The Parallel Apartments (67 page)

“What was your—”

“I killed some people.”

“Hm, plural, good. Murder? Manslaughter? Who? Why? Where? Are you sorry?”

          
per saltum repudiated capital punishment observe drops in capital crimes until an instance so heinous that in effect vigilantism or let us say reverse vigilantism

“Also, abuse of a corpse.”

Murphy paused. A curious sensation, starting at his feet, began to climb and constrict him like kudzu winding up a phone pole, a pokey but livid asphyxia that took Murphy a full ten seconds to identify as fear. Murphy wasn't on the internet messaging with some true-crime blowhard; this was a real guy, less than a body-length away, fresh out of prison for killing,
more
than killing, messing with their bodies after the fact, maybe screwing them, or chopping them up and arranging the pieces according to some horrific private symbology. Who knows what he's capable of, right now, in the True Crime Convention snack bar? Murphy, not for the first time, felt, in addition to punily frightened, holistically outclassed.

          
mountebanks that diagnose with cardiomyologia long dead European nobles based purely on their portraits hanging in museums and more than a few revising all of Eur

“I mean,” continued Murphy, “if you care to discuss it.”

“It was a family.”

“You… killed a whole
family
? Yours?”

The man did not answer. He did not seem to move. Presently, he said:

“I don't know if it'll be of any help, but one thing they all had in common was that they were all pretty likable, pretty friendly.”

“What? Who? The family?”

“No, the serial killers I knew. In Angola. I'd say nice fellahs, if you didn't know any better. Even Raymond Herrmann. Looking back—”

“Raymond Herrmann
!? Are you kidding? Jesus!”

“—he was a good friend to me.”

          
hilariously considered by inmates at least the most honorable but if you consider the effect of a bullet to the body as not an invisible death ray like on the tamer television shows but as the strongest man in the world hitting you so hard with the end of a tack hammer that it tears your execution garment punches through your sternum and lodges in a ventricle cauterizing your flesh the round is so hot and I can assure you that based on interviews the

“What else?”

The man never let go of his coffee cup. He asked Murphy for details of the attempted murders, which Murphy gave, changing nothing but locations and dates and pronouns.

“So, whaddaya think? Any insights?”

“Well, yes,” the man said after a moment. He looked right at Murphy, the first time he'd done so. The damage to the man's face was severe, the kind of wound once commonly seen among veterans of World War II. “What if…”

The scaling kudzu was now rib-cage-high.

“…your guy is…”

What must it feel like to get beaten up like that? To hear sharp pops and gristly crunches and tiny, high-pressure bursts, right inside your own head? The panic that comes with dislocation, the nausea that attends escaping blood, the helplessness of prostration, the illogic of sudden deformation, the time lost, death closer, sleep impossibly far away.

“
…not…
”

Jesus Christ, to get your eye squashed between collapsing maxillae? To get hit so hard your brain shakes loose and becomes moorless in your own skull? Do compressed eyes pop, as though gnocchi?

“…a serial killer?”

“Huh?”

“Maybe he's failing on purpose, subconsciously. He wants to kill, he thinks he does, but maybe he just doesn't have what it takes. That he's really a human, not a monster, that he just needs a little therapy or a good talking-to or a copy of
What Color Is Your Parachute.
”

“Respectfully, that's fucking stupid.”

“Yessir, it could be. But it would explain why he hasn't killed anyone, and why you can't find him. You're hunting a killer, but there isn't one. You're just plain old barking up the wrong tree.”

“Incorrect.”

“That's not to say he, whatever he is, shouldn't be stopped. Maybe you ought to try the police again. I'll corroborate best I can, if you want me to.”

“I imagine the police wouldn't listen to a word you had to say. After killing your whole family and all.”

“It wasn't mine. My family is alive, as far as I know, but I surely died for them when I killed those other people.”

          
you not the first Antarctic homicide to be swept under the permafrost so to speak for want of a sys

“Really. So you killed total strangers? I hate to judge, but that's fucking horrible.” Murphy felt no shame in this statement. Murphy's program of murder was totally different than this monster's.

“It was. I was drunk and hit their car with mine. The Nguyens. Two little girls and their mother and grandparents.”

“Ohh,
vehicular
homicide. I don't really count that. I take it all back. Not fucking horrible.”

“Why?”

“Because it was an accident, right? Still, fourteen years is pretty light for five dead.”

“And two dogs.”

The man explained that his sentence for each death had been twenty-two years, but the judge who sentenced him ordered the terms to be parole-eligible and run in concurrence. The man had gotten a break for three reasons: the judge was rehabilitation-minded; the judge was a
Smirnoff man himself; and the judge all but announced that he felt that the Vietnamese were an ethnicity that in Louisiana should not carry as high a value as others—he had abstracted and simplified the family as “dead foreigners”—perforce, crimes against them were not to be reprimanded so harshly. They were recent émigrés, and since the man had killed everyone in the family, there were no relatives to speak for them, and very few friends.

“I can't believe you got parole.”

“Well, I declined, but the parole board accused me of reverse false contrition and made me leave.”

“You're kidding.”

“Nosir.”

“You wanted to stay? In prison? You're a weirdo, brother.”

“Yessir.”

“So why don't you do another crime and let yourself get caught and go back?”

The man said nothing. He withdrew into a brown study. His disposition seemed scolding or condescending or in some way asserting that Murphy was a simpleton, prompting Murphy to say:

“Or why don't you just kill yourself?”

“It is one of the conditions of my parole that I participate in a traveling anti-drinking-and-driving exhibit for one year.”

“You're not going to kill yourself, so you can obey parole.”

“Well,” said the man, “yes.”

“So do it after.”

“The problem with suicide as an act of contrition,” continued the man, “is that no one will see it as you did. It will be viewed as an act of cowardice, an escape from one's comeuppance. In fact, I think there is no way to both promise and commit true contrition. If a criminal wants to express genuine sorrow, and hurts himself, it will be seen as the criminal simply getting what he wants. The criminal, in order to be truly penitent, may not have what he wants, no matter how self-destructive or painful or steeped in real remorse.”

“So I'm guessing you took Bourque's blanket so he would fuck you up.”

The man, if nothing else, was practiced at saying nothing.

“What else did you do to yourself?”

After a moment the man told Murphy how it was possible to hone the edge of a plastic playing card, the durable kind they use in casinos, with a kind of sandpaper fashioned from salt and semen, achieving an edge sufficient to distaff and/or castrate without the mess and uncertainty associated with the normal prison method, which was a daylong commitment to a gradual choking-off of one's privates utilizing a garrote made from straws or some such.

          
generations removed can the real effect of execution be felt but like Schrödinger's cat will be both

“That's repugnant. Did you really cut them—
everything
—off? That's a lot of trouble to go through when you could've just cut your throat.” “Well, that wasn't the point.”

“Your voice isn't high—sure you're not pulling my leg a little?”

“It doesn't change if castration is performed after puberty.”

“You know what? You almost sound proud of yourself.”

The man stood up. Murphy thought he was going to get beaten up. For one instant Murphy was entirely bound in fright kudzu. But the man said:

“Well, looks like it's time for me to go back to my booth.” “Wait, is that the one with the rusty mashed-up car, a couple down from the Black Widow booth?”

“Yes, but that's not rust. It's blood. That car was involved in another five-fatality drunk-driving crash, just a week ago. My obligation here is to talk about what I did, answer questions about the wreck, prison, and remorse, and let people see my face and my bobbed groin close up. Scared straight, et cetera. Good luck with your serial killer. If you really think there is one running around, I hope you seek assistance. This convention is a good place to find it.”

“You're gonna drop your pants?”

“Yes.”

“Wait, slow down. Where are you going after the convention? Staying in town?”

          
forgotten offhand but certainly Mexico and Uruguay were wont in drafting plead-the-belly laws which of course is an absurdity in Cathol

“I'm traveling with the convention, so next is Oklahoma City. I wouldn't stay in Austin anyway. I've got people here, and I know they'd be unhappy if they happened to run into me.”

Murphy thought this a little saccharine, a little too poor-me. Maybe the man was right about his contrition paradox.

“Can I just ask you one more thing? Sir? Okay, here's a hypothetical situation: say my killer had a victim right now, all tied up, ready for dispatching, and say we were on the wall, you know, you and me, like flies, and we were watching him, how could we tell if he was a real serial killer or if he really wasn't, how could we tell? How would we know?”

The man stopped and looked down at Murphy.

He's on to me.
Murphy imagined a massive SWAT/FBI/ATF/OSI raid, with tear gas and flamethrowers and bomb robots and stony Texas Rangers shod in boots made just for stomping on the fluffy heads of suspected serial killers.

          
continue to exercise even criminal prosecution as wholly unwrit as twelfth-century French customary law yet are quite enviably

“He would kill her.”

This was a big man. Murphy looked up at his chin.

“But,” continued the man, “I know he won't.”

          
murder or not. Thank you.

XXIX

January 2005

Oh, shit, where did he come from? thought April.

In spite of the chill, April was standing on her balcony wearing only slippers and an (unlaundered) lilac bathrobe. She was watching a huge moco jumbie in the shape of a socked leg—how silly—walk down Airport Boulevard, part of some parade, when a man wearing a virtually spherical beard as dark as an attic approached, lightly startling her. He looked at first like the sort of man employed by pizza parlors and tree-trimming services to walk door-to-door deploying flyers.

“Hi,” said April. “Look at all those crazy people in the street over there.” The man showed her a long, shiny metal thing, part of a car? Had she bumped into his car in the parking lot and not realized it? She was so ditzy lately! She was about to say sorry—she always apologized first, even if a situation didn't demand it—but before she could form the word, she realized that the metal thing was a long knife and that it was now poking the loose drum of skin under her chin and that it was guiding her back into her own apartment.

“Be quiet,” said the man, shutting the door behind him. “Or I'll end this all right now. Now get on the floor. No, turn over onto your stomach.” The man kicked away some of April's clothes and CDs and decapitated microphones and plastic toys to make a place for her to lie down. “Jesus, this place is disgusting.”

“Yes, sorry.”

“You,” he said, “are gonna pay for my mistakes.”

“You're punishing me? Why?”

“Shut up. Here.”

A dull silvery object bounced next to her head and came to rest against her cheek. What was this? A toy? A ball?

“Wrap some around your mouth. All the way around your head and cover your mouth. Right. Around again. Again. Again. Again. Now around your eyes. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Fuck.”