The Killing Type (10 page)

I haven’t reported any of these emails
to the police, my reasoning being that they are directed at me
personally and contain nothing in the way of explicit information
that might lead to the killer’s apprehension. Yes, I hear you,
strident reader, saying that the significance or not of potential
evidence is not for a writer, however skilled and professional, to
decide. I do hear you, but I am considering my options. Allow me to
lay them out as I did my ever-decreasing supply of pants this
morning across my meticulously made bed:

Show the emails to the
police immediately. The reasons are numerous and obvious.
There
is
a
possibility that the killer is deriving some satisfaction from
these exchanges with me, that the contrivance of a sort of
secondary victim both enlivens and angers him, perhaps to the
extent that in some way I might be contributing to the tally of
people who are being murdered. This thought does give me
significant pause, but Libran counterarguments also influence
me.

Ignore the emails as I have been
doing.

Engage the killer in a
correspondence. I have to admit that I don’t trust my own integrity
enough to do this. Allow me to explain in crude terms. Once my book
is published, sales would be helped enormously if the inclusion of
actual emails from the killer could be touted in a breathless but
respectable blurb somewhere on the jacket. However, I am not
writing this book merely so that it will sell a lot of copies, but
for the psychological research value, for—well, for many things
that have nothing to do with money or fame or anything remotely of
such crass self-interest. What I crave from a prolonged exchange
with such a depraved conscience (or lack of one) would be to see
how the animal works, observe it in its habitat, see it manoeuvre,
hear it roar. I do believe that my intentions are pure in this
regard, but the chance that somewhere buried deep inside me lurks a
desire for exploitation for selfish ends—my
own
dark animal—keeps me from making
the correspondence a two-sided one.

Taunt the bastard, as the raver might
say. This is not a viable option, but I list it here merely to
complete the various possibilities. I am averse to the risk that
such a strategy would entail, and in any case, though I do consider
myself someone with psychological acumen well above that of the
average person, yet I am not an expert who would know what to say
to a killer in order to make him stop or reveal himself or
otherwise act to my (and the community’s) advantage. Of course, one
would fear the opposite, that the rage I might incite would drive
him to kill more. Or, it just now occurs to me, to kill me as
well.

I procrastinate, which
amounts to option two above, I suppose. For distraction, no media
beckon me this evening, nothing electronic, no books, nothing at
all. I settle back in my armchair, the light just right from the
blue lamp behind me and to my left. There is absolute quiet while I
pore over the pages of notes I have taken. I wish I could say that
I have identified suspects: rather, I have simply compiled bits and
pieces here and there, a detail, a quotation from the newspaper,
some apparent inconsistency (dare I say
clue
?) that may in fact turn out to be
simply a misreporting by one source or another. I start to doubt
myself. How does anyone ever put all this together and come to a
conclusion, make a profile of a killer, actually catch the
guy?

I have to admit to myself an odd and
uncharacteristic feeling of depression that I have been
experiencing for the past couple of weeks. I sit in my most
comfortable of chairs, or I take a long walk on the sunniest of
days, but I fail to energize myself at all. My friend Simon who
talked me through a bout of this some ten years ago told me at the
time that it was “chronic low-level depression” or “ahedonia” or
something of the sort. In sum, an inability to make myself happy or
to take pleasure in any activity or situation. The doctors say,
apparently, that it is all chemical, and hence the quick dispensing
of a variety of medications which “inhibit” this or “uptake” that
or some such thing (I never have had much of a head for medical
mumbo-jumbo). Simon swore by his own therapist and the resultant
medication (called AlphaFlex), and said that in a matter of weeks
he was back to his happy, regular self, presumably from the drugs
having readjusted his body’s chemicals back to their primordial
balance.

I abhor such artificially induced
states and so am loath to consult a physician for fear that he or
she might cajole me into experimenting with this or that elixir.
Yet I do crave some relief. I try to concentrate on my research but
often find my poor deranged mind wandering. I seem to vacillate
between worry whether I will ever boost myself out of this dreadful
down, and disorganized mental sleuthing about what the bloody cause
of it all is. Perhaps it is quite simple: a bookish scholar is
bound to go a little wonky when he spends his days trolling through
reports about killing instead of reading delightful old books in
some quiet sanctuary where the silence is deafening and the sound
of a polite, suppressed cough is a welcome distraction.

I search for my own cures. I
try St. John’s wort and Omega 3-6-9 without success. I choke down
two of the foul-smelling SJW with each meal, and on some days I
sense just the hint of, of
something
—not relief, for sure, but
just the thinnest slice of
something
—but it is illusory, like a
shimmering chimera you only
think
you see in the distance. The 3-6-9 are no better,
either alone or in combination, and to make matters worse they are
gigantic urine-coloured caplets about the size of two-thirds of my
pinky finger. Still, I persist with them for a few weeks until my
supply is exhausted and I cannot justify the expense of
replenishing them, wandering again in the aisle of the drugstore
devoted to home remedies and herbal medicine.

I try treating myself to luxurious
foods, high-quality ice cream, pizzas from that specialty place,
Thai food that is both spicy and elegant, but nothing of that
strategy works either, and I also worry that I will gain weight
(the scales, thank God, tell me otherwise). I abandon the whole
project when I realize that they are superficial pokes at a perhaps
insoluble problem. I wonder whether I may simply need a temporary
change of venue, a shakeup of my routine, some time off. I would
find it hard to justify a vacation this early in the research, and
my finances would not permit me anything more than the most
rudimentary escape.

At the barber shop the next
morning, the talk is all about the Rutherford murder. I flip
through a surprisingly recent issue of
Newsweek
while I wait for an empty
chair, and in between photos and the odd headline which grabs my
attention, I mostly eavesdrop on the conversations. No subterfuge
is of course necessary in order to listen in: it’s an accepted fact
that the talk is all communal, so that even though Ella is engaged
in a heated debate with the fat man who always gets his head
shaved, nobody minds the silent attendance on the part of the
others in the shop.

“I can’t really agree with you on that
one, Jim,” Ella says as she expertly shaves another deep furrow in
his curly brown hair. “I think we all have to give the police a
break on this one. I mean, yes, four people have been killed, but
this kind of thing never happens here in Knosting, and
the—”

“It’s not just that,” Jim says, and I
worry for an instant that Ella might not like the interruption, and
she with a straight razor near at hand too. The electric shaver
whirs as she makes a circuit around his left ear. She pulls the ear
out from his head and probes with the shaver, cutting the hair very
short.

“It’s not just that,” Jim
repeats. “I guess I just expect
something
, instead of just murder
after murder after murder, and all they can say is that they
presume—I heard one of them use that word,
presume
—that they
presume
that they’re all done by the
same person, but they have no leads and the public are asked to
contact them with any information. I mean,
Jesus
—pardon my French.”

Ella is working on the back now. She
has the edge of the shaver against Jim’s head, making a tapered
trim, and she then stands back a little to assess her
accuracy.

“Well, yes,” she says while she
touches Jim lightly on the forehead in order to make him sit up so
that she can have a better look at her handiwork. “But I think you
need to give them a bit of a break, allow some time, is
all.”

The debate ends there for now and in
the silence the rest of us look around the room and then resume our
reading with new attention. For me, that lasts about ten seconds
and soon I am flipping through distractedly, a photo of a car bomb
here, a headline about torture there. After about five minutes I
happen to look up as Ella is finishing off Jim. She deftly removes
the cape, pulling it to one side and making a large pouch so that
the sheared hairs don’t fall into Jim’s lap. She shakes the
contents out onto the floor and then folds it into a rough half and
lays it over the back of the chair.

She meets Jim over at the cash
register and I can see that he favours her with only one of the
loonies that she gives him back as change from the ten. I’ve seen
her smile several times now at this kind of modest tip.

“Thanks for coming in, Jim. See you
next month.”

“Yeah,” Jim says, now halfway out the
door.

Ella smiles at me and waves her hand
in the direction of the chair. I put down my magazine and seat
myself after she has removed the cape. I like this part of the
whole ritual, I have to admit. Perhaps it is the lack of female
company that I have had to endure for the last several months, no
woman actually touching me in any way. Or perhaps it is the
atmosphere of utter attention, the ethos of dedicated personal
service. She puts the cape on me, clips it at the back, and then
adjusts it over me at the front.

“The same?” she asks.

“You know, I thought maybe a little
shorter this time. I mean, even nothing with scissors: just the
shaver. Perhaps number two or one and a half?”

“Oh my, quite a change. You know what
they say? Once you go that short you never go back.” She laughs
lightly and then turns her attention to the selection of shaver
heads arrayed on the counter in front of her mirror. She chooses
one and snaps it on. The thing whirs to life.

“OK, here goes,” Ella says.

We talk very little, as usual, and
especially for me this time as veritable masses of hair come
tumbling off my head, onto the cape and then the floor, and in a
few cases which I note with distress, into my shoe. It is
fascinating to see myself in the process of being transformed. I
start off relatively nondescript, I think, a man whose short hair
is still short but who has allowed the telltale tufts to form on
his neck and sideburns, grey and wiry and brittle. Ella uses the
furrow method on me just as she did on Jim and at various points
during the job it looks like something has gone horribly wrong.
However, I end up very, very clean.

I rub my hand over my sharp stubble,
from forehead to the trim back. “I feel like a new man,” I tell
her, and she just smiles, removes the cape in her careful way
again, and we meet over at the cash register. I give her both
loonies and she smiles again.

“Thanks, Andrew. It looks good, by the
way.”

I return her smile and head out the
door. It’s only when I am out in the sunshine of a main street on a
busy Saturday morning that I realize that for those glorious
fifteen or twenty minutes, while I was being ministered to by able
hands, I did not think of killing at all. Once Jim had left I was
in my own little world there, the hair tumbling safely all over
me.

Chapter 11

Evil is indeed banal and the crude
practicality of murder is more horrible than the noisy, shiny
spectacle that one has seen countless times on television and at
the movies. Guns don’t make that booming sound, people don’t bleed
like that, death throes involve more slumping than flailing. I
suspect that I am not the only viewer whose sympathy has been
attenuated rather than aroused by the sight of an actor in
paroxysms of faked death, seconds dragging by while he conveniently
has the chance to complete his last desire (declare love, reveal
the secret code, “Marco did it”), and then the head either being
thrust back as an ultimate punctuation, an exclamation mark, or the
chin dropping to the chest and the eyes often remaining open so
that they may be ever-so-gently closed by the person (girlfriend,
fellow spy) left behind.

Blood doesn’t keep flowing after the
weapon has done its damage and the heart is no longer beating: it
clots, stops. I have had the most ridiculous conversations with the
raver in which—and I believe I am inferring correctly—he expected
that a body would gush blood in Peckinpah fashion, like a hose let
loose on the lawn, until the police arrived to plug up the
holes.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, no sentiment
so strongly felt by him that an expletive doesn’t make the perfect
prelude. “Jesus Christ. I mean, did you see the body on the news?
Hardly any blood at all. What the fuck is that all about?” The
implication seemed to be that, the bullet holes notwithstanding,
the man hadn’t been shot at all, that the police were covering
something up, for some reason that my own less conspiratorial mind
could not fathom.