Killer: A Novel Read online

  Killer

  a novel by

  Stephen Carpenter

  Copyright © 2010 Stephen Carpenter

  PAST IMPERFECT

  Five Years Ago

  CHAPTER ONE

  Most suicides leave notes. My Sara didn’t.

  Most women who kill themselves choose non-violent means. My Sara went to Chalet Sporting Goods in Pasadena and selected a Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun in matte black. She put it on her Visa, waited the requisite ten days, then picked up the gun from the store and drove back to our rented home in San Gabriel. Then, after smoking enough cigarettes to fill the Santa Anita Racetrack ashtray we bought at the swap meet, my Sara tied her short brown hair back, went into the backyard, kneeled on the grass, placed the gun muzzle under her chin, and reached down for the trigger. The police later figured she must have only barely reached it—my Sara stood 5’3” in gym socks—but reach it she did, and she blew the front half of her head into the bright blue cloudless Southern California sky.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fifteen months later I woke up in a hospital. My hands were bound to the bed and two middle-aged men were telling me I was charged with murder.

  For a few minutes my mind wouldn’t work at all. I couldn’t remember anything—who I was, where I was, how I got there, what had happened. It is a lonely thing to find yourself adrift, without a past. I lay there those first panicky moments, not moving, all of my energy focused on remembering, searching to find something to hold on to, anything to root me back into my life.

  An image came to me—Sara smiling up at me from the couch—then I remembered her name, just before I remembered my own. And then I remembered the Unspeakable afternoon in San Gabriel when I came home and couldn’t find her and I went to the back door and opened it and saw the gun on the ground and then I saw her lying on the grass and my desperation to remember suddenly became desperation to forget. I had been safe in my ignorance before the Unspeakable came to me, and now it took every ounce of will to resist the agony of memory and push it back to the place where memories live when they are unwanted. But memories don’t always obey.

  How long had it been since that day? A week? A month? Yesterday—?

  “Richard Bell?” said one of the middle-aged men, his voice rising to let me know it was a question. I saw a badge on his belt and he fixed his baggy, boozy eyes on mine.

  I shook my head, having just remembered my name.

  “My name is Rhodes,” I said, my voice an unrecognizable rasp. Shaking my head was a mistake. My bruised brain bounced around inside my skull and the dull ache revved to a chainsaw whine.

  “We know that, Mr. Rhodes. Do you know a Richard Bell?”

  I closed my eyes, afraid to remember anything more, afraid to think or move as the approaching thunderstorm of a hundred-year hangover threatened to flood my head if I tried too hard to do anything.

  Who the hell was Richard Bell?

  Boozy Eyes held out a mug shot from a laser printer that was low on toner. Richard Bell looked like a guy who would wind up murdered—swollen nose and deep, angry lines stamped into his face. A mean son of a bitch. A junkyard dog from Cops.

  “I don’t remember,” I croaked.

  “You don’t remember what?” asked the other cop. He wore a blue necktie flecked with soft clouds, like a child’s pajamas. Happy Father’s Day, Daddy!

  “I don’t remember him from anywhere, no,” I glanced up from the picture, my voice coming back, accompanied by random, spectacular lightning bolts of pain in my head.

  “We found Mr. Bell in Highland Park this morning,” Cloudy Necktie produced a glossy 8 x 10 crime scene photograph of Richard Bell, curled up in a trash dumpster like a sleeping baby. Richard Bell’s throat had been cut so deeply that his head was only hanging onto his body because his stark white spinal cord was still intact. Someone had started cutting through the front of Richard Bell’s throat and didn’t stop until they had gotten almost completely through the vertebrae in his neck. One of his eyes was half-closed, the other eye was wide open and staring at a rotting head of lettuce in front of his face. I wondered if that head of lettuce was the last thing Richard Bell saw on earth. I wondered who would throw out an entire head of lettuce. Then the room began to spin.

  “Your car was found near the body,” Cloudy Necktie informed me. He showed me another glossy photograph: my car, parked near the dumpster, with blood all over the interior.

  “That’s impossible. Last night I was…”

  Where the fuck was I last night? Where the fuck was I right now?

  “Last night I was…” I began again, to prime the pump of memory, but all that came up was a flood of sour whiskey, which washed up out of me and all over Boozy Cop’s shoes.

  “Goddamnit!” The detective jumped back and looked like he was going to shoot me right there. Cloudy Necktie suppressed a smirk and held up the photograph of Richard Bell in the dumpster again.

  “Last night…?” he prompted me.

  Even if I hadn’t been too busy throwing up to answer, I had seen enough Law & Order to know this was the point where I should probably shut up.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Getting arrested for murder and chained to a jail infirmary bed for a week is an incredibly effective way to begin your journey to sobriety. I hit the belly of the bottom the second night I spent cuffed to my cozy, rusting bed, sweating and shivering with delirium tremens. The cockroaches crawling over me were only the beginning—the trailer before the Feature. It occurred to me later that the roaches might not have been a hallucination. Lying awake the next night, I saw two rats scamper up under the covers of a comatose guy named Angel. Angel had tried to commit suicide by cop, but only managed to get shot in the shoulder—not enough to kill him, just enough to introduce a bullet fragment into his blood stream, which lodged in a blood vessel in his brain and turned him into a brussel sprout. The rats ate some part of Angel that I know only as a dark blood stain on the sheet between his legs as they rolled his body out the next day.

  The real bottom came after the cockroaches, when my Sara appeared at my bedside with her head at a strange angle, revealing her stark white spinal cord. In her hands was a rotten head of lettuce, which she was offering me. She said my name and I cried out when I saw the look in her eyes—a look of infinite pain; of hollow, bottomless regret. She ran a cool hand over my hot forehead, down my wet cheek, then she let her hand fall across my neck.

  Then angry lines formed between her eyes and around her mouth and Sara’s face became the face of Richard Bell, and his hands tightened around my throat. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, and couldn’t fight back, although I must have tried like hell. The next morning I awoke to find my left hand puffed up like a cartoonish purple balloon hand. The doctors told me I had broken two of my wrist bones trying to rip my arm from the cuff.

  But alas, I was sober.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My purple balloon hand saved my ass. The tiny fractures in my wrist bones became infected and extended my stay in the infirmary, which set my arraignment and trial back. The combination of my alcoholism and the negligence of the Los Angeles County Jail infirmary doctors led to avascular necrosis in my wrist bones and I was transferred to UCLA, where they rebuilt my wrist, replacing the dead bones and ligaments with chrome and plastic parts. And it was during that time that a local news station picked up the story of Richard Bell’s murder. And Archie Bledsoe, God bless him, came forward with my alibi. Archie was the bartender at McDougal’s the night Richard Bell met his last head of lettuce. I was dead drunk, as usual, and Archie had picked me up and ushered me into the alley, where I slept until the police found me early the next morning and brought me to the jail infirmary. I had no memory of any of this, but Archie sw
ore to it. At the time of the murder I was where I always was—the corner booth in back, the darkest and farthest from the door, appearing nightly, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jack Rhodes! Good evening, my invisible friends, and welcome to my slow, sad, painless death by alcohol. Listen, listen, and I will tell you my tragic tale of love and loss and limpid alabaster atomized into sky...

  The police pieced together that Richard Bell had rolled me in the alley, taken my wallet and keys and stolen my car and somehow wound up in Highland Park on his final dumpster dive. The cops had no reason to hold me, the case against me was dropped, and I was released.

  So there I was, sober and free after a fifteen-month forgotten nightmare. Fifteen months since I had found my Sara and went crazy—panicked, sobbing crazy—that awful sunny afternoon in the backyard, trying to find her face.

  Please God, let me see her face again… Please don’t let this be real, it’s not real...I only want to see her face again please God oh please…

  Fifteen months since I found her; fifteen months of drinking in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night. Every night. Fifteen months of my life that are gone forever in memory. Fifteen months and I had finally awoken from my Jack Daniel’s dream to find my shattered life still shattered, my heart still blazing with pain that I had doused all day, every day, for fifteen months. And now, without the booze to douse it, the horrible fire roared back and I did the only thing I could do to stop it; the only thing I could do to keep from reaching for sweet, bottled relief.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I moved from our home in San Gabriel and took a tiny apartment in Pasadena and I began to write the same way I used to drink—every day, obsessively, without a pause or a break, except to go wash dishes at Delancey’s for the dinner shift. There I rinsed the grease and the unwanted food off the plates and lost myself in the puzzle of my first book.

  Before Sara’s death I had tried my hand at all kinds of writing: short stories, spec screenplays, TV pilots, all with little success. Here and there I sold something—an article to Rolling Stone about B movies, and another to Esquire. I even wrote a true-crime book for a fly-by-night publisher about infamous serial killers—the only book I’d ever had published at the time. But always I kept coming back to the Great American Novel, as Sara and I called it, with as much sarcasm as we could muster. I had tried and failed at a few chapters, at last giving up and giving in to the need for money. The Great American Novel became the Reduced Expectation of simply sustaining some kind of a life as a writer. Sara taught kindergarten at a pricey private school in South Pasadena while I scrambled from agent to agent, magazine to magazine, never quite making enough to sustain our household on my own, but Sara’s paycheck took up the slack and we were young, still in our twenties, and there would always be time…

  Now with Sara gone and the constant, numbing flow of booze behind me, I wrote desperately to keep the demons and the memories away during the day, and at night I gripped the heavy stainless steel spray nozzle in the kitchen at Delancey’s and washed the encrusted baked potatoes and cold rinds of steak fat off the plates and slowly loosened the knots in my head until I eventually untangled a promising story—or situation—for a series of novels that might just work.

  And it did work. I wrote the first book in six months, titled it Killer, and sold it to Terrapin Publishing for the fabulous advance of $10,000 dollars. The hardcover sales took everyone by surprise—they couldn’t keep it on the shelves. The order for the first printing of the paperback was 250,000 copies, and by then I was halfway through the second book in the series. My publishers even bought the rights to the true-crime book I had written about serial killers years before, and published a slick new edition.

  When I used to do interviews, I was sometimes asked to explain the success of the Killer series, and I always said that I thought people just bought the hook: a meticulous serial killer masterminds a murder in every book, but we never meet him or hear him described. We only know him through his handiwork, as seen through the eyes of the determined young FBI agent, Katherine Kendall, who works desperately to solve each book’s murder and prevent another. Katherine Kendall, who stands 5’3” in gym socks, never quite catches her killer, but she prevents the death of a young woman in each book, and in that way she defeats the killer in every book. And I sold a lot of books.

  The kitchen staff at Delancey’s gave me a drunken little party when Killer sold and I gave my notice. At the party I found myself wanting a drink for the first time in a year, so I left early. I went home and wanted a drink even more, so I decided it was time to move.

  Which brings me to Vermont.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The point was to get as far away from California as possible. Away from the old drinking haunts; far, far away from the Unspeakable sunny afternoon in San Gabriel. I sat at home with an atlas the night after the Delancey’s party and measured the distance from Los Angeles to the farthest point away in the U.S. The answer was Maine. But I remembered a few movie people I’d met and didn’t much like who had summer homes in Maine, so I chose to avoid it. In the end, I met an editor at a publishing event who recommended an area in Vermont which she felt would be perfect for my desired seclusion.

  So I left. Just like that. I gave everything away except Sara’s things, which I put in storage, and got on a plane with a single bag in my hand and wound up looking at cabins and homes in rural Vermont with a divorced realtor in her sixties from New York who was determined to settle me somewhere.

  A few weeks later I moved into a 2300 square-foot cabin on sixteen acres near Featherton, a tiny town in the middle of Vermont. The cabin was built by an orthodontist and his wife as a second home, but divorce forced them to sell the place before they moved in. It was a brand new cabin, built of split pine logs. It had a master bedroom, a smaller bedroom which I converted to a study, a spacious living room with a big fireplace, and a modern kitchen. It was quiet and secluded and I felt I could work there. The day after I moved in I drove my rental car to Burlington and bought a Ford F-150 pickup from a dealership. I drove my new pickup to Featherton and bought a chainsaw and other tools from Langtree Hardware. Virgil Langtree owned the hardware store in Featherton, as well as the grocery store and the gas station with the mini-mart. Virgil, who seemed at least a hundred years old, sold me wedges and chisels and guided me with Yankee parsimony in selecting tools to stock my cabin and the utility box in the back of my pickup. I learned a lot from old Virgil—how to cut down the dying pines on my property; how to notch the trunk at the appropriate height and depth. How to avoid kickback with the chainsaw, how to alternate sides when notching the trunk to make the tree fall where I wanted. I spent late afternoons and weekends splitting the logs into firewood and stacking them alongside the cabin. Eventually the cabin was surrounded by firewood and I gave up the chainsaw for an axe. Virgil showed me how to set wedges to split the wood. It was hard work, but it felt good to get up a sweat at the end of a day of writing. When I had more wood laid up than I could ever use I bought a table saw and built a large woodshed on the border of the woods that surrounded the cabin. I insulated a small section of the woodshed and hung drywall. I also hung a speed-bag and a heavy bag, and bought a bench and some free weights. When it was too cold outside to perspire, I worked the bags and the weights until I had sweat out the day’s dose of caffeine and my muscles loosened and my breathing deepened and I forgot everything but the rhythm of the bags and the weights and the blood pounding through me.

  I was alone but I wasn’t lonely. The isolation and self-reliance were a balm. I took long walks through the woods at the end of the day, or whenever I got stuck on a writing problem. I discovered the ruins of an 18th century farmhouse on my property that had been razed a hundred years ago. I would wander around the ruins of the farmhouse, ruminating on my writing and looking absently for signs of the old structure. Sometimes I would find little artifacts; a brick, or an old nail. My bookshelves became littered with relics I found there. A three hundred yea
r-old old bottle of Kill Devil rum sat empty on the window sill above my kitchen sink, catching the morning sun through its thick, bubbled, wavy blue-green glass.

  So I spent the next five years in Featherton, Vermont, felling trees with my axe and my word processor, piling up firewood and filling paperback racks in airports and grocery stores everywhere. No one would ever confuse me with John Updike but I didn’t care. I had wood to cut and books to write. Always, always books to write. Because the demons were always, always just around the corner.

  PRESENT PROGRESSIVE

  Five Years Later

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’m sitting at my desk, wondering if I should kill the cute sheriff with an axe or a claw hammer in the final chapter of my fourth book when there is a sharp knock at my front door. It sends my over-caffeinated heart into a sprint. No one ever knocks. Even the UPS guy leaves his packages at the mailbox out on the state highway to avoid the quarter-mile driveway I deliberately leave rutted and unpaved. The door itself is solid oak—real oak, two inches thick, with four heavy gauge steel hinges and three titanium deadbolts, one by the doorknob, one on top of the door, and one at the bottom of the door, installed by the orthodontist, a lifelong New Yorker.

  I unlock the door and open it to find Claire Boyle, the local sheriff and inspiration for the doomed fictional sheriff whose nude body I was just about to hack to pieces on my word processor. I don’t mention the coincidence to Claire.

  “Morning, Jack,” Claire gives me a prim Yankee smile; the same smile I get from all the locals. After five years, the good people of Featherton, VT. have come to regard me with cautious curiosity. In town they nod at me on the street, but they don’t maintain eye contact for long. Claire has more reason than most to be cautious about me. Two years after I moved to Featherton, my barber Jezzie decided it was a sin and a shame that a local land-owning heterosexual man of marrying age was still single, so she set me up with Claire. I figured maybe enough time had passed since Sara, but after two awkward dates I told Claire it was too soon. I never called her again. And now, three years later, it’s too late.