The Serialist Read online

  “We’ve learned, and I won’t say how, about this book project you’ve got going and we wanted to speak to you in person and let you know that we, as the families of the victims, are strongly opposed to it. Couldn’t be more strongly. We’re here to appeal to you personally. To let that animal—”

  The Jarrels had settled into their seats, like puffy birds, and seemed content to listen calmly to Hicks, but Toner could barely contain himself, squirming and sighing, twisting the dial on his expensive dive watch. He cut Hicks off almost immediately.

  “Appeal’s got nothing to do with it. We already have a lawyer ready to slap an injunction on this anytime. A top lawyer, believe me.” He pointed a finger at my chest, and I noticed he had a wedding band on. It was either the ring he’d exchanged with his dead wife or he had remarried. “Money’s no object. This is fair warning, that’s all. Look at these poor people. You want to open old wounds?”

  The Jarrels blinked calmly at me, as if we were talking about the cold. They were holding hands. Hicks looked down at his own empty palms. He seemed embarrassed.

  “Look, Mr. Bloch,” he said. “I’m sure you mean well. You’ve got a job to do.”

  Toner burst in again. “That’s got nothing—”

  “Jack, please,” Hicks said. “Let me say this.”

  “Bloodsucker,” Toner muttered and turned away.

  Hicks leaned toward me. His eyes were a watery blue under his glasses, like rocks at the bottom of a goldfish bowl. “We all deal with things in our own way,” he said. “But you can imagine what it’s like. My wife couldn’t handle it. It broke her. She lost her will to live. She’s buried next to Janet now. So I’m asking. For all of our sakes. For our girls too. Please let us rest in peace.”

  I agreed, more or less. I told them that this was just a first meeting between Clay and me. I said that I wasn’t planning on doing the book and their wishes would definitely weigh in. I didn’t bother to address the legal issue because I knew, from Claire’s attorney, that we were on firm ground, regardless. I also knew that Toner was rich (the top lawyer was no doubt his), that Clay had once worked for him at the factory he owned, and that this was how Clay had met his wife, adding a measure of guilt, a sense of being the connection between killer and victim, that I knew was surely the true source of Toner’s rage. I even knew that Mrs. Hicks had died of heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver. I knew all about them from my research, but I wondered, seeing them in person, if you encountered these people randomly, would you know? Not the exact truth of course, but would you know, when you met them, that something was wrong, that something terrible had happened? Did tragedy show, any more than evil? And I wondered, also, why only three of the dead girls were represented. Where was the family of the fourth?

  16

  When I got home there were five messages on my voice mail. Two from Claire that I skipped. She’d already left one on my cell. One from Morris wanting to get a drink. One from Jane. Isn’t it strange how, no matter how long it’s been, certain voices stay recognizable, after one word, one breath?

  There was a party in two days to celebrate the spring issue of The Torn Plaid Coat and she was inviting me, last minute. She had hesitated because of the potential awkwardness, but now she realized that she did really want to see me, she said. If I wanted to come. If it wasn’t too difficult for me. Of course it was too difficult. But of course I couldn’t stand to let her know it. So of course I had to go. False pride and foolishness, I know, but sometimes that’s all we have left.

  The last message on my phone was a voice and a name that I didn’t know.

  “Hello, Mr. Bloch. This is Dani Giancarlo. Daniella, I mean. I’m sorry for bothering you at home. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m wondering if I could meet with you anytime tomorrow. Thanks.” She gave a number, then, “Oh, I’m Dora Giancarlo’s sister. OK, thanks.”

  Dora Giancarlo was Clay’s other victim: Nancy Jarrel. Janet Hicks. Sandy Toner. Dora Giancarlo. I called her back. When she answered, there was a roar of voices in the background, like she was at a party. I told her not to worry, I’d spoken to the others. She insisted on meeting me anyway.

  “But I’m not writing the book,” I repeated, louder. “I agreed.”

  “No,” she yelled into the phone. “No, please. Don’t.”

  17

  “Of course you’re doing the book.” Claire was perched on my desk chair, in a plaid miniskirt, black tights and turtleneck, poking at her BlackBerry while I paced and wrung my hands. “Not to sound insensitive, but so what if the victims’ families don’t want it? You’re a writer. You’re supposed to tell the story, not be influenced by that.”

  “But what about this deal with Clay?” I asked. “Going to see these fucked-up groupies and writing little porn stories for him? How creepy is that?”

  She shrugged. “It’s like in your book Born to the Game, when Mordechai agreed to bust the King Pimp out of prison for the greater good of catching the crooked white warden.”

  “No, it’s not like that at all. Here’s the difference. I made that up. This is real. And totally fucking twisted. I’ll be scarred for life.”

  “But you’re already scarred for life. You were a porn editor. You ghostwrite term papers for high school kids. You dress up like your dead mother and write soft-core S&M vampire books and meanwhile you haven’t even had a real, human girlfriend in how long?”

  I shrugged. I’d lost track.

  “You’re a mess. No offense. This is your big break. Maybe your last. Focus on that. Forget about meeting this sister. Let me meet her for you.”

  “No, that’s OK. I feel like I owe it to her.”

  “Whatever.” She sighed. “And what about Jane’s party?”

  “How do you even know about it?”

  “I checked your messages while you were gone. What if there was a business call? Go to the party and schmooze. The relationship is ancient history. But let me cut your hair first. And wear your other black sweater.”

  “It itches,” I said. “What’s wrong with this one?”

  “It has a hole in the armpit.”

  I went and checked my armpit in the bathroom mirror. She was right.

  “Harry?” She appeared in the door. “Can I crash here tonight?”

  “Won’t your dad care?”

  “He’s in St. Bart’s with the girlfriend. I told him have fun but you better not marry her.”

  “OK, make up the sofa and I’ll order Chinese.”

  “Great,” she said. “And take that sweater off. I’ll try to sew it.”

  I’d first learned that Jane was seeing her now husband Ryan when I ran into them at a Christmas party, our old Columbia professor’s annual open house. It wasn’t the sort of event I frequented, but Claire and my mother had both urged me to go, and I wasn’t worried about seeing Jane there, since I’d heard she was on a writer’s cleansing retreat in the Himalayas. But as soon as I walked in and took off my coat, I saw her, clear chakras aglow, a Tibetan shawl around her shoulders. At first, we were both stunned, as if we’d seen each other’s ghosts. Then we fake laughed and half-hugged. She introduced me to Ryan, whom I pretended not to know. I hadn’t made it past page three of his tediously clever novel, but his face and name were everywhere just then. They told me how they’d met, or their eyes had, at the mountaintop monastery during a throat-singing concert.

  “We’d taken a vow of silence for the week,” Ryan eagerly explained, assuming like most happy folks that I couldn’t wait to know all about it. “So I had to slip her a note during meditation.”

  “We went back and forth like that all week.” Jane laughed. “MacSweeney’s is publishing the notes!”

  “Ha,” I said. “That’s great.”

  Ryan beamed. “When we could finally speak, at the airport, I didn’t say a word. I just kissed her.” He tried to demonstrate, but Jane looked away, blushing, and he landed one in her hair.

  “It’s like that story I wrote, remember?” I asked Jane,
just saying something so I wouldn’t scream. “About the two female sherpas and the mountaineer who get trapped in an ice storm and have to share body warmth?” I’d published it in Raunchy under the title “Mighty Him-a-Lay-Hers,” and back then, she’d laughed herself purple.

  Now she said, “Not really,” in a pinched voice and squeezed Ryan’s hand, as if sending a signal pulse. “Let’s all get a drink. I hear the wine punch rocks.”

  “It’s awesome,” I agreed. “You should try it. But I’m just on my way out. My mom’s sick,” I added, unforgivably.

  “Send her my love.”

  Jane called me later to smooth things out and tell me they were engaged. No one knew yet except for the families and me. When I reported back to my mother, she merely shrugged and, as usual, crushed my few remaining ego crumbs under her colossal support.

  “Good. You’re better off.”

  “But you always loved Jane. You said she was smart, beautiful.”

  “Smart, yes. Beautiful, yes. Also successful. And very sexy with a great figure. But all wrong for you.”

  “I see.”

  Claire was equally sensitive. “She’s a starfucker. Believe me, I know. My dad married at least three of them, including my mom. She dropped you like a bad stock, cut her losses, then saw her opening with what’s his face. Why don’t you date a porn girl? That will at least get you some press.”

  In any case, that was the last I’d heard from Jane, except for after my mother died, when she wrote a very kind note. And my mother’s parting advice for me? “Wait a few years,” she’d told me. “Then marry Claire.”

  18

  That night, while Claire slumbered on my couch, I had a dream. It wasn’t really a nightmare. It wasn’t even about meeting Clay. It was about me. I was watching myself, in my apartment, but it was like it used to look, back when my mother was alive. In fact, she was alive in the dream, though sick and in her bed. I was making her soup and talking to her by yelling back and forth down the hall, which was how she preferred to communicate. The dream was like a movie with the sound turned off. I could see everything, as if I were there, watching our mouths move, but unable to hear what we were saying.

  Then I noticed something strange. I was stirring the soup with my right hand. Big deal, I know, but I am a lefty, a severe lefty, and I don’t do anything with my right hand. But there I was, stirring soup, adding salt, grinding pepper, all with my usually useless right hand. It’s like in a mirror, I thought, still sleeping, and began to wonder, did I ever stir soup with my right? It’s possible, isn’t it? But then I noticed that in the dream I was also wearing my watch on my left, like righties do, and that was definitely wrong. Then it seemed to me that the backs of my hands, in the dream, were hairier than normal, only a bit, but still, I started to get a weird feeling, like the thin edge of a rising panic pushing its way into my chest. Then I saw that in the dream I was wearing blue socks, navy blue, and that’s definitely impossible since I only ever owned white or black. And these looked like wool, also impossible since wool makes my feet sweat. I looked closely, as if zooming in, and my face in the dream had different lines than my waking face. The forehead creases were missing and there were deep verticals by the mouth. And there, sneaking across the right temple, snaking through the hair, was a thin blue vein that was not mine. It’s not me, I realized. That man isn’t me.

  But by then it was too late. He was already heading down the hall toward my mother’s room, balancing the bowl of soup on a plate, with the spoon and napkin tucked under one arm and the salt under the other since she always wanted more, no matter how much you added, and whistling soundlessly as he went. And suddenly I knew that he was death, coming for my mother, and I started to scream, to warn her, but it was a silent world and, as if underwater, my screams fell empty from my mouth and rolled away, and no one could hear them, except me, apparently, since I woke up, sweating, in my mother’s bed, and ran to the mirror and for a crazy moment, before I was really awake and my eyes adjusted to the light, and before I remembered mirrors were backward anyway, I touched my own right temple and thought I saw the blue vein.

  19

  The following afternoon, I met Dani Giancarlo at a coffee shop in Soho. When she walked in, a chill went through me, and although she was beautiful and smiling at the world, I felt sad. She wore jeans tucked into high boots and a white cable-knit sweater and was hauling an enormous leather shoulder bag along with her backpack and purse. Her hair was long and straight and blond. That was the only difference. Otherwise she was a dead ringer for her sister with the long brown hair. I stood.

  “Ms. Giancarlo? Over here.”

  She looked momentarily startled, then smiled, waved shyly, and came over. I noticed her dark red nail polish, a weird contrast with the rest of her appearance.

  “Hi,” she said, and shook my hand before piling her luggage onto the other chair at our table. “Sorry. I have no time to go home between school and work.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Psychology. I think.” The waitress came by and she ordered a decaf soy cappuccino.

  “And you work at a bar or a club?”

  “Yes.” She looked surprised. “How did you know?”

  “It was loud on the phone when I spoke to you. Like a party. And just now you were exceedingly polite to our waitress, like someone who knows what it’s like. And that bag makes me think you have to change for work, and dress up too, since your hair and makeup are done.”

  “Wow.” She laughed. “You should be a detective. Although I guess it makes sense that a writer is observant too.”

  “Actually, I mostly write fiction. And not very realistic fiction either.”

  She smiled shyly again. “And you worked for Raunchy. They told me.”

  “They?”

  “Toner and the others.”

  “Ah well, then I guess you know they came to see me too. And they’re adamant about me not writing the book.”

  “I know.”

  “And frankly, after meeting him, I’m more than a little queasy about it myself.”

  “I’m sure. He’s disgusting.” She reflexively reached into her purse for a pack of Marlboro Lights, which she then left untouched. She sipped her pseudo-coffee, frowned, then added sugar, stirred, and sipped it from the spoon, like soup. I raised my own cup and realized it was empty. Awkwardly, I put it back down.

  “Well then,” I said. “Not to be rude, but why did you want to see me?”

  She stopped fidgeting and looked me in the eye.

  “Because I’m still hoping you’ll write it. I wanted to tell you that in person.”

  “I have to say I’m surprised to hear that. Can I ask why?”

  She took a minute to think, slowly restirring her gross beverage, but when she spoke it was in a calm, even tone. “My sister and I were close as children. But by the time she died we had drifted apart. Or I had drifted. She was the golden child. Smart, pretty, wanted to be an actress. She was going to college. I had already run away by then and gotten caught up in my own thing. Drugs and whatever. It’s a long boring story. Then after my sister died, my mother fell into a depression and two years later she killed herself. Or as my dad said, accidentally took an overdose of sleeping pills. Now he lives in Arizona. He’s got a new wife and two kids. He’s OK, I mean he helps me with school and stuff, but he doesn’t want to talk about anything. But I feel like I owe it to Dora. To find out what happened. What her last hours were like. To find her, you know, remains and to give her a real burial. I can’t blame the other families or even my dad. I guess some people are just the type who don’t want to know.”

  “But not you.”

  She shook her head.

  “Dora was your twin,” I said.

  “Yes.” She smiled. “Of course. That’s how you recognized me.”

  “Yes. It’s interesting that you said she was the pretty one. You look identical. Except for the hair. You dyed it?”

  “Yeah.” She ran a han
d through it, and it glittered as it fell. “I don’t like it. I did it for work.”

  “Bigger tips?”

  “Yeah. But I refuse to get a boob job.” She laughed again. “I guess I can tell you, since you probably won’t be shocked. I’m actually a stripper not a waitress.”

  I laughed too. “To be honest, stripper was my first guess. I was being polite.”

  I put her in a cab and found the subway. As usual the train to Queens took forever, and while I sat on the platform I thought about Dani. There was something familiar that nagged at me, because really I did not know anyone remotely like her, too beautiful and too haunted. Even as she smiled and giggled blondly, she was her own dark sister’s ghost. Then later, at my desk, I got it: she was not the kind of girl I ever really met; she was the kind of girl I dreamed up and put into my books, where she either stabbed the hero in his sleep or slipped from his grip on a rooftop and fell to her death.

  20

  The Torn Plaid Coat party was in a bar in Williamsburg. I had to take three trains to get there, but still, when I reached the door, where a few dozen bikes were chained, and peeked in at that convention of expensive jeans, ironic vintage T-shirts and interesting glasses, my knees buckled and I almost turned around. Luckily the reading was in progress and I was able to slip in quickly and duck to the back. At the podium, a freckled young poetess with long red ringlets was holding forth, chanting in that whiny up-and-down singsong I think of as the generic poetic.

  I recall:

  the morning light

  was clear and firm

  the sheets were crisp.

  Chau-bak brought breadfruit

  from the garden

  and opened it with

  a knife.