“Tony,” I said, “we need to give Walt notice on the first of July. I don’t think I want this guy in our house any longer than he needs to be here.”
Tony surprised me by arguing against getting rid of him. “Why? What has he done? We’ll lose the rent money if we evict him and we probably won’t be able to find someone else to take the room.” Even though Tony was not exactly fond of Walt, the pain of losing the income was now apparently worse than putting up with his strange behavior.
I struggled to explain. “I think there’s something wrong with him. I don’t think it’s wise to have him around.”
Tony grunted. “I think you’re exaggerating things.” He turned over and went to sleep.
Maybe he was right. I wasn’t a psychologist. I wasn’t trained to diagnose mental disorders. Walt hadn’t done anything or said anything that was threatening or scary. I probably had overstated his eccentricities. I would attempt to see the positive side of him and not judge him so harshly.
THE NEXT FEW days went by without incident and I was feeling better. Okay, nothing to worry about after all.
On Thursday night, Walt came downstairs and handed me a sheaf of papers, stapled together at the corner.
“My new short story,” he said proudly. “I’m going to try to get it published. Maybe you can tell me where to send it.” I was a published author, if just once, having been paid one hundred dollars for my submission to Humor magazine, a short-lived publication.
I looked down at the single-spaced typewritten material. At the top of the first page was the title, “My Silent Enemy,” and underneath it, “by Walt Williams.”
Walt retreated to his room and I sat down on the couch and started reading. His composition quickly made my skin crawl. The story was about a man with two personalities. One was an avenger stalking “filth and vermin” in the local park-“his slayground.” The second was a frightened man walking through the dark in the same park, hearing footsteps coming behind him. When he turns quickly to see who is following him, he sees no one. Then he wrote, “Death wore my face. Death used my name. I was my silent enemy.”
All my thoughts about something being wrong with Walt rushed back to me with a vengeance as I read his work. I never did discuss it with him. I kept the story and one copy of it eventually ended up in police evidence. I didn’t realize then that this tale was to be a harbinger of the events to come just a few days later.
Walt had now been living in my house for nearly three weeks. On Saturday, the day Kim planned to have her talk with him, I took the kids to Virginia to spend the day and night with a friend of mine who had children of the same age. When I got back the next day, I planned to call Kim to see how her talk with Walt went.
Then, on Sunday morning, I got the phone call about the homicide.
THE NEWS OF the murder still ringing in my head, I stared at Walt standing in front of me.
“Hey! Hey!” He grinned. “I’m going off hiking with the church.”
I looked at his clothing. He wasn’t wearing his usual daytime outfit of shorts and a summer shirt. Instead, he was in blue jeans and a long-sleeved dress shirt, which seemed overdressed for the hot June day. Maybe he was protecting himself from thorns and branches, I reasoned.
I looked him in the eye. “Say, did you hear about the murder on the bike path that happened last night?”
“Yeah, I heard about it.”
“Isn’t that dreadful? The poor girl!”
Walt made no comment.
“Were you on the path yesterday?” I tried to make it sound like I was kidding him a bit.
Walt looked away, crossed his arms, and then looked back at me with a cold stare. “Yeah, but I cut across the stream behind the bowling alley on Kenilworth Avenue and got my feet wet.”
Then he turned abruptly and left the room.
I tried to process what I had just heard. Did he admit he was on the path yesterday? Did he actually claim he left the path and waded through the water to cut over to a road that would take him out of his way and make his walk longer? Did he really say he was in the same stream where the body was found? Did he really seem to have no reaction to the grisly murder, show no compassion for the victim, or even be spooked about the fact that she was murdered on a path he walked daily? Wasn’t he worried he could become a suspect or could have been another victim? Yet he didn’t seem to be fazed by the event or his proximity to it.
It was a long day of stewing and gnawing doubts. Could it be?
Nah, come on, it couldn’t be. Okay, he is weird, very weird, and he has issues. This doesn’t make him a killer. Of course, there was that story about the “slayground.” Could he have been hunting “filth and vermin,” “sluts and bitches,” acting out his Avenger character? No, you are overreaching. Stop it.
IN THE EVENING, Walt returned to the house and went up to his room. An hour later, Kim called.
“Can you go check on Walt for me?” she asked.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
She gave me a quick rundown of her talk with him during his visit to her home on Saturday afternoon. “I told him I wasn’t ready for a committed relationship and would prefer to be friends. I tried to give him back the ring and he got very upset. He huffed out of the house.”
I held my breath and then asked what time he had left.
“Early evening, about seven p.m.”
I felt a moment of relief that he hadn’t left later, closer to nightfall. Good, if he walked directly back to the house he would have already been home before the murder went down. Then the unfortunate thought came to me that maybe he didn’t come directly back. Maybe he stopped at a store, or hung around near Kim’s house awhile, thinking about going back and trying to talk her into giving him another chance.
“Anyway,” Kim went on, “I thought I should call him to be nice and make sure he was all right, but when I was talking to him just now, he sounded really disturbed. I asked him if he was all right and he didn’t answer. I thought he might be suicidal because he told me he tried to commit suicide before. I asked if he was going to do anything bad and he said, ‘You don’t know what I’ve already done.’”
I felt the room reel just a little. The early feelings of unease returned with the force of a hammer. Oh, please, do not let this be true.
“Can you check on him?”
I made myself sound calm. “Sure.”
I knocked on the door and called to Walt. “Hey, everything all right up there? Kim is a little worried about you.”
He answered in a chipper voice. “Sure, I’m fine.”
I went back to Kim. “He’s fine.” I felt I sounded a bit sarcastic, as my attitude toward Walt was definitely going downhill.
Kim breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, good. I would hate to think I pushed him over the edge. Okay, thanks, I’ll catch you later.”
I couldn’t tell her my thoughts. I didn’t want to burden her right then. And I didn’t want to sound nuts. I didn’t know what the heck I was really thinking, or what I should do. What if Walt really was a psychopath, a rapist, a serial killer? I wanted to believe I was wrong, and I told myself I was.
I put the children to bed and went to lie down myself. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the innocent girl lying in the water, naked and still. I felt ill and I felt guilty. I should do something. What if she were my child? How would I react if I thought a citizen was hanging on to information about who might have killed her? For God’s sake, I would scream, “Go to the police!” I thought about my safety and my children’s safety. I wondered what would happen if he knew I suspected him. Would he come after us, kill us all? I wondered what others would do. Would they decide they didn’t really know anything and convince themselves not to contact the police?