Blood Music (17 page)

Why indeed? THE SYMPHONY SEASON IS ABOUT TO BEGIN. Every year the Philharmonic gave a tour of free concerts in New York City's parks. MUSIC UNDER THE MUTILATED MOON. June nineteenth, the day after the full moon. IF YOU TRY TO STAY MY HAND YOU WILL MAKE SCHUBERT ALL THE SWEETER.

“Pat was hoping you would watch Mary that night,” Zelly said carefully. She didn't want to go but she did, too: to be that close. She didn't know she was biting her lip. It was frightening and exciting at once. Like being in the laboratory when a difficult experiment is being performed. She felt guilty about being excited but she couldn't help it. It wasn't as if she wanted somebody to get hurt.

“You know I'm going down to Oak Ridge to stay with Emily,” her mother said. Emily, Zelly's second-eldest sister, was nine months pregnant and counting, and she wanted her mother to be there to help when the time came. Mrs. Thuringen was always there, at weddings and births and divorces and at deaths, too; when Zelly's father died it was the mother that comforted the children, not the children that comforted the wife. “Zelly, you can't let Pat drag you both there. It's too far for Mary, and honey, you've got such pretty blond hair.”

“But I'll be with Pat, Mama. And now I guess the baby will, too.”
And I'll be there to
—she thought, and stopped herself. Nerves and loneliness.
There is nothing wrong with Pat.
“Anyway, he really wants to go. It's the Beethoven, and the Schubert. They're his favorites.” Schubert's Quartetsatz was one of the few classical pieces that Zelly loved. Pat had once told her that the Quartetsatz was the music the universe moved to.

“I know. I know, honey, but it's just not someplace I think you should be. And wait a minute, I think there's a bad moon that night.” Zelly heard rustling; that would be one of her mother's astrology magazines. Mrs. Thuringen considered herself something of an expert in astrological matters. She called her children to warn them that Mercury was going retrograde or there was a particularly nasty aspect between Uranus and Mars. When she came back on the line she sounded worried. “That's the night after the full moon. It's in Scorpio this month.” Zelly said nothing. “Scorpio,” her mother repeated. “It's a very violent moon. And there's a square between Mars and Venus. That's action—and sex. Violence. Full moon in Scorpio, Mars square Venus. The last time I remember seeing something like this was when that poor jogger got raped and beaten almost to death in Central Park.”

“Mom, it's not the full moon, you just said it's the day after the full moon. And anyway—”

“You know the full moon is in effect for one day before and one day after. All the primitive types will be affected for at least three days altogether. And the square is right on that day, seven forty-nine in the evening. Oh, Zelly, that's right when the concert is.”

“Eight o'clock. I'd stay home—I really would, I believe you—but you know how Pat is about astrology. Whenever I tell him you told me something he says maybe Venus is in the International House of Pancakes. And he's going to be with me and the baby. It'll be good for her, she can crawl in the grass. And what could possibly happen to me with Pat there?”

And I want to see, she thought to herself guiltily, I want to see for myself if something happens.

H
e would go to the whores tonight. The familiar loading docks, shadows at night where shadows moved and sucked, the familiar smells of animal blood and human sweat, were refuge, sanctuary. Only the memory of the boy tainted their sweetness. He would go, and if he saw the whore-impostor he would kill it.

But as he drove the clouds broke unseen overhead and the full moon winked silver light along the roof of the van. Suddenly he stopped the van; if you asked him his name he wouldn't have known it. There was no one on the street—nothing—except the sudden moon.

The whores could wait. He got out of the van and walked without thinking: there were no words for the things he was looking at in his mind. He saw the knife fall and there were no words for it; the blood spurted out in a perfect arc, there was blood on his hands. He clenched and unclenched his gloved hands as he walked down the street.

He had followed the one he got in the vestibule. And afterward, under the anonymous fluorescent light, he had taken off her clothes, and nobody walked by. He had had her one more time after he got her clothes off, why not? Anyone could have come by and nobody did. She lay there all night and nobody did.

Now he watched the woman walking ahead of him. She had her shoulders hunched against the cool night wind. Blond hair. His hand around her throat, in their own bed, why had he done that? Even her blond hair on the pillow unresisting had never before prompted such a response.

He moved behind her like a cat. He could see the upward slope of her cheekbone and then her hair covered it, blown gently by the balmy June air. Her high heels made a glittery, satisfying sound. Much better to have been ahead of her, to have been waiting. But she did not quicken or slow her pace as he approached. She did not look behind. So many women make that mistake: they don't look behind to see what might be catching up with them.

He kept about half a block behind her; when her steps did begin to quicken he saw a flash of silver: she had taken her keys out of her bag. Where was she coming from, alone? He could see her dead already. Feel her.

To be free of the knife he must become the knife, to re-create what had been destroyed. The moment of perfect love.

L
eanore Haller. Twenty-two years old. Last seen, by her friend Elizabeth Steen, outside Vivaldi's, a cappuccino café on Jones Street, at ten-thirty the night of June eighteenth. Leanore wanted to get home in time to tape
Ninotchka,
with Greta Garbo, which was due to air at eleven o'clock. Leanore had never mastered the timer on her VCR; she couldn't even get the clock part to work. She loved Greta Garbo, though. Loved old movies, especially silent movies, loved the atmosphere of old movies, the clothes, the mannered dialogue and different ways women's faces have been made up to emphasize different, desirable aspects of the female ideal: in the silent era it was eyes, large and black-fringed, and the mouth was played down, made smaller, poutier, like a child's mouth. To emphasize innocence, when innocence was a premium of sexual enticement. In the forties the women had great square shoulders and erect stances; in the twenties they stood stooped, with their abdomens thrust forward in a parody of a little girl's posture. In the movies today the women have very big, open lips, so that men necessarily think of what those lips would be like opened more, and lowered, and filled. Innocence no longer excites, and the current ethos demands at least the promise of a prostitute's expertise.

Leanore Haller painted her mouth very big, in bold red slashed across the skin above and below her rather thin lips. Midnight Rose. She affected long fringed shawls and very high black heels. The grainy shot that appeared in the newspapers the morning of June nineteenth was one that had been taken the summer before, when Leanore and her then-boyfriend, George DuBasky, went on a canoeing trip down a river upstate which the papers were never to get right. Leanore sat against a gray outcropping of rock, staring off somewhere into the middle distance. The Ramapo? The Delaware? She had a tiny half-smile on her unpainted mouth. They got her height wrong, and her middle name. The picture didn't even really look like her. Not Rose, Rosie. Because her mother loved the sound of it, and wanted Rosie for her proper name, but her husband said no one would ever take the girl seriously if her name were Rosie. And five foot eight, not five seven and a half.

Leanore Rosie Haller was found lying on her back at the bottom of a stairwell on Greenwich Street. Her blue jeans had been wrenched off one leg; the zipper was broken. Her left high heel was some two feet away, lying with the heel straight up in the air. The contents of her purse lay scattered across the sidewalk: tissues, a spiral notebook, Midnight Rose. Her blouse was undisturbed, her royal-blue fringed shawl was matted and torn under her. It was determined later that her keys were missing; they could not be found anywhere on the sidewalk or the street. That part of Greenwich is sometimes rather deserted, but Leanore had told her parents in Ohio that she was not afraid. The papers would quote her mother: “She said that she understood the dangers of the big city but she was willing to make sacrifices for her art.” The lead in the high school play, the drama club in college. A pretty fair portfolio put together by a gay male photographer friend who lived down in SoHo. Nights spent waitressing or, as on June eighteenth, a Friday and Leanore's night off, spent in the company of friends.

Her throat was mottled gray and purple from the force of the hands that had encircled it. The white of her left eye was red. She had apparently died before the knife wounds were inflicted—a fact to which her mother in Ohio would cling for many years—and so the eleven cuts did not bleed much. Four in the area of the left breast, two on the right breast, four in the abdominal area, one lower down, on the upper left thigh next to the pudenda. In the newspaper picture her face was not clearly visible, just the attitude of the mouth and the self-conscious stare. At the time Leanore was thinking about how Alla Nazimova had looked in the 1921 silent-movie version of
Camille.

Leanore's hair was ash blond, and she wore it shoulder length. Belinda Boston had yellow hair; she had had an abortion when she was nineteen. Linda Swados, whose light brown hair was lit with gold streaks in the summer, had also had an abortion, and she had been molested by her grandfather throughout most of her childhood. Elizabeth Moscineska, eighteen years old, strawberry blond, had wanted to be an opera singer when she was a child. She was attending Parsons School of Design at the time of her death. Rosalie Howard had plans, with her friend Stacy Iocca, to start a mothers' group in Hoboken. Six or seven babies, neighborhood moms, a chance to get out of the house and talk to people. Dark blond hair, dyed. Cheryl Nassent looked, in her newspaper photograph, like a very sweet person; it was something about the eyes. Her hair was very long, honey blond, and a silver feather earring showed at her left ear. Leanore had been stabbed eleven times, Cheryl five, Linda eighteen. Rosalie had been cut only once, Elizabeth six times. Belinda had been stabbed eight times. Leanore went to auditions for television commercials, Linda was an assistant producer for the local public television station. Rosalie liked to gossip, although of course she didn't call it that, and Cheryl loved cats. Elizabeth hadn't yet gotten over how big New York City was; her eyes were used to a distant horizon, and she could not accustom herself to the glass canyons of Sixth Avenue. Leanore was going to be this generation's Gloria Swanson, a gaudy ambition that was absolutely meaningless to the men who asked her her background at the commercial auditions. Belinda loved to cook.

Would the Symphony Slasher keep his promise? The newspapers betrayed a subdued indignation: he had said the nineteenth. The city had been planning to put into service every available police officer the night of the concert. The cordon was provisioned to run approximately two and a quarter miles around the wooded and open perimeter of Cunningham Park. The police were “cognizant of the gravity of the situation and fully prepared to go forward” with their original plans.

The papers ran the picture of Leanore Haller, but fully half the day's space was taken up with speculation. In 1977 David Berkowitz, who called himself Son of Sam, promised to kill on the anniversary of his first killing. He wrote a letter to Jimmy Breslin, saying so. As the day approached, the media became more and more shrill, peremptory: Why do you only kill women with dark hair? Blond hair is the American dream. Why do you only kill women with long hair? Short hair is sexy too. Why do you only kill women in Queens and the Bronx? What's the matter with Brooklyn? Brooklyn is synonymous with New York. And the anniversary came and no one was killed.

The media screamed betrayal. All their deadlines had been met, space allotted in the next day's edition for the victim's picture and her history. And the next day—or the day after, not any later than that—Son of Sam murdered a Brooklyn woman with short blond hair. And the papers were grateful.

Would the Symphony Slasher keep his promise? Would he come out again to kill, the blood of his latest victim barely dry, his seed in her barely dry, her body lying on a mortuary slab awaiting autopsy—would the Symphony Slasher keep his promise to New York?

Leanore Rosie Haller had just gotten a bit part in a beer commercial, but they hadn't had a chance to notify her yet.

T
he last light gathered at the apex of the sky like drops in the center of an inverted bowl. An airplane high up, on its way to Europe or Iceland, was lit white by the rays of the unseen sun, which had set ten minutes ago, leaving the crowd below in shadow and the trees in sharp relief against the darkening sky. Zelly sat cradling the baby on the spread of a blue woolen blanket that stood out unearthly against the deepening dusk. Certain shirts in the summer crowd stood out, red or yellow or green, a white beach chair like a beacon, a red plastic beer cooler seeming to float above the dark sea of the grass. Girls wearing pastel dresses, men in shorts or blue jeans, materialized out of the formless crowd like chalk-faced ghosts, walked by, and disappeared. Bits of conversation floated by, inane and compelling: “—the eighty-seventh one tonight—” “—two-bit madonna—” “—the beat was wrong, it should have been sliced—” The trees were papered with a saturnine face, a sharp nose and an uncertain mouth, hundreds of times duplicated in the deepening gloom.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN
?

The baby was lying on her back looking at the sky, getting sleepy. Pat stood, a shadow against azure. Zelly watched him scanning the crowd, his sharp nose appearing and disappearing as he turned his head, a fox scenting the wind. He was a tall figure in his work overalls, all dark blue with a white stripe where his name should have been. He'd torn off all the name labels when he started his own business, he said having your name on the pocket was for flunkies. He looked almost military, precise, a dark blue silhouette. It was nice to see him interested in people, in being with people. Zelly didn't even care when his eyes followed a pretty woman. All the women were pretty under the kindly rising moon.