Let the Devil Sleep

filthy front window, a gas station with one pump, and a post office in a cinder-block building the size of a one-car garage.

Kim’s car-and video-proceeded up a rutted road with snowbanks on either side, separating it from more tumbledown buildings and trees that seemed long dead rather than just seasonably leafless. Absorbing this, Gurney was struck that Turnwell represented a country environment that was as far removed from Williamstown, where Jimi’s father had lived, as the dark side of the moon. He wondered if the cultural and aesthetic distance constituted an intentional statement.

The question was increasingly on his mind as the video proceeded.

Also, the question of who was wielding the camera. Presumably Robby Meese, a fact that would place this visit to Jimi Brewster sometime prior to the breakup.

The car slowed as it approached a small house on the right. The house and the bleak property surrounding it showed an aggressive disregard for appearances. Nothing, from the posts supporting the sagging roof over the tilting porch to the door of the adjoining outhouse, was set at a right angle to anything else. In Gurney’s experience a blatant disregard for the ninety-degree concept was usually an indication of poverty, physical incapacity, depression, or a cognitive disorder.

The man who emerged from the shabby front door onto the porch was slim and nervous-looking, with darting eyes. He was wearing black jeans and a T-shirt of the same orangey color as his short hair and close-cropped beard.

His having been a freshman in college twenty years earlier would make him at least thirty-seven, but he looked a decade younger. The CHALLENGE EVERYTHING aphorism printed in bold letters on the front of his shirt lent support to the image of youthfulness.

“Come in,” he said, waving his guests impatiently toward the door. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”

The camera followed him inside. The back of his shirt proclaimed, AUTHORITY SUCKS.

The interior of the house was as uninviting as the outside. The furniture in the small front room was minimal and worn-looking. There was a colorless couch against one wall and a small rectangular table pushed against the opposite wall with a folding chair on each of its exposed sides.

There was a closed door on each side of the couch. A door in the rear of the room provided a glimpse of a narrow kitchen. The light was coming primarily from a wide window over the table.

As the camera panned around the cramped space, Kim’s voice could be heard. “Robby, turn that off until we get settled.” The camera continued to run, zooming in slowly on the slight, red-haired man, who was shifting his weight from foot to foot with a twitchy energy. It was hard to tell whether he was smiling or grimacing.

“Robby. The camera. Off. Please.” Despite Kim’s peremptory tone, the video continued for at least ten seconds more before fading to black.

When the picture and sound resumed, Kim and Jimi Brewster were sitting across from each other at the table. The picture angle and framing suggested that Meese was probably operating the camera from somewhere on the couch.

“All right,” said Kim with the kind of enthusiasm Gurney remembered seeing in her the day he met her. “Let’s get right into it. I want to say again, Jimi, how much I appreciate your willingness to take part in this documentary project. By the way, would you prefer that I call you Jimi or Mr. Brewster?”

He shook his head-a small, jerky movement. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever.” He began drumming his fingernails lightly in a staccato rhythm on the tabletop.

“Okay. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll call you Jimi. As I explained while we had the camera turned off, this conversation we’re having now is a preliminary run-through of some questions I’ll be asking you at a future date in a more formal-”

He stopped his drumming abruptly and broke in. “Do you think I killed him?”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what everyone secretly wonders.”

“I’m sorry, Jimi, but I’m not following-”

Again he interrupted her. “But if I killed him, then I must have killed them all. Which is why they couldn’t arrest me, because I have an alibi for the first four.”

“I’m lost here, Jimi. I never thought that you killed-”

“I wish I had.”

Kim paused, looked stunned. “You wish… that you’d killed your father?”

“And all the others. Do you think I look like the Good Shepherd?”

“What?”

“I mean, like the way you imagine the Good Shepherd would look?”

“I never… I never really pictured him.”

Brewster started drumming his fingernails again. “Because he did everything in the dark?”

“The dark? No, I just… I just never pictured him, I don’t know why.”

“Do you think he’s a monster?”

“Physically… a monster?”

“Physically, mentally, spiritually-any way, every way, whatever way. Do you think he’s a monster?”

“He did kill six people.”

“Six monsters. Which makes him a hero, right?”

“Why do you think that all his victims were monsters?”

During this dialogue the camera had been zooming in very gradually, like an intruder on tiptoes, as if to explore the slightest tic or wrinkle in their faces.

Jimi Brewster’s eyelids were quivering without quite blinking. “Easy. You piss away a hundred thousand dollars for a car-a fucking car-you are, de facto, an evil piece of shit.” His voice was intense and accusatory and seemed, like everything else about him, less mature than his chronological years. He looked and sounded more like a troubled member of a high-school chess club than a man in his late thirties.

“An evil piece of shit? Is that the way you felt about your father?”

“The great surgeon? The fuckface money-grubbing piece-of-shit surgeon?”

“Your father. You still hate him as much now as you did back then?”

“Is my mother still as dead now as she was back then?”

“Sorry?”

“My mother killed herself with sleeping pills he prescribed for her. The great genius surgeon. Who got his genius head blown off. You want to hear a secret? When they called me to tell me, I made them repeat it three times. They thought I was in a state of shock. I wasn’t. I was in a state of such pure joy that I wanted to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I wanted to hear the news again and again. It was the happiest day of my life.” Brewster paused, radiating excitement, fixated on Kim’s face.

“Aha!” he cried. “There it is! I can see it in your eyes!”

“See what?”

“The big question.”

“What big question?”

“Everybody’s big question: Could Jimi Brewster be the Good Shepherd?”

“As I said before, that idea never occurred to me.”

“But it’s there now. Don’t lie. You’re thinking, ‘All that hate. Was it enough hate to blow away six pieces of shit?’ ”

“You said you had an alibi. If you had an alibi-”

He interrupted her. “Do you believe that some people can be physically in one place and spiritually someplace else?”

“I… I’m not sure what that means.”

“There are Indian yogis that people have reported seeing in two different places at the same time. Time and space may not be what we think they are. I seem to be here, but I might also be somewhere else.”

“Sorry, Jimi, I don’t really-”

“Every night, in my mind, I drive around on dark roads, looking for genius doctors-pill pushers, robotic shits-and when I see one in his shiny shit car, I aim my gun at him, leveling the gun sight midway between his temple and his ear. I squeeze the trigger. There’s a blast of light from heaven-the white light of truth and death-and half his fucking