The Pearlkillers Read online

  ‘Some religious female.’

  ‘People can be religious for all sorts of reasons, and from a lot of different motives. This new-fangled church they belong to – the Church of The Redeemer: that should tell us something.’

  ‘He’s a dope,’ Joe said flatly. ‘He always was.’

  ‘This isn’t a traditional church. It’s some kind of offshoot. On the perimeter.’

  ‘Ecclesiastically off-Broadway,’ Sherman said. ‘Back to hellfire and cleanliness. Come back, Darwin, and say it again, louder. Christ Almighty, they’re taking over the country. Now they want to teach it in the schools.’

  ‘That’s just an election gimmick,’ Dave said.

  ‘We get a President who knows his way around the Hollywood back lot and he didn’t even bother to see that movie about the monkey trial.’

  ‘What would you say he was like before?’ Herb asked.

  ‘Before getting to be President?’

  ‘What was Bill like before this girl converted him? At least, I’ve been assuming she was the one.’

  ‘A worrier,’ Dave said. ‘Nervous and worried, and couldn’t ever pull himself together when he had to, or couldn’t relax and enjoy himself. Had this thing about his parents and his childhood. No good with girls, either. Always worried everything would go wrong. Unless he was drunk. Then he was fine.’

  ‘Kind to animals,’ Sherman said. ‘Good with old people. Not so good with children. He froze up when people were rude to him. He ran on rails.’

  ‘He was scared,’ Joe said. ‘He was scared shitless all the time. He was the one that panicked.’

  ‘That was only once,’ Herb said.

  ‘But it showed what he was like.’

  ‘Well, I sort of got the same impression about him: that he was somebody who was afraid of a lot of things. Stepping over his own feet half the time, afraid of living his life, of finding out what his possibilities were, letting rip. Which means, maybe he’d be easy to frighten.’

  ‘No good,’ Joe said. ‘You ease up for a minute on that kind and all of a sudden they’re more afraid of somebody else instead and they’re talking all about whatever it was you wanted to keep quiet. It’s got to be permanent.’

  ‘What was he most scared of?’

  ‘Carmen,’ Sherman said. ‘That’s why it was so bad when it happened.’

  ‘OK. We wait till they get here. Or do we map something out? Like I said, it looks to me like it’s serious. I wouldn’t have gotten you all together otherwise.’

  ‘I could do it easy,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve still got my guns. But—’

  ‘I don’t like this kind of talk,’ Sherman said.

  ‘But I’d want all of you to be in on it some way. I mean, I’m not going to go in there alone and come out with the scalps and have the cops saying, “Where were you when the lights went out?”’

  ‘You’d kill a woman?’ Dave asked.

  ‘If it’s me or them, I’d kill anybody,’ Joe said. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Bill is one thing. I wouldn’t like it, but if he’s really going to put us behind bars, so be it. But a girl – that doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘She could go to the cops just like him. She’s the one pushing him to clear his conscience. She’s got it coming to her.’

  ‘I don’t want to listen to this,’ Sherman said. He stood up.

  Herb said, ‘Take it easy. We’ve got to decide something today. And we’ve all got to be together on it. We’re all affected by this.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any need to talk about killing.’

  ‘No, there may not be. But you can’t afford to be so squeamish that we let the question drop till they’re here in town talking about how good we’ll feel when we go to the cops. Are you really prepared to let it happen?’

  ‘I just think there’s got to be some other way.’

  ‘OK. Sit down and think of one.’

  *

  The five of them – Herb, Dave, Sherman, Joe and Bill – had had rooms in the same college dorm, on the same staircase. On the ground floor, down the hall from Herb, was a boy they hadn’t noticed the year before, when they’d been in their Freshman dorms. His name was Jeff and he was good-looking, rich, spoiled and a snob. He arrived in a white sportscar which was his own, not his parents’, and had all kinds of expensive and desirable objects delivered to his rooms – the best ones in the building – which he occupied alone, and which looked out on the tree-lined street. He had visitors. While his neighbours were still trying to find girls to go out with who’d say yes, Jeff was entertaining women who were working, possibly even married, and who – since his suite of rooms gave on to the street – could actually climb in and out of the living room at night.

  He didn’t bother to get to know anyone he thought wasn’t going to be important. The five other boys near him he evidently considered not worth noticing.

  One day Dave and Sherman were looking out of the window and saw Jeff walking across the path below.

  ‘Do you suppose Jeff stands for Geoffrey?’ Sherman asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past him,’ Dave said.

  It was quite a while afterwards that someone looked him up in the Freshman yearbook and discovered his first two names to be ‘C. Jefferson’. After that, there were bets on what the ‘C’ stood for. A friend of a friend, who had access to files in the Dean’s office, did the rest.

  They could hardly believe their luck. Joe actually didn’t believe it for days. ‘It’s a girl’s name,’ he said.

  ‘Well, his family’s part Cuban or Spanish, or something,’ Dave told him. ‘It’s probably one of those names that can be for both girls and boys.’

  Within hours they were calling the name at Jeff from their windows. He didn’t react. The next time he passed by, it was, ‘Hey, Carmen Miranda.’ He shouted back, ‘Screw you.’ Over the next few days he called out other things, phrases not in common use at the time – obscenity and gutter-language that the middle classes hadn’t yet taken up as a fashion. The five boys yelled it back.

  But of course all the time they were leaning out of their windows shouting ‘Asshole’ and ‘Shitface’ and asking why he didn’t do such-and-such with so-and-so, they knew the thing that hurt the most was simply his own real name: Carmen, which he’d tried to disguise and hide at the beginning.

  The crowd of them battled along that way from September through to the spring. Then, just before exam time, everyone was busy. They studied and they went out, saw movies, planned parties.

  There was one large panty-raid on a neighbouring women’s college. The raids were an imported custom from larger, rowdier universities that had already abandoned the practice and were more interested in reviving others, like goldfish-swallowing and crowding into telephone booths.

  And the parties began. Some boys were drunk for days at a time. There was vomit on the staircases, loud music at night, mobs of talking, laughing, dancing people giving parties or looking for parties, or left behind. A friend of Herb’s said he’d found the most beautiful girl one night, who couldn’t remember where she was, and said she couldn’t remember her name, either, and left before the morning without even giving him a phone number.

  You were supposed to check people in and out in the usual way, but everyone knew that it was standard procedure to do both at the same time. Many girls were actually staying through the night, stealing out early the next day. There were a lot of girls in the building on the evening of Rockwell’s party. Rockwell lived across the courtyard. The party was huge. There was hardly room to contain all the guests on his side of the building; most of them kept getting lost, anyway. Herb, Dave, Sherman, Joe and Bill weren’t invited because they’d gone to the first one: Rockwell was giving three parties – one for friends, one for formal and family connections, and the last, and biggest, for acquaintances. All night long people were passing out in the corridors or asking how to get back to the party. They were screaming and crying, laughing and singing. Rockwell’s phonogr
aph played Chubby Checkers, Dixieland, big-band swing and barrelhouse.

  The five boys tried to work but ended up breaking out the liquor and having their own party instead. Near midnight Sherman and Bill went out for food and brought back cheeseburgers, submarine sandwiches, french fries, doughnuts and cheesecake. After that, they had some more to drink. They considered starting up a poker game or going out somewhere, or crashing Rockwell’s acquaintance-party, or sneaking into the gym and going for a swim. The swim won.

  ‘But first we go wake up Carmen and Dolores,’ Joe said. ‘Give them a little surprise.’

  Everybody was pretty drunk by then and it sounded like a good idea. Dolores was the name they’d given Carmen’s latest girlfriend – a redhead who wore high heels and, until the warmer weather had begun, a fur coat. The idea was to catch the two in bed. Everyone wanted to get a good look at Dolores.

  ‘And we’ll invite them along,’ Dave said. ‘Big swimming party in the buff. Dolores is a good sport, she won’t mind. She’s probably a call girl, does it all the time.’

  They charged up the hallway and pounded on the door. Herb turned the knob and pushed. The door opened. He switched on the light. They squeezed in through the corridor and living room, into the bedroom.

  Carmen was standing in the middle of the floor. He’d obviously just gotten up out of bed, where he’d been sleeping alone. He was naked and angry.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ he asked.

  Joe said, OK, where was she, and started calling names. Sherman and Herb were laughing. Bill sat down on a chair. Dave headed towards the bathroom, saying she was probably hiding in there.

  ‘Get out of here,’ Carmen told them. He added a lot about their characters and at the same time picked up and threw a cushion that caught Dave on the side of the head and knocked him into a chest of drawers. He didn’t seem to be afraid at all, nor in any way embarrassed about having no clothes on. He looked around for something else to throw.

  Joe tried to tackle him at the knees. Carmen pushed him aside so he fell against a chair.

  All five felt that the fight began because Carmen kept throwing things at them. Their only aim was to stop him. And since there were five of them, they soon managed to knock him down and sit on him, even though he was sober and they were drunk.

  Sherman then said he felt terrible and needed some air. He wanted to go up on the roof. So did Herb. The others said they couldn’t leave Carmen there alone. They decided to take him with them.

  They dragged him up all four double staircases to the top, out the emergency door and on to the roof.

  It was a warm night full of stars. The breath of greenery came to them out of the darkness, from the treetops around the building. Carmen, who had seemed for a while to be only semiconscious, came to. He started to fight again. He landed quite a lot of lucky punches and ducked out from under blows that then hit the others. For a while the five friends were stumbling around and fighting each other.

  They caught him because he had no clothes. He had worked his way over to the edge of the roof near the front entrance. On one side below them was a large tree. Later it occurred to Herb that perhaps Carmen had hoped to be able to climb over the guttering, shinny down a few feet, grab hold of a branch and get into the tree, where he’d be safe from them until morning.

  But they thought he was trying to manoeuvre them around so that he could start pushing them over. Dave and Joe began to mutter about what they could do to him to teach him a lesson. Herb and Sherman were still laughing, and Bill was in hysterics: it sounded as if he was crying.

  The group struggled, fell, and lurched forward: grunting, laughing and swearing. And then, all at once, they lost him. ‘Look out,’ Sherman said, and it was already happening. They hadn’t realized just how close to the edge they were, but they knew it the moment he slipped away. He gave a little cry that must have been just before he hit – the kind of sound a man might make if he’d bumped into the furniture in the dark – and then they heard the thump, and silence afterwards.

  The entranceway to the building was paved stone and lit at night from the lights over the doorways. By leaning out carefully, they could see him below, lying face down.

  He didn’t move. They were all sure he was dead, but Herb said they had to call an ambulance right away, and Sherman said definitely: an ambulance and the police.

  Bill went berserk: the police couldn’t, wouldn’t – to be mixed up with the police – his family, never. Joe and Dave didn’t like the sound of it, either. ‘We just go back to your room and forget about it,’ Joe said. ‘It was an accident. They’ll think he was taking LSD, trying to fly.’

  ‘We’d better get off this roof,’ Dave said. ‘He’s lying in the light down there. Anybody finds him, they’re going to come on up here.’

  They went back to Herb’s room, had some coffee and talked about it. Joe socked Sherman in the jaw to stop him from telephoning. They had some more to drink and then had to prevent Herb from leaving the room. The ones who didn’t want to get mixed up with the police began to find reasons why the others should stay clear, too. ‘It would ruin your career,’ Dave told Sherman. To Herb he said, ‘You don’t think he’s still alive, do you? Falling on stone? We get the ambulance and the cops, and there’s some dead greaseball kid out there all beat up and no clothes on – are you kidding?’

  ‘Son of a bitch had it coming to him,’ Joe said.

  Bill stared down at the floor and said nothing. He drank three cups of coffee and fell asleep on Herb’s fold-up sofa.

  At about an hour before dawn, Joe and Dave went back to their rooms. Sherman and Herb slept. They slept all through the morning till noon, when there were loud knocks and poundings on all the doors in the hall.

  The police didn’t believe the drugs theory, although according to the rumours going around, they tested the body for all kinds of things. They also went into Carmen’s rooms, where they found everything broken and about twenty girls and boys lying on the floor, in the bed, chairs, couches and wherever they could find space; they had moved in when someone saw the light on and the door open; their fingerprints were everywhere, their drinks all over the rug – they’d danced, made love, thrown up, smoked marijuana and left the shower on for six hours.

  But despite the orgiastic behaviour of Rockwell’s invited and uninvited acquaintances, what really shocked everyone speculating about Carmen’s death was the fact that he had been naked. The bruises and scratches covering his body were incidental: they were evidence of violence, whereas the nakedness appeared to be a sign of erotic activity of some sort. And it was mainly as a result of the wild rumours which immediately sprang up that all five students were at first glad they had chosen to keep quiet. No one, they realized, would believe the truth. It looked too bad. It looked suspicious. It also, they came to see, looked deliberate.

  *

  They were never suspected, although they were questioned, but so was everyone else in the house. They said there had been too much coming and going to notice anything, that the racket had gone on just about all night, that they’d been drinking too and playing the phonograph, and that all they could say for certain was that when they went out for cheeseburgers and came back, there wasn’t anybody lying on the ground in front of the entrance.

  Carmen’s uncle, a surprisingly young man called Earl-Somebody, came up to the college a few days later. He brought a dark-haired, intense-looking girl with him, who bore a slight facial resemblance to the dead boy; she was a cousin and her name was Lisa. Most of the time she sat in the uncle’s car, or paced up and down. Whenever she had to wait for too long, she got up and walked around like an animal in a cage: on the sidewalk, in the corridors, in a room.

  Earl himself came and asked them a lot of questions, among which were ones about friends, drugs, women, quarrels, money troubles. They told him they’d liked Jeff fine, only he’d kept himself apart from everyone else. The only close friends he’d seemed to want were the women they’d seen him wi
th and they didn’t know who any of those were, except to say that they hadn’t looked like college girls – they’d worn a lot of make-up and had their hair all specially done; and the shoes … you know.

  ‘Sure,’ Earl said. ‘I get you.’ He thanked them all, and, as he left, asked a couple of questions about traffic directions. Herb walked to the entrance with him and then out on to the street, where the car was parked. He told him how to get across town.

  Earl said, ‘Somebody hated him a lot.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘He was beat up real bad.’

  ‘Maybe when he hit the ground—’

  ‘No. The cops told me it was all done before that. And more than one guy, definitely.’

  ‘Well, as far as I know, everybody in the building got along with him. The only thing I can think of is something to do with his girls.’ Herb described how people could be let into those ground-floor rooms from the windows on the street. Then he said, ‘But you can’t imagine what it was like with that party going on. There were fights and jokes going on all night long. The noise was just unbearable. We turned up the volume as high as we could, and the walls were still shaking with it. And everybody was pretty drunk. So, it doesn’t have to have been on purpose. It could have been some kind of a dare that got out of control.’

  ‘Except’, Earl told him, ‘that he hadn’t had anything to drink. That seems strange.’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ Herb agreed. ‘The whole thing seems strange.’

  Earl held out his hand. Herb shook it. For the first time he realized that he had destroyed part of his life: from that point onward all mention of the incident, or the time surrounding it, would call up the fabricated substitute: the safe, untrue version.

  There was worse to come. After a week, Herb and Sherman began to feel that the two guilty ones – the ones who had really wanted all along to kill Carmen – were Joe and Dave. And Joe and Dave felt that though they were all in it equally, the others were looking at them in a funny way and not really backing them up.

  Bill started to have nightmares, or rather, one particular bad dream that kept repeating. In it, he was walking along without any worries until suddenly he came to the edge of a cliff he hadn’t noticed at all, and he began to slide towards it. He started to go faster and faster, until he fell over the edge, waking up in terror. He went to the other four for help, but they only told him to relax and forget about everything. Dave gave him some sleeping pills a girlfriend had let him have. They didn’t work when they were supposed to, but knocked him out the next day, taking effect so quickly that Bill said he was scared about what they must be doing to his brain. He stopped taking them, lost weight, and developed a nervous twitch in his chin. He said that all he could think about was that they were going to get caught, and then they’d be in a lot more trouble than they would have been if they’d reported the accident straight away. It was, he said, like hit-and-run drivers.