When she got home she had met his eyes, and they were unchanged. Fear lay in a film on her vision; a dog would have smelled it on her. The baby was sleeping; she would have known it and cried. Extra sheets for the crib and socks and Mary’s stuffed pink poodle. Knowing how thoroughly he’d been able to hide it from her made it easier. The world cannot read your face. The world had not read in his face even the smallest clue.
Until last night Pat had not raped and murdered six women—seven dead in all—and then he had. The worm in the apple had become the apple. Hysteria and strained nerves and unwarranted suspicion had become shrewdness and perspicacity.
Because Pat didn’t know she knew, she didn’t know. It wasn’t that hard, after the first moment. Blankets and eye-makeup remover and underwear. All the baby’s dirty clothes out of the hamper, because this time she knew for certain she was never coming back.
She had been forced to wait. The night had been the worst. As she slid toward unexpected sleep he moved over her; she had never refused him; she was afraid to refuse him now. He thrust into her without foreplay, and he didn’t touch her neck. It was over soon. When he finished she could taste her own blood on her lip where she had bitten it.
At seven-thirty in the morning Zelly had lain in bed next to Pat, scanning the front page of each section of the Times. Pat sat next to her in bed and drank his coffee. Her skin was screaming.
“You want another cup of coffee?” she asked him, calculating how to get out of the house. “Honey—” she said, then she almost said it: I’m going to take Mary out for a walk this morning. But she never took Mary out in the morning, and he knew it. There must be no deviation from ordinary routine.
How he must have enjoyed watching her these past months! How he must have loved listening to her speculate on the characteristics of the Slasher, the likelihood of his making a fatal mistake, all the thousand little details about which she’d had an opinion. She hated him next to her the way a woman would hate any lover who had made a fool of her. As though her mind couldn’t accept the full depth of horror offered up to it and had to grab and react to the one aspect of the truth that it could easily understand: he has been laughing at me.
In the middle of the night she had been certain she would call the police the minute Pat left the house. But by morning she knew what would happen if she did that. The police would stake out her apartment, waiting for Pat to come home. She would go to her mother’s house (“Just act as though nothing’s happened”), but she was pretty sure they would stake that out too, knowing that eventually he would go there. For where else did he go? Home, his mother-in-law’s, and out to kill. And Pat would come home and see that the police were staking out his house. And he would know who had told them.
Pat would go to her mother’s house. And he would see the stakeout there and then where would he go? How could she put her face outside the door if he were free? She and the baby and her mother would be prisoners in that house. How could she take her baby for a walk, or to the doctor? And her mother—how could she let her mother leave the house if he were out there somewhere? Because he would know who had told the police, and he would kill them all.
Even if he ran she could never feel safe. How long had it taken to catch Ted Bundy after he escaped from jail in Utah? Two years? What would Zelly and her mother do for two years, watching the television to hear the latest news of a killing in Omaha, in Chattahoochee, knowing he could be just around the corner? She could not call the police while Pat was out of the house.
“What are you doing today, honey?” she’d asked behind the movie pages, staring at the grainy newspaper image of a man grabbing a lingerie-clad woman by the arm, the leg—an advertisement for a murder mystery. “She Has to Make the Ultimate Sacrifice,” the caption read. Zelly had waited for Pat’s reply and wondered what that sacrifice was: was she going to sleep with him or was the man going to kill her? Pat was reading the sports pages.
Her shoes wouldn’t fit in the bag. She didn’t want to take these shoes anyway. She went to the closet and knelt, and memory rose abruptly. Pat’s shoes. She’d had a dream about Pat’s shoes.
They stood in a row, inspection-perfect, but in the next instant they would explode into action and fly out of the closet around her head like bats from a cave and she would lose her mind. Zelly reached for a shoe and was surprised when it felt like nothing more than leather.
There was something brown down the outside, possibly dung. Something that had been sticky. Ketchup, or mud. Little flakes fell in a red dust on the floor. Zelly inserted her fingernail under a flake and pulled it away. She touched her thumb to the flake and it disintegrated into a thousand red specks. Suddenly there was a noise outside the door. Zelly turned her head and her whole consciousness was in her ears. She would not be able to move away from the closet in time.
The footsteps halted and then began again. Away from the door and across the landing to the next flight. Zelly stared at the dried blood on her thumb and realized that she had begun to cry.
The letter she left just said, “I can’t make it work. I’m sorry. I’m at my mother’s. Call me.” He would think she was leaving him, but he wouldn’t think she was running away from the Symphony Slasher. He would call her mother’s, the way he did last time, but now she would put him off. Say anything to keep him there. And the moment he hung up the phone she would call the police.
48
“These lights drive me crazy, you know that?”
“I didn’t notice,” said Blackman. There wasn’t a lot of traffic in the tunnel. A few cars had gone by in the opposite direction, and far ahead Blackman could see two sets of lights. One car was red, one was just a dark blur far up ahead. Blackman reached for the Styrofoam cup balanced on the gear shift without taking his eyes off the road. He knew Scottie’s hand would reach the cup an instant before his own, knew that Scottie would hand him the cup. “You’re better than having a wife.”
“You always say that. When are you going to just break down and propose?”
The lights went by for a moment in silence.
Blackman’s lips were pushed tightly together. His hands on the steering wheel were drained of blood; it had been pushed away by the force of his grip.
“What do you suppose Levy was doing in the meat-packing district at ten o’clock on a Monday night?” Scottie asked.
“She said she was leaving the scene. Nassent had to be with her. The dispatcher said she was in an awful hurry.”
“She’d have to be out of her mind.”
“I’d do it. You weren’t at Levy’s original questioning,” Blackman said. “She was the angriest rape victim I’ve ever seen. And I have seen angry ones. I should have known. Listen,” abruptly changing the subject as the car came out of the tunnel into the sudden night, “it adds up that our man would live in New Jersey.”
“Patrick Wyche,” Scottie said.
“Patrick Wyche. Patrick Wyche. No better or worse than any other name.” The highway outside the tunnel was eight lanes wide, with overhead signs and bright streetlights and arrows pointing in different directions.
“I hate New Jersey,” Scottie said. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, just a pair of taillights on a red Camry swinging around a corner. “The guy the Hoboken Police are sending is supposed to have all the info on Wyche, when we meet him at the house.”
“This could be a one-way ticket to where the sun don’t shine, going to this man’s house.”
“Where are we going to look?” Scottie snapped. “They sent Chen down to where Levy said she was calling from. And we got O’Donnell going over to her place to talk to her when she gets in.”
“Don’t blame yourself. This Nassent thing has been a long shot all along.”
“Not anymore.”
“No. Not anymore.” They were silent as the patrol car passed a sign that read NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE ¼ MILE.
“Shit,” said Blackman suddenly, “I think I overshot my mark.”
“Second corner by t
he gas station?”
“Damn, I overshot. Damn,” slamming his palm against the steering wheel, “God fucking damn. Motherfucking New Jersey highway. We blew it.”
49
In the tunnel John and Madeleine did not dare say anything. They sat silently and the tunnel lights beat a tattoo across their faces.
John looked furtively at Madeleine and her face was closed. He was shut out—or she was shut in with the memory of the man walking toward her. When she said, “That’s him,” her voice had been small, like a child’s; and now she faced her future with a child’s irresolute grace.
Suddenly she turned to him and said, “I love you.” Before he could answer she said, “I’m not frightened,” and he understood that she didn’t want him to answer.
“I am,” he said.
The tunnel ended abruptly and the air on their faces felt like hope, cool and dark and sheltering and open to the sky.
“Do you think the cops’ll come?”
“I don’t know. Do you think they believed you?”
“If you listen to calamity for hours and hours every night, how do you sound? I think I was interesting to them.”
“Then maybe they’ll send somebody.” The street was industrial, fantastic; they were passing train yards, endless shiny-dull tracks in all directions and hulking empty carcasses of trains. The van’s taillights shone on the pocked asphalt. They were about five blocks behind the van; when it pulled into the station John slowed his car, but in a few moments, before they reached it, the van pulled away, and when it turned right up ahead of them John noticed Madeleine’s hand tense on the door handle. But when they got to where the van had turned they saw that the street ended and there was no place to go but right, and the taillights were still there ahead of them. They were the only two cars on the road.
50
He looked into the rearview mirror as the tunnel gave way to cool night air. The mirror had joggled up, and he found himself looking into the shadowy back of the van. There was something lying in the middle of the carpet back there. A little shape, a darker shadow. He pulled the van over into the gas station where he would have made his right turn to go home; what was lying there? It stared with vacant eyes, shark’s eyes, button eyes: a tiny brown bear.
Mary’s bear. What would Mary’s bear be doing in the back of his van? Suddenly an image of Zelly rose, Zelly rooting in her purse for her keys, when was it? Two nights ago, a year ago? For a long time Zelly had carried around a little plastic duck teething ring that Mary no longer found attractive. For luck. In his mind she took things out of her fanny pack and laid them on her dresser: a lipstick, a packet of tissues, a tiny brown bear. For luck. Now it lay next to a dark, triangular stain and looked at the ceiling.
He reached his hand out but did not touch it. Could not. Zelly had been in the back of the van. The chorus from Handel suddenly blasted back into his head—Hallelujah! Hallelujah!—and he dug his nails into his palms.
He looked with some surprise at the crescent indentations, which hurt. Zelly had seen the clippings, the unfinished letter. Under the cardboard box the notebook lay undisturbed but he knew she had opened it. The tarp had been moved. She had looked into the bucket. She knew who he was.
His hands as he started the van again were very calm; he felt calm. He had been stopped less than a minute. He was going to have to kill Zelly.
How long had she known? She had had that anticipatory look, like a deer staring down headlights, for some time now. Since she’d run away to her mother’s house and then come back. Funny, he’d never truly been able to believe that what he did could have been associated with his other life. Even the panties—they could have come from anywhere. They had slid so easily from her dead body, they lay like a pile of lavender on the gray carpet of the van. Her lifeless eye had stared—he had loved her then. He had moved the panties down over her unresisting thighs and Zelly had held them in her hands.
It was almost a miracle to him that objects did not transmit memory. What had Zelly thought while she was holding the panties? That he was having an affair. She must have done her snooping when she’d said she was going out to dinner with that other mother. Last night.
So last night when he’d made love to her she must have known. He had felt a stirring toward her as she lay in bed with her back to him. She had lain as though asleep, although he knew she wasn’t asleep. And in the morning she’d said she had a headache, and he’d noticed that she wouldn’t put the baby down at all, but he hadn’t thought anything of it. Yet while she stood near the window in the living room (uneasily, he realized now, teetering a little on one foot like an adolescent waiting for a phone call), she had had a memory of the inside of his van. How could he not have known?
As he drove the last blocks, the buildings and the freight yards he was passing began to shudder and buckle in on themselves. Every time he had driven down this road was right here. The silhouette of an abandoned engine doubled in on itself; the lights in the tenement across the street were on and off and on again, pale against the lightening sky or a bright yellow beacon in the dead of night. The empty train cars gleamed with every shade and nuance of light he had ever seen move across their hulls. He had seen a man once, coming out of the mouth of an abandoned railroad car; the man was there now, forever descending, looking down, one foot held irresolute.
As he turned the corner Manhattan swung into view, in shadow, in bright sunlight, dim with rain. One had screamed, and three had struggled. One had never seen his face at all. One had smiled at him. Two had spoken. They were all the same woman, and in the dark front seat of the van he began to hear her voice. Hushabye, don’t you cry, go to sleepy little baby. She used to sing him that. His house was half a block away. He could see a light in the living room window. She had not called the police. Behind the shifting memories his senses were clear. There were no unmarked vehicles, no snipers hiding behind parked cars. There was no foreign presence in the apartment; the bland welcoming light was no subterfuge. On the porch next door an old Italian woman sat with her deaf husband; her placidity was unfeigned. Along the length of the street no leaf stirred. When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little horses. He would say hello to the old woman and her husband and he would go upstairs and kill his wife’s lying eyes. Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, all the pretty little horses.
What did she used to say? When you’re bigger we’ll go to London to visit the Queen. That’s what she used to say. Just like in another of her many nursery rhymes. And he had believed her. The other he could not remember at all. Even with the rush of memory, the sudden availability of memory, he could not remember him. An arm, a hand. The arm would be raised forever, and it would be forever falling.
After he killed her he would have to do something with the baby. He couldn’t just leave it there. The baby sitting next to its dead mother had not cried. In the closed low room where he crouched watching he did not cry.
When he opened the door to the apartment he did not know for a moment what he would see. That other room was suddenly so real that he almost forgot what he was going to do, and he hesitated against the blank wall of fluorescent light that came out of the kitchen. Where was she?
Something was wrong—the absence of monotone chatter from the television set. He could see it standing dark in the corner through the living room door. He knew it was no trap. There was no one waiting here, no drawn sweaty guns.
The apartment was empty. She was gone. As he stood in the kitchen the kitchen disappeared and he didn’t feel anger or relief or regret or fear. Somewhere a wall melted and he was aware of only one thing: She was gone.
The boy sat uncomfortably in the little space under the stairs. He was five years old. His father’s raw voice sometimes took on the cadence of repetitive ritual; his mother’s retorts, her whimpers and her screams, were part of an ancient call and response. From where he was crouched under the stairs they couldn’t see him. And when they could see him it didn’t matter. Their entire l
ives were lived out in this illegal basement studio apartment. In the dark, from his mattress in the corner, he heard love and he heard hate, and when he heard love he thought it was hate, because he heard so much hate.
The only real love he recognized was in his mother’s voice when she spoke only to him, in the lullabies she sang and the stories she told. When his father wasn’t home the single room took on the rareified aspect of a bell jar, in which he and his mother existed unmolested and only for each other. Then the door opened and the familiar litany began again.
This time it was very bad. He was a small boy, brown-haired, with deep brown eyes that had little folds at the inner corners. He looked like his mother. His mother’s hair was honey blond, and he could see her now across the room, with the light on her hair where his father held it clenched in his fist. Schubert was on the stereo—he knew that because his mother loved that music, she always played it. “Ave Maria” and the Lieder and the Quartetsatz. She used to play classical music all the time, especially when his father was out of the house: “The Flight of the Bumblebee” and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and “Peter and the Wolf.” Her favorite was Schubert, who had died young. Her name was Emily. His father’s rage was inexplicable. His father never spoke his name. His mother did: “Patrick.” Never Pat, always Patrick. “Patrick, when you’re a bigger boy we’ll go to London to visit the Queen.” In her mouth his name was a caress.
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