Small Town

twenty-three

For the first time, the Carpenter had signed his work.

The Post called it a direct response to their headline. They’d depicted him with a nail in his forehead, and he’d left his latest victim mutilated in just such a fashion. While quick to take credit, if that’s what it was, the newspaper was just as quick to absolve itself of any responsibility in the matter. Medical evidence, they pointed out, established beyond question that the woman had lain dead for days in that tub of ice water before her killer had added his final grisly touch.

The News called it a challenge to the authorities. The Carpenter was taunting the police, daring them to catch him. No doubt he blamed the police for failing to prevent the 9/11 tragedy that took his family from him, and this was his revenge.

The Times interviewed a forensic psychiatrist, who pointed out that the Carpenter, who had always sought anonymity in the past, had now gone public, seeking the credit for his latest murder. He had now reached the stage where he actively desired to get caught, and would no doubt behave accordingly, taking greater risks, making less effort to avoid arrest, and very likely raising the stakes by committing crimes on an increasingly grand scale.

Fran Buckram first learned of the Boerum Hill murder from a TV newscast. He went out and bought all three papers and read the coverage in each, then turned on New York One to see if there’d been any further developments. There were none, then or in the days that followed, but the story continued to get a lot of play in the media despite the lack of anything you could call news.

Different experts contributed theories and observations, and reporters polled ordinary citizens throughout the metropolitan area to get their remarkably uninformed opinions. Everyone with even a passing acquaintance with Evelyn Crispin, at the law firm where she’d worked and in her Boerum Hill neighborhood, was encouraged to offer an appraisal of the woman’s character and lament her horrible death.

How had the Carpenter picked her? What was it in her life that made him choose to end it? Why, having evidently killed the woman immediately upon gaining access to her apartment, had he cohabited with her corpse for well over a week? (This had not been intended to infer, the Times explained the following day, that there had been any sexual contact between Ms. Crispin and Mr. Harbinger, either before or after her demise, such contact having been specifically ruled out by postmortem examination. The day after that, the paper printed a second Corrections notice, stating that the word infer in the previous day’s follow-up should of course have been imply.)

Buckram, who made it his business to read everything printed on the subject, thought that they were missing the point. He had a pretty good idea how the Carpenter had selected his victim. He hung out in the neighborhood and kept his eyes open, which seemed to be something he was good at, and painstaking about. He looked for someone who lived alone, whose apartment he could go to and from without passing through a lobby. He’d picked her out for convenience, and had killed her not because her death was part of his plan (whatever his plan might be), but because he wanted her apartment.

So he could hide out in it.

You didn’t need to be a Feebie profiler in a cheap suit or a Freudian with a Viennese accent to work it out. You didn’t have to think like a psychopath, either. It was, as far as he could make out, pretty much a matter of common sense. The son of a bitch was so hot he was on fire, with a whole police force turning the city inside out looking for him. They’d found his bank account and frozen it, found his storage locker and cleaned it out. He had no access to money or possessions, and nowhere to sit down and think about it.

The birds of the field had their nests, but a police task force was making sure the son of a bitch had no place to lay his head. Every desk clerk in every flophouse and cheap hotel had his picture, and got frequent follow-up visits from the cops. Homeless shelters, lounges at all three New York airports, waiting rooms at Penn Station and Grand Central — all were under close police scrutiny. Transit cops checked the benches on the subway platforms and went from car to car through the trains, eyeballing the sleepers. Even the drunks and druggies sleeping it off on sidewalks, normally regarded as part of the urban landscape, got a second look these days.

So he’d found an apartment to sublet. He couldn’t do it the usual New York way, by checking the ads in the Voice or paying a broker or bribing a super, so he’d improvised, picking out some poor lonely Eleanor Rigby type, following her home, and throttling her. He’d fed the cat because that was simpler and quieter than killing it, and he’d watered the plants — well, who knew why he’d watered the plants? Maybe he just liked plants. The ice water bath, which puzzled some analysts while others saw it as some exotic form of torture, was just the guy’s way of keeping the apartment livable. The ice helped to keep the stink down.

And the nail in the forehead?

Well, that was puzzling. No getting around it, that was a poser. If it was anything other than a signature, a way to claim this death as one of his own, Buckram couldn’t think what it might be. And why would he want to do that?

To play a game with the police?

He didn’t think so. The man had suffered extraordinary losses. His whole family had vanished in the blink of an eye, and not in a fire, not in an auto accident, not in a train wreck or plane crash, but in the course of a deliberate attack upon the entire city. That didn’t seem likely to turn a quiet gentleman, almost reclusive in his retirement, into some cackling schemer intent upon making fools of a police department. No, Harbinger had a purpose. It might not be rational, couldn’t be rational, but there was probably logic to it. Not that anybody could crack the code from a distance and read the poor bastard’s mind.

As far as the tabloids were concerned, he was evil. Sick, twisted. And his acts were evil, no question about it, but something in Buckram resisted the demonization of the man. He’d run across a lot of people over the years who’d done evil things, and some of them knew their deeds were evil, but others did not. The woman who smashed her daughter’s skull because she was sick of changing diapers was categorically different from the man who sat on his son’s chest, effectively crushing the boy to death, because that was the only way he could think of to expel the devil that made the child cough all night long. Both were criminally unfit parents, and both could be placed in a space capsule and rocketed into orbit without making the world a poorer place for their absence, but one was evil in a way that the other was not.

He wished he could figure out what the Carpenter was trying to accomplish.

Because if you could do that, maybe you could figure out what he was going to do next. And he was going to do something. The nail in the forehead, if it did nothing else, served notice that the Carpenter wasn’t ready to hang up his tools.

Until then, he’d thought the man might be done. He wasn’t a lifelong career psychopath, had lived an apparently blameless life until 9/11 unhinged him, and it had seemed entirely possible that the level of carnage he’d achieved in Chelsea might well have shocked him out of his madness. Buckram had half-expected the man to turn himself in, or kill himself. They might recover his body from the river, or scrape him off the subway tracks.

Or he might just stop what he was doing and disappear. The common wisdom held that pattern criminals and serial killers never stopped until they were caught or killed, that what drove them continued to drive them to the end. But he knew this wasn’t always so. Sometimes the bad guys seemed to lose interest. When they’d achieved a degree of notoriety, like the Zodiac nut job in San Francisco, the speculation about them went on forever. When their tally was lower and less publicized, their retirement went unnoticed; if, say, three prostitutes are abducted one after another from truck stops in Indiana and Illinois, and found brutally murdered in Interstate highway rest areas, it’s news; when it doesn’t happen a fourth time, it stops being news, and people forget to wonder why the guy stopped.

They wouldn’t forget about the Carpenter, but he could have stopped. He could have wiped up his fingerprints and left the hammer and nail in the hardware drawer and gone off into the night, and no one would have linked this latest killing to him. And the next time he went to ground he might have worked out a way to do it without killing anybody.

But he’d used the hammer, used the nail. He wasn’t done. He had something planned, something that would dwarf the Chelsea firebombings. Buckram could think of all sorts of possibilities. The city had no end of icons — the skyscrapers, the bridges, the great statue in the harbor. Anyone could compile a list, and, after 9/11, nothing seemed off limits to madness. But what good was a list when you couldn’t read the bastard’s mind?

He couldn’t think his way to a solution, nor could he think of anything else. He wished to God there was something he could do. He’d thought of offering his services to the cop who was running the case, but realized what an embarrassment that would be all around. Even if he did it quietly, who could avoid the assumption that he was grandstanding, positioning himself for a 2005 run at Gracie Mansion? And, if he somehow convinced everybody otherwise, what possible help could he provide? As far as he could tell, they were doing everything there was to do, and doing a reasonably good job of it in the media hothouse that was New York.

He thought of the drawing room mysteries of the twenties and thirties, with the gifted amateur sleuth who volunteered his services to the baffled police and solved intricate murders for them. And here he was, all set to present himself as a latter-day version of that amateur sleuth. Because that was all he was now, his professional experience notwithstanding. He was a private citizen, and nothing changed that — not the awards and commendations boxed up in his closet, not the courtesy cards in his wallet, not the monthly pension check he drew after twenty-plus years of service. Not the revolver in a locked drawer in his desk, or the carry permit for it.

So he sat around reading about the case, and calling old friends to talk about it. And he thought about it, and tried to figure some useful way he could play a lone hand, somehow out-thinking the Carpenter and tracking him down on his own. It was an appealing fantasy, but that’s all it was. A fantasy.

Yet he stayed with it. Because, for some goddamned reason that, like the Carpenter’s scheme, he hadn’t yet managed to figure out, there didn’t seem to be anything else he could do.

It was the woman, of course. Susan Pomerance. Seeing her at Stelli’s, remembering her from L’Aiglon d’Or, he’d seized his opportunity and picked her up.

Right, like a moth picking up a flame.

Next thing he’d known he was spread-eagled facedown on her bed and she was calling him by a girl’s name and treating him like a girl. He thought she was going to rip him open, thought he’d bleed to death shackled to her bed and hooded like a trained falcon. And then he came so hard he thought he’d die of that.

Afterward, dismissed and sent home, he took a long shower, then drew a hot tub and soaked in it. He tried to put the evening in some sort of perspective, but couldn’t get a handle on it, swinging back and forth between excitement and revulsion. He’d sleep on it, he decided. A lot of things made more sense after a good night’s sleep.

He wondered if he’d be able to sleep, but dropped off almost immediately and didn’t stir for almost nine hours. He awoke with a sense of having dreamed throughout the night but no recollection of any of the dreams. He ached physically, not only where she’d penetrated him but in muscles throughout his body that he’d tensed in unaccustomed ways. And he winced at the memory of what he’d done, or rather of what he’d allowed to be done to him. And at the recollection of his own response.

Come see me Friday, she’d said. Yeah, right, he thought. The only question in his mind was whether he should call and let her know he wasn’t coming or just not show up and let her figure it out for herself. With her looks and her morals, she wouldn’t have trouble finding another partner; with her toy chest, she wouldn’t be hard put getting along without one.

Maybe he’d send flowers, with a note saying he’d decided not to see her again. Once, a philosopher... the note could say.

Would she get the reference? A professor at Colgate had loved to tell the story. Voltaire had accepted an invitation from a friend to go to a specialized brothel — young boys, something like that. He’d gone and had a good time, and the friend invited him again a few weeks later. Voltaire declined. But you had such a good time, the friend said. Mais oui, said Voltaire. Once, un philosophe. Twice, a pervert.

Flowers and goodbye. That would be nice, the sort of mixed message that might even appeal to the dizzy bitch. Or, to keep it simple, he could skip the flowers and skip the note and just never see her again. She’d get over it, and so would he.

He checked his book, and saw that it was moot. He couldn’t go Friday anyway, he had to speak at a dinner in Connecticut. That would be his second speech of the week — he had to fly to Richmond Tuesday morning to talk at a luncheon.

He spent the weekend at his apartment, letting the machine take his calls. Monday morning he called the lecture bureau and said something had come up, to cancel his appointments for the week. Both of them, the lunch in Richmond and the dinner in Hartford. The woman he spoke to was clearly rattled and obviously wanted him to be more specific about his reasons for canceling, but he didn’t have the energy to invent something, and she evidently couldn’t bring herself to press him for a reason.

Wednesday he was supposed to get together with a writer who came highly recommended. They were just going to have lunch and explore in the most general fashion the possibility of their working together to develop a book proposal. Tuesday he called the writer to cancel. Did he want to reschedule? Not now, he said. He had the writer’s number, he’d call him when things cleared up a little.

Wednesday he had lunch alone at a diner in the neighborhood, then walked in Central Park for hours, pausing now and then to sit on a bench and stare off into space. Thursday he went to the gym, gave up on the treadmill after five minutes, gave up on the weight machines halfway through his cycle. Sat in the steam room for longer than he should have, and was dizzy and dehydrated when he got out of there. Went home, drank a whole bottle of Evian water, and went to bed.

Friday he picked up the phone to call her and tell her he wasn’t coming. He had her number at the gallery and dialed six of the seven digits, then hung up. Picked up the phone again, dialed three digits, quit.

Jesus.

At eight that night he gave his name to her doorman, praying that she wouldn’t be home. The doorman called upstairs, then nodded to him and pointed to the elevator. He knocked on her door and she called out that it was open.

He went in. There was no one in the living room. He walked on through to the bedroom and found her dressed in a black leather garter belt and black mesh stockings and high-heeled black shoes. Nothing else. The outfit should have looked absurd, but didn’t.

“Hi, Franny,” she said, almost gently. And smiled.

“Susan.”

“No, don’t talk. The hood will come later, but for now I don’t want you to speak. Do you understand?”

He nodded. She was crazy, he thought, and he was crazy to be here, he ought to leave right now. And he was getting a hard-on, and who the hell was he kidding? He wasn’t going anyplace.

“I waxed myself, Franny.” She touched herself, showing him. “It was starting to grow back, so I took care of it. You use hot wax, you pour it on and let it cool and rip it off. It’s painful, and very erotic. But it’s pretty.” She held herself open for his inspection, asked him if he didn’t think it was pretty. He nodded, and she told him to get undressed.

“Look at you, Franny, you’re hard as a rock. What’s a sweet little girl like you doing with such a gorgeous cock? One of these times I’m going to wax you. Everything, your chest, your armpits, your cock and balls and ass. Everything. You’ll be so silky smooth everywhere, and you’ll wear silk underwear and you’ll be hard all the time. Get on your knees, Franny. I’m all sensitive from the waxing and I want you to lick me. I want you to make me come.”

When she sent him home later that night he felt at once gloriously alive and determined he would never see her again. He went home and had another night full of unremembered dreams, waking with a furious erection and a strong urge to relieve himself, which he resisted.

Sunday night he had a sandwich and a beer at a good deli, and around eleven he went over to Stelli’s for a drink. He joined some friends at a table but hardly said a word, and didn’t stay long. Early night, Stelli told him on the way out. Big day tomorrow, he said.

But all he did the next day was read the papers and watch TV news. Tuesday after breakfast he called his lecture bureau and told them to cancel all his scheduled engagements and not make any future bookings for him. He wasn’t surprised when the phone rang ten minutes later and it was the head of the bureau, demanding to know what was the matter. Was he disappointed with their service? Was he going with a competitor? And, even if he was, didn’t he realize he had to honor the bookings they’d made for him?

He said it wasn’t that, he’d lost his taste for public speaking, he just couldn’t do it anymore. He fended off further questions, and noted that she didn’t close by telling him to give her a call if he changed his mind.

When he got off the phone he went through his book and canceled everything but a dentist appointment. Then he got out of the house and went for a walk in the park.

Friday he was back at London Towers. This time she hooded him immediately, pinned him on his back on the bed, and kept him on the edge of climax for an eternity. Finally she told him she was going to apply heat, that he might think it was going to burn him, but that it would not do him any damage. Then he felt something red-hot pressed against the base of his scrotum, then jabbed into his rectum. He smelled burning hair and thought he was going to die.

After a long moment the sensation changed, and he realized it wasn’t hot at all, it was cold, and that she’d rubbed him with an ice cube that even now was melting inside him. He lay there while his breathing returned to normal and she gentled him with a hand on his chest and abdomen, stroking him lightly, calming him down.

What he’d smelled, she told him, was a feather from her pillow, held in the flame of a candle. For verisimilitude, she said. Her lips touched the base of his scrotum, where she’d first touched him with the ice cube.

Next time, she said softly, you’ll be expecting ice. And you’ll get fire.

The following afternoon, Saturday, he looked up a number and called a woman he hadn’t seen in several months. Her name was Arlene Szigeti, and she worked at Carnegie Hall, in the Planned Giving division. Her job was to convince rich people of the value of making substantial bequests to the organization in their wills. She would take prospects to dinner and a concert, making them feel like members of an exclusive club. “I go out several nights a week with people a great deal more well off than you,” she’d told him once, “but you’re different. You pick up the check.”

“Fran,” she said. “Well, it’s been a while.”

“Too long,” he said. “Are you free for dinner Wednesday?”

She had plans Wednesday, but Tuesday was open. Maybe a show first, he suggested, and dinner afterward. They agreed on a couple of plays neither of them had seen, and he got good orchestra seats to their first choice. She met him at the theater, looking even lovelier than he remembered. She was in her midforties, with fine-spun blond hair and elegant features. Her father, a Hungarian with ties to the Esterhazy family, had come over after the 1956 revolution, her mother’s parents were Jewish refugees who got out of Germany just in time.

After the play they had a light supper down the street at Joe Allen’s, then walked to her apartment on Fifty-fifth Street, five minutes away from her office. It was a foregone conclusion that they would go to bed — they always did — and that the relationship would not lead to anything. They enjoyed each other’s company, in and out of bed, but the emotional chemistry wasn’t there.

In her apartment she offered drinks and he said he was fine, and she came into his arms and they kissed.

He still hadn’t kissed Susan.

In bed, his passion for her was stronger than it had ever been, and she was an apt and eager partner. At the end she lay with her head in the crook of his arm and her hand cupping his groin.

“Whew,” she said. “If I knew you were that hot, we could have skipped dinner.”

“Just so we had our dessert at home.”

Friday night he was at Susan’s again, naked, bound. “Now,” she said, “tell me all about your date.”

The previous week, just before he left, she’d asked him if he was sleeping with anyone else besides her. He said, “Sleeping? When did we ever sleep together?” Fucking, she said. Was he fucking anybody?

Not lately, he’d said, and she said that was no good. She was fucking other people, and he should do the same. During the coming week, she said, she wanted him to call some woman and go to bed with her. She expected a full report on Friday.

“But not on Thursday,” she’d told him at the door. “I want you fully recovered.”

Recounting the evening with Arlene, he realized that part of the excitement he’d felt with her came from knowing he’d be reporting in detail to Susan.

She listened intently and asked questions throughout. She wanted a full description of Arlene’s body, wanted to know just what he’d done and how he felt. When he was done she told him he deserved a reward, and she got out her kit of wax and cheesecloth. She trimmed his hair with a scissors, waxed his chest and underarms and groin, then rolled him over and did his backside.

The wax was hot, but not too hot to bear. The removal of the hair was painful, but also bearable. When she’d finished she made him touch himself and sat cross-legged while he stroked himself.

When he was close to climax she moved his hands away and took him in her mouth, then climbed onto him and kissed him full on the mouth, giving him his seed, commanding him to swallow it.

“Oh, Franny,” she said. “Our first kiss. Isn’t it romantic?”

He would see her again this Friday, and every Friday. He no longer entertained the notion of giving her up. He was, he supposed, enslaved, and it might be said that their relationship gave new meaning to the term pussy-whipped. He didn’t care. It didn’t seem to matter.

Once she’d asked him if it was true that he’d never been with a whore. Not until this summer, he said.

I’m not a whore, she said, and he said he hadn’t meant it as an insult. She said she hadn’t taken it for an insult, but that it was inaccurate. He said he knew that, that she didn’t take money, that he hadn’t meant it that way, but she cut off his explanation. She wasn’t talking about money, she said. Money aside, didn’t he know what a whore was?

A whore, she told him, would do anything he liked. She was entirely different. She would do things he didn’t like, and make him like them.

He didn’t call Arlene again, or any of several other women who might have been available to play a similar role. Even if he’d been interested, the thought of trying to explain his sudden lack of body hair was daunting.

When he went to the gym, he skipped the steam and sauna, waited until he got home to take his shower. He didn’t like the idea of anyone seeing him like this, and yet he was not entirely sorry she’d done it. He liked the smoothness of his skin, its sensitivity. And, while he didn’t want to expose his hairlessness, when he walked about with clothes on he felt like a man with a delicious secret.

It was strange, all of this, and he didn’t know what to make of it. He’d always taken it for granted that he knew who he was, and she kept showing him a side of himself the existence of which he hadn’t even suspected. She couldn’t have created this dark side, it would have to have been there all along, and he supposed it was better to know about it than not.

Or was it? William Boyce Harbinger (did his wife call him Bill? had his mother called him Billy?) must have had an unsuspected dark side of his own, forever hidden from view until the towers fell and shined an awful light on it. Harbinger, reborn as the Carpenter, must have been astonished by the acts he was capable of performing. Could anyone argue he was better off for it?

He kept coming back to the man, because he could think of nothing else besides his weekly descent into — into what? Depravity? Madness? His own unplumbed depths?

Better to think about the Carpenter. Maybe, somehow, he’d come up with a way to catch him.