The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 8

EMPTY BUD CANS already littered the outdoor stairwell. The Gambler and Bobby and the other crew bosses asked us not to litter, but there was no way to get a bunch of exhausted bookmen, thrilled after a long day to be sitting and drinking beer, to pick up after themselves. The bosses didn’t really care as long as the books were sold, and Sameen and Lajwati Lal, who owned the motel, were content if not exactly happy as long as the bills were paid. We stayed at this motel every time we came to Jacksonville, and they weren’t about to mess with a decent-size account, so in the end nothing got done.

I rounded the stairs, nearly slipping in a puddle of spilled beer but recovering by leaping into the air and landing at the bottom of the first floor.

To get to the pool I had to cross a little courtyard, go past the reception lobby, and come out the other end. I never got that far. When I landed I smelled something sweet and familiar, and it wasn’t until I felt a hand on my shoulder that I processed the scent.

It was pot. Not that I found anything especially sinister about pot. Sure, I associated its use with my father, but my father also wore pants, and I wasn’t about to eschew them on similar grounds. I’d smoked a few times, and though it always made me headachy and paranoid, I figured that sometimes you had to be a good sport and go along to get along. But here, on the road, with the bookmen, I associated pot with just one thing: rednecks.

“Where’s the Hebrew fire?” Scott lisped in his high-pitched voice. It wasn’t bad enough the guy had an impediment, he sounded as if he’d just sucked in helium as well. He had one of his dinner-plate hands on my shoulder, and there was nothing friendly about it. He pressed hard, but even so I could have gotten away if that’s what I’d wanted; however, doing so would have involved some squirming, which struck me as humiliating. Better, I thought, to act as though I didn’t care. This strategy was one I’d turned to again and again in middle school and high school. It never worked, but I clung to the routine as desperately as a sailor clung to prayer in the face of a storm.

“Yeah, where ith it?” Ronny Neil said. Harassing me didn’t mean that Scott was above contempt.

I looked at Scott’s hand. “I’ve got somewhere to go,” I said. The sour odor of his unwashed body began to pierce the shell of the pot.

“Where would you have to go?” Scott asked. His eyes were already red and half-closed, and he teetered a little uncomfortably on his feet. I tried not to stare at a cluster of pimples on his chin, big and foamy white at the top.

“Yeah,” Ronny Neil repeated, tossing his hair back like an actor in a shampoo commercial. He took a big suck from the pipe, held it for a moment, and blew the smoke in my face.

I understood the gravity of smoke blowing. A man blew smoke in your face, you beat the shit out of him if you had the chance. It was a hanging offense, a reason to go nuclear.

“Bobby wants to see me,” I said in a scratchy voice. It seemed like a good lie. No one wanted to get on Bobby’s bad side. There was no percentage in that.

“Fuck Bobby and fuck you and fuck all your asshole friends,” Ronny Neil said.

“That,” I observed, “is a lot of fucking.”

“You little shit,” Scott added. He jabbed his finger in my stomach. Not insanely hard, but hard enough to hurt.

Ronny Neil smacked Scott in the back of the head. “I tell you to hit him, you fat fuck?”

“I just poked him,” Scott answered defiantly.

“Well, don’t juth pokth himth. Don’t juth poke nobody until I tell you to, asshole.” He turned to me. “You think Bobby is so great? He ain’t shit around here, and he don’t know shit about what’s going on. The Gambler trusts us. You understand? Not you and not Bobby. So stop hiding behind him like he was your mama.”

“Bobby’s a fucking asshole,” Scott said. “He gives all the best areas to a pussy like you.”

“A puthy like you,” Ronny Neil repeated.

“You know what, I’m starting to feel like a third wheel in this conversation,” I said. “I think the polite thing would be for me to excuse myself.”

“I think the polite thing would be for you to stick it up your ass.”

“It’s funny,” I said, “how the standards of politeness vary from culture to culture.”

“You think you’re smart. You blank again tonight?” Ronny Neil handed the pipe over to Scott, who looked at his hand for a moment, trying to figure out how to keep me where he wanted without touching me. Scott then studied the ground and moved around on unsteady feet to block me from getting away.

“I didn’t blank,” I said. “Not that it’s your business.”

“When you fall asleep tonight,” Scott said, “we’re gonna fuck you up.”

I had heard this threat before, but it never amounted to anything. They didn’t want to get fired, they just wanted to make me afraid. And it worked, because even though they hadn’t done anything yet didn’t mean they weren’t going to. They were certainly capable of it. Guys like Ronny Neil and Scott had no real future, not one they could imagine or look forward to. The end of high school had always meant that I could put the worst behind me; for Ronny Neil and Scott, it meant that the best was over. They were entirely capable of doing something horrible and irreversible, of sending themselves to jail, all on a whim.

My clenched determination not to waver before them was beginning to crumble. I’d seen too much today, and now I could feel the tears welling back somewhere in my throat. I needed to find some way to end this.

“Just what do you boys think you’re doing?”

We all turned around. Sameen Lal came storming out of the registration office, a paddle I somehow recognized as a cricket bat in one hand. He was in his forties, slender and tall, and had a thick head of black hair, well-defined cheekbones, and small, intense eyes, a natty little mustache. We stayed in his motel many times, and he recognized some of us and had opinions about the ones he recognized. He and his wife had singled me out for friendly waves, a “Good morning,” a sympathetic nod at night. They somehow knew my name. They also appeared to understand that Ronny Neil and Scott were bad news.

“I smell something illegal,” Sameen said. “I want you boys to clear out of here.”

“How you doing, there, Semen? I smelled it, too,” Ronny Neil said. “I think Lem here’s been smoking ganja. Best you should call the police and turn him in.”

Hardly my idea of a good joke, tonight less so than ever. Fortunately, Sameen understood what he was dealing with.

“I find your story very unlikely. Now, this is my motel, and I’m telling you to clear off, or I’ll report this to your boss.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I’d hate to see this here motel of yours burn to the ground, if you take my meaning.”

“His meaning is arson,” I said, working hard to sound dry now that my rescuer was here.

“I never threatened nothing,” Ronny Neil said. “You just remember that when this here place burns down that I never threatened nothing.”

“I do not want to hear your threats,” Sameen said. “You are a pair of very bad boys. Now, clear off, I said.”

“Okay, then.” Ronny Neil took hold of my arm and began to lead me away. “Let’s go.”

Sameen raised the cricket bat. Only a few inches, but it was clear he meant business and that he understood a lot more than his retiring demeanor suggested. “Let go of him, and clear off by yourselves.”

“I don’t like the way you’re ordering us around, Semen,” Ronny Neil said. “You don’t decide who goes where, now, do you?”

The two of them stared at each other, each waiting for something definitive to happen. Over by the pool, above the throb of conversation and music, I heard a few words, unmistakably Chitra’s voice, and I wanted to find some way to excuse myself. For her sake, yes, but for my own, too. I didn’t want to be there to witness more violence, not even if it meant Ronny Neil having his head bashed in by a vigilante wicket keeper.

“Excuse me, Mr. Lal, you’ve got a customer waiting for you, sir, so if you don’t mind, I’ll look out for Lemuel.”

The assassin walked toward us with an easy if slightly slouched gait. He had a spirited grin, and one hand was up in a half wave. Ronny Neil, Scott, and Sameen stared. They stared at this crazy-looking guy with his wild white hair and gangling enthusiasm.

“I’m Lemuel’s friend,” the assassin said to Sameen. “He’s okay now.”

“How do you know my name?” Sameen asked.

“It’s inscribed on your cricket bat.”

Sameen squinted with suspicion. “Can I leave you with him?” he asked me.

I nodded. I was afraid to do anything else.

Sameen nodded back. “You come see me if you have any more problems,” he said to me, and then went back to his office.

I liked that Sameen had come out to help me. I was grateful, even touched, but I’d never believed that this inoffensive, nearly invisible man, even with his bat, would be a match for Ronny Neil and Scott. The assassin, on the other hand, was another story.

The brief gust of relief I felt was gone in an instant. The assassin might get Ronny Neil and Scott to back off, but I couldn’t help feeling I was better off with Ronny Neil and Scott. I wanted to beg them not to leave me alone with him.

“What do you want?” Ronny Neil asked, his voice slow and viscous. He held himself straight, but he was a good three inches shorter than the stranger.

“Just looking for Lemuel,” the assassin said. He put a hand on my shoulder and began to lead me toward the pool.

I didn’t want to go. I wanted to cling to something, to resist. But there was no resisting him, and I went.

“That your boyfriend?” Ronny Neil called.

I ignored them. But the assassin didn’t. He turned and cocked his thumb and index finger into a gun and fired invisible digit bullets at each of them.

How frightened should I be? I wondered. I had already known he was down here. I had been coming to the pool because he was there. And we were in public. For all that, however, I felt the chill of terror simply from his proximity.

As though he belonged, as though he were the host and I the visitor, the assassin led me to the throng of bookmen by the pool. For a criminal, he didn’t fear crowds much.

In my haze, I didn’t see her come up to us. But then there she was. “I’ve met your friend,” Chitra said, gesturing toward the assassin with her red-tipped fingers. She stood next to me, smiling warmly, even goofily, as if she’d started in on a beer that would be one too many. And talking to me- our first exchange of the weekend. For all my fear, I felt the thrill at hearing her voice, which was soft and high, the accent sort of British and sort of not. “He’s quite funny.”

I grabbed a tall boy, popped it open, and drank without tasting, trying not to gulp. “Yeah, he’s a great guy,” I said to Chitra. I then turned to the killer. “What are you doing here?” I tried to keep the trembling out of my voice, tried to hit the tone I would have used with anyone I knew who had turned up unexpectedly. I wildly missed the mark.

“Looking for you, Lemuel. Will you excuse me for a minute?”

“Of course,” Chitra said.

The assassin put his hand on my back, pushing me away from the crowd. I didn’t much care for him touching me in that way, in part because he was a killer, but also because people already were quick to label me as gay. Not that they really much contemplated my sexual proclivities, but the insult came easily to guys like Ronny Neil and Scott, for whom “faggot” interchanged nicely with “pussy” and “Jew-boy.”

The assassin stopped by the candy machine that rested between the two public bathrooms. The nauseatingly sweet scent of deodorizer wafted out.

“Why’d you go back to the trailer, Lemuel?” the assassin asked.

So there it was, the reason he had followed me here. I felt the whoosh of panic in my ears. I’d been caught. But caught at what, exactly? Maybe, I tried to tell myself, I should relax. Now that I knew what it was, I could deal with it. Maybe. On the other hand, a guy who resolved his problems by killing now had a bone to pick with me, and that was discouraging.

“I didn’t have a choice.” The words tumbled out, hasty and hollow. Nothing in the assassin’s body language suggested menace, but I had to believe that I was talking to save my life. “I accidentally handed the wrong credit app to my crew boss.” I explained the rest, how Bobby wanted to go back, wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The assassin considered my explanation for only a matter of seconds. “All right,” he said. “But your pit boss didn’t see anything strange?”

I shook my head. “He just rang the doorbell and knocked, and then we took off.”

“Because it looked kind of funny to me,” the assassin said. “From where I was watching, it looked funny.”

“Yeah, I know. But I couldn’t do anything about it.”

“I guess there’s no harm done, huh?” He gave me a little pat on the shoulder. “And I got to meet that nice girl.” He leaned closer. “I think she likes you,” he said in a stage whisper.

“Really? What did she say?” The absurdity of the question, of the conversation, descended on me at once, and I blushed.

“She said she thought you were cute. Which you are, in a timid sort of way.”

“Can I get my driver’s license back?” I wanted to hear more about what Chitra had said, I wanted to interrogate the assassin, get every detail of what she said, how she said it, how it came up, her body language, her expression. I almost began the interrogation, but I had to remember that this was not a friend, not someone with whom I could talk about a girl. I was also eager to change the subject from the very probably gay assassin’s evaluation of my cuteness.

He shrugged. “Okay.” He reached into his pocket and pulled it out. “But I’ve got your name and address memorized, so, you know, I can find you if you decide you want to be a jerk about this. But I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. And, hell. It’s one thing to frame someone for murder, kind of another to make him wait on line at the DMV.”

“As long as you have your sense of priorities in order.” I put the license back in my pocket, strangely comforted. The assassin was acting reasonable, so maybe I really didn’t need to worry. I couldn’t believe it, though. The fact that he wasn’t always, at every moment, homicidal didn’t change what he’d done, and it didn’t make me worry about him any less.

I was about to say something that I hoped would encourage his departure when I saw something in my mind, saw it in a cinematic flash. We’d been right there, cleaned up all around it, but there was something we missed. “Fuck,” I whispered.

The assassin raised one eyebrow. “Yes?”

“The checkbook.” It came out like a croak. “Karen wrote a check for the books, and she wrote a note in her checkbook. The receipt. I was the only one working that area. The cops will be able to figure out it was me.”

“Crap.” The assassin shook his head. “Why didn’t you think of that before?”

“I wasn’t exactly prepared for this,” I yelped. “I’m not a professional. I didn’t have a list of things to tick off.”

“Yeah, you’re right. You are right.” He stood for a moment, still, processing the new information. “Okay, Lemuel. We’ve got to go back.”

“What? We can’t.”

“Well, we have to. Otherwise you, my friend, are going to jail.”

“I don’t want to go back there,” I said in a quiet voice. “I can’t do it.”

“You want me to go by myself? To save your butt? That’s hardly fair.”

I thought to say that I wasn’t the one who’d killed Bastard and Karen in the first place, but I knew how the words would sound coming out of my mouth, absurd and petty all at once. And you just didn’t get petulant with a killer.

The assassin looked at me, cocked his head like a deer in a petting zoo. “You’re not afraid of me, are you, Lemuel?”

It might have sounded odd or creepy, but in fact there was something kind of touching about it. The killer didn’t want me to be afraid.

“You know…,” I began. I didn’t know where to take it.

“I told you. I’m not going to hurt you. You’re going to have to trust me, now, because we’re in this together.”

“Fuck this,” I announced. “And fuck you, too.” Then, on second thought, I added, “Nothing personal, I mean, but this isn’t me. This isn’t my life. I’m not involved in killings and assassinations and break-ins. I can’t be part of this. First thing in the morning, I’m going to call a cab, go to the bus station, and go home.”

“That’s a great idea,” the assassin said. “Running away is a reasonable strategy sometimes. There are some things that should be run away from. The only problem is, Lemuel, this one is going to come running after you. I understand that you want to be done with it all, and I want you to be done with it, but for that to happen, you’re going to have to see it through. You run away now, all eyes are going to be on you.”

I didn’t want to accept it, but I knew it was true. “I can’t believe this.”

“I don’t blame you,” the assassin said, “but denial is not going to get you through this. Lemuel, I’m going to get you through this.”

He gazed at me, a beatific smile on his pale skin, and I believed it. Inexplicable as it was, I believed it. The rational thing would have been to run screaming, to barricade myself in the room and call the cops. That was the only way I might get out of it, but the assassin was so smooth, so crafty, I couldn’t quite believe that I would get the better of him. If I called the cops, I’d end up in jail, and if I rebuffed the assassin, I’d end up in jail. I didn’t want to go anywhere with him. He was a killer, and I didn’t want to be alone with a killer.

“Okay,” I breathed.

“Now, we have to go get that checkbook. The two of us, okay? You can do this.”

I nodded, unable to summon any words.

The assassin drove a slightly beat-up Datsun hatchback, charcoal or gray or something. It was hard to tell in the dark. I had vaguely imagined he would drive an Aston Martin or a Jaguar or something James Bond-ish, with ejector seats, retractable machine-gun turrets, a button that would instantly turn it into a speedboat. Mainly it had old magazines and empty orange juice cartons cramping the floor on the passenger side. There was a pile of paperback books on the backseat- books with odd titles like Animal Liberation and The History of Sexuality, Volume One. How many volumes did a history of sexuality require?

I’d been nervous getting in. We weren’t allowed to leave the motel, and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere with friends who might live in town. If I had reported Ronny Neil and Scott’s harassment, I had no doubt that they would have thrown themselves into paroxysms of outrage at my tattling, acting like a baby. I also knew they would not hesitate to turn me in if they saw me leave. Still, so what if they did? Given the enormity of the crime I was covering up, slipping out at night didn’t seem all that terrible.

The assassin kept his eyes straight ahead of him, hands at two and ten o’clock on the wheel. He looked calm and comfortable, just an ordinary evening of an ordinary life. I felt neither calm nor comfortable. My heart pounded, my stomach churned and the nausea returned, this time interlaced with glutinous chunks of fear. Leaving in pursuit of the checkbook had seemed like my only move, but now I had to wonder if I had just signed on to my own death.

“Why are you going to such trouble to help me?” I asked, mostly just to break the horrific silence. The assassin had some kind of strange, hollow, thudding music playing softly from his tape deck. The singer groaned that love would tear him apart again. “You could just fuck me over if you wanted to.”

“I could. You’re right. But I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“To begin with, if the cops get you, there’s always a chance that you’ll lead them to me. It’s unlikely, but it could happen. Better they should get no one than get you. Besides, it would be wrong for you to go to jail for this. Even if you were arrested and acquitted, that would be monumentally unfair if I could prevent it. I did what I did to those people because it was the ethical thing to do. It hardly makes sense to let someone else suffer for my convenience. What’s the point of behaving ethically if it’s going to have unethical consequences?”

“You want to tell me why it was ethical to kill them?”

“Melford.”

“What?”

“Melford Kean. That’s my name. I figured, you know, now that we’re working together, you ought to know my name. So maybe you’ll trust me. And now you don’t have to think of me as ‘the killer’ or something.” He thrust out his right hand.

Feeling fully the absurdity of it, I shook. He had a firm shake, but Melford Kean’s hand felt thin and precise, like a musical instrument. It wasn’t the hand of a killer- more like that of a surgeon or an artist. And the calm confidence of his shake helped to distract me from the notion that his giving me his name didn’t make me feel safer, it made me feel less safe. I knew his name. Didn’t that make me a danger to him? I didn’t point that out, however. Rather, I said, “I’ve been thinking of you as ‘the assassin.’ ”

“That’s sort of cool. The assassin. Mysterious agent of unknown forces.” He laughed.

I didn’t get why it was funny. I thought it was more or less true.

“Since we’re friends and all,” I proposed, “maybe you can tell me why you killed them.”

“I can’t, Lemuel. I’d like to, but I can’t because you’re not ready to hear it yet. If I tell you, you’ll say, ‘He’s crazy,’ and your opinion of me and what I do will be set in stone. But I’m not crazy. I just see things more clearly than most people.”

“Isn’t that what crazy people say?”

“Point taken. But it’s also what people who see more clearly say. The question is when to believe those who say it. You know about ideology?”

“You mean like politics?”

“I mean ideology in the Marxist sense. The way in which culture produces the illusion of normative reality. Social discourse tells us what’s real, and our perception of reality depends as much on that discourse as it does on our senses. Sometimes even more. You have to understand that we’re all peering at the world through a gauze, a haze, a filter- and that filter is ideology. We see not what’s there, but what we’re supposed to believe is there. Ideology makes some things invisible and makes some things that aren’t there seem like they’re visible. It’s true not just of political discourse, but of everything. Like stories. Why do stories always have to have a love component? It seems natural, right? But it’s only natural because we think it is. Or fashion. Ideology is why people in one era might think their clothes look normal and neutral, but twenty years later they’re absurd. One minute striped jeans are cool, the next they’re a joke.”

“So, you’re above all that?” I asked.

“The striped jeans? Yes. But for the most part, I’m bound up in ideology the same as everyone else. Yet knowing that it’s there grants us some small power over ideology, and if you squint, you can see a little more clearly than most. That’s really the best you can hope for. Because we’re all the products of ideology, none of us, even the smartest and the most aware, most revolutionary, can escape it- but we can try. We have to always try. And maybe you can try, too, so when I see you squinting, I’ll tell you.”

“That sounds like an awful lot of crap to me.” I wished I could take it back the minute I said it.

“Look, I know it’s bogus to just leave you in the dark, so let me ask you a question. I don’t think you’ll be able to answer it right now, but when you can, I’ll know that you are able to see past our cultural blinders. Then I’ll be able to tell you why I did what I did. Okay?… Good. Now, prisons have been around for many centuries, right?”

“Is that your question?”

“No, there’ll be a whole bunch of little questions. They’ll be leading up to the big question. I’ll tell you when we get there. So, prisons, right? Why do we send criminals to prisons?”

I peered out the window into the darkness. Dark houses, dark streets rolling by in the middle of the night. People quietly sleeping, watching TV, having sex, eating late night snacks. I sat in a car talking about prisons with a crazy man. “For doing things like killing people in their mobile homes?” I ventured. It was like the grammar lesson in the convenience store. I needed to learn to shut up.

“You’re a funny guy, Lemuel. We send them to prisons to punish them, right? But why? Why that punishment?”

“What else do you want to do with them?”

“Hell, you could do lots of stuff. Let’s say someone is a housebreaker, slips into homes, takes jewelry, money, whatever. Doesn’t hurt anyone, but just takes stuff. There are lots of ways to deal with him. You could kill him, you could cut off his hands, you could make him wear special clothes or give him a special tattoo, you could make him do community service, you could provide him with counseling or religious training. You could look at his background and decide he needs more education. You could exile him. You could send him to study with Tibetan monks. Why do we use prisons?”

“I don’t know. That’s what we use.”

Melford took a hand off the steering wheel for a moment so he could point at me. “Correct. Because that’s what we use. Ideology, my friend. From the moment of birth, we are trained to see things a certain way, and that way seems natural and inevitable, not worth questioning. We look at the world and we think we see the truth, but what we see is what we are supposed to see. We turn on the television and happy people are eating at Burger King or drinking Coke, and it makes perfect sense to us that burgers and Coke are the path to happiness.”

“That’s just advertising,” I said.

“But advertising is part of the social discourse, and it shapes our minds, our identities, as much as- if not more so than- anything our parents or schools teach us. Ideology is more than a series of cultural assumptions. It makes us subjects, Lemuel. We are subject to it, so that we serve culture rather than culture serving us. We see ourselves as autonomous and free, but the limits of our freedom have always already been delineated by the ideology that provides the border of our tunnel vision.”

“And who controls the ideology? The Freemasons?”

He smirked at me. “I love conspiracy theories. The Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Jesuits, the Jews, the Bilderberg Group, and my personal favorite: the Council on Foreign Relations. Great stuff. But where these conspiracy theorists go wrong is that they see the result as evidence of schemers. To them, because there’s a conspiracy, there must be conspirators.”

“And that’s wrong?”

“Dead wrong. The machinery of cultural ideology is on autopilot, Lemuel. It is a force- like a boulder going down a hill. It is going somewhere, picking up speed, and damn close to unstoppable, but there is no intelligence behind the boulder. It is beholden to physical laws, not its own will.”

“What about the rich guys in smoke-filled rooms who plot to make us eat more fast food and drink more sodas?”

“They’re not driving the boulder. They’re being crushed by it, just like the rest of us.”

I took a polite moment to consider this idea, and then I moved on. “This isn’t helping me with the prison question.”

“It’s pretty basic, really. Because of our ideology, sending criminals to prison strikes us as inevitable. Not as a choice, one option of many, but as the thing. Now, let’s go back to our hypothetical housebreaker. What is supposed to happen to him in prison?”

I shook my head and smiled at the absurdity of it all, playing this peripatetic game with a killer. And it was absurd, but the thing was, I enjoyed it. For the few seconds that I could forget who Melford Kean really was, what I had seen him do earlier that evening, I enjoyed talking to him. Melford held himself as if he were important, as if he knew things, really knew them, and this whole business with prisons might not make sense, but I felt sure it would lead to something, and to something interesting, too.

“I guess he’s supposed to consider his crimes and feel miserable about his imprisonment so that when he gets out he won’t do it again.”

“Okay, sure. Punishment. Go to your room for talking fresh. Next time you want to talk fresh, you won’t since you know what’ll happen to you. Punishment, yes, but also punishment as rehabilitation. Take a criminal and turn him into a productive citizen. So, when you take a housebreaker and you send him to jail, what do you think happens to him? What does he learn?”

“Well, I guess in reality he doesn’t really rehabilitate. I mean, it’s pretty common knowledge that if you send a housebreaker to prison, he comes back an armed robber or a murderer or a rapist or something.”

Melford nodded. “Okay, so criminals go to prison and learn how to become better criminals. Does that sound about right?”

“Yeah.”

“You think President Reagan knows that?”

“Probably.”

“What about our senators and representatives and governors? They know?”

“I guess. How could they not?”

“Wardens? Prison guards? Policemen?”

“They probably know better than most.”

“Okay, are you ready for the big question? Everybody knows that prisons don’t work to rehabilitate. If, in fact, we know they do just the opposite, which is to say they turn minor criminals into major ones, why do we have them? Why do we send our social outcasts to criminal academies? There’s your question. When you can answer it, and you know the answer is right, I’ll tell you why I had to do what I did.”

“What is this? Like a riddle?”

“No, Lemuel. It’s not a riddle. It’s a test. I want to see what you can see. And if you can’t at least try to peer past the gauze, there’s no point in knowing what’s on the other side, because no matter what I say, you won’t be able to hear it.”

Melford made a left onto Highland Street, where Bastard and Karen had made their home up until the time of their murder. We cruised about halfway down the block, and I wondered if he was planning on stopping right in front of the trailer. Probably not, I decided. Just casing the neighborhood first.

That turned out to be a smart move, since when we drove past we saw that there was a cop car in the driveway. We almost missed it because the lights were off. No headlights, no blue and red flashes of strobing disaster. In the darkness, with no car lights and no porch lights, a policeman in a brown uniform and a wide hat stood talking to a woman, one hand on her shoulder. And she was crying.