The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

Peter Straub The Process Is a Process All Its Own

From Conjunctions

A man named Tillman Hayward wrote these words in a Hardy & Badgett leather-bound notebook, five by four inches, with pale-blue lined paper. He had purchased the notebook, along with three others like it, on sale for $9.95 at Ballantine and Scarneccia, a high-end stationery store in Columbus, Ohio. He “lived” in Columbus. His real life took place elsewhere.

Tillman Hayward, “Tilly,” did not work in Columbus. He earned his reasonably substantial salary as a property manager in Columbus, but his real work — his “work” — was done elsewhere. This separation was self-protective.

He was writing with a German-made mechanical pencil purchased for $8.99 at the same store. Faber-Castell, its manufacturer, described it as a “propelling pencil.” He liked the word “propelling”: to propel sounded madly up-to-date. A propeller-pencil. (It, the word, not the pencil, smelled a great deal of Elmer’s Glue.)

Tilly Hayward had been married for nine years to a blond woman named Charlotte, née Sullivan. Tilly and Charlotte had produced three blond daughters, each of them the replica of both her mother and her sisters. They looked like triplicates born in different years. These perfect girls were named Edith, Hannah, and Faith. The Hayward family lived in one of the apartment buildings owned by Charlotte’s father, Daniel Sullivan, a flinty Irish immigrant in a flat cap, who had never known a moment’s warmth or sentimentality. Tilly’s job was to oversee the properties, keep them in satisfactory condition, check out whatever new might come on the market, and to make sure the rents came in. He deployed a full range of subcontractors to deal with the tenants’ demands. With his father-in-law’s approval, Tilly also had taken it upon himself to search for other properties to add to his holdings. He had convinced his father-in-law that the city of Milwaukee, his birthplace, was an excellent location for the long-planned expansion of the Sullivan company. Six or seven times a year, sometimes way more than that, Tilly either drove, took the train, or flew to Milwaukee (the handsome General Mitchell Field, where his tricky old dad used to take the kids to watch the planes take off and land). There, he sometimes stayed with his brother, Bobby, and Bobby’s wife, Mags, in the old brown-and-yellow duplex on West Forty-Fourth Street, where Bobby, Tilly, and their sister, Margaret (later Margot), had been born and raised. At other times he planted himself in hotels, not always under his real name. “Jesse Unruh” and “Joe Ball” spent a few days at the Pfister, “Leslie Ervin” at the funkier, less expensive Plaza. Although Tilly appeared to be, and sometimes actually was, dedicated in his search for commercial properties, he had as yet to purchase a single one of these buildings for the Sullivan real estate empire.

It was in Milwaukee and under conditions of rigorous secrecy that Tilly’s real “work” was carried out.

Tilly Hayward was one of those men in possession of two lives. Either he was a dark, disturbing criminal sociopath who wore a more conventional person around him like a perfectly fitted suit of clothing, or he was a conventional person who within himself concealed a being like a wild animal. Tillman’s response to his duality was not simple. He wondered sometimes if he were really a person at all. Perhaps he had originated on some faraway star — or in some other, far-distant time. Often, he felt other.

Many of the words whose odors Tillman caught as they emerged reeked of death and corruption. There were some words that almost always stank of the graveyard, of death and corpses. (These were words such as “happiness,” “fulfillment,” “satisfaction,” “pleasure,” also “joy.”) Tillman understood that these words smelled foul because the things they referred to were false.

In Tilly’s sensitive nostrils, the word “job” often smelled like fresh vomit. People who spoke of their jobs evoked entire butcher shops filled with rotting meat. Tilly knew that if he ever permitted himself to speak in mixed company, away from his family, of the job he did for Sullivan Real Estate Holdings, the same terrible stench would attach itself to his vocabulary. Therefore he never did speak of these matters except to his wife, who either did not notice the stinks that accompanied these words or, having grown accustomed to them during childhood, pretended that she did not. Words like “sorrow,” “unhappiness,” “grief,” these words that should have carried perhaps the worst stenches of all, did not actually smell so bad — more like rotting flowers than rotting meat, as though what had once been fresh about them was not so very distant. When Tilly went out in search of the people whom he dealt with as part of his real “work,” he deliberately sought women who uttered the foulest words of all. He had an unerring instinct for women whose vocabularies betrayed a deep intrinsic falsity. He often thought that other people could do the same. He thought that a kind of politeness kept other people from speaking of this power, so out of uncharacteristic politeness he himself remained silent about it. There were times when he wondered if he alone could detect the odors that clung to the spoken words, but if that were true, and the power only his, he could never figure out what to do with it. Apart from being perhaps another indication of his status as an alien from a sphere far different, the power seemed a mere frivolity: like so much else, it had no relevance beyond its own borders.

Funny thing: the word “remorse” actually smelled pretty good, on the whole. The word “remorse” tended to smell like wood shavings and sunburned lawns; at its worst it smelled of anthills, or something sort of like anthills, sand dunes, Indian burial mounds. He never objected to the smell of the word “remorse.” In fact, rather to his surprise, Tilly tended to like it a lot. It was a pity that the word was heard so seldom in the course of ordinary conversation.

Tilly, of course, tended not to have ordinary conversations.

In October of 1958 Tilly once again found himself in Milwaukee. He had come not in pursuit of one or more of his many private obsessions, but because he had a genuine interest in a real estate property. Two years before, Tilly had acquired a real estate license. It had required considerable effort, but he managed to pass the qualifying exams on his first attempt. He wanted to be able to justify his trips out of town, especially those to Milwaukee, on commercial grounds. Now he had come to inspect a building, a four-story, mixed-use building on Welles Street. Its only problem was its single tenant: a sixty-five-year-old woman who had once worked for the mayor and for the past six years of her life had claimed to be dying from cardiomyopathy. Tilly had come to see if it might be possible to resolve this tenancy problem by means of certain efficient measures never to be revealed. Yet when he looked at it again, the building had become far less attractive — he saw the old lady, intractable, seated on her unclean old sofa, skinny arms extended as if for hundreds of feet, and chose not to negotiate in any way.

Late in the afternoon of the same day, Tilly decided to take a walk through downtown Milwaukee. He wanted to uncoil, perhaps also to allow passage into the attentive atmosphere of some portion of his rabid, prancing inner self. Around the corner on Wisconsin Avenue stood the vast stone structure of the Central Milwaukee Library, and across the avenue from this big, dark building was a bookstore called Mannheim’s.

Tilly had no interest in these buildings and could imagine no circumstance that would persuade him to enter either one. No sooner had he become conscious of this fact than he took note of someone, a young woman, who had no problem being in both. Through the slightly sunken and recessed front door of Mannheim’s she floated, unencumbered by handbag, not to mention doubt, fear, depression, or any other conventional female disorder — perhaps thirty yards away, and already, instantly upon her entrance into his frame, rivetingly, infuriatingly attractive.

The girl was in her midtwenties, and perhaps five and a half feet tall, with dark brown hair and long blue eyes in a decisive little face with a flexible red mouth. She wore a green cardigan sweater and a khaki skirt. Her hair had been cut unusually short, to almost the length of a boy’s hair, though no one could mistake her for a boy. He liked her suntanned fox face and her twinned immediate air of independence and intelligence. The girl glanced at him, and before continuing on displayed perhaps a flicker of rote, species-reproductive interest. (Tilly had long felt that women capable of bearing children came to all-but-instantaneous decisions about their willingness to do so with the men they met.)

She went up the stairs to the sidewalk, moved across the cement, and with a side-to-side flick of her eyes jumped down into the traffic moving north and south on busy Wisconsin Avenue. Delightful little twirls of her hands directed the cars that coursed around her, also to dismiss the few drivers who tried to flirt with her. It was like watching someone conducting an orchestra that moved around the room. She looked so valiant as she dodged through the fluid traffic. Who was this girl: her whole life long, had she never been afraid of anything? At first not entirely aware of what he was doing, Tilly began to move more quickly up the block.

The young woman reached the near curb and flowed safely onto the sidewalk. Without the renewed glance he felt he rather deserved, she sped across the pavement and proceeded up the wide stone path to the Central Library’s massive front doors. Tilly began walking a little faster, then realized that she would be inside the building before he had even reached the pathway. He suffered a quick, hell-lit vision of the library’s interior as a mazy series of tobacco-colored corridors connected by random staircases and dim, flickering bulbs.

Once he got through the main door, he looked both left and right in search of the girl, then straight ahead down the empty central hallway. At the end of the hallway stood a wide glass door, closed. Black letters painted on the pebbled glass said FICTION. This was almost certainly where she had gone. She was imaginative, she was interested in literature: when the moment came, she’d have things to say, she would be able to speak up. Tilly enjoyed flashes of spirit in his playmates.

At the you know. During the. Maybe. If not then, what a pity, never.

Tilly strode through the glass door into the fiction room. The girl could have been bent over a book at one of the wide tables or hidden behind some of the open shelves at the edges of the room. He did a quick scan of the tables and saw only the usual library riffraff, then moved toward the shelves. His heart began to beat a little more quickly.

Tilly could taste blood; he could already catch the meat-sack stench of “please” and “mercy” as they slid through the girl’s sweetheart lips. Better than a meal to a hungry man, the you know... except the you know was a meal, finer than a T-bone fresh from the slaughterhouse and butchered on the spot...

Tilly stopped moving, closed his eyes, and touched his tongue to the center of his upper lip. He made himself breathe softly and evenly. There was no point in letting his emotions ride him like a pony.

Twice he wandered through the three stacks of books on the fiction floor, going in one end and out the other, along the way peering over the cityscape tops of the books to see if his target was drifting down the other side. Within a couple of minutes he had looked everywhere, yet had somehow failed to locate the girl. Girl walks into room, girl disappears. This was a red-line disappointment, a tremble, a shake-and-quiver. Already Tilly had begun to feel that this girl should have had some special place in his grand scheme — that if she were granted such a place, a perfection of the sort he had seldom known would have taken hold. The grand scheme itself borrowed its shape from those who contributed to it — the girls whose lives were demanded — and for that reason at the moment of his fruitless search the floating girl felt like an essential aspect of his life in Milwaukee. He needed her. The surprise of real fulfillment could be found only in what would happen after he managed to talk her into his “special place” out in the far western suburbs.

After something like fifteen minutes, Tilly finally admitted to himself that somehow she had managed to escape from the fiction room. Baffling; impossible. He had kept his eye on the door the whole time he’d been in the room. Two people, both now bent over their reading, had entered, and only three people had left — a pair of emaciated women in their fifties and a slender Negro girl with glossy little curls in her hair.

For a moment Tilly considered racing out and following the wide central hallway wherever it went. He saw, as if arrayed before him on a desktop, pictures of frantic Tillman Hayward charging into rooms where quiet people dozed over books or newspapers. No part of balance and restitution could be found in the images strewn across the desk. Something told him — everything told him! — that none of these people half asleep under the library lamps could be his girl.

He had lost her for good. This wonderful young woman would never be permitted to fulfill her role in the grand design of Tillman Hayward’s extraordinary life. For both of them, what a tragic diminution. Tilly spun around and dropped himself into an empty chair. None of the pig-ignorant people reading their trashy books even bothered to glance at him. He continued to try to force calm upon himself, to take control of his emotions. Tilly feared that he might have to go outside, prop his hands on his knees, and inhale deeply to find calm. Eventually his body began to relax.

The girl was gone. There was nothing to be done for it. It would always be as if he had never seen her. For the rest of his life he would have to act as though he had never sensed the possibilities with which this young woman, so alive with possibility, had presented him. Tilly knew himself to be a supreme compartmentalizer, and he did not doubt his power to squeeze the girl down into a little drawer in his mind, and there quite nearly to forget her.

Two nights later, he had planned to get some rest before going back to Columbus, but the idea of Mags and Bob sitting in their miserable living room thinking God knows what and remembering too much of what he might have said made him edgy. Probably he should never have given that True Detective to poor little Keith. It was like a secret handshake he could not as yet acknowledge. It was like saying, This is my work, and I want you to admire my achievement, but it is still too soon for you and me to really talk about it. But you’re beginning to understand, aren’t you? Because that was true: the kid was beginning to put things together.

Tilly tried stretching out on the bed and sort of reading his book, which was a novel based on the career of Caryl Chessman, the Red Light Bandit, who had been sentenced to execution in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Tilly loved the book. He thought it made Chessman seem at least a little sympathetic. Yet his attempt at reading did not go well. The image of Bob and Mags seated stiffly before their television, and that of Keith doing God knew what with True Detective in his bedroom, kept dragging his concentration away from the page. Finally he decided: one last night, maybe one last girl. Good old Caryl kept himself in the game, you had to give him that.

He checked his inner weather. A sullen little flame of pure desire had flared into being at the prospect of going out on the hunt one last time. He tucked the book beneath his pillow, took his second-favorite knife from its hiding place, then put it back. He would play it All or Nothing: if he could coax a girl out to his special place in the suburbs, he would use his favorite knife, which was stashed in a drawer out there; if he failed, there’d be one less corpse in the world. All or Nothing always made his mouth fizz. He lifted his overcoat off the hook on the back of the door and slipped his arms into the sleeves on the short distance to the living room.

That coat fit him like another skin. When he moved, it moved with him. (Such sensations were another benefit of All or Nothing.)

“Why do you do that, Tilly?” Mags asked.

“Do what?”

“That thing you just did. That... shimmy.”

“Shimmy,” a word he seldom used, stank of celery.

“I have no idea how to shimmy, sorry.”

“But you are obviously going out. Aren’t you?”

“Oh, Mags,” sighed Bob.

“Last-minute look at a property. I shouldn’t be superlate, but don’t wait up for me.”

“Where would this property be, Tilly, exactly?”

He grinned at her. “It’s on North Avenue, way east, past that French restaurant over there. The next block.”

“Is it nice?”

“Exactly my question. Be good now, you two.”

“What time is your train tomorrow?”

“Eleven in the morning. I won’t be home until midnight, probably.”

When he got outside and began walking down the street to his rented car through the cool air, he felt himself turning into his other, deeper self. It had been months since he had last been in Lou’s Rendezvous.

Formerly an unrepentant dive, Lou’s had recently become a college joint with an overlay of old-time neighborhood pond scum. Ever optimistic about the possibility of having sex with these good-looking youngsters, the old-timers kept jamming quarters into the jukebox and playing “Great Balls of Fire” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream of You.” That the neighborhood characters never got disgusting made for a loose, lively crowd. Supposedly a businessman from Chicago, a man who had been at Lou’s several times before, the Ladykiller dressed well, he was relaxed and good-looking. Knew how to make a person laugh. The man wandered in and out, had a few drinks, talked to this one and that one, whispered into a few ears. Some thought his name was Mac, maybe Mark. Like a single flower in a pretty vase, the girl from the library was parked at the corner of the bar. Her name was Lori Terry. She called him Mike and slipped out of the bar with him before anyone had time to notice.

So not Nothing. All. A final present from the city of Milwaukee.

After he had driven west some fifteen minutes she asked, “So where are we going anyhow, Mike?” (Young avocado, peppermint.)

Like very few people he had observed, Lori Terry had the gift of imbuing words and even whole sentences with fragrances all her own. His nephew had a touch of this ability too.

“This place a little way out of town,” he said.

“Sounds romantic. Is it romantic?” She’d had perhaps two or three drinks too many. (“Romantic” kind of hovered over a blocked drain.)

“I think it is, yes.” He smiled at her. “Tonight wasn’t the first time I’ve ever seen you, you know. I was in the library this morning. I saw you walk from Fiction right through into Biography.”

“Why didn’t you say hello?”

“You were too fast for me. Peeled right out of there.”

“Must have made quite the impression.” (Some lively pepperminty thing here, like gum, only not really.)

“I looked at you, and I thought, That girl could change my life.”

“Well, maybe I will. Maybe you’ll change mine. Look what we’re doing! Nobody ever takes me out of town.”

“I’ll try to make the trip extra-memorable.”

“Actually, isn’t it a little late for going out of town?”

“Lori, are you worried about sleep? Because I’ll make sure you get enough sleep.”

“Promise?” This word floated on a bed of fat green olives.

He promised her all the sleep she was going to need.

Trouble started twenty minutes later, when he pulled up into the weedy dirt driveway. As she stared first at the unpromising little tavern next to his actual building, then at him, disbelief widened her eyes. “This place isn’t even open!” (Rancid milk.)

“Not that one, no,” said the Ladykiller, now nearly on the verge of laughter. “The other one.”

She swiveled her head and took in the old storehouse with the ghostlike word clinging to a front window. “Goods?” she asked. “If you tell me that’s the name of the place, you’re fulla shit.” (Gunmetal, silver polish.)

“That’s not a name, it’s a disguise.”

“Are you really sure about this?”

“Do you think I brought you all the way out here by mistake?” He opened his door, leaned toward her, and smiled. “Come on, you’ll see.”

“What is this, an after-hours joint? Like a club?” With a gathering, slow-moving reluctance, she swung the door open on a dissipating cloud of rainwater and fried onions and moved one leg out of the car.

“Private club.” He moved gracefully around the hood and took her hand to ease her delivery from the car. The temperature of his resolve was doing that thing of turning hot as lava, then as cold as the flanks of a glacier, then back again, in about a second and a half. “Just for us, tonight.”

“Jesus, you can do that?”

“You wait,” he said, and searched his pocket for the magic key. It glided into the lock and struck home with the usual heavy-duty sound effects.

“Maybe we should both wait.” (Chalk-dusty blackboard.)

He gave her an over-the-shoulder glance of rueful, ironic mock regret. “Wait? I’ll get you back into town in plenty of time.”

“We just met. You want me to follow you into this old building, and it’s already past twelve...”

“You don’t trust me?” Now he was frankly pouting. “And after all we’ve meant to each other.”

“I was just thinking my father would be really suspicious right now.”

“Isn’t that part of the whole point about me, Lori? That your father wouldn’t like me?”

She laughed. “You may be right.”

“All right then.” He opened the door onto an absolute darkness. “Just give me a sec. It’s one flight down.”

“A basement? I’m not so...”

“That’s how they keep the place private. Wait, I’ll get the light.”

He disappeared inside and a moment later flipped a switch. Watery illumination revealed floorboards with a sweeping, half-visible grain. She heard the turning of another vault-like lock. He again appeared in the doorway, took her hand, and with only a minimum of pressure urged her into the building. Shivering in the sudden cold, she glanced around at the barren cell-like room she had entered. It seemed to be perfectly empty and perfectly clean. He was drawing her toward a door that opened onto a rectangle of greater brightness. It gradually revealed the flat, dimpled platform and gray descending handrail of a metal staircase. No noise came from the dark realm beyond the circle of light at the bottom of the steps.

“Ladies first,” he said, and she had reached the fifth step down before she realized that he had blocked any possibility of escape. She turned to look at him over her shoulder, and received, as if in payment, a smile of utmost white seductiveness. “I know, it looks like no one’s here. Works in our favor, actually. We’ll have the whole place to ourselves. Do anything we like, absolutely everything.”

“Wait a second,” she said. “I want to have a good time, Mike, but absolutely everything is not in the picture, do you hear me?” What he had here, Till realized, was a clear, straightforward case of a specific fragrance emerging from a sentence as a whole, instead of blooming into the foreground of a lot of other, lesser smells. And in this case, the fragrance was that of a fresh fruit salad, heavy on the melons but with clean, ringing top notes of lime, just now liberated from the grocer’s wrapping. Dazzled, he felt momentarily off-balance, as if his weight were on the wrong foot.

“Loud and clear. I don’t have those kinds of designs on you.”

“You don’t?” In spite of everything, it was a kind of shock. He could smell it too: the fruit salad had been topped with a layer of thin, dark German pumpernickel. From two words. He was going to kill this wonderful girl, but part of him wished he could eat her too.

“Just wait at the bottom of the stairs. There’s another door, and I have to get the light.”

The habit of obedience rooted her to the floor as he squeezed past and pushed a third key into a third lock. Again Lori took in the heaviness of the mechanism, the thunk of precision-made machinery falling into place. Whatever made Mike happy, he had taken pains to keep it safe. Mike grasped her elbow and drew her after him into the dark room. The door closed heavily behind her, and Mike said, “Okay, Lori, take a gander at my sandbox, my pride and joy.”

He flipped up a switch and in the sudden glare of illumination she heard him relocking the door. In all the sparkle and shine she thought for a moment that she was actually looking at a metal sandbox. When her vision cleared, she glanced over her shoulder to see him tucking a key into his pocket.

“Oh my God,” she said, and stepped away from him through a briefly hovering cloud of old saddles and baseball mitts.

“Lori Terry. Here you are.”

“You’re him.”

“I am?”

“You’re the Ladykiller guy. Goddamn.” (Concrete sidewalks. Steel girders, plus maple syrup. She imprinted her own odors upon the words that issued from her, and she had the strength of character to shape entire utterances within that framework. He was still reeling.)

He spread his arms and summoned a handsome smile. “Like what I’ve done with the place?”

“I’d like you to take me home, please.”

He stepped toward her. “In all honesty, Lori, this could go either way. Whichever path you choose, you’re gonna end up in the same place. That’s the deal here.”

She moved about three inches backward, slowly. “You like blowjobs, Mike? I’ll make you come like a fire hose.” (Oh, exquisite, in fact almost painfully exquisite: when she must have been dropping into terror like a dead bird, her sentences came swaddled in clove, and ginger, and yet again the kind of maple syrup that came from trees bleeding into pails way up in Vermont and Maine, that area.)

“I always come like a fire hose. Of course, most of my partners aren’t alive anymore. I like it that way. Come to think of it, they probably do too.”

“You think a woman would have to be dead to enjoy making love to you? Let me prove how wrong you are.”

He was inching toward her, but the distance between them remained constant.

“You’re an unusual girl, Lori.”

“What makes me ‘unusual’?” (Marshmallow and chocolate: s’mores!)

“You’re not cowering on the floor. Or sniveling. All the other girls—”

She took one fast step backward, spun around, and sprinted toward the center of the room. Amused by this display of nerve, he lunged for her playfully and almost deliberately missed. Lori ran around to the other side of the second steel table and leaned on it with stiff arms, her eyes and mouth open, watching him closely, ready to flee in any direction. For a couple of seconds only, she glanced into the corners of the shiny basement.

“To get out, you need my keys,” he said. “Which means you ain’t gonna get out. So are you going to make a break for it or wait for me to come get you? I recommend the second one. It’s not in your best interest to piss me off, I promise you.” From across the room, he gave her the openhearted gift of a wide, very nearly genuine smile.

She kept watching him with the close, steady attention of a sailor regarding an unpredictable sea. On every second inhalation, she bent her elbows and leaned forward.

“Because right at this moment? Right at this moment, I admire the hell out of you. All kinds of reasons, honest to God.”

He waited for her to break for either the right or the left side of the metal table so that he could at last close the distance between them and finish the gesture he had begun at Lou’s Rendezvous, but she did not move. She kept on leaning forward and pushing back.

“You remind me of something I can’t really remember. That fubar enough for you? Doozy of a story. About someone who won’t stay dead but doesn’t live.” He lifted his arms, palms up, and all but uttered an involuntary sigh. “People keep telling me this shit, like they want me to remember! My brother, that stupid Henry James story... It’s no good. It doesn’t actually mean anything... but shouldn’t it mean everything? A person who won’t stay dead? Plus... someone else, a boy? An old boy?”

He shook his head as though to clear it. “Say something. Say anything. I love what happens when you talk.”

“Oh?” Not enough to be measured: something about peanuts in a roaster... peanuts rolling in an oiled pan...

“You know how words have these smells? Like ‘paycheck’ always smells like a dirty men’s room? You know what I’m talking about, yeah?”

“You smell what I’m saying?” Without relaxing her attention, Lori leaned forward and narrowed her eyes. “How would you describe the smell of what I’m saying now?”

“Like butter, salt, and caramel sauce. Honest to God. You’re amazing.”

Lori exhaled and straightened her arms, pushing herself back. “You’re a crazy piece of shit.”

The Ladykiller kept looking at her steadily, almost not blinking, waiting for her to move to the right or the left. He told himself, This resurrection stuff is all bullshit to lull her into breaking away from the autopsy table.

Unless...

Something dark, something unstable flickered in his mind and memory and vanished back into the purely dark and fathomless realm where so much of the Ladykiller was rooted. Once again he shook his head, this time to rid himself of the terror and misery that had so briefly shone forth, and after that briefest possible moment of disconnection saw that Lori had not after all been waiting to bolt from the table. Instead she had jerked open the drawer and snatched out a knife with a curved blade and a fat leather handle wrapped in layers of sweat- and dirt-stained tape. He loved that knife. Looking at it, you would be so distracted by its ugliness that you’d never notice how sharp it was. You wouldn’t fear what it could do until it was already too late.

“Oh, that old thing,” he said. “What are you going to do, open a beer can?”

“I’ll open you right up unless you toss me those keys.” (The worse it got, the better it smelled: a bank of tiger lilies, the open window of a country kitchen.)

He pulled himself back into focus. “Jeez, you could have picked up one of the scalpels. Then I might be scared.”

“You want me to swap it for a scalpel? It must be really lethal.”

“You’ll never find out,” he said, and began slowly to move toward her again, holding out his hands as if in supplication.

“No matter what happens, I’m glad I’m not you.” (Dishwashing liquid in a soapy sink, a wealth of lemon-scented bubbles: in his humble opinion, one of the world’s greatest odors.)

Lori Terry moved back a single step and assumed a firmer grip on the ugly handle. She was holding it the right way, he noticed, sharp side up.

“You’re a funny little thing.” He straightened up, laughed, and wagged an index finger at her. “You have to admit, that is pretty droll.”

“You have the emptiest, ugliest life I can imagine. You look like you’d be so much fun, but really you’re as boring as a cockroach — the rest of your life is a disguise for what you do in this miserable room. Everything else is just a performance. Can’t you see how disgusting that is?” This whole statement emerged clothed in a slowly turning haze of perfumed girl neck gradually melting to a smellscape of haystacks drying in a sunstruck field. This was terrible, somehow shaming.

“I thought I heard you trying to talk me into a blowjob.”

“That’s when I was scared. I’m not afraid of you anymore.” (Spinach, creamed, in a steakhouse.)

“Oh, come on.” He moved across the room on a slanting line, trying to back her into a corner. “I know you’re scared.”

“I was afraid when I thought I had a chance to get out of this cockroach parlor. But I really don’t, do I? I’m going to die here. At best, I’ll cut you up a little bit. Then you’ll kill me, and it’ll all be over. You, however, will have to go on being a miserable, fucked-up creep with a horrible, depressing life.” (Who knew what that was — horses? A rich man’s stables?)

“At least I’ll have a life,” he said, and felt that he had yielded some obscure concession, or told her absolutely the wrong thing.

“Sure. A terrible one, and you’ll still be incredibly creepy.” (Astonishingly, this came out in a sunny ripple of clean laundry drying on a line.)

“I believe you might be starting to piss me off.”

“Wouldn’t that be a fucking shame.” An idea of some kind moved into her eyes. “You thought I might change your life? I think you were right, I think I will change your life. Only right now you have no idea how that’ll happen. But it’ll be a surprise, that I can tell you.”

Amazed, he said, “You think you’re better than me?” (And you just said four or five sentences that smelled like cloves and vetiver.)

“You’re a disgusting person, and I’m a good one.”

She feinted and jabbed with the curved blade. It was enough to push him backward.

“I see you’re afraid of this knife.”

He licked his lips, wishing he were holding a baseball bat, or maybe a truncheon, a thing you could swing, hard, to knock in the side of someone’s head. Then, before he could think about what he was going to do, he ducked left and immediately swerved to his right. Having succeeded in faking her off-balance, the Ladykiller rushed forward, furious and exulting, eager to finish off this mouthy bitch.

Before he could get a proper grip on her, Lori surprised him by jumping left and slashing at him. The blade, which had been fabricated by a long-dead craftsman in Arkansas and honed and honed again a thousand times on wet Arkansas stone, opened the sleeve of his nice tweed jacket and continued on to slice through the midriff of his blue broadcloth shirt. In the second and a half it took him to let go of her shoulder and anchor his hand on her wrist, blood soaked through the fine fabric of the shirt and began to ooze downward along a straight horizontal axis. As soon as he noticed that the growing bloodstain had immediately begun to spread and widen, he heard blood splashing steadily onto the floor, looked for the source, and witnessed a fat red stream gliding through the slashed fabric on his sleeve.

“Damn you.” He jerked her forward and threw her to the ground. “What am I supposed to do now? Hell!”

She looked up at him from the floor. Crimson stains and spatters blossomed on her opened skirt and splayed legs. “The sight of your own blood throws you into a panic,” she said. “Figures, I guess.” (Tomato soup, no surprise, with garlic. Was she actually controlling the smells she sent out?)

“You hurt me!” He kicked her in the hip.

“Okay, you hurt me back. Now we’re even,” she said. “If you give me the keys, I’ll bandage you up. You could bleed to death, you know. I think you ought to be aware of—”

Both her words and the renewed smell of laundry drying in sunshine on a backyard clothesline caused rage to flare through all the empty spaces in his head and body. He bent over, ripped the knife from her loose hand, and with a single sweep of his arm cut so deeply through her throat that he all but decapitated her. A jet of blood shot from the long wound, soaking his chest before he could dodge out of the way. Lori Terry jittered a moment and was dead.

“Bitch, bitch, damn bitch,” he said. “Fuck this shit — I’m bleeding to death here!”

He trotted across the room to a pair of sinks, stripping off his jacket as he went and leaving bloody footprints in his wake. Though his wounds bled freely, and when first exposed seemed life-threatening, a matter that made him feel queasy and lightheaded, soon he was winding bands of tape around a fat pad of gauze on his arm. The long cut on his stomach proved less dangerous but harder to stanch. While simultaneously stretching toward his spine with one hand and groping with the other, he found himself wishing that Lori had not been such a colossal bitch as to make him kill her before she could help him wrap the long bandage around the middle of his body. Of course, had she not been such an unfeeling bitch, she would have obliged him by curling up in whimpering terror even before he explained in free-spending detail precisely what he was going to do to her. The tramp had escaped the punishment she had craved, down there at the dark center of her heart. She got to fulfill her goal, but she had cheated herself of most of the journey toward it! And cheated him of being her guide!

While he was mopping the floor with a mixture of bleach and soapy water, the Ladykiller remembered his admiration of Lori Terry — the respect she had evoked in him by being uncowed. Instead of bursting into tears and falling down she had offered him a blowjob! He had approved the tilt of her chin, the steadiness of her voice. Also the resolute, undaunted look in her eyes. And the odors, the odors, the odors, in their unfathomable unhurried march. In farewell to her spirit, he dropped to his knees at the edge of her pooled blood, pursed his lips, and forcefully expelled air, but although he managed to create a row of sturdy little ripples, for only the second or at a stretch maybe third time in his life as the Ladykiller he failed to raise up even a single bubble. He nearly moaned in frustration, but held back: she had refused to speak in Cockney, she had held to her dignity.

For the first time in his long career, the Ladykiller came close to regretting an obligatory murder, but this approach to remorse withered and died before the memory of her ugly dismissal of his life. Why, he wondered, should a sustained, lifelong performance be disgusting? Couldn’t the cow see how interesting, how clever, his whole splendid balancing act had been? After this consoling reflection, his pain, which had been quietly pulsing away, throbbed within his lower abdomen and left forearm. This was a sharp reminder of her treachery. When the floor shone like the surface of a pond, he rinsed and stowed the mop, reverently washed the curved knife in a sink, and approached the long, cold table where Lori Terry’s naked body, already cleansed and readied, awaited the final rites.

Two hours later, with everything — tables, walls, floor, switches, the dismembered body — rescrubbed and doused yet again in bleach, he stacked Lori’s remains in a cardboard steamer trunk: feet and calves; thighs; pelvis; female organs from which his traces had been washed; liver, heart, lungs, stomach, and spleen in one bag, the long silver ropes of her intestines in another; hands and forearms; upper arms; rib cage; spine; shoulders; and as in life the open-eyed head atop all in a swirl of bleached hair. At the end she had smelled of nothing but washed corpse. He locked the trunk, lugged it up the stairs, dragged it to his car, and with considerable effort wedged it into the car’s trunk.

On his journey back into the city, he found that the care he had given her body, the thorough cleansing, the equally thorough separation of part from part, its arrangement within its conveyance, brought back to him now the respect he had learned to feel for her once the final key had turned in his serial locks. For respect it had been, greater and more valuable than admiration. Lori Terry had displayed none of the terror she, no less than his other victims, felt when she saw the pickle she was in: instead she had fought him from the beginning, with, he saw now, offers of sex that had actually promised something else altogether. She had wanted him exposed and vulnerable, she had wanted him open to pain, in grave pain — she had intended to put him in agony. It was true, he had to admire the bitch.

A momentary vision of the dismembered body arrayed like an unfolding blossom in the cardboard trunk popped like a flashbulb in his mind. He heard words begin to flow through his throat before he realized that he was talking out loud — talking to Lori Terry.

As he spoke, he had been removing the girl’s remains from the cardboard trunk and placing them this way and that on the cobblestones of backstreet downtown Milwaukee. It took a while to get them right. By the time he was satisfied, gray, early light had begun to wash across the cobbles and the garbage cans behind the clubs. Lori Terry’s porcelain face gazed up at him like a bust in a museum. Then he was gone, yessir, the Ladykiller was right straight outta there, clean as a you-know-what and on to pastures new.