Gray Matter

by Shirley Kennett

  When she was gone, Schultz put down his fork. “Odd that she should mention humming.”

  “I noticed,” said PJ. “I’ve been thinking about that, from a psychological point of view. Sometimes humming is just a nervous habit that people pick up, like drumming their fingers or biting their nails. It’s an example of a stress reaction, when people are repeatedly caught between the fight and flight responses. They can’t lash out directly at what’s causing the stress, and they can’t get away from it either. The body is prepared for physical confrontation, but the mind says no. The physical response leaks out, so to speak, and the person bites his nails or develops a twitch or pops his knuckles. Or hums. That’s probably what’s happening with the cook. Maybe he hates his job, thinks he could do better, but is trapped for some reason.”

  “Aren’t we all,” said Schultz, as he mopped up egg yolk with a piece of toast. PJ averted her eyes. Although she herself ate eggs occasionally, they were always thoroughly cooked. She thought of runny egg yolks as liquid chicks.

  “So the cook probably has a mild stress disorder. But there is a more serious aspect. Some mentally ill people hum as a disassociative technique. It occupies their senses, like white noise, in order to block out an underlying chaos. Incessant humming, or a variation such as whistling or thumb-twiddling, is also seen in people with dementia, like Alzheimer’s patients, who are trying to cope with a slippery mental organization.”

  “You saying our creep’s senile?”

  PJ smiled. “No. I do think, though, that he might be humming to distance himself from what he’s doing, or from what some part of him is doing, during the killing. He could be a multiple personality, although that is more common with women.”

  “Could the killer be a woman?” Schultz said. “We’ve checked out Katrina thoroughly. She has a solid alibi for the time of the Burton killing, but can’t prove her whereabouts after she left the hotel the first time.”

  “I don’t think that fits the profile, but anything’s possible.”

  Schultz paused for a moment. The cook had come through the swinging door from the kitchen with a mop and pail. The sound of classical music drifted out to the counter while the door was open, then was abruptly cut off.

  “Could be this place is getting too high class for me,” Schultz said. “That didn’t sound like the stuff Millie usually plays. Next we’ll have cloth napkins and candles on the tables and more forks than we know what to do with. Hey, cook,” Schultz said, gesturing at the man wielding the mop, “good eggs.”

  The cook turned and gave him a thumbs-up, then went back to his mopping. He was, for the moment at least, not humming, although his lips were pressed together as though he was having difficulty keeping the humming inside.

  Schultz and PJ got refills of their coffee and tea. Schultz wanted to go over the computer simulation in detail, as if he needed to hear it from PJ, as well as see it on the screen. So she talked him through it, then told him she was anxious to get going. She paid her bill, left a dollar tip, and headed out. She turned at the door to tell Schultz that she wasn’t going to be in the office the rest of the day or Sunday either, and saw a curious tableau.

  Kelly had retreated to the far end of the diner for a modicum of privacy and was pushing up on her considerable bosom with one hand and adjusting her bra strap with the other. Schultz was hunched at the counter, sipping his coffee and gazing ahead, mind busy behind blank eyes. She had seen him in that posture before. The cook, who was now mopping the table area out of Schultz’s sight, was staring fixedly at him. PJ idly wondered if the cook was bisexual, then briefly considered how Schultz would be as a sex partner.

  It was not an appetizing thought.

  Strangely reluctant to disturb the scene with the information about her whereabouts, she left quietly. Schultz knew she was moving in to her new home this weekend, so she decided to let the great detective figure out the obvious.

  CHAPTER 13

  PAULEY MAC SETTLED INTO the rhythm with the mop, pushing in circles, rinsing, squeezing. He was convincing at it, just as he was convincing as a cook in a diner. A man of many talents, a cultured voice said caustically in his mind. He almost laughed out loud. That piano player, Burton, had a great sense of humor.

  He stayed close enough to the counter to hear the detective and the woman talking. It was odd to hear people talking about him as if he wasn’t there. As he had been maneuvering his pail through the door of the kitchen, he had heard Doctor Gray say that the killer could have multiple personalities. Pauley Mac had read about multiple personalities, but he didn’t think that he fit the description. After all, there were no blackouts or lost time when one personality suppressed the others. Pauley Mac and Dog knew about each other and cooperated, more or less, in the business of animating the body they shared with each other and about thirty other guests.

  He wondered what Schultz would do if he knew he was in the same room with the killer. He wondered what the bitch would do. Schultz would probably stand up, pull a gun from underneath that jacket that couldn’t possibly button over his gut, and splash Pauley Mac’s multi-talented brain onto the freshly-mopped floor. Dog and Pauley Mac both savored that image for a minute or two. When the conversation drifted back into his awareness, he thought that he had missed something, something important that had to do with computers. Then he concentrated on what they were saying.

  The bitch was talking about the murder of George Burton as if she had been there all along.

  They knew about the floral delivery man ploy.

  They knew about the carrying case. They knew that he sat on the carrying case while working.

  They knew about the cat scratching him—Dog growled—and they had a blood sample. His blood, intimate and incriminating, gotten from underneath the cat’s claws.

  They knew about his set of tools, but probably not that he had murdered that storekeeper and then taken them. He used whittler’s knives, not stone cutting tools.

  They knew about his machete—though they thought it was a kitchen cleaver—but probably not that he had licked Ma’s and Pa’s blood from it.

  They knew about plastic bags and how they kept the blood from dripping, making sure he didn’t leave a trail down the hallway. But they thought that he would use an ordinary garbage bag. How crude.

  But they were close, so close.

  How was this possible? How?

  It must have to do with the computer that was mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, although Pauley Mac didn’t know exactly how. He had been in Radio Shack and played a game on a computer, two little figures punching and kicking. He couldn’t imagine Shithouse Schultz getting anything useful out of a computer. It had to be the bitch.

  Pauley Mac checked her out carefully from head to foot while swishing his mop in circles. No doubt about it—she had that hard, smart look that he associated with white coats and needles and pills in little paper cups.

  Suddenly she stood up to leave. He wanted to follow her, but his shift wasn’t over until after lunch. It had taken some maneuvering on his part to get this job, and he didn’t want to irritate Millie in his first week.

  After finding out that Schultz came to the diner frequently, he followed one of the cooks home. The cook was a man who couldn’t have been more than sixty years old but who could pass for eighty. He lived in a musty apartment building. Pauley Mac disdained concealment and followed him brazenly up the stairs, pulling on rubber gloves as he climbed. The landing smelled like piss. Dog wanted to stop and sniff, but Pauley Mac kept moving, a few steps behind the old man. When he opened his apartment door, Pauley Mac shoved him in and came in behind him, slamming the door.

  The man was terrified. The smell of his fear was nearly as strong as the smell of the last meal prepared in the apartment: canned hash. Pauley Mac calmed him down by speaking reasonably, saying that he wanted the cook’s job at the diner, and offering him fifty dollars if he would quit immediately, no questions asked. With Pauley Mac waving a fifty d
ollar bill in his face, the man called Millie and told her that he was leaving town suddenly to tend to a sick relative, sorry about the short notice, just got the news, he had no choice, didn’t know when he would be back, if at all.

  When he got off the phone, Pauley Mac pocketed the fifty and twisted the old man’s neck like he used to do to the chickens when he was a boy. That had been his job ever since he got enough strength in his arms.

  He figured that the old man didn’t have any talents that were useful, so there was no reason to take his head. All the old man could do was cook greasy eggs and burgers, and Pauley Mac could already do that. The cook’s death was a practical matter, a means to an end. He had considered not killing him, just scaring him out of town, maybe breaking an arm or a couple of fingers. But if the old coot went to the police, there would be trouble at the diner, questions at the very least.

  He dug the car keys out of the man’s pocket, went outside, and pulled his rusty Buick into the alley around the back of the apartment building. Then came the risky part. He brought the body down the rear stairs, hefted over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. The old man was as light as if he really had been a chicken, and Pauley Mac, though lean, was tough and wiry. He put the body in the passenger seat, propping it up by fastening the shoulder belt and leaning the head against a greasy toss pillow he fetched from the couch in the man’s apartment. It looked as though the passenger was simply taking a nap, except that his head rolled unnaturally whenever the car turned a corner.

  He drove south out of St. Louis, parallel to the Mississippi River on I-55. On a deserted stretch of two-lane blacktop near Crystal City that followed the high, rocky bluffs, he stopped the car in the driving lane—there was no shoulder—and shoved the cook’s body into place behind the steering wheel. He pushed the Buick and watched as it rolled downhill to an exposed turn with no guardrail.

  Pauley Mac walked a couple miles back to the four-lane highway, peeled off his gloves, stuck out his thumb, and caught a ride with a trucker who had a delivery in the west county area. He got out at the St. Charles Rock Road exit of I-270, thanked the driver, and walked several miles to his house. When he got home, he had a blister on the heel of his left foot.

  The next morning he showed up at the diner just as Millie was taping the “Cook Wanted” sign in the window. His job interview consisted of fixing Millie breakfast. A few minutes later he was tying an apron around his narrow waist as Millie’s newest employee.

  Pauley Mac watched the bitch’s hips swing as she walked toward the door. He considered rushing over to her, slitting her loose trousers and tight underpants with a knife, and bending her over a table, pressing her face into a customer’s plate of eggs and bacon while porking her from the rear.

  He’d almost certainly lose his job if he did that.

  Resigned that he would have to track her down later, he turned his gaze back to Schultz, mopping all the while. The bitch might be the one with the fancy computer, but the man whose buttocks sagged over the stool was the trained policeman. If she kept whispering juicy tidbits—tidbits, tit bites, tit bites, boob lubes, Dog playfully intoned—into Schultz’s ear, he just might put the pieces together. That wouldn’t do at all. Pauley Mac had plans, exciting plans, for the future.

  While browsing through a magazine at a supermarket checkout line, Pauley Mac had come across an article entitled “Childhood Innocence.” In a flash of prescience, he knew that he was looking at the theme for his next killing cycle, be it months or years from now. He had tried it on for size by walking past a preschool when the children were playing outside in the yard. Dog had little interest in chubby little girls with hairless slits and tiny dots on their chests where tits would grow or soft little boys with thighs like drumsticks and toy pricks dangling between their legs like those little hot dogs people serve as appetizers. But Pauley Mac wasn’t concerned about appearances. He wanted abstracts like playfulness or belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, things that had not been a part of his own childhood.

  The morning of Pauley Mac’s tenth birthday should have been full of childish promise, a day of wishes fulfilled, family warmth, cake, and candles. Instead, it was one of the mornings that he dreaded, the kind that seemed to be happening more frequently. Pa was between jobs and had been up late with his friend Joe, sitting on the broken down porch, sharing cheap whiskey, and tossing empty bottles into the bedraggled weeds that passed for a front yard.

  Ma had been in a foul mood all evening, ranting about Pa’s drinking the devil’s blood and cuffing Pauley Mac’s head whenever he got within arm’s reach. She had gone to bed early and was snoring when Pauley Mac crawled into bed next to her. She woke slightly, and cuddled against his back. He could feel her breasts pressing against him. He thought of them as balloons filled with some putrid substance that would poison him if she pressed against him hard enough, or when she squeezed and kneaded them with her hands. He lay stiffly, eyes open, hoping against hope that Pa would fall asleep on the porch.

  Not this time. Pauley Mac finally fell into a restless sleep. When he woke at dawn he felt his father’s weight against him in the bed, like a log that would roll on him and crush the life from him, and he would be squished flat like that toad he had smashed with a rock.

  He had shared their bed as long as he could remember. When he tried to slink off and sleep somewhere else in the house, he was beaten and reviled until, cowed, he returned. Many times they were tired and rose groggily in the morning, and he would fix himself breakfast from whatever kind of food was in the house and escape to school, or, during the summer, into the woods. But not this morning, a morning that should have been full of promise, of birthday giggles, of cake and candles.

  Pa turned to face him, a crude expectation in his eyes and his rotten breath in Pauley Mac’s face. Shaking with fear and resignation and disgust, Pauley Mac knew that after he was done pleasuring Pa, Ma would expect her turn.

  There was never any tenderness, not even when Pa shuddered and spurted, or when Ma twisted in the sheets. Instead, they cursed him as though he were to blame for their acts, as though all of the evil in that house flowed from him. He was worthless, he was dirt, he would never amount to anything. He would never have any of the finer things in life, and he had somehow kept them from having them, too. Nothing he could do was good enough. He didn’t even have the brains of a dog. Of a mouse. Of a worm.

  Pauley Mac nursed his bruises and his cracked ribs, his cuts and his black eyes. He looked at his parents with terrible hate and with equally terrible longing, wishing that he could do something to earn their approval, so that they would love him in return. Or, at least, stop beating and cursing him. He knew that something vital was missing from his life, but he didn’t know the extent of the darkness inside himself.

  That day, his tenth birthday, after he cleaned himself as well as he could with a cold dirty washcloth and dressed, he skipped school and went out and got himself the brains of a dog. He cracked open the skull of Old Bert, the neighbor’s ancient hound, with Pa’s machete. Then he scooped the warm soft tissue out with both hands, ate it raw in the woods, gagged, threw up, and ate some more.

  It didn’t work. Even though he now had the brains of a dog, had literally made them part of his body, still his parents didn’t love him. He despaired, and lay trembling in the bed between them.

  When he was twelve, he thought perhaps he simply wasn’t lovable, so he killed a boy who was popular at school and devoured some of his brain, choking down the torn, bloody pieces, willing himself not to vomit them back out. Then he tossed the body, with its head attached but half empty, in front of a train. It was splattered so badly, no one suspected that part of the brain was missing.

  When he was sixteen, he dropped out of school. He came to believe that Ma and Pa needed to be closer to him in order to love him. A lot closer. So he killed them both while they slept in the bed with the sheets stained with come and juice. He told the sheriff that a man had broken in, murdered his par
ents, beaten him, and stolen the cash Ma kept in the lard bucket in the kitchen. The sheriff had his suspicions, but he also knew pretty well how Pauley Mac had been treated, so he simply told Pauley Mac to move on out of the county and preferably out of Tennessee altogether.

  Schultz was gone from the diner. Pauley Mac finished out his shift mechanically and drove home in his pickup truck. He was depressed, and he blamed it on the bitch. It was Saturday afternoon. He didn’t work tomorrow, so he could spend the next day and a half in the cocoon of his home. He went into the dining room and played the electronic keyboard for a time, closing his eyes and letting his fingers wander over the smooth keys as beautiful music played in his mind. His depression lifted, and he spun and launched himself into the air, first from the bed and then from a kitchen chair, trying out his newly-acquired dancing ability.

  He was not aware until hours later that he had twisted his ankle. When he did notice it, he couldn’t decide whether to apply ice or heat to the injury. He knew that when the twisted ankle first happened, the application of an ice pack would reduce swelling. Later, heat would relieve the pain. But where was the dividing line, he wondered. An hour? Three hours? Since he didn’t know exactly when the injury occurred—surely it hadn’t happened while he was dancing, since he was supremely graceful—he settled for applying heat. He wrapped his right ankle in towels dipped in boiling water and minimally cooled. Wincing at the heat and discomfort, he plopped heavily into a chair. The heat eased his pain and he slept, head lolled to the side, jaw hanging open.

  The rest of the weekend slid by quickly. The cook’s death was a minor article on page twelve of the Sunday Post-Dispatch. Another one of those unexplained one-car accidents, no hint of foul play. Monday Pauley Mac was at the diner promptly at five in the morning, his ankle almost back to normal, just hurting a little when he put his weight on it a certain way. The bitch doctor came by about eight o’clock and bought a couple of rolls to take to the office. Pauley Mac couldn’t hang around her, though, because Millie happened to be in this morning. He stayed in the kitchen, a model employee.