"Can you believe it? I think I'm still back on Manhattan Avenue. I already had it arranged to sublet Tierney's apartment. I was just waiting for them to get on the plane. Soon as that happened, goodbye Jim Shorter, hello Joel Silverman. He's a nice Jewish boy, Joel is. You know you can trust him to water your plants and not piss on your carpet." He laughed. "Then you turned up. I couldn't disappear right away, not the way I'd planned. I had to wait for you to lose interest. But instead of shining you on and getting rid of you, I let you take me to a fucking AA meeting. Can you believe that?"
"And one meeting changed your life."
"Yeah, right, just like those lamebrains telling their stories. All of a sudden you're calling me on the phone, I'm calling you on the phone, and how do I get you off my back and quit being Jim Shorter? First I went and did Helen in Forest Hills, because that wasn't a load of shit about having an affair with her. Widows are pretty easy targets, you know. She's not the first I got next to after I did the husband. There was a guy named Bayliss you wouldn't even know was one of mine-"
"In a hotel room in Atlanta."
"Yeah, well, I looked up the wife afterward. Same thing with Helen, such a shock discovering your husband's body, blah blah blah, next thing you know she's got her knees up and I'm slippin' her the salami. I don't know if I can explain what a pleasure it was. It's like killing the husband a second time."
"And then you killed Helen."
"I thought I could keep you from finding out. You were talking about going out to see her, so I figured I'd better see her first. Then afterward I thought, shit, even a good accident's suspicious. You got to know I'm good at doing accidents. I realized I had to pull the plug on Jim Shorter and disappear, and the hell with whether or not you figured it out. So I thought let's go out with a bang, let's be dramatic, and I got that fucking clown of a weatherman."
"Gerry Billings."
"Asshole. Chirpy little fucker with his bow ties and his million-dollar smile. The look on his face when I shot him. He bought the scene, you know. Thought it was a traffic accident and he was an innocent bystander who was getting shot for no reason at all. I was praying he'd recognize me and go out knowing, but I didn't have time to waste so I just shot him and got it the fuck over with."
"Why kill them, Jim?"
"You think I need a reason?"
"I think you've got one."
"Why should I tell you?"
"I don't know," I said, "but I think you probably will."
He hated them from the start.
Bunch of self-satisfied bastards. Eating and drinking and running their mouths, and he sat there among them and wondered what he was doing there. Whose idea had it been to invite him? What made anybody think he fit in?
Crazy, too. Bunch of grown men sitting around and waiting to die. The whole idea of dying made him sick to his stomach. He didn't like to think about it. Everybody died, death was out there waiting for everyone, but did that mean he had to think about it?
He was shaking when he left Cunningham's that first night back in 1961. If there was one thing he was clear on, it was that he was done with this group of fruitcakes. They could meet next year without him. He was done. Let 'em read his name or burn his name, whatever the fuck they wanted, because he was through with the whole deal. Luckily they hadn't made him sign his name in blood, or swear an oath on the head of his mother, or any of the usual secret-society mumbo jumbo. They had let him in, God knows why, and he could let himself out. And don't bother to show me to the door, thank you very much, but I can find my own way out.
But he went back the next year. He hadn't planned on it, but when the time came something made him go.
It was just as bad. Most of the talk concerned the progress they'd made since the last dinner- the promotions, the raises, the goddamn successes all over the place. The following year was more of the same, and he decided that was it, he was finished.
Then Phil Kalish died and excitement went through him like an electrical charge. I beat you, he thought. You were smarter and taller and better-looking, you were making good money, you had a wife and a family, and where did it get you? Because you're dead and I'm alive, you son of a bitch.
And wasn't that the point of it, staying alive? Wasn't that what they got together to celebrate? That they were alive and the ones who weren't there were dead?
So he went to the dinner in 1964 and heard Phil Kalish's name read. And he looked around the room and wondered who would be next.
That's when he started planning. He wasn't sure he was going to do anything, but in the meantime he could set the stage.
The first thing to do was die. He thought of a lot of ways to do it, most of them involving killing somebody and planting his identification on the corpse. But Vietnam was starting to heat up, and that was easy. He called Homer Champney and explained that his reserve unit had been called up and he couldn't make it back to the city for the dinner. He wasn't in the reserves, he'd never been in the army or the National Guard, a psychiatric evaluation had kept him out, which showed what they knew, the idiots, because he had turned out to be a far better killer than the people they took in. He phoned again, the week before the dinner, to report that he was being sent overseas.
By the following year he'd died in combat. The night of the dinner he went to a movie on Forty-second Street and thought how they'd be reading his name along with Kalish's, and they'd all say nice mournful things about him, and every one of the cocksuckers'd be glad it was him and not them.
A lot they knew.
He took plenty of time setting up the first one. He took his time with each of them, wondering how many of them he could do before they started to get suspicious. Well, they were down to fourteen men before anybody suspected a thing. More than half of them gone, although not all of them were his doing, not by any means.
But most of them were. And each time, all through the planning and the preliminary steps, he felt really alive, really in charge of his life. And then when he did it, well, actually doing it was pretty exciting, because it was dangerous and you had to be careful nothing went wrong.
Once it was done, though, it was sort of sad.
Not that he mourned for them. Fuck 'em, they deserved what they got. And it was wonderfully satisfying, because each time it was one more down and he was still standing, and he'd beaten another of the bastards.
No, what was sad was that it was over. A cat probably felt the same way when the mouse she was playing with finally gave up the ghost and died. You got to eat your dinner, but the game was over. Kind of bittersweet, you could call it.
That's why he was stretching it out. That's why he'd taken so many years instead of knocking them off at the rate of one a month. He'd kept them from finding out for a long time, and now they knew, and in a way that made it even better, because what could they do about it? Gerard Billings had known, and what good did it do him?
They wore the best clothes, and they ate at the best restaurants, and they got their names in the paper. Expensive dentists kept their teeth white and expensive doctors kept them feeling fit, and they got their suntans on expensive beaches. And this was their game, not his, and he was beating them at it. Because someday they'd all be dead, and he'd be alive.
"Except I guess I lose," he said. "You're gonna kill me."
"No."
"Then someone else'll do it for you. What's the matter, you don't want to get your hands dirty? That's why they hired you, 'cause I know those fucks wouldn't get their hands dirty, but what's your problem that you got to pass the buck? I'm ashamed of you, Matt. I thought you had more to you than that."
"Nobody's going to kill you, Jim."
"You expect me to believe that?"
"Believe what you want," I said. "In an hour or so I'm getting back on the plane with the other fellows."
"And?"
"And you're staying here."