Valentine (28 page)

Then his father’s terse shout, and the slap that sent her crashing into the passenger door.

“Shut the fuck up, you crazy bitch!”

All the way home.

By the time the car arrived in bleak Mill City, Pennsylvania, Victor knew what he was going to do.

But he wouldn’t think about that now.

The waitress brought his cheeseburger deluxe and coffee. He grinned as he thanked her. Blushing, she sidled away.

His memories of the weeks immediately following that February 29 were indistinct. He was in jail, and a lawyer kept arriving to talk to him, asking about his father and his mother and how many times he’d been in the hospital and locked in the bedroom closet. And somebody kept going on about a bargain,
and voluntary manslaughter rather than second degree, and fifteen to thirty instead of life, consecutive.
Not
consecutive, his lawyer had continually shouted. No way consecutive!
Concurrent!
That’s final, take it or leave it. And the phrases: “hot blood” and “severe abuse” and “emotional trauma.” He didn’t understand any of it, so he let the lawyer do the talking, and he agreed to the bargain he was offered because fifteen years, minimum, sounded better than life—not to mention Pennsylvania’s death penalty, if there was a trial. These were options, the lawyer explained. So he did what he was told at the arraignment. The next thing he knew, he was in prison.

He remained there for twelve long, long years, dreaming. Of the day when he’d be free. When he could find the Elements. He hated them now, more than he’d ever hated his parents. The whole thing was
their
fault, after all. If it hadn’t been for them, none of this would have happened. He would never have been expelled. He would have stayed at the college studying English, and by now he’d be a world-famous author.

Like Jillian Talbot, Goddamn her soul to hell! Most of all, he hated Jillian Talbot.

He sat there in the prison, day after day, cursing them, cursing the very existence of the four young women he held responsible for his plight: earth,
wind, fire, and water. Their own stupid joke gave him the idea for his justice.

But how would he accomplish it?

The answer arrived in his first days in the prison yard, and in the big communal shower room. He had never seen other men naked before, not even his father. He looked around the shower at the big, muscular convicts, then down at his own body. He realized that he had never thought about his personal appearance, what he presented to the outside world. Watching the men shower and work out in the yard and the gymnasium, he became aware for the first time that he was different from them. Very different. Victor Dimorta was ugly.

The answer was simple: he wouldn’t be Victor Dimorta anymore. He would re-create himself, reinvent himself. Transform himself into something else. Someone else. He would become—

He grinned now, thinking of it.

—
Valentine.

That’s when he began his rebirth.

For the duration of his internment, Victor was a model prisoner. He never complained, he never got sick, and he kept a respectful distance from everyone, authorities and cons alike. He enrolled in every rehab course the prison offered: he painted, potted, sculpted, and photographed. He discovered his own brilliant talent, even greater than English. He submitted
himself to one hour a week of elective psychiatric consultation. He taught illiterate inmates how to read and write. He joined a softball team and a basketball team. And every day for two hours, he worked out: Nautilus, freeweights, running, wrestling, calisthenics.

And every night, he dreamed about women. Four specific women. He allowed his hatred to fill him, consume him, until it became the most essential part of what he was. The obsession grew: he even found pictures in magazines of women who looked like them. He cut them out and taped them to the wall next to his bed. One in particular, a supermodel named Stacy Green, bore a striking resemblance to Jillian Talbot. Jillian was the Element to whom he’d been the most attracted. So he stared at pictures of Stacy Green, thinking of Jillian as he fondled himself.

And he did something else he’d never done before: he made friends. Most of the others liked him, especially the ones he patiently coaxed toward literacy. Two in particular, a guy about his age named Eric and an elderly lifer named Benny, became actual pals. He had long conversations and traded jokes and played beside them on teams, enjoying the newfound camaraderie that everyone else in the world took for granted. He learned how to fit in, how to get along, how to make people like him. This, too, was essential.

He never thought about his parents. He discarded their memory as useless, unconstructive, and potentially repressive. Big Joe and Angela Dimorta couldn’t touch him, couldn’t hurt him now. Not anymore. He relegated them to the past, to the oblivion they so richly deserved. The oblivion to which he, Victor, had sent them.

He was changing. Little by little, over the course of those twelve years, he evolved toward that new image he had formed in his head; that man who was not shy, skinny Victor Dimorta. Day by day he grew, becoming more strong, more controlled, more magnificent. And by the time he came up for parole, he knew that he was close, very close.

His parole was granted. On the day he walked out of the prison, he weighed fifty-five pounds more than he had on the day he walked in. He had a new body and a new personality. A new vitality. But there was still one more thing he needed, the most important part of his plan.

He went to Pittsburgh, where he met with his parole officer. This man—very nice, really—found him an inexpensive room and a stockroom job at McCrory’s on Fourth Avenue. He went dutifully to work every day and dutifully back to his room every night.

During the next weeks, he reoriented himself to freedom, to living in the outside world. It felt new
to him, this ability to move around unchecked and even unnoticed. He had the job and the rooming house, not to mention the parole officer, but beyond these there was an acute sensation of being unrestrained that he had never experienced before. With it came the realization: he had never been free before. Not in the past twelve years, certainly—but not in the eighteen years before it, either. He assimilated the feeling, making it a part of his new identity.

His new identity, he thought. Yes. It’s time. Now.

One day, a month into his parole, he went to the Pittsburgh branch of his bank in Mill City. The eighty thousand he’d left there thirteen years before had nearly doubled: he figured he could well afford what he was going to do now. He then went back to the prison to visit his friends, Eric and Benny. Sitting on the other side of the bulletproof glass panel from them had been odd, downright embarrassing, but he needed information that only Benny could supply. Benny had, in more than thirty years in prison, become a living encyclopedia of useful criminal information: he told Victor where to go and what to ask for. Victor thanked his friend, lied that he would visit again soon, and returned to Pittsburgh.

At the end of seven weeks of stockroom work, when the parole officer had relaxed surveillance and was looking the other way, Victor Dimorta left the rooming house one morning, walked two blocks west
to Chatham Center, and entered the taxi waiting there for him. He was driven to a private clinic on the outskirts of the city.

Twelve weeks and three operations later, he was no longer Victor Dimorta.

He was Valentine.

He emerged from the clinic’s post-op facility on August 23, three and a half years ago, and began what felt like his longest wait. He waited for months, living in a motel in a small town near Pittsburgh. In this time, he finally lost his virginity—with a vengeance. He employed the two prostitutes who worked out of the motel’s bar and grill, and took them to his room. There, he asked them to teach him everything they knew, everything that pleased a woman. Every way to make her tremble at his touch. He spent entire weekends in bed with them, sometimes singly, sometimes both at the same time, until they both assured him that he was no longer merely having sex with them: he was making love to them, and extremely well, too.

He made frequent pilgrimages to his home in Mill City, now an abandoned shell in a row of ramshackle houses on the hill above the dying town. He had to be careful approaching the house, because the state police were looking for him. Still, every few weeks he found himself there again, sleeping in his childhood bed and eating at the rotting table in the dusty
dining room. In the years since, he’d been drawn back there again and again, often living there for weeks at a time, alone and unseen. It was his home, the only home he’d ever known. And now that his parents weren’t there, it was perfect.

He spent a great deal of time inspecting himself in the full-length mirror inside the door of the upstairs bathroom. He would stand before it naked, drinking in this handsome, powerfully built new person he had become. This sexy, friendly animal who could excite women with his grin and satisfy them with his body.

He was Valentine.

And he was going to kill the four Elements. Every last fucking one of them.

On January 26, three years ago, the waiting was over. He flew to Los Angeles. He rented a room in a quiet part of town. He rented a Mercedes. He went to Rodeo Drive and bought a new wardrobe. Then he drove to Sharon Williams’s apartment complex and began to watch her.

The waitress shuffled over with fresh coffee as he remembered the picnic in Los Angeles, and the second meeting, a year later in Boulder. He smiled.

The next one on his list, Cass MacFarland, was the most difficult of the four to find. She was not in
Montclair, New Jersey, anymore. Taking a tip from the relocated Belinda, he’d decided to locate Cass in August, a full six months before Valentine’s Day, and it was a good thing he did.

He went to Montclair and began his search. For three days, he checked out every place near her old home where he thought people might know her. He asked every neighbor on her street and came up empty. He asked bartenders and waitpeople in every restaurant and tavern in a two-mile radius. Nothing. Finally, on a hunch based on their major at Hartley, he went into the nearest bookstore to her childhood home.

Bingo. The middle-aged couple behind the counter knew Cassandra very well. They’d watched her grow from a girl to a woman. She’d always been one of their best customers. Read all the time, probably because she. wanted to be a writer. She used to come in with her husband, before the divorce. She left Montclair then. Where did she go? he asked. Well, they didn’t know where she’d moved to—but David would. David was her older brother, an actor who lived in New York City, and he and Cass were very close. So sad about his disinheritance, the wife observed. He’s gay, you know. . . .

There were only two David MacFarlands in the Manhattan directory. He got him on the first try. He
was an old friend of Cass’s from Hartley, in town on business. How could he reach her?

The brother surprised him. Well, I can’t just tell someone that on the phone, he said. But if you’ll give me your name, I’ll mention it to her the next time I call her. . . .

Victor slammed down the phone: he hadn’t been expecting that. Cursing his luck, he left Montclair and went straight to the address on West Forty-fourth Street in New York.

David MacFarland was either a tall, lanky, handsome man with black hair or a slightly shorter, equally good-looking blond with a mustache. The blond man was obviously ill, and he walked slowly, painfully, with the help of a cane. He watched them coming and going from the building a couple of times. They lived in the basement apartment of the four-story brownstone.

It was easy. He’d learned all about lockpicking from Benny, the old lifer. He’d studied fundamentals of electronics in one of his brownie-point courses. A quick trip to a shop on Broadway and he was all set.

He checked into a fleabag around the corner, went back to David MacFarland’s building, and waited. That evening, the two men came up the steps to the street and hailed a cab. Both were holding brightly wrapped birthday gifts. Wherever they were going, he reasoned, they’d probably be a while. He waited
until the cab turned the corner before bounding down the steps.

There was a deadbolt on the door. He stood there, frustrated and furious, casting his gaze around for some other means of entry. Then he laughed and put his picking device back in his pocket. The window next to the door was slightly open: someone had forgotten to close it.

The first thing he did was look for an address book, or anything in the apartment that might have the address, or even a phone number. The leatherbound Filofax he found in the bedroom obviously belonged to the roommate, and there were no Mac-Farlands listed. So, plan B. In ten minutes, the bug was in the phone receiver and he was in his room around the comer, setting up the tape machine. Then he went out for a steak dinner.

He spent the next three days exploring Wonderland, this beautiful, exciting city he’d read about and seen in movies. He went to museums and Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building and Macy’s. He saw his first Broadway musical. New York was such a perfect place to get lost in, to be anonymous in. He knew, before those three days had passed, that he was going to live here. He’d find a place—but first . . .

On the evening of the third day, he came back to the room and played the tape back. In the two previous
days, he’d heard mundane conversations between the roommate, Rick—apparently the blond with the cane—and his mother, who called every day to be sure he was taking his medication. Then David, the tall one with the black hair, would get on with her and assure her that Rick was okay, that she needn’t come to New York yet. He’d heard David talking to a woman who was apparently his theatrical agent. No calls this week, she said, whatever that meant. He’d heard calls from friends, men and women inviting them places and chatting aimlessly and always, always asking after Rick’s health.