“I didn’t think so. You come from Queens, right? Not even any fucking around when you were a kid? So, I got in the car and I did him and he was a pleasure, let me tell you some of these guys stink. And they hold you down so you have to swallow. I spit it back in their faces. They love it. But this guy—I thought maybe he could have been something more. You don’t think it ever happens in the front seat of a car? With a whore? It happens. Men love whores. Like Henry Miller. I guess I’m just looking for a way out. I use condoms, I don’t want to hurt nobody.” He was still looking away; he was talking to himself.
“He looked like the evil prince in a fairy tale. Every girl’s dream. So I offered him a little bit more.” He stopped talking for so long that John thought he would not come back. “He said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ That’s all. While he was beating me. First I just thought he was turning himself on. I thought it wasn’t me he was hitting. And he said—you know what he said? Like God, you know in the Bible, what’s he say? ‘I am that I am.’ Or what I am. But that’s what he meant. Like God, like I’m supposed to know. And then later I saw the picture and I did know. The same guy that killed all those girls. It would have been a kick if he hadn’t hurt me. I’m sorry. But it was—power is such an aphrodisiac—somebody else’s. Do you like to feel powerful?”
“I like to feel like I’m not getting a bullshit act.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I’m a bad boy.”
“We’re talking about the man who might have murdered my sister.” But he could see it, shining out of the cloudy pools of the boy’s eyes: I aroused his passion, and to me he imparted his secret.
“ ‘Do you know who I am,’ ” Angel said softly. “I’m sorry.” He paused again. “And now I know who he is. But what good does it do you?”
“I need for you to tell me if you see him again. You can call me, maybe you can get his license number. And of course I can pay you—”
“I don’t want your fucking money”—surprising John—“I don’t know if I give a shit—I don’t know. It’s sad when beauty dies. It’ll be sad when I die, won’t it? I’ll help you. If I don’t lose your card or give it to somebody for a joke. John Nassent. Were there a lot of flowers at her funeral?”
“Yes.”
“I want a lot of flowers at my funeral. Were there a lot of people there?”
“Yes.”
“I got my whole funeral cortege right here,” gesturing at the empty street. “He said if he ever saw me again he’d kill me.”
“Oh. Well, I couldn’t ask you—”
“I’m going to die anyway. I told you—I’m HIV positive. I’m walking around dead right now. It doesn’t matter if I don’t hurt yet. As soon as I do—first sign—I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. I’ll be in all the papers. I was born in Brooklyn, you know that? This way I get to go out big but I don’t hurt anybody else. It’s going to be cool. I’m going to have all my friends come and watch.
“Don’t feel sorry for me, man. I don’t want to get old and lose my figure. You think I don’t know what this means to you? That guy, somebody should kill him. You are going to kill him, aren’t you? Because there’s nothing as pretty as a girl—you think it’s funny I say that, huh? Well, sometimes you don’t get what you want in this life. Your sister, was she pretty? I would give anything to be a girl just for one day, man. Just for twenty minutes. To have a man look at me and—you know, when he hit me I wasn’t surprised. He thought he had something else. Well, I got the real thing, but I never met no really nice man that wanted it.
“That car, I got to go.” He laughed. “But I will call. If I see him. And if you ever get curious, you don’t really get AIDS from spit on your cock. If you need me ask Dixie, she knows.” And he was gone. John turned and walked back downtown; he was out of the meat-packing district in five minutes but he carried the boy in his head, the seductive, sepulchral smile and the eyes—the other pair of eyes that had seen the face of the man who murdered his sister.
42
“If I hadn’t gotten him to take the Pedialyte I don’t know what I would have done.” Zelly was only half listening to the woman next to her on the bench; hell would freeze over before Mary would take Pedialyte. And now she was trying to eat the wheel of somebody’s tricycle. “I used Gatorade when Mary had it,” she said absently.
Zelly was looking through a copy of the Post while Mary played at her feet. It was Friday, June twenty-sixth, and the Slasher had written the Post another letter. WERE THE CHILDREN FRIGHTENED AFTER THEY FOUND HER? She was trying to act, inside herself, as though she weren’t thinking about Pat at all. As though she were an audience to herself and had to put on a good performance. I am not thinking about when Pat could have mailed a letter. I am not thinking about the fact that Pat was out late the night before the concert, that he was gone all during intermission. I have not been thinking about it.
“Joey threw up again this morning but I think we’ve gotten through the worst of it,” the woman said. Joey cried every time he had apple juice. “So don’t give him apple juice,” said Zelly shortly, trying to read. Then she looked up from the paper. “But it’s not that easy, I know. Mary cries for applesauce and if I don’t give her applesauce heaven help me.” KELLY WAS HAPPY TO GO WITH ME, TO BE MINE FOR INTERMISSION. It was ridiculous to even think about it. Everything had been entirely normal since the night Pat came to get her and Mary at her mother’s house three weeks ago. She must have delayed postpartum syndrome or something. She’d been having bad dreams.
“What’s that?” Stacy said, leaning over. “Oh, the Slasher murders. God, this whole thing gives me the creeps.”
“Me too,” said Zelly. I LOVED THEM ALL. I LOVE THEM ALL.
“You know what I think? I think that Slasher guy comes from around here.” Zelly’s stomach tightened. “I think so too,” she said.
“Did you know Rosalie?” the woman asked. Joey started crying where he sat on the cement, next to the slide; a two-year-old had run right over him. I DO NOT COLLECT CARDS BUT HEARTS, I STOP THEIR FOOLISH BLOODY BEATING. The woman picked him up and murmured in his ear.
“I met her once,” Zelly said. “I always wanted to get to know her better.”
“Well, she used to take her baby—Brian—to Church Square Park. I used to go to Church Square too, but I haven’t been able to go since she died. Just once, and everybody was talking about it.” WE WILL MEET AGAIN BUT NOT WHEN THE MOON IS FULL. “You knew her?”
“Rosalie was my best friend in Hoboken. I’m from the Bronx originally. Are you from around here?”
“Born and bred.”
“My name’s Stacy,” she said, and she stuck out her hand but it was sticky so they just laughed and nodded.
“Zelly.”
“Rosalie was from Secaucus. When I heard I—I think it was the same guy who’s doing it in Manhattan.”
“So do I,” said Zelly.
“You do?” She paused to disentangle Joey from a piece of plastic beer ring. “This park is filthy,” she said.
“I thought Church Square was worse.”
“As a matter of fact it is. There’s glass, and kids come at night and move the benches around like performance art. You come in the morning and see how far under the monkey bars they moved one today.”
“We have the Parks Department guys in the morning, but they don’t do much.”
“The dogs are the worst. You know, the owners just let them run anywhere. The other day a Labrador came right up to Joey and licked him in the face. Can you imagine? The thing that bothers me is that it’s not even legal. The law says you have to have them on a leash at all times.”
“Even inside the park?”
“Yeah, that’s the law. Joey—not in your mouth. I know it looks like a cookie but it’s garbage. I’m sure it’s the same guy, though. Rosalie was blond. She dyed it, that’s the ironic thing. She just started dyeing it a couple of months before she died.”
Stacy was obviously impressed
with her own image, of having access to such esoteric knowledge about the victim, as though Rosalie were a celebrity and not a dead person. Zelly could understand that; she herself could only approach the periphery of Rosalie’s death. Stacy was a Friend of the Victim. She was obviously not a bad person but she couldn’t seem to help herself. Maybe it was the only thing that had ever happened to her, that vicarious death.
“That’s the baby,” Stacy said, and, “Hi, Brian,” to a stocky baby boy wearing a Yankee baseball cap. He was with a pleasant-looking middle-aged Indian woman. “I didn’t know his sitter was bringing him up here. I heard he cries a lot more than he used to.” He was not crying at that moment. He was looking at his hands. He looked practically supernatural sitting there looking at his hands, once you knew who he was: Baby Found with Blood on His Hands.
“You know,” Stacy said, “I’m getting so I’m afraid to walk down the street at night. I just don’t go off Washington Street anymore.”
“I don’t either.”
“I’m really getting jumpy. I’ll tell you something, the other night—do you ever feel like you get—I don’t know—not warnings exactly, but—I don’t know—feelings about things? About places? When they look perfectly harmless.”
“I guess so. I don’t know.”
“Well, the other night—actually it was weeks ago—I was walking down Hudson Street—is that a bottle cap your daughter has?”
“Oh—no, it’s a piece of something. Honey, don’t eat that, I don’t even know what it is.”
“I was walking down Hudson Street, down by the park? You know, I don’t know the name.”
“Stevens Park? By Fourth Street?”
“Yeah. Where you can see the Empire State Building across the river. And there was this van. I don’t remember if this was before the papers said that the killer might drive a dark van. I didn’t get a real good look at it but it was this dark van. I remember it had lettering on the side, in the front? And it was just sitting there, I didn’t even see anything, but I got really freaked out, I couldn’t even walk by it. That ever happen to you?”
“No, but I can imagine it.”
“I don’t know how to explain this but I got such a strong feeling—like if I walked by that van I would never see my home again. It sounds stupid now but it was really scary. It was almost as though I couldn’t walk by it—as though there was a wall or something in the way. So I just stood there and listened to the music.”
“Music?”
“Yeah. The van didn’t even look like there was anybody inside it—I didn’t see any light—but it was blaring this classical music, really loud. It’s just that they’re calling him the Symphony Slasher now—but this was before they were calling him that. Anyway, I got really creeped out and went around the block. And I said to Michael that we really ought to get out of the city altogether. It’s time—” And over the gentle blur of her voice Zelly heard her own internal voice like a mantra: Pat has a dark van. Pat has a dark van and it has writing on the front panel. Pat has a dark van and it has writing on the front panel and he plays classical music all the time, Pat has a dark van. “—thinking of looking in Chatham,” Stacy was saying. WE WILL MEET AGAIN BUT NOT WHEN THE MOON IS FULL. I AM NOT SO SHALLOW WHY A VAN? WE WILL MEET AGAIN.
43
They had been drinking wine and he had heard her giggle for the first time. The streets were soft and welcoming and there had never been fear; fear had dissipated on the new summer air. June twenty-sixth. Red wine with dinner, they ordered pasta dishes but didn’t eat them. Only once—when Madeleine flinched as the waiter leaned his arm in front of her to put down the bread plate—had the wine reminded him of blood.
Madeleine was jubilant. Now they had a real lead, one even the police didn’t have. She hadn’t told John that the police had contacted her. She was afraid it would stop him and equally afraid it would intensify his efforts. Now she wondered whether they should call the task force; but the wine dissuaded her. Even to Madeleine events had taken on the quality of a dream. Their shared aim was becoming a hard shell around them, like a cocoon; they were in a cocoon and they were dreaming. They had begun from a point of intimacy many never reach. They shared, in a sense, a past, and they shared the same fantastic hope for the future. And wine and hate and unrelenting hope had made them giddy tonight.
“My boyfriend always wanted to have sex in one of those basement entrances, down the steps,” Madeleine said. She was looking at her rape as an objective fact, like weather or a geographical feature of the landscape. From where she was it had no power over her.
“Your boyfriend was an asshole,” said John.
“At least I can joke.” They were silent a moment; she had taken his arm as they left the restaurant and her hand felt like a piece of fire.
Madeleine was looking up at the gingko trees on St. Luke’s Place. They shone with an unearthly inward light, like hundreds of tiny green moons. “Where’s the strangest place you ever had sex?” she asked.
“At Kennedy Airport. We found a place—a cul-de-sac at the end of a long corridor past the bathrooms. You could feel the planes taking off through your feet.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My high school girlfriend.” The jet engines had roared up his legs and exploded into the darkness of the girl he held in front of him.
“My high school boyfriend and I used to climb through one of the windows of the church down the block. We did it on the altar.”
“That’s even better.”
“He used to be an altar boy.” The streetlights reeled slowly and she laughed. They were walking down the gently sloping street and she held his arm tighter so they wouldn’t begin to run. Everything was very clear and far away and he knew they were going to make love.
There was no hurry. Her hand was on his arm and he could see the line of her cheekbone and the flow of her dark gold hair as she walked beside him. She was really very small.
They came to her building and went up the steps; they were quiet because they knew they were going to make love. They were shy with each other and she would not raise her face toward his. She fumbled with the key and she stumbled over the familiar threshold.
Madeleine’s apartment was small, a space before a window and a loft bed only. The room was cluttered with books and papers and clothing strewn across chairs; the kitchen counter was hidden beneath cups and hand towels and open containers. John wanted to take her on the floor.
She was standing with her back to him in front of the sink; she held a yellow china cup in her hand. She held it uncertainly, and her head was bowed. John moved up behind her and slid his arms in a ring around her waist and buried his face in her neck. She raised her head back like a cat stretching, rubbing her head against his face, and she put down the cup and put her hands on his hands where they lay around her waist.
Like lightning in his brain he saw her, for an eternal instant, supine, her back against the cement, the man over her. Then it was gone and she was soft in his arms. He turned her, gently, and lifted her chin and looked at her eyes. She was crying. When he kissed her he tasted her salt. She put her arms around him and he saw it again in an instant’s illumination, legs spread under the man, and felt a swift involuntary pull at the groin and he didn’t know if it was the man’s hands on her throat or her tongue in his own mouth.
They kissed across the room and he ran his hand over her body and it wasn’t him it was the man, wherever he touched her she had been burned. The probing of her tongue excited him, and he thought of what had been done to her and she moved her breasts under his hand and her head hit the cement and she was very dear to him, he wanted to protect her, he wanted to take her like a whore. And her kiss was like a sacrament in his mouth.
He pulled her gently away from him and saw that she was still crying. “I’m sorry,” she said, and he felt ashamed. He wanted to say something—“I love you”—but he didn’t say anything. Even “I love you” would be an insult to her wound. He kissed her
forehead. She put her head down against his chest.
“Is that your only bed?” he asked her. She looked surprised but she nodded, still crying soundlessly; her shame was more than he could bear. If he had to he would gladly wait forever.
“It’s just as well,” he said. “I’m afraid of heights.”
44
She thought it would be safest just to take the whole key chain: If he were awake when she got back it would be more difficult to slip the single key back on to the ring than it would to put the ring back on top of his dresser. And if he noticed the ring was missing she could just say she hadn’t seen it; Pat had put his keys down in exactly the same spot so many times that it wouldn’t be hard to shake tonight’s memory: the hands reaching out to lay the keys down, the tiny metallic clink, the mind already on dinner and the game and maybe a cold beer. The image the mind replays when asked to remember setting down the keys—is that the most recent image or one of a thousand images overlaid from a thousand days of setting the keys down just so, in exactly the same spot? What other images overlay one another in Pat’s mind, each reflexively similar to the last? The mundane tasks of washing up; balling a rag in his hand to wipe the blood from his arms; changing his uniform and tossing it in with the others on Saturdays to take to the Laundromat; washing his face, his hair (or would he drive around a while, rubbing his fingers across his cheek, rubbing the sticky palm of his hand—DID YOU TASTE HER BLOOD?)?
Coins and a hairbrush and a couple of Band-Aids and four stamps. And the key chain coiled like a little cobra in the middle. She picked it up and it weighed a universe in her hand. This was the final betrayal, as real as sweat in a motel room: no matter what she found or didn’t find it was the end of her marriage. Maybe it would be better after all just to take the one. She slid the van’s key off the ring, working it while she listened to the shower run in the bathroom; Pat was singing. Wordless, low, something she didn’t recognize. She was nauseated. She slipped the key into her pocket and it lay along her thigh, the flat cold metal would surely show through her summer shorts, it burned her thigh. He would know she had it. Would he kill her then?
Blood Music Page 18