Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories

Judgment

The man had been standing here for twenty minutes, just after dusk, just after the rain began. The drops were silver in the dirty light of the street lamp. It was chill enough, this late April, to tint the man’s cheeks a winter red and make his nose run.

Dressed as he was in a dark cap and dark topcoat and dark slacks, the man was nearly invisible in the gloom. Not that he had to worry much about being seen. This part of the city was being torn down, hundred-year-old houses leveled and many of the rest boarded up. Only a few people lived here anymore, and most of them were the homeless who huddled in the corners of empty houses shivering against the cold in their rags and gloves with missing fingers, drinking cheap wine that was as bitter as lighter fluid.

The house the man stared at was boarded up, but on the second floor you could see a faint light between the boards over the windows. At one time the place had been a respectable two-story white frame house. Husbands and wives and kids and dreams had lived here, but no longer. Now just a man named McLennan walked its floors.

A car went by, the sort of car you’d expect to see in this neighborhood, a big old dinosaur a dozen years old with a smashed windshield and cancerous rust everywhere and a rumbling muffler in bad need of replacement and three teenagers in the front seat giggling behind pot and beer.

Nicholas Ryan stepped out of the light till the car got past and then he walked quickly through the dirty puddles in the middle of the street.

Rain spraying his face, Ryan hurried onto the lawn of the house and then moved in the shadows along the side of the place. Two or three times he felt his foot slide into dog shit and once he crushed the ragged neck of a broken beer bottle. The once-white siding was now covered with rust stains, as if it were bleeding.

Ryan took the stairs leading up the side of the house. Whipping wind covered any noise he made.

When he reached the top step, he put his head close to the torn screen door and listened. He heard nothing. McLennan was an alcoholic who started drinking right after he got off his factory job. He was usually passed out by now. That’s what Ryan was counting on, anyway.

The door was easy to push open, the inside lock hanging at an angle just as Ryan remembered.

A minute later, he stood inside.

During the last of its years, the house had been rented out as two large apartments, upstairs and downstairs. Ryan just hoped the downstairs looked better than this.

The upstairs consisted of a single large room plus a bathroom and a tiny room for storage. The furniture had all come from Goodwill, sprung purple couch and wobbly blond coffee table and any number of knickknacks that were embarrassing to behold, not least the hula-girl lamp on one of the end tables. The faded floral wallpaper was peeling, and ran with the same sort of stain as the white siding.

The floor was an obstacle course of empty beer cans, pizza cardboards, dirty socks, dirty underwear, gigantic dust balls, steel-toed work shoes, and endless empty gnarled-up cigarette packages.

If only I could count on him getting lung cancer, Ryan noted ruefully.

But the smell was worst of all. It was the smell of mildew and age and dust and dirt and shit and piss and sweat; and the smell of perversion. Ryan could think of no other way to characterize it. This large squalid room reeked of a decadence that almost made him vomit. He wanted to get out of here as soon as he could.

Richard McLennan had the ancient Motorola TV console and the purple couch and the overstuffed armchair with the filthy orange slipcovers and the blond coffee table arranged so that it all fit together like a tiny living room. He could sit in the chair with his feet on the coffee table guzzling beer after beer and watching the black and white 21" Motorola TV screen.

Next to the chair was a cardboard box, and Ryan knew right away that this was what he was looking for. The proof he needed.

Before seating himself and going through the box, he walked over to the far east corner of the room where the single bed was pushed up against the wall and where McLennan lay snoring. Above the bed was a cheap plastic crucifix, Christ dying endlessly. A crucifix did not belong in such a room. Ryan wanted to tear it from the wall.

Ryan stood above the bed and looked down at the man. He was really pretty nondescript, McLennan. Fleshy but not fat; unpleasant-looking (always needed a shave and a haircut) but not ugly; middle-aged but not really aged. Now, lying among sheets that hadn’t been washed or straightened out in a long time, McLennan slept with a brown quart bottle of beer clutched in his right hand. The beer had spilled on the bed. McLennan lay face-up, his snoring a wet ugly sound.

Ryan, assuming McLennan wasn’t going to wake up, went back to the chair. He sat on the edge of it and picked up the cardboard box.

The first picture was a Polaroid color shot. It showed a girl approximately six years old standing completely naked and staring at the camera. She had some kind of dog collar around her neck. In the right of the photo you could see a whip dangling. It looked like a long black terrible snake. The little girl’s expression was blank. She had probably been drugged.

The next photograph he found was of a little boy and a dog and—

Sickened, Ryan tossed the photo back into the box and set the box back down. There would be hundreds of such photographs in the box, every sort of little boy and girl, every imaginable configuration and position and perversion and—

Ryan put his face in his hands and began drawing deep, deep breaths. He wanted to smell clean, fresh air. It would be good to stand outside again in the chill night. Be reinvigorated. Redeemed. This place and all it represented was beginning to overpower him. Over there in the west corner was where the photo of the little girl and the whips had been taken. He tried not to think of what had become of her after McLennan was done with her. What had happened to any of the children.

He went straight over to the bed now and took out the Walther and fitted the silencer to it and then put the weapon right against the center of McLennan’s forehead.

Ryan said, “Wake up.”

After a time, the snoring spluttered to a stop and McLennan’s sad frantic brown eyes showed themselves.

He was still drunk — his rank breath overwhelming even from this distance — but not so drunk that he didn’t understand immediately what was going on.

“Hey!” he said. “What the hell’s happening here?”

He tried to jump up from bed. Ryan kept the muzzle of the Walther tight against his forehead.

“You didn’t stop the way you promised, did you?” Ryan said.

“Hey, what the hell’re you doing here? You think I don’t know who you are and what you are?”

“You promised me, McLennan. You promised me you’d stop or get help.”

“You can’t do this. You’re a—”

But before he could get the word out, Ryan killed him. A single bullet straight into the brain.

A small gelatinous embryo was borne out the back of McLennan’s head. He jerked and jumped as if he’d been electrocuted and then he lay quite still. The air smelled of the gunshot and blood and of McLennan shitting his pants.

Ryan raised his hand and made the sign of the cross and then said some words in Latin. He still preferred Latin.

Before he left he dumped the cardboard box in the sink and took lighter fluid and burned all the photographs.

“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It’s been three weeks since my last confession.”

“Go on. Confess your sins.”

“I killed a man tonight, Father.”

There was a long silence in the darkness of the confessional. In the shadows on the other side of the curtain the old priest sighed. On the air was the sweet scent of incense. It was nearly nine o’clock on a Saturday night. The church was empty except for a lone old lady who knelt beneath her bright ethnic headscarf far ahead at the communion rail.

The old priest sighed again. “It’s you, isn’t it, Father Ryan?”

“Yes, Father, it is.”

“This is the third time you’ve confessed to me in a year.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Yet you continue to kill people.”

“Only those who won’t help themselves or seek help from others. The man I killed tonight confessed to me once a month that he had molested children. I told him to stop, I told him where he could find psychiatric help. But he did nothing to help himself.” He paused. “We’ve taken the vow of silence, Father. I couldn’t turn him in. I stopped him the only way I could — before he hurt any other children.”

“And the two others you killed?”

“An arsonist who set several fires that killed people, and a rapist who mutilated his victims afterward.”

“And you could find no other way to stop them, Father Ryan?”

“No other way. Otherwise they would continue to kill people.”

In the vast shadows of the church, the old woman at the communion rail coughed. The sound reminded Ryan of a gunshot.

“Are you sorry for your sins, Father Ryan?”

“I want to be sorry, Father.”

“Then pray with me that you never again do such a thing.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Pray with me now, Father Ryan. Pray harder than you ever have in your life, Father Ryan.”

“Yes, Father. I will. I promise. Harder than I ever have in my life.”

Three weeks later, the man came back to Father Ryan. Late on a Saturday night. Father Ryan in his confessional. Only a few people left kneeling before the flickering green and yellow and blue votive candles.

Father Ryan recognized the voice immediately.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“Go on. Tell me your sins.”

A pause. “My daughter, Father. She’s ten and I—”

“Yes?”

“I force her to have sex with me.”

“I see.” Trying to control his anger, Father Ryan said, “You’ve been here before.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Confessing the same sin.”

“Yes, Father.”

“And I’ve told you about the psychology clinic over on Third Avenue by the railroad tracks.”

“Yes, Father.”

“How it’s free and confidential.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Have you gone there yet?”

“No, Father.”

“But in the meantime, you’ve molested your daughter again?”

“Yes, Father.”

Father Ryan said nothing. “Are you going to go to the clinic?”

“Yes, Father.”

“You absolutely promise me?”

“Yes, Father.”

Father Ryan heard the rest of the man’s sins and then gave him his penance.

When he left, the man sounded quite sorry about what he’d done.

Father Ryan had to hurry. Slip out the side door to the parking lot and catch a glimpse of the man and the car he was driving.

Father Ryan stood in the shadows of the church door watching a nice-looking man in a three-piece-suit get into a small sports car. Father Ryan, who had a good memory for figures, noted the man’s license number.

Sadly, turning back to the interior of his church, Father Ryan knew that he would soon enough be using the man’s license number as he set about investigating the man just as he’d first investigated McLennan and the two others.

Father Ryan, alone in the church now, went to the communion rail and prayed long into the night.