Mr. Murder

body, she is an outcast herself, and therefore an infuriating symbol of his own alienation.

She is taken by surprise when he punches her in the face. The blow is hard enough to stun her. As Heather goes limp, nearly unconscious, he slips both hands around her throat and chokes her with all the force of which he is capable.

The struggle is quiet. The blow, followed by extreme pressure on her windpipe and diminishment of the blood supply to her brain through the carotid arteries, renders her incapable of resistance.

He is concerned about drawing the unwanted attention of other motel guests. But a minimum of noise is also important because quiet murder is more personal, more intimate, more deeply satisfying.

So quietly does she succumb that he is reminded of nature films in which certain spiders and mantises kill their mates subsequent to a first and final act of intercourse, always without a sound from either assailant or victim. Heather’s death is marked by a cold and solemn ritual equal to the stylized savagery of those insects.

Minutes later, after showering and dressing, he crosses the highway from the motel to the Blue Life Lounge and gets in his rental car. He has business to conduct. He was not sent to Kansas City to murder a whore named Heather. She was merely a diversion. Other victims await him, and now he is sufficiently relaxed and focused to deal with them.

9

In Marty’s office, by the party-colored light of the stained-glass lamp, Paige stood beside the desk, staring at the small tape recorder, listening to her husband chant two unsettling words in a voice that ranged from a melancholy whisper to a low snarl of rage.

After less than two minutes, she couldn’t tolerate it any longer. His voice was simultaneously familiar and strange, which made it far worse than if she’d been unable to recognize it at all.

She switched off the recorder.

Realizing she was still holding the glass of red wine in her right hand, she took too large a swallow. It was a good California cabernet that merited leisurely sipping, but suddenly she was more interested in its effect than its taste.

Standing across the desk from her, Marty said, “There’s at least five more minutes of the same thing. Seven minutes in all. After it happened, before you and the girls came home, I did some research.” He gestured toward the bookshelves that lined one wall. “In my medical references. ”

Paige did not want to hear what he was going to tell her. The possibility of serious illness was unthinkable. If anything happened to Marty, the world would be a far darker and less interesting place.

She was not sure that she could deal with the loss of him. She realized her attitude was peculiar, considering that she was a child psychologist who, in her private practice and during the hours she donated to child-welfare groups, had counseled dozens of children about how to conquer grief and go on after the death of a loved one.

Coming around the desk toward her, his own wine glass already empty, Marty said, “A fugue can be symptomatic of several things. Early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, but I believe we can rule that out. If I’ve got Alzheimer’s at thirty-three, I’d probably be the youngest case on record by about a decade.”

He put his glass on the desk and went to the window to stare out at the night between the slats of the plantation shutters.

Paige was struck by how vulnerable he suddenly appeared. Six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, with his easy-going manner and limitless enthusiasm for life, Marty had always before struck her as being more solid and permanent than anything in the world, oceans and mountains included. Now he seemed as fragile as a pane of glass.

With his back toward her, still studying the night, he said, “Or it might have been an indication of a small stroke.”

“No.”

“Though according to the references I checked, the most likely cause is a brain tumor.”

She raised her glass. It was empty. She could not remember having finished the wine. A little fugue of her own.

She set the glass on the desk. Beside the hateful cassette recorder. Then she went to Marty and put a hand on his shoulder.

When he turned to her, she kissed him lightly, quickly. She laid her head against his chest and hugged him, and he put his arms around her. Because of Marty, she had learned that hugs were as essential to a healthy life as were food, water, sleep.

Earlier, when she had caught him systematically checking window locks, she’d insisted, with only a scowl and a single word—“Well?”—that he not hide anything. Now she wished she hadn’t insisted on hearing about his one bad moment in an otherwise fine day.

She looked up and met his eyes at last, still embracing him, and said, “It might be nothing.”

“It’s something.”

“But I mean, nothing physical.”

He smiled ruefully. “It’s so comforting to have a psychologist in the house.”

“Well, it could be psychological.”

“Somehow, it doesn’t help that maybe I’m just crazy.”

“Not crazy. Stressed.”

“Ah, yes, stress. The twentieth-century excuse, the favorite of goldbrickers filing fake disability claims, politicians trying to explain why they were drunk in a motel with naked teenage girls—”

She let go of him, turned away, angry. She wasn’t upset with Marty, exactly, but with God or fate or whatever force had suddenly brought turbulent currents into their smoothly flowing lives.

She started toward the desk to get her glass of wine before she remembered she had already drunk it. She turned to Marty again.

“All right . . . except when Charlotte was so sick that time, you’ve always been about as stressed out as a clam. But maybe you’re just a secret worrier. And lately, you’ve had a lot of pressures.”

“I have?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“The deadline on this book is tighter than usual.”

“But I’ve still got three months, and I think I’ll need one.”

“All the new career expectations—your publisher and agent and everyone in the business watching you in a different way now.”

The paperback reprints of his two most recent novels had placed on the New York Times bestseller list, each for eight weeks. He had not yet enjoyed a hardcover bestseller, but that new level of success seemed imminent with the release of his new novel in January.

The sudden sales growth was exciting but also daunting. Though Marty wanted a larger audience, he also was determined not to tailor his writing to have wider appeal and thereby lose what made his books fresh. He knew he was in danger of unconsciously modifying his work, so lately he was being unusually hard on himself, even though he had always been his own toughest critic and had always revised each page of a story as many as twenty and thirty times.

“Then there’s People magazine,” she said.

“That’s not stressful. It’s over and done with.”

A writer for People had come to the house a few weeks ago, and a photographer followed two days later for a ten-hour shoot. Marty being Marty, he liked them and they liked him, although first he had desperately resisted his publisher’s entreaties to do the piece.

Given his friendly relationship with the People people, he had no reason to think the article would be negative, but even favorable publicity usually made him feel cheap and grasping. To him, the books were what mattered, not the person who wrote them, and he did not want to be, as he put it, “the Madonna of the mystery novel, posing nude in a library with a snake in my teeth to hype sales.”

“It’s not over and done with,” Paige disagreed. The issue with the article about Marty would not hit the news-stands until Monday. “I know you’re dreading it.”

He sighed. “I don’t want to be—”