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Authors: Wayne Jones

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BOOK: The Killing Type
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Of course, it’s one of those questions
that has only one appropriate answer, like the time I was “asked”
to leave Toronto U.

“Sure, that would be lovely,” I say,
and in spite of my dark, morose self I genuinely do mean it. As she
walks back to the counter to retrieve her drink, I wonder if she
noticed the soft lilt in my voice, nearly pleading for her company,
that I was simply not able to suppress. I feel the same jumble of
emotions that dogged me all the way through my adolescence, when
the desire for connection generally lost out to the fear of
rejection. As she strides back toward me, the flaps of her coat fly
off behind her and I can see that she has crafted a style that is
soigné at the same time as it is casual, what looks like black silk
on top and elegant denim below, and a swath of skin in
between.

“Thanks,” she says as she sits,
throwing her coat over the back of one of the extra chairs. “I know
it’s kind of rude of me to do this and you’re a sweetheart for not
saying anything even if you are pissed.”

“Not at all.”

The rustling noises which accompany
settling in eventually dissipate and we are both left like
symmetrical bookends facing each other and holding our
cups.

“We have to stop meeting like this,”
she says finally and laughs at her own joke. “And you know, it’s a
bit of a cliché, but it’s good to laugh. I mean, it’s good to have
some relief from these murders. I’ve spent all day going back and
forth between being horrified or surprised or even just
frightened.”

I can see something of a little girl
in her eyes, a terror, and her hands as well as her lips are
trembling ever so slightly (the trained eye notices these things)
as she sets her cup down.

“So, listen,” she continues, “what’s
your story? You told me a bit about yourself at the library there
and then at the restaurant, but what do you do when you’re not
writing a book about murder?”

I hesitate, not because I don’t know
where to start but because there is nowhere to start.

“It’s fairly dull actually,
if I have to be honest. I mean, my life. Well, not
dull
, perhaps, but—I
suppose what I am trying to say in my own bumbling way is that I do
not have too many activities outside of this research, but that I
do consider the research to be important, and that does provide me
with a kind of solace in my lonely nights.”

“I agree with you, I mean about the
fact that the book will do some good.”

We both sip and I take the mental
opportunity to try to fathom exactly what she is trying to glean. I
do realize the possibility that she may be completely integrative,
that she may be genuinely interested in a scholar’s work, or in a
live version of how a crime gets investigated and solved. But a
doubt nags in my gut, one of those undefinable feelings that I have
trouble articulating or explaining but of which I am as certain as
I am of anything.

“I’ve said too much,” she says. “I
tend to pry.”

“It’s quite all right.”

There are always turning points in
conversations just as there are in relationships. Something is said
or done or—in a memorable moment I had with one of the toadyish
assistant professors at TU—thrown, and then subsequent interactions
are irrevocably altered. During the rare quiet evening at home when
I am too fatigued for research or reading, I’ve turned on the radio
and heard the most execrably mawkish songs bemoaning the same
phenomenon (“baby done done something or other,” and so on). Alas,
I suspect this fate has befallen Tony and me, and no manner of
cajoling or explanation can revive us. I would like to tell her
that I don’t mind her questions at all, that I don’t consider them
intrusive, that in fact I welcome the platonic attention of any
human whom I find intelligent and witty.

“Well, I should get going anyway,” she
says predictably.

“Oh, so soon?” As blackly doomed as it
is, I do still entertain a glimmer of hope.

“Yes. Though maybe we can, like, hook
up some other time?”

“I would like that very
much.”

She gathers up her coat and with
something part way between a smile and a grimace of regret, she is
gone past the counter and out the door. I watch her out on the
street as she flips her collar up around her ears and looks up the
one-way street before she crosses on the red, no looking
back.

It does occur to me that I have
misinterpreted this entire exchange, that Occam’s razor applies,
and that perhaps she was simply happy to see me for a short time,
did not want to overstay her intrusion, and genuinely would like to
meet again. I try to convince myself of that as I settle back into
my seat and try to forget everything bad.

 

Chapter 8

 

It was exactly 24 hours after the
Easley murder that I received the following email
message:

 

Your research project will not end
happily. More people will be killed, the papers will prate, but I
will not be found out and your book will build to no denouement or
climax or cataclysm of resolution, the murderer dragged away before
an angry, jeering, relieved crowd while the police do their best to
fight the temptation to just throw the trash to the dogs. Instead,
your words will simply fall off, beginning from nothing and leading
nowhere, and while your desperate readers skip to the conclusion in
which nothing is concluded, I will be driving slowly out of town,
or lounging about in the comfortable quarters to which I am
accustomed and entitled.

 

How does one deal with something like
that? My first reaction, objectivity and detachment and the rigour
of the scholarly mind for now assuaging and distracting the
emotions, was to find out where this came from. How does this
person know about what I am doing? How can he be so confident that
he will not be caught and that I will not succeed? How can he be so
callous and brazen about the lives of innocent people? I am
catching a slight hint of naïveté in my voice, and I worry whether
I am in way over my head. A conscienceless psychopath wanders the
streets and a hapless quasi-academic thinks he can do something
about that, even if it is just to document the rise and
fall.

I go for a drive, hoping the cool
August evening air will do something to help. While I am stopped at
a light on Brock Street, I hear voices coming up behind me. Ignore
them, I tell myself, ignore them. A cab full of students, all men
(or approximations of men), pulls up beside me, and one of them
says, calmly, as if he is simply reciting a fact he has memorized
for one of his summer classes, “Hey, buddy, you’ve got a piece of
shit car.” The cab proceeds when the light turns green, but I hold
back, scared for some reason, beaten down, feeling unaccountably
vulnerable. I care nothing for cars and yet for some reason this
dismissal of my trusty vehicle—relatively old, but very
reliable—bothers me. I don’t understand it. I feel as if my feet
have been taken out from underneath me, as if things I could always
count on, I can no longer count on. This car is not what I thought
it was, this town is not full of dedicated students who are
respectful of others and have better things to do than to cruise
around in cabs making unprovoked, frivolous statements about—the
whole thing is silly, of course, but it reminds me how precarious
my own security of self is, how easily I can be diverted from the
quiet confidence of a trained scholar to the blubbering idiocy of a
consumer who is starting to wonder whether he should trade up to a
newer model.

I drive home quickly, park the (old)
car, and walk slowly to my room. I lie down on the couch and just
stare up at the ceiling. The silence and solitude help. Short
bursts of thought still assail me, but with decreasing frequency.
Minutes pass and I feel myself starting to forget the details of
the incident in the car, and beginning to concentrate on those of
the email. I parse the words and phrases, rearrange, recombine,
reconstruct. The trick is knowing just how much attention any thing
or event deserves. Is there something in this message other than
the obvious—the killer claims he will kill again and will get away
with the whole series? Should I reread to the power of ten? Or
should I just forward the bit of crude and shabby confidence to the
police, and let them bumble away at trying to track the person
down?

My epiphany comes about the same time
that I shift my weight on the couch, squirming to a more
comfortable position. Selfishly perhaps, I see a battle, one
against one, the trained scholar who is trying to write the book
and the killer, the subject matter, who is brazenly mocking the
utility of my enterprise. “Your book will build to no ...
resolution.” I see the challenge in these hateful words: my book
may not build to anything (so says he) but I may still confront him
and solve the crime. Am I reading too much into this? The book not
succeeding but the crimes in fact being solved? I picture the kind
of showdown that I don’t really want to happen, the hunted criminal
turning on the hunter writer just when I am unprepared, bending
down to brush that bit off my shoe, and then he has stopped and
when I right myself he is no more than about three metres in front
of me, and I know that this is either the time that I die, or the
time for some extraordinary intervention on the part of God or
evasive and direct action on my own atheistic part, an existential
man alone fighting—

But I’ve gotten away from my point,
viz.: The killer wants to goad me, brandish the failure of my book
as an incentive for me to keep on looking, to make a liar out of
him. I have to admit that I am concerned about my own personal
safety. Granted, this is a small town and so the activities even of
a modest scholar are perhaps relatively easily sniffed out by
anyone with a modicum of interest, but I do wonder what else this
killer knows about me. Email address, yes, also easy to find out,
but does he know where I live as well? Does he know my habits? I
hesitate to give myself airs, or to encourage pathetically
grandiose comparisons, but I heard a news report on the radio
recently, the gist of which was that one of the main ways to
prevent a terrorist assassination is to avoid a regular schedule.
Take a different route to work, get your morning coffee at various
places, “mix it up,” as the consultant with the brilliantly white
shirt and impeccable moustache put it.

I admit to not doing that: I
am, sadly, a creature of habit. I like my coffee just
so
, and always at the same
time, and certainly always at the same place. I scour my memory
now, trying to find the obvious stalker during the course of my
days, but my thoughts devolve to outrageous comical clichés: a man
reading a newspaper but lowering it as I pass by, a woman smoking
at a street corner, hiking up her collar and activating to pursuit
when I cross, another man ... but you get the idea. Alas, even in
the midst of the cartoon a worry still tingles: am I likely to be
tracked down by a man who obviously lacks a conscience and who
would not hesitate to kill?

 

I am much less frantic the next day,
quite giddy with a joie de survivre in fact, and I carry out the
regular morning rituals with a measured luxuriousness that I
generally do not have time and patience for. The razor plows its
way through soapy white stuff while a distracted scholar tries not
to smile and ruin the next pass. My mind starts doing a calculation
not only of the amount of time that we humans spend every day on
these activities, but also of the order in which they are done.
From casual conversations that I have had with friends and
acquaintances through the years, I know that there is a great deal
of variation. The young philosophy prof at Toronto U. shaved while
he was in the shower, for example, and it saddens me that I
remember that the head of the English department insisted on
brushing his teeth before doing anything else in the morning. My
own sequence, then as now, is: floss, brush, mouthwash, shave,
shower. I derive a certain comfort and security from this order for
these rituals, and when some circumstance or other occasionally
forces me to diverge from them

—well, I feel quite disoriented and a
strong insistent urge keeps distracting me from my current
engagement and reminding me that I should go back to perform the
one I’ve missed. This morning I am perfect but just on Sunday past
when those damn dogs across the street had done their regular
rounds of yapping and defecating at around 7:30, and the owners
laughed heartily at something or other, all combining to get me out
of sleep and out of bed much earlier than I had anticipated and
needed—and the end result was a cranky and inattentive Andrew who
stumbled into a hot shower before he had had breakfast or done any
of the other necessarily precedent actions. The day was just not
right after that.

As I am stepping out of the properly
ordered shower this morning, the phone rings and for an instant I
consider drying quickly and rushing to give a subservient answer. I
change my mind just as quickly, continuing in my leisure. In a
moment of insanity a couple of weeks ago, I gave my phone number to
the raver to just shut the poor man up and give myself some peace.
The details escape me, but I think the circumstances were that he
was promising to keep me up to date on some facts or patterns
associated with the murders—he’d discovered a website or a blog or
some such thing, and he characterized the revelations as “very
interesting.” He asked for my number and I was as surprised as I
was reluctant to give up this simulacrum of privacy that I fancy I
entertain in my little room, unreachable by both the unwashed and
the civilized.

BOOK: The Killing Type
7.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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