The Killing Type (21 page)

All sectors of the town seem
to be outraged in unison at this latest installment. The
Gazette
publishes a
special afternoon edition of the paper, with the front page devoted
entirely to an editorial entitled “Stop It Now.” It’s a very thin
issue, just the one section, with some updates on national and
international events but demonstrating its purpose on that front
page and in fact wearing it rather proudly. I like the ambiguity of
the plea, simultaneously a quiet command directly to the killer, as
well as a call for the police to marshal whatever investigative
abilities they have to solve the case. The tone betrays the mix of
emotions which evidently and understandably inspired it, though
heavily dominated by anger, and hence there is a lack of care to
the actual writing that proves to be rather an embarrassment, even
for a local small-town paper. I say that as a careful academic, of
course, a man trained in rhetorical control, not meaning to
disparage. However, I cringe particularly at the sinking to
colloquialisms (“this guy,” “what’s going on?”) and the
pock-marking with what I hope are not the manifestations of general
editorial standards, but rather typographical and grammatical
errors brought on by the hasty production. Overall it’s fairly
impossible to dispute the basic sentiment: “This town of 120,000
people has seen nine of our own brutally murdered, and with the
police department not being able to capitalize on a single lead
which has come it’s [sic] way. Whoever it is that calls in extra
forces—the OPP, the RCMP, the guy in
Diehard
—needs to call them in now and
solve this before we see the tenth person go down.” “Go down” is
not quite the right tone, of course, but perhaps I quibble and do
not allow enough for the anger and frustration of the
editors.

I am sitting at my favourite pub, the
name based on one legend or other which I cannot quite remember.
The waiter, bless him, is on his way to bring me my usual before I
am even settled in my seat.

“Hey, Andrew.”

“Hi.”

The range of sentiment is visible
around the room, as I’ve found it has been in this room several
times over the past months. What’s changed is that it is narrower:
I am not sure whether this is the influence of the editorial, or
whether both are symptoms of a malaise afflicting the whole town.
There’s shouting over near the pool table, and I do fear for the
end result because the topic doesn’t appear to be pool. There’s a
bona fide debate in the corner at the big table, less raucous than
the pool combatants but also threatening to heat itself up (or
down) to stupidity.

A man who appears to know me, but whom
I can’t place, plops himself down in the spare chair at my
table.

“What a mess,” he says and my
irritation with being imposed on blinds me for an instant to what
he is referring to.

“Yes,” I say, putting my faith in
minimalism.

“Can I ask you something?” he says. “I
mean, some of the other guys have been saying that you’re smart and
that you’ve even been investigating this shit.” He pauses as if
expecting me to affirm the veracity of his inane
chatter.

“Go on,” I manage.

“Well, it’s like this. We’re just at
the end of our goddamn rope and we don’t know what to make of all
this.” I note the tiniest pinpoint of spittle forming at the
intersection of his lips on the left side, and fear the worst for
myself. “Nine people killed, no arrests, no leads, not a fuckin
thing from the police. There’s some of the dumber guys here that
suspect—you know, that have conspiracy theories, like the police
are in on it or something. But most of us don’t buy
that.”

He takes a long sip of his beer, as if
preparing himself for the point of all this.

“It’s like this,” he says again, and I
genuinely worry that he is going to repeat everything, that I may
be the victim of a loop of drivel. “We think you may have the
answer, and are just sitting on the big reveal for some
reason.”

I take a sip of my own beer,
languidly, lovingly, as I see that he really is finished talking
and is content to sit back and wait for me to opine, to (if I
must)
reveal
.
“Listen, Ralph—is it OK if I call you Ralph?”

“My name is Frank.”

“Listen, Ralph, I think you may have
been partially misinformed. I am not really investigating these
murders. I am writing a book and so trying to do some research,
some in libraries and some on the street, so to speak, but it would
be derelict and simply inaccurate to call it an
investigation.”

“OK, sure, but do you have any, like,
hunches or anything?” A sigh from me, a bigger sip by him, spittle
now disappeared and hopefully not transferred. I find myself
searching on the table in front of him for the deposit.

“Do you want me to be
honest?”

“Yes, sure, of course.”

“It’s like this,” I say, just for the
pleasure of noticing that he does not notice. “I may myself have
been critical of what the police have done, or not done, in the
past. I may have said a few things to people right here in this
bar, perhaps even to you even though I don’t specifically recall
ever having met you before. But, I’ve truly come to the conclusion,
at this juncture now anyway, that the killer is just damn good,
that even a more competent police force still would not have been
able to track him down by now.”

I’m lying, but I think this is the
shortest path to get him to go away satisfied: better something
explicit and semi-logical than the messy realistic truth. He sits
back in his chair, playing with a coaster and seeming to ponder the
ridiculous howler I have told him, mulling it, considering its
non-existent intricacies.

“You may have a point there,” he says.
“Like some super killer.”

I can’t conceal a smile at the
summation that I would not have expected outside of bad 24-hour
news updates on the television. I have to feign a need to go to the
bathroom, and so I get up and for a moment it seems like he is
going to follow me there, like a mopey teenager trailing his
same-sex idol. But no: he has quickly and rather rudely posted
himself at another table, and I hear another “It’s like this” as I
round the corner.

So, the reader may be inquiring, what
do I really think? If this ultimate town menace has not swallowed
some potion, not had an exposed forearm bitten by a wily insect,
not been laid prostrate by an ur-ogre and arisen with a murderous
mission—if not, then why has he been able to persist not only
without being captured, but also with the police not being able to
come within a micron of even identifying a half-plausible suspect?
I am afraid the truth, or at least the truth that is available to
my own humble proddings, is not a mess I have concealed from my
recent interlocutor but rather a simple admission: I do not
know.

I was being somewhat modest
with him in quibbling over “investigation,” mostly to deflect
annoying attention from the forensically illiterate, armed with
only anger and good will and the dull recitations from one or other
walk down the hall in
CSI
. Though it might sound defensive
or insincerely insistent, I do feel that I have been carrying on an
investigation—a journalistic one, with perhaps not enough muck
being raked, but an investigation nonetheless. And in between my
outings for gumshoeing I have made a true effort to allow myself
time for reflection and analysis. Ralph/Frank, whom I have met
before (now that I think of it), in an earlier fit of desperation
around murder 5 or so, asked me then to “stand back.” A crude and
well-worn metaphor just a smidge from hackneyed, but the old boy
had a point. That’s what my time alone has been for. I’ve spent
many evenings in utter silence, just me on the couch with a
precariously perched glass of Courvoisier on my knee, reviewing the
days and weeks and months, sifting the bad leads out of good
evidence, trying to see a pattern in a series of bloody events
which have defied such reification (you can always count on a
scholar for a fancy prose style).

Most of those evenings I’ve
just gotten up stiffly after literal hours have passed, made as
much noise raising myself as I generally make getting myself seated
anywhere these days. I’ve had flashes, eureka moments when I’ve
thought I made a connection which I hadn’t seen before, but by the
time I’ve made it to the refrigerator for a beer or a virgin
colada, it had all collapsed under the weight of its own
illogicality. Of course, I have not been a complete dolt. I have
pieced a few things together,
connections
even, but they amount in
total to not much more than the basic edges around the jigsaw
puzzle, the frame of jagged facts with a maw of emptiness gaping,
yawning, fairly
yelling
at the dark centre of it all.

Chapter 22

It occurs to me only as Tony is
scouring my bookshelves, her back turned to me in a lovely
innocence that makes me ashamed of my previous suspicions of her,
that this is the first time that anyone else has been in my room
since I’ve been living here. I’ve insisted to my landlady that she
not clean the room, and she has been trusting enough to leave those
domestic niceties to me (I know because without her knowledge I’ve
changed the lock to my door, and she’s never mentioned that). And
now here is Tony, turning to me with a book in her hand, walking
towards me, her mouth open and a question about to come, and here
am I nervous as a schoolboy.

I turn around abruptly and head to the
bathroom before she reaches me. I look back for a second, part of
my feverish head worried that she might follow me in here, and, no,
I see her look at the book, then at me, and then sit down at my
dining table.

The cold water feels good on my face.
I splash it carefully from forehead to chin and cheek to cheek, and
then along the back of my neck where I feel a nice cool calm
activated, and a droplet then making its way down my back. I verify
the results in the mirror: I’m ready.

Tony is sitting in the wing chair when
I emerge.

“Funny place you have here,” she
says.

“Funny? Funny how?”

“Kind of controlled clutter. Too much
stuff in it for such a small room, but it’s all kind of fanatically
organized.”

I laugh lightly. “That’s not a bad way
to put it.”

“You’re a collector, I see.” She
motions vaguely with her left hand. “The books, I mean.”

“Yes, I—listen, can I get you
something, you know, to drink? I have some red wine left, I think.
Or water. Or—”

“Wine sounds great.”

As I walk past her on the way to get
the glasses, she sinks back in the chair with an insouciant comfort
that I sadly realize I have never been able to manage in this
place. Or, perhaps, any place. A sliver of her midriff is showing.
Her hair is everywhere. A shoe, her slip-on shoe, dangles from the
foot which seems to be pointing me the way to the wine. Her sock is
deep red.

“You don’t keep any murder books here
though. Why’s that?”

She uprights herself as I approach
with the wine, takes the glass, and then sinks back down carefully
to her former position, the wine glass placed carefully atop her
breastbone. Whenever she wants to sip, she sits up, and then sinks
down again in a choreography of glass and liquid and body which I
find both funny and alluring. I am not used to these feelings. I am
not used to what I want to do.

I sit down opposite her, bent forward
and with my elbows on my knees until this becomes uncomfortable. I
sit back and try to relax.

“I think I have a select few here
somewhere,” I say, motioning vaguely toward my trunk. “But, yes,
you’re right, for someone who is doing the kind of research I am, I
don’t have a comprehensive collection. The libraries have lots,
though, and I’m amazed what you can find online as
well.”

She sips and, damn her, she has the
confidence and security of person to be able to just remain silent
and stare straight at me, not in defiance but apparently just
savouring this moment, this wine, this other person.

“How is the book coming
along?”

“Well, the final two or three chapters
have yet to be written—I mean, the police haven’t caught anyone and
so we have to conclude that this rampage is not over yet. Nine
people dead, can you really believe that?”

The question just sits there while
Tony swirls her wine, the caps of the waves she is producing rising
higher and higher, sometimes threatening to spill out onto her
pristine white T-shirt.

“I have a new theory,” she says
finally. “I don’t think this killer actually lives here in
Knosting. I don’t think he’s anywhere near here. I just can’t
believe that someone here in town has done these murders, and then
gone home and then a few weeks later does it all over again. And
all without the police being able to track him down at all. I think
he’s in Toronto or somewhere—shit, maybe even over in New York
state and just coming up every now and then to kill.”

She sips and looks over at
me.

“Wow,” I manage.

She stands up suddenly, puts down her
wine glass, and takes a long exaggerated bow.