Fat Ollie's Book

17

THIS WAS THEmeat-packing section of the city.

During the daytime, trucks pulled in and out, and sides of beef were unloaded, and hung on platform hooks and then carried inside where they were weighed and refrigerated. Food stands and flower carts and stalls selling photographs suitable for framing lined the streets during the daytime, and African merchants in tribal robes hawked imitation Rolexes and Louis Vuitton luggage. During the daytime, there were restaurants and book shops and antiques emporiums and furniture stores, and couples wandered down to the river to watch the big steamers and the tug boats, and the ferries chugging over to Bethtown during the daytime.

At night, the streets were thronged with hookers.

“Vice don’t bother with this petty shit anymore,” Walsh told Ollie. “Ever since the terrorist business started, we got more important things on our mind. Hookers have it easy now. Terrorism made it easy for hookers.”

“How about you get some hooker commits a crime?” Ollie said.

“That’s a different story. Every now and then, one of the girls’ll stab a john gets out of line, that’s an ADW no matter how you slice it, no pun intended.”

“I’m not talking about deadly assault, I’m talking about a minor crime like stealing somebody’s dispatch case has something valuable in it. Does that attract your attention?”

“You know,” Walsh said, “you sometimes have a snotty way of saying things.”

“Gee, really. What did I just say that was snotty?”

“You said, ‘Does that attract your attention?’ With a little edge to it, you know? As if we’re not doing our jobs or something. As if Vice has nothing to do all day long but worry about some fuckin dispatch case.”

“Well, you just told me you look the other way, you got more important things on your mind, you don’t bother with this petty shit anymore…”

“That’s just what I mean,” Walsh said. “The way you just said that.”

“I was only repeating what you said.”

“It’s thewayyou repeated it.”

“All I’m asking is whether a hooker who stole a dispatch case is worth your valuable time, is all I’m…”

“There you go again,” Walsh said. “My valuable time. That little edge of sarcasm there. That snotty tone. I was trying to indicate to you that we’ve been on high alert for Arabs and other such types ever since 9/11. This is Vice here, we know every whore house in this city. These fucks pray to God five times a day, but then they go out drinking and lap-dancing before they crash an airplane into a building.”

Ollie suddenly liked the man.

“I tell you,” Walsh said, “I wouldn’t care to be some guy who looks even vaguely Middle Eastern when the only mischief on his mind is getting laid, though they ain’t supposed to do that in their religion, anyway, go to a whore house. Unless they’re Saudi Arabians in London,” Walsh said, and Ollie liked him even more. “We got girls all over town waiting to call us the minute one of these creeps shows up. But that ain’tallwe do, Weeks.”

“Oh, I know that,” Ollie said.

“No, youdon’tknow it, all your remarks about our looking the other way, or being sarcastic about my valuable time…”

“Don’t be so fuckin sensitive,” Ollie said.

“Well, Iamsensitive,” Walsh said. “Vice ain’t concerned only with prostitution. We’re after the policy racket, bookmaking, loan sharking, ticket scalping, we’re after the big boys, the ones running the show. We want to get ’em on RICO, send ’em up forever. That’s why you tell me some hooker stole a fuckindispatchcase, I’m supposed to get all excited about it? Give me a break, willya?”

“I’m sorry, but that case had something in it very valuable to me.”

“You telling me it’syourcase?”

“Yes, it was my case this Herrera hump stole from my parked car and hocked.”

“So what was so valuable in this case of yours?”

“Well, nowyou’redoing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Sounding sarcastic.”

“I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic.”

“I mean, you tell meyou’resensitive, well,I’msensitive, too,” Ollie said.

“I’m sorry, okay? Tell me what was in the fuckin case, okay?”

“A novel I wrote.”

“You wrote a novel?”

“Yes.”

“So did I!” Walsh said.

Everybody wants to get in the act, Ollie thought.

“It’s with my agent right this minute,” Walsh said.

He’s got an agent, no less, Ollie thought.

“What’s it about?” he asked.

“Police work, what do you think it’s about?” Walsh said.

That’s what we need, all right, Ollie thought. Another novel about police work. There used to be no novels about police work at all. Then, all of a sudden—God knows who or what the influence might have been—every shitty little town in America had a fictitious character working out of a detective squadroom. To look at all these police novels out there, you’d think every hamlet in America was overrun with crime. Dumb little village has a population of six hundred people, according to these novels there are murders being committed there every hour on the hour. Let’s say you live in Dung Heap, Oklahoma, and your day job is you’re a garage mechanic. You go to the local police chief and you tell him you’re a writer and you want to set a series in his police station. The Chief says, “Come in, sit down, I’ll bare my soul to you.” Never mind being arealcop. Nobody’s real anymore, Ollie thought, that’s the trouble. Well,Walshis real, but fuck him, the Irish hump!Hewrote a police novel. That makes him competition.

“So let’s find Herrera, okay?” Ollie said.

“One of these days, we have to have a beer together,” Walsh said. “Talk shop.”

Yeah, one of these days nextyear,Ollie thought.

“Hey, fellas, wanna take a picture of my pussy?” a voice behind them said.

They both turned to see two girls standing there and grinning. The one with the camera seemed a trifle high. Not stoned high, just silly high. Marijuana, Ollie guessed.

“It’s Polaroid,” she said, still grinning, extending the camera to them. “You like what you see, we can talk about further exploration.”

Further exploration, Ollie thought. Everybody sounds literary these days.

“Thanks, no,” he said.

But to tell the truth, he was tempted.

The girl was wearing a short black skirt, a red silk blouse, and red patent shoes to match, no stockings. She looked like Dorothy inThe Wizard of Oz.Well, the red shoes did. She had very lovely breasts, most of them showing in the low cut peasant blouse. In fact, Ollie thought he detected the rosiest of nipples peeking out of the right side of the blouse. The girl had a beauty mark near the corner of her mouth, and black hair done in twisty little ringlets, and dark brown eyes. Ollie suddenly thought of Patricia Gomez.

“You want to look for Herrera or what?” Walsh asked.

“Be more fun taking my picture,” the girl said, and waggled her eyebrows.

“Some other time,” Ollie said, and winked at her as he turned to follow Walsh.

THE NAMEThe Cozywas lettered onto the plate glass windows out front.

“They may know something about him here,” Walsh said, and reached for the doorknob.

A little bell tinkled over the door as the detectives entered, making the place sound as cozy as it looked. The feeling was one of gingham and pine. Ten or twelve tables with blue, checked table cloths. Stools at the bar cushioned in the same blue check. A pine-framed mirror behind the bar. A blonde wearing a white T-shirt, red Larry King suspenders that exaggerated the thrust of her breasts, high-heeled pumps, and a short blue skirt was behind the bar. A second blonde, identically dressed, was working the tables. There were maybe six or seven people sitting here and there around the room. The detectives took stools at the bar. The blonde behind the bar came over. Ollie wondered if the other blonde was her twin sister.

“Are you drinking or working?” she asked Walsh.

“We’re both off duty,” he said. “What’ll you have, Ollie?”

It’d been “Weeks” before he discovered they were both literary people. Now it was “Ollie.” Next thing you knew, he’d be asking how to utilize metaphor most effectively.

“A beer’d be fine,” Ollie said. “You got Pabst?”

“Coming up,” the blonde said. “How about you, Detective Walsh?”

“Just a shot of bourbon, Flo, little water on the side.”

The other blonde came to the bar, looked at her pad, read off, “BLT down, hold the mayo, iced tea no sugar,” and then turned to Walsh and said, “Hey, long time no see. How’s your book coming along?”

“Finished it,” Walsh said. “With my agent right this minute.”

“Oh, gee, good luck with it.”

“Thanks, Wanda. This is Detective Weeks here.”

“Hey,” Wanda said, and gave him the once-over.

Of the two blondes, Ollie guessed Wanda was the prettiest. Although to tell the truth, they were both quite attractive. Ollie had always liked the look of blondes, especially real blondes, which these two definitely did not seem to be, but then again you could never tell until the panties came off, could you? He thought it odd that he was now attracted to a woman like Patricia Gomez, all dark and exotic looking, not that he was attracted to her, per se, but certainly interested in her, to say the least. He wondered how she was, in fact. Wondered what she was doing right this very minute, eleven o’clock at night. He thought maybe he’d give her a call when he got home later on, ask her if she’d like to go for some pancakes or something. He sure liked the way she filled that uniform of hers.

As he was leaving the Eight-Seven tonight, he happened to mention to his good buddy Parker that he’d made a date to go dancing this Saturday night with a Puerto Rican girl.

“Is she a hooker?” Parker asked.

“Hell, no,” Ollie said. “She’s a cop.”

“I don’t think you should date a fellow police officer,” Parker said, offended.

“I like the way she fills her uniform,” Ollie said, and winked.

“Never mind how she fills her uniform. Don’t go dating a cop. Especially a Puerto Rican one.”

“Why’s that?” Ollie asked.

“Cause she’ll cut off your dick for a nickel and sell it to the nearest cuchi frito joint,” Parker said.

Ollie wondered about that now.

Wanda here, and her twin sister behind the bar, if that’s what she was, certainly knew how to fill their own uniforms, these T-shirts with the red suspenders framing tits like melons, how do you likethatfor a fresh simile, Detective Walsh?

Wanda took the stool on his left.

“So, Detective, what brings you to this part of the city?” she asked.

One elbow on the bar. Leaning over it. Left breast pressing against the rounded edge. Short blue skirt sliding back very high over very white, very smooth-looking legs and thighs. Looking up at him. Blue eyes. Her sister had blue eyes, too. If Flo was indeed her sister.

“Oh, a little business down this way,” Ollie said.

“Are you Vice, too?” she asked.

“No, no. I’m with the Eight-Eight Squad. We just wrapped a murder,” he said.

“Oh my, a murder,” Wanda said, and rolled her delicious blue eyes. “Who got killed? Or am I being presumptuous?”

Everybody so literary these days.

“No, not at all,” he said. “You probably read about it in the papers. It’s Councilman Lester Henderson.”

“Oh, wow, a big one,” Wanda said.

“But he’s down here looking for a dispatch case,” Walsh said, leaning over to talk past Ollie.

“Actually, I recovered the dispatch case,” Ollie said.

“Oh. Then it’s the book wasinsidethe case,” Walsh said to Wanda. “Ollie wrote a book, too.”

“Did you, Ollie?” Wanda said. “May I call you Ollie?”

“Yes. But I used a pen name on it,” he said.

“What name did you use?”

“John Grisham,” Walsh said, getting even for the Irish joke.

“Actually, I used a girl’s name,” Ollie said.

“Oh, really?” Wanda said, and leaned closer to him, her eyes widening.

“Ready when you are, hon,” Flo said.

“I’ll be back,” Wanda said, and swung out sideways to get off the stool, the skirt sliding back even higher on her thighs, almost to Katmandu, in fact. She went to the other end of the bar, picked up her order, looked back over her shoulder at Ollie—who felt himself growing faintly tumescent in his pants—winked at him, and then swiveled over to a man sitting alone alongside the wall under a framed poster of Boy George.

“I wish I could write a book,” Flo said wistfully.

“Maybe I could give you lessons sometime,” Ollie said.

“Maybe you could give usbothlessons,” she said.

“Maybe so. Let’s ask Wanda when she comes back.”

Ollie was thinking he’d stepped in shit here. A three-way without any effort at all. How lucky could a person get? Walsh looked at him. There was a faint, smug, Irish look on his kisser. Probably congratulating himself on his wise-ass John Grisham remark, whoever the hell that was.

“Meanwhile,” Walsh said, “we wanted to ask you girls about somebody who maybe you’ve seen in here.”

“What makes you think that?” Flo asked.

“Kind of place The Cozy is,” Walsh said.

“Hi, honey, you miss me?” Wanda said, and took the stool on Ollie’s left again. Ollie put his left hand on her knee.

“How come you decided to put a girl’s name on the book?” she asked.

“I thought it would sell more copies,” Ollie said, and slid his hand onto her thigh.

“That the only reason?” Wanda asked, and snuggled a little closer to him.

“Guy’s a Puerto Rican switch-hitter,” Walsh told Flo. “Goes by Emmy on the street. His square handle is Emilio Herrera. Ever see him in here?”

“Oh, sure,” Flo said. “Emmy’s a darling.”

“You know Emmy, too?” Ollie asked Wanda, just as he reached clear up under her skirt and got the shock of his life.

• • •

“YOU SHOULD HAVEtold me she was a he,” he shouted at Walsh. The two men were striding up the street toward where Ollie had parked the car. One look at them, you’d know they were cops, that stride they had. Same way you took one look at a hooker, you knew she was a hooker, the strut on her.

“You were getting along so fine there,” Walsh said, grinning. “I didn’t want to…”

“And who the fuck is John Grisham?”

“…interrupt a beautiful…”

“Is the other one a man, too? Flo? Is she a man?”

“She is a man, yes, Ollie.” He grinned again, the fuckin Irish bastard. “I guess that rules out both of them, huh?” he said.

Ollie walked on ahead of him. He was at the car, unlocking the door, checking the windows to make sure some other faggot junkie hooker hadn’t smashed one of them, when Walsh caught up.

“You won’t be needing me anymore, will you?” he asked. “You got what you wanted, right?”

“I got alocationis all I got.”

“They told you he lives in Kingston Station,” Walsh said. “What more do you need?”

“Kingston Station is six blocks wide and a mile long,” Ollie said. “That’s a lot of territory to get lost in.”

“It’s also Jamaican,” Walsh said.

“So?”

“Your man’s Puerto Rican. He should stick out like a sore thumb.”

“I’ve been looking for the little fuck the past week,” Ollie said. “So far he ain’t sticking out so good.”

“What’s your book called?” Walsh asked.

“Fuck you,” Ollie said.

“Nice title,” Walsh said, and threw a finger at him and walked away from the car.

• • •

THE TRUE AND PROPER NAMEof the neighborhood now called Kingston Station was Westfield Station. Perhaps that was because when railroad tracks still ran along that side of the city, the station stop there was called Westfield. It was not until an overwhelmingly large number of Irish immigrants settled in Westfield Station that the neighborhood was familiarly dubbed Dublin Town. Russian Jews started pouring in at the turn of the century, and the place was popularly renamed Little Kiev. Upward mobility sent the Jews to the suburbs, ceding the area to Italians moving out of ghettos downtown. The area was still called Little Kiev, but the streets now resonated to cries of“Buon giorno”and“Ba fahn gool!”But not for long.

Prosperity led to migration. The Italians, too, followed the trail to the suburbs. Nature abhors a vacuum. The Puerto Ricans came next, and finally the Jamaicans. So many Jamaicans, in fact, that first the rest of the whitebread city, and then the residents themselves, began calling the area Kingston Station. An enterprising mayor, gunning for the Jamaican vote, even suggested that the name be legally changed to what everyone was calling it, anyway. Nobody but the Jamaicans liked that idea. In everyday conversation, then, Westfield Station was Kingston Station. But the name on the maps remained what it had been back in 1878, when the railroad opened its route along the river.

Everybody in Kingston Station—

Well, everybody along James Street, anyway.

—had heard of the transvestite hooker who called himself Emmy, but nobody knew where the hell he was. Ollie had been a detective for a very long time. He knew the word had gone out. Somehow, Emilio Herrera had learned that the law was looking for him.

So where the hell was he?

• • •

SHANAHAN’S BARat midnight was full of policemen who’d just come off duty. This made Emilio and Aine somewhat uncomfortable. But they were here to learn if this was, in fact, the bar Olivia Wesley Watts had mentioned in her report to the Commissioner, and it certainly looked as if it might be.

Emilio was convinced that the woman they’d seen coming out of the basement on Culver Av was indeed Livvie, who had somehow escaped her captors. Aine thought this was a very far-fetched notion.

“She fits the description exactly,” Emilio said, and quoted from the report, which by now he knew by heart because he’d read and reread it so many times, searching for clues. “‘I am a female police detective, twenty-nine years old, five feet, eight inches tall, and weighing one hundred and twenty-three pounds, which is slender.’”

“I weigh a hundred and six,” Aine said. “That’sslender.”

“That’sskinny,” Emilio said, and went on quoting from the report. “‘My hair is a sort of reddish brown, what my mother used to call auburn…’”

“My hair is red, too.”

“Your hair is not reddish brown.”

“But it’s red.”

“It’s carrot colored.”

“That’s still red,” Aine insisted.

“‘I wear it cut to just above the shoulders,’” Emilio quoted. “‘What my mother used to call a shag cut.’”

“I wear my hair short, too,” Aine said.

“And shaggy,” he agreed. “‘My eyes are green…’”

“So are mine.”

“‘I look very Irish…’”

“So do I.”

“Aine, what is yourpoint?” Emilio asked, truly irritated now.

“My point is, do you thinkI’mOlivia Watts-her-name?”

“Of course not.”

“So why do you think some Irish babe you ran into on the street is her?”

“Because she was coming out of the verybuilding!” Emilio said. “Otherwise it would be too much of a coincidence!”

“The world is full of coincidence,” Aine said wisely.

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Emilio said. “You believe in coincidence, then you don’t believe in God. It’s God makes things happen, not coincidence.”

“Oh okay. Then it was God made me a junkie and a whore, right?”

Emilio looked at her.

“Whatareyou?” he asked. “Some kind of atheist?”

“That’s what I am, yes,” Aine said.

“Since when?”

“Since I was twelve years old and a priest felt me up in the rectory.”

“That never happened.”

“Oh no?”

“And anyway, you can’t blame God for some horny priest.”

“WhatdoI blame him for? All these fucking lunatics fighting wars in his name? Killing each other in his name? I don’t know any atheists who kill people in God’s name. Not a single one. I don’t believe in a God who allows such things to happen. I believe in coincidence, is what makes things happen.”

Which was when Francisco Palacios walked in and took a stool beside them at the bar.

BECAUSE THE GAUCHOrecognized Emilio as a fellow Puerto Rican, and because he had an eye for the women, especially if they seemed not to be wearing either panties or a bra, he struck up a conversation with the young couple, directing his conversation at first directly to Emilio, entirely in Spanish, because he didn’t want the young Irish girl, was what she looked like, to think he was coming on to her, even though he was. This annoyed Aine, so she said, “Are you guys gonna talk Spanish all night? Because if you are, I’ve got better things to do.”

The Gaucho leaned over the bar and began chatting with Aine about the latest movies she’d seen and her favorite color and did she like to walk hatless in spring rain, all the stuff he thought a woman liked to hear. Aine was in fact flattered by his attention. She was well aware of the adage that held if you wanted to succeed with a lady, you treated her like a whore, and vice versa. She knew he was treating her like a lady, which meant he suspected she was a whore, but that was okay with her. It was the thought that counted.

On the other hand, The Gaucho had no idea she was a working girl. In his eyes, she looked like a well-scrubbed Irish girl from one of the suburbs, albeit one of these anachronistic hippie types who ran around without underwear. There was something sharp and snippy about her, qualities he liked in a woman. Qualities he had found in Eileen Burke, who did not, alas, seem too terribly interested in him. He looked at his watch. The detectives were now ten minutes late.

“Listen,” he said, “I know you’re here with your boyfriend and all…”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Aine said.

“Oh, well good,” The Gaucho said. “I have an appointment here—in fact they’re late—but it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to discuss our business, and then I thought maybe you’d like to go for a drink someplace quieter than this, what do you think?”

Aine looked him dead in the eye.

Green eyes clashing with brown eyes, sparks flying.

“Sure,” she said, and smiled like an Irish shillelagh, whatever that was.

As coincidence would have it, Eileen Burke walked in just then.

EMILIO SHREWDLY CALCULATEDthat the other guy who came in some five minutes later was either a civilian like Palacios or a detective like Livvie. He was absolutely positive now that the girl with the reddish-brown hair was Olivia Wesley Watts.

All three of them had moved to a table over by the phone booths. From where he was still sitting at the bar with Aine, who had her legs crossed and who was nursing a very sugary non-alcoholic beverage, Emilio could not hear a word of their conversation. This was unfortunate because he was sure they were discussing the blood diamonds hidden in the basement from which Livvie had escaped earlier today.

They were instead discussing cocaine.

So were the three men in the living room of a tenement flat half a mile uptown.

SUZIE Q. CURTISwas never permitted to sit in on any of these brainstorming sessions between her mastermind husband and his two rocket-scientist associates. Her job was to keep them supplied with food, like the women in theGodfathermovies. Although to see those movies, you sometimes got the feeling the gangsters in them were as interested in cooking spaghetti with clams, or sausage with peppers, as they were in killing people. Just nice homey fellows who if you looked at them cross-eyed, they would slit your throat.

Her husband and his cronies were talking about killing some people tomorrow night.

Listening from the kitchen, where Suzie was making tuna fish sandwiches with slices of tomato on them, she could hear their conversation clear as a bell.

“We go in shootin,” her husband was saying. “Never give them a chance to frisk us.”

“Cause then we’d be at a disadvantage,” Constantine said. “If we let them frisk us.”

She could just imagine him twitching and grinning.

“Exactly,” her husband said. “We know she’ll be there with the coke, she’d be stupid not to bring the coke when we went to all this trouble setting this up. We mow everybody down, grab the coke, and split.”

“She’ll have goons with her,” Lonnie said.

“How many? Two, three? Even half a dozen? We got the element of surprise on our side.”

“That’s right,” Constantine said. “Nobody’s gonna expect us to come in shootin.”

“Exactly!” Harry said, and laughed. “Who’d think we could be that stupid?”

Me, Suzie thought, and sliced another tomato.

HE HAD TAKEN HERinto the back room of his shop, where there were all sorts of sex toys. She had seen all of them before, of course—there was nothing she hadn’t seen or done—but she looked at them all agog and amazed like an Irish virgin, and pretended to be shocked when he asked her to put on a leather merry widow and thigh-high leather boots, so where’s the whip, honey? she was thinking. It turned out he wasn’t into the dominatrix scene, after all; it was just the opposite. He merely wanted to see what a nice Catholic girl like Aine would look like all dressed up like a whore.

She figured she wouldn’t break his heart just yet.

She’d go along with it, let him believe she was Cathleen the Colleen for a little while longer. Then she’d tell him she was a working girl, bro, and ask him for a deuce. Or whatever the traffic would bear.

Instead, he started talking about himself.

She kind of found this interesting about him.

The way he opened up to her.

He told her he was a spy named The Gaucho.

Shutup,she said, aspy?

Verdad,he said. Or Cowboy, I’m sometimes called.

Boy, she said, a spy.

For the Police Department, he said.

So what it was, he was a snitch, was what it was.

She didn’t say this to his face.

She let him talk.

And, of course, like all men, he wanted to show her how important he was.

So he told her he had been instrumental in uncovering valuable information that would lead the police to a big drug bust tomorrow night at midnight in the basement of an apartment building on Culver Avenue.

3211 Culver, she thought, but did not say.

Midnight, she thought.

That’s when it’s going down.

Midnight tomorrow.

A hun’ fifty keys of coke will change hands, he told her.

Three hundred thousand dollars will change hands, he told her.

So she didn’t ask him for any money, after all.

He had given her enough already.

And besides, it was kind of nice to make love instead of to be fucked all the time.

I FOUND THE LETTERSfrom her the night before.

I knew right then I had to kill him.

We kept a gun in the house. I don’t know where Lester bought it. I think in a pawnshop someplace downtown, near his office. He bought it when the first of our children was born. Lyle. When he was born. We’d heard there’d been a kidnapping in Smoke Rise, many years ago, at the King estate, on the water. Douglas King. So we figured we needed a gun. I don’t know whether Lester registered the gun or not. Frankly, I didn’t care. Lester was a councilman, he often took liberties. I mean, he parked in clearly marked No Parking zones, he went through red lights when he’d had a little too much to drink, he was a great one for breaking the rules. He felt he was privileged, do you know? A city councilman. Only this time, he broke one rule too many.

I know I’m not a beautiful woman, but I’ve always been a good wife. To think of him with a nineteen-year-old girl—how could he? I had to kill him. That was all I knew. Never mind confrontation, never mind asking for explanations, never mind forgiving him, I wanted him dead, I wanted to kill him. I knew he’d be going directly to King Memorial after his trip upstate. I knew what time he’d be getting there. I knew all this, he’d told me all this on the phone. The only thing he hadn’t told me was that a young girl was in bed with him.

The gun was in the safe in his study. Same place I found the letters. The desk in his study. I wasn’t looking for the letters, I was looking for his appointment calendar. Because we were supposed to go to a dinner party that Sunday when he got home, and I had the time written in my calendar as six o’clock, which sounded early, so I wanted to check it against his calendar, to make sure. But I couldn’t find it anywhere on his desk, his calendar, so I started looking through the drawers, and that was when I found the letters, at the back of the middle drawer to the right of the kneehole, buried under a stack of papers.

I wanted him dead.

I read the letters, and I went directly to the wall safe, and opened it, and took out the gun, and loaded it. We kept it unloaded, because of the children. The box of cartridges was in the safe, with the gun. I loaded the gun, and then I went upstairs to dress.

I dressed for expediency. Nothing else. I wasn’t thinking of any kind of disguise, I had no thought of getting away with it, I just didn’t give a damn. I merely wanted him dead. So I dressed for ease of movement. Baggy blue jeans I used when I was gardening, a T-shirt, white socks and Reeboks, my hair up under Lyle’s baseball cap so it wouldn’t fly all over my face, wouldn’t get in my eyes when it came time to shoot him. I put on a ski parka when I left the house. We used to ski a lot before the children were born. The gun was in the right hand pocket of the parka.

I took a taxi up to the Hall. I walked right in, nobody there to stop me, you’d think after all this terrorist stuff there’d be people frisking me or something. But no. I walked right in with the gun in my pocket. I opened the door at the back of the auditorium, opened it just enough so I could look in. He was onstage with a lot of other people, Alan Pierce, Josh Coogan, some other people I didn’t know. I closed the door and came around the side of the auditorium, to where there were a lot of offices and a corridor running between them. I went down the corridor almost to the end of it, and then opened a door that led to the stage.

My heart was beating very fast.

I opened the door and found myself in this backstage area, the wings I guess you’d call them, looking out at the stage. It was very dark where I was standing. There was no one around. Everyone was onstage, calling directions and adjusting lights and what not. Alan told Lester to go off left and then walk toward the podium so they could make sure the follow spot was on him, something like that. I took the gun out of my pocket.

Alan said Okay, start your cross, and Lester stepped out of the wings on the other side of the stage and began moving toward the center of the stage, this bright light on him, it was as if they were illuminating him for me, so I could kill him, the son of a bitch.

My hand was shaking.

When he reached the podium, I shot him.

I fired six times. I don’t think all of my shots got him. But I saw him falling, and I could see blood all over his pink sweater, so I figured I had got him good. Then everyone started screaming and yelling. I turned and ran.

That was the first time I had even a notion of survival. Of getting away.

Before then, I’d only wanted him dead.

I could hear yelling behind me.

I kept running.

There was a corridor with anEXITsign at the end of it. I was heading for the door under it, when someone came out of an office at the end of the hall, a woman, and I turned and started running in the opposite direction again, back toward the stage. But there were voices ahead of me now, coming off the stage, so I opened the nearest door and went in whatever it was, I didn’t know what it was, I was just trying to hide.

The room was dark except for faint daylight coming through a narrow window at the far end. I could hear people running by outside, shouting. In the dim light, I saw urinals. I was in a men’s room. I ducked into one of the stalls just as someone cracked open the door. Anyone in here? a man’s voice yelled. I held my breath. The room was dark, the light from the window filtered. Where’s the fuckin light switch? the man asked himself. Silence. I heard him fumbling around on the wall. Then he asked Anyone in here? again, and muttered something, and closed the door, and was gone. I heard more running outside, voices passing by, fading. I waited.

I didn’t know where to go. I wanted to cry. I had killed him, and now I wanted to cry. Not because he was dead, the son of a bitch. But because they would catch me and put me in prison forever. The children, I thought. I kept still in the dark, terrified that the man would come back and put on the light this time, and search the room, and find me, and take me away.

I don’t know how long I waited there in the dark, in the stall. At last, I came out of the stall and stood still, listening in the dark, for several moments. Then I went to the window. It was open a crack, just some three or four inches. I opened it all the way. I was looking out onto what seemed to be an airshaft, the sky far above, a narrow paved passageway below. I climbed up and over the sill and dropped to my feet on the other side. The passageway ran behind the building for the entire width of it. I ran down it, enclosed by walls on either side of me, and saw another window on the far wall. This one was open just a little bit, too. I reached up, and opened it all the way. Then I hoisted myself up and climbed into what I realized was another men’s room, a smaller one this time, just two stalls, and a single urinal, and some sinks.

The lights were on.

A man was in one of the stalls.

I heard him coughing, and then I heard the toilet flushing.

I ran for the door at the other end of the room, opposite the sinks.

I opened the door, and stepped out into a long corridor. I was on the stage-left side of the auditorium. A door painted red was immediately to my left. An illuminatedEXITsign was above it. I opened the door and went out into an alley. Sunlight struck my eyes. I dropped the gun down a drainage sewer near the wall, and began running.

An old bum in army fatigues was just stepping into the alley at the far end.

I almost knocked him off his feet.

He said, Hey!

That was all he said.

Hey.

After I’d just killed a man.

THEY ASKED HERif there was anything she wished to change or add to her confession. She said No. They asked her to sign it, and handed her a pen.

She signed it.

It was all over but the shooting.