Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Seven

When he got off the phone Mark Adlon went to the bar in the sun room and poured two fingers of Dewar’s Ancestor into a highball glass. He took it and a matching empty glass into the kitchen, where he filled both glasses with ice cubes from the automatic ice dispenser built into the refrigerator door. He topped up the scotch with spring water and filled the other glass with lemonade, then carried them both out onto the patio where his wife was reading the latest issue of People magazine.

“Oh, thank you, dear,” she said.

“It’s plain lemonade, but if you want a little vodka in it—”

“No, I’d rather have plain.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He took a seat alongside her, set down his drink on the glass-topped coffee table, and looked out across the expanse of lawn.

“The days are really getting long,” he said.

She nodded. “Just two weeks to Midsummer Eve.”

“I never understood that,” he said. “If it’s the first day of summer, why call it Midsummer Eve? Midsummer Eve ought to come in the middle of summer, shouldn’t it?”

“You would think so, wouldn’t you?”

Marilee Adlon was three years older than her husband, although they had decided, around the time they moved from Topeka to Overland Park, to reduce her official age by five years. People made certain assumptions about a couple when the wife was older, they had agreed, and simply by revising her age they could avoid these assumptions.

Certainly she had no trouble passing for the forty years she admitted to. In high heels she was almost exactly the same height as her husband. Her face was a long oval, her eyes somewhere between brown and green. Her hair, a rich brown with red highlights, was shorter than she usually wore it; she’d been to the beauty parlor during the past week, and had had a styling and a permanent.

She touched her hair now, patting it with the fingertips of both hands. “I think I’m getting used to this,” she said. “Do you like it?”

“It looks fine.”

“What about the color?”

“What about it? Isn’t it the same?”

“Good, that means the difference isn’t all that noticeable. Adrian wanted to lighten it by what he called a quarter of a shade, whatever that means. It looks much lighter to me, but if it doesn’t to you—”

“I’m not the most observant man in the world, but I didn’t notice any change. I don’t see it now, not even after you’ve called it to my attention.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that. I don’t mind having it lighter so long as nobody notices. Now isn’t that ridiculous, what I just said? But you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

She picked up her glass and took a long sip of lemonade, making a sound of appreciation. “That is good,” she said. “I’m glad you didn’t put vodka in it, it wouldn’t taste as good.” She put the glass down. “I’d probably be completely gray by now,” she said.

“You think so?”

“Oh, I do. When I’ve been a while between touch-ups, and I get a look at the roots, all I see is gray. I’ll tell you, I’m glad I never let it get started.”

Her hair had started to show some gray in her early thirties, and she had immediately responded by coloring it. Since then, her hair color had gradually grown lighter than its original shade — this was not the first time that Adrian or one of his predecessors had worked his subtle magic — and, while her hair never appeared lighter from one month to the next, you had only to look at an old photograph to see how much lighter it had indeed become.

“I wonder what it would look like gray.”

“You could let it grow out.”

She shook her head. “No thank you. You wouldn’t like it, Mark.”

“I’d like it just fine however you wore it.”

“That’s very loyal, but you wouldn’t like the look, believe me. For one thing, I’d look ten years older. Instantly, immediately.”

“That would still leave you looking a couple of years younger than the calendar says you are.”

“Aren’t you a sweetheart,” she said, putting her hand on his. “Or is there something you want?”

He laughed. “No, but there’s something I hate to have to tell you. I’m going to miss Jennifer’s graduation.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. Have you told her yet?”

“I thought I’d wait and tell her tomorrow. I wasn’t absolutely certain until I spoke to Koenig just now.”

“Well, you couldn’t tell her now. She’s out with Carole Keller and the Parkhill girl.” She sighed. “You know, I almost should have had that vodka. I’m a little jittery tonight.”

“Oh?”

“Just a lot of nervous energy. I feel fidgety, that’s why I can’t keep my hands off my hair.”

“I thought you were just getting used to it.”

“Yes, but I also can’t seem to keep my hands still.”

“Is that right,” he said. “You say Jennifer’s out for the evening?”

“Well, I don’t think she’ll be too late. School tomorrow, of course.”

“And Luke’s out, his car’s gone.”

“I think he said something about the baseball game.”

“Yes, that’s right, he told me he was going to watch the Royals. Well, I know why you’re so fidgety.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really. And Dr. Adlon knows just the treatment you need.”

“Oh, my,” she said. “So early in the evening?”

“We’re all alone.”

“So we are. Of course the phone could ring.”

“Not if I took it off the hook.”

“What a clever man you are,” she said.

Upstairs they undressed quickly and in silence. She left the drapes undrawn — there were woods behind the house, and no one could see into any of the bedroom windows. She got into bed and he joined her, taking her in his arms. For a long moment he held her, feeling the length of her body against his.

Then she lay on her back and closed her eyes. His hand touched her cheek and swept slowly down over her body, cupping the roundness of her breast, brushing the flat plain of her stomach and the slight convexity of her abdomen. When his fingers reached her pubic mound she opened her thighs, and he moved to crouch between them.

He touched her, first with his breath alone, then with his mouth. This was what she liked, and as always he found himself wholly in sync with her inner rhythms, automatically varying the pace and intensity of his lovemaking, speeding up, slowing down, speeding up again, teasing a little, holding her off, and then, finally, taking her all the way.

Her climax was powerful, a long rolling wave of passion to which she utterly gave herself over, swinging her head from side to side, crying out, sobbing, her whole body bucking and twitching beneath him. It was men who were always seeking sex, he thought, but it was women who got so much more out of it, their comings a whole artillery barrage in contrast to the single staccato bark of a male orgasm. He continued his ministrations, coaxing the last little spasm of fulfillment out of her, then moved at last to lie down beside her with her taste dark and rich in his mouth and her scent filling the whole room.

“God,” she said.

“See? I knew what you needed.”

“You always do.” Then, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

He had gotten an erection shortly after he had placed his mouth upon her. This happened some of the time, but not always, and it did not seem to be in any way related to the pleasure either of them took in the act. He had remained erect throughout, and was so now, but he felt under no obligation to do anything about it. He lay there until it had softened and shrank. By then she was asleep. He covered her with the sheet, got dressed, and went downstairs.

For some years now their lovemaking had always taken this form.

It was the only way that gave her real pleasure, and she had once admitted that she had usually feigned her orgasms during coitus, something he had half known all along. His oral attentions to her, usually a prelude, now became their sole practice.

He sometimes wondered how she thought he found fulfillment. Perhaps she assumed he climaxed while performing upon her, either spontaneously or with manual assistance. Perhaps she suspected he masturbated afterward, or used prostitutes. Perhaps she didn’t think about it. Whatever her thoughts, she kept them to herself.

She certainly wouldn’t have wanted to know the truth. That his orgasms were very infrequent, and, in recent years, never accompanied by seminal ejaculation. And that he had not had intercourse in eight years.

Not since the first time he killed a woman.

It had not eluded Mark that there might be something noteworthy in the fact that his first act of murder had taken place within two months of his first real estate deal. He was reasonably self-analytical, and he thought he knew why the one development in his life had precipitated the other. It was not, to be sure, that purchasing that first duplex north of Gage Park had somehow corrupted him, that it had instilled a desire not previously present. On the contrary, the hunger to kill women, to find release and fulfillment in their death, seemed to him to have been part of his sexual makeup all his life.

His earliest fantasies, before he’d had the wit to accompany them with masturbation, had involved the torture and death of helpless female partners. When he did discover masturbation, violent and murderous fantasies always played a part; when he tried to perform the act without the fantasies, out of moral revulsion for them, either he was not able to climax at all or his orgasm was weak and unsatisfying.

He had never considered acting on his fantasies. As far as he was concerned, they were a perversion forever confined to his inner life, taking place exclusively in the theatre of his mind. No one would ever know the truth about his sexual impulses, and whatever secret shame he suffered would be their only consequence.

He had had fears at one point that he might crave to act them out. While he was not a virgin when he married Marilee, his experience was minimal; oral sex from prostitutes, a brief clothes-pushed-aside coupling with a girl he’d dated a few times, both of them drunk the night it happened. On none of those occasions had he had any urge to injure his partner, and when he met and fell in love with Marilee he found such urges inconceivable. He loved her, he revered her, and the thought of her suffering any injury whatsoever, let alone at his hands, was unendurable.

Making love to Marilee, he found himself using his fantasies almost from the beginning. They were not invariably present, but without them he sometimes had difficulty performing.

But fantasy was fantasy and reality was reality. In his mind, horrible scenarios were acted out; in his bed, he and Marilee expressed their perfect love for one another. It was at the very least ironic that his mind and body should be following two such wholly different scripts, that his, children were conceived in love to the cerebral accompaniment of burnings and dismemberings, stabbings and garrotings. But he loved them none the less for it, and they brought him no less joy.

He worried about his fantasies less as time passed. Once in a while he would try to do without them, but they always returned, and he grew increasingly to take them for granted. They were mental Muzak, sometimes barely noticed on a conscious level, but the business ran less efficiently in their absence.

Of course it was his success with real estate that enabled him to turn fantasy into fact. Not that he woke up one morning and told himself, Hey, I just bought a house, I think I’ll go kill a girl. But his real estate dealings empowered him, transformed him from a man floating through life, working for his father-in-law, barely scraping by, to a confident enterprising self-starter in charge of his own destiny.

He felt alive, he felt successful, he felt strong. But he also felt increasingly restless, and several nights he had left the house while Marilee and the kids were asleep, getting in the car and driving for hours over country roads around Topeka.

Then one night, itching with restlessness, he found himself driving into Kansas City. Downtown, somewhere around Central Avenue, he’d come upon a flock of black streetwalkers in wigs and hot pants, strutting on the pavement and working the cars that cruised the street.

Several times in recent years he’d gone with prostitutes, paying twenty dollars to sit in his car parked on a dark street while a girl’s head bobbed in his lap.

He drove past them, circled the block, drove more slowly this time.

The girl he chose was tall, with long legs and full breasts and an implausible red wig. Skimpy royal blue hot pants were snug on her taut butt, and the tails of her clinging sky-blue blouse were tied in front to create a bare midriff. Her skin was very dark, her nail polish the color of dried blood, and her name, she told him, was Bambi. And her price?

“Twenty dollars,” she said, and sized him up. “Unless you be wanting to spend some money, and then we can go to my room and take our time.”

Her room was the end unit at a hot-sheets motel. She evidently rented it by the night, because there was no charade of going to the office to register. She already had the key, and they went straight to her room.

She set a price of a hundred dollars, and he didn’t bargain. It struck him that he had bought property that same week for no cash down, took title to a sixty-thousand-dollar house without parting with a dime of real money, and here he was shelling out a hundred dollars to rent a girl’s flesh for — what, an hour?

She performed orally, then spread herself on the bed for him and smiled in invitation. He started to mount her and his erection softened. She grabbed and pumped with her hand, impatient, and hurt him, and he slapped her hand away. She looked at him, a measure of irritation showing on her face, and that triggered his rage, an oceanic rage that welled up out of nowhere and turned the world red.

He slapped her, his open hand catching her full force across the face. Her head snapped back. She clawed at him. He caught her wrist with one hand, bending it back, and he doubled his other hand into a fist and buried it in the pit of her stomach.

She opened her mouth to scream. He punched her in the face, hammered at her face with his fists. His cock was rock-hard, a bar of steel.

When he stopped she was unconscious, her nose broken, her mouth bleeding, her face horribly bruised. An orgasm had erupted out of him, as unexpected and unstoppable as his rage, and rivers of semen pooled on her middle.

He stood up, but he had to sit down again. He was shaking so bad he couldn’t stand, scared as he’d never been scared in his life. For all of that, he had never before felt so utterly alive.

But what was he going to do about the girl?

She probably ought to go to the hospital. He couldn’t take her there, but could he just leave her here? Suppose she’d memorized his license plate number. Even if she hadn’t, she could certainly recognize him again. Of course he didn’t come to Kansas City that often, and rarely at night.

Had he told her he was from Topeka? Had he, God help him, told her his name?

“I’m Bambi.”

“My name’s Mark.”

But no last name, and there’d been no card to sign at the desk, no desk at all, no likelihood that he’d been seen or his plate number noted. All she knew was that his name was Mark and he was from Topeka and he drove a Chevy Nova — this was long before the days of the Lincoln. And she might get somebody to come looking for him, because, Christ, he’d really done a job on her, he could have killed her—

Be a lot simpler if he had, he realized. Safer, easier all around. No loose ends.

You could still do it.

His mind didn’t know what to make of the thought. His body, however, responded instantly and unequivocally, his penis springing fully erect, painful in its urgency. Just moments ago he had shuddered in the most powerful climax of his life, and now he was gripped by desire greater than anything in his experience.

She had removed her sky-blue blouse. He got it from the chair where she’d hung it, felt its silky texture in his hands. He got on top of her, spread her legs, thrust into her inert flesh. A low moan bubbled up through her puffy lips.

He wrapped the blouse around her throat, took an end in each hand, and drew his hands apart.

She died. He came, and felt reborn.

After the ecstasy, the horror.

First, though, the urgent need to get away, and to escape safely. He had no idea what he might have touched, but he used a towel to wipe his prints from every likely surface. The five twenty-dollar bills he’d given her were in her purse, and while he didn’t think currency would hold fingerprints well, neither could he think of a compelling reason to leave them behind. He doubted that he’d left many fingerprints; the motel room was soiled and squalid, and his natural inclination had been to avoid unnecessary contact with anything in it.

He fled. He forced himself to observe the speed limit returning to Topeka, not wanting anything that might establish his presence in Kansas City that night. Back home, he drank two ounces of whiskey straight from the bottle, scrubbed himself in the shower. First thing in the morning he took the Nova through a car wash. She had been in the car, and when the boys scrubbed and vacuumed the interior, they might remove some traces of her presence.

There was a three-paragraph story the following day in the Kansas City Star, and no follow-up to it over the next several weeks. When a month had passed without incident he allowed himself to believe that he had gotten away with it.

It was, after all, hardly the crime of the century. A black streetwalker, beaten to death in a sordid motel room. What clues did the police have to work with? No license number, no eyewitness description of the killer, no fingerprints. He’d left his seed on her belly and in her loins, and he’d very likely left pubic hairs entwined with her own, but so, he suspected, had other of her clients. The police could tell a lot about you from that sort of physical evidence, and once they had reason to suspect you they could either clear you or tighten the ring of circumstantial evidence with blood and semen and hair, but in the absence of other clues they would have no reason to beat a path to your door.

He had killed. For no reason more rational than rage he had battered a young woman senseless. With no motive more justifiable than blood lust he had strangled her. The thought sickened him even as the memory continued, God help him, to thrill him.

Well, it would never happen again.

But of course it did.

Again and again and again. In eight years, he had killed an astonishing total of fifty-three women. Every now and then the urge would come on him, triggered by a scent or a smile or a pout or the swell of a breast or the curve of a hip. His blood would race with the need for satisfaction, and there was only one way that kind of satisfaction could be achieved.

Sometimes he fought the urge, stifling it for a greater or lesser period of time. Sometimes he gave in to it as soon as he conveniently could. He was always prudent, always kept risks to a minimum, but as soon as an appropriate victim provided herself, he took her.

He was clever about it, and he took a certain pride in his cleverness. Early on he realized that the best way to avoid detection was to keep the authorities from suspecting that his various homicides were all the work of a single killer. He read about other serial killers, and they all seemed to be wedded to some variable that stamped all their killings as having been done by the same hand. They used the same murder method, or they picked the same type of victim, or they left the same kind of diorama at the murder scene.

He purposely did things differently each time from the last. Now a knife, now a scarf, now his bare hands. An ice spick, a hammer, a length of clothesline. One time the girl would be nude, another time she’d be fully clothed, and on the next occasion she might be tied up. He had a lifetime of delicious fantasies to draw upon and an imagination more than equal to the task of supplying new fantasies. Of his fifty-three episodes, no two had been quite the same.

No cute crap, though. No blood smears on the walls, no lipstick marks on the dead woman’s forehead. He was not playing a game with the police. The thrill was not in tempting fate, in almost getting caught. The thrill — and God knew it was thrill enough — the thrill was in the doing.

Mrs. Minnick, whose round plumpness had inspired him in Denver, had never been at risk. He had been careful from the beginning never to select a woman whom he knew personally, or one who could be connected with him in any conceivable way. The simple act of murder was the only tie between him and his victims.

That was his rule, but he had broken it once. One afternoon he’d been showing a house in Kansas City. The prospective tenant was a divorced woman, new in town; her children were in school and she was looking at houses and apartments, and oh, she was just too delicious to resist, with thin wrists and ankles and lank blond hair and librarian’s glasses and rabbity front teeth, not traditionally pretty but wonderfully desirable.

He asked her enough questions to determine that no one knew where she was. And it was still impossibly risky, because anyone in the neighborhood might have noticed her car parked in the driveway, but he weighed the risks and decided she was worth it. God, she was nice!

He picked up a heavy glass ashtray and knocked her unconscious with a series of blows to the back of the head. He used a cord from one of the floor lamps to tie her hands and feet, and gagged her with her own pantyhose. He hurried down to his own car and fetched a large screwdriver from the trunk. She was conscious by the time he got back, flopping around on the carpet like a beached fish.

He talked to her for a while, and he felt her tits through her clothes and reached up under her skirt to fondle her. Then, when he just couldn’t stand it another minute, he thrust the blade of the screwdriver up one of her nostrils and into her brain.

Afterward, in the quietest part of the night, he carried her out of the house and loaded her into the trunk of her car. He drove to Crown Center and left the car at a municipal parking ramp. He took a cab back to his rental house and drove his own car home. He threw the screwdriver down a storm sewer, and he tossed the pantyhose and the lamp cord into a trash can. A day later he vacuumed the carpet where she’d flopped about and put a new cord on the lamp.

Now, while Marilee slept, he made himself a cup of tea with milk and sugar and took it to his den. He put the TV on but devoted most of his attention to the newspaper, giving the real estate listings and the financial pages a thorough review.

His daughter came home around ten-thirty. He heard her and called to her, and she came in and sat with him for a few minutes before going upstairs. After she’d kissed him and left he remembered he hadn’t said anything to her about missing her graduation.

Well, he’d tell her the next day. Or leave it for Marilee to handle. Anyway, he didn’t think Jennifer would be all that torn up about it.

She’d get a good present, and that ought to take some of the sting out of his absence.

He put the paper aside and thought, by no means for the first time, of the clashing inconsistency of his life. He loved his wife and daughter, was indeed devoted to them, and at the very same time he was passionately addicted to the sport of killing women for pleasure. For that was what he did; he hunted them down and killed them with the same delight that some other men killed deer — not for the chase or for the venison, but for the unutterable joy of killing.

The women he preyed on were other men’s wives, other men’s daughters. How would he feel if someone else used Jennifer as he had used Cindi in Denver? How would he feel if some other man gazed greedily into Marilee’s eyes while she died?

He forced the thoughts aside. They had come before, they would come again. He forced them aside.

And thought instead about some of the things he had done over the past eight years and some of the women he had done them to. He gave himself up to his memories and let himself be stirred by them.

A shame he hadn’t had more time in Denver. She was nice, Cindi, and he would have liked taking his time with her. And yet there was something especially exciting about the speed of it. Just a couple of minutes and she was gone, almost before she knew what was happening to her.

He got up, paced back and forth across the oriental carpet. Jesus, he’d done Cindi just a week ago and he was ready to go again. Usually it was a month or more before he felt this agitated, but he felt like going out right this minute.

He wouldn’t, of course. But neither would he wait a month. There was no real need to space his killings, so long as he didn’t do anything to attract attention. It was not as though there was an annual bag limit for hunters. Women were not an endangered species. They were all over the place; the country was teeming with them.

The summer stretched out before him, warmly inviting. There was no reason he couldn’t make himself a gift of the next three months. His business dealings would largely run themselves. At the same time, the prospect of business would justify extended absences; all he had to do was announce that he had a big deal taking shape, and he could be out of town for the whole summer without ruffling anyone’s feathers. He need only call home a few times a week, and drop in once or twice to take care of business locally, and he could have the whole summer to himself.

And it was still two weeks until Midsummer Eve. His count stood at fifty-three now. By the first day of autumn, how great a string might he have?

Seventy? Eighty? A hundred?

He remembered John Randall Spears thundering at them during the real estate seminar. “If your properties yield up a positive cash flow, there is nothing in the world to prevent you from acquiring more of them. If you can own one house you can own a hundred houses, you can own a thousand houses. There is no limit to the amount of wealth you can create. There is no limit to the amount of property you can own!”

No limit.