After the First Death (12 page)

“No.”

One hand fussed with her hair. “Poor baby.” The hand dropped to my leg and patted me. “I never found out who was the lucky man. I got the impression it wasn’t a name I would have recognized. Or you either. Someone she met in the neighborhood, that would be my guess.”

I looked away. Not Stone, not Landis. Somebody, but no one she knew, no one I knew. Not the man she had later married.

Just … someone.

It didn’t make any sense. Why kill for her and then give her up? Or, if he had thought he would get her, why kill a second time? He must have known he was safe. I had spent years in jail, and by the time I was out my wife was on the other side of the continent and married to another man, and I obviously suspected nothing, and did not even know the man, so that suspicion would be of no value to me—

Unless it was not her lover at all, but someone who just happened to hate me.

But who?

“You don’t look happy, sweetie.”

“I’m not.”

“Poor lamb. I didn’t help you, did I?”

“No.”

She moved closer to me. I could smell her, her perfume mingling with the odor of sexual arousal. “Poor lamb,” she said again, “there ought to be something I can do for you. I can’t give you a drink, I can’t give you any worthwhile information—”

I couldn’t say anything, or move. Or ignore the dismaying fact that I wanted her.

She stood up, more bright-eyed than ever, her tongue working nervously with her upper lip. She took off her blouse and slacks, kicked off her house slippers, removed her underwear. Her body was boyish, with tiny breasts and narrow hips, and it had aged well.

“There is
something
I can give you, lamb.”

I hate you,
I thought, but I couldn’t make the thought stick. Lust is the ultimate legislator, and the mind its servant I stood up. I removed my own clothing. And she watched me, her eyes examining my body, saying silently that they had seen all of the male bodies in the world, and that, now, they wanted this one.

I reached for her. She danced lightly away from me, eyes amused.

“Not here, lamb. We don’t want to stain the couch, do we?”

She took my arm. Her hands were cool. We walked, side by side, toward the bedroom. She bumped her hip against me as we walked. At the doorway I grabbed her, kissed her. She ground her body against mine, then slipped out of my arms.

“Bed,” she said.

She lay on her back. My hands touched her breasts, her belly. I moved over her, ready for her, and …

“Come on, lamb. I never fucked a killer before. Can you do it without a knife, baby?”

The words were knife enough. They went for the groin and found their mark, and desire dropped like a fast curtain. Everything turned to flashes of red and black. I had a fire in the back of my skull. My hands turned to fists.

I did not kill her, I did not even hit her. I wanted to. I ached to. But somehow I found strength I never even knew I had, and I threw myself away from her, threw my whole body away from her and off the bed and onto the floor. And lay there for a nearly blank moment while the red and black faded slowly out and the world, for better or for worse, came back into focus.

“Well Gwen said you were a lousy lay, killer. Do you always crap out like that? Is that what happens with the whores? You use the knife when you can’t get it up?”

“I never killed those girls,” I said quietly. I got up from the floor. “I never killed anyone. But just now I came within two inches of killing you, Linda. I hope you got your kicks.”

“I got all the kicks you could ever give me, killer.”

I looked at her. I couldn’t even hate her any more. It was all gone, and I felt nothing more than a nugget of shame for having briefly wanted her.

“You can put the knife away,” I said. “I just became immune to you.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“My baby sister had a lover.”

“I don’t care.”

“She told me all about it.”

“I don’t care.”

“She wasn’t in love, though. It was purely for sex. You couldn’t keep her happy in that department, killer.”

I turned away from her. I walked back into the living room and she followed after me. I got dressed. She didn’t.

“I know who it was.”

“I didn’t ask his name. Partly because, at the moment, I don’t think I really cared. Partly because I had the feeling she would tell me anyway. I had challenged her to stick the knife in again, and she had to prove she could do it, so she would tell me.

“Don’t you want to know?”

“What’s the difference?”

“It was someone you know.”

I dressed slowly and deliberately. I wanted more than anything on earth to get out of there and away from her, but I took my time and dressed slowly and carefully, turning my socks right side out, before putting them on, knotting my tie neatly, all of that.

And she said, “It was Doug MacEwan.”

13

I
DISAPPOINTED HER. SHE WANTED A REACTION AND I SIMPLY
didn’t give her one. Not, I must admit, because I was too drained and dispassionate and dull to be surprised, but because I very simply did not believe her. It was too obvious a line.

“You really are immune, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“My mistake, then. I should have told you in bed. That was my Sunday punch; I was saving it from the minute you started asking, and I thought I’d hold it right until the end, but—”

“Earlier,” I said, I might have believed it.”

She took a step back, placed her hands on her hips, and flashed me an astonished smile. “Oh, beautiful,” she said. “You don’t believe it?”

“Of course not.”

“Then maybe you’re not immune after all.”

“You’re wasting your time, Linda.”

“Am I? Okay, killer, let me cite chapter and verse. Easter time, the same year you killed the girl, Gwen told you she was going with me to see Uncle Henry, who was supposed to be dying. He wasn’t. The same weekend your friend MacEwan had a convention in St. Louis. He didn’t You can even check all of this out you silly bastard. About a week after their weekend Gwen didn’t come home one night She said she was with me; I was drunk and trying to kill myself. You offered to come over and she wouldn’t let you. MacEwan had a story for Kay that night, too. Then a week after that—”

She went on, and she documented everything quite perfectly, and after a while I stopped listening. I felt strangely numb. I wanted to go away. I wanted to be alone someplace dark and quiet and warm.

“Still think you’re immune, killer?”

I looked at her. “Get dressed,” I said “You look lousy naked.”

“I asked you a question.”

I turned from her, walked toward the door.

“Do you think he framed you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You just can’t admit that you killed those girls yourself, can you?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t say anything. I opened the door, I walked outside into fresher air, I closed the door after me. And walked down the path to the sidewalk with the sound of her laughter ringing metallically in my ears.

I must have walked around blindly. I thought I was taking the right route back to the train station, but evidently I made a wrong turn somewhere and wound up lost. By the time I realized this my sense of direction was completely out of whack, and I ultimately circled around half the city and came up behind the railroad terminal from the far side.

Which was just as well.

Because I had made one mistake. I had never thought to rip the bedroom telephone out of the wall, or to incapacitate Linda, and she had decided to use the knife one final time. There were police cars all over the place.

14

I
SLIPPED BACK INTO THE SHADOWS, TURNED THE CORNER, WALKED
quickly away. The train was clearly out, and it stood to reason that the bus depot would be similarly guarded. The highways out of town would be patrolled, and if I tried to hitchhike a cop would pick me up.

The gray in my hair would not help. Linda had no doubt described my current appearance when she sounded the alarm. I turned another corner, leaned against the trunk of a tree and tried to catch my breath. A wave of bright fury came suddenly and went as suddenly. I thought of going back to her house and getting her car keys, but it stood to reason that the cops would have her place staked out for the next few hours, and perhaps throughout the night Even if they didn’t, she would know better than to open her door a second time.

I kept walking. It did no good to hate Linda, I realized. One might as logically hate a cat for killing birds. It is part of the essence of catness to slaughter warblers, just as it is part of the essence of Lindaness to decorate the walls of her psychic trophy room with male genitalia. It is a trait of the species; however deplorable, one can expect no better.

I moved steadily away from the center of town and walked in darkness down quiet residential streets. Every family seemed to have two cars, and often only one was kept in the garage, sharing that space with bicycles and toys and power lawn mowers and such. The second car, ungaraged, was parked either in the driveway or at the curb.

Many of these cars, I discovered, were not locked.

This was an interesting revelation, but I wasn’t sure just what I could do with it. There is a way of starting a car without a key, I understand; I believe it involves the use of some apparatus called a jumper cable or wire or something which is affixed to the terminals of the ignition switch. I’m not quite sure how it goes, and have no idea how one does it.

It would seem an art worth knowing. All of those unlocked cars began to drive me to distraction. Better by far if the cars were locked up tight with their keys left in the ignition. Any fool can break a window.

Hide-A-Key—

I remembered, suddenly, the brilliant little device sold through the mails and at hardware stores and gas stations, a magnetized box in which a spare key could repose beneath a fender, theoretically available whenever needed. I’d bought one myself once, years ago, and had dutifully tucked an extra key into it and slapped it onto the underside of a fender. It was months before I needed it, and sometime during those months it had fallen off and was lost forever.

Did people still use them? I wondered. And I checked a variety of cars, looking in the logical places, on the undersides of the fenders, front and back, and felt foolish the first time, and felt like an idiot by the time I was key-hunting on the tenth or twelfth car. But ultimately I found a year-old Plymouth convertible whose owner had responded to the Hide-A-Key sales pitch. He had evidently bought the thing about the same time he had bought the car and had never touched it since. The Hide-A-Key was rusted and grime-covered. But it slid properly open, and the key fit quite neatly into the ignition.

I had not driven in a long time, and did not know the roads. Driving—like swimming, like love—is never forgotten. Routes are, but once out of town I followed the New York markers and got where I was going. There were things I did not want to think about on the way. I played the radio, and between the noise of a rock ’n’ roll station and the unknown route and unfamiliar car, I didn’t have to think about very much of anything.

I left the car somewhere on the West Side and walked back to the hotel. I spent the night not sleeping. I wanted a drink badly. But by the time I had managed to decide to get up and go out and have one, it was four o’clock and the bars were closed. So I stayed where I was, and kept trying to sleep, and kept not making it.

According to my erstwhile sister-in-law, Gwen had had an affair with Doug MacEwan. Linda, certainly, was in no sense constitutionally incapable of falsehood; her only reason for telling the truth instead of a lie would be that the truth was more damaging. In this case, the truth seemed to be that the pal that I loved stole the gal that I loved—and, given the circumstances, my own position seemed perfectly obvious.

Except that things are rarely as simple as they seem. The automatic rage, the sense of having been cruelly used and ignominiously betrayed, just wouldn’t come. Time does more than heal wounds. Time can, in some instances, grow scar tissue in advance and prevent the wound from doing more than scratching the surface.

You see, there were all of those years in the way. The gal that I loved was a gal I loved no more. It had all happened five years ago, five desperately long years ago, and my world in those five years was so much changed that I could not put the betrayal into context. The participants in the drama were my once-wife (who now betrayed me nighdy, or however frequently their schedule permitted, with yet another man, to whom she happened to be lawfully married) and my vestigial best friend, whose world now barely overlapped with mine and with whom I could no longer communicate. I might damn them both for treachery and lechery, but I was so far removed from the realness of it that I was more struck by the fortuitous rhyme of those two sins than by the awesome enormity of the crime.

I believed that it had happened. I knew that it had happened. Viewed from my present vantage point, armed with Linda’s passed-along knowledge, much of Doug’s reticence ever since Sunday night came vividly into focus. And, more to the point, I remembered what Kay had said, albeit hysterically, earlier that evening.

You have to leave us alone, Alex! You have to leave us out of it! It was years ago! It means nothing now, can’t you understand? It’s over and done with, we’ve forgotten all about it—

At the time I had read all of this as meaningless hysteria which defied proper translation. Forgotten all about what? And what was over and done with? Our mutual friendship, I had assumed at the time. But it now seemed clear that Kay had thought I had known of the affair—as she herself had evidently long known of it.

So I believed it. I believed it, and lay in bed not sleeping, and tried to be furious about it all, and couldn’t. Which is not to say that I felt nothing. What I did feel, actually, was double-barreled—on the one hand, an alarming sense of extreme personal isolation; on the other, the sort of feeling a child must have upon discovering, many years after the fact, that he was adopted. The equihbrium-shattering realization that the most important persons in one’s life are not at all what one has forever thought them to be, and that one’s life itself is not as one has seen it.