Life Penalty (20 page)

The second drawer contained his underwear. Each pair of jockey shorts was folded carefully in the same manner, sorted into neat little stacks of five. There were six such stacks.

The third drawer was reserved for undershirts. Once again, they were neatly arranged in groups of five, all white, all V-necked. Three stacks.

The last drawer contained two shirts, one black, one blue and gray checked. They sat beside each other, collars pressed, pockets empty, sleeves tucked under.

Gail was careful to return everything to its exact position before moving on, She closed the bottom drawer at the same moment she heard the footsteps on the stairs.

She had been so absorbed in the contents of the dresser that she hadn’t heard any sounds at all. Now whoever was on the stairs was headed in this direction, and it was too late for her to escape. She was trapped.

The steps stopped somewhere outside the door. He was waiting for her to try to leave. Gail stood paralyzed in the center of the room. Then she heard the sound of a key clicking into a lock and recognized that it was coming from down the hall. She waited until she heard a door close before allowing herself the luxury of crying.

Stop it, stop it, she admonished herself, wiping away the tears and taking a last look around. What was it she had been looking for? What exactly had she been hoping to find? Some sort of physical evidence linking this man to her daughter? Some shred of evidence that would reveal him for the man she suspected him to be?

All his room told her was that he had a fetish for cleanliness, and as far as fetishes went, this one was certainly preferable to some of the others she had read about. I wonder if he does windows, she thought, heading for the door. Get out now, her inner voice commanded, her eyes returning to the bed in the middle of the room. She hadn’t looked under the bed.

Get out of here, the little voice pleaded.

Gail marched with determination to the bed and knelt beside it, thrusting her arm underneath. She felt something hard hit her hand. Another stack—this time of magazines—she realized before she saw them, and didn’t have to look to know what sort. They were the same type
as the ones she had seen in that awful store. In rapid succession, photographs of tortured and mutilated women appeared before her eyes. “Oh my God,” she wailed, stuffing the magazines back under the bed, becoming aware of some sort of commotion outside.

He was back! She knew it before she reached the window. He was arguing with the drunks, trying to push past them into the house, and, for some reason, they were being difficult and blocking his way. The boy looked up in exasperation and Gail pushed her body back against the wall. Had he seen her? Had she moved fast enough?

There was no more time to wait and wonder. Gail tore out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her at the same moment she heard the front door closing downstairs. They would pass in the hallway, she realized, not sure in which direction to run. She decided she would only trap herself if she ran upstairs; if she went down, at least she had a chance.

She reached the landing at the same time he did, but as he had done on their first encounter four days before, he virtually ignored her. If he had seen her, he gave no clues. His head lowered, his shoulders slumped, his eyes firmly on his shiny brown leather boots, he walked past her as if she didn’t exist. Gail clasped the banister for support. She heard the door to his room slam shut.

W
hen she returned to the rooming house the next day, the boy had gone.

“What do you mean, ‘he’s gone’?” Gail asked Roseanne, as the landlady was busy laying fresh sheets across the boy’s bed.

“Took off this morning bright and early.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

Roseanne fixed Gail with the most world-weary of stares and said nothing. Gail looked morosely around the boy’s now empty room, its closet open and bare, the drawers cleared of their neat little stacks. She watched as Roseanne lazily tucked in the sheets, tossed the pillow across the top of the bed and perfunctorily covered her poor effort with the tatty blue-flowered bedspread. “I’ll say this for him, he was a neat one, all right. Kept everything smelling so clean. Kind of hate to lose ones like that, the ones that are quiet and keep to themselves.”

Gail felt a sickening sensation in the pit of her stomach. He was gone. She had lost him. “Did he say why he was leaving?”

The landlady shrugged, not about to waste her time on an answer.

“What was his name? Did you know his name?”

Roseanne stared at the ceiling as if studying a crack.
“Don’t think he ever told me, and I probably never asked. Doesn’t matter anyway. They never tell you their real names.”

“Did you ever talk to him?”

Roseanne returned her eyes to Gail’s. “What for?”

It was Gail’s tum to shrug. “Why are you interested in this guy?”

“I’m just interested in people, I guess,” Gail answered lamely. “I like to try and figure out what makes them tick, why they do certain things. The quiet ones are sometimes the most interesting because they’re the most surprising. You can never figure out what they’re thinking.”

“I never
cared
what they were thinking.”

“I just find it interesting,” Gail continued, trying not to ramble. “You know how you’re always reading in the newspapers about some crazy killer, and the police interview all his friends and neighbors and they say that he was real quiet and kept to himself all the time, that they never knew what was going on in his head. They’re always so surprised when it turns out that he was busy killing people in his spare time.” Roseanne regarded her strangely. “You have to watch the quiet ones,” Gail laughed uneasily.

“Guess we don’t have to worry too much about you,” Roseanne said on her way to the door “You want the room?”

“What?”

“The room. It’s a little nicer than yours ’cause it’s got the window onto the street instead of the back alley. Course, it also means you get more noise …”

“I don’t want the room,” Gail said quickly. “Actually, I’ll be leaving myself some time today.”

Roseanne pushed past her into the hall. “Suit yourself. I don’t give refunds.”

“You have absolutely no idea where he went?” Gail asked again.

Roseanne stopped. “He did say something about having to dispose of a bunch of bodies,” she chuckled, her laugh trailing her down the stairs to her apartment. “I think you’ve been watching too much television,” she called back just before Gail heard the door to her room close.

Gail was out on the street a few minutes later.

Where could he have gone? What street would he have picked? He had obviously discovered that someone had been snooping through his things. What secrets had he been hiding? Where had he gone? Gail paced up and down the shabby neighborhood as if she were a cop patrolling her beat. Which house was he staring down at her from now?

The day had not started well. She had slept fitfully and awakened tired. Jennifer had been moody and disagreeable, dawdling over her breakfast, only to tear out of the house when she realized she’d be late for school. Jack had been visibly upset, even annoyed, when she’d refused to consider the possibility of accompanying him to the next meeting of the Families of Victims of Violent Crimes. He changed the subject abruptly, saying something about his mother having returned from her most recent trip to the Orient, and when Gail mentioned that she hadn’t realized his mother had been away, Jack only shrugged, not bothering to repeat what he had voiced so often lately, that Gail seemed to be off in her own little world, that they were drifting further and further apart.

She had wanted to tell Jack about what she was doing, the suspect she had found, but she was afraid that he would tell her this was too dangerous and that she would have to stop. Leave it to the police, he would surely say, and so she had said nothing. On his way out the door, he had reminded her again to take her car in for a tune-up before the weather got too cold.

It was almost as if the car had ears, Gail thought approximately an hour later when it refused to start. She had turned the key in the ignition and listened to it sputter and wheeze, trying to connect, yet missing by the tiniest of spasms. “Turn over,” she had commanded angrily, pressing her foot to the floor and then having to wait ten minutes because in addition to whatever else was wrong, she had flooded the engine. Why hadn’t she listened to Jack? she castigated herself. He’d been telling her for months to take her car in. She was about to call for help when the engine finally caught hold and started. “Thank God,” she muttered, determining to take the car to the garage over the weekend.

She had raced into Newark, worked herself into a frenzy of anticipation, only to discover that the boy had vanished. Packed his bags and disappeared. His bags, she thought, capturing in her mind the image of his belongings. She hadn’t seen a bag. Yet he had obviously had one. What else had she missed?

Gail spent the rest of the day hunting for another room, and finally settled for one on Howard Street, a block and a half down from the first. It was smaller than her other room, and a dollar cheaper, though as Roseanne had warned her, not as clean. She paid for three nights in advance. The landlord, a sturdy-looking middle-aged man with a pronounced stutter, cautioned her against noisy parties but said little else. She spent the early part of the afternoon on her new bed listening to the couple in the next room argue through paper-thin walls. Was he here? she wondered. When she had asked that question of the various landlords up and down the streets, each had professed ignorance. Could be, they told her. He would have arrived just this morning, she had pressed. Surely they could remember: slim, young, with a very short crew cut. Could be, they repeated, shaking their heads, unable, or more possibly, unwilling, to jog their memories.

At three o’clock, Gail returned to her car, disappointment clinging to her like a second shadow. The car wouldn’t start. “Great,” she said, smiling to hold back the tears, “just great.” She pressed gently on the gas pedal three times, careful this time not to flood it. Then she turned the key in the ignition and waited for the familiar rumble. Nothing happened. The engine was cold and dead.

“My car won’t start,” she told the short, balding man in the booth of the parking lot. “What should I do?”

“Call Triple A,” he advised.

“I can’t wait for Triple A. I have to get home.”

The man raised his palms skyward. What had she expected? It wasn’t his car. It wasn’t his problem.

“Can I leave it here overnight?”

“Five dollars,” he told her.

“I’ll call Triple A in the morning,” she assured him, but it was obvious that he didn’t care what she did. In the meantime, she’d have to figure out a way to get home. She gave the man his money and walked out into the street, the cold wind biting at her cheeks. “Don’t you cry,” she said aloud as she searched in vain for a taxi. “Don’t you dare cry. Damn car.”

She began walking up the street. She couldn’t very well walk back to Livingston. Perhaps there was a bus.

She didn’t see them until they were almost on top of her and by that time it was too late to prevent a collision.

“Jesus Christ, lady, watch where you’re going,” the first boy snapped angrily. “You don’t own the sidewalks.”

“Sorry,” Gail whispered to the two young men, one dark, the other—the one she had stumbled into—fair. Fair and slender, she noted. There were so many of them, she cried softly, letting the frustrations of the day finally escape.

“Hey, lady, it’s okay,” the dark-haired youth said quickly. “He didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just his way, you know what I mean?”

Gail continued to cry, knowing both boys were watching her, unable to stop.

“Weird,” the first boy muttered as they moved away.

“You shouldn’t have talked to her like that,” the other scolded.

When Gail was finally able to wipe her eyes and look around, she found that she was standing alone outside a video-game store. It was filled, she noted, as she peered through the outside window, with youngsters who should have been in school. A second later she was standing inside the doorway, the door held open by the wedge of her back. She stared at the young men wrestling wildly with the various games—there were no girls, which she found mildly interesting—saw their looks of intense concentration and wondered if any of them ever concentrated this hard on their schoolwork. They laughed; they swore in frustration; they continued to pour the required money into the slots. Gradually, they began to feel the cold draft from the open doorway, became aware they were being watched. The noise and activity stopped.

“Hey, you comin’ in or going out?” someone called.

“Yeah, it’s gettin’ cold in here,” several voices echoed, their courage growing as peer support increased.

“Can I help you with something?” a man asked from behind the counter.

Gail backed out of the store, taking the sound of laughter with her.

“Guess her kid’s over with the competition,” she heard someone say as the door closed in front of her.

The boy from the rooming house had not been inside. She had known that he wouldn’t be.

Gail approached the corner and stopped. Two girls, no more than Jennifer’s age, stood on the curb, their arms outstretched, their thumbs in the air. Gail watched them anxiously. Didn’t they know how dangerous it was to
hitchhike? Oh well, she sighed, at least there were two of them. A minute later a car containing three teenage boys pulled up and the girls climbed inside.

So much for safety in numbers, Gail scoffed, her feet propelling her to the corner. In the next instant she was standing where the two girls had stood, her right arm outstretched, her thumb wavering in the cold air. Why not? she reasoned. You never know who you might meet.

Six cars passed without stopping.

“You want a lift somewhere?” a voice asked from behind her.

She turned quickly, recognizing one of the boys from the video-game shop. He was about seventeen or eighteen, with dark hair, and jeans that looked as if they had been painted onto his skinny frame. He was staring at her as if he knew who she was. Gail shivered, but not from the cold.