Serial

46

Pearl was glad she’d drawn this assignment. She’d given her interview with Jock Sanderson a lot of thought. The way she figured it, they were already in the territory where the Skinner might assume the woman who was his main target, the focus of his revenge, would seem to be simply one in a line of Skinner victims, none distinguishable from the others. Thus none of the suspects would in any meaningful way be distinguishable from the others. At least that was how the killer would see it. When he thought his safety in numbers was adequate, he would kill the one true object of his rampage.

And of course, his one true object couldn’t be distinguished by being the last killed.

Perhaps that one true object had been Judith Blaney.

Sanderson seemed surprised to see Pearl, which struck her as odd, considering they had an appointment. Pearl wondered if he preferred that his questioner were a man. Maybe a woman seeking the killer of women made him uneasy. If so, all the better.

Afraid of women? Sometimes these creeps are deeply afraid.

Jock Sanderson was a medium-height man whose compact build made him appear shorter. It was Pearl’s experience that men with that physical characteristic were deceptively strong. But then Quinn was tall and rangy, and he was unusually strong even for his size. Pearl warned herself not to categorize people on the basis of small samplings; in her business that could prove fatal.

Sanderson had the kind of eyes that picked up the dominant color around them, and a full head of wavy black hair. He would have been downright handsome if there hadn’t been a crookedness to his features that spoiled the effect. He had a nice smile.

“Please come in,” he said, making a sweeping motion with his right arm to invite her grandly into his squalid apartment, as if he were a butler at a posh estate.

Well, the apartment wasn’t actually squalid. Though the furniture was a bit worn and mismatched, the place was clean and ordered. So much so, in fact, that Pearl pegged Sanderson for kind of a neatnik.

As she moved past him he did a nifty little dance to get out of her way, as if he wanted to stay on the perimeter of her attention but not too close.

Pearl crossed the living room and sat on a sofa draped with a rose-pattern slipcover. It reminded her of the sofa in her mother’s living room when she was a kid. There was what looked like a cigarette burn in it.

“Cool enough in here for you?” Sanderson asked, smiling for about the third time since she’d arrived. He had even white teeth that he obviously liked to flash.

“Just right,” Pearl said. Though it was past eleven and the morning hadn’t yet heated up, an old window unit was humming away on alert without the compressor engaged. There was a faint odor in the place, as if someone had recently been frying fish. She drew her notepad from a pocket of her linen jacket and found the pencil tucked inside its leather cover. She flipped to the first unmarked page. “You said on the phone that you already knew about Judith Blaney’s death.”

“True,” Sanderson said. “I always watch local news in the morning before I go to bed.” He sat perched on the substantial arm of a hulking chair covered with brown corduroy. “The murder of a beautiful woman. Another Skinner victim. That kind of thing doesn’t take long to make the news.”

“You said you watched the morning news ‘before’ going to bed?”

“True.” As if Pearl had gotten another one right. The white smile. “I work nights. Usually get home sometime around six in the morning. Then I shower, shave, eat a healthy breakfast, and go to bed.”

Too much detail, Pearl thought. Lying?

“How did you feel when you heard about Judith Blaney’s death?” Pearl asked.

“I was glad.” No change of expression on the almosthandsome features.

“She was tortured before she died.”

“I know a lot about torture.”

Pearl raised an eyebrow.

“From being in prison,” Sanderson explained.

“Tortured at whose hands?”

“You’d be surprised. A rapist isn’t high on the scale of respect when it comes to the other prisoners. And for that matter, let’s include the guards. Some of them think the thing to do is to make sure the inmate understands what it feels like to be raped. There are too many unguarded places, times. There’s no one to stop them from doing what they want.”

“You were raped in prison?”

“Many more times than once.” He swallowed hard enough for her to hear the phlegm crack in his throat. The expression on his face caused a pang of pity in Pearl.

“I know it won’t help to say I’m sorry,” she said, “but I am.” It was odd, she thought, that he’d make it a point to bring up the subject. Other than as an explanation of what he’d had to go through because of Judith Blaney. Didn’t he know he was giving himself a motive?

“I was physically what you would call attractive when I went behind the walls,” Sanderson said. “I was repeatedly beaten, along with the other indignities. That’s why I look now like I might be an ex-boxer.”

Pearl didn’t think he looked like a former fighter, but she let him go ahead and think she did. His hands were too delicate looking to have been taped and used as blunt instruments.

“You raise my curiosity,” she said.

“I’m not gay,” he said. “Never was.” Sanderson drew a deep breath, as if to steady himself. “But that’s not what you’re here to talk about.”

“No,” Pearl said. She tested the pencil to make sure it had a sharp enough point. “Judith Blaney was killed sometime around eleven o’clock last night.”

“I’ve got some coffee on,” Sanderson said. “Would you like some?”

“No,” Pearl said. This guy was something. “I would like some answers instead of more verbal dancing around.”

“Sure. My bad.” He actually looked embarrassed. “At ten last night I was working with a crew cleaning up the old Superior Theater on West Forty-sixth Street. Some kind of church or other had rented it for a revival meeting that went until just past ten. We were waiting and started working as soon as the place cleared.” He shifted position on the chair arm. “You know the Superior? It’s been shut down as a movie theater for years, but it’s still in use. Different kinds of events take place there.”

“I know it,” Pearl said. “It was a porno theater in its later years.”

“Yeah. Shame.”

“Who employs you, Mr. Sanderson?”

“Company called Sweep ’Em Up. It’s a janitorial service that cleans up the venues after sporting events, lectures, political rallies… whatever. You can probably tell from this apartment that it doesn’t pay well, but you don’t get your pick of jobs when prison’s on your resume.”

“How’d you get this one?”

“There’s a prisoner-placement service, a charity thing. And my AA sponsor Dave vouched for me. So far, it’s worked out well enough, but I’d like to get something better someday. Move up in the world, far as I can go, anyway.”

Another suspect with a drinking problem. Well, that should be no surprise. “What else does Sweep ’Em Up clean?” Pearl asked.

“Oh, we’re a big outfit. We clean Broadway and off-Broadway theaters, hotel ballrooms…”

“How long you been working there?”

“Couple of years. It’s the only job I’ve had since I got out. It’s helped me stay straight, stay out of trouble.”

“Do you attend AA meetings regularly?”

“Now and then, I’d say. I’ve been sober for nine months now. I won’t lie to you. I fell off the wagon a few times. But Dave and my faith in a higher power picked me up and made me sober.”

“That’s good,” Pearl said.

“I try.” The wide, white smile. “Gotta keep trying.”

“People can vouch for you being at work from about ten o’clock last night until past dawn?”

“Oh, yeah. The whole crew. Six of them, not counting me. And the company locks us in as soon as we set to work. For our own good. Safety. And you know, in the event anything big gets stolen, we don’t get blamed. They leave a guard outside one of the doors, so we can get out in case of a fire.”

“You worked all night?”

“Somebody sure did. Go by and look at the place. We swept up and bagged all the trash and bottles and condoms. Yeah, condoms even at a revival meeting. You’d be surprised.”

“Not me,” Pearl said, thinking for some reason of Nancy Weaver. She pretended to scribble something with her pencil. “I will talk to Sweep ’Em Up and the people involved. To check your story.”

“I wish you would.”

“You said you were glad when you heard Judith Blaney had been murdered. Can you explain that a little more?”

“What’s to explain? The bitch was responsible for ruining my life. After what happened to me, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t feel glad about what happened to her.”

Pearl smiled. “I guess you know that gives you a motive.”

“I’ve got an alibi, too, thank God.”

“Tell me, Mr. Sanderson, after you were proven innocent and got out of prison, didn’t you even once consider…”

“Killing Judith Blaney?” He crossed his arms, and muscles rippled. He shouldn’t have been such a pushover in prison. But then some of those cons pumped iron half the day, building themselves into perfect thugs. An ordinary man like Sanderson wouldn’t have stood a chance without somebody in the cellblock to back him. And like he said, rapists were on the rung just above child molesters. Even the worst cons had something like morals. “To be honest,” he said, “I did think about killing her.”

“ Really think about it?”

“No, not really. It takes balls to kill somebody, and I lost those in prison. Figuratively speaking.”

“Good,” Pearl said. “I mean about the figurative part.”

She looked for the toothy white smile, but it didn’t appear.

After replacing her notebook and pencil in her purse, she stood up and thanked Sanderson. He straightened up from where he was perched on the chair arm.

She handed him her card. “If you think of something…”

“I won’t,” Sanderson said. “I don’t intend to think of Judith Blaney at all. Alive or dead.”

As Pearl left the apartment, she decided she didn’t blame him.

“I checked out his story,” Pearl told Quinn later that day in the office. “There’s no doubt where he was when Judith Blaney was killed. He’s got seven witnesses confirming his alibi, including a uniformed security guard.”

“So we cross off another one,” Quinn said. “Jock Sanderson isn’t the Skinner.”

“He’s another guy with a drinking problem.”

Quinn nodded where he sat in his desk chair. “What happened to those men, to be wrongly convicted of rape and then serve time, it figures to drive some of them to drink when finally they do get out and realize they still wear the badge of dishonor.”

“I guess,” Pearl said. “It’s a complicated problem with a simple but damned difficult solution.”

“Probably most of the men still alive on our list of thirty-two have a drink or drug problem.”

“Maybe the Skinner does.”

“No,” Quinn said. “I have some idea of what makes him tick.”

Pearl remembered that Quinn himself had once been falsely accused of rape.

“Being falsely accused of a heinous crime has its effects,” Quinn said. “Instead of drinking, shooting up, or sniffing, the Skinner kills.”

“And Jerry Lido becomes a computer maniac.”

“Right.”

“Trading one addiction for another.”

“I suppose.”

“And you?”

“Me?”

“Your addiction is that you need a mission,” Pearl said. “Is that what you traded for?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

He smiled. “That would be you or Cuban cigars, Pearl.”

“You’ve already got Cuban cigars, in your desk drawer.”

“That’s a fact, Pearl.”

Jock Sanderson left the AA meeting alone. It had taken place in a room above a restaurant. There was nothing fancy about it, and it could do with a visit from Sweep ’Em Up. There was a slightly raised platform at one end, and metal folding chairs were lined up facing it. A large framed photograph of a smiling President Kennedy hung on the wall across from the door. No one seemed to know why. The room had a separate entrance with a stairway leading up from a door at street level.

Jock had without doubt been the most interesting member there this evening. He’d stood up and told the others everything about Judith’s murder. Well, not everything. He’d almost convinced himself that the torture and murder had occurred as a complete surprise to him. Faking sincerity. He’d long thought that was what got you ahead in life, phony sincerity. If you had luck to go with it. The luck was what Jock had never had, but now maybe things had turned a corner.

Dave, his sponsor, had left the meeting ahead of him and was waiting out on the sidewalk.

“You gonna be okay, Jock?” Dave asked, concern on his alcohol-ravaged face.

“I am,” Jock said. “I was tempted, but I denied myself. I’ll be okay.”

“The devil’s waiting to move in on you if you give it half a chance,” Dave said.

“And I know it, Dave. But I’ve got God on my side now.”

“That’s good. Wanna go for some coffee?”

“I think I need to be alone, Dave. Deal with the grief.”

“You suffer grief over the death of a woman who wrongly accused you of rape?”

“I do. I mean, the way she was killed. So horrible. It requires God’s understanding, Dave, but I can try. Judith Blaney did nothing to me deliberately. She made an honest mistake.”

“You sure of that, Jock?”

“I am. She had no reason to lie.”

Dave stepped back and regarded him. “I think you’re going to be okay, Jock.”

“I am.”

“But stay on your guard.” Dave hugged him, then turned and walked away.

“On my guard,” Jock said after him. “That’s me.”

But he was thinking it was other people who’d better be on their guard.