Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  She was so tired from school all day and then the lesson. She was pretty dizzy in fact, and as her eyes worked on adjusting, trying to see him against the sun, her head was tilted, because the man was standing not directly in front of her but to the side a little. The world was a little tilted, and she could see the man, in a glowing silhouette, with the sun making stratified rainbow bursts over his shoulder. The sun made sparks fly from the bits of glass and shell ground up in the blacktop everywhere except where the man’s shadow fell. So the shadow was dull and flat, and everything shimmered around it.

  And remember her angle, which made the man himself so hard to see. The silhouette and the shadow he cast, it was hard to tell which was which. It was like seeing two shadows, bound at the feet and leaning away from one another. Like a moment before, he’d been one man, but he’d been sliced crosswise down the center, and as he was hinged at the feet, one of him fell one way and the other of him fell the other. She felt giddy and giggled briefly at her private image and how silly it was.

  When she fixed her focus the man was smiling and pointing at his ankle.

  “I’m such a klutz,” he said. “I twisted it.” He held a racket, but he wasn’t sweating. She put her hand to her brow so she could see him better. She could see little glinting lights in his hair, but mostly he remained a shadow. She stood up, and then she could see him. He was really good-looking.

  That’s what she thought, and that’s what she said to me: He had medium brown hair, but he’d been in the sun a lot and when the light hit it you could see reddish and golden strands.

  Like her own hair, in fact, a worn sorrel shade, but his was hollow, without gloss.

  He was kind of tall, she said. He had normal features, his eyes were cool-looking, he was good-looking is what she said.

  The man’s shadow loomed, and he said, “You’re pretty good out there.”

  “I am not,” CiCi said, smiling despite herself, and I could see the funny half-blushing look she’d make with her face, because it was true, she was lousy at tennis, but when he said it she thought for a second that maybe he was right, maybe she looked good out there. I knew the face I made when I felt like that, part embarrassed that anyone had noticed me, that I’d been unaware of being watched, part hopeful that maybe I was wrong, maybe I was good.

  He said he had an old racket in his van, that it wasn’t as good as the one he used, but it was a damn sight nicer than hers. He said he thought she had a lot of potential. That he’d like to give her the racket because a good racket made all the difference.

  “I don’t even like tennis that much,” she said.

  “Oh, you should,” said the man. “It’s not right to waste your gifts.”

  She walked with him across the parking lot to where his van was, carrying her racket and her duffel bag, and he limped at her side, carrying his. He opened the sliding door and put his duffel bag on the van floor. He was standing to her side and a little behind her, and his hand touched the small of her back as he leaned past her to put his tennis racket on top of the duffel bag.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding truly sad. “I’m such an idiot. That other racket’s at the pro shop. I’m having it strung.”

  “Well that’s okay,” CiCi said.

  The man said his name was Mark, and he offered her a ride home if she needed one. CiCi was mad at her mother anyway, so she said yes, she actually did need a ride. They drove off. They chatted. Then after a couple miles Mark started to sound stuttery. Suddenly he pulled onto the shoulder and stopped the van with such force that it rocked. He leaned across her and opened her door. “Get the fuck out of my car,” he said, and shoved her. And he left her there on the side of the road.

  CiCi stood, empty-handed, on the shoulder of the road, and then she walked. By the time she got home, her father was out driving around looking for her and her mother was standing by the telephone, unraveling the fringe on a dishtowel, frantic. She’d called the police. “I want to strangle you!” she said, hugging CiCi. She said the police were out looking for her, that they’d relayed her description to patrolmen all over town.

  But I don’t know, maybe the police said they had to wait forty-eight hours, that’s what I hear they have to say.

  But CiCi said her mother said the police had her description, so maybe CiCi’s mother lied. Or maybe the police lied to CiCi’s mother.

  Either way, she clutched at CiCi and wept, and then she held CiCi at arm’s length and yelled and said, “Where on God’s green earth have you been? The police are out using their resources right now!” So CiCi told her mother a strange man had tricked her into his van. She said he took her duffel bag and her tennis racket and then he left her on the side of the road, and as soon as CiCi’s father came home, they all got into the car and drove down to the station and made out a report.

  Two days later, five sorority sisters at the Chi Omega House at the State University were variously raped, beaten, killed, mutilated, and a couple weeks after that, twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach was abducted in Lake City, and eight days after that, Ted Bundy (who’d abandoned the white van he’d been using) was pulled over (in what turned out to be his second Volkswagen Bug, an orange one this time; the first one, some less interesting color, he’d used all through what you call his “string” of killings in Washington, Colorado, and Salt Lake City) and arrested.

  A few days after that CiCi was called in and interviewed about Mark and his tennis rackets, his ankle, and his van. They interviewed her for hours, she said. She said at times there were eight to ten people in the room taking notes. She said there was a one-way mirror in the room and that at one point a lady psychiatrist came in and asked her about whether “this Mark” touched her here or there, and she just knew tons of people were behind the glass, watching. She did the lady psychiatrist’s voice in a sort of fake-British accent, in a kind of tea-party voice. “Well my dea-h Beatrice,” that sort of thing. She pretended to be the British psychiatrist and pointed at my chest the way a schoolmarm might point at a blackboard or a disgusting lump of mud on the floor.

  “Did he touch you hea-h?” she said, and then pointed to my crotch, “Or did he touch you hea-h,” as if that then must be the case.

  They tape-recorded her, and there was a stenographer on a little chair in the corner the whole time. After the interview, the police called her parents’ house once or twice, to ask one more question or to confirm one more detail (So how sure are you about the color of that van? Anything, for instance, that struck you as suspicious? So again, please name the items you remember seeing in the back of that van. You say he hurt his ankle. Did it seem to you that he had hurt his ankle? You say it was stratified sunbursts?), but then she didn’t hear from them any more. They just stopped calling.

  She figured for sure they’d need her to testify in Miami, where the trial took place. In her diary she wrote out what her testimony would be. She wrote out all the possible ways she could be cross-examined and wrote out her responses to every one. And right about that time—way before I met CiCi, when I was states and states away, complaining to my teacher at recess that retarded John Crumb was sitting in the outfield with the dandelions, hunched over his foot, licking the heel of his sock, and he wouldn’t come in, even though I told him it was time to line up—right about that time, when the trial started and CiCi had not been called to testify, CiCi flung herself on the morning paper, reading it and wringing it, weeping in the breakfast nook, and CiCi’s mother said, “Thank God it’s all over. No more Ted Bundy.” She told CiCi under no circumstances was she to watch the trial coverage on television, but CiCi went to friends’ houses or to Dillard’s at the mall even, and watched there. “It’s true he’s good-looking,” she told her friends, “but in real life, he’s not as good-looking as everyone says.”

  She read about him, she watched him, she imagined him, she remembered him. She felt a pull of greatness. She felt she was on the edge of being unearthed, she felt the possibility of going down in history.
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  One time CiCi showed me in the paper how they were getting ready to make a TV movie about Ted Bundy, about who might get to play the leading man, the Matinee Idol Murderer, the High I.Q. Killer, the Stranger Next Door, the Promising Republican, the Murderous Prince Charming.

  “How do you think you got away?” I asked her.

  “I dunno,” she said. “I guess he didn’t like me.”

  On Ted’s balcony, the air remained stiff and so filled with liquid it took effort to breathe. CiCi leaned back in the beach chair. She let the strappy sandals drop to the floor and folded her hands in her lap. She closed her eyes. I looked at the new polish on my toes. It looked dumb. Then I watched her face for a little while, knowing exactly what it’s like to sit like that in the dusk, to feel like you’ve disappeared, like you might as well be anywhere. I could see how tired she was. Her complexion was off a little. A little pale, a little puffy, a little uneven in color. Like she’d been sailing all day. Like she’d come home from that much wind and then washed her face over and over. She looked like she could be sleeping; her face held that extremely peaceful expression that’s as close as it gets to no expression at all. Then as I watched, although I swear it didn’t change a bit, I could see sadness in there, and pensiveness, and a kind of fear, too. I mean look at a doll’s face sometime. It’s all there.

  “CiCi,” I said, when watching her overwhelmed me. “Will you tell me what happened with the guy in Miami?” And she did.

  Heat shone and coated the highway, its pavement, its tin guardrails, its heaving trucks and darting cars. On the bus, CiCi changed from her sneakers into her heels and put the sneakers in a big canvas bag. At the bus station she put her wallet and her lipstick into a white leather purse the size of a grapefruit, locked the canvas bag in a locker, and slipped the key to the locker into her bra. But you could see the key poking at the material, so she took it out and put it in the purse.

  Outside, she worked her legs hard to keep her stride long in the shoes and among the people. The city towers felt bottom-heavy, with people on their lunch breaks spinning in and out of lobbies on revolving doors. Higher up, the windows were like closed eyes, and it was hard to imagine anyone in there. The thin upper stories seemed hollow, like metallic husks, and it looked both bright and silent up there. A flock of small birds, the kind of birds you might find anywhere in the world, one version or another, a flock of plain little birds, zoomed in unison in front of one mirrored tower and then behind the next, silvery, each blinking, wings in, wings out, like mirrors turned toward you and then sideways, flashing, full-on bright and then invisible, fast. Dazzling. A shifting shining cloud. They could have been white birds, or they could have been dark birds. It was impossible to tell, each was so alternately shiny and invisible. As a mass they twinkled in the hot sky. When CiCi looked up the flock was there, like the crowd of sparkles that the tips of shallow waves make in a lake. They were like nerve endings, like a cross-sectioned antiseptic limb, the electrode nerve endings pulsing, tongues licking air for what seemed like ages, and within a second the flock was gone behind a wall of pink marble. Her purse bounced at her hip as she walked, so she put her hand on it. The strap crossed between her breasts. Her skirt fluttered at her knees, and her stomach fluttered in her skirt.

  As soon as she entered the café the guy spotted her and he gestured to her as he rose from his seat by the window. She’d actually noticed him on her way into the restaurant. She’d seen him in the window as she walked past it to get to the door, and she actually thought it’d be too good to be true if this was the guy, because he was so sharp looking, with a linen jacket and a silk shirt and one gold chain you could just see where his collar opened. He pulled her chair out for her as she approached and touched her arm to guide her into it. CiCi lifted her purse strap over her head. It took her several tries to get the strap to stay on the rounded back of the tippy chair.

  The guy introduced himself. His name was Dean, or Daniel, or Dylan, I don’t remember. As he was talking, saying, “Wow, CiCi, I’m glad you made it, I’m so glad you agreed,” he took a mini tape recorder from his briefcase and showed it to her with his eyebrows raised, acknowledging to her that he was turning it on, that she could object if she wanted, everything out in the open, on the record, super-professional, all via eye contact, like he did it every day and like she did too. He placed the mini recorder on the café table next to the vase with its one ruffled flower. He said he was so glad they’d be working together, and then he gestured to the menu and said, “Anything you want.” When the waiter came, he ordered her a glass of white wine without even asking.

  The vase on the café table was white, and the shape of an egret, of a lean bowling pin. It had a thin blue ribbon around its neck, a decorative noose. The waiters scurried around in black-and-white and the whole room hummed with its mirrors and flamingo pink and aqua everything.

  Then she told him. She told him exactly what it was like to be in a van with Bundy, she told him just as she’d written in her journal she’d tell it. How his hair sparkled. How he touched the small of her back. How he held her hand to help her balance as she stepped into the van like it was a gleaming white carriage. Yes, she said, his eyes devastated her. Yes, he seemed truly wounded when he remembered the racket was in the shop. His hands quivered on the steering wheel as he listened to her tell him what she was studying in school. His face turned to something ravaged and rageful when he shoved her from the van. Yes, she was frightened. Like there was a beast inside him, she said. Like Jekyll and Hyde.

  The guy shook his head, overwhelmed, it seemed, with sympathy. He was eating bowtie pasta with curled-up shrimps. “And you were just a child,” he said.

  “I know,” said CiCi. “I was pretty naïve. But you have to remember, Romeo and Juliet were thirteen, right?” A busboy came by and filled their water glasses. CiCi watched the ice cubes rock to the lip of her glass, ready for water to spill, but water didn’t spill and the cubes rocked back into place.

  “Funny thing, though,” the guy said. Donny, David, Dominick, whichever it was. “As I’m remembering from my notes it was, what, the twelfth? For your incident? Thursday, right? I mean, look at the dates here,” he said, pulling a small spiral notebook out of his briefcase.

  “Yeah,” she said, not quite getting it.

  “Well, it doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Because, I mean, he didn’t get that van until right before he left. So, if he had the van, you know, that’d mean he’d have to be over in Lake City killing Kimberly Leach. Look,” he said and handed her the notebook. She held it in the palm of her hand. He’d drawn a little map in blue ink, showing Tallahassee and the Chi Omega Sorority House and Lake City and the Holiday Inn where they’d come up with a receipt. He’d made little x-marks-the-spot marks in red ink, and put the dates next to each x in purple ink. “Because see that was a Saturday, with Kimberly,” he said, pointing with his fork. CiCi looked at the notebook in her hand and it looked like the map of that day: the tennis court, the parking lot, the stretch of road through the newly constructed stretch of strip malls, the anonymous shoulder where he pulled over, her parents’ house, the police station. Change the names and it could be a map of anything.

  In the air conditioning, she suddenly felt cold in her sundress and her face got hot. When she looked at him, she couldn’t help it, her eyes, as they say, swam with tears. Once, when she was a little kid, she’d rescued a baby rabbit from her cat and held it in the palm of her hand, where it crouched, in shock. She held it, trying to figure out what to do, in wonder at its fur, at its eyes, its immaculate feet. She bent her knees and crouched there, in her backyard, watching the exquisite animal breathe, so caught with it that when the creature stopped breathing it was the first she’d noticed time passing since she’d flung the cat away. In the café, she held the notebook like that, and when she let herself realize what it meant, that it had never been Bundy in the van at all, that it’d been just some guy, any old guy, and that suddenly she couldn’t reme
mber what the man at the tennis courts looked like at all, he was nothing but a shadow in the sun, in that moment it was like the notebook died, and she reached her hand across the tippy table, palm up, holding it out for Derek, or Dennis, whatever his name was, to take.

  At that point, CiCi told me, well at that point she’s just letting it be obvious how upset she is and the guy really slimes up to her. So that’s a little better, in a way, she said, to have him be all comforting and sympathetic, especially out there in public where everyone in the restaurant knows how good-looking he is, and they don’t have to know he’s a fucking slime. But then he does something scary. He says he’ll take her by the bus station to pick up her stuff and then take her home, but first he takes her to a hotel. It’s a fancy hotel, and he takes her there in his amazing little red convertible, which she’d actually walked by on her way to the café and thought what a cute car it was. But in the room, he gets obsessed with making her come. He says it’s criminal—no lie, CiCi said to me, his exact words, it’s criminal, he says—that she doesn’t orgasm and then it’s all fucking afternoon, he’s doing this, and he’s trying that, and she tries faking it twice, but he catches her and says, “Relax, relax, baby, it’s no hurry,” and then a little while later he says, “Give it to me,” which she heard about guys saying but never thought they actually said. She says finally she thought she maybe did come, but she was so mad she didn’t change her face at all and pretended she didn’t, and finally he gave up and said she shouldn’t worry, with some girls it took them years to learn how to get turned on, but at least she knew now it took a real man to be patient with her and she should expect no less ever again. No lie, she said. He said real man.