Gray Matter (13 page)

“What’s the idea?” he said, trying to catch his breath. “I told you to wait in the car.”

“I can take care of myself. I shouldn’t even have let you come.”

“Yeah, well, creeps wait in parking lots for good-looking dames like you. How’d you like some jerk to grab you by the throat and have your skirt up over your head before you get a chance to scream?”

PJ looked defiant. “I’m not wearing a skirt,” she said. “I only did that on my first day to impress everyone. Basically, I hate skirts.”

“Oh. Well, tear your slacks off, then.”

“Shut up. People are staring.” There was a man at the front desk looking in their direction.

“Say, Julio,” Schultz said familiarly, “how’s it going?”

“OK, man, keeping out of trouble. How you doing?”

“Same. What’re you doing out here in the sticks?”

“Safer for my family, man. I got two daughters.”

Schultz nodded and gave PJ a slight push toward the elevators. “That guy used to be a security guard in an office building downtown. I knew he had gotten a job as a night clerk in a hotel, but I didn’t know it was out here in St. Charles.”

He pressed the button and rocked back on his heels. “Good guy. Probably got a gun under the counter.”

“Is it just hotels that bother you, Schultz, or are you planning to follow me home every night when I move into a house? Which, by the way, is supposed to happen in about,” she looked at her watch, “seven hours from now.”

“I guess I have a thing about hotels.”

They were in front of her room. “As long as you’re here,” PJ said, “why don’t you come in for a minute and get dry? We’ll have to talk quietly because Thomas will be asleep, though. I have some soda and ice.”

“Is it diet soda?”

“No.”

“I’m game.”

Inside, she went over and kissed Thomas on the cheek. He was sprawled sideways across the bed, and shifted under her light kiss. She pulled the covers up as best as she could, considering that he was lying sideways. Then she headed for the bathroom.

“I’m going to get out of these wet clothes. Here’s a towel.”

A towel came flying in his direction. He caught it and dried his hair, musing that a washcloth would have been sufficient for that. Then he folded the towel onto the seat of the only chair in the room and sat down heavily. A cat jumped up into his lap, and he rested a hand on its sleek body. He had always liked cats, as much as he liked any animals, which wasn’t much. After a couple of minutes he sensed that he was being watched. He looked over at the boy’s bed and saw that Thomas was sitting bolt upright in bed, staring at him.

The boy was sturdily built, with a large bone structure that would support substantial muscular development when puberty struck, but now seemed to jut out at odd angles. His hair was thick and black, and he wore it in a blunt cut with a weight line at mid-ear. His eyebrows and eyelashes were black and luxurious also, in contrast to the rest of his face, which seemed cheated by comparison: thin lips, angular cheeks, chin, and nose. The light in the room was just bright enough to show his deep aquamarine eyes. Schultz tried to remember if he had even seen eyes that particular shade, and came up blank.

“Who the fuck are you?” Thomas said.

The bathroom door opened and PJ stood there in a long white bathrobe.

“That will be one dollar,” she said, with a touch of amusement in her voice.

Thomas wasn’t amused. “What’s going on here, Mom? What’s this guy doing in our room in the middle of the night? And what are you doing in your robe while he’s here?”

PJ almost burst out laughing. “Really, Thomas, it’s not what you think. At least I don’t think so. What exactly are you thinking?”

Schultz didn’t know whether to open his mouth or not, so he sat and watched the events unfold.

Her son’s anger flared because PJ seemed to think the situation was funny. His face was red and contorted. “What I’m thinking,” he said, “is that you hopped into bed with the first man you found. Boy, it didn’t take you long. We’ve only been in town a week!”

PJ stood flabbergasted.

“Maybe Dad didn’t spoil things after all. Maybe it was all your fault,” Thomas continued. He was practically yelling with pent-up anger. “Maybe you’re going to walk out on me now, too, with your new lover. Dad told me that you were a lying bitch. I told him he was all wrong, but now I’m not so sure!”

PJ still stood with her mouth open, unable to respond to her son’s outburst.

Schultz stood up, dumping the cat on the floor.

“That’s enough, son,” he said. “There’s nothing going on here except simple hospitality. I work with your mother at the St. Louis Police Department, and she invited me in for a soda. Anything else is in your dirty mind. Now, I think you’d better apologize and get back to bed before I haul you out of here and explain to you how to talk courteously to grownups.”

Dog hummed tunelessly and mindlessly as he sat on the black case putting the finishing touches on a new portrait. It was always the same thing that he hummed: the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Pa had been a baseball fan.

He had been tempted once to taste some of the scraps of skin and flesh he carved away, but that seemed unnecessary, and overly Dog-like. No need to go for the appetizer when the main course was so…available.

Vanitzky had stopped screaming about an hour ago, and his head was lolled forward against the back of the chair. He was conscious but lost in an internal world where there were no painful strokes and no blood running down the curve of his back, first a few trickles, then a small river.

Satisfied with his carving, Dog stood up and flipped the latches of the case he had been sitting on. He pulled out an instant camera and took several pictures of his efforts. The flashes were harsh against the subdued color scheme of the suite. He put them into the case while they were still gray and undeveloped, with no hint of the horror they had captured. It was always fun to see how they came out when he got back home.

He removed from the case a machete, an old one with a worn and nicked wooden handle. The blade itself had a couple of notches in it, but had been carefully sharpened with a whetstone he kept wrapped in a piece of blue flannel. Ma had told him it was a little piece of his birthing blanket, the one she had wrapped him in herself after she squatted, pushed him out her sex tunnel, and caught him. Carrying the machete in his right hand, he walked in front of Vanitzky and slapped his face lightly.

Dog always liked to see the look in their eyes as he held the head steady by the hair and swung the machete.

After waiting patiently for the blood to drain, he dropped the head into a plastic bag, the great big kind with a zipper on top used for freezing cakes and pies. Pauley Mac had discovered them when he worked in a train kitchen, and he always kept a supply. Then he sealed the zipper, put that bag inside another, and sealed it also. Finally, he nestled the heavy bundle in the foam cutout inside the black case.

The next hour or so was spent cleaning up. There was a rough wiping with a hand towel from the bathroom. Then he stripped and carefully packed his bloody clothes in more plastic bags. He wiped himself with baby wipes (the travel pack, so handy), and dressed in fresh clothing from the black case. Then all of the used items were carefully stowed in the case, which was latched and locked. He looked around for an unusual item, anything which would attract the attention of the police, leaving them puzzling over the significance of it. It was something he did at every scene, like arranging the roses in the pianist’s apartment. Nothing jumped out at him, so he decided to leave the tray with the chocolate covered strawberries which he had used to get into the room. He wiped it carefully with a clean washcloth until it gleamed and he was certain that no prints remained. He helped himself to a couple of the strawberries as a reward for his effort. Finally it was time for the inspection, to make sure that the place was clean of anything to connect him to the scene. For the first time, he glanced into the bedroom of the two-room suite.

The mussed bed sent unmistakable signals. Dog wanted to go over and roll in the sheets, but Pauley Mac ruled against it. After all, Dog had already had his fun today; now it was Pauley Mac’s job to make sure the place was clean.

There was a video camera on a tripod, pointed at the bed. Pauley Mac could see from the doorway that the camera wasn’t recording. There was no little red light. He didn’t have a video camera himself, but he knew how they worked. He liked to clown around in front of them in stores. It always amazed him when he saw himself on camera or even in the mirror that there was only one reflection. It seemed to him that there should be thirty or so, jumbled on top of each other, with his own identity a pale outline underneath them all, like multiple exposures on film.

It didn’t take much imagination to figure out that Vanitzky had videotaped his sexual encounter with Katrina. Pauley Mac revised his opinion of the relationship; it was probably a pay-for-play situation after all. He considered winding back the tape and watching it, but he didn’t want to enter the bedroom. That was one less place Pauley Mac had to worry about being clean. Besides, he wasn’t sure how to connect the video camera to the television for playback. There was no VCR in the room.

Reluctantly, Pauley Mac turned his back on the tempting scene. He picked up the large case, now considerably heavier than when he had brought it into the room, and moved it over to the door. He noticed the indentations left by the case in the plush carpeting next to the chair containing Vanitzky’s beheaded body, and carefully scuffed them out with his shoes. Suddenly he remembered that the pianist’s apartment had been carpeted, and most likely he had left behind a similar set of indentations.

Always said he had the house habits of a pig, that boy,
Ma interjected.
Always leavin’ his mark on them floors, be it a puddle of piss or dog shit on his shoes. Could always tell when little Pauley Mac done walk through a room.

It could have been funny, but coming from Ma it wasn’t.

Other voices in his head berated him for his carelessness. There was a distinct undercurrent of satisfaction from those who wished that he would be caught. He quieted them all; there was still work to be done.

At the door, he removed his gloves and pushed them into his pocket with quick, nervous movements. It wouldn’t do to be seen in the halls wearing gloves like that. He turned the doorknob using the washcloth he had used to polish the strawberry tray, put the case out in the hall, and closed the door, again with the washcloth, which disappeared into his pocket on top of the gloves. Soon he was outside, satisfied that no one had seen him. The pickup with the BADDOG license plates headed home. There was just time for a snack before bedtime.

W
HEN THE PHONE RANG,
PJ sat up groggily. Her feet seemed pinned down, and she remembered the cat sleeping on the bed, curled next to her feet. She let a couple more rings go by as she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, disturbing—what was the name Thomas and his friend Winston had come up with? Megabite, with an
i
, not a
y,
that was it. Clever name. She realized she was rambling mentally, shook her head, and looked at the clock radio on the night stand. Four-fifteen. She had been asleep less than three hours.

Thomas, who was also awakened by the phone, stumbled into the corner of her bed on his way to the bathroom. She was reluctant to answer. Since phones were invented, people have feared that jarring ring in the middle of the night. It was always bad news, except when it was a wrong number and then you couldn’t get back to sleep anyway, lying there with heart pounding, breathing shallow and fast. As a psychologist whose patients sometimes looked inward at this time of night and saw only despair blacker than the night outside, she had particularly dreaded night calls. She reached for the phone.

“Hello.”

“Sorry to wake you, Doc. I wanted to wait until morning but the lieutenant thought you should be notified right away.”

It was Schultz. His words and the tone of voice in which they were delivered made her alert instantly.

“I’m listening.”

Schultz sighed. “There’s been another murder, same MO. A ballet dancer, whatever you call a male ballerina. In a hotel on Lindell Boulevard. Call came in through 911.”

The hairs on PJ’s arms rose, and her breath stopped in her throat. Something Schultz had said about hotels, about strange things happening in hotels. She glanced at the bathroom door behind which her precious, confused, and infuriating son was tending to his private functions. She heard a reassuring splash of water in the sink.

“Still there, Doc?”

“Yes, I’m sorry, go on.”

“Man named Ilya Vanitzky. His girlfriend Katrina Rolls was with him in his hotel room until nearly midnight, doesn’t know exactly when she left. She came back at three-forty-five because she forgot her insulin kit. She’s diabetic, needs a shot first thing in the morning. She lost her spare kit a week ago and hadn’t replaced it. Seems she’s constantly misplacing the stuff. Her shrink told her she does it to be self-destructive because she hates herself deep down. Anyway, she opened the door with the key Vanitzky had given her. She was surprised that he didn’t have the safety chain fastened. He always made a point of it. She was more surprised when she turned on the lights.”

PJ’s imagination filled in the scene Katrina saw. The toilet flushed, and Thomas came out and sat on the edge of her bed. She found his presence comforting.

“I suppose I need to come to the hotel,” she said.

“Well, you are the leader of the pack, Doc,” he said. “Sometimes the crown ain’t too comfortable, if you get my meaning.”

“Yes, Detective, I certainly do. And sometimes the tail end of the dog is just that: the tail end. It doesn’t always get to wag the dog.”

Schultz chuckled, a kind of gurgling noise that sounded like a garbage disposal fed a heavy meal. “I’ll have to remember that one, Doc. I might get a chance to use it sometime.”

He gave her directions to the hotel, and she hung up the phone. She thought that her son looked beautiful, simply because he was alive and sitting on her bed with his young face so serious and his mussed hair standing straight up.