Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  “With a really long Q-tip,” I said.

  ‘Yeah, right. The thing is, I never meant for this to happen. Not that anything’s happened, not really, and nothing will, because the only way anyone can try to get in touch with Kristin Lynne Thompson is through my email address, and anything that gets to my mailbox I’ll just delete.”

  As if it could be that simple. As if anything in our age would ever again be truly delible.

  WE MUST HAVE scattered, we Bordens. That was our last name, Borden, like Elsie the Cow and her husband Elmer, famous for his glue. Or like Lizzie, as you prefer.

  Borden. I let Word perform a Global Search of this document to confirm that I had just now written my original surname for the first time in all the years since I signed over my car’s title to a dealer in Fort Wayne.

  The ten little Bordens and how they grew. I’ve had some time to remember the names, and it’s interesting what comes back to you if you give it a chance. Judy and Rhea, Arnie and Hank and Roger and Charlotte—and Tom and Lucas, Carole and Joyce. With the youngest four, two boys and two girls, I can’t remember their birth order, can’t attach faces or any other specifics to their names. And I’m not a hundred percent certain of some of those names. Was it Luke or Lucas, Joyce or Joy? Was it just-plain-Carol or Carole-with-an-E?

  I may not have known then. I don’t think the younger ones were ever all that clear in my mind. I’m afraid I never paid them much attention.

  And now, for the first time in a while, I found myself wondering what had become of them. My parents would certainly be long gone by now, and my father surely would have died well-insured. And my brothers and sisters? It seemed a good bet that some of them would be alive, even as one or two of them would probably not.

  Judy and Rhea might be grandparents. Even great-grandparents, if their own early training in motherhood had got them off to an early start. Arnie, Hank, Charlotte, Luke, Carole, Joyce, Tom—where had you all gone off to, and how many marriages and divorces could you claim? And how many offspring?

  I had never cared enough to pose the question. I still didn’t care, not really, but the questions came regardless.

  ROGER. THAT WAS my name, Roger Edward Borden. I never liked it. Much better to walk around in a castoff shirt with Buddy on the pocket, better to answer to Buddy than to Roger.

  Roger Wilco. Roger the Dodger.

  I don’t suppose there’s anything genuinely wrong with the name. It’s neither dirt common nor weirdly unusual.

  But I’d never liked being Roger.

  LAST NIGHT, AFTER the others were asleep, I looked at the gun.

  It was in the lowest of the three drawers on the right-hand side of my desk. That was the drawer that you could lock, and so that’s where I’d put the thing back when I acquired the desk. Years and years ago, that would have been, and I don’t remember where I’d kept it before.

  Or when I’d last looked at it, and consequently I had to search the desk’s other drawers, the unlocked ones, until I found the key. If nothing else, it put paid to the argument that I kept the gun for protection. Any intruder could kill all of us several times over before I could get my hands on the thing.

  But I did in fact find the key, eventually, and I was able to turn the lock, and the gun that time forgot was waiting where I’d left it.

  The sight of it in the otherwise empty drawer, the feel of it when I took it in my hand, brought back flashes of memory. One of them reminded me how I’d sniffed the barrel all those years ago, trying to determine if it had been recently fired. The results, I recalled, were inconclusive.

  I repeated the action, but this time what I smelled was the steel of which the gun had been made and the gun oil with which I’d cleaned it before placing it in the drawer. That came back to me, coming across the gun-cleaning kit on a basement shelf at Thompson Dawes, bringing it home, and cleaning the thing in the manner explained in the kit’s instruction sheet.

  Where was the kit? Wouldn’t I have put it in the drawer as well?

  I don’t believe I’ve described the instrument itself. It’s a five-shot Colt revolver with a two-inch barrel, and there’s a .38-Special cartridge in each of its five chambers. This was not the case when it came into my hands. At first it had in fact appeared to be fully loaded, but there were spent cartridges in three of its chambers and live rounds in only two.

  And so it had remained until the day I cleaned it. The details had slipped my mind, but sitting there with gun in hand brought them back. When I cleaned the gun with the kit I’d found, I had cleared all five chambers, and the following day I’d disposed of everything, the kit included, in the store’s trash.

  Thompson Dawes didn’t stock guns, which had made the discovery of the kit a surprise, but I’d never paid much attention to the basement, and now I had a look around to see what other wonders it might hold. Porter Dawes had evidently sold firearms at one point, phasing them out before I went to work for him; I didn’t find any, but I did uncover some supplies—another cleaning kit, the same as the one I’d used, and two boxes of shotgun shells, and a variety of handgun and rifle bullets.

  It all went in the dumpster, but not before I’d transferred five .38-Special rounds from their box to my jacket pockets, where they weighed more than I would have guessed. I didn’t know if they’d fit, but as far as I could tell they were identical to the live rounds I’d discarded, and when I got home that evening I eased the burden on my pockets and filled the Colt’s empty chambers.

  The bullets seemed to fit well enough. I knew, as must be obvious, next to nothing about guns, and had no way of knowing whether a pull on the trigger would result in a gunshot or a mere click. I could have found out readily enough through the simplest of experiments, but why? With the revolver locked forever in its drawer, what difference did it make whether or not it was capable of firing a bullet?

  Then why load it in the first place?

  A fair question. I’m not sure I raised the question at the time. I doubt I’d have bothered to load the gun, not if I’d had to go out and buy ammunition for it. But those five rounds were in a box of shells I was in the process of discarding, they weren’t costing me anything, not even the effort of a trip to a gun store, and if one were going to keep a gun in a locked desk drawer, shouldn’t it be a loaded gun? Shouldn’t it be ready for use, even if one were never likely to use it?

  Never mind. I didn’t give it much thought then, if any. No need to overthink it now.

  So. Last night I found the key, unlocked the drawer, drew it open. I took the gun in hand, felt its weight, breathed in its smell of steel and gun oil.

  I did not hold the gun to my temple, or put the barrel in my mouth. I did not tighten my finger on the trigger and squeeze off a shot.

  I did not do any of those things. But I did imagine myself doing them.

  For what it’s worth.

  THAT THIRTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD case in a city in Nebraska I can’t be bothered to look up. It’ll come to me.

  The killer, the man who got away with it for all those years, who went to his grave without ever being suspected of anything, had left his semen in the girl he’d raped and strangled. And years later the cold case investigators worked up his DNA profile and checked it against the state and federal databases.

  And came up empty, because the man they were looking for wasn’t there to be found. Aside from a handful of traffic violations and a couple of DUI arrests, one of which got his driver’s license suspended for six months, he’d gone through the rest of his life without making a mark on a police blotter. I can’t say that his was an exemplary life, and for all I know he’d killed again, but if he’d done so he’d left no evidence behind.

  So they ran the DNA he’d left in Kearney—that was the city, I knew it would come to me, and he wasn’t from Kearney, he was from some nearby town, and it’ll come to me, too. And indeed it has. Grand Island. He killed her in Kearney, he went home to Grand Island.

  But that’s not the point. The point is
that they ran his DNA and came up empty, and that was the end of that, except of course it wasn’t. Another year and another technical development, and while the possibility that he might be a direct descendant of Charlemagne hadn’t prompted him to swab his cheek and mail if off to Ancestors R Us, some relatives were not so discreet.

  And, just as a fortyish woman in Washington State and a younger man in Utah had pinged when my daughter’s DNA showed up, so did the Kearney Killer’s relatives light up the screen when someone took a good look.

  On some of the cold case shows they tell you how, after a fresh look at forensic evidence points to a suspect, the cops have to shadow him for weeks waiting for him to spit on the sidewalk or discard a paper cup, thus giving them lawful access to his DNA. In this case, there was nobody around to cast a shadow. A court order allowed them to exhume a grave in West Texas, and they didn’t need the consent of the deceased to take a sample of his DNA.

  Bingo! A perfect match.

  Case closed.

  MAYBE SOMEONE IN Bakersfield, or more likely somebody with California’s state equivalent of the FBI, had already begun submitting the DNA from Cindy Raschmann to the various who’s-your-daddy sites. Maybe the outfit Alden had selected had already received California’s query, and maybe the results had already popped up on their screen.

  Any or all of these things might already have happened. And if they hadn’t, they would. And someone in California would put in a request, and someone in Sacramento would approve a trip to Ohio, and the next thing you knew there’d be two men on our front porch, ringing our doorbell.

  They show up in pairs, don’t they? But it wouldn’t necessarily be two men, not nowadays. It could be a man and a woman. It could even be two women, theoretically, but that seemed less likely.

  They could be out there right now, while I sit here imagining them. They could be driving past the house, figuring out their approach. The process, in fact, could be anywhere at all along the timeline, and the question of how far they’d come showed itself as immaterial.

  Because it was all just a matter of time, and the amount of time didn’t matter. They were coming. And I wasn’t going anywhere.

  THAT LAST ENTRY was three days ago. The day before yesterday I booted up the computer and read the last thing I’d written. I closed the file and went on gazing at the blank screen.

  Shut it down, went to the kitchen, got a beer out of the refrigerator. Looked at it, put it back, chose a ginger ale instead. Sat on the porch with it, watched the passing traffic. There’s not much of it, not on our little street, but cars do pass by now and then.

  I found myself noticing the license plates, realized I was looking for an out-of-state tag. But they wouldn’t have driven here from California. They’d have flown and rented a car. Or some cooperative local officer would be driving them around.

  The ginger ale was sweet. Artificially sweetened, in fact. It’s a brand Louella likes. I don’t know that she has to worry about calories, but she would rather enjoy the sweetness without taking in the sugar.

  “Although it seems like cheating,” she said once.

  What am I going to do about her? About all of them?

  YESTERDAY, A DAY after the ginger ale on the porch, was the day for my usual visit to Penderville. I called my manager, invented a reason to cancel our lunch, said I’d try to get down there sometime in mid-afternoon.

  “But just in case,” I said, and we had as much of a conversation as we needed to have.

  Around four I got on I-75, headed for Penderville. I stayed on past the exit I usually took, and pulled into the parking lot for a restaurant called Crazy Jane’s. The red neon sign, which had caught my eye over the years, showed a woman in profile. Jane, I suppose, though there was nothing obviously crazy about her.

  I parked, and after a few minutes I got out of the car.

  A man walks into a bar.

  THERE WERE PERHAPS a dozen customers, all of them from age groups a good deal younger than my own. A man and a woman in a booth, three men at a table, the rest perched on barstools. A head or two turned to note my entrance, then turned away.

  A country song played, a woman singing. I couldn’t make out the words.

  The bartender was a woman, her cap of hair so blond it was white. At first glance I’d taken her for a man because she had that haircut they give you at Marine boot camp. But her face was feminine enough, if a little hard, and the short shorts and halter top displayed a woman’s body, and an attractive one in the bargain.

  I ordered a beer, and she said they had PBR on tap. Was that all right?

  I nodded, and she’d drawn the beer before I’d managed to decipher the initials. Pabst Blue Ribbon, of course.

  “Sit anywhere,” she said.

  I carried the glass to a table along the wall and thought about her haircut, wondering whether it was a nod to fashion or a personal statement in some area of sexual politics.

  I imagined myself asking her, my hands on her throat making it impossible for her to reply. She would be strong, but this was my fantasy, so I would be stronger.

  A thought came unbidden. Maybe it wasn’t a haircut, maybe she’d lost all her hair to a round of chemotherapy.

  Maybe she’d already survived a greater peril than I could pose, even in the privacy of my mind.

  A record ended, another began to play. A male vocalist this time, but the lyrics were no easier to make out.

  I took a sip, finally, of my PBR. When she’d said the initials, the very first thought that came to me was Peanut Butter and Jelly. I’d recognized that as wrong, and the next thing I thought of was NPR, for National Public Radio, and then Pabst came finally to mind, a rather distant third.

  It tasted fine.

  I generally keep Heineken in the refrigerator, and a six-pack lasts a long time. It was a Heineken I’d picked up and put back the other day in favor of a diet ginger ale.

  I picked up the glass to take another sip, put it down without doing so. I thought, The beer that made Milwaukee famous. Wasn’t that a song? A slogan first, of course, but then there was the song, how the beer that made Milwaukee famous made a fool out of me. Or a jackass, or some other two-syllable word.

  Except that was Schlitz, wasn’t it? That claimed to have made Milwaukee famous?

  A loser, that was the word. What made Milwaukee famous made a loser out of me.

  Jesus, what fucking difference did it make?

  HOW LONG WAS I there? Half an hour?

  Long enough for a few more songs to play, long enough for one of the loners at the bar to depart, long enough for two others to replace him. Long enough for me to abandon the fantasy I’d been attempting to build around Maggie.

  That was the bartender’s name. I heard a customer call her by name, which made her a little less anonymous, and a little less suitable for the use I was trying to make of her. I found myself recalling things about her I’d barely noted during our brief transaction. A small tattoo on her wrist, apparently a cryptic Chinese symbol. A larger one on her shoulder, which I took at first to be a crayfish—and then forgot about, and then remembered and decided was more likely to be a scorpion.

  Which might mean she was a Scorpio, born in the autumn. Or that she had or used to have a Scorpio lover. Or that the creature was her totem animal, chosen as such for reasons at which I could only guess.

  I knew nothing about her, but knowing this much made her a little bit more of a person, and turned what I was attempting to do in the privacy of my imagination into an offense against her person. That she was unaware of it, that I was to her no more than an old man with a beer sitting almost invisible in the shadows, that she’d very likely forgotten me altogether—none of this seemed to mitigate my crime.

  There was another woman, the one in the booth. I couldn’t really make out what she looked like, so I let my imagination flesh her out as it preferred. And in my mind I sent her companion to the restroom, and lured her out of the place before he returned, and—

&
nbsp; Never mind.

  I guess I was inside Crazy Jane’s for half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes at the outside. My glass of PBR was still mostly full when I walked away from it.

  My imaginings, redirected from Maggie to the woman in the booth, wouldn’t play the game. My mind couldn’t stay focused on them. It insisted on wandering, and I gave up and let it wander, and after I’d asked myself for the fourth or fifth time what the hell I was doing there, I did some wandering of my own—out the door and across the parking lot and back behind the wheel of my car.

  And I ask myself now what I was doing, and answers bubble up, or seem to.

  There was a thought that had come to me as I parked my car. A sheep as a lamb, I thought. Shorthand for You might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb, that is to say, meaning if I was doomed to be arrested for what I’d done all those years ago, then I might as well update my résumé by doing the same thing once again.

  But those five words were the extent of that thought. I’d always known I wasn’t going to find a victim in Crazy Jane’s. I wasn’t looking for one.

  And what was I looking for? Really?

  I wasn’t looking for Cindy Raschmann. Nor was I looking for the MILF who got away.

  Maybe I was looking for Buddy.

  Looking for the man I’d been, looking to find him lurking within my present self. Because he has to be there, somewhere.

  I’m tired. I’m going to bed.

  I WONDER WHAT’S going on in Alden’s mind.

  He must know something.

  This evening we had the network news on during dinner, and there was something about a preliminary judicial decision. Could a company voluntarily share its genetic data base with cold case investigators? Could it be compelled to do so? Was the right of privacy of some unwitting relative of a killer thus infringed, and did that right trump the moral imperative to get a dangerous criminal off the streets?