The Strangler Read Free Page A

streets: Chambers Street, Allen, Blossom.
    Now the window was open. Cold air blew in.
    Classical music played on the hi-fi set. Her son had bought the hi-fi for her; she could barely work the thing. But now it was playing Sibelius, the Fifth Symphony. The record ticked and crackled, but oh, the music! It swayed in a three-note theme, over and over, over and over—the long, gathering crescendo.
    A long smear of blood.
    A red handprint.
    Mrs. Feeney lay on the floor. Her robe ripped open, legs wrenched apart, ankles pinned in the slats of two dining-room chairs to hold them spread, a pillow tucked under her rear end to prop it so that her pudendum was aimed at the front door. A pillowcase and stockings were wrapped around her neck, tied off with a big bow. Bluish bruises and the pink lividity of pooling blood mottled her skin around the garrote. Her mouth was still moist. In her eyes were tiny red spiders, capillaries that had burst.
    The Sibelius symphony reached its climax. Five identical chords—irregularly spaced, like a dying heartbeat—each chord separated by a long, breathless pause. In an unstable B flat, the music pulsed twice—three—four—five times—then fell, exhausted, into its natural key of E flat—and it was over. The needle caught in the gutter and scratched there.
    A fly, a lethargic November fly, flicked onto the dead woman’s cheek. It tasted the corner of her mouth and scrubbed its forelegs together.

5
    Michael, on the front porch. He paced. He hunched inside his winter coat, dragged on a cigarette, picked at the spongy floorboards with his toe. The planks were rotting, flaking apart. What a fucking dump. Whole place was falling apart. It was amazing how quickly a house began to disintegrate, how opportunistic the rot and damp were. One good stomp and he could crack any of these boards.
    The screen door creaked and Ricky’s head extended horizontally out of the door frame. “Supper.”
    “Be in in a minute.”
    Ricky’s head retracted into the house, the screen door slammed, then the door snicked shut behind it.
    But a few seconds later Ricky’s head was out again. “She says now.”
    “Tell her in a minute.”
    “I told her. She says ‘in a minute’ isn’t ‘now.’”
    “I know ‘in a minute’ isn’t ‘now.’ That’s why I said ‘in a minute, ’because that’s when I’m coming in: in a minute. Jesus.”
    Ricky came out onto the porch, shut the door behind him. “The fuck are you doing out here? It’s freezing.”
    Michael held up the cigarette.
    “So come inside and smoke it. It’s freezing.”
    “You seen this?” Michael nudged a long splinter in one of the floorboards with the toe of his penny loafer. He worked it back and forth until it flaked off. “Look at this.”
    “I know. It’s a fuckin’ mess. We’ll fix it in the spring maybe. Come on, let’s go. It’s cold, I’m hungry.”
    Michael scowled.
    “What’s a matter, Mikey? You got a headache?”
    “No, I’m fine.”
    “Then what’s the problem?”
    “I don’t have a problem.”
    “You’ve got a puss on.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “You do. I’m looking right at it. Puss.”
    “I don’t have a puss.”
    “You do.
I’ll be in in a minute.
”
    “Fuck you, Rick.”
    “Fuck you, Rick.”
    Ricky smirked. The same charmed, blithe, princely grin he’d been deploying since the day he was born, four years after Michael. Ricky had smirked before he even had teeth, as if he knew, even as an infant, that he was no ordinary child.
    The gloom Michael was feeling lifted a little, enough that he could shake his head and say “fuck you” again, warmer this time,
fuck you
meaning
stick around
.
    “Let me bum one of those, Mikey.”
    Michael dug the pack of Larks from his pocket, and Ricky lit up using the end of Michael’s cigarette.
    “Jesus, would you look at this,” Michael said.
    The brothers peered through the window into the dining room, where an enormous red-faced man was taking his place