The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (3 page)

No, not quite. Babe looked closer and saw how thin the line between shock and cheerfulness was on this particular face, and how troubling the similarity had been for her, all her life.

She left with a tin of Sucrets. “I like the box,” she said. “Do they work?”

When he’d returned to the pharmacy counter, the little old lady, who’d been browsing the Seasonal Items aisle, came wobbling up. The shopping cart had a long pole with a red plastic pennant at the top, to discourage theft. The woman herself had a large red mole on her forehead, an eyebrow-pencil beauty mark on her cheek, and an Eastern European accent. She rested her breasts on the consultation counter. This wasn’t unusual. The counter had supported plenty of geriatric, confidential breasts. She beckoned at him though he was already very close to her and said in the voice of a spy, “She did, you know.”

“Did what?” asked Babe.

“She did kill her muzzer and fazzer. I have zeen on the—” the woman drew a square with her index fingers. “Channel 5. She goes to jail, and now she leaves, maybe zix months ago.”

“No,” said Babe.

“Yez,” said the woman. “When she is a girl, she haz kill her muzzer and fazzer. Now she haz sore t’roat.” The woman shrugged.
Make your own conclusions.

CONNIE MURDER. MURDER PAROLE. Teenager parole. Doctor murder.
Mother murder. Mother father murder.
Everything he stuck in the search box of the city paper’s website sounded like the name of a bad rock band and brought up nothing.

Constance murder.

Her name was Constance Lafferty, and she had beaten both parents to death on October 11, 1982, first her mother, and then her father. First with a candlestick, then with a hammer. A two-blunt-object job. Her mother had been dead drunk, according to the autopsy; the father had been slightly tipsy, if tipsy could be applied to the dead, if that wasn’t too trivial a word. The daughter, the murderer, the blond woman who that day had given him four flowers, Connie, may or may not have had a boyfriend, a drug problem, a friend in the world. The parents were loving or absentee. She’d been on the honor roll.

No mystery to who, how, when, where. Lots to why. She confessed, she pled guilty, she went to prison. She’d found God, of course. God seemed to spend a lot of time in the federal prison system. No one ever found God at Disney World.

The picture he instantly recognized: it had been famous and shocking, once upon a time. Even on a computer monitor, the gray blood looked like wet newsprint. He couldn’t get the dead parents and the live girl on-screen at the same time, and wobbled them back and forth. Her hair was darker and longer, all one length.

Who took that photo? Who covered the bodies? Who called the police?

Shouldn’t somebody do something?

Crime photos are usually badly composed. You get a first impression when you look—in this case, the visible ear, the wisp of hair from beneath the sheet of the female victim (the mother,
her
mother), the soft features of the teenage girl—but you’ll guess wrong. The bodies look as though they were dropped from a height onto the floor, though they only fell from ordinary human height. The daughter looks as though she’s just walked in the room.

He saved the file and ordered a copy from the newspaper’s archives.

The newspaper stories about Samantha’s death—
my
death, Babe thought, not as in
when I died
but
the death that belongs to
me
—were not accessible online. In this way Babe was like a teenager. He had come to believe that a thing that was not mentioned on the Internet might never have happened at all. A search for “Samantha Kent” turned up plenty, an African American studies professor, a missing go-go dancer, a talented sixteen-year-old long distance runner in Overland Park, Kansas, a fictional character in an interactive porn story, any number of people who weren’t her. He was glad for that. There was a theory in physics that, as he understood it, posited that there were endless universes with endless possibilities. You need never worry about what your life would have been like if you hadn’t, say, met a chubby brunette woman who had a birthmark shaped like a blueberry muffin on her left hip, who chewed bubble gum way past bubble-gum-chewing age, who worked in a stationery store and was absent-minded enough to look left and then right but fail to look left again before crossing a street, who was hit by a midsized car, possibly according to an eyewitness a blue sedan, a woman who died instantly. In some other universe, right now, she existed but you didn’t, or she existed but the birthmark didn’t, or no one had invented bubble gum. In some other universe, the two of you had never met. When he idly Googled her name, which he didn’t do often, he liked to pretend that all of those other people with her very common name represented the dozens of universes where she was still alive and well and had never met him, and good for her, he thought, good for her.

Babe kept the flowers, Gerber daisies according to Hilary the pharmacy assistant, on the front counter. He tried to keep them going. He changed their water daily, and when they dropped their petals to the counter, one by one, it seemed like every bad movie montage he’d ever seen that described the passage of time and the death of something ineffable.

She came back the next week, in black Mary Tyler Moore stirrup pants, and asked for antacid advice.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He meant about the heartburn. She nodded as though receiving sympathy for a great deal more. She stood wide legged at the counter, bent at the waist. She shifted her hips as though she were about to swing her foot onto the counter like a limbering dancer.

“Your wife’s dead,” she said. She’d been doing some research of her own.

“Yes.”

“
I’m
sorry.”

“Why?” he said. An inappropriate joke, a tic, really, from the days back about six months after Samantha’s death when he mistakenly believed his sense of humor had returned, bounced into his mouth. “Did
you
kill her?”

Connie nodded in a forward direction. “Nope,” she said, “nope, that one I woulda remembered.” Then she laughed her hooting laugh.

The next week it was acne medication.

Then she had athlete’s foot, then rosacea, then psoriasis.

That was the summer of
there had to be a reason
. Everything was innocent, of course! She was married! He was a decent guy! There had to be a reason she killed her parents, a reason she believed in God, a reason she sought him out. Neither of them understood. They met only at the pharmacy counter in the middle of the day, when business was slow, beneath the red letters that said CONSULT. If he were in the middle of a consultation, she browsed in the makeup section. There was a brand of very cheap, highly glittered preteen cosmetics that she loved: she would stripe the back of her hand with the testers (blue, pink, lilac, the Flag of Connie) and wait for him to finish. He spoke to her with paternal caution, the kind of wary, passionate tenderness he imagined people had for their teenage children. Pride, worry, rigor, joy. She depended on him in her stunted way. They had jolly, pointless conversations.

“Hey Babe!” Connie would holler as she passed through the automatic doors near the front of the store. “How’s the pill and potion business?”

She made the teenagers who stumbled through the store after school laugh, but they made her laugh, too. She couldn’t get over the pants! The underwear purposely pulled up to the waist with the pants belted around the hips!

“I just want to—” She clenched her hands and mimed yanking someone else’s pants down. “You know? I want to
pants
them.” She hooted. “Seriously, that’s what would have happened in my high school!”

A kid passed with the rolling walk that Babe attributed to overloose pants, overweight shoes, possibly shoplifted items stowed in underwear. His skin looked maloxygenated. His brown eyes looked trapped and nervous. “Can I ask you a question?” Connie asked. “I just have a question.”

Babe could almost feel the pharmacy counter rise up around him. Then he realized he was dipping below the counter in embarrassment and fear.

“Why the pants?” Connie asked the kid. “I mean, come on! You can hardly walk in them.”

“Oh God,” said Babe. But the kid smiled, the kid displayed the great grillwork of his braces, which were paved with McDonald’s French fries. He gave a hitching shrug. “They’re
cool
,” he said.

“Oh!” said Connie. “Yeah? What’s cool about them?” She really wanted to know. She examined the drape of the leg.

“Hey man,” said the kid. “They’re just cool. Weren’t you ever young?”

“Me?” asked Connie. She scratched her chin and winked sideways at Babe. “Not sure,
man
. I’ll definitely get back to you on that one.”

OF COURSE THERE were theories.

She was abused by her mother, the doctor. She was abused by her father, the head of a small Catholic charity. She was abused by her parish priest. She’d had a head injury and was never the same after that. She did drugs and had a psychotic break. She had seizures. She hallucinated. She snapped.

She was abused by her mother the doctor under the guise of medicine, in the medical office that was, like the kitchen, an addition off the back of the house: she was abused on an examination table, she was abused with medical equipment, she was made sick with medication so that her mother could get the sympathy of a sickly child, she was a sickly child. She was abused by her father, the head of a small Catholic charity, and when she told her doctor mother about it, her doctor mother refused to believe it, her doctor mother slapped her. She was on drugs. She was covering up for someone else.

She killed them for no reason.

She confessed to the murders. That was a fact. She said the same thing to everyone, the lawyer paid for by her grandparents (both sets), the police, the social workers, the psychiatrists: “There’s nothing I can say.”

HIS FIRST MURDERESS. His first Christian, for that matter, at least his first Born Again. Did that explain the daffy expression on her face? Maybe it was just all the corrections he’d made to his initial impression of her, a cheerful dork in a snowflakepatterned sweater. (Even that sweater seemed tragic to him now, fifteen years out of date. She clung to the knitwear of her youth.) Then an insane woman. Now a murderer, but what kind? She killed people. She believed in God. Babe didn’t know which was more unfathomable. Connie of the bad sweaters, Connie of the flowers.

Connie, why did you do it?

The teenagers who hung around the store became human to him, because of Connie. She was fascinated by the boys and disdainful of the girls, like any girl who for whatever reason hadn’t attended her high school prom. “They’re so big and quiet!” she said of those boys. In their raised sweatshirt hoods, they were a race of muffled men, leaning hood to hood to communicate, a branch of the military service in some mumbling country, on leave here on the shores of the strip mall. They examined batteries as though they were foreign trinkets, bags of Fritos like they were the local delicacy: delicious, possibly lethal, worth the risk. They never raised their voices, except, occasionally, to laugh. One had the laugh of a movie genie. The sound could shake you apart.

Sometimes the European little old lady would ask for pharmaceutical advice when Connie was there. “Excuse me, darling,” she would say, putting her hand on Connie’s elbow. “Excuse me, sweetheart.” She’d wedge herself in at the consult counter, using her breasts as a lever, and Connie would try to step away, but the little old lady wouldn’t let her. She’d hook her arm in Connie’s. “No, darling, sweetheart, a moment, I wouldn’t bodder you but. Excuse me sir! I am wondering perhaps vhere is somessing for ear vax.” Who knew where she was from? Maybe there had been a moment in her life when she wished she had the nerve to swing a candlestick.

“Listen,” Babe told Connie later, in the hosiery aisle. “You don’t have varicose veins.”

“I don’t? Cool!”

“No, listen. You don’t have acne. You don’t have psoriasis. You don’t have athlete’s foot. What do you want?”

“I’m just worried about you,” she said. “That’s all. I worry.”

“I’m all right,” he answered, insulted, ecstatic.

She was so
innocent
. Not technically. She’d killed her parents, no suggestion of accomplice or mitigating circumstances. As a person, though, innocent and pure of motive. She brought flowers to everyone who treated her with kindness, even the guy at the McDonald’s. Imagine the guy at McDonald’s, a skinny Haitian teenager with walleyes and a shy smile, receiving a bouquet of flowers! She thanked people for the smallest favor. She seemed frozen at fifteen, as though she were the one who was killed, as though Babe were being haunted by the memory of a long-ago lost child.

He tried to imagine the night of the murders and failed every time.

You’d have to be that innocent, Babe thought, to kill your own parents. How could a girl with a guilty conscience manage it!

DID YOU LOVE your parents?

Yes.
Did you love your mother?
Yes, I said so, I just said so.
But particularly your mother?
I loved both my parents the same.
But you killed them
?
Yes.
Why?
[Silence.]
There has to be a reason.
I didn’t mean to.
Constance. Connie. The murder scene—
I was there. You don’t have to tell me.
Do you consider yourself a good person?
I don’t consider myself anything.
Do you consider—

I don’t consider myself anything. There’s nothing wrong with me.

SHE WOULD HAVE told him, as best she could, though no one would understand. She didn’t understand, either. If you’d asked her on October 10, 1982, if she ever could have killed anyone, she would have said no, of course not, and she would have believed it. But she was rageful. No one knew that but her parents, and even they didn’t know the depths. She was fifteen and furious. At night she whipped her thoughts around until she felt she could smash through the window and fly through the streets of the town, bursting into bedrooms. People were asleep like storybook children. They never woke up or looked at her while she pummeled them to death. Usually she dreamt of one bedroom visit a night, but sometimes she flew to two or three. She flew wrapped in garbage bags because of blood splatters, in bathing caps to avoid shedding hairs, in wigs so as not to be recognized. She flew concocting alibis. Usually she was righteous, but sometimes she killed people for bullying reasons, the girls who didn’t know how to dress, the boys with bad skin who made her nervous.