Doris wrapped herself up in a fur coat Hank had bought her when they were still married and headed on over to a local cocktail lounge, the Venice Room. She began drinking a few stiff ones with a half dozen of her friends. Some of the friends were married and some weren’t, and the ones that weren’t were most likely on the make. Shortly after midnight, a big-shot architect named John Betley came into the bar for a nightcap. At fifty, John had four years on Hank, but that wasn’t all he had on him. He was better looking and college-smart and more hoity-toity than Hank. Jimmy said he was a real lady-killer and normally that was a compliment, but not in this case.
“He thought he was better than us working stiffs,” Jimmy said, “but Hank showed him who was boss.”
I dug up as much as I could about John Betley. I learned he was the only boy in a Catholic family of five kids. He’d gone to a fancy architecture school all the way over in London, England. During World War II, he’d been an officer, fighting the dirty rotten Nazis all over Europe and getting all sorts of medals. He’d never had a ball and chain and still lived with his parents and Jimmy said that made him a mama’s boy.
On that Friday night, he’d eaten a lobster dinner at home with his parents, which made me think they must be loaded. After dinner, he took off in his sleek white convertible. I don’t think he was looking for trouble like Jimmy and Hank often were. I figured he was probably just looking for fun.
He arrived at the nearby Venice Room for a nightcap, and spotted Doris and her friends. He joined them. Maybe he was lonely and wanted some company. Maybe Doris had her eye on him and drew him over like the floozy Jimmy said she was. Either way, he didn’t plan to stay long. The place was closing at one and he told everyone he was going back home to bed. But the others weren’t ready to call it a night. Doris invited them all back to her house. The house with the bad lawn that was now frozen solid. The house she got in the divorce and was gonna sell soon ’cause now she would be residing in KooKooLand, where the lawns were always soft and green. John said he didn’t want to go to Doris’s place, but his drinking buddies wouldn’t take no for an answer. He finally agreed to go for a quick one.
Nobody noticed that the back door of Doris’s house had been forced open. They were probably having too much fun. John didn’t just have one drink and twenty-three skidoo. He stuck around. Finally, everyone else took off. Doris and John were left alone in the living room.
But, they weren’t really alone. Hank was hiding in the house, listening to them. Some people, like my friend Tina, said they were having S-E-X. Some people said they weren’t. Jimmy said bullshit, of course they were, ’cause what else would a whore and a ladies’ man be doing alone together at five in the goddamn morning. That was when Hank came out of his hiding place and, as he told Jimmy some time later, ordered John to get the hell out of his goddamn house. John, he said, told him he should get out, that the house didn’t belong to him anymore and that he should buzz off and leave Doris alone.
Hank didn’t say what Doris’s reaction was to his showing up. No doubt, if she was half-lit, Hank’s appearance would’ve sobered her right up. After all, she knew better than anybody what Hank was capable of. It was one year to the day since she’d gone and squealed to the coppers. Gone and gotten an order from a judge to keep him the hell away. A piece of goddamn paper that Hank had said frick you to many times by showing up at the house anyway since the coppers always went easy on him. Ever since then, Doris had told people, had even told Susan, that it was only a matter of time before Hank did her in. She told Susan that Goodwin Funeral Home should handle all the arrangements. She didn’t want her daughter to be at a loss when D-day came and Hank blew her brains out.
Except he didn’t use a gun, which Jimmy said would’ve been too goddamn easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel or jacking a baby deer. Hank gave them a fighting chance, said Jimmy. He used an ordinary kitchen knife. Well, two ordinary kitchen knives. Knives that used to be his knives from a kitchen that used to be his kitchen.
Maybe John Betley wasn’t looking for trouble that night, but trouble found him anyway. I wondered, if he hadn’t stood up to Hank, whether he might still be alive. But any guy who had defended his country against an army of bullies sure as hell wasn’t gonna walk away from just one. One who was shorter than him and who probably seemed like somebody he could take. But unfortunately for John, Hank was good and mad. And, from what I could tell, when somebody was good and mad it made them big and strong.
Jimmy thought Hank had every reason to be good and mad.
“In the old country, if a wife cheated on her husband and ruined his good name, she disappeared,” he said to me the night after the murders. “She fell off a goddamn cliff or something, and nobody asked any goddamn questions. That’s the way it’s been for thousands of years. A man’s wife embarrasses him, she pays the price. Sayonara, baby.”
“But Doris wasn’t Hank’s wife anymore,” I pointed out.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Jimmy replied. “Hank’s a goddamn Catholic. Even if he never went to church. To Catholics, divorce is a goddamn sin. Once you marry somebody, even if she’s a whore like Doris, you’re stuck with her. That stupid church and Hank’s old lady drummed that into his squash ever since he was a pip-squeak. So if you ask me, it’s their goddamn fault he carved up Doris and her big-shot boyfriend. Maybe they oughta lock up his mother and the goddamn pope.”
I nodded because I didn’t want Jimmy to think I disagreed with him. But I didn’t really see how Hank’s mother and the goddamn pope could be blamed for what Hank did. They weren’t anywhere near the house with the bad lawn.
Hank was the one who killed two people.
Here’s how he did it.
He stabbed John thirteen times, in the lungs, liver, all over his breadbasket. He stabbed him through the palm of his hand, probably as John tried to defend himself and Doris. He stabbed Doris eleven times. The blow that killed her went right into her heart. He left the knife sticking out of her chest. Maybe he couldn’t get it out, or maybe he just wanted to leave it in there like some warrior planting his flag on the battlefield. The newspaper said Hank and Doris’s marriage had been like a twenty-three-year war. It had looked like Doris had won the battle, but Hank pulled a sneak attack and had come out on top.
John bled to death on the floor between the living room and the dining room. Doris was attacked in the kitchen and laundry room. The cops figured John was killed first and then Doris.
I tried to imagine how long Doris had to watch the bloodbath, how long it had taken Hank to stab John thirteen times. When no one was around, I ran an experiment to find out. I opened Jimmy’s special drawer in the kitchen. The drawer had nothing but knives in it. Knives of every shape and size for cutting up anything from a buck to a flounder. Some of the knives were rusty and some were shiny. Some still had dried blood on them. I picked a good-sized one and pretended I was Hank. I sliced into thin air and timed myself with Jimmy’s stopwatch. Allowing for the time I figured it would take to yank the knife out of human flesh, I was amazed to see that Hank could’ve done it in under fifteen seconds. Even so, that still would’ve left Doris enough time to escape. Maybe that’s what she was trying to do when she went toward the kitchen, since the back door was in that direction. Or maybe she was going for a knife of her own to fight Hank off.
There was no real way of knowing the details. Hank was the only one left who’d been there and his recollection wasn’t so hot. Or so he said. Some time later he told Jimmy the whole goddamn thing was like a dream. He said he woke up at one point and he was on the floor. Doris was standing over him telling him everything was OK and that they should get married again. Then he realized he was standing over her body, and she was the one lying dead on the floor.
So he twenty-three skidooed.
He got into his truck and drove off into the early-morning darkness, leaving the house ablaze with lights. He headed out onto the turnpike and drove toward his sports shop. Near the Amoskeag Bridge, not far
from the store, he crashed his truck into a guardrail. Maybe he was trying to kill himself, or maybe he was just driving like a maniac and lost control. He abandoned the truck there and walked the rest of the way.
A short while later, a state trooper was flagged down by a passing driver who reported seeing an accident on the other side of the turnpike. When the trooper got to the scene, all he found was a smashed-up truck. No people, no bodies, nothing. Fortunately, the truck had the name of Hank’s store written on the side, so the trooper sped on over there.
The trooper pulled up in front of the sports center at about seven a.m. The lights in the store were off, but it was light enough out that he could see inside. He spotted Hank stumbling around the back of the store. Guns and ammo had been knocked or shoved all over the place. Hank appeared to be bleeding from a head wound and trying to sop up the blood with a paper towel. The trooper tried the door, but it was locked. He banged on the door. Hank looked over and gestured for him to buzz off. The trooper realized this wasn’t gonna be a routine traffic accident. He got on his radio and called for backup.
Shortly after, a Manchester cop arrived in his cruiser. The two coppers approached the store and peered through the window. They saw Hank weaving and falling down. They rapped on the window. Hank snatched a rifle and struggled to load it.
The trooper knocked on the window one more time.
Hank shouted at them to get the hell out of there. To show them he meant business he kept trying to load the rifle, and this time it looked like he might succeed.
“We better get out of here. He’s a crack shot,” the Manchester cop warned the trooper.
They took off toward the corner of the building. A shot rang out from inside the store. Moments later, they heard a loud thud. Then silence.
The cop quickly radioed for more backup and an ambulance.
The two coppers crept back toward the entrance and peered through the window again. They could see Hank lying on the floor. It didn’t look like he’d shot himself. It just looked like he’d passed out.
The coppers didn’t bust down the door. They waited until more coppers arrived. When the new guys got there, they decided someone oughta drive over to Doris’s to see if she had a key to the store.
And when that someone got to the house on that freezing December morning he found Doris and John, all hacked up.
Meanwhile, back at the sports center, the other coppers discovered that a guy who worked at a nearby gas station had a set of keys to the store. The coppers unlocked the door and found Hank wasn’t all that bad off. He came to and was taken to the hospital to get his bloody noggin stitched up.
A makeshift courtroom was set up in Hank’s hospital room. Hank knew most of the guys there—the judge, the clerk, the chief of police. Shortly after noon, Hank was charged with killing his former wife, Doris Piasecny, and a man she had taken a shine to, John Betley. As fate would have it, Hank’s longtime lawyer, a guy who had gotten him out of scrapes before, was the cousin of the man he had just murdered. Hank expected the guy to represent him anyway, but the cousin wanted no part of it. So Hank was left that morning without a lawyer. Or, as Jimmy described it, without a goddamn shyster. The judge entered innocent pleas for Hank, giving him time to find himself a new lawyer.
Hank didn’t seem worried about losing his lawyer, or about anything else for that matter. When he was handed copies of the murder charges, he flipped them onto the foot of the bed without even glancing at them. As the clerk began to read the charges, he cut the guy off and asked if it was really necessary to read through all that stuff about the murders.
The chief of police put his hand comfortingly on Hank’s shoulder and let him know there was no way around it. So the murder complaints were read and Hank sat there fidgeting and gritting his teeth like he couldn’t wait to get it over with.
A newspaper photographer wanted to snap some photos, but the chief wouldn’t allow it. At least he spared Hank that embarrassment.
When it was all over, Hank asked for a cigar and somebody lit one up for him. I figured men smoked cigars in that hospital all the time when someone was born. I don’t know if anybody had ever smoked one after someone died, but I guess there was nobody or nothing stopping Hank from doing it.
A Real Live Dead Woman
The next morning, Hank was transferred from the hospital to the Valley Street jail and I trudged off with Tina to the Temple Market. Tina pumped me for information about the murders and I told her what I’d heard Jimmy and Shirley discussing over breakfast.
“Some people say Hank cut off the guy’s Down There and put it in Susan’s mother’s mouth.”
I demonstrated how Jimmy, as a joke, had pretended to stuff his Jones breakfast sausage down Shirley’s gullet.
“Eeewww!” shrieked Tina. “Now I’m gonna have to say a million Hail Marys.”
“Don’t be such a baby,” I said. “It’s no worse than what I saw that killer in Blood Feast do.”
“You think you’re so tough! Just wait till Hank breaks outta jail and shows up at your house. He’ll chop up your whole family. Sylvester even.”
“He’s not getting out, numbskull. They’re gonna lock him up and throw away the key, probably. And, anyway, if he does bust outta jail and come around, I’ll just plug him with Jimmy’s .22.”
“I know one thing. He’s going straight to hell. He’ll be down there with Lee Harvey Oswald and the Boston Strangler and Judas and all the other bad men.”
“My father says what Hank did is all the pope’s fault ’cause the pope won’t let people get divorced even if they hate each other’s guts.”
Tina’s face got all red like a big blister.
“Your father’s goin’ straight to hell for saying that! And for all the bad things he said about President Kennedy. I bet President Kennedy’s up in heaven right now helping God make a list of who’s good and who’s bad and your dad’s on the bad list.”
The way Tina described it heaven sounded just like the North Pole, which made sense since hell was hot, so heaven hadda be cold. God sounded like Santa Claus and President Kennedy was like an elf.
Picturing heaven as eternal Christmas, I could suddenly see it a whole lot clearer. And I knew it was where I, who cherished Christmas above all other days, belonged.
It made sense that Jimmy, who hated Christmas more than Ebenezer Scrooge, would be going to hell. It was kind of comforting to think that if the dummkopf cops didn’t nab him, an all-knowing God would. The only thing was, I didn’t wanna be stuck down there with him.
“Do you think there’s any chance I’m goin’ to hell too? Or is it just men down there?”
Tina looked very serious.
“Girls can definitely go to hell. Unless you become a good Catholic you’re gonna be frying down there with Hank.”
“How do you know that?”
“The priest and the nuns and my mother said so.”
“How do they know?”
“They just do. They’re grown-ups.”
“My father says it’s all a crapshoot and nobody knows what happens when we die.”
“He’s a big liar who’s going to hell. How can you believe anything he says?”
As much as I liked to consider myself smarter than Tina, I had to admit she had a point.
“I’m not going to hell,” I blurted out. “Starting today I’m gonna be the best Catholic in the whole world.”
“Ha. You won’t be better than me. I got a big head start.”
“I’ll catch up. I’ll beat you. You’ll see.”
“Yeah, how you gonna do that when your father won’t even let you go to church?”
“God knows he won’t let me go. ’Cause God knows everything, right?”
“Yeah,” Tina admitted grudgingly. “Maybe God’ll give you a dispensation until you grow up. But then you’ll have to go to church a hundred times more to make up for it. Until then, you better pray a lot. You better pray like a maniac.”
“I am a maniac!�
��
I grabbed an icicle and pretended to stab Tina. Stabbed her all over just like Hank had done to Doris and that guy unlucky enough to cross his path.
When we got to the Temple Market, Horrible Heddy had her snout buried in the Union Leader, devouring every detail of the murders. I was afraid she’d remember what I’d told her about being bosom buddies with Hank, but she didn’t seem to have a clue about my association with the madman she was reading about. Not until Tina opened her big trap.
“Her father’s best friends with that maniac,” she reminded Heddy.
Heddy looked up from the paper, annoyed.
“Yeah, tell me another one. . . .”
“Her father says Hank cut off the guy’s you-know-what and fed it to the lady like a sausage,” Tina blurted out.
Heddy nearly fell over.
“Holy Christ!”
“It’s a sin to take the Lord’s name in vain,” Tina sniffed.
“The papers don’t say nothing about nobody cutting off anybody’s you-know-what.”
I figured now that the cat was out of the bag, I might as well try to impress Heddy with my inside knowledge.
“That’s ’cause the coppers are covering up for Hank. My dad says half of ’em been deer hunting with Hank and the other half wish they’d been.”
“Yeah, well, that ain’t gonna save him.”
“My dad says he’ll beat the rap.”
“Dream on. They’re gonna lock him up or string him up, one or the other.” She shook her head. “It just figures you project kids would know a lunatic.”
“I never met him,” Tina protested. “And I never want to. He might stab me in the eye.” She demonstrated with a Tootsie Roll what Hank might do to her.
I suddenly felt bad for Hank, felt the need to defend him, if for no other reason than that he was Susan’s father.
“He didn’t mean to do it. He was probably just trying to scare Doris. Anyway, she drove him to it.”
Heddy got as cold as that icicle I’d tried to stab Tina with.
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