The Parallel Apartments (66 page)

Oh
god,
how Murphy wished he'd finished off that bitch.

No matter. He would. Just be serene, patient. All the best criminals were. He unclenched, closed his eyes, waited until his breathing evened out, then opened them.

And before him was the convention's largest booth: Bolton's Second Amendment Freedom Hall, whose inventory was weaponry. It was divided into two parts: Background Check and No Background Check. The bulk of the latter were accoutrements (rope, plastic tarping, fake cop badges, caltrops, how-to books), and edged weapons, including bayonets—craftless repro bayonets, shoddy copies of his own McCoy. Murphy had decided on the ride over that bayonetting would be his signature method. With a runneled, edged weapon, there was plenty of room for creativity and experimentation and happy accidents. Dismembering, beheading, poking-themed torture, impalement, general chopping and slicing. But guns, bombs, crossbows, missile tubes, and other background-check crap requiring remote ignition or launching… all cowardly. Boring. Up-close killing, close enough that a murderer could smell the insides of his butchered victim, was for
men.

Nevertheless, the tent excited Murphy, and served as the entryway for this black-and-red carnival of antisociety. And in an almost-divine perseveration of the metaphor, Murphy next happened upon a carnival-type ride: a life-size robotized diorama of the four presidential assassinations, in which one could participate either as assassin, with a genuine period arm (unloaded), or president, in authentic garb, at the moment of impact, with convincing squibs. And like a carnival, there were long boustrophedon lines populated
with full-bladdered youths who should've gone before queueing up. Fuck that; Murphy didn't have all day. That bitch wouldn't stay hog-tied and mummy-wrapped in generic cheapo silver duct tape forever.

The next booth was bare except for a table neatly stacked with hundreds of copies of a LuLu-produced book entitled
Wherefore Scary Clowns?,
and a woman, probably the author, standing on a small blackout stage, reading from a copy of the book, which seemed to assert a theory as to why clowns and clown imagery figure so prominently in so many capital crimes. Murphy did not stay. There was so much to see.

Within an hour Murphy began to experience sensory fatigue. The booths began to run together: a Q&A forum with DNA-exonerated folks, a dealer in antiquarian crime books. (Among his stock was a little book from 1486,
De Venenis,
about poisons. Ten grand he wanted for it. What a dummy. Surely there were plenty of eely thieves roaming around here, looking for just such artifacts to pinch and fence on eBay.) There was a genuine gas chamber, in whose death chair one could sit while one's friend remotely gassed one. A faintly almondy perfume that was surely intended to mimic the odor of real sodium cyanide pervaded the entire auditorium. Nice touch.

There was a small but densely attended booth on money laundering and secret accounts, another on internet scams, and, of course, a vendor of prisoner art and writings, a robust commerce over which the state of Texas asserted notoriously gentle regulation. Only in Texas might artistically talented spree rapists make a buck representing their crimes in sculptures of chewed and molded bumf.

At the “Are You a Sociopath and If So How Bad” booth, manned by a Johns-Hopkins-trained Sikh psychopathologist, Murphy paused to study the line of men with flat affects as they patiently, calmly waited their turns. Murphy had already answered plenty of online questionnaires, and, with a sense of shame he ever struggled to own, knew already that he was not a sociopath, so he hurried on toward the end of the first row, where a PowerPoint presentation on the phenomenon of copycat crime and Young Werther's Syndrome was being given by a short man wearing a tight rugby shirt.

The next-to-last booth in the aisle was manned by the political arm of the Reviewers. They were protected by chicken wire, like an underappreciated band in a roadhouse. Maybe Murphy would come back and throw a beer bottle at them. And the last booth was a prison consultancy, Bottom Bunk,
operated by a young woman whose tight pea-green latex catsuit stood in sensationally pornographic counterpoise to her lips, which were so red and moist it looked like she'd been eating pomegranates and sucking cock all morning. As Murphy passed by, he saw the lips say something about how her husband, the founder of the firm, wasn't able to make it today, because he was in prison doing research.

And at the back wall, behind a freestanding booth housing a wee but boom-box-voiced gasbag lecturing to an audience of none on international criminal judiciaries, was the snack bar. Murphy ordered a chocolate milk, and sat alone at one of the two round, sticky, cafeteria-type tables. He could barely think but for the booming, fanless lecturer.

          
never could reconcile that with the preindependence Malawian penal code

The chocolate milk snuck into the wrong tube, and Murphy choked.

“Okay, fellah?” said a man at the other table, also alone. A big man, seventy or so, dressed in a lumberjack's wool and old, cracked cowboy boots, the sole of one beginning to separate at the toe, giving it the aspect of a thirsty crocodile. He held on to a Styrofoam cup of black coffee with both hands as though it were part of the table and letting go meant falling to his death. One side of the man's face was still, as though from a stroke, but also flattened, as though his skull had just gone and jellied up one day and a child had come along and rolled it flat with her little Holly Homemaker rolling pin.

          
asserts that vigilantism was the only justice available to pre–civilized man or pre–customary law or pre–case law and that in fact vigilante justice would have been a laughable redundancy in the Bronze Age which satis

Murphy thought briefly about the man's question, investing it with larger meaning.
Am I okay?
Murphy was in fact quite dejected. He'd felt nearly euphoric when he arrived, but now he could only enumerate and dwell on his failures. He wasn't a sociopath, he loved his granny, he peed (
moistened,
at worst) his futon, he hadn't returned his faintly spoiled chocolate milk for something safe, like a beer, because he didn't want to be impolite. Murphy had never even really done any damage, except for his youthful arson. And the katana “murder” of a sex doll.

And this morning's home invasion and assault.

“I'm lousy, buddy, yourself?”

“Why, I'm just fine,” said the man, who talked funny, probably an effect of his face injury or deformity or whatever that was. He sounded as though his gums were studded with rubber bullets instead of teeth. “Can I fetch you a napkin?”

Before Murphy could answer, the man was up and at the snack bar, plucking napkins out of a Lucite napkin box.

          
guidelines call for lashing to the suitably immobilized and spread-eagled accused's privates a pail into which the victims would place stones the very youngests' hands being guided by an adult relative until the accused's privates became

“What happened to you?” said the man, handing the napkins to Murphy, sitting back down, and again taking hold of his coffee-cup piton.

“Me? What happened to
you
?”

“Well, this was the result of a disagreement that ended in violence. It was well deserved, though.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“I tried to take another man's blanket in the night. A cold night.”

The animated half of the man's face blushed.

“Jeez, glad I asked,” Murphy said, though he was curious, really. Were the men camping? Cell mates? Homos?

The blush dissipated. He politely regarded Murphy. Murphy didn't like this guy. He was too…
darling,
his granny would've said.

          
that is to say what future code will not care about the history of what is now becoming known as space law as inevitably astro-on-astro- or cosmo-on-cosmonaut rape or assault or casuistry will occur on international space stations

“And what brings you to the convention?” “I'm here for research.” “That right?”

“I have this theory,” said Murphy, “that there might be a killer at work, a serial killer, out in, ah, New Orleans, but the cops haven't figured out that
the crimes are connected, even though the killer, I believe, has been sending taunting letters to the newspapers and the cops. I called them and offered my theory and filed reports and whatnot, but nobody seems to care.”

The man nodded thoughtfully. “New Orleans is an ideal host for such a scenario.”

“Really. Why?”

“Why, the police there have a reputation for discarding ethics in favor of convenience. Crimes thus proliferate in inverse proportion to the ethics discarded.”

          
would dispute the provisions in Sharia its capital sentence for apostasy but the sentence of earectomy in Hussein's body of torts—no pun intended—is performed under local anesthesia by a licensed physician as if the criminal were there for wart removal or

“Oh,” said Murphy. “Yeah, I know all that, that's why I'm looking into the possibility myself. So that's why I'm here. I'm trying to get into the killer's mind. Trying to think like he thinks. He might even be here.”

“That's exciting,” said the man. Murphy observed him closely for shibboleths of mockery, but found none.

“Yeah. Well. So, he killed six people so far. Almost seven. He's the real thing, and nobody cares.”

“Hmm. Maybe the pattern is too subtle for the detectives?”

“You think I'm lying.”

“Nosir, I do not.”

The man had finished his coffee, and in the last thirty seconds seemed to have grown less interested in chatting, and looked like he was preparing to depart. Murphy realized he wanted the man's company. Needed.

“The fact is,” Murphy said quickly, “the serial killer hasn't actually succeeded in totally killing his victims.”

“I see. But the line, as I understand it, between killed and not totally killed is sharp and features no gray.”

Again Murphy could not detect any sauce, though from the mouth of anyone else the statement would've been high-key sarcasm. This guy was either the driest or the most precisely earnest man he'd ever met.

“Fine. Okay, he hasn't killed anybody, though every attempt just barely
fails. Just a one-in-a-billion streak of rotten luck. Tiny miscalculations resulting in the intended's survival.”

“If I were an intended, I would consider my survival good luck.”

That
was a little judgmental. But also a slip on Murphy's part.

“Yeah, well, like I said, I'm deep inside his malformed mind, thinking like him. It's how the best minds at Quantico catch their killers, don't you know.”

          
common to all lockups a slight physique or otherwise unable to defend oneself who is not already affiliated with a gang or harem is virtually guaranteed to be sexually assaulted badly enough to drive the person to request solitary confinement which among ordinary prisoners is the punition to be most avoided and if denied then the weakling will often commit suicide or more often try and fail at same rendering them even more victimizable

“What do his attempted murders have in common? Apart from their all being ‘attempted'?”

“Can't tell you.”

“All right, then.”

“You seem awfully curious. Maybe it's you.”

“No, not me,” said the man, sincerely matter-of-fact.

“Well, that's good enough for me. You're officially off the suspect list.”

“I only ask because I might be of some help here. Who's on your list?”

“You just want some credit when I catch him. Okay, tell me: how could you possibly help?”

“Well, I've known six serial killers in my day. Three were executed for their crimes, two others are on death row.”

“Bull.
Shit.
”

The man blushed again, purply darkening his earlier blush of embarrassment.

“Well, I…”

“What, you're a lawyer? You don't have a lawyerly look about you, no offense.”

          
fied simply as actionable or not actionable which is of course comparable to the process of indictment but in Syria and surprisingly in the BeNeLux and Finland finds a state between the two as though a light switch position observably between on and off

“I was in the penitentiary for fourteen years. I met them there. One was a cell mate for a few months. It was his blanket I took, and paid for.”

“Yeah? Who? I bet know who it is, I know my killers.”

“Charles Bourque.”

“No shit.”

“No, none.”

“Maybe you are my killer, then, in spite of your irrefutable alibi.”

“No, I just got out, a week back, parole.”

“You're kidding. Your first few days as a free man, you come
here
?”

“Well, I'm an element of one of the exhibits. A condition of parole.”