Ed McBain - Puss in Boots

Still didn’t know what I was going to do about Meg.

That only came to me later.

I’m not dumb, I’m not a stupid person. I knew I had to destroy this woman so I could get the film she carried with her each night to the studio, get the key to the storage bin where maybe there was more film, destroy the movie. But how would it serve the Lord if I destroyed myself at the same time? No, no, I’m not stupid.

She was married, I knew that by then, I’d seen her husband at the house there on Pompano Way, knew she was married, what kind of a man allowed his wife to do such things? To spew such filth upon the earth? So the idea came to me, it occurred to me that I could kill two birds with one stone, three birds if you counted the movie, destroy the woman and her husband both and then destroy the movie.

I broke into the house on the tenth of November, watched the house till they were both gone, knew the house would be empty. Stole his clothes and the knife. Some other things, too, so they wouldn’t know what I was after. Stole some of her clothes, too, I still have them, they’re in Meg’s bureau where she used to keep her things before I burned them. I still look at the woman’s clothes sometimes, I look at them. Wonder what kind of a woman could do such things. Look at her clothes and wonder. Still wonder.

Gave myself a little time after I broke into the house. Figured I’d wait a week so nobody’d make any connection. Then decided ten days’d be better. Followed her to the studio. Waited outside for her. She come out, it must’ve been twenty to eleven, around then. It didn’t take more’n a minute to do it to her. Got my clothes — his clothes — all covered with the filth of her blood while I was doing it. Took the cans of film and tape in this aluminum carrying case and her pocketbook and her keys. It wasn’t no more’n ten minutes from Rancher Road to my house, another ten minutes to shower and change my clothes — I’d already locked Meg in the generator room by then, though I still didn’t know what I was going to do with her. I wrapped the bloody clothes and the knife in a plastic garbage bag, left the house around eleven it must’ve been, took me fifteen minutes or so to get to Pompano Way, I must’ve got there around a quarter past eleven, thereabouts. I buried the bloody clothes and the knife in the backyard, behind the house, in the flower bed. Then I went to the storage bin and opened it with her key, and took what was inside there. Got there around midnight, I guess. Took everything was inside the bin.

I watched that movie a lot.

Still do.

Never saw anything in my life like what’s in that movie.

People shouldn’t be allowed to see movies like that.

I’ll burn it one day.

For wickedness burneth as the fire.

“Mr. Diehl,” Haggerty said, “I show you this Polaroid photo taken by the Sheriff’s Department at thirty-seven-fifty-five Timucuan Point Road earlier tonight. Is this your wife, Margaret Diehl?”

“But the wicked shall be cut off from the earth,” Diehl said, “and the transgressor shall be rooted out of it.”

“Sir? Is this photograph I show you, this picture of a woman in red boots... is this your wife Margaret Diehl, sir?”

“For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church,” Diehl said.

“Is this your wife, sir?”

“Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.”

“Mr. Diehl, can you tell us what happened to your wife? To this woman in the photograph. Is this your wife, sir?”

“What?”

“Your wife. Is this woman your wife?”

“ Was my wife.”

“ Was your wife? Do you mean she’s no longer your wife because she’s dead, sir?”

“Dead? No, no.”

“Sir... this woman in the photograph. Sir, her arms have been amputated—”

“Yes, I know.”

“Do you know who amputated her arms, sir? And mutilated her breasts?”

“I did.”

“Then, Mr. Diehl... did you kill your wife, Margaret?”

“No. Kill her? No, no. I was gonna put her out tonight. On the street. Near the manger.”

“Put her body out on the street?”

“Put her out on the street. For all to see her shame. For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.”

“But your wife is dead, sir. The medical examiner—”

“No, sir.”

“Mr. Diehl, the medical examiner estimates that she’s been dead for quite some—”

“Then who’ve I been talking to? Speak not in the ears of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of thy words.”

“Did you cut off her arms, Mr. Diehl?”

“The fingers.”

“Sir?”

“I started with the fingers. To punish her for what she’d done with her hands. For what evil is in mine hand? And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you—”

“Mr. Diehl—”

“Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood.”

“When you say you started with the fingers—”

“That’s a lie.”

“Sir?”

“I cut off her hair first. Everywhere. All over her body. Her head, down there... everywhere.”

Silence.

Haggerty turned to Bannister.

“Skye? You want to take this?” he said.

“Mr. Diehl,” Bannister said, “I’m Skye Bannister, the state attorney. I wonder if I might be able to help you make yourself a bit more clear. As I understand this, you cut off your wife’s fingers, and then her arms—”

“First her hair.”

“Then her fingers—”

“No, then her tongue. I cut out her tongue. But the tongue can no man tame. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. So is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body and setteth on fire the course of nature, and it is set on fire of hell.”

“You cut out her tongue—”

“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjugation.”

“And then her fingers, and her hands... her arms—”

“His own hands shall bring the offerings of the Lord made by fire, the fat with the breast, it shall he bring, that the breast may be waved for a wave offering before the Lord. They’ll see her tonight, when I put her out beside the manger. See her naked, the whore, except for the boots. I stitched her mouth shut, too, with nylon sail thread, so she’d never be able to use it again for the things she done. Stitched her shut down there, too, for a whore is a deep ditch and a strange woman is a narrow pit.”

Skye Bannister sighed.

It was eleven-thirty on Christmas Eve, and outside in the hospital parking lot a Christmas tree blinked red and green to a starry night.

“Mr. Diehl,” he said, “is there anything you’d like to add to what you’ve already told us?”

“You’ll find something in the water,” Diehl said.

“Sir?”

“How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?”

“Mr. Diehl, is there anything you’d like to change or correct in what you’ve—”

“Nothing,” Diehl said. “I don’t want to change nothing I done.”

Bannister looked at his watch.

“Time completed, twenty-three hundred hours, thirty-one minutes,” he said into the microphone, and then, to the stenographer, “It’s a wrap.”

They left Diehl’s room.

In the corridor outside, Bannister said, “Meese’s people were right.”

“What?” Matthew said.

“The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography. They were right. Pornography leads to violence.”

Matthew said nothing.

On Christmas morning, he wondered what he was supposed to do.