Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby

At nine, they drove to an after-hours party at the Chambers Gallery, where witnesses told police the couple talked to several people including the gallery owner and the architect of their new house. They each had another glass of some jug wine.

At ten-thirty, they returned to the Pressman Hotel, where they'd been staying in suite 17F for almost a month since their wedding.

The hotel operator says they made several phone calls between ten-thirty and midnight. At twelve-fifteen, they called the front desk and asked for an eight o'clock wake-up call. A desk clerk confirms that they used the television remote control to order a pornographic movie.

At nine the next morning, the maid found them dead.

«Embolism, if you ask me,» Nash says. «You eat a girl out and you blow some air inside her, or if you fuck her too hard, either way you can force air into her bloodstream and the bubble goes right to her heart.»

Nash is heavy. A big guy wearing a heavy coat over his white uniform, he's wearing his white track shoes and standing at the bar when I get there. Both elbows on the bar, he's eating a steak sandwich on a kaiser roll with mustard and mayo squeezing out of the far end. He's drinking a cup of black coffee. His greasy hair is pulled into a black palm tree on top of his head.

And I say, so?

I ask, was the place ransacked?

Nash is just chewing, his big jaw going around and around. He holds the sandwich in both hands but stares past it at the plate full of mess, dill pickles and potato chips.

I ask, did he smell anything in the hotel room?

He says, «Newlyweds like they were, I figure he fucks her to death, and then has himself a heart attack. Five bucks says they open her and find air in her heart.»

I ask, did he at least star-69 their telephone to find out who'd called last?

And Nash says, «No can do. Not on a hotel phone.»

I say, I want more for my fifty bucks than just his drooling over a dead body.

«You'da been drooling, too,» he says. «Damn, she was a looker.»

I ask, were there valuables—watches, wallets, jewelry—left at the scene?

He says, «Still warm, too, under the covers. Warm enough. No death agonies. Nothing.»

His big jaw goes around and around, slower now as he stares down at nothing in particular.

«If you could have any woman you wanted,» he says, «if you could have her any way you wanted, wouldn't you do it?»

I say, what he's talking about is rape.

«Not,» he says, «if she's dead.» And he crunches down on a potato chip in his mouth. «If I'd been alone, alone and had a rubber … ,» he says through the food. «No way would I let the medical examiner find my DNA at the scene.»

Then he's talking about murder.

«Not if somebody else kills her,» Nash says, and looks at me. «Or kills him. The husband had a fine-looking ass, if that's what floats your boat. No leakage. No livor mortis. No skin slippage. Nothing.»

How he can talk this way and still eat, I don't know.

He says, «Both of them naked. A big wet spot on the mattress, right between them. Yeah, they did it. Did it and died.» Nash chews his sandwich and says, «Seeing her there, she was better-looking than any piece of tail I've ever had.»

If Nash knew the culling song, there wouldn't be a woman left alive. Alive or a virgin.

If Duncan is dead, I hope it's not Nash who responds to the call. Maybe this time with a rubber. Maybe they sell them in the bathroom here.

Since he had such a good look, I ask if he saw any bruises, bites, beestings, needle marks, anything.

«It's nothing like that,» he says.

A suicide note?

«Nope. No apparent cause of death,» he says.

Nash turns the sandwich around in his hands and licks the mustard and mayo leaked out the end. He says, «You remember Jeffrey Dahmer.» Nash licks and says, «He didn't set out to kill so many people. He just thought you could drill a hole in somebody's skull, pour in some drain cleaner, and make them your sex zombie. Dahmer just wanted to be getting more.»

So what do I get for my fifty bucks?

«A name's all I got,» he says.

I give him two twenties and a ten.

With his teeth, he pulls a slice of steak out of the sandwich. The meat hangs against his chin before he tosses his head back to flip it into his mouth. Chewing, he says, «Yeah, I'm a pig,» and his breath is nothing but mustard. He says, «The last person to talk to them, their call history on both their cell phones, it said her name is Helen Hoover Boyle.»

He says, «You dump that stock like I told you?»

It's the same William and Mary bureau cabinet. According to the note card taped to the front, it's black lacquered pine with Persian scenes in silver gilt, round bun feet, and the pediment done up in a pile of carved curls and shells. It has to be the same cabinet. We'd turned right here, walking down a tight corridor of armoires, then turned right again at a Regency press cupboard, then left at a Federal sofa, but here we are again.

Helen Hoover Boyle puts her finger against the silver gilt, the tarnished men and women of Persian court life, and says, «I have no idea what you're talking about.»

She killed Baker and Penny Stuart. She called them on their cell phones sometime the day before they died. She read them each the culling song.

«You think I killed those unfortunate people by singing to them?» she says. Her suit is yellow today, but her hair's still big and pink. Her shoes are yellow, but her neck's still hung with gold chains and beads. Her cheeks look pink and soft with too much powder.

It didn't take much digging to find out the Stuarts were the people who'd bought a house on Exeter Drive. A lovely historic house with seven bedrooms and cherry paneling throughout the first floor. A house they planned to tear down and replace. A plan that infuriated Helen Hoover Boyle.

«Oh, Mr. Streator,» she says. «If you could just hear yourself.»

From where we're standing, a tight corridor of furniture stretches a few yards in every direction. Beyond that, each corridor turns or branches into more corridors, armoires squeezed side by side, sideboards wedged together. Anything short, armchairs or sofas or tables, only lets you see through to the next corridor of hutches, the next wall of grandfather clocks, enameled screens, Georgian secretaries.

This is where she suggested we meet, where we could talk in private, one of those warehouse antique stores. In this maze of furniture, we keep meeting the same William and Mary bureau cabinet, then the same Regency press cupboard. We're going in circles. We're lost.

And Helen Boyle says, «Have you told anyone else about your killer song?»

Only my editor.

«And what did your editor say?»

I think he's dead.

And she says, «What a surprise.» She says, «You must feel terrible.»

Above us, crystal chandeliers hang at different heights, all of them cloudy and gray as powdered wigs. Frayed wires twist where their chains hook onto each roof beam. The severed wires, the dusty dead lightbulbs. Each chandelier is just another ancient aristocratic head cut off and hanging upside down. Above everything arches the warehouse roof, a lot of bow trusses supporting corrugated steel.

«Just follow me,» Helen Boyle says. «Isn't moss supposed to grow only on the north side of an armoire?»

She wets two fingers in her mouth and holds them up.

The Rococo vitrines, the Jacobean bookcases, the Gothic Revival highboys, all carved and varnished, the French Provincial wardrobes, crowd around us. The Edwardian walnut curio cabinets, the Victorian pier mirrors, the Renaissance Revival chifforobes. The walnut and mahogany, ebony and oak. The melon bulb legs and cabriole legs and linenfold panels. Past the point where any corridor turns, there's just more. Queen Anne chiffoniers. More bird's-eye maple. Mother-of-pearl inlay and gilded bronze ormolu.