Dave Zeltserman - Killer

She had me sit back down, and brought me over a piece of cherry pie and a fresh coffee. I sat for a while eating while she kept me company. When I told her I better get going, she looked worried.

“He might be out there looking for you,” she said.

“Nah, he’s a coward.” I hesitated, then asked, “Whatever possessed you to let someone like that buy you drinks?”

She smiled at that. “I ended up ditching him, didn’t I?”

I couldn’t help smiling back at her. I nodded to her as I left the diner. I looked around to see if he was out there waiting for me, but I guess he had better sense than to be waiting for a lunatic.

Later that morning I went back to the store that sold me my cell phone, but the salesman I had dealt with still wasn’t there. The only person working in the store was the same salesgirl I had tried talking to earlier, and she looked horrified when she saw me walk back into the place. I didn’t bother talking to her, and instead just turned around and left.

It was a warmish October day and the sun felt good on my face. With nothing else to do, I took a walk down some side streets and ended up stumbling upon the Charles River. I walked along it until I found a grassy spot where I could sit and watch the water. My pop used to tell me how he swam in the Charles River when he was growing up, but by the time I was a kid the river had gotten too polluted for anything like that. Not only was it a yellowish brown color but you could smell the chemicals and sewage that came off of it. Now as I sat there the water looked clean. I wondered briefly whether it actually was or if it was an illusion with the muck and filth still there but better hidden beneath the surface.

Looking out over the water, my thoughts slowly drifted to Jenny. She had to know early on that I was involved in some sort of shady business. We had too nice a home and too many other nice possessions for me to have just been working at a liquor store, and she was too smart not to know I couldn’t’ve made all that extra money betting on the horses like I used to tell her I did. I’m sure she never suspected me of being a hit man, but she knew something was up. There were those times I’d catch her giving me an odd look before she’d realize it and correct it. And then there were those times when I would need to leave town for days or longer, and those questions she’d swallow back when I would return home. It must’ve crushed her when she found out the truth, but even then she tried to hide it from me and put a brave face on. She never abandoned me, and right up until the end before cancer got her, I knew she would’ve been waiting for me if she could’ve.

It was hard thinking of her dying the way she did. I knew it had been a long, painful death for her. My mom had written me several letters letting me know what Jenny went through. Even through all of that, Jenny acted cheerfully the few times I was able to reach her by phone, trying to pretend there was nothing wrong with her.

When she finally succumbed I didn’t know about it until months afterwards. By this time my mom had already been dead for six months, and I had no contact with my kids. I guess the prison officials left responsibility for informing me about my wife to my kids, or maybe things just slipped through the cracks. Even at this late date I didn’t know where Jenny was buried, but I guess it didn’t much matter. It wasn’t her there, just some bones left from her. It wouldn’t make any difference if I visited the grave or not. Nothing could change that she was gone.

I tried hard to remember what my wife looked like, but I could only bring up a vague impression. It had been years since I’d been able to picture how Jenny looked. I had little to console myself over what happened with her other than I’d been able to tell her where my safety deposit boxes were without the federal or state officials ever having any idea about them. At least she had been able to live out her last few years in comfort before the cancer hit her, and my kids were able to go to college.

After a while I found that I had stopped thinking of Jenny, and instead my thoughts had moved on to my victims. It wasn’t so much that I was trying to make peace with what I had done as trying to understand how I could’ve done what I did. I tried to make some sense of the person I was now and who I used to be and the brutality back then that I was capable of. I thought about the biker in Lucinda’s diner whose wrist I almost broke, and wondered whether that meant anything, and decided it didn’t. But even with who I was back then, I never once laid a finger on my wife or kids. They never once looked at me with fear or dread. I tried to put that in perspective with what I used to see in my victim’s face before the last moment, but it exhausted me.

Eventually I gave up trying to make sense of it. Instead, I focused on just clearing my head and trying to think of nothing. More than anything I wanted to just lie back and enjoy the feel of the sun on my face. It didn’t work. Too many memories pushed their way through, and before too long I had to get up in my attempt to outrun them, or at least outwalk them.

I spent the rest of the morning and a good part of the afternoon walking along the Charles River trying to leave those memories far behind, one in particular which especially haunted me. It was four o’clock when I returned back to Moody Street. I ate an early dinner at a Korean barbecue place. The prices were cheap and the food tasted good, and for the most part I was too tired to pay attention to those old memories. After a couple of beers it wasn’t even an issue.

That night when I left work, I thought I again saw a black sedan following me. I had this impression that it had turned down a side street, but by the time I looked for it, it was gone, nothing but a mirage. I was bone-tired, especially after all the walking I’d done earlier, and decided my mind had to’ve been playing tricks on me – it wasn’t as if I could actually remember hearing anything, or for that matter, seeing anything once I rubbed the exhaustion out of my eyes, but still, it left me feeling unsettled.

Tuesday turned out to be uneventful. It was especially quiet that morning at the diner and Lucinda ended up sitting down at my table and reading me prose from a notebook that she kept. When she asked me what I thought, I could see the anxiousness in her eyes and tugging at her mouth. I told her the truth, that I thought it was good, and she made a few cracks, both self-deprecating and insulting, about the state of my mental faculties if I thought that crap was any good and how ridiculous it was for her to care anyway about what a senile old coot like me thought, but I could tell it was a relief to her that I liked it, and she seemed to move lighter on her feet afterwards.

Later, I tried the phone store again, and my salesman still wasn’t there. I spent the rest of the morning at the library searching through old newspapers. Eventually I found Jenny’s obituary. It talked about her being a loving mother and sister, but nothing about being a loving wife. I was left out of it. I wished my kids had included a picture of Jenny with the notice. The only small bit of consolation I pulled out of it was I now knew where Jenny was buried.

I thought about why my kids had left her picture out of the obituary, and decided they had done it intentionally thinking that someday I’d be out of prison and I’d be looking for it. The day I found out about Jenny dying, I left messages with both Michael and Allison, asking if they could send me a picture of their mother since the ones I had brought to prison years earlier had disappeared from my cell. If my kids heard my messages, they didn’t bother responding to them and I never received any pictures in the mail. To make matters even more pointless, the cemetery Jenny was buried in was in Revere and right in the middle of Lombard’s territory. I wouldn’t put it past them having someone watching Jenny’s gravesite. Maybe when I know my time has run out, I’ll make the trip. For now it wouldn’t be safe for me to go there, and I wasn’t about to commit suicide – at least not yet, and especially not by proxy.