Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  Still, habits want to persist. On a few occasions I would find myself sitting here, where I’d write down a sentence or two only to erase it—not because it needed to be erased, but because it had never needed to be written in the first place. Then long moments, some spent reading over what I’d written, some spent doing nothing at all, and then a few words or a sentence, and then I’d erase that, too, and eventually I’d close the file and shut off the computer and go back downstairs.

  But it seems to me I should make note of what happened this evening. I was in the living room reading a magazine; we’d watched Jeopardy, and after we all answered the Final Jeopardy question (or supplied a question for the Final Jeopardy answer), Louella and Kristin settled in with whatever was on HGTV. Alden gave me a significant look, and I put down my magazine and followed him onto the porch, where he told me he couldn’t be 100% positive, but he thought he’d managed to remove his sister’s DNA from the agency’s database.

  “Maybe not remove it,” he said, “because nowadays I don’t think anybody can ever remove anything, and pretty soon they’ll stop bothering to put DELETE keys on computers. But I think I fixed it so nobody can get access to it. Like if somebody submits his DNA and they look for matches and near matches, the way they do, well, they won’t find out what genes they share with Kristin.”

  How had he managed that?

  “I’m not positive I did,” he said, “because to find out for sure I’d have to figure out a way to test it, and how do I do that and make sure I’m not raising any red flags in the process? But what I did, I got a lawyer to call them and say how she was a minor, and her DNA was submitted without her permission or the permission of her lawful guardian. So they were on notice not to communicate with her in any manner, or to provide information about her DNA profile to anyone, or even to keep her genetic information on file. What’s the matter?”

  “The lawyer,” I said. “Who did you use?”

  “Edward P. Hammerschmidt.”

  “How much did you have to tell him?”

  “Uh, I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “Well, you must have,” I said. “You couldn’t just write out a script for him. How would he know what to say? And how could he keep from wondering what kind of a secret we had to be sitting on? And—”

  “Dad.”

  “And where the hell did you find him, anyway? I can’t claim to know every lawyer in Allen County, but Hammerschmidt’s a name I’d recognize if I’d ever come across it before, and I didn’t, so—”

  “Dad?”

  I looked up.

  “Dad, I made him up. I got this DNA guy on the phone, I forget his name, and I said I was Edward P. Hammerschmidt, attorney in fact for the legal guardian of a minor child, and, well, I rattled it off.”

  “And he bought it?” I thought about it. “Well,” I said, “why wouldn’t he?”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “Easy enough to comply with your request and avoid whatever action you might take. That doesn’t mean the data will completely disappear from their system.”

  “There’s probably no way to make that happen. I mean, even if that’s what he tried to do, would he even be able to do it? A hundred percent?”

  “Seems unlikely.”

  “It’d be like if somebody tells you to forget something ever happened. People say that all the time, but nobody expects you to erase something from your memory, because how could you even do that? ‘Okay, I’ll forget I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus.’ But if nobody can access Kristy’s data, and if nobody gets emails saying there’s a young girl in Ohio who’s a probable second cousin—”

  “Then it’s as good as erased.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Anyway, I figured it was worth a shot.”

  HE IS, AS I’ve noted before, a resourceful young man, and no one could wish for a better son. It’s impossible to calculate percentages, but I’m confident that his five-minute phone call has improved my chances.

  I feel safer now, I was about to write (and in fact did write it, in this very sentence, but never mind). But is it so? I’m aware that I’m more likely to escape detection than I was before he passed himself off as Edward P. Hammerschmidt, Esq. But knowing isn’t feeling, so the question arises: Do I feel any safer now?

  And here’s what I’ve just realized: I don’t feel any safer, because I don’t need an increased feeling of safety—and that’s because I haven’t felt myself to be in any genuine peril ever since those two conversations, first with Alden and then with Louella.

  They didn’t render me any safer. They didn’t lessen the likelihood that a cold case in Bakersfield would warm up and reach all the way to Lima.

  But what they succeeded in doing was making me feel safe. There’s a sense now that nothing can really touch me, that the people who matter in my life—and matter so much more than I ever thought anyone could matter—that they know all my secrets, and love me as much as they ever did.

  As much? Arguably more. The husband and father they know is less armored, less hidden.

  And if the secret they now know is monstrous, it doesn’t seem to have led them to regard me as a monster. I may have done something monstrous, I may even be said to have gone through a Monster Phase, but—

  “But that was in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.”

  The line is Christopher Marlowe’s, from The Jew of Malta, a play I’ve neither seen nor read. I’ve no idea where I came across it, though I could probably guess why it stuck in my mind sufficiently to make me Google it just now. The speaker’s crime was fornication, surely a lesser offense than homicide, but the similarities are undeniable. It was indeed in another state, if not another country. And, yes, God rest her soul—the wench is dead.

  I’d told Louella that I’d made love to her in advance of our conversation because I thought it might be for the last time. Even if she accepted what I was about to tell her, even if we stood together as husband and wife and went on sharing a bedroom, it seemed possible that her new knowledge would rule out physical intimacy.

  But it wasn’t more than a day or two after our conversation that she yawned theatrically and announced that she could barely keep her eyes open. On that occasion, and twice since then, what she now knew did nothing to diminish her ardor and enthusiasm.

  And who knows, really, what else she brings to the bedchamber? She knows I killed a woman, and to be comfortable in my embrace she has to wall off that knowledge in some chamber of her memory.

  But how impermeable is that wall? Perhaps she leaves an opening, perhaps she allows herself now and then to rub up against what she knows. Perhaps her passion is heightened by imagining what I might do—while knowing that I won’t.

  Isn’t that why people go to horror movies? So that they can relish the thrill of fear in an unthreatening environment? What’s on the screen scares them, but does so in a safe way. It’s an illusion, up there on the screen, and they’re in the audience with a bag of popcorn, or at home on the couch with the remote control in their hands.

  And doesn’t that help explain the audience for true crime shows? There are a couple of cable channels devoted exclusively to them, while the broadcast networks keep pumping out Dateline and 48 Hours. The abiding majority of cases feature women as victims, which may not come as a surprise, but here’s something I only recently learned, and did find surprising: the audience for these programs is predominantly female.

  On the screen, it’s a woman who gets herself shot or stabbed or strangled. And it’s a man who does the killing, and the husband or boyfriend is almost always a suspect, and more often than not he’s guilty.

  And the woman watching can hardly escape thinking of her own man. He’s in his basement workshop trimming out a model plane, or in his den with his stamp collection. Or walking the family dog, or having a beer with his buddies.

  And he would never do anything like the husband on the television screen.

  Would he?

  May
be that’s part of it. And, if it is, what business is it of mine?

  I can’t know everything that’s going on in her mind, her heart, her deepest self. Nor can she know all my innermost secrets, the deepest of which I’m sure are unknown even to me.

  “I’m so sleepy,” she’ll say, with something that is not quite a twinkle in her eye. “I think you should get some rest,” I’ll respond.

  And, while we become as close as two human beings can possibly be, each of us is off somewhere, listening to some personal music that no one else can ever hear.

  A DECISION THIS afternoon, not unexpected, from Alden. He’ll be starting college in September at Ohio State’s Lima campus. That means he can live at home. In fact it’s a virtual necessity, as OSU-Lima doesn’t have dormitories.

  He had applied, at his guidance counselor’s urging, to five schools, and was accepted at all of them. The only strong contender, beside OSU-Lima, was the university’s main campus in Columbus. That’s where he’ll almost certainly go to vet school, and there he’d have the traditional college life of football games and fraternities and pep rallies and beer blasts, or as much of it as still exists these days.

  I thought he might want all that, thought too that he’d get a better undergraduate education at Columbus than the local school could offer. And he would indeed have a richer menu of courses to choose from, and a more illustrious faculty, but he’s sure OSU-Lima will get him into grad school at Columbus, and that’s all he wants from it.

  I’d be paying a few thousand dollars a year less for his tuition this way, he pointed out, and of course I’d be saving money on dorm fees and meals, plus he’d get to eat his mother’s cooking instead of whatever mystery meat they served up in the school cafeteria.

  But the biggest factor was his apprenticeship with Ralph, which could continue during his four undergraduate years. “By the time I finish,” he said, “I’ll probably be more qualified than most vet school graduates. In fact Ralph says I should be able to fit in some original research while I’m at Columbus. Not that you’d need that on your résumé in order to give rabies shots, but I think it’d be cool.”

  And wasn’t he concerned that he might be missing something?

  “What, like in Animal House? Come on.”

  So he’ll be here, under our roof, and the money his decision will save me, while certainly welcome, is nothing compared to the pleasure of having him here for the next four years.

  Best of all is knowing that this is what he wants, that he’d rather stay in Lima than move a hundred miles east to the state capital. That he’d rather live at home. With his mother and sister. And me.

  And it wasn’t hard to figure out what to get him in June.

  “Besides,” he’d said at one point, “if I did go to Columbus, you know I’d be coming home one or two weekends a month. That’s a couple of hours wasted each way, plus the cost of the gas. And there’s the wear and tear on the Subaru. I mean it’s okay here in town, you know, but I don’t know how long it’ll hold up, you know?”

  I’m already looking forward to the two of us on a joint mission to pick out his graduation present.

  I JUST LOOKED at the most recent entry. Before I write what I came upstairs to write, I feel compelled to note that Alden and I shopped around shortly before the principal handed him his high school diploma, and he’s now driving a new steel-blue Hyundai Elantra.

  “Are you sure, Dad? Brand new? I figured, you know, pre-owned.”

  I told him I was afraid he’d have to do the pre-owning, for whoever might buy it after he’d traded it in.

  “No way,” he said, patting a fender. “I’m keeping this baby forever.”

  AND WHAT HE said an hour or so ago was, “Whoever that guy’s supposed to be, he doesn’t look like anybody I’ve ever seen.”

  He was referring to two black-and-white photographs, both of the same subject. The first showed a teenage male, looking uncomfortable in a plaid jacket and a striped tie, a rigid half-smile on his face. The second looked at first to be a picture of the boy’s father, but it was in fact the youth himself, transformed through some combination of artistic license and computer magic into a middle-aged man.

  He was still wearing the jacket and tie, but both garments had been altered—updated, I suppose. Each had lost its pattern, so that he appeared to be wearing a blazer and a dark tie. One’s imagination colored the new image—a navy blazer, a maroon necktie.

  His hairline was higher, his brow lined, his features showing the years. One thing that hadn’t changed was his facial expression. He still looked posed and uncomfortable, and as if he’d have preferred to be standing almost anywhere other than in front of this camera. That sort of expression and attitude was somehow better suited to an adolescent than to a mature man, but I don’t suppose a computer could be readily programmed to give instructions to the subject of a doctored photograph: “Grow up, sonny. Get over yourself.”

  “Breaking news,” Lester Holt had said, as he almost invariably does as a prelude to whatever news item is next on the agenda. Through the technological breakthrough of genetic forensics (or perhaps he said forensic genetics), cold case investigators in Bakersfield, California, had determined the identity of the alleged perpetrator of a rape and murder that took place half a century ago.

  We were on the living room sofa, all four of us. TiVo had been silently recording the NBC Nightly News while we finished dinner, and with the table cleared and the plates loaded in the dishwasher, we’d sat down to watch it as we did more nights than not. It never takes much more than twenty minutes of our time, as we can speed through commercials; even so, Kristin’s rarely there for more than half of it.

  She was still sitting next to her mother tonight when they showed the photos, the original and the new improved version, individually at first, then side by side. We also got to see what’s probably the only extant photo of Cindy Raschmann, one I recognized not because it resembled my memory of her but because I’d seen it in earlier coverage of the case.

  They gave the name of the man, whom they were careful to call the alleged killer. He was Roger E. Borden, and he’d evidently disappeared without a trace after having left home not long after his high school graduation, several years before the rape and murder of Ms. Raschmann. Where he’d gone, what he’d done, and what had led him to Bakersfield seemed to be unknown, as did whatever course his life might have taken after the incident.

  There was at present no way to know if Borden was alive or dead; if alive, he could be virtually anywhere, although almost all of the persons with whom he shared DNA seemed to be located west of the Rocky Mountains. But, NBC’s breathless reporter on the scene stressed, this was very much an ongoing investigation, and authorities were optimistic that more information would be forthcoming. Meanwhile, there was an 800 number for viewers to call if they had information about Roger Borden’s life before or after the murder. Or if they recognized the man in the photos, and had knowledge of where he might be living now.

  We sat in silence, watching. They cut to a commercial, and it took a moment before Alden picked up the remote and hit the Fast Forward button. Kristin picked that moment to head off to her room, and once she was out of earshot someone could have said something, but no one did.

  I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the newscast. My eyes saw what they showed on the screen, my ears took in what they had to say, but nothing really registered. I was waiting to see if they’d show the two photographs again, my long-ago yearbook photo and its aged version, but it wasn’t that urgent an item, and once was enough.

  Alden turned off the TV, and broke the silence that followed with his pronouncement: The man on the screen was no one he’d ever seen before.

  I of course had recognized the yearbook photo immediately. I even remembered the sport jacket, and the tie. I’d only owned two or three ties, and rarely needed to wear one. The one in the photo, I seemed to remember, was striped in red and navy. But I wouldn’t swear to that.<
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  As for the older version, I don’t know that it looked much like the face I see in the mirror every morning. But I recognized myself in it, perhaps because I could see the young Roger Borden staring back at me through the older Roger Borden’s eyes.

  But did it look like the man I’d become over the years?

  Hard to say.

  What I did say was that NBC had very likely given the item more attention than it would get on the other networks. A couple of years ago they’d included Cindy Raschmann’s murder in a Dateline episode covering three cold cases. That didn’t give them proprietary rights in the matter, but it had supplied them with clips and footage, along with an opportunity to plug Dateline.

  “We may see those pictures again,” I said. “Or we may not. It depends what response they get.”

  “Calls to that 800 number,” Louella said.

  “People who went to school with me, or think they did. People who saw me just last week at the Greyhound station in Spokane, or on a park bench in Oakland. People who can detect a resemblance between that picture and the grouchy neighbor they’ve never liked, and always wondered about.”

  “ ‘You rotten kids get off my lawn!’ ” Alden said.

  “Ideally, they’ll get a few dozen calls, all of them from the West Coast. And long before they’ve finished checking them all out, everyone will forget about tonight’s news.”

  “That picture? Kristy didn’t even look twice at it.”

  “No.”

  “She could have said, ‘Hey, you know who that looks like?’ The way you’d say the dog on The Simpsons was acting like Chester. But she didn’t.”

  No, she hadn’t.

  “So maybe you looked like that once. But not anymore.”

  And so we reassured each other that there was nothing to worry about. And here I am at my desk, wondering if I believe it.