Killer in town

There was a killer who lived in town. He had a little house across the street from the rec center. He just happened to live there, he didn't use it to lure kids into his house from the rec center or anything like that. He killed women.

During Little League games we'd sit on the bench and try to look into his windows from across the street. It was never dark enough outside that you could see anything more than shapes moving across the window like clouds. In the spring and the fall we'd ride our bikes down there and dare each other to knock on the door. He'd come out into the yard and talk to us, he was a pretty nice guy.

"How's school going?" he'd ask us. We'd tell him, ok, ask him had he killed anyone lately. He'd wink and crack a joke and we'd ride off.

"I don't want this killer in our gas station!" Everyone went quiet. We were holding a bunch of four-liter bottles of generic-brand soda. The killer feebly held out his 20 to the cashier; he didn't look at the woman. "Is anybody listening to me?"

When we got older we invited the killer to play basketball with us. He was pretty good. Bigger than all but one of us, but he didn't use his size against us. He mostly stuck with mid-range jumpers, and he was good at them, and he was a good passer too. One time he let us into his house. Ostensibly we were thirsty but we really just wanted to see the inside of a killer's house. The furniture was very functional. Bookshelves, odds and ends. Nothing on the wall. He told us to wait in the living room. When we went into the kitchen we saw the floor was covered with a blue tarp and some gray dead legs were stretched out across it. Jay got scared and started to cry a little and we made fun of him the rest of the summer for it.

The killer came into the living room with our sodas. Was it something I said? he mugged. We laughed, even Jay. He looked behind him, did a cartoon "oh no!" reaction at the legs and grabbed at his collar and pulled at it and said "oh jeez" and we laughed. Mike asked to see the bodies, but he chuckled and said no, that's where he worked, and it stressed him out to have other people in there, he was a bit of a "privacy freak" about that.

The killer gets the ball. He looks to pass, fakes a lob at the rim, but his target is covered. He pulls the ball in to his chest for just a second. His defender makes a half-hearted stab at it, but the killer is already in the air, one arm high above his head, one knee at his waist, a soaring hook shot, and the ball leaves his hand like he's just letting it go and it moves through the air slower and gentler than a body bound by such physical laws as gravity and wind resistance should.

"You should be ashamed of yourself." The woman picks up the ball. She shakes her finger at the killer; it is as if none of the rest of us are there. "You shouldn't be out like this, a killer like you." The killer stands there, looking ashamed. She throws the ball over the fence; she meant to throw it in the pond, but it lands in the sand and only just rolls into the water. It is not the killer's ball; it is Jon's ball.

We invited the killer to our graduation. We did it as kind of a joke, but we were all disappointed when he didn't come. We asked him why not, and he said it wouldn't have been right. He looked just as disappointed as we did.

The night we graduated, actually, he was killing someone, a woman he'd picked up at the bar at the Commons where he picked up most of the women he killed. He didn't tell us that; we read about it in the paper. We were pretty upset with him after that. We decided to get him back for missing our graduation. One night we went over to his house with a bunch of cans of paint in ugly colors -- purple, teal, ugly bright yellows and greens. We opened them up and just splashed them on the front of his house, and when we ran out of room on his house we poured the rest out on his car and lawn and driveway. We tried to be quiet about it, but we were 17 and 18 and pumped up on adrenaline and were not, I'm sure. At one point we looked up and he was in the window looking down at us and we ran like hell to Steve's and Tony's cars which we'd parked down the street, but he didn't do anything. We probably shouted 03 at him, which was our graduation year, or one of us did, and another one said ssh and the rest laughed. His house was painted like that for a month or two, and then he spent the summer fixing it up, repainting the house, getting new windows, ripping up and replacing the grass. We watched the whole thing happen from the basketball courts at the rec center across the street.

"Who are you to judge me?" The woman quivers. "Because I'm a killer? I pay my taxes!" He holds a hammer in his hand, but this is a normal thing; he is at the hardware store.

One day they came and arrested the killer. First they put police tape around his house, then the media arrived, then the police talked to them for a while after they'd finished putting up the tape, then they knocked on the door and let themselves in and arrested him. He wore a bathrobe and pajamas and slippers even though it was the middle of the day. He kept his head down walking over to the car like he was finally embarrassed.

We asked the police why they were arresting the killer. They told us, because he'd killed a lot of women. Yeah, we said, but why now. The police said they'd been busy. We said, you've just been hanging out at that stop sign by Village Lane pulling people over for making rolling stops. They said, yeah they were busy there.

Greg visited the killer in jail. He was always the one who'd felt closest to the killer. He brought him a stick of dynamite he'd smuggled in inside a chorizo. The killer swallowed the dynamite and said he hoped he'd explode. Dynamite doesn't work that way, though.

"Do you know who killed her?"

"Yes."

"Is the killer in the courtroom today?"

"Yes."

(pointing)
(gasping)

"Let the record show he's pointing at the killer."

In the end the killer's lawyer got him off. He argued that the killer had no motive for killing all those women he'd never met until he picked them up at the bar and put something in their drinks (often) and brought them back to his house and strangled them (in all but one case, in which a woman fought him too hard and he stabbed her). The most likely suspect, he said, was the one who profited the most from the killings, and that person was himself, the defense lawyer, who after all now was handling a lucrative court case as a result of the killed women. The killer was freed and the defense lawyer was questioned but never charged due to a lack of physical evidence.

Privately, the killer said he was very sorry for killing all those women. He moved away and tried to open up a hotel, but he just ended up killing some more women. That's just all he knew how to do! It was sad! People don't get a good enough education and this is what happens to them. People aren't told that they have certain gifts to give to the world, they aren't encouraged by their parents or teachers, they aren't loved by their lovers, they don't go to therapy and learn to sublimate their anger and sexual frustration into painting drawing working driving meditating exercise and this is what happens to them. He was dropped on his head, that was the problem. He was an unhappy child, or he was happy enough, but then he shit himself in school and he was never the same after that. Shit himself right in front of everybody, right on the playground, can you imagine? What that does to a person! When he was 14 years old he burned his genitals in an accident in chemistry class, can you imagine what that does to a person? Of course then there was the racism, he always did hate racism. He hated things; he never learned how to love. He loved immoderately, or not at all. A lot of dead women.