He turned at the corner, walked a block, turned again. He kept walking until he came to a small storefront restaurant with signs in Spanish. There were no tables, just a worn Formica counter with eight backless stools.
He took a stool. The menu hung on the wall, chalk on slate, with several of the dishes rubbed out. Even if he read Spanish, it would have been hard to make out. The woman behind the counter, assuming he didn’t speak Spanish, addressed him in strongly accented English, asking him what he wanted. He pointed to the plate of the man two stools away on his right.
“Arroz con pollo,” the woman said. “Tha’s cheecken an’ rice. Tha’s what you wan’?”
He nodded. The food, when she brought it, was a little spicy for his taste, but it wasn’t bad. He wasn’t hungry, he was rarely hungry, but realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. And thirsty. Water was aqua in Latin, and was it agua in Spanish? Or if he just made the gesture, raising an invisible glass to his lips...
While he was considering the matter, she brought him a glass of water.
He had eaten half his meal when he heard sirens. And this wasn’t a single ambulance, this was more than one siren. He tucked ten dollars under his plate and didn’t wait for change. He’d lost his bearings, wasn’t sure which way he’d come from, but all he had to do was walk toward the sirens.
The building was burning after all. He didn’t see flames shooting, but there was a lot of smoke, and a lot of activity on the part of the firefighters. A crowd had gathered to watch, and he joined them, but felt dangerously conspicuous. He managed to find his way to the subway and went home.
It made the papers, because there were two fatalities — a young man who’d evidently been sleeping, or comatose from drugs, and a firefighter, thirty-two years old, the father of three, a resident of Sunnyside, Queens. Both had died of smoke inhalation.
He mourned them, and honored their sacrifice.
A day after the Bronx fire, he set about reorganizing his life. He liquidated his stocks and mutual funds and put everything into a money-market account at his bank. The apartment was his most substantial asset, but it seemed an impossible chore to list it for sale and wait for the co-op board to approve a prospective purchaser. And how much money did he need, anyway? A few dollars for rent, a few dollars for food.
In the end, he’d walked away from the apartment. Rented a storage locker, ferried some possessions there a carton at a time, then packed a small suitcase and left. Sooner or later, he supposed, his failure to pay maintenance charges would lead someone to take some sort of legal action, and he’d eventually lose the apartment, but he’d never even know when it happened, and wouldn’t care if he did.
Since then, he had set a fire in a two-family house in Middle Village, Queens (minimal damage, no loss of life) and sacrificed three people in their homes, most recently Marilyn Fairchild, of Charles Street. Sometimes his actions seemed pointless to him. How could individual sacrifices revitalize the wounded city? As well, he thought, to try easing the water shortage by spilling a bucket of water into the reservoir.
Then he’d spotted Gerald Pankow, and recognized him, and saw a way to establish a pattern.
And now he rose from the body of the girl. He opened the door a few inches and stuck his head out. He said, “Could one of you come here for a moment? Something seems to be wrong with” — what was her name? — “with Clara.”
The older woman came, the madam, and she saw Clara lying on her back, then registered the chisel planted in her chest, and looked up at him, naked, advancing on her, and opened her mouth to scream, to cry out, but before she could make a sound he hit her with the hammer. It was a glancing blow and it drove her to her knees. She held up hands curled into claws, she blinked at the blood flowing down her forehead and into her eyes, and he swung the hammer full force and smashed her skull.
Without checking if she was dead he bolted from the room. Debra was racing for the phone. She tripped over a footstool, righted herself, and had the phone in her hand when he reached her. He wielded the hammer and hit her on the shoulder and she dropped the phone and cried out, and he swung backhand and hit her just above the bridge of the nose. She went sprawling and he rained blows upon her, hammering at her face until her features were unrecognizable.
His own heart was pounding. He steadied himself, got to his feet, and had trouble keeping his balance because the room was spinning. His knees buckled, and the black curtain came down.
Later, when he got around to noting the time, he calculated that he had been out for the better part of a half hour. He had fallen beside Debra, and he had blood all over himself, and he must have left fingerprints all over the place, and she’d cried out between the first and second blows, and someone a floor above could have heard her, could have heard the noise the hammer made, could have heard him when he fell.
He might have awakened to bright lights and sirens. Instead he came to in the midst of silence and death.
He found the bathroom. He showered, used the liquid soap, used the Herbal Essence shampoo. He retrieved the hammer from where it lay beside Debra’s body, the chisel from Clara’s chest, and washed them both in the sink before returning them to the briefcase. He dressed, tied his tie until he got the knot right.
He put his hand into the pocket of his suit jacket and drew out the little turquoise rabbit. He’d been carrying it ever since he took it from Marilyn Fairchild’s apartment, and now he walked over to Clara’s body, got down onto one knee, and placed the rabbit so that it covered the hole the chisel had left in her chest.
What would they make of that?
He went around the apartment, using a hand towel to wipe surfaces he remembered touching and others he might have touched. But he’d touched the rabbit, hadn’t he? He picked it up and wiped it off and decided he wasn’t ready to leave it behind after all. He put it in his pocket and left Clara’s wound uncovered.
The poor girl...
He had the towel over his hand when he turned the doorknob to let himself out, dropped it behind him before he drew the door shut.
He walked crosstown to his hotel. On the way he stopped several times to discard the tools from his briefcase, dropping them into three well-separated storm drains. He hadn’t used the big screwdriver, had never even removed it from the briefcase, but he got rid of it just the same, and left the briefcase propped against a trash can. Perhaps someone would get some use out of it.
eleven
From the moment he’d found Marilyn dead in her apartment, the very apartment he’d been so blithely cleaning, opening doors ceased to be a carefree enterprise for Jerry Pankow. He couldn’t turn a key without at least a quiver of anxiety over what he might find on the other side of the door.
Not so much with his commercial clients, the three bars and the whorehouse. But when he called on his once-a-week residential clients, he couldn’t entirely banish the fear of finding a dead person on the premises. He rang the doorbell first, as he had always done, and then he knocked, as always, and then he turned the key in the lock and opened the door and called out Hello! once or twice, and stood still listening for a response.
And after that, after he’d assured himself that there was no one conscious within, he was very careful to survey the entire apartment, to look in every room. Not until he’d determined that he was alone did he set about doing his job.