Ikon (2 page)

She smiled, although not at him, ‘Margot’, she said. ‘Margot Schneider. Nee Petty.’

‘Ah, Margot,’ said Henry. He waited for a Trailways bus to toil its way past him; then made a right on Lincoln towards Paradise Valley. The road curved upwards, glaring and hot and dusty. Far away to their right, the tall buildings of downtown Phoenix wavered in the late-afternoon heat, the Convention Center, the Compensation Fund Building, KOOL Radio. Henry felt as parched as a Gila lizard in a vivarium, trapped under the sun. He took out a cigarette, and pushed in the electric cigar-lighter on the Oldsmobile’s dash, but when Margot Schneider gave him a reproachful sideways look, he let the lighter pop out, untouched, and patiently put the cigarette away.

She lived in a one-storey ranch-style house on Oasis Drive, a select suburb in the eastern wrinkles of the Phoenix Mountains. Below the veranda, sprinklers sparkled on a vividly-green rhomboid of lawn. Wind-chimes hung along the eaves, tinkling in plaintive celebration of the first breath of wind that Oasis Drive had felt all day. Margot Schneider led Henry up to the front door, fluted glass backed by gilt-and wrought-iron roses. The street number was 62, which Henry thought was morbidly appropriate.

‘Nice place,he remarked, as she opened the door. ‘How are your neighbours?’

‘Quiet. The Millers next door are really sweet. He runs a bathroom boutique in Scottsdale, Tub Time. Across the road, the Kargs, they’re okay. He works for Mountain Bell.’

‘What do their wives do?’

‘Oh,’ she shrugged. They raise the kids, and watch As The World Turns.’

‘I’m a Guiding Light fan myself, smiled Henry.

She led him into the house. There was a large white-painted living-room, with an angled ceiling, and an oak fireplace. On the walls were luridly-coloured Red Indian prints by Barrie Tinkler. The rug was off-white, shaggy, and needed a clean. The few pieces of furniture were

reproduction antiques, a mock-Leuis XIV console, a pair of mock-Chippendale chairs. But it was the little spindly-legged table in the smallest corner of the room which interested Henry the most. There was a cluster of black-and-white photographs there, framed in silver. Mrs Schneider at the age of twelve. Major and Mrs Schneider on their third anniversary. The family dog, Natasha. Major and Mrs Schneider at a barbecue at Myrtle Beach. Henry picked up a photograph of Major Schneider standing confident and clean-profiled beside the nose-needle of an F-16, and marvelled at the care and attention which had gone into creating Mrs Schneider’s new life.

‘Your husband was a good-looking man. When did you say you met him?’

‘I didn’t. But, December, 1950.’

December, 1950. That was when they were shooting As Young As You Feel.’

She was unwrapping her purple silk scarf. She stopped suddenly, and said, -What?’

I told you,’ Henry grinned. ‘I was always a movie fan. Movies, and soap operas. Did you ever see River Of No Return?

She squinted at him, her eyes deep in her fat-pillowed cheeks. ‘No,she said. ‘I can’t say that I ever did. Was it on Midnight Movie?’

Tv maybe. Yes, maybe it was.’

There was another pause. In the far distance, they could hear the warbling of a siren. Then Margot Schneider said, aid you care for a drink? I don’t have any beer.’

‘Anything will do. Whiskey, wine, you name it.’

I have some Stag’s Leap riesling, from Napa Valley.’

‘Okay. Stag’s Leap riesling would be fine.’

They sat on the terrace overlooking the Phoenix Mountains and drank wine which, for Henry, was too cold and too sweet. It was very late afternoon now, and as the sun sank over Yuma County, to the west, the mountains were filled with crumpled shadows. Their faces, like Margot Schneider’s face, were revealed by the light to be suddenly old.

intestines in the next room. How the victim had screamed and sobbed. And the client’s eyes would never rise to meet his. The money would be passed across the desk without a single look being exchanged. Henry had concluded that hardly anyone has a stomach for killing, not even by proxy, and he had put up his prices, twenty years ago, to $5,000 a job. The next week he had killed a man in Pittsburgh with a Bosch electric drill, boring five holes into his skull before he finally died. He had never heard anybody scream so much, not before, nor since. But he never had nightmares about it.

He wiped his wine-glass clean with his soft white linen handkerchief. He also polished the arms of the chair, and every other surface he might have touched. There was no point in washing his glass up completely, no point in trying to make it look as if Margot had died accidentally, or as if she had committed suicide. Nobody could do by accident what Henry was about to do to Margot; and nobody could ever do it to themselves.

He got up, and crossed to the patio doors, still flexing the saw, and stood listening for a moment. Then he stepped inside.

She had taken a quick shower, and now she was sitting in her bedroom brushing her hair and warbling happily to herself. Henry didn’t find it more difficult to kill happy people than he did to kill angry or frightened or miserable people. In fact, it was more satisfying if they died happy. He had an old-fashioned sense of what was right.

He walked into the bedroom without knocking. The off-white carpet was soft and quiet, and so she didn’t hear him. The television was showing a news report of angry parents who were picketing a newly-destreamed public school in Flagstaff. There was a queen-size bed with a white quilted satin bedspread, and white drapes; a white bedside telephone; a bottle of Nembutal. The door to the bathroom was still ajar, and inside, Henry could see Mar-got’s clothes strewn on the floor, her purple tent-dress, her slip, and one discarded sandal. Margot herself was

sitting in front of her white rococo dressing-table, wearing a white satin bathrobe with a large silver satin star sewn on to the back of it. She was pouting at herself as she lined her lips with Vivid Pink.

He thought: that’s a hangover from a long, long time ago. A pink like that, only a blonde would wear.

He came right up behind her, only a few inches away, and it was only then that she focused on his reflection in the mirror, and realized that he was there.

‘Well,’ she said, without turning around. She replaced the cap on her lip-liner, and reached for her blusher. ‘If I’d known you were the kind of guy who likes sneaking into a girl’s bedroom …’

‘What would you have done?’ he asked her. His pulse was still beating with that even, purposeful rhythm, but his voice sounded light and amused. On the television, an angry parent was saying, ‘I won’t have my child educated side by side with hoodlums and trouble-makers and ignorant Indians, that’s all. My child has a right to lead the life that / had.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I wouldn’t have asked you home.’

‘I knew you were going to ask me home the moment I set eyes on you,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes?’ Her voice was a little sharper.

‘No slight intended,’ said Henry. ‘I didn’t think you looked cheap, or easy, or even particularly lonely. But I could see what qualities you possessed, straight away. Star qualities, you know? You’re a star, in your own way.’

‘I wish I was.’

‘Oh, believe me,’ said Henry. He raised the flexible saw behind her back, his hands firmly grasping the two wooden handles, stretching the blade out until it was taut.

Margot Schneider touched up her cheeks with blusher, then pressed her lips tight together and stared at herself closely in the mirror, as if she wasn’t at all pleased with the way her face looked.

I should lose some weight, you know? But it’s so difficult when you don’t have anybody to lose weight for.’

‘Why don’t you lose it for me? I’m as good as anyone.’

‘I don’t suppose I shall ever see you again, shall I, after today? That’s the way they all are. Horny, tired, sick of business. All they need is one evening of comfort. Then they go back to their wives.’

While she rummaged in her dressing-table drawer, Henry raised the saw higher, until it was only a few inches above her head. ‘I’m so untidy,’ she said. They used to tell me that when I was a little girl, you know? I can never find anything.’

Henry said, ‘Look up. Look at yourself in the mirror. Now, what can you say about a woman who looks like that, at fifty-six?’

Margot Schneider kept on rummaging for a moment, and then froze. Henry could see the muscles in her back tighten up. It seemed like a whole minute before she spoke, and when she did, she sounded like someone else altogether, someone frightened and small.

‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ she whispered.

‘What do you mean? You’re Margot Schneider, that’s what you told me.’

‘You said fifty-six. How do you know I’m fifty-six?’

‘You told me.’

‘I never told you any such thing. I always tell people I’m fifty-one.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Henry. He was trying hard to make his voice sound normal, praying even harder that she wouldn’t turn around and see him standing right behind her with that thin whippy steel saw held upraised in both tense fists.

She said, in a haunted gush, ‘Haven’t I given enough? I never had anything to start with. Haven’t I given enough? For the love of God, all of you, you’ve taken everything!’

‘Listen, Margot - ‘ he told her.

‘Don’t lie to me,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve been taunting me all afternoon with it, haven’t you? Hollywood, the movies, the River Of No Return? and I was dumb enough not to understand what you were doing to me.’

He said, in a tone that was almost shocking because it

sounded so sincere, ‘Margot, believe me, I don’t think you’re anyone but Margot Schneider. Why should I?’

Seconds went past. One of the parents on the television snapped, ‘If they want guinea-pigs then let them use guinea-pigs. They’re not using my kids.’

Then, almost as if she knew what was going to happen, and had decided to accept it with the dignity of Joan of Arc, or Lady Jane Grey, Margot raised her head and stared at herself full-face in the mirror. In that instant, and in that last instant only, she looked just the way she had always looked in all her photographs, wide-eyed, surprised, frightened by everything she knew but even more frightened by everything she didn’t.

In that same instant, Henry Friend snapped the saw down past her face and pulled it tight against the flesh of her bare neck. He was so fast, he had trained for this single act of killing for so long, that she didn’t even have time to take in enough air to scream. All she made was a high inward gasp, and then Henry had ripped the saw hard to the right and hard to the left, tearing through soft white skin, through the strong sternocleidomastoid muscle at each side of the neck, through the fibrous sheath which contained the carotid artery, the jugular vein, and the vagus nerve.

He let out a loud, desperate, ‘Ah!’ of effort and horror, and then he gave one last rip to the right, and the wire-bladed saw pulled clear through the cartilage between her cervical vertebrae, and her head rolled off her shoulders and dropped with a hideous drumming noise on to her dressing-table, amongst her combs and her make-up.

Blood fountained spectacularly out of her gaping neck, gouting and splashing all over her mirror and halfway up the wall. Her body tilted off the stool and fell heavily to the floor still pumping pints of sticky red all over the white carpet, all over the bedspread, like some ghastly and unstoppable action-painting, Jackson Pollock in gore. One foot twitched and shuddered, and actually kicked off its fur-trimmed satin slipper.

It took Henry a long time to recover himself. He stared down at the floor because he couldn’t face the severed head which was lying on the dressing-table. The head was splattered with blood, but it still looked unnervingly alive, as if Margot’s eyes would suddenly roll and stare at him, as if Margot’s voice would whisper from its lips.

‘Jesus,’ he said to himself. He was shaking all over. He must be losing his nerve.

After two or three minutes, he turned away from the chaos of blood and went to the bathroom. It was still steamy and fragrant from Margot’s shower. He washed the saw under the basin faucets. The mirror was too cloudy for him to be able to see himself: all he could make out was a foggy pink face, an indeterminate monster from a past that was probably better forgotten, the ectoplasm of other people’s nightmares. Blood circled the basin and whorled around the drain.

He packed away the saw with the neatness of a professional workman. Then he left the bathroom, closing the door behind him, and walked straight across the bedroom, deliberately diverting his eyes from the dressing-table. He went into the kitchen and found a large green plastic trash bag under the sink. He peeled off his bloody surgeon’s gloves, rolled them up, and dropped them into the bag. For a moment, he closed his eyes, like a man with a migraine. But it had to be done. He returned to the bedroom, carrying the bag, and forced himself to step right up to the dressing-table and look down at Margot’s head.

It wasn’t the blood that disturbed him. He had seen plenty of blood before. Once, in Oklahoma City, he had crushed a young Italian up against a parking-lot wall in his car, and severed both of the boy’s legs, femoral arteries spouting blood like hoses. And aferwards, as he drove away on Kelley Avenue under a blue Oklahoma sky, he had lit a cigarette with a hand as steady as Black Mesa on a clear night. Blood was no problem. Blood was part of the job.

Yet, Margot’s head unsettled him badly. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because, historically, she was already

dead, twenty years buried; and while he might have succeeded in murdering her body, her personality had somehow survived this execution unscathed; as if Henry had done nothing more than lop the head off a waxwork dummy. Her life-force, her legend, remained intact. That inexplicable radiance that had always made her appear to be far greater and far more glamorous than she actually was - that radiance still shone. He had killed her, but she was still alive. For Henry, this wasn’t like the old days at all. It was too much like Hollywood voodoo, Sharon Tate and Jayne Mansfield and Anton LeVey. It was too much like Helter-Skelter. Henry looked down at her head, at the way she stared so intently and yet so blindly at her pots of cosmetics, at the garish blue tongue which was beginning to slide out from between her parted lips, at the congealing blood which had stuck up her hair like a coronet, or a coxcomb; and he knew that he was fated too. Twenty years of his life, for this. Twenty years to discover what doom really was.