Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  “And may it be better than the past,” she said, and took a sip. “You know my name.”

  “And all it cost me was the price of a drink.”

  “But I don’t know yours.”

  “You’re better off that way,” I said. “I tend to forget it myself. People generally call me Buddy.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll call you,” she said.

  And we talked, and she found excuses to touch me—the back of my hand, my arm. I put a hand on her knee and she didn’t pull away. I looked a question into her eyes and she answered with a slow smile.

  To the future, I’d said, and I could see it all right there in front of me.

  “Back in a minute,” I said, and headed for the men’s room. And walked past it, and out the back door. I’d already checked out of my motel, and everything I owned was in the trunk of my car.

  Along with a new blanket, a roll of duct tape, and an icepick.

  Drove to the closest on-ramp, got on the Interstate. Kept it just under the speed limit, just as I’d have done if I’d left Carolyn with a crushed windpipe and a belly full of semen.

  Instead I’d left her with half an Orange Blossom, most of a J&B and soda, and all the time in the world to wonder what she’d said that turned me off.

  Hard one for either of us to answer.

  Crossed a state line, found a motel. Checked in, had another shower. Got in bed.

  Thought about my MILF. This time we left the bar together, and drove to her house, which I chose to situate in a suburban cul-de-sac. Immobilized her with the duct tape, but left her mouth untaped because I wanted to be able to hear her scream.

  I made sure the houses were far apart. No one would hear her screams.

  And so on.

  I WAS GOING to tell you about Barbara Graham.

  Not the part you can read on Wikipedia. Mother a prostitute, Barbara in the game herself early on. The company of career criminals, and three or four or five of them heard of a woman who was supposed to keep a lot of money around the house. And they broke in, and the woman wouldn’t give up the money, and Barbara pistol-whipped her and suffocated her with a pillow.

  Or she didn’t. She said she didn’t but what would you expect her to say?

  The crime went down in March of 1953. On June 3, 1955, after an appeal and a very brief stay of execution, they led her to the gas chamber. Somebody told her it would make it easier for her if she took a deep breath as soon as the cyanide pellets were dropped. Her response: “How the hell would you know, you silly rascal?”

  You really think she said silly rascal? The woman’s last words, and some city editor felt the need to clean them up. “How the hell would you know, you fucking moron?”

  Sounds more like it.

  But none of that is the point. It’s all background, and most of it probably true, for a story that’s far less verifiable. There was this man, his name lost to history, who boasted that he was the last man ever to fuck her.

  She had been locked up in the women’s prison in Chino, but they transferred her to San Quentin, where she spent a single night on Death Row before they gassed her. And there was this trusty, a man doing straight life in San Quentin for who knows what, and he was tasked with cleaning the lethal chamber after the execution had been carried out. Which I suppose involved hosing down this and wiping up that, after he’d removed the dead body.

  Well, you see where this is going. Here she was, not merely hot-looking but something of a celebrity, and she’d been dead for what, ten minutes? Fifteen minutes?

  Still warm and still fresh, so he took a few minutes to fuck her.

  No way she could fight him off, not once she’d taken that deep breath. No way anyone else would be around to watch, because it was an unpleasant task they’d been eager to palm off on a prisoner. A couple of minutes of in and out, and after he’d made a deposit in her cashbox, he’d move the body where they’d told him. And then he’d hose down this and wipe up that.

  And afterward he could tell all his friends about it. “You know what I did, man? Think you can’t have any pussy in prison? Well, think again.”

  Maybe he did it, just like he said. Maybe he never did it, but got off on telling the story. Or maybe he never existed in the first place, maybe a couple of prison guards carried her out on a stretcher, and someone else made up a story a month or a year later. Once somebody told it, you can see how it would tend to get repeated.

  So buy it or not, as you prefer, and I don’t see how anyone could prove it one way or the other. Certainly not at this late date.

  Still, I like to think it’s true.

  OF COURSE I remembered the case. I was in my early teens when they gassed her, and it was years later before I heard the story about the upstanding citizen who’d been her last lover. But I knew what they printed in the papers, and a couple of years later I got to see Susan Hayward play her in the film.

  A fine-looking woman, Susan Hayward. Judging from the photos, you could say as much for Barbara Graham.

  I DON’T KNOW what it was that saved my MILF. Possibly our conversation, which forced me to reclassify her from object to person. Or perhaps it was in the cards. Perhaps, like college basketball stars opting for the NBA draft, I was one and done.

  I can certainly see how it could have gone the other way. I’d gotten away with murder, and not because I was a criminal genius, always a step ahead of the police. I’d blundered into a crime, blundered through it, and blundered out of it, with nothing beyond dumb luck guiding my footsteps.

  Another man—or my own self, on another day—might have decided if I’d gotten away with it once I could get away with it twice, and three times, and four.

  And so on.

  What I decided was the reverse. Don’t push your luck, I told myself. Take what happened and tuck it away, out of sight but not out of mind. Enjoy it in memory, for as long as you can. Transform it into fantasy if you will. But don’t do it again.

  How many men can take that advice? How many of us can cross a forbidden line once and never step over it again?

  That might as well be a rhetorical question, because how could anyone possibly answer that? No one’s keeping stats on those of us who are one and done.

  And if we relive those moments, if we take other victims in the privacy of our own minds, well, that won’t put us on any lists, either. So I don’t know how many men commit such an act once and never repeat it, don’t know if our numbers are many or few.

  But I know this much. I managed it.

  I SPENT A few days driving, heading generally north and east, staying in budget motels, entertaining myself with poetry.

  I’m thinking of Wordsworth’s definition, of which I was entirely ignorant at the time: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” In the tranquility of my motel room, with the TV off and the door locked and the shades down, I would recall what had happened with Cindy, and what might have happened with Carolyn.

  Powerful feelings, to be sure. Not to mention spontaneous overflow.

  Each morning I arose and got behind the wheel, each evening found myself another motel. One night outside of Peoria I checked in and walked across the road to a Denny’s. Breakfast any time! the menu proclaimed, and I sat at the counter and tucked into their Hungry Man’s Breakfast, only to discover I didn’t have appetite enough to finish it.

  But I lingered over a second cup of coffee, not out of a desire for it but because I liked the looks of the waitress. A brunette, and on the plump side, but with something saucy about her.

  Aside from ordering my meal, I never said a word to her. Not even to order the coffee, or later to ask for the check. I pointed to the cup and she filled it. I scribbled in the air and she brought the check.

  Later that night, she was the unwitting star of my little movie.

  Worked fine.

  TO MAKE THIS life change work, it had to be more than a matter of living in memory
and fantasy while keeping reality at bay. That was clear to me. I had to become a different person—or, more accurately, I had to create a different life for myself.

  I’m not much inclined to get into it, but you would almost have to wonder what made me the way I am. One’s used to the normal components—raging alcoholic father, domineering mother, sexually abusive parent or uncle or priest or scoutmaster or trusted family friend. “Why is this man a monster? Because his childhood was monstrous.”

  Not mine.

  Ours was an oversized family—six sons, four daughters—but neither abusive nor dysfunctional. My father owned and oversaw an insurance agency, the town’s largest, and while I was in high school began offering mutual funds as well. My mother, with ten children under her care, never considered a career outside the home, though the needlework she entered in contests frequently won prizes.

  I was a desultory student, often lost in thought and consequently unprepared when called on. But I did well enough on tests to balance it all out, and my grades were average.

  I joined the Boy Scouts, hoping for camping trips, but our troop was more interested in saluting and marching, as if it might find its true calling as a chapter of the Hitler Youth. A few months was enough, and I dropped out. But not because our scoutmaster (who, now that I think about it, bore a distinct resemblance to Adolf Eichmann) ever laid a finger on me.

  Nor did the teachers at the Sunday school we all attended. I didn’t last long there, either. My brother Henry told my mother that he hated it, and did he have to go? She said he didn’t, and I said I hated it too, although I merely thought it was tedious. So Henry and I never went back, which is not to say that we played together while our brothers and sisters learned more than anybody needs to know about Mary Magdalene and Lazarus. Henry, Hank to his friends, was four years older than I, and found me at least as dull as Sunday school.

  If there was one thing that stood out about our family, it’s how little apparent interest we had in each other. I guess my father was proud to have so many children, even as he was proud he was able to support us all. But that was about as far as his interest went. And I guess my mother was, well, maternal—albeit in a way that you couldn’t call motherly. She did the cooking and, with the assistance of a twice-a-week housekeeper, kept house. Made sure we had our shots, made sure there were clean clothes in our dresser drawers. Put dinner on the table and saw to it that we ate it. All in a manner I’ve since realized was dispassionate: We were her children, and she was supposed to take care of us, and she was a woman who did what she was supposed to do. And so she did.

  My older sisters helped, Judy and Rhea, born less than a year apart. Irish twins, I’d heard them called, though I had no idea why. Arnie showed up a year later. I was fifth in the birth order, the third boy, four years younger than Hank, who was himself two and a half years younger than Arnie. Then four more years passed before the next birth, a sister named Charlotte.

  And to which of them was I closest?

  None of them, really.

  I had to think to write that paragraph with their names, Arnie and Hank and Charlotte. I barely remember them, my clutch of siblings. There were four more after Charlotte, and I think they were an even mix of boys and girls, but I can’t recall their order of birth, or even their names. Ten all told, so many of us you’d have thought we would have to have been Catholic, but we belonged in fact to some bland Protestant denomination.

  Maybe my parents were ignorant or slipshod when it came to birth control.

  Maybe they actually wanted us. Though I can’t imagine why.

  TWICE I ALMOST left the gun behind.

  A day or two after I acquired it, when I took it from its pint-of-whiskey paper bag for perhaps the tenth time, still holding it so as to avoid disturbing the previous owner’s fingerprints or imposing my own, it occurred to me that it might be dangerous for me to be in possession of it. I sniffed it, wondering if it had been fired since its last cleaning, but all I smelled was metal; if either gun oil or gun powder residue were present, my nose couldn’t spot them.

  I put it back in its paper bag, stowed it for the time being on the motel room’s closet shelf. It could stay there, I decided, until someone found it, and it might be someone other than the maid, because she’d need to be taller than average to reach it.

  I went to bed, and in the morning I changed my mind and took the weapon with me when I left.

  A few days later, I packed up and was out the door of another motel when I remembered I’d neglected to retrieve the thing from the dresser drawer where I’d stowed it. I remember standing there, half in and half out of the door, unsure what to do. I went back for it, and this time I stashed it in the glove compartment.

  BY THE TIME I let Greyhound drive me across the Ohio state line I was a different person.

  Literally. At least to the extent that I had an Indiana driver’s license in a new name. I was now John James Thompson, a far more common name than the one I’d been born with. That was my choice. I didn’t want to stand out.

  It used to be remarkably easy to change one’s identity. When the American West was the frontier, all you had to do was ride into town and give your name. No one would ask to see your ID, because the whole concept barely existed. You didn’t need a license to ride a horse. There were no Social Security cards, even as there was no Social Security. You got to be whoever you claimed to be, and unless trouble followed you from your old life, your new name could be yours for as long as you wanted.

  It was still pretty easy in 1968. You learned the name of some unfortunate child who’d died young, ideally in infancy, claimed his name for your own, and requested a copy of your birth certificate. I might have been Clarence Glendower or Peter Kowalski, but rejected the first as too distinctive and the second as too ethnic. Little Johnny Thompson had survived infancy, but his gravestone reported that he’d died a month shy of his fifth birthday. And he’d been born just over two years after me, on the fourteenth of June.

  June fourteenth is Flag Day, and while the Thompson lad hadn’t lived long enough to wave any flags, or have any raised in his honor, the holiday made it easy to reel off my new date of birth when asked.

  Over time, of course, it was the other way around. After not too many years I was for a fact John James Thompson, and my birthday helped me to remember when Flag Day was.

  The only downside, really, was that usurping JJT’s date of birth made me two years younger than I was in actuality. And what was the matter with that? Well, for a long time it was fine. But the time came when I had to wait an extra two years before I could collect Social Security.

  I PICKED UP my birth certificate and a Social Security card in Indianapolis, then drove to Fort Wayne, where I took a test and got an Indiana driver’s license for my new name. My car was registered to my old name, and I thought about selling it to myself, but decided that would leave a trail. I sold it instead to a used car dealer, took a bus from Forth Wayne to Lima, Ohio, and bought a used Plymouth Valiant off a dealer’s lot. The following afternoon I took another test and traded in my Indiana license for an Ohio one.

  I never actually picked Lima as my new home, and I might have moved on and gone further east, possibly all the way to the coast. But things started falling into place.

  I was staying at first in a motel, and got into a conversation with the guy on the desk, who told me about the Rodeway Inn a quarter of a mile away. Their night man had quit abruptly and they were looking to replace him.

  And I was looking to earn back some of the money I’d been spending on meals and motels, and the couple of hundred I was out of pocket swapping my car for the Valiant. I assured the manager at the Rodeway that I didn’t drink, didn’t mind working nights, and had no use for Democrats or Coloreds, and that got me a room and a salary. Both were on the small side, but I could live with that.

  And one thing led to another.

  I thought of my father, who’d joined Kiwanis and Rotary and the Lions Club, and not
out of a sense of civic duty. “The contacts are important,” I’d heard him say, and something clicked when I learned that Rotary met once a week in a conference room right there at the Rodeway. I found a men’s shop and bought a blue blazer and a shirt and tie, and took a deep breath and walked into the next meeting, figuring the worst that could happen was they’d ask me to leave.

  They didn’t. I went every week, and one day maybe three or four weeks in a portly fellow asked me what line of work I was in. I said I was new in town, and for the time being I was on the desk nights in that very motel. “It’s honest work,” I said, “but, well—”

  “But not much chance of advancement,” he said. “You know who’s looking for someone?” He pointed at a rail-thin man on the far side of the room. “Porter Dawes,” he said. “Man could hide behind a straw, but he’ll treat you right. You know him? C’mon, John. Be my pleasure to introduce you.”

  Dawes was in the hardware and housewares business, and within a few minutes so was I. After two years he made me the manager, and two years after that cancer took him down. When he knew he wasn’t going to get better, he sat me down with his lawyer, and we drew up an agreement for me to buy the business from his widow, paying a small amount down and the rest out of earnings. She’d also participate directly in profits, but as owner I’d get the lion’s share.

  “I’m glad to have that settled,” he said after we’d signed it. “Now I can die in peace.” And a month later he did just that.

  BY THEN I was a member of Kiwanis and the Lions as well, and if I didn’t get to every meeting I was active enough to be on a first-name basis with a sizable portion of Lima’s business and professional class. The store had always been profitable, but I made a couple of changes after I took over, and signed on a fellow Rotarian to develop an ad campaign. Profits went up.

  I guess people noticed, and a white-haired man named Ewell Kennerly asked me if I’d thought about Penderville. All I knew about it was that it was a ways south of town on I-75.