Choice of Evil

by Andrew Vachss

  A car swept by. Nobody saw it good enough to say much except that it was a dark color, moving fast. Gunfire poured from the windows. At least two guns—they found that from the ballistics lab later. Five people went down. Two dead. One of them was my Crystal Beth. The car flew north, disappeared somewhere in Harlem.

  That didn’t prove anything—didn’t mean it was their home base. There’s a hundred ways out of Harlem: bridges, tunnels, alleys. Underground garages where you could stash a car and switch to the subway.

  The first thought was that the drive-by had to be about the dope business—a typical triggerboy spray-and-pray hose-down job. One of the guns had been a Tec-9, so that sounded right. For about a minute. Then it went on the books the same way the streets already had it—as a hate crime.

  Fag-bashers all over the city were high-fiving.

  Then they started dropping.

  The first three weren’t hard to connect. They’d been convicted of beating a gay man to death after luring him into a playground at night. Aluminum baseball bats and bicycle chains were all they needed, although one of them stabbed him a few times after he was dead. Didn’t take a psychologist to figure out that last part.

  One rolled over immediately, took a short manslaughter hit in exchange for his testimony. The other two went to trial. The lawyers got a lot of camera time. And their clients got a lot of time Upstate—a pair of life sentences.

  But then the appellate courts reversed all the convictions—said the cases should have been severed for trial. So everything was voided, even the guilty plea. All three got bail pending a retrial. The gay community protested. Got a lot of TV coverage. Changed nothing.

  Then two of them got done. They’d been living together. Sleeping together too, I guess—they were found in the same bed, what was left of them.

  The third one, the informer, he must have figured it out—or thought he did. He called the cops, asking them to take him back Inside while he waited for the trial. The cops said they were sending someone right over. I guess the guy opened the door himself. Whoever he opened it to stuck an ice pick into his spine. Then hacked his head off with a butcher knife while the fag-basher watched himself die, paralyzed.

  The reason the cops knew that, they found the victim’s phone had been tapped into. And rerouted. When the third one had dialed 911, he’d been talking to his doom.

  And while the cops were wasting time grilling the family and friends of the gay man who’d been murdered, some “Christian” organization took out a full-page ad saying homosexuals needed to “convert” or burn in hell.

  That night, every TV news show ran clips of the organization’s spokesman saying, “AIDS is God’s cure for homos,” and other, similar sound bites.

  The next day, the spokesman was napping in a hammock in the backyard of his estate when a long-distance rifle shot opened his left eye. Opened a bigger hole in the back of his head.

  One of the picketers at the funeral of the murdered gay man—the one holding the sign saying his death was God’s Good Riddance—got a UPS package. And got a real bang out of it.

  But it was the poisoned black-market steroids that killed the bodybuilder—the one who kept in shape with fag-bashing—that finally persuaded the cops.

  They managed to keep the connection between the victims out of the papers. But the killer trumped them by going public.

  Be warned! These attacks have not been indiscriminate. All the targets were predators, and homosexuals were their prey. Queer-bashing is no longer a risk-free sport. For too long, the gay community has tolerated assaults in the vain hope that protection would come from outsiders. Be warned: now we hunt.

  The first radio station to receive the tape with the machine-altered voice had played good citizen and turned it over to the cops. But it wasn’t long before another station decided it couldn’t pass up the chance for a ratings score. Once it went out over the airwaves, the dam was breached. The flood followed.

  A short time after I met Crystal Beth, we got into a war. A war to keep our house safe. It took all of us. And all we had. Just before I left for the showdown, Crystal Beth said she wanted to have my baby. That last time, as we parted before I went out to do my work, she asked me. Of all the women in my life, she was the only one who’d ever asked. Flood had told me she’d thought about it, had been thinking about it, but she went back to Japan and I never saw her again. Belle loved me. Died for me. But she knew her blood was bad—she was her sister’s daughter, and she’d never pass that along. I’ve had sex with so many women. I liked some of them; some of them had liked me. But it was only Crystal Beth who’d wanted my child.

  I’d told her the truth then. I can’t make babies. Had myself fixed a long time ago. Not because my blood was bad, like Belle’s. I don’t know my blood. “Baby Boy Burke” is all it says on my birth certificate. It’s not my blood that stopped me—it’s that I know blood doesn’t mean anything.

  But the cops had this much right: when Crystal Beth was taken from me, I needed to spill some.

  Only I couldn’t find the shooters.

  And while I was looking, this other guy kept killing the tribe they came from.

  Trolling for freaks in this city is no different from poling a skiff through a swamp, hunting for gators. They don’t have to be smart to be dangerous. And you better not fall in the water.

  The gay community already had one of the usual arrest-and-conviction bounties out on the drive-by killers. There was government money too. The lame Mayor caught so much heat the last time he opened the public coffers for reward money—for that “gay serial killer” who’d never even crossed our borders—that he was an easy mark. But even a total of more than a hundred grand didn’t turn up a trace. Oh yeah, the pay phones were clogged with quarters from informants, but not a single tip proved out.

  Then a skinhead clubhouse in Queens blew up. The whole thing. Maybe a half-dozen of them inside. Impossible to tell—too many body parts to match into complete sets. The radio stations played his tape right away this time. Short and sweet:

  Skinheads all hate fags. This was always stupid. Always a mistake. Now it’s a mistake to be a skinhead. A fatal mistake. See you soon, boys.

  They should have known what would happen at the gay-pride parade. The cops, I mean. It takes them longer because they act as a herd.

  Or maybe they thought he’d only react to actual violence. When the first two drunks jeering at the queers dropped like they’d suffered heart attacks, the cops started running toward them. But by the time they figured it was him—had to be him, firing from a rooftop, scoped and suppressed—he was gone.

  So were the two drunks—heavy-caliber hollowpoints tend to do that to you.

  A pervert who ran something called Homo-Haters Gazette—a website featuring news of “successful actions” against gays around the world—must have thought the letter he got was fan mail. The cops couldn’t determine from the few fragments that they found. And they couldn’t interview a guy with a severed brainstem.

  “They want you for it.” Morales, on the phone, voice like a bulldozer in a garden.

  “Get real,” I told him.

  “Just did,” he said. “Straight up. They don’t know where you are, but they’re looking.”

  “So. . .?”

  “You should come in. I know this one ain’t yours.”

  “Thanks.”

  “For what? You not slick enough to be sending no letter bombs, pal.”

  “I can find out,” Davidson said, puffing on his cigar. “But if I make the inquiry, that alone will. . .”

  “I know,” I told him. “Do it.”

  “Give me a call, uh, tomorrow. Before ten.”

  “Done.”

  “Burke. . .?”

  “What?”

  “Anything you want to tell me?”

  “I got nothing to do with this one. Any of them.”

  Davidson nodded, not doubting. If I’d killed anyone, I would have told him. He was sure of that—I’
d done it before. He was a good lawyer, knew all the tricks. He wanted to get paid, but he did the work. Better than most, that last part.

  “You can’t stay here,” Lorraine said, the second she crossed the threshold to Crystal Beth’s place.

  “I know,” I replied.

  She didn’t know what to say to that; a look of surprise froze on her face. “I. . . didn’t mean you had to get out this minute,” she said stiffly. “I just meant. . . I mean, you know why we set this place up. You know what we do. Having a man here. . .”

  “I understand. I’ll be out in twenty-four hours. It’s not like I got a lot of stuff to pack.”

  Pansy’s enormous head swiveled back and forth, following the conversation but dismissing the woman as a threat.

  “Burke. . .”

  “What?”

  “I never liked you,” Lorraine said. “But I know what you did for. . . us. Before, I mean. And I know you loved. . . her.”

  “Crystal Beth. You can say her name.”

  “Maybe you can. It. . . hurts me just to. . .”

  “All right. Never mind. I told you, I’ll be out in—”

  “Do you think they’ll ever catch him?”

  “The guy who killed her?”

  “No. The guy who’s killing all of. . . them.”

  I shrugged.

  “You don’t care?” she asked, an extra-aggressive tone sliding into her already hard voice.

  “What are you asking me, Lorraine?”

  “If he were to. . . kill them all, he’d get the one who killed. . . her, right?”

  “Kill every fucking fag-basher in the city? Right. That’d do it.”

  “I wish he would. I wish I could.”

  “So why don’t you give him a hand?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why? Because it’s a gay thing?”

  “It’s a woman thing.”

  “Yeah? Then how come you keep saying the killer’s a man? It’s easy enough to alter a voice on tape.”

  “He is a man. Everyone knows that. I meant. . . Crystal Beth. Her. And me. Between us. You could never get that.”

  “And that’s what you hate me for?”

  “I didn’t say I hated you. I said I never liked you.”

  “You know what, Lorraine? I never liked you either.”

  “That matter we discussed the other day?” Davidson’s voice, treading carefully over the line at Mama’s.

  “Yeah.”

  “Your. . . surmise was, in fact, reasonably accurate. The individuals to whom you referred have expressed a desire for an interview, but they cannot seem to locate the. . . object of their interest.”

  Meaning: yes, the cops want to talk to you, and no, they don’t know where you are.

  “You think this ‘interview’ should take place?” I asked him.

  “Assuming the factual content of the material you imparted during our prior conversation is unchanged, I do. If only to. . . reorient their interest.”

  Meaning: yes, if I really had nothing to do with the murders, I should go in and talk to the cops, answer their questions, show them they were wasting their time so they’d leave me alone.

  “Set it up,” I told him.

  “What do you need a lawyer for, you coming in here to assist us with our investigation and all?” the sandy-haired plainclothes cop asked me, nodding his head in Davidson’s direction.

  “Oh, I’d be scared to come here by myself,” I told him. “I heard you guys do terrible things to people when nobody’s watching.”

  “A comedian, too?” his partner asked, a short guy with a round face and a boozer’s nose.

  “Me? Nah. I even heard you guys sometimes put a telephone book on top of a guy’s head and whack it with a nightstick. Doesn’t leave marks, but it kind of scrambles your brains.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” the sandy-haired one asked.

  “My brains are still scrambled from the last one, and that was a long time ago,” I told him, nice and quiet, but letting him know I was done dancing. “You’ve been looking for me. Okay, here I am. You want to ask me some questions, do it. You don’t, see you around.”

  “My client is here at the request of the DA’s Office,” Davidson put in. “Since he’s not a suspect, I assume you won’t be Miranda-izing him?”

  “Sure, counselor,” the one with the boozer’s nose said. He opened a notebook, looked over at me. “Name?”

  “See you around,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “Hold it!” the sandy-haired one said. “What’s your problem?”

  “I don’t have a problem. You guys do. I came here, in good faith, because I thought you thought I could help you. You know who I am. You got my rap sheet and my mug shots right there in front of you. What else you want to know?”

  “A current address would be nice.”

  “Sure as hell would,” I told him. “Problem is, I don’t have one.”

  “You’re homeless, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “So you’re sleeping in the shelters?”

  “I look that fucking stupid to you?”

  “Hey, Johnny, relax,” the boozer-nosed one said to his partner. “Burke here, he got a lot of friends he could stay with. Besides, they don’t let no dogs in the shelters, right?”

  “What dog?” I asked him.

  “Ah, it’s gonna be like that.”

  “Last chance,” I said, meaning it.

  “Okay, okay. Relax. Come on. Let’s just deal like men, all right?” the sandy-haired one lied. “We know your girlfriend was one of the ones killed in that drive-by, at that queer rally.”

  I looked at him like I was watching a TV test pattern.

  “And we figured, maybe, you’d like to find the guys who did that.”

  I kept looking at him.

  “And we know you’ve been asking around. . . .”

  “Do you?” I said, uninterested.

  “Yeah, we do. We got a witness to it, all ready to walk in and talk to a grand jury.”

  “And the crime is. . . what? Asking questions? That was true, all reporters would be doing life.”

  “And we got a bunch of fucking murders,” he went on. “All fag-bashers. So, the way we figure, somebody don’t like fag-bashers. Brilliant so far, huh?”

  “About up to par,” I acknowledged.

  “And we figure, there’s at least one, maybe two, or even three fag-bashers that you don’t like.”

  “Oh. You mean, you solved that case? You got the shooters.”

  “You’re one sarcastic motherfucker, aren’t you? How about this one, Mister Burke. How about you tell us where you were on the thirteenth? Say, between four in the afternoon and eleven at night?”

  “I can’t remember,” I said flatly. “You know how it is, drifting around, looking for a place to stay.”

  “So you got no alibi for that time?”

  “I got no alibi for any time,” I promised him.

  “You fit,” boozer-nose said.

  “Fit what?”

  “The profile. Everyone knows you’re a revenge freak. They killed your girlfriend, so you. . .”

  “I what? I don’t know who did it. You know, why don’t you tell me, find out if your theory’s correct?”

  “We don’t know,” the sandy-haired one said. “And we figure, you don’t, either. So maybe you’re just working your way through the whole list.”

  “You know why I came in here?” I asked him. “You know the real reason?”

  “No. Why don’t you tell us.”

  “I came in because I thought you guys were actually trying to get whoever killed Crystal Beth. I thought maybe you knew who it was, but you didn’t have enough to arrest them. And that maybe you were going to let that. . . slip, understand? Then you’d close the case. Call it ‘exceptional clearance’ and keep your stats up. But now I see what’s going on. All this bullshit game-playing crap. You think it’s me? That I’m a fucking serial killer? Jesus H.—
”

  “Hey, pal, it’s not like you never—”

  “Never what? Went around whacking people for the freakish fun of it?”

  “Nothing freakish about it,” boozer-nose assured me. “Somebody did my girlfriend, I’d wanna take ’em out too.”

  “And if you knew it was a Spanish guy, you’d kill every Latino in New York?” I asked him.

  “Gentlemen,” Davidson interjected. “It is quite obvious that my client is unable to meaningfully assist in your investigation. And that you are not going to arrest him. I am quite certain of the former. Unless I am mistaken about the latter, we are, in fact, leaving.”

  I followed Davidson out the door. Neither of the cops said anything.

  “That’s really why you wanted to come in?” Davidson asked me in the car on the way over to his office.

  “Yeah. It happens. Some cases, they close ’em that way: ‘Exceptional clearance.’ Means they know who did it, but they can’t prove it. Every once in a while, it eats at a cop, and he lets a name slip out. . . to somebody who just might do something about it.”

  “You figure they wanted you to kill the guys who—?”

  “How could they lose? Not only do they close one case, they get a beautiful new felony handed them on a platter, complete with perpetrator. One step closer to that gold shield.”

  “I thought I was cynical,” Davidson said.

  “You are,” I assured him.

  But nothing happened. Nothing changed. There’s a million places to live in this city, but it’s hard to find one off the radar screen. The Mole had done it. Even if you suspected he lived in an underground bunker in a Hunts Point junkyard, you wouldn’t go poking around there to make sure. The Prof used to live in the subways until he hooked up with Clarence. Then they found a crib over in East New York, right off one of the prairies. Bought the whole building, a gray brick eight-flat, for a song and started the rehab. Only they’re never going to have tenants. They offered to let me stay, but they blended into that neighborhood and I didn’t. It wouldn’t take long for somebody to notice.