Father hadn't granted forgiveness, exactly, but he did say he would find "something constructive" for his son to do.
And what Father had done was, gradually, turn his investments and business dealings over to Lloyd, who found he had a complete and immediate knack for it. At first just a bookkeeper, he soon began doing some of the actual investing and, even in these hard times, made money for his father. Of course Father said nothing by way of approval, but he eventually turned virtually everything of a business nature over to Lloyd for his managing. Father and son began to speak. Civilly. Hardly warm. But if the war would never be over, at least there was a truce of sorts.
Among the matters Lloyd managed were various rental properties. These included a number of rooming houses in some rather unsavory parts of the city, as well as the bungalow where his father had begun his career, years ago, over on Central Avenue. Father-supported by his own father, whose money was in oil-had set up a practice in that neighborhood, an office/surgery, and abandoned it as he became more established and the neighborhood declined.
In dealing with these properties, Lloyd-who had been suppressing certain of his desires-began to mingle with the lowlife scum who dwelled there. He found that for a few dollars, sometimes less than one dollar, sometimes for a beer or some smokes, he could get those desires satisfied.
But he did not want to go down that road anymore. He wanted to please his father, who after all hated queers. Lloyd began to date females of his own social class. He had been engaged to Jennifer Wainright for a year now. She was a lovely girl and innocent; very religious; steel money. She agreed with him that they should wait until after they were married to "consummate their love."
The engagement seemed to make his father very happy. He had smiled several times, touched Lloyd's shoulder once.
Lloyd's life had really come together in the last few years. His father was accepting him, in a limited way admittedly, as the family business manager. He was engaged to be married. He had been seeing a psychiatrist- something his father had insisted upon about the time he turned over the business affairs to his son (had somebody at college said something to Father?)-and his doctor told him he could, with therapy, overcome his "homosexual tendencies."
And, of course, the truly satisfying thing, the most wonderful thing, was his return to surgery.
It had begun as a disaster. It had begun with one of the lowlife sex partners attempting to blackmail him-a woman he'd had various kinds of unnatural acts with. Lloyd had made the mistake of using his real name, and this lowlife bitch had tried to turn a buck because of it. Lloyd had pretended not to be upset by the demand, and drove the woman to the bungalow on Central Avenue, which was going unrented at the moment. On the pretense of getting the money for her, he led the cheap whore down into the cellar, where his father's surgery had been, and stabbed her in the chest repeatedly with one of the scalpels from the surgical gift set.
There was a lot of blood, but, oddly, he'd had an orgasm-the most intense he'd ever had with a woman.
Maybe he wasn't queer after all.
He had laid her on the dusty, dented white-enamel examining table his father had left behind and decided the best way to get rid of the evidence was in pieces. And, for the first time in a long time, he performed surgery.
He found it very satisfying.
Late that night he drove the pieces-some of them wrapped in newspaper, some packed away in an old suitcase-up to Euclid beach and tossed them out into the water. When they washed up on shore, they would (he assumed, correctly) be thought to have washed in from the lake.
And, so, simply, elegantly, it had begun: his return to surgery, and a second sexual awakening. Sometimes the sex would be with men, but he was moving away from that; he would turn them into women sometimes, and that would make it better. He felt there was nothing at all wrong with dispatching these human derelicts-they were just so much flotsam and jetsam, after all. Faggots and whores who could serve mankind best as lab specimens.
He would keep the bodies, at least parts of the bodies, and practice both surgery and sex on them-surgery to make his father proud, and sex to improve his performance with Jennifer, when they eventually married.
He was not a "butcher." He was a surgeon. Hadn't his father said so, at the Torso Clinic? "No layman could have attempted such meticulous incisions." His father was proud of him! "We are dealing with an intelligent human being-most likely not a denizen of the lower strata." Yes! Father recognized breeding when he saw it!
In addition to its medical import, he saw his adventuring in the Flats, in the Third precinct, as another kind of research-sociological and psychological. In fact, that was how he maintained a "cover" (he did so enjoy the true-detective magazines); he told the landladies of the various rooming houses he oversaw that he would be keeping one room for himself and using a pseudonym. He was doing scientific research and it was crucial they not reveal to any of the other tenants that he was anything but another worker (or out-of-worker) in the neighborhood.
He had become "Andy," and it was a tribute to his intelligence and social skills that he could blend in with this rabble so effortlessly. They trusted him. They became his friends. For as worldly as they were, they were naive fools.
Like Frank Dolezal. Had Frankie mentioned his friend "Andy" to the cops, he wondered? Lloyd doubted it. Knowing Frankie, the poor bastard had spent most of his time begging for a drink, and thinking he'd committed the murders himself. That was a laugh! Frankie Dolezal, bricklayer, blackout drunk, and onetime slaughterhouse stooge, pulling off "meticulous incisions. Not in this lifetime, Frankie!
But the sheriff (and Ness) now made Frankie for the "Butcher." Which presented Lloyd with a dilemma.
Should he at this point wish to give up surgical and sexual experimentation, he could; the blame, the "Butcher" title, would forever be Frank Dolezal's. Part of him hated the idea of that-that such an untalented lowlife should get credit for his brilliance-but there was much to be said for quitting while you were ahead.
That was where shadowing Ness came in. But Lloyd had a problem with killing Ness. First, doing so would tip to the world that Dolezal was not their "Butcher"; and second, Lloyd was not a murderer. He was a surgeon, a sociologist, a psychologist, a bold and creative experimenter in the laboratory of life; but not a murderer. He did not kill to protect himsef, but for science, and for love.
Killing Ness would be neither scientific, nor sexual, and Lloyd wasn't sure he was up to that. Even if Ness had been spouting off in the papers.
Oh, if it were a matter of self-defense, if Ness came at him with a gun or something, Lloyd would not hesitate to kill. This had begun when he had killed that blackmailing whore, after all, which was self-defense of a sort. But cold-blooded murder? And of someone more or less from Lloyds own social class? That was not Lloyd's style; he was no fiend, after all. He had standards.
Perhaps it was time to end all experiments. He would be married soon.
He wondered if, by now, he could perform adequately with a woman-a live woman, a whole woman. He thought so. Practice, as they said, made perfect.
Now, as he finished his third bowl of Wheaties, he approached the counter, where the slim, pretty brunette waitress was leaning against one elbow, fooling absently with the gold filigree ring on her right pinkie.
"You look tired, beautiful," he said, and smiled.
She smiled back at him. "Been a long day."
"When's your shift end?"