Choice of Evil

by Andrew Vachss

  She gave me a wondering look, trying to read my face. Good luck.

  “If that’s true, how come the cigarette companies don’t advertise it?” she finally asked.

  “You can get it other places besides cigarettes,” I told her. “In stronger doses too. Over-the-counter, any health-food store.”

  “So why would you—?”

  “These taste better,” I said.

  “Oh. So what you really are is a junkie, huh?”

  “Nah,” I told her, “I could stop anytime I wanted.”

  She folded her arms again and stared hard at me. I wondered if she’d go for it. For me, quitting cigarettes is a sucker bet. I can do it. Done it a bunch of times. It’s just a shuck. There was a girl once. In another town. Another world. Her name was Blossom, and she was a doctor. She bet me I couldn’t stop smoking for a week. I still remember the payoff. And her promise—the one she made when she left. The one I’d never hold her to.

  But Nadine wasn’t having any. Or maybe she wasn’t a gambler. “Sure,” is all she said, not leaving the door open enough.

  Pansy strolled around, sniffing occasionally just for the fun of it. She knew she couldn’t snarf something off the ground—I’d trained her never to do that—but she liked the smell of discarded fast-food containers anyway.

  “So what’s this about?” Nadine asked, once she realized I was just going to relax and have my smoke without saying anything to her until I was done.

  “There might be a way you could help,” I told her. “It all depends on whether you’re telling me the truth. And if your pal was telling you the truth.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “And how good a pal he really is,” I continued, like I hadn’t heard her.

  “She’s a really good pal,” Nadine said.

  “We’ll see. There’s no risk pulling up a guy’s rap sheet. Even if they check the computer log-on record, she wouldn’t need much of an excuse to explain why she wanted to know more about me. . . especially with this open pattern-killer running. But taking a look at those cases themselves. . . “

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is this pal of yours actually assigned? I mean, is she on the task force they got or whatever?”

  “I don’t under—”

  “There’s a case running, right? A bunch of them. The killings in the park, that’s one. I already talked to the two slugs who’re working it. But the others—the ones this Homo Erectus guy is doing—no way there’s only a two-man team assigned to that. There’s got to be more. A lot more. Too much press for it to be otherwise. So, first thing, is your pal involved in that, yes or no?”

  “I. . . don’t know.”

  “Jesus. Look, like I said, I don’t know how you play. And that’s none of my business. But I also don’t know how you talk, and that is, understand?”

  “No, I don’t,” she snapped back, turning toward me, face tilted up, jaw out-thrust, hands on hips.

  “Well, then, I’ll explain it to you,” I said, keeping my voice as measured as my words. “Every crew has its own language. Sometimes it overlaps, sometimes it doesn’t. In prison, they call everything outside ‘the World.’ That’s what they call it in the army too. But if someone told you they were ‘waiting to get back to the World,’ it wouldn’t mean squat, right? Okay, you say someone’s your friend, what does it mean? Depends on your own language, see? I need to know what words mean to you if I’m going to do anything with you. Otherwise, we’re walking down a trail, I say ‘Duck!,’ and you think I’m pointing out a fucking mallard.”

  “You think gay people—?”

  “How about if you actually try listening to me, okay? I’m not talking about subcultural crap, I’m talking. . . just you, all right? Just tell me, Nadine. Tell me this. When you say this woman’s your ‘pal,’ what’s that mean? You took a roll with her one time? You’re in love? You go back to high school together? You can trust her? How much? With what? You understand what I’m saying now?”

  She moved her hands to behind her back, flexing so her biceps popped. Took a step back. Looked up at me. “She’s my. . . you know that skinny blonde I was with? The first time you came to the place?”

  “I remember her.”

  “This one’s like. . . her. She’ll do what I tell her.”

  “That doesn’t overlap,” I told her.

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means just because she’ll lick your boots or whatever master-slave games you play doesn’t mean she’ll do what you tell her outside of sex.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “Yeah, I do. I know it enough not to trust it. And that’s all I ever need to know.”

  “You think she wouldn’t obey me? I could walk her on a leash right up Broadway if I wanted.”

  “Yeah, how very dom of you. It’s not the same.”

  “Maybe not between men and women. Or even men and men. But with me, they all—”

  “Sure. Look, I’m not going to argue with you. I’m not about arguing.”

  “So what are you about?”

  “Testing.”

  “And what’s the test?” she said, moonlight glinting in her cobalt eyes, lips slightly apart, excited now, eager to show me how much control she had over her pets.

  “I might have a way to get in contact with this guy,” I said softly. “A long shot. But I’d need a credential. Something to prove I was in the know. And something to test him with too—make sure I was dealing with the right guy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ever since they started working these murders as a group, they’ve been keeping all the evidence in one place. Forensic stuff, I’m talking about. Crime-scene photos too. The papers say a guy was stabbed to death, all right? But they don’t say anything about how many times he got stuck, or in what places, or even whether it was a Bowie knife or an ice pick. . . . You get the picture?”

  “I. . . think so.”

  “When something like this happens, it brings out the loons. I promise you, guys with loose wing-nuts have been confessing for weeks. On top of that, you get freaks who thrill themselves pretending to be the killer. No way the letters the papers have been printing are the only ones they got. So how would they know which ones were righteous and which ones were scams? Details. He sends them a little something each time. Just so they know they’re dealing with the real thing. That’s what I need too.”

  “How come? Why would you need—?”

  “Look, let’s say there’s a place I could leave a message. Not for him, specifically, but a place where he might look for messages. I tell him I want to talk, okay? He’s got to know I’m the real deal. And if he answers, I’ve got to know he is too, see?”

  “I don’t see. How could you. . .?”

  “That’s my problem. Your problem is whether you can make this other girl do what you tell her outside the bedroom.”

  “Just tell me what you want,” Nadine said, voice hardening.

  “Just a piece,” I lied. “A little piece. Something they’d use as a polygraph key—tell your pal that, she’ll know what you mean.”

  “Yes, but I don’t.”

  “Then ask her, okay? Or order her, however it is that you all communicate. I don’t have time to screw around with this. Either you really have something to ante up or you don’t.”

  “I. . . All right, you’re saying I get this ‘polygraph key’ and then I’m in?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “And if I don’t, I’m out?”

  “That too.”

  “Even after what I told you?”

  “What? That fairy story about how you love this guy? You’re a power freak, so what? I already figured that one out.”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  “The only thing I want to do with your ass is watch it walk away,” I told her.

  She stepped close to me, stood on her toes, her chest brushing mine. “You’re a liar,” she said softly.
>
  “Behavior is the truth,” I answered, blocking her game-player’s jab. Then I turned away and snapped my fingers for Pansy to come.

  She was quiet on the drive back. At least for a few minutes. When I lit another smoke, she pointedly hit the switch for her window. I did the same for mine.

  “I’m cold,” she said, something different in her voice. . . too ghosty for me to grab.

  “You want the heater on? It’s got to be seventy degrees out.”

  “No. I’m just not. . . dressed right,” she said, hugging herself. She wasn’t wrong about that—the lemon silk T-shirt she was wearing showed her off real good, but it was about the same as going topless when it came to weather protection. And you didn’t need X-ray eyes to see she wasn’t wearing anything under it.

  “I’ve got a blanket in the trunk,” I told her.

  “Why can’t I just wear your jacket?”

  “Because it’s full of stuff that’s none of your business.”

  “Like. . . what? A gun?”

  “There’s that thing about language again,” I told her. “What does ‘none of your business’ mean to you?”

  “Fine,” she sniffed.

  I snapped my cigarette out the window. “Thank you,” she said, sending her own closed. I did the same.

  “Better now?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  She went quiet again. I shoved in a cassette, turned one of the dials to crank the bass heavier toward the rear of the car—Pansy likes the bass lines best.

  “Who’s that?” she asked after a couple of minutes.

  “Judy Henske.”

  “Oh, wow. She’s. . . great. I never even heard of her. Is she, like, old or something?”

  “How old does she sound?”

  “Like she’s about thirty-five. . . and like she’s lived a couple of centuries.”

  “Good call,” I told her, letting Judy’s fire-and-velvet voice roll over us both. That particular tape was all estrogen—KoKo Taylor, Katie Webster, Etta James, Marcia Ball, Irma Thomas, Little Esther, Janis, La Vern Baker, Big Mama.

  “I never heard any of that,” she said toward the end. “Ever.”

  “Then you’ve been cheated, girl.”

  “Are any of them. . . alive. I mean. . .”

  “Marcia Ball was in town last week. Judy’s on the coast. KoKo’s still working. Sure.”

  “Would you take me? I mean, take me to hear some of that. . . what is it, anyway?”

  “It’s what you call it. To me, it’s the blues.”

  “But it doesn’t make you blue. I mean, the songs are. . . sad. Some of them. But that one, the engineer one, that was. . .”

  “Raucous?” I asked her. Magic Judy’s “Oh, You Engineer” puts it right in your face—you want her to ride your train, you better have one hell of a motor.

  “Yeah. She sounds so tough.”

  “She’s a mean woman, no question.”

  “Not like. . . nasty, right?”

  “No. One who can take care of herself.”

  “And you like that? In a woman?”

  “That’s all I do like,” I said, telling her the truth for once.

  “What you said to me before. . . when I told you to kiss my ass.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  I didn’t say anything, thinking of where my line had come from: a stripper I knew a long time ago, standing in front of a mirror, looking back over her shoulder to make sure the black seams on her nylons were straight. . . “My butt is my best feature. The only time a man ever really fell in love with me was when I was walking away from him.”

  Silence filled the car. I didn’t switch tapes—we were only a few blocks from the joint where I was going to drop her off.

  “You don’t know what to do with an apology, do you?” she finally asked.

  “Sure.”

  “No, you don’t. I apologized for what I said. Now it’s your turn.”

  “I got nothing to apologize for,” I told her, pulling to the curb.

  She opened the door, turned to face me, said, “You know you lied,” and slammed the door behind her.

  Things were quiet for a few days. I invested a lot of time trying to put a sweet little sting together, but it wouldn’t mesh. So I passed. That’s the way I do business—safely or not at all. Impatience imprisons.

  The city stayed edgy. Then the director of one of the above-ground pedophile organizations turned the key to start his pretty new car and drove straight to hell. The radio report said the car exploded right in the freak’s driveway.

  First Amendment absolutists wrote frenzied letters to newspaper editors, bemoaning a country where a person could be executed for expressing unpopular opinions. They didn’t sign their names. Talk shows were loaded with pious pigs droning about the wages of sin. The cops said they had some suspects, but no prime ones.

  For all that, the smart money was that the hit was personal, not political. The major pedophile organizations love to publish their little “Enemies Lists,” especially on the Net. But if they knew how long that list really was, they’d spend the money on bulletproof vests instead.

  Still, the group the dead man had headed decided they needed it to be political, milk it for the mileage. So they announced a candlelight vigil would be held outside Gracie Mansion—the Mayor’s house.

  They were standing there, mourning their loss for the TV cameras, when somebody who knew how to use a grenade launcher took seven of them out with one blast.

  The snuff film was a big hit on the networks. But nobody put it together—in fact, most of them were a hundred and eighty degrees off—until the next letter arrived.

  There are many ways to oppress gays. Fag-bashing is the most obvious, but not the most devastating. Physical attacks on homosexuals are not only tolerated by the general community, but covertly encouraged. These are known facts. What is not known is that much of the animosity against gays is fueled by the utterly false belief that a pedophile is a homosexual run amok. Journalism has been complicitous in this fraud. The very newspaper in which this is being printed is a prime example. Remember the headline: “Teacher Arrested in Homosexual Child Abuse”? That story involved a kindergarten teacher and a five-year-old boy. Ask yourselves—and this is addressed to the journalism community as well—if the victim had been a little girl, would the headlines have screamed “Heterosexual Child Abuse!”? You know the answer. Much of this is ignorance, but some of it is by design. Pedophiles have carefully self-styled as “gay,” seeking to extend the continuum of tolerance for homosexual relations between consenting adults to the rape of children. How many pedophiles have camouflaged themselves as “gay activists” in order to use the old “First they came for the Jews” canard to terrify gays into some “common cause” nonsense? Gays hate child molesters as much as straights do. Some of us, more so. Some of us victims much more so. After careful consideration, I have concluded that pedophiles who insist on being labeled “homosexual” are equally guilty of fag-bashing. Now they will pay the same price. Watch your language!

  It was signed with the “Homo Erectus” tag. Nobody questioned its authenticity—the body count had wiped out any doubts.

  The city reeked of fear.

  I missed not paying taxes. Juan Rodriguez died in the attack on my office. Sooner or later, IRS would go looking for him. That wasn’t a problem, but the No Visible Means of Support was. Or it would be, if I got popped again. And I felt that coming—IRS wasn’t in a hurry, but the cops were. They would have paraded one of the outpatients who confessed in front of the cameras by now, doing the whole Perp Walk thing, but they knew what would happen next—the killer would show the world that it was phony. And who knows? Maybe he’d decide that promoting a bogus confession was a kind of gay-bashing too. Nobody wanted to walk into that minefield. But arresting me was no big risk. They wouldn’t have to tell the papers I was suspected of the actual murders, just recite any lame routine about “conspir
acy” or “aiding and abetting” and it would take the heat off them for a while. With my record, I’d qualify perfectly for remand without bail—history of violence, no roots in the community, significant risk of flight to avoid. . .

  The best way to lock in a bogus ID is to have it keep up its tax payments while you’re someplace where you couldn’t. I figured I was going down soon as the cops found me, and I wanted the new name in place first. That way, I could start the withholding and Social Security and all the other government crap rolling first, and let it build while I was Inside. Davidson would spring me sooner or later—it’s happened before—and I could get something out of it.

  But I couldn’t hunt from Inside, so I couldn’t stay there too long. My plan was to have Davidson walk me in again, soon as Wolfe came through with the ID. Pansy can get her own food. I have this six-foot-high metal box with a lip at the bottom that she can shove with her snout to make the dry dog food drop. And a hundred-gallon water bottle inverted in place so she can drink, too. It’d be good for a couple of months, minimum, and there’s plenty of space for her to roam around. It’s not perfect, and I felt bad the last time it happened, but there’s nobody to leave her with. I mean, she wouldn’t go after Max, but she wouldn’t go with him either.

  We talked it over once, me and him. If I ever went away for a long stretch again, I told Max to tranq her out and then move her over to Elroy’s. He’s a crazed counterfeiter who lives in a shack out in the country with a pit bull who gets along with Pansy. I know she’d stay there peacefully—she did it before. Elroy had wanted Pansy and his dog to get together, create a brand-new breed. But they were pals, not lovers, and he finally accepted it.

  There was nothing else I had to worry about. Everyone in my family could take care of themselves. And each other. I didn’t have bills to pay or a landlord to worry about. My family had too much sense to come on visiting day. Crystal Beth would have come no matter what they told her, I thought. I cut that off quick, before it started to hurt.

  I was ready, just waiting on the ID.

  Then I got a call, and everything changed again.