Blood Music (2 page)

Today she would certainly buy the
Post.
WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN THE WEST VILLAGE
, read the
Times.
The
Post
would have a screaming, satisfying headline:
SLASHER STRIKES AGAIN
! That was the fifth one. One of the murders had actually happened in Hoboken, fifteen minutes from the West Village by the PATH train. Zelly was sure it was the same killer.

There had been five murders in four months: one in Hoboken, three in the Village, and one just below the Village, in SoHo. The one in Hoboken wasn't the first, and it didn't really seem to be the work of the same killer: the woman wasn't raped. She was found knifed to death in broad daylight; her baby boy was found sitting next to her. The baby had blood on it. The
Post
had had a field day with that; if the baby hadn't had blood on it the
Post
would never have covered a murder in New Jersey.

The other four victims had been found with their throats slit and their bodies repeatedly stabbed, raped right before or right after they died. Even the
Post
was reticent on that point. All but one of the women had been blond. Even the Hoboken woman was blond. “Attractive,” as though that were a prerequisite for getting yourself killed.

Zelly considered herself something of an expert on serial killers. The Son of Sam killings had happened in New York City in the seventies, when Zelly was twelve. That's what started it for her. A postal worker in his twenties named David Berkowitz called himself Son of Sam and shot girls with long dark hair. Sometimes he couldn't see properly and shot boys with long dark hair. He killed three people and left one woman paralyzed and one man with a steel plate in his head before the police caught him.

Zelly followed every detail of the Son of Sam case as it developed. It wasn't every day that a serial killer operated right across the river, with stories daily in the papers and reports nightly on the television news. Son of Sam even sent letters to Jimmy Breslin at the
Daily News,
vaguely poetic, terrifying maunderings that Zelly spent hours trying to decode.

One night Zelly and her cousin went with his father to an apartment building in Forest Hills where his father worked as a doorman. They were going to pick up some things from an apartment where somebody had died, a chair and some books. Zelly waited in the car while her cousin and her uncle went upstairs to get the stuff. Sitting alone in the car under the streetlight, she realized that the street on which the car was parked was the very same street where Son of Sam had shot and killed a nineteen-year-old girl a month before. Zelly didn't know how far away it had happened, two blocks or a mile or three doors down. She got a comb out of her purse and started to comb her long blond hair, thinking, sending a message to Sam: It's blond, Sam, look if you're out there, this is blond hair, it's not dark at all, it's light. She was scared to death. Lots of girls cut or dyed their hair that summer.

From that time on, Zelly had found her avocation. The body in the wood, the vampire invisible among the daylight crowd, became her area of expertise, until by the time Pat met her she was a party-talk encyclopedia on the intricacies of the sociopath's desires, the psychopath's will.

When Zelly had begun her reading, serial killers had still been called mass murderers. Now mass murderers were people who killed a lot of other people all at once, the way that man did down in Texas, aiming his gun at random but shifting the muzzle away and firing whenever he caught sight of a woman out of the corner of his eye. Serial killers usually killed women or little boys or teenagers—almost never fully grown men—and generally they raped or mutilated their victims. Zelly knew all about it, Dean Corll down in Houston—she couldn't even think about that—John Wayne Gacy in Chicago, the Green River Killer in Seattle, still uncaught eleven years later.

Son of Sam wasn't like those; he was simple, elemental. He never touched the people he killed. But the West Village Slasher, as the papers were calling him, raped and he knifed. There hadn't been any mutilations in these killings; Zelly thought of Dean Corll even though she didn't want to. They found one victim with his penis gnawed almost in half; he was thirteen years old. When the Slasher killed he held the head back, exposing the jugular vein like an offering. And then he stabbed, eight wounds, five wounds, eighteen. Morton Street, Greenwich, the West Side Highway.

The first of the Slasher murders had occurred back in January. The woman had been twenty-two, of Riverside in the Bronx, and she was supposed to meet some friends at a surprisingly elegant Spanish restaurant down near the old docks on the icy, run-down riverfront. Her body was found one block over and two blocks in, next to a flight of iron steps leading down to a deserted basement in an otherwise occupied building; the steps were covered with debris—black plastic garbage bags and broken bottles and used condoms—and the frayed rope that hung across the entrance had been neatly cut. The woman's face was frozen in a puddle of shiny, blood-scummed water; the body had to be pried free with ice picks.

The second victim was found on Morton Street in late February, many blocks over and down, in an entirely safe part of the neighborhood. Her body lay naked inside the narrow vestibule of her apartment building, her hand clutching a set of bloody keys. Eighteen years old, and she'd arrived in the city less than a year ago to study art at Parsons. The papers love a murder like that one.

The third was the March murder on the Stevens campus. Few of the newspaper articles included this one in their lists of the killings. She'd been twenty-six, just two years younger than Zelly.

In the first week of April there was a killing in SoHo, just south of the West Village, in which the victim had had brown hair. She had been murdered the same way, raped and then knifed, and left half-clothed next to a construction Dumpster. She had been cut with particular ferocity. Thirty-four years old, older than the others. Not blond, not young enough. The papers had hesitated: she wasn't the Slasher's type. But Zelly had known immediately that she was a Slasher victim. And now Cheryl Nassent, only three weeks after the last killing, proving Zelly right; why would he kill again so soon, if not to make up for his mistake?

Zelly knew all the victims' names. The first was Belinda Boston, a beautiful name; she was the worst for Zelly, who could not get out of her mind the image she had seen on television, police workers bundled against the January cold, wielding long-handled ice picks and talking to one another as they worked. The second was Elizabeth Moscineska, a strange name, Zelly thought, for Nebraska. Rosalie Howard on the Stevens campus; then Linda Swados, damned by the press for dying too dark and too old, as though she had cheated a more deserving young blonde out of a particularly American death. Of course none of the women resembled the others in the least, their hair ranging from Midwestern corn-colored to ash. And plain brown for Linda. But to the killer they had probably all been the same woman.

Zelly read the article in the paper twice. In the other room the baby was sleeping. While she read Zelly unconsciously pulled at her bottom lip with her teeth. Pat kept telling her to try to stop but she couldn't; it was just nerves. Cheryl Nassent had been nineteen years old. She was found late last night on the West Side Highway by a passing motorist. Naked, her throat slashed. The police didn't think she'd died far from there. She was more poignant in life to Zelly than the others had been in death: there was something in the newspaper picture of Cheryl that reminded Zelly of herself, a certain shy bravado behind the there's-a-camera-pointed-at-me smile.

Cheryl had been out on the town with a bunch of friends. Everybody was high and it was such a night, seventy degrees at ten o'clock, the last week of April. Zelly had wanted to go out last night but her mother wasn't feeling well so she couldn't baby-sit, and then Pat had to work late anyway. He did electrical work, wiring. Wyche Electric. He didn't have a storefront yet, just the van and his tools, but he'd always wanted to start his own business and he could fix anything electrical; he could make wires sing. He'd begun the business back in November, about the same time the baby was born. Zelly was terribly proud of him, making a go of it by himself, thirty-one years old and already making it with his own business. Still, she was getting tired of being so much alone.

Cheryl had gotten separated from the others somehow, going from one bar to another, everybody drunk and laughing all over the street. That was in the middle of the Village, at MacDougal and Bleecker, where all the tourists and the people from the boroughs went. Nobody knew how Cheryl got over to the West Village. Zelly thought that probably the police knew she hadn't been carried far after she died because of the way the blood settled. Pat thought she was morbid.

The baby stirred in her crib in the other room. Zelly didn't hear it but she felt it. In a minute the baby would start to cry. Zelly always knew, when the baby was still in her womb and it didn't move for a while she could make it move by thinking about it. Mary. Six months old now.

Zelly looked up from the paper. Her eyes were crystal blue, and her mouth was wide. She looked about eighteen. She looked every moment as though she were about to smile.

“Found naked at the side of the West Side Highway.” Zelly could remember having stopped to talk to Rosalie Howard once, on the street outside Bel Gusto, where she went to buy cappuccino muffins, which she ate surreptitiously while Mary was napping. Zelly and Rosalie had talked about losing weight, about how hard it was to lose what you gained when you got pregnant. Rosalie had had a very big baby boy, and they'd talked about that, how much bigger the boys are and how much more they eat; Rosalie's boy was meaty, he looked like a tiny sumo wrestler. And Rosalie had told her about the mothers' group she wanted to start, just four or five neighborhood mothers and their babies getting together once or twice a week. “You lose touch, you know?” Rosalie'd said. “You start thinking that nobody else has ever had your problems.” And Zelly had nodded a vigorous assent.

After that Zelly and Rosalie had smiled at each other whenever they met, pushing their strollers up and down Washington Street in the afternoon. Zelly always meant to stop and get to know her better. Now she was dead.

Mary was crying. Pat might come home for lunch; he almost never did but he might. And Zelly liked to have the house nice for him. He worked so hard. If she started now she could vacuum the living room and wipe down the kitchen and make a couple of sandwiches before lunchtime. She looked at Cheryl Nassent's smile and folded the paper and went to tend her baby.

J
ohn Nassent was pulling himself back together. He didn't really remember the funeral, and so far he hadn't gone back to see the grave. Two weeks. Cheryl was buried in Calvary Cemetery, an enormous city of the dead that stretched for half a mile on either side of the Long Island Expressway.

John kept expecting Cheryl to come down the stairs for breakfast in the mornings. His wife was gone, and now Cheryl was gone. John had been married for eight months. Molly hadn't liked Cheryl. She hadn't liked the way John and Cheryl could sit silently, for hours, reading or watching television or just looking out at the yard from the back porch; she had not been brought up in silence. John had no defense against her accusations that he and Cheryl seemed to communicate without words and to need nothing but each other's company. Molly said it made her feel like the other woman.

But John and Cheryl lived deep below the surface, where if no light fell at least there was the assurance that no danger could penetrate either.

John had risen to the surface once, to love Molly, and then his silence had quenched her flame. She could not follow him, and she could not free him. He too had the capacity to burn, and burn ferociously, but so far neither love nor rage had much troubled his depths. When Molly left he had signed everything, paid for the lawyers, wished her well. He had not questioned her and he had not fought for her. But now his sister had been raped and murdered.

John came by his reticence by blood. When Cheryl was killed he could not believe it—literally could not—because it had already happened. When he was nine years old his mother had been found broken across the hood of a white Chevy Impala. She had been raped and then thrown off the roof of the twenty-four-story building where they lived in Fresh Meadows, Queens. Two boys did it, seventeen, eighteen years old. They dragged her up to the roof as she got in the elevator and nobody heard. John's father kept expecting her to come back from the movies around eleven. At eleven twenty-five the whole south side of the building heard a thud. John's family lived on the north side, on the seventh floor. They didn't hear the thud, and they didn't hear the screaming either. The papers made sure they found out about the screaming.

Cheryl had been six months old. She didn't remember her mother at all. She didn't remember the trial. How the two boys had planned the crime, everything but the victim, for months. How they waited at the elevator. How they dragged her up the last flight of steps, where the door to the roof was never locked, how for twenty-five minutes they raped her, how one of them had balked at the last minute at throwing her over the edge and the other one had said, “The bitch is history, man, don't you want to hear it when she goes?”

John's father had heard it for the rest of his life. After the murder the family had moved a few miles away, to Bayside. They never spoke about his mother; his father almost never spoke at all. It was as though what he was listening to in his head were more compelling than any momentary reality. And John never knew, all his life he would wonder, was his father listening for the turn of the key in the door or was he listening for screams?

John's father had died a year ago. Liver cancer. John didn't know whether to be sad or happy. John knew that as a last tribute to his wife his father wanted a terrible death, but he had made sure his father was denied that. The last thing his father said was, “I won't have to listen to it anymore,” but he was on morphine then and didn't know what he was saying. At the funeral neither John nor Cheryl had cried.