The Killing Hour (13 page)

‘It makes perfect sense.’

‘Oh? What’s that, Mr Smartmouth?’

‘He was putting himself into the role like any reputable actor would. He was living the part, acting out a bizarre scenario, and that way when their bodies were found nobody would really understand what happened. Maybe he only wanted to kill one of them but by killing them both it looks more random, right? It looks like he picked two women and drove them into the woods to kill them in some ritualistic or crazed act. What if only one of them was a target? If he killed her then you would look for somebody more personal to the victim. Isn’t that how it goes? This way who do you look for? Some maniac?’

‘And that’s what I found. You were Cyris when you killed them and you’re Feldman when you got caught.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘How long had you known them? Did you meet them that night?’

‘I told you.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t just pick their houses at random. You followed them first. Where did you first see them? The supermarket? The movies?’

He holds his hand out and uncurls his fingers. The stake rolls out. It hits the ground and doesn’t bounce. It makes me jump. It makes me think of the way Kathy and Luciana died.

‘Maybe you met them at a bar. They were friends out having a quiet drink, and you were the guy who kept hitting on them. In the end they figured out you wouldn’t leave them alone so they played along with you. You swapped names and numbers, only they gave you fake ones and you gave them your real one. You took it back after you followed them home and killed them.’

‘There was no forced entry. How do you explain that?’

‘Maybe you convinced them at the bar you were a nice guy and they took you home. Maybe they were drunk and asked you for a lift. You had your bag of tools in the boot and you just couldn’t say no. They let you inside and the rest is obvious.’

He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a packet of cigarettes. He removes one with his lips, starts to put them away, then holds them out to me as if to show he isn’t such a bad guy after all. I shake my head. He shrugs, as if not accepting one of his cigarettes is undeniable proof I must be crazy. He sucks deeply, then breathes a mouthful of smoke into the damp air. It hovers above his head but doesn’t drift.

‘You cut off Kathy’s breast and took it home.’

I feel sick. ‘It still doesn’t add up. You think one of them waited in the car while I killed the other?’

‘You attacked one of them quickly and knocked her unconscious, then subdued the other. You probably left her tied up in the car.’

‘That’s not how it happened.’

‘Tell me about the cars. Why did we find an abandoned van? Why was Luciana Young’s car stolen? Why was your car used? Why did you take Luciana into the bathroom to kill her?’

Kathy’s ghost has gone and Luciana’s arrives. I feel like Old Man Scrooge. She looks at me from where Kathy stood earlier, only she has no drink to hold. Or chains to rattle.

‘See? You already know it doesn’t add up. You already know it takes more people then you have in your scenario to move all those cars.’

‘She tried to call the police but you had to stop her, didn’t you?’ Landry says.

‘What happened?’ Luciana asks.

‘I broke the phone.’

‘I know,’ they both say, but only Luciana carries on. ‘It was too late anyway, Charlie.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I wonder where Jo is right now. Tied up or free, she’s safe. Going to her house on Monday was the first of a new series of fresh mistakes.

‘Who’s Jo?’ Landry asks.

‘Huh?’

‘You just mentioned Jo.’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘Yes you did. Did you kill her too?’

Did I? No. I only tied her up and pushed her around. Luciana slowly shakes her head at me exactly as she did on Monday morning. She had come out of the shower and swapped roles with Kathy. She offered me fresh clothes to replace the bloody ones I was wearing. She shook her head when I told her mine weren’t that bad and called me a typical male. She left me alone in the lounge to think, alone to drink my beer, alone to think about the two women who, after their showers, were turning out to be incredibly beautiful. The beer had my head buzzing. The next thing I knew darkness was my friend and in the darkness I thought about the offer Cyris made me. I woke to find Luciana crouching in front of me and my beer seeping into her carpet.

‘She told me not to worry about it,’ I say.

‘Who? Jo?’

‘She said, “It’s perfectly okay for the man who saved our lives to stain my carpet.” She handed me a flannel and a towel and a change of clothes, then gave me directions to the bathroom.’

‘You showered in her bathroom,’ Landry says. ‘You showered before you killed her.’

‘Yeah, I showered.’

‘You were a mess,’ Luciana says, and I wonder where Kathy has gone.

I walked down her hallway and, like the bar Kathy leaned against, it seems long ago and so far, far away. I’m going to die out here at the hands of a lunatic cop. Even so, walking into the steam of her bathroom filled me with excitement. It was full of typical womanly scents – soaps and subtle perfumes that make you think of meadows and flowers. I was in a house with two beautiful women and they were in my debt. Anything could have come from it and, as it turns out, something did.

I dropped my own clothes in a heap. I was smeared in blood and dirt; patches of my hair had been welded together with blood. The only clean parts were where my clothes and watch had been. There were clumps of dirt in my ears and my forehead had the lump it still has now. I was smiling – smiling to be alive, smiling as I thought what my students would say the next day when they saw me walk into the classroom, smiling at the thought of Kathy and Luciana joining me in the shower.

The hot water hit my damaged body and stung like hell. I was in the bathroom Luciana would soon die in. I was dancing from one foot to the other, washing green shampoo through my hair, creating a red lather. Red water ran down my body, moving over sore muscles and torn skin in long stripes. It was blood and I liked the fact that most of it wasn’t mine. When I returned to the lounge Kathy and Luciana were talking on the couch.

‘You certainly looked uncomfortable in those clothes,’ Luciana says to me.

‘I didn’t have any underwear on.’

My headache, as it is now, was thumping along nicely.

‘I’m trying to be serious here, Feldman, and all you can tell me is you weren’t wearing underwear in the shower? Why the hell would you?’

‘Ignore him, Charlie,’ Luciana tells me. ‘We should have gone to the police. That’s what you wanted to do, but at that point it didn’t matter. There was no hurry because Cyris was dead. We were sure we could go in the morning. We were too exhausted, too upset to deal with the questions then. We planned to go first thing. You were going to come with us. What happened?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Exactly,’ Landry says. ‘Why did you shower?’

‘I was a mess,’ I tell him. ‘I was covered with Cyris’s blood.’

‘Your play-acting alter ego.’

‘Think about it,’ I say. ‘Why would I shower before killing two people? Why would I shower if I was going to get covered in blood anyway?’

‘Forget about the damn shower,’ Landry says, ‘and tell me about Jo. Just how many victims are there?’

I look at his
Kiss the Cook
cap and I wonder what state of mind he was in when he bought it. It’s hard to imagine him out shopping, just cruising the mall and walking into a clothes shop and finding that hat on a shelf. Did he make pleasant conversation with the sales girl while she rang up the sale and put the hat in a bag? Did they flirt? Talk about the weather? Did he wear it out of the store? Did he know then that one day he would wear it while taking another man’s life?

Luciana is starting to fade, following Kathy back to the world where they live now. She’s wearing the robe she died in but the towel she had wrapped around her hair when she woke me is gone.

The night was winding down and since we weren’t going to the police it was time to go home. Since they would end up dead in their own houses the first thing I needed to do was separate them. I sat wearily on the arm of the couch – Monday morning was draining me. It was at that moment I learned Kathy was married.

‘You were jealous, weren’t you?’ Luciana says.

‘How many victims?’ Landry repeats.

‘I wasn’t jealous,’ I say, but I was and Luciana knows it.

Kathy’s husband was a lawyer and he would help us. I had killed a man and I needed representation. That was another reason we were waiting till morning. Maybe it was even
the
reason. I was distracted at the time. In the end I grabbed my bloodstained clothes and I left, taking Kathy with me.

‘Jealous? Are you on something, Feldman? Is that the problem?’

‘Among other things,’ I say, and Luciana fades away and life, as it is out here at gunpoint, returns to normal.

22

A psychopath. The word doesn’t come close to describing Feldman. He doesn’t know what word does. It would probably take a combination of words. A string of them. Long-lettered terms that only doctors with diplomas would know how to pronounce. Landry has never dealt with anybody so messed up, and in a way this actually helps. It helps that with each sentence that comes out of Feldman’s mouth Landry knows his decision to bring the man out here is the right one. Hell, it’s even cost-effective.

He adjusts the gun across his knees, shrugs his shoulders back to offset the beginning cramp and shifts further into the chair. It’s going to be a long night. ‘You just said you weren’t jealous. Weren’t jealous of who? Jo?’

‘I liked Kathy, that’s all. Is that a crime?’

‘The way you liked her it sure as hell is. Why’d you kill Luciana in the bathroom?’ he asks, catching himself using the victim’s first name. How long has he been doing that? It means he’s personalised them; it means this has become more than just a case. But why the hell not? If he’s going to kill a man it ought to be over somebody with a first name. They deserve to be personalised. They deserve justice.
Revenge? Do they deserve revenge?
He decides that they do. It’s why he’s out here. It’s why he’s just screwed up what short life he has left. ‘Why not the bedroom? You said she’d already showered, so why take her back in there?’

‘I don’t know why,’ Feldman says, and Landry has heard that same answer before from dozens of men unable to explain why they killed dozens of women.

‘She was still alive, Feldman, when you rammed that stake into her heart.’ He leans forward and tightens his grip on the shotgun. ‘We know that because of the blood splatter. We know she was in pain because her fingernails cut deep crescents into her palms.’

‘The phone call to the police. How did the phone get outside if I burst into her house when they arrived home? Why would I snap the keys off in the ignition of the van?’

Two good points, two valid points, and he’s given them some thought. That’s his job. ‘You broke the keys because the van was stolen and you had use of the victim’s car.’

‘That’s a lame explanation and you know it. How about the phone?’

‘You discarded it outside simply to confuse us,’ he says.

‘Now you’re really reaching if you believe that. What about the cars?’ Feldman asks, his voice rising as he starts to panic. ‘There were no cars outside Luciana’s house. If Kathy dropped her friend off, then what happened to her car?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I thought you had it all worked out.’

‘How can I know how your mind works?’ The truth is he doesn’t want to know.

‘You can’t. You’re too crazy to have any idea.’

Landry jumps to his feet, frustrated that a man like this can label him anything, let alone crazy. He moves quickly across the room, wanting to strike him hard with the shotgun, but when he takes aim and Feldman twists away he realises this sick son of a bitch probably isn’t that far off in his assessment. Of course he’s crazy. No sane police detective would have brought a suspect out here with the pretence of a trial. He lowers the gun and steps back. Feldman turns towards him and opens his eyes, his body relaxing with relief.

‘There were two cars,’ Landry says, moving back to his chair. ‘Luciana’s and your van. You followed them to Luciana’s house. You killed her there. Rather than taking the van you drove Kathy back to her house in Luciana’s car, killed her, then dumped her car.’ He sits down, gets comfortable. ‘First you tore the page from her pad but your mistake was in not taking the whole thing.’ He sucks in another breath of cigarette smoke.
Good, sweet smoke. Help me get through this.
‘Why did you keep her breast?’

‘You said my car was seen up her driveway. See? It still doesn’t add up.’

He knows it doesn’t. The vehicles have never added up and it has niggled at him the entire time. But lots of other things add up. The pieces all fit together nicely without worrying about who drove what.
Only they don’t. In the end there are pieces left over and only people sloppy in their work are happy to ignore extra pieces.
The stake in Feldman’s home. The severed breast. The bloody clothes. His car spotted outside one of the victim’s homes. The letter he wrote. The cuts and bruises on his skin. His ramblings during their interview. His lying at the start of the evening. The bloodstained pad with his name on it. That’s more than enough. More than a jury needs to convict.

Are you sure? Are you really that sure? Or are the cancer pills fucking with you?

He flicks his cigarette butt towards the fireplace, only managing to get half the distance required. He pulls out the packet and lights another. He’s sick of this. He wants to go home. Wants to retire. ‘I want to hear it in your own words.’

‘Hear what?’

He sucks in a deep breath. The air is cold and tastes of mildew and cigarette smoke. ‘Just tell me the truth. Things’ll be easier on both of us. We can get this over with.’

‘Why? You got plans? You gonna go home and spend the rest of the night justifying killing me?’

‘Tell me,’ he says, ignoring the comment because it’s too close to the truth, ‘which one of them did it to you, Feldman? Which woman was the lucky one to give you that nice bruise on your forehead?’