The Serialist Read online

  “You were scared.”

  “Fuck yeah. I was five. So I hid in the closet. I guess I felt safer. And then, the next morning, I had to use the bathroom really bad, I remember that, but it seemed so far to cross the room. I remember, it must have been pretty early, cause the TV was on the whole time, it was the Today show and I knew the cartoons would start soon and I could peek out and see them.”

  He stared into space now as he spoke, leaning forward, perfectly still, brown eyes on nothing. I held still too, in the windowless room that smelled like ammonia, like hospitals and men’s rooms, and heard the fluorescent strip above us softly hum. It cast our shadows down flat: the pencil in my hand on the notebook, the shape of his shoulders and head unfolded, like a blank map, across the table and floor. What is the name for that color? Not gray, not black, but a darker tone of whatever the shadow touches—fake wood, gray linoleum, tan paper, pink skin.

  “And then suddenly the door opened and it wasn’t my mom, it was the cops. Just suddenly cops were all over. Or it seemed that way, maybe it was only two cops, but you know, they seemed huge with their uniforms and guns and belts. And social services was with them. And they took me. And that was it.”

  He stopped. I waited. And then: “You never saw your mother again?”

  “No. Never again. That was it.”

  27

  When I came out of the visitors’ room, Flosky and Theresa were there, waiting in the outer room with the benches and vending machines.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling. Flosky turned away, smoking furiously despite the large No Smoking sign on the wall above her head. Theresa looked tired and pale, her black hair pulled back from her face. She drew a folder from her briefcase.

  “Here’s the signed copy of your contract.”

  “Thanks. Is something wrong?”

  Theresa lowered her voice. “Our last appeal was denied.” She glanced over her shoulder at Flosky, who was ashing her cigarette in the water fountain. It was Theresa who actually looked sad. Flosky just looked slightly more pissed off than usual.

  “Sorry.” I wasn’t sure what to say. Was I sorry, now that I had gotten to know him, that Darian was going to die? Not particularly. “So it’s over then?” I asked Theresa.

  “Nothing’s over,” Flosky broke in. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “No,” I fumphered. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  She turned on the water fountain and doused her cigarette, then fed a dollar into the soda machine and pressed the button for Diet Coke. The dollar spat back out.

  “Fucking thing.” She flailed at the machine, kicking and punching, then stumbled as her pointy-toed shoe caught an edge. “Fuck,” she repeated, hopping on one heel. “That’s a brand-new shoe.”

  “Here, let me try,” I said. I pulled out my money and slid a smoother bill into the machine. I could see from its scarred face that it had borne the blows of many frustrated visitors. The soda can dropped as the guard entered the room.

  “Carol Flosky?” he called out.

  “Yeah?”

  “Your client’s ready.”

  “OK.” She grabbed her case and, hobbling with remarkable dignity, proceeded through the door toward her client. I noticed too, as she passed, that when she’d punched the soda machine, the thick ring on her finger had cut the flesh, revealing a slim line of blood. She hadn’t so much as flinched. If I ever get in trouble, I thought, I want her as my lawyer. The guard sniffed.

  “You been smoking in here?” he asked me.

  “Me? No. I don’t smoke.”

  He frowned at me and left me alone with Theresa and a large, awkward silence.

  “You want a soda?” I asked lamely. “I don’t like diet.”

  She shook her head. “He doesn’t know yet,” she said. “She’s going to tell him now.”

  “I know. He was fine when I saw him. The interview went really well.”

  Theresa sat down and took out a fat law book bristling with yellow Post-its. She snapped open her glasses case and put them on. Is it any wonder that I’ve always had a little thing for the sexy librarian type? What could be hotter than a girl who reads?

  “Hey,” I said. “You know that writer, the vampire one you told me about? I checked her out. Looks pretty good.”

  “I think so,” Theresa said without looking up.

  “I saw where she has a new book coming out soon.”

  “It’s just out. I got it.”

  “Really?” This was news to me. “I’ll have to check it out. So you got it already, huh? You’re really a fan?”

  She ignored me and bent into her work. Where her shirt lifted in back, I saw an inch of pale skin, and the tendrils of a black tattoo, creeping up, or down. My inner vampire felt his fangs.

  “Well, just if you’re interested,” I went on, “I saw where the author’s doing this online thing too.” It was a gimmick my publisher had come up with. In truth, I barely understood the concept, but Claire had promised to help. “She’s going to be inside a chat room,” I explained, trying not to look too alarmed.

  “Yes,” she said into her law book. “I already know.”

  28

  On the train I started transcribing the interview, typing into my laptop while listening to the tape on headphones, always the worst part. It’s amazing how long-winded people seem when you have to type it all out, myself included. It took me a while, when I began doing interviews, to learn to stop interrupting my interviewees so that I could talk. Then later I’d have to listen to myself on tape, telling my own tired anecdotes. And the sound of my own voice grated, a nasally Queens whine even worse than I’d imagined. Even now, listening to myself with Clay, I winced every time I heard one of my annoying tics, like endlessly saying “Right, right.” The truth is that the writers and filmmakers most admired for their natural-sounding dialogue are completely stylized, while most real, unedited transcriptions of actual conversations soon grow unbearably boring.

  And so it was with Clay. He went on and on, in a monologue both chilling and numbing, through the litany of horrors that was his journey in the child welfare system, shunted from foster home to foster home, neglected, bullied, beaten and quite possibly molested. One of his former foster parents was later arrested for molesting boys, although Clay was not specifically named as a victim and when I brought it up he denied it. But his statements differed from the record in many ways, especially about his mother.

  Geraldine Clay was a nightmare. The pathological nature of her mothering went far beyond the poverty and neglect Clay described. She was a prostitute with a long record of arrests, including many for theft, drug possession and public drunkenness. According to the child welfare case notes, introduced into the record during the sentencing phase of his trial, she not only left him alone for extended periods but also kept little Darian locked in the closet while she entertained clients. At first he cried, so she gagged him until he learned to remain silent. If he wet himself during his incarcerations, he was beaten. Although it’s true that social services took him that morning after her arrest, when she informed an officer in the station her child was still home alone, he became a ward of the state only by default. Even after her release from jail, after doing sixty days for misdemeanor soliciting, she never showed up at any of her son’s custody hearings. She just left him behind as she continued to accumulate arrests in various cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit. Then maybe she cleaned up her act, because after 1996 there is nothing. She would have been around forty or forty-five by then and it’s possible that, like many chronic recidivists, she just aged out, got too old and tired for the extremely stressful life of a full-time criminal. Or maybe she got killed.

  29

  Finally I fell asleep on the train, wearing my headphones, with the tape running. I had some weird dreams I couldn’t recall, woke up choking on the cord, and reached home exhausted. But the day wasn’t over yet. As I came down the street from the subway, a guy who looked like an undercover cop got out of
an undercover cop car. The car was a black Chevy. The guy wore a black overcoat over a navy suit with a white shirt and a red tie. He didn’t seem like the tough type though. He looked smart—unframed spectacles, a tight mouth, lined face. His graying black hair was brushed back, kind of long for a cop. I felt a rush of irrational fear, the fear that, despite my constant insistence that nothing is my fault, I am somehow, deep down, obscurely but irredeemably guilty.

  “Bloch?” he asked.

  “Yes?” I said in a quiet voice.

  “Special Agent Townes.”

  “Yes?” He showed me ID but I just glanced at it. I knew his name from my research on the Internet, and now his face looked vaguely familiar as well: he was the FBI agent who caught Clay.

  “I need a minute,” he said.

  “Sure.” I forced a deeper tone into my voice. “Come on up for a cup of coffee.”

  “No time. I have to fly to Memphis tonight. If you don’t mind we can sit in my car.” He opened the back door without waiting to see if I minded. I did mind, but I got in anyway, and as he slid in beside me, the fed behind the wheel got out, to give us our privacy, or maybe to avoid witnessing my torture.

  “How’s the book coming?” he asked. We were both staring straight ahead, as if parked in a drive-in movie.

  “Good,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “I thought you promised the families of the victims that you wouldn’t write it?”

  “I never promised anything. And not all the relatives feel that way.”

  “Daniella Giancarlo? She’s a mess. Junkie, stripper. She’s one step from the can herself. I’m talking here about the other families. The Jarrels. The Hicks. Good honest people who just want to suffer in peace. Mr. Toner got a lawyer. He owns a factory around here. A big spread out on the Island too.”

  “What’s he make?”

  “Huh?”

  “The factory.”

  “Polybags. Those rolls of plastic bags that the dry cleaners put over your clothes.”

  “Darian Clay worked there?”

  “Yeah. That’s right. And how do you think he feels? Knowing that sick fuck spotted his wife at his factory? You should respect their wishes. It’s the least you can do.”

  I shrugged. I kept my tone steady. “Daniella Giancarlo may not own a garbage bag factory, but her sister is just as dead.”

  Townes turned and regarded the side of my face. I wasn’t the author of Hot-blooded Killer, Cold-hearted Pimp, a Mordechai Jones Mystery for nothing.

  “Look,” he said. “Of course she’s obsessed with the case, she was in a fog when it happened. She’s got guilt, whatever, plus she’s twins. Issues up the yin-yang. Ever think you’re taking advantage of her?”

  “Ever think it’s none of your business?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. I braced for a punch, and my right eye, closer to him, squinted involuntarily. This is the other side of that irrational fear I mentioned, equally irrational outbursts of stubborn rebelliousness.

  But Townes didn’t even blink. “Catching killers is my business,” he said. “Feeding like a parasite on the corpses of the victims is yours.”

  Then he put his hand out and I shook it. He didn’t even squeeze that hard. Still, as I got out, waving jauntily, and headed toward the door of my building, I kept a guiding hand on the wall: my knees were shaking so bad, I was afraid I’d fall.

  But when I told Claire, in a rush of panic mixed with pride, about how I’d been leaned on by the feds, she laughed. She was wearing a leotard and leg warmers, doing some kind of yoga in my living room, with her cell phone headset on.

  “Townes? Townes can suck my left tit,” she said, while bending herself in two. “Of course he wants you out. I’ve been checking up on him. He just signed a deal to write his memoirs, but he has to wait till he retires. If he quits early, he gives up his full pension, dental, everything. Meanwhile, you’re going to beat him to the punch, the movie, the whole megillah.” She smiled at me from under an arm, or leg. “It’s a tough one all right, but it’s his balls caught in the zipper, not yours.”

  “Really? A memoir?” I asked, sitting on the couch, trying not to watch her tiny prelegal bottom rise and fall. “Who’s ghosting his book?”

  30

  Crimson Night and Fog was published, to little or no fanfare. Even my ceremonial trip to the Barnes & Noble in the Roosevelt Field Mall was a bust. The book was nowhere in sight, although I found a few scrambled copies of my others misplaced about and quietly reshelved them. Finally I asked a young sales associate if that new, eagerly awaited novel by Sibylline Lorindo-Gold wasn’t due out today. He shrugged and checked the computer, which said there were four copies on the shelf. I insisted, and he dragged his heels into the back, emerging with a book much like the one I already had at home: a plump trade paperback, with a cover image of a crimson sky bleeding into a black mountain range. I had wanted the blood streaks to be embossed so they would pop out and look more like actual drops, but it wasn’t cost effective. I thanked the associate, who shrugged again, and once he’d wandered off, I set the book in a prominent place on the Horror/Urban Paranormal shelf, before slinking off to the bus.

  Luckily, I did have a few readers out there somewhere, if not in my home borough. That night I prepared to meet the handful of souls who would gather, in a far corner of the Web, to chat about the new book with the author.

  Claire and I had joked about my donning my Sibylline wig for the session, or lighting black candles and sipping claret, but instead I opted for my usual writing gear: sweatpants, T-shirt, terry-cloth bathrobe, glass of ice and one-liter bottle of Coke. Why not a two-liter? Here’s a writing tip: I find that the big bottles lose their gas too quickly. I can’t compose on flat soda. And don’t forget to recap the bottle or the whole thing’s moot.

  I signed on as crimson1, and for ten sickening minutes, I hung there in cyberspace alone. It was dark and cold. Then, one by one, a small constellation of lights blinked on: darklilangel and burningangel23, bloodlover78, bleed4U, satangirl and demonatrix. Claire made me nervous, standing behind me as I typed, so I promised to read the exchanges out loud to her while she reclined on the couch.

  “Oy,” I groaned. “Satangirl wants to know where I get my ideas? Jesus. Where do you think? Out of my ass.”

  “You wrote that?”

  “No. I wrote, ‘Dreams, Fears and my Daily Life. Though I won’t say which is which.’”

  “Good. OK. What else?”

  “Bloodkidz asks if Mistress Clio and Baron Charlus von Faubourg St. Germaine will finally do it in this volume.”

  “Read it and see, you cheap bastard.”

  “Right,” I said, and typed just the first part. Claire grabbed the can of nuts I’d put out for my energy snack.

  “Who’s next?” she asked, picking out the cashews.

  And on we went, me reading and typing, Claire shouting out answers, until a screen name came up that made me pause and keep it to myself. Someone called vampT3 popped on but said nothing, as if standing in the doorway, while the others grilled me on vampyre arcana and the fates of characters whom I’d forgotten I ever made up. I read those aloud to Claire, meanwhile keeping one secret eye on that silent name, as if flirting behind my girlfriend’s back with the vamp at another table, and asking myself, did or did not those three little ts belong to Theresa Trio? Was that my legal aide peeking at me from behind a screen somewhere in the city? Was she wearing those sexy glasses?

  Then vampT3 cyber-spoke: Did it bother me as, no offense, a nice-seeming older lady, to know that so many readers found my work so erotic? She, as a woman who by the way was straight, nevertheless felt that I, a fellow woman but older and wiser and more experienced, had somehow touched on her deepest, darkest desires, the fantasies she never told anyone and thought belonged to her alone. How did that make me feel? As a writer? As a woman?

  “What’re they saying?” Claire demanded, now lying flat on her back, staring at the ceiling in boredom as she dropped pea
nuts into her mouth.

  “Nothing, same baloney. Darkchild asks can I really taste the difference between type A blood and type AB, because he or she can’t. Blood4U on the other hand is eager to donate.”

  “Skip the sickos.”

  “Hey, watch it,” I said. “The sickos paid for those nuts.”

  31

  The second woman on Clay’s list was Marie Fontaine. She lived in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, in an apartment that I realized, when the bus let me off at the corner, was most likely over her parents’ garage. The house was a split-level, weather-beaten, with black streaks along the seams in the white siding and some raw spots in the thin, early lawn. As you may remember, it was a strange spring. After a warm winter that was both kind (how could one not be thrilled to be walking in a T-shirt in December?) and troubling (how could this weather not be the final verdict—we have broken the earth?), April was gripped by a sudden cold snap that sent snow flurries swirling through a bright afternoon. On the Fontaines’ lawn, a pink and white dogwood had bloomed too soon, probably during a day of false spring, and now it dropped its petals in the mud. Following Marie’s directions, I went up the stairs beside the garage, to a thin wooden door, behind which I heard the throb of industrial pop.

  I knocked loudly, and she must have been waiting, because the volume turned down immediately, and a moment later, she opened the door—a short, thick girl with big eyes, big lips and a big bust. Her coloring was dark Mediterranean. Her clothing was gothic mall.

  “Hi, I’m Marie.” She put out a small hand. We shook.

  “Harry Bloch. Thanks for meeting me.”

  We went in. It was a studio with a sleeping alcove and kitchenette, rather like Fonzie’s but with a lot more black lace and candles. Along with the posters of the Cure, Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, there were pictures of Charlie, the original Manson, as well as those celebrated serial-killing couples the Honeymoon Killers and the Moors Murderers. On the bureau was a small shrine dedicated to Clay: some bones tied in hexes, a squirrel skull, dripped-down black candles and incense, news photos taped to the mirror. I spotted the letters, Clay’s letters to her, the mates of the ones from her to him in my file. Hers were tied with red ribbon and tucked into a shell-decorated box. It made me sad, this one touch of girlishness in the midst of all the willed, overweening Evil. I wondered how she’d feel if she knew how Clay had snickered, handing over her love letters, along with the naked Polaroids, which I had with me now, in a manila envelope in my shoulder bag.