Silent Terror

17

And so the kiss made me a fugitive, and set the man who gave it free to kill with the stylish ease that I used to own.

At the time, of course, I had no idea what Ross was doing. Panic and unnamed desires kept him shut out but close — like a hot wind at my back, one that would turn me blind if I stared into it. Today, with manuscript pages and police documents accumulating on my desk and pins marking my journey on the map covering my cell wall, the lines connecting our respective murders make the dichotomy stand out in boldface: Ross discreetly choosing his victims, cloaked with a badge and extradition warrants, always returning safely to rural Wisconsin; Martin tearing cross-country in flight from real sex, seeking the perfect non-Martin to become, burning like an ant caught in sunlight through a magnifying glass held by a sadistic child.

Burning my way back to my own childhood;

Feeding sacrificial fires with a grandfather and three brothers;

Sabotaging my old caution by skipping at the edge of the flames...

Blasted out of Huyserville, I drove due east on sludgy two-lanes to Lake Geneva. The resort was thronged with athletic youths in brightly colored sportswear, and in the wake of Ross I felt inadequate to the task of working among them. The snub-nose .38, loaded in an undercarriage compartment, seemed like a poor substitute for my magnum; and I knew that if I put my hands on a victim — man, woman, young, old, ugly or attractive — they would feel like Ross, and I wouldn’t be able to finish the job. My only recourse was to force myself to forget the man — his looks, his feel, his style.

That night I did something extraordinarily out of character.

I booked a suite at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club and spent an evening celebrating an auspicious unnamed occasion, forcing myself to act like a reveler blowing off steam. I ate an overpriced meal at the “Sultan’s Steakhouse,” tipped lavishly and watched the floor show at the “Jet Setter’s Lounge.” Young hostesses in low-cut rabbit costumes looked disapprovingly at my out-of-style clothing there, but changed their tunes when I showed them my rabbit-ear room key with “Potentate’s Pad” embossed on the back. Then they accepted my stylishly handed-out twenty-dollar bills with proper humility and led me to a front-row table in the “VIP” section. I ordered Dom Perignon champagne for myself and my fellow VIP’s, and was roundly applauded. Soon the man next to me was offering cocaine, and in the spirit of the unnamed occasion I snorted it and drank greedily from the bottle at my table.

The floor show featured a vulgar buffoon named Professor Irwin Corey. His act consisted of ad-libbed double entendres and malapropisms aimed at the people sitting at the ringside tables; and although at first I found him tedious, as I snorted and drank on he became the funniest thing I had ever seen. Old notions of control kept my laughter internal until Corey pointed to a fat drunk who was snoring with his head on the table. In the voice of an oriental sage, the Professor said, “You drink to forget, Papa San?” and reflexively I thought of Ross, dug through my mind for a portrait and came up instead with the face of a pretty boy from a Calvin Klein ad. Then I did laugh out loud, spewing, spittle and tears across my table until Corey noticed me, walked over and slapped my back and said, “There, there, big guy. Take a shot of meth, two bunnies, four Excedrin and call your broker in the morning. There, there.”

I don’t know how I made it back to my suite; my last waking image was of rabbit girls solicitously opening a door into ice-cold air. When I did awaken, my head was throbbing and I was sprawled fully clothed across a red satin heartshaped bed. I thought of Ross and got another vacuously handsome model, then a flashback of the evening hit, ringed with question marks and dollar signs. This led to a series of four-figure speculations followed by??? and I comforted myself with the thought that the night was a one-time-only blowout. Then I ran a mental litany of my safe-deposit box balances and key hiding places — and came up three short.

Now Ross appeared in detail, smoothing his mustache with utter cool, murmuring, “Martin, you dumb shit.”

I lashed out at the bed with my fists and knees; Ross was saying, “Thought I let you off easy, huh? Sweetie, who could ever forget a face like mine? Ross the Boss, what a guy.”

I jumped up and tore through the suite until I found stationery and pens on a table by the telephone. With shaking hands I wrote down bank names, figures and hiding places, ending with a total of five boxes and $6,214.00. Simple subtraction gave me the cost of my evening of prosaic debauchery: $11,470.00 minus $6,214.00 equaled $5,256.00.

Ross said, “You’ll never make it as a swinger, Martin. Splitting on the tab’ll save you a few bucks, though. They didn’t see your van when you registered, so all they’ve got is your name... WHICH YOU CAN CHANGE.”

I was back on the road inside of ten minutes, and Ross, faceless but huge, was like a Santa Ana wind behind me.

I never mentally regained the lost money, and I spent a month traveling throughout the West picking my remaining safety boxes clean. I can only describe that month as savage. Driving into cities where I had previously killed felt savagely stupid; keeping the money in the Deathmobile’s glove compartment felt necessary, but savagely risky. Ross loomed all around me — faceless as an advisor, but savagely beautiful and dangerous when I didn’t listen to him.

Other faces were there, always on roadsides. Men, women, old, young, pretty, ugly — they all had big open mouths that shouted, “Love me, fuck me, kill me.” Ross, faceless, only a voice, kept me from wasting them, kept the idea of a new identity in my mind. In the counselor role that Shroud Shifter used to play, he told me to take my time and eschew murder until I found a perfectly expendable man to become, a man who looked exactly like me and who would never be missed. Knowing that Ross would remain sexless only if I obeyed him, I waited.

Reversing directions after picking up my last cache of money, I headed East again, driving all day, sleeping in cheap motels. Ross’s presence was always with me, and his obsession of making me kill for a non-Martin Plunkett persona grew in my brain, buttressed by savage questions:

What if the dead man and his car are discovered in Wisconsin?

What if the troopers remember that you were detained at the same time that he disappeared?

What if the two facts are connected?

What if the spent shells that you discarded by the roadblock are found?

What if the Playboy Club management files on you for Defrauding an Innkeeper, and that fact gets connected to the others, resulting in a fugitive warrant?

Those questions gave me the courage to act independently of Ross the faceless counselor, and surprisingly, the beauty that I thought would descend on me didn’t.

But on my own, I failed.

I spent a week in Chicago, prowling lowlife dives, trying to buy a set of fake ID. No one would sell to me, and after a half-dozen attempts I knew my old criminal touch was fear-riddled — that I came across as a snitch and a fool. I drove out of the Windy City chased by Ross’s derisive laughter and “I told you so’s.”

I was skirting Lake Michigan when I snapped to a compromise plan: settle down for a month or so, alter the appearance of the Deathmobile, re-register it and get Illinois plates to replace my old Colorado ones. I searched out flaws to the plan, saw a huge major risk, and decided to go through with it anyway. The boldness of the measure seemed to please Ross; he said, “Do your own thing” and went faceless as I set to work.

First I pulled into Evanston, found a furnished room and paid two months’ rent in advance; then I drove to the local Department of Motor Vehicles office, boldly displayed my Colorado license and registration and told them I wanted Illinois license plates for my van. After filling out forms, the clerk did exactly what I knew he would — he went straight to a teletype machine and ran my name and vehicle nationwide for wants and warrants. While the man waited for the computer kick-out, I gripped the .38 snubnose in my pocket and watched his face. If I came up Wanted in Wisconsin or elsewhere, he would react, and I would shoot him and the other two clerks by the coffee machine, steal one of their cars and GO.

I did not have to revert to such melodrama; the man returned smiling, and I paid my fee and listened to him tell me my temporary license sticker would arrive in one week, my plates in six. I thanked him and went looking for an automobile paint shop.

I found one near the town dump on Kingsbury Road, and waited reading magazines while Deathmobile II was face-lifted from silver to metallic blue. When it rolled out of the paint barn looking brand-spanking different, a Latin youth sitting next to me said, “Sharp fucking sled, man. What you call it?”

“What?”

“You know, man. Its name. Like Dragon Wagon or Pussy Pit or Fuck Truck. A sled that cool’s gotta have a name.”

Still feeling bold from my DMV office showdown, I said, “I call it the Killer’s Kayak.”

The kid slapped his thighs. “Right on O-matic!”

I settled into Evanston. It was a wealthy town, a Chicago suburb more or less — and there was a profusion of small colleges to give me the protective coloration of the perpetual graduate student. With temporary roots laid down I thought of Ross less and less, and began to realize that his audial and physical presences were no more than mirror forms of self-love — I was infatuated with the man because we both excelled at the same profession and were, Spartan in other aspects of our lives — me always moving, him pursuing a career that obviously entailed long hours of boredom. He came to my aid in times of panic as Shroud Shifter used to, when my own reservoir of self-love was depleted by the exigencies of living on the road. If, symbiotically, I was serving him in the same capacity, fine; if not, I didn’t care. Also, there were other faces to look at; the Evanston campuses were crawling with them. With the Ross face/voice symbolism tagged, I slowly became convinced that giving up Martin Plunkett, transient convicted burglar, in favor of another identity was imperative — and I started looking for a twin brother to kill.

The quiet lucidity of the idea, conceived in terror but time-tested through various emotional states, allowed me to move methodically toward my first fratricide. I fashioned a silencer out of metal tubing and wire and test-fired the .38 at buoys on Lake Michigan; I prowled campuses after dark, the snubnose in my pocket, my game plan to shoot my quarry on a quiet walkway, steal his wallet and quietly walk away. I had four look-alikes spotted and was in the process of weeding them out when I first noticed the idiot.

I knew two things about him immediately: that he was mentally deficient and that his physical resemblance to me, although substantial, went deeper. I knew we were bonded hypothetically; that if I had grown up innocent instead of irredeemably jaded, this is what I would be.

With no intention of ever hurting the man, I watched him play in the garbage dump every day for a week running. The boardinghouse I lived in was on a hill three blocks from the dump, and with binoculars I could see my hybrid brother toss rocks at abandoned cars and rummage around for rusted auto parts to put to use as toys. Toward dusk, an attendant from the “Home” would lead him away from his playground, and it was she that I wanted to hurt.

I had narrowed down my hit list to two, and was heading toward the Evanston Junior College campus to make my final decision when I met the could-have-been Martin face-to-face. It was early evening, and only an hour earlier I had watched with amusement as the man hid in the weeds, foiling the nasty-looking spinster type who came to drag him away from his fun. Now, as I slowly cruised past the dump, he emerged from the shadows and flagged down the van.

I stopped, and flicked on the cab light. The man walked over and stuck his head in the passenger window; in extreme close-up I saw that his features were a hideously slack version of my own. “I’m Bobby,” he said in a squeaky tenor voice. “Wanna see my playhouse?”

I could not refuse; it would have been like denying my childhood. Nodding, I got out of the van and walked with Bobby through the dump site. His shoulder brushed mine, and it felt soft, weak. I found myself wishing that someone would make him build up his body, and was about to offer brotherly words of advice on the subject when Bobby pointed to a light flickering up ahead. “My house,” he said. “See?”

The house was two rotted car seats arranged facing each other, with a Coleman lamp in the middle. The light from it shot straight up, forming a tunnel that illuminated Bobby’s head hanging loosely out from his shoulders as if he couldn’t hold himself erect without help. “My house,” he said.

I put my hands on Bobby’s shoulders; he jerked into a military posture and said, “Yes, sir,” but his head still lolled off at an angle. I looked at the ground, then back at the askew idiot face bobbing now like a toy animal in a hotrod backseat. Tightening my grip, I said, “You don’t have to call me that. You don’t have to call anybody that.”

Bobby grinned, and I felt his spongy body quiver under my hands. His grin got bigger and more contorted, and I saw that he was in some kind of idiot ecstasy. Finally his tongue and palate and lips connected, and he got out, “You want be my friend?”

Now I started to quiver, and my hands on Bobby quivered, and the glow from the lantern burned the tears that were running down my cheeks. I turned my head away so my idiot brother wouldn’t think me weak, and I heard him making wet noises as though he was crying. I looked at him then, and saw that the sounds were coming from the obscenity of the big round O he was making with his mouth, and that he was waving a dollar bill, flaglike, in front of my chest.

I took my hands from his shoulders and started to walk away. Hearing contorted sobs and “Pl-pl-pl,” I turned back to see Bobby holding out the dollar, trying to beg for my friendship and make his hideous overture at the same time. I put my left hand back on his shoulder; I took the .38 from my windbreaker pocket. Bobby tried to smile as he wrapped his lips around the silencer. I pulled the trigger and my hybrid brother flew into the dirt, and I stole his wallet only to have it as a memento of my first mercy killing.

Robert Willard Borgie ruined Evanston for me, and I got out a month after my one-and-only routine police questioning. I drove West then, Illinois plates on the blue Deathmobile, no Ross or Shroud Shifter advising me, only an awful sickly-sweet smell clinging to my person. I felt perilously close to self-annihilating revelations, and as I sped across brutally long and flat and hot stretches of farmland, I schemed and daydreamed and even ran old brain-movies to keep them pushed down. Troubling thoughts broke out anyway:

Borgie was subhumanly intelligent, and he wanted you that way—

You fixed on him as your brother, and didn’t plan to kill him, even though he looked just like you—

He made you cry—

If he made you cry out of empathy then your will is slipping—

If he made you cry for yourself, you’re finished.

I ended that long and hot and flat leg of my journey in Lincoln, Nebraska, renting a boxlike, cramped and hot bachelor apartment on the city’s north side. I found a night watchman job, and was assigned to sit in the foyer of a downtown office building from midnight to eight each morning, wearing a gold-braided uniform and a mace gun and handcuffs in a plastic scabbard. Aside from rounds of the hallways once an hour, my time was my own. The former night man had left a dozen cartons of magazines behind, and rather than go stir-crazy brooding over dead retards and what they boded, I devoured copies of Time and People and Us.

It was a complete new education at age thirty-one. Years had passed since I last explored the written word, and the culture I had moved through had changed dramatically — changes lost on me as I maneuvered with tunnel vision. Between June and late November of ’79 I read hundreds of magazines cover-to-cover. Although the snippets of information I sucked in detailed disparate events, one theme dominated.

Family.

It was back, it was strong, it was “in,” it had never gone away. It was the antidote to new strains of sexually transmitted virus, to Communism, to booze and dope addiction, to boredom and malaise and loneliness. Androgynous musicians and Fascist preachers and muscle-bound black buffoons with Mohawk haircuts and gold chains proclaimed that you were fucked without it. Pop philosophers said that the years of rootlessness were over in America, and the nuclear family was the new-old constituency, period. Family was what you yearned for, worked for, bled for and sacrificed for. Family was what you came home for. Family was what you had while certain scum roamed around the country having nightmares and killing people and weeping when mirror-image idiots offered them blow-jobs for a dollar. Lack of family was the root of all hurt, all evil, all death.

My anger simmered, sizzled, bubbled and stewed all those reading months, and Ross popped up periodically, offering comments like a Greek chorus:

“Martin, if I thought it’d help you out, I’d be your family... but you know... blood is thicker than water.”

“The thing about family is, you can’t choose your own.”

“The thing about being alone like you is that you can take anything you want from anybody.”

“Awww, poor Marty’s mommy was a doper and his daddy took off and the nasty retardo made Marty cry. Awwww.”

“Didn’t I tell you back in January to get yourself a new ID?”

I started looking for a genealogy to usurp. People magazine said that bars were “The new meeting places for singles seeking to become duos,” and since I wanted to connect with a man to kill, it was only fitting to go to bars where single men were seeking to become duos with other men. Christian Times magazine called such places “dens of sexual depravity that should be banned by a constitutional amendment,” and somewhere between the two statements the truth probably hid. I didn’t care either way, and the idea of gay-bar-hopping for a new ID was my antidote for a slipping will to murder. So I read men’s fashion magazines, bought myself a slick new wardrobe and jumped will-first into the scene.

Which in Bible Belt Lincoln consisted of two bars, side by side on the east edge of the industrial district. I gave myself a strict timetable: four nights of searching only, out of the bars by 11:30 and at my job by 12:00 the first three nights, after-hours prowling only allowed on the fourth night — Friday, my work night off. If no one suitable materialized during the four nights, I would abandon the plan. A newspaper article I had read mentioned that college boys sometimes cruised “Fag Row” looking for bar patrons’ cars to deface, so I would park Deathmobile II a half-mile away and walk over. No leaving fingerprints on bar tops or glasses, my face to be kept averted from everyone but possible hits.

I was well programmed for caution and control, but I wasn’t prepared for the distractions I met, the variations on Ross and blondness. “Tommy’s” and “The Place” were simply dingy rooms with long oak bars, tiny wrought-iron tables and jukeboxes: disco-blaring dives where conversation was next to impossible. But they were packed with blonds cloned from the Ross Anderson style: compact muscles that only hard work could have developed, short hair, toothbrush mustaches and tight-fitting “he-man” clothes — Pendleton shirts, faded Levi’s and work boots. It took me two nights of drinking club soda at the bar, eyeballing for tall, dark-haired men like me, to figure it out: I was in the middle of blue-collar homosexuals at play — hod-carrying, meat-packing, truck-driving men, the blonds among them most often Eastern European types with high cheekbones and ice-blue eyes. It was a subculture that neither my travels nor my recent reading spurt had prepared me for, and as a dark-haired WASP in a polo shirt and crewneck sweater, I felt completely anomalous. Expecting swishy types who would be drawn to me like moths to a flame and just as easily snuffed out, I found shit-kickers who would be exceedingly tough mano a mano.

So for two nights I drank club soda, the nonsexual wallflower at the homosexual prom. The tall, dark haired men I spotted tended to run too lean or too young to be me; my constantly trawling eyes were rebuffed when I made contact with others; the Ross and blondness clones kept me nervous, fingering my glass for something to do with my hands. I had been prepared to be frightened and angry and possibly tempted, but now something else was settling on me, like an undercurrent in the constantly throbbing music. It was a weight that felt like regret. The men surrounding me, frivolous but masculine, made me feel old and numbed by my history of brutal experience.

Early on the third night of my mission I found out why I was being avoided. I was washing my hands in the restroom at Tommy’s when I heard voices just outside the door.

“... I tell you, he’s a cop. He’s been hanging out here and next door for the past couple of nights trying to look oh so cool, and you can just tell.”

“You’re just being paranoid because you’re on probation.”

“No, I’m not! God, slacks and a sweater, how tacky! He’s L.P.D. Vice, baby, so hit on him at your own risk.”

There was a giggle. “You think he’s got handcuffs and a big gun?”

“Yes, baby, I do. And a wife and three kids and an entrapment quota.”

The two voices joined in laughter, then trailed off. Thinking of Ross and how he would have reacted to the conversation, I walked back to my seat at the bar. I was wondering about the feasibility of continuing my mission when I felt a tentative hand on my elbow. I turned around, and there I was.

“Hi.”

It was the voice of my admirer. I stepped off the stool, saw that he was within an inch of my height, ten pounds of my weight and two years of my age. By squinting, I picked up brown eyes. Turning away from him, I wiped the bar top and my glass with my sleeve, then pivoted back with male-model grace. “Hi,” I said.

“You move real nicely,” the man shouted above the music. Ross zipped through my mind and said, “Kill him for me,” and I cupped my ear and pointed to the door. The man caught my drift and walked ahead of me, and when we hit the sidewalk, I looked around for witnesses. Seeing nothing but a cold, deserted street, I mentally affixed myself as L.P.D. Sergeant Anderson and said, “I’m a police officer. You can take a ride with me out to the wheat flats, or a ride to the station. Take your pick.”

The almost-Martin laughed. “Is this entrapment or a proposition?”

I laughed a la Ross. “Both, sweetie.”

The man poked my arm. “Hard. I’m Russ.”

“Ross.”

“Russ and Ross, that’s cute. Your car or mine?”

I pointed down the street to where Deathmobile II waited. “Mine.”

Russ leaned into me coyly, then pulled himself back and started walking. I kept pace with him, staying up against the sides of buildings, thinking of late-night burials and whether my old shovel was capable of cracking wheat-rooted frozen earth. Russ kept quiet, and I imagined him imagining me naked. At Deathmobile II I opened the door and squeezed his arm as I motioned him into the cab, and he let out a little grunt of pleasure. Anticipation and exhilaration hit me, and when I got in behind the wheel I exploded with an urge to know Russ/Martin’s history.

“Tell me about your family,” I said.

This time his laugh came out crude, his voice a mid-western bray. “Very romantic there, gay officer.”

The “gay” angered me; I hit the ignition, gunned the gas and said, “I’m a sergeant.”

“Is that part of your typical gay sergeant’s foreplay?”

The second “gay” accentuated the feel of the .38 tucked into my waistband and kept me from lashing out. “That’s right, sweetie.”

“Any man who calls me ‘sweetie’ can hear my tale of woe.” Russ tooted a fanfare on an imaginary horn, then laughed and proclaimed, “This is your life! Russell Maddox Luxxlor!”

The full name settled on me like a declaration of freedom. The industrial district disappeared, prairie flats and a huge starry sky loomed ahead, and I started to buzz all over. “Tell me, sweetie.”

The midwestern twang came out archly, theatrically. “Wellll, I’m from Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I’ve known I was gay since about age zero, and I’ve got three lovely sisters who buffered me through the tough parts. You know, being picked on, that kind of thing. And Daddy’s a Congregational minister, and he’s uptight about it, but not crazy on the subject like the born-agains, and Momma’s like a big sister, she accepted me real—”

The monologue’s sex drift was turning my buzzing ugly, itchy. “Tell me other things,” I said, holding my voice down. “Cheyenne. Your sisters. What it’s like to have a minister for a father.”

Russ pouted. “I guess you know all about that other stuff already. Okay, Cheyenne was a bore, Molly’s my favorite sister. She’s thirty-four now, three years older than me. Laurie’s my next favorite, she’s twenty-nine and married to this awful farmer man who hits her; and Susan’s the youngest, twenty-seven. She had a drinking problem, then she joined A.A. Daddy’s a good guy, he doesn’t judge me, and Momma quit smoking a few months ago. And oh God, this is so boring.”

I tightened my grip on the wheel until I thought my knuckles would pop. “Tell me more, sweetie.”

The dead man’s effete bray rattled through the cab. “It’s your funeral; my family would bore Jesus to death. Okay, Susan’s the prettiest, and she’s a dental tech; Laurie’s fat, and she’s got three rug rats with her awful husband, and I’m the smartest and the most sophisticated and the most sensit—”

I said the words the very instant the idea took hold. “Let me see the pictures in your wallet.”

Martin/Russ said, “Sweetie, don’t you think this is getting a little far afield? I’m up to party, but this is getting weird.”

I looked in my rearview, saw nothing but dark prairie, decelerated and pulled over to the side of the road. The dead man gave me a spooked look, and I took the .38 from my waistband and leveled it at him. “Give me your wallet or I’ll kill you.”

With jerky hands he plucked it from his back pocket and put it on the dashboard. With calm hands worthy of Ross Anderson, I lowered the gun to my lap and fingered my way through the photo and credit-card compartments. Seeing three young women in graduation gowns and a couple in ’40’s wedding attire, I winced; seeing a pictureless Nebraska driver’s license, valid draft card and Visa, American Express, and Diner’s Club, I smiled and said, “Get out of the van.”

Martin got out and stood by the door, shaking and murmuring prayers. I put the wallet in my pocket and joined him on the roadside, savoring mental images of my three new sisters until their about-to-be-excommunicated brother started to weep. Then, jarred, I poked the silencered snout of my weapon into his back and said, “Walk.”

I marched him exactly sixty-two paces, one step for each year of our lives, then said, “Turn around and open your mouth.” With chattering teeth he did, and I stuck the barrel in and pulled the trigger. His pitch backward almost wrenched the gun from my hand, but I managed to hold on.

The cold prairie air singed my lungs as I mentally regrouped. I thought of making a search for the expended round, then rejected the idea — my only other hit with Ross’s piece had been in Illinois seven months before; there was no way the killings would be connected.

I was walking back to Deathmobile II and my shovel when I saw headlights approaching from the direction of Lincoln. The abruptness of it spooked me, and I got in, hang a U-turn and headed to work. I was on the job early, and I spent the entire shift memorizing the photographs of my new family. In the morning I burned them to ash in the ground-floor men’s room, and when I flushed the sooty remains I knew the faces were imprinted in my memory bank forever.

18

Forever lasted eleven days.

Those days were happy, peaceful. I had earned a family to fill up empty spaces in my past, and although Russell Luxxlor’s body was discovered, nullifying my attempt to steal his identity, I still had Dad and Mom and Molly and Laurie and Susan as consolation prizes. Salable credit cards were a bonus on top of that, and I decided to unload them when I left Lincoln for good — a prescheduled two weeks after the killing.

Luxxlor’s death made the local media, and one newspaper account had police accurately speculating that he was killed for his ID; I was even mentioned as having been seen with him at Tommy’s. Still, I wasn’t questioned, nor was I worried — it was the homosexual community that would bear the brunt of the heat.

So, for eleven days I existed in a realistic fantasy world devoid of violence and sexual urges I laughed with favorite sister Molly and comforted sister Laurie when her husband gave her grief; I encouraged sister Susan to stay sober and teased Mom and Dad about their religious fervor. I was running on a fuel mixture that was 80 % fantasy, 20 % a detachment that knew the game the rest of me was playing. The point spread existed harmoniously within me and my new family drifted through my sleeping dreams in a jumble that made them seem old and well thumbed.

On my twelfth post-killing morning I woke up and couldn’t remember Molly’s face. Wracking my memory wouldn’t bring it back; small chores to ease my mind were no help. Fantasizing with other family members made my 20 % detachment zoom to 90 % plus, and toward evening every time I memory-searched for Molly I came up with the bloodied faces of old women victims.

That night I panicked.

Sister Laurie was starting to slip into blankness, and I loaded all my belongings into Deathmobile II and headed out of Lincoln on the Cornhusker Highway. Recalling a newspaper article on the local crime scene and its meeting places, I stopped at a roadhouse called Henderson’s Hot Spot and tried to sell Russell Luxxlor’s credit cards to two men playing pool. Nervous and twitchy, I said all the wrong things and spooked them. When their hardboiled fish eyes zoomed in on me, I ran to the Deathmobile and sped out of Nebraska at ten miles over the speed limit.

The incident sent me into a tailspin, and where before I would have killed boldly to counteract my feelings of powerlessness, now I sought solace, creature comforts, the quenching of an extraordinary curiosity as to how other people lived.

For eight months I traveled slowly northeast, staying for weeks at a time at expensive motor inns, exploring the local terrain. I slept in big soft beds and watched cable T.V.; I ate expensive meals that devoured my bankroll. The remaining members of my adopted family dropped from my mind, one at a time, as I notched eastbound miles; to replace them I picked up hitchhikers, plied them with marijuana and got them to talk about themselves and their families. Letting them out unharmed, their past mine in 80 %/20 % fashion, I always felt just a little bit more secure, more safe. Ross began to seem like a distant apparition.

Then 80/20 revolted against me, becoming 100 % nightmare.

It happened suddenly. I was asleep in a big, soft Howard Johnson’s bed in Clear Lake, Iowa. Recent hitchhikers were walking through my slumber, their faces getting more and more distinct. My anticipation grew as I sensed all of them were blond; I moved in their direction. Then I saw that they were wearing powder-white wigs; then I saw that they were all child versions of people I had killed; then they all bared long, sharp fangs and went for my genitals.

I woke up screaming, and was on the road inside of two minutes,

Frightened out of another city, again I fought the fear out of character.

I stayed awake for 106 straight hours; I let my beard grow; I changed my hairstyle. I smoked big pipefuls of my own marijuana, experiencing its effects for the second time; I laughed giddily and ate like a pig under its spell. When I finally knew I could no longer remain conscious, I pulled off the roadside, only to have Ross Anderson snuggle up next to me in my dreams.

“You’re getting soft, soft, softer”;

“You’re getting soft on people”;

“You’re getting soft on people so you won’t have to kill them”;

“If you quit killing you’ll die.”

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME.”

19

A nightmarish week later I met Rheinhardt Wildebrand, and in the end, superbly refortified, I killed him without hesitation — despite admiring his superb lack of niceness. The prologue to my symbolic grandfather was seven days of fitful sleep filled with victim-faced animals snapping at me and constant kill-urgings from Ross. My tailspin was moving into its nadir — I was running out of money; my beard was growing out patchy and incongruously light; and Deathmobile II was coming down with engine trouble, pings and rattles that reflected my own inside/outside deluge. Pulling into Benton Heights, Michigan, it threw a piston, and I pushed it to a nearby repair shop and placed half of my remaining cash down as a deposit on a ring job and a complete engine overhaul. Handing me an itemized list of the van’s maladies, the head mechanic said, “You been drivin’ mean, boyo. You ever hear about, oil changes and transmission fluid? You’re lucky the fucker didn’t blow up on you.”

If only he knew.

It was now a question of finding a place to stay and a job for money to restore the Deathmobile. With my .38 in my pocket, I walked around Benton Heights. It stood on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, and the constant view of sludgy dark water reminded me of Bobby Borgie, dead in Evanston some hundreds of miles across it. Knowing his presence would haunt me in the place, I hopped a bus to the nearest large city — Kalamazoo.

Where, walking aimlessly through its environs, I met Rheinhardt. I was coming out of a convenience store with a container of milk when he spotted me and dropped the first of his many memorable one-liners: “What’s a subversive like you doing in a dull neighborhood like mine?”

Warming to the flattery and the geezer’s crusty style, I said, “Looking for victims.”

Laughing, the old man said, “You’ll find them. Is that a Colt or a Smith and Wesson in your pants?”

I looked at my waistband and saw that the grip of my .38 was exposed. Correcting the matter, I said, “S. and W. Detective’s Special.”

“With a long barrel like that?”

I hesitated, then said, “Silencer.”

“You make it yourself?”

“Yes.”

“You a tool and die man?”

“No.”

“Traveling man?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a tool and die man. Come to my house, we’ll drink and talk.”

I hesitated again. But when the old man said, “I’m not afraid of you, so don’t be afraid of me,” I followed him down the block to his musty old house of memories.

And I stayed.

Years before, “Uncle” Walt Borchard had bored me with his stories. Now, “Grandpa” Rheinhardt Wildebrand enthralled me with his, and the telling/listening hinged on a simple dynamic: Borchard’s need for an audience was indiscriminate, Rheinhardt’s specific — he was slowly dying of congestive heart disease, and he wanted someone as solitary and idiosyncratic as himself to know what he had done.

So I became his nephew, allegedly motivated by Rheinhardt’s oblique references to leaving me his wealth. In reality, that dynamic was shelter. As long as I slept in the gingerbread house and listened, I endured no nightmares.

Rheinhardt Wildebrand had been a Prohibition bootlegger, hauling whiskey down the Great Lakes on a barge; he had sold die-making devices to Canada-based agents of Hitler’s regime, pocketing the payment, then selling the same equipment to the U.S. Army. He had harbored Dillinger in the gingerbread house after the public enemy’s shoot-out at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Minnesota, and the mint-condition 1953 Packard Caribbean sitting chaste in his driveway was a present from the late Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, given in appreciation of Rheinhardt’s blueprints for jail-bar construction and placement, the car driven up from Miami by Meyer Lansky himself.

I believed the stories absolutely, and Rheinhardt believed mine — that I was an armed robber on the run from a parole violation and a botched payroll job in Wisconsin. That was why I shared his hermit life-style so willingly; that was why I endured my patchy beard and kept my face averted from prying neighbor eyes when we talked on the front porch. My only other lie was in response to a direct question, Rheinhardt knocking back a shot of Canadian Club and asking, “Have you ever killed a man?”

“No,” I answered.

After two weeks in the gingerbread house, I knew the old man’s habits and that I was going to murder him for the advantage I could gain by exploiting them. He kept a cache of several thousand dollars in his basement — I would steal it. He purchased all his clothing, household utensils and books from mail-order catalogs, paying for them with high-limit Visa, American Express Gold and Diner’s Club cards, sending in one check a year, with the 19.80 % annual interest the credit-card companies loved. Since those companies were used to his eccentricities, I would destroy his checking account by sending in big forged checks for a year of future card transactions, accompanied by forged notes stating in Rheinhardt’s inimitable style that he was “Taking my act on the road until I kick the bucket, and this check is to cover all my possible charges, so you won’t have to dun me.” I would wipe the house free of my fingerprints, slip Rheinhardt a sedative, drive him out to Lake Michigan, shoot him and dump him in the water, appropriately weighted down. He would not be missed for weeks, and by then I would be long gone.

The plan was brilliant, but formulating it destroyed my love of Rheinhardt’s stories, and the nightmares came back.

Now it was the old man’s neighbors who attacked me, wig-wearing monsters informed with telepathic powers. They knew I was going to murder Rheinhardt, and they told me they would let me escape from the deed only if I gave them the old pirate’s money. When I refused, they took on the faces of my Aspen victims, taunting me with the refrain from an old big band tune — “I’ve Got a Kraut in Kalamazoo! Kalamazoo! Kalamazoo! Kala-ma-zoo-zoo-zoo!”

Nine straight mornings I woke up shrieking and kicking and flailing. On my feet but still in my dreams, I lashed out at the furniture in my bedroom, knocking over night-stands and chairs. The first time, Rheinhardt rushed in, concerned. Then, day by day, he grew more and more worried. As the nightmare mornings continued, they eclipsed our storytelling hours, and I saw the old man’s worry turn to disgust. I was not the hard case he had thought; Lansky and Dillinger would have considered me a sissy; he was a sissy himself for sharing his secrets with someone so weak.

Now Rheinhardt’s tales were told in a desultory tone, and Ross took over the many faces of his characters. I knew it was time to kill the old man or get out.

Knowing that one more screaming/stumbling/lashing episode would push Rheinhardt into ordering me to leave, I foiled potential nightmares by staying awake to scheme. After one sleepless night I had the old man’s handwriting down pat; after two I had notes written to Visa, Diner’s Club and American Express. My third night was a trip to Kalamazoo’s South Side, where I scored a half-dozen 1½-grain Seconal. Night four — dingy, zorched, whacked-out and fried from 108 hours of continuous consciousness — was when I struck.

First I emptied the Seconals into Rheinhardt’s nightcap of Canadian Club and milk. He chugged the drink down as he usually did, and half an hour later I saw him asleep on his bedroom floor, half in and half out of his pajamas. Leaving him there, I tore through the house with a wet washcloth, wiping every wall and furniture surface in every room I had been in. With that elementary track-covering accomplished, I raided Rheinhardt’s basement money cache, stuffed huge wads of bills into my pockets and ran the uphill mile to the Kalamazoo Bus Depot, catching the late bus to Benton Heights with only seconds to spare. An hour later and eight hundred Wildebrand dollars poorer, I was behind the wheel of the now velvet-running Deathmobile II heading back to the gingerbread house.

Reentering it, my nerve ends felt as though they were being ground with sandpaper, and my heart beat so hard that I knew it would have to burst before I completed the kill. My throat was constricted and my hands shook, and sweat buzzed on my skin as if I were a live wire. Only concentrating on not touching anything extraneous kept me from imploding, and I bolted the stairs up to Rheinhardt’s bedroom.

He was still on the floor, and a small pulsing vein in his neck told me he was still alive. Again leaving him there, I ran to my bedroom and picked up the three credit-card letters, then ran back to search the desk and dresser for checkbooks. My hands were closing on a pile of them when I heard “Imposter!” and turned around to see Rheinhardt leveling a double-barreled shotgun at me.

“IMPOSTER!”

We drew down on each other. I snagged the muzzle of my .38 as I pulled it out of my pants; Rheinhardt jerked both triggers. They hit empty chambers, and the old man smiled at me, then fell dead at my feet. Another hour later, on a shelf of rock overlooking Lake Michigan, I gave him a formal execution befitting his dignity — two shots in the head and an overhand hurl into the deep six. With his grandfatherly bequests in my glove compartment, I then took off at a law-abiding 35, all my exhaustion evaporated. Thinking of Ross, I said, “Look, Dad, no fear,” and went cruising for someone with appropriate ID to kill.

20

The following maxims form a summation of my next several months and epigrammatically describe certain perils inherent in roaming around America killing people:

Mr. Perfect staggered in front of my windshield on a deserted stretch of U.S. 6 east of Columbus, Ohio, one early evening in April of ’81, and within ten miles I had heard his entire life story — family misunderstandings, shoplifting, burglary, reformatories, prison, parole and the search for the “Big Break.” At dusk we turned off the road to share a bottle I allegedly had, and moments later I shot the man twice in the head. His pockets yielded identification belonging to William Robert Rohrsfield, born within a month of my own birthday, an extra seven pounds the only physical point distinguishing him from me. I buried Martin Plunkett deep under the hard soil by the Interstate and became Billy Rohrsfield. The irony of transmogrifying myself into a fellow burglar combined with Grandpa Rheinhardt’s foolproof credit made me feel loose, cocky, stylish. From there I moved into a wordless, sleepless euphoria that felt like a permanent one-way ticket to Panaceaville, Fat City, the Big Contentment. Had I been able to verbalize in my trance, I would have told myself that at thirty-three all my needs were met, all my destinations had been reached, all my curiosities and desires had been sated. Instead of putting forth the sly spiritual epigrams that begin this chapter, I would have advanced the ethos of a Vegas hustler on a roll — I’ve got it made.

But something happened.

I had just crossed the Ohio-Pennsylvania border when I was tossed by hand out of the Deathmobile’s cab. Flying head over heels, I had a view of blue sky, U.S. 6 and my van continuing without me. Then I was back in the cab and shimmying across the dotted yellow line; then I was side-swiping a chain-link fence on the right shoulder; then I braked and banged my head on the dashboard.

When the shock was over I began crying. Too many days of too little sleep, I told myself through my tears. Be good to yourself, another voice added. I agreed in the German accent I affected when using Rheinhardt Wildebrand’s credit cards, drove very slowly to a motel and slept.

The next morning, the first thing I encountered upon rising was a perfect mental image of my “sister” Molly Luxxlor, lost since December of ’79. I wept in gratitude, then remembered that I was Billy Rohrsfield, not Russ Luxxlor, and that Billy’s sister Janet was a child-beating shrew. Molly vanished, and a facsimile of Janet took her place, curlers in her hair, a rolling pm in her hand. I laughed my tears away, shaved, showered and walked out to the motel office to return my key. The clerk greeted me with, “Auf Wiedersehn, Herr Wildebrand!” and I ran from the salutation straight to Deathmobile II, straight to another head-over-heels toss into the sky.

Airborne, I saw travel posters and billboards for the Jook Savages and Marmalade; hitting the driver’s seat, I saw L.A. County Sheriffs spread-searching a scared young man. At first he looked like Billy Rohrsfield, then he looked like Russ Luxxlor. Then I automatically moved into my old 80 %/20 % fantasy-detachment game and saw what was happening.

You can run, but you can’t hide.

My first lucid impulse was to destroy the Wildebrand credit cards and Rohrsfield ID. A second, more lucid thought stopped me: discarding such valuable cools would be an implicit admission that I couldn’t control my own selfhood. A third, most cogent thought took over from there: You are Martin Plunkett. Driving away, colors stacked up behind the litany that allowed me to hold the wheel steady and Deathmobile II at an even 55. The words were I am Martin Plunkett, and the colors were telling me exactly what they did in San Francisco back in ’74.

Landing in Sharon, Pennsylvania, I went verbal beyond my litany and took tight hold of my destiny. The color days had cleared my mind and had given me the courage to make certain admissions and arrive at conclusions as to how to restore order to my life. Wanting the prosaics of resettling out of the way before I formally stated the words to the summer air, I bought three rooms full of medium-priced furniture with Rheinhardt Wildebrand’s Visa card and rented a three-room apartment on the town’s west side, using the name William Rohrsfield. Juggling the two fake identities produced no moments of schizophrenia or disturbing euphoria, and when I was alone in my new home, I made my declaration:

Since Wisconsin you have been in flight from your own unique strain of sexuality, warrior in nature; you have been running from old fears and old indignities, experiencing near-psychotic hallucinations as a result; you have lost your will to kill coldly, brutally and with your hands; killing simply and anonymously has rendered you a nonentity, devoid of pride, slothful in your habits. You have become a comfort seeker of the most despicable sort, and the only way to reverse the above is to plan and carry out a perfect, methodical, symbolically exact set of sex murders.

You can run, but you can’t hide.

Tears of joy were streaming down my face when I finished my self-confrontation, and I wept against the nearest object available to hold — a cardboard box filled with dishes and cooking utensils.

Over the next four months I secured the symbolic accoutrements: airline posters and rock posters identical to the ones adorning the walls of Charlie Manson’s fuck pad back in ’69, a set of burglar’s tools and a theatrical makeup kit. Locksmith technology had improved since my burglary days, so I bought do-it-yourself door locks representing the new technological spectrum and practiced neutralising them at home. Hours of makeup practice in front of my bathroom mirror got me adept at working pancake and fake noses into non-Martin Plunkett visages, and as my steel-town summer wound down, all that remained was to find the perfect victims.

Easier said than done.

Sharon was a rough-hewn industrial city, Polish/Russian in its basic ethnic thrust, honky-tonk in its life-style. There were plenty of blonds out on the street projecting “kill me” auras, but an entire summer of cruising for an attractive blond-blonde couple brought me nothing but eyestrain. To combat the frustration and stay in reality while doing it, I went or another pop-culture jaunt, courtesy of People and Cosmopolitan.

“Family” was still big, as were religion, drugs and right-wing politics, but physical fitness seemed to be moving into first place among America’s fads. Health clubs were the newer “new meeting grounds” for singles; body awareness had spawned the “new narcissism”; and bodybuilding equipment and techniques had progressed to the point where one “new fitness” gum flatly stated that weight workouts were the “new religious service,” while muscle-toning machines themselves were “the new totems of worship, because they unleash the godhead physical perfection in all of us.” The entire craze reeked of a bottom line of people wanting to look good so that they could fuck with a higher class of partner, but if that was where the attractive ones were congregating...

Sharon had three health clubs — “Now & Wow Fitness,” “The Co-Ed Connection” and the “Jack La Lanne European Health Spa.” A battery of phone calls got me the rundown on their respective merits: Jack “La Strain” was for the serious iron pumpers, the Co-Ed Connection and Now & Wow were pick-up joints where men and women worked out on Nautilus equipment and took saunas together. All three bright-voiced phone people invited me to come down for a “free introduction workout,” and I took the latter two up on their offer.

Now & Wow Fitness was, in the words of the bored black man who handed me a towel and “gym kit” upon entering, “A fat farm. All Polack chicks lookin’ to get skinny so they can glom themselves a steelworker, then eat themselves fat again when they get married.” The two rooms full of chubby women in pastel Danskins confirmed his appraisal, and I walked back out immediately, returning my towel and gym kit still fresh. “I told you so,” the man said.

The Co-Ed Connection, a block away, had the feel of instant paydirt. The cars in the parking lot were all sleek late models, as were the instructors of both genders who waited in the foyer to greet prospective members. Again handed a towel and “workout kit,” I was led into a football-field-size room filled with gleaming metal equipment. Only a few men and women were straining under bars and pulleys, and the instructor noticed my look and said, “The after-work rush starts in about an hour. It’s wild.”

I nodded, and the sleek young woman smiled and left me at the entrance to the men’s locker room. The sleek young male attendant inside assigned me a locker, and I changed into gym shorts and a tank top emblazoned with the Co-Ed Connection logo — a sleek masculine silhouette and a sleek feminine silhouette holding hands. Checking my appearance in one of the locker room’s many full-length mirrors, I saw that I was more large than sleek, more blunt than stylish. Satisfied, I pushed through the door and started pumping iron.

It felt good, and I was pleased to know that I could still bench-press two hundred and fifty pounds twenty times. I moved from machine to machine, experiencing pleasant aches, getting in sync with the jar of metal, the hiss of pulleys, the smell of my own sweat. The room started filling up, and soon there were lines forming in front of the various contraptions. Bluff-hearty macho men were offering encouragement to pushing, pulling, squatting and lifting macho women all around me, and I felt like a visitor from another planet observing quaint earthling mating rituals. Then I saw THEM, eased my shoulder-press load down and said to myself, “Dead.”

They were obviously brother and sister. Both clad in purple satin instructor’s uniforms, both blond and superbly shapely in classic male/female modes, both slightly more than vacuously pretty, they breathed a long history of familial intimacy. Watching them explain the benching machine to a skinny teenage bey, I saw how their gestures accommodated each other. When he used a chopped hand for emphasis, she repeated the motion, only gently. When he brought flat palms up to show how the pulleys worked, she did it just a little bit slower. Staring hard at them, I knew that they had performed incest early on, and that it was the one thing they never talked about.

I dismounted from the shoulder-press machine and walked to the locker room. Sweating from exhilaration now, I discarded my gym outfit and put on my street clothes, then strode back through the workout area. The siblings were explaining muscle development to a group by the jogging treadmill, pointing out laterals and pectorals on each other, letting their fingers touch the places. Touching the same parts of myself, I felt my sore muscles throb, then beat to the word “Dead.” At the front of the area I noticed a picture roster of the club’s instructors. George Kurzinski and Paula Kurzinski smiled side by side at the top. I dated their death warrant nine months in the future — June 5, 1982, fourteen years to the day since I saw my first couple make love. Leaving the Co-Ed Connection, I turned on my mental stopwatch. Pleased with the sound of its spring-loaded movement, I let it run continually while I activated my plan one step at a time.

Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

September, 1981:

Learning that the Kurzinskis live together, sleep in separate bedrooms and visit their widowed mother at the sanitarium every Sunday. Tick tick tick tick.

November, 1981:

Surveillance reveals that Paula Kurzinski sleeps over at her boyfriend’s house on Wednesday and Saturday rights; George Kurzinski’s girl friend sleeps with him, at the siblings’ apartment, on those nights. Tick tick tick tick tick.

January, 1982:

Securing the floor plan of the Kurzinskis’ apartment from the Sharon Office of City Planning. Tick tick tick tick tick tick.

February, 1982:

Becoming expert at picking locks identical to the lackluster “Security King” on the Kurzinskis’ front door. Tick tick tick tick.

April, 1982:

Disguise, drugs and weaponry procured; escape route and four alternates mapped out. Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

May 15, 1982:

Run-through of the Kurzinskis’ apartment successfully executed; auxiliary blades stashed under bedroom and living-room carpets; loaded .25-caliber Beretta found in Paula’s top dresser drawer; loaded .32 S. & W. revolver found under George’s mattress. Tick tick tick tick tick.

May 28, 1982:

Second run-through of Kurzinskis’ apartment; blank cartridges placed in both weapons; as added precaution both hammers bent ⅛" to the side to ensure misfire.

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick........

From Law Enforcement Journal, May 30, 1982, Issue: