The Parallel Apartments (64 page)

“Settle yourself, Livie, I don't want any presents.”

“I'm sor—”

“Do you know what I want you to do? What would be a nice present for me, and what will solve all of this?”

“What?”

“Forgive your mother.”

“There's nothing to forgive. She didn't do anything wrong.”

“Talk to her, allow her to forgive you.”

“I tried. I'll never do it again.”

“I want you to try something. Every time you wake up, be it from a nap or a night's sleep, I want you to get up, come and sit crosslegged on the living-room floor, close your eyes, and be your mother. Think like her. See what she sees. Allow yourself to imagine her imagination, and explore it. Find in her what she sees in you—what she used to see and what she sees now. You will come to be the mother that forgives her daughter, and to be the daughter that allows a bestowal of forgiveness.”

“I…”

“Say ‘Merry Christmas, darling, I'll do it.'”

“Okay.”

“You don't have to do anything else. You don't have to call her, meet her, or attend family counseling. This exercise is for your mind and spirit only. And for me, I guess. I'll benefit by your returning grace.”

One evening in January, Archibold arrived home with a copy of the Classifieds section of the
Statesman.
He said to Livia:

“There's gonna be an estate sale. It says it's gonna feature a bunch of 45s and LPs of Austin music from the sixties and seventies. I think we should go and see if we can't find a Ye Moppe Hedds record with your song on it.”

“When?”

“This Sunday, the ninth.”

XXVII

January 2005

Boy-o
-boy
did Murphy Lee Crockett wake up in a good mood.

After five humiliating failures, how delicious to arise in the morning—a nice, crisp one, too, judging by the window's pleasing frostwork—with the fresh, still-wet memory of a grisly, fully realized murder. No regrets, no empathy, no remorse. He was, officially, a Psychopathic Serial Murderer at the Beginning of His Lethal and To-Be-Legendary Career. And, not coincidentally, today was the first of the three-day True Crime Convention, the largest in the world. He would walk among the meek. He would visit the booths like the devil in disguise. This time next year, there would be a booth devoted to him.

Murphy attributed much of his past failure to hasty, insufficient preparation, overexcitement, shortsightedness, and shoddy ordnance. Conversely, his success last night he attributed to surgically precise planning, a cool head, and the feather-fine, ruby-hard edge of Zordmurk.

What a shame, though, that the fucking sword had broken while he'd been hacking away at that bitch. A fluke, surely, just an accident of contact physics, like how the laziest of knuckleballs sometimes disintegrate the
toughest Rawlingses. Or else she had bones like…well, like Japanese steel. Whatever, she was history long before Zordmurk betrayed him by snapping off at the hilt.

He'd made his appointment months in advance, shortly after he'd received Zordmurk in the mail. His neighbor Porifiro had been bugging him about how he could set Murphy up with a girl who would break some off without any of that dating and courting nonsense. And she was very attractive, too. He showed Murphy a picture of his friend, who was indeed very attractive.

“You don't know her, man!” Murphy had said. “That's your cousin or something.”

“Okay, never mind.”

“Wait, lemme see.” Murphy became aware of some changes in hormone levels in his body. She was very, very attractive.

“Okay.”

“There's a detail that you should know.”

“I knew it. She has AIDS. She's a man. She lives in Perth.”

“No, no,” said Porifiro. “She's a pro.”

“A hooker? Jesus, Porifiro. Get out of my sight.”

“Look, you're a friend, I'll throw in a hundred bucks.”

“Yeah, right.”

Porifiro dug deep in a pocket and came up with a bunch of wadded banknotes, which he made a production of smoothing out, squaring, and orienting, and finally handed Murphy five somewhat-humid twenties.

“It's expensive, man, a hundred bucks won't pay a tenth of what it costs for an hour with her.”

“Are you serious?”

“But here,” he said, going into another pocket and coming up with a ticket of some kind. “This is a half-off coupon.”

“So it'll still cost me four hundred bucks?”

“More like $650. Best I can do, man.”

“I do not trust you,” said Murphy.

“Look, she hasn't had a good man, like you, in a long time, and she's my friend, so I've been trying to set her up with a good man, and you're the only one I know, Murphy Lee.”

Murphy considered this. He'd always wanted to fuck a hooker.

“What's her name?”

“Marcia.”

“You're kidding.”

“What would I do that for? It's Marcia, Marcia Brodsky. You
know
her?”

Murphy could not believe his good fortune.

Porifiro began to giggle.

“What's that for?”

“I don't know, I giggle, that's why, look, here's the number. Don't talk except to answer her questions, then do what she tells you. You gonna have to wait a few months, probably—she's a busy woman. Do
not
mention my name. Confidentiality, you know.”

Murphy called that night. What a thrill it was to hear her doomed voice on the phone!

“Right now I'm booked until February '05, Mr. Brady,” Marcia said.

“Six months.”

“Unless I have a cancellation. Would you like me to place you in the standby queue? You'll be number 154. Remember, it might be very short notice, possibly the same day you're called.”

“Fine.”

“Do you have a phone number for me?”

Murphy gave her the number to his recently purchased prepaid cell phone.

“Excellent! Can't wait to have you visit, Mr. Brady. I promise you a good time.”

More hormones squirted around his body. If he wasn't afraid of AIDS and leaving evidence behind, he'd fuck her before he killed her.

His number came up almost a month early, January 13. Yesterday.

“Basic, right, Mr. Brady?” Marcia had said.

“Uh, I guess.”

“You're aware of the particular nature of our services?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, I'm going to give you an address. Just follow the path to the back door, place your fee in the slot provided. Your services today total
$750, half off the regular price. Cash only, all taxes included, no tipping necessary—then wait for me to buzz the door open. Oh, please ignore the dog—he's on a tether, and, anyway, he's all bark. Then go right to the door decorated with chili-pepper Christmas lights. Come right on in when you're ready. Oh, I can't remember—on or off?”

“Uh. Huh?”

“The lights? Would you like me to leave them on or off for you?”

He had not considered this. Would he be happy to merely hear screams, hacking thunks, whispery, flesh-dividing swipes, the splashes of arcing jets of pulmonary blood hitting the walls? Or see it all, too?

A flash of nausea decided for him.

“Off.”

“By the way, how did you hear of me?”

“Uh, friend. He gave me the half-off ticket.”

“Wonderful! I'll expect you at 2 a.m.”

Murphy arrived on time. He pushed open the chili-pepper door, walked in, found Marcia sleeping under a sheet at the edge of the squash-court-sized bed, drew his sword, and began swinging, stabbing, slicing, hacking. Warm spatter found his face, his hands. To his pleasant surprise he found he was not at all nauseated. Murphy hacked and hacked in the dark, virgin silence.

The next morning, Murphy jumped out of futon, quickly dressed, jogged down to the corner, and bought the last copy of today's
Statesman
from a vending machine. His crime must be already famous: this box, concealed as it was by a dense copse of courier drop boxes, never sold out. On September 12, he had taken, for the price of a single issue, the whole stack of papers and sold them on eBay for a profit that made Murphy hope for more national tragedies.

Hmm, not on the front page. Or second or third. Murphy grew more and more disappointed as he walked home.

Murphy hated the
Austin American-Statesman.
They seemed to get off on ignoring Murphy Lee Crockett. Once, in order to send them an anonymous, untraceable note outlining his criminal intentions, Murphy had gone to the trouble of taking a bus all the way to fucking
Dallas,
trapped in a tedious, hot disguise (fake beard, Red Man cap with attached mullet wig, sunglasses), just so he could buy an overpriced money order from a Money Box in a
crappy part of town, and drop by a Half Price Books to pick up a few stacks of second-hand magazines from whose articles he could, rubber-gloved, snip and paste to sheets of untraceable bond paper the letters necessary to spell out his dares and taunts, which, history would adjudge, would exceed the creativity, sociopathy, and emergency of the notorious missives of the Zodiac and BTK, and perhaps even the scrawled dares of…
the Ripper himself.
But no. The
Austin American-Statesman
had declined to publish or even acknowledge his note, no explanation given.

Plus, the incompetent daily ignored his actual murders, or, to be precise, his courageous attempted murders. What self-respecting paper finds attempted murder unnewsworthy? No one in the world realized a serial killer was out there practicing. Dummies. Only the
Chronicle
had noticed anything at all, and that particular incident—Murphy's thwarted halberd impalement of Peter Bradley, the marrow-boiling, chain-mailed bankruptcy attorney—had turned up in the highly disrespectful and unimportant column, “News of the Weird,” whose editorial tone was one of luftmensch contempt.

Those days were over. Nevermore would the world overlook him. Even the limp
Statesman
couldn't ignore a sex murder in its own streets; a Shinogi-Zukuri-katana slaying of an elite, lovable,
white
prostitute ought be worth a column inch or so somewhere in the first twenty pages.

Yet no story appeared.

The only explanation was that the murder had been discovered too late to make press time. Or had yet to be discovered. He'd google the news now and then during the day today, and stay tuned to Fox. They'd be the quickest to pick up and nationalize the story of a cold yet impassioned edged-weapon murder of a sin-profiteer. Fox loved that stuff. And Murphy loved Fox.

At home Murphy turned on the TV, sliced a fat slab off of a fifteen-pound ham, built himself a monster ham-and–Kraft American Singles dagwood, and lay down on the futon to eat and fart and skim the rest of the paper. Vacuous comics, laughable arts section, stale news, and the intolerably meaningless metro happenings—today the
Statesman
brought to attention the Fourth Annual Shin-Splints Awareness Day Double Marathon, a 52.4-mile walk to raise awareness of the plight of those suffering from the affliction, a cause its participants might most sincerely beatify by limping the entire distance. Fourteen thousand faux gimps jamming traffic, ruining Murphy's
day, taking up valuable broadcast, print, and internet news minutes that should be his.

Just to be thorough, Murphy browsed the obituaries. Nothing. He returned to the front page, which was dominated by another story about the fucking Reviewers.

A week ago, reported the
Statesman,
the band of moralists had invaded the large, supposedly impervious home of a megabudget film star of international adoration who happened to live here instead of Hollywood and who had recently been caught on video cheating on his wife, an infidelity that prompted his admission to a series of like affairs, mostly with youthful, surgically recrafted colleagues, devastating his wife and children, letting down his friends, irritating his agent, enraging his moneymen, titillating or appalling everyone else, and, evidently, inciting the Reviewers. The video that undid him, taken from the security camera monitoring an isolated ATM kiosk in downtown Bucharest and posted—briefly—on the website
ebaumsworld.com
,
featured the star and a Tollywood substarlet in an obscene, full-face suckfest that passion quickly elevated to frantic, panty-stripping amplexus on the kiosk's brick floor. During the pleasantest stretch of their Dunhill-smoking postcoital nod, they were set upon and robbed of their clothes and valuables and Dunhills by a gang of boots 'n' bracers, a crime that gained the couple zero sympathy, and ultimately bought the pair bench warrants for sexual crimes from the judiciaries not only of Romania but of Andhra Pradesh, the starlet's home. After the star's wife, a self-help guru of great moral probity, moved herself and her belongings back home to her mother's in Jacksboro, the Reviewers broke into the now-bachelorized star's fortified mansion, and in a theretofore-unseen revue of comprehensiveness, disintegrated pretty much everything owned by the star, except a fine first-edition King James Bible, which they'd left open to Revelation.