The Killing Type

by Wayne Jones

  “Have you always smoked?”

  “Well, not always, of course. I started when I was in junior high, and have given it up probably four or five times. Actually, I’ve been good lately: it’s only big meals and, well, other pleasures that seem to activate the desire.” She smiles.

  I am beginning to regret some of my actions. I remember occasions when I have slighted this woman, acted (and been) indifferent, and of course suspected her of committing crimes. In the course of a life of teaching and research, a life spent among other people, if you are attentive at all you develop an intuitive sense of the value and intentions of those you fraternize with. I evidently misread Tony, though I hasten to add, first, that I did not spend much time with her in total, and, second, that I am not meaning to imply that the woman has suddenly fallen in love with me, that a single act of physical intimacy indicates a solidity of character precluding the ability to kill people.

  “Where are you?” I hear, and realize that I have been in a daze while she has finished her first and lit her second cigarette. There are dots of grey ash on my sheet, which she brushes off, smiling sheepishly. “Oops.”

  I raise my eyebrows, and then make a move toward her but hold back for some reason. I feel a rush of not quite sympathy, but some kind of tender human emotion to which I am unaccustomed and which I am having some difficulty describing. Tony is as secure and as carefree as I can imagine it is possible for any person to be while naked and attempting to get the attention of another person who is only seemingly reluctant to return to bed.

  “Hey, come over here and keep me company!” she says with unnecessary insistence. I settle myself in beside her and she makes tiny animal noises, snuggles her face into the side of my neck. I flinch at the attention, at what my febrile mind misinterprets as a threat of some kind.

  “Listen,” she says, “I like you. I, well—help me out here a little.”

  “I,” I say, but then it all just fades to nothing.

  “Yes, come on, you can do it, you can say it!” She’s practically shouting by the end of it, and I know that she’s not mocking me, however—I have a sudden urge to be alone but I am not sure how to manage the suggestion and the logistics of that in my present circumstance. This—“Listen, honey, it’s been a heck of a time, but perhaps it’s time you moved along out of here”—would work but its effectiveness is tempered somewhat by its outrageous inappropriateness.

  “I think I get the idea,” she says.

  “Pardon?”

  “Well, maybe I should be going.” The woman’s prescience is astounding.

  “Please, no, you are most welcome to stay,” I protest a little weakly.

  “It’s cool,” she says. “Just lie back here with me while I finish this cigarette.”

  I oblige, crawling awkwardly and shamefully up beside her and then lying down. She looks over at me just after taking a luxurious inhale, and her face is slightly distorted so that it seems like she is about to say something to me. Instead she just smiles, warmly I think, and resumes looking up at the ceiling, the smoke leaving her mouth in what sounds as much like a sigh as an exhalation. It continues in silence like that until eventually, in a sequence which I am not sure lasts a minute or a half-hour, she gets up, dresses, says something to me that I do not quite discern, and then kisses me and leaves.

  And.

  I sink back into that still-warm bed and wonder what I have to do now.

  Chapter 23

  It is a few days later. I am generally an extremely well-organized person, certainly in my daily, prosaic life and as far as possible in the larger things as well. I believe that I deal effectively with the shocks and surprises that happen to any active person, that I don’t simply fall into things: I plan, I consider, I react with common sense and intelligent judgment (which are not always the same thing).

  Allow me to speak clearly: having a sexual encounter with Tony or with anyone else is not something that I wanted or planned. I do not revel as some do in the entanglements that inevitably ensue from sexual liaisons, especially temporary ones. I believe that I have enough life and literary experience to be able to survive—perhaps even flourish—in a long-term romantic relationship, but even then there is something about the loss of individuality that does not sit very well with my personality. And when the encounter is implicitly recognized by all participants to be based in nothing more than physical satisfaction, then I am supremely uncomfortable.

  And angry, though it is an anger without just cause and certainly without a just object. I am not, as the kids say, “mad at Tony,” for anything. I believe that she and I are perhaps in similar situations: she had planned nothing, I had planned nothing. Any anger I have is mostly directed toward myself and my own temporary physical weakness.

  The phone rings and I am in the position of the jilting or awkward lover, the rage of youth preventing me from thinking straight. It is all rather embarrassing. I confirm from the call display that it is Tony, but I cannot bring myself to answer. Any of the possible scenarios would be unbearable. She wants to reconnect. She wants to apologize. She is calling to chat as if nothing at all has happened. She wants to confess to murder. Moved by the intensity of the intimacy with me, she wants to establish a long-term romantic relationship in which—

  But this is all rather crazy. I dim the lights in the room and pick the sparest, the hardest chair to sit on. There is pure silence outside, the kind I like, the kind I revel in, the kind in which I do my best work and thinking. Tony’s face, the echo of her voice, the mishmashed letters of her name all swirl around in my head as time flows on inexorably. Minutes go by, fifteen, almost an hour, and finally everything does seem to settle. There is the rush of a certain kind of clarity, not confidence per se, but a sureness, a faith in my tendency and my decision.

  I’ve already killed nine people with a certain degree of planning and deliberateness, and this one will be no exception.

  Chapter 24

  It’s the brightest of bright sunny winter mornings when I awaken at precisely 10:27 am. I have things to do, but I loll in bed watching the light as it moves across the various objects in my room, as if it is having trouble making up its mind. There are shouts outside on the street that I can’t quite place, and then a loud thud in the hallway outside my door that I hope is not the landlady falling again. I listen for the telltale sounds of a woman who shouldn’t be walking unaided in the first place attempting to right herself from a hard floor. Nothing. Good.

  10:46 and I smile at the 19 minutes of my life that I have—what, wasted? That seems much too harsh. As I set out on this new phase, I have to make a pact with myself to be a little less rigid, not criticize and analyze everything to the exact letter. This will be a day of purity, of ascetic bliss, a day to quietly look forward to the dramatic changes I am about to put myself through, to pack up my mind before I pack up my belongings. This time passed under all-cotton sheets, off-white and striped in blue, this is the only kind of quiet luxury I will indulge in today. I will neither eat nor drink to excess. I may take a brisk walk, may stay in and read something that has nothing to do with murder, may loll in the tub in those bubbles that smell like clean.

  I have often had trouble with transitions in the past, not only in adjusting to them and accepting the new situation, but also in simply making it across that bridge. This time, however, I am feeling that I could accomplish the move with some expedition (and fewer puns).There is something about the contrast in the before and after states (oh, dear) that ironically will make it easier this time. When I was pushed out of Toronto U. and moved here in the first place, for example, or any of the times before that when I have moved from one college to another—all those have been cases where I was leaving a job, however undesirable sometimes, and headed for another job, more desirable generally but still a daily commitment of some sort. This time it is the bliss of a kind of retirement, but nearly twenty years before that usually happens and so with me of sound enough body and mind to be able to enj
oy myself.

  I sit on the edge of my bed, hands clenching the mattress beside each leg, and look down at the scruffy T-shirt I am wearing, the ghost of a greasy stain still haunting the front in spite of my repeated efforts to efface it. I am joyous that this does not bother me in the least. I do eventually heave myself from sitting to standing and head to the bathroom to perform the usual rituals, though I skip the shaving. What a gorgeous luxury this seems, and I realize that my appreciation for anything today will be keener than it likely deserves.

  It’s raining outside and though I notice this with my first step onto the battered, gum-blackened sidewalk in front of the house, I do not go back to equip myself against the wet. I’m wearing good sturdy shoes and a dark green lined overcoat which at least affords me protection against the cold, and with my hands in my pockets and my head slightly bowed I am quite comfortably refreshed out here. I walk with two topics coursing through my head, one my overall plan for the future (as grand as that sounds), and the other a kind of rehearsal, much more immediate and of shorter duration than the grand plan.

  First, the future. I persist in feeling giddy about it, even though on paper my prospects do not look rosy. I have nearly run out of my meagre funds from my retirement package from Toronto University, and I don’t have any other job to go to. Even if there is a faculty position out there just tailored for an academic of my credentials, the competition is always fierce for such plums, and in any case the hiring process itself generally takes months. I get tired just thinking about the whole thing: finding a posting, applying, waiting for an acknowledgement, hoping for an interview, and on and on. I probably won’t even put myself through that horror. Instead, I imagine doing something much more simple, and I try not to romanticize any of the uglier realities. I do not envisage myself waiting on tables or opening a small bookstore or otherwise trolling through interpersonal tedium in a fruitless quest for redemption (and money). No, not that, not that at all. I imagine something with the body, working construction perhaps (I have a cousin somewhere in Alberta who’s part of a union), or maybe even learning a trade which demands some modicum of intellectual effort. Plumber. Electrician. Something like that. Comfortably ensconced as I have generally been in the ivory tower of academe, I’ve never investigated whether perhaps the government would be willing to subsidize the training costs of an impoverished but otherwise respectable citizen. In any case, I am perversely optimistic.

  As for the more immediate present ...

  Chapter 25

  Pauley, Tony, the last one.

  Chapter 26

  Some crimes have no resolution and some provide no solace when they are resolved. The victims are still victims, and the people who have suffered only vicariously and vacuously in front of the television are no better off knowing who the killer is and why he did what he did. That, I fear, is the case here. I came to this town with a plan in mind and did not just flail into murder out of frustration. Academia was the forum that I believe I was destined and gifted to perform in, and at the risk of sounding melodramatic I will tell you that my rejection by brutes because of my theories, because of the research I had worked so diligently on and had hoped to work on with even more industry in the years to come—that broke my heart. I decided on a path of murder with the same defeatist resolve as the man who decides on suicide. I concluded that it was all over, that I was not going to get the life that I wanted after all, and that I would give it all up and at least go out with some degree of integrity, however factitious. I did have some fun contriving all those emails from the supposed killer, but apart from that I really did not get much of a chance to exercise the writing and research skills which generally fester in me.

  I feel worst about Tony, who is the only non-random victim in this decimal, alphabetical little rampage of mine. She was a convenient P in my traverse across the QWERTY row of the keyboard (you I owe in between), a fine accident, a nice way to end the run, wrap it all up, make my point, as they say, and then move on, as they say some more. She’s been a good distraction for both writer and reader in—what shall I call it?—this memoir (sounds kind of grand and innocent)? story (a little plain)? confession? I wish I had never met her, frankly, so that my tally could have been pure and unsullied by anything resembling personal vengeance. Other days, though, I revel in the serendipidity of it: the one person who had more details about me and about the murders—and who might have put it all together—and that person turns out to be alphabetically correct as well. Maybe there is a God.

  It’s a small thing that I have done, a petty insistence on making my point about the value of keyboard research by choosing victims whose last names began with a letter along a row of that very keyboard. A big bully pushes me down in the mud, and I push ten other smaller people off a cliff. There are big issues implicit in all of this though: academic freedom, general decency ... Perhaps the trumpetting of those ideals may seem disingenuous from the mouth (the pen, the keyboard) of a killer, but I don’t think that the abdication of one tenet of civilized humanity disqualifies a person from all of them.

  I wish I felt better about the whole project, I sincerely do. Or, to put it more accurately: I wish I felt either better or worse. I wish I felt something. These ten bodies, these scores of lives I have ruined—it all is just so much past history, typed pages, nothing but things that are now complete and which I plan to move away from with the same slow haste I have carried out my atrocities in the first place.

  1 For the basic facts, see Canadian Crime Fiction by L. David St C. Skene-Melvin—what is it with crime writers and complex names?—published in Shelburn, Ontario, in 1996. This bibliography is an essential tool for any serious student of Canadian crime fiction, though the text is as riddled with typographical errors as some of the characters described are with bullets. That title of the London edition, for example, is given as A Comparison for Cariboo, an understandable mistake among the rabble perhaps, but demonstrating a gross lack of attention to detail which is unforgivable in a scholar. For more accurate details about the titles, see the catalogue of the Library and Archives Canada.

  2 See his entry in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, 2nd ed. (Don Mills, ON: Oxford, 1997), p. 85.

  3 The Globe and Mail, July 23, 2004.

  4 For a succinct but insightful study of this phenomenon, see Val Simmons, “The ‘Marathon Effect’ in the Unsuccessful Investigation of Serial Murder,” Journal of Homicide 19, no. 4 (June 2005), pp. 32-38.

  5 Naim Booker, Not Killing Softly: My Years Tracking Down Serial Murderers (New York: QTY, 2005), p. 96.

  6 See Michael Mallor, Born to Kill (Nashville, TN: Blackstone, 2003).