He was still crouched, standing up at the stove, and his face was really a series of funny faces. He looked like a man pretending to be a clown in a spattered blue bathrobe.
I said, “Turn it off. And close your slovenly bathrobe.”
He said, “Jack.”
My ears were still full of the shots. I could smell the used loads and I could smell his last night’s sausages. And I was certain I could smell the rot I had smelled here before. It was Janice. We were standing in her. I let the pistol come up and I squeezed off again. The solid sound of the round striking into the floor at his feet, the spray of wood and linoleum splinters, made a strong argument.
I said, “Tighten your fucking bathrobe, goddamn it. No. Wait. A man shouldn’t dress like a boy. Don’t tighten it. Take the fucker off.”
He slowly stood. He pushed his glasses back up on his nose. He took his bathrobe off and held it out. I pointed to a chair and he dumped it. In a voice that sounded tinny after the shots, he said, “What’s wrong, big guy? Why the gunplay? Why the anger? I understand I got you into a search you didn’t want to be part of—”
“You lied to me two or three — I think it was three times,” I said. “Archie got me into it, not you. You wanted me out of it. That must be a compliment. I don’t care. I heard it and I heard it, and then I used what’s left of my brain to think about it. You. Archie thought it would help me out if I did something about getting back a missing girl. You were talking to him, and he made the suggestion. You were supposed to be so eager to find her, you had to say yes. Jesus, what’s not to say yes to? A broken-down campus cop who takes a week to find his dick in the men’s room. Right? So you came to me and asked me and then as soon as you had an excuse, like when I stuck as much of my body as I could in front of a bunch of arms and legs, you came crying over to turn me free. That’s the part that’s the compliment, you fucker. That anything about me worried you. That you actually thought I could do anything. See anything. Hear anything.
“But you’re finally so goddamned convinced you’re smarter than everybody. Than the little girl you fucked and killed. Than her parents. Than half the law-enforcement officers in a couple of counties. Surely smarter than me. So you had to repeat the lie about who engaged my useless services. But you know, Professor Strodemaster, sir, Ph.D., even a poor dumb fuck like me sooner or later hears it when a wormy, phony, arrogant cocksucker lies and lies and lies.”
I saw spit pop out of my mouth. I heard my voice climb higher and higher. I did not forget I had a round left in the cylinder.
“And you sliced her apart here. And what’d you do after? Did you can her in her juices? Freeze her crotch so you could take it down to remember her by?”
He shook his head and gripped his glasses over the ears like they were coming off. He looked down an inch or so with a sorrowful face. “Jack, boy,” he said. “You’re talking to a fucking associate professor of physical sciences with tenure for life and an NSF grant in his package. We don’t do dismembering. The guys in biology do that. And they don’t do it to people. This is fucking college life we’re talking, Jack. You and I are employees of a school. The worst cutting up gets done is at parties, unless they’re scoring on one another’s wives. I’m a wronged, innocent associate professor, guy. I’m also your friend. Remember? And here. Consider this. I heard this, and I believe it to be true, seeing how punchy you’ve got. We are both of us men whose wives walked out. We’re both wronged. Are you hearing me, Jack?”
I always admired how some people could open their mouths and talk. They could talk and talk. But I didn’t think I wanted, now, to hear about my dreams, and especially not from Strodemaster. I tapped him on the soft part of the temple with the gun.
I said, “What’d you do, butcher her in the kitchen? Clog your septic up with her body parts? That’s why it stinks like that. You used some kind of scientific knife thing and you cut off her arms and legs first, and then I guess her head. Her head next? Did you slice off those tiny nipples? Didn’t you at least let her wear that sad little sexpot brassiere when you cut her up?
“You know,” I said, and I tapped him again, at the bridge of the nose, kind of hard, “sometimes they notch people up with their gun sights and then they go absolutely crazy a little and shoot up a tenured-for-life associate professor’s house. They let them bleed to death on the kitchen floor, where the girls got sliced and diced.”
I lifted my foot in its hard boot and I ran the lug sole down his leg, from the knee to the instep inside the loose tongue of his boot.
He vomited onto his boots and it spattered onto mine. I didn’t move back. I’ve had worse on my feet from drunks and speed freaks and I was taught to see it as a tactic. “Barf and run,” we used to call it.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, knocking his dirty glasses off. They fell into the vomit. He left them there, though he reached for his face a couple of times as if to adjust them. His face looked incomplete, a little younger. I felt like I could see it better. But I couldn’t read it, and I was glad. I didn’t want to understand his thoughts.
I’d raised a welt on his nose and a little dark streak on his temple. His leg was probably red down the shin, and that would hurt for a good part of a week. I thought at first the tears were from his vomiting, but he was crying for real.
“I could never hurt that child like that,” he said, snuffling. “Cut her up?”
“Well, I haven’t met that many killers,” I said, “and I never was smart enough to figure people out. That’s why it took me so long with you. What is it, you get off better with little girls? It’s some kind of psychological thing with you? Or was she one of those secret-rebellion kids who’s a miracle in the sack? And you of course were the super father physicist local community guy with the prick that was tenured for life and you were instructing her in whatever she couldn’t get in the preacher’s house. Holy shit, Randy. Did I leave any of it out?”
“Oh yes,” he said. He moved to the wall and stooped the way nearsighted people do. He picked up the chalk at the end of its red string and he faced me. He erased the map lines on the board with the side of his arm. Vomit and mucus ringed his mouth. His eyes looked soft and unfocused. He pointed with the chalk to the chalkboard and, peering in, made an X in a circle in the upper left-hand corner of the board. “Let this represent the emotions between us,” he said in a pleasant and even eager voice.
“Jack,” he said, “she was both a child and an adult. She was a woman. She was. Truly. The emotion is a difficult one to name, but not to feel, and we felt it. I’m trying through this crude iconography to suggest the flow of emotional power—” He made an arrow point from the X to the right of the board. “Here. This might represent the field of power that flowed from her house to mine and, naturally—” He made an arrow that moved back to the X.
“Let me add this for clarity,” he said. He circled a Y. “I’ll be Y,” he said. “Understand?
“Now.” He made a crude drawing of a house under X and another, sloppier, under Y. Below them, he crosshatched an area. “The corn-field behind our houses. We’ll assume the snow.” He looked up, smiling a boy’s shy smile. “I don’t know how to indicate the snow.”
He looked back at the chalkboard. “No,” he said. He wiped with his hand and forearm until most of his marks were gone.