Small Town

After three days of movies and as many nights of following his quarry, the Carpenter tailed Peter Shevlin from the Eighty-sixth Street IRT station to a Vietnamese restaurant on Broadway, where he ordered a take-out dinner. Instead of heading for his apartment, he continued downtown on Broadway. He crossed Broadway at Eighty-fourth Street, which a street sign designated Edgar Allan Poe Street, then turned right and walked west to Riverside Drive. Flights of steps led down to an underpass, and the Carpenter followed him through it to the strip of park edging the Hudson.

The Carpenter waited in the park while the man boarded his boat, waited while the boat sat at anchor long enough for Shevlin to eat his dinner, and remained where he was when Shevlin cast off and took the boat out onto the river.

He wished it would rain. Rain would bring Shevlin back sooner, and would clear the park of other pairs of eyes.

But the good weather held, and the Carpenter got to see the sun set behind the buildings on the Jersey shore. It was past eleven by the time Shevlin’s boat returned, and by then the Carpenter had picked his spot and was waiting. He’d reached into his navy-blue backpack — its load had increased in the past few days, with purchases he’d found it advisable to make — and he drew out a steel tire iron he’d picked up at an auto supply store on Eleventh Avenue. He’d have preferred a hammer, but suspected that hardware clerks were looking closely at older men who came in to buy hammers.

Shevlin passed without seeing him in the shadows. He stepped out, said, “Mr. Shevlin?”

The man turned at the sound of his name, and the Carpenter pointed to the ground and said, “You dropped something.” Shevlin lowered his head, tried to see what he might have dropped, and the Carpenter stepped forward quickly and struck him full force with the tire iron, catching him just behind the ear. Shevlin dropped like a felled ox, and the Carpenter hit him again at the back of the neck, then grabbed him and dragged him into the bushes.

He checked for a pulse and wasn’t surprised when he failed to detect one. Just to make sure, he clapped a hand over Shevlin’s mouth and pinched the man’s nostrils shut, and stayed like that for several minutes. If Shevlin hadn’t been dead from the blows, he was surely dead now.

The park was deserted, but it was still too early for what the Carpenter had to do. First he returned the tire iron to his backpack, pleased with the way it had performed. Then he wrapped Shevlin in a pair of black plastic lawn and leaf bags, tucking his legs into one, pulling the other down over his head. Anyone noticing him now would see a trash bag, or perhaps some plastic mulch for the shrubbery, rather than human remains.

When he was satisfied with his work, the Carpenter found a bench from which he would be able to tell if anyone discovered the body. No one came any closer to it than the joggers who breezed by every now and then, and they were far too intent on their efforts to notice some dark form twenty yards away.

At two-thirty in the morning, when twenty minutes had passed without a single human being coming into that part of the park, the Carpenter resumed his labors. He stripped off all of Shevlin’s clothing, filling one of the leaf bags with his jacket and trousers, shirt and socks and shoes and underwear. He removed his watch, but couldn’t get his wedding ring off his finger, and decided it didn’t matter.

He’d bought a boning knife and a saw at a restaurant supply house on the Bowery, and he used them to dismember Shevlin’s corpse, cutting the man into manageable-size portions. The work was distasteful, but the Carpenter was not overly surprised to discover that it didn’t bother him. It was a job, and he performed it as quickly and efficiently as possible, inserting each severed portion of the man into a plastic bag, securing the bag with tape, and setting it aside while he tackled the next part of the job.

Earlier, he’d located a Dumpster on Seventy-seventh between West End and Riverside Drive. He walked there carrying a taped-up plastic bag in each hand; each contained one of the man’s thighs. He placed the packages in the Dumpster, which was full of what looked to be the debris from the gut rehab of a brownstone. He buried his packages under some broken bricks and loose plaster.

He put some of the smaller parcels in garbage cans, and walked all the way to Broadway to empty the bag of clothing into the Pembroke Thrift Shop’s 24-hour collection box. The final two parcels went into his backpack. A key from Shevlin’s key ring got him through the gate to the Boat Basin, and another admitted him to the boat’s sleeping quarters.

He took off his shoes, stretched out on the bunk. The cabin was tiny, but he found it cozy, and quite comfortable. He wouldn’t sleep, he’d had plenty of sleep earlier at the Lincoln Plaza multiplex, but it was pleasant to stretch out and feel the gentle rocking motion of the anchored boat.