Slocum went over to the ancient Kelvinator, took out a can of Hamms and opened it with a great deal of violence, and then slammed the refrigerator door.
“You think he’s all right?” I said.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means did you kill him?”
“Kill him?” He laughed. The contempt was back in his voice. “Kill him? No, but I should have. I keep thinking of your daughter, man. All the things you’ve told me about her. Not a perfect kid — no kid is — but a real gentle little girl. A girl you supposedly loved. Your frigging daughter, man. Your frigging daughter.” He sloshed his beer in the general direction of Dexter. “I should get out my hunting knife and cut his balls off. That’s what I should do. And that’s just for openers. Just for openers.”
He started pacing around, then, Slocum did, and I could gauge his rage. I suppose at that moment he wanted to kill us both — Dexter for being an animal, me for being a weakling — neither of us the type of person Slocum wanted in his universe.
The apartment was small and crammed with threadbare and wobbly furniture. Everything had been burned with cigarettes and disfigured with beer-can rings. The sour smell of bad cooking lay on the air; sunlight poured through filthy windows; and even from here you could smell the rancid odors of the bathroom. On the bureau lay two photographs, one of a plump woman in a shabby housedress standing with her arm around Dexter, obviously his mother; and a much younger Dexter squinting into the sun outside a gray metal barracks where he had served briefly as an army private before being pushed out on a mental.
Peeking into the bedroom, I found the centerfolds he’d pinned up. They weren’t the centerfolds of the quality men’s magazines where the women were beautiful to begin with and made even more so with careful lighting and gauzy effects; no, these were the women of the street, hard-eyed, flabby-bodied, some even tattooed like Dexter himself. They covered the walls on either side of his sad little cot where he slept in a room littered with empty beer cans and hard-crusted pizza boxes. Many of the centerfolds he’d defaced, drawing penises in black ballpoint aimed at their vaginas or their mouths, or putting huge blood-dripping knives into their breasts or eyes or even their vaginas. All I could think of was Debbie and what he’d done to her that long-ago night...
A terrible, oppressive nausea filled me as I backed out of the bedroom and groped for the couch so I could sit down.
“What’s the matter?” Slocum said.
“Shut up.”
“What?”
“Shut the fuck up!”
I sank to the couch — the sunlight through the greasy window making me ever warmer — and cupped my hands in my face and swallowed again and again until I felt the vomit in my throat and esophagus and stomach recede.
I was shaking, chilled now with sweat.
“Can you wake him up?”
“What?”
“Can you wake him up?”
“Sure,” Slocum said. “Why?”
“Because I want to talk to him.”
Slocum gulped the last of his beer, tossed the can into a garbage sack overflowing with coffee grounds and tomato rinds, and then went over to the sink. He took down a big glass with the Flintstones on it and filled it with water, then took the glass over to where he had Dexter handcuffed. With a certain degree of obvious pleasure, he threw the water across Dexter’s head. He threw the glass — as if it were now contaminated — into the corner where it shattered into three large jagged pieces.
He grabbed Dexter by the hair and jerked his head back.
Groaning, Dexter came awake.
“Now what?” Slocum said, turning to me.
“Now I want to talk to him.”
“Talk to him,” Slocum said. “Right.”
He pointed a large hand at Dexter as if he were a master of ceremonies introducing the next act.
It wasn’t easy, getting up off that couch and going over to him. In a curious way, I was terrified of him. If I pushed him hard enough, he would tell me the exact truth about the night. The truth in detail. What she had looked like and sounded like — her screams as he raped her; her screams as she died — and then I would have my facts... but facts so horrible I would not be able to live with them. How many times — despite myself — I had tried to recreate that night. But there would be no solace in this particular truth; no solace at all.
I stood over him. “Have you figured out who I am yet?”
He stared up at me. He started crying. “Hey, man, I never did nothing to you.”
“You raped and killed a girl named Debbie eleven years ago.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. Honest. You got the wrong guy.”
I knew that by the way I studied his face — every piece of beard stubble, the green matter collected in the corners of his eyes, the dandruff flaked off at the front of his receding hairline — that I was trying to learn something about him, something that would grant me peace after all these years.
A madman, this Dexter, and so not quite responsible for what he’d done and perhaps even deserving of pity in my good liberal soul.
But he didn’t seem insane, at least not insane enough to move me in any way. He was just a cheap trapped frightened animal.
“Really, man; really I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“I’ve been tracking you for eleven years now—”
“Jesus, man; listen—”
“You’re going to hate prison, Dexter. Or maybe they’ll even execute you. Did you ever read anything about the injections they give? They make it sound so humane but it’s the waiting, Dexter. It’s the waiting—”
“Please,” he said, “please,” and he writhed against his handcuffs, scraping the table across the floor in the process.
“Eleven years, Dexter,” I said.
I could hear my voice, what was happening to it — all my feelings about Dexter were merging into my memories of those defaced centerfolds in his bedroom — and Slocum must have known it, too, with his animal wisdom, known at just what moment I would be right for it
because just then and just so
the Cobra came into my hands and I
shot Dexter once in the face and once in the
chest and I
v
Slocum explained to me — though I really wasn’t listening — that they were called by various names (toss guns or throwaway guns) but they were carried by police officers in case they wanted to show that the person they’d just killed had been armed.
From a holster strapped to his ankle, Slocum took a .38, wiped it clean of prints, and set it next to Dexter’s hand.
Below and to the side of us the apartment house was a frenzy of shouts and cries — fear and panic — and already in the distance sirens exploded red on the soft blue air of the summer day.
vi
That evening I cried.
I sat in a good room in a good hotel with the air-conditioning going strong, a fine dinner and many fine drinks in my belly, and I cried.
Wept, really.
Whatever had kept me from crying for my daughter and then my wife and then my son was gone now and so I could love and mourn them in a way I’d never been able to. I thought of each of them — their particular ways of laughing, their particular sets of pleasures and dreams, their particular fears and apprehensions — and it was as if they joined me there in that chill antiseptic hotel room, Debbie in her blue sweater and jeans, my wife in her white linen sheath, Jeff in his Kiss T-shirt and chinos — came round in the way the medieval church taught that angels gathered around the bed of a dying person... only I wasn’t dying.