Paul Cleave - The Killing Hour

“She told me not to worry about it,” I say.

“About what?”

“She said, ‘It’s perfectly okay for the man who saved our lives to stain my carpet.’ She handed me a flannel and a towel and a change of clothes, then gave me directions to the bathroom.”

“You showered in her bathroom,” Landry says. “You showered before you killed her.”

“Yeah, I showered. I wasn’t going to. I wanted to show up the way I was, but. . I don’t know, there was something just too creepy about sitting around with another man’s blood on me. Anyway, I figured I’d still have my clothes, and that would be enough. Kathy was still trying to get hold of her husband. She said she’d stay in the clothes she was in.”

“You were a mess,” Luciana says, then smiles at me, the tense of her sentence suggests she’s thinking back to the past, that she’s not still there living it.

I walked down her hallway and walking into the steam of her bathroom filled me with excitement. It was full of typical womanly scents-soaps and subtle perfumes that made you think of meadows and flowers. For the first time I thought of Jo. Up until that moment I hadn’t given Jo, or my parents or any of my friends or my job, a moment of thought. I was in a house with two beautiful women and they were in my debt. Anything could have come from it and, as it turns out, something did.

I dropped my own clothes in a heap. I had no idea how bad I was until I looked in the mirror. I was smeared in blood and dirt; patches of my hair had been welded together with blood. The only clean parts were where my clothes and watch had been. There were clumps of dirt in my ears and my forehead had the lump it still has now. I was smiling-smiling to be alive, smiling as I thought what my students would say the next time they saw me walk into the classroom looking like I’d been hit by a car. And, truth be told, I was smiling at the thought of Kathy and Luciana joining me in the shower. Of course I was. What guy wouldn’t?

The hot water hit my damaged body and stung like hell. I was in the bathroom Luciana would soon die in. I was dancing from one foot to the other, washing green shampoo through my hair, creating a red lather. Red water ran down my body, moving over sore muscles and torn skin in long stripes. It was blood and I liked the fact that most of it wasn’t mine. When I returned to the lounge Kathy and Luciana were talking on the couch.

“You certainly looked uncomfortable in those clothes,” Luciana says to me.

“I didn’t have any underwear on.”

My headache, as it is now, was thumping along nicely.

“I’m trying to be serious here, Feldman,” Landry says, “and all you can tell me is you weren’t wearing underwear in the shower? Why the hell would you?”

“Ignore him, Charlie,” Luciana tells me. “We should have gone to the police. That’s what you wanted to do. We sat down and talked about it. You wanted to go. I wasn’t sure. But Kathy wanted to get hold of her husband. She said her husband used to tell her all the time where people messed up was by not having a lawyer. She said the common mistake innocent people made was to assume the police would think that innocent people were innocent. You wanted to go and she wanted to stay, and I sided with my friend. Of course I did. If I’d agreed with you. .” she says, and doesn’t need to finish the sentence.

“Cyris was dead,” I say, to both Luciana and Landry. “So we decided to wait until we could get hold of Kathy’s husband. We would then go in together. We were all too upset and exhausted, and that was a recipe for saying the wrong thing during questioning. We planned to go first thing.”

“Why did you shower?”

“I told you already. I was a mess,” I tell him. “I was covered with Cyris’s blood and I know it’s dumb, but I kept feeling like it was going to seep into the pores of my skin and make me sick.”

“Your playacting alter ego.”

“Think about it,” I say. “Why would I shower before killing two people? Why would I shower if I was going to get covered in blood anyway?”

“Because you showered after you killed them, not before,” Landry says. “Tell me again why you killed Jo.”

“I didn’t kill Jo. She was helping me.” I look at his Kiss the Cook cap and I wonder what state of mind he was in when he bought it. It’s hard to imagine him out shopping, just cruising the mall and walking into a clothes shop and finding that hat on a shelf. Did he make pleasant conversation with the sales girl while she rang up the sale and put the hat in a bag? Did they flirt? Talk about the weather? Did he wear it out of the store? Did he know then that one day he would wear it while taking another man’s life? Or was it a gift? He’s not wearing a wedding ring, but aren’t cops with tough-guy attitudes often divorced? Maybe he has children, maybe the hat is a father’s day present.

Luciana is starting to fade, following Kathy back to the world where they live now. She’s wearing the robe she died in, but the towel she had wrapped around her hair when she woke me is gone. The night was winding down and since we weren’t going to the police it was time to go home. Since they would end up dead in their own houses the first thing I needed to do was separate them. I sat wearily on the arm of the couch-Monday morning was draining me. It was at that moment I learned Kathy was married.

“You were jealous, weren’t you?” Luciana says.

“How many victims?” Landry repeats.

“I wasn’t jealous,” I say, but I was and Luciana knows it. Jealous that Kathy was married. It was stupid. At least she was married to a man who would help us. I had killed a man and I needed representation. I didn’t want to be the next Benjamin Hyatt. I didn’t want to be the next guy the country felt sorry for, then read about in the newspapers having been beaten in jail. In the end we agreed to get together in the morning. I grabbed my bloodstained clothes and I left, taking Kathy with me.

“We should have stayed together,” Luciana says. “But he was dead. You told us he was dead.”

I look away. I can’t face her. She’s right. I told them he was dead and he wasn’t.

“Jealous? Are you on something, Feldman? Is that the problem?”

“Among other things,” I say, and Luciana fades away and life, as it is out here at gunpoint, returns to normal.

Landry is confused. It’s like Feldman is having a conversation with somebody who isn’t here. Feldman understands this is a trial-is he trying some sort of insanity defense? Perhaps he’s not trying one-perhaps he really is just that insane. Would it make a difference?

It would. If Feldman wasn’t in control, if there really is something in his brain that isn’t wired up right, then the guy cannot be held accountable. If he had arrested him and not brought him out here instead, then over the following days they would look into his life and see if there was any history of being mentally unstable.

That’s not what is going on here. Feldman is in control of his actions. Of course he is. He’s a psychopath. Only that word doesn’t come close to describing Feldman. He doesn’t know what word does. It would probably take a combination of words. A string of them. Long-lettered terms that only doctors with diplomas would know how to pronounce. Landry has never dealt with anybody so messed up, and in a way this actually helps. It helps that with each sentence that comes out of Feldman’s mouth Landry knows his decision to bring the man out here is the right one. Hell, it’s even cost-effective.

He adjusts the gun across his knees, shrugs his shoulders back to offset the beginning cramp, and shifts further into the chair. Not much longer to go. So far the only thing that Feldman has said that may be remotely true is what he said about his wife. There was something in his words that frightened Landry. Something that suggested perhaps she has been helping. If that’s the case, then she’ll have called the police by now. It means there’s no going back. Not that it matters. He’s a dead man anyway.