Mr. Murder Read online

  The emptiness. He dreads the emptiness.

  And now it is upon him.

  He feels as if he is a hollow man, made of the thinnest blown glass, fragile, only slightly more substantial than a ghost.

  At times like this, he desperately needs a mirror. His reflection is one of the few things that can confirm his existence.

  The restaurant’s elaborate red and green neon sign illuminates the interior of the Ford. When he tilts the rearview mirror to look at himself, his skin has a cadaverous cast, and his eyes are alight with changing crimson shapes, as if fires burn within him.

  Tonight, his reflection is not enough to diminish his agitation. He feels less substantial by the moment. Perhaps he will breathe out one last time, expelling the final thin substance of himself in that exhalation.

  Tears blur his vision. He is overwhelmed by his loneliness, and tortured by the meaninglessness of his life.

  He folds his arms across his chest, hugs himself, leans forward, and rests his forehead against the steering wheel. He sobs as if he is a small child.

  He doesn’t know his name, only the names he will use while in Kansas City. He wants so much to have a name of his own that is not as counterfeit as the credit cards on which it appears. He has no family, no friends, no home. He cannot recall who gave him this assignment—or any of the jobs before it—and he doesn’t know why his targets must die. Incredibly, he has no idea who pays him, does not remember where he got the money in his wallet or where he bought the clothes he wears.

  On a more profound level, he does not know who he is. He has no memory of a time when his profession was anything other than murder. He has no politics, no religion, no personal philosophy whatsoever. Whenever he tries to take an interest in current affairs, he finds himself unable to retain what he reads in the newspapers; he can’t even focus his attention on television news. He is intelligent, yet he permits himself—or is permitted—only satisfactions of a physical nature: food, sex, the savage exhilaration of homicide. Vast regions of his mind remain uncharted.

  A few minutes pass in green and red neon.

  His tears dry. Gradually he stops trembling.

  He will be all right. Back on the rails. Steady, controlled.

  In fact he ascends with remarkable speed from the depths of despair. Surprising, how readily he is willing to continue with his latest assignment—and with the mere shadow of a life that he leads. Sometimes it seems to him that he operates as if programmed in the manner of a dumb and obedient machine.

  On the other hand, if he were not to continue, what else would he do? This shadow of a life is the only life he has.

  5

  While the girls were upstairs, brushing their teeth and preparing for bed, Marty methodically went from room to room on the first floor, making sure all of the doors and windows were locked.

  He had circled half the downstairs—and was testing the latch on the window above the kitchen sink—before he realized what a peculiar task he had set for himself. Prior to turning in every night, he checked the front and back doors, of course, plus the sliding doors between the family room and patio, but he did not ordinarily verify that any particular window was secure unless he knew that it had been open for ventilation during the day. Nevertheless, he was confirming the integrity of the house perimeter as conscientiously as a sentry might certify the outer defenses of a fortress besieged by enemies.

  As he was finishing in the kitchen, he heard Paige enter, and a moment later she slid both arms around his waist, embracing him from behind. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “Bad day?”

  “Not really. Just one bad moment.”

  Marty turned in her arms to embrace her. She felt wonderful, so warm and strong, so alive.

  That he loved her more now than when they had met in college was no surprise. The triumphs and failures they had shared, the years of daily struggle to make a place in the world and to seek the meaning of it, was rich soil in which love could grow.

  However, in an age when ideal beauty was supposedly embodied in nineteen-year-old professional cheerleaders for major-league football teams, Marty knew a lot of guys who would be surprised to hear he’d found his wife increasingly attractive as she had aged from nineteen to thirty-three. Her eyes were no bluer than they had been when he’d first met her, her hair was not a richer shade of gold, and her skin was neither smoother nor more supple. Nevertheless, experience had given her character, depth. Corny as it sounded in this era of knee-jerk cynicism, she sometimes seemed to shine with an inner light, as radiant as the venerated subject of a painting by Raphael.

  So, yeah, maybe he had a heart as soft as butter, maybe he was a sucker for romance, but he found her smile and the challenge of her eyes infinitely more exciting than a six-pack of naked cheerleaders.

  He kissed her brow.

  She said, “One bad moment? What happened?”

  He hadn’t decided how much he should tell her about those seven lost minutes. For now it might be best to minimize the deep weirdness of the experience, see the doctor Monday morning, and even have some tests done. If he was in good health, what had happened in the office this afternoon might prove to be an inexplicable singularity. He didn’t want to alarm Paige unnecessarily.

  “Well?” she persisted.

  With the inflection she gave that single word, she reminded him that twelve years of marriage forbade serious secrets, no matter what good intentions motivated his reticence.

  He said, “You remember Audrey Aimes?”

  “Who? Oh, you mean in One Dead Bishop?”

  One Dead Bishop was a novel he had written. Audrey Aimes was the lead character.

  “Remember what her problem was?” he asked.

  “She found a dead priest hanging on a hook in her foyer closet.”

  “Aside from that.”

  “She had another problem? Seems like a dead priest is enough. Are you sure you’re not over-complicating your plots?”

  “I’m serious,” he said, though aware of how odd it was that he should choose to inform his wife of a personal crisis by comparing it to the experiences of a mystery-novel heroine whom he had created.

  Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it sometimes was for a writer? And if so—was there a book in that idea?

  Frowning, Paige said, “Audrey Aimes . . . Oh, yeah, you’re talking about her blackouts.”

  “Fugues,” he said.

  A fugue was a serious personality dissociation. The victim went places, talked to people, and engaged in varied activities while appearing normal—yet later could not recall where he had been or what he had done during the blackout, as if the time had passed in deepest sleep. A fugue could last minutes, hours, or even days.

  Audrey Aimes had suddenly begun to suffer from fugues when she was thirty, because repressed memories of childhood abuse had begun to surface after more than two decades, and she had retreated from them psychologically. She’d been certain she’d killed the priest while in a fugue state, although of course someone else had murdered him and stuffed him in her closet, and the entire bizarre homicide was connected to what had happened to her when she was a little girl.

  In spite of being able to earn a living by spinning elaborate fantasies out of thin air, Marty had a reputation for being as emotionally stable as the Rock of Gibraltar and as easy-going as a golden retriever on Valium, which was probably why Paige still smiled at him and appeared reluctant to take him seriously.

  She stood on her toes, kissed his nose, and said, “So you forgot to take out the garbage, and now you’re going to claim it’s because you’re suffering a personality breakdown due to long-forgotten, hideous abuses when you were six years old. Really, Marty. Shame on you. Your mom and dad are the sweetest people I’ve ever met.”

  He let go of her, closed his eyes, and pressed one hand against his forehead. He was developing a fierce headache.

  “I’m seri
ous, Paige. This afternoon, in the office . . . for seven minutes . . . well, I only know what the hell I was doing during that time because I’ve got it on a tape recorder. I don’t remember any of it. And it’s creepy. Seven creepy minutes.”

  He felt her body tense against his, as she realized that he was not engaged in some complex joke. And when he opened his eyes, he saw that her playful smile was gone.

  “Maybe there’s a simple explanation,” he said. “Maybe there’s no reason to be concerned. But I’m scared, Paige. I feel stupid, like I should just shrug and forget about it, but I’m scared.”

  6

  In Kansas City, a chill wind polishes the night until the sky seems to be an infinite slab of clear crystal in which stars are suspended and behind which is pent a vast reservoir of darkness.

  Beneath that enormous weight of space and blackness, the Blue Life Lounge huddles like a research station on the floor of an ocean trench, pressurized to resist implosion. The facade is covered in a shiny aluminum skin reminiscent of Airstream travel trailers and roadside diners from the 1950s. Blue and green neon spells the name in lazy script and outlines the structure, glimmering in the aluminum and beckoning with as much allure as the lamps of Neptune.

  Inside, where an amplified combo blasts out rock-’n’-roll from the past two decades, the killer moves toward the huge horseshoe bar in the center of the room. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, beer fumes, and body heat; it almost resists him, as if it’s water.

  The crowd offers radically different images from the traditional Thanksgiving scenes flooding television screens during this holiday weekend. At the tables the customers are mostly raucous young men in groups with too much energy and testosterone for their own good. They shout to be heard above the thundering music, grab at waitresses to get their attention, whoop in approval when the guitarist gets off a good riff.

  Their determination to enjoy themselves has the frantic quality of insectile frenzy.

  A third of the men at the tables are accompanied by young wives or girlfriends of the big-hair and heavy-makeup persuasion. They are as rowdy as the men—and would be as out of place at a hearthside family gathering as screeching bright-plumed parrots would be out of place at the bedside of a dying nun.

  The horseshoe-shaped bar encircles an oval stage, bathed in red and white spotlights, where two young women with exceptionally firm bodies thrash to the music and call it dancing. They wear cowgirl costumes designed to tease, all fringe and spangles, and one of them elicits whistles and hoots when she removes her halter top.

  The men on the bar stools are all ages and, unlike the customers at the tables, each appears to be alone. They sit in silence, staring up at the two smooth-skinned dancers. Many sway slightly on their stools or move their heads dreamily from side to side in time to some other music far less driving than the tunes the band is actually playing; they are like a colony of sea anemones, stirred by slow deep currents, waiting dumbly for a morsel of pleasure to drift to them.

  He sits on one of only two empty stools and orders a bottle of Beck’s dark from a bartender who could crack walnuts in the crooks of his arms. All three bartenders are tall and muscular, no doubt hired for their ability to double as bouncers if the need arises.

  The dancer at the far end of the stage, the one whose breasts bounce unfettered, is a striking brunette with a thousand-watt smile. She is into the music and genuinely seems to enjoy performing.

  Although the nearest dancer, a leggy blonde, is even more attractive than the brunette, her routine is mechanical, and she seems to be numbed either by drugs or disgust. She neither smiles nor looks at anyone, but gazes at some far place only she can see.

  She seems haughty, disdainful of the men who stare at her, the killer included. He would derive a lot of pleasure from drawing his pistol and pumping several rounds into her exquisite body—one for good measure in the center of her pouting face.

  An intense thrill shakes him at the mere contemplation of taking her beauty from her. The theft of her beauty appeals to him more than taking her life. He places little value on life but a great deal on beauty because his own life is often unbearably bleak.

  Fortunately, the pistol is in the trunk of the rented Ford. He has left the gun in the car precisely to avoid a temptation like this, when he feels compelled toward violence.

  As often as two or three times a day, he is gripped by a desire to destroy anyone who happens to be near him—men, women, children, it makes no difference. In the thrall of these dark seizures, he hates every last human being on the face of the earth—whether they are beautiful or ugly, rich or poor, smart or stupid, young or old.

  Perhaps, in part, his hatred arises from the knowledge that he is different from them. He must always live as an outsider.

  But simple alienation is not the primary reason he frequently contemplates random slaughter. He needs something from other people which they are unwilling to provide, and, because they withhold it, he hates them with such passion that he is capable of any atrocity—even though he has no idea what he expects to receive from them.

  This mysterious need is sometimes so intense that it becomes painful. It is a hunger akin to starvation—but not a hunger for food. Often he finds himself on the trembling edge of a revelation; he realizes that the answer is astonishingly simple if only he can open himself to it, but enlightenment always eludes him.

  The killer takes a long pull on the bottle of Beck’s. He wants the beer, but he does not need it. Want is not need.

  On the elevated stage, the blonde slips off her halter, exposing pale upswept breasts.

  If he retrieves the pistol and expanded magazines of ammo from the trunk of the car, he will have ninety rounds. When the arrogant blonde is dead, he can kill the other dancer. Then the three muscle-bound bartenders with three headshots. He is well trained in the use of firearms—though he has no recollection of who trained him. With those five dead, he can target the fleeing crowd. Many who don’t die from gunfire will perish when trampled in the panic to escape.

  The prospect of slaughter excites him, and he knows that blood can make him forget, at least for a short while, the aching need that plagues him. He has experienced the pattern before. Need fosters frustration; frustration grows into anger; anger leads to hatred; hatred generates violence—and violence sometimes soothes.

  He drinks more beer and wonders if he is insane.

  He remembers a movie in which a psychiatrist assures the hero that only sane people question their sanity. Genuine madmen are always firmly convinced of their rationality. Therefore, he must be sane even to be able to doubt himself.

  7

  Marty leaned against the door frame and watched while the girls took turns sitting on their bedroom vanity bench to let Paige brush their hair. Fifty strokes each.

  Perhaps it was the easy rhythmic motion of the hairbrush or the tranquilizing domesticity of the scene that soothed Marty’s headache. Whatever the reason, the pain faded.

  Charlotte’s hair was golden, just like her mother’s, and Emily’s was so dark brown that it was almost black, like Marty’s. Charlotte chatted nonstop with Paige throughout her brushing; but Emily kept silent, arched her back, closed her eyes, and took an almost catlike pleasure in the grooming.

  The contrasting halves of their shared room attested to other differences between the sisters. Charlotte liked posters full of motion: colorful hot-air balloons against a desert twilight; a ballet dancer in mid-entrechat; sprinting gazelles. Emily preferred posters of autumn leaves, evergreens hung with heavy snow, and moonlight-silvered surf breaking on a pale beach. Charlotte’s bedspread was green, red, and yellow; Emily’s was a beige chenille. Disorder ruled in Charlotte’s domain, while Emily prized neatness.

  Then there was the matter of pets. On Charlotte’s side of the room, built-in bookshelves housed the terrarium that was home to Fred the Turtle, the wide-mouthed gallon jar where Bob the Bug made his home in dead leaves and grass, the cage that housed Wayne t
he Gerbil, another terrarium in which Sheldon the Snake was the tenant, a second cage in which Whiskers the Mouse spent a lot of time keeping an eye on Sheldon in spite of the glass and wire that separated them, and a final terrarium occupied by Loretta the Chameleon. Charlotte had rejected the suggestion that a kitten or puppy was a more appropriate pet. “Dogs and cats run around loose all the time, you can’t keep them in a nice safe little home and protect them,” she explained.

  Emily had only one pet. Its name was Peepers. It was a stone the size of a small lemon, smoothed by decades of running water in the Sierra creek from which she had retrieved it during their summer vacation a year ago. She had painted two soulful eyes on it, and insisted, “Peepers is the best pet of all. I don’t have to feed him or clean up after him. He’s been around forever, so he’s real smart and real wise, and when I’m sad or maybe mad, I just tell him what I’m hurting about, and he takes it all in and worries about it so I don’t have to think about it any more and can be happy.”

  Emily was capable of expressing ideas that were, on the surface, entirely childlike but, on reflection, seemed deeper and more mature than anything expected from a seven-year-old. Sometimes, when he looked into her dark eyes, Marty felt she was seven going on four hundred, and he could hardly wait to see just how interesting and complex she was going to be when she was all grown up.

  After their hair was brushed, the girls climbed into the twin beds, and their mother tucked the covers around them, kissed them, and wished them sweet dreams. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she warned Emily because the line always elicited a giggle.

  As Paige retreated to the doorway, Marty moved a straight-backed chair from its usual place against the wall and positioned it at the foot of—and exactly between—the two beds. Except for a miniature battery-powered reading lamp clipped to his open notebook and a low-wattage Mickey Mouse luminaria plugged into a wall socket near the floor, he switched off all the lights. He sat in the chair, held the notebook at reading distance, and waited until the silence had acquired that same quality of pleasurable expectation that filled a theater in the moment when the curtain started to rise.