25
I spent the night parked in a campground in Upper Westchester. Curled tight in a ball, I slept and dreamed of Ross; every time the hard metal floorboard jarred me awake, I thought of him in my first moments of consciousness and felt his body. At dawn, my muscles aching from long hours of holding myself womblike, I stood up on tenuous infant’s legs. Shivering despite the blast-oven heat in the van, I wondered how it had ended all around me — without my even being there.
Still muscle-cramped, I inched up to the cab and turned the ignition key to Accessory, then flipped on the radio. Moving the tuner to an all-news station, I heard, “... and on the Wisconsin end of the investigation, authorities have discovered a Buck knife and hacksaw with Anderson’s fingerprints on them buried in plastic bags in the woods near his apartment. Federal agents believe they are the weapons he used to murder and dismember his seven victims. Here on the New York end, we have a recorded statement made by Anderson’s cousin, seventeen-year-old Rosemary Cafferty:
“I’m... I’m just glad Ross is in jail where he can’t hurt anybody else except other criminals. He... he must be evil. I can’t believe he’s a member of my family. He... he might have hurt one of us. All—”
I turned the radio off, stifling the soprano trill that had tried to relegate Ross and me to a cheap stereotype with the words, “Richie, do you think maybe Ross is gay?” I knew then that she and her tennis-clad chums had been my friend’s betrayers. FAMILY typefaced itself across my vision, and I set out to become Shroud Shifter in broad daylight.
At a sporting goods store in Mt. Kisco, I bought a big Buck knife and a leather scabbard. From there I drove to a hardware store nearby and purchased a hacksaw with razor-sharp teeth A trip to a punk-rock boutique in Yonkers netted me a black vinyl jump suit, and the green-haired salesgirl who sold it to me looked at my Brooks Brothers outfit and said, “You’re really changing styles.” From Yonkers it was only a hop, skip and jump to the Lord & Taylor in Scarsdale and the purchase of a woman’s black silk opera cape and a makeup kit. With a ball of theatrical putty already in my glove compartment, I had everything I needed.
Walking out of Lord & Taylor, I saw a Scarsdale Police cruiser parked at the curb. The cop by the passenger door was saying to the driver, “...youngest fucking lieutenant in his department’s history.” He tapped a stack of papers on the dashboard and added, “And now the feds have got a want on some buddy of his.”
In the most audacious move of my life, I approached the car, looked the passenger cop dead in the eye and said, “Excuse me, Officer. Were you talking about Ross Anderson, the killer?”
The cop gave my Ivy League persona a cursory glance and said, “Yes, sir.”
Seeing that the papers on the dashboard were Wanted flyers, still damp with printer’s ink, I asked, “May I have one of those? My son collects them.”
Chuckling, the policeman handed me the top piece of paper. I said, “Thank you,” then walked over to the shade of Deathmobile II to savor the moment of my formal public emergence.
The big black banner print read, “Wanted: Interstate Flight — Murder.” Below it was two mug shots from my 1969 burglary arrest. I looked callow and sensitive. Underneath my physical statistics, police buzzwords made me buzz: consider armed, extremely dangerous and an escape risk; may be driving pre-1980 silver Dodge van; suspected of multiple murders in numerous states.
Only the “Escape Risk” rang untrue. It was over now; there was no escape. Thinking of Ross, I added plastic bags to my shopping list, ran across the street to a supermarket and bought a pack of a dozen. Returning to the Deathmobile, I looked at the dashboard clock and saw that it was almost noon. I sang “Do not forsake me, O my darling, on this our wedding day!” over and over as I drove to Croton.
Beer parties were in rowdy progress on front lawns up and down the summer-house block, and I cruised by slowly, trawling for Ross’s cousins and their consorts. Not seeing them, I drove to a shopping center, found a pay phone and called Information. The operator gave me a Croton listing for Richard Liggett Senior, and I dialed the summer-house number, letting the phone ring twenty times. The dial tone ticked rather than buzzed, and I hung up and headed back toward my target street.
Parking a block away, I stepped into the back of the van and stripped off my preppy garb. Nude, I held my shaving mirror with one hand and with the other applied my Shroud Shifter face, turning my pug nose hawk with putty, my blunt cheekbones sharp with rouge, my eyebrows dark and menacing with mascara. Slicking back my hair with spittle, I wrapped my knife and hacksaw up in a paper bag, then put on my black jump suit and affixed my cape. Remembering a pair of scuffed black loafers under my spare tire, I dug them out, dusted them and slipped them on. Then, dripping with sweat and smelling of vinyl and face powder, I stepped out of my Shroud Shifter closet for the world to see.
Children waved at me from passing cars; an old man sitting on his porch drinking beer yelled out, “Halloween ain’t till next month, buddy!” I bowed and fluffed my cape for all my fans, and when I turned onto my target block, the keg partyers pointed to me and gifted me with little rounds of applause and bursts of laughter. Walking across the Liggetts’ front lawn, a boy roasting hot dogs on the veranda next door yelled, “Hey, Alex! That you, man!”
“Yeah, man!” I shouted back.
“You pledging Delta, man?”
“Yeah!”
“Boogie down, man! Richie and Mady are at the club, but there’s brew in the fridge!”
I shouted, “Yeah, man,” and twirled my cape, then walked across the porch and through the open door. Inside, the house was cool and quiet, and I moved from room to room memorizing the disarray, recalling how it had offended Ross. Overflowing ashtrays, unmade beds, clothes on the floor and expensive computer games upended atop sofas and chairs fascinated and enraged me, and I kept circuiting, upstairs and down, looking for more evidence of the bankruptcy known as HAPPY FAMILY LIFE.
Razor stubble and shaving cream caked on disposable razors; a toothpaste tube crimped all the way up to the top; a diaphragm in its case. Still life after still life after still life kept me in a swirl for hours, with the lengthening of shadows through the windows providing a dim awareness of time passing. Then, as I was examining paperback novels spilling out of a bookcase, I heard, “Alex, are you here?”
It was the voice of Richie Liggett, issuing from downstairs. I looked around for the bag holding my knife and hacksaw, saw it on a dresser across the bedroom and called out, “I’m upstairs, Richie!” Footsteps thudded on the stairway, and by the time they reached the second floor hallway I had the knife held in my right hand behind my back.
Richie Liggett appeared in the doorway and laughed. “Jesus, Alex. Delta? Your family’s always gone Sigma O. Your mascara’s running, by the way.”
Disguising my voice with a movie-monster growl, I said, “Where’s Mady?”
“In the kitchen. You hear about Ross?”
I monster-growled “traitor,” then grabbed Richie by the hair, brought my knife up and slit his throat, straight through to the windpipe in one motion. He reached for his neck and pitched forward in another single movement, and I stepped away to avoid being sprayed by his blood. Hitting the floor with a crash, he started gurgling, and I flipped him onto his back He kept trying to speak, his mouth flapping in spastic counterpoint to his twitching legs, and I took a pillow off the bed and dropped it on his face. Straddling the traitor’s head, I stepped on the ends of the pillowcase and held the death mask firm with all my weight. When the flailing stopped and the white fabric was seeping with red, I wiped my knife and walked down to the kitchen.