by Wayne Jones
With that there is a cheer and the march sets itself in motion in an admirably orderly fashion. I am torn about whether to proceed with the crowd, perhaps cozy up to an activist and match him stride for stride with question after question, or to sit here on the steps of city hall, reflect on what I have seen, and await the return of the protestors. I do stand there for about five minutes as they all clear out and round the turn onto William Street, but I ultimately feel the monster fatigue in me, and I decide to head off.
The dead woman, the latest cause of all this uproar, is Pamela Yang, and all I can think of as I walk away and head home is that this feels like such a vibrant name. I reach my room and just plop down onto the little red sofa, slouching, back arched unhealthily. I resent the sounds I hear outside: it is not noisy, but even the occasional car horn, someone talking to someone else, “so the brakes never need to be fixed again,” someone else laughing—everything makes me want nothing but the perfection of silence. I am a little disgusted at my own practicality as well, because at the same time that I am to some extent at least grieving a senseless death (number whatever-it-is) I am also making mental notes about details, things that would not exploit the victim but that would entice (vile, wrong word) readers. Pamela face down, that sound the pedestrian heard.
I cannot relax at all, and I get up again and head out to the pub, where unfortunately I meet the raver. My mind is swimming with details and, unfortunately, I haven’t noticed him come into the room. He’s in mid-sentence by the time he sits down next to me.
“... what they’re doing anyway, so I say let’s go house to fucking house and give a lie detector or look for evidence or whatever until we find this prick.”
I consider my options in this situation, and none of them is very appealing. For the briefest of fantasy moments, I doff an imaginary Sherlock Holmes hat and start puffing on one of those silly pipes and silently pronounce the raver himself as the murderer. The guise, the ruse, is brilliant: what better way to distract attention from yourself than to seem to be attracting attention? I’m reminded of the parade of bullies I barely endured in high school, dumb brutes who appeared to revel in self-confidence but whose facades came tumbling down in various circumstances, typically when they were genuinely challenged or when you met them alone and could reason with them without the posturing.
There are exactly seven people in the room other than myself and the bartender. They are all as tarred with guilt as the raver is. That’s not a pool cue I see but a rifle, the safety on for now but his thumb sliding slyly and dangerously close when he makes the nine in the side. That knife of a swizzle stick is not much good for stirring but I can see from the look in his cloudy eyes that he’s aching to wield it, do his best with the gin and tonic and then go slashing.
Or maybe it’s the whole room, a murder for each pair of people so far for all but one of them—and who would that be? Who has that shifty look, those shuffling feet, that anxious tension that betrays itself in nervous laughter and brooding silences? Not the guy in the red and black lumberjack shirt. Not the guy pretending to watch television. Not the—yes, it’s him, it’s the accountant with the cheap scuffed-up briefcase, the shabby shiny dark blue suit whose pants are lighter than the jacket because they’ve been washed more than it has been drycleaned. And there’s that telltale ring around the collar of a shirt that used to be pristine white but now is off, as they say, off white. I see him counting up victims on stubby little fingers, the tally running through the total permitted by two hands and forcing him to start over, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and then that sly evil hint of a smile of anticipation when he realizes that it’s his turn now with the fourteenth.
The cue ball pops out onto the floor at my feet and I am snapped back into what passes for reality now.
“Ooops,” the raver says.
I pick up the ball and peruse it for a minute, and then just toss it to him lightly. He fumbles the reception and the ball clacks to the floor again and rolls right back to me. I pick it up and he looks at me in a certain way, so I just hold it out to him this time and he walks over slowly to retrieve it.
“Safer this way,” he says to the ball, avoiding my eyes altogether.
I sit back in my chair and my hand gravitates toward a glass of something that I don’t even remember ordering. I sip: it’s sour and the colour of dirty water. It invigorates me somewhat though, like a shot of adrenaline, and I set it down and turn back to watch the game. Like a baby, I wish that life could reduce itself to quarters or periods or halves, or to whatever other convenient slice with an unequivocal result. I am tired of this mystery tonight, tired of the growing list of dead people and with the time not conveniently running out, tired of this not being a game from which someone rescues me from the floor after the last second has clicked off and it’s all zeroes and somebody, somebody has won. I just want it to be over, that’s all.
Chapter 15
I pull myself together the following night: I consider the obvious and start wondering whether Tony could possibly be a murderer with a penchant for self-assured emails flaunting her eventual elusion of capture. Like any other revolutionary speculation in research, the idea seems both crazy and self-evident at the same time. I do not completely share the mob’s disillusionment with the police, but now I do sense a little resentment building in me at the prospect that I, a mere ex-researcher, a writer of books, a harmless drudge, should be the one who is trying to tease out tidbits and be the only person who is effectively investigating this case. No, I did not find Tony by using techniques of inspired Holmesian (or even Millhonian) deduction, but I am a firm believer in the power and the meaning of serendipity. I did not just happen to be at the library reading books on the same topic as she was: I was, as some bronzed bimbo said on TV this evening, “in the zone,” and primed like a medium for the interception of clues and hints and people who are likely to be involved in this serial mess.
I learned from carrying out literary research that things are not always as they appear. In fact, a certain wariness serves well as a guiding first principle so as to prevent one from making assumptions where they should not be made. My own dismissal from TU, for example, was an egregious example of specious reasoning being used to arrive at what would be an untenable decision in more rational circumstances, involving people who were less animated by open-mindedness than by a tendency toward hasty conclusion. But I have talked enough about that here. In the case of Tony, the simplistic analysis yields a seemingly obvious conclusion on either side: she revels in talk of murder and so seems a likely candidate for some experimentation with same, and she’s a gregarious girl with a quirky sense of humour whom it is hard to imagine cutting up one victim or throwing another one off a building. However, the case studies are filled with examples of serial killers bragging about their conquests, and those like Ted Bundy who were the epitome of charm.
Objectivity is a bitch of a god in any kind of analysis or research. You strive to please her, you do everything you can to ensure that her strictures and requirements are met, and you still end up with a shabby approximation of the knowledge you were trying to discover. You call them facts, but deep down you know they are not, and you are slightly ashamed of your duplicity and complicity in this doomed effort.
My general process for writing this damn book has also been a horrendous experience in other regards. First, the mechanics of my composition. From conversations and correspondences which I have had with writers along the whole range of expertise—everyone from well-published academics and professional journalists, to amateurs who slog away at occasional freelance pieces which disgrace one print publication or another, even to people whose oeuvre consists of nothing but letters to mom and short stories tucked away (thankfully) in a drawer while they tend to children and the other practicalities of the non-artistic life—by far most of those writers tell me that they write by first gushing out sentences and then relying on the editing stage to hone the words into something beautiful or informative.
My own method is quite different: I do not commit a sentence to paper or to the screen until I am satisfied with its overall heft, with both the what and the how, the content and the style. In the case of my book on the serial killings, this method has proven to be a considerable mental strain. Instead of cathartically relieving myself of the burden of a particularly brutal fact, for example, I have to stew over all of its atrocious details in my attempt to render the information accurately and articulately.
I read somewhere once that Anthony Burgess was surprised at how difficult he’d found the writing of his novel A Clockwork Orange. He had thought and hoped that a writer would be able to write about anything, that extreme violence should be as easy to master—I am forgetting his exact comparison now, and so admit to speculation—as, let’s say, the most banal of domestic dramas. My own background research has also been trying. I have felt that it is necessary to provide the reader with context. Therefore I have sought out and read intently a wide range of murder books. Case studies in which the most horrific crimes are dispassionately presented in all their inhuman detail. Junk “true crime” paperbacks cranked out by self-important hacks interested more in money and titillation than in anything else. Articles in academic journals. Police reports. Newspaper features on killers from Humbert to Homolka.
I turn on my computer and while it boots itself up I get out of my clothes as if I am shedding something dead, a skin. While I am throwing them into the bottom of the closet with the rest of the soiled laundry from a tough week, I hear the computer make its musical sound, as if it is delighted to be revived again. I put on loose shorts and a long T-shirt and sit down at the flat screen.
I have another email:
Oh, dear Jesus, but you are a sight for a killing type such as myself. I feel somewhat like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, coming back not to inspire you to action but to remind you of your haplessness and futility. Give up, lay the book aside, stop this incessant analysis (or semblance of same), and return to whatever hole you came out of and leave me be to finish my job. I’ve killed and I will kill again, and your meddling will be something I merely crush as I proceed undeterred.
There is no deliberation this time: I call the police. An Officer Carp tells me to forward the email to him but also to save it on my own computer.
“I’d also like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind?”
“Of course.”
His throat is cleared, some papers are shuffled. “Do you know of anyone who would be sending you this kind of message, perhaps not even seriously, just as a joke perhaps?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why do you say of course not?”
“Well, just that it’s not much of a joke, is it? I mean, it’s not funny, actually a little scary, for me anyway.”
“Yes, I can understand that. OK, another question: Have you ever had an email like this before? Is this the first one?”
“No, this is the first one,” I lie, boldly and baldly, seeing no point in divulging my negligence, my suppression of evidence, I suppose. I do a quick calculation in my head and the result is that it’s unlikely that this lie will ever come back to hurt me: either the killer will be caught, making the point moot, or he will not be, and the police will be busy with more important things than a couple of prequel emails.
“OK,” he says, sounding more or less convinced. “Listen, I am going to have to let you go now, but we’ll be reading through this email and we’ll likely be calling you again, perhaps even to come down to answer a few more questions—all part of the routine—a few more questions, or maybe an officer can come to your house.”
I am not sure whether he is asking or telling.
“Sure,” I say, and he hangs up abruptly.
I click off my own phone but it rings immediately again.
“Yes?” I say, expecting a forgotten followup question from Carp. But there is only silence. I utter an embarrassing series of “Who’s there?” and “Hello?,” like a frantic woman in some cheap horror movie, but there is no satisfaction provided by the other end. I hear literally nothing, not even breathing. After about a minute, the connection goes dead and I click off my own phone and set it back down on an end table.
Later that evening, as we had arranged via much more prosaic emails, I meet Rachel the librarian at her apartment. In a demonstration of trust and helpfulness that literally brings a tear to my eye—a man she hardly knows being invited into her home—she has agreed to review some of my research and to suggest avenues for future investigation. I turn off the sidewalk, go up to the purple door, and knock. Feet make a sound on what sounds like hardwood, and the radio, playing a classical movement that I can’t quite place—Sibelius perhaps?—is promptly turned down. She lives on the first floor of a small brick house on Pembroke Street, less than a ten-minute walk from my own place.
“Hi, Andrew,” she says even before the door is fully open. “It’s so good to see you,” and the door is closed quietly but efficiently behind me. She leads me into a living room of elegant though somewhat cramped comfort and invites me to sit down on what is either a small couch or a large loveseat. I choose the left side, inattentively worried that she might have to squeeze in beside me, but once I am settled I see that there is an armchair at about a forty-five-degree angle to the right arm.
“I was just about to get myself some tea,” she says. “Would you like some, or I could get you coffee or something else? No alcohol in the place.” She laughs.
“Tea sounds great.”
While she is in the kitchen I remove some of my handwritten notes and a pen from my portfolio. A shiver of hopelessness goes through me as I wonder what I am doing here and what I could glean from anyone about this impossible case, but I right myself at about exactly the time that Rachel comes with our tea.
“It’s Earl Grey,” she says. “I hope that’s OK?”
“Wonderful. For me tea is like a fine wine that I only have occasionally. I have to admit that I drink a kind of swill of coffee most days, and treat myself to latte now and then, but tea is a real, well, treat.”
She performs the delicate movements required to position the cups on our respective end tables, and while she is touching the top of the lid and pouring mine, I take the opportunity to observe her in all her integrity. The concentration might be the same as she devotes to a game of chess with a colleague, or to a particularly tricky question from a patron at the library. I am embarrassed when pourer’s eyes meet starer’s, but she simply smiles, sets the teapot down on a doily, and settles into her chair as if she is waiting for me to ask the first interview question.
“It feels odd,” she says finally and I sigh internally. “It feels odd to have the luxury of sitting here while—you know, while there’s someone out there killing people and while there are family and friends out there whose lives have been ruined by all of this. I feel guilty sometimes.” Her cup clacks onto the saucer more loudly than she evidently meant it to, and she seems to be somewhat startled. There’s a ripple in her composure but she recovers quickly.
“That’s a common reaction,” I say, relieved to know something. “In the research I’ve done, it’s clear that there is a whole variety of emotions and reactions that serial murder causes, some quite surprising. In one town, I don’t remember where just now, but the citizens started vandalizing the city. It wasn’t that they were angry with the police or anything like that, just the tendency toward crime spreading like some sort of virus. Or at least that’s one of the theories.”
“Wow, that’s fascinating. I guess I have more pedestrian theories myself. Or speculations or whatever you want to call them. One thing is that I’m not sure why people don’t just hole up in their apartments, in their houses, and just never come out until the man is caught. I’m kind of amazed at myself that I don’t do that actually. I’ll be walking down the street after an evening shift at work, like when it’s just starting to get dark, and it only suddenly occurs to me then that—well, you know.
I kind of rush home then.”
I set my cup down with the intention of reassuring the poor woman. “Listen,” I say a little too imperatively, “I firmly believe that in spite of the obvious, we’re all fairly safe in town. Not to sound too crude and mathematical about it, but it’s highly unlikely that little you or little anyone is going to be, so to speak, selected.”
She laughs awkwardly at this and sets down her own cup. I notice for the first time, with the light a certain way and my own plans and aspirations at a certain angle, how beautiful she is. It is my turn to be embarrassed now, at two contradictory speculations that are now swirling in my tea-soaked brain. The first is a desire for love, with scenarios quickly formed of the seekers of information—the humble neglected scholar and the integrative librarian—travelling the world from writer’s birthplace to writer’s deathplace, Sam in Lichfield, Vladimir near Montreux. Alas, I also have a horrible waking nightmare of another speculation, with Rachel as murderer inviting the hapless investigator to her house in order to get her name crossed off any mental list of suspects. No need to kill me when she can just distract me with feigned friendliness. Of course, even the bare thought is utterly ridiculous, and I am saddened (but not demonstrably so, I don’t think) that this is the kind of meanness that my mind has been reduced to: everyone is a suspect, and the least likely the more suspicious.
In fact, and I’ll say it here now, I have heard titterings around town pointing to my own guilt, the factitious “reasoning” being that the murders started soon after I arrived in town, and why would a prestigious academic such as myself choose to leave the big city anyway? Not that these charges are within a small-town, country mile of any credibility—and are actually something of an insult to perhaps the one person who has been carrying on anything approaching an investigation—but the—