Meeting Evil: A Novel Page 14

  As to his physical well-being, however, he had led a charmed life: had never really been hurt in prison fights with homemade weapons; had been missed when shot at, sometimes point-blank, by a cop; and once even failed to get hit with double-O buckshot from ten or so feet away. God was preserving him for some purpose. He half believed that, which meant he also, by the same degree, did not believe it. He realized he was inconsistent about much. Sometimes he was not offended by what on another occasion would have made him go crazy. He would not use a blade on a man above the shoulders: he had no idea why not unless it was because male voices were richer. If you cut a woman’s throat, you did not have to listen to her whine or screech. He had spared Sharon so long only as a courtesy to John, though all he had had in mind, so long as she remained quiet, was kicking her out of the car at the earliest opportunity. But then why had he not done so during the period when John went off by himself? Because he had known they would meet up again soon and did not want to offend him. It was their destiny to be brothers. Intuition was the faculty that most influenced what Richie did, though it might well seem to others that he acted altogether on sudden impulse. In reality he was much deeper.

  John was one of the rare people who understood that, hence the addiction to him.

  Now that he had lost his immediate transportation, he was in no hurry for a reunion. He was hungry and had to use the toilet. He knew John’s home address and might very well go there, but only after meeting some human needs. There was plenty of time for everything: all was in circular flux, so that with patience you could encounter everything coming around again eternally. Because of this truth he never had either worries or regrets, nor could his spirit be broken, no matter how much they tried.

  He entered the office of the first motel he came to and registered for a room, using a credit card he had taken from the wallet of the man from whom he had that morning stolen the car at knifepoint. As I.D. he displayed the same guy’s driver’s license, with the picture that bore very little resemblance to him even after he slicked his hair down, but the motel clerk was no more inclined to question it than the cop had been earlier in the day, in fact did not even look at the photograph as he laboriously copied out the lengthy number inscribed thereon. Such lazy, worthless people were everywhere you looked.

  “Could you,” Richie asked with his endearing smile, “tell me where I could get a real meal around here? I don’t mean that instant junk next door, burger-in-the-box, bucket-of-grease, and so on, but roast beef, mashed potatoes ‘n’ gravy, chicken in the pot, you know what I mean, I hope. Buttered noodles, baked beans, macaroni ‘n’ cheese.…”

  The clerk smiled back. He was a short man, small-eyed, and already balding though no older than Richie. “But you got to go into town to Mahoney’s. It’s a bar and grill, with the dining room out back.” He gave directions.

  Richie found his room, only after walking around most of the motel, in the rearmost segment, which looked onto a narrow strip of parking blacktop and, beyond that, up to the motorway, which would surely roar all night. The TV had no remote, and the bathroom exhaust fan, which came on automatically with the overhead light, made a nerve-racking clatter. Charging what plus tax came to almost eighty dollars was criminal for such accommodations, and he was so indignant that he emptied his bladder not into the toilet but onto the bed. He had had the idea of washing up before going into town for the meal, but now this room was out of the question, and he anyway did not have a razor with which to deal with the stubble he felt on his cheeks.

  He went outside. There was only one parked car in sight. At the moment, it was being unloaded by a stocky man in a dark suit. He took a valise from the trunk and brought it to the door of the room two down from Richie’s. He had just inserted the key in the lock when Richie reached him.

  “Excuse me,” Richie said, showing his smile. “I’m very sorry to bother you, but my phone’s not working. I was wondering if you’d call the desk for me?”

  “Be glad to,” said the man, who wore gold-rimmed glasses of a kind Richie thought elegant. “Just let me get inside.” He turned the key and pushed the door open. He had picked up the suitcase and taken the first step inside the room when Richie struck him on the crown with the butt of the revolver. The body pitched forward, knees buckling, and fell full-length on the beige carpeting, parallel with the combination dressing table/luggage shelf. There was a soft moan and some writhing. Richie knelt and, after carefully removing the eyeglasses, kept hitting the head until it was an ugly red mess and there was no further movement of the body. He had not had time for tying and gagging, and there was no alternative.

  He lifted the suitcase to the bed and opened it. He took the leather toilet-article kit into the bathroom. The overhead fan here apparently did not work at all, which was a relief after the noise of the one in his own room but another outrageous example of the poor quality of the motel. If they thought he would take that lying down, they could not have been more wrong.

  After showering the day’s grime off himself, and the blood that had been splashed on him from the sloppy way he had disposed of the guy on the floor, owing to his inhibition against using a knife above the neck on a man (he never got a drop on him when using his box-cutter blade from behind), he shaved with the electric razor, combed his hair in more or less the style of the victim, and put on a pin-striped navy-blue suit, a white shirt, and a striped tie from the suitcase, all of which—except the tie, of course—fitted him loosely, for he was more slender than the man from whom the clothes had been acquired. The jacket was large enough to conceal the pistol in his waistband, as he ascertained in the mirror.

  When he put on the gold-rimmed glasses, his face bore a slight resemblance to the photograph on the driver’s license. Certainly it was a closer match than he had made with the previous license. Along with the wallet he had taken a set of car keys. He was about to leave when he had an idea. He stripped the body to its underwear, rolled it up in one of the bedspreads, and, having looked out the door and found nobody in sight, got his shoulder under it and, with one big effort, raised its leaden weight. He carried the body to his own, unlocked door. Inside the room, observing the niceties, he dropped it on the other bed than the one he had urinated on. From his pockets he took the twin flasks of aftershave lotion and men’s cologne found in the toilet kit and sprinkled their fluids around the room, especially in and around the bed that held the body. He had brought along the matches from the farmhouse. He struck several of them now and started a series of little fires that quickly united into one. He watched the flames until they had taken hold, then left the room and, after dropping the empty bottles into a swing-top trash can in the nearby alcove that also contained a Coke machine, got into the car and drove to town, following the room clerk’s directions.

  The business section consisted of one block, with the bar & grill about halfway along. He parked at the curb almost directly outside, but when he entered the place he saw that it was full, which suggested that most customers lived near enough to walk. He liked this sort of village. At the end of the street was a war memorial in the middle of a little park inside a traffic loop, and the hardware store next to the bar had the waist-high show windows of yore, framed in dark-green much-painted wood.

  A jukebox was playing in the front room of the bar, country music with words that could really move you if you listened. Richie went on into the back room, in which only one table was occupied. He chose a booth against the far wall. A fat girl wearing a gleamingly clean apron came to take his order. Her skin too was unblemished. That was important to Richie if he was going to eat.

  He had not opened the menu. “I hope you got pork chops.”

  “We sure do,” the fat waitress said with a simper that he did not much care for, but the prospect of the meal overshadowed all else. “I hope you bread them nice.”

  “Breaded? Why, I sure think we can. I’ll tell him, anyhow. And what you want with? Limas, home fries—”

  “Lima beans?” Rich
ie asked with enthusiasm. “Absolutely. And mashed potatoes ‘n’ gravy.” This place was living up to the room clerk’s recommendation so far. Of course, you couldn’t tell how it would taste, and whether the breading might not hide a lot of fat and gristle. He rejected lettuce-and-tomato with Thousand Island and a preprandial cup of coffee, ordering instead a blackberry cordial, which he downed before the waitress left the tableside. He told her to bring a refill.

  “Well,” she said simperingly, swooping up the empty glass, “that didn’t last long.”

  Richie was annoyed by such comments on the part of people who served him in public, for they were necessarily insincere, but he kept himself under control by reflecting that they were in this case addressed not really to him but rather to the salesman or whatever he appeared to be in the borrowed clothes and eyeglasses. The latter distorted his vision slightly, and the strain caused him to wear a faint frown, but that was probably all to the good so far as his new image went.

  The pork chops, when they came, were fine, the breading not too clammy, and he had no fault to find with the lima beans or the mashed potatoes, but the waitress had also brought him a little side dish of creamed corn, something he detested. If she had come back at this point and asked if everything was okay, as they did in some places the last time he had been released from Barnes, he might have pushed her fat face into the dish, and wrung her neck if she screamed, but as it happened she did not return until he had finished eating everything else, and even then did not mention the untouched corn.

  He had continued to drink blackberry cordials throughout the meal. Richie never got drunk. If in motion, as earlier in the day when he swallowed the pint of vodka, he felt no effect whatever. But in a comfortable situation such as this one, with no purpose but to feed, alcohol brought out a natural warmth in him. If he settled in a town like this, he would eat here every night, and he would have a dog at home, to whom he could take leftovers from his meal. A nice big friendly sweet animal, golden retriever or setter, not some mean customer you’d have to shoot if he got his teeth in somebody and wouldn’t let go. Richie didn’t need a guard-or attack-dog: he could protect himself.

  The waitress came back from taking the dirty dishes away. “What’s your pleasure for dessert?”

  “You got a dog?” Richie asked. “A pet, you know.”

  “Why, no, I don’t. I used to have a cat, but that was when I was a lit—”

  “I guess there’d be people around here with dogs, wouldn’t there? I mean, they’d sell me one?”

  “I bet we can find you somebody,” the waitress said, bending slightly at the waist, creasing herself. She obviously ate too much of the fare she served; she had no discipline. “You came to town looking for a dog to buy, is that it?”

  “Just passing through.”

  “I can ask Wally if you want. He’s the boss. He’ll be back in a little while.”

  “That’s all right,” Richie said. “You got tapioca pudding?”

  “How about cup custard or rice pudding?”

  Had the edge not been taken off him by the breaded pork chops and blackberry cordial, he would have been offended by this stupid suggestion that the desserts were interchangeable.

  “Forget it.”

  “How about coffee?”

  He ordered another cordial instead. Caffeine taken after late afternoon would keep him up all night. The fat-assed waitress smiled when she brought him the replenished glass. He hoped she had not got the wrong idea from his question about the dog. He threw down the cordial with one gulp and wiped his lips on the napkin. He took the wallet out and looked through its contents. The driver’s license and credit cards were in the name of Randolph J. Pryor. The cash was more than expected: six hundred dollars, most of it in hundred-dollar bills.

  The waitress brought the check without asking. Richie liked that. What he did not care for was her comment: “Come back and see us real soon.” He certainly did not look, but expected that she had accompanied this with a leer. He approved of efficiency but was repelled by familiarity on the part of strangers. Many had the warped idea that this was courtesy. It was not. He decided to pay in cash, having a supply of it, and he left a gratuity of 50 percent, his way being either to overtip or to leave nothing. When he gave too much, he exited before it was collected, so he did not have to endure the thanks of people so inferior they collected the garbage on the dirty plates of others. When he tipped nothing, however, he always stayed and faced the servitor down, so that he or she would not believe it was an oversight. He got few complaints; they could usually see he meant business. But sometimes—in the city, of course—he had had to retaliate for the negative reaction. People who acted properly had nothing to fear from him.

  On the way out he went to the men’s room and peed again. That was also his style, to go all day without urinating and then do it more than once within an hour or so. Leaving the toilet, he was bumped into by someone entering. The impact was so violent that it unseated the eyeglasses from his nose. Nevertheless, it was Richie who said, “Hey, sorry!” He would rather take responsibility than appear a victim of a chance occurrence.

  The other, drunk, gruntingly accepted the apology and staggered into the men’s room. People who let themselves get into that condition were pathetic.

  On reaching the street, he decided to walk down the block and look at the stores, all of which were closed now that the sun was setting. One was some kind of old-fashioned dry-goods shop catering to both sexes, women’s nightclothes in one window and blue work shirts and thick socks in the other. Farther on was a plumber’s office with a desk in a shallow room in front and then an open door through which could be seen shelves and bins full of pipes and fittings. An emergency number was painted on the plate-glass show window. Richie had taken a plumbing course as a teenager at a juvenile-detention center and on completing it was supposedly qualified to start work as an apprentice, but he remembered little of the trade by now, except what crude but effective weapons could be fashioned from the old metal pipes, now almost entirely replaced by plastic, which was pretty useless for anything except conveying water.

  At the end of the block he came to a firehouse, its doors wide open. He remembered hearing, while eating his pork chops, a nearby wail or whine that he now suspected had been a siren. The firemen in a town like this would be volunteers, local householders, married guys, fathers, fine people, a far cry from the police. Cops were the scum of the earth. It turned his stomach to see one even at a distance. Much of his trouble came from the police, starting when he was quite young. A cop could look at a crowd of a thousand people and zero in immediately on him. If you thought about it, what kind of person became a policeman? Someone who wanted to deny something to others. Who else would get any reward from that kind of work? They got paid very little, took all kinds of risks, and were out all hours and seldom home with their families. And most of the people they rubbed elbows with were either other cops—the same kind of morally inferior men they themselves were—or criminals. Richie had a low opinion of criminals, and he had known a number of them. In a life like his you met all kinds, but that did not mean you had to approve of everybody.

  He walked back to where the car was parked, in front of the bar & grill, and a couple of the barflies came out from inside and stared at the distant sky.

  “I can’t see nothing,” said one of them, and he turned and addressed Richie. “Wife called and says out at Exit Eleven one of the motels is on fire. Know anything about that?”

  “No,” said Richie. “I just finished eating a meal here.”

  “Sure you did,” said the man with the beer, hoisting it at Richie. “I saw you.”

  “Out of control, she says,” said the first man, peering at the sky. “Heard it on the radio. Think you’d see some smoke if it’s as big as they say. But you’ll see it all if you’re driving out that way.”

  “I’m not,” Richie said. “I’m going in that direction.” He pointed.

  “West Picket,
” the man said smugly, nodding.

  More people were now emerging from the front door. Richie got into the car and drove slowly along the main street and then into a residential neighborhood, where he increased speed slightly so as not to look as if he were casing the area. The day was in that transitional state from afternoon to evening. Some windows were lighted, some not. He prudently put on his headlights (after he had found the switch, which was located in a different place in every car he had ever driven: there ought to be a law). He did not want to get stopped by the police for such a trivial matter. That was where criminals made their mistake, and why they couldn’t win for long: minor matters. In the city they would jump a subway turnstile and get busted for that and then be found to have a list of outstanding warrants on them for felonies. Or out here in the sticks, they’d shoplift a beer or run the only traffic light in town and get nailed by the local law, who’d find an automatic weapon under the seat and a kilo of drugs in the trunk. Richie had been called disturbed and put on lithium, but obviously the people with the real problems were out and roaming around the universe, being unbelievably stupid, causing trouble for good men like John.

  Now that the joke about going to John’s house was a distant memory, Richie thought about really going there. He had lost contact with John back before he had gone to the motel, he forgot exactly how, but could remember having no bad feeling. And he had not worried about losing touch with him completely, because he did know where he lived. Of course, he would not want to go to John’s house at dinnertime and upset the wife, who might have a certain prejudice about him to begin with, the way that redheaded little whore with the car did: right away, on sight. A certain kind of female hated his guts after one look. Others, like the fat waitress, could get the hots for him with very little encouragement. Which was scarcely better. He detested immorality. He hoped he would be allowed to make that clear to John’s wife when he met her, because as yet John seemed to have the wrong idea about him. Richie was willing to admit that some of this was his own fault: he probably pulled John’s leg too much, but it was fun to kid him. You always got a reaction, and that was something Richie was always on the lookout for. So many people walked around half dead. For them life was a complete waste. If they were awakened from their stupor, they tended to be rude. John, on the other hand, stood for something, had something to defend, was a real man.