Dave Zeltserman - Killer

“This is ridiculous, Leonard,” she told me. “I’m not some weakling. I can carry some of that.”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” I said, puffing only slightly from my exertion.

After she unlocked the cabin door, I went in first, telling her I’d find the kitchen and put the stuff in there. Instead, though, I put it all down quietly and stood just inside the door so I was behind her when she walked in, taking a canister out of her handbag. She never even knew I was there until I had her arm twisted behind her back and forced the silver canister out of her hand.

“Leonard, please-” she started to say.

The canister had no markings or labels printed on it. I sprayed it in her eyes. A small stream came out of it, and Sophie immediately went into convulsions. I let her drop to the old-fashioned pine-board floor. I could smell immediately that she had emptied her bowels.

Her handbag was one of those large affairs, almost like a small duffel bag. I went through it and found other items of interest. Scalpels, things that looked like dental instruments, and other tools that looked like they could induce great pain. Sure enough I found what I was searching for: a roll of masking tape. Sophie was still going through convulsions when I taped her wrists behind her back and her ankles together. I noticed her nose had started bleeding and a thin stream of blood leaked out of one of her ears. I pulled up a rocking chair and sat and waited until her convulsions stopped. It took a while, but eventually she settled down.

“A nerve agent?” I asked her.

She nodded. “A mild one,” she said in a hoarse, weak voice. She was obviously drained from what she had just gone through, and her skin color was awful, but she looked like an entirely different person. She was still beautiful, but there was an iciness about her, almost like she was made from metal. Whatever warmth and vulnerability she had displayed before had been stripped away. I know this must sound funny since she was probably never more vulnerable in her life, but what I saw lying there was more machine-like than human. Beautiful, even still.

“Does it have any long-term side effects?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was there ever any attraction between us?” I asked.

“None. I never found you anything but repulsive. It was all an act.”

She didn’t say this to be mean or hurtful, nothing more really than giving me the facts. Besides, she wasn’t telling me anything that I hadn’t known all along, at least on some deep subconscious level.

“Let me guess, you were never sexually abused as a child, nor did you ever serve time in prison,” I said.

“I had a happy childhood. And no, I never did time.”

“You put on a damned good act,” I said.

“Thanks, but obviously not good enough. What gave me away?”

I shrugged. “I never told you I was working as a janitor, yet you made a comment about me cleaning toilets for a living.”

Her eyes dulled as she digested that. Of course I could’ve told her I’d researched her name at the library and all I could find was an obituary for a girl in Minnesota who had been killed three years earlier in a hit-and-run. I could have also told her how at some gut level I knew the instant I saw her what she was. I might’ve been in denial about it, but I must’ve known then. I saw no reason to make her feel any worse than she did so I didn’t tell her any of that.

“Why’d you go through this whole elaborate set-up?” I asked her. “You had so many opportunities to kill me before this.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” she said. “I had researched you enough to know how difficult it would’ve been if I didn’t gain your trust first. Even if I were camped out on a rooftop with a high-powered rifle, from what I know about you, you probably would’ve sensed it. Besides, I wasn’t hired just to kill you. My job was more complicated than that.”

“What were you hired for?”

“To find out what you did to my client’s sister. Then to make you suffer pretty badly before killing you.”

“What do you mean client’s sister?”

She winced as blood from her ear dripped into her eye. “Does the name Sally Hughes ring a bell?”

I thought back on the girl in the bulky green parka. Back then I didn’t want to know her name, so I never looked inside her pocketbook. “No,” I said.

“It should. You murdered her in 1992 and made sure her body was never found.”

“I never killed a woman before,” I said.

She smiled weakly at that. “Leonard, I’m being straightforward with everything I’m telling you, you can show me the same professional courtesy. Seven months ago, when my client found out that you had murdered Fred Marzone, she knew that you had murdered her sister also. Sally was working at a hospital nearby where you had left Marzone’s body. Judging from where she lived, she would’ve been cutting through that same parking lot if she was walking home after work.”

She broke into a coughing fit. It didn’t sound too good, and after it stopped, she smiled weakly at me again. “My client tried to get the police to reopen their investigation into Sally’s disappearance, but they refused to. Their reason was that you would’ve added Sally’s murder to your confession if you had actually done it. Leonard, I’ve been curious about this. Why didn’t you admit to killing her? With the deal you had worked out there would’ve been no consequences for it.”

“I didn’t kill her,” I said.

Sophie’s eyes went blank. “Okay,” she said, flatly.

“A few weeks ago you searched my apartment, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. I was looking for any trophies you might’ve taken off of Sally. I didn’t find any. I did find the money you taped inside your radiator, but I left that alone. I also saw all your little matchsticks and other safeguards, but I figured you would come to the conclusion that Lombard searched your place, so I didn’t bother replacing any of it.”

“Is the sister coming here?”

Sophie hesitated for only a second before nodding. “She’ll be here in an hour,” she said. “She wanted to watch while I inflicted pain.”

“My own curiosity – how much is she paying you?”

“A lot.”

“How much is a lot?”

She gave me another weak smile. “A quarter of a million dollars. Leonard, I’d like to make another request for professional courtesy. I’ve soiled myself and I’m bleeding from my ear and nose and I’m nauseous like you wouldn’t believe. Can you make this quick, and end this already?”

“Sophie, I don’t want to kill you,” I told her. “I want to somehow get through this without having to do that. What I’m going to do is move you to one of the bedrooms, then wait for your client to show up. I didn’t kill her sister, and I’ll find a way to convince her of that, and…”

And fuck it.

There are only so many lies you can stack on top of each other before they come tumbling down on you. Early on most of the lies were to myself. Deep, deep denial, you know. As much as I tried convincing myself otherwise, I knew on some subconscious level why I had to stay in the Boston area after I was released from prison. I had to be there for Lombard and his boys to make a play for me. And if not them, then someone else holding a grudge.

You see, I’m not a madman. I’m not some psychopathic killer who can just grab their victims at random. I don’t get sadistic pleasure from my killings, and I certainly don’t enjoy seeing my victims suffer. But I do need to kill. It’s something ingrained deep in my core. Until recently I’ve been trying to pretend that wasn’t so; I wanted badly to hold on to this idea of me being a different person, but I can’t do that any more. That’s okay. I can deal with what I really am as long as the killings are the result of a job or my acting in self-defense. As long as I’m not just some crazy lunatic running around slaughtering people.