The Essential Ellison Part 110

He looked down at the woman swathed in the rug, and he could not see her face. Small puffs of breath were all that told him she was alive. " Ma' am," he said, leaning forward. " Ma' am, please take this." He held out the twenty.

Annie did not move. She never spoke on the street.

" Ma' am, please, let me do this. Go somewhere warm for the night, won' t you... please?"

He stood for another minute, seeking to rouse her, at least for a go away that would free him, but the old woman did not move. Finally, he placed the twenty on what he presumed to be her lap, there in that shapeless ma.s.s, and allowed himself to be dragged away by his wife.

Three hours later, having completed a lovely dinner, and having decided it would be romantic to walk back to the Helmsley through the six inches of snow that had fallen, they pa.s.sed the Post Office and saw the old woman had not moved. Nor had she taken the twenty dollars. He could not bring himself to look beneath the wrappings to see if she had frozen to death, and he had no intention of taking back the money. They walked on.

In her warm place, Annie held Alan close up under her chin, stroking him and feeling his tiny black fingers warm at her throat and cheeks. It's all right, baby, it's all right. We' re safe. Shhh, my baby. No one can hurt you.

Psychologists specializing in ethology know of the soft monkey experiment. A mother orangutan, whose baby has died, given a plush toy doll, will nurture it as if it were alive, as if it were her own. Nurture and protect and savage any creature that menaces the surrogate. Given a wife image, or a ceramic doll, the mother will ignore it. She must have the soft monkey. It sustains her.

Mefisto In Onyx Once. I only went to bed with her once. Friends for eleven years- before and since- but it was just one of those things, just one of those crazy flings: the two of us alone on a New Year' s Eve, watching rented Marx Brothers videos so we wouldn' t have to go out with a bunch of idiots and make noise and pretend we were having a good time when all we' d be doing was getting drunk, whooping like morons, vomiting on slow-moving strangers, and spending more money than we had to waste. And we drank a little too much cheap champagne; and we fell off the sofa laughing at Harpo a few times too many; and we wound up on the floor at the same time; and next thing we knew we had our faces plastered together, and my hand up her skirt, and her hand down in my pants...

But it was just the once, fer chrissakes! Talk about imposing on a cheap s.e.xual liaison! She knew I went mixing in other peoples' minds only when I absolutely had no other way to make a buck. Or I forgot myself and did it in a moment of human weakness.

It was always foul.

Slip into the thoughts of the best person who ever lived, even Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, just to pick an absolutely terrific person you' d think had a mind so clean you could eat off it (to paraphrase my mother), and when you come out-take my word for it- you' d want to take a long, intense shower in Lysol.

Trust me on this: I go into somebody' s landscape when there' s nothing else I can do, no other possible solution...or I forget and do it in a moment of human weakness. Such as, say, the IRS holds my feet to the fire; or I' m about to get myself mugged and robbed and maybe murdered; or I need to find out if some specific she that I' m dating has been using somebody else' s dirty needle or has been sleeping around without she' s taking some extra-heavy-duty AIDS precautions; or a co-worker' s got it in his head to set me up so I make a mistake and look bad to the boss and I find myself in the unemployment line again; or...

I' m a wreck for weeks after.

Go jaunting through a landscape trying to pick up a little insider arbitrage bric-a-brac, and come away no better heeled, but all muddy with the guy' s infidelities, and I can' t look a decent woman in the eye for days. Get told by a motel desk clerk that they' re all full up and he' s sorry as h.e.l.l but I' ll just have to drive on for about another thirty miles to find the next vacancy, jaunt into his landscape and find him lit up with neon signs that got a lot of the word n.i.g.g.e.rin them, and I wind up hitting the sonofab.i.t.c.h so hard his grandmother has a b.l.o.o.d.y nose, and usually have to hide out for three or four weeks after. Just about to miss a bus, jaunt into the head of the driver to find his name so I can yell for him to hold it a minute Tom or George or Willie, and I get smacked in the mind with all the garlic he' s been eating for the past month because his doctor told him it was good for his system, and I start to dry-heave, and I wrench out of the landscape, and not only have I missed the bus, but I' m so sick to my stomach I have to sit down on the filthy curb to get my gorge submerged. Jaunt into a potential employer, to see if he' s trying to lowball me, and I learn he' s part of a ma.s.sive cover-up of industrial malfeasance that' s caused hundreds of people to die when this or that cheaply-made grommet or tappet or gimbal mounting underperforms and fails, sending the poor souls falling thousands of feet to shrieking destruction. Then just try to accept the job, even if you haven' t paid your rent in a month. No way.

Absolutely: I listen in on the landscape only when my feet are being fried; when the shadow stalking me turns down alley after alley tracking me relentlessly; when the drywall guy I' ve hired to repair the damage done by my leaky shower presents me with a dopey smile and a bill three hundred and sixty bucks higher than the estimate. Or in a moment of human weakness.

But I' m a wreck for weeks after. For weeks.

Because you can' t, You simply can' t, you absolutely cannot know what people are truly and really like till you jaunt their landscape. If Aquinas had had my ability, he' d have very quickly gone off to be a hermit, only occasionally visiting the mind of a sheep or a hedgehog. In a moment of human weakness.

That' s why in my whole life- and, as best I can remember back, I' ve been doing it since I was five or six years old, maybe even younger- there have only been eleven, maybe twelve people, of all those who know that I can " read minds," that I' ve permitted myself to get close to. Three of them never used it against me, or tried to exploit me, or tried to kill me when I wasn' t looking. Two of those three were my mother and father, a pair of sweet old black folks who' d adopted me, a late-in-life baby, and were now dead (but probably still worried about me, even on the Other Side), and whom I missed very very much, particularly in moments like this. The other eight, nine were either so turned off by the knowledge that they made sure I never came within a mile of them- one moved to another entire country just to be on the safe side, although her thoughts were a h.e.l.luva lot more boring and innocent than she thought they were- or they tried to brain me with something heavy when I was distracted- I still have a shoulder separation that kills me for two days before it rains- or they tried to use me to make a buck for them. Not having the common sense to figure it out, that if I was capable of using the ability to make vast sums of money, why the h.e.l.l was I living hand-to-mouth like some overaged grad student who was afraid to desert the university and go become an adult?

Now they was some dumb-a.s.s muthuhfugguhs.

Of the three who never used it against me- my mom and dad- the last was Allison Roche. Who sat on the stool next to me, in the middle of May, in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, in the middle of Clanton, Alabama, squeezing ketchup onto her All-American Burger, imposing on the memory of that one d.a.m.ned New Year' s Eve s.e.xual interlude, with Harpo and his sibs; the two of us all alone except for the fry-cook; and she waited for my reply.

" I' d sooner have a skunk spray my pants leg," I replied.

She pulled a napkin from the chrome dispenser and swabbed up the red that had overshot the sesame-seed bun and redecorated the Formica countertop. She looked at me from under thick, l.u.s.trous eyelashes; a look of impatience and violet eyes that must have been a killer when she unbottled it at some truculent witness for the defense. Allison Roche was a Chief Deputy District Attorney in and for Jefferson County, with her office in Birmingham. Alabama. Where near we sat, in Clanton, having a secret meeting, having All-American Burgers; three years after having had quite a bit of champagne, 1930s black-and-white video rental comedy, and black-and-white s.e.x. One extremely stupid New Year' s Eve.

Friends for eleven years. And once, just once; as a prime example of what happens in a moment of human weakness. Which is not to say that it wasn' t terrific, because it was; absolutely terrific; but we never did it again; and we never brought it up again after the next morning when we opened our eyes and looked at each other the way you look at an exploding can of sardines, and both of us said Oh Jeeezus at the same time. Never brought it up again until this memorable afternoon at the greasy spoon where I' d joined Ally, driving up from Montgomery to meet her halfway, after her peculiar telephone invitation.

Can' t say the fry-cook, Mr. All-American, was particularly happy at the pigmentation arrangement at his counter. But I stayed out of his head and let him think what he wanted. Times change on the outside, but the inner landscape remains polluted.

" All I' m asking you to do is go have a chat with him," she said. She gave me that look. I have a hard time with that look. It isn' t entirely honest, neither is it entirely disingenuous. It plays on my remembrance of that one night we spent in bed. And is just dishonest enough to play on the part of that night we spent on the floor, on the sofa, on the coffee counter between the dining room and the kitchenette, in the bathtub, and about nineteen minutes crammed among her endless pairs of shoes in a walk-in clothes closet that smelled strongly of cedar and virginity. She gave me that look, and wasted no part of the memory.

" I don' t want to go have a chat with him. Apart from he' s a piece of human s.h.i.+t, and I have better things to do with my time than to go on down to Atmore and take a jaunt through this crazy sonofab.i.t.c.h' s diseased mind, may I remind you that of the hundred and sixty, seventy men who have died in that electric chair, including the original 'Yellow Mama' they sc.r.a.pped in 1990, about a hundred and thirty of them were gentlemen of color, and I do not mean you to picture any color of a shade much lighter than that cuppa coffee you got sit tin' by your left hand right this minute, which is to say that I, being an inordinately well-educated African-American who values the full measure of living negritude in his body, am not crazy enough to want to visit a racist 'co-rectional center' like Holman Prison, thank you very much."

" Are you finished?" she asked, wiping her mouth.

" Yeah. I' m finished. Case closed. Find somebody else."

She didn' t like that. " There isn' t anybody else."

" There has to be. Somewhere. Go check the research files at Duke University. Call the Fortean Society. Mensa. Jeopardy. Some 900 number astrology psychic hotline. Ain' t there some semi-senile Senator with a fulltime paid a.s.sistant who' s been trying to get legislation through one of the statehouses for the last five years to fund this kind of bulls.h.i.+t research? What about the Russians...now that the Evil Empire' s fallen, you ought to be able to get some word about their success with Kirlian auras or whatever those a.s.sholes were working at. Or you could- "

She screamed at the top of her lungs. " Stop it, Rudy!"

The fry-cook dropped the spatula he' d been using to sc.r.a.pe off the grill. He picked it up, looking at us, and his face (I didn' t read his mind) said If that white b.i.t.c.h makes one more noise I' m callin' the cops.

I gave him a look he didn' t want, and he went back to his ch.o.r.es, getting ready for the after-work crowd. But the stretch of his back and angle of his head told me he wasn' t going to let this pa.s.s.

I leaned in toward her, got as serious as I could, and just this quietly, just this softly, I said, " Ally, good pal, listen to me. You' ve been one of the few friends I could count on, for a long time now. We have history between us, and you' ve never, not once, made me feel like a freak. So okay, I trust you. I trust you with something about me that causes immeasurable G.o.ddam pain. A thing about me that could get me killed. You' ve never betrayed me, and you' ve never tried to use me.

" Till now. This is the first time. And you' ve got to admit that it' s not even as rational as you maybe saying to me that you' ve gambled away every cent you' ve got and you owe the mob a million bucks and would I mind taking a trip to Vegas or Atlantic City and taking a jaunt into the minds of some highpocket poker players so I could win you enough to keep the goons from shooting you. Even that, as creepy as it would be if you said it to me, even that would be easier to understand than this!"

She looked forlorn. " There isn' t anybody else, Rudy. Please."

" What the h.e.l.l is this all about? Come on, tell me. You' re hiding something, or holding something back, or lying about- "

" I' m not lying!" For the second time she was suddenly, totally, extremely p.i.s.sed at me. Her voice spattered off the white tile walls. The fry-cook spun around at the sound, took a step toward us, and I jaunted into his landscape, smoothed down the rippled Astro-Turf, drained away the storm clouds, and suggested in there that he go take a cigarette break out back. Fortunately, there were no other patrons at the elegant All-American Burger that late in the afternoon, and he went.

" Calm fer chrissakes down, will you?" I said.

She had squeezed the paper napkin into a ball.

She was lying, hiding, holding something back. Didn' t have to be a telepath to figure that out. I waited, looking at her with a slow, careful distrust, and finally she sighed, and I thought, Here it comes.

" Are you reading my mind?" she asked.

" Don' t insult me. We know each other too long."

She looked chagrined. The violet of her eyes deepened. " Sorry."

But she didn' t go on. I wasn' t going to be outflanked. I waited.

After a while she said, softly, very softly, " I think I' m in love with him. I know I believe him when he says he' s innocent."

I never expected that. I couldn' t even reply.

It was unbelievable. Unf.u.c.kingbelievable. She was the Chief Deputy D.A. who had prosecuted Henry Lake Spanning for murder. Not just one murder, one random slaying, a heat of the moment Sat.u.r.day night killing regretted deeply on Sunday morning but punishable by electrocution in the Sovereign State of Alabama nonetheless, but a string of the vilest, most sickening serial slaughters in Alabama history, in the history of the Glorious South, in the history of the United States. Maybe even in the history of the entire wretched human universe that went wading hip-deep in the wasted spilled blood of innocent men, women and children.

Henry Lake Spanning was a monster, an ambulatory disease, a killing machine without conscience or any discernible resemblance to a thing we might call decently human. Henry Lake Spanning had butchered his way across a half-dozen states; and they had caught up to him in Huntsville, in a garbage dumpster behind a supermarket, doing something so vile and inhuman to what was left of a sixty-five-year-old cleaning woman that not even the tabloids would get more explicit than unspeakable; and somehow he got away from the cops; and somehow he evaded their dragnet; and somehow he found out where the police lieutenant in charge of the manhunt lived; and somehow he slipped into that neighborhood when the lieutenant was out creating roadblocks- and he gutted the man' s wife and two kids. Also the family cat. And then he killed a couple of more times in Birmingham and Decatur, and by then had gone so completely out of his mind that they got him again, and the second time they hung onto him, and they brought him to trial. And Ally had prosecuted this bottom-feeding monstrosity.

And oh, what a circus it had been. Though he' d been caught, the second time, and this time for keeps, in Jefferson County, scene of three of his most sickening jobs, he' d murdered (with such a disgustingly similar m.o. that it was obvious he was the perp) in twenty-two of the sixty-seven counties; and every last one of them wanted him to stand trial in that venue. Then there were the other five states in which he had butchered, to a total body-count of fifty-six. Each of them wanted him extradited.

So, here' s how smart and quick and smooth an attorney Ally is: she somehow managed to coze up to the Attorney General, and somehow managed to unleash those violet eyes on him, and somehow managed to get and keep his ear long enough to con him into setting a legal precedent. Attorney General of the State of Alabama allowed Allison Roche to consolidate, to secure a multiple bill of indictment that forced Spanning to stand trial on all twenty-nine Alabama murder counts at once. She meticulously doc.u.mented to the state' s highest courts that Henry Lake Spanning presented such a clear and present danger to society that the prosecution was willing to take a chance (big chance!) of trying in a winner-take-all consolidation of venues. Then she managed to smooth the feathers of all those other vote-hungry prosecuters in those twenty-one other counties, and she put on a case that dazzled everyone, including Spanning' s defense attorney, who had screamed about the legality of the multiple bill from the moment she' d suggested it.

And she won a fast jury verdict on all twenty-nine counts. Then she got really fancy in the penalty phase after the jury verdict, and proved up the other twenty-seven murders with their flagrantly identical trademarks, from those other five states, and there was nothing left but to sentence Spanning- essentially for all fifty-six- to the replacement for the " Yellow Mama."

Even as pols and power brokers throughout the state were murmuring Ally' s name for higher office, Spanning was slated to sit in that new electric chair in Holman Prison, built by the Fred A. Leuchter a.s.sociates of Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts, that delivers 2,640 volts of pure sparklin' death in 1/240th of a second, six times faster than the 1/40th of a second that it takes for the brain to sense it, which is- if you ask me- much too humane an exit line, more than three times the 700 volt jolt lethal dose that destroys a brain, for a pusbag like Henry Lake Spanning.

But if we were lucky- and the scheduled day of departure was very nearly upon us- if we were lucky, if there was a G.o.d and Justice and Natural Order and all that good stuff, then Henry Lake Spanning, this foulness, this corruption, this thing that lived only to ruin...would end up as a pile of f.u.c.king ashes somebody might use to sprinkle over a flower garden, thereby providing this ghoul with his single opportunity to be of some use to the human race.

That was the guy that my pal Allison Roche wanted me to go and " chat" with, down to Holman Prison, in Atmore, Alabama. There, sitting on Death Row, waiting to get his demented head tonsured, his pants legs slit, his tongue fried black as the inside of a sheep' s belly...down there at Holman my pal Allison wanted me to go " chat" with one of the most awful creatures made for killing this side of a hammerhead shark, which creature had an infinitely greater measure of human decency than Henry Lake Spanning had ever demonstrated. Go chit-chat, and enter his landscape, and read his mind, Mr. Telepath, and use the marvelous mythic power of extra-sensory perception: this nifty swell ability that has made me a b.u.m all my life, well, not exactly a b.u.m: I do have a decent apartment, and I do earn a decent, if sporadic, living; and I try to follow Nelson Algren' s warning never to get involved with a woman whose troubles are bigger than my own; and sometimes I even have a car of my own, even though at that moment such was not the case, the Camaro having been repo' d, and not by Harry Dean Stanton or Emilio Estevez, lemme tell you; but a b.u.m in the sense of- how does Ally put it?- oh yeah- I don' t " realize my full and forceful potential" - a b.u.m in the sense that I can' t hold a job, and I get rotten breaks, and all of this despite a Rhodes scholarly education so far above what a poor nigrah-lad such as myself could expect that even Rhodes hisownself would' ve been chest-out proud as h.e.l.l of me. A b.u.m, mostly, despite an outstanding Rhodes scholar education and a pair of kind, smart, loving parents- even for foster-parents- s.h.i.+t, especially for being foster-parents- who died knowing the certain sadness that their only child would spend his life as a wandering freak unable to make a comfortable living or consummate a normal marriage or raise children without the fear of pa.s.sing on this special personal horror...this astonis.h.i.+ng ability fabled in song and story that I possess...that no one else seems to possess, though I know there must have been others, somewhere, sometime, somehow! Go, Mr. Wonder of Wonders, s.h.i.+ning black Cagliostro of the modern world, go with this super nifty swell ability that gullible idiots and flying saucer a.s.s holes have been trying to prove exists for at least fifty years, that no one has been able to isolate the way I, me, the only one has been isolated, let me tell you about isolation, my brothers; and, here I was, here was I, Rudy Pairis...just a guy, making a buck every now and then with nifty swell impossible ESP, resident of thirteen states and twice that many cities so tar in his mere thirty years of landscape jaunting life, here was I, Rudy Pairis, Mr. I-Can-Read-Your-Mind, being asked to go and walk through the mind of a killer who scared half the people in the world. Being asked by the only living person, probably, to whom I could not say no. And, oh, take me at my word here: I wanted to say no. Was, in fact, saying no at every breath. What' s that? Will I do it? Sure, yeah sure, I' ll go on down to Holman and jaunt through this sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d' s mind landscape. Sure I will. You got two chances: slim, and none.

All of this was going on in the s.p.a.ce of one greasy double cheeseburger and two cups of coffee.

The worst part of it was that Ally had somehow gotten involved with him. Ally! Not some bimbo b.i.t.c.h...but Ally. I couldn' t believe it.

Not that it was unusual for women to become mixed up with guys in the joint, to fall under their " magic spell," and to start corresponding with them, visiting them, taking them candy and cigarettes, having conjugal visits, playing mule for them and smuggling in dope where the tampon never s.h.i.+ne, writing them letters that got steadily more exotic, steadily more intimate, steamier and increasingly dependent emotionally. It wasn' t that big a deal; there exist entire psychiatric treatises on the phenomenon; right alongside the papers about women who go stud-crazy for cops. No big deal indeed: hundreds of women every year find themselves writing to these guys, visiting these guys, building dream castles with these guys, f.u.c.king these guys, pretending that even the worst of these guys, rapists and woman-beaters and child molesters, repeat pedophiles of the lowest pustule sort, and murderers and stick-up punks who crush old ladies' skulls for food stamps, and terrorists and bunco bafons...that one sunny might-be, gonna-happen pink cloud day these demented creeps will emerge from behind the walls, get back in the wind, become upstanding nine-to-five Brooks Bros. Galahads. Every year hundreds of women marry these guys, finding themselves in a hot second snookered by the wily, duplicitous, motherf.u.c.kih' lying greaseball addictive behavior of guys who had spent their sporadic years, their intermittent freedom on the outside, doing just that: roping people in, ripping people off, bleeding people dry, conning them into being tools, taking them for their every last cent, their happy home, their sanity, their ability to trust or love ever again.

But this wasn' t some poor illiterate naive woman-child. This was Ally. She had d.a.m.ned near pulled off a legal impossibility, come that close to Bizarro Jurisprudence by putting the Attorneys General of five other states in a maybe frame of mind where she' d have been able to consolidate a multiple bill of indictment across state lines! Never been done; and now, probably, never ever would be. But she could have possibly pulled off such a thing. Unless you' re a stone court-bird, you can' t know what a mountaintop that is!

So, now, here' s Ally, saying this s.h.i.+t to me. Ally, my best pal, stood up for me a hundred times; not some dip, but the steely-eyed Sheriff of Suicide Gulch, the over-forty, past the age of innocence, no-nonsense woman who had seen it all and come away tough but not cynical, hard but not mean.

" I think I' m in love with him." She had said.

"I know I believe him when he says he' s innocent." She had said.

I looked at her. No time had pa.s.sed. It was still the moment the universe decided to lie down and die. And I said, " So if you' re certain this paragon of the virtues isn' t responsible for fifty-six murders- that we know about- and who the h.e.l.l knows how many more we don' t know about, since he' s apparently been at it since he was twelve years old" '- remember the couple of nights we sat up and you told me all this s.h.i.+t about him, and you said it with your skin crawling, remember?- then if you' re so d.a.m.ned positive the guy you spent eleven weeks in court sending to the chair is innocent of butchering half the population of the planet- then why do you need me to go to Holman, drive all the way to Atmore, just to take a jaunt in this sweet peach of a guy?

" Doesn' t your 'woman' s intuition' tell you he' s squeaky clean? Don' t 'true love' walk yo' sweet young a.s.s down the primrose path with sufficient surefootedness?"

" Don' t be a smarta.s.s!" she said.

" Say again?" I replied, with disf.u.c.kingbelief.

" I said: don' t be such a high-verbal G.o.dd.a.m.ned smart aleck!"

Now I was steamed. " No, I shouldn' t be a smarta.s.s: I should be your pony, your show dog, your little trick bag mind-reader freak! Take a drive over to Holman, Pairis; go right on into Rednecks from h.e.l.l; sit your a.s.s down on Death Row with the rest of the n.i.g.g.e.rs and have a chat with the one white boy who' s been in a cell up there for the past three years or so; sit down nicely with the king of the f.u.c.king vampires, and slide inside his garbage dump of a brain- and what a joy that' s gonna be, I can' t believe you' d ask me to do this- and read whatever piece of boiled s.h.i.+t in there he calls a brain, and see if he' s jerking you around. That' s what I ought to do, am I correct? Instead of being a smarta.s.s. Have I got it right? Do I properly pierce your meaning, pal?"

She stood up. She didn' t even say Screw you, Pairis!

She just slapped me as hard as she could.

She hit me a good one straight across the mouth.

I felt my upper teeth bite my lower lip. I tasted the blood. My head rang like a church bell. I thought I' d falloff the G.o.ddam stool.

When I could focus, she was just standing there, looking ashamed of herself, and disappointed, and mad as h.e.l.l, and worried that she' d brained me. All of that, all at the same time. Plus, she looked as if I' d broken her choo-choo train.

" Okay," I said wearily, and ended the word with a sigh that reached all the way back into my hip pocket. " Okay, calm down. I' ll see him. I' ll do it. Take it easy."

She didn' t sit down. " Did I hurt you?"

" No, of course not," I said, unable to form the smile I was trying to put on my face. " How could you possibly hurt someone by knocking his brains into his lap?"

She stood over me as I clung precariously to the counter, turned halfway around on the stool by the blow. Stood over me, the balled-up paper napkin in her fist, a look on her face that said she was n.o.body' s fool, that we' d known each other a long time, that she hadn' t asked this kind of favor before, that if we were buddies and I loved her, that I would see she was in deep pain, that she was conflicted, that she needed to know, really needed to know without a doubt, and in the name of G.o.d- in which she believed, though I didn' t, but either way what the h.e.l.l- that I do this thing for her, that I just do it and not give her any more c.r.a.p about it.

So I shrugged, and spread my hands like a man with no place to go, and I said, " How' d you get into this?"

She told me the first fifteen minutes of her tragic, heartwarming, never-to-be-ridiculed story still standing. After fifteen minutes I said, " Fer chrissakes, Ally, at least sit down! You look like a d.a.m.ned fool standing there with a greasy napkin in your mitt."

A couple of teen-agers had come in. The four-star chef had finished his cigarette out back and was rea.s.suringly in place, walking the duckboards and dis.h.i.+ng up All-American arterial cloggage.

She picked up her elegant attache case and without a word, with only a nod that said let' s get as far from them as we can, she and I moved to a double against the window to resume our discussion of the varieties of social suicide available to an unwary and foolhardy gentleman of the colored persuasion if he allowed himself to be swayed by a cagey and cogent, clever and concupiscent female of another color entirely.

See, what it is, is this: Look at that attache case. You want to know what kind of an Ally this Allison Roche is? Pay heed, now.

In New York, when some wanhabe junior ad exec has smooched enough b.u.t.t to get tossed a bone account, and he wants to walk his colors, has a need to signify, has got to demonstrate to everyone that he' s got the juice, first thing he does, he hies his a.s.s downtown to Barney' s, West 17th and Seventh, buys hisself a Burberry, loops the belt casually behind, leaving the coat open to suhwing, and he circ.u.mnavigates the office.

In Dallas, when the wife of the CEO has those six or eight upper-management husbands and wives over for an intime, faux-casual dinner, sans placecards, sans entree fork, sans ceremonie, and we' re talking the kind of woman who flies Virgin Air instead of the Concorde, she' s so in charge she don' t got to use the Orrefors, she can put out the Kosta Boda and say give a f.u.c.k.

What it is, kind of person so in charge, so easy with they own self, they don' t have to laugh at your poor dumb strut tin' Armani suit, or your bedroom done in Laura Ashley, or that you got a gig writing articles for TV Guide. You see what I' m sayin' here? The sort of person Ally Roche is, you take a look at that attache case, and it' ll tell you everything you need to know about how strong she is, because it' s an Atlas. Not a Hartmann. Understand: she could afford a Hartmann, that gorgeous imported Canadian belting leather, 'top of the line, somewhere around nine hundred and fifty bucks maybe, equivalent of Orrefors, a Burberry, breast of guinea hen and Mouton Rothschild 1492 or 1066 or whatever year is the most expensive, drive a Rolls instead of a Bentley and the only difference is the grille...but she doesn't need to signify, doesn' t need to suhwing, so she gets herself this Atlas. Not some dumb chickens. .h.i.t Louis Vuitton or Mark Cross all the divorcee real estate ladies carry, but an Atlas. Irish hand leather. Custom tanned cowhide. Hand tanned in Ireland by out of work IRA bombers. Very cla.s.sy. Just a state understated. See that attache case? That tell you why I said I' d do it?

She picked it up from where she' d stashed it, right up against the counter wall by her feet, and we went to the double over by the window, away from the chef and the teen-agers, and she stared at me till she was sure I was in a right frame of mind, and she picked up where she' d left off.

The next twenty-three minutes by the big greasy clock on the wall she related from a sitting position. Actually, a series of sitting positions. She kept s.h.i.+fting in her chair like someone who didn' t appreciate the view of the world from that window, someone hoping for a sweeter horizon. The story started with a gang-rape at the age of thirteen, and moved right along: two broken foster-home families, a little casual fondling by surrogate poppas, intense studying for perfect school grades as a subst.i.tute for happiness, working her way through John Jay College of Law, a truncated attempt at wedded bliss in her late twenties, and the long miserable road of legal success that had brought her to Alabama. There could have been worse places.

I' d known Ally for a long time, and we' d spent totals of weeks and months in each other' s company. Not to mention the New Year' s Eve of the Marx Brothers. But I hadn' t heard much of this. Not much at all.

Funny how that goes. Eleven years. You' d think I' d' ve guessed or suspected or something. What the h.e.l.l makes us think we' re friends with anybody, when we don' t know the first thing about them, not really?

What are we, walking around in a dream? That is to say: what the f.u.c.k are we thinking!?!

And there might never have been a reason to hear any of it, all this Ally that was the real Ally, but now she was asking me to go somewhere I didn' t want to go, to do something that scared the s.h.i.+t out of me; and she wanted me to be as fully informed as possible.

It dawned on me that those same eleven years between us hadn' t really given her a full, laser-clean insight into the why and wherefore of Rudy Pairis, either. I hated myself for it. The concealing, the holding-back, the giving up only fragments, the evil misuse of charm when honesty would have hurt. I was facile, and a very quick study; and I had buried all the equivalents to Ally' s pains and travails. I could' ve matched her, in spades; or blacks, or just plain nigras. But I remained frightened of losing her friends.h.i.+p. I' ve never been able to believe in the myth of unqualified friends.h.i.+p. Too much like standing hip-high in a fast-running, freezing river. Standing on slippery stones.

Her story came forward to the point at which she had prosecuted Spanning; had ama.s.sed and winnowed and categorized the evidence so thoroughly, so deliberately, so flawlessly; had orchestrated the case so brilliantly; that the jury had come in with guilty on all twenty-nine, soon- in the penalty phase- fifty-six. Murder in the first. Premeditated murder in the first. Premeditated murder with special ugly circ.u.mstances in the first. On each and every of the twenty-nine. Less than an hour it took them. There wasn' t even time for a lunch break. Fifty-one minutes it took them to come back with the verdict guilty on all charges. Less than a minute per killing. Ally had done that.

His attorney had argued that no direct link had been established between the fifty-sixth killing (actually, only his 29th in Alabama) and Henry Lake Spanning. No, they had not caught him down on his knees eviscerating the shredded body of his final victim- ten-year-old Gunilla Ascher, a parochial school girl who had missed her bus and been picked up by Spanning just about a mile from her home in Decatur- no, not down on his knees with the can opener still in his sticky red hands, but the m.o. was the same, and he was there in Decatur, on the run from what he had done in Huntsville, what they had caught him doing in Huntsville, in that dumpster, to that old woman. So they couldn' t place him with his smooth, slim hands inside dead Gunilla Ascher' s still-steaming body. So what? They could not have been surer he was the serial killer, the monster, the ravaging nightmare whose methods were so vile the newspapers hadn' t even tried to cobble up some smart-aleck name for him like The Strangler or The Backyard Butcher. The jury had come back in fifty-one minutes, looking sick, looking as if they' d try and try to get everything they' d seen and heard out of their minds, but knew they never would, and wis.h.i.+ng to G.o.d they could' ve managed to get out of their civic duty on this one.

They came shuffling back in and told the numbed court: hey, put this slimy excuse for a maggot in the chair and cook his a.s.s till he' s fit only to be served for breakfast on cinnamon toast. This was the guy my friend Ally told me she had fallen in love with. The guy she now believed to be innocent.

This was seriously crazy stuff.

" So how did you get, er, uh, how did you...?"

" How did I fall in love with him?"

" Yeah. That."