The memories had lost the power to stir him the way they used to. But still he thought of those times the way other old men thought of living flesh, of women hot and alive with passion, and the memories hardened their minds without touching their bodies, and they rejoiced in the memories while they grieved for the years that had stolen away their own lust, left them with only water spouts, and sometimes not even that.
The same grief overtook Richards now, as he thought of those bright days, as the mild, moist air bathed his aching joints. He remembered a summer day in 1931, the very first time he had killed a woman. He had been bumming his way across Illinois, and had just gotten off an eastbound freight to see if he could earn a bite to eat by doing some chores when he saw her. She had been near his own age (a fetish with him—as he had grown older, so had his victims), and very pretty, though dressed poorly. She was picking daffodils by the side of the track, and he had said hello to her, and they had talked, and she told him that she often came down to the track to pick flowers, and he thought she spoke as if she were simple-minded.
And then the thought had come to him for the first time, the thought that would come again scores of times before age slowed him and dulled the savagery, blunted the need, the thought that he was alone with her here, that no one had seen him get off the freight, and no one would see him get on another one that would carry him away. And his mind told him that where the girl’s life was concerned he was God, and, as he felt the God he had read of in the Old Testament was wont to do, he killed. The hunger of which he had felt only small pangs became insatiable, and he killed her, doing other things before and after, things of which he had not known he was capable, but which, in retrospect, did not trouble him. He did decide, however, that a pocketknife was not very effective for that kind of work, and resolved to use a larger blade in the future. And when he had cleaned himself, hidden the body, and leapt into the open boxcar door of another freight, he knew that he had found his life’s purpose.
A garbled curse broke his reverie, and he looked down and saw Anderson, his roommate, smashing his walker up and down as if he were killing ants. Richards saw that the rubber tip of the back left leg had become wedged between the root of a tree and the edge of the sidewalk.
“Do you need help?” Richards called down in his gentle tenor. “Do you want me to call a nurse?”
“Go to hell, goddammit,” Anderson replied, as Richards had known he would, and battered the hapless walker all the harder until he finally extricated the leg. He swore often, but always, Richards thought, with the air of a man who felt uncomfortable with the words he used. Anderson had been a small town used car dealer for fifty years, and, beside belonging to their mutual organization, was also a member of the Rotary, the Lions’ Club, and the Odd Fellows, and had been active in his church, none of which smiled on blasphemy. Anderson, Richards theorized, had always been a closet blasphemer, and now age permitted him liberties.
Richards, on the other hand, had taken liberties ever since 1931, when the so-called Midwest Ripper had begun his nine year killing spree that had claimed eighteen female victims (eighteen who were found, at any rate), During this time Richards worked for a Chicago firm selling cookware door to door from the safety of an anonymous company car. His territory stretched from southern Michigan to northern Kentucky, and from the Mississippi River to central Ohio. It was a large area, filled with possibilities, and not once in nine years did anyone in Chicago mention that Richards’ territory was the same as the Ripper’s. Richards, however, took the precaution of never killing a woman in Michigan. Only many years later, when he read of geographical patterns in serial killings, did he realize that his evasive maneuvers were far ahead of their time, as were the killings themselves. He took pride in that.
On the balcony, he paused, felt a stirring in his abdomen, told himself to go in and relieve the pressure before he had an accident. If he had an accident, then he would have to be cleaned up, and that would take too much time away from this lovely, perfect day, from the warm sun, the balmy air.
He made it in time, congratulated himself, and, as he left his room, received a smile from Marianne, the nurse on duty. Then he got a styrofoam cup of decaffeinated coffee from the large, metal urn and took it back out onto the balcony, thinking about Marianne. He could have easily killed her. She was the type he wanted during what he thought of as his second, more mature period, after the war. He had been 34, older than a lot of the enlistees, but he had worked hard, taken initiative, and had been a sergeant when he left the Army five years later. The legalized killing had been good for him, and though he had not felt the ecstasy as he had with the women, it was, temporarily, enough.
In 1945 he felt as if his hunger had been satisfied for life, and gave up the road, moved to a small town in Indiana, where, through his Army contacts, he took a job as an assistant manager at a drug store, and, for the next four years, became as bourgeois and respectable as he would ever be. This was the time he had accepted his boss’s invitation to join the organization which now housed him in his old age.
But in 1949 the aching need had returned, and he left the small town and went back to the Chicago firm, where, despite a ten year hiatus, there were people in sales and in personnel who recalled his previous successes, his great drive, and rehired him. His work of selling started anew, as did the real work of his soul, done with blade and hands and lips and tongue, sometimes in darkness, but most often and most joyously in the light, on the warm, sun-dappled, mossy floors of forests, or upon lush mattresses of bent wheat, or on grass as green as a hundred memories.
The women were all like Marianne, older, in their forties, with figures that had filled out, and round, rosy faces. Many of them were widowed by the war, and ached for a tall, strong, and handsome man like Richards to sweep them away in his big black car, fill the needs of which they had not been aware, make them more than women, transform them past their sundered flesh, create legends of them. By 1950 it was obvious to all that the Midwest Ripper had returned.
The notoriety dismayed Richards, as it had in the thirties. He wished for anonymity, and read the stories in the newspapers only to see how much was known, if any detail could draw the search to him. Only once, in 1953, did someone see a black car, either a Pontiac or a Dodge, near the house where a victim lived, but the witness, a child, had not recalled nor even thought to look at the license plate. Richards was relieved, as he never had any wish to be caught. He thought that if that tired cliché of criminology was true, it was true of men other than himself.
His last killing was in December of 1955, a month before his fiftieth birthday. When he finished, he was tired, and felt only a ghost of the exultation that had previously filled him. Was it, he wondered at the time, because his victims were older too? Because they had lived more of their lives, was there less vitality released by the knife, less life in the blood that flowed? His passion was still there, but cloaked with thick velvet, tired and tiresome, as if he were like other men his age, men married for years, making love to women who had no more surprises to share. Or maybe, he thought, he was just getting older.
It was possible, wasn’t it? As men entered their fifties and sixties, youthful passions flagged, things that were of burning interest no longer retained their novelty. The lust that made a young man of twenty seek out whores was dead in men of eighty. Such a diminution of fire was not instantaneous. It was not there one day and gone the next. Rather, Richards knew that it subsided slowly, the flames fading to glowing embers, and then to the last sparks that gleamed only when blown upon, and finally to cold and dusty ashes, all heat gone, incapable of flaming again.