Dispatch (30 page)

Impossibly, Kyoko was on my television that evening. I had just watched a comedy on HBO in an attempt to escape from my real life, and when I switched the channel to watch NBC's local newscast, Kyoko was there. I don't know if she'd somehow gotten someone to intercept the signal or if this intrusion was sanctioned by the powers that be, but her pretty face filled the screen, and though there was no sound, she kept mouthing the words, "I love you. I love you. I love you..."

I switched off the television.

I dreamed that night that I was lying in bed and Kyoko, naked and beautiful, sat on my face. But she smelled of ass rather than pussy, and when I tried to get up, tried to squirm out from under her, I couldn't. I was unable to breathe, I was choking to death, and I tried to push her off me, but my hands kept sinking into her skin as though she were made of clay, and the weight of her body kept increasing, pressing over my mouth and nose, cutting off my supply of air.

I awoke just before I died.
 

The witch was gone. Had I written her out of existence?

Could I write Kyoko away, too?

I thought about it. The idea was worth a try, I decided, and I sat down and penned a series of letters from various points of view to various recipients, working at my highest and most inspired level, concocting reasons why she should be fired from the company, why she needed to be removed from the presence of other Letter Writers. The reasons were real and fake: because she was a psychotic stalker, because she was an incompetent letter writer. I used every arrow in my arsenal, and I sent all of the correspondence off at once, hoping that perhaps sheer bulk would be impressive enough to get my point across.

There she was the next day, standing in front of my office when I arrived, holding an elaborately wrapped present, which she gave to me along with an unwelcome kiss. I refused the present, angrily sent it back with her and watched with a sort of grim satisfaction as she dashed to the elevator in tears.

I wrote more letters.

The following day, she sent me a formal note of apology for the present, then plopped herself down next to me at lunch. None of my friends knew what to do or how to react. All conversation stopped, and Stan suggested tersely that it would be better if she left. Shamus, as promised, tried to hit on her, but she shot him down in cute broken English that charmed even Ellen. Kyoko snuggled next to me, pressing her bare leg against mine under the table, and I stood, leaving the rest of my lunch and excusing myself as I returned to my office. According to Stan, she spent the rest of the hour talking about me.

I wrote
more
letters.

The day after that, I found a long black hair on the soap in my shower. And a pair of women's panties mixed in with the clothes in my hamper when I sorted through everything to do the laundry. In my mailbox was a naked picture of her, a recreation of her original photo that she'd taken by herself in my bathroom.

That was the last straw.

I had to kill the bitch.

I tried to unthink that thought but failed. I recalled my conversation with Henry.

I think killing her's your only choice.

No. I couldn't do that.

Although I'd done it before, through letters, and the truth was that if I could get rid of her that way, I would—without feeling any guilt or remorse. Hell, I'd be overjoyed if she keeled over right this second and never darkened my pathway again. But it was one thing to be morally liable for the death of a person, and it was quite another to perform the actual deed. That was why presidents responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians in war actions slept like babies at night, while an individual who had too much to drink and accidentally killed a pedesterian would be wracked with guilt for the rest of his life.

Isn't that a sin?
I'd asked Henry about killing another Letter Writer.

A sin.
Why had I used that terminology? It certainly wasn't the way I usually spoke or thought.

I thought of my dream of Christ's rotting body.

God was dead. There was no sin.

Yes, I decided. I would murder her.

I read the letter accompanying her photo:

Dear Jason,

I wrote a letter to Eric today. I told him all about us. I told him I knew you way before Vicki did and that I not only loved you first, I loved you more. I told him that we were together now and we were going to have our own son, a son you'd love far more than you loved him.

It hurts sometimes to tell the truth, but it is always the best way to go. It is better to get the pain over now, quickly, than stretch it out.

I had another dream about you last night. I was sitting on the toilet and you were standing in front of me, dangling it in my face, I couldn't resist the temptation, and I opened my mouth and took you all the way in and worked on you until you finished.

I always dream about us in the bathroom. I think it is because that is where I took that picture of myself Do you still have it? I have thought of you every day since. I wrote the letter that killed my father because of it. I drove my mother away because of it. I am here because of it.

And now we are together once more. And Vicki and Eric and the whole world know! Nothing can come between us ever again!

Love always and forever,
Kyoko

Enraged, I tore the letter into little pieces, flinging the pieces furiously across the room as hard as I could, only to watch them fall and flutter hopelessly to the ground a foot or so away from me. She dared to write to my son? Filling his head with who knew what lies and psychotic half-truths? I would have beaten her head against the wall if I'd had her before me at that moment. My only consolation was that maybe he wouldn't receive the letter. I still wrote to my wife and son every day, and I had yet to hear back from them, so maybe our personal correspondence wasn't being delivered. Even if her letter did reach him, though, Vicki would intercept it first. She'd read it, and she might very well believe it, but she wouldn't pass it on to Eric. Of that I was sure. She would keep that information from him.

I looked at the little scraps of letter on the ground. At least I'd had the presence of mind not to tear up the envelope. It had Kyoko's address on it.

I was going to need that.
 

I drove to her house after dark.

She lived not in our gated community but in a Japanese section of the city. It was a mishmash of various styles and eras, architectures of East and West coexisting side by side. Despite the pagoda roofs, though, despite the neon signs in Japanese and the bonsai gardens in front of the low simple homes, everything seemed just a little too meticulously detailed, a little too thoroughly thought out. And of course, the streets were strangely empty. Cars were parked along the sides of the streets but not moving, and it was only the blinking of the lights and the presence of random noise from unseen sources that made it seem populated at all.

I drove past Kyoko's house, then parked two doors up.

I was glad she did not live in an apartment or condo, though I had plans for taking care of her if that were the case, as well. But a house was much easier, would allow me to enter and leave much more quickly, and I remained in my car, slumped in the front seat while I waited to see if anyone else drove by.

The streets were deserted, as were the sidewalks, and finally I opened the car door and stepped out. The air here smelled different, at once smoggier and more fragrant than it did in my neighborhood, as though a fleet of buses were idling next to a field of flowers, and I wondered if her city in Japan smelled like that. I'd probably never find out.

She definitely would not smell it again.

Because tonight she was going to die.

I felt no qualms as I walked up the sidewalk, opened the small gate in front of her house and stepped on the series of inset stones that led across the moss-covered ground to her door. A front window was open, the light on inside, and I could hear noise from within. I paused. She was listening to music. Not music on the radio or TV, but music from a record or CD. And I recognized it instantly.

the crack in the bell.
Daniel Lentz.

Daniel Lentz was
our
composer, Vicki's and mine.

Hearing his music issue from Kyoko's stereo was like a slap in the face and in a way seemed more an invasion of my privacy than even breaking into my house had. She was not trespassing upon physical space here; she was stomping on my memories and my intimate life with Vicki.

And why was she allowed to have her own music when I wasn't? Especially since her music
was
my music.
My
CDs and records had been taken from me. It was another layer of insult, and it gave me the strength to pound on the front door. "Kyoko!" I called, feigning friendliness, hoping my anger wasn't evident from my voice. "It's me! Jason!"

The door flew open. "I know you come!" she said in her thickly accented English. She was dressed not as though she'd planned to spend a quiet evening at home but as though she'd planned to go club hopping and was not intending to return alone.

There was no one on the street as far as I knew, but I still felt far too conspicuous standing on her stoop like this, knowing what I intended to do. "Could I come in?" I asked. "I'd like to talk to you."

She seemed disappointed, her face falling, matching the petulant tone of her voice. "Just talk?"

"More," I promised. My palms were sweaty.

She brightened instantly, smiling. "I want more, too. Sex. You want sex?"

This was dragging on interminably! I risked a look backward, saw no one, nothing unusual in the darkness. "Yes," I promised. "Sex."

Kyoko grabbed my hand, pulled me in. Her fingers were soft but firm. She closed the door behind us, then immediately reached for my belt. I slapped her hand away. She looked up at me, surprised and hurt. "You say you want sex."

"I lied," I said.

I grabbed her throat quickly and squeezed as hard as I could, gratified by the expression of shock on her face. Strangling someone looks so easy in movies, on TV, but the truth is that the human neck is tougher than it appears. Her throat bulged against my hands, seeming to grow as the muscles stiffened in self-preservation. Beneath that, the cartilage protecting her trachea and esophagus felt like hardened cowhide. I pushed her to the ground, doing so gently so as not to lose traction but trying to get her in a position where I could more easily apply pressure.

I wanted to choke that bitch, wanted to see, to hear, to
feel
the life leaving her body.

She thrashed about, but until almost the very end, I think, she thought it was some sort of joke, a type of rough foreplay or kinky fetish game. She twisted around awkwardly, intentionally spreading her legs in my sight line so I could see that under her skirt she wore no panties and was completely shaved.

But that reminded me of those panties she'd left in my hamper, and all I could think about was the fact that she'd trespassed in my home, invading my privacy, as the music—
my and Vicki's music
—continued playing on the stereo like some sick-joke reminder of everything that had gone so horribly off course in my life. I thought of the letter she said she'd sent to my son.

"This ... is ... for ... Eric!" I managed to get out.

And then I killed her; then she died.

She pissed herself first, and her bowels evacuated, and the second I let go of her neck, vomit dribbled out of her mouth. I staggered away, sickened, and threw up myself, puking on an end table, the reliably rational part of my brain thinking that I was leaving damning DNA evidence. But at that point, I didn't even care. Opening the door, I stumbled out of the house into the night, wiping my mouth as I hurried across the short yard, through the front gate, down the sidewalk to my car. I felt queasy but not because I had just murdered someone. No, it was the simple physical smell of her waste that made me gag, a reflexive animal aversion that had nothing to do with the moral overtones of what I'd just done.

Hell, if she hadn't shitted and pissed and puked, I'd be on cloud nine right now.

Because I was glad she was dead. I'd done the right thing, and despite my physical repulsion, I felt as though a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Just as I had been when my dad had been gunned down, I was filled with a euphoria that I knew, intellectually, to be evil and wrong but that, emotionally, felt satisfying and very, very right indeed.

I drove home.

And it was all over.

I took a long shower and was still in bed in time to catch a rerun of
ER
.

I went to work the next morning whistling a happy tune. In my office, there were no unwanted envelopes, no surprise visits.

My only fear over the next few weeks was a simple one, the same one that any person would have in my circumstances—the fear of being caught. For the next several days, I diligently watched all local newscasts, read all local newspapers, searching for any information about Kyoko's death, any indication that the police were on my trail. But there was no mention of the killing anywhere, her name did not appear in any obituary, and when I scanned the weekly police log that was printed in Friday's edition of the
Brea Gazette
, her address was not listed and no murders at all were mentioned.

Could it be that her body had not been discovered yet?

Or had the company covered it up?

I was tempted to tell Stan what I'd done. I didn't know if he would understand, but he was my friend and I knew he would not turn me in. He would definitely have some theories about what had happened. But I decided not to involve him. Why widen the circle of guilt? This was my doing and mine alone. It would be wrong to drag anyone else into it.

When another week had passed with no news, I gathered my courage and drove past Kyoko's house. I saw no police tape, no for sale sign, nothing unusual or amiss, nothing that would indicate the owner of the house had been murdered.

I sped home.

But the next day I returned, one of her letters in hand, pretending as though I had come on invitation and wanted to visit. My mouth was dry, my palms were wet, but I managed to walk through the small yard and up to the front door, where I first rang the bell, then knocked. "Hello?" I said loudly, as though calling out to see if anyone were home.