Butcher

22

Bayou City

Perhaps a quarter of a century back in time, the woman called Alma—Anna Kaplan—had shut down. To lose a child in such an unspeakable manner, to endure inconceivable depravities, to survive the nightmare of evil that was the Holocaust, what were these experiences but stepping stones to a kind of quiet madness?

Her way of coping, of surviving, was to close her doors to the world, both literally and metaphorically. Part of her that shut down was the part that once felt love for children. It was a mild enough lunacy, given the circumstances of her youth. This woman, chronologically in her sixties, but mentally and emotionally ancient, lived a barren life long since reduced to the bare essentials of existence.

Once a week she would trudge the three and a half short blocks to Bob's Discount Store, a weekly stop in her agenda that included City Grocery, Bayou City Bank and Trust, and, occasionally, the post office.

At Bob's Discount, however, there was an added hazard: children. When they were out of school, or if she timed her visit wrong and arrived during the noon hour or in late afternoon, she was face to face with noisy children. Only Bob's low-priced merchandise, such as bargain-basement toilet paper, gave her the courage to brave the perils of the store each week.

There were no kids in the store when she entered, and that was a relief. She cringed at the abrasiveness of their loud, piercing voices, the blundering oafishness of their actions. They seemed to know she felt great distaste for them and it made them hate her, she suspected.

Summer vacation, teacher's meeting days, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and of course dreaded Halloween, as they called it here, these were the times she feared and loathed the most. Noisy, awful children would be running through the streets, and if you ventured out of doors they would come very close to you, threatening to touch you, sometimes shouting things. She favored inclement weather for the reason it kept most of them out of sight and out of mind, even if it pained her old and crippled bones.

Halloween, the night of October 31, was the most feared of her personal abominations. All Hallows’ Eve was a time of devil worship, when the cruel calendar would conspire to pull the children forth in unsupervised clots, the spirit of the darkness encouraging their more sadistic impulses.

Alma Purdy would spend these nights quietly in the living room of her small frame house, all the lights off, the curtains and blinds pulled tightly shut, an ancient but trusty revolver loaded and clutched in her lap. She would sit this way for hours, fearing to make a sound, praying to her harsh gods they would not come to her door again—the loud banshee children, cloaked in their disguises—mean snickers stabbing through her as they threatened “trick or treat."

So when she found no noisy kids clamoring in the aisles of Bob's Discount, her first sight of the man brought only gratitude. She went on about her business, an old cripple homing in on the cheap toilet tissue.

He had a purchase in his hands and was on his way toward the cash register to pay when they met, almost colliding, two ships in the same lane, between School Notebooks! Special! and Big Chief Tablets—Save!

There was a second or two of recognition, shock to her nervous system, a startled shudder through his, no doubt or question in either of their minds. She'd seen the Boy Butcher. He had been recognized. He knew it. She knew it. He was smoother, and managed a flicker of a smile. She could feel her body jerk in frightened reaction as she forced herself to keep going.

He waited until the old woman had paid and left the store, as he fought to get himself back under control. Adrenals in overdrive, heart thumping like a long-distance runner's, he stood in back of the far aisle, his back to the round security mirror. All he could see was that shocked flash of recognition in the woman's eyes. He forced himself to calm down and put a smile on his face, moving up to the counter to pay.

“That be all today, Doc?"

“Mmhm,” he said, paying. “How's the missus doing?” The man at the register began yammering about his hypochondriac wife, and Royal nodded as if he were interested in her welfare.

“Say, that older lady who just left ... was that Helene Caulfield?” He used the name of a former patient now living over sixty miles away.

“You mean Mizz Purdy? That's old Alma Purdy. She's the one shot at them trick-or-treaters that time. Everybody knows her. She's got about half her oars in the water,” he said with a wicked chuckle, pointing at his skull for emphasis. Solomon Royal anticipated the five-minute dialogue of moronic banter that would follow any anecdote about her activities.

“Oh, goodness, that reminds me,” he said quickly, pointing a preemptive finger in the clerk's direction, “I need to get Miss Caulfield on the phone.” Royal mumbled something about tests as he paid and made his way out the door. His face felt red in the air.

There was a Bayou City directory, an absurdly small booklet, chained to a pay telephone outside the store. Purdy, Alma, was listed on page twenty-four, complete with address. Three or four blocks away!

He caught himself hyperventilating and willed deep breaths. He started his car and pulled out into Main Street. The crippled woman was hobbling along less than half a block away. Plenty of time.

Royal turned at the end of the block, found the street she lived on, turned again, counting house numbers. It was a small frame dwelling on a postage-stamp lot, the house badly in need of paint. The small town street appeared empty of people, only one truck coming from the opposite direction. He saw no one in his rearview. He backed into the nearby alley, parked, killed the engine.

His heart was hammering. Too late to worry about that now, he thought, getting out of the car. No traffic, no watchers. Dr. Royal opened the trunk and looked in a small canvas carrier in the corner of the neat storage space. Removed a few items: surgical gloves, a long screwdriver, the thing he always carried for emergencies, and a small black syringe case.

He estimated about a minute to a minute and a half and old Alma Purdy—who shot at Halloween pranksters—crippled, half-demented Alma, would come dragging around the corner, see him, and scream.

But Dr. Solomon Royal would be nowhere in evidence. He was already on the way to the back of her house, moving between the Purdy house and another dingy frame dwelling. Both structures shut up tight as drums. If neighbors peered through dusty curtains they did so surreptitiously.

Doctor Royal walked up to the back door of the little house and turned the knob as if he lived there, knocking very gently as he did so. His heart still pounded in his chest and he would later recall that at that moment his hearing seemed unusually acute. He could hear several different faraway vehicle sounds, machinery noise from a small business a block away, a distant car horn, bird noises, a kind of whir not unlike a furnace noise, the sound of a small dog barking across the street, his breathing, the noise of the screwdriver in the cheap lock, the crack of the door.

Inside, he moved silently and quickly out of sight, through the back porch and kitchenette, into the hallway, past the phone, living room, back through the bedroom, squeaking loudly across her bare wooden floor. Each room was alive with the strange pervasive odors of age, of garbage, of the woman herself, all offensive in his nose. She was not fastidious but, as best as he could tell in this cursory pass through, she apparently lived alone. Not even a parakeet chirped in the house.

He assumed she'd come in the front door. But what if she entered through the rear door, found the puny lock compromised, and began screaming for the police? His mind ran many steps ahead of her, planning his exit routes, cobbling together some plausible construct of lies should the unthinkable happen. He sensed his own panic, controlled it. He moved one of her kitchen chairs away from the window, where he could wait unobserved, and sat down.

Out of view from either door he prepared his syringe, which he carefully placed on the kitchen countertop, and arranged the other items he would need. With the weapon in his right hand he practiced standing a time or two, but he could neither stand nor move across the kitchen floor silently. He decided to remove his shoes and did so, standing again. He moved a couple of steps. Better. Pleased with the results, he sat down again, working to calm himself in the remaining seconds or minutes before she showed herself.

A younger woman, a woman with a more normal background, a less totally frightened woman, a woman whose emotional gyro had not been impaired by the horrors to which Anna Kaplan had been subjected, a woman with a keener olfactory sense might have detected some vibrations, sensed something out of place, felt another's presence, intuitively realized she was not alone, smelled the cologne of a stranger.

But it was all she could do to get her key to work in the lock and move directly toward the telephone in the hallway.

To the man who waited for her in the shadows of her small kitchen the key in the door had sounded like a gunshot, and it was as if her screeching voice began its high wail the moment she burst through the front door.

She'd flung the door open and lunged at the phone, dialing almost as she opened the phone book to the first page where the police numbers were printed. That page was all she'd focused on since she started the long, frightening walk home, how she would open the Bayou City book and see that number listed on the Fire-Police-Ambulance page. It never dawned on her that there were two small books issued to residences, one for the immediate city limits, one for the surrounding communities, and she'd grabbed the book with the county sheriff. Sheriff, police, they were all the same.

As the words tumbled out of her mouth and she heard the laughter in the man's voice she knew it would be useless. Even before he'd finished questioning her she knew what she must do.

The thing that prolonged Alma Purdy's life was not saying goodbye. When the call to the authorities had come to an end, and the man taking her call had said they'd look into it, she simply said, “Yes,” a monosyllabic grunt in the same dead, emotionless tone she'd used all the way through the conversation. As she set the phone down on the slim directory and began rummaging around in her desk drawer for a newspaper account she'd saved, the man listening patiently in the next room had no way of realizing the line had been disconnected.

There were the few seconds it took for the woman to dial when he heard the unmistakable sounds of another call being made, but he decided against a quick move, assessing it as excessively risky. There was always the chance he'd be implicated in the moments it would take him to spring from the kitchen and strike her down.

“Mrs. Talianoff?” Her screech broke the silence of the house. “It's Alma Purdy. You know the package I gave you for safekeeping? ... That's right. Please go ahead and send it. Yes. That's right. Just tell him to mail it now. Okay. Thank you.” She broke the connection and he was out of the chair, moving on his stocking feet, but she'd just dialed the 0 this time, and her high whine was already speaking again as he reached the doorway. “Operator?” He froze.

“I want to call a man in Kansas City,” she demanded. The woman's voice then dropped back to the dead monotone she'd used during the rambling call to the local authorities. “No. Please get the number for me. I don't have the number.” He heard more conversation about how it was an emergency.

He'd put himself in incredible jeopardy with the inane business of waiting for the woman in her filthy home. What an idiot he'd been to react in such an illogical manner. A hundred times he'd curse the fates, and himself, for not having simply run the bitch down in the street. It would have been so simple. A traffic mishap.

“A mentally defective elderly cripple lurched out in front of his car,” he imagined one of his defenders would say. No one would have suspected him for a second. He goaded himself with wish-fulfillment scenes as he listened to the crone's lies, heard himself described, stood in this simpleton's kitchen fighting for composure, when he could have painlessly deducted one more bitch from the female Jew population with his front bumper.

“Is this Mr. Kamen?” he heard her ask. “Are you the one who looks for Nazis from the war?” Regrets mounted. How many mistakes had he made in the last ten minutes? He felt perspiration in his right palm, the hand gripping the weapon. He never perspired. The situation would have been ludicrous had it not been threatening. He must kill her and leave the “elderly cardiac arrest victim” to rot. “I'm calling because I know where there's a Nazi."

He heard her say his name and realized he now would not even be able to wash his hands of her simply. Now he must also make the meddlesome old bitch vanish. That meant coming back after dark, taking more chances, somehow moving the dead weight to his car. Nothing insurmountable, but each element compounded his risk factor.

By the time she finally replaced the phone and walked into her kitchen his pent-up fury lashed out at her and she died without knowing that Emil Shtolz had smashed her to death like the wrath of the devil itself.

Ignoring her frail, fallen body, he checked the directories and then tried local directory assistance for new listings. The hurried search failed to yield a Talianoff, Taliakoff, or anything close. Emil Shtolz moved on to other more pressing matters, and never found Lenore Talianoff, Bayou City's only other old Jew, and the closest thing Alma Purdy had for a confidante.

Mrs. Talianoff lived with her son and his family, the son having taken his stepfather's name, and it was to the son she spoke.

“Are you going to the post office today?"

“Not today, Mother. Whatcha’ need?"

“I'm keeping a package for a woman. She called me and asked me to mail it for her, so I'm mailing it already."

“I'll get it after a while. I'm calling in a UPS pickup. Will that be all right, if it goes out tomorrow?"

“That's fine, honey. So, are you coming home for lunch?"

The package, about the size of a small book, was rectangular and wrapped in thick paper obtained by cutting apart a grocery sack. The label, printed in a somewhat shaky hand, bore the address of a man in Kansas City, Missouri. The UPS center in Earth City would, in fact, misdirect it, but so far as Lenore Talianoff was concerned the matter was ended and she'd discharged her responsibilities in full.