Blood Music (8 page)

“Next time give me some warning, okay?”

“That would have taken all the fun out of it.”

Zelly felt the sticky vomit cold against her skin where it was seeping through her shirt. Her reality was different than his reality. He hadn't been trying to hurt her. He smiled at her, and her throat hurt, but there was now no longer any stranger in her husband's eyes.

E
verything was quiet all along the dead and empty street. Suburban houses, twenty-five feet apart, lawns white with fertilizer, a horsey smell in the air. It was dusk, May twenty-first. Color receded, and arbitrary things stood out with eerie clarity: a clay flowerpot on a shadowy porch, a yellow plastic sunflower on a dark-green plastic stem. Two days since the last attack. Somewhere a woman was breathing who had seen the man's face. The papers had waited hysterically for something more to happen, but the moon was waning and nobody had died.

John had sat at his desk at work like a somnambulist, had sat in front of the television at home like a catatonic. The house his father had left him had gotten bigger since Cheryl died. In the mornings, in the kitchen, the soft May sun fell through the window in motey slants. But whatever room he was in, he knew that all the other rooms were empty. Probably he should sell that house.

He was enveloped in a passionless lethargy from which there was no one to rouse him. He had friends, but after three or four attempts they accepted his transparent excuses of work and ill-health with the mistaken, lazy sympathy that is incapable of recognizing when death has entered into a life and become part of it.

Sometimes John and Cheryl had taken walks together in the evenings. Less frequently in the months before her death, when John was happy to lose her to her new friends, her new experiments with night and beer and smoky selections on the jukebox. But they had walked the night before she died. It was a stupid, sentimental detail John refused to ignore: the night before she died. Like a child's doll in the wreckage left by a hurricane.

Here was a house Cheryl had liked: somebody had built a funny little turret onto the side of a Cape Cod. Here was the cat they could never get to come to them; John did not try now. Here were all the living rooms they had imagined behind plastic-backed 1960s curtains. All the lives they had imagined.

John stood a moment, paralyzed by loss. Well-meaning, inept Mary Ellen had said, standing awkwardly in his office doorway, that surely Cheryl would want him to get on with his life. But who knows what the dead want? Who would want to know?

A cat suddenly appeared at John's feet, a plaintive soft cry and soft fur at his ankles: the cat who would not come. It was crying now, and it had nothing at all to do with Cheryl and John felt tears welling up. The cat twined around his legs and slipped out of reach. As he stretched his hand toward the warm anonymous fur, his eye fell on a pile of newspapers bundled and tied at the edge of the sidewalk. They had been rained on.
SLASHER VICTIM LIVES
!

The cat cried again; there it was on the front page: the Metro Edition. He knelt and groped at the soggy rope that bound the papers; he hurt his fingers and didn't feel it. An old man on a porch two doors down watched with blank disapproval. Page three, he had cut his fingers on the rope. There was blood on the page now. Seven lines down. One corner of the article tore off and dissolved into ink in his fumbling, bloody fingers. “The victim has been identified as Madeleine Levy, twenty-seven, of the West Village.”

John scooped up the unsuspecting cat; it hissed once, with vampire's teeth, and struggled free with ruffled dignity. Madeleine Levy. Her name was Madeleine Levy.

H
e drove down the West Side Highway at night, the whores outside the Riverview Hotel waved at him but he didn't slow down. The rearview mirror joggled up suddenly and he found himself looking into the back of the van. Darkness. There was no indication that there had ever been anybody there. He moved the mirror back to its proper place and the darkness disappeared abruptly into the empty street. There. Walking unsteadily along the sidewalk, blond hair an untidy Marilyn cloud. But when he saw her face she smiled a groggy invitation. Not a whore, never a whore. The easy, the obvious. The virtuosic touch was in knowing: that all women desired death, that Woman subjugated herself to the superior force, the obvious necessity of death. The whores got into death's car a dozen times a night, they could be killed like cockroaches and who would care?

It angered him that the papers said it was the moon—that all the loonies come out when the moon is full. It wasn't the moon. He wasn't a pickpocket or a prostitute killer or a fare evader down in the subway. As though the eternal, ineffable tableau he created were the product of the same forces that made crabs sidle up the beach or dogs bark in their backyards.

Hadn't that one that spoke to him—the one whose voice he'd loved, her honey voice—come to him on a night the moon was not quite half full, an irregular blob in the pitch of the sky? Because the dark one had been unsatisfying. The dead dark eye, the mouse-brown softness against his fingers against her neck. That was the only one he was sorry about. He had wasted his seed and his power on that one. And the next one had come soon, sooner than expected, and it was not a sacrifice to any moon but to the honey light that glittered in her hair.

He had played this neighborhood out. Here on the highway the hookers would not stop soliciting if a cloud of locusts descended on them. And that was good; there were times he needed them, them and the ones up on Little West Twelfth Street, when the soft familiar flesh of his wife was bland, like bread or cereal, when he needed dark flesh and dark hair.

Why had he put his hands around his wife's throat? That memory had the same quality as the others; as if his wife had been, for a moment, one of the others.

Why had he forced himself on her? She never refused him. She was not meant to be a challenge.

He had frightened her—he felt a kick in his gut, deep inside—that was dangerous, she was his wife. She was meant for ordinary pleasure, not for passion. And she was the mother of his child. She must never be touched by the things he did.

He drove: Red-capped Guardian Angels patrolled the blocks. Women walked in twos or with boyfriends or not at all. They had begun to wear hats, caps, and patterned scarves to cover their honey or ash or yellow hair. Stores on West Fourth Street, stores along Bleeker and Hudson, all carried the same sign in their windows: YOU ARE SAFE HERE.
IF YOU ARE THE VICTIM OF A CRIME OR FEEL THAT YOU ARE BEING THREATENED
, COME INTO THIS STORE. The signs contained safety tips: DO NOT
TRAVEL ALONE AT NIGHT
.
REPORT ANY ABNORMAL BEHAVIOR OF
ANYONE
DIRECTLY TO THE POLICE
. DO NOT
TALK TO STRANGERS
. The signs gave the number of the Slasher Task Force.

The task force had been set up to deal with the hundreds of leads being offered from all parts of the city. People were calling and saying it was their neighbor, their teacher, the Con Ed repairman. The killer was murdering one woman for each year of his failed marriage. The killer was somebody's son-in-law who drank too much, stayed out late, and had a penchant for blondes. Somebody's brother who beat his blond wife. Somebody was killing a woman for each astrological sign.

The air on the Village streets vibrated with fear. No longer were there strolling couples and groups of friends laughing down the busy streets. The West Village had always carried a holiday aspect, to his mind. Now the crowds were quieter, and people looked behind them more often. Couples had stopped sitting hidden behind old ivy on the worn stone steps of the century-and-a-half-old brownstones. The steady hum of people on the streets, in the cappuccino joints, the stores, had stuttered and skipped a beat; a new note had entered, a faint, insistent, shrill note like the echo of a scream. There are thousands of ways to die, and all the vibrant young blondes were going to die someday—but they didn't want to die with a madman's hands around their necks, a madman's sperm between their legs.

To have such power was like a drug. The labels in the paper didn't trouble him: psychopath, sociopath. The psychological profiles: marginal man, underachiever, victim of women. There was no one who knew him. He pushed the memory of his wife's frightened face away: no one.

That one, there. Slight and dark, leaning up against a lamppost, probably because she was too stoned to stand up straight. Since there would be no love tonight, that one would do just fine.

T
here were seven M. Levys in the Manhattan phone book. John took an uncomprehending bite of his ham-and-cheese sandwich and pushed a page of calculations away from a Diet Pepsi can. Two on the Upper East Side, one on the Upper West Side. One in the Thirties, in Murray Hill. A full four within the boundaries of the Village. Horatio Street, Thompson, Greenwich Avenue, Bank Street. No Madeleines, just M.'s.

John always assumed that an initial meant a woman's name. How many M. Levys would hang up on him when he said, “I'm calling about the Slasher attack . . .”?

Greenwich, Bank, and Horatio were all in the right neighborhood. The Horatio Street address was pretty far east, he thought; he wasn't sure how the addresses ran in the West Village. For the rest of Manhattan it was up from zero in either direction from Fifth Avenue. Two hundred West Thirty-ninth Street would be about Seventh Avenue. Four hundred East Fifty-sixth Street would be about First Avenue. But John wasn't sure about the Village, where all the streets ran cockeyed, many had names instead of numbers, West Fourth Street crossed West Twelfth, and Waverly crossed itself.

He would try the Horatio number after the Greenwich and the Bank numbers. Thompson was in the middle of the Village, where tourists and people from the boroughs went. Where Cheryl had gone the night she disappeared.

John pushed the ham-and-cheese angrily overboard into the wastebasket. He hadn't bought a knife yet but he knew it had to be a knife. A gun would be safer but he had absolutely no idea of how to obtain one that couldn't be traced. And he didn't even know how to use a knife, didn't know how to kill; a knife was entirely outside the realm of reasonableness and practicality—but it had begun with a knife, and so it had to end with a knife.

John dialed the first M. Levy quickly, before he could think about it. One ring, two. He knew what he would say. If it was the right one she would not hang up.

Four rings, five. Suddenly John realized that it was the middle of a workday. Even if she hadn't gone back to work yet she might not be there. He would probably have to talk to a machine.

“Hello, we can't come to the phone right now. Please leave your name, number, and the time that you called after the beep.” John hung up without saying anything and was immediately sorry for leaving silence on a woman's phone. “Whenever I hear a click and a silence,” Cheryl had told him once, “I know it's probably a wrong number, but it could also be somebody calling to find out who lives here and whether I'm home.”

John suddenly felt impossibly foolish. He would have to call back, to talk to dead air and never receive a reply. Why should they call him? Every M. Levy would be made afraid.

He dialed the next M. Levy. Action was better than no action. Bank Street. A man's voice, belligerent; a bulldog of a voice: “Hello?”

“Hello,” John said pleasantly, as though he were some sort of salesman. “My name is John Nassent. I'd like to speak to Ms. Madeleine Levy, if she's at home.”

“If you're the press you can go to hell.” John's breath escaped in silent, jubilant thanks.

“I'm not the press, I promise you. Please tell Ms. Levy that John Nassent wants to speak with her.” There was a pulsing silence on the line. Madeleine Levy would recognize the name of one of the women who had died. “Please,” John said again.

“The number was supposed to be changed yesterday,” the man said. “Fucking telephone com—excuse me. What do you want to speak to my daughter about?”

“When she hears my name I think she'll speak to me.” The man considered, was gone. John listened to the reassuring static of the open line. He waited a long time. By the time he heard the woman's voice he was a long, sad way away.

“My father said your name was John Nassent.” No hello.

“Yes,” said John; he was chagrined by her anger.

“One of the girls who was killed was named Cheryl Nassent.”

“She was my sister.” A beat of quiet for that, a tribute.

“How do I know you're not from some scummy rag, trying to trick me?”

“You tell me if that happens and I'll kill the son of a bitch.”

“How do I know you're not the Slasher, then? Calling up with a pretty good story.”

“Ms. Levy? You have no reason to trust me. But the same man that hurt you murdered my sister. And I need to talk to you about that.”

“The papers all said that I had ‘escaped unhurt.' That I didn't have any ‘serious injuries.' ”

“I need to talk to you, Ms. Levy. Maybe I can help you.”

“Help me? Oh, right. Like the press helped me. Like the police—”

“I'm not the press, Ms. Levy, and I'm not the police. Listen, you can call information and get my number and call me back. I live in Bayside. I just want to talk to you.”

“Oh.” Madeleine Levy had run out of steam. “I guess that sounds reasonable—I don't know. My father wants to talk to you.”

Her father thought it was a good idea, too. He would call that night at nine o'clock. He sounded neither suspicious nor afraid. He sounded like he would kill John if John hurt his little girl. John liked him.

After John hung up the phone he stared for a long time out the window; there was no view. Madeleine Levy was very, very angry. John liked that, too. If she hadn't gotten angry she might be dead. If Cheryl had gotten angry earlier, years and years earlier—if she hadn't been such a quiet girl, so careful never to worry or to hurt—if she hadn't been such a “good” girl—she might still be alive.