Mady Behrens was frying hamburgers. When she saw me, she let out a ladylike yelp and managed to say, “You’re not Alex.” I said, “You’re right,” and stabbed her in the stomach, then the chest, then the neck. In her death throes she knocked the frying pan off the stove, and the last thing she felt before her eyes closed was hot grease spattering her tennis-tan legs.
TICK/BEAT TICK/BEAT TICK/BEAT TICK/BEAT TICK/BEAT TICK/BEAT.
I stumbled upstairs, breathing blood and vinyl. Richie Liggett was now a piece of inanimate disarray to match the rest of the HAPPY FAMILY LIFE detritus. I carved SS on both of his legs, then sheared them off with the hacksaw and tossed them onto a dusty chair covered with tennis balls. With the blood smell now dominating all others, I took my tools and walked down to Mady Behrens. When she was similarly marked and vivisected, I threw her legs in the sink along with the dirty dishes.
BEAT/TICK
BEAT/TICK
BEAT/TICK
BEAT/TICK
BEAT/TICK
Exhausted, I ran my eyes over the kitchen. The disarray I had created looked soft and pretty; the unevenly hung calendar and framed mottoes undercut my art and buzzed me like angry little bees. Straightening them made me think of Ross, and with his image came a new surge of energy. I began to set the house right.
For hours I straightened, tidied and rearranged, putting the HAPPY FAMILY DWELLING in an order that spotlighted the Shroud Shifter and his revenge. With all the room lights blazing, I worked, forcing my brain away from Ross only to look at my watch and remind myself that Dom De Nunzio and Rosie Cafferty were due. The more I toiled, the more I saw that required fixing, and when I heard voices on the veranda just after midnight, I was nowhere near finished.
I cut them down in the entrance hall, all stab and shriek and my Buck knife darting past protective arms to tear into the traitors’ faces. Rosie Cafferty was already dead and my weapon was raised to give her boyfriend’s throat a final slice when I remembered that Ross introduced me to them as Billy Rohrsfield, meaning someone else had betrayed the two of us. I hesitated, and for a split second Dom De Nunzio, helplessly pinioned under my knees, looked absolutely perfect — and perfectly like Ross. Hoarsely whispering “I’m sorry,” I held his eyes shut while I stabbed and stabbed and stabbed his life away.
There were no ticks or tick/beats as I carved SS on two more pairs of lovely legs in tennis whites, sawed them off, then walked to the living-room wall and rolled a set of my bloody fingerprints on it, circling the area in blood so that even the most stupid cop wouldn’t miss the evidence. Gathering up my knife and hacksaw, I walked to the Deathmobile, my cape flowing in the summer night wind. Inside the van I changed back to Brooks Brothers, then scrubbed blood from my hands and Shroud Shifter from my face. With calm hands I pressed fingerprints to the handles of my knife and saw, then triple-wrapped them in plastic bags. Rummaging through the van’s tool kit, I found an earth spade. I took it up to the cab with me, then went looking for places to plant the means to rapid justice.
I buried the hacksaw at the base of a tree adjoining the Bronxville Library, and the knife by the lake in Huguenot Park in New Rochelle. Remembering a rooming house that several caddies had mentioned, I drove to the 800 block of South Lockwood and knocked on the door underneath a sign that read: “Rooms by the week — usually vacancies.”
The old black woman who answered my knock feigned anger at my late-night intrusion, but when I said, “I want a room, and I’ll pay two months cash in advance,” she fell all over herself letting me in and pointing me toward a desk holding a large guest register. Handing her a big wad of hundreds that were useless to me now, I said, “My name is Martin Plunkett. Remember that. Martin Plunkett.”
26
It took them three days to find me.
I slept throughout most of those seventy-two hours, sating a weariness caused by one of the longest road tours in history, and when I heard the helicopters hovering directly over my head, I was relieved that it was over. Looking out my window I saw the flashing lights of a dozen police cars, and within moments whispers, sleep-blurred grunts and scurrying footsteps told me the rooming house was being evacuated. Then heavy boots went thump/tick, thump/tick, chump/tick all around me, and the ritual bullhorn warning sounded: “We have you surrounded, Plunkett! Surrender, or well come in and get you!”
I walked to the door and shouted through it. “I’m unarmed. I want to talk to the head man before you take me in.”
Backing away, ready to hit the floor, I got my answer — loud voices arguing. I was able to pick out “You’re crazy, Inspector,” and “He’s mine,” and then the door was kicked in and an ordinary-looking middle-aged man in a gray suit was pointing a .38 at my head.
He didn’t say “Freeze, motherfucker,” or “Up against the wall, asshole.” He said, “My name’s Tom Dusenberry,” as if we had just met at a cocktail party. I said, “Martin Plunkett,” and when he pulled back the hammer of his gun, I smiled.
He didn’t look as though he was deciding whether to shoot me; he looked like a man living deep within himself, wondering how far to let me in. Still smiling, I said, “Are you with the New Rochelle police?”
“F.B.I.,” he said.
“The exact charges?”
“Interstate Flight from the Malvin killing for me; the four kids in Croton for keeps.”
Something in the man’s statement hit me low and hard, but I couldn’t place it. Trying to nail the blow, I stalled for time, sizing Dusenberry up in the process. He was beginning to grow on me as extraordinary — and I didn’t know why.
We remained silent for close to a minute, me thinking, him staring. Finally he said, “Why Plunkett?” and I knew. The man was simply moderation personified — voice, body clothes, soul. It was something he could never have cultivated; he just was it. “Why what, Mr. Dusenberry?”
“Why all of it.”
“You’re being ambiguous.”
“I’ll be specific. Why have you killed so many people, caused so much fucking pain?”
Now I could sense he was straining, getting itchy for something to happen fast. Sweat was darkening his shirt collar and his bland blue eyes were narrowing. Soon his legs were quivering with tension, and the only thing calm about the man was his finger on the trigger. He was growing feverish in his desire for pat answers.
“I’ll make a formal statement,” I said. “Then you’ll know. And I won’t make that statement unless it’s released for the public at large, verbatim. Do you understand?”
“You’ve made that very clear.”
“I’ve made it very clear because I know you want to know, and unless you let me confess my own way, you never will.” Dusenberry lowered his gun. “You’ve been wanting to tell it for a long time,” he said. “You’ve been dropping hints for years.”
If he thought it was a trump card, he was wrong; I knew my desire for glory had grown cancerously self-destructive a long way back on the road. “And that’s how you found me?”
Dusenberry said, “In part,” and smiled; the blandness of his perfectly capped teeth froze me and clarified his puzzling statement. The Interstate Flight charge stemmed from the Saul Malvin killing — and only Ross knew about that. “In whole,” I whispered.
Now the teeth were sharp and pointed, and the bland federal agent was a shark. “Anderson plea-bargained you to beat the death penalty,” he said. “He threw you to the hungriest, most ambitious fed prosecutor who ever breathed — to save his own worthless, sadistic faggot ass.”