I Am No One You Know (24 page)

Erma wiped at her eyes.
Shook his head, walked away.
What more manly gesture!

It was when Erma was returning the rolls of microfilm to the librarian that she happened to see, on a table, scattered pages of the city paper. Immediately her eye leapt to a photo of a familiar face. Reverend E. G. Eldridge. And the headline
MINISTER BRUTALLY ATTACKED IN ROBBERY ATTEMPT.

Appalled, Erma read that E. G. Eldridge, fifty-one years old, had been attacked with a razor while getting into his car in the parking lot behind his church, the Disciples of Jesus Christ, on Friday of the previous week. The attack had occurred at 7
P.M.,
after dark but in a lighted area. Eldridge had not seen his assailant. He’d been severely lacerated in the face and hands and was in stable condition in the hospital. The unknown assailant had removed Eldridge’s wallet from his coat pocket but dropped it near him without taking money or credit cards. Police believed he’d been frightened off by someone on the street, but no witnesses to the crime had yet come forward.

“For me. He did it, for me.”

For several minutes she sat stunned. Then she folded up the newspaper carefully, inserting pages in their proper order, and returned it to the librarian’s desk where current issues of the local paper were kept.

S
HE LIFTED THE
telephone receiver. She would call the police, she would say carefully: “I think I know who might have assaulted Reverend Eldridge. His name is…”

So long she held the receiver in her sweaty hand, the dial tone turned to an irritated mechanical squawking in her ear. Somewhere close by, a siren wailed. It had begun to snow again, windborne sleet. Not yet March, this winter of Erma’s life seemed to have gone on forever with the fascination of one of those mad works of adoration
The Faerie Queene, The Romance of the Rose…
By the time she replaced the receiver the mechanical squawking had ceased. There was no dial tone, no sound, as if the line had been cut.

This can’t be happening can it? I am not truly here.

Through the ice-stippled side window of her car Erma saw the dimly lighted windows of 81 Bridge Street. A shabby red-brick town-house in a neighborhood of similar run-down rowhouses near the ramp of the enormous bridge. Human life was dwarfed here, human habitations like caves, hives. Though close by, the polluted river was invisible.

She wondered if Kethy was home. If he was alone.

I can’t love you. You mustn’t love me. You don’t know me: my face is not me.

You must not hurt others on my account…

Yet their connection was forged too deep for such words, now.

No words Erma uttered would matter to Kethy, no words could deflect his adoration.

He’d stayed away from class. He wouldn’t come again, Erma understood. So she must go to him, if they were ever to meet again. He would injure and even kill on her account but he believed himself unworthy of her.

Uncertain what to do, Erma drove on. She was morbidly excited, exhilarated. She’d brought Kethy’s last composition with her, to give to him personally. What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She’d become, she believed, a stronger person: willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.

The last time she’d called home, for instance. The duty-bound daughter. Gentle all-forgiving never-judging daughter. Her mother was saying in a hurt whining voice why are you so far from us Erma, why have you left us in our old age, like your brothers, no better than your brothers, why do you imagine you can “teach,” you’re not the
type, never were, you’re shy, you used to stammer so badly remember how you came home crying, the other children teased you so—and Erma quietly hung up the receiver on her mother’s voice. Smiling, thinking
The connection was broken. No one’s fault.

Within the hour she’d arranged for her telephone number to be changed, unlisted.

She would tell Kethy, maybe. They’d laugh together. She would tell Kethy such things she’d never told anyone in this raw new life of hers in the Midwest or in the old lost life back east. She would tell him
None of them ever knew me, I’m so lonely.

Erma was circling the block, evidently. She perceived that that was what she was doing. One-way streets, and narrow. And vehicles were parked on the streets, some of them abandoned. There was trash dumped on the pavement, overturned trash cans. In this setting Kethy’s “Obsevation and Anylsis” acquired a touching, comical significance. Remedial English, taught to inhabitants of such a world. The strategies of prose, persuasive prose, prose to save one’s life, taught to Death Row prisoners. Erma hadn’t graded Kethy’s compositions, out of respect. Out of fear for him, yes; but out of respect, too. She would return the composition to him in person as an act of homage but she hadn’t committed herself to any action beyond that. She was one who wished to believe that human motives precede actions for she was (she had always been) a rational individual yet clearly there were times (was this one of those times?) when actions might precede motives and even render them useless.

The one-way streets made this part of the city a maze. Erma had been forced to drive several blocks out of her way.
Go home! Continue on home, no one will ever know you’ve been here.
She passed beneath another ramp of the old ugly Victorian-era bridge. In warmer weather it would be dangerous for Erma to drive in this part of the city, a lone white woman in a compact car, but tonight no one was on the street. Though her heart was pounding, she knew the symptoms of anxiety. Exhilaration! She saw that she was driving again on Bridge Street, heading south. Street numbers were diminishing: 231, 184, 101…She approached Kethy’s house another time. She was fairly certain someone was home. That bluish undersea TV glimmering. She braked her car at the curb: a shadowy figure was passing by the
window, behind the carelessly drawn shade.
I drive my car at night, for I am lonely. Could toss a bomb through any lighted window.
Erma turned off the ignition. She saw that, while the porches of other rowhouses on the street were cluttered with objects, chairs, bicycles, trash cans, the porch at 81 Bridge was empty except for a single trash can.

He lived alone. He was in there, alone.

Carefully, Erma walked up the icy sidewalk. Stepped onto the porch. Through the thin, cracked shade she had the impression of a male figure moving swiftly toward the door by the time she pressed the bell. The door was opened within seconds like an inhalation of breath: Arno Kethy stood there, staring at her.

He wore a clean black T-shirt. Work pants, hiker’s boots. A long spidery blue tattoo covered much of his left forearm. His eyes were deep-set, shocked. As if he’d been expecting a visitor he’d shaved so recently that tiny beads of blood shone on the underside of his jaw. And he’d cut his hair with a scissors, now the gingery-graying hair fell just below his ears, newly washed, limp and thin.

Erma heard her prepared words. “Mr. Kethy, may I speak with you? Arno.”

T
HEY BROUGHT HIM
the skull in a plastic bag, in pieces. Like broken crockery it was. A human skull smashed into approximately two hundred fragments, a few large enough to be immediately identified (a three-inch section of the lower jaw containing several teeth, a portion of the largest bone of the cranium), and the smallest about the size of his smallest fingernail. Contrary to popular belief, the human cranium isn’t a single helmet-shaped bone but eight bones fused together, and the facial mask is fourteen bones fused together, and these, in the victim, had been smashed with a blunt object, smashed, dented, and pierced, as if the unknown killer had wanted not merely to kill his victim but to obliterate her very being. There was the almost palpable wish here that the dead should cease to exist even as matter: should never have existed. No hair remained on any skull fragments, for no scalp remained to contain hair, but swaths of sun-bleached brown hair had been found with the skeleton, and had been brought to him in a separate plastic bag. Since rotted clothing found at the scene was a female’s clothing, the victim had been identified as female. A woman, or an older adolescent girl.

“A jigsaw puzzle. In three dimensions.”

He smiled. Since boyhood he’d been one to love puzzles.

He was not old.
Didn’t look old, didn’t behave old, didn’t perceive of himself as old. Yet he knew that others, envious of him, wished to perceive him as old, and this infuriated him. He was a stylish dresser. Often he was seen in dark turtleneck sweaters, a wine-colored leather coat that fell below his knees. In warm weather he wore shirts open at the throat, sometimes T-shirts that showed to advantage his well-developed arm and shoulder muscles. When his hair began to thin in his mid-fifties he simply shaved his head, that tended to be olive-hued, veined, with a look of an upright male organ throbbing with vigor, belligerence, good humor. You couldn’t help but notice and react to Kyle Cassity: to label such a man a “senior citizen” was absurd and de-meaning.

Now he was sixty-seven, and of that age. He would have had to concede, as a younger man he’d often ignored his elders. He’d taken them for granted, he’d written them off as irrelevant. Of course, Kyle Cassity was a different sort of elder. There was no one quite like him.

A maverick, he thought himself. Not to be labeled. Born in 1935 in Harrisburg, PA, a long-time resident of Wayne, NJ: unique and irreplaceable.

Among his numerous relatives he’d long been an enigma: generous in times of crisis, otherwise distant, indifferent. True, he’d had something of a reputation as a womanizer until recent years, yet he’d remained married to the same devoted wife for four decades. His three children, when they were living at home, had competed for their father’s attention, but they’d loved him, you might have said they’d worshipped him, though now in adulthood they were closer to their mother, emotionally. (Outside his marriage, unknown to his family, Kyle had fathered another child, a daughter, whom he’d never known.) Professionally, Dr. Kyle Cassity was something of a maverick as well. A tenured senior professor on the faculty of William Paterson College of New Jersey, as likely to teach in the adult night division as in the undergraduate daytime school, as likely to teach a sculpting workshop in the arts school as a graduate seminar in the School of Health, Education, and Science. His advanced degrees were in anthropology,
sociology, and forensic science; he’d had a year of medical school, and a year of law school. At Paterson College he’d developed a course titled “The Sociology of ‘Crime’ in America” that had attracted as many as four hundred students before Professor Cassity, overwhelmed by his own popularity. had retired it.

His public reputation in New Jersey was as an expert prosecution witness and a frequent consultant for the New Jersey Department of Forensics. He’d been the subject of numerous media profiles, including a cover story in the
Newark Star-Ledger
Sunday Magazine bearing the eye-catching caption
SCULPTOR KYLE CASSITY FIGHTS CRIME WITH HIS FINGERTIPS.
Was such publicity embarrassing? Or did it, in a way, gratify his sometimes childish vanity, his wish to be not merely known but well-known, not merely liked but well-liked? In his heart he wasn’t an ambitious man.

He gave away many of his sculptures, to individuals, museums, schools. He gave lectures for no fee throughout the state.

As a scientist he had little sentiment. He knew that the individual, within the species, counts for very little; the survival of the species is everything. But as a forensic specialist he focussed his attention upon individuals: the uniqueness of crime victims, and the uniqueness of those who have committed these crimes. Where there was a victim, there would be a criminal or criminals. There could be no ambiguity here. Kyle had no patience for the proviso…“Innocent until proven guilty.” You were guilty, guilty as hell, as soon as you committed a crime.

As Dr. Kyle Cassity he worked with the remains of victims. Often these were were badly decomposed, mutilated, or broken, seemingly past reconstruction and identification. He was good at his work, and had gotten better over the years. He loved a good puzzle. A puzzle no one else could solve except Kyle Cassity. He perceived of the shadowy faceless as-yet unnamed perpetrators of crime as human prey whom he was hunting, and was licensed to hunt.

“P
OOR GIRL.
I
T
ended for you sooner than it should have, eh?”

This skull! What a mess. Never had Kyle seen bones so broken. How many powerful blows must have been struck to reduce the skull, the face, the living brain to such broken matter, Kyle tried to imagine:
twenty? thirty? fifty? A frenzied killer, you would surmise. Better to imagine madness than that the killer had been coolly methodical, smashing his victim’s skull, face, teeth to make identification impossible.

No fingertips—no fingerprints—remained, of course. The victim’s exposed flesh had long since rotted from her bones. The body had been dumped sometime in the late spring or early summer in a field above an abandoned gravel pit near Toms River in the southern part of the state, a half-hour drive from Atlantic City. Bones had been scattered by wildlife but most had been located and reassembled: the victim had been approximately five feet two, with a small frame, a probable weight of one hundred to one hundred ten pounds. Judging by the hair, Caucasian.

Here was a grisly detail, not released to the press: Not only had the victim’s skull been beaten in, but the state medical examiner had discovered that her arms and legs had been severed from her body by a “bluntly sharp” weapon like an ax.

Kyle shuddered, reading the report. Christ!—he hoped the dismemberment had been after, not before, the death.

Strange it seemed to him: the manic energy the killer had expended in trying to destroy his victim in the most literal way, he might have used to dig a deep grave and cover it with rocks and gravel so that it would never be discovered. For of course a dumped body will eventually be discovered.

Yet the killer hadn’t buried this body. Why not?

“Must have wanted it to be found. Must have been proud of what he did.”

What the murderer had broken, Dr. Cassity would reconstruct. He had no doubt that he could do it. Pieces of bone would be missing of course, but he could compensate for this with synthetic materials. Once he had a plausible skull, he could reconstruct a plausible face for it out of clay, and once he had this, he and a female sketch artist with whom he’d worked in the past would make sketches of the face in colored pencil, from numerous angles, for investigators to work with. Kyle Cassity’s reconstruction would be broadcast through the state, printed on flyers, and posted on the Internet.

Homicides were rarely solved unless the victim could be identified. Kyle had done a number of successful facial reconstructions in the
past, though never working at such a disadvantage. This was a rare case. And yet, it was a finite task: the pieces of bone had been given to him, he had only to put them together.

When Kyle began working with the skull in his laboratory at the college, the victim had been dead for approximately four months: through the near-tropical heat of a southern New Jersey summer. In his work place, Kyle kept the air conditioning at 65°F. He played CDs: Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier
and
Goldberg Variations,
performed by Glenn Gould, most suited him. Music of brilliance and precision, rapid, dazzling as a waterfall, that existed solely in the present moment; music without emotion, and without associations.

Someone’s daughter. Missing four months. By now they must know. Must be resigned.

T
HE HAIR!
It was fair, sun-bleached brown with shades of red, still showing a distinct ripply wave. Six swaths had been gathered at the crime scene and brought to his laboratory in a separate plastic bag. Kyle placed them on a windowsill where, when he glanced up from his exceedingly close work with tweezers and bits of bone, he could see them clearly. The longest swath was seven inches. The victim had worn her hair long, to her shoulders. From time to time, Kyle reached out to touch it.

Sun-warmed on the windowsill. Lustrous burnished-brown. Clinging to his fingers with static electricity, as if alive.

E
IGHT DAYS:
It would take longer than Kyle anticipated. For he was working with exasperating slowness, and he was making many more small mistakes than he was accustomed to.

His hands were steady as always. His eyes, strengthened by bifocal lenses, were as reliable as always.

Yet it seemed to be happening that when Kyle was away from the laboratory, his hands began to shake just perceptibly, as in the aftermath of tension, or terror. And once he was away from the unsparing fluorescent lights, his vision wasn’t so sharp.

He would mention this to no one. And no one would notice. No doubt, it would go away.

Already by the end of the second day he’d tired of Bach performed by Glenn Gould. The pianist’s humming ceased to be eccentric and became unbearable. The intimacy of another’s thoughts, like a bodily odor, you don’t really want to share. He tried listening to other CDs, piano music, unaccompanied cello, then gave up to work in silence except of course there is no silence: traffic noises below, airplanes taking off and landing at Newark International Airport, the sound of his own blood pulsing in his ears.

Strange: the killer didn’t bury her.

Strange: to hate another human being so much.

Hope to Christ she was dead by the time he began with the ax…

“K
YLE, WHAT IS
this new project? You seem so…”

Distracted, Vivian might have wished to say. Her voice was hesitant and mild and in no way confrontational. For these two had been married for more than forty years and Kyle’s wife had long ago learned how to gauge his moods, how to interpret his ominous silences. Seeing him now pause on the stairs, frowning, running an impatient hand over his smooth, darkly flushed and veined head as if a thought had suddenly struck him.

“…seem so distressed. Kyle?”

Kyle looked toward her, and paused. Then he seemed to wake from his trance and smiled, saying, “Am I? I don’t mean to be.”

In this way, polite, pleasant, he deflected her question. His immediate response to an interruption of his thoughts was often a smile.

“Is it…anything we can talk about?”

“Is what ‘anything we can talk about’?”

He wasn’t angry with Vivian, he was protective of Vivian. But he did rather resent her use of the word
distressed.

Not very likely, that Kyle Cassity would be distressed.

He had no interest in discussing his forensic work with his wife, or with anyone except fellow professionals. Her naive questions and invariably emotional responses bored him. If he confided in Vivian about the skull, her soft face would stiffen. Her fingers would flutter at her throat and her eyes would register alarm, dread, even hurt.

Oh Kyle, how can you work with such ugly, such hideous…

Why do you ask, then?

You’re my husband, I want to know. I want to share…

No. You don’t.

In his domestic life, Kyle made every effort to be good-natured. As a younger man, he’d been difficult: but those days were gone. He no longer allowed his frustrations with his work to erupt into displays of temper with his family. He no longer saw other women, he no longer became involved with sexually attractive, needy, manipulative women. He’d outgrown not passion exactly, for often he felt still the wayward pangs of sexual desire, but the capacity for taking passion seriously. Among those closest to him Kyle had cultivated his good nature like a paper mask. Not a rubber mask that clung to his face and might have interfered with his breathing, not a gargoyle-mask that called attention to itself. Kyle Cassity’s mask was smiling, affable, kindly, patient. He’d been a charismatic lecturer at the college, and he maintained some of that spotlit affability around the house. Through the mask’s mouth he could even kiss, sometimes. Brushing his lips against the lips of the woman who was his wife. Brushing his lips against the cheeks of the adults who were his grown children, and now the young children, scarcely known to him, who were his grandchildren. Through the mask’s smiling eye-holes he regarded the world, that region of infinite chaos, sorrow, and cruelty, with a sunny equanimity.

Vivian was saying, not accusing but simply saying, in the manner of one naming a mystery, that he hadn’t seemed to be sleeping very well lately, and he didn’t have much appetite, and she wondered if he was working on something stressful…“I wish you would tell me. If there’s anything you can talk about?”

“Vivian, yes. Of course.”

He was on his way out. Though it was nearly 10
P.M.,
he wanted to return to work. Through dinner he’d been distracted by thoughts of the skull, that was now about one-quarter re-assembled. Once he reached a critical point in the reconstruction, the remainder would go quickly: like completing a jigsaw puzzle. His heart yearned for that moment with the avidity of a young lover.