Tunnel of Night (20 page)

Dr. Bernard asked Wolf to illustrate his point. The young man scribbled on a sheet of paper, then turned the paper facedown and slid it across to the psychiatrist.

“My move has created a number of possible moves for you,” Wolf said. “If I entertain, say, the two or three most likely moves, then I can anticipate their impact,
my subsequent move, your options, mine, and so forth. Try it.”

It was a rhetorical and argumentative question. Bernard knew enough to not answer.

After a long pause, Wolf said, “Make your move.”

I WOKE UP SOMETIME IN THE AFTERNOON
.

The sun pissed its way in through the only window in the apartment. I was drained, running on empty

I didn’t move, just stared at the ceiling. A lightbulb hung from a single strand of wire that disappeared through a crack in the plaster. The crack, shaped like the contour of a woman’s breast, was filled with cobwebs. Stains from the last century’s rains formed other patterns on the ceiling and walls.

The ratcheting of rodent teeth emanated from somewhere behind the lath.

Shit.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and lurched to a sitting position. I swallowed the last of the pills I had taken from my sister.

Last night I drank wine at the Willard. A cheap taxi ride transported me here, light-years away from the splendor of the hotel and into a zone of marginal people. Sometimes it’s necessary to live like this, beyond the edge of what passes for civilized society. It is a matter of survival.

Somewhere in the apartment building a TV blasted, advertising everything from Jesus to Jeeps.

I groped along the top of the bureau until my hand wrapped around the .44 Magnum. I watched the clock as the second hand drifted past the three. If it reached the three again—and the TV was still screaming about breakfast cereals, cars, athletic shoes, tampons, detergents, deodorants—I was going to walk out into the hall, find the offending apartment, kick in the door, and shoot everyone in sight.

You are such well-trained consumers, such obedient buyers. You listen, read, see images, digest the spin, allow reality to be created for you, then go out and buy—even when it is a product that will kill you. I have had only one victim who was as compliant as you, and even she did not pay me to end her life.

The second hand swept by the six.

Yeast infections. Beer. Basketball shoes. More cars.

The blasts of TV noise were probably some kids’ mother plopped like Jabba the Hutt in front of Ricki Lake while they were out in the alley shooting dope.

Nine.

America’s number-one-selling minivan. Twelve.

I pushed myself off the bed and walked through the combination living-dining-kitchen area, a rectangular space demarcated by a sofa, a red Formica-topped, aluminum table, and the roach-ridden sink.

Barefoot, wearing a rumpled T-shirt and stained boxers, I stepped into the hall and listened.

There was laughter from the TV. “So you didn’t know he was in the next room sleeping with your sister.”

“No. And I didn’t know he was seeing my mother, either.”

More laughter.

I walked down the stairs and turned to my right. A black man carrying a lunch pail came out of a silent apartment and froze when he looked at me. His eyes drifted down to the Magnum. “Go to work,” I said.

He slipped past me and ran down the stairs. I walked farther down the hall and stopped at apartment four. Listening.

“What was the final toll?”

“He slept with my mother first, then with me, both of my sisters.”

I pulled back the hammer on the gun.

“Two weeks ago he called me in my dorm at college and had the nerve to say he wanted to see me again.”

“But you did see him, didn’t you?”

There were groans from the audience as I raised the .44, preparing to kick in the door.

The TV in the apartment went silent just as my sister’s final gift, the pills, kicked in. My head cleared.

I lowered the hammer and dropped my arm to my side. Whoever lived behind the door had just won the lottery and didn’t know it.

I walked back to my apartment.

Everything is part of the design.

What is meant to be, will be.

I TURNED THE TAP IN THE SHOWER AND WAITED
for the hot water. Wildlife scattered for shelter in their cracks in the grout. The place was disgusting—even worse than Echo’s trailer, which was at least clean. But the apartment was serving its purpose. There was one more act to be played out here. The rest of the show was set for other stages.

As water splashed into my face, I thought about my plan, my design—its exquisite detail, the way it repeated itself in multiple forms, like a kaleidoscope. The first time I saw an Escher print, I was fascinated by the figures—monks taking their measured steps for eternity, but achieving only a finite depth and height. No more, no less. Forever.

I toweled off, slipped into my Valley Carpet coveralls, and doffed my ball cap. I grabbed the keys to the van, took the freight elevator to the basement, and slipped into the alley.

I had emerged from beneath the earth, but I still had far greater heights to achieve.

AS I DROVE SOUTH ON 1-95, I REMEMBERED reading a case report that Lucas Frank had written for a professional journal fifteen years ago. His subject was Norman Elgar, a man I knew well. Despite the enormous risk, I had visited Elgar at the Massachusetts State Prison in Walpole, the same facility that had housed Albert DeSalvo, but failed to protect him. DeSalvo had been stabbed to death.

My conversation with Elgar had been far more revealing and informative than the bullshit that Lucas Frank, M.D., had sold to his peers.

The short, wiry, blond killer and I sat at a table in the prison cafeteria, the rattle and chatter of other voices a constant annoyance. The diminutive but proud man grasped my hand and looked into my eyes. He saw a kindred soul.

“Dreams are better than the real world,” he said. “When I understand a dream, its meaning, I never forget it. It’s like a taste that stays in my mouth, something
that can be savored for a long time. Sometimes the real world blinks out on me, fades, even disappears. Dreams never do that.”

I remember that I nodded, and continued to allow him to grasp my hand. “Just like a murder done well,” I said.

Elgar smiled.

In Lucas Frank’s article, Elgar had greeted the doctor in much the same manner. Lucas Frank had broken the hand grasp, and the words he had attributed to this man were quite different.

I had not visited Norman Elgar because his artwork was good. It was not. He raped, sliced, and tossed. I went to see him because all the gurus of the criminal mind had been there. The FBI, with their cameras and questionnaires, had completed their work when Lucas Frank arrived.

“When I die,” Elgar said, “they’re going to cut into my brain. They want to examine the limbic area. They seem to think I might have a lesion or some other abnormality. They have to explain me. They can’t diagnose those things until after you’re dead. They did the same thing to the aliens who landed in New Mexico in the 1950s. Maybe they think I’m from Mars. It’s strange. They harnessed the energy in an atom and blew up thousands of people, but they say they don’t understand the drive to destroy.”

He stared into my eyes, and then told me about the most triumphant experience in his long career. “Her name was filled with hard sounds. Cutting sounds. Biting sounds. It was like her face in profile—the sharp features. She had a piercing nose. She had a snotty attitude to go with it.”

Elgar giggled.

“She walked stiff-legged in tight skirts so that her buttocks hiked up and down like the pistons in a big Dodge. I liked that. The way she clipped off her words, snapped them out into the air—I didn’t like that. I never spoke to her. I was always there, and I listened. I watched her. I followed her. If she rode a bicycle, I stole one so that I could keep up with her. I looked at her through her windows. She never knew how close I was. She had blue eyes and poise. Confidence. When she smiled, she hesitated—just a fraction of a second before the smile—like she was teasing her audience with the mystery of whether there would be a smile. She was so clever. She made everyone wait and guess and want her. God, she was perfect.”

He leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his neck. “She was always on display. It was her own fault.”

“She invited you.”

“What else would you call it?”

This man was disgusting, transparent, reactive. But he had information that I wanted. “Lucas Frank described you as arrogant,” I said, remembering the psychiatrist’s comments to his favorite reporter.

Frank remarked about how devious and elaborate a psychopath’s self-analysis was, how polished, sincere, and reasonable his “excuses” for his violence seemed. “Human predators succeed,” Frank said, “because they are so believable. Norman Elgar is persuasive, especially when he talks about his own pain.”

Frank cited the case of Jack Henry Abbott, the convict-author whose “maundering volume of self-pity” over a life lived in prisons convinced the New York literary world’s heavy hitters to publish Abbott’s
In the Belly
of the Beast,
and to support his release from prison. “Jack Abbott made his audience feel compassion and guilt,” Frank said. “They wanted to believe that they could succeed where others had failed. They were going to rescue him, change him. Abbott didn’t last two months on the street before he killed again.”

I had enjoyed the book. Lucas Frank spoiled it for me. His attack on Abbott was an attack on me.

“I’ve never seen the article that he wrote about me,” Elgar said, “or any of the interviews that he gave to Anthony Michaels. I’m not arrogant. I trust myself. I know that I’ll make the right choices at the right times. I’m content with who I am, and I don’t regret anything. I cherish all eighteen of my special women.”

I knew that the concept of trusting one’s own mind was something that the famous psychiatrist would understand, but never report in any article for other shrinks, or discuss in any interview with a newspaper reporter. How could he expect anyone to seriously think he was just like us? They would laugh him out of his profession.

I do not operate on impulse. It is a matter of design, patience, intelligence, and self-trust. I would never react to provocation, which is a method that Frank has used with success.

Frank had wanted to tip Norman Elgar over, to see his rage, to see him in “the mind that allowed him to rip into human flesh,” as he described it to the press. The interview was a move in the psychiatrist’s game. He wanted Elgar’s final stats, the details, so family members could be informed that their missing loved ones weren’t missing anymore. I wanted to know about the doctor and his technique.

“Lucas Frank saw me as a smug sonofabitch,” Elgar said. “He was pissed because I wouldn’t give him details. He wanted me to crumble. I can still hear his words. He said, ‘You achieved notoriety for a compulsion. It’s like someone who can’t stop washing his hands.’ Is that a provocation, or what? Washing my hands, my ass. I reacted.”