Blood Music (4 page)

“Exactly,” said Zelly. Pat had wandered over to the television and stood leafing through
TV Guide.

“The Green River Killer, in Seattle, once left a skull out by the side of the road to be found,” she went on. “And he even brought some bones up to Oregon so the police would find them there and get confused about where the murders were being committed.”

“You know, Perez is probably going to take a beating tonight,” Pat said, and he and Greg became immediately oblivious to the conversation. Zelly was relieved; she was having a good time.

“So these killers aren't acting on any kind of impulse,” said Philip.

“'Cause I need some polish for my sister's wedding,” Lizzie was saying to Gail. “I don't usually wear any but I'm a bridesmaid and she's insisting.”

“Oh, no. That's a real misconception.” Zelly was leaning forward, intent on her explanation. “It's not the moon or anything like that. The impulse to kill is irresistible—but it isn't blind. Serial killers inevitably kill a certain kind of victim—blondes, little boys, teenage girls, whatever. And they're completely aware of their actions.”

“Your sister's getting married? Is it that broker guy she was seeing?”

“So it's not like Lon Chaney in the werewolf movies,” Philip said.

“Lon Chaney, Jr.,” said Pat. So he
was
paying attention.

“No, it's not. They have to kill, but they're completely in control within the boundaries of their mania. They usually kill about once every four weeks, and a lot of the time it really is around the full moon. But they plan—not every single crime, per se—they just plan to be ready to kill.”

“He's not so bad,” Lizzie said to Gail. “They've worked a lot of things out.”

“I still want to know about the staging stuff,” said Philip. “The Slasher just undresses the victims and leaves them right out in the street.”

“Oh, gross,” said Gail.

“That's an incredible risk,” Greg said.

“It's a ritualistic thing,” said Zelly. “Knowing that the body is going to be found is part of a ritual. But it is unusual to leave the bodies right out in the street.”

“You women all love this kind of thing,” Greg said.

“Now, don't tell me we all secretly dream of being victims,” Lizzie bridled.

“What's the ritual part about, Zel?” asked Philip. Pat had stopped paying attention again. He leaned over and the television leapt to life, and the room was filled with the monotone of a sports announcer's voice; immediately it seemed as if they had been listening to it for hours.

“These killers are often very proud of what they do,” said Zelly.

“I think with your coloring,” Gail said to Lizzie, “you should wear something more orange.”

“Proud?” asked Philip. “How could he be proud?”

“Well, remember this guy's a fruitcake,” said Greg.

“That's so easy to say, isn't it?” Pat said suddenly. “The guy's a fruitcake. Maybe he's trying to create something, or to re-create something. Like performing a piece of music. Maybe what this guy's trying to say has to be said over and over, because he wants to present it perfectly.” Zelly stiffened: he was making fun of her.

“But I really like that color,” Lizzie said.

“But what is it he's trying to say?” Philip asked.

“Don't encourage him,” Zelly said, but Pat was suddenly quite intent.

“Maybe he doesn't really know himself yet. Maybe that's why it's got to be done over and over again.”

Greg laughed. “You make this sound like a piece of performance art, not a series of rape-murders.”

“He must really hate women,” said Gail.

“I think all men have contempt for women,” Lizzie said.

“And fear,” Zelly put in.

“Fear?” asked Pat. “What of? When you're so easy to kill.”

“Oh, that's a charming thing to say,” said Lizzie. “You said Rosewood, right?” picking up Zelly's fingers.

“I'll get you some,” Zelly said.

“How would you kill a woman?” Pat asked Greg.

“Christ, that's a hell of a question,” said Philip.

“Your husband is in a delightful mood tonight,” Gail said to Zelly.

“He's just making fun of me,” she said. She was biting her lip.

“How about you, Philip?”

“I can't answer a thing like that. I wouldn't kill anybody.”

“Isn't it amazing the things men can say about women in polite company and get away with it?” Gail said. “One time this guy told me he didn't trust women because he could never trust anything that bleeds for five days every month and doesn't die.”

“Christ,” said Zelly.

“Please forgive us all,” said Philip.

“A gun would be easiest,” said Greg, “but throttling would probably be more interesting.” Lizzie reached over and slapped his arm.

“Well, of course strangling has its points,” said Pat, watching the game. “I might start with that. But there is a certain elegance to using a knife. A certain appropriateness.” Zelly glared at him.

“It's all your fault, Zelly,” said Philip. “Pat's been listening to you too long. You read about this stuff long enough and you start thinking about how to do it.”

“Look,” said Pat, “Mattingly just hit a double. Come on, Greg, stop encouraging my wife. Come watch the game.” The men withdrew to the sofa but Philip was obviously still listening.

“Yeah, but how do you explain
my
husband?” Lizzie was asking Gail.

“Usually it's assumed the mother had something to do with it,” Philip said from over on the sofa.

“You know, it's always the mother!” Gail burst out. “You'd think fathers just simply didn't exist! I hate that, that it's always got to be the woman's fault.”

“It isn't, really—” Zelly began.

“I think men are in awe of what a woman is capable of,” Gail went on. “We can perform a miracle, and men just can't handle that.”

“It sure didn't feel like a miracle when Mary was born,” laughed Zelly.

“But it was,” said Gail, and Zelly nodded.

“I think men are afraid of us,” she said. “I think men resent our power.”

“And don't forget the power of the mother,” said Philip. He was leaning away from the game. Pat and Greg were looking at the screen.

“The mother really is everything to a child,” Philip went on, “especially if she breastfeeds. Literally everything. I think, at least when the baby is very small, no matter how much the father helps out.”

“Jesus, look at that,” Pat said excitedly to Greg, “a man home. Philip, you're missing this.”

“—and a boy child, in the normal course of gaining independence, has to get much further away from his mother than a girl child does. A girl is always like the mother—the mother is never fully ‘other.' But a boy child at some point must accept the fact that the mother is ‘other' in every way. And maybe some children, maybe if they've been damaged in some way—I'm not saying it's always the mother's fault, but maybe a child that's been terribly hurt has a lot more difficulty accepting the mother as ‘other' without denying her entirely—and by extension denying all other women.”

“Phil, you're deep,” Pat said. “And you just missed two runs.”

“I think all men deny women,” Gail went on. “I think they deny us a fundamental existence, or the right to existence.”

“I like women,” Philip said pathetically, and they all laughed.

“Hey, Zelly,” said Lizzie in the sudden small silence, “it's our turn. How would you kill a man?”

Gail laughed. “Oh, good,” she said.

“Pat's right,” said Zelly, “we're easier to kill than they are—easier for them, anyway. Women don't have as many alternatives. I guess I'd have to shoot him.”

“You two were made for each other, you know that?” said Philip. Greg and Pat were watching a number of bikini-clad young women on the television dance around a beer truck.

“But the Slasher must really hate women an awful lot,” Gail said again.

“He doesn't necessarily hate women,” said Pat. “They're just there, you know?” Zelly wished he would just watch the TV.

“You mean he might hate men, or himself, or the government, it's just easier to take it out on women?”

“Well, there's the sexual thing with women. Women are everywhere. Unprotected.”

“Remember those ‘Why Ask Why' commercials from last year?” Gail asked Lizzie. “I hated those.”

“Who knows what motivates the Slasher? For all we know he might think—”

“Oh, God, so did I. Whoever wrote those
really
hated women.”

“—the moment of death is the moment of greatest love.”

Gail and Lizzie were laughing.

“What did you say, Pat?” Zelly asked.

“Some such shit,” said Pat.

“Holy fuck!” Greg burst out, “look at that fastball!”

“I thought they outlawed fastballs,” Lizzie said.

“Spitballs,” said Pat.

“The papers say he does it because of the full moon,” Gail interjected.

“All crime goes up at the full moon,” said Zelly. Pat was watching the game again. “But he killed Cheryl Nassent three weeks after he killed at the full moon, because that time he killed the wrong woman. He was looking for a blonde but he killed a brown-haired woman by mistake.”

“He killed somebody by mistake?” asked Gail.

“You know what I mean. Her hair must have looked lighter under the streetlight.”

“Was that her name, Cheryl?” Pat asked; now there was a man on a ski slope with a woman in a bikini on his lap.

“What kind of idiot would kill a woman by mistake?” laughed Greg.

“It's not funny,” said Lizzie severely.

“I didn't mean—”

“When's the next full moon?” asked Philip.

“Tomorrow,” said Pat. “Can't you leave that Slasher crap alone even for one night? Give it a rest, Zel, come watch the game.”

Z
elly had been a cashier behind the counter at a discount beauty store when she met Pat. She had gone to college but had not gotten a degree; she'd never been inclined to the practical; she loved English Lit courses but barely scraped by in her major, business and administration. She could not type, her fingers became toes. She had no business or, indeed, practical aspirations at all; she wanted a husband, she wanted a home of her own, she wanted to have a baby without really understanding what taking care of a baby entailed. She had no big dreams, no creation within bursting to emerge. She was waiting for something. In the cosmetics store at least the nail polish was free; it seemed as good a place as any to wait.

Pat came to the store several times, making transparently unnecessary purchases, before he asked her out. They went to the movies and they went to concerts, and he never took her dancing but he was unfailingly considerate, if cool, and his aspirations fell in with hers: the picket fence, the dog in the backyard, the tricycle on the sidewalk in front of the house, pot roast and pie smells wafting out the kitchen windows.

Pat had big dreams. To have his own business, to be his own man, a yearning for perfection and control. He wanted to hold his destiny in his hand. Her husband was a genial person with a ready wit and a sharp intelligence, but Zelly was aware of currents that ran far below his easy smile. He seemed calm but he was not calm. Pat had never seemed, even when he was courting her, to have only one face. He contained a mystery; it was the mystery that made Zelly love him. Her imagination lent him Brontëan depths.

Zelly's satisfaction with her life sprang from a solid grounding in the pleasures of normalcy; from the little Pat told her about his childhood she suspected his desire for normalcy sprang from something deep and unquenchable of which even he was largely unaware. What little he'd told her—his parents dead before he was six years old, an unsympathetic uncle and an aunt whom he seemed, obscurely, to hate—pointed to a lonely, fragmented past. Pat had grown up something of a loner, she thought, something of an outsider among the precocious sophistication of his generation, with its easy experimentation with sex and drugs. Zelly and the baby grounded Pat—he seemed to want to re-create in their marriage a sanctuary from a much earlier time.

Zelly had had boyfriends before she met Pat; she had been popular. But she'd never fallen in love. That was one of the things she was waiting for. And when she fell in love with Pat the strength of her feelings frightened her. She didn't know if he had any idea how much she loved him. She never pushed it on him, never strove to crack his own cool, indulgent facade. And she had been certain, until the birth of the baby, that she was met with an answering passion.

Zelly halfheartedly pulled a paper towel across the formica kitchen counter. He would expect dinner to be waiting. Even when he got home after midnight he expected something to be sitting in the microwave. Well, there were a few raviolis left. The baby was sleeping in her crib and the whole apartment was spotlessly clean but still Zelly moved around, wipping this and that.

TV or a book? But she stood at the counter, looking out the window. There was a full moon tonight. May eighteenth. She had shown it to Mary when they went out for their afternoon walk; it hung pale in the pale day sky. The Slasher might strike again tonight.

There was a noise on the stairs outside. Footsteps, light but measured, coming up the stairs. Pat. They had made love last night, after everybody went home. What was that he'd said, something about the greatest love? At the time she'd thought it was weird—but there was his key in the lock. And he was whistling, his favorite piece of music. Zelly put the rag down and went to greet her husband. His favorite piece. Schubert's Quartetsatz.