A Killer Like Me

CHAPTER EIGHT

Friday, July 27, 4:50 PM

Murphy stood at the door holding a last-minute arrangement of flowers he had picked up at a supermarket. He knocked but there was no answer. He opened the door and stepped inside. The stench of stale cigarettes almost knocked him down.

“Mother?” he called out.

The apartment was small, even by single-bedroom, retirement-community standards. A sitting room, a kitchenette, and a bedroom, with a bathroom the size of a telephone booth wedged in the middle. Even so, the place was eating a hole through Murphy’s paycheck.

Overflowing ashtrays occupied nearly every flat surface. A film of nicotine covered everything else. Through the open bathroom door, he saw the vanity in its normal state of disorder, a jumble of medicine bottles, beauty products, and potions, along with another ashtray piled high with cigarette butts.

He found her on the balcony, a space just big enough for a lawn chair and a garden table. Her third-floor view looked down on a pair of tennis courts that Murphy had never seen anyone use. He squeezed onto the balcony, hoping to catch enough fresh air to breathe.

“Where have you been?” his mother said, her voice coming out in that same screech that had grated on his nerves his entire life. Memories from childhood. Every evening his mother standing on the front porch, shrieking for him in her vodka-soaked slur: “Sean Patrick Murphy, get yourself home this instant. It’s supper time.”

A couple of older neighborhood boys teased him about it daily at the bus stop until he worked up the nerve to smash one of them in the head with his seventh-grade science book. He took a beating, but they stopped teasing him.

His mother twisted her head around to look at him. “Did you hear me? I said, where have you been?”

Murphy dropped the flowers on the glass-topped table, next to a half-filled ashtray and a half-empty highball glass. His mother didn’t even acknowledge the flowers. “I’ve been busy, Mother. I’m a homicide detective in the murder capital of the United States.”

“You don’t think your sister’s busy, a single mother with a special-needs child? Still, she manages to call me every day to ask how I’m feeling.”

Murphy stared at the tennis courts. “Theresa is a saint, mother. You should have had twins when you had her. Then you could have skipped me altogether.”

“Don’t talk about your sister like that. I didn’t say she was a saint. Lord knows she has bad taste in men-or maybe it’s just all men are bad-but she’s a good daughter and a good mother to that boy.”

Not quite good enough to help pay for this place, Murphy thought.

He regretted the thought as soon as he had it. His big sister, older by two years, had a full plate. Her husband had left her four years ago, not long after he and Theresa found out their son was autistic.

“That boy, by the way, your six-year-old grandson, has a name. It’s Michael.”

Murphy glanced back through the glass door and saw a bottle of Grey Goose on the kitchen counter. Living on Social Security, with her policeman son having to take up the financial slack, she still bought the good stuff.

“You know Mr. Meyer, the old man down the hall in three ten?” his mother said.

She glanced up at him and dropped her voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “He’s Jewish, you know.” Then she went back to her normal, nerve-fraying bray. “Well, I just found out he went to Notre Dame. I told him you were on the football team there. Turns out he played football too. I didn’t even know Jews played football, did you?”

“I hear they let them do all kinds of things now that the war is over.” His mother’s latent racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism had always irritated him, mainly because she would deny to her dying day-and truly believe it-that she was any of those things.

“Are you being a smart aleck?” she said. “You sound just like your father.”

“I was on the football team for one season, and I only played in two games, both of which we lost.”

“Notre Dame, though, that’s something,” she said, more to herself than to him.

The coach might have kept him on the team the next year, but Murphy never found out. He came home that summer and never went back. His mother needed somebody to look after her. By that time, Murphy’s dad had been dead almost five years, dropped by a heart attack in the kitchen at age forty-nine. Theresa was off on some adventure or another with her boyfriend, hiking across India, or Pakistan, or some other godforsaken place. “That Protestant boy” was how his mother always described her future son-in-law.

Theresa transferred to UC Berkeley that spring to get a master’s in neonatal nursing. And most likely to get away from their mother. Murphy stayed home. It was what his father would have expected of him. Someone had to take care of Mother.

“Your sister’s thinking about taking a teaching position at the hospital,” his mother said. “She’s thinking about getting out of that

… that ward she’s been in for so long.”

“Neonatal intensive-care unit,” Murphy said as he stared down at his mother’s head, at her thinning white hair, her flaky red scalp, and thought, not for the first time, about bashing in her skull, maybe with her favorite ashtray, the five-pound granite one she bought on a trip with Dad to the Grand Canyon. Just to get her to shut up about Theresa.

Murphy loved his sister, but she lived in San Francisco. She came home two, maybe three times a year. Sure, she called every day-with nationwide cell-phone plans, it was practically free-but she never sent a check.

Again, Murphy regretted his own thoughts. Maybe he should take some time off and fly out to visit Theresa and Michael. The kid was probably ready for a Giants game. His autism didn’t stop him from much. He was smart. He was funny. And somehow, probably because of his innocence, he made Murphy feel good.

“I might go see her,” Murphy said.

“Who?”

“Theresa.”

His mother craned her neck to look up at him. “Not without me you’re not.”

Murphy thought again about the granite ashtray, but he swallowed the thought. “Maybe we can both go,” he said.

“You know how I hate airports. All that walking. I can’t do it anymore.”

“You’re sixty-eight, Mother. We’ve had presidents older than you. People in their seventies run global corporations, and run marathons. Maybe if you laid off smoking and gave up booze you might feel better.”

She turned away. “There you go with the criticism again. You’re exactly like your father, you know that? He was no saint, let me tell you. He gambled. He drank. He smoked. Most of the time when he came home he smelled like a brewery.” She reached for her highball glass and drained it.

“He worked twelve hours a day at a chemical plant, Mother, until he dropped dead. Cut him some slack.”