Small Town

The first day or two, he’d figured he had to get rid of the rabbit.

It was dangerous to have it in his possession, and he was just lucky beyond belief that the cops hadn’t found it when they’d come looking for it. How likely would they be to overlook it a second time?

He thought of ways to dispose of the rabbit, simple things like dropping it into a sewer, more elaborate strategies like walking a few blocks west and tossing it off a pier into the Hudson. You wouldn’t have to weight it down, like a body. It would, appropriately enough, sink like a stone.

But for some reason he wanted it.

He liked the thing, and wasn’t that nutty? Although, if you thought about it, it wasn’t all that surprising. If he’d liked it enough to swipe it in the first place, why shouldn’t he go on liking it?

Had he somehow killed her for it? Had she caught him taking it, and called him on it, and had that triggered the fight that left her dead? He could see how that might have happened, but that was the trouble, he could imagine anything and everything.

He’d keep it, he decided. At least until it was time to buy more cornmeal.

H E R C A R D W A S S T I L L in his sock drawer.

Susan Pomerance, who sold folk and outsider art, and what was a turquoise rabbit if not folk art? Probably not the sort of thing she dealt in, but she very likely knew something about the art of the southwestern tribes.

Come up and see my fetish—how was that for an opening line?

Did he even need an opening line? She’d made her interest clear enough. All that had been required of him was that he call her the next day, or the day after, and they could follow her script.

But he hadn’t called. He’d found the rabbit, and walked around in a daze for a few days, and then forgot about her and her calling card, and now far too much time had elapsed. Hi, this is John Creighton, I’ve had better things to think about than you, but I’m horny as a toad right now, so why don’t you come on over? Yeah, right.

She was good-looking, too, and more age-appropriate and culture-appropriate than the girl he’d hit on. But he’d waited too long, and that was that.

Might as well throw her card away.

Then again, it wouldn’t hurt to hang on to it.

M A U R Y W I N T E R S S A I D , “B E E N a while, boychik. I feel like we’ve been in touch on account of I keep reading about you in the papers.”

“Have I been overdoing it, Maury?”

“No, it’s good, the publicity. The more you show up as an important figure in the arts, the more absurd it is that you should be accused of a crime. Listen, you remember Fabrizzio?”

“Vividly.”

“Yeah, she makes an impression. She also made an offer.”

“Oh?”

“And I report it to you because I have to, but I also have to advise you very strongly to turn it down. What she offers is for you to plead to second-degree manslaughter, with a sentencing recommendation of three to five years. You’d do the minimum and be out in under three.”

“I see.”

“Now the only interesting thing about this offer,” Winters said,

“is that she made it, and believe me, she had a tough time getting the words out. The only reason she’d offer a plea to Man Two is her case is looking a little worse every day, and what she wants and what her boss wants is for it to go away. And the reason I’m even bothering you with it is because I’m going to turn it down, thanks but no thanks, and then she’ll ask me what I want, and I’ll say I want her to drop the charges altogether, and she’ll make another offer.”

“Which will be what?”

“My guess? Involuntary manslaughter, a year or two, whatever the code calls for, and the sentence suspended so you got no time to serve.”

“Really.”

“That’s my guess. And that’s where we have a decision to make.” He thought for a moment. “I’d have to allocute,” he said.

“That’s exactly correct, but how do you even happen to know the word, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“TV.”

“Of course, how else? Now everybody can talk like a lawyer. Yes, you’d have to allocute. You’d have to stand up in front of God and everybody, which includes the judge and the media, and tell how you happened to kill Fairchild.”

“Which I didn’t do.”

“Which you have always maintained you didn’t do, but you’d have to say you did. Now I can’t advise you to lie, but someone in a similar position could say that his partner had been choking on something, had appeared unable to breathe, and consequently he’d taken hold of her and tried to assist her by shaking her, and it so happened he was holding her by the neck, and the shaking didn’t help, and the next thing he knew . . . well, you get the point.”

“Yes.”

“If she offers it and if we take it, which is a lot of ifs for one sentence, you do no time whatsoever. That’s the good news, but the bad news is you’re on record as saying you did it. Anybody on the inside’ll know it’s a formality, but the general public’s only going to know that you stood up in court and admitted you killed the woman. You’ve got a felony conviction on your record, and yes, you’re free to walk around, but so’s OJ, and there’s not a whole lot of people inviting him over for dinner, or trying to fix him up with their sisters. Other hand, when it comes to prison, there’s a world of difference between being inside and being out.”

“What would you advise, Maury?”

“At this stage,” he said, “I wouldn’t, because what’s to advise when there isn’t an offer on the table? This is just a heads-up, John, so you can start thinking about it. Meanwhile, remember that green rabbit those bozos came around looking for?”

“Blue.”

“Huh?”

“It said blue on the warrant.”

“I stand corrected. Let’s hope they find that Carpenter putz, and they search him head to toe, and when they look up his ass, lo and behold, there’s the rabbit. Then you won’t have to decide what to do about the offer Fabrizzio hasn’t made yet.” C O U L D H E S T A N D U P in court and say he’d done it?

If he was innocent, could he proclaim himself guilty? If he was guilty, could he admit it, make it a matter of record?

And suppose he didn’t know? Suppose he couldn’t really say one way or the other?

twenty-two

HE HAD BEENthe hunter. Now he was the hunted.

It had changed so suddenly.

The Carpenter, they called him. At first it had been the Curry Hill Carpenter, when they had no idea who he was or what he’d done beyond the triple murder on East Twenty-eighth Street. He didn’t like the name much, but appreciated the reference to the neighborhood, because that name, Curry Hill, embodied the city’s resourcefulness in matters of nomenclature. Here was an area that didn’t really have a name, that had never been thought of as a discrete geographical entity. It was south of Murray Hill and north of Gramercy, east of Kips Bay and west of the Flatiron district, so how to refer to it if you were trying to sell or lease property there?

Well, it was adjacent to Murray Hill, that section named for the Murray family, and Indo-Pak restaurants abounded, so why not Curry Hill?

Just the Carpenter, now. After that Friday night, after they’d been clever enough to see that the firebombings were his work as well, one newspaper referred to him as the Curry Hill–Chelsea Carpenter, but that was cumbersome and not as catchy.

Since then, of course, they’d matched a fingerprint and knew about the Cauldwell Avenue fire in the Bronx. And they knew his name, and played off that in their stories and headlines, but mostly they called him the Carpenter, perhaps recognizing that his name (which he no longer used) and his address (where he no longer lived) were of far less significance than what he did.

The Carpenter. He’d disliked the name initially, irked at the way they were fixated on the physical implements he’d used on a single occasion, the hammer and the chisel. (They didn’t even know about the screwdriver.) He grew more accepting of the sobriquet as he came to see it as pointing up the workmanlike nature of his efforts. And then one day it struck him that the word was more appropriate than they could consciously realize, for wasn’t a carpenter more than a worker, more than the simple practitioner of a trade? Wasn’t he, first and foremost, a builder?

Reading the stories, one realized that they missed the point, that they saw only the destructive aspect of what he was doing.

They had no way of knowing that he tore down only to rebuild, took life only to renew life. They had no understanding of sacrifice, his or anyone else’s.

And yet they must, on some unconscious level. That wasn’t why they named him the Carpenter, that was the natural result of his use of the tools, reinforced by the happy alliteration of craft and neighborhood. But perhaps that was why the name stuck, why they clung to it after they knew his name. He was a carpenter, a builder, and he was building their city, and would go on with his mission while he had breath in his body.

Y O U ’ D T H I N K T H E Y ’ D H A V E caught him by now.

At the beginning, he took it for granted he’d be caught, and didn’t expect it would take long. When he watched firefighters battle the blaze on Cauldwell Avenue, he’d have been unsurprised if some inspector had picked him out of the crowd, had walked right up to him and taken him into custody. All right, mister. We know you set the fire. Care to tell us why?

And he’d have told them why. They might not have understood, but he’d have made the effort.

But no one approached him, or even looked twice at him. And in the weeks that followed he realized that no one ever looked twice at him, that he might have been invisible for all the attention he received.

When he was a boy he used to like a radio program about a character named Lamont Cranston, alias the Shadow. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. The Shadow, an announcer explained each week, had the power to cloud men’s minds so they could not see him.

And didn’t he have that power?

Except he achieved it through no exercise of will. And he wondered if it might not be an effect of the losses he had sustained, the four sacrifices that had set him upon his own sacrificial mission.

Could not those deaths, coming one upon another as they did, have taken away bits of his own very self? He had not felt the same since then, and knew he never would. Was it not possible that part of what he’d lost had been that quality that commanded attention from others? He was not literally invisible, like Lamont Cranston, but when people did see him he didn’t make much of an impression on their awareness. They took no notice of him and retained no memory of him.

As time passed, he came to take his invisibility for granted, to view it as a protective shield that would guarantee him invulnera-bility while he did his terrible work. He’d continued to take precautions, he’d made sure no one was looking when he hurled his jars of gasoline and when he wielded his razor, but he no longer expected to be captured, or even seen.

He hadn’t even thought about security cameras. Nor had he fully appreciated the nature of the manhunt that would be an immediate result of the three Chelsea bombings, or that they’d be tied almost immediately to the triple murder on Twenty-eighth Street. He should have assumed the latter, he’d deliberately constructed a pattern, choosing the three establishments because they, like the whorehouse, were cleaned every morning by the very same young man who’d discovered the body on Charles Street.