The City Under the Skin

26. MARILYN OFF THE GRID

That night, Marilyn returned alone to the Grid. Although Zak had said he sometimes went there to lick his wounds, and he surely had plenty to lick now, he wasn’t there, and she was relieved. Sex complicated everything. She probably shouldn’t have taken him back to the Telstar. She wondered how long it would be before he called her: too soon, she was sure.

The place was a lot less welcoming and a lot more crowded than when she was there the first time: there was nowhere to sit. She bought herself a drink and took up a spot standing, wedged in by the piano, where she could listen to Sam, who was now playing something melancholy and formless and, she assumed, improvised. She found that encouraging. She dropped a couple of bills into his tip jar, and when he took a break, she offered to buy him a drink. Funny how if you’re a young woman and you offer to buy a drink for some guy and say you’re really interested in his work, he can be surprisingly willing to talk to you. He slid along the broad piano stool so Marilyn could sit next to him.

“My friend tells me you used to be a cop,” Marilyn said.

“Who’s your friend?”

“Zak Webster. Map guy. Comes in here once in a while.”

“I don’t remember names,” Sam said. “Or faces.”

“Wasn’t that a problem when you were a cop?”

“It was the least of them.”

“You were one of those profiler guys, right?”

“Aren’t you the little Nancy Drew?”

“Seriously, can I ask you a question, Sam?”

“Don’t tell me you’re a writer? Journalist? Documentary filmmaker?”

“No, no,” she said quickly. She was ready with a lie or two she’d worked out. “I’m an actress.”

He looked her over. Yes, he could believe she was an actress, though he couldn’t believe she’d ever be a very successful one.

“I’m working on a part,” Marilyn explained quickly.

“Lady Macbeth?”

On another occasion she’d have been prepared to be insulted, and to deliver an insult in return. Instead, she said, “No, it’s a brand-new play. It’ll be the premiere. We’re workshopping it, doing some improvisation. So I need some background.”

“You’re playing a cop?”

“No, I’m playing the murderer.”

He smiled at her just a little condescendingly and said, “You don’t look the type.”

“Well, that’s the whole point.”

“So, what do you want? Help with your motivation?”

He exhaled a small snort of ridicule.

“What’s wrong with that? Don’t cops try to work out motivation?”

He snorted again, but he didn’t argue.

“The thing is,” said Marilyn, “I can totally understand why people kill people. That seems the easy part. But I want to know what they do next.”

“What does your playwright say?”

“That’s the problem. He keeps changing his mind, doing rewrites, so I’m trying to give him some input.”

“He’ll love that,” said Sam, and ran his fingers along the keyboard, played some suspended chords, then a few cop show stabs and arpeggios.

“Some people just shrug it off,” he said, “and they get on with their lives like it never happened. No guilt, no remorse. Nothing. I guess we call them sociopaths. Or psychopaths. I can never remember which is which. They can both be pretty hard for the cops to catch.”

“And really hard to portray on stage, I guess,” said Marilyn.

Sam shrugged exaggeratedly, to show this was not his territory. He said, “And some murderers go directly to the nearest cop and confess everything. That kind of takes the sport out of it.”

“Doesn’t make for much of a play, either,” said Marilyn. “But what if they don’t go to the cops yet still feel the need to confess?”

“Like to a priest? A family member? Only a fool trusts a priest. Or his own family.”

Marilyn smiled at him sweetly, as if she knew he was only pretending to be so cynical.

“What if they wrote down their confession, like in a diary?” she said. “Is that possible?”

“I’ve seen that. Gets it off their chest, and if they’re really twisted, then they have the thrill of reliving the murder all over again.”

“Right,” said Marilyn with what she hoped sounded like no more than professional enthusiasm.

“It’s a dumb thing to do, though,” he said. “People have a way of finding other people’s diaries, and they always read them.”

“What if it was in code?”

“That would make life trickier. And a lot less plausible.”

“Or what if maybe they burned the diary after they’d written it?” Marilyn suggested. “Like a sacrifice, burning the sins away.”

“No, it’d just be burning a diary. The sins would still be right there.”

Sam’s fingers moved up and down the keys again, in exaggerated ecclesiastical scampering. A weary drunk leaning against the bar turned around and blessed himself.

“What if you drew a diagram of the murder?” Marilyn said. “Like a map. So there wouldn’t be any actual words saying ‘I did it.’ In fact, depending on how you drew the map, somebody could look at it and still not realize it was showing a murder. You wouldn’t have to draw knives, body parts, pools of blood. Is that the kind of thing murderers ever do?”

“I’m sure somebody somewhere has done it at some time.”

“So how about this? Our character commits the murder…”

“This is your character?”

“Yes.”

“Why does she commit the murder?”

“For money.”

“Female hit man? You know, you’re making it harder and harder for me to suspend my disbelief, but okay, carry on.”

“And afterward,” said Marilyn, “she’s all crazy and worked up, maybe goes into a kind of fugue state. Drives around the streets. And in order to get the murder out of her system, she grabs some random woman from the street. Do you buy that?”

“I wouldn’t even want to rent it.”

“Stick with me, Sam. She drags the victim into a van, takes her into a basement, straps her down, strips her naked, gets some tattoo equipment, tattoos a map on the woman’s back showing all the details of the murder.”

“Man, I really want to see this show of yours. Why does she do that?”

“So that it’s gone. The confession’s been made. The murderer feels free. And the tattooed woman goes back to the streets. The fugue state disappears. Then sometime later, I’m not sure how long, these women with the tattoos start showing up. Yes?”

“This playwright of yours — who’s his biggest influence? David Mamet? The Three Stooges?”

Marilyn raised her hands in a “search me” gesture.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve still got a lot of exploration to do.”

“I would think so.”

Sam stared down at the keys but kept his hands folded in his lap.

“Do you believe in this bullshit you’re giving me?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to believe in it?”

Marilyn had no answer to that.

Sam continued, “I guess I’m supposed to say something wise and profound about now, yeah? Follow the money. Cherchez la femme. Round up the usual suspects.”

“You’re not taking me seriously.”

“I’m taking you as seriously as I can. And the truth is, I think you’re miscast. I think you’d make a much better victim than you would a murderer.”

He played a few deep, rumbling, sonorous notes on the bass keys.

“Still, if you need somebody to do the incidental music for the show — give me a call,” he said. “I’m not easy, but I’m cheap.”