The Killing Type (8 page)

It’s coming back to me now,
though, my conversation with him. He was particularly voluble on
his own background, how he came to Knosting, even why he’s ended up
so angry all the time. I was shocked to hear him speak so
forthrightly, frankly because I never thought him capable of such
introspection. He arrived here from Calgary with his family, a wife
and an infant girl, about five years ago. I can’t recall now
whether his employer had transferred him or downsized or just
outright laid him off for no particular reason, though I do recall
that he was categorical about being wronged in some way. He worked
for less than a year before he lost his job here as well, and then
there followed a few years of odd jobs, under-the-table work, hard
labour and the like while he was often forced to be collecting
welfare as well. The story turns into something of a country song
after that: his wife has an affair with the owner of the garage
where he happened to get work as a mechanic, and after he argues
with her—and, unfortunately, hits her—she gets a restraining order
and takes their child to the other end of town. Through some
circumstance which seemed to make him more livid than the loss of
his family, the wife ended up with his truck as well.
“
That
, and I have
to pay the fucking bitch three hundred dollars in fucking support
every month,” he said in that charming way of his.

I wonder and worry about the poor man.
One part of me is relieved that he has murders to occupy his mind,
that he can channel his anger towards all aspects of those bloody
facts—people dead, inept police, no end in sight—instead of the
vagaries of his unfortunate domestic and personal life. Is it
perverse of me to think that the murders serve as a distraction,
that it is better for him to exercise himself about the incompetent
investigation than to be stewing about his family? Doesn’t a person
have only a finite fund of mental energy, which in the raver’s case
is better expended on anger about murder than anger about a
(perhaps) conniving wife?

I dry myself off and step out onto the
bathroom floor again as if I am regaining refuge, the safety of
terra firma. I quickly do the usual at the sink and head to the
bedroom to get myself ready for a day which I have not planned yet.
The phone rings again and I pick it up this time without checking
the call display.

“Hey, Andrew?”

“Oh, hello, how are you?” It’s the
raver.

“Good. Listen, I hope I’m not catching
you at a bad time.” (Silly boy, and of course he continues with
barely a pause.) “I was wondering if you’d be up for right now, you
know, getting together today some time in order to talk about the
murders. You know, like I was telling you about the other
day?”

The reader who is surprised at my
taking no more than a nanosecond to decide to comply with the man’s
request does not quite understand the drives that animate a
scholar, the quest for knowledge, the virtual inability to resist
any occasion that might move the research forward in even the
smallest way.

He rambles on a bit while I
see that I am dripping onto the hardwood, but ultimately we agree
to meet at that new place where I can get strong coffee and a
sandwich that does not feature white bread or those
atrocious
wraps
. He
is dressed better than I have ever seen him and I can’t pinpoint
why this bothers me: the shirt is a very elegant white linen,
wrinkled to just the right degree, the shorts are a lovely faded
blue cotton, and he is clean shaven and more tanned than I remember
him from our last meeting.

“You look all set for summer,” I say
to him before I am able to edit what comes out of my
mouth.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re dressed right for it.
Keep it short, keep it cool,” I conclude, trying to affect a casual
demeanor which is naturally foreign to me.

“Oh, yeah, right,” he says, and laughs
a little uncomfortably.

“So, you’ve seen some patterns in the
murders?” I say, changing the topic and salvaging my purpose in
coming out at all.

“Well, I can’t be totally sure, of
course,” he says and then takes a very demure bite of his muffin
(morning glory). I am quite struck by the contrast in his demeanor
from the loudmouth I have witnessed up till now. I wonder what it
is that has quieted him down like this: perhaps the social intimacy
of being on an actual arranged outing with an acquaintance, as
opposed to the chance meetings he and I have had up till now; or
perhaps a genuine insight which has sobered him. He
continues.

“I can’t be totally sure, but I’ve
been looking at the names of the victims, like, I mean, looking at
the letters in the names.”

“The letters?”

“Yes, I know it sounds a bit crazy but
hear me out.” I shall spare the reader the deluded details, but he
then launches into an incredibly contrived thesis about the last
letters of the victims’ last names, or some such drivel (it may
have been some other letters, from the killer’s name, or I don’t
know what). In any case, at the end of it I find myself in the
awkward position of having to pretend to give any credence at all
to his ridiculousness. And somewhere inside me, I sigh
disappointedly as I realize that his calm exterior does not really
indicate or presage any concomitant alteration in his crazy raving
interior character. The waiter arrives with exquisite-looking
napkins enrobing chunky utensils and I sigh again when I realize
that there is no way for me out of this engagement: I must just
make the best of it.

In fact, things go rather well,
considering. I make some polite perfunctory inquiries about his
theory, but I do believe that he puts two and two together (or
rather less than that) and concludes somewhere in the depths of
himself that he may have been overly open to suggestion or wild
imaginings, or perhaps that an investigative scholar demands more
than a little hint or coincidence here and there. The turkey on the
brown bread is fresh and moist and adorned with a flavoured
mayonnaise which imparts just the right taste overall. I swill my
beer like a Viking and by the end of the meal he and I are joking
about things that have nothing at all to do with
killing.

After all the food has been
consumed, the waiter arrives to clear away our dishes and to
inquire if we want anything else. The raver (he does have a name:
Wilson) and I exchange sad, tentative glances, neither wanting to
be the first to commit the other to an unwanted extension. I smile,
first at Wilson and then at the waiter, and indicate that I will
permit myself one more beer (what
is
getting into me?). Wilson visibly beams at this
and babbles his own order for a rum and Coke.

“Listen, Andrew,” he says when the
waiter has gone, “let me just say that about the, about the theory
and all of that. I’m not saying that it’s the God’s truth or
anything like that: it’s just something I put together. I mean, I
do believe that there is something to it, but, well, I know that it
might be a bit out there.”

I smile and try not to make it
paternalistic or condescending. He catches me before I have the
chance to say a word.

“It’s OK, no problem. You’ve been nice
and polite.” He laughs a little more loudly than I would have
preferred.

There’s a lot of silence for the rest
of our outing after that, though I don’t think that it is the
result of resentment on his part. At one point I notice that each
of us is unintentionally mimicking the movements of the other: a
sip taken, a glass set down, a barely perceptible slouching down to
just the perfect position of comfort into chairs which are
evidently not made for regular human behinds.

“Well,” he says with a kind of
flourish after his glass has been set down for the last time, and
both actions do have the feel of terminal punctuation. “I think I
should be heading off. Listen, Andrew, it was very good of you to
come out and meet me about this. Thanks a lot.”

“Not at all,” I say, the apex of
self-sacrificing civility. “It was my pleasure.”

He smiles, stands up quickly
to leave, and suddenly I am just left there alone. I have the odd
feeling that I have averted something, confronted the enemy and
emerged victorious, and I have no idea of the genesis of such crazy
ideas. I shake my head at my
own
craziness, and not seeing anything of any
particular interest as I survey the room, I prepare myself to leave
as well. I hold back for a few minutes, though, in order to be sure
that Wilson has cleared the area.

Chapter 9

Responding, perhaps, to a
challenge that I have never issued and can therefore legitimately
abjure any responsibility for, the killer kills again. The victim’s
name is Juan Rutherford, 45 years old, a relatively recent arrival
in the Knosting area, about a year and a half ago. A short (5 foot
5, I record unmetrically) and slender (125 pounds) man, short
greying hair, handsome by most standards, at least according to the
picture of him published in the
Gazette
.

I cite the man’s height and weight
only because they may have been contributing factors in the way he
died. “Blunt-force trauma,” most of the media called it—aping the
police jargon, as usual—but the fact is that Mr. Rutherford was
beaten and kicked to death, and at some point the underlying bone
structure of most of his face was destroyed. I have not seen the
effects on this poor man, and do not want to, but in the course of
my research I have seen close-up photographs of the same brutality
inflicted on others. One stands out, partly for the white-trash
context. A woman asks her current boyfriend to kill her former
boyfriend, and he agrees. The man is beaten to death, his face is
trampled, and later the head is cut off, a cigarette is inserted in
the mouth, and the whole disgusting installation is put on a
pillow.

I wonder how people can be so insanely
violent. Taking some pride in not being a naive gawker, I accept
the hardships of life, the twists and turns of fate, and I do not
expect glorious light to shine from all the actions of humans who
are sullied and imperfect as I am. Still, dare I say that I am
shocked that a fellow human’s head could be dealt the same
practical injustice that most of us reserve for pesky insects? I
spoke somewhat sarcastically about journalists copying the sterile
lingo of the police, but perhaps the practice derives more from
self-preservation than from laziness. The euphemism of technical
terminology can sometimes convey the facts accurately without
conjuring up images of the cruel mess.

This is not a day to spend alone, and
certainly not with my nose or any other part of me buried in dusty,
bloody tomes. I realize in a flash that this is a good sliver of
time when my landlady, poor dear, is not napping or watching one of
her shows. During my first visit with her, when I first moved to
Knosting, she and I spent a lovely hour or two in her place
discussing not only the practicalities of my renting arrangement,
but also the details of her daily schedule. She is a charming woman
really, though with a distressing tendency to overestimate her own
physical abilities. Generally speaking, she should not be walking
around much at all, but I have seen her returning from a “stroll in
the park,” as she called it, as if her very life were not in danger
from a simple fall to the ground, or worse, from not quite making
it across the street before the yellow roadster with the
inattentive driver barrels over her.

I shake off these thoughts as I
descend the stairs and head for her door. The rug in the foyer is
looking a little shabby, even in this generously muted light, and I
can see as I am knocking that dust bunnies are scurrying into the
hardwood corners.

“Well,
hello
, Andrew,” she says with genuine
enthusiasm. “Is everything all right? Is there something that I
could do for you?” (Another thing: she frets too much over her
tenant. The old girl is going to worry herself into an early
grave.)

“Oh, yes,” I say. “Everything’s fine.
I was just wondering if you could do with a little
company?”

Her face brightens noticeably—she
spends a lot of time alone—and a smile forms and stays there for a
batch of awkward seconds before she steps out of the way and makes
room for me to enter. I’d forgotten about the utter elegance of her
apartment. When I was there the first time, admittedly I was
focussed on making conversation and a good first impression, and on
getting the messy logistics of the renting out of the way (cheques,
no lease but a bit of an arduous and dubious “signing agreement,”
as she styled it). In a medium-sized space, or at least in the
living room to which I have access, she has managed to accommodate
a lot of furniture without the place seeming cluttered or tacky.
She seats me in an extraordinarily comfortable old armchair of a
deep maroon colour. The fabric is a soft, rich velour with a
pattern of flowers in bas relief.

“Could I get you something to drink,
Andrew? Some tea, perhaps—I was just about to put on a
pot.”

“That would be lovely,” I say. As she
smiles and turns to go toward the kitchen, I ask, “May I help you
with anything?” but she declines with a vigorous shake of her head
and a waving finger, the latter of which I am at a loss to
interpret. Perhaps she misunderstood?