The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed (16 page)

It sounded reasonable to me, but Curt shook his bead violently. “Somebody knew she had hay fever. Somebody sneaked in and turned on the oven while we were talking out front. He knew she couldn’t smell. He tried to kill her.”

His tone was flat and metallic, like stones falling on a slate roof. He turned his back to us and looked out the window. Lou whispered to me:

“You’d better go and visit your mother. He’s liable to go over the edge.”

I looked at Curt’s stony face; I didn’t believe he was in danger of going over. On the other hand, he didn’t seem to need me. I looked at Sharon sprawled awkwardly asleep in a tubular aluminum chair. My folks lived only fifteen miles away, closer than Sherman. I decided to go.

My parents are the old-fashioned type; they greeted my wee-morning-hours arrival with open curiosity, but postponed their questions until breakfast. By this time they’d decided I’d quarreled with Lou. They disapproved—not of the quarrel, but of my departure. Groenfelder women have traditionally stayed on the home ground and fought it out toe-to-toe with their spouses. I didn’t want to bring up Anne’s death and I didn’t want them to know what had happened to Sharon, so I let their misapprehension stand.

That afternoon I called the hospital, but they wouldn’t let me talk to Gaby. The head nurse crooned that she was out of danger but receiving no calls. I asked for Curt, but they could give me no help and they gave me his number in Sherman. I called there and got no answer. I rang Lou and got the same negative result.

Another day was all I could take. I left Sharon there and told Mother I was going home to Sherman. Instead I went to Connersville. The receptionist at the hospital said I could see Gaby during visiting hours, in thirty minutes. I sat down to wait. The only other person in the room was a man whose face was three-fourths hidden by his newspaper. The visible one-fourth was enough for identification; I’d seen those sparse, carefully combed black hairs before.

“Boggus,” I said. “Detective Boggus, what are you doing here?”

He put down his paper and moved to a chair beside mine. “Guarding the patient,” he said. “Seeing that she gets no unwanted visitors.”

“Somebody could sneak by in a hospital uniform.”

He pursed his lips and smoothed his hair. “Well … I wanted to sit in the corridor but they wouldn’t let me. I couldn’t help that, could I?”

“You know where Curt is?”

“I’m not supposed to say.” Unnecessarily, he added: “I don’t know.” After a moment he cleared his throat. “Incidentally, is he straight?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean in the head. The lady upstairs got hurt when a stove blew up. Okay, it could be attempted murder like he says, but a stove’s a damned awkward weapon. I can’t help remembering that the last killer he staked me out on turned out to be a fag and his boyfriend. That’s why I ask if Friedland’s straight.”

I saw the receptionist beckoning. “He’s straight,” I said, getting up. “Don’t sleep on the job.”

The receptionist told me Room 220. I went up and found Gaby lying flat on her back, her neck and shoulders bandaged. She gave me a dreamy, drugged smile. “Velda … they say I won’t be scarred.”

“Good. Where’s Curt?”

She frowned as though trying to place the name. “He was here … was that yesterday …?”

I saw she was too dopey to talk sense. I took her hand and squeezed it. “I’ll find him. Don’t worry. Detective Boggus is downstairs.”

“Boggus.” She giggled. “Have no fear, Boggus is here.” Suddenly her voice raised in alarm. “Velda, Curt went back to that terrible place. They’ll kill him there. They hate him, all of them …”

I walked out into the corridor, silently cursing hospital officials for drugging patients just before visiting hours. Then I had a chilling thought: Maybe it hadn’t been the hospital. I found the floor nurse in her lighted cave down the corridor. “The patient in two-twenty, did you give her a drug?”

The woman gave me an icy frown. “Who are you?”

“I’m her sister-in-law. It’s very important.”

She consulted a chart. “Yes, fifteen minutes ago she received codeine. It would make her somewhat … hazy. She was complaining about the stitches, you know. She had nearly fifty.”

“Thank you.” I decided I was worrying too much. As I left the hospital, Boggus lowered his paper and gave me a nod, which was supposed to be reassuring. It didn’t help, because Gaby wasn’t my big worry now.

A quarter mile from Curt’s house I could see the place was dark. I parked the car at the entrance to a cornfield and hiked the rest of the way. I was surrounded by silence as I stepped onto the front porch; I waited a moment, then the cicadas resumed their hysterical trilling. I took off my shoes, tiptoed forward and put my ear to the front door. It gave silently. I pushed it open and called Curt’s name softly. There was no answer. I walked up to the second floor; the bed rooms were empty. A ladder led up to the attic where Curt had fixed up a study. I climbed up and pushed open the trapdoor. Above me Curt’s voice hissed from the darkness: “Keep down!”

I slid out onto the floor and lay flat. The darkness in the studio was Stygian; Curt had done the walls in black. I lay for a moment letting my eyes acclimate, then I used my peripheral vision as Curt had taught me. Curt sat on the floor beside the window with a rifle across his knees. I thought of a spider sitting in the middle of his web, waiting for someone to come along and twitch it.

“I think I’ve got him,” said Curt. “He’s out there watching the house. Smart of you to come in without using your lights. Might have scared him off. How’s Gaby?”

“She’s fine …” Suddenly it all seemed like a play. There couldn’t be a killer out there watching the house; this was Sherman in the year 1964, not the Dark Ages….

“How do you know he’s out there?” I asked.

“Phone wires cut,” said Curt. “Electricity off. He wants me to run for it. That’s why he didn’t try for you.”

I had a prickly feeling that Curt was crazy. Wasn’t that the way paranoiacs were, everything had to fit their fantasy? Maybe the light company had cut off his lights, maybe a phone wire had fallen down. Wouldn’t that be just as logical? I felt an urge to humor Curt, to do nothing to shake his fantasy.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“We’ll soon know.” Curt lit a cigarette, wedged it into the front sight of his rifle, and passed the glowing end along the window.
Pwwinnng!
A bullet crashed through the window and tore into the shingle roof.

The shock was so great that for a moment I thought the slug had struck me in the stomach. Immediately all my doubts disappeared. There’s nothing quite as convincing as solid lead. There was a killer out there; there was a murderer loose in Sherman. I realized how soldiers must feel when they’re on the front line and the awareness hits them: My God, they’re trying to kill
me!

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Capture him. Get a confession.”

I was about to ask if he’d quit suspecting Lou but he silenced me: “Shh. He’s coming in.”

I looked but I saw only darkness. “How do you know?”

“I feel him,” said Curt in an intense whisper. “He’s scared, uneasy, but he’s excited too. He likes the idea of killing me…. He’s choked up with desire, the kind you feel for a woman. He’s coming on in a crouch … soon he’ll hit the trip-wire. It’s attached to a couple of flash units, the kind they use for photographing game. I think that’s what scared Sharon’s horse. I looked around the spot and found pieces of melted plastic. They use it to coat flashbulbs so they won’t explode—there!”

A brilliant flash showed a stocky, bunched figure turning away as though about to run. Curt flicked a switch; a spotlight stabbed down. Curt’s voice rang out into the night.

“Hold it or I’ll shoot!”

The figure froze.

“Turn around!”

I held my breath as the killer turned. It was Johnny Drew.

“We caught a rabbit,” said Curt. “The wolf is still loose.”

Control is the key. My father killed himself when I was eight, but not before he taught me control through his own lack of it. Noise drove him into a rage; he must have had a brain tumor but nobody knew. He kicked apart my games and cursed me when I laughed. I devised secret games, and I learned how to laugh deep down inside. I drank poison after he died; they thought I didn’t understand; they kept saying, Don’t ever do that again, it’ll kill you, don’t you understand? I understood that they were afraid of death. I wasn’t, because it seemed like something that had already happened to me. It made me stronger than them because they were afraid and I wasn’t. That’s when I hit upon the game. Later I figured out that your own death ends the game. You keep it going as long as you can. That’s one of the rules.

The year after that Teddy Groner and I built a campfire near the haystack. I was fascinated by the way the orange tongues of flame could lick something and make it shrivel and die. I yelled, Feed it feed it, and started throwing hay on the fire. Teddy screamed and tore at my arms. I looked up and saw his five-year-old sister Lotte on top of the stack, but I couldn’t stop. After awhile the yellow tongues licked her and she fell. I had to move back but Teddy stood frozen. Afterwards his face was blistered and his hair burned to a crinkly mass which flaked and fell off under your fingers. He remembered nothing. I told Teddy’s folks I’d been off across the pasture when the fire started, and Teddy couldn’t deny it. Teddy was never right after that, but you couldn’t tell it for awhile. He hated me; sometimes he’d charge me blubbering and swinging his fists, but he never knew why. When we were twelve we built a house of grass and sticks and sat inside smoking cigaret butts. The little house caught fire; there was no danger but Teddy ran in terror. When the fire was out we went to Teddy’s house to tell his mother but she said he was in bed sick. He was out of school for two months. After that he stuttered, played with trucks like he’d done when he was six years old. But I could never be sure that someday he wouldn’t remember that fire. When we went swimming that day, we took Teddy with us. He was supposed to stay on the bank but you couldn’t depend on Teddy. He started swimming out to the boat, then he dived down. I knew he planned to swim under the boat and come up on the other side. I slipped off the other side and caught him as he rose. He was out of air so he didn’t struggle long….

One thing led to another. The little girl’s death led to Teddy’s, and then I was never sure of the other boys who’d been on the boat. There was Mart, that big red-necked peasant whose only hold on Velda was that he’d laid her first and she wasn’t sure the other boys had what he had. I watched them together out on their farm, and I knew that’s all she wanted from him—even though she’d told herself it was love and family and children. Those picnics she used to fix … she never ate a damn thing because she couldn’t wait until lunch was over and they could get on with the real reason she’d come out there. Afterwards—Mart never saw this part but I did—she’d kneel down over the stream and wash herself, then straighten her clothes and go home looking demure as a bride. I was sure Mart had seen me the day he came running up the hill. That afternoon I went back with a hammer. The tractor made so much noise—he had an old John Deere—that he didn’t know I was behind him until I climbed up on the drawbar. I cracked him behind the ear and he stumped down in the seat. I stopped the tractor, pulled him off and dragged him to the gully. Then I plowed four full rounds (you don’t think about what can happen while you’re vulnerable, you just try to cut the time as short as possible) in order to finish the section of land he’d marked off. Then I drove the tractor to the edge of the gully, cramped those little front wheels, and jumped. The tractor came down on top of him, the steering wheel crushed his chest. I wiped my fingerprints off the wheel, brushed my tracks out of the sand and left. On the way back to town I met Barney Proctor on his way to take Mart fishing. (Barney didn’t really like to fish; he just wanted to get away from Ethel.) He found Mart’s body and apparently forgot about meeting me. But it was Teddy Groner all over again; someday he’d remember and wonder what I was doing out there. I waited until he was fishing alone under the railroad bridge. I split his skull with an axe while he was baiting his hook (at twelve-forty-five, which gave me fifteen minutes before the one o’clock freight). I’d always wondered how it would sound; like a huge steel door crashing, like a mountain of tin cans falling down. The train took care of the evidence. Actually, that was the only real emotional kick in it; the rest was the sort of intellectual satisfaction you get when everything clicks into place, the knowledge that all seams are straight, no loose ends are left to snag you while you aren’t watching….

Anne was different. She looked like Velda—except that Velda gave an impression of control. Her claws were sheathed, her lips covered the sharp white teeth. With Anne you noticed the teeth first, and you knew she was a meat-eater. She might have been different, but Frankie pulled her cork and her true nature burst through the Southern Baptist upbringing. I began to notice how often she was the object of a fight. While two brawny louts battered each other there sat this tender young morsel on the sidelines with her legs crossed protecting that little muff which was the object of the brawl and looking vaguely bored by the whole thing. While blood and gore splashed on the floor, she’d be casing the joint to see who was next. I was younger then; I didn’t understand the game as well. I knew it well enough to see Anne’s game, but I didn’t have a clear picture of my own. Maybe Anne did … or maybe it was instinct that turned her eyes in my direction. I know that any man will have a weak moment sooner or later, and I knew if I put it off until I couldn’t help myself, she’d be in control. So I took her when I really didn’t give a damn one way or the other: it was at the lake on the Fourth of July. Everybody was there; the coves were full of boats and skiers—though not as many as these days. I nosed my boat up to one of those floating beer joints they launch every holiday and called out to her: “Get in, we’ll go for a ride.” She shrugged and got in; five years had passed since Frankie left but she still hadn’t found anything worth caring about. I nosed through a screen of cattails and into a secluded cove; from the main channel it seemed to lead into a slough, but there was a clearing in the middle of it. I killed the engine, pulled the bottle out from under the seat, and gave it to her. Schenley’s Black Label, a little warm from the sun, and she took it down a good inch on her first pull. I slid my arm around her and started to kiss her but she stiffened up: “You bring me here to kiss me?” “No.” I said. “Then why did you bring me here? Go on. Say it.” I said it and she laughed. “Most guys are afraid to say it. I guess I’ll let you.” She had on a two-piece swimsuit, I don’t remember what color. She just peeled off the bottoms and slid forward in the seat. Then she looked at me and waited; the rest was up to me. At one point in the operation another boat came nosing into the cove; I bent under the dash like I was repairing a loose wire, but Anne raised the bottle in a toast. The other boat circled and left (it was a tourist couple also looking for privacy) and they never suspected that Anne was sitting there with her bare bottom on the seat. Anne looked at me with a lopsided grin (she’d had three more slugs of warm whisky) and said, “Finish what you started—if you can.” She had style, Anne did. She dangled her hand in the water the whole time. Afterward she rolled out of the boat and hung in the water, then reached in and got the bottom of her suit and pulled it on … all very casual and debonair, as though she were an experienced, high-class whore and not just a twenty-three-year-old rural honky-tonk queen …

She never came to me; I had to go to her. She knew what I was after (at the time I played the sex game to the fullest, believing it was the only game I had going) and she liked to make me crawl. I set up a meeting in Kansas City; she was to meet me in the room, but she picked up a belligerent drunk in the hotel bar and brought him with her. I was supposed to fight him and drench the place with blood, but I just took out my knife and said to him: “You’re in over your head, buddy. Shove off.” He crabwalked backwards out of the room. Anne was drunk and thick-lipped; I knew she hated me then because she clawed me and dared me to use the knife on her. She started yelling and throwing things and I knew she wanted the hotel people to come and she wanted it to be in the papers and spread all over the home town. She wanted the whole world to come crashing down on her head and mine too….

I gave her money and she shut up. After that it was a game to see how much money she could get from me. The money was only a way of keeping score, like holes in a cribbage board. Every time I saw her she’d present me with a bill. She told me she didn’t give a damn for me or money; she’d give Frankie every cent she got, but he wouldn’t take it. He took nothing from her and she offered everything. I began to hate the name Friedland. On that last night she sent me a note to meet her in Connersville with five thousand dollars. She didn’t say or else, but I knew. When I met her, she said Frankie had to leave town before he got in bad law trouble. She wanted enough money for both of them to start up elsewhere. I gave her a check—it didn’t matter because I knew the game had run out. I followed her when she left, knowing she’d meet Frankie. (There was no plan in my mind; I was just watching for an opportunity.) She stopped outside the club and sat in her car. I pulled around the other side of the club and parked four cars away with my lights off. Soon a boy came out headed for the outside john. I heard Anne tell him she wanted to see Frankie. When he went inside, Anne lit a cigaret; I jumped out of my car and ran up while she was still blinded by the flare of the match. I put my left hand over her mouth and nose and jammed her head back against the seat. The cigaret burned my palm but I didn’t know it until later. I already had my jackknife open in my hand. I whispered, “Goodbye, Anne,” and then jabbed the blade in below her left jawbone. I yanked it toward the right as hard as I could; her head jerked and flopped; there was a gush of blood and a whistle of air and a gurgling sound. I got the check from her purse and went to my car for the heavy jack-handle. Frankie came out and spoke her name, then leaned into the car. I clubbed him in the back of the head and watched him fall on top of her. I hit him again and drove away. I stopped at a river and washed off the blood and got rid of the knife. Then I stopped at a roadside restaurant and ate a thick steak and potatoes. It was only then that I noticed the burn on my hand. It wasn’t shaking at all.

But after Bernice, something warned me: That’s one too many young, pretty, loose married women. One of these days somebody will come along and add two and two. It turned out to be Friedland; that fact gave me a weird feeling of powers outside my comprehension. I felt as though the fates were pulling my strings and all I could do was babble and make the proper hand motions….

Sandy was a thing I had to do. She and Anne had traveled in the same crowd, and it was possible Anne had said something about me. I kept putting it off because Sandy didn’t interest me, but when Friedland came back … well, in a sense he killed her. I picked her up as she started to walk home from the tavern with her baby. I gave her a drink and drove her around, watching her suck on the bottle. It was clear from the way she trusted me that she suspected nothing. But after I left her at the house—then George tore into town—I knew Friedland could make something of the fact that I’d driven her home. I went into the silent house, tied Sandy’s hands and feet, and woke her up. I wanted to talk to her first, but she was disappointingly drunk. I just held my hand over her nose and mouth; she twisted and turned in the bed for only a couple of minutes. Air is such a precious thing, we die so quickly without it. The baby started whimpering then; I was afraid it would wake the others and there’d be three more to deal with. Some people aren’t cold enough to be true humanitarians. I am; I smothered the baby too. Then I dropped the match on the floor behind the stove, watched it flare, then left. Some players would hang around and sweat it out: Are they really dead? Did I leave a clue? I threw it in the lap of the gods and left, and once again they took care of me.

But still, the act was pointless from the beginning. Curt Friedland pushed me into it, and I don’t like to be pushed…. No, it’s not a question of liking, but of uncertainty. I’d never before been up against a man who understood the game, and I wasn’t sure of the rules. The one good thing about the new development was Velda. She occupied the ideal listening post in the community and Friedland needed her. I’m not sure how he worked her into his game; perhaps she worked herself. If she’d loved Mart she would not have been vulnerable to Curt but she didn’t, otherwise she’d have gone the same way Anne did. The Groenfelder girls love only once, and when they lose their man, they die in essence. Velda didn’t die; she was still looking. Men saw the searching look in her eyes and thought they were the object—Johnny Drew, Jerry Blake—but they weren’t. Curt seemed to fill the bill. Maybe Velda was attracted by the coldness which enabled him to manipulate people, and by his reckless disregard of life which brought him nearer and nearer the big question mark. Given another environment, another historical setting, Friedland would have been a superb professional killer. (He’d administer death gently, like a blessing, as it should he done.) Maybe Velda was drawn by the smell of death. Whatever it was, she changed, matured, and now she glows with life purpose. Friedland was the catalyst Velda waited for, and I …