William Landay - The Strangler

The door was ajar and Michael glimpsed a hairless bone-white knee above the rim of the bathtub.

He did not like to think of that knee-it was naked and animal-and so he focused on the gun in his own hand and what a supremely well-designed tool it was. The way it nestled in his palm. How naturally his fingers curled around the grip, how perfectly sized it was, smaller than a tennis racket handle, thicker than a knife handle. What a sensuous pleasure to raise and point it. It felt like a part of him, an extension of his hand. When he raised the gun and sighted along its barrel when he tapped the door open with it and he beheld Brendan Conroy-round and white and lightly haired, his head lumpy and small under wet hair, his legs incongruously skinny, the little pale-pink rosettes of his nipples, the spatters of orange freckles-an old fat man on his back in the bathtub-sprawled-the vulnerable fleshy clump of his genitals it felt as if the gun barrel was an eleventh finger or, more exactly, as if it were his own index finger extended to absurd length, telescoped outward and didn’t every child know-didn’t He was distracted by Conroy, by that sly shit-eating grin, as if they were sharing a little joke, the two of them. Hey there, boyo, now what did you mean to do with that thing?

Didn’t didn’t every kid in the playground who had ever formed his hand into a gun and said pshoo! -

Conroy, a pinkish blob in the background of the gun sight didn’t every kid know that pointing your finger and pointing a gun were essentially the same gesture? But how godlike, to kill with nothing more than a pointed finger! Like a wizard pronouncing a curse, you had only to point and wish someone dead-you had only to decide it, and bang.

“Bang,” Michael whispered aloud. He lowered the gun.

Conroy was already dead. A single bullet hole in his chest, at the heart-where, Amy had once said, a lucky marksman could kill a man with one shot. Already dead.

The tub spout dripped. Pink, pink.

Michael stared. Would he have done it? Yes, he assured himself. Maybe. He thought he would have. Then: No, of course not.

He came to the side of the tub.

Dark wet blood was gelled over the hole in Conroy’s chest. No blood or damage on the walls of the shower stall; the slug must still be inside the body. Conroy had been standing naked in his tub when he took the bullet into himself, absorbed it in the thick mass of his torso. Another remarkable thing, that: The bullet had emerged from inside the gun only for a millisecond before burying itself again inside this man, leaping from one host to the next. Then Conroy had fallen, or sat, and died with this ambiguous expression on his face, not so much wounded as astonished. There was water beaded on his skin, and pink watery streaks of blood that marbled his belly in intricate thready patterns like veins.

There was still work to do, of course. It was not enough that Conroy was dead; the murder had to be explained, the whodunit resolved, the story spelled out.

So Michael pulled the shower curtain closed, feeling fastidious and cunning both, but not really deciding anything now, just following through on a course he had already committed to-finishing. The curtain rod screeched.

Carefully, so as not to disturb the fingerprints, he slipped the magazine out of the pistol grip, pried up the top bullet with his finger, and dropped it in his pocket. True, the slug already in Conroy’s body would not match the slugs fired from Gargano’s Smith amp; Wesson, but it would take a careful ballistics test to reveal that. It would require no special knowledge to count the slugs, though, and to realize that Conroy’s body held one more bullet than Gargano’s gun could have fired.

Ready now, Michael chambered a round, wrapped his arm inside the shower curtain, and tensioned the trigger. But the trigger pull was tight and the gun did not fire.

An inch or two from Michael’s nose, the shower curtain-an opaque sunflower-yellow vinyl stamped with a flower print-reflected the sound of his frustrated sigh.

He plunged his finger down hard, once. The thunder echoed in the small bathroom, amplified by the tiles, and an after-explosion in his ears, trailed by a ringing sound. The spasm of the gun’s recoil sent a wave of pain through his injured right shoulder. The bullet casing carelessly tossed away. The homey, smoky-fireplace smell of the burned powder.

He had the feel of it now, he thought, and he pulled, pulled, pulled, pulled, pulled the trigger, and this time he counted, as Gargano had instructed. Seven rounds. One fewer than the magazine in a Smith amp; Wesson Model 39 could hold.

Michael slipped into church and glanced about, as if he meant to steal the candlesticks.

The pews were nearly empty. Two old men sat far apart from one another, barely moving. Michael recognized them both as parishioners at St. Margaret’s. He’d seen these old-timers here a thousand times, back when Michael was a kid and going to Mass regularly, but now he could not for the life of him remember their names. They seemed to be waiting, these old men, though for what Michael did not know. It was mid-morning. No Mass was scheduled.

He slunk down the center aisle, clearing his throat softly, selfconscious about the rustle of his clothes and the shushing of his shoes.

Seated in the front row, characteristically, was Michael’s mother. From the back, her shape and posture struck Michael as very oldlooking. Her spine and shoulders were beginning to warp. Even so, she was still very much the iron lady, the morning after her son was murdered. She gave Michael a brief glance, then turned her attention back to the altar. There was no trace of tears on her face.

“You okay, Mum?”

“Yes.”

He sat down.

Margaret’s black pocketbook stood between them on the bench. A big black faux-patent-leather thing with a stiff strap for a handle. Michael eyed the handbag, then he picked it up and opened the clasp.

Margaret gave him another sidelong look but did not protest. Her expression suggested to Michael that she was not defeated, she was not giving in to him; she simply did not care what he found in the purse or what he thought. Go on, then, she seemed to be saying, see for yourself.

He opened the purse and looked down into it. Joe Senior’s service pistol was nestled inside, among the clutter of balled-up tissues, the compact and lipstick, the wallet and keys. The gun lay on its back. Michael was transfixed a moment, before he realized the risk and clicked the pocketbook shut. The clasp, with its overlapping gold beads, reminded him of a schoolgirl’s crossed knees. He put the pocketbook back down on the bench.

Beside him, Margaret had willed herself-her face, her posture-into a resolutely ordinary pose. She had nothing to say about Conroy’s multiple betrayals, of her husband and her sons and of Amy, and she made no excuses for the pistol in her pocketbook-down one bullet, surely, and mustn’t Brendan Conroy have been dazzled by the sight of her taking aim square at his breastbone. She picked up the purse and threaded her forearm through the strap.

“Come on, Ma, we got to go. There’ll be people at the house.”

“All night and day there’ll be people over to the house, talking us half to death, eating us out of house and home. We’ll all be fit for the loony bin before it’s over.”

“Okay, Ma.”

He stood and offered his elbow, which she took, and as they processed down the aisle she nodded at the two old parishioners who, she informed Michael in a stage whisper, were a drunk and a philanderer respectively, though the one still drank like a demon while the other’s philandering days were long behind him. The two of them together, she said, didn’t have enough sense to tie their own shoelaces. But the Lord is in no hurry to come collect His fools. Only the good ones like Joe He comes for. Only the good ones. “Only my Joe,” she whimpered, and Michael felt her weight on his arm and he stiffened his elbow to support her.