Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

So much for deterrence. Somehow, even the threat of a death sentence was no deterrent at all to these new crimes. Deterrence only comes after you get caught, after danger becomes real, palpable. Now you know better for the next time. Once disaster came to pass for me, I didn’t speed at all for years and years. I owned a Porsche and I never took it past fifty-five. My friends laughed at me, fellow motorists honked and cursed, and I just nodded inwardly: I knew something they didn’t know, I was now right and they were all wrong. That’s deterrence. It only works when you’re not really a criminal.

As for Bill, he couldn’t extrapolate that lesson from his learning. He was undeterred with respect to new crimes because he was only worried about doing the time for the crime he’d already been convicted of. That sentence hung over his head, but it did not exist for him until it was formally pronounced. I would trade my life to bring back my family—it’s not a police matter, it’s personal, it’s internal; but Bill has never been concerned about bringing back Dijianet, he just doesn’t want to be punished for her death, and he never once considered the possibility of punishment all the weeks he was killing her. To him, “law-abiding” means nothing more nor less than not getting caught, and, if you don’t get caught or you don’t get punished, then there was no crime at all. Criminality is to him a judgment imposed by others; he has no moral sense himself.

That’s what makes Bill a criminal, and that’s why he’s undeterred when he contemplates the next horror he wants to inflict on the world.

So, being convicted of Dijianet’s murder taught Bill one thing and one thing only: how to be a better murderer the next time around.

What he learned and learned well was how not to get caught.

And a whole lot of girls in Southern California proved his point.

Carol Miller was beat and cold and dirty and she had the shakes. Or maybe it was the mirror. Maybe she was rock steady and it was the mirror that was shaking. Just another California quake. Her friend—the John—had let her back inside his house so she could use the bathroom to pull herself together, and the fact that he didn’t want a blow job told her that she probably needed more pulling together than she had the strength for. Sleeping in the dirt under the porch had seemed such a good idea—an inspired idea at the time—but now she couldn’t quite remember why she’d done it. In fact, if someone told her she hadn’t done it at all and that she was mistaken to recollect that she had, she would have been convinced to agree. But one thing was clear: She hadn’t spent the night at the Waldorf, that much she could deduce by the reflection in the mirror.

It had been one long night, one of many.

Now what to do?

She stuck a hand up into her tremendous mass of matted black hair, shook her head and tried to ignore the stuff that fell out—best not to know if it was dandruff or leaves or wiggly things looking for warmth to stay alive—the less you know what’s there the less you itch, she’d learned long ago—and she looked around and saw the John standing there and staring at her. He was by the chair where he’d carelessly thrown his Dockers before he went to bed. Now he was taking the wallet out of the pants pocket, yawning, crawling back under his shabby, big flowered comforter, sliding the wallet beneath his pillow, still firmly in his grasp. He knew what she was thinking, and she hadn’t even thought it yet. Next time she’d have to be quicker, next time she’d have to lift the wallet while he was still asleep.

“I need a loan,” she said.

“Good-bye,” said the John. “Lock the door on your way out.”

“Can 1 have breakfast—some cereal?”

“Just leave me a little sugar this time, okay?”

She nodded. Last time she’d forgotten the cereal altogether and just ate a bowlful of milk and sugar. It had made her teeth ache but it stopped her twitching long enough to get her up the block to where a fake Rastafarian with a real gold ring in his nose and a cloisonne stud through his tongue sold drugs in the parking lot of a coffee shop. Somewhere on him he had a pager and a cell phone that always rang incessantly and he never answered, not in front of anyone anyway. “Step right over here into my office, mon,” he would say to Carol with his fake Jamaican accent, the wooden beads in his hair clickety-clacking as he eased in behind a dumpster where there was just enough room to exchange cash for a condom filled with heroin cut by too much talc or flour or rat poison or whatever this “dude” happened to have had handy when his ship came in, “and mind my brother Lionel there—he s groovin—this is some kind of potent shit, mon.” Sure enough, squinched under the edge of the dumpster would be “Lionel”, the fake Rastafarians fake brother, eyes rolled up and white in his head and under his yellow and blue knit cap with the L.A. Rams logo patch removed, swaying to a reggae beat so distant as to be unheard by anyone but himself, shilling to the quality of this particular drug and this particular dealer. Lionel always had a gold shawl over his shoulders, the sun on one side, the moon on the other, stars in between, the skeleton of tarot card “death” stitched on the back, a prop-laden “fool” on the front. When he’d hear his name pronounced, Lionel would hold up a finger to his lips—“Shhhsh”—so as not to be diverted from his reverie. That’s when you could see that his front bottom teeth were gold capped but the gold was going green/black, the color of algae.

Showmanship, mon, that’s what it was.

Truth was, competition was fierce among the Riverside-area drug dealers. Demand was high, but so was supply, and the territorial lines of dealers were rather a blur, often bloody. The fake Rastafarian—who was actually a local kid named Al—decided early on that “exotic” implied mystery, knowledge, superior drug connections, and nonthreatening affability, at least that’s what it seemed like to him when he watched reruns of Miami Vice on cable, so he got a whore-friend to knot the beads in his hair and he went singsong Jamaica mon ever been to the islands mon hey this is your space really that’s cool no problem I can move on mon, even though he wouldn’t know Haile Selassie from Santa Claus. The act was that the former Al smiled and emptied his empty pockets for anyone who asked; while it was Lionel who actually carried the piece and minded the stash.

And Carol was desperate to pull herself together and get down to the coffee shop parking lot, to the former Al’s office, hoping that he’d still be in residence and he’d be willing to barter with her for a fix. She’d even lick the algae off Lionels teeth if that’s what it took. Their fantasy for hers—that would be the trade. Or so she hoped.

“Yeah, I’ll be going,” Carol said to the John. “Hey, you know what time it is?”

“Too early to be having this conversation, okay?” said the John irritably.

“Right. Seeya.”

“Preferably not,” said the John.

Carol went out the door.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the former Al and the current Lionel were not in their “office” when Carol got there. She was prepared to wait them out, figuring that unless they were on their winter vacation practicing with the Jamaican bobsled team, they were bound to show up any minute and push their wares, mon, but then she saw the dried brown puddle of blood by the corner of the dumpster that Lionel used for support, and that gold shawl of his was peeking out from under some trash bags in the dumpster itself.