Small Town

twenty-four

The Carpenter sat on a bench in Riverside Park, not far from the Rotunda, and the Boat Basin Café. It was getting on for midnight. The café was closed, and a light rain an hour earlier had cleared the park of the few walkers and sitters who’d shared it with him. The Carpenter didn’t mind the rain. He scarcely noticed it.

From where he sat, he could keep an eye on one of his city’s greatest anomalies, the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. This little complex of docks and piers at the Hudson’s edge allowed a favored few New Yorkers the privilege of mooring their boats there for an essentially negligible annual fee. Anyone who had a slip at the Boat Basin clung to it as if it were a rent-controlled apartment, and in fact it was that and more. If you were a boater, it afforded you economical dockage far more convenient than marinas like the one at City Island, way up in the remote northeastern region of the Bronx. But most of the boats moored at Seventy-ninth Street never left their slips, and many of them didn’t even have working engines, running their lights and appliances off propane generators. They were houseboats, with the stress very much on the first syllable, and their lucky occupants were able to live a raffish Bohemian life in wave-rocked comfort for considerably less than it would have cost them to park a car anywhere in Manhattan.

The great wonder in the Carpenter’s mind was that it had taken him this long to think of it. What better place to pass unnoticed than in a derelict boat on the Hudson? His own apartment was ten minutes away, and he knew the Boat Basin well enough. Once, when his children were young, he’d had fantasies of keeping a boat there. It would have been pleasant to take them all boating on a summer afternoon, then walk on home through the twilight...

He’d been coming to the park now for several nights, keeping out of the way of the occasional cop on patrol, always choosing a bench out of the reach of the streetlights. Now and then, in the hours between midnight and dawn, he’d go for a closer look at the dark and silent vessels.

The Basin dwellers, he knew, were a close-knit group, in the manner of a gathering of outcasts. They respected one another’s privacy but stood united against a common enemy — i.e., the real estate interests and municipal authorities who periodically conspired to get rid of them. It wouldn’t do, he knew, to take over the home of some gregarious houseboater, some pillar of the floating community.

Better to supplant a part-time resident, to slip like a hermit crab into the empty shell of a pleasure boater with an apartment somewhere else. And that way he’d be assured of a seaworthy vessel, one he could take out onto the water if he wished.

So he waited, looking for an opportunity. And he was watching patiently that evening when a boat pulled in and docked. It was a nice-looking one; he’d seen it the night before, noticed earlier this evening that it was not at its slip. He’d seen fishing poles on hooks above the cabin, and supposed the fellow had gone out for a night’s fishing, or just to get out on the water and look up at the stars.

The lights went out, the engines ceased to throb. A man, wearing a brass-buttoned blazer and a Greek fisherman’s cap, walked from the pier and headed east through the park.

The Carpenter followed him.

Over the next three days the Carpenter learned that the man’s name was Peter Shevlin and that he lived in one of the fine prewar apartment buildings on West Eighty-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam. The lobby was attended around the clock, and the Carpenter never even considered entering it.

Shevlin worked in a high-rise office building on Sixth Avenue in the Fifties, and rode to and from his office on the subway. He seemed to live alone, and to spend much of his time alone. One evening he stopped on his walk from the subway to pick up dinner for one at a taco stand on Broadway, and that reinforced the Carpenter’s conviction that he did not share his apartment with a wife or lover.

Years ago he’d been inside Shevlin’s building, and knew the apartments there were all quite sizable. He guessed that Shevlin was widowed; if he’d been divorced, his wife would very likely have wound up with the apartment, and Shevlin would be sleeping on his boat, if indeed the courts didn’t take that away from him as well. And he was of an age to be a widower. He was, the Carpenter realized, about his own age, and it struck him — for the first time, oddly — that the two of them were not that far apart in appearance. If you stood them side by side they’d look entirely different, but they were about the same height, and similarly built, they both had gray hair, and to describe one was to describe the other.

It was, he thought, as if the man had been sent to him. Another widower, a man who lived just two blocks from the Carpenter’s old apartment. A man who’d lived the Carpenter’s dream, owning a boat and mooring it at Seventy-ninth Street. A man ready for sacrifice.

The Carpenter slept during the day, turning up at one of the multiplex movie houses in time for the first show of the day. He took the senior discount, bought popcorn, and went into one of the theaters. The clerks were all young people working for minimum wage, and they hardly even looked at their patrons. The Carpenter, his head lowered, his shoulders drooping with age, never got a second glance.

He’d go to a theater, breakfast on popcorn, and doze off, sleeping lightly, and always waking up when the feature presentation ended. When he was a boy you could go to the movies and sit there all day, you could watch a double feature three times over if you were so inclined, but now they had lengthy intermissions between showings and you had to leave when the picture was over.

But there were eight or ten or a dozen or more screens under a single roof, and what was to prevent you from going from one to another? It was illegal, your ticket only entitled you to a single performance of a single film, but on weekday afternoons none of the films played to as much as a quarter of capacity, and often he was one of a half dozen patrons making up the showing’s total audience. Why waste an attendant’s time to keep a lonely retiree from double-dipping?

The Carpenter got plenty of sleep. Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep anymore, he watched the movie.

After three days of movies and as many nights of following his quarry, the Carpenter tailed Peter Shevlin from the Eighty-sixth Street IRT station to a Vietnamese restaurant on Broadway, where he ordered a take-out dinner. Instead of heading for his apartment, he continued downtown on Broadway. He crossed Broadway at Eighty-fourth Street, which a street sign designated Edgar Allan Poe Street, then turned right and walked west to Riverside Drive. Flights of steps led down to an underpass, and the Carpenter followed him through it to the strip of park edging the Hudson.

The Carpenter waited in the park while the man boarded his boat, waited while the boat sat at anchor long enough for Shevlin to eat his dinner, and remained where he was when Shevlin cast off and took the boat out onto the river.

He wished it would rain. Rain would bring Shevlin back sooner, and would clear the park of other pairs of eyes.

But the good weather held, and the Carpenter got to see the sun set behind the buildings on the Jersey shore. It was past eleven by the time Shevlin’s boat returned, and by then the Carpenter had picked his spot and was waiting. He’d reached into his navy-blue backpack — its load had increased in the past few days, with purchases he’d found it advisable to make — and he drew out a steel tire iron he’d picked up at an auto supply store on Eleventh Avenue. He’d have preferred a hammer, but suspected that hardware clerks were looking closely at older men who came in to buy hammers.

Shevlin passed without seeing him in the shadows. He stepped out, said, “Mr. Shevlin?”

The man turned at the sound of his name, and the Carpenter pointed to the ground and said, “You dropped something.” Shevlin lowered his head, tried to see what he might have dropped, and the Carpenter stepped forward quickly and struck him full force with the tire iron, catching him just behind the ear. Shevlin dropped like a felled ox, and the Carpenter hit him again at the back of the neck, then grabbed him and dragged him into the bushes.

He checked for a pulse and wasn’t surprised when he failed to detect one. Just to make sure, he clapped a hand over Shevlin’s mouth and pinched the man’s nostrils shut, and stayed like that for several minutes. If Shevlin hadn’t been dead from the blows, he was surely dead now.

The park was deserted, but it was still too early for what the Carpenter had to do. First he returned the tire iron to his backpack, pleased with the way it had performed. Then he wrapped Shevlin in a pair of black plastic lawn and leaf bags, tucking his legs into one, pulling the other down over his head. Anyone noticing him now would see a trash bag, or perhaps some plastic mulch for the shrubbery, rather than human remains.

When he was satisfied with his work, the Carpenter found a bench from which he would be able to tell if anyone discovered the body. No one came any closer to it than the joggers who breezed by every now and then, and they were far too intent on their efforts to notice some dark form twenty yards away.

At two-thirty in the morning, when twenty minutes had passed without a single human being coming into that part of the park, the Carpenter resumed his labors. He stripped off all of Shevlin’s clothing, filling one of the leaf bags with his jacket and trousers, shirt and socks and shoes and underwear. He removed his watch, but couldn’t get his wedding ring off his finger, and decided it didn’t matter.

He’d bought a boning knife and a saw at a restaurant supply house on the Bowery, and he used them to dismember Shevlin’s corpse, cutting the man into manageable-size portions. The work was distasteful, but the Carpenter was not overly surprised to discover that it didn’t bother him. It was a job, and he performed it as quickly and efficiently as possible, inserting each severed portion of the man into a plastic bag, securing the bag with tape, and setting it aside while he tackled the next part of the job.

Earlier, he’d located a Dumpster on Seventy-seventh between West End and Riverside Drive. He walked there carrying a taped-up plastic bag in each hand; each contained one of the man’s thighs. He placed the packages in the Dumpster, which was full of what looked to be the debris from the gut rehab of a brownstone. He buried his packages under some broken bricks and loose plaster.

He put some of the smaller parcels in garbage cans, and walked all the way to Broadway to empty the bag of clothing into the Pembroke Thrift Shop’s 24-hour collection box. The final two parcels went into his backpack. A key from Shevlin’s key ring got him through the gate to the Boat Basin, and another admitted him to the boat’s sleeping quarters.

He took off his shoes, stretched out on the bunk. The cabin was tiny, but he found it cozy, and quite comfortable. He wouldn’t sleep, he’d had plenty of sleep earlier at the Lincoln Plaza multiplex, but it was pleasant to stretch out and feel the gentle rocking motion of the anchored boat.

There were things he would have to do. Shevlin’s hands and head would have to be disposed of properly. He didn’t care if someone found the other body parts, although it would be fine with him, and not all that unlikely, if they escaped detection and spent eternity in a landfill. But it didn’t matter, really, if the city discovered that one more of its residents had died. His sole interest lay in keeping them from knowing to whom the various body parts had once belonged.

Fingerprints and dental records made the hands and head considerably more identifiable than the rest of the man. He could knock out the teeth, toss them in the river. Weight the toothless skull and sink it somewhere. Slice the flesh from the palms and the tips of the fingers before disposing of the hands.

A call to Shevlin’s office would keep his absence from setting off any alarms. If someone did miss him and got the doorman to check his apartment, they’d find nothing suspicious within. He didn’t think anyone would think to check the boat, certainly not for a while.

And he only needed it for a while.

The motion of the boat was restful, even hypnotic. He dozed off and slept for a little while, then woke up and stayed where he was, enjoying the gentle rocking motion, enjoying the tight quarters, enjoying everything about his new home.

He felt wonderfully at peace.