John Lutz Bundle (45 page)

Pearl scooped up the photos and returned them to her pocket. “I want to thank both of you. You’ve been a big help.”

She left them the way she left most people she interviewed, looking slightly confused and concerned. Pearl guessed everyone had something to hide.

As she was going out, she heard Ernie say behind her, “Phones? I never knew we sold phones.”

Before the papers, even
City Beat,
had a chance to break the news about Ida Ingrahm, local TV had it. It had been leaked to them by one of their many sources at the NYPD, an organization that fortunately wasn’t a ship.

Florence Norton saw it first thing when she got home from work, kicked off her shoes, and lazily clicked on the remote.

The TV was still on NY1, from when she’d checked the temperature this morning before leaving for her job as sales rep for Best of Seasons salad dressings. Florence was good at her job, and had just about convinced one of the hottest restaurants on the West Side to increase its weekly order of special ranch with bacon and beef bits. She was over forty and had bad feet, and the calls she had to make, along with the subway rides where there were no available seats were taking their toll. She had to lose weight, she knew, but she also, deep down, knew she was only fighting a holding action.

The volume came on slightly before the picture on her old TV: “…the Butcher again…”

Then there was the pretty blonde anchorwoman, Mary something, looking concerned but still sexy, as if someone were pinching her slightly too hard.

Florence watched and listened as the woman explained how police thought it possible that the Butcher was murdering women whose last initials spelled out the name of the lead homicide detective assigned to catch him, a guy named Quinn. Of course, police reminded, this could be a coincidence, and there was no need for public panic. Still, it was wise to take precautions.

“Victims
Q, U,
and
I
have already been found,” Mary said with pained concern, which means—”

Holy Christ!

It suddenly occurred to Florence that she was an
N.

A potential victim. All of a sudden, the Butcher didn’t sound simply like a corny name for a killer on television news.

For a while her feet stopped hurting, and she was infused with so much nervousness that she almost got up from the sofa.

Calm down…Calm down…You’re not some flighty ingenue. You’re a grown-up, self-sufficient woman. Maybe even too self-sufficient. So Dad always said.

The police were right; there was no need for public panic.

Unless maybe you were a woman and your last initial was
N.
Unless maybe you were Florence Norton.

She turned up the volume and sat forward on the sofa, while the pretty blonde woman reminded viewers that the Butcher killed slim, attractive brunettes.

Reassuring, Florence thought, with bitter irony. She was breathing easier. While she had mousy brown hair, it was a comfort to know she was middle-aged, dumpy, and nobody had ever thought of her as attractive. Passable at her younger, thinner best, but that was years ago.

Directors would hardly cast her as the delectable prey of a psychosexual serial killer.

Florence had long ago stopped worrying about not being a beauty. Despite being overworked, she was quite happy doing her job, going to art exhibits, and dining out with friends of both sexes. It was a narrow life, perhaps, but she found it a contented one.

She used the remote to switch channels. The national news. Now here were people with real problems. In some city where there were palm trees, flames and smoke were curling into the sky above a fire-ravaged building. Several cars parked nearby were also on fire.

The picture cut to a helicopter shot of a distant white van speeding the wrong way along a freeway; apparently the vehicle contained the arsonist who’d set the fire. This was something, Florence thought. She peered at the screen, trying to read the crawl without her glasses, and figured it all had to be happening in LA.

The intercom buzzed, and she muted the TV and rose from the sofa. It took her several seconds to cross the room on her sore feet, press the painted-over button, and ask who was there.

She felt not the slightest sense of danger when the voice from the lobby fifteen stories below told her there was a Federal Parcel package to be delivered to her address.

A present? Something she’d ordered from a shopping channel and forgotten?

Whatever, it was sure to brighten her mood.

Pearl had removed her practical cop shoes and sat with her feet propped on the coffee table, watching TV news. Another California car chase. Was that all they did out there, when they weren’t hauling in junkie celebrities?

Maybe that was what she should do, she thought, watching the white van being pursued by an orderly procession of LAPD cars with flashing lights. Leave New York and become an LA cop, join the parade of police cars. Forget about Quinn and the NYPD and this noisy, dirty city with the accelerated heartbeat. Forget about all her frustration. LA looked clean and sunny and sparsely populated—at least compared to New York. It looked manageable. Being a cop in la-la land might even be fun.

She took a sip from her can of diet Pepsi and watched the driver in the white van slow down and cut across a grassy median, then wave at the cops and lead the pursuit in the opposite direction. Police cars on the other side of the highway politely got out of the way as the van passed.

The hell with that, Pearl thought, and wondered how far the asshole in the van would get in some good old New York traffic with NYPD radio cars on his tail.

As she watched, two cops by the side of the road stood helplessly with hands on hips as the van sped past.

Pearl shook her head.

The hell with that!

If it hadn’t been her TV, she might have thrown the soda can at it.

Bocanne, Florida, 1979

Darkness had fallen.

Nine-year-old Sherman Kraft lay on his sagging mattress in his bedroom in the ramshackle house on the edge of the deep swamp. His door was open about a foot, and he’d scooted over on the bed so he could see out into the hall, where from time to time his mother appeared and peeked into the bedroom of their boarder, Ernest Marks.

His mother’s hair was darker than the shadows, unkempt and hanging to beneath her shoulders, exaggerating the eager craning of her neck as she opened Marks’s door a few inches to peer in. Sherman knew what she was looking for, waiting for.

He was a skinny boy but with a good frame, and as handsome as his mother was beautiful. He had his father’s blue eyes but his mother’s firm jaw, her high forehead. His thin lips were a slash that curled downward slightly at one corner, like his mother’s. Maybe like his father’s, too. Sherman had no idea what his father looked like, only that his name was George, he was what Sherman’s mom called a con man, and he’d deserted them both five years ago and been shot to death by a woman’s angry husband in South Carolina.

Chickens coming home to roost, Sherman’s mom had remarked a few times, and that was the end of conversation about her late husband and Sherman’s late father George.

George the forgotten man.

The hinge on Mr. Marks’s door squeaked again, not loud, almost like the plaintive cry of a mouse surprised by a trap. Marks was a big man, in his late sixties, but he still looked strong. Sherman’s mom was being careful.

Sherman let his gaze slide to the side in the dim bedroom. It took in his wicker desk, where he was homeschooled. His bamboo fishing pole, propped gracefully against the wall in the corner. His threadbare armchair, where he loved to sit and read, whenever he could buy or steal a used paperback. Sometimes, when he had nothing to read, he simply sat and did math problems in his head. It was funny, the way the world could be broken down into numbers and mathematical equations. Everything neat and orderly in its place, if you concentrated hard enough and made things fit. If you questioned things enough. Sherman was always questioning. Not out loud, of course, but questioning.

How many heartbeats to the minute? He considered taking his pulse. His heart was surely racing. He’d read somewhere that seventy-six was normal. He placed his fingertips over his pulse for what he thought was ten seconds, then did the calculation.

Much higher than seventy-six.

He knew why.

The door hinge squealed louder out in the hall. His mother, no longer being careful, opening Mr. Marks’s door all the way.

Much,
much
higher than seventy-six. Like a bird trapped in my chest and beating its wings.

Footsteps in the hall, bare feet on the plank floor. His mother, coming toward his room.

She pushed his door open all the way and looked in at him. He could see her only in silhouette, dark and almost without substance, like a shadow.

Sherman rolled onto his side, facing away from her. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t.

He never did.

“Sherman, I know you’re awake. I need your help.”

He knew there was no point in arguing. He simply didn’t disobey. It was always easier if he did as he was told. Always.

He rolled over and sat up in bed.

“Go into Mr. Marks’s room and wait for me,” his mother said. She wasn’t whispering.

“Mom…”

“This isn’t any fun for me, either, Sherman.”

He nodded to the shadow in his doorway and watched it disappear into darker shadows. Then he climbed out of bed, slipped on his jeans that felt stiff and cool even though the night was warm, and walked reluctantly into the room across the hall.

The conch shell lamp by the bed was on, too dim to read by. Next to it on the table was a cracked saucer with a snubbed out filter-tip cigarette in it. Mr. Marks was in bed, lying on his back, his right hand raised about a foot off the mattress, as if he were about to reach for something. Not looking at it, though. Staring at the ceiling. Not breathing. So still. Dead.

The light was on in the hall now, and Sherman’s mother came into the bedroom. She was carrying a long-bladed pair of scissors.

“We’ll undress him here,” she said in her crisp voice that meant business, “then you know what to do.”

Sherman knew.

Mr. Marks hadn’t been dead long enough that he was starting to get stiff. Sherman had been told that was why they had to act soon each time, before rigor mortis set in. He’d looked up the term in his old dog-eared dictionary and knew what it meant, though he didn’t quite understand why it happened.

Like the dead cat I found that time out in the swamp…Didn’t bend when I picked it up by one leg. Its claws were out, though, sharp, hurt…

Sherman, thinking of other things, any other things, wanting to be in some other place, any other place. Pretending this was happening to somebody else. A different Sherman altogether.

While his mother snipped away with the scissors, Sherman yanked and tugged, and the tattered gray T-shirt and underpants Mr. Marks slept in came off and away from his heavy body. Sherman tossed them into a pile alongside the bed. He knew his mother would burn them later. She rolled Mr. Marks off the bed and he landed on the woven throw rug with a terrible soft muted sound of flesh-padded bone hitting hard.

Sherman and his mother each grabbed a corner of the rug near Mr. Marks’s head, and then pulled with all their might to get him moving. Then it wasn’t so difficult to drag his body on the rug along the hall floor to the bathroom.

It was more of a struggle to wrestle him into the big clawfoot bathtub. As if he felt the need to resist even though it was too late.

An elbow bonked loudly against the tub. “Damn you!” Sherman heard his mother say, but he knew she was talking to Mr. Marks. Sherman worked harder to get a long, uncooperative leg into the tub, his own bare foot slipping on the plastic his mother had spread on the tile floor, making him almost fall.

Then Mr. Marks’s big soft body with gray hair all over it settled down in the tub, his feet at the end with the faucets, his head resting on the slanted porcelain at the other end. His expression was peaceful. He might have been relaxing, taking a bath.

There was no need for words now between Sherman and his mother. She tugged the plastic shower curtain around the freestanding tub so it shielded the back wall, then went into the kitchen while he went out to the garage and got George’s old tools—a handsaw, jigsaw, cleaver, and a power saw with a long coiled cord.

He carried them into the house in a burlap sack, then removed them and placed them carefully on the floor next to his mother’s kitchen knives.

His mother began to undress, which was his signal to leave.

He went out to the hall and closed the door behind him, but he stooped and peered through the keyhole, as he always did.

There was his mother, her leg, the rest of her, looking so much paler, smoother, and larger than she did with her clothes on. The shower was running and she was bending over the tub, using the knives and heavier tools. Sherman knew that when she was finished with the knives, cleaver, and handsaw, she’d turn off the shower before using the power saw. Water and electricity were a dangerous mix, she’d warned him. Setting a good example.

She never once glanced toward the keyhole, but he was sure she knew he was watching.

It was the power saw’s lilting whine that he could never forget.

When she was finished, Sherman’s mother called for him to come back into the bathroom. He waited a few seconds, so they could both pretend he’d been in his bedroom, then he opened the bathroom door, knowing what he’d see.

There was his mother, fully dressed. Everything in the bathroom was meticulously scrubbed. All the fluids from Mr. Marks had been washed down the drain to the septic tank. His pale, clean parts were neatly stacked in the tub, his torso, thighs, calves, arms, then his head. His sparse gray hair was wet and matted, but his face wore a peaceful expression, as if he might be dreaming of his childhood.

The black plastic trash bags were folded in the tiny closet with the towels. Sherman’s mother got them out, separated plastic, then snapped a bag in the air to open it out. Sherman helped her to stuff the pieces of Mr. Marks into the bags, arms and head in one, two bags for thighs and calves, one for the torso. The bag with the head in it was always surprisingly heavy, so Sherman carried that one. Always the gentleman, or he’d be scolded.

He and his mother lugged the bags out to the cedar-plank back porch that faced the deep swamp. The alligators were conditioned to being fed from there, everything from fish heads to…everything. They’d be waiting in the darkness, all of them, hungry and expectant; as if they recognized the sounds and knew what they meant. Maybe the whine of the power saw.

Sherman and his mother removed one by one the pieces of Mr. Marks and tossed them to the alligators beyond the porch rail. Some of the pieces the gators dragged back into the depths of the swamp. Some they ate right there. One of the big gators always made primitive, guttural noises along with the crunching of bone. That was another sound Sherman would never forget. A sound that was older than the human race, and might be in the collective memory and needed only reminding.

It wasn’t until years later that Sherman understood what it was all about. The elderly boarders would disappear from the isolated shack on the edge of the swamp and be missed by no one. Before renting them a room, Sherman’s mother always made sure they had no family. Their Social Security checks would continue to arrive, and be endorsed by Sherman’s mother. One of the few useful skills her con man husband had taught her, before leaving her so she could toil alone with child and poverty, was forgery.

She made the most of it, and wasted little time.

Tomorrow she’d place another classified ad in the papers under Rooms for Rent. She knew there’d be plenty of replies. Florida was full of pensioners, lonely and poor and closing fast on the end of life, people who had no family and needed a final place to stay before being claimed by death or the dreaded retirement homes.

There! Dessert.

There was a final grunting and stirring and rippling of water in the moonlight, a parting splash in the darkness beneath the moss-draped trees.

Sherman’s mother leaned down and with his help began folding the now-empty plastic bags.

They were the thick kind that could be washed out and used again. Over and over.

Fifteen minutes later Sherman was back in his bed, listening to the night sounds outside his window. A loon cried off in the distance. Closer by, there was the rustling of something moving through the brush. Insects droned and shrilled constantly so that you got used to them and only now and then realized you heard them. The swamp seemed peaceful but wasn’t.

The swamp was a dark place that held its secrets close.