“So is your mom home now?” Johnny asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “She was just in here asking me if I was okay with the divorce, if I was going to be traumatized by it.” She laughed, then asked, “Why?”
He didn’t think she was suspicious, she was just asking.
“Just curious,” he said, but he needed some explanation, so he added, “I mean, do you think she and the trainer are still… getting together?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t look like she was going anywhere today. She looked like shit actually.”
“So you think she’s staying in today?”
“Yeah, why?”
Now there was a little suspicion, and Johnny had to be careful. He didn’t want this to be something that Marissa would look back on later and wonder about.
“I was just saying,” Johnny said. “It would be bad if your father caught her and the trainer together.”
“Yeah, bad for my father,” Marissa said. “But honestly I don’t see how things could get any worse between them. It’s about as worse as it can get right now.”
Yeah, right, Johnny thought, but he said, “You’ve done a great job handling all of this so far. I’m so proud of you.”
At about four o’clock, Johnny left his apartment. He had everything he needed in his black backpack. He hunted around a while and finally found an older Saturn with no LoJack or alarm. He broke in, hot- wired it, and was on his way.
The drive to Forest Hills took longer than he expected because of rush hour traffic, but he was still doing okay on time. He parked in the closest spot he could find, about half a block away from the Blooms’ house. From the car, he called Marissa to confirm that she was actually in the city with her friend Hillary, but he told her it was because he missed her and just wanted to hear her voice. He looked around carefully, and when he was pretty sure that no one was watching, he got out of the car and headed toward the Blooms’.
It was 6:22, and Adam was probably on the subway on his way home. Adding on fifteen minutes for rush hour and assuming he didn’t stop off anywhere, he should arrive at the house in Forest Hills by seven fifteen. Johnny wanted Adam to come home after he killed Dana. If for some reason he came home much earlier it could be problematic.
Johnny was wearing black leather gloves and a black wool cap. It wasn’t exactly hat- and- glove- wearing weather- it was in the fifties- but he wanted to disguise his appearance as much as possible. Besides, he knew Dana would be too distracted by his good looks and charm to notice anything else.
Nearing the house, he was especially careful to make sure no one was noticing him. A man at the far end of the block was leaving his car and heading into his house, but the man wasn’t looking in Johnny’s direction. Still, Johnny hesitated, walking at a slower pace, until the man went into his house, and then Johnny continued toward the Blooms’.
The SUV and the Merc were in the driveway- Johnny hoped this meant that Dana was home. He didn’t want to ring the front doorbell and risk someone seeing her letting him into the house, so he went down the driveway toward the backyard. Johnny wouldn’t have done this if he’d remembered about the dog. That crazy mutt must’ve heard him or sensed him or something, because when he was about halfway up the driveway the barking started. Johnny didn’t see the point in turning back and ringing the front doorbell, and he wasn’t concerned with the barking itself- he was worried about someone next door looking out the window and seeing him, then remembering this later and telling the police.
Going as fast as he could, he went to the Blooms’ backyard, then up onto the small deck. From this position he was out of view from the house next door, and he didn’t think he’d been seen.
He rang the doorbell, and several seconds later he saw Dana looking out. Baby, he thought, as he smiled wildly and gave her a little wave. But she held up one finger, like she’d be back in a second, and before he had time to say anything she was gone.
Shit, this was a complication Johnny didn’t need. The dog was barking even louder, and although he was out of view of the house with the dog, he was in clear view of the backyard of the house of the Blooms’ other next- door neighbor. If someone in that house heard the fuss the dog was making and came out onto the back porch, the person would see Johnny standing there.
What the hell was taking Dana so long? He knew she was probably changing, putting on makeup or something. It seemed like she’d been gone for ten minutes, but it probably hadn’t been nearly that long.
He told her he was supposed to meet Marissa at the house. Of course she said Marissa wasn’t there, but he didn’t know if Marissa had told her mother about her plans to go into the city. If she had, Johnny was going to say they’d changed their plans, but Dana seemed totally clueless and invited Johnny in to wait.
He was glad to be inside the house, and the damn dog’s barking was finally dying down. He turned on the charm so she wouldn’t notice his gloves or that he looked like, well, like someone who was going to kill her. The way she was looking at him, acting all flirty, he knew she wanted him, and he could’ve seduced her. He would’ve loved to have added her to his long list of conquests. Man, would that have been a trip, to screw Adam Bloom’s wife before he killed her? But Johnny wasn’t an idiot. He knew that banging her would get him into all kinds of trouble with DNA, and he wanted to play this thing right.
Still, he wanted to have a little fun with this thing- if he couldn’t actually screw her, at least he could make her think he was going to. Meanwhile, when she went to get him some iced tea, he grabbed a chef ’s knife, one that had about an eight- inch blade, from the knife rack on the counter. This was part of his plan, as he’d seen the knives when he was in the kitchen the other night. When she asked him to sit down he didn’t, but she didn’t seem to notice that he had the knife there behind his back. Then, what the hell, he told her how attracted he was to her, and he could tell she wanted him so badly, even if she was acting like she didn’t. But he didn’t want her to flip out, start screaming, so he decided to just get it over with.
He’d never killed with a knife before, but he’d killed with a switchblade and once with a shank that time at Rikers. He knew that the key to killing with any type of blade was to not be half- assed about it. Anybody could stick a knife a few inches into a body- hell, a weak old lady could probably give you a nice little wound. But to do serious damage you had to go all the way with it. You had to fight through that next inch or two of muscle and maybe bone so you could cut up the major arteries and organs. So when Johnny stabbed her in the middle of the back, he made sure he did it hard enough to get most of the blade in; then he pushed even harder, feeling it cut through something, and it went in easier. When he’d gotten about five or six inches of the blade in and it wouldn’t go any farther, he let go of her.
He backed away, watching her squirm around in her blood on the kitchen floor. He hated watching her suffer. He would’ve loved to yank the knife out of her back and slit her throat or stab her right in the heart, get it over with, but he didn’t want blood to splatter everywhere, especially on him. From what he could tell, he only had a little blood on his gloves and on the edge of the right sleeve of his sweatshirt, and he wanted to keep it that way.
The important thing was that although Dana was still alive and moaning and trying to crawl away, she wasn’t actually screaming in pain, maybe because she was too weak and couldn’t get the air into her lungs. The knife had probably gone into one of her lungs- or maybe there was too much blood coming up out of her mouth. So Johnny just stood back, waiting for her to bleed out, trying to make her feel better by saying things like “Just let it go” and “Stop fighting it.”
It really sucked that it was taking her so long to die. Eventually she stopped moaning, but she was still squirming. The suffering was hard to watch, but there was something about the blood that Johnny found, well, beautiful. Maybe he was starting to take this art shit too seriously, but the, what was that word, contract? No, contrast. Yeah, he loved the contrast of the bright red blood on the white tiled floor. Also, he loved the way the blood was spreading away from the body, the puddles expanding very slowly but keeping their perfect rounded shape. When he got home later he was going to try to re- create this scene, try to get this same shade of red. He’d probably have to mix a little white into the red, and he’d use oils, not acrylics. Maybe he’d do a whole series of paintings, call them his Bloodworks. Oh, man, was he a genius or what? He could see his paintings hanging at the Met- or what was that one across the street, the Prick?- and all the uppity art lovers going on and on about what a genius he was. Yeah, they would all be talking in big words about the “message” of the paintings. He could hear them saying they were a comment on society, on “our times.” They’d probably invite him to all their parties, all the rich people tripping over themselves, wanting to talk to the man who’d painted the Bloodworks.
