to find that out, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to buy yourself a copy.”
Several days later Andrew Carter slipped out of his bed, where he’d lain, wide-awake, for the past three hours. It was two a.m.
He glanced at the quiescent form of his sleeping wife and — with the help of his cane — limped to his closet, where he found and pulled on an old pair of faded jeans, sneakers and a Boston University sweatshirt — his good- luck writing clothes, which he hadn’t donned in well over a year.
Still in pain from the gunshot, he walked slowly down the hall to his office and went inside, turning on the light. Sitting at his desk, he clicked on his computer and stared at the screen for a long moment.
Then suddenly he began to write. His keyboarding was clumsy at first, his fingers jabbing two keys at once or missing the intended one altogether. Still, as the hours passed, his skill as a typist returned and soon the words were pouring from his mind onto the screen flawlessly and fast.
By the time the sky began to glow with pink-gray light and a morning bird’s cell-phone trill sounded from the crisp holly bush outside his window, he’d finished the story completely — thirty-nine double-spaced pages.
He moved the cursor to the top of the document, thought about an appropriate title and typed:
Then Andy Carter sat back in his comfortable chair and carefully read his work from start to finish.
The story opened with a reporter finding a suspense novel that contained several circled passages, which were strikingly similar to two real-life murders that had occurred earlier. The reporter takes the book to a detective, who concludes that the man who circled the paragraphs is the perpetrator, a copycat inspired by the novel to kill.
Reviving the case, the detective enlists the aid of the novel’s author, who reluctantly agrees to help and brings the police some fan letters, one of which leads to the suspected killer.
But when the police track the suspect to his summer home they find that
Then the detective gets a big shock: On the fan’s body he finds clues that prove that a local police sergeant is the real killer. The author, who happens to be with this very officer at that moment, is nearly killed but manages to wrestle the gun away and shoot the cop in self-defense.
Case closed.
Or so it seems…
But Andy Carter hadn’t ended the story there. He added yet another twist. Readers learn at the very end that the sergeant was innocent. He’d been set up as a fall guy by the real Strangler.
Who happened to be the author himself.
Racked by writer’s block after his first novel was published, unable to follow it up with another, the author had descended into madness. Desperate and demented, he came to believe that he might jump-start his writing by actually reenacting scenes from his novel so he stalked and strangled two women, exactly as his fictional villain had done.
The murders hadn’t revived his ability to write, however, and he slumped further into depression. And then, even more troubling, he heard from the fan who’d grown suspicious about the similarities between certain passages in the novel and the real crimes. The author had no choice: He met with the fan at his lakeside cottage and beat him to death, hiding the body in the garage and covering up the disappearance by pretending to be the fan and telling his boss and landlord that he was leaving town unexpectedly.
The author believed he was safe. But his contentment didn’t last. Enter the reporter who’d found the underlined passages, and the investigation started anew; the police called, asking him for fan letters. The author knew the only way to be safe was to give the police a scapegoat. So he agreed to meet with the police — but in fact he’d arrived in town a day before his planned meeting with the detective. He broke into the police sergeant’s house, planted some incriminating clothing he’d taken from the dead women’s houses and stole one of the cop’s mallets and a business card. He then went out to the dead fan’s lake house, where he’d hidden the body, and used the tool to crush the skull of the decomposed body and hid the mallet, along with some of the dead man’s hairs, in an oil drum. The card he slipped into the wallet. The next day he showed up at the police station with the fan letter that led to the cottage — and ultimately to the sergeant.
The author, who’d asked the unsuspecting sergeant to drive to dinner, grabbed his gun, made him stop the car and get out. Then he shot him, rested the pistol near the dead cop’s hands and fired it into the woods to get gunshot residue on the man’s finger (writers know as much about forensics as most cops). The author had gotten the shotgun from the trunk, left it with the sergeant and then climbed back into the squad car, where he’d taken a deep breath and shot himself in the belly — as superficially as he could.
He’d then crawled onto the road to wait for a passing car to come to their aid.
The police bought the entire story.
In the final scene the author returned home to try to resume his writing, having literally gotten away with murder.
Carter now finished rereading the story, his heart thumping hard with pride and excitement. True, it needed polishing but, considering that he hadn’t written a word for more than a year, it was a glorious accomplishment.
He was a writer once again.
The only problem was that he couldn’t publish the story. He couldn’t even
For the simple reason, of course, that it wasn’t fiction; every word was true. Andy Carter himself was the homicidal author.
Still, he thought, as he erased the entire story from his computer, publishing it didn’t matter one bit. The important thing was that by writing it he’d managed to kill his writer’s block as ruthlessly and efficiently as he’d murdered Bob Fletcher and Howard Desmond and the two women in Greenville. And, even better, he knew too how to make sure that he’d never be blocked again: From now on he’d give up fiction and pursue what he’d realized he was destined to write: true crime.
What a perfect solution this was! He’d never want for ideas again; TV news, magazines and the papers would provide dozens of story leads he could choose from.
And, he reflected, limping downstairs to make a pot of coffee, if it turned out that there were no crimes that particularly interested him… well, Andy Carter knew that he was fully capable of taking matters into his own hands and whipping up a bit of inspiration all by himself.
THE VOYEUR
He had no serious chance for her, of course.
She was way out of his league.
Still, Rodney Pullman, forty-four both in age and in waistband, couldn’t help being seduced by the sight of the Resident in 10B when she’d moved into his Santa Monica apartment complex six months ago. After all, a man can dream, can’t he?
With focused hopes but diffuse energy, Pullman had moved to LA from Des Moines two years ago to become a movie producer and spent months papering Tinseltown with his resumes. The results were unremarkable and he finally concluded that success at selling Saturns and industrial air conditioners in the Midwest would never open doors at companies whose products included TomKat, George Clooney and J-Lo.
But, despite the rejection, Pullman got into the Southern California groove, as he’d write to his parents. Sure, maybe folks out here were a little more superficial than in Iowa and occasionally he felt like he was coasting. But what a place to be adrift! This was a promised land — wide highways, silky fog on the beach, sand between your toes, gigaplex movie theaters, all-night noodle restaurants and a January low that matched the temperature of a typical May Day in Des Moines.
Pullman shrugged off his failure to become a mogul, took a job as a manager at a chain bookstore in
