“Mentioning you was what really drove her away,” he said, walking past her and sitting on the couch, taking gulps of his beer with what was probably a sullen look on his face that he couldn’t quite cast off.
“Are you trying to be hurtful?”
“Yes, but it’s also accurate. She doesn’t have pleasant memories of you, Mom.”
“She can’t have any pleasant memories of that time, Emil. Or the years before or after it. It’s—she’s—really a miracle, you know? To emerge from that swamp of trauma not just as a functioning person, but as an eye, a curious, roving investigator of what’s around her—well, it’s just miraculous. If she turned that eye on herself I think she’d crumble in moments, of course, but that’s not weakness. It’s sanity.” Jill had put the core down and waved her index finger at the coffee table. Familiar with her “fetch” gesture, he picked up her laptop and made a joking feint at tossing it to her before walking it over to the counter. Jill opened it and began typing, likely a version of what she’d just said.
“You can’t turn it off, huh?”
“Language is language. You use it and it uses you.”
“I mean the performance, Mom. I’m trying to talk to you. I’m trying to get your help.”
Jill stopped typing and looked at him, anger sharpening the few lines around her blue eyes before she shook her head and laughed. “Not everything is for your benefit. I’m on to something here. For the first time in a good couple of years, I have something that I need to write about, and I have you to thank for it. So, of course I’ll help you, but that doesn’t mean I have the patience to be insulted before I do so.”
“Fine.” This was as good an apology as he was going to get from his mother, and this “fine” was about all Emil was capable of offering up as well. This detente of acknowledged but undealt-with nastiness joined a lifelong catalog of similar exchanges that were behind them, stretching back to Emil’s earliest years of being verbal, shortly after his mother had returned from Stilford with the recordings and notes that built Last Victims. Jill’s publisher had insisted on The Varner Spree Killings as the subtitle, but she still thought it was coarse, an interpretation that ruined all the multifaceted brilliance of the two words she’d opened Blanche Varner’s story with.
“It really is all Blanche’s story,” Jill said.
“What?”
“You have to understand that first if you’re going to approach her intelligently, and if you’re going to tell this part of the story properly. It’s not about Chuck Varner shooting people. That’s backstory, Emil. It’s relevant, it’s important, but it’s not the story. I didn’t realize that until I’d spent days and days with the little girl that she was.”
“The killings are the real story, Mom. This isn’t some memoir-drifty-literary journey. Crissy Varner’s been shot dead, Chuck Varner’s daughter makes movies talking about everyone’s fucked-up problems except her own, and I have a pet cop that’s come close to telling me that there’s orders from above not to look into Mommy Varner’s murder. It’s about killing and about looking away.”
“Looking away. That’s it, Emil, don’t you get it? The story is what Blanche turned away from, what she turned into. Haven’t you noticed how odd she is? How cold, unreactive? Unless she’s changed. That’s her father in her, not just the experience, what she’s been through. I’d never met a child like her, so remarkable, so frightening. I hope she hasn’t changed.”
“You don’t know what the story is this time, Mom. Maybe you didn’t know back then, either.”
“What do you mean?”
“Chuck Varner was never dead for Crissy Varner. Or for Blanche. He’s alive still, in that trailer, and in that city.”
Jill Gudgeon laughed at this, a full-throated, rasping laugh that made it impossible to believe that it had been decades since her last cigarette.
Emil clenched his right fist inside his jeans pocket. “Right, Katharine Hepburn, I get it, it’s funny. You talked about Crissy’s obsession in the book, I know, but you didn’t get to any of the practicalities. Her planning, Mom. She was the one who got me to reach out to Blanche, to use a movie project as a lure. That was in our very first conversation. She said that Blanche needed to be back in the city, and that no matter what, it would happen. Blanche in Stilford. Like it was a prophecy. And Blanche is there, right now.” Emil stopped himself; he was already taking on enough risk just by knowing what he already knew.
“Yes, I’m sure it’s very impressive. What are you doing here, Emil? You could have lectured me over the phone,” Jill said, getting up and starting a light stretch.
Emil looked away. He wanted to tell her something that would really hurt her: that he’d learned more from Crissy Varner, from the precious times that they’d spoken together and she’d enlightened him, showed him his full potential, than he’d learned from his own mother in an entire lifetime. But he couldn’t. Not just yet. Not until the plan had unspooled a little further, and Jill Gudgeon understood that it was her son who was the brilliant one, the patient one, the probing one, the one who understood when to get out of the way of a story and let it happen, even if that meant casualties.
“You know why I’m here, Mom.”
Jill Gudgeon straightened up.
“Yes, but I would like to hear it.”
“I need money.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
* * *
KINDT STARTED OFF driving slowly and sped up as we got closer to the water—the river delta at San Paulo Park. His yellow Mazda, dirty as it was, stuck out from the pickup and sedan traffic on the way there, allowing me to hang back far enough to avoid being spotted. When he pulled into the parking lot of the park, though, I decided to ditch subtlety in favor of getting my shit back. I pulled up alongside him, close enough to prevent him from opening his door. I rolled down my passenger window and waited for him to do the same with his driver’s side.
“AC broken?” I asked. Kindt had opened his flowered shirt by two further buttons, and dark streaks of sweat pulled the faded fabric close to his skin. There was sweat on his eyebrows, the liquid glimmering under the cold blue lot lights.
“First you assault me on property that I manage, then you stalk me?” He undid his seatbelt and measured the space between our cars with his eyes.
“You broke into a crime scene and stole a murder victim’s personal possessions, Kindt. Give it back.”
“What?”
“The box. You followed me because you wanted something in the trailer that you couldn’t get at without breaking in. Give back what you took and I’ll let it end here, once you tell me exactly why you knew where it was, and what made you want to throw it out. Understood?” I pulled the small Ruger from where it was holstered at my side and rested it on my knee.
“I left something in there myself on a previous occasion when I was repairing the damage that your family member did to the property. Tools. That’s what I went in to recover.” Kindt moved his right arm, doing something I couldn’t see. Reaching for the box and trying to push it onto the floor off the passenger seat, probably. I stopped my finger from moving closer to the trigger.
“Did you put that Cobra Commander sticker I got from a liquidation store on the lid in 1999? Did you sand off the logo from the bottom with rock polishing paper you stole from Bobby Hendricks in the first grade?” I climbed out of my seat, tucking the gun back into my shorts, and circled over to Kindt, barely breaking eye contact. I reached into his passenger window before he had thought to shut it and leaned down, grabbing the blue box. I felt the familiar pebbled surface of the top and the unusual weight of it—if there were only papers in it, they’d been crammed dense—while Kindt looked at me with dull hatred.
“You were gabbing with me pretty good in the trailer, Mr. Kindt. You don’t have anything to say now?”
“I say we can agree to call this quits right now or we’ll both end up telling the cops different stories, and you don’t carry much respect in this town,” Ki
ndt said, as though his slumlord proxy status would grant him a stealing-evidence free pass. “I took that outta the property to cut off any more questions or poking around, and that’s the truth. Found it on your mom’s table right after the shot, when I went in to try to help her. When I saw what was in there, I thought the decent thing was to keep it private.”
“So you hid it on a property that any police worth their salary would be turning upside down and over within minutes of you calling in,” I said. I opened the passenger door and sat down, Dunkin’ Donuts cups and pungent burger wrappers rustling under my feet. If Kindt was armed, I liked being closer to him, better able to close the distance with a couple of the strategic punches Chuck had taught me in the woods behind our trailer, leaving my gun where it was. Kindt stayed quiet. The BB wound in my arm throbbed, and the pain kept me calm.
“Is there anyone else who ID’d Vernon Reilly as being at the scene?” I thought of Officer Maitland’s blank, incurious eyes again, and about whether that lack of curiosity came from laziness or from knowing all the answers already, because he’d planned them out himself.
“How would I know that?” Kindt asked.
“You know in the way you can only be sure of a lie: you made it up, so how could anyone else have seen him out there?” A guess delivered confidently can be a useful interviewing tool—maybe it’d work for parking lot interrogations, too. Kindt didn’t say anything, clammed up like someone who’d been arrested more than a few times and knew the value of a blank stare and an off-topic response.
“I didn’t want to steal anything. I’m not a thief, just someone who doesn’t want to be bothered. And who’s just trying to do what your mother would have probably wanted. So take your shit outta here and quit bothering me.” Kindt put his hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. As soon as I stepped out with the box and closed the passenger door, he reversed and screeched out of the dark parking lot.
Alone there, the box felt heavier in my hands than it had in the car. Checking that my rental was locked up, I walked a few steps over to a park bench, and sat down with my phone’s flashlight on to open the box. First I took out the roll of money, which looked like more cash than Crissy had ever held at once in her lifetime. Then I started to look through the Polaroids.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
* * *
Excerpt from Last Victims: The Varner Spree Killings by Jill Gudgeon. Morris & Connington, 2000.
People who saw Chuck Varner preach immediately understood how this all worked, Crissy was always explaining to me. I pressed her on it, as much as I could, telling her that I couldn’t possibly do Chuck justice without seeing him. I knew there was a tape, one she’d never told the police about, one that she’d probably hidden along with the rifle that she swore Chuck never brought back from the overpass shooting.
It was a smile she had, a tiny suggestion that only a perceptive lens in close-up or a professional gambler would be able to see. I only asked about a potential tape twice. The first time was after I brought Stella to the mall, a trip that I never told her mother about. I think that Crissy will be pleased that I did it when she reads this book—Harlow Mall has banned Crissy from the premises, and every security guard is compelled to memorize a photo of her the day they are hired. After Micaela Abrega, the wife of Peter Cane (whom Varner shot through the liver, the fatal bullet emerging from his back and lodging in a sculpture of Orange Boost mascot Mr. Citruz), caught Crissy Varner distributing cards with Chuck-related slogans on them in the parking lot, Crissy practically became a part of the training manual. So mother can’t take her daughter to the site of Chuck’s ascendance into immortality.
I asked Crissy if there was a tape when she got back from work that night. “You loved watching him speak so much. I can tell when you’re talking to me, sometimes, that you’re emulating his speeches, his patterns—”
“Yes,” Crissy said, walking past where I was sitting on the tiny vinyl couch to check on Stella, who’d gone to bed without a word of protest or request to watch a few more minutes of television. The girl watched less television than any child I’d met since my son was born and I started noticing such things.
“So I was just wondering if there was a way I could hear him teach. Or see him.”
Crissy came back into the room from the kitchen with a drink she hadn’t bothered to mix, just gin on ice. And the little smile, which really had almost nothing to do with her mouth: it was a dent in her right cheek, not quite a dimple, more of a line. A straight, temporary wrinkle.
“Sorry, Crissy.” I let it go. “Stella was so good today. She really has perfect discipline.” I’m still glad I didn’t pursue it. She wouldn’t have forgiven me if I’d pressed her, not when she was exhausted after work. “I want to drive you up to my hotel, Crissy. You and Stella. Stay the night, I’ll get you a room. Not tonight, you’re clearly almost done in, but I thought it would be nice. A treat.”
Crissy agreed, and I got her the room. Stella stayed in it all night, with an assortment of toys, books, and my permission to use a reasonable amount of room service. Crissy and I waited until she was asleep to use the pool, which was starting to empty out. It was after nine, and I’d lent Crissy my green swimsuit, which looked younger on her than on me. I felt like I was in an old photograph when I wore it, almost two-dimensional, chaste. Crissy filled it out, not coarsely, just youthfully. Seeing her like that made me remember that she’d been only twenty when she had Stella.
We paddled around for a few minutes, returning to our drinks of gin and lemonade in poolside plastic Minute Maid bottles. When we were quiet, it was possible—not just for me, but for her, too, I’m sure of it—to believe ourselves friends, especially in this hotel, this vacation space. This time, I decided not to ask, but to say.
“I know there’s video, Crissy. At least one. You’re too responsible not to have put Chuck Varner on tape at least once, and we both know it. Even if the police were too slow to ask, even if you were too smart to give fuel like that to the press, knowing they’d just cut it up for TV, it must exist.”
“It wouldn’t have done the police any good.”
“Of course it wouldn’t. They just want to collect everything and bury it in a cardboard box in some basement, pretend they’re doing the work. That’s not what I’ve ever been here to do, Crissy. I’m here to extend the lesson, but I need to learn it first.”
An hour later, we were in my room, which adjoined the one I’d gotten for her and Stella. I’d watched Stella while Crissy went back to the trailer, fishing out the VHS from wherever it rested. The front desk of the hotel sent up a VCR to replace the slick DVD player in my room. I gave the teenager who installed it a ten-dollar tip, mostly for doing his work quietly enough to allow me to crack the connecting door open to watch Stella, who was sleeping in the center of one of the two enormous beds.
When Crissy got back, I moved to shut the connecting door, but Crissy waved me off.
“She sleeps through anything.”
We put the tape in and sat on one of the beds together, migrating back toward the headboard and pillows piled there as it played. The camcorder taking the footage was too steady to be handheld, and showed Varner talking to a group of four teenage boys, two with long, beautiful ponytails, the other two with shaved heads. They’re in a parking lot, the light is orange, the arid heat almost visible. Three of the boys are white, one is Asian, and as the minutes pass, they start making less eye contact with each other, tossing fewer of the snide looks that define the thinking American teenager. The more Chuck Varner talks, the clearer it is that he has them. He’s in profile for most of the video, skinny under a loose black T-shirt, with a sharp nose and slicked-back black hair that keeps falling over his eyes as he talks and gestures. He never touches it, just moves his head in a slight whipping nod to punctuate sentences every now and then, setting his hair just right as he does it.
Chuck Varner speaks to me for the first time.
“Society is slow castration.
Do you get me? I know it sounds ridiculous, at first. He’s got to be exaggerating. Why would the whole goddamn world be so interested in my dick, a guy asks himself. You usually go around begging anyone TO be interested in your dick, and find no takers. Am I right?” Chuck gets his first laugh.
I didn’t think he’d be a comedian, and I didn’t think he’d be so effective at engaging sullen parking-lot smoking teenagers, who had clearly been passing a joint moments before he approached them. The crassness gets them, an older man being juvenile with them. The Asian boy, shorter and chubbier than his friends, seems to be the leader, his laugh giving the rest of them permission.
“The world is interested in taking from you what you value most. And when you’re this age, right at this moment, all you can think about is fucking, right? But that’s not really, really what you’re thinking about. It’s what your body is coding the message as, and you can, in a way, trust your body. But don’t just listen to lust. Listen to the anger that comes with it. Sex is pleasure, yes, but sex is also chaos. Losing yourself.
“And the anger. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it. Don’t tell me it didn’t just sweat out of you watching those bands in there, banging your heads off your necks. You, especially—great Bolt Thrower shirt, man—you needed that, didn’t you? You need nights like this because you don’t know what’s going to happen if you don’t get them. That contact you get in the pit, when you’re throwing arms and you know the bodies are flowing around you because everything is right—that’s chaos. It’s life.
“You’re angry because you need to fuck. You need to fuck because you need pleasure and chaos. Pleasure IN chaos. And you’re mad at the fucking gatekeepers, man. Whether it’s that girl you can’t even ask out because you know it means more to her to say no than it does to just give talking to you and touching you and knowing how good that could be a chance, whether it’s the shithead cops and fake cops that our world is infested with—they’re castrators, guys. They’re so focused on controlling the temporary, the moment, that people like us scare the shit out of them.
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