Small Town

It was hard now to recall why he’d established that pattern in the first place. He’d seen and recognized the young man; following him, it seemed as if he was being specifically led to the sites of his next sacrifices. It hadn’t occurred to him to question this at the time, and now, looking back on it, he failed to see what his purpose might have been. You couldn’t say it had no rhyme or reason. It had rhyme, certainly, but the reason was less readily apparent.

No matter. It was done.

He sat at the window, watching the city.

The apartment was a comfortable one, light and airy, comfortably furnished, with two window air conditioners that kept the place almost too cool throughout an August heat wave. It was spacious as well, occupying the entire top floor of a narrow three-story frame house on Baltic Street, in the part of Brooklyn known as Boerum Hill. He remembered Baltic Street from Monopoly; it and Mediterranean were the cheapest properties on the board. This Baltic Street was nicer than that, although he imagined the neighborhood had been marginal twenty or thirty years earlier. Now, like so much of Brooklyn, it had benefited from gentrification, and was attracting middle-income New Yorkers, unable to find space they could afford in Manhattan, or in long-desirable parts of the borough like Brooklyn Heights.

Evelyn Crispin, the woman whose apartment this was, was one such person. She was fifty-one years old, and worked as a legal secretary at a Wall Street law firm. She had been married in her twenties, and a wedding picture in a frame on her dresser showed her as a young and pretty bride, standing beside a beaming groom. He’d died a few years later, killed in an automobile accident, and shortly thereafter she’d moved to New York to start a new life. It had evidently been a solitary life, and for the past fifteen years she’d led it in this Baltic Street apartment, which she shared with a cat whose name William Harbinger did not know.

The cat, nameless or not, demanded periodically to be fed. It did so now, weaving itself around his ankles, rubbing its body against him to attract his attention. He went into the kitchen, got a can of cat food from the cupboard. There were only two left on the shelf, and when they were gone he’d have to figure out what to do about the cat.

He opened the can, spooned the food into its dish, placed the dish on the floor. Watching the animal eat, he was reminded that he ought to eat something himself, and opened a can of lentil soup and another of roast beef hash, which on balance did not look all that different from what he’d just fed to the cat. He heated the soup in a saucepan and the hash in a frying pan, transferred the contents to a bowl and a plate, and sat at the kitchen table to eat his meal. When the cat hopped up onto the table to investigate, he took it by the scruff of the neck and tossed it across the room. That would do for now, but next meal it would try again; the beast was capable of learning, but not of retaining what it learned.

When he was finished eating he washed his dishes in the sink, wiped them dry with a red-and-white checkered dishtowel, and put them away. He was, he thought, the ideal tenant. He washed the dishes, made the bed, and fed the cat. He even watered the plants, although he suspected he was overwatering at least one of them.

He checked the refrigerator’s freezer compartment, and it had obligingly made ice of the water he’d put in the ice cube trays. He filled a bucket with the cubes, refilled all four trays with tap water, and dumped the bucket of ice cubes in the bathtub. Then he closed the bathroom door and returned to the front room and his chair by the window.

He missed his books, his histories, his diaries of old New Yorkers. As far as he knew, they were still in his storage locker in Chelsea, but that wasn’t a safe neighborhood for him. In a sense, no neighborhood was especially safe. His picture had been in all the papers and on all the news programs, and America’s Most Wanted had shown it to the whole country. (Let’s get this coward off the streets! had been the urgent message of the show’s intense host, and he’d found this puzzling. He didn’t expect the public to understand what he was doing for them, but in what respect could he be seen as cowardly? Evil, perhaps; he could see how they might view his actions as evil. But certainly not cowardly.)

In Chelsea, though, the residents could be expected to feel more personally connected to what he had done, and to have looked more intently at his photograph. He couldn’t expect to pass unnoticed there. Nor could he be certain that the police had not already traced the storage locker, in which case they were very likely keeping it under surveillance. He missed his books, but he didn’t need them, and didn’t care to risk walking into a trap.