The Ninth Step (19 page)

Edgar pulled Cornell back under the bus. Cornell grabbed at the pavement, losing more fingernails, but he could not beat the force drawing him under.

Edgar pulled Cornell back inside the walled maze. On his knees, Edgar positioned himself over Cornell and watched him try yet again to wriggle away, his lower body dragging behind. Edgar turned him over as one would a scurrying bug, flipping him onto his back and immobilizing him. Cornell looked into Edgar’s eyes and saw a vacancy there, a lack of self-awareness, and realized all was lost.

Game over, old sport.

Cornell closed his eyes and said, “God damn.”

After the first blow, Cornell cried out, but Edgar did not hear those cries for mercy. He repeatedly brought the cube down on Cornell’s head.

One savage blow after another.
Layers
.

Like a caricature of a blind man, Edgar patted the cold asphalt surface, feeling for his glasses. Without them he would not be able to drive his car. In his mind’s eye, he imagined his hands coming within millimeters of his glasses, but never actually touching them. But such was not his fate, and after five minutes of fruitless crawling and searching, his hand came squarely down on the bifocals. The left lens still bore its single horizontal hairline crack, but the right was now smashed to an opaque cataract. But the left side was enough for him to be able to see, to do what still needed to be done.

Rather than drag Cornell’s body through the landscape of bus carcasses, Edgar drove the car through the ranks, stopping beside Cornell’s supine body, Cornell’s eyes staring skyward in a final look of surprise.

Moving a human body, Edgar quickly learned, was not an easy task. After lining the bottom of the trunk with the emergency blanket (to catch any blood, or other DNA evidence—modern forensics was a force to be reckoned with, and Edgar made a mental note to vacuum the entire car with a public vacuum and spray the trunk with bleach solution), Edgar found that the simple mechanics of transferring the body from the ground to the trunk were beyond his physical capabilities. It wasn’t the weight of the body; it was the complete lack of resistance. No matter how he tried to scoop up Cornell, the corpse just slipped out of his grasp. Slipped
through
his grasp. Errant limbs went askew. The head lolled as though tethered by only a string. The torso had no more consistency than a strand of limp spaghetti. It was impossible.

At one point, in midlift, the body shifted in such a way that it nearly toppled Edgar. He had to simultaneously drop it and reach overhead to grab the trunk lid to keep from falling on top of the body. When he let go of the trunk lid, Edgar did not realize that he had left a single, perfect thumbprint delineated in Cornell’s blood. As Edgar was learning, when it came to committing a crime—and getting away with it—there were an untold number of variables. This was one he did not catch.

Edgar eyed the blanket lining the trunk and was struck by inspiration. He spread the blanket (not a big one, but just big enough, he reckoned) beside the body. It took only three moves to get the body onto the blanket: first the head and shoulders, then the feet and legs, and then it was a simple matter of grabbing hold of the belt and shifting the remainder of the torso atop the blanket. Layers seemed to be the solution to many of life’s little problems. With the body atop the blanket, it would be no more difficult than folding a burrito. A very large, very heavy burrito.

Before making the first fold, Edgar saw an angular irregularity in the otherwise chaotic pulp that he had beaten Cornell’s head into. He leaned in and studied the protruding corner. Then he reached down and plucked the section of the Rubik’s Cube (the section itself a minicube with a little protruding arm that interlocked with the other minicubes) that was lodged in Cornell’s temple.
No wonder criminals are so often caught
, Edgar thought.
So many variables to contain.

And his mind was just not working as it normally did. If Edgar had to use just one word to describe his usual thought
process, it would be
organized
. And now, tonight, just when he needed that quality most of all, it had seemingly deserted him. Thoughtless emotion had taken over.
No
, Edgar realized.
Not emotion. Instinct. Like an animal.
But animals, animals that guided themselves by instinct alone, did not pause to give concern to being caught. He decided to slow down, to bring back organized thought. He needed to be thorough.

Edgar got back on his hands and knees and started searching. He could see now, at least partially, so he quickly found the Rubik’s Cube under the adjoining bus.
The murder weapon. Had he really almost left behind the murder weapon?
He saw that there was only the one missing section, and he snapped that piece back into the cube. He also noted with curiosity that the beating he’d administered had somehow dislodged the puzzle from its completed position. The cube was now unsolved. A part of Edgar wanted to complete the few twists it would have taken to once again line up all the colors, but he recognized that as an idiotic impulse and didn’t give in to it. He tucked the cube next to the body and finished rolling it up.

The nylon cord was still in the backseat, so Edgar trussed up his Taco Bell Burrito Supreme with special Rubik’s Cube sauce with three lengths of the rope. He was then able to manhandle the body by grasping the cords and heaving it up to, and into, the trunk.

Edgar looked down at his handiwork and was greeted with the sound of music. Doo-dee doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo; doo-dee dee-dee dee-dee dee-dee deeeeee. “The Entertainer.” Cornell’s phone chirped clear as a bell even through the blanket.
Who in the fuck kept calling?
Edgar decided that there was no way he was going cut the cords and unwrap his Mexican treat to silence the phone. That was a layer he was just going to have to let go. He was too tired, and it wasn’t worth the effort.

He closed the trunk with a deliberate, vacillation–ending assuredness. A few final chords of “The Entertainer” could plainly be heard in the quiet storage depot. Then silence. Blessed silence. He had done it.

That was when he remembered the gun. Yet another layer. He had Cornell’s gun in his coat pocket.
My God, the variables!
He should have wrapped that up with the body as well. Now that bit of business was probably worth unwrapping the burrito, but Edgar felt that he’d been here far too long. He thought of small changes in ordinary variables. Internal and external variables. Of nonlinear transformations in the behavior of complex systems. He imagined people as lines moving at random, moving in chaos, and thought of the path of one line intersecting with the path on which his line had taken him.

He needed to keep his line moving.

Edgar looked to the heavens and said, “God damn.”

He got in the car and drove away, the bloody thumbprint on the back of the trunk a stark exclamation point.

Edgar drove. The hum of the engine pacified his jangled nerves. Dawn had given way to morning. And still Edgar drove. Going nowhere. School buses and early commuters were beginning to show up on the roads.

His mind replayed the last two days’ events over and over, searching for bits of evidence he might have overlooked. He was positive there was something, but he just could not quite grasp hold of it.

He had stopped at a gas station and spent thirty minutes in the restroom cleaning himself. His skin and hair were easy enough, and there were just a few stains on his clothes, but the black overcoat had taken most of it, and it didn’t really show on the black material. By the time he had finished daubing the spots
with liquid soap and scrubbing them with wet paper towels, the stains looked no more menacing than a sloppy spaghetti dinner. During the ablutions, Edgar heard the occasional padded thump of Cornell’s gun swaying in his overcoat pocket and banging against the sink. He considered wiping it down and tossing the weapon in the bathroom trash can but decided against it. It seemed risky, and he didn’t like the idea of depositing evidence across a wide area. Lines could intersect. Variables grew exponentially.
Layers, my friend. Layers.

Of the thumbprint on the back of the trunk, however, Edgar remained unaware. It stood out like a scarlet confession, but only to the guilty. To any driver who saw it, it looked like an ordinary smudge. If someone were to take a closer inspection, it might look like a painter’s hand had caused a thoughtless mistake. That is, if they were not looking for guilt.

Edgar struggled for insight into his increasingly disorganized thought process and was at last able to admit to himself that there was nothing else. No other evidence. He simply did not know what to do with the body. And rather than admit this, he had latched on to this idea of the unraveled thread. The forgotten clue.

He forced himself to let that idea drop and cast about for options on where to dispose of the body. And the gun. A landfill? That was a thought. But in broad daylight? The body was wrapped up, concealed. So he would only look like any ordinary person dropping off a 180-pound burrito at the town dump.

A roadside ditch? That was pretty ugly. A shallow grave out in the woods? What woods? And what about nonlinear transformations?
Intersections? Paths crossed in chaos? He would have to go home and get a shovel. Or stop at a hardware store and buy one. His mind flashed on an image of the imaginary clerk who sold him the shovel sitting on a witness stand, his imaginary finger pointed in accusation at Edgar.
Him, he’s the one.
And the prosecutor asking him later,
Please, explain it to us once again, Mr. Woolrich. Tell us why, less than thirty-six hours after your wife gave birth to your daughter, you felt compelled to take a two-hour drive and buy a shovel?

Edgar willed his mind to organize. To just please organize. But he couldn’t. All he could see was that smug imaginary prosecutor lining up the evidence. The errant hair strand or stray microdroplet found in the trunk (you could never get it all).
Do you care to tell us about that, Mr. Woolrich? Just how did a strand of Cornell Smith’s hair end up in your trunk? In
your
trunk! And what about this, Mr. Woolrich
, the prosecutor would trumpet, waving a slip of paper in the air.
What about this note found in your desk? Demanding money. Isn’t it true that Cornell Smith was blackmailing you?

The note! That was it. That was what he had forgotten. In his desk at school. Tucked in a drawer so Martin wouldn’t see it. And then forgotten.

His mind. What had happened to his mind?

Edgar turned the car around.

Edgar decided that no matter how much his mind had slipped, he had the God-given sense not to drive on school property with a corpse in his trunk, so he headed first for home. He did indeed have a shovel in the garage, but that would be for later. Whatever he was going to do, he couldn’t very well do it in broad daylight. Or gray daylight. It was overcast today.

He would stash Cornell’s body in the garage for safekeeping. Just until he could figure out what to do. No, better yet, leave it in the trunk. Just park the car in the garage and take Helen’s car to the school. That way, it would save his back from lifting the body again and decrease the chances of cross-contaminating his home with DNA evidence.

The neighborhood was quiet as always, and the calm, familiar atmosphere transferred to Edgar. With a plan (albeit a half-assed one) in place, he was starting to feel some small degree of confidence that he might actually get away with this.

That tranquillity was shattered when Edgar turned onto his street. Immediately, he saw the police cruiser parked in his driveway and adrenaline surged through his body like an electric shock. A lone officer was leaning against the cruiser, speaking into his radio.

How was this possible? Why would a policeman be at his house first thing in the morning? How could they know Cornell was dead? How was that even possible? Were there surveillance cameras at the bus depot? Edgar didn’t see how. There would have been no way to power them. The lighting ran only to the outskirts. What was going on? He knew he had to get rid of the body. The police were looking for him. They would search his car. But only if they had a search warrant. Why were they looking for him? Could it possibly be something completely unrelated? Could it? Of course it couldn’t.

All of these thoughts shuttled through his mind almost simultaneously. Edgar, the picture of suburban serenity, drove purposefully past his own driveway, looking straight ahead. At the next block, he turned right, then right again, and then he was out of the neighborhood.

He decided to go straight to the school. What else was there to do? He had to have that note. Every strand needed to be
gathered. Cauterized. As he pulled out onto the main road, a line from William S. Burroughs occurred to him, popped up unbidden in his mind:
I can feel the heat closing in
. And what was it?
Setting up their devil doll stool pigeons
. He’d read it in college. In those days, it had seemed like every incoming freshman was issued a bong and a copy of
Naked Lunch
. Edgar had passed on the water pipe but gave Burroughs a try. He’d absolutely hated it. The narrative was a disjointed, disorganized mess. He’d forced himself to finish reading it and then passed it off to somebody else. Maybe you had to smoke pot for it to make sense. Edgar simply didn’t get it. And he hadn’t realized until right now that some of Burroughs’s febrile words had left a mark on him.
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves
,
setting up their devil doll stool pigeons
.

He simply had to retrieve that note. It was the last piece of evidence. The only thing that could cast any suspicion on him or Helen. It was the devil doll stool pigeon waiting to rat him out.

His cell phone rang. It was Helen. She and the baby had been discharged. They were ready whenever he was. Helen didn’t ask what he was doing, and Edgar didn’t volunteer. An unspoken agreement had passed between them. It was Edgar’s responsibility to protect his family. It was Helen’s responsibility to not ask questions and allow him to do his job. The primitive act of childbirth, the ancient roles they had each taken on; these things awoke an instinct. A selfish, ruthless survivalism.