Blood Music (5 page)

W
ere there ever voices? He wasn't sure. A chorus of heavenly seraphim—and the everyday murmur of his wife's voice, the baby's crying, the irritated or supplicating voices of infrequent clients. When his hands were on electrical wires he felt grounded in a certain reality; a precise, mathematical reality of positive and negative.

There were two worlds, and he walked the tightrope between them uneasily. The sudden surge of light or power, the clean calm wires unentangled, circuits restored to their proper channels; these things cleansed him, and then he went into the chaos that waited outside.

There weren't really voices, but there was music. High and far away and all the time. Nobody else could hear it. It got louder slowly, over days and weeks. It used to be soft and far away always, but now it got louder; sometimes he recognized the music and sometimes he didn't. Beethoven and Chopin and Delius and Bach. Strange dissonances, the drumming from
The Rite of Spring.
It underlay conversations, it provided a counterpoint to sight. Lately when days and weeks had passed the music began to overlay everything else; it became images. Sometimes he said things and then was unaware of what he had said. Part of him was astonished that anybody knew about the Slasher murders. Nobody else could hear the music. And nobody else could see the image that came into his mind more and more often now, unbidden: the matted hair, the eye, the blood on the ceiling. Things he could not remember ever having seen.

He drove and drove the dark streets. Sometimes he went to the meat-packing district up above the West Village, where the whores sucked him off. He didn't hear the music when they took him in their mouths. He heard nothing; blessed blackness descended and he was lost to himself. His wife had tried to do it for him once. He had not let her—if she had not been his wife he might have killed her. The good women of his imagination did not do such things.

He had never been able to control his fantasies. The bloody eye, the broken body, had been with him for as long as he could remember. Beauty was inextricably mixed up with blood. He fed his fantasies with girlie magazines, where all the women offered themselves to the men behind the camera's eye. Unconsciously he thought all women were like this, that the women in the magazines got pleasure from their actions. That theirs was a chosen degradation, and that all women would choose it.

His victims were everywhere. All women were a single Woman. He wanted a love as poignant as intense fear, as the moment before death. In destroying women he was penetrating the mystery of his life.

Still he went around from job to job in the daylight hours; sometimes the client was a woman and while she was talking to him he thought about what he could do to her. He saw his female clients guillotined in front of him and he fixed their broken fuses and spliced their wires while he saw their faces contorted and covered with blood. And he said, oh, yes, that's the trouble, you won't have to worry anymore. And their bloody sightless eyes thanked him, and their cold fingers wrote the check, and he left them unaware of their own deaths. And he went home to a blond woman and when the pressure of the music grew too strong he escaped again into the chaos of the night in his van, along the dark empty streets inside his head.

T
he headlines were screaming.
SLASHER VICTIM LIVES
! It was May nineteenth, and John was drinking coffee in his office; he was the accountant for a medical publishing company in the Helmsley Building, across the street from Grand Central Terminal. The commute from Bayside took an hour and forty-five minutes, sometimes two hours. He took the express bus every morning, and every evening he waited on the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Third Avenue to catch the express bus home. He looked at the people in the crowd as he waited for the bus, he looked at them as he rode the bus home. The man could be any one of those people. That was the only way John ever thought of him: the man. He tried not to think about what the man had done.

John had not known before that you can stop thought. That you can catch and freeze an image and back away from it before it moves—before it hurts you. Sometimes at night in the moments before sleep the image escaped and he saw Cheryl, her head thrown back; he saw the knife.

SLASHER VICTIM LIVES
! Could he really do what he had said he was going to do? The woman had been raped, but somehow she had gotten away before the knife. She knew, whoever she was, she knew some of the things that Cheryl had known. Not the last thing, not the blade. What was the last thing Cheryl saw? His face? And this woman had seen his face.

At home in the morning John read the
Times
with his coffee, and every morning as he took the paper out of its blue plastic sheath he held his breath until he scanned the headlines for the Metropolitan section. The
Times
would never deign to put a Slasher murder on the front page. But it was there now, in the lower right-hand corner:
WOMAN ESCAPES
“
SLASHER
”
ATTACK
. And then the
Post
headlines over people's shoulders on the bus. John hated the
Post.
The things it had said about Cheryl—“reported virgin,” as though that were shameful. He didn't read the
Post.

The
Times
article didn't mention the woman's name. It was common practice now in the press not to print the names of sexual-abuse victims. To leave some clothing on the psyche, at least. John had a copy of the
Daily News
in his lap. He had finished reading the articles. He was still staring at the paper in front of him. The
Daily News
hadn't printed her name either. But John had to know.

She had been walking in the West Village at about eleven-thirty at night. She lived in the area. She was blond, “attractive.” Twenty-seven years old, a teacher. She'd been walking on Washington Street, one block in from the West Side Highway. Between Eleventh and Bank streets.

John wished he could talk to that woman. The papers had been full for months of comparisons with other cases. They talked mostly about Ted Bundy. There had been one girl, Cheryl's age, John thought her name was Georgiana. Georgiana was walking down an alley on a summer night, all the windows were open. This was in a college town, John couldn't remember where. There were students leaning out all the windows, Georgiana knew them all. She called out hellos to them as she walked. At the end of the alley was a busy street. Right before the street there was a stretch of alley, about thirty feet long, where nobody could see Georgiana from the windows. She walked into the dark there and never came out the other side. Her body was never found.

John didn't know the West Village very well. He had been walking there several times, years ago. He remembered that there were steps leading down to used or unused basements in front of every row house along every street. There were courtyards in back of some of the houses, with narrow alleyways. They were kept locked—or most of them were usually kept locked. There were odd configurations of buildings butted up one against the other; some of the buildings were triangular. There were small, oddly shaped empty spaces between the buildings. There were empty buildings, for sale. Up near the meat-packing district above Jane Street there were parking lots, underneath the rusted columns that supported a stretch of old, abandoned railroad track that ran for several blocks over near the river. There were schoolyards, shadowy asphalt deserts at night, under surreal yellow lamplight. There was a playground that had been a cemetery in the nineteenth century. In that safe, well-to-do neighborhood there were a thousand places to commit a rape-murder.

The woman, the woman who had seen the man's face, had already been released from St. Vincent's Hospital. The papers had published no description of her attacker. The woman was “cooperating with the police,” however, and they expected to circulate a description within twenty-four hours.

When that woman was gang raped and beaten nearly to death in Central Park in 1989, none of New York City's mainstream papers printed her name. The
City Sun,
one of the city's two black newspapers, thought the arrest of five young black men had been a setup, and they did print her name. Protesters stood outside the courtroom every day while the trial was going on and chanted her name next to the television cameras. Cheryl had been very interested in that trial, she had said that if you read the
City Sun
and the
Amsterdam News
you understood why some people were saying it was a frame-up. So Cheryl knew that woman's name but she said she would never have been able to say it out loud.

All morning at work John thought about what to do. Call the hospital? They'd never tell him. At eleven o'clock he called anyway, Admissions, St. Vincent's. “Excuse me, but could you tell me the name of the woman who was treated and released last night in the Slasher attack?”

“Are you a member of the immediate family?”

For one mad moment John thought of saying yes. “No,” he said. For the first time in a long time he almost laughed.

“I'm sorry, but we are not at liberty to give out patient information.”

“Is there anyone I could—”

“I'm sorry, but we are not at liberty to give out patient information.”

Numbers. Columns on a page. How much the new Mac computers were costing versus the figures on typesetting and page makeup for a year ago. What precinct would it be? Washington and Bank. He called information, where they eventually told him it was the Sixth Precinct. As he dialed the number he realized he was frightened. He had to tell himself there was no way the police were going to know who he was or why he was trying to find out the woman's name. But when the phone rang in his ear he still wanted to hang up.

“Sixth Precinct.” The voice, a woman's, had no inflection at all.

“Uh—I guess I want the Slasher Task Force.”

“Just a moment.” The voice was completely uninterested.

“Slasher Task Force. How can I help you today?” This voice was big and hearty; it filled up John's ear. A black voice, Southern.

“Excuse me.” John hesitated. “I'm trying to find out the name of the woman who escaped from the Slasher,” he said finally; but he had given his hesitation to the policeman on the other end of the phone, like a piece of clothing that can later be used for tracking.

There was a ruminative silence in John's ear; when the voice spoke again it was easy.

“My name is Sgt. Blackman,” the voice said, and it laughed. “And I
am,
too.” A truly rich voice, multilayered. Now it was friendly and watchful. “And what might your name be?” John said nothing, said, “Uh,” very softly. The voice filled the gap. “You know I can't just hand out that information to whoever asks me for it. How about you tell me who you are and why you need to know?”

“Is she all right?” John asked; quite suddenly it didn't matter about finding the Slasher, just for a moment, it was more important that the woman be all right.

“No, she's not.” The voice had gone altogether cold. “She had the scare of a lifetime, and she doesn't need any newspapermen knocking on her door this morning.”

“Oh, no,” John burst out, “I'm not with the papers. My—” and he stopped in confusion; he had given something away.

“Well, that's good to hear,” Sgt. Blackman said, his voice smooth again. John got the impression of a big dog sitting up on a desk at the other end of the line, a big dog with its head cocked to one side and very intelligent eyes. “You know I can't give out her name.” There was a pause so sudden and complete that John thought the phone had gone dead.

“It's just that—” he said, and then he stopped and heard nothing and went on, “—but I just wanted to talk to her. I need to talk to her.” The air was dead in his ear and then Sgt. Blackman said, very softly, “Why?”

John moved the phone away from his ear because his eyes had filled with tears and he had to clear his throat. He didn't want Sgt. Blackman to hear that but he probably had. John put his hand up to his face and rubbed, hard; he hated to cry. He put the receiver back up to his ear. “I'm sorry,” he said briskly, “I guess I'm wasting your time.” And he moved to hang up, ashamed of himself and angry, and Sgt. Blackman said, “Wait,” a command and a promise.

“I want you to know I'm here, son,” Sgt. Blackman said. “You're not trying to hurt the lady, I know that. I think you feel for her. But if you want to know something, why don't you just ask me?”

The voice was every male authority figure, loved and feared, that John had ever known, but he would not succumb. He said, “I'm sorry, Sergeant, but I can't tell you. I have a good reason for wanting to talk to her, and you're right, I'd never hurt her. She's been hurt—” and his voice betrayed him, and he was crying, and he hung up the phone.

He sat at his desk for fifteen minutes and then he went down the hall to Circulation to tell Mary Ellen that he was going home for the day. He'd say he didn't feel well, and if anybody asked, would she tell them?

Mary Ellen was bent over a copy of the
Post.
When she looked up and saw him her eyes were gleaming. “You hear about the latest—oh, I'm sorry.” In most people's minds there was a tragic best-seller romance in being the relative of someone who had died so horribly, and John knew he was not tragically romantic. His pain was like Cheryl's latent beauty: if you didn't care you wouldn't see it.

“It's okay,” he said. “I'm going home. It made me sick. I wish I could find out her name. I want to talk to her. I think it would do me good to talk to her.” John didn't know why he was telling this to Mary Ellen. It could be dangerous later, if he ever did what he had to do.