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He drove there alone. An ordinary street. An ordinary working-class neighborhood. A Polish delicatessen on the corner, then a dry cleaner's, a shoemaker's shop, an oculist. Hanukkah candles visible in many apartment windows. A Christmas tree blinking in a bakery.

He entered the building. No name beside the buzzer for the top-floor-rear apartment. He rang for the super. The inner door clicked open. A white-haired woman with glasses stepped into the hall.

"Yeah?"

Janek
showed his shield. She frowned, motioned him in. There was the smell of garlic on her breath. No, she didn't know 6B. No, she didn't have an extra key.

Janek
climbed the stairs, resting at each landing. The odor of roach poison, apparent in the lobby, was nearly overpowering by the time he reached the top.

He pulled out his revolver, cocked it, held it ready. He knocked. No answer. He pressed himself back against the wall, turned the knob and pushed.

The door swung open slowly. At first he thought the room was empty. But when he moved to the doorway and stared into the gloom he met a pair of hard gray eyes.

H
e had been inside Amanda's apartment nine times before he killed her. Nine times! Could
Janek
believe that?
Nine! Nine!

Think of the risk. Incredible! An absolutely impossible feat. But those expeditions had been necessary, first to case the place, plan, rehearse. But even more important (and he doubted
Janek
had considered this) on account of the single great imponderable: the dog.

That awful dog, that snarling Petunia—she'd been his biggest worry. Because if he was waiting for Mandy, waiting for her behind the curtain in the shower, the dog might sense his presence, warn her off, and that could blow everything, cause her to scream, force him to rush out into the living room and attack her there. Then there would be a struggle. He would have to kill her without the advantage of surprise. And that could lead to variables. He might be forced to improvise. And unless he carried out his script exactly as he had written it he could put himself in jeopardy. Worse, he could risk the perfect symmetry of his design.

Anyway...

L
ater, when it was over,
Janek
would recall how easily it had come, entering the dimly lit room, seeing him curled up on the shabby vintage-World War II sofa. "Hello, Peter," he had said gently, putting away his thirty-eight. Then he had sat down very quietly in a chair with lace doilies on the arms.

It took no prompting on his part to encourage Peter to begin, and, once he did,
Janek
felt no need to urge him on. They sat in silence for a while in that strange and gloomy room, lit only by an old-fashioned lamp whose shade bore a ragged lacy fringe. And then Peter started talking and
Janek
listened, nodding, as the story tumbled out. Peter seemed smaller now, boyish, without his former menace, and all the while the framed photos of Laurie and Jesse Dill sat perched on the side tables like silent sentinels to the extraordinary discharge of their son.

Peter,
Janek
knew, was not confessing particularly to him, but to Jesse, perhaps, or to some fantasy father by whom he wished to be absolved. In the end,
Janek
felt, it didn't matter: he was there, a detective-confessor, an empty vessel waiting to be filled. As soon as Peter made his proud boast that he had been in Amanda's apartment
"
nine times!
"
the crime was as good as solved and the only outstanding issues were the details
Janek
hadn't figured out.

The rage he had figured out long before.

And so he listened, glancing from time to time at Peter slumped on the couch, eyes half closed, blank, vacant, speaking in a soft but passionate whisper, directing his words not particularly to him but more generally to the room.

As if,
Janek
thought, Peter was describing a story he'd made up for a film.

The tale was told that coldly, he thought.

T
he dog was unpredictable, hated strangers, snarled at everyone, so he had to figure out a way to neutralize her, and the way he thought of was to make her familiar with his scent. If he left his scent in the apartment (which is what he'd done by going there so many times) and Mandy came home with Petunia from a walk, and Petunia began to act funny, to rush around squealing and snarling looking for the stranger she could smell, then, well, obviously, since there would be no one there, Mandy would order the little monster to shut her yap, and the next time it happened she would recognize the pattern and would disregard the warning which would be the only warning she would ever get.

And still, he knew, it would be dangerous.

Brenda, on the other hand, was a cinch. Vulnerability was the way to court a whore. He had known that for years, had known that all his life. All you had to do with a girl like that was be nice to her to have her eating from your hand.

He hadn't met Brenda before, hadn't thought of bringing in another woman. That idea came later. But he was getting ahead of himself. Back to Mandy. She was the spur, the cause.

He had studied her for months. He'd been at home a lot licking his wounds. His last picture,
Film Noir
, his finest work, he thought, had failed, played two weeks at a crummy theater in the Village, hadn't even made it onto the drive-in circuit, and after that debacle all his sources of financing had dried up.

So he was home a lot, and he noticed her, and then he started to watch her carefully. Her window, lit up at night, became a screen upon which he could fantasize a tale.

Studying, fantasizing, he discovered the way into her apartment—that ladder down from the roof, that apparently unlatched window grill. One night when she went out to a movie—he knew because he'd been following her—he got into her building, went up onto the roof, climbed down the ladder, looked through her window and tested the grill to make sure it wasn't locked.

He didn't go in on that occasion, so that was not one of the nine. So maybe you could say he'd been there nine and a half times before the final night, because you'd have to count that first expedition since it broke the barrier between fantasy and fact.

He spent hours drawing storyboard sketches of how she might be killed. And the more work he put into them the more exciting the idea became. And then he started following her and then he was caught up. And the more caught up he was the more definitely she was doomed, for once an idea took hold in him he felt compelled to carry it out.

For weeks he followed her, watching, studying, learning the currents of her life. He knew when she woke up, walked her dog, the time and place where she waited for her bus, her route to the school where she taught, the supermarket where she shopped.

She'd come home from work and change, right there, in the living room, without even bothering to close the blinds. Like she didn't care. Like she was flaunting herself. Like she was saying, "Hey, look at me, feast your eyes and eat your heart out, jerk. Because I'm a perfect little princess and you'll never touch me.
Never
never
never
.
"

The cunt!

He followed her up and down the aisles of the supermarket, watching her pluck items from the shelves. And thus he came to know her favorite brands of scouring pads and laundry soap (biodegradable, that kind of crap). He learned how often she replenished her pantyhose, her impulsive purchases of raisins and nuts, that she liked skim milk, unsalted butter, pink grapefruit and the goody-goody stuff like yogurt and wheat germ and whole-grain bread.

Her life was measured, her habits were predictable—even her variations held no surprise. A visit to the dentist. A splurge at a bookstore. Dinner by herself at the Chink joint on Third near Seventy-ninth. An occasional evening out alone, at a concert or a film. (She had no taste in cinema; liked the arty foreign stuff, those
sensitive
French pictures in which the girl shows so much sweet agony you feel like strangling the little bitch!)

A stop at the library, the bank, the wine store. Lunch with a colleague, that fag art teacher she always dragged around. Clothes to the cleaners. Then off to her exercise class, as if getting into shape meant anything since nobody would ever get to touch the precious tuned-up flesh.

She did not go out with men. He wondered why. She was decent enough looking, slim, a little drab perhaps, but her features were nice, occasionally even beautiful, when she wasn't looking sappy at some children or walking around smiling smugly to herself. He supposed it was her aura, the image she projected that she was content, that she wasn't sensual or open or worth another person's time. She held her elbows close, avoided eye contact, parted her hair in the middle and let it hang. Still, he saw, people liked her: she acted meek, pretended sweetness, and it was enraging the way she got away with that, since she was so clearly hostile, especially to males.

The monotony of her life became a drama. How long, he wondered, could it go on? He could not imagine how she could endure such a tiresome routine: get up, make coffee, read the paper, walk the dog, go to work, come home, walk the dog again, stop at the store, cook dinner, grade papers, walk the dog a final time, return, bathe, listen to the radio, stretch-exercise, turn off the lights, resign herself to emptiness, fall into dreamless sleep.

That was the suspense: would she break out of it, do something, finally, to shatter the design? He felt that she might, that she was a bomb waiting to go off. And so he waited. And nothing happened. And that made him angry, too.

He could predict when her period was coming. She would grimly buy a small bottle of aspirin and an
Econopak
of sanitary pads. She'd grimace waiting for her bus, speak with irritation to her building super, yank back on her dog, greedily munch sunflower seeds on her walks. You'd think those damn periods would do something for her, make her conscious she had a twat. At least cause her to own up to having one instead of pretending she was this porcelain doll. Then, maybe, he wouldn't have hated her so much for being such a little hypocrite. But she didn't own up to anything; the longer he studied her, the greater his hatred grew.

Because she was a fake. Mean. Nasty. Not generous and sweet the way people thought. She was a
fuckless
bitch and she was asking for it. For something. Begging for it, he thought sometimes.

So maybe that was just the way he looked at it. Maybe other people would have drawn different conclusions. So what? He was burning up with hatred. He had this itch to
despoil
her. Cut her down.

If, he decided, he could not finance a new movie to siphon off his rage, then he would kill her and that would be better than any movie—more difficult, complex, brilliantly planned and executed, unsolvable and ultimately more satisfying; by comparison his stabbing of his mother would seem like child's play.

(Oh, yeah, he'd taken care of her. And that Neanderthal she was sleeping with. Assumed
Janek
had dug that up. No point in bringing Old Jesse around if
Janek
hadn't figured out the connection first.)

Their eyes met twice. She was on her way to work, on her bus, and he was on it, too, across the aisle. The driver stopped suddenly and some of the standing passengers were thrown. She glanced up, saw him staring at her, creased her brows as if struggling to remember him and, failing, turned back quickly to her book.

The second time was when he tracked her to a movie, a revival of
Les
Enfants
du
Paradis
at an upper Broadway theater that from time to time had played his own old films. The movie was long and she had gone to the last performance. It was raining hard when she came out. She paused a moment, made a decision, ran into the street and flagged down a passing cab. He watched her slide into it, lean forward, speak to the driver, then suddenly turn and stare panic-stricken out the back. As the taxi pulled away he had no doubt she saw him, a receding figure staring after her, standing alone in a belted raincoat beneath a dimly lit marquee.

It was around that time that he got the idea of turning her into a whore. He began to plan in earnest and came up with the notion of the switch.

He started going to whores, looking for one who resembled her. ("Yes, you were right. I was impressed—I didn't think you'd get that far so fast. They were look-alikes, but not in an obvious way; only in a way that suited my purposes.") And checking out the whores was fun because they didn't pretend to be anything but what they were. Which was trash, of course, but at least they knew it. Not like Mandy. She didn't know what she was.

Anyway, Brenda turned out to be very important because it was the switch that made his crime a work of art. It seemed impossible in practice, if so beautiful in concept, and yet he felt he could do it, that he had the brains, experience and temperament to bring it off. So the plan became a puzzle that filled his days, a game he would play out with flesh and blood. And in the end it was the blood that almost got to him—he nearly swooned when he cut off Amanda's head.

T
he blood.

He had always loved blood, from way back, early in his childhood, when he'd watched his Uncle Harold operate. Something about it was beautiful, the color, sure, but also the way it moved. Spurted sometimes, or flowed slowly, spreading out into puddles, rich and thick.