Karl undressed and threw the ragman’s filthy clothes down the laundry chute, happy to be rid of them. Carefully, he removed the money taped to his scrotum. Naked, he sat down on the toilet and settled in to have his first bowel movement as a free man. What a pleasant, quiet, private experience.
He picked up a copy of
He didn’t recognize many stars. The girls all looked young and too skinny, and they dressed like whores. They shouldn’t be surprised to be raped and killed, going around like that. The men were unremarkable. Half of them looked like they had dressed at the Goodwill and didn’t have sense enough to tuck in their shirts. Most of them needed a haircut and a shave.
So did he, he reminded himself.
The shower was hot and had good water pressure. Karl lathered himself with Olay soap and rinsed off the top layer of grime. Then he lathered himself again, picked Christine Neal’s pink razor off the shelf, and began to shave. He started with his head and worked his way down-his face, his chest, his belly. He considered himself lucky not to have a hairy back like a lot of men did, else he would have needed help.
From his belly, he skipped down to his legs, as careful not to nick himself as any woman would be. Then he helped himself to a fresh razor blade and began the very delicate task of shaving his privates. Karl couldn’t stand the feeling of hair prickling out of him. It made him feel unclean.
He stroked his penis and made himself hard, making the shaving of his scrotum easier.
A woman’s scream broke his concentration.
Christine Neal stood in the bathroom doorway, frozen in shock. Her eyes locked with Karl’s for the briefest moment; then she bolted.
Karl leapt out of the shower, slipped on the wet tile, but managed not to fall. He sprinted down the hall and tackled Christine Neal from behind as she reached for the phone on the kitchen counter. The handset tumbled to the floor.
She was a strong, athletic woman, and she twisted, and arched her back, and kicked and scratched at him. They struggled on the floor, Christine Neal grunting and trying to scream and choking on her own breath. Her hand swung wildly along the floor and managed to grab the phone again.
Karl lunged to get the thing away from her, rolling partly off her to get it. Christine Neal scrambled desperately to get her feet under her. Before she could take a step, Karl grabbed her by the ankle, and she fell once more. She was sobbing now, hysterical, trying to call out for help.
She twisted onto her side and tried to drag herself out of his reach, tried once more to pull a knee up under herself.
Karl reached out and grabbed her by the hair, but the hair came off in his hand, a wig. He chucked it aside and straddled her waist.
She was on her back now. His hands were around her throat, squeezing. She hit at him with her fists, tried to arch her body up beneath him to get him off. She tried to scream. The scream died under his thumbs.
Karl squeezed harder. Christine Neal was beginning to turn blue from lack of oxygen. Her tongue came out of her mouth, swollen and purple. Her eyes were bulging.
Karl fixed on her eyes, on the emotion in them. Sheer animal terror. He thought it must be horrible to die this way, looking into the face of your killer and finding no compassion, no sympathy. In his case, he imagined she didn’t see anything at all.
This wasn’t personal. He had no anger toward this woman, no real desire to kill her. But he couldn’t have her calling the police. He was flying below the radar now. No one had any idea where he was. He was free to move about the city as he wanted. And he had plans. He couldn’t let Christine Neal have an opportunity to ruin those plans. It simply wasn’t practical to let her live.
The swinging of her arms became weaker and weaker, until she was doing nothing but slapping her hands against the floor… then just twitching… then nothing.
Karl did not take his hands away from her throat, didn’t stop choking her. He didn’t want Christine Neal reviving and having a second chance to get away or call for help. He kept squeezing until his hands began to cramp.
When he finally did let go, Karl remained sitting on top of her. Her head fell to one side, mouth hanging open, nothing in her eyes but tiny pinpoint hemorrhages. Christine Neal was gone.
Karl sighed. He rested for a moment, stretched his hands and fingers, rubbed at the aching muscles of his forearms. After a while he got up and dragged her body down the hall and into the bedroom. He removed her clothes and threw them down the laundry chute where he had thrown the ragman’s clothes, then went back into the bedroom and shoved Christine Neal’s body under her bed, careful to adjust the dust ruffle after.
He wiped down the bathroom with alcohol. Cleaned out the drain traps. Found a bottle of Drano and poured it into both the sink and the tub drains. In the kitchen, he wiped down the telephone handset and placed it back in the cradle. He left no signs of the struggle.
He found the door to the basement, put a load of laundry in the washing machine-the ragman’s clothes and Christine Neal’s clothes-added detergent and half a bottle of bleach, and started the machine.
Back on the first floor, Karl picked up Christine Neal’s blond wig and went back into the bedroom, into the walk-in closet, to dress.
From a drawer of panty hose and knee-high socks, Karl chose a pair of opaque brown tights. He put them on, taking great care not to run them, then tucked his money into the crotch and tucked his privates away as best he could. Then he chose a brown knit calf-length skirt and pulled it on.
From a drawer of underwear, he chose a bra. But it was too tight around his rib cage, digging into him. How women put up with the discomfort was beyond him.
Instead, he found a stretchy, tight-fitting T-shirt and fashioned the illusion of small breasts with two pairs of athletic socks, each pair rolled into a ball. The tightness of the T-shirt held them in place. A boxy brown cotton sweater went over the T-shirt.
Shoes, he expected, might present a problem. But when he started comparing the length of his foot with the length of Christine Neal’s shoes, Karl found that wasn’t the case. He selected a pair of low-heeled brown boots and pulled them on. They fit as well as any shoes he’d had.
In the bathroom once more, he set about transforming himself. He had once worked as a stagehand in a playhouse in St. Louis and had watched the actors carefully as they applied the layers of color and shading, creating characters on the bland canvas of their own faces.
He applied foundation, concealed the bruises and shadows, created eyes with brown liner and shadow and dark mascara. With a shade called Dolce Vita, he painted his swollen lower lip and gave himself the appearance of having a fuller upper lip, using a colored pencil.
When he had finished, Karl stood back and studied his masterpiece in the mirror. He stretched Christine Neal’s blond wig over his bald head.
Just like that, he had become a woman.
Karla.
No one was on the lookout for a blond woman in a brown skirt and sweater.
His finishing touches were a brown and blue print silk scarf, which he tied around his throat to hide his Adam’s apple and the red marks on his own throat where Snake’s handcuffs had bitten in the night before, and a pair of large-framed brown tortoiseshell sunglasses, the kind President Kennedy’s wife had always been photographed in.
Karl went back into the bedroom, bent over, lifted the dust ruffle. Christine Neal’s sightless eyes stared at him; her mouth was open, her swollen tongue sticking out at him. She looked like a spare mannequin that had been discarded in the back room of a store, forgotten under other unneeded props and racks.
“Thank you, Ms. Neal,” Karl said respectfully. “I’m sure you was a real nice lady.”
He put the dust ruffle back in place and walked out, stopping at the coat closet in the hall to choose a brown poncho. In the kitchen, he picked up Christine Neal’s handbag and car keys before he let himself out the back door.
The car in her garage was the dark blue Volvo. Nice. Leather seats and all. A car that wouldn’t stand out in this part of town. She had kept it real clean too. It smelled like lemons.
