He paused again, and then said with perfect gravity, "It takes a special kind of animal to do something so vicious. And not to feel any remorse."
"You didn't torture him the way I tortured you," I said softly.
"You know everything you've done, don't you? You really understand!
"I didn't get the whole picture when I was following you. I imagined you were more intimately perverse, wrapped up in your own romance. An arch self-deceiver."
"Was that torture, what you did to me?" he asked. "I don't remember pain being involved in it, only fury that I was going to die.
Whatever the case, I killed this man in Long Island for money. It meant nothing to me. I didn't even feel relief afterwards, only a kind of strength, you know, of accomplishment, and I wanted to test it again soon and I did."
"And you were on your way."
"Absolutely. And in my style too. The word was out. If the task seems impossible, get Roger. I could get into a hospital dressed like a young doctor, with a name tag on my coat and a clipboard in my hand, and shoot some marked guy dead in his bed before anyone was the wiser. I did that, in fact."
"But understand, I didn't make myself rich as a hit man. It was heroin first, and then cocaine, and with the cocaine it was going back to some of the very same cowboys I'd known in the beginning, who flew the cocaine over the border same fashion, same routes, same planes! You know the history of it. Everyone does today. The early dope dealers were crude in their methods. It was 'cops and robbers' with the government guys. The planes would outrun the government planes, and when the planes landed, sometimes they were so stuffed with cocaine the driver couldn't wriggle out of the cockpit, and we'd run out and get the stuff, and load it up and get the hell out of there."
"So I've heard."
"Now there are geniuses in the business, people who know how to use cellular phones and computers and laundering techniques for money which no one can trace. But then? I was the genius of the dopers! Sometimes the whole thing was as cumbersome as moving furniture, I tell you. And I went in there, organizing, picking my confidants and my mules, you know, for crossing the borders, and even before cocaine ever hit the streets, so to speak, I was doing beautifully in New York and L.A. with the rich, you know, the kind of customers to whom you deliver personally. They never have to even leave their palatial homes. You get the call. You show up. Your stuff is pure.
They like you. But I had to move out from there. I wasn't going to be dependent upon that."
"I was too clever. I made some real-estate deals that were pure brilliance on my part, and having the cash on hand, and you know those were the days of hellish inflation. I really cleaned up."
"But how did Terry get involved in it, and Dora?"
"Pure fluke. Or destiny. Who knows? Went home to New Orleans to see my mother, brushed up against Terry and got her pregnant. Damned fool."
"I was twenty-two, my mother was really dying this time. My mother said, 'Roger, please come home.' That stupid boyfriend with die cracked face had died. She was all alone. I'd been sending her plenty of money all along."
''The boardinghouse was now her private home, she had two maids and a driver to take her around town in a Cadillac whenever she felt the desire. She'd enjoyed it immensely, never asking any questions about the money, and of course I'd been collecting Wynken. I had two more books of Wynken by that time and my treasure storehouse in New York already, but we can get to that later on. Just keep Wynken in the back of your mind."
"My mother had never really asked me for anything. She had the big bedroom upstairs now to herself. She said she talked to all the others who had gone on ahead, her poor old sweet dead brother Mickey, and her dead sister, Alice, and her mother, the Irish maid— the founder of our family, you might say—to whom the house had been willed by the crazy lady who lived there. My mother was also talking a lot to Little Richard. That was a brother that died when he was four. Lockjaw- Little Richard. She said Little Richard was walking around with her, telling her it was time to come."
"But she wanted me to come home. She wanted me there in that room. I knew all this. I understood. She had sat with boarders that were dying. I had sat with others than Old Captain. So I went home."
"Nobody knew where I was headed, or what my real name was, or where I came from. So it was easy to slip out of New York. I went to the house on St. Charles Avenue and sat in the sickroom with her, holding the little vomit cup to her chin, wiping her spittle, and trying to get her on the bedpan when the agency didn't have a nurse to send. We had help, yes, but she didn't want the help, you know. She didn't want the colored girl, as she called her. Or that horrible nurse. And I made the amazing discovery that these things didn't disgust me much. I washed so many sheets. Of course there was a machine to put them in, but I changed them over and over for her. I didn't mind. Maybe I was never normal. In any event, I simply did what had to be done. I rinsed out that bedpan a thousand times, wiped it off, sprinkled powder on it, and set it by the bed. There is no foul smell which lasts forever after all."
"Not on this earth at least," I murmured. But he didn't hear me, thank God.
"This went on for two weeks. She didn't want to go to Mercy Hospital. I hired nurses round the clock just for backup, you know, so they could take her vital signs when I got frightened. I played music for her. All the predictable things, said the rosary out loud with her. Usual deathbed scene. From two to four in the afternoon she tolerated visitors. Old cousins came. 'Where is Roger?' I stayed out of sight."
"You weren't torn to pieces by her suffering."
"I wasn't crazy about it, I can tell you that. She had cancer all through her and no amount of money could save her. I wanted her to hurry, and I couldn't bear watching it, no, but there has always been a deep ruthless side to me that says ' Do what you have to do'. And I stayed in that room without sleep day in and day out and all night till she died."
"She talked a lot to the ghosts, but I didn't see them or hear them.
I just kept saying, 'Little Richard, come get her. Uncle Mickey, if she can't come back, come get her."
"But before the end came Terry, a practical nurse, as they called them then, who had to fill in when we could not get the registered nurse because they were in such demand. Terry, five foot seven, blonde, the cheapest and most alluring piece of goods I had ever laid eyes on. Understand. This is a question of everything fitting together precisely. The girl was a shining perfect piece of trash."
I smiled. "Pink fingernails, and wet pink lipstick." I had seen her sparkle in his mind.
"Every detail was on target with this kid. The chewing gum, the gold anklet, the painted toenails, the way she slipped off her shoes right there in the sickroom to let me see the toenails, the way the cleavage showed, you know, under her white nylon uniform. And her stupid, heavy-lidded eyes beautifully painted with Maybelline eye pencil and mascara. She'd file her nails in there in front of me! But I tell you, never have I seen something that was so completely realized, finished, ah, ah, what can I say! She was a masterpiece."
I laughed, and so did he, but he went on talking.
"I found her irresistible. She was a hairless little animal. I started doing it with her every chance I had. While Mother slept, we did it in the bathroom standing up. Once or twice we went down the hall to one of the empty bedrooms; we never took more than twenty minutes! I timed us! She'd do it with her pink panties around her ankles! She smelled like Blue Waltz perfume."
I gave a soft laugh.