The Serialist

by David Gordon

  “Nah,” I shrugged. “Don’t try to cheer me up. I think I’m more the dupe type.”

  Terence smiled at this and we went back to reading magazines. Then he fell asleep—no doubt he’d been up all night watching me—and I stared out the window. His head slumped against my arm. Poor Terence. I foresaw an unrewarding career. He would be a lovable loser like me, the Harry Bloch of law enforcement, dependent on the kindness of his suspects, trusting me not to slip away or take his badge and gun. As he cuddled in closer, I thought again about what Clay had said. Homicidal maniac or not, as a literary critic he had a point. Everything I’d done in my career had been more or less a failure. At my best, I brushed the underbelly of mediocrity. If by writing as and for so many others, I had managed to wring out a subsistence-level existence, this fact only threw my true failure into deeper relief, as I admitted there was nothing worth publishing under my own name anyway. And now, handed what everyone agreed was the story of a lifetime, my own and others, I had managed to miss it. I had met the victims, seen the crime scenes, brushed up against the unknown killer; I’d met the central figure, been allowed to see, even compose, his thoughts, ideas, dreams: I had all the clues but had discovered nothing. In my hands all it amounted to was bad porn and some unfinished notes for a cheesy true-crime as-told-to.

  65

  When I got home, Claire was in my office, behind my desk, talking on my phone. She was in her school uniform with the white tights and working on a Twizzler. She signaled for me to sit. I dropped my bags and slumped on the couch. She hung up, crossing her legs as she swiveled toward me. She didn’t eat the Twizzler, just kind of chewed it like an old man trying to cut back on cigars.

  “We need to talk. I spoke to the publisher and got you an extension on the new Zorg, but they weren’t happy. I know you’ve been distracted, but it’s time to get back to work.”

  “Distracted? Someone tried to kill me. Twice.”

  “Well, now that first one was just an assault, am I right? They knocked you out and left you. But I understand. You’re upset. Just let’s be clear: there’s really no book here anymore.”

  “Fuck the book. This is real life. Nonfiction. Do I look like the type who’s gunning for posthumous recognition?”

  “OK, but nothing’s coming in. There’s barely enough in your account for rent.”

  “I know, I know. Pride’s a luxury I can’t afford.” I stood and started pacing. “But I was used by that bastard Clay and by that bastard Townes. I feel like a worm on a hook and . . . Wait. You looked at my bank statement?”

  “I checked it online.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “I set it up for you. The code is my birthday.”

  “When is your birthday again?”

  She stood and smoothed her skirt. “Look, I’m going to school.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that.”

  “But I’ll be back tonight, if that’s OK. Dad’s in Hilton Head.”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Oh, and Robertson’s office sent that over.” She pointed her gnawed Twizzler at a big manila envelope. She saw my blank face. “He’s the lawyer? It’s your stuff, back from the FBI.”

  She left and I made coffee, then sat behind the desk and tried to think of an ending for Whither Thou Goest, O Slutship Commander. I was stuck with Commander Dogstar and Polyphony, fleeing intergalactic war and seeking a refuge for their own forbidden love, crash-landing on Earth just as the engine in their timespacecraft is about to die. But then what? Much like Commander Dogstar himself, I stared helplessly into my blank screen, feeling time crawl past me, watching the photons die. Despite what Claire said about my poverty, I was too overwhelmed by reality to focus on my made-up world, a world I deeply regretted ever leaving.

  At least the books I wrote were honest lies. The characters might be familiar, reusable types, but I wasn’t pretending to plumb the psychology of my vampires and cyborgs, any more than I pretended to understand Dani or Theresa Trio or any of the women who chased Clay. I just recounted the old themes: betrayal, vengeance, fear, escape. Love, which might as well be an arrow through the heart for all the sense it made.

  In its tropes and types, genre fiction is close to myth, or to what the myths and classics once were. Just as, a century or two ago, one could refer to Ulysses or Jason and hit a deep vein of common understanding in your reader, now we touch that place when we think of a lone figure riding in the desert, or a stranger in a long coat and hat coming down a corridor with a gun, or a bat wheeling above the city at night. Reduced to their essence, boiled down, the turns and returns of genre unfold like dreams, like the dreams that we all share and trade with one another and that, clumsy and unrealistic as they are, point us toward the truth.

  In the roundtable discussion I had with Dani and Claire about our favorite detectives, I had, I now realized, forgotten the best of them all, that solver and creator of mysteries, Dr. Freud. Contemporary with Sherlock Holmes, writing up cases like his own Watson, his practice and methods were oddly similar to Holmes’s. They both even did coke. Always the case began with a client arriving in his dusty, cluttered study, full of books and relics, to tell the great man of what was missing or lost. Always he set out by listening, in a wreath of smoke, by noticing the clues, and by diligently, patiently, fearlessly following where they led, which was always into the past, kingdom of lost things, and where, at the end of the story, which is always the discovery of its beginning, there is always a crime.

  I ripped the manila envelope open. It contained the tapes and incomplete transcripts of my interviews with Clay and the murdered women, my notebooks and files. I popped in a tape and began randomly flipping through papers while listening to Clay ramble on, in that backward tone, a voice I now knew had been put on for my benefit.

  I opened the file Clay had given me: his love letters, the stack of pink and purple Polaroids and prose that he’d collected from his admirers. I flipped through, grimly entranced. Yet another kind of porn, I suppose. So many women, stretching back through time, so many faces, names, bodies. What had become of them? Any one could have ended up like the three I met. Then near the bottom of the stack, I found a handwritten note, on nice white stationery, dated three years before.

  Dear Mr. Clay,

  My name is Daniella Giancarlo. My sister is Dora. I know that you have always said you were innocent of her murder. I also know that she modeled for you, so you must have liked her and thought she was worthy to be in your work. She is my identical twin. That’s why I felt I could be presumptuous and write to you. I was at your trial, and I think you looked at me and smiled. I kind of feel like I almost know you, since we went to the same high school, though not at the same time. I am younger, of course, and I was only there till junior year, when my family moved to the Island. I even remember your house, the foster house around the block from school. For all these reasons, I want to ask you a favor. Please, despite what they say in the papers, I am hoping you will show me you are a kind man. If you can help me find my sister’s remains or learn anything about her death, please tell me. I know you have the power to help.

  Respectfully yours . . .

  A small head shot, like a passport photo, was included, showing Daniella or her sister (who knows?) with brown hair. The overly deferential tone, the flirtatiousness—it all suggested a freshman psych major with a book on managing psychopaths, but it still made my stomach churn. Why hadn’t she told me? Why hadn’t Clay? Had he written her back? He had alluded to her with me. Was he teasing me, perhaps, with a clue? Why hadn’t Dani mentioned the high school and the foster home? True, she’d left that neighborhood years before the killings and there was no way she could have known Clay back then. But still.

  I tore through the transcripts of my interviews with Clay and found the spot where he mentioned his foster mother. Gretchen. That was the name. Mrs. Gretchen. That bitch ought to be in prison, he said. Instead of sitting on her ass in that old house. Why wou
ld he stay informed about this woman he hated after all this time? How could he even know she was alive and still in the house? Were they in contact? Had Dani told him?

  Here we come to the part I always dread writing, when the plot needs to snap together and resolve itself. The climax or whatever. The third act. It’s a thankless task. Story plotting is like plumbing: no one wants to think about it until it stops working. Then everybody’s a critic. But consider for a minute how unrealistic, how contrived your own real-life dramas would look on paper, how obvious the secrets and hidden motives would appear, set down in black and white for the eyes of the objective reader. For example, and be honest now, was anyone surprised by the way things went between Jane and me—except for me? So even in a true-crime story like this one, making the story part feel true is hard labor, heavy digging and burying, and creating suspense is largely a matter of covering one’s footsteps. Still, looking back, I see that I let the answers slip more than once as I scattered my trail of clues across these pages.

  66

  Outside my building, I saw Agent Terence and another guy parked in his usual spot across the street. I was tempted to ask for a ride, but I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his pal, so I left him there reading the Post. It took two trains and a bus to get there, and when I emerged from the subway, I saw that Dani had called my cell, but I didn’t check the message.

  I had to wander for a while before I found the house. This neighborhood had gone through several lives since Clay and I were kids. It had been dying then, a faded district of run-down apartment buildings and private homes that the owners were too old or poor to keep up, clinging to the lower rungs of the middle class while the city itself slid into bankruptcy. Now it was in revival, everything bright and clean, and a house like Clay’s foster mother’s, with its crooked steps and sinking foundation, its overgrown shrubs and drawn curtains, was like a bad rash, the bane of the block. As I paused and checked the address outside, a young mom eyed me suspiciously from across the street. She was bundling a baby into the back of a Volvo, and her driveway and house were bordered with flowerbeds. Her irises were in full bloom. On my side the walk was cracked and weedy, and there was a dead old Buick rotting in the drive. I smiled at her and she looked away abruptly. She climbed into her car and I heard the electric door locks hiss. I didn’t blame her. The place gave me the creeps too, and I looked over my shoulder for the reassuring sight of Agent Terence. He wasn’t around.

  I pushed the gate back and immediately I heard an enraged dog begin barking. I waited long enough to be sure it was coming from inside the house and then proceeded across the yard, past a sagging, overgrown apple tree, a bald, patchy lawn, and another dead car, this one a rusted-out VW bug pulled onto the dirt. I opened the torn screen door and stepped onto the porch. By now the dog was worked into such a frenzy that the whole zip code knew I was there, but I rang the bell anyway, for the hell of it. No answer. I knocked and the dog flung itself against the door in a murderous fit. I heard nails scratching, but that was it.

  I gave up and walked around to the back of the house, where I found a heap of a garage that looked like I could push it right over, the withered remains of an ancient vegetable garden and a half-toppled fence. Two trees whose branches had grown together covered the whole rear of the yard in permanent shade, with years of dead leaves layered beneath them.

  I looked over the fence. I saw a small woods, a patch of no-man’s-land running behind the houses, with a highway overpass on one side. On the other side, I glimpsed a bright green field through the trees. I checked my map. That was the high school where Clay had gone and where he had learned to take photos.

  I slid sideways through the falling fence and made my way into the woods. The tangle of trees above me was so thick, the sun barely broke through, starving the weaker plants on the sparsely covered ground.Instead the earth was blanketed abundantly in trash—a huge quantity of paper, bottles, mattresses, tires, unidentifiable heaps of rotten or charred matter. The thaws and rains of spring had turned big sections into mud, and I had to hop and skip my way along. The woods ended in a kind of small meadow, an overgrown slope between the trees and the edge of the school property, where the grass was closely trimmed.

  The scene was vaguely uncanny. It reminded me of something, like a place we’ve read about in a book, or as if this were my old school, which I’d forgotten and stumbled across by accident. I walked around, hearing the overpass traffic buzz and whisper like insects in the trees. Now it came to me: this had to be the field where that kindly teacher Mr. Bratwurst had discovered young Darian mooning about with a camera and encouraged him, taking him in hand. Did he take anything else in hand as well? Given Clay’s background, it would seem likely. Every relationship in his life was built on victimization. The only variable was who was predator or prey. As I turned and went back through the woods, my cell phone rang and I grabbed it. “Private number” it read. I answered. The signal was awful.

  “Hello?”

  “Harry Bloch?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Agent Bateson.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s me. Terence!”

  “Oh, sorry. Hi.” The phone showed no bars. I was surprised it could even ring.

  “Listen,” he went on. “I wanted to tell you. We were called off your tail for a staff meeting but I wanted you to know that a woman in a car was seen following you this morning.”

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “Dani?” I asked. “Is it Dani?”

  “This is Terence,” he said, and the phone died.

  I realized then how quiet the woods were. Even the dog had stopped. Only that faint hum from the overpass. Then I heard a branch snap, or something, and I froze. Whatever was snapping froze too. If it was anything at all. I took a careful step. And suddenly from the corner of my eye, there was a movement, like a figure in the trees. I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t care. I bolted, and ran right into the mud. My foot sank ankle deep in the muck, and when I pulled, it sucked off my shoe.

  “Fuck!” I howled, forgetting for a second that I was supposed to be hiding from someone. I reached over to retrieve my lost shoe and my other foot sank with a slurp. “Shit,” I whispered softly. Feeling, I admit to you, like crying, I crouched down in the fetid slop and dug my shoe out, then carefully hopped to dry ground. I started running, guided by panic, one wet sole slopping and my other foot in a sock, clutching my shoe to my chest. Every few feet I would nervously glance behind me. I saw no one but kept thinking I heard a foot, a crackling twig, a breath. When I got to the fence, the dog exploded, and though it shocked the hell out of me, I was thrilled. I broke into a wild charge across the yard. And now I saw a dim light in the window.

  “Help!” I yelled, and scurried over, waving my shoe. At the window I saw the dog. It was just a small poodle of some sort, wiry and gray, barking and jumping, bouncing its paws off the windowsill. The light was a TV with its back to me, and beyond that lay a person of some sort, a figure, gray and old, spread in a recliner.

  “Help!” I called again. I banged on the glass. The little dog howled and spit like it was going to lose its mind. But the person never budged. Dead maybe? More likely sleeping or drunk. Was that Clay’s foster mother, or even her boyfriend? The lump was sexless. Finally I gave up and ran on, or limped really, at this point. My foot hurt and I was out of breath. When I reached the street, I thought about banging on the neighbor’s door, but I remembered she was out, and anyhow, I realized how I looked, sweaty, wild, covered in mud, stumbling from the neighborhood’s haunted house, brandishing a shoe. I stopped and put it on. I tied both laces. And then, a small miracle, the sweetest sight in the world: a taxi came around the block.

  I flagged it down, calmly, so as not to spook the driver, and even though according to Claire I couldn’t afford it, I had him take me all the way home. Darkness fell, but slowly, now that it was spring. We sped along past Flushing Meadows Park, the lines of tr
ees streaked by, and in the dimming light they melted into a mass of black and green. Reflected on the taxi window, my own face wavered and flowed across the woods, like a photo that had been double-exposed. I remembered taking such a picture myself, as a kid, with the plastic camera my mother gave me, when I took a summer art class, one of those free workshops the city sponsored to keep urban youth off the streets. That’s when I understood, and in a flash, sitting in the cab, I solved the case.

  Now, you may have noticed that, in my normal, day-to-day existence, I can be a little dense, as Claire says. I tend to stumble through life as if lost in a deep forest with an out-of-date map that I can’t figure out how to fold. The trees all look familiar, animals are making scary sounds in the bushes and the sandwich in my bag isn’t what I ordered. No doubt I’m not alone in this. It is because life stumps us that so many adore puzzles and games and mystery stories. Sitting on the couch, cracking the spine of an Agatha Christie, or magneting a Tuesday Times crossword to the fridge for Claire to ignore (or strangest pleasure of all, solving the problem I set myself in my own books, as if one side of my brain finally embraced the other like a long lost twin), I see through reality’s inscrutable surface and glimpse the inner cogs and wheels as they spin. I imagine a world that I can make sense of and, just for a moment, I know how it must feel to be a genius.

  But of course we have only one world, this dark and knotty one, and the truth we find when we look too deep is rarely pretty. Unlike in books, where we are all fearless seekers, in life, most of us would rather not see too clearly. And so, although the sudden rush of knowledge I felt was strong, its taste in my mouth was bitter: I knew the name of the killer now. I understood.

  I pulled out my cell. It was working again, but so what? I didn’t have Terence’s number or Townes’s. I had his card at home somewhere, I thought. Or was that Claire’s lawyer? Could you call the operator and ask for the FBI? We got to my place. It was dark now, a clear, bright night. I paid and hurried in. No one followed. I took the elevator up. I opened my door and headed through the dark apartment toward my office. Halfway there I remembered that the card, if I had it, was probably still in my bathrobe pocket. So I walked into the bedroom and turned on the light.