Silent Terror

13

The city I chose was San Francisco, and my only reason for doing so was that its topography was antithetical to L.A.’s. Terraced hillsides and Victorian houses would not pulse with hidden messages from my past, and the city’s relative lack of neon would mean diminished penal-code hallucinations. Los Angeles had formed me and owned me and driven me out; San Francisco was the opportunity to nullify my personal history and forge new drives in memory-free surroundings.

So, with the simple traversing of 430 miles, I went from increasingly lucid indicators of my destiny to an amnesia made easy by San Francisco’s newness. I rented an apartment on 26th and Geary in the Richmond District, wiping out the bulk of my savings furnishing it with innocuous non-steel furniture and pastoral framed prints. The exigencies of behaving like so-called normal people were softly satisfying, and I began to think I could play the role for a long, long time.

Deciding to give myself a week before looking for work, I explored the city. Quaintness, oldness and prettiness were manifest, and a sense of grace seemed to imbue the people I saw on the street — they were, on the average, far more attractive than L.A. inhabitants, with a greater ethnic diversity, and a fairly large number of them were traffic-stopping blonds.

I didn’t stop for them, though; an unseen weight pushed my foot onto the accelerator when those comely reminders of my past appeared. It was solid evidence that my benign amnesia was holding. Other signs — dreams filled with pastel colors, quiet nighttime walks, the loss of my gun obsession — added up to the magically simple word happiness.

And continued happiness required money. My week of tranquility had eaten up all but two hundred dollars of my funds, and I needed the quick replenishment of a weekly paycheck. On my eighth morning in San Francisco I got out the Yellow Pages and looked for employment agencies with casual labor pools. I found a half-dozen of them listed, all on the same block of South Mission. I drove there, anxious to carve another notch on my serenity.

It was a skid-row block, the kind that in Los Angeles had always depressed me. But here the seediness seemed almost charming, and as I locked my van and consulted my agency list, I got a feeling of belonging. Propelled by it, I pushed through a door marked “Mighty-Man Job Shop” and walked up to a paper-littered front counter.

A young woman with shoulder-length black hair looked up from her desk and smiled at me, then said, “You’re the man from Orinda who wanted three slaves — oops — I mean Mighty-Men to do yard work, right?” She consulted some forms in front of her and added, “Eddington, right? You said you’d send your chauffeur to pick the winos — I mean workers — up?”

Caught off guard by her directness, I blurted, “What?”

She smiled at my befuddlement. “You mean you’re not Eddington, but you need slaves?”

I looked into her eyes and saw that she was probably high. “No, I—”

“Then you came to ask me for a date?”

I realized I was being flirted with. I got a hollow “nothing” feeling, and reflexively grasped for Shroud Shifter’s counsel, then snapped to the fact that this was San Francisco, not L.A., and S.S. was supposed to be obsolescent. “I’m new in town,” I said. “I need work, and I saw your ad in the Yellow Pages.”

The woman said, “God, I’m sorry, it’s just that you’re so neatly dressed, and... well... mostly the guys we get are boozehounds and dopers, you know, looking for a few bucks to get bombed on. Are you crashing here on the Row?”

“I’ve got an apartment,” I said.

She looked surprised. “Where?”

“Twenty-sixth and Geary.”

Now she looked astonished. “God, my boyfriend lives on that block. Listen, you look sort of middle-class, so I’ll hip you to something. We pay our guys minimum wage for menial stuff like passing out handbills, unloading non-union trucks, that kind of thing. Our basic scam is that we pay in cash at the end of the day. That way, the slaves blow their money on wine and dope every night and come back the next morning. If you can afford to live in the Richmond, you can’t afford to work out of here.”

Now I was astonished — I was starting to like the woman. “I spent my savings moving in; now I need to find work so I can keep the place.”

“Wow, a real working man in a bind.” The woman took a cigarette from the pack on her desk, lit it and smoked in silence for long moments. Finally she snapped her fingers and walked to the counter. Leaning forward conspiratorially so that her hair brushed my face, she said, “Go over to the S.F. State campus and check out the bulletin board outside the student employment office. They’ve got lots of jobs listed for decent bucks. Just rip off the cards for the jobs you’re interested in, call the numbers and tell them you’re a grad student who goes to school at night so you can work full-time. You’re big and you look smart, so you should get hired. Got it?”

I said, “Got it,” and drew away from the cascade of hair. The woman straightened up and smiled, and I knew that she had relished our contact. Holding out her hand, she said, “I’m Jill, by the way.”

Intending a perfunctory shake, but taking the hand gently, I said, “I’m Martin.”

“Good luck, Martin.”

“Th-thank you for your help.”

Consciously shutting down the delicacies of the exchange, I followed the woman’s advice and drove to the San Francisco State campus. The bulletin board she had mentioned was covered with cards offering work, and I deviated from her plan only by memorizing the jobs and phone numbers rather than stealing the information. From a pay phone I called the advertisers, getting three no-answers for the clerical openings, and a brusque male “Yes” for the manual labor card.

“I’m calling about the job you posted at S.F. State,” I said.

“Are you a full-time student?” the voice asked.

“I’m a night grad student.”

“Are you husky? Pardon my French, but this is no job for a candy-ass.”

“I’m six-three, two hundred and strong. What exactly do I have to do?”

“Have you got transportation?”

“Yes. What—”

“I’m a real-estate developer in Sausalito. I need a husky kid to clear tree stumps out of my new site. It’s tough work, but the pay is a five-spot an hour, off the books, with no deductions. What’s your name?”

“Martin Plunkett.”

“Okay, Marty, I’m Sol Slotnick. You want the job?”

“Yes.”

“Can you meet my foreman tomorrow? In Sausalito?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then write this down: Over the Golden Gate, off the highway at exit four, right turn, left turn at Wolverton Road. You’ll see a big field with signs posted — Sherlock Homes, a logo with the detective guy. Tomorrow at eight. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“A-okay. You’re gonna need tools, an ax and a scythe, but I’ll supp—”

I interrupted my new employer. “I’ll supply my own tools, Mr. Slotnick.”

“Do your own thing, huh? Okay, kid, good luck.”

That night I devastated my remaining money. At an army surplus store I bought khaki work pants and shirt, a pair of waterproof hiking boots, a webbed cartridge belt and my first instruments of brushed-steel utility since my burglar’s tools years before: one short-handled ax, one long-handled ax and one heavy-duty gardener’s scythe. The ax heads were coated with transparent Teflon, and guaranteed to be “self-sharpening” — the more you used them, the sharper they were supposed to get. It sounded too good to be true, so I bought a sharpening stone to back up the claim.

The next day I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to the “Sherlock Homes” site. It was a huge clearing overgrown with brash and dotted with tree stumps, surrounded on all sides by thick pine forest — months of work for one man. The foreman told me that Mr. Slotnick wanted the job completed by September 10, when the construction crew was scheduled to begin laying the foundations, and if I was lucky and the environmentalists didn’t fuck things up, I could get an additional job chopping down trees across the highway at the proposed site of Slotnick’s “Singles Paradise” tract. After explaining that all I had to do was uproot every tree stump on the property and chop down all the brush and let it lie for the bulldozers, the man pointed to the tools affixed to my belt and said, “You look like a pro, so I won’t be coming around to check on you. Payday is every Friday at five, here.” Shaking my hand, he left me alone with nature.

And nature, even though I was conspiring against her, gave me four and a half uninterrupted months of exhilarating beauty and blessedly mindless work.

I swung and hacked with my axes and scythe from April through August, eight hours a day, seven days a week, oblivious to heat waves and torrential rain. Shock waves pulsed through my body as I worked, and I felt myself getting stronger and stronger, but I never worried about developing attention-attracting muscles as I had in jail, because the scent of hay and ripped wood protected me, the pines enveloped me, and when I chopped with my eyes closed I saw pretty soft colors, shades that got darker the harder I swung, but still remained kind and gentle in my mind. Completely exhausted at the end of each day, the colors held at the corner of my vision as I drove home, ate dinner and fell immediately into deep sleep.

I was parking my van outside my apartment one night in early September when I heard, “Martin! Hi!” The words didn’t fully register at first — no one had addressed me by name in months, and I was exhausted from an especially long day’s work and hungry for food and sleep. Then the voice repeated itself — “Hi, Martin!” — and I looked across the street and saw a pretty woman with long black hair. The hair, backlighted by a streetlamp, drew me like a magnet, and I walked over to her.

She was standing on the sidewalk with a man, and they were weaving very slightly, as if tipsy. It took me a few seconds, hut finally an image of hair brushing my face gave me the woman’s name. Shroud Shifter, appearing out of nowhere, hissed, BE NICE. “Hello, Jill,” I said. “Nice to see you.”

Jill giggled and reached for her companion’s arm. “We’re really zonked. Did you get a job? You must have, you’ve still got the place.”

Shroud Shifter was waving a conductor’s baton, whispering something I couldn’t hear. “Yes, I followed your advice. It worked, and I’ve been working ever since.”

Jill said, “Great. Steve, this is Martin; Martin, this is Steve.”

I turned my attention to the boyfriend, a surly type with ridiculous muttonchop sideburns. S.S. was saying BE NICE BE NICE BE NICE. I said, “Hey, Steve, what’s happenin’,” and stuck out my hand hippie-style. Steve said, “What’s happenin’, man,” and gave me a counterculture bone-crusher. I winced in mock pain, and Jill laughed. “Steve’s an airline mechanic, and he’s really strong. You want to come up for a drink or something?”

At the “or something,” S.S. waggled his eyebrows. I said, “Right on,” and Jill got between her boyfriend and me and took our arms, saying in a stage whisper, “I am so stoned.” Her hand on my elbow felt alternately hot and cold and soft and hard, but the touching wasn’t the least scary. We walked three abreast halfway down the block and up the steps of a Victorian four flat, and Steve unlocked the door and flipped on a light switch. Jill dropped my arm and said, “There’s something Stevie’s been alter me to do for a long time, and now I’m just stoned enough to do it.” She skipped through the living room, and my eyes automatically circled the four walls.

Airline posters were crookedly Scotch-Taped along them, and of all the countries represented, Tahiti and Japan jumped out at me, as if I had once visited them. Shutting the door, Steve said, “I been all these places at least twice. You work for Pan-Am, you get two free trips a year, bring your chick if you want.” He pointed to the as clipped to my belt. “You a carpenter?”

I said, “I’m a tree surgeon,” and surveyed the room again, wondering why places I had never seen seemed so familiar. Steve was giving me a strange look, so to put him at ease I added, “Jill got me my job. I was broke when I first landed in town, and I hit Mighty-Man looking for a gig. Jill sent me down to the S.F. State employment office.”

Steve said, “Jill’s the friendly type,” and S.S. sent me a series of snapshots: Jill flirting and sleeping with other men, but always returning to Steve, who was grateful to have her back and would take her on long reconciliation trips to exotic places, courtesy of his employer; Steve brooding over being treated like a doormat, getting drunk with his mechanic buddies and railing against Jill, but always calling her from the bar to tell her he’d be late.

“What are you drinkin’, man?”

Steve’s voice snapped me out of the movie he had been co-starring in. “You got a beer?” I said.

“Does a bear shit in the woods? Come on, let’s hit the fridge.”

I followed Steve into a small kitchen. More airline posters were taped to the walls, but the grease-coated pictures of Paris and the Bavarian Alps did not dig at my memory. Steve caught my look again, and said, “You’re scopin’ them posters like a man who needs a vacation.” He opened the refrigerator and pulled out two cans of beer. When he handed me one, I said, “Yeah, Tahiti or Japan, maybe.”

Popping his can, Steve said, “Those places suck. The food sucks, and the Japs look like the slopes in ’Nam.” He guzzled beer and belched, then laughed. “Coors, breakfast of champions. We had the Coors Olympics at work last year. Guy who won drank four six-packs, held t in for two hours, then filled a gallon gas can with piss. That was the triathalon. Get it? Three events, like in the real Olympics. You been to ’Nam?”

I leaned against a grease-spattered wall and pretended to sip my beer. Shroud Shifter teletyped BE SMART BE SMART BE SMART across Steve’s face, and I said, “I was Four-F. An old football injury.”

Steve belched. “You didn’t miss much. You play End?”

“What?”

“What do you mean, what? You’re tall, you masta at least tried out for End.”

“Third-string quarterback,” I said self-effacingly.

Steve smiled at my calculated commiseration. “Third string, the story of my life. I wonder what Jill’s doing. She usually loves to bullshit with visitors.”

“Did somebody mention my name?”

I turned my head in the direction of the words. Jill was standing in the kitchen doorway wearing a robe, with a towel wrapped around her head like a turban. She said, “Remember those old Clairol ads? ‘If I’ve got only one life, let me live it as a blonde’? Well, watch.”

With a flourish she pulled off the towel and shock her head. Her lovely black hair was now peroxide yellow, and Shroud Shifter flashed DON’T LET HER DON’T LET HER DON’T LET HER DON T LET—

I unclipped my self-sharpening, Teflon-coated, brushed-steel ax and swung it at her neck. Her head was sheared cleanly off; blood burst from the cavity; her arms and legs twitched spastically; then her whole body crumpled to the floor. The force of my swing spun me around, and for one second my vision eclipsed the entire scene — blood-spattered walls; the body shooting an arterial geyser out the neck, the heart still pumping in reflex; Steve, frozen on his feet, turning a catatonic blue.

I reversed my stance, flipped the handle so that I had the blade side out, and roundhoused my return shot left-handed. The blow caught Steve in the side of the head, and there was a sound like cracking eggs amplified ten million times. The blade stuck, and for long seconds I was holding the already dead man up on his feet. Then I yanked, and the body pitched forward while my ax flew in the opposite direction, brains and blood lubricating its flight.

Then Steve fell and began making gurgling sounds;

Then his limbs did their death dance;

Then a jet of blood burst from his skull into my eyes.

Then I came, and all the colors I had seen on the job combined, and hurled me to the floor to form a triad.

I awakened hours later. A telephone was ringing, and I could taste linoleum and blood. Opening my eyes, I saw a section of floor and two beer cans lying on their sides. I began to sense what had happened and held back sobs, then sent brain messages to my arms and legs to see if I had been given amputation as punishment for my crimes. My fingers scratched a cold surface and my legs jerked, and I felt grateful. The phone stopped ringing, and I wondered whom to be grateful for. Then the piece of floor and the beer cans were gone, replaced by red print on blank paper: ME ME ME ME ME ME ME.

On blank brain film, I typed YES YES YES YES YES. TELL ME WHAT TO DO.

Shroud Shifter said, Open your eyes. I obeyed, and he and Lucretia were there nude. I was memorizing their bodies when S.S. rebuked me in the harshest voice he had ever used: We are fantasy parents you have utilized since childhood. We give you what you need so that you may do what you have to do. You have experienced what some people would call a psychotic episode. In point of fact, sooner or later, premeditatedly, you would have done what you did.

Pausing, Shroud Shifter allowed me a moment to respond. I typed why?

He said, you are a murderer, Martin.

It was the first time he had ever addressed me by name.

I begged him to say it again, so that I would know what to do. He consented.

You are a murderer, Martin.

You are a murderer, Martin.

You are a murderer, Martin.

With my destiny ringing in my ears and my self-admitted fantasy father leading me step by step, I earned the title. First I thoroughly wiped every surface I might have touched, then I negated the forensic evidence of my ax blows by desecrating the two corpses at the places where I cut them down, using a kitchen knife and meat mallet to subterfuge blade marks and impact points. The work was messy, but I willed my brain to consider it tedious. When I was finished, I washed my hands, took off my bloodsoaked khakis, put on a jump suit from Steve’s closet and wrapped up my clothes and boots in seven layers of trash-bag plastic. With my bare feet free of foreign matter, I picked up my ax and webbed belt and checked my watch. It was 3:16 A.M. Turning off the lights, I left the apartment. There was no one on the street. I walked home and fell asleep seeing colors.

From the front page of the San Francisco Examiner, September 4, 1974:

From the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 1974:

From the Berkeley Barb, September 11, 1974:

14

While the events described in the preceding accounts were taking place, I was invisible in the storm center, lucid and gracefully careful, as apprentices should be when they finally achieve the status of Professional.

You are a murderer, Martin.

Awakening from my post-killing color sleep at 7:30, I automatically shaved and showered and prepared myself for work. I knew exactly what I had done and what I had to do, and went about it free of waking colors and brain-movies. First I dressed in my spare set of work clothes; then, knowing it was unlikely that the bodies had yet been discovered, I tossed Steve’s jump suit in with my bloodied khakis, web belt and ax, wrapped the plastic bundle up tightly and carried it out to my van. I drove to the clearing site as if my day portended business as usual, and I buried the death kit in a marsh area outside downtown Sausalito. Getaway step one completed, I sat on a rock and charted the remaining steps in mental typeface, “Business As Usual” my basic escape theme.

Neighbors may have seen you with the ax, so you need to obtain an identical ax illegally, then wear down the blade so that it will appear blood-free and well used if subjected to forensic scrutiny.

Your alibi is that you were home asleep at the time of the murders. The other tenants will corroborate you as an early riser, early returner and quiet tenant, and no one saw you on the street talking to Steve and Jill. No witnesses were present at the Mighty-Man office when you met Jill, and if she told people about meeting you and the police question you about it — you must deny it, because that line of questioning will, logically, follow their first routine questioning of all neighborhood residents. And if you change your story after first claiming not to have known her, you will become a major suspect.

The police will be taking down license numbers of every vehicle in the surrounding area, cross-checking the registration against the California Criminal Records Bureau’s files. Your burglary conviction and the fact that you recently completed your probationary term and moved here from Los Angeles will be noted, and you will be subjected to intense questioning and possible physical abuse. You must never waver in your denials of guilt, even under extreme duress, and you must refuse to take a polygraph test.

You are a murderer, Martin.

In the end, my scenario translated into reality with almost perfect fidelity. I shoplifted an ax identical to my old one at a hardware store in Sausalito and devastated the cutting edge on the site’s few remaking tree trunks. I continued my mop-up work for Mr. Slotnick, and the foreman came by and told me that on September 10 I was out of a job, because the site was going to be plowed, and the “Ecofreaks” had put the kibosh on Big Sol’s “Singles Paradise” tract. I maintained my business-as-usual plan, and the delay in discovering the bodies made my confidence grow in quantum leaps.

Then, fifty hours and ten minutes after the moment, I heard the sirens, and I looked out my front window and saw red twirling lights proclaim my name. I watched as the red was intensified by more and more police cars, then I went to bed and slept, and dream lights spelled out “You are a murderer, Martin.”

Loud knocks on my door awakened me at dawn. I put on a robe, walked over and yawned into the peephole. “Yeah? What do you want?”

A perfunctory voice answered, “Police, open up.”

In an instant I knew they had already run their vehicle cross-checks and had knowledge of my record. The thrust of my performance came to me, boldly embellished. I rubbed sleep from my eyes, opened the door and reverted to my old jailhouse persona. “Yeah, what is it?”

Three hard cases were on my doorstep. They were all as big as me, and they were all wearing crewcuts, cheap summer suits and scowls. The one in the middle, distinguishable only by a badly stained necktie, said, “Don’t you know what it is?”

“Fill me in,” I said. “It’s six-fucking A.M., and I’m dying to hear what you have to say.”

The cop on the left muttered, “Comedian,” and motioned for me to step aside. I complied with feigned reluctance, and the three filed into my living room, the necktie man immediately pointing to my ax and 3cythe propped up against the wall by the door. “What are those?” he asked.

I looked him straight in the eye. “An ax and a scythe.”

“I can see that, Plunkett. What do you use them for?”

I acted surprised at his mention of my name, and made myself hesitate three seconds, watching the other two fan out to search my apartment. “To trim my nails,” I said.

“Don’t fuck with me,” he said, easing the door shut.

“Then tell me what this is all about.”

“I’ll get to it. How long have you lived in San Francisco?”

“Since April.”

“Why do you possess those tools?”

“I’ve been working at a building site in Marin, and I use the tools to dig out tree stumps and brush.”

“I see. Who got you the job?”

“I got it off the bulletin board at S.F. State.”

“Are you a student there?”

“No.”

“Then what gave you the right to the job?”

“Being broke gave me the right. What’s—”

“Shut up. Are you sure you didn’t get the job at the Mighty-Man Agency?”

“I’m positive.”

“How many burglar.es have you pulled in San Francisco?”

“Three trillion at last count. I—”

“I said don’t fuck with me!”

I flinched backward and looked scared. Shifting performance gears, I said, “I pulled one B and E in L.A. five years ago, and I did a year, and I stayed clean and topped out my probation and moved here. I was a fucking kid when I pulled that B and E, and I haven’t done it since. Now what do you want?”

The necktie cop hooked his thumbs in his belt. The pose allowed me a view of his holstered .38, and staring straight into his eyes gave me glimpses of the low-voltage brain behind them. “You know this is serious,” he said,

I cinched the belt of my robe. “I know this is more than a burglary roust.”

“Smart lad. Did you see the police cars on this block last night?”

“Yes.”

“Wonder what was happening?”

“Yes.”

“Make any attempt to find out?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve had enough of cops to last me a lifetime. What—”

“I’ll tell you in due time. You like pussy?”

“Yeah, do you?”

“Had any lately?”

“In my dreams last night.”

“Cute. You like blondes or brunettes?”

“Both.”

“Ever get a woman to dye her hair for you?”

I laughed to cover my shock at the unanticipated question. “Snatch hair, you mean?”

The necktie cop snickered, then looked over my shoulder. I turned and saw his partners going through my kitchen drawers. When one of them gave a negative head shake, Necktie said, “Let’s change the subject.”

“How about baseball?”

“How about boys? You bisexual?”

“No.”

“Into three ways?”

“No.”

“You take it up the ass?”

“No.”

“Oh, you eat it then?”

I started to get angry for real, and my hands twitched at my sides. Necktie noticed my change of expression, and said, “Strike a nerve, cool cat? Maybe you got reamed doing your bullet in L.A.? Maybe your switch gets flipped by boys now, and you hate yourself for liking it. Maybe your switch flipped Monday night about nine o’clock when Steve and Jill suggested a party? Maybe you misinterpreted the whole scene, and when Jill wouldn’t put out you took it out on Steve with a meat mallet, and you chopped off Jill’s head because you didn’t like the way she was looking at you. How many people you killed, Plunkett?”

In the course of a microsecond, an astonishing thing happened. As I felt the color drain from my face I became my performance, my real anger became perfect real shock, and I was the innocent man falsely accused. Stammering, “Y-y-yyou mmean pppeople wwere mmurdered,” I knew that the necktie cop bought it straight down the line. When he said, “That’s right,” I saw his disappointment that I wasn’t guilty; when he said, “Where were you Monday night?” I knew the rest of the interrogation was just a formality. The revelation passed, and as I assumed a normal, sane sense of culpability, it took every ounce of my will not to gloat. “I... I w-was here,” I stuttered.

“Alone?”

“Y-y-yes.”

“What were you doing?”

“I... I got home from my job around eight-thirty. I ate dinner, then I read for an hour or so and went to bed.”

“A swinging evening. That what you usually do?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you hang out with friends?”

“I haven’t really made any friends here.”

“Don’t you get lonely?”

“Sure. Who do you think—”

“I’ll ask the questions. Do you know a woman named Jill Eversail or a man named Steven Sifakis?”

“Are they the ones...?”

“That’s right.”

“What do — did they look like?”

“She was a foxy brunette, about five-six, nice tits. You like tits?”

“Come on, Officer.”

“Okay, what about Steve Sifakis? Five-eleven, one-ninety, reddish brown hair with muttonchop sideburns. He was supposed to be hung like a mule. You dig big cocks?”

“Just my own.” I heard the two cops in the kitchen laugh, and turned around to look at them. One man was shaking his head and drawing a finger across his throat, the gesture obviously intended for Necktie. Turning back, I said, “Can we wrap this up? I have to go to work.”

“We may damn well wrap you up, Plunkett,” Necktie said slowly.

I went in for the kill, knowing I could outgame any machine in captivity. “This is getting old, so why don’t I wrap this up? Since I didn’t kill anybody, why don’t we all hotfoot it down to the station. You hit me with a lie-detector test, I pass it, you cut me loose. What do you say?”

Necktie looked past me to the leader cop. I resisted the urge to watch their signals, and concentrated on the stain that gave the cop his impromptu name. I had just decided it was chili when Necktie said, “Did you see anybody on the street when you came home Monday night?”

I considered my “victory” question for a moment, then said, “No.”

“Hear any strange noises?”

“No.”

“See any unfamiliar vehicles?”

“No.”

“Ever fuck Jill Eversall or score grass from Steve Sifakis?”

I gave Necktie a look of contempt that would have wilted the Pope. “Come on, man.”

“No, you come on. Answer my question.”

“All right. No, I never fucked Jill Eversall or scored grass from Steve Sifakis.”

One of the cops behind me cleared his throat; Necktie squared his shoulders and said, “We may be back.” The leader cop said “Stay clean” as he walked past me to the door, and the other one winked.

Of course they never came back, and I spent the next several weeks enjoying my anonymous fame as the “Richmond Ripper,” an appelation bestowed on me by an Examiner reporter. “Business as usual” were my watchwords, and I imagined myself under twenty-four-hour surveillance, my every move being scrutinized by equally anonymous forces anxious to bring me down. The conscious cultivation of paranoia kept me coming home at night when I wanted to be on the street listening to people talk about me; it kept me going to university job boards, searching out work, when I wanted to be spending the money I had hoarded on guns. It would not let me collect newspaper clippings on my crime, nor would it let me do what I most wanted to do — move on to other cities and see how they affected me. The regimen boiled down to asceticism in place of celebration, and the only thing emotionally satisfying about it was that I knew it was making me stronger.

Ten days after the killings, I found another “Heavy Labor” job — weeding an entire hillside on the edge of the U.C.-Berkeley campus. The work was tedious — exacerbated by the fact that I didn’t need the money — and eavesdropping on students’ conversations made me angry: Watergate and Nixon’s recent resignation were their favorite topics, and when they deigned to talk about me, I was dismissed as a “psycho” or “sick puppy.” I decided that on October 2, a month to the day from the murders, I would celebrate.

The time passed slowly.

I worked on the hillside, listened to students talk and read newspapers on my lunch hour. Reading the papers was like being dangled on an ego string. Articles comparing me to the Manson Family, “only smarter,” felt like yanks into the clouds; paragraphs attributing my murders to the “Zodiac” killer — a mystic psychopath who sent lurid communiques to the police — felt like being flung to the dirt. Eight straight days of no print space was the complete abandonment of a mother hurling an unwanted child into a garbage heap.

Nights were the slowest to pass.

On my way home, I would sometimes see cops rousting long-haired youths, and I would know, somehow, that I had been the catalyst of that minor chaos. Cutting a street-swath through people in my van was satisfying, because I knew they knew of my actions. But at home, in my cocoon of caution, there was only me. And though “you are a murderer, Martin,” was now my identity, I had not yet decided to stay yanked in the clouds through continuous killing.

By October 2, the Richmond Ripper case was stale media bread, and my instincts told me that the police had gone on to matters of more urgent priority. Logic joined my heart in telling me to celebrate, and I did.

It took me an entire day and night to find what I wanted, and the four-hundred-dollar price tag was infinitesimal compared to the effort of talking out of the side of my mouth to a long succession of South San Francisco hoodlums, exchanging “pedigrees” and criminal amenities, then going on a half-dozen wild-goose chases before connecting with a retired pawnshop broker looking to liquidate “hot stock.” The ultimate transaction was quick and effortless, and I was the unlawful owner of a brand-new, never-registered, untraceable Colt .357 magnum “Python” model revolver.

Now I had two talismans — one handcrafted, the other earned. At home I brought them together, threaded cylinder to muzzle. They fit perfectly, adding a tactile weight to my new identity. On my way to work the next morning I bought a box of hollow-point ammunition, and with the loaded and silencered hand cannon under my shirt, I dug weeds out of the soft dirt until dusk. Then, framed by dormitory lights and a starry night, I practiced.

Muzzle flash, recoil, the dull thuds of the silencer; slapping sounds as the bullets tore into the spade-furrowed dirt. Cordite and soil in my nostrils, and headlights from passing cars on the road above me momentarily illuminating the craters made by individual shots. My right wrist aching from the magnum’s internal combustion; emptying the spent shells into my pocket after every sixth explosion; reloading in the dark and firing, firing, firing until my box of hollow points was empty and the hillside smelled like a battlefield sans blood. Then the drive home, trembling inside, anxious to hit the open highway and just go.

But going was, at that point, inimical to business as usual, which meant “stay.” So I did stay, finishing my weeding job, but continuing at U.C.-Berkeley as a backup custodian, sweeping and mopping on the regular crew members’ staggered days off. I set my go day as Thanksgiving, November 24, and continued to live on the cheap, allowing myself one luxury: ammunition.

So as not to arouse suspicion by repeated purchases of single boxes, I drove to San Jose and bought a gross of them, a total of 7,200 rounds. I secreted the box in a heavily wooded area near the Berkeley side of the Bay Bridge, and every night after work I fired at imaginary targets on the water. Each muzzle burst/recoil/silencer thud/wave kick brought me closer to go, but I still didn’t know what it meant.

I found out the day before my departure.

My homemade silencer was virtually destroyed from overuse, so I drove to South San Francisco to find the pawnshop dealer who had sold me the Python, to see if he had connections who could sell me a professional replacement. The man smiled as I made my request, took a picture of saving ships from his wall and twirled the dial of the safe behind it. Within moments I was screwing a C.I.A. “Black Beauty” suppressor to the muzzle of my magnum and handing over five hundred dollars as payment. More than satisfied, I tucked the gun into my waistband, covered it with my shirttail and walked outside to my van. Seeing a coin-operated news rack filled with Chronicles, I walked over to buy one, hoping for a back-page mention along the lines of “still no clues in Richmond Ripper case.” I was about to feed the machine my fifteen cents when I noticed a poster tacked to the telephone pole beside the rack.

Banner print exclaimed “The Wages of Sin!!!” and below the words there was a crystal-clear photographic reproduction, with S.F.P.D. 9/4/74 written on the bottom. The words below that had to do with salvation through Jesus, but the picture in the middle caused me to shake so hard that it was impossible to read the exact message.

Jill Eversall’s severed head lay in the foreground in living black and white. The rest of her body was sprawled in the kitchen doorway. Beyond it, Steve Sifakis’s akimbo legs, blood-streaked walls and floor were visible. Shroud Shifter typed ugly ugly ugly ug — across my vision, then erased the line and replaced it with wrong disarray not ugly amateur disarray not ugly not bad amateurish not ugly not bad.

I ripped the poster off the pole and wadded it into a ball, then threw it into the gutter and ground the cardboard with both feet until my boots were soaked, seeing the Tahiti and Japan airline posters on Steve Sifakis’s walls and the original memory that had eluded me — Season’s lover hurling me topsy-turvy, darkness into light, similar posters on the wall as he beat me into humiliation. S.S. took on Country Joe McDonald’s voice and sang, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, stormy weather cause your pump to rust.” His voice faltered in mid-stanza, but I knew he was telling me to go out and buy a beautiful Polaroid camera to go with my magnum. Other instructions followed, not verbally, not typed, but telephatic. Only over the next fourteen hours, as I methodically accomplished each task, did they come to typeface life:

Buy the camera and film.

Go home and load all your property into your van, including the furniture you had originally planned to leave behind.

Drop off your keys with the old lady downstairs.

Buy a holster for your weapon, cut a hole in the bottom to accommodate the silencer, then clip the magnum to the springs underneath the van’s driver’s seat.

Sleep well, and take U.S. 66 east toward the Nevada line early tomorrow morning.

Dispose of all your furniture except the mattress after you are free and clear of the San Francisco area.

Keep the Polaroid close at hand.

Those duties behind me, professionally rendered and typefaced and check-marked upon completion, I drove east through lush Nevada pine forests, solo, with no Shroud Shifter as co-pilot. Traffic was non-existent, my gas tank was full, and I had three thousand, six hundred dollars in the glove compartment. The camera was an arm’s length away on the passenger seat. Mountains loomed behind the tall trees. I felt very peaceful.

Then I saw the hitchhikers.

They were a teenaged boy and girl, both long-haired and wearing Levi’s jackets, jeans and backpacks. I pulled to the side of the road and stopped, and seconds later the boy was at the passenger-side door, the girl directly behind him. With one hand I pulled up the locking button, with the other I reached under my seat for the holstered magnum.

“Thanks, mister!”

I fired three times, chest high, and from the way the boy and girl pitched backward I knew my shots had caught them both. Setting the hand brake and hitting the emergency blinker, I slid over the passenger seat and out of the van. The teenagers were lying on the gravel shoulder, dead. I looked past their bodies, saw that the shoulder dropped off in a small slope, and kicked the corpses over the side, then spread loose gravel on the blood from the exit wounds. A stopwatch with a ten-minute timer jumped into my brain, and I got my Polaroid from the van and ran down the hill with it.

The hitchhikers were lying in soft dirt at the bottom, joined in a jigsaw-puzzle posture — her head on the rear crook of his right leg, their fingertips crossed at divergent angles. The bodies reminded me of signal flags sending the word disarray in semafore, and I almost forgot caution in my desire to make them perfect.

But I didn’t. First I checked his chest and back, then hers, and when I saw a back exit wound on the girl and rips on her pack next to it, with no marks on the outside, I knew the spent slugs were inside. With my stopwatch reading 1:37 elapsed, I pulled down the zipper and tore through panties and blouses until my fingers hit hot steel. I put the rounds in my shirt pocket and let them burn, then furiously kicked a shallow grave out of the dirt surrounding the three of us.

6:04 elapsed.

I wiped the girl’s backpack free of fingerprints with my sleeve, then stripped the two corpses and threw their clothes and packs into the grave.

7:46 elapsed.

With the lovers nude, I placed the girl on her back and spread her legs; the boy I positioned on top of her. When the simulated intercourse was perfect, I snapped my first picture, watched the camera expel the blank print paper and waited.

9:14 elapsed

Photographic perfection imprinted itself, and weirdly, preternaturally, I knew the image was a clue to my fixations with blonds, Lauri the hooker, and things much, much older.

10:00 elapsed, alarms sounding, the realization that Shroud Shifter and I had finally merged as one. I covered the bodies with loose dirt and arranged heavy branches over the plot to hold them down.

Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

Giving myself commemorative bonus seconds, I put the snapshot in my pocket; saw that the blood on my collar was no more than the amount caused by a shaving cut; realized that next time I should steal money and possibly credit cards. When it was time to go, I obliterated my footprints by walking sideways over them on my way up the hill. At the top, the landscape was absolutely still. My van looked new in the fall sunlight, and on impulse I named it the “Deathmobile,” then drove away.