by Ed Gorman
Jeff died three years later, wrapped around a light pole on the edge of a country park, drugs and vodka found in the front seat of the car I'd bought him six months earlier.
Left alone at the wake, kneeling before his waxen corpse, an Our Father faint on my lips, I'd felt certain I could cry. It would be a tribute to Jeff; one he'd understand; some part of the process by which he'd forgive me for being gone so much, for pursuing William K. Dexter while Jeff was discovering drugs and alcohol and girls too young to know about nurturing. I put out my hand and touched his cheek, his cold waxen cheek, and I felt something die in me. It was the opposite of crying, of bursting forth with poisons that needed to be purged. Something was dead in me and would never be reborn.
It was not too long after this that I met Frank Slocum and it was not long after Slocum took the case that we began to close inexorably in on William K. Dexter.
And soon enough we were here, at the apartment house just outside Des Moines.
Eleven years, two months, and five days later.
iii
The name on the hallway mailbox said Severn, George Severn. We knew better, of course.
Up carpeted stairs threadbare and stained, down a hallway thick with dusty sunlight, to a door marked 4-A.
"Behind me," Slocum whispered, waving me to the wall.
For a moment, the only noises belonged to the apartment building; the thrum of electricity snaking through the walls; the creak of roof in summer wind; a toilet exploding somewhere on the floor below us.
Slocum put a hefty finger to his thick mouth, stabbing through a thistle of beard to do so. Sssh.
Slocum stood back from the door himself. His Cobra was in his hand, ready. He reached around the long way and set big knuckles against the cheap faded pine of the door.
On the other side of the door, I heard chair legs scrape against tile.
Somebody in there.
William K. Dexter.
Chair legs scraped again; footsteps. They did not come all the way to the door, however, rather stopped at what I imagined was probably the center of the living room.
"Yeah?"
Slocum put his finger to his lips again. Reached around once more and knocked.
"I said 'Yeah. Who the hell is it?'"
He was curious about who was in the hall, this George Severn was, but not curious enough to open the door and find out.
One more knock. Quick rap really; nothing more.
Inside, you could sense Severn's aggravation.
"Goddammit," he said and took a few loud steps toward the door but then stopped.
Creak of floor; flutter of robin wings as bird settled on hallway window; creak of floor again from inside the apartment. Slocum held up a halting hand. Then he pantomimed Don't Move with his lips. He waited for my reaction. I nodded.
He looked funny, a man as big as he was, doing a very broad, cartoon version of a man walking away. Huge noisy steps so that it sounded as if he were very quickly retreating. But he did all this in place. He did it for thirty seconds and then he eased himself flat back against the wall. He took his Cobra and put it man-high on the edge of the door frame.
Severn didn't come out in thirty seconds but he did come out in about a minute.
For eleven years I'd wondered what he'd look like. Photos deceive. I always pictured him as formidable. He would have to be, I'd reasoned; the savage way he'd mutilated her. . . . He was a skinny fortyish man in a stained white T-shirt and Levis that looked a little too big. He wore the wide sideburns of a hillbilly trucker and the scowl of a mean drunk. He stank of sleep and whiskey. He carried a butcher knife that appeared to be new. It still had the lime green price sticker on the black handle.
When he came out of his apartment, he made the mistake of looking straight ahead.
Slocum did two things at the same time: slammed the Cobra's nose hard against Severn's temple and yanked a handful of hair so hard, Severn's knees buckled. "You're dead, man, in case you haven't figured it out already," Slocum said. He seemed enraged; he was a little frightening to watch.
He grabbed some more hair and then he pushed Severn all the way back into his apartment.
iv
Slocum got him on a straight-backed chair, hit him so hard in the mouth that you could hear teeth go, and then handcuffed him, still in the chair, to the aged Formica dining-room table.
Slocum then cocked his foot back and kicked Severn clean and hard in the ribs. Almost immediately, Severn's mouth started boiling with red mucus that didn't seem quite thick enough to be blood.
Slocum next went over to Severn and ripped his T-shirt away from his shoulder. Without a word, Slocum motioned me over.
With his Cobra, Slocum pointed to a faded tattoo on Severn's right shoulder. It read: Mindy with a rose next to it. Not many men had such a tattoo on their right shoulder. It was identical to the one listed in all of Severn's police records.
Slocum slapped him with stunning ferocity directly across the mouth, so hard that both Severn and his chair were lifted from the floor.
For the first time, I moved. Not to hit Severn myself but to put a halting hand on Slocum's arm. "That's enough."
"We've got the right guy!" It was easy to see he was crazed in some profound animal way I'd never seen in anybody before.
"I know we do."
"The guy who killed your daughter!"
"I know," I said, "but—"
"But what?"
I sighed. "But I don't want to be like him and if we sat here and beat him, that's exactly what we'd be. Animals—just like him."
Slocum's expression was a mixture of contempt and disbelief. I could see whatever respect he'd had for me—or perhaps it had been nothing more than mere pity—was gone now. He looked at me the same way I looked at him—as some alien species.
"Please, Slocum," I said.
He got one more in, a good solid right hand to the left side of Severn's head. Severn's eyes rolled and he went out. From the smell, you could tell he'd wet his pants.
I kept calling him Severn. But of course he wasn't Severn. He was William K. Dexter.
Slocum went over to the ancient Kelvinator, took out a can of Hamm's and opened it with a great deal of violence, and then slammed the refrigerator door.
"You think he's all right?" I said.
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?"
"It means did you kill him?"
"Kill him?" He laughed. The contempt was back in his voice. "Kill him? No, but I should have. I keep thinking of your daughter, man. All the things you've told me about her. Not a perfect kid—no kid is—but a real gentle little girl. A girl you supposedly loved. Your frigging daughter, man. Your frigging daughter." He sloshed his beer in the general direction of Dexter. "I should get out my hunting knife and cut his balls off. That's what I should do. And that's just for openers. Just for openers."
He started pacing around, then, Slocum did, and I could gauge his rage. I suppose at that moment he wanted to kill us both—Dexter for being an animal, me for being a weakling—neither of us the type of person Slocum wanted in his universe.
The apartment was small and crammed with threadbare and wobbly furniture. Everything had been burned with cigarettes and disfigured with beer-can rings. The sour smell of bad cooking lay on the air; sunlight poured through filthy windows; and even from here you could smell the rancid odors of the bathroom. On the bureau lay two photographs, one of a plump woman in a shabby housedress standing with her arm around Dexter, obviously his mother; and a much younger Dexter squinting into the sun outside a gray metal barracks where he had served briefly as an army private before being pushed out on a mental.
Peeking into the bedroom, I found the centerfolds he'd pinned up. They weren't the centerfolds of the quality men's magazines where the women were beautiful to begin with and made even more so with careful lighting and gauzy effects; no, these were the women of the street, hard-eyed, flabby-bodied, some even tattooed like Dexter himself. They covered the
walls on either side of his sad little cot where he slept in a room littered with empty beer cans and hard-crusted pizza boxes. Many of the centerfolds he'd defaced, drawing penises in black ballpoint aimed at their vaginas or their mouths, or putting huge blood-dripping knives into their breasts or eyes or even their vaginas. All I could think of was Debbie and what he'd done to her that long-ago night. . . .
A terrible, oppressive nausea filled me as I backed out of the bedroom and groped for the couch so I could sit down.
"What's the matter?" Slocum said.
"Shut up."
"What?"
"Shut the fuck up!"
I sank to the couch—the sunlight through the greasy window making me ever warmer—and cupped my hands in my face and swallowed again and again until I felt the vomit in my throat and esophagus and stomach recede.
I was shaking, chilled now with sweat.
"Can you wake him up?"
"What?"
"Can you wake him up?"
"Sure," Slocum said. "Why?"
"Because I want to talk to him."
Slocum gulped the last of his beer, tossed the can into a garbage sack overflowing with coffee grounds and tomato rinds, and then went over to the sink. He took down a big glass with the Flintstones on it and filled it with water, then took the glass over to where he had Dexter handcuffed. With a certain degree of obvious pleasure, he threw the water across Dexter's head. He threw the glass—as if it were now contaminated—into the corner where it shattered into three large jagged pieces.
He grabbed Dexter by the hair and jerked his head back. Groaning, Dexter came awake.
"Now what?" Slocum said, turning to me.
"Now I want to talk to him."
"Talk to him," Slocum said. "Right."
He pointed a large hand at Dexter as if he were a master of ceremonies introducing the next act.
It wasn't easy, getting up off that couch and going over to him. In a curious way, I was terrified of him. If I pushed him hard enough, he would tell me the exact truth about the night. The truth in detail. What she had looked like and sounded like—her screams as he raped her; her screams as she died—and then I would have my facts . . . but facts so horrible I would not be able to live with them. How many times—despite myself—I had tried to recreate that night. But there would be no solace in this particular truth; no solace at all.
I stood over him. "Have you figured out who I am yet?"
He stared up at me. He started crying. "Hey, man, I never did nothing to you."
"You raped and killed a girl named Debbie eleven years ago."
"I don't know what you're talking about, man. Honest. You got the wrong guy."
I knew that by the way I studied his face—every piece of beard stubble, the green matter collected in the corners of his eyes, the dandruff flaked off at the front of his receding hairline—that I was trying to learn something about him, something that would grant me peace after all these years.
A madman, this Dexter, and so not quite responsible for what he'd done and perhaps even deserving of pity in my good liberal soul.
But he didn't seem insane, at least not insane enough to move me in any way. He was just a cheap trapped frightened animal.
"Really, man; really I don't know what the hell you're talking about."
"I've been tracking you for eleven years now—"
"Jesus, man; listen—"
"You're going to hate prison, Dexter. Or maybe they'll even execute you. Did you ever read anything about the injections they give? They make it sound so humane but it's the waiting, Dexter. It's the waiting—"
"Please," he said, "please," and he writhed against his handcuffs, scraping the table across the floor in the process.
"Eleven years, Dexter," I said.
I could hear my voice, what was happening to it—all my feelings about Dexter were merging into my memories of those defaced centerfolds in his bedroom—and Slocum must have known it, too, with his animal wisdom, known at just what moment I would be right for it
because just then and just so
the Cobra came into my hands and I
shot Dexter once in the face and once in the
chest and I
v
Slocum explained to me—though I really wasn't listening—that they were called by various names (toss guns or throwaway guns) but they were carried by police officers in case they wanted to show that the person they'd just killed had been armed.
From a holster strapped to his ankle, Slocum took a .38, wiped it clean of prints, and set it next to Dexter's hand.
Below and to the side of us the apartment house was a frenzy of shouts and cries—fear and panic—and already in the distance sirens exploded red on the soft blue air of the summer day.
That evening I cried.
vi
I sat in a good room in a good hotel with the air-conditioning going strong, a fine dinner and many fine drinks in my belly, and I cried.
Wept, really.
Whatever had kept me from crying for my daughter and then my wife and then my son was gone now and so I could love and mourn them in a way I'd never been able to. I thought of each of them—their particular ways of laughing, their particular sets of pleasures and dreams, their particular fears and apprehensions—and it was as if they joined me there in that chill antiseptic hotel room, Debbie in her blue sweater and jeans, my wife in her white linen sheath, Jeff in his Kiss T-shirt and chinos—came round in the way the medieval church taught that angels gathered around the bed of a dying person . . . only I wasn't dying.
My family was there to tell me that I was to live again. To seek some sort of peace and normalcy after the forced march of these past eleven years.
"I love you so much," I said aloud to each of them, and wept all the more; "I love you so much."
And then I slept.
vii
"I talked to the district attorney," Slocum said in the coffee shop the following morning. "He says it's very unlikely there will be any charges."
"He really thought Dexter was armed?"
"Wouldn't you? A piece of trash like Dexter?"
I stared at him. "You know something terrible?"
"What?"
"I don't feel guilty."
He let go with one of those cigarette-raspy laughs of his.
"Good."
Then it was his turn to stare at me, there in the hubbub of clattering dishes and good sweet coffee smells and bacon sizzling on the grill. "So what now?"
"See if I can get my job back."
"At the university?"
"Umm-hmm."
He kept staring. "You don't feel any guilt, do you?"
"No. I mean, I know I should. Whatever else, he was a human being. But—"
He smiled his hard Old Testament smile. "Now, don't you go giving me any of those mousy little liberal 'buts,' all right?"
"All right."
"You just go back and live your life and make it a good one."
"I owe you one hell of a lot, Slocum."
He put forth a slab of hand and a genuine look of affection in his eyes. "Just make it a good one," he said. "Promise?"
"Promise."
"And no guilt?"
"No guilt."
He grinned. "I knew I could make a man out of you."
viii
Her name was Anne Stevens and she was to dominate my first year back at the university. Having met at the faculty picnic—hot August giving way to the fierce melancholy of Indian summer—we began what we both hoped (her divorced; me not quite human yet) would be a pleasant but slow-moving relationship. We were careful to not introduce real passion, for instance, until we both felt certain we could handle it, about the time the first of the Christmas decorations blew in the gray wind of Harcourt Square.
School itself took some adjusting. First, there was the fact that the students seemed less bright and inquisitive, more conservative than the students I remembered. Second, the faculty had some doubts about me
; given my experiences over the past eleven years, they wondered how I would fit into a setting whose goals were at best abstract. I wondered, too. . . .
After the first time we made love—Anne's place, unplanned, satisfying if slightly embarrassing—I went home and stared at the photograph of my wife I keep on my bureau. In whispers, I apologized for what I'd done. If I'd been a better husband I would have no guilt now. But I had not, alas, been a better husband at all. . . .
In the spring, a magazine took a piece on inflation I wrote and the academic dean made a considerable fuss over this fact. Also in the spring Anne and I told each other that we loved each other in a variety of ways, emotionally, sexually, spiritually. We set June 23 as our wedding day.
It was on May 5 that I saw the item in the state newspaper. For the following three weeks I did my best to forget it, troubling as it was. Anne began to notice a difference in my behavior, and to talk about it. I just kept thinking of the newspaper item and of something Slocum had said that day when I killed Dexter.
In the middle of a May night—the breeze sweet with the newly blooming world—I typed out a six-page letter to Anne, packed two bags, stopped by a 7-Eleven and filled the Volvo and dropped Anne's letter in a mailbox, and then set out on the interstate.
Two mornings later, I walked up a dusty flight of stairs inside an apartment house. A Hank Williams Jr. record filled the air.
To be heard above the music, I had to pound.
I half expected what would happen, that when the door finally opened a gun would be shoved in my face. It was.
A Cobra.
I didn't say anything. I just handed him the news clipping. He waved me in—he lived in a place not dissimilar from the one Dexter had lived in—read the clipping as he opened an 8:48 a.m. beer.
Finished reading it, he let it glide to the coffee table that was covered with gun magazines.