Small Town

Years ago he’d been inside Shevlin’s building, and knew the apartments there were all quite sizable. He guessed that Shevlin was widowed; if he’d been divorced, his wife would very likely have wound up with the apartment, and Shevlin would be sleeping on his boat, if indeed the courts didn’t take that away from him as well. And he was of an age to be a widower. He was, the Carpenter realized, about his own age, and it struck him—for the first time, oddly—that the two of them were not that far apart in appearance. If you stood them side by side they’d look entirely different, but they were about the same height, and similarly built, they both had gray hair, and to describe one was to describe the other.

It was, he thought, as if the man had been sent to him. Another widower, a man who lived just two blocks from the Carpenter’s old apartment. A man who’d lived the Carpenter’s dream, owning a boat and mooring it at Seventy-ninth Street. A man ready for sacrifice.

The Carpenter slept during the day, turning up at one of the multiplex movie houses in time for the first show of the day. He took the senior discount, bought popcorn, and went into one of the theaters. The clerks were all young people working for minimum wage, and they hardly even looked at their patrons. The Carpenter, his head lowered, his shoulders drooping with age, never got a second glance.

He’d go to a theater, breakfast on popcorn, and doze off, sleeping lightly, and always waking up when the feature presentation ended. When he was a boy you could go to the movies and sit there all day, you could watch a double feature three times over if you were so inclined, but now they had lengthy intermissions between showings and you had to leave when the picture was over.

But there were eight or ten or a dozen or more screens under a single roof, and what was to prevent you from going from one to another? It was illegal, your ticket only entitled you to a single performance of a single film, but on weekday afternoons none of the films played to as much as a quarter of capacity, and often he was one of a half dozen patrons making up the showing’s total audience. Why waste an attendant’s time to keep a lonely retiree from double-dipping?

The Carpenter got plenty of sleep. Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep anymore, he watched the movie.

A F T E R T H R E E D A Y S O F movies and as many nights of following his quarry, the Carpenter tailed Peter Shevlin from the Eighty-sixth Street IRT station to a Vietnamese restaurant on Broadway, where he ordered a take-out dinner. Instead of heading for his apartment, he continued downtown on Broadway. He crossed Broadway at Eighty-fourth Street, which a street sign designated Edgar Allan Poe Street, then turned right and walked west to Riverside Drive. Flights of steps led down to an underpass, and the Carpenter followed him through it to the strip of park edging the Hudson.

The Carpenter waited in the park while the man boarded his boat, waited while the boat sat at anchor long enough for Shevlin to eat his dinner, and remained where he was when Shevlin cast off and took the boat out onto the river.

He wished it would rain. Rain would bring Shevlin back sooner, and would clear the park of other pairs of eyes.

But the good weather held, and the Carpenter got to see the sun set behind the buildings on the Jersey shore. It was past eleven by the time Shevlin’s boat returned, and by then the Carpenter had picked his spot and was waiting. He’d reached into his navy-blue backpack—its load had increased in the past few days, with purchases he’d found it advisable to make—and he drew out a steel tire iron he’d picked up at an auto supply store on Eleventh Avenue. He’d have preferred a hammer, but suspected that hardware clerks were looking closely at older men who came in to buy hammers.

Shevlin passed without seeing him in the shadows. He stepped out, said, “Mr. Shevlin?”

The man turned at the sound of his name, and the Carpenter pointed to the ground and said, “You dropped something.” Shevlin lowered his head, tried to see what he might have dropped, and the Carpenter stepped forward quickly and struck him full force with the tire iron, catching him just behind the ear. Shevlin dropped like a felled ox, and the Carpenter hit him again at the back of the neck, then grabbed him and dragged him into the bushes.

He checked for a pulse and wasn’t surprised when he failed to detect one. Just to make sure, he clapped a hand over Shevlin’s mouth and pinched the man’s nostrils shut, and stayed like that for several minutes. If Shevlin hadn’t been dead from the blows, he was surely dead now.

The park was deserted, but it was still too early for what the Carpenter had to do. First he returned the tire iron to his backpack, pleased with the way it had performed. Then he wrapped Shevlin in a pair of black plastic lawn and leaf bags, tucking his legs into one, pulling the other down over his head. Anyone noticing him now would see a trash bag, or perhaps some plastic mulch for the shrubbery, rather than human remains.

When he was satisfied with his work, the Carpenter found a bench from which he would be able to tell if anyone discovered the body. No one came any closer to it than the joggers who breezed by every now and then, and they were far too intent on their efforts to notice some dark form twenty yards away.

At two-thirty in the morning, when twenty minutes had passed without a single human being coming into that part of the park, the Carpenter resumed his labors. He stripped off all of Shevlin’s clothing, filling one of the leaf bags with his jacket and trousers, shirt and socks and shoes and underwear. He removed his watch, but couldn’t get his wedding ring off his finger, and decided it didn’t matter.

He’d bought a boning knife and a saw at a restaurant supply house on the Bowery, and he used them to dismember Shevlin’s corpse, cutting the man into manageable-size portions. The work was distasteful, but the Carpenter was not overly surprised to discover that it didn’t bother him. It was a job, and he performed it as quickly and efficiently as possible, inserting each severed portion of the man into a plastic bag, securing the bag with tape, and setting it aside while he tackled the next part of the job.

Earlier, he’d located a Dumpster on Seventy-seventh between West End and Riverside Drive. He walked there carrying a taped-up plastic bag in each hand; each contained one of the man’s thighs. He placed the packages in the Dumpster, which was full of what looked to be the debris from the gut rehab of a brownstone.

He buried his packages under some broken bricks and loose plaster.

He put some of the smaller parcels in garbage cans, and walked all the way to Broadway to empty the bag of clothing into the Pembroke Thrift Shop’s 24-hour collection box. The final two parcels went into his backpack. A key from Shevlin’s key ring got him through the gate to the Boat Basin, and another admitted him to the boat’s sleeping quarters.

He took off his shoes, stretched out on the bunk. The cabin was tiny, but he found it cozy, and quite comfortable. He wouldn’t sleep, he’d had plenty of sleep earlier at the Lincoln Plaza multiplex, but it was pleasant to stretch out and feel the gentle rocking motion of the anchored boat.

There were things he would have to do. Shevlin’s hands and head would have to be disposed of properly. He didn’t care if someone found the other body parts, although it would be fine with him, and not all that unlikely, if they escaped detection and spent eternity in a landfill. But it didn’t matter, really, if the city discovered that one more of its residents had died. His sole interest lay in keeping them from knowing to whom the various body parts had once belonged.

Fingerprints and dental records made the hands and head considerably more identifiable than the rest of the man. He could knock out the teeth, toss them in the river. Weight the toothless skull and sink it somewhere. Slice the flesh from the palms and the tips of the fingers before disposing of the hands.

A call to Shevlin’s office would keep his absence from setting off any alarms. If someone did miss him and got the doorman to check his apartment, they’d find nothing suspicious within. He didn’t think anyone would think to check the boat, certainly not for a while.

And he only needed it for a while.

The motion of the boat was restful, even hypnotic. He dozed off and slept for a little while, then woke up and stayed where he was, enjoying the gentle rocking motion, enjoying the tight quarters, enjoying everything about his new home.

He felt wonderfully at peace.

twenty-five

THE CALLER, WHO’Dgiven his name as if she ought to recognize it, had a straightforward request. Would she, as a gallery owner in Chelsea, be willing to donate a piece of art to be auctioned for the benefit of Chelsea Remembers?

What, she wondered, was that? It couldn’t be the first thing that came to mind, which was a memoir by an ex-president’s daughter.

But what the hell was it?

She confessed to an unfamiliarity with the cause, and the caller explained that Chelsea Remembers was an organization formed to raise funds for a memorial to the neighborhood residents, male and female, gay and straight, who had lost their lives in the Carpenter’s savage firebombing spree.

She said, “A memorial? Like a statue?”

“There’s been no decision yet as to what form the memorial might take. A statue is certainly a possibility, but there have been suggestions ranging from special streetlights in front of the three sites to an annual release of doves.”

Ravens, she thought, would better suit the men who’d perished at Death Row. Ravens with just a touch of polish on their talons.

Just say yes, it’s a worthy cause, I’d love to help, she told herself.

But something made her say, “Maybe I’m missing something.

What’s the point, exactly?”

“The point?”

“I mean, do we have to throw up a monument every time some-

body steps in front of a bus? How much bad public sculpture does a city need? I mean—”

The voice turned to ice. “Miss Pomerance, our small community lost eighty-seven members in one utterly horrific hour. The lucky ones were burned to death at once. The others spent hours or days in agony and then died. Still others recovered, and after a few years of skin grafts some of them may actually look halfway human. The point, if you will, would seem to be implicit in the organization’s name. The point is that Chelsea remembers.”

“I—”

But he hadn’t finished. “We can only show our remembrance by doing something. Few of the victims had dependents, so aiding the families of the victims would indeed be pointless. Many were estranged from their families, if they had families at all. This neighborhood was their family, Miss Pomerance, and some memorial, some bad and surely unnecessary piece of public sculpture, would seem to some of us to be a good deal better than nothing.”

“I am terribly sorry,” she said. “Please tell me your name again.”

“It’s Harwood Zeller.”

Oh, God, she did know who he was. He owned several buildings on Ninth Avenue, and operated a restaurant in one of them and an antique shop in another.

“I have to apologize,” she told him. “I don’t know what got into me. Actually I do, I just got off the phone with my mother, and—”

“Say no more. When I get off the phone with my mother, I’m apt to bite people.”