The Serialist

by David Gordon

  I know what you’re thinking. My duty as Commander was clear: turn her brain off and dispose of the body. But I hesitated. Why? I told myself it was because we were on a long mission to unknown destinations, that I needed her skills and was dangerously low on spare body parts. But maybe it was the way she bathed me, or the look on her face when I turned the Sexagon up to full volume. Or maybe it was just the way her breath sounded, sleeping there in my ipod. I didn’t have the heart to press the reset button. And that was how my troubles began. I, Commander Julius Dogstar, Master Twelfth Degree, should have checked my own vitals. I should have taken my pulse and felt the microscopic black sun in my blood as it sped invisibly toward my heart.

  52

  When we got home, we ordered pizza. It was my idea. After our fruitless visit to Clay’s, the mood of my little investigative team was somber and I thought it might cheer us up. We got a large (half plain, half pepperoni), something we were only able to order thanks to Dani. For Claire and me, a whole pie was usually too much. I can eat four slices at my best, and Claire gives out after one or two. When snake-hipped Dani announced she was up for three, Claire regarded her with a newfound respect.

  “Really? Three? But you’re so skinny.”

  She shrugged. “It’s all the dancing. You burn it up. Also I do yoga and Pilates.”

  “I do yoga, but I want to try Pilates. They say it’s really good for your core.”

  “Totally.”

  I nodded enthusiastically. I wasn’t sure what a core was, or if men had them too, but I was extremely pleased that my two lady friends had something in common.

  “I went to yoga once,” I offered.

  “You?” Dani scoffed.

  “It’s true,” Claire said. “He was the worst in the class. He doesn’t even know right from left.”

  “I got flustered,” I said. “I admit my balance isn’t that great.”

  “No shit,” Claire said. “He almost knocked over a pregnant woman.”

  “And you’re stiff as a board,” Dani added. “When you stretch it sounds like Velcro.”

  “That’s true,” Claire said. “The instructor wouldn’t even let him try the headstand. She was afraid of a lawsuit.”

  They laughed gleefully as I tried to rally a defense: “She complimented my child’s pose.”

  “Yeah. That and coffin,” Dani said, and this was apparently so witty that Claire laughed into her straw and squirted soda. At last they’d found something they could enjoy together—criticizing me. Then, stuffed with cheese and coated in grease, we sat back, cracked a second round of sodas, and I tried, as team leader, to reflect on the day’s lessons.

  “Well, I guess I’m not much of a detective, am I? I don’t know what I thought I’d find there today. Bloody footprints, maybe.”

  “Isn’t this what detectives do, though?” Dani asked.

  I shrugged. “How would I know?”

  “They revisit the scene, look around, find clues,” she said. “How do you know what you’re looking for till you find it?”

  “Columbo seems to know,” I said.

  “I love Columbo,” she said, picking dried cheese off the cardboard with her nail and eating it.

  “Gross,” I said.

  “Who’s Columbo?” Claire piped up.

  “An old TV show from before your time,” Dani told her. “Before mine too.” She grinned at me.

  “He’d always notice these little things no one noticed,” I said. “Like where were the victim’s car keys or why would a girl fold her clothes before jumping out a window?”

  “Why would she?” Claire asked.

  “She was hypnotized into jumping.”

  “Monk notices those things too,” Dani said. “I like him.”

  “Well, so did Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “He wrote a whole monograph on cigar ash.”

  “That’s what we need,” Claire said. “Some CSI-type evidence. Like a body hair in a drain. Or a tooth.”

  “Come on,” I said. “What should I do? Get out my old microscope? I think the FBI has that covered.”

  “I like those English detectives on PBS,” Dani said. “Inspector Morse. Inspector Lynley. They’re dashing.”

  “I like Inspector Frost,” I said.

  “Me too, but he’s not so dashing. Just good old-fashioned police work. Experience and instinct, right, gov?”

  “Well, that’s not going to be me either, is it?” I said. “Like Ed McBain says in his books, based on established police routine.”

  “Then there’s Prime Suspect,” Dani continued. “What’s her name?”

  “Helen Mirren.”

  “She’s pretty hot in that.”

  “She is,” Claire agreed. “The one where she makes it with the younger black dude?”

  “Then you have your psychological-type detectives,” I said.

  “Profilers,” Dani said. “Like Wire in the Blood and the Hannibal Lecter guy.”

  “I was thinking more of Inspector Maigret,” I said. “Or Poirot even. Detectives who kind of soak up the atmosphere and empathize with the characters. In a way they’re like writers, creating plausible narratives.”

  “There you go,” Claire said. “You can do that. Like you’re writing one of your books. Except plausible.”

  “I just hope I’m not the Lew Archer, Philip Marlowe type.”

  “How’s that?” Dani asked.

  “They just stumble around until someone kidnaps them or beats them up,” I said. “Hammett’s heroes too, like Sam Spade, getting hit on the head all the time. Marlowe gets drugged on almost every case, still he can’t resist. When the bad guy offers a cigarette, he lights right up.”

  “ ’Cause he’s drunk,” Dani said.

  “And did you notice,” I went on, “how they never bathe or sleep but they shave constantly? They’re like, ‘I stopped off at home to shave and change my shirt.’”

  “But they look good, in those suits and hats,” Dani offered. “Even the bad girls like them.”

  “And they get to make a lot of smartass comments along the way, like Humphrey Bogart,” Claire said. “And not take shit from nobody.”

  “And they smoke unfiltered cigarettes and keep whiskey in their desk,” Dani said.

  “And then the girl leaves them flat broke in the end,” Claire said, and as if we had emptied the bookshelf, a silence fell over the room. Claire pushed her chair back and, burping softly, went to lie on the couch. Dani got up and started clearing the table. I gathered the empty cans and followed.

  “I remember,” I said, “when I was a kid, I’m not sure how old, in grade school, a rapist was loose in the neighborhood and I saw this sketch and description of the suspect that the cops taped to a lamppost. I can still remember, he had glasses, a mustache, parted hair. Anyway, it said to watch out for this guy and report any information or clues. And I took it literally. Like I just started walking around, on my way home from school or whatever, looking for this guy or, even weirder, looking for clues. I even had a magnifying glass.”

  Dani laughed mildly, rinsing the dishes. Claire was now sprawled on her back, snoozing. I went on.

  “I remember I collected these random things that for whatever reason I thought of as clues. A little medallion I thought was gold but I’m sure was tarnished brass at best. An electrical cap—you know, the plastic thing with a cut bit of wire hanging out. The tube from a cigar that still smelled. It was purple with gold printing, which seemed fancy to me. I kept these things in a shoebox and I’d sniff the cigar tube and pretend to be smoking it while I went over the items, waiting for them to add up to something. Then one day I was walking past this alley and I heard a scream. Of course I was terrified. I was certain the rapist was attacking someone right there. I wanted to run away but I forced myself to walk down the alley to the end, where it wrapped around the back of a building. I remember creeping along, my heart pounding, with my back to the wall. And then, summoning all my courage, I peeked around the corner.”

&nb
sp; I paused and Dani glanced over. “So? What was there? The rapist?”

  “Of course not. There was nothing. A stairway down to the basement. Who knows where the scream came from? Someone arguing or a TV. Maybe it wasn’t a scream even. Maybe it was a kid laughing. But when I looked around the corner, completely terrified and like rigid with anxiety, my eyes fell on one thing: a cigar, half smoked, sitting right on the ground, directly in front of me. And its band was the same purple and gold as my tube.”

  “Wow. So then what?”

  “Nothing. I grabbed the cigar butt, which I thought of as evidence, and got the hell out of there. I ran home. I put the butt in my tube, and then my mom smelled the stink of it and took the whole thing away. She promised me she was turning it over to the cops, but for some reason they never followed up with me.”

  Dani laughed.

  “But the point of the story—”

  “Yeah, I was wondering,” she said.

  “Well, obviously none of this had anything to do with the rapist.”

  “Obviously.”

  “It was only in the mind of a kid. And even the cigar matching. What was that? Just a random connection.”

  “A weird coincidence.”

  “But not even that weird when you think about it. A cigar and a cigar tube? It was probably a cheap brand, sold everywhere. There were probably dozens around. I just noticed it because I was looking. Something takes on meaning to us and we start seeing it. Like Diet Coke cans, or broken shoelaces, or redheaded men with blue socks. Who knows what else was in that same alley, invisible to me, that I suddenly would have noticed if I’d been tuned in to seeing, say, packs of Newports or torn lottery tickets with the number six in them? Instead of the clues leading us to a mystery, I sometimes think it’s the mystery that suddenly turns everything into a clue.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said, turning off the faucet and drying her hands. “It’s like after my sister died. I hadn’t seen her in years. But suddenly, everything reminded me of her. A commercial about paper towels, an old song. I kept seeing her everywhere. Like really thinking for a split second that it was her, turning a corner or going by in a car. When she was alive, she didn’t exist for me. But once she was gone, she was everywhere.”

  I reached out and touched Dani’s hand. She squeezed my wrist, hard, but then let go and went to her purse for a smoke. I looked over at the couch and realized Claire was awake after all, lying on her back, eyes open, listening.

  “I’ve got to get back and change for work soon,” Dani said, smoking by my open window. The curtain ruffled as if someone was back there, about to appear.

  I grabbed Claire’s keys and we went. Now that we were alone together, in the elevator and walking to the car, the awkwardness returned and I struggled for something to say. Again Claire’s question from the day before asked itself in my head: What if Clay was innocent? It was easy to dismiss Flosky and Trio’s doubts as opportunistic. But what about the certainty of others? Was it any less self-serving? To prove Clay innocent would be a disaster for Townes, the cops and the courts. To even suggest his innocence would enrage Toner and the other victims’ families. And I felt horrible just thinking about the possibility near Dani. I unlocked the passenger door for her and then went around and got in.

  “Dani,” I said, as I shut the door.

  “Don’t say anything.” She cut me off. “Just let’s do it.”

  I nodded and started the engine, then drove a couple of blocks before turning down a quiet street. As I pulled into a secluded spot behind a truck and under a tree, I happened to look in my side mirror and see, I thought, a late-model black Impala parking discreetly up the block. We were being followed. Or at least it seemed like that to me. Dani grabbed my arm and I climbed after her into the back seat. As she pulled off her sweater and unbuttoned her jeans, I glanced through the back window. I didn’t see the Impala. Then she pressed against me and I shut my eyes.

  53

  For the next few days we followed Darian Clay, even if at a distance of years, and despite the grim sites we were seeking, Claire, Dani, and I settled into the rut of any unhappy family on vacation: I drove, Dani misread the map, and Claire lounged in the back, making sarcastic cracks, complaining of nausea, hunger and then, after lunch, nausea again. She and Dani didn’t seem to hate each other any more than most relatives, and the feeling of normalcy, however false, gave me a sense of safety. What could happen to a carful of regular folks cruising around and bitching at each other in broad daylight? Evenings, we ordered in, Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, and watched Law and Order reruns in the thin hope of picking up a useful pointer. But all I learned was that, if you want to know whom a suspect called from his phone, you checked his LUDs (local usage details), which won me a dollar from Claire. (“Why would they check his lungs?”) Dani helped Claire with yoga and Pilates and then, to my great consternation, showed her some basic “dance” moves, which led Claire to modify her antistripper stance.

  “I mean it’s not my chosen career path,” she told me over morning cornflakes.

  “Good.” I waved my spoon for emphasis. “That’s why you’ve got to do your homework. I mean do it yourself.”

  “But at least Dani’s fun and she has interesting stories. For instance, did you know Preparation H, the butt cream, can get rid of those bags under your eyes?”

  “I’ll have to try it.”

  “I’d rather my dad date strippers than those phony junior miss executive types in their miniskirt suits who always try to hug me. Blecch.”

  The three of us drove out to Astoria to find the Jarrels’ home, where their daughter Nancy had been living with them when she was killed. The whole way there I looked for the black Impala, but it was nowhere in sight and I decided I had just been paranoid.

  We found the block, but the address no longer existed. After several trips up and down the street, we concluded that their old house, as well as most of the one- and two-family homes on the block, had been leveled and a ten-story glass and steel structure stood in their place. We parked and walked by the entrance to the new office building. People dressed in business clothes stood smoking with IDs hanging around their necks. I wondered what the Jarrels thought. After the murder and the circus of the trial, they sold out and moved upstate. Perhaps they were glad to find a buyer who would wipe away what for them was only a sign of their pain: a home that had become a memorial. Still, it made me sad. Clay stole the girl’s future. Now her past had also been erased and replaced by a blank box, in which, standing before it, we saw only our own reflections.

  The Hickses had been country people, at least by my standards, and had lived someplace in Pennsylvania, but their daughter had been living up in Washington Heights while she studied acting and waitressed at a restaurant downtown. We ate at the restaurant, for no particular reason except that it was lunchtime, sitting outside despite the chill. It was the kind of place that called fries “curlies” on the menu and the bacon cheeseburger Dani ordered was called an “Oinker.” I felt sorry for our waitress, smiling desperately in her striped polyester outfit and giggling about the “humongously awesome pepper jack nachos.”

  Claire gave her a very Claire look from over her shades. “I doubt they’re really that awesome. I’ll just have the cheesy weezy quesadilla. Isn’t that a redundancy?”

  “Totally,” the poor girl squeaked, giggling in fear. I could see Janet Hicks in her. Needy, hungry, frantic, so terrified of not being a star that she forgot to be scared of Darian Clay and rushed eagerly to her doom. We drove past the acting school, which was still there, upstairs in a midtown office building, where Darian had posted his notice looking for models, then continued up to Washington Heights. I thought I spotted the black Chevy behind us again on Broadway, running a light.

  Janet Hicks had lived, with two roommates, on the tenth floor of a building close to Riverside Drive. She went running by the water in the mornings, got a juice in the Dominican bakery, went down to her improv class in th
e afternoon and served bad, overpriced burgers all night.

  We walked along her street and took a turn in the park. Although you could feel the encroachment of Columbia University and the condo developers pushing people out, the Heights had changed less than most parts of the city and for now it was clinging on. People spoke Spanish in the stores. Old ladies hung out the windows and mothers sat on the stoops while their kids played in the street. The sun was setting, and all along the block, the grand old buildings loomed like ships easing down to the river. Soon night would fall and someone would blast salsa music from a window or car, so loud the whole street could hear. Soon summer would come and someone would open the hydrant for the kids.

  And at night, after visiting those monuments that only we could recognize, Dani and I hid in lots and alleys and performed our own strange ritual, grasping and struggling wordlessly in the backseat.

  54

  Although it had been sold and resold several times, the Toners’ old home in Great Neck still looked like the photo I had of white columns and a long lawn behind a high gate. Toner himself now lived with his new wife in an even bigger house in an even richer neighborhood nearby. More significant to us, however, was the factory, which Toner had inherited from his murdered wife’s father and still owned, and where Clay had been briefly employed. It was a long, windowless building, fenced in and topped with barbed wire. I knew from Townes that they made plastic bags, but really almost anything could have been going on in there. We drove around the perimeter a couple of times and then parked out front and watched some trucks come and go. It was getting toward the end of the day and we were tired. We were all on our phones when someone knocked on Dani’s window. She jumped.