Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  The questions raised seemed to be both legally and morally complicated, and it was evident they would not be resolved overnight. The arguments were familiar, as one heard them often enough in slightly different contexts—when some government agency wanted access to someone’s iPhone after a terrorist incident, for example, and Apple refused a court order to unlock it.

  At one point I glanced at Alden and caught him looking at me. Our eyes met for only an instant, and I’m not sure I could read anything in his, but I sensed something. Some concern, some perception that the question under examination applied to me in some specific way.

  Or maybe I had a spot on my shirt. Maybe there was nothing to be read in his expression, and it was my own ever-present anxiety that made me think otherwise.

  The newscast ended with the usual feel-good segment, this one about a woman with two artificial legs who’d just donated a kidney to someone. Louella turned it off, and I suppose we could have talked about that, but instead we picked up on the DNA question.

  “It’s an argument that keeps coming up in one form or another,” I said. “On the one hand you’ve got the individual’s right to privacy, and on the other there’s the public’s right to security. Changes in technology keep raising new questions. If you commit a crime, or at least give them reason to think you did, they can take you into custody—and take your fingerprints while they’re at it, and do a computer check to see if you left those fingerprints at a crime scene in Salt Lake City.”

  “What crime could somebody commit in Salt Lake City?” Louella wondered. “Monogamy?”

  “And they’d arrest you years later,” Alden said, “on suspicion of serial monogamy. But I think I see where you’re going, Dad. They fingerprint everybody they arrest, and nobody questions their right to do it, because that’s been the procedure for years. When did they first start taking people’s fingerprints, does anybody know?”

  Nobody did. I said they’d been doing it for longer than I could remember, and if anybody ever tried to argue it was an invasion of privacy, nobody’d paid any attention to him. “DNA’s different,” I said. “It may vary from state to state, but generally speaking you need a warrant or a court order to obtain a sample.”

  “Because you’re taking something from a person?”

  “And invading his person to do it,” I said, “although the difference between inking a man’s fingertips and swabbing his cheek doesn’t seem all that significant, does it?”

  “But if he drinks from a cup,” he said, “it’s not an invasion. That’s if it’s a paper cup and he throws it away, because if it’s in the trash it’s fair game. But if he hangs on to the cup and you grab it away from him, then they can throw out the evidence on grounds of whatever it is, unlawful search and seizure?”

  “Or not,” I said, “depending on what you did and what state you did it in, and what the judge had for breakfast that morning.”

  “Aren’t you glad you’re going to be a vet?” Louella asked him. “And not a lawyer?”

  “But look what you do every day,” Kristin said, shaking a finger at her brother. “Invading the privacy of individuals who can’t even argue in their own defense.”

  We all looked at her.

  “When did Chester give you permission to check out his DNA? Maybe he wanted to keep his Rottweiler ancestry private. Did you ever think of that?”

  I suspect she was half-serious, as she’s got her own way of looking at the world, and a propensity for speaking true words in jest. This time she succeeded in redirecting the conversation, and we were soon engaged, not for the first time, in pointing out to one another the several qualities that elevated our Chester to the pinnacle of dogdom.

  I welcomed the change of subject, and had the feeling I wasn’t alone in so doing.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Hours later. Alden went to his attic retreat, presumably to do homework. The rest of us watched Jeopardy, and after the Final Jeopardy entry stumped the six of us—we three Thompsons and all three contestants as well—I came up here and wrote the preceding section.

  And then there was a knock. I turned. Louella, in a nightgown. One I’d given her.

  “I’m just so tired,” she said, and yawned. “I know it’s early, but all of a sudden I can’t keep my eyes open.”

  “Why don’t I tuck you in?”

  “I don’t like to disturb you,” she said. “When you’re hard at work. But if you’re sure you don’t mind—”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  IT WENT WELL.

  And why should that come as a surprise? Ever since I first suggested she feign sleep, that had been unfailingly the way we made love. More often than not it was at her suggestion (“Oh, I can’t stop yawning. I’m just so sleepy all of a sudden.”) but some of the time it was I who got the ball rolling (“Honey, I can see how tired you are. Why don’t you just close your eyes and let yourself drift off?”).

  We left my study and went to our bedroom, where she arranged herself on the bed. I was concerned that my visit to Crazy Jane’s might get in the way, or that the ghost of Cindy Raschmann would be in the room with us.

  But none of this happened. My mind didn’t summon up a fantasy starring Maggie the bartender or the woman in the booth or anyone at all, real or imaginary. Some years back I’d let go of the habit of rousing myself with fantasies, invented or remembered, probably because they’d lost their efficacy. It had thus become my habit simply to devote myself to the task of giving pleasure to my partner.

  To my wife, that is to say.

  To my wife, Louella.

  We are older now, and what I feel in my heart and mind does not always empower my loins. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Our coupling, whatever form it takes, gratifies us both.

  Tonight, surprisingly, I was able to perform in the conventional fashion, and—

  No, that’s enough. I won’t erase what I’ve just written, but I think it’s past time to shut the bedchamber door. And skip a double space, and start afresh.

  THERE.

  I’ve just locked the desk drawer, after having unlocked it a few minutes ago. I took the gun in my hand, felt its weight, let my finger rest upon its trigger. I did not point it anywhere, except perhaps in my imagination.

  And now it’s once more locked away, and the key to the drawer back where I keep it.

  There was a gag gift someone gave my father. He kept it on his desk, for a while at least, and I can recall his demonstrating how it worked. It was a little box with a button, and he pressed the button, and the lid lifted, whereupon a disembodied hand emerged from the box with its finger extended. The finger pressed the button, which reversed the entire process, and the hand returned to the box and the lid closed.

  I’ve made a dog’s breakfast of describing the process, but perhaps you get the idea. I forget what they called the thing, but it had the word “executive” in the title, and the idea was that you turned it on and its sole function was to turn itself off.

  I think I just went through something similar with the gun. I unlocked the drawer in order to lock it again.

  IF YOU HAVE a gun on the wall in the first act of your play, you owe it to your audience to see that it’s fired before the final curtain.

  I don’t know who said that. I don’t think there were guns in Shakespeare’s plays, I think it was all swords and daggers and poison. So it wouldn’t be Shakespeare, and Mark Twain didn’t write plays, and neither did Benjamin Franklin.

  You could look it up.

  Never mind. I’ve looked it up for you. Anton Chekhov.

  WILL I FIRE this gun?

  I’d say I’ve earned the right. It’s been hanging on the metaphorical wall since it came into my possession, and I’ve mentioned it often enough in this document that no reader can legitimately claim to be inadequately prepared for whatever role it might play.

  If they’re going to track me down, if the DNA I left in and on Cindy Raschmann hooks up with some unknown niece or nephew, I’d rather not be arou
nd to watch it all play out. My imagination conjures up no end of third-act scenarios, and every last one of them is awful.

  Better to get out before it happens.

  Do I want to die? No, I honestly don’t. I like my life, I like being the man I’ve become. I love my wife, my son, my daughter.

  And there’s the rub—and I don’t have to look up that line, even I know it’s Shakespeare’s. Hamlet speaking, to be or not to be.

  But there it is. The rub.

  I love my wife. I love my son. I love my daughter.

  Let me just blurt this out. I never expected to love anybody. I never regarded it as an option. And when I look back at my earlier self, the young lout in the Buddy shirt, I see a man who fits every standard definition of a sociopath.

  A man with no conscience. A man with no empathy. A man who neither knows nor cares what other people are feeling.

  A man who knows right from wrong, even as he knows that the earth is ninety-three million miles from the sun. Yes, okay, that’s nice, I get it, but so what?

  I cannot claim to have made a study of sociopathy, but I’ve had enough of a personal interest in it to learn something about it. And one conclusion I’ve drawn, one that seems irrefutable and inescapable, is that there’s no cure for the condition. No amount of awareness—of oneself, of the world one lives in—

  No, let’s make this personal:

  No amount of awareness, of myself or of the world I live in, can alter who I am. I may be capable of changing my behavior, even as I crossed a state line, even as I sold one car and bought another, even as I changed my name.

  I, who had been a drifter, had evolved into a homeowner. A husband and father, a family man, a creature of settled habits. I’d been in the same line of work almost as long as I’d been in Lima, and I owned the business now, and had enlarged it and made a modest success of it.

  I, who had found it within myself to strangle a young woman and violate her dead body, now sat down to dinner every evening with my wife and son and daughter. And bowled in a league once a week. And—

  Enough.

  What, then, had become of Buddy? Had he been some sort of sociopathic larval stage, and had he subsequently emerged from his chrysalis a fully evolved human being?

  It would be nice to think so.

  But I sit here, staring at my computer screen, staring beyond it at the person I am and the life I’ve led, and it’s just not so, is it?

  Buddy hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still here. He acts differently, and in certain respects he sees himself and the world differently.

  But has he grown a conscience?

  No, I was quick to type just now, but then I backed up to amend it. Let’s make it Yes and no.

  Because I am aware, in a way and to an extent that Buddy never was, of what I ought to do. And I have become in the habit over the years of following the suggestions of that particular inner voice.

  Because it’s right? Because it’s what God or some equivalent thereof, some Divine stand-in, wants me to do? Because I’ll feel better about myself if I do the right thing?

  No, I don’t think so.

  I think I’ve learned that it’s prudent for me to do what this quasi-conscience prompts me to do. It’s in my interest, and I’m able to act in my own interest and override contrary impulses. In fact I’ve done so for long enough that I’m barely aware of those impulses.

  But I continue, in my heart of hearts, in my essential self, to be a sociopath.

  Let me be candid, even though my fingers balk at typing the words. I am sitting here, weighing possible courses of action circumstances might lead me to take. I have just told you that I love my wife, my son, my daughter.

  And one course of action I find myself weighing, and indeed considering quite dispassionately, would have me annihilating my family.

  Killing them all. Killing Louella, killing Alden, killing Kristin.

  IT’S BEEN THREE days since the last entry. After I typed their names I sat looking at the screen, reading that paragraph over and over. I tried to find something else to write, to add to what I’d written, and what words came to me didn’t seem worth recording.

  After a while I shut down the computer and went to bed.

  And fell asleep right away, and slept soundly. And got up in the morning and took up my life where I’d left it, and didn’t walk into this home office of mine until evening, after the news and after Jeopardy. Opened the file, read the last three paragraphs, sat there thinking or not thinking for perhaps five minutes, and then shut things down again.

  Did the same thing the following day. The day after that—which I guess was yesterday—I didn’t even come in here. Stood at the door, couldn’t think what I’d write, couldn’t think why I’d want to write anything.

  I thought of the gun. Thought about Chekhov. Went downstairs to see what was on TV.

  And here I am now.

  IT WOULD BE to spare them.

  And that makes its particular sense to me, even as I recognize the notion as utterly ridiculous. Here are three people, three for whom I care as I never thought myself capable of caring for anyone, three people leading lives they clearly enjoy—and I actually find myself entertaining the thought of ending those lives.

  I’m sure you find the thought appalling. I assure you that it is no less appalling to the man whose thought it is.

  But if I don’t?

  Because, you see, even as I love them, so do they love me. I’m the loving husband of one, the loving father of the others. While I rather doubt that they confuse me with Christ or Confucius or Captain America, and while I trust that there is something clear-eyed and balanced in their love, they surely think far more highly of me than I could ever think of myself.

  They think I’m a good man.

  And why shouldn’t they? I’ve never given them cause to think otherwise. In the life I’ve led, the life of which they’ve been a part, I have acted the part of a good man.

  I’ve given a good performance. I’ve even managed at times to convince myself.

  But what happens when the police cars pull up in front of our house? What happens when our doorbell rings and one of us answers it?

  What happens when it all goes pear-shaped?

  Disbelief, for a starter. They’ve made a mistake, they’ve come to the wrong house, they’ve got the wrong man. Somehow or other an error has been made, and somehow or other the husband and father they know and cherish has been linked to an atrocious act which could only have been committed by someone else.

  But belief would come, quickly or slowly. One way or another, they would know the truth.

  And then? I don’t know what would happen after that. I can envision any number of futures, but can’t know which one lies in store for us. Because we have free will? Or only because the predetermined scripts of our lives have been withheld from us?

  Subjectively it would seem to amount to the same thing. The one thing that’s clear to me about the future is that it is to be dreaded. They will know the truth about me, as will everyone with whom I’m acquainted, all my fellow Kiwanians and Rotarians and Lions, the fellows I bowl with, the workers I employ . . .

  And so on. The customers at the stores, in Lima and in Penderville. Everyone living in the area, really, everyone who looks at a television set or picks up a newspaper.

  People I don’t know. People I’ve never met and will never meet. People all over the world, people who but for the miracle of DNA would never have heard of John James Thompson or Roger Borden or, God help us, Cindy Raschmann.

  Of course I don’t have to hang around and see it through. I don’t need to find a lawyer and watch it all play out. Right now, sitting here, I could unlock the lower right desk drawer and put a bullet in my brain.

  And that would end it. Barring the awful irony of life after death, I’d be out of it. It would be over for me.

  But for them?

  All the rest of the wretched scenario would continue to play out in my absence. Re
porters would thrust microphones in Louella’s face, seeking details of her life with a rapist and murderer. Alden and Kristin would undergo something similar, and arguably worse.

  I’d have gotten off easy, I’d have taken the coward’s way out, and I’d have left them to go through no end of hell on their own.

  So. Three people, my wife and my son and my daughter, and they were the only persons on earth for or about whom I genuinely cared. If I killed them one by one in their sleep, if each was dead and gone in an instant, then when I went on to take my own life it would be over.

  We’d all be safely gone. No one could touch us. No revelation of the truth could shatter our world of illusion, because we’d no longer be in that world or any other.

  It would, of course, be a much bigger story than the simple resolution of a long-forgotten cold case. The monster who’d raped and murdered so many years ago would be entirely subsumed into the far more horrible monster who’d annihilated his entire family.

  A bigger story, a more enduring story. But wouldn’t it be that tree falling in the forest, falling soundlessly because there was no ear present to hear it? If all four of us were gone, what could it matter what went on in the world we no longer occupied?

  The gun’s in the drawer. The drawer is locked. The key is within my reach.

  And here I sit.

  Would I be committing the foulest and most despicable act imaginable, infinitely worse than what I’d done to Cindy Raschmann?

  Or would it be an act of mercy?

  I’ll have to think about this.

  AND DID I?

  My routine kept me busy. Up, shower, shave. Breakfast, and a second cup of coffee with Louella once the kids were on their way to school.

  It was a pleasant morning. I’d have walked to work, but that would mean walking home at noon, because I’d need the car to get to my lunchtime Rotary meeting. I’d missed the last two or three meetings, and I didn’t care to lose contact.

  The clubs had long since ceased to be important for the business connections they fostered. Thompson Dawes did what it did, never failing to turn a profit, never threatening to deliver genuine wealth. We’d survived Walmart and Costco and Home Depot, although each in turn had posed a threat. There’d be no new stores, and no Herculean efforts to grow the business.