We Were Killers Once

by Becky Masterman

  * * *

  Three hours later he was cruising the town on a new bicycle, a large backpack strapped to his back, layered with money at the bottom, some clean clothes and basic toiletries over that, and a small knife, the kind you used to gut fish. It would do in the short term until he connected with Yanchak.

  Around lunchtime he found a place called Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers that offered a local paper for free in a box out front. The “fingers” he discovered to be strips of chicken. The paper told him there was a room to rent cheap not too far away. The price of the bike had taken his breath away, and told him just how far his money could stretch these days. He would have to make contact sooner than he thought.

  This troubled him, as he had intended to stay clean while he took care of business.

  There was some hesitation from the man who answered the door of the place with the room to let. Beaufort was not invited in immediately. Might have something to do with the neighborhood. Staying alive in prison meant reading other people, and Beaufort figured he had this guy summed up pretty quick. Some affliction that caused him to hold his hand in front of his body and a slight limp. Stroke maybe. Getting disability checks. While Beaufort sized up the man he could tell that the man was sizing up Beaufort, and coming to the same initial conclusion as everyone else, mostly. Just like the guy who drove him to the bus station. Just like the waitress. Smallish, old. What harm could he be? If the man felt the hair go up on the back of his neck he didn’t trust the instinct.

  “I take cash, one week at a time,” the man finally said. “Fifty.”

  “That’s okay with me,” Beaufort said, and gave him two twenties and a ten from his wallet. “I might only be here a week, is that okay?”

  The man looked disappointed but took the money and showed him to the room. Beaufort thought he might have looked less suspicious if he had asked to see the room first, but apparently that didn’t matter. Luckily the transfer of money removed any residual hesitation. The room was clean enough and had a private bathroom attached. He had kitchen privileges, too, as long as he contributed to the beer supply. Neither man had asked the other his name.

  When the bedroom door was shut, Beaufort finally sagged onto the bed and doubled over from the ache in his gut. It was easy to hide that ache from others, but not from himself. He almost thought he would start to cry, but long years of disuse made it impossible. He got up, put his new clothes in a drawer in the room but kept the money in his backpack. Then he left the house, got on his bike, and headed off to the Pascagoula City Library to do two things: find out how to research things on the internet, and get himself an email address.

  He had fears about dealing with the world that had changed so much during his time in prison. Not fears of people, but of changing times and whether he would look stupid in them. Whether people could tell he was an ex-con and how long he’d been put away. Along with the nightmares of killing, he had had dreams of people laughing at him. And he was also afraid, not of anyone in the drug trade, any driver or waitress or man with a room to rent, but of people both alive and dead for a long time.

  But most of all, he was afraid of this thing called forensic science.

  Five

  Because we hadn’t experienced so much life together, Carlo and I tried to catch up by telling each other stories, like the one I told him about being six years old and learning about the Clutter/Walker family murders. There was still much neither of us knew, but it was about making the time to know it, not necessarily about keeping it secret.

  Except for my feelings when I had killed a few people during my career. I had told him some of the facts surrounding those times, but I had never confessed how deeply satisfying it felt, knowing the terror and pain they had caused others, to watch those bad boys die. I had to carry those demons alone.

  The father in the story I had told Carlo about in bed that night was Fergus Quinn. We all managed to survive childhood and followed in his law enforcement footsteps. My sister Ariel joined the CIA. Todd, the baby in the family, went with Dad’s outfit, but eventually did become a homicide detective.

  I was career FBI until I got into some trouble and was discreetly transferred to Tucson, Arizona, where I hated the boss and opted for early retirement. Shortly thereafter I met Carlo DiForenza, a Catholic priest turned philosophy professor. Hoping to find some serenity, I took his class on Buddhism at the local university. The serenity still eludes me, but I did find love when I married my, as I called him, Perfesser. To him I was always “O’Hari,” a blend of my Irish roots and the sultry spy Mata Hari, not the first woman to use her sex as a weapon. Such were Carlo’s fantasies about me and the kind of life I had once led.

  Carlo knew how to retire with style. While I busied myself with private investigations that sometimes paid more in trouble than in money, Carlo spent his time dabbling in all those pursuits he had put aside first for the priesthood, then for philosophy, then for taking care of a first wife who had been ill a long time. Jane was her name. While I had redecorated the house in my own taste, her ghost sometimes still appeared, in the form of the pugs she had given Carlo before her death, or the smells that struck me whenever I opened the kitchen cabinet where spices like coriander sat waiting to be used. When I thought of her, I imagined her being a really good woman, one worthy of Carlo. And at those times the pugs, the spices, they judged me.

  At times like that I had to shake off the suspicion that I didn’t measure up to her. There was no evidence for this, as I had resisted asking Carlo to tell stories about their life together.

  Not to say we didn’t have a full life of our own, apart from Jane. During the relatively short time I had known him, Carlo had started writing a book called Asterisks and Idols, which he tried to explain to me on several occasions with little success. With a couple of colleagues and the priest at the Episcopal church we sometimes attended, he was planning a graduate seminar on the interface of science and myth.

  Nor was life only about religion. Tackling geology, we had hiked dozens of trails in the Catalina Mountains near our home, and there collected rocks; he could name each one.

  But interest in five-billion-year-old rocks was five minutes ago, and Carlo had recently lifted his eyes to the heavens. No, not religion—astronomy. I liked taking peeks through his twelve-inch Celestron, an impressive reflecting telescope with a GPS system. Carlo would tower behind me with his hands on my hips and his chest pressing the back of my head, just to make sure I was in the right position for the viewfinder, he said. I can’t forget seeing the Orion Nebula while sandwiched between Carlo and infinity. That and the scent of Gillette aftershave.

  Oh God, how I loved him!

  Ahem: This is why I was so excited about the anniversary present I planned to give Carlo: a full overnight viewing at nearby Kitt Peak Observatory. Kitt was one of the ten largest observatories in the whole world, and it was only a two-hour drive from our house. In Arizona a two-hour drive is nothing. I planned to drop him off and pick him up the next day, so the gift would include chauffeur service.

  I had just finished making the reservation online when the phone rang.

  Gemma-Kate, my niece, Todd’s daughter, showed up as the ID. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to her just then, but when the rings went to the answering machine I heard her say, “Aunt Brigid, pick up the phone. I have an issue.”

  This was the first time she had ever asked for my help. Shit.

  I picked up the phone. I said, “Are you pregnant?”

  “Did you really think I would come to you if I were pregnant?”

  Oh snap, I think is what the kids say. “I suppose not,” I said, thinking of other possibilities. “You need me professionally? Did you assault some frat boy?”

  “I take umbrage to that,” she said with a mild tone that didn’t match said umbrage.

  “Don’t be coy. How bad did you hurt him?”

  Now, one might think these assumptions a little insensitive, and that Gemma-Kate would rise up in shock,
angry self-defense, what have you. That’s because you don’t know Gemma-Kate.

  Nine months ago she had come from Florida after her mother died from a long illness, and moved in with us to establish Arizona residency prior to starting at the state university. Bad things ensued. The funny thing was, I discovered Gemma-Kate wasn’t gratuitously evil, not like a serial killer or anything; she just didn’t have the empathy or moral imperatives the rest of us have. She has always maintained that poisoning one of our pugs was only an accident.

  She said.

  This was Gemma-Kate’s psyche, while sporting a petite physique that had spring breakers in Fort Lauderdale risking statutory rape when she was fourteen, short curly blond hair, and a roundedness about all her features that made her appear as threatening as Betty Boop.

  Maybe I know her because, as may be apparent from my remark about the little thrill I’ve experienced watching bad guys suffer, I tip a smidgen to the left of the empathy spectrum myself.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’ve been forced to take a humanities class, so I signed up for something called Oral History. I have to interview someone old by next week.”

  “I’m not that old,” I said.

  “Oh, come on,” she said.

  “No. You already know everything about me that can be known. I’m not telling you the rest.”

  “But I don’t have that much time and I don’t know any other old people in Tucson.”

  “You are not endearing yourself to me.”

  “I’ll cook dinner,” she said.

  This gave me pause. During the time she had lived with us I discovered Gemma-Kate had become a gourmet cook while taking care of her sick mother.

  Seeing that she had me now, she said, “So, yes. I have a biochemistry class to get to.”

  “What about Carlo?” I asked. “Interview Carlo.”

  “Why?”

  “Ex-Catholic priest, could be a good story in there for you.” Frankly, I didn’t think there would be anything to interest her, but it was a good way to skirt talking to her myself and still get dinner.

  “Was he a priest when he met his first wife?” she asked.

  After hesitating a moment, “I’m not sure” slipped out of my mouth. Why did I not know this? I thought.

  Whether or not she heard that hesitancy in my voice, whether it intrigued her, I couldn’t tell. What I could tell is that she felt she had sucked all the value out of this conversation and grown bored. She agreed to interview him.

  Then we hung up and I forgot about Gemma-Kate and picked up the latest issue of Cooking Light, telling myself I wasn’t competing with a dead wife. Of course not. I was too mature and worldly-wise for that.

  Six

  If you had told Beaufort that a tough guy like him would hesitate at the front of a library, afraid to walk through the door, he would have laughed at you. Yet here he was, conscious of his brain sending the signals to pick up one resisting foot after another, up the front steps of the Pascagoula City Library.

  There was information to be had in there, free and anonymous. He had heard from other inmates about the development of what they called the digital age. He didn’t have much to do with it himself. Being a lifer meant being in a bad place. Not a bad place the way people spoke of in this modern psychology, but literally a bad place locked up with scum suckers. You didn’t get nice perks like computer time. This computer business made him feel like a time traveler from the past. The kid walking down the steps, nearly bumping into him before swerving with an apology, was looking at what they called his “device.” Little computers you held in your hand that did everything, add up numbers, look at movies, even act as a telephone or a camera.

  Email. Beaufort turned and watched the kid walk down the sidewalk. If that punk could get the hang of this, so could he.

  Then somehow he was inside, going to the front desk and asking for help from a woman who held her hair up with a stick. He played humble, old, and ignorant with the librarian whom he could tell liked him even though she must have been a good twenty years younger. It looked like he still had a way with the ladies. Certain kinds of ladies, anyway—the lonely ones who hadn’t had a man in a while. With the way he’d kept his body fit in prison he probably looked a little younger than his age when he wanted to.

  At his request for computer instruction she showed him to one of the computers that sat in a row along the wall. She pulled up a chair and spent quite a bit of time with him on a slow morning, telling him about search engines and which sources were reliable.

  He understood little and grew impatient. “Show me how to set up an email account,” he said, and then added, “Please.”

  The woman cocked her head and for one moment fixed him with one eye like a bird, but if she found anything odd about him she gave no further indication. She accessed her own email and showed him the way the address was constructed. “See, I use my name, PatriciaButts@yahoo.com.”

  “Got it,” Beaufort said.

  “Good!” Patricia Butts said. Beaufort wondered if she was a teacher. She acted like a teacher with a student. When he questioned her about getting information from the internet, she showed him how to, as she put it, “google.”

  When she left him to take care of a frowny woman with a stack of books at the checkout counter, Beaufort set up a Yahoo account for himself, then went back to the internet, where the little blinking line rested on the Google space. He felt like one of those archaeologists opening a long-closed tomb, the suspense of finding something weighing against the suspense of finding nothing. He typed a name. A throb of pain hit behind his left eye, putting him on notice just how tense he was about this. He reached up and rubbed hard at a spot on his forehead as he hit the RETURN button with his other index finger and watched the computer.Within less than the time it had taken to touch his forehead the screen announced 500,000,000 “results” starting with some photos of medical appliances and something called Fashionable Canes. Whatever sound he made had Patricia the Librarian look in his direction. At least he didn’t sweep the computer off the table, but for the first time he thought this might be harder than he had previously figured. Taking one of those deep breaths that he had learned in prison support groups, he slid his chair back and decided to go for some lunch.

  After all, he kept repeating to himself, this was all just to make sure everything was copacetic, that the thing called forensic science wasn’t lying in wait to bite him in the ass. Despite the dreams that threatened him, no one alive knew what really happened.

  * * *

  He chose an Applebee’s because it was close to the library. These menus made him nervous. There were so many options for everything these days, it would take some time to stop being either giddy or frustrated by all the choices of eating establishments and the vast menus so big you couldn’t see over the top of them. The menu fluttered in his hand when he tried to hold it up, so he put it on the table in front of him, opened to the sandwich pages, and stuck his hands between his knees to steady them.

  “Hi. My name is Candy. I’ll be your server today,” a voice said.

  “Give me the Reuben with fries,” he said. It was one of the things where he recognized all the ingredients. “And a beer.”

  “What kind of beer do you want?” Candy asked with an efficient click of her ballpoint pen.

  Tired of choosing, tired with the effort of struggling to fit in, he gave her a glare that would have once cowed a gang member one-third his age and growled, “Just bring me a fucking beer.”

  She cocked her hip in one direction and gave her head a little jerk in the other. “Well, bless yer heart,” she said, making him imagine her plunging that ballpoint pen into the side of his neck.

  His look must have changed into one of sheer befuddlement, because she said, more kindly, “I’ll bring you a Bud.”

  His meal arrived. While chomping through it, and dipping his fries in extra ketchup, another luxury on the outside (there were so many!), he thought about the conversati
on in the prison some years before that had started him to worry again.

  It was some small-time loser who was doing fifteen on an armed robbery conviction. He talked about how they were doing so much with analyzing folks’ DNA. That it was putting a lot of guys in, sure, but getting some off, too. He was going to appeal his case because there was a bit of evidence that might have someone else’s DNA on it.

  “You think this could get you out?” Beaufort had asked.

  “Doesn’t hurt to try,” the guy answered.

  “Did you do the crime?” Beaufort asked.

  The guy shrugged. As far as Beaufort knew, the loser was still doing his time, but late at night when he tried to sleep he kept thinking the words it was putting a lot of guys in, sure.

  Then he heard that they had started reinvestigating cold cases with the new DNA techniques. Rapes and homicides that had occurred years ago. Nicole Brown Simpson. JonBenét Ramsey. Especially high-profile cases like that, that had never been solved.

  Like the cases no one ever pinned on him.

  It got so he was running through every second of those long-ago events every time his mind tried to rest. Where he might have shed a cell. Whether his semen could still ID him. Even apart from that there was now some massive fingerprint database, all computerized, that he heard could find a match within seconds. He couldn’t decide if he should worry more about the DNA or about the fingerprints. It got to be an obsession. He wanted to know if anyone still thought about the case. But he didn’t want to know. But he wanted to know.

  There’s some who would say, Hey, give it up, guy. You’re nearly seventy years old, coming to the end anyway. What difference does it make if you go back to prison now? What difference does it make if you spend your final days on death row? You don’t have that many final days left.

  Funny thing was, you think about the future more when you’re old than when you’re young.