Lunar Park

I immediately reached into my pocket and popped a Xanax.

Kimball waited politely.

After a moment of throat clearing, I eked out: “I’m ready.”

Kimball now had his game face on. “Recently—very recently—my colleagues and I became convinced that a theory about a case Midland County has been investigating for the last four months was in fact no longer a theory and—”

I flashed on something and interrupted him. “Wait, this isn’t about the missing children, is it?”

“No,” Kimball said carefully. “It’s not about the missing boys. Both cases did begin around the same time, at or near the beginning of summer, but we don’t believe they’re connected.”

I did not feel the need to tell Kimball that the beginning of summer was when I first arrived in this town. “What’s going on?” I asked.

Kimball cleared his throat. He skimmed a page in his notebook and then turned it over to inspect the next page. “A Mr. Robert Rabin was killed on June first on Commonwealth Avenue at approximately nine-thirty in the evening. He’d taken his dog out for a walk and was attacked on the street, and stabbed randomly in his upper body area and his throat was cut—”

“Jesus Christ.”

“There was no motive for the crime. It was not a robbery. Mr. Rabin had no enemies as far as we could ascertain. It was just a random killing. He was—we thought—simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He paused. “But there was something strange about the crime besides the viciousness of the attack and its apparent lack of motive.” Kimball paused again. “The dog he was walking was also killed.”

Another pause filled the office. “That’s . . . also terrible,” I finally said, guessing.

The length of Kimball’s next pause was painting the room with a distinct and palatable anxiety.

“It was a Shar-Pei,” he said.

I paused, taking this in. “That’s . . . even worse?” I asked meekly, and automatically took another sip of vodka.

“Well, it’s a very rare breed of dog and even rarer in this neck of the woods.”

“I . . . see.” I suddenly realized I had not hidden the vodka bottle. It was out in the open, sitting on my desk, half-empty and with its top off. Kimball glanced at it briefly before looking down at a page in his notebook. Sitting across from him I could make out a chart, lists, numbers, a graph.

“In the Vintage edition of American Psycho,” he said, “on pages one sixty-four through one sixty-six a man is murdered in much the same way that Robert Rabin was.”

A pause in which I was supposed to locate something and make a connection.

Kimball continued. “The man in your book was also walking a dog.”

We both breathed in, knowing what was coming next.

“It was a Shar-Pei.”

“Wait a minute,” I automatically said, wanting to stop the fear that kept increasing as Kimball neared the information he wanted to impart.

“Yes?”

I stared at him blankly.

When he realized I had nothing further to say he looked back at his notes. “A transient—named Albert Lawrence—was blinded last December, six months before the Rabin murder. The case remained unsolved but there were certain elements that kept bothering me.” Pause. “There were certain similarities that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at first.”

The atmosphere in the room had flown past anxiety and was now officially entering into dread. The vodka was not going to work anymore and I tried to set the mug back on my desk without trembling. I didn’t want to hear anything else but I couldn’t help asking, “Why?”

“Mr. Lawrence had been inebriated at the time of the attack. In fact he was passed out in an alley off Sutton Street in Coleman.”

Coleman. A small town about thirty miles from Midland.

“Mr. Lawrence’s account was considered somewhat unreliable due to the amount of alcohol he’d consumed, and we had very little to go on in the way of an accurate physical description of his assailant.” Kimball turned a page. “He said the man who attacked him was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase but he couldn’t recall any physical characteristics as to the man’s face, his height, weight, hair color, etcetera.” Kimball continued studying his notes before looking up at me. “There had been a couple of articles about the case in the local press but considering what was happening in Coleman at that time—the bomb scares and all the attention those were receiving—the attack on Mr. Lawrence didn’t really register, even though there were some murmurings that the attack had been racially motivated.”

“Racially motivated?” And bomb scares? In Coleman? Where had I been last December? Either drugged out or in rehab was all I could come up with.

“According to Mr. Lawrence, his assailant apparently used a racial epithet before leaving the scene.”

Kimball kept pausing, which I was now grateful for since it was helping me put myself back together after each new byte of information was handed out.

“So, this Mr. Lawrence . . . was black?”

After another pause, Kimball nodded. “He also had a dog. A small mutt that the assailant also attacked.” He glanced down at his notebook again. “The assailant broke the dog’s two front legs.”

I did not want it to, but the point of Kimball’s visit was becoming clearer to me.

“Mr. Lawrence also had a history of mental illness and had been institutionalized various times, and since Midland County doesn’t have a large black community, the theory that this crime was racially motivated didn’t really play out. And the case remains unsolved.” Kimball paused. “But, again, there was something about it that kept bothering me. It seemed like I had read about this case before. And”—Kimball opened the copy of my book that sat in his lap—“on pages one thirty-one and one thirty-two in American Psycho—”

“A black homeless man was blinded.” I murmured this to myself.

Kimball nodded. “And he had a dog that Patrick Bateman broke the legs of.” He glanced again at his notebook and continued. “In July, a Sandy Wu, a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant in Brigham, was murdered. Like Mr. Rabin, his throat was slashed.”

I sat up. “Did . . . he have a dog?”

Kimball shifted uncomfortably and frowned, giving off the vibe that he did not think we were on the same track. But that wasn’t true. I just wanted to prolong the inevitable.

“Um, no, he did not have a dog, but there was a detail that again took me back to American Psycho.” Kimball pulled something from the notebook and reached forward to give it to me: a receipt from a restaurant called Ming’s, encased tightly in a plastic slip. The receipt was wrinkled and—now I swallowed— spattered lightly with brown flecks. On the other side, scrawled in ink, were the words I’m gonna get you too . . . bitch.

Kimball paused after I handed the slip back to him.

“This particular order was being delivered to the Rubinstein family.”

Kimball waited for my reaction, which wasn’t forthcoming.

“On pages one eighty and one eighty-one a delivery boy is killed in the same manner as Mr. Wu and, as in the book, the assailant wrote the identical message that Patrick Bateman does on the back of the receipt.”

I closed my eyes and then tried to open them when I heard Kimball sighing.

“We—well, actually just me at that point—backtracked to another unsolved case involving a Victoria Bell, an elderly woman who lived on Outer Circle Drive.” Kimball paused. “She was decapitated.”

I knew the name. A bolt of clarity shot through me when I realized where Kimball was going with this.

“There is a Victoria Bell in American Psycho—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute—”

“—but this one was found in a motel off Route Fifty just outside Coleman about a year ago. She’d been stripped and placed in a bathtub and covered with lime.”

“Wait—she was covered with limes?” I exclaimed, recoiling.

“No, lime. It’s a dissolvent, Mr. Ellis.”

I closed my eyes again. I did not want to go back to that book. It had been about my father (his rage, his