Chuck Hustmyre - A Killer Like Me

Murphy stared at the tennis courts. “Theresa is a saint, mother. You should have had twins when you had her. Then you could have skipped me altogether.”

“Don’t talk about your sister like that. I didn’t say she was a saint. Lord knows she has bad taste in men-or maybe it’s just all men are bad-but she’s a good daughter and a good mother to that boy.”

Not quite good enough to help pay for this place, Murphy thought.

He regretted the thought as soon as he had it. His big sister, older by two years, had a full plate. Her husband had left her four years ago, not long after he and Theresa found out their son was autistic.

“That boy, by the way, your six-year-old grandson, has a name. It’s Michael.”

Murphy glanced back through the glass door and saw a bottle of Grey Goose on the kitchen counter. Living on Social Security, with her policeman son having to take up the financial slack, she still bought the good stuff.

“You know Mr. Meyer, the old man down the hall in three ten?” his mother said.

She glanced up at him and dropped her voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “He’s Jewish, you know.” Then she went back to her normal, nerve-fraying bray. “Well, I just found out he went to Notre Dame. I told him you were on the football team there. Turns out he played football too. I didn’t even know Jews played football, did you?”

“I hear they let them do all kinds of things now that the war is over.” His mother’s latent racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism had always irritated him, mainly because she would deny to her dying day-and truly believe it-that she was any of those things.

“Are you being a smart aleck?” she said. “You sound just like your father.”

“I was on the football team for one season, and I only played in two games, both of which we lost.”

“Notre Dame, though, that’s something,” she said, more to herself than to him.

The coach might have kept him on the team the next year, but Murphy never found out. He came home that summer and never went back. His mother needed somebody to look after her. By that time, Murphy’s dad had been dead almost five years, dropped by a heart attack in the kitchen at age forty-nine. Theresa was off on some adventure or another with her boyfriend, hiking across India, or Pakistan, or some other godforsaken place. “That Protestant boy” was how his mother always described her future son-in-law.

Theresa transferred to UC Berkeley that spring to get a master’s in neonatal nursing. And most likely to get away from their mother. Murphy stayed home. It was what his father would have expected of him. Someone had to take care of Mother.

“Your sister’s thinking about taking a teaching position at the hospital,” his mother said. “She’s thinking about getting out of that

… that ward she’s been in for so long.”

“Neonatal intensive-care unit,” Murphy said as he stared down at his mother’s head, at her thinning white hair, her flaky red scalp, and thought, not for the first time, about bashing in her skull, maybe with her favorite ashtray, the five-pound granite one she bought on a trip with Dad to the Grand Canyon. Just to get her to shut up about Theresa.

Murphy loved his sister, but she lived in San Francisco. She came home two, maybe three times a year. Sure, she called every day-with nationwide cell-phone plans, it was practically free-but she never sent a check.

Again, Murphy regretted his own thoughts. Maybe he should take some time off and fly out to visit Theresa and Michael. The kid was probably ready for a Giants game. His autism didn’t stop him from much. He was smart. He was funny. And somehow, probably because of his innocence, he made Murphy feel good.

“I might go see her,” Murphy said.

“Who?”

“Theresa.”

His mother craned her neck to look up at him. “Not without me you’re not.”

Murphy thought again about the granite ashtray, but he swallowed the thought. “Maybe we can both go,” he said.

“You know how I hate airports. All that walking. I can’t do it anymore.”

“You’re sixty-eight, Mother. We’ve had presidents older than you. People in their seventies run global corporations, and run marathons. Maybe if you laid off smoking and gave up booze you might feel better.”

She turned away. “There you go with the criticism again. You’re exactly like your father, you know that? He was no saint, let me tell you. He gambled. He drank. He smoked. Most of the time when he came home he smelled like a brewery.” She reached for her highball glass and drained it.

“He worked twelve hours a day at a chemical plant, Mother, until he dropped dead. Cut him some slack.”

Saturday, July 28, 6:05 AM

The shrill ring of his cell phone jolted Murphy awake.

He cracked his eyelids and stared at the ceiling until the next ring. He was lying on his sofa. Still dressed. With a pounding headache. After an hour of listening to his mother’s ceaseless complaints and criticism, Murphy had gone home and killed half a bottle of Knob Creek.

The phone rang again.

Then someone knocked on his door.

Murphy felt his sphincter tighten. The first thing he thought of was the Public Integrity Bureau.

He hadn’t done anything wrong that he knew of, but like every working New Orleans cop, he lived in a perpetual state of anxiety about PIB-also known as the Rat Squad. If they wanted you, they could get you. Which is why half the cops in this city were retired in place, just coasting along, not making any waves or any arrests. That was the only sure way to stay out of trouble.

His cell phone shrieked again. The sound cut through his whiskey-addled brain like a knife. He had to change the ring, maybe set it to a song, something he liked.

Murphy found the phone on the coffee table under this month’s National Geographic. He must have tried to read before he passed out. He couldn’t remember. The caller ID showed Gaudet’s cell phone. Murphy and Gaudet’s squad had off this weekend. Their first in three weeks. Why would Gaudet call him at six o’clock in the morning on their day off?

He flipped open the phone. “Yeah.”

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Gaudet shouted in his ear.

The knock at the door came again.

“Somebody’s at the door. Hold on.” Murphy took the phone away from his ear. “Who is it?” he yelled.

The person at the door mumbled something.

Murphy put the phone back to his ear. “Give me a second.” Then he crawled off the sofa and stumbled across the den.

When he jerked the door open he found a shriveled old black lady staring up at him. She lived across the hall. Murphy had seen her a dozen times since he moved into the converted rooming house a year ago, following the fiasco with Kirsten, but he didn’t know her name. He had heard from another neighbor that the old woman had no family and lived on Social Security and cat food.

Six o’clock in the morning and she was already dressed for the day in a print dress with a lace shawl draped over her shoulders. She held a folded Times-Picayune in her hand. “Are you the detective in the newspaper?”

Oh, shit.

Murphy pressed the phone against his ear. “Juan, I’ve got to call you back.”

“Have you seen the newspaper, motherfucker?” his partner shouted. “You said she would keep your name-”

Murphy flipped the phone closed.

“Is it true?” the old lady said, holding up the newspaper. “About the serial killer?”

On the front page, above the fold, Murphy saw his own photograph pasted beside a long article. He pulled the newspaper from the old lady’s hand. “Excuse me a minute,” he said. Then he shut the door in her face.