He got up, and crossed to the patio doors, still flexing the saw, and stood listening for a moment. Then he stepped inside.
She had taken a quick shower, and now she was sitting in her bedroom brushing her hair and warbling happily to herself. Henry didn’t find it more difficult to kill happy people than he did to kill angry or frightened or miserable people. In fact, it was more satisfying if they died happy. He had an old-fashioned sense of what was right.
He walked into the bedroom without knocking. The off-white carpet was soft and quiet, and so she didn’t hear him. The television was showing a news report of angry parents who were picketing a newly-destreamed public school in Flagstaff. There was a queen-size bed with a white quilted satin bedspread, and white drapes; a white bedside telephone; a bottle of Nembutal. The door to the bathroom was still ajar, and inside, Henry could see Mar-got’s clothes strewn on the floor, her purple tent-dress, her slip, and one discarded sandal. Margot herself was
sitting in front of her white rococo dressing-table, wearing a white satin bathrobe with a large silver satin star sewn on to the back of it. She was pouting at herself as she lined her lips with Vivid Pink.
He thought: that’s a hangover from a long, long time ago. A pink like that, only a blonde would wear.
He came right up behind her, only a few inches away, and it was only then that she focused on his reflection in the mirror, and realized that he was there.
‘Well,’ she said, without turning around. She replaced the cap on her lip-liner, and reached for her blusher. ‘If I’d known you were the kind of guy who likes sneaking into a girl’s bedroom …’
‘What would you have done?’ he asked her. His pulse was still beating with that even, purposeful rhythm, but his voice sounded light and amused. On the television, an angry parent was saying, ‘I won’t have my child educated side by side with hoodlums and trouble-makers and ignorant Indians, that’s all. My child has a right to lead the life that / had.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I wouldn’t have asked you home.’
‘I knew you were going to ask me home the moment I set eyes on you,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes?’ Her voice was a little sharper.
‘No slight intended,’ said Henry. ‘I didn’t think you looked cheap, or easy, or even particularly lonely. But I could see what qualities you possessed, straight away. Star qualities, you know? You’re a star, in your own way.’
‘I wish I was.’
‘Oh, believe me,’ said Henry. He raised the flexible saw behind her back, his hands firmly grasping the two wooden handles, stretching the blade out until it was taut.
Margot Schneider touched up her cheeks with blusher, then pressed her lips tight together and stared at herself closely in the mirror, as if she wasn’t at all pleased with the way her face looked.
I should lose some weight, you know? But it’s so difficult when you don’t have anybody to lose weight for.’
‘Why don’t you lose it for me? I’m as good as anyone.’
‘I don’t suppose I shall ever see you again, shall I, after today? That’s the way they all are. Horny, tired, sick of business. All they need is one evening of comfort. Then they go back to their wives.’
While she rummaged in her dressing-table drawer, Henry raised the saw higher, until it was only a few inches above her head. ‘I’m so untidy,’ she said. They used to tell me that when I was a little girl, you know? I can never find anything.’
Henry said, ‘Look up. Look at yourself in the mirror. Now, what can you say about a woman who looks like that, at fifty-six?’
Margot Schneider kept on rummaging for a moment, and then froze. Henry could see the muscles in her back tighten up. It seemed like a whole minute before she spoke, and when she did, she sounded like someone else altogether, someone frightened and small.
‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ she whispered.
‘What do you mean? You’re Margot Schneider, that’s what you told me.’
‘You said fifty-six. How do you know I’m fifty-six?’
‘You told me.’
‘I never told you any such thing. I always tell people I’m fifty-one.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Henry. He was trying hard to make his voice sound normal, praying even harder that she wouldn’t turn around and see him standing right behind her with that thin whippy steel saw held upraised in both tense fists.
She said, in a haunted gush, ‘Haven’t I given enough? I never had anything to start with. Haven’t I given enough? For the love of God, all of you, you’ve taken everything!’
‘Listen, Margot - ‘ he told her.
‘Don’t lie to me,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve been taunting me all afternoon with it, haven’t you? Hollywood, the movies, the River Of No Return? and I was dumb enough not to understand what you were doing to me.’
He said, in a tone that was almost shocking because it
sounded so sincere, ‘Margot, believe me, I don’t think you’re anyone but Margot Schneider. Why should I?’
Seconds went past. One of the parents on the television snapped, ‘If they want guinea-pigs then let them use guinea-pigs. They’re not using my kids.’
Then, almost as if she knew what was going to happen, and had decided to accept it with the dignity of Joan of Arc, or Lady Jane Grey, Margot raised her head and stared at herself full-face in the mirror. In that instant, and in that last instant only, she looked just the way she had always looked in all her photographs, wide-eyed, surprised, frightened by everything she knew but even more frightened by everything she didn’t.
In that same instant, Henry Friend snapped the saw down past her face and pulled it tight against the flesh of her bare neck. He was so fast, he had trained for this single act of killing for so long, that she didn’t even have time to take in enough air to scream. All she made was a high inward gasp, and then Henry had ripped the saw hard to the right and hard to the left, tearing through soft white skin, through the strong sternocleidomastoid muscle at each side of the neck, through the fibrous sheath which contained the carotid artery, the jugular vein, and the vagus nerve.
He let out a loud, desperate, ‘Ah!’ of effort and horror, and then he gave one last rip to the right, and the wire-bladed saw pulled clear through the cartilage between her cervical vertebrae, and her head rolled off her shoulders and dropped with a hideous drumming noise on to her dressing-table, amongst her combs and her make-up.
Blood fountained spectacularly out of her gaping neck, gouting and splashing all over her mirror and halfway up the wall. Her body tilted off the stool and fell heavily to the floor still pumping pints of sticky red all over the white carpet, all over the bedspread, like some ghastly and unstoppable action-painting, Jackson Pollock in gore. One foot twitched and shuddered, and actually kicked off its fur-trimmed satin slipper.
It took Henry a long time to recover himself. He stared down at the floor because he couldn’t face the severed head which was lying on the dressing-table. The head was splattered with blood, but it still looked unnervingly alive, as if Margot’s eyes would suddenly roll and stare at him, as if Margot’s voice would whisper from its lips.
‘Jesus,’ he said to himself. He was shaking all over. He must be losing his nerve.
After two or three minutes, he turned away from the chaos of blood and went to the bathroom. It was still steamy and fragrant from Margot’s shower. He washed the saw under the basin faucets. The mirror was too cloudy for him to be able to see himself: all he could make out was a foggy pink face, an indeterminate monster from a past that was probably better forgotten, the ectoplasm of other people’s nightmares. Blood circled the basin and whorled around the drain.
He packed away the saw with the neatness of a professional workman. Then he left the bathroom, closing the door behind him, and walked straight across the bedroom, deliberately diverting his eyes from the dressing-table. He went into the kitchen and found a large green plastic trash bag under the sin
k. He peeled off his bloody surgeon’s gloves, rolled them up, and dropped them into the bag. For a moment, he closed his eyes, like a man with a migraine. But it had to be done. He returned to the bedroom, carrying the bag, and forced himself to step right up to the dressing-table and look down at Margot’s head.
It wasn’t the blood that disturbed him. He had seen plenty of blood before. Once, in Oklahoma City, he had crushed a young Italian up against a parking-lot wall in his car, and severed both of the boy’s legs, femoral arteries spouting blood like hoses. And aferwards, as he drove away on Kelley Avenue under a blue Oklahoma sky, he had lit a cigarette with a hand as steady as Black Mesa on a clear night. Blood was no problem. Blood was part of the job.
Yet, Margot’s head unsettled him badly. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because, historically, she was already
dead, twenty years buried; and while he might have succeeded in murdering her body, her personality had somehow survived this execution unscathed; as if Henry had done nothing more than lop the head off a waxwork dummy. Her life-force, her legend, remained intact. That inexplicable radiance that had always made her appear to be far greater and far more glamorous than she actually was - that radiance still shone. He had killed her, but she was still alive. For Henry, this wasn’t like the old days at all. It was too much like Hollywood voodoo, Sharon Tate and Jayne Mansfield and Anton LeVey. It was too much like Helter-Skelter. Henry looked down at her head, at the way she stared so intently and yet so blindly at her pots of cosmetics, at the garish blue tongue which was beginning to slide out from between her parted lips, at the congealing blood which had stuck up her hair like a coronet, or a coxcomb; and he knew that he was fated too. Twenty years of his life, for this. Twenty years to discover what doom really was.
He gingerly picked up the head by its sticky, blood-soaked scalp, and tumbled it into the green plastic bag. His stomach turned over, but he managed to keep the rest of his lunch down. He took one last look around the bedroom, deliberate and slow, making absolutely sure that he had left nothing behind which could identify him. In the living-room, he carefully collected up all the family portraits, and systematically went through every drawer and cupboard, searching for photographs and letters. It took him over an hour.
It was almost dark when he closed the door of Margot Schneider’s house behind him, and crossed the driveway to his car. He unlocked the trunk, and stowed the head carefully on top of the spare wheel, so that it wouldn’t roll around when he turned corners. He spread a plaid blanket over it, just in case. Then he climbed quickly into the car, started it up, and drove back down Oasis Drive without lights. In a few moments, he was speeding along Lincoln Drive, back towards 24th Street, where he would turn left for Sky Harbor airport.
The getaway contingency was simple. It had been devised years ago, when Henry had first started looking further afield than California. Henry would park the Oldsmobile at Sky Harbor’s long-term parking-lot, unscrew the licence-plates and peel off any special decals. Then, from the terminal, he would telephone his people in Los Angeles and tell them what had happened. While he boarded his flight at Phoenix, an exactly similar vehicle would be rented from the Avis desk at LAX, and by the time Henry arrived in Los Angeles, this new vehicle would be waiting for him, minus its licence-plates, in the LAX parking-lot. Henry would attach to it the plates from the car he had rented in Phoenix, and check it in to the Avis desk, making a point of telling the girls there how arduous the drive had been from Arizona. ‘And those dust storms, phew…!’
The accomplice who had rented the car from Los Angeles would fly to Phoenix with his licence-plates, screw them on to Henry’s old car, and then drive immediately to Las Vegas, and check it in there, pretending he had driven up from Los Angeles.
The switch would remain undiscovered until one or other of the cars was serviced; and even then the mechanics probably wouldn’t bother to check the vehicle numbers.
Henry turned on the radio as he drove south on 24th Street towards the airport. The yuccas on either side of the road were silhouetted against the evening sky like black-paper cutouts on a Carmen Miranda stage set. KTAR radio was playing Hotel California: ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave… .’ He lit a cigarette and his hands were trembling. Twenty years between killings was far too long. Twenty years between anything was far too long. He felt like a medieval mariner, hoary, bearded, hopeless, who had suddenly reached the brink of the world.
Two
Daniel was woken up by a loud, insistent purring, like a cat eating its breakfast. He opened his eyes and blinked at the sunlit adobe ceiling above him, and wondered for nearly a minute where he was, and what century he was in. He thought: Buck Rogers must have felt like this, when he woke up from that gas-filled mine in Pittsburgh and discovered that he was in the twenty-fifth century. Where am I, and who is this woman lying next to me, and why is she snoring so loudly?
She was a coppery redhead, although her hair was all that Daniel could see of her. He seemed to remember that her name was Cara. At least, that was what she had said it was. Hitch-hikers rarely told the truth, and it was a kind of unwritten law of the highway that they didn’t need to. It was enough that they were entertaining, or sexy, or both. Cara from South Dakota, making her way to the Coast. Daniel had been to South Dakota himself, playing the Treble Clef Club in Rapid City, and he didn’t find her story at all incredible. All that South Dakota was good for, as far as he could tell, was escaping from.
‘Hey,’ he said, gently shaking her shoulder.
‘Hmmph?’ she said, stretching herself out.
‘You’re snoring.’
She wrestled the sheet around herself. I am not, either,’ she told him, without opening her eyes. ‘Ladies never snore.’
‘Oh no? Well, what’s that purring noise you’re making?’
‘Emphatic breathing,’ she said. ‘Now, let me get some sleep, will you? It isn’t even dawn, for God’s sake.’
Daniel leaned over and looked at her in close-up. ‘It’s six-fifteen,’ he announced. T have to be open at seven.’ He decided that he still had pretty good taste in women after all, as long as she didn’t have herpes. She was sharp-faced, white-skinned, and big-breasted, with those wide flaring hips that always reminded him of milkmaids.
It was amazing the women you could encounter on the highway between Superior and Phoenix on a hot Thursday evening, or any evening, come to that. Vassar graduates, lady truck drivers, hookers, viola players, feminist activists, gambling shills; and now Cara.
She kept on snoring, deep and low, but Daniel couldn’t really complain about it. Last night, after the last of his customers had gone home, she had helped him to stack the dishes and clean up; and then, sweet and high on good red wine and Bruce Springsteen records, she had tumbled among the sheets with him with such fun and energy and unembarrassed lust that it had taken all his self-control not to let out his famous window-vibrating rebel yell, just for the sheer joy of it. This morning, his back and thighs were scratched like Brer Rabbit in the brambles, and his lips felt as if they had been caught up in a catering-sized garlic press.
He climbed stiffly out of bed, and the springs squeaked. His jeans and his T-shirt were crumpled up on the bare-boarded floor in the most peculiar heap, as if he had leaped out of them last night without even undoing them. The large Mickey Mouse alarm clock on the bureau said 6:20. He yawned so hard that he almost dislocated his jaw, and sniffed.
Susie was standing just outside the door, in her long pink Mary Poppins nightdress. She watched him silently as he took out a clean shirt and dressed, and then followed him along the corridor as he went to pee and to throw cold water in his face. It was only when he had risen from the depths of his towel to stare at himself in the cracked bathroom mirror that she said anything.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked. She was seven, with blonde braids, and a pretty little perky face, and china-blue eyes. Just like her mother. Mega-cute.
‘That’s, er, Car
a. Cara from South Dakota.’
Is she staying for breakfast?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Do you like her?’
Daniel stared down at Susie for a long time. In the end,
he said, ‘I don’t know yet. We haven’t really done a whole lot of talking.’
‘But she’s staying for breakfast?’
‘Sure. We didn’t argue or anything.’
‘And you don’t hate yourself? And she doesn’t hate herself?’
‘I don’t know. She’s still asleep. If s kind of hard to assess how much you like or dislike yourself when you’re still asleep.’
I can sing when I’m asleep.’
Daniel shuffled down the narrow wooden stairs to the old-fashioned Mexican-style kitchen. Susie followed him, with all the intentness of a concerned wife. Daniel opened up the huge Amana icebox and began to take out bacon strips and eggs and hamburger patties and sausage links in preparation for the morning stampede. In addition, there would be two gallons of coffee to perk, three dozen oranges to press, twenty-five buns to be sliced and nine tables to be laid. He drank a large gulp of grapefruit juice straight from the carton, and helped himself to a handful of stale Cheetos.
Susie said, ‘It’s time you settled down, you know.’
‘Settled down?’ Daniel demanded. T am settled down. What could be more settled down than living here with you, doing what I’m doing?’
‘I mean you could marry.’
Daniel shook his head. ‘I tried it. You know that. I’m not the right type for marriage. I don’t have the right amino-acid chains for marriage. Besides, I’m allergic to fidelity. It brings me out in hives.’
‘You’ve been faithful to me.’
‘You’re my daughter. Being faithful to your children is different.’
Susie toyed with the magnetic clips stuck to the front of the icebox. ‘Don’t you ever think about mommy, ever?’
‘You know I do. Your mommy was the prettiest lady who ever lived. And to prove it, you’re the prettiest daughter who ever lived. But she wanted something else,
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