by Paul Cleave
He pictures the two dead women. He pictures the contents of the cardboard box. He pictures the other cases he’s never been able to let go even long after they were solved. The fuel is coming back. He remembers the young woman floating facedown in the bathtub in this very cabin, her gray, wrinkled skin, her milky eyes. He thinks of other young women face down in alleyways and hallways and ditches and other bathtubs. Feldman’s as guilty as they come-he’s doing the world a favor by taking him out of it.
He hates Feldman. Hates his sarcasm. In the end it’ll be the smugness that’ll make his transition from judge to executioner easier to bear. As soon as Feldman admits what he did then he can happily. .
Happily?
That’s the wrong word. There’s nothing happy about this. This is the last place he wants to be. In six months when his sins are weighed up in whatever magical afterlife landscape he goes to, a large piece of him will still be back here.
He needs Feldman to confess, then he can get this over with. He needs that confession because it will come with a feeling of justice. With it, dying from the cancer will be easier to do.
Without it, he’s just one more bad man doing bad deeds.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“I didn’t kill anybody,” I reply, choosing to answer his question about who I killed first with the honest truth. I don’t know what it is, but nobody these days is prepared to believe anything I say, and I haven’t lied yet.
I try to think about things logically. Like a mathematician. Or one of those thinking-outside-of-the-box riddles: two people are in a room, one has a gun, the other is handcuffed. No wonder I never liked riddles.
“Kathy and Luciana were staked through the heart,” he says.
“I didn’t do it.”
“I saw the bodies. And I found a stake on your bedroom floor.”
“I can explain that.”
“Okay. Go ahead and explain.”
So I do. I go ahead and tell him how my Sunday night to Monday morning unfolded. I tell him about driving home. About Luciana stepping out in front of the car. My trip through the woods. Finding Kathy tied up. Killing Cyris. I tell him we didn’t go to the police because of what happened to Benjamin Hyatt, and how we wanted to get a lawyer first. The ghosts stay away as I tell him, but as I get closer to the end of the story, I can feel them nearby, and eventually they appear as I’m telling him about my conversation with Kathy in the lounge while Luciana was in the shower.
“Kathy was asleep when he first attacked her,” I tell him, and in the front of my mind the lounge we sat in while she told me this starts to form, slowly at first, and soon I can smell the blood on my clothes and taste the last mouthful of beer. Kathy brought me into a world where evil happened and I had loaded my hands full of its treasures. I can see Landry sitting opposite me, but standing just over his left shoulder is Kathy. She’s so real I could touch her. But of course she’s not real. She’s a figment of my imagination. Guilt manifesting itself into a form in which it can haunt me. My head is hurting from the blows it’s taken lately, and I reach slowly up and to the bump from Sunday night, and Kathy fades a little as I rub it, but then comes back when I stop. A real ghost wouldn’t do that. One projected by my guilt would.
“I never heard anyone come in,” she says.
“I know you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault,” I say to my guilt, hoping in a way it could be more than that, hoping it really could be Kathy I’m talking to.
“Jesus, Feldman, you’ve lost me,” Landry says.
“I didn’t know what time it was, Charlie, maybe ten thirty, and I woke up as his hand pressed down against my mouth. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. He held the tip of a knife next to my eye.”
“I killed him with that knife,” I say.
“Him? I’m not talking about this Cyris you’re going on about. I’m talking about the women. Which one did you kill first, Feldman?”
“I didn’t kill them,” I say. “I really didn’t kill them.”
Kathy is ignoring Landry because in her world he never existed and that’s the fundamental problem with homicide cops-it’s already too late when you need them. Kathy stares at me with remorse and pity. She has a drink in her hand. It’s the one she had before I showered to wash away the blood. She seems uninterested in the cabin. The cold doesn’t affect her. The back of my neck is alive with goose bumps. She isn’t a ghost. Isn’t my guilt. She’s a memory. Her words are the same words she told me.
“I could smell his skin. So vile. Like he hadn’t bathed in days. Strange, huh? I was choking on his odor. I was sure he had plans for me, but right at that moment the smell was all I could think about.”
“He broke into Kathy’s bedroom and abducted her,” I say.
“You killed her first?”
“He moved his knife to my throat. It trapped the smell and the taste in there. I was desperate for air and was starting to black out. Then he was promising me if I made a sound he would kill me. His eyes were so dark. So intense. I knew then that this man was pure evil. Have you ever seen pure evil, Charlie?”
“I once saw an episode of Melrose Place.” Kathy’s ghost smiles, and Landry looks at me as if I’ve completely lost it. Maybe I have.
“He told me his name was Cyris and I should remember it because I’d be calling it out over and over in the night. He told me to nod if I could remember that, so I nodded. I was so afraid and I thought he was going to kill me right there, but instead he backed away and tossed me some clothes. He ordered me to dress and I was happy to.”
“Answer the Goddamn question,” Landry says. “Who’d you kill first?”
“Cyris. He was the first one to die.”
“Tell me about the women. Tell me why you killed them.”
“Yes, Charlie, tell us why,” Kathy says, surprising me because it means she knows about Landry, and this is turning from a memory of a conversation into an actual conversation.
I close my eyes to try and hide from her and what I see is Cyris in the trees, Cyris with the metal stake and the knife, Cyris asking me if I wanted to join him. When I open my eyes I’m expecting to see Kathy has gone, but she hasn’t. She pours herself another invisible drink, then leans against a doorway that is nearly two days ago and at least sixty or so miles away.
“They weren’t meant to die,” I say. “Don’t you see? I saved them. I saved them.”
“From Cyris. Tell me what they did to make you kill them. Tell me.”
“I didn’t kill them.”
Kathy looks down at her ghostly feet. They are bare and I wonder if she can see the floor through them like I can. “I didn’t know he was going to take me away to hear me scream. I would have fought more had I known what my fate was going to be.”
“He took them from their houses to torture them,” I tell Landry. “He tied them to trees.”
“In the pasture you wrote about.”
“Things like this only happen to other people,” Kathy tells me, and she starts to fade.
“He forced her into a van, and that’s when she saw he had Luciana too. She was unconscious. She said that scared her the most.”
Kathy is nodding slowly, agreeing, fading quickly now.
“She said she knew at that point she was going to die.”
I try to imagine the terror she must have felt as Cyris forced her to walk through those trees, the horror of having Cyris carrying her unconscious friend with them. My fear of walking through those trees in the darkness later had been nothing in comparison. What would it be like to know you were being taken to your death? How would you feel knowing the rest of your short life would be lived out in immense pain and cruelty? I shudder at the thought of putting myself into her position. This is electric-chair material. Like being taken down a corridor there is no coming back from. I look at Landry’s bag and think of the Bible inside he told me was there. Could anybody in these situations really find comfort from one?
“He tied her up to a tree. He dumped Luciana on the gro
und. He didn’t know, but she had woken during the walk. He’d dumped her at the side of the clearing they were in. He was so focused on Kathy that he didn’t notice her inching away. Eventually she would run away and flag me down. As she was doing that, Cyris was telling Kathy that she was a mistress of evil. She said it was like being attacked by two different people. One moment he was calm, the next he was in a frenzy-only she was sure the frenzy was an act. She was positive he was calm the whole time.”
“An act? Even if I believed another man killed them, why would I believe he was acting in a frenzy just for the sake of acting? He had no audience.”
I tell him what Jo said. About an actor in a role. About him wanting the police to believe one thing when in fact it had been another. Then that scenario evolves a little. “Maybe he even only wanted to kill one of them, but by killing them both it looks more random, right? It looks like he picked two women and drove them into the woods to kill them in some ritualistic or crazed act. What if only one of them was a target? If he killed her then you would look for somebody more personal to the victim. Isn’t that how it goes? This way who do you look for? Some maniac?”
“And that’s what I found. You were Cyris when you killed them and you’re Feldman now that you got caught. You were right about the actor.”
“You’re wrong.”
He shakes his head. “There was a connection between the two, so I know you didn’t just pick their houses at random. You followed them first. Where did you first see them? The supermarket? The movies?”
“See? This is exactly what I said before. You’re not willing to hear anything that doesn’t fall in line with what you think happened.”
He holds his hand out and uncurls his fingers. The stake rolls out. It hits the ground and doesn’t bounce. It makes me jump. It makes me think of the way Kathy and Luciana died.
“Maybe you met them at a bar. They were friends out having a quiet drink, and you were the guy who kept hitting on them. In the end they figured out you wouldn’t leave them alone so they played along with you. You swapped names and numbers, only they gave you fake ones and you gave them your real one. You took it back after you followed them home and killed them.”
“There was no forced entry. How do you explain that?”
“Maybe you convinced them at the bar you were a nice guy and they took you home. Maybe they were drunk and asked you for a lift. You had your bag of tools in the trunk and you just couldn’t say no. They let you inside and the rest is obvious.”
He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a packet of cigarettes. He removes one with his lips, starts to put them away, then holds them out to me as if to show he isn’t such a bad guy after all. I shake my head. I don’t tell him that those things will kill him. He shrugs, as if not accepting one of his cigarettes is undeniable proof I must be crazy. He lights it and sucks deeply, then breathes a mouthful of smoke into the damp air. It hovers above his head, but doesn’t drift.
“You cut off Kathy’s breast and took it home.”
“What?”
“What? You didn’t think I looked in the box?”
“I had no idea. I just assumed it was a head.”
Landry shakes his head. “You just don’t stop trying, do you?”
I feel sick. “It still doesn’t add up. You think one of them waited in the car while I killed the other?”
“You attacked one of them quickly and knocked her unconscious, then subdued the other. You probably left her tied up in the car.”
“That’s not how it happened.”
Kathy’s ghost has gone and Luciana’s arrives. She looks at me from where Kathy stood earlier, only she has no drink to hold. Instead she’s holding a towel to dry her wet, ghostly hair.
“She tried to call the police, but you had to stop her, didn’t you?” Landry says.
“What happened?” Luciana asks.
“I broke the phone.”
“I know,” they both say, but only Luciana carries on. “It was too late anyway, Charlie.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you kill Jo?”
“What? No,” I say. “How do you even know about her?”
“But you abducted her.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I thought.”
I shake my head. “No, it’s not what you’re thinking. I was trying to help her.”
“You were helping her by abducting her.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth.”
“No, I don’t think you know just how crazy it really sounds. Where is she?”
“She was helping me find Cyris.”
“Let me get this straight. You abduct her, and she agrees to help you.”
“Like I said, I know it sounds crazy. But it’s true.”
“You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that during my career,” Landry says. “People think if they lead into a conversation by saying they know how crazy it sounds, that somehow it will make what they say more believable. But it doesn’t. It only makes them sound more guilty.”
“Well, she was helping me.”
“Bullshit.”
“She was in the car,” I tell him, and suddenly I realize what that means. “She saw you! She will have seen you, and she’ll be able to identify you to the police. You should take me back. Don’t make it worse for yourself.”
“You’re lying.”
I shake my head. “I’m not lying. Look into my eyes and tell me I’m lying.”
He looks into my eyes. “You’re lying,” he says.
It’s been a few hours since I tied Jo up. In that time she will have managed to work herself free, or in that time somebody will have walked past the car. If she worked herself free, she will have gone into a neighbor’s house to call for help. She couldn’t have driven anywhere because I have the keys-unless Jo has spent time over the last six months learning how to hotwire a car. Right now the police will be looking for me. She will have told them. The only problem is she won’t have told them where. And she won’t be able to have told them who took me. But it’s something. Knowing Landry may be found guilty of killing me isn’t much comfort, but it’s something.
“Tell me about Luciana,” he says, and as if on cue, Luciana reappears.
She slowly shakes her head at me exactly as she did on Monday morning. She finished drying her hair and offered me fresh clothes to replace the bloody ones I was wearing. She shook her head when I told her mine weren’t that bad and called me a typical male. She left me alone in the lounge to think, alone to drink my beer, and the beer had my head buzzing. Kathy was trying to call her husband. The next thing I knew darkness was my friend and in the darkness I thought about the offer Cyris had made me. I had fallen asleep. I woke to find Luciana crouching in front of me and my beer seeping into her carpet.
“She told me not to worry about it,” I say.
“About what?”
“She said, ‘It’s perfectly okay for the man who saved our lives to stain my carpet.’ She handed me a flannel and a towel and a change of clothes, then gave me directions to the bathroom.”
“You showered in her bathroom,” Landry says. “You showered before you killed her.”
“Yeah, I showered. I wasn’t going to. I wanted to show up the way I was, but. . I don’t know, there was something just too creepy about sitting around with another man’s blood on me. Anyway, I figured I’d still have my clothes, and that would be enough. Kathy was still trying to get hold of her husband. She said she’d stay in the clothes she was in.”
“You were a mess,” Luciana says, then smiles at me, the tense of her sentence suggests she’s thinking back to the past, that she’s not still there living it.
I walked down her hallway and walking into the steam of her bathroom filled me with excitement. It was full of typical womanly scents-soaps and subtle perfumes that made you think of meadows and flowers. For the first time I thought of Jo. Up until that moment I hadn’t given Jo, or my parents
or any of my friends or my job, a moment of thought. I was in a house with two beautiful women and they were in my debt. Anything could have come from it and, as it turns out, something did.
I dropped my own clothes in a heap. I had no idea how bad I was until I looked in the mirror. I was smeared in blood and dirt; patches of my hair had been welded together with blood. The only clean parts were where my clothes and watch had been. There were clumps of dirt in my ears and my forehead had the lump it still has now. I was smiling-smiling to be alive, smiling as I thought what my students would say the next time they saw me walk into the classroom looking like I’d been hit by a car. And, truth be told, I was smiling at the thought of Kathy and Luciana joining me in the shower. Of course I was. What guy wouldn’t?
The hot water hit my damaged body and stung like hell. I was in the bathroom Luciana would soon die in. I was dancing from one foot to the other, washing green shampoo through my hair, creating a red lather. Red water ran down my body, moving over sore muscles and torn skin in long stripes. It was blood and I liked the fact that most of it wasn’t mine. When I returned to the lounge Kathy and Luciana were talking on the couch.
“You certainly looked uncomfortable in those clothes,” Luciana says to me.
“I didn’t have any underwear on.”
My headache, as it is now, was thumping along nicely.
“I’m trying to be serious here, Feldman,” Landry says, “and all you can tell me is you weren’t wearing underwear in the shower? Why the hell would you?”
“Ignore him, Charlie,” Luciana tells me. “We should have gone to the police. That’s what you wanted to do. We sat down and talked about it. You wanted to go. I wasn’t sure. But Kathy wanted to get hold of her husband. She said her husband used to tell her all the time where people messed up was by not having a lawyer. She said the common mistake innocent people made was to assume the police would think that innocent people were innocent. You wanted to go and she wanted to stay, and I sided with my friend. Of course I did. If I’d agreed with you. .” she says, and doesn’t need to finish the sentence.