Chapter Eleven
He browsed the tables of the yard sale. He was in San Jose, California, in a neighborhood called Willow Glen, and the house was a California bungalow with pale green stucco walls and thick growth in the back and side yards. The front was grass, healthy and lush, and on top of the grass the homeowner had set up card tables and a couple of pieces of painted wooden furniture, all bedecked with bits and pieces of his life. And of hers, his late wife’s.
He felt the gentle Bay Area sun on the back of his neck as he perused the offerings, paying special attention to the things that looked like they had belonged to a woman. A hand-held mirror with a plastic back and handle in a tortoise-shell finish. A red cotton bathrobe. A cookbook stained with cooking grease. A cheap plastic earring rack. “Look at that, Mother,” he said under his breath, giving her fingers a squeeze. “How tacky can you get?”
Then he put her fingers back in his pocket and kept browsing.
The homeowner sat in a folding lawn chair under an umbrella, wearing a Polo shirt, khaki pants, and deck shoes with no socks. He greeted each new arrival in a friendly manner, then sat back and let them shop, answering any questions presented to him. The homeowner didn’t know that the man had seen him before, many times. He had no idea that the man had been inside his house—had, in fact, seen some of these items in their original setting.
The man liked to think that if they knew of him at all, the media would have called him the Impressionist. Of course, he was too good for that, too careful. He had practiced his art for years, and there had never been any speculation that his many projects had been the work of any single person.
The name had two meanings, each equally applicable, and that fact brought him a great deal of pleasure. First, he was an impressionist in the sense of a copycat, a mimic. He studied the work of those he admired, and he created his own masterpieces in their styles. That contributed to his anonymity—the police usually assumed that his creations belonged to the original artists, so they never widened their nets enough to include him. Since the authorities didn’t know about him, the press never caught on either, and so he remained an elusive, unknown master.
The other meaning had to do with the Impressionist school of art. The Impressionists broke every rule. They didn’t paint what they saw or try to tell religious stories with their paintings—they painted what they felt. They told real stories about human emotion. They moved out of the studio and sent back dispatches from the real world. In a similar manner, he traveled around the country, creating his canvases and leaving them for others to find and interpret.
But he was an artist, of that there was no doubt. An artist and a scholar, a student of death. He was already more expert than most, because he had made it his life’s pursuit, but there was always more to learn. He studied the works of other craftsmen, learned their secrets, and copied them, because only by copying could he truly understand them from the inside. Some of those he imitated had been arrested and imprisoned. Copying their work had the additional benefit of confounding the authorities and making the public doubt them when the word inevitably got out. Others were still working, still painting their own pictures upon the land. The fringe benefits that sometimes accrued here were also pointed—the authorities would find a scene that they wanted to pin on a particular individual, but although the style would be the same as that person’s other works, the physical evidence wouldn’t match. So did they go to court with that evidence, or try to bury it? The Impressionist enjoyed watching the confusion his efforts created.
He picked up a board game. Twister. It took several people to have a good game of Twister, two at the minimum but more were better. He knew only one person lived in this house now, and from the looks of him, he didn’t throw a lot of parties. “Are all the parts in here?” he asked.
The man looked back at him with eyes that sorrow had sunk and creased. “Not many parts to it,” he said. His voice caught. He was no doubt remembering playing the game with his pretty wife, their limbs intertwined, bodies pressed against each other. That was what the Impressionist had been trying for. He wanted to see the hurt creep across the man’s face as he thought about his loss. “The mat and the spinner, I think is all there is.”
“And you want a dollar for it? That’s what the label says, one dollar.”
“Yeah. I could go down to seventy-five cents if you think that’s too much.”
“I’ll think about it,” the Impressionist said. He set it down again. He remembered where the board games had been, in the family room on a couple of shelves beneath a big television set. It had been a comfortable room, friendly, with colorful abstract prints on the walls and thick carpeting. The young couple had no doubt hoped to raise a family in that room. Maybe the homeowner would marry again, have another chance. Maybe he was selling off his dead wife’s belongings to make room for a new woman, now that a little more than a year had passed.
Learning the way the survivors reacted was a big part of studying death. After a certain point, the dead were no longer available to watch, but those who stayed behind still had much to teach. The Impressionist watched the homeowner interact with a pair of shoppers who bought a ceramic lamp and some women’s dresses. The wife had been, the Impressionist remembered, a size five. The homeowner clutched the dresses a moment too long, as if unwilling to release them now that he had put them on the market and stuck masking tape price tags to them.
Finally, he’d had enough. If he stayed too long the homeowner might start to wonder about him, would take a closer look and would remember him if he saw him again. That wouldn’t do.
He settled on a small painted figurine of the Virgin Mary. It looked like something that might rest on a dashboard, but he remembered having seen it on her side of the bed the last time he was in the house. At the end, she had been praying furiously, so he thought that the thing had some special meaning to her—perhaps even more than her young husband knew about. The masking tape tag on the bottom only valued it at fifty cents, a bargain for her spiritual signpost.
He was often struck by how many people cried out to God—or maybe to a lower-case god, it was hard to tell—at the end of their lives. Failing that, they cried out “Fuck! Fuck!” Was it the divine aspect of sexual activity they were appealing to? Was there so little daylight between the two? Which was sacred, which profane, and when one was looking squarely at certain death, did it matter anymore? For all he had learned about that final darkness, there was still plenty of uncharted territory to explore.
He fished two quarters out of his pocket and approached the homeowner. “I’ll take this,” he said. He put the quarters down on the table in front of the man’s cash box. That way the man would have to pick them up with his fingers, helping to obscure any prints he had left on them—not that anyone would have reason to inspect the quarters anyway.
The woman’s death had been blamed on a man who had died during a high-speed police pursuit, when his car had flipped off an embankment on Highway 17, heading toward Santa Cruz. He had killed seven other young women in Santa Clara County, all of them about this woman’s age, all physically similar to her. He had killed them the same way the Impressionist had, breaking into their houses when they were home alone, tying their wrists and ankles with nylon rope, then completely swathing their heads in garbage bags and duct tape. He sat with them until they suffocated, then cut away the plastic and left them in lewd poses, partially clothed, on their marriage beds. In each case, the woman’s husband had been the first to find her.
The Impressionist knew it was virtually impossible not to leave some trace evidence at a crime scene. A hair, a fiber, a little dirt from the bottom of a shoe, a partial fingerprint on a surface somewhere. He didn’t worry too much about it. Trace evidence only did any good if there was someone to match it with, and nobody was looking for him. The fact that any evidence he had left in this little bungalow didn’t resemble anything left at the others had ceased to be a concern when the police department’s number one suspect had died in a fiery crash. No court appearance, no expert witnesses, no problem.
“Thanks,” the young homeowner said.
“Don’t mention it,” the Impressionist said. “It’s a lovely piece.” He dropped it into his right hip pocket, with Mother’s fingers, and sauntered back to his rented car. He would never return to this house, never see the young man again.
As he drove away, he tooted the horn twice, and waved his hand. Not at the young homeowner, but at his memory of the wife. His creation, one of his masterpieces. He would always remember her, especially with her Virgin Mary to remind him.