The Killing Type

by Wayne Jones

  “Listen, Andrew,” he says, “I have a favour to ask you.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m a little tired of eating out these days, and I wonder whether you wouldn’t mind just coming over to my place. We could grab a cab and be there in ten minutes. You haven’t ordered yet, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t, and sure, that sounds fine.”

  I tell the waiter that we are leaving after all, and I have to resort to a lie about an emergency (“she’s barely breathing”) to bring it all home.

  His house is a lovely-looking brick thing in an equally lovely neighbourhood. I sink into a luxurious leather armchair and Leonard goes to get us drinks. I think sadly of how odd it is to be here with him, about how unusual it is for me to feel a strong connection to any person these days. In better days at Toronto U. (where he was a professor of comparative literature) he was one of the main delights in being there at all, but after his retirement and move out west, everything deteriorated. I’ve never been quite sure why he’d decided to retire early anyway: Toronto U. is one of those more progressive and forward-thinking schools which doesn’t feel compelled to enforce mandatory retirement and thereby lose its most experienced faculty members only to save a few dollars.

  “Andrew?” I hear.

  “Oh, sorry. Listen, Leonard, it’s excellent to see you. Retirement seems to be treating you well.”

  “I have my days.”

  “Have your days? You don’t mean that you’re regretting it for some reason?”

  He looks up. “Oh, no, quite the opposite. It’s wonderful not so much to be away from the work, the scholarship—some days I miss that actually—but being away from the politics and the other bullshit, well, that’s a relief frankly.” He smiles.

  “It’s fascinating to hear you say that. We were good friends then—still are—but I never knew at the time that the political shenanigans bothered you or were something you were even aware of.”

  “I tried not to think about it at the time, or talk about it much.”

  “You know,” Leonard says, “you never did fully explain to me why you ended up leaving. If I recall correctly, you talked about disagreements and a mutual decision to leave and all of that, but what really happened?”

  It is my turn to smile this time. “Well, I am not sure whether it is a very long story or a very short and simple one.”

  “Give me the medium version,” he says.

  It takes me about five minutes and I do attempt some degree of objectivity—allowing that I should not have gotten quite so angry that time, admitting that sometimes I was just trying to disrupt the departmental meetings—but I do reaffirm to him the maltreatment I experienced.

  “Wow,” he says when I am done and while I look down.

  The evening proceeds, I have to say, with some tepidity after that. I really am not sure of the reason. I do feel a connection to Leonard, and I am not merely flattering myself in saying that I believe the feeling is mutual. But there is something, perhaps, about the separation of time and place that simply attenuates any relationship, however true or intense it might have been. There are some awkward silences and even a good forty-five minutes when we are reduced to watching some very loud and inane television, until ultimately Leonard rescues us by professing to be tired. He leads me to my room and I am soon asleep.

  I don’t know how much time elapses (it seems like very little) but there is a knock on the door.

  “Leonard,” I say, still not quite awake. It’s neither morning nor night.

  “There’s been a bit of a—I got a call just now and it looks like my brother in Calgary has had a stroke. I have to fly out today to be with him and his family. It nearly killed him, Janice said.”

  I shudder selfishly first, wondering what exactly it is I have to do and where I have to go not to be surrounded with death. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” I manage eventually, now sitting up in bed. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “You know,” he says, “and I hope this is not an imposition, but it would be good if you could stay here in the house for a few days. I mean, I know you were staying anyway, but I’d like to have someone here even when I am gone. It’ll probably only be for a few days and if it seems like it’s going to be longer than that, I’d call.”

  It’s perfect, and I agree. For a minute I wonder if I am dreaming.

  “I’ve got a cab waiting outside, so I’ll just give you a call when I’m in Calgary. Thanks for this. Everything you need should be here; you’ll be comfortable.”

  And with that he is gone from the doorway. Presently I hear muffled voices, and a trunk and then a door close, and car tires squealing slightly. I sink back to sleep, really dreaming this time.

  I find it quite disorienting several hours later after I’ve had my fill of sleep and am padding around in another person’s house when he’s not there. It feels like burgling and I half expect the police to come crashing through the door, finally catching me just as the toast pops and I am dishing the scrambled eggs out onto a plate. In fact, it is all quite idyllic. I walk around inspecting the place like it is a new house I’ve just bought or a hotel I am staying at for a while. It is immaculate and homey at the same time, unpretentious but also not cluttered with the detritus that accompanies people who cannot move to a new house without dragging most of their old possessions with them. I hear music outside and when I look out the small window above the sinks in the kitchen I see two cars, one an old white sports car with the radio blaring and two young girls in tartan skirts dancing and smoking, and the other a new black sedan with two older women in the front seat, one of them crying.

  I treat myself to a quick but wholesome breakfast (fresh grainy bread, strawberry jam from England) and head out the door. Leonard, even in his haste, has left me my own set of keys, including the one to his car. I hesitate only slightly and then having calculated the likelihood that I would ever have this opportunity again, I unlock it, eschew the seatbelt, and fire the motor up. The dancing girls glance over at me for only the briefest moment and then, finding me a lacklustre attraction, resume their more rhythmic lives. As I pass the woman crying, I slow down like a crude rubbernecker on the highway after a collision. Her friend is handing her a tissue and neither of them, absorbed in their own sorrow and ministration, has time for me.

  I head for the public library, partly for the joy of experiencing another city’s organization of knowledge, but acknowledging to myself that I will likely poke around in the murder section as well. Never mind: there is still enough of a vacationary feel about the impulse that I give in to my tendencies as usual. I am disappointed to see that the emphasis seems to be on things other than books. The DVD check-out area is bustling: the clerks who are sorting them for the eager patrons wear gloves, as though they were preparing for surgery. And, alas, the aforementioned murder section is serviceable but not impressive, and has nowhere near the breadth and depth of that in the Knosting library. There’s a long line-up at the internet stations and so I just leave.

  Back in the car, I start to feel odd. I pull out of the excellent parking space I’d snagged, and in the midst of this bustling provincial capital I realize that I feel safer than I do in my adopted little Knosting. There’s a kind of niceness here that used to exist in Knosting before the murders started. All problems seem minor, the girl with a piece of duct tape on her cut heel instead of a Band-Aid, the flagman at the construction site who is a bit ashamed of how easy hard labour is, the latte waitress who mock-cries and tells me she was “starting to panic” because she couldn’t match my order to the little number at my table. Still, there is something about the place that “creeps me out” (must stop watching those teen television programs while I am here). A bit defeatedly, I head back to Leonard’s place, a safe haven until I plan my next move.

  I misjudge the house as I am heading down the darkened street and so inadvertently turn into someone else’s driveway. The couple in the wrong house initiate a suburban all-systems alert
. The man is at the living room window, peering out just enough to see who the intruder is but not so much that he exposes any more of his coordinates than he has already (or that the enemy has already gleaned). The wife is at the side door, the light goes on, and I am expecting that she is the one who will do something—a warning shot, a shaking fist—but when I back out and am headed to my true destination they have apparently deactivated the alert and returned to the cocoon. I drive around the block a couple of times when I realize that they are Leonard’s right-next-door neighbours, partly not to frighten them with the proximity of the threat, but partly for my own peace of mind. I eventually sail nicely into the correct driveway, turn off the engine, and head back into the house.

  The answering machine is blinking and I check the messages as Leonard has instructed me to. The first one is from him: his brother has died and after a couple of days to “take care of things” he should be back in Victoria, and would I mind staying in town until he does? (I do, really, but what choice does one have?) The second message is from a neighbour (perhaps the skittish one whose driveway I was just in?) asking if those sausages of his which are in Leonard’s freezer are “getting in the way,” and if they are he is willing to come over and pick them up. I am not daft enough to miss the purpose of the call, and I will make sure not to eat his precious sausages. There’s another message about some kind of festival with 800 pies, and the last one from a husky-voiced female talking about a “gift that’s fun to sit on,” and ending: “I think you know what I mean.” (I truly do not, nor do I want to learn.)

  I get myself a glass of water from the fridge and settle into a cushy black leather armchair. I ruminate again, even in this domestic comfort—these thoughts never desert me—I ruminate again on how death follows me around. Granted, Leonard’s brother was downed by God and not by a serial killer, but I pine now and again for some extended period of time which is not punctuated by one mortality or another. I remember now some of the stories which Leonard told me about his brother (though his name escapes me: Renaldo or something like that?): a big man, apparently, although I have no idea whether that is a factor in the incidence of stroke. Sad to say, but I am better informed on unnatural rather than natural causes. A younger brother, as I recall, and with an odd phobia which Leonard shared with me one evening: Renaldo couldn’t bear to see the inner workings of any building he was in. He visited Leonard at his rather ramshackle apartment in Toronto once and the medics had to be called after he opened the closet door of the guest room and found a mess of duct work and wiring there, the result of a renovation project which Leonard’s landlord had dragged out for months. Leonard was watching television in the living room when he suddenly heard a shriek and then a thud, the latter being Renaldo falling to the floor. Leonard rushed to the bedroom and found him in a lump, his head bleeding from contact with the dresser on the way down.

  I get a call from Leonard asking me to pick him up at the airport the next day.

  As is generally the case when I am about to lose something, even something which I am no longer sure I want any more or have ever wanted, I pine for this house and this city all the next day. I get up early and take a drive up to Shawnigan Lake while it is still very dark, enough to envelope me if I turned off the headlights. I stop at the Westside Market, not open yet, but the rancid smell of yesterday’s (and perhaps many months’) french fries still inhabiting the otherwise crisp, clean air. A couple of hours later, the day underway for other humans now, I am in the English Properties, all those coiffed housewives toodling around in various expensive SUVs while the Filipina help walks the little dog and the black help waiting at the bus stop after her shift is over. I return to Leonard’s house exhausted with the intensity and number of the sensations, not quite sure what I should do. A warm shower at first, and then adjusting the faucets till it’s tepid, cool, cold, and coming out of that I do feel refreshed. On the way to the airport, I find myself humming some inane song I have picked up somewhere like a virus.

  I park in the temporary parking and scramble across to the airport (I am running late, with no excuse other than dawdling). I check the screen for arrivals and run again, and as I run up breathlessly I see that Leonard is there already and is sitting off to the side with his suitcase.

  “I’m very sorry,” I say as I rush up to him.

  He smiles weakly and I am a little shocked at how tired he looks. I imagine that the fact of a brother’s death along with the hasty arrangements all added up to a severe lack of sleep.

  “It’s no problem,” he says. “Thanks for coming.”

  I have some difficulty finding the car and we go up and down several rows before Leonard spots it. Seated comfortably and headed back to the house, I first try to engage him in conversation, but his answers are short and at first I worry that I have done something wrong or that he is miffed at me for not knowing where I’d parked the car when evidently he wanted to get home and go to bed. But, no, he’s just tired, and so I let the silence just sit there like another passenger. It feels good, this proximity to another person, this slice of intimacy but without the need to dirty it up with chatter. I weave my way confidently through the streets on the way back to the house. At first I am worried that Leonard is monitoring my choice of directions, but I glance over to see that his head is pointing out the passenger-side window and I even think he may be dozing occasionally. When I pull into the driveway, he quickly opens the car door. I retrieve his luggage from the trunk and we proceed into the house.

  “I’m kind of exhausted,” he says when we are in the foyer. “I hate to be rude, but I really have to get some sleep. Is it OK if we just catch up in the morning?”

  “Of course.”

  I watch him as he pads down the hall to his bedroom. He’s left his suitcase here and I can see that he simply turns on the light, gets undressed, turns off the light, and then gets into bed. I trace his steps to the entrance to his room and gently close the door.

  In the morning, we don’t have much chance for catching up, as I have to head off to the airport and Leonard is still not quite revived. I insist that he not drive me, that I can take a cab, and he relinquishes my point easily. I hug him with some affection as I head out the door and as we disengage and I am still close to him, his wan pallor is striking.

  In the cab on the way to the airport, I review some of the fleeting memories of what I did: I see a pier, I see a tiny car parked in a suburban driveway, I see a woman running alone whom I asked for directions and who did not just slow down and run on the spot, but simply stopped next to the car—an image which arouses feelings in me that I have not experienced for quite some time.

  I wander in something of a daze when I am in the airport, half-forgetting where I’ve come from and where I am going. Victoria, yes, and, and—Knosting, yes, Knosting by way of Toronto. The people seem to be not so much milling about waiting for their own flights, but there to act as a skillfully choreographed obstacle course. I read fitfully and finally plop down in my seat, 19B, with relief. Why did I ever leave home?

  Chapter 19

  Ullrich, Priscilla, poisoned.

  The police eventually concluded that succinylcholine (one of the drugs that some American states still administer in lethal injections) was used. My research for the book has made me a regular feature at news conferences and the like, and I do not think I merely flatter myself by saying that I am a known and trusted presence by the police. One officer confides this detail to me which had gone unreported (and, alas, unasked) by the Gazette and other media: “You know, technically it is a poisoning—the killer injected the stuff—but it’s suffocation, what we call asphyxia, which kills the person. The drug paralyzes the whole body, even the respiratory muscles, so that the person just can’t breathe. It may sound simple and clean and peaceful, but it’s a pretty horrific way to die.”

  He also tells me some of the other details about this death, preliminary conclusions which they’ve reached in these early stages of the forensic investi
gation. It appears that the murderer broke into the woman’s apartment, or, rather, that he simply opened a door which had been inadvertently left unlocked. “Priscilla,” the officer continues, in a touching but somewhat pathetic conversion to the first name, “was tied up, gagged, and, we think, injected while the bad guy sat at the kitchen table and on a single sheet of paper, using a pen which he brought with him and took away with him, wrote PU #7, a reference of course to this being the seventh killing.”

  There was a sense of genuine concern in his voice and in his small actions (pursing of lips, bowing of head, voice lilting and breaking ever so slightly as he described some of the crude details) that surprised me, inured as I am after about twenty more years of life experience than he has had, and a full decade in academia. I do not consider myself jaded or unsympathetic but rather, shall we say, practical, commonsensical, realistic. The rigour and discipline demanded by the writing of a book of the type I am engaged in also diminish my sentimentality and any easy tendency toward overt emotion. It is perhaps unseemly and selfish to mention at this juncture, but my treatment at Toronto University by that execrable department head (and the other assorted toadies under his control) also has hardened me slightly, so that I can stand apart and intellectually appreciate the sorrow of a situation, but not be so overcome that I stammer into ineffectiveness.

  But where was I?

  Yes. Priscilla Ullrich. The police officer. I note the killer’s heinous reference to “#7,” the reduction of serial murder to a simple enumeration which is being worked through like a list of goals, but I can’t take any solace in the fact that there are “only” three more killings left, if one can trust a madman’s email. The swath through this city is wide, “the damage has been done,” as the raver ranted to me just last night. Though not escaping the bonds of verbal cliché, he does, as he would say himself (and with these words no doubt), “have a point.” The town has changed. There are fewer people on Princess Street at any time of the day, and along residential streets I have noticed an increased circumspection, family members actually clustered closer together on verandas, as if to fend off attack even from humble academics out for an evening stroll. The media deal only in extremes: interspersed among the column inches and live updates of minutiae about who has been killed and where and when and how (lots of how, but alas no why or by whom), there are stories about puppies being born or rescued or enhancing the residents’ lives in a seniors home.