Stone Shadow

Dallas

The other one is thinking and feeling. I see what you're going at of course but, no, I'm not sure that would hold water.'

“Why not?'

“It's somewhat farfetched. Not impossible, but we could create ANY sort of hypothetical. Example: Ukie. Highly intelligent. Very bright. Fails repeatedly in his efforts to, as he says, ‘become a star.’ Craves adoration. Respect. Wants attention. Needs it to placate his forever-wounded sense of self. Hey, folks, look at me. Admire ME. The folks don't give him the attention or the admiration he needs. They rebuke and criticize him by making him FAIL. They withhold his precious stardom from him. He lashes out in anger. First by forcing his sexual attentions on strangers. Rubbing up against women in the public conveyance. Showing himself in the crowded store. Picking up a woman and raping her. Who's to say if Miss Scannapieco was the first or the twenty-first? Lots of rapists don't get talked about until they get caught. Lots of victims don't come forth.'

“Yeah.'

“So now we have a possible profile of a guy who is getting away with murder. That's what he says to himself. He's raped X numbers of women, forced his ATTENTIONS on them, paid them back for not giving him the respect and adulation he needed. He's getting away with murder. He can do anything. If I can rape and get away with it, why not do whatever I want? I'm smarter than your average bear. Fiendishly clever in fact. I'll show ‘em. I'll start killing them and burying the bodies. Then they'll be sorry they didn't treat me like a star.'

“So it sounds like you're saying—'

“I'm just saying Ukie could be guilty of murder. COULD be. I'm saying he's clever and antisocial enough to have killed, and disturbed enough in theory that he could in effect convince himself of a mythologized tormentor so that he could fool us. It's not a wholly unlikely scenario. Playing the devil's advocate.'

“I'm confused again,” Eichord said, and Sue Mandel puffed up his cheeks in an enigmatic smile and flipped the end of his tie like in the Laurel and Hardy movies. “Another fine mess, huh?'

“I dunno.” Jack shook his head at the futility of it.

“For openers, let me lay all this on you.” He shoved a stack of papers in Jack's direction.” Herrrre's Ukie. In all his laid-back hyper, I-did-it, I-didn't-do-it glory. These are test results, Observations. They're not quite the same as test scores. You passed. You didn't pass. The Rorschach. Gestalt. Ways of measuring the things that have pulled Ukie's behavior off the pattern of the norm. Ways of seeing how he looks at life. How he projects himself onto his happenings. If he knows right from wrong. Values his own life or yours—that sort of thing. Best I can say overall is, the results are still inconclusive. You can take a look. Feed it into the meat grinder and see what kind of hamburger you get.'

“Okay.'

“Okay.'

It was a long drive back to the motel and Jack found a station playing big bands and that made it a little less Painful. Basie, some ancient Woody, a band that sounded like Tadd Dameron or one of those cats from the Birdland years and a drummer who seemed to be banging on a table with a ruler, a bittersweet swig-era, punctuation mark as he drove, and he stopped and bought a fifth and picked up a bucket of ice on the way to his room.

He opened a can of the dog food and took it outside and gave it to dog and ran a fresh bowl of water. And of course the fucking dog was nowhere in sight. He should have known the beast wouldn't be sitting there waiting for a loser like him. He slammed the door on the day, poured a full glass over a couple of rocks, killed it in four five sips. Built another, sat on the bed, kicked off his shoes. Said aloud to the empty room as he reached for the glass, “Well, shit. Let's get drunk and be somebody,” downing the Daniel's and melting ice and tasting something else, a nagging and nameless uncertainty.

Highland Park

They began in the living room, papers strewn around her, both of them formal and businesslike. Each working hard to cover any base that might help Ukie's seemingly disastrous legal position. Covering all the trivial tidbits of fife that make up one's past. The modest surroundings of orphanage and foster home had given both of the twins the desire if not the will to achieve. But there the identical biochemistry somehow lost its ability to influence and shape their lives.

“I wonder,” she thought aloud, “how is it that two identical twins, each with the same potential gifts, can end up so differently. Where did you two first start differing in your achievements?'

“Ooooooeeece,” he sighed quietly, “that's going to have to go so far back into our childhood.'

As he started to talk she was aware that she was wondering if Laurindo, over their softly strumming his unamplified, open-string Spanish guitar in the background, was the right music. My God, the RIGHT music. She's working with an accused murderer's brother and selecting music like she'd brought a date home. And this hunk sitting there in his tailored shirt and slacks that looked like they'd been painted on, why couldn't he be wearing a baggy old suit, cuffed trousers showing an inch of white skin above short socks? Why couldn't he be another Ukie and be sitting here in his cranberry double-knits and white belt? But Joe Hackabee was something else again. She blinked and took a deep breath and shook off this thing she was feeling.

'—having to work and I'd been luckier and found something at Holman's Ice Cream, and it was manna from heaven—you see you made minimum wage but you got all this precious OVERTIME every third week and you saved a lot of money because the ice cream was tree.” She smiled. “So to a kid—you know, this was a kid job, a bunch of little squirts working under some teenage tyrant they'd found as the kid version of a shop steward—anyway, it was such a great job to find. All the kids we knew wanted to get a job at Holman's. And of course I got Bill a job there. They were always losing kids, having to fire them or whatever, and I probably wasn't, there a week before somebody quit or was let go, and I naturally spoke up. They'd ask you—now this is serious business and we don't want you bringing somebody in here who steals or is lazy or treats the customers poorly, and I promised that Bill was great, and they said okay they'd give it a try and they liked me so they took him too.'

“What happened?'

“You asked how twins can end up differently and I don't know. We were alike in so many physical ways but INSIDE we always seemed to be at odds. He wanted it handed to him and I knew you had to work for it. They said he stole. Holman's. And it was like a little trial. I recall one Saturday morning. Funny. I still remember this so vividly. The boss kid called us all in'—he smiled wistfully—'and he said it was about Bill. He'd been accused of taking some money. ‘I don't remember how much—it couldn't have been anything—maybe the till was a dollar short but that was a major offense. And he said we were to tell him if Bill had taken it. Passing little scraps of paper around like secret ballots to vote on his guilt. A little jury. If only we'd had you there to defend him, huh?'

“Yeah.” She was hanging on every word.

“And of course, needless to say, a little boy jury of his peers found him guilty as hell.'

“Kangaroo court.'

“Probably not even that. We didn't get to examine the ballots so the boss kid could have dumped on him. He was out. But we were still close as you'd expect identicals to be. I told them to jam the job'—he shook his head disgustedly—'left a perfectly neat job at Holman's Ice Cream to go out and look for work with Bill. And we found the next job together. Vorchardski's Nursery, I'll never forget. It was poor money and they worked you like a slave but we thought it was great because you got to work outside.

“We both envisioned being these all-star twin jocks one day, at the time we both loved baseball and we were extremely conscious of working hard to get in shape. But it's one thing to fantasize about working hard and another to actually do it.'

“Was U—Bill a lazy boy?'

“Ummm. Not lazy precisely. He just had his head on a little tilted if you know what I mean. He'd stay up all night scheming or working on some way to scam somebody but as far as out there in the hot sun with a trowel and a handful of peat moss, huh-uh. He'd bitch to me about how crummy the wages were or whatever and I'd be out there enjoying it, working away, and I guess one of the bosses saw what he was like and they axed him