Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 10

Knowing what had to be done, and doing it, were two different things, especially given the consequences: death. Contemplating another man’s death was a power all its own. As much as this man wanted to believe otherwise, to ignore the palpable high coursing in his veins was nearly impossible. Tonight, his was the power of God, there was no denying it. He felt drawn toward intoxication, but he resisted this. He felt like humming, and so he did, though out of tune-he had never held a tune in his life.

He stood on a Hefty garbage bag just inside the back door and stripped naked, revealing his uncomfortably thin body. Carefully stepping off the garbage bag, he turned it inside out, capturing the clothing, and slung the bag over his shoulder like Santa Claus, and carried it through the sitting room, up the narrow stairs and into the bedroom, where he set it down into the closet.

He entered the bathroom still humming, his gaunt frame a stranger to him-he still thought of himself as the muscular beefmeister he had once been. Wearing the latex gloves that he had donned prior to entry, he opened the medicine cabinet. A small wire showed in the metal seam of the cabinet, and as he pulled on this the entire cabinet came free of the wall, and he set it aside, revealing a clear glass vial, a box of disposable syringes, and a box of needles. He removed the vial and a single syringe and a needle and returned the medicine cabinet to the wall so that he could see himself in the mirror.

He hated this part: the needles, the pain.

Standing before the mirror he studied his face, wiped the alcohol-soaked cotton ball across the sun-hardened, aged skin, lifted the syringe, and pricked the needle into his top lip, wincing with the puncture, and drawing a drop of blood. The injected fluid stung and itched at the same time-histamines-and the lip swelled and enlarged almost immediately, turning a bright red, as if an insect had bitten him. The lower lip was next, and again he winced. He worked his lips, as would someone standing too long in the cold, and attempted to speak. “Good evening,” he said to the mirror, working his puffy lips painfully until they formed the words more clearly. “Good evening, Mr. Payne.”

Another injection, just below the mandible joints, produced swollen jowls and distorted his face magnificently. But it was the two shots, one below each eye, that altered him to the point of establishing a new identity. He was, at once, a squinty, puffy-faced bulldog with gray hair showing around the edge of the Yankees baseball cap-synthetic wig hair sewn to the edges of the cap, not his at all.

The image in the mirror was no longer that of the man who stood before it, but instead one Wallace Sparco-the name on the bills, the apartment lease, and even on the credit cards that had bought the clothes hanging in the upstairs closet. An invented identity. The man did not feel himself as Sparco-he wouldn’t allow himself to go that far, to allow that dangerous switch to be thrown in his head. He knew damn well who he was and what was going on here-he was going to kill a man. A worthless piece of shit. He was going to fix things. He was more than willing to make the sacrifice necessary. Prepared. But he would not allow himself to enjoy it-despite the occasional rush-try as part of him did to do just that-and he would not allow any part of himself to fool any other part: It was wrong to kill, regardless of the justification; he knew this in his heart, his soul, in the quiet depths of his being. He was doing a job, that’s all. Charity work.

He kept humming as he drew the cosmetic pencil through his thin eyebrows, darkening them. He envied Pavarotti that enormous talent, that gift. He thought of Mozart as a freak-some step beyond genius. Einstein belonged there with him. Michelangelo. Cuban cigars. Mexican beer. The stuff of life.

And in this mirror, another man, a man of his invention-there were many ways to play God.

You do what you have to, he reminded himself.

The face that had started in this mirror before the charade of the injected histamines was one this man hardly recognized as his own: gaunt and drawn, pale, with jaundiced eyes. He thought of himself as handsome, but the face he saw there was not.

He drove an old beat-up Mazda two-door, registered to Mr. Wallace Sparco, dressed in Mr. Sparco’s clothing, and wore Mr. Sparco’s old brown shoes, Timex watch, leather belt, and carried his nylon wallet. He slouched as the fictitious Mr. Sparco slouched and yet he hummed as only the driver hummed.

He drove up the hill toward Trinity College, the view to his right a spectacular display of the sparkling lights of the valley, and slowed before turning left as the street became chaotic with costumed college-aged trick-or-treaters out for an evening of self-abuse. The costumes were products of educated imaginations, and the willowy, womanly legs, clad in black tights, were those of eighteen-year-old WASPs, wobbly from beer and steadied, no doubt, by concern and giddy anticipation. Mr. Wallace Sparco drove slowly through the teeming students, reminded of Mardi Gras. He beeped his horn lightly and turned left, not understanding exactly why he bothered to drive up the hill but deciding each life, even that of Wallace Sparco, was entitled to the occasional distraction. Back on course, he made his way to Farmington Avenue and headed for the affluence of West Hartford only a short ten-minute drive away, where the dismal poverty of the south end ghetto gave way to the manicured comfort of the Caucasian enclave, where black gave way to white, and project housing to suburbia. The AMEX cards were quiet tonight, the downtown deserted. Parents were home supervising another Halloween. A few minutes past the retail core, Wallace Sparco turned right and, a few minutes after that, on into the nestled canopy of darkness and the colonial-style homes that hid here from the fear of the inner city only a few short miles to the east.

Wallace Sparco turned left onto Westmont and up the winding hill, then right onto Wendy Lane, driving to the very end of the cul-de-sac, where he pulled into and drove down the long driveway of the Tudor house marked with the Twentieth Century Real Estate sign, switched off his headlights, and parked. He waited five minutes in absolute silence. The area in front of the garage could be seen from only one aspect of one other house, a neighbor a hundred yards away through thick woods. The Tudor was shown occasionally, and when it was, it was often at night to accommodate a working couple. But it wouldn’t be shown tonight because Wallace Sparco, introducing himself as Alfred Gluck, had booked a showing with the agent who carried the listing-the rendezvous planned at the agent’s office, six miles away and scheduled for an hour earlier. By this hour, a no-show. Now, all his.

The back wall of 37 Orchard Street, covered in the gray, strangling veins of dormant ivy vines, could be seen through the two acres of barren autumn woods. Payne’s young and attractive wife was said to be at her regular Wednesday dinner with friends, where she would remain until dropped off at 10:00 P.M. She was, in fact, fucking wildly with the man who headed the local community theater group, a man ten years her junior who paid an uncanny resemblance to Dustin Hoffman but possessing little talent. At least acting talent, he thought. She had never once, in the three weeks that he had kept her under surveillance, made it home before ten, leaving her husband, Harold, on this night, to become a victim. A statistic. A suicide.

Reviewing his carefully orchestrated plan, Wallace Sparco checked his Timex watch and saw that he had a full fifty minutes to accomplish what had to be done.

Plenty of time in which to play God.