By nightfall he’s placed the battered old Camry in the storage shed he rented the previous day. If anyone finds it there, they’ll find a vehicle with no fingerprints on it. There’ll be no prints on the tools in the trunk, either—the spade, the mallet, the splendid knife. The roll of duct tape.
He retrieves his own car, a beige square-back Ford Tempo with his lug-gage in its trunk. He drives west on I-64 and north on I-81, the cruise control set at four miles over the speed limit. He doesn’t stop except for gas until he’s across the Pennsylvania state line. There, in a mom-and-pop motel with a front office that smells of curry, he takes a long hot shower and makes a bundle of all the clothes he wore, to be donated to Goodwill in the morning. He slips into bed naked and lets himself relive each moment of the afternoon’s entertainment, starting with the boy’s getting into the car and ending with the last stroke of the knife.
This time there’s no need to deny himself. His climax is fierce in its intensity, and he cries out like a girl in pain.
9
It’s noon, and no one has yet made an appearance on the other side of the long window. It is as if the curtain has risen upon an insistently empty stage.
Where is everybody?
Has there been a call from the governor? No, surely not, because the governor wants to go on being governor, and may even hope for higher office someday. He won’t be making any calls. Nor is there a lawyer out there with a last-ditch appeal to a high court. The appeal process has long since ended for Preston Applewhite.
Is Applewhite all right? He’s a young man, a man just over the threshold of middle age, but old enough for a stroke, old enough for a heart attack. He pictures the man struck down in his cell at the eleventh hour, imagines the ambulance ride, the race to save his life. And then of course the stay of execution, until he’s deemed in good enough condition to be put to death.
But surely it’s just his own imagination, having a field day. The other spectators aren’t fidgeting in their chairs or checking their watches. Perhaps executions are like rock concerts, perhaps everyone knows they never start precisely on time.
It’s not as though anyone has a train to catch. But there would seem to be time for a further stroll down Memory Lane . . .
.
.
.
80
Lawrence Block
Two days after the Willis boy’s death, he rents a furnished house in York, Pennsylvania. It’s a few days short of a month before he returns to Richmond.
But it’s not an idle month. He has a DSL line installed for his computer, and he’s often online, researching subjects on the Internet, checking his e-mail, keeping up with his news groups.
At least once a day he disconnects his own laptop and boots up the one he’s bought, which he thinks of as Preston Applewhite’s computer. In MS-Word, he writes out a breathless account of the boy’s abduction and murder, departing from reality only in that he tells of the weeks he spends leading up to the event, how he wrestles with the impulse, how he determines he has no choice but to go through with it.
And he’s deliberately vague about the killing ground: I took him to a fine and private place. I knew no one would disturb us there. He’ll simply disappear. No one will think to look for him there.
Online, he opens an e-mail account for Applewhite, ScoutMasterBates at Hotmail.com. On the registration form, he calls himself John Smith, unimaginatively enough, but the street address he provides is 476
Elm Street. Applewhite’s actual street number, while not on Elm Street, is indeed 476. For city and state he enters Los Angeles, California, but includes Applewhite’s Richmond zip code.
As ScoutMasterBates, he surfs the net looking for porn sites, and they don’t prove terribly elusive. It’s only a matter of days before his mailbox begins to fill up with porn spam, and by visiting the sites that promise young male models, that talk of man-boy love, he increasingly becomes the target of purveyors of kiddy porn. “All models over eighteen (wink!
wink!)” one site declares.
He downloads porn, pays for it with a credit card that can’t be traced back to him. Weeks ago he was in a restaurant, where he saw a patron at another table pay her check with a credit card and walk off without her receipt. He got to it before the waitress, passing the table on an unnecessary trip to the men’s room, palming and pocketing the yellow scrap of All the Flowers Are Dying
81
paper. It shows her account number and expiration date, and that’s all he needs for small online purchases. In a month or two she’ll go over her statement and, if she notices, call her credit card company to complain.
But he’ll be done with her account by then.
Back in Richmond, he sets about getting access to Applewhite’s house and car and office.
That turns out to be easy. Applewhite’s a monthly client at the parking garage around the corner from his office. He goes there himself, inquires about rates and hours and access, and finds questions to ask until the attendant’s attention is diverted, at which time he snatches Applewhite’s keys off the numbered hook. He needs a full set for his girlfriend, he tells a locksmith, and the man grins and says he’s a trusting man, that he’s been married eighteen years himself and his wife still doesn’t have a key to his car.
A single key opens the door and the trunk. There are other keys on the ring as well, and he has them all duplicated, knowing one will be a house key and another a key to the office. Inside of an hour he makes another visit to the parking garage, where it’s a simple matter to put Applewhite’s keys on a table, where they might have fallen if dislodged from the hook.
Late at night, long after the lights have been turned off in the Applewhite home, he lets himself into the unlocked garage and opens the trunk of the car. He has an old army blanket with him, purchased at the Salvation Army store in York, and he spreads it out in Applewhite’s trunk, rubs it here and there in the trunk’s interior, takes it out and returns it to its plastic bag.
Two days later he exchanges cars, picking up the dark Camry, leaving the beige Tempo in the storage shed. He starts cruising when school lets out and soon picks up an older, more knowledgeable boy than Jeffrey Willis. Scott Sawyer is fifteen, with knowing eyes and a crooked smile.
His T-shirt is too small, the worn blue jeans provocatively tight on his thighs and buttocks. When he gets in the Camry, he drapes an arm over the seatback and tries to look seductive.
The effect is comical, but he doesn’t laugh.
I think you’ll find something interesting in the glove compartment, he tells the boy. And, at the right moment, he swings the rubber mallet.
82
Lawrence Block
There’s a failed country club north and west of the city, off Creighton Road on the way to Old Cold Harbor. The property’s for sale, and the sign to that effect has been there long enough to have served for drive-by target practice. The nine-hole golf course is all weeds, the greens neglected, the fairways overgrown. Earlier he scouted the place, picked a spot. Halfway there the youth comes to, tries to scream through the duct tape, tries to free his hands, thrashes around within the confines of his seat belt.
He tells him to stop it, and when the thrashing continues he takes up the rubber mallet and hits the boy hard on the knee. The thrashing stops.
Out on the golf course, he drives into the rough bordering the fifth hole, hauls the boy out of the car and drags him deep into the woods. He immobilizes the boy by smashing his kneecaps with the spade, strips him, and positions him appropriately, then dons a condom and rapes him.
The younger boy, Jeffrey Willis, was more appealing. Softer, smaller, his innocence more palpable. Too, there was the novelty of sex with a male. But for all that the experience with Scott Sawyer is savagely exciting, and there’s no need to hold back his climax. Straining for it, he reaches down, picks up the knife—how sweetly it fits his hand—and strikes, and strikes again.