"Remember Henry Lucas in Texas? The guy said he had killed over five hundred people, which would have made him the biggest serial killer since Dracula. But he was lying. Can you imagine lying about that? You know why it's dangerous for famous people to go to jail? Because some loser in the can thinks if I kill them, then I get to be famous too. And since I ain't never going to be famous for anything else, why not? That's why that fuckhead murdered Jeffrey Dahmer. And you know how worried they were about Mike Tyson getting hit when he was in? Some people get famous writing books. Those who aren't so creative get famous killing people."
"Then why was this killer silent so long?"
"Maybe he was content with what he did, but isn't anymore. For thirty years, no big bestselling author was ever interested in writing this story. I think you're safe so long as you're working on it. He wants the book finished so long as it tells the real story. He wants credit."
"But then he's cutting his own throat!"
"Maybe not. He's been damned clever so far. You know about female spiders? They can store sperm up to eighteen months, and they have this nice little tendency to eat the male after he's done his duty. What we have here just might be similar – someone's stored this up for thirty years, but now wants to make some babies with it."
As if David Cadmus's killer and my problems with Veronica weren't enough, I had to give a speech. Months before, students at Rutgers University had organized an arts festival and invited me to speak on the future of the popular novel. I agreed to go because I didn't have anything else to do and the kids sounded so enthusiastic.
After returning from California, I glanced at my calendar and realized with horror that the thing was two days away. I whipped up some drivel in an afternoon, asked my neighbor to watch the dog, and drove south to New Jersey, cursing all the way down the turnpikes.
They put me up in a nice hotel and had me scheduled to do so many things I didn't have time to think about my problems. There were interviews, book signings, a visit to an advanced creative-writing class. Fine.
The night of my speech, I was sitting in the hotel room watching television. Suddenly I had such a panic attack that I ran out of the room, went downstairs and bought a pack of cigarettes to get me through the rest of the evening.
The problem was they had put me in a no-smoking room at the hotel and that was the only place I wanted to smoke. America has been so cowed by health Nazis in recent years that lighting up I felt as guilty as a fifteen-year-old. The guilt got so bad that I went to the window and tried to open it, thinking I'd stick my head out and blow the poisonous Winston into the already-ruined Jersey air. Unfortunately, the hotel was ultramodern and the room had all-but-sealed windows. The management thought it best to control your environment, whether you liked it or not. But I wanted real air. I managed to wrestle the window open enough inches to get my head and my hand out. Feeling quite accomplished, I smoked the cigarette down to the butt and flicked it, sparks flying, toward the parking lot. I slid my hand back into the room but not my head. It – I – was stuck. Tonight's feature speaker, full of wisdom and insight into the plight of the contemporary novel, was stuck halfway out a window on the fifth floor of the Raritan Towers Hotel.
In my terror, I kept thinking about all those people downstairs waiting. People who had come to listen and consider. If they only knew where the featured mouth for the evening was. Then I thought about someone coming up to get me and seeing me half-guillotined in that window . . .
The trapped rat inside took over and I battled until I was able to make it budge an extra few inches. When all of me was back in the room, I looked in a mirror and saw an angry red line down the side of my neck, the window's souvenir. Rubbing it hard, I tried to get some blood flowing there again, but then someone was knocking at the door and it was time to go.
The lecture hall was full – there must have been three hundred people there. Totally flustered by my war with the window and now all these attentive faces, I raced through the speech. There was a question-and-answer session afterward that I handled a little better. When it was over, what seemed like half the audience came up to get their books autographed. I left my notes on the podium and stood at the front of the stage, signing. It took about an hour.
When I was done, I went back to the podium to pick up the papers. Another green Post-it was stuck on top of them.
"Hi, Sam! What happened to your neck?"
The package arrived almost simultaneously with Ivan's next report. It was a small orange envelope addressed to me in Veronica's memorable handwriting. Inside was Stephen Mitchell's translation of The Book of Job. Nothing else.
It was the first time I had heard from her in days and I didn't know what to think. Life had been quiet since my return from Rutgers. I spent most of the time working on Pauline's book. Frannie and I spoke on the phone almost every day, but he hadn't been able to turn up anything of importance. The only fingerprints on the videotape were his and mine. The same with the Post-it notes. Because there were so few written words on them, clone in block letters, no graphologist could do an analysis. Frannie's friends with the Los Angeles police had canvassed Cadmus's neighborhood, but no one had seen a person on the front porch the day we were there.
When I told Frannie about what had happened after my speech, all he could say over and over was "Asshole!" Home seemed the best place to be, and other than a couple of visits from Cassandra and Ivan, I saw no one. Aurelio called once to ask how the book was going. The only thing I could think to say was, "It's movin' along." I wasn't about to tell that loudmouth what had been happening. If McCabe was right, I was relatively safe so long as I continued writing. I assumed Mr. Post-it was aware of what I was doing. But did he peek in the window to keep tabs on me? Sneak into the house when I was out and read what I had written?
I read Veronica's book in one afternoon and was awed by the beauty of the language, Job's brilliance at verbalizing his fears and anger in front of the Almighty. But why had she sent it to me? What was she trying to say? Besides loving the story, I couldn't help thinking she was using it as some kind of Trojan horse to sneak up on me. I wasn't wrong. A few days after it arrived, I received a postcard from her. The only thing written on it was a quote from the text, which I remembered immediately.
Remember: you formed me from clay . . .
Yet this you bid in your heart,
this I know was your purpose:
to watch me, and if I ever sinned
to punish me for the rest of my days.
You lash me if I am guilty,
shame me if I am not.
You set me free, then trap me,
like a cat toying with a mouse.
Why did you let me be born?
Did she see herself as Job? And I as God? I couldn't even coax my dog off a chair! The thought made me pick up the phone. She wasn't home. I left a message, saying, please call because we have to talk. Nothing. I waited two days and called again. Instead of her voice, she sent another card with another quote:
Is it right for you to be vicious,
to spoil what your own hands made?
Are your eyes mere eyes of flesh?
Is your vision no keener than a man's