Psycho-Paths

by Robert Bloch

  “Wait a minute. . .”

  “You do that little girl last Saturday night? The one off Andréws?”

  He was weeping inconsolably now. “No, no, no, I didn’t do nuthin’, no, no. . .”

  “Well, if you didn’t do her, you’ve done others. That’s enough for me.”

  He kicked while she hauled down his floppy pants around the red high-tops. He screamed blindly at the moon while she wrapped the garbage bag tie wrap around the root of his testicles. He was found moaning in shock fifteen hours later when it was too late to save him from the rather simple, if crude and torturous, castration that had been performed on him.

  Beatty knew she couldn’t rely on finding the child molesters on the streets. She’d miss three fourths of them that way. She might hurt innocent men too. That wasn’t her plan. When in the station, she made it her business to check the computer databank on known local pedophiles when typing in her paperwork each shift. She figured she could castrate two a week when she had their names and addresses and familiar hangouts.

  She left some of them in empty warehouses. She put one beneath an overpass and he was discovered by the winos the next morning. After two weeks, another child rape-murder occurred. This meant she hadn’t caught the right one yet. But she would. Oh yes, she would. Eventually. If he continued in her territory, she’d get her man.

  The thought of it made her laugh. If only she could tell Margo she was seriously after a man now. “I’m a normal woman, after all,” she’d tell her. “I’m going after my man tooth and nail, just like every other woman does. Nothing can deter a determined woman.”

  Beatty laughed and laughed at the idea.

  But she was careful not to smile when the guys at the station talked about the castrations. It made them uneasy, these strange crimes. The victims were all pedophiles with rap sheets. All with their balls tied off blue as blazes and dead as snails left to dry in the sun. Served ’em right, of course. Seemed downright Biblical. But still, it was unlawful, wasn’t it, to castrate a man without benefit of trial or jury or judge? Made a man feel a little vulnerable and antsy; made him want to check his crotch when no one was looking, make sure everything was intact.

  Weeks after Sally’s funeral, Beatty’s sister came to the house. She wore a black pantsuit and her hair was swept back from her finely furrowed forehead. She sat on the sofa, her legs crossed, eyes downcast. She took the coffee mug Charlie handed her and hugged it with both hands. She looked smaller than ever to Charlie. Drabber. Lost. Death did that to you.

  “Charlie, I’ve come to talk.”

  “Well, I didn’t think you were coming over to borrow a recipe.” Charlie sat across from her in a wicker rocker, scrutinizing Margo’s bitten fingernails.

  “Don’t be a smartass, Charlie. It’s in the papers all the time.”

  “What is?”

  “About the castrations. The. . .pedophiles.”

  Beatty permitted herself a cat’s smile behind the rim of her coffee mug. “Hmmm.”

  “Are you doing it?”

  Beatty tried not to flinch. She didn’t think her sister had the inventiveness to figure out something like that. The men all claimed it was a male who accosted them from behind, blindfolded and handcuffed them, then left them some place where they’d be found hours later. The guy was big, they claimed. And strong. And he had a deep, gravelly voice. Mean-ass son of a bitch. Heartless bastard, maiming them for life.

  “What makes you ask something like that?”

  “Charlie, I know you. I know how much you loved Sally. And. . .”

  “And what?”

  “There’s been something wrong for a long time, Charlie. You’ve been. . .obsessed. . .for a long time.”

  Beatty kept silent. She wouldn’t move now. Wouldn’t say anything to start an argument, start in on the recriminations. What she was doing was between her and the perverts. The courts couldn’t stop them. Let them out on bond, let them out after short sentences. Nothing short of taking their manhood away could stop them. Everyone knew that, but no one had the stomach for it. The liberal governing body thought castration, either physically or chemically, an inhumane act. As if raping a five-month-old baby girl was humane. As if ripping apart the vagina of eight-year-old Sally was humane. She’d get them all. Eventually.

  Margo was jabbering. “. . .if it’s you, Charlie, we have to do something. I’ve already lost my daughter. I don’t want to lose my sister too.”

  “You’re grieving,” Charlie said. “Imagining things. It’s not me.”

  “Would you tell me the truth if you were doing it?”

  “Sure,” Charlie said, going for the coffee pot so her sister wouldn’t notice the tightening behind her eyes where the determination sat still and ready on a throne made of pallid bone.

  The first murder happened accidentally. Beatty left her victim in an empty rental house near the beach. She figured the real estate people would be showing it within the next day or two. It was a nice house with a big price tag, the rooms done in pastels, the yard sculptured with white shell and tall cacti. She left a bucket of water for the pervert just in case it was a while before he was found. Then she forgot about him.

  Four days later the station was full of talk. Castration victim found dead, they said. His bucket of water was overturned. He’d crawled on his belly to the locked door, but no one heard the banging. His ankles were tied. Hands cuffed behind his back. Blindfolded. Tie-wrapped. And dead. His balls, they said, had rotted off. Just like they do when a farmer puts a thick rubber band on a hog’s balls. He had swelled up and begun to blow fumes strong enough to reach outdoors before someone called the cops to check it out.

  Beatty felt a twinge. Not of guilt, for guilt was beyond the bounds of her reasoning in the matter. Guilt was the reserve of the pedophiles. That and fear. She’d given them the fear. Many of them who had lived in the Lauderdale area had left for cooler climes. She went stalking the addresses and hangouts some nights now and discovered the freaks had moved on. It always made her furious.

  No, the twinge, on learning of the pervert’s death, was one of minute joy. It tingled way down inside like an itch in her innards where she couldn’t get at it. She began to wonder, as she prowled the beat in her squad car at night, if maybe she shouldn’t just off the rest of the squirrelly bastards. It might take more planning, more cunning, but why not go for it? Castration was fine for a warmup, but wasn’t dying the real thing? Sally didn’t get any second chances.

  Sally liked comedy movies. Sally liked pistachio ice cream. Sally told her once she wanted to grow up and be a cop like her aunt Charlie. Just like her. Be a big, fine, strong cop who kept the city safe for all the decent people.

  But then again, murder, that was something much more serious than castrating the deserving. Her victims were formally charged pedophiles. Guys who had been apprehended and were out on appeal or had served a little time. Culprits. Bonafide. So castration was called for. It was just and right and there’s no telling how many little children she’d saved from the clutches of sure doom because of her actions. But murder, now that was definite. A real crime against man. She was supposed to uphold the law and keep the peace. Was she also supposed to wipe out the scum single-handedly? Well, why not? If not for her, they’d fill the gutters with dead children. Pedestrians would have to step over them to go to the corner store for a quart of milk. No one wanted that. She was performing a needed civil service. Absolutely.

  The memory of Sally in the body bag, the swirling lights flickering over her small dead face, brought Beatty to a firm decision.

  Kids died. Bereft of trial by a jury of their peers. Lacking bondsmen and endless appeals.

  So let murder begin. Castration wasn’t good enough for the worms. Not nearly.

  It was another Saturday night. Sultry, the air tasting of salt water. Palms rustling with soft breezes. Jaguars and Mercedes trolling the byways and avenues. The pink and peach and turquoise club buildings bristled with pie-eyed snowbird pa
trols from Quebec and the Eastern Seaboard.

  Beatty scanned the sidewalks for one particular suspicious character. She had a copy of his rap sheet on the seat beside her. She saw a drug deal going down and rolled on past. They scurried into the shadows. She saw a hooker enter a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce. She whipped around the car, waving at the stunned chauffeur.

  Minor infractions, these. Nothing to get bent out of shape over. She was after bigger game. Had been for months now. Although the child murders had ceased, she was not convinced the man who killed Sally had been fixed yet. That’s how she thought of it. Fixed. Before she’d fixed them the way you fix a tomcat. Now she meant to fix them permanently. She had a knife handy for the job. She kept it beneath the driver’s seat when on duty. When off duty, it lay beneath the driver’s seat of her Hyundai.

  She saw a lone man on the sidewalk. He wore tight-fitting jeans and an oversize beach shirt printed with pink palm trees. His face fit the photograph on the rap sheet. He swerved at a corner when he noticed the patrol car pacing him. Beatty felt her antenna wriggle and she reached to feel the knife just to be sure it was there. She stopped the car at the curb and was after him like a bolt of lightning homing in on a metal rooftop rooster.

  He was really moving. Beating it down into a lower-class working neighborhood where there were no streetlights. Beatty felt the itch start in her guts and work its way up to her lungs as she ran after him, wind singing past her ears. Dogs barked from fenced yards. The sickle moon peeked through coconut trees as she passed beneath them. He had taken to the middle of the street now, arms and legs pumping. He sounded like a locomotive.

  Beatty decided to try it. “Halt! Police!”

  He glanced back, slowing down. He turned, windmilling his arms for balance, then finally came to a stop. He was out of breath when she reached him. “Jesus! I didn’t know it was a cop.”

  “That’s why you flew when you saw my squad car.”

  He laughed a little guiltily. “What’s the problem here, Officer?”

  “Turn around, present your back to me.” Beatty had the cuffs off her belt loop.

  “Now what’d I want to do that for?”

  Beatty grabbed his arm and whipped him around. She cuffed him and led him back to the car. He complained all the way, but Beatty had tuned him out. She was thinking about the palmetto fields west of town and the knife beneath the car seat.

  “You kill the little girl off Andréws Avenue?” she asked. She asked them all that without expecting a confession. It just had to be asked, that’s all, part of the procedure.

  “I never killed no one!”

  She pushed him into the backseat. “Yeah,” she said. “I bet you’re lily-white innocent. I bet you never touched a kid before in all your lousy, slimy life.”

  The road was dark and empty, the lights of Lauderdale left far behind to leave a peach candy smear on the eastern horizon. The pervert had long since stopped talking. When Beatty shut the engine, the only sound was an irregular ticking from beneath the hood.

  This was Beatty’s favorite dumping ground. She figured two castrations and one murder would make it forever off limits, but it would still remain her favorite place. The low, spiky palmettos covered acres. To the right of the field stood a line of tall pine and fir and palms, soldiers to witness justice done.

  Beatty jerked him from the car. “Your name is Jose Calendero, is that correct?” She had the knife in her hand. He seemed fascinated by the moonlight glinting from the stainless steel blade. She prodded him with the tip. “Your name is. . .?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m Calendero. So what? Whatju wanna do about it?”

  “Cocky bastard, aren’t you? C’mon, move it.”

  She moved him, stumbling and cursing, along a zigzag path through the palmettos. Once far enough from the road, she had him face her.

  “Calendero, you do kids. You’re a leech and a sicko. You spent four years for assault on a minor, beat two more rape charges, and you spend your waking hours figuring out how to entrap children for your own perverse pleasure. For that, you die, Jose. If you killed the little girl near Andréws, you killed the thing I loved most. If you didn’t kill her, you might as well have. It’s your kind who are responsible for it.”

  During this speech, Calendero kept glancing nervously toward the treeline. Beatty looked over, too, when she saw him give a crooked little smile. She was astonished to see a ragged line of men coming toward them in the center of the palmetto field. They carried flashlights and shotguns cradled in their arms. A voice called: “Officer Beatty, this is Sargeant Delmar. Lay down your weapon. I repeat, lay down your weapon!”

  Calendero was grinning like a drunken baboon. “We set you up, Beatty. They got your ass now. They been watching you like coon dogs ever since we left the street.”

  Beatty stepped close to Calendero as if to embrace him. He automatically jerked away, but he was too late. The knife handle protruded from his belly. He grunted in soft surprise, his dark eyes inches from her own. “You crazy mutherfucker. . .”

  “Maybe, Jose. But you’re one dead mutherfucker. And that suits me just fine.”

  Beatty tried twice, but they saved her each time. It was months before they let her out of solitary. Margo was allowed to visit once a week. Beatty wanted to say goodbye, but that would clue everyone in and she couldn’t have that. She talked about Sally instead.

  “I guess you were right, Margo. The shrinks have convinced me. I was over the edge even before we lost Sally. They think I used Sally to make up for everything that was missing in my life. Just like you tried to tell me.”

  “Losing. . .Sally, put us all over the edge, Charlie. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I see you’re going to have another baby.” This pleased Beatty immensely, her chief regret the fact she’d never live to be an aunt again.

  Margo shrugged. “I don’t know how I feel about it. Nothing can replace. . .nothing can make. . .”

  Beatty brought a finger to her lips. “Don’t say it. Life goes on. It’s not safe, it’s not secure, and it’s not even fair, but it goes on.”

  When Margo left, Beatty stood at the separation window with her fingertips pressed against the glass until a guard took her away. That night she carefully scooped out the metal shavings she’d taken bit by bit from where the workmen were putting in new plumbing in the women’s showers. She swallowed a few shavings at a time, chased by tap water. She curled up on the mattress when it was done, and thought about her empty life and Sally’s useless, empty death. When her stomach lining was eaten out and the hemorrhaging began, she smiled silently into the dark. This time they wouldn’t save her. No more interference. She’d get her way finally. She’d chew her fist off before she’d utter a sound.

  A determined woman could always get what she wanted. Eventually. Officer Charlene Beatty would make book on it.

  Kessel’s Party

  Michael Berry

  With so many adult pleasures at hand, the guests were at first reluctant to play a children’s game. But when the nineteen-year-old actress let herself be blindfolded with the bra of her bikini, people began to get into the spirit of things.

  Kessel watched with satisfaction and amusement. He sipped at his Scotch, one arm around Catherine. Someone behind him said, “Happy birthday, Dennis. Great party!”

  Kessel only nodded in reply. He didn’t want to miss anything.

  A laughing fat man took the actress by her bare, tanned shoulders and spun her around several times. He let go, and she stumbled twice before finally catching her balance. Giggling, she patted her stomach and said, “Don’t make me toss my cookies, Harry!”

  Brian Levesque, Kessel’s friend and bodyguard, handed the girl a sawed-off length of broom handle. “Good luck,” he said, then got out of the way as the actress began swinging the stick wildly.

  The guests laughed and clapped. The actress lashed out, missing her unseen target by a good two feet.

  “Where is it?” she squealed.
/>   Kessel looked at Catherine and saw his enjoyment of the scene reflected in her pale grey eyes. He smiled broadly, something he rarely did.

  “Warm! Warmer! Cooler! Cold!” The group chanted hints at the girl, wanting the game to go on, but also wanting her to end the suspense.

  It had been thirty years since Kessel had last had a pinata at his birthday party. When he was ten, his family’s cook, Gloria, gave him his first, a beautiful papier-mache donkey filled with treats and trinkets. It had seemed a shame to break such a beautiful thing, but he loved it when his friends from school scrambled for the treasures it held, shrieking with glee and greed. It had been a genuine hit, and his popularity on the playground skyrocketed afterward. Gloria brought him a pinata every year until his thirteenth birthday. After that his parents were dead, and there were no more family parties.

  The bare-chested girl homed in on her target, grazing it with the broom handle, but not with enough force to shatter the pinata. “Dammit!” She laughed, as those around her groaned with disappointment.

  This pinata, too, was a donkey, but made from hand-fired clay, instead of paper. Señor Gutierrez, ninety-five if he was a day, had made it himself in his small, cluttered studio in the barrio. He did it as a personal favor to Kessel. Painted in brilliant reds, blues and greens, the pinata was truly a work of art, worthy of a spot in a museum.

  “Mr. Kessel? Can I talk to you?”

  Kessel kept his eyes fixed on the girl, the stick and the pinata. “Not now.”

  “It’s kind of important—”

  “Not now, Michael!”

  The actress, sure now where the pinata hung, leaned back and smacked it a good one. The pottery broke, and all the goodies spilled out onto the carpet.

  The crowd fell on the prizes, as raucous and avaricious as his grade school playmates. Today, however, the stakes were higher, and the partygoers had to scramble to snatch the choicest items. For among the Tootsie Rolls, lollipops and plastic party favors lay other, more significant surprises: Godiva chocolates, Cartier wristwatches, wads of rolled-up currency, bindles of white crystal.