciousness like a musical riff, faint and changing but ever the same, never getting closer but never entirely forgotten.

Could he be free of the fever need? He could kill for a long time before killing lost its charm, he knew that. And he could bait the press and the whole city with his letters for a long time too, relishing his controlling hand behind every newspaper article, every TV sound bite.

Yet his wife wanted him home. He had frightened her, had driven her away. He had tested her love and found it strong; but he had also made her cry. She was his wife. She was pure—except for that one delirious, uncontrolled moment, the baby screaming in the playpen. But he would expiate that sin. And she would never leave again. He would stay home for awhile.

The woman sat on the sofa and read the paper and didn't look at him. She was wearing sweatpants and a white T-shirt. There was a pair of hunter-green pleated pants slung over the edge of the bed, and a peach silk blouse. There was nothing provocative about the woman's pose on the sofa; she was just sitting there. From where he stood on the chair he could see the top of her bowed head, and the tops of her breasts under the T-shirt.

What would she do if she knew? His hands were busy with the open pipe but he was aware of her. Would she cry? Scream? She sat there and he knew she was thinking about him. The newspaper made a rustling sound as she turned the page. She was still reading about him: there were pictures of the six women. He had Leanore's keys in his pocket. The woman put her hand tentatively over the picture of Cheryl Nassent; Cheryl smiled uncertainly at the camera and the light caught the silver feather at her ear. The woman's finger caressed the earring; it came off soot-gray in her hand. He could still hear the honeyed memory of her voice. Had she told him her name? He never thought of her by name.

There was a time when he had never killed, but that was long ago and he didn't remember it well. A summer day, three or four boys in a guiltless, self-absorbed circle: when you take the right wing off look how he twitches, when you pour the lighter fluid and touch the match to it, look! Taking the legs off flies, if you are an eight-year-old boy, is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. He'd had no sisters to torment. But he could yell, “No girls on the slide!” and push, hard, and mothers would be indulgent. Kiss the girls and make them cry.

He killed a kitten when he was nine. It submitted with slit eyes to the fingers rubbed behind its ears, along the delicate bones of the underjaw. It purred. Its neck vibrated lightly under his hand: sinew and bone. When he tightened his fingers the body pulled abruptly and claws dug into his leg and then he really was angry. He rubbed his thumb against his forefinger with the neck between them, the other hand at the back feet, holding them away from his thigh. He couldn't have said what he was thinking about.

Then the kitten was dead. He didn't remember this now; he remembered it in dreams sometimes, and he always loved the feel of fur. The woman had turned the page and she wasn't thinking about him anymore.

If he continued to kill, would his wife begin to suspect?

He knew she was not a fool. Even with all her reading and all her thinking and all her psychological second-guessing she was blind to what he was doing, as the world was blind—but she was closer than the world. And when she found the panties he had discovered that it was possible for the world to come to him in his most secret places. She would have to be watched.

She did not suspect—he knew that. Even when she held the evidence in her hand she had not known. And he had rendered it innocuous with lies. Always he had the power of his lies. But what if—what if? Gnawing at the certainty of his invincibility. And he could not bear to have her know. To have her innocence destroyed.

Because then he would have to kill her.

“This isn't going to be a very tough job,” he said genially, and the woman on the couch lifted her head and smiled a little.

J
ohn couldn't remember whether Eenie Meenie was a gay bar. It had windows—Madeleine had said that most of the gay bars in the Village still didn't have windows. But he didn't see any women in the windows. There were very few women at all on the street here, at the corner of Christopher and Greenwich. It was eleven o'clock on Monday night, June twenty-second, and he really wanted to be with Madeleine. There were a lot of men here, young and muscled and convivial and loud. They all looked the same to John: close-cropped, almost military hair, clean-shaven faces; if there was a mustache it was short and straight. All the men were immaculately groomed. They wore muscle shirts, T-shirts with the collars cut off, skin-tight jeans. Their skin shone with a uniform health-club glow. They called to one another from across the streets.

Quite a few of them had something to say to John. A transvestite in a yellow dress—John would have thought he was a woman anyplace else—called out, “Hey, straight boy, who you think you're fooling? You want a little real action you come right over here to Mama.”

“No, thanks, I already have a mama,” John said, smiling. Two black men standing in front of an X-rated video store (“Video Rentals, Novelties, Magazines, Rubber Goods”) muttered, “He think he like pussy but he hasn't tasted a real piece—” John wondered at their antennae; he would not have taken every one of them for gay; for all the sameness of their uniform he wouldn't have been able to say for certain anyplace else, This one is, or, That one is not. But he was obvious to everybody here.

Eenie Meenie probably was a gay bar. But there was an Off-Broadway theater up the block, and tourist shops—candles, antiques, fancy chocolates—among the X-rated appliance stores and the gay clothing shops. John had been going in and out of bars and restaurants for two hours and he was a little high from the drinks he'd ordered and he hadn't found out anything at all. He was tired of identifying himself as the brother of a murder victim.

He stood for a moment as though contemplating a jump into deep water, and then he shrugged and went into Eenie Meenie. If it was a gay bar he would just leave. “Well, well, Princess, we're proud of you!” somebody shouted at his back.

Inside the door it was so smoky that John could not find his breath. “Don't choke on it, boy,” a voice said; an apparition out of the smoke, a pale face with kohl-rimmed eyes and scarlet lips—a boy, maybe eighteen years old.

“I don't intend to,” John said affably, heading for the bar. It was a gay bar all right but he was already inside and anyway who knows where hope is?

The long, scarred cherry-wood bar stood like a distant shoreline across the sea of unfamiliar faces, every one of which seemed to be pointed toward him. For a moment they seemed to be moving toward him, like foam on a wave. There were a few catcalls, an overall scrutiny so piercing that John forgot what he was wearing, and then the wave crested, and dissipated into a hundred fragments of bodies—heads, backs, elbows, arms. Every mouth in the place seemed to be moving. Lips smoked and lips talked, and lips opened suggestively or in boredom, and John was still certain everybody was looking at him as he made his way across the floor.

John knew better than to ask the bartender for what he really wanted, which was a screwdriver, he ordered a whiskey and soda. “Sure,” said the bartender, blessedly without a smile or even any overt acknowledgment at all. John felt his spine relax a little and he dug in his pocket for a cigarette.

“Need a light?” A chocolate hand, perfect nails. John shook his head, smiling without looking up, but then he couldn't find his matches—how was he going to get out of here without feeling like a fool—and he sat with his cigarette dead between his fingers, and when he looked up the hand was still there.

“Nobody's going to bite you—unless of course that's what you're looking for. Me, I don't like the rough stuff.” It was a young black man, perhaps John's age, perhaps younger. He wore a gold muscle shirt that showed his pectorals and biceps to good advantage. His eyes were green. He had a wide, flat nose and the slightly skewed aspect of a fighter. His manner was much younger than John's. He was as amiable as a stray puppy.

“I just need a light,” John said, but he smiled in return. “Listen—” he said after one deep nauseating, soul-satisfying pull on his cigarette.

“Felix,” the young man said.

“John. Listen—I'm looking for somebody.”

“Trying to find a man?”

“Yes and no.”

“'Cause honey, we're
all
trying to find a man.”

“That's the no. This is a specific man. I know he wouldn't come in here—”

“What make you think you know? 'Cause he straight? You here—you straight, right?”

John laughed. “Right. But I don't think he would. Women are really his thing. I just came in here by mistake. I'm looking for the Symphony Slasher.”

The rap music on the jukebox held a beat and his words fell heavily into sudden silence: “Symphony Slasher.” Felix paused in lighting his own cigarette and held the match up like a torch and peered at him under the little flickering light. “That the man you looking for? What make you think he be here?”

“I don't. I didn't know this was a gay bar.”

Felix threw back his head. “Hey,” he shouted out to the room at large, “Mr. White Bread here say he didn't know this was a gay bar! Now, you want to tell him or should I?” And a wave of faces turned toward him again and a chorus of voices, overlapping, shouted out, “This,” with a pause for emphasis, “is a
gay bar!
” The bartender set down John's drink with a flourish; it seemed to John like the ending to a dance routine. “Yeah,” he said, “I figured that out.”

Felix clinked John's glass against his own. There was a ring of people around them now. Some had heard the words “Symphony Slasher” but most only saw a chance for sport.

“That Slasher guy, he kill women. White women. Don't look like anybody around here be interested in that particular flavor of fish.”

“Yeah, man, we don't go for hair pie.” There was a chorus of whistles and raucously held noses. The faces went out of focus for a second.

“He murdered my sister,” John said quietly.

A hush fell. Glass clinked and voices could suddenly be heard toward the back of the room—“His sister, man.” John realized that he was holding his whiskey glass so tightly that his fingers were cramping. He set it down carefully. “Your sister?” Felix said. “I'm sorry. I don't behave very well sometimes. We thought you was here for the experience.”

“No. It's not an experience I'm enjoying, particularly.” But he felt distracted from his own pain; he would learn nothing here.

“I want to apologize for these ingracious ignoramuses,” said Felix. “Unfortunately some people are brought up in barns—”

“I know nobody meant any harm,” John said wearily.

“Eddie, get this man another drink. I want to correct the image of inhospitality these cretins have given you of this establishment. I'd like, myself, to—” There was a commotion somewhere in the room, a self-important ripple through the crowd. Whispered voices could be heard: “The Slasher—” “his sister—” and this new noise overlay that; it sounded as if a path were being cleared for royalty.

“Let me through, you silly bitch, I've got something important to tell this guy—Felix—”

Felix, who had stopped talking at the interruption, looked around, leaned over, and asked cheerfully, “Which one was she?”

“Cheryl Nassent.” It was the first thing everybody asked. Felix looked blankly at him. “End of April.” They never remembered her any other way. But he always said her name.

“Oh,” said Felix, “that was a bad one.”

“Took her right off the street, in the middle of Bleecker.”

“They found her all the way over by the West Side Highway, man.”

“I got a cousin lives over there, Horatio and Washington.” They were explaining it to themselves. For a moment there was random chatter, static, and then the focus shifted and everybody was looking at the young man shouldering his way through the crowd.