Stone Shadow

Dallas

The other one is thinking and feeling. I see what you're going at of course but, no, I'm not sure that would hold water."

“Why not?"

“It's somewhat farfetched. Not impossible, but we could create ANY sort of hypothetical. Example: Ukie. Highly intelligent. Very bright. Fails repeatedly in his efforts to, as he says, ‘become a star.’ Craves adoration. Respect. Wants attention. Needs it to placate his forever-wounded sense of self. Hey, folks, look at me. Admire ME. The folks don't give him the attention or the admiration he needs. They rebuke and criticize him by making him FAIL. They withhold his precious stardom from him. He lashes out in anger. First by forcing his sexual attentions on strangers. Rubbing up against women in the public conveyance. Showing himself in the crowded store. Picking up a woman and raping her. Who's to say if Miss Scannapieco was the first or the twenty-first? Lots of rapists don't get talked about until they get caught. Lots of victims don't come forth."

“Yeah."

“So now we have a possible profile of a guy who is getting away with murder. That's what he says to himself. He's raped X numbers of women, forced his ATTENTIONS on them, paid them back for not giving him the respect and adulation he needed. He's getting away with murder. He can do anything. If I can rape and get away with it, why not do whatever I want? I'm smarter than your average bear. Fiendishly clever in fact. I'll show ‘em. I'll start killing them and burying the bodies. Then they'll be sorry they didn't treat me like a star."

“So it sounds like you're saying—"

“I'm just saying Ukie could be guilty of murder. COULD be. I'm saying he's clever and antisocial enough to have killed, and disturbed enough in theory that he could in effect convince himself of a mythologized tormentor so that he could fool us. It's not a wholly unlikely scenario. Playing the devil's advocate."

“I'm confused again,” Eichord said, and Sue Mandel puffed up his cheeks in an enigmatic smile and flipped the end of his tie like in the Laurel and Hardy movies. “Another fine mess, huh?"

“I dunno.” Jack shook his head at the futility of it.

“For openers, let me lay all this on you.” He shoved a stack of papers in Jack's direction.” Herrrre's Ukie. In all his laid-back hyper, I-did-it, I-didn't-do-it glory. These are test results, Observations. They're not quite the same as test scores. You passed. You didn't pass. The Rorschach. Gestalt. Ways of measuring the things that have pulled Ukie's behavior off the pattern of the norm. Ways of seeing how he looks at life. How he projects himself onto his happenings. If he knows right from wrong. Values his own life or yours—that sort of thing. Best I can say overall is, the results are still inconclusive. You can take a look. Feed it into the meat grinder and see what kind of hamburger you get."

“Okay."

“Okay."

It was a long drive back to the motel and Jack found a station playing big bands and that made it a little less Painful. Basie, some ancient Woody, a band that sounded like Tadd Dameron or one of those cats from the Birdland years and a drummer who seemed to be banging on a table with a ruler, a bittersweet swig-era, punctuation mark as he drove, and he stopped and bought a fifth and picked up a bucket of ice on the way to his room.

He opened a can of the dog food and took it outside and gave it to dog and ran a fresh bowl of water. And of course the fucking dog was nowhere in sight. He should have known the beast wouldn't be sitting there waiting for a loser like him. He slammed the door on the day, poured a full glass over a couple of rocks, killed it in four five sips. Built another, sat on the bed, kicked off his shoes. Said aloud to the empty room as he reached for the glass, “Well, shit. Let's get drunk and be somebody,” downing the Daniel's and melting ice and tasting something else, a nagging and nameless uncertainty.