The Nighttime is the Right Time Page 16

  For one thing, I am no longer what most people think of as "young." I am fifty-five years old, which, while it might not be called young by some people, is not exactly old, either. Not these days. People are living longer all the time. I read an article not so very long ago that said the fastest growing population group in this country is composed of people from eighty to eighty-five years of age. So fifty-five isn't as old as it used to be.

  Of course Harold could not see it that way, not recently at any rate. He had become fascinated with women who were twenty years younger than I. Even thirty years younger. I watched him poring over his Playboy every month, as if trying to discover a blemish on the perfectly smooth peach-colored skin of the Playmate of the Month.

  "Harold," I always said, "those girls are young enough to be your daughter."

  He would look up guiltily. "I'm just reading the interview."

  I never believed him, however. It wasn't so long ago that he began asking me to call him "Harry." He seemed to think it sounded younger than "Harold," perhaps more sporty, but I refused to change. He had been Harold to me ever since we met, more than thirty years ago. Fifty-five might not be old, but it is too old to begin changing the habits of more than half a lifetime. So I did not call him Harry, and now he will always be Harold. That is the name engraved on his stone.

  In addition to being fifty-five years of age, I am not of the correct physical dimensions to attract the killer, whose victims are all short and slim, as well as young, much like the Playmates of the Month. I am admittedly somewhat larger than they. I am six feet tall and weigh one hundred and seventy-six pounds. I am not fat, however. Statuesque is the term I prefer. I am quite strong and believe that I could give quite a good account of myself if I were attacked.

  "Have you ever thought of joining a health club?" Harold asked me one day as he was looking through the sports section of the paper.

  He had never cared for sports, and I knew perfectly well what he was looking at. He was certainly not reading the box scores from the previous night's baseball games, or even the advertisements for health clubs. He was looking at the advertisements for the "gentlemen's clubs" that advertise prime rib specials for under four dollars and feature entertainers with names like "Brenda Boobs," who are fresh from their careers in "XXX Rated Hits." I have seen the advertisements.

  I asked what he meant about my joining a health club, though I thought I knew.

  "Get a little exercise," he said. "Do you good. Tighten you up a little."

  He himself had recently begun exercising every morning with something called a "Tummycizer," which purported to be a device that would reduce his waistline by several inches within a month. So far as I could tell, it had not yet had any effect.

  The tie I am looking at now came, according to the label, from "Sears -- The Men's Store." It is four and one-quarter inches wide and is 100% polyester. It is dark green, and the scene repeatedly depicted on it is that of a decaying forest, with falling brown and yellow leaves, grey stumps of trees, and four mushrooms with brown tops. The label does not instruct the wearer as to the color of suit that would be appropriate.

  Harold and I were married for twenty-seven years. In all that time, I do not believe he was unfaithful to me even once; that is, not until near the end. Then it was a different story, though not a very original one.

  He was two years older than I, and I believed that he had successfully avoided the "midlife crisis" that I had read about so often in Reader's Digest and other publications. He had not, however. He had only delayed it a bit longer than most, and it struck him hard when it finally arrived.

  He was, naturally enough, humiliated when I caught him out in one of his clumsy lies and told him that I knew about what was going on.

  It is possible that his humiliation only increased when he later told his intentions to the young woman (I believe that she could have been no older than thirty) with whom he was currently involved. Now that I knew all, he explained to her, he would divorce me and marry her. Though it would be a struggle, since it was possible that he would soon be out of work and since no doubt the divorce would strip him of a considerable portion of his assets, he was certain that they would be happy because of the love they had for one another.

  She laughed at him, of course.

  She did not love Harold and was not interested in marriage with a fifty-six-year-old man, grown slightly bald, sporting a paunch that the Tummycizer had not reduced, and having no prospects for a decent income. She had gone out with him, let him pay for her meals, and accepted his gifts of money and clothing. She had probably even given him sex as a reward (though he never admitted that to me), but she was not in the least interested in marrying him. So her reaction to his declaration was predictable. Had Harold asked me (as of course he did not), I could have told him what she would do. I might have done the same thing myself at her age and in similar circumstances had I ever been involved in anything so sordid as an extra-marital affair, which of course I never was.

  I could never have told Harold, however, how he himself would react. I would never have expected it, and I am sure that he did not expect it either.

  At home, Harold had always been mild. Not meek, exactly, but certainly mild. He never raised his voice to the children when they were growing up, not even on the day that Dwayne put the cat into his wagon and rolled it into the street in front of the oncoming traffic.

  This time was quite different, I suppose because Harold had been under a great deal of pressure at home (from me) and at work. The job that he had held for nearly thirty years was being eliminated, and while the company had a private pension plan, it was not a very good one. Too, it did not go into effect until the worker reached the age of sixty-two. Add to all that the crisis of masculinity (or whatever it was) that Harold was experiencing, and the stress must have been considerable.

  Not that I am trying to excuse him. He should never have done what he did, and I can never hope really to understand why it happened. There are no doubt circumstances besides those I have cited and that I do not know about. I can never know them now.

  What Harold did was to kill the young woman and dump her in a ditch on a deserted section of a county road that branched off Highway 288. She was found shortly thereafter, becoming the first in the series of victims that I referred to above.

  I am looking now at an Arrow tie, four and one-quarter inches wide. It is brown, with three narrow diagonal white stripes crossing it near the bottom. It is, like the others from this rack, made of one hundred percent polyester. It is not, of course, the tie that Harold used to strangle the young woman. Ties these days are much narrower, though perhaps they are still made of polyester. I have not come to the newer ties as yet. They are on another rack.

  "Why, Harold?" I asked him, when he came home and confessed everything to me.

  He had his own little apartment by that time, but I am sure he felt a need to talk to someone, and he knew that I could never turn him away. I had not even wanted him to go in the first place. I had never been comfortable without him in the house, and I would have tied him to me if I could have. Leaving was his idea, not mine.

  At any rate, that night he came home. He tried to explain himself, I suppose, but he was unable to do so.

  "Because," he said. "Because . . . . "

  But that was all he could say. He was sobbing and incoherent, and I told him to get undressed and go to bed. I told him that everything would be all right, though of course it would not. How could it be?

  I was hoping, however, that what had happened might bring him back to me. As far as I was concerned, the woman who had almost succeeded (though perhaps that had never been her intention) in breaking up my home was dead. She had received no more than she deserved. Justice was served, Harold's fling was over, and he was at home where he belonged. I gave him a pill to help him sleep, but I am not sure that he took it. Most likely he did not.

  I went to the closet at that time and looked at all the ties. He ha
d taken only a few of them with him to the apartment, but I was glad that he had taken them. I had felt that somehow they would bring him back to me, and I suppose that they did, if hardly in the way I had expected.

  I am sure that I know which one he used. It was one of his favorites, the one that Dwayne gave him last year. It had a gaudy floral pattern, but I do not recall the name of the manufacturer.

  Harold died sometime very early the next morning, somewhere between four and five o'clock. I was sleeping in another room, and while I cannot be sure that was sleeping as well, I hope that he was. That would make his death at least a little easier to bear. I would hate to think that he lay awake torturing himself by agonizing over that woman, who so richly deserved her end.

  But because I was not with him, I cannot really be sure of the time of death, only that it must have been between four and five o'clock. That is what the doctor estimated.

  His heart had not been strong for several years. The doctors repeatedly had warned him about his blood pressure and his cholesterol count, both of which were elevated. They had even told him to stop smoking, and he had done so for a while. Recently, however, probably because of the stress, he had started again. I had spoken to him about it, but to no avail.

  So the young woman -- the young women, as I am sure there had been more than one even though he never admitted as much -- took Harold away from me a second time. Permanently. The ties did not bind, not forever.

  The funeral was distressing, to both me and the children, who loved their father almost as much as I. I did not tell them of their father's infidelities. It would have done no good at all and might have done much harm. Nor did I mention the death of the young woman. I did not want to upset them needlessly. It was right for them to remember their father as he had every right to be remembered.

  I have passed the time since Harold's death in various ways. I read the newspapers thoroughly every day. I watch television. Recently I have begun to catalogue the ties, and each one reminds me of what a good husband and father Harold was until very near the end of his too-short life.

  The tie I have here now, for example, is particularly nice. It has a geometrical pattern of browns, blues, and blacks. It was designed by Oleg Cassini, whose name, I believe, is highly respected in the world of fashion, though oddly enough the tie was made in Burma. That seems a strange place for a tie to have been made, and surely Oleg Cassini is not a Burmese name.

  The young women continue to die, all of them strangled with ties, which also seems strange. They are very careless it appears, leaving their "gentlemen's clubs" unescorted at all hours of the night, prey for anyone clever enough to await them at the right place or stupid enough to allow themselves to be lulled by someone they do not expect to kill them.

  Harold is not the killer. He did kill the first one, as I have explained, but he can kill no more. I am not sure that I know who killed the others.

  I do know, however, that I have dreams, strange dreams. In some of them I am waiting in lighted parking lots, looking lost and distracted, as if I need assistance. Young women ask if they can help, and I ask them for a ride. I do not remember what happens after that, though I have tried.

  There are no female serial killers, or very few. I read that in an article not so long ago. The article mentioned that there was one woman who, I believe, posed as a hitchhiker and killed a number of men, but there have been no other women that I am aware of who have done so.

  The dreams trouble me, however, and that is why I prefer to remain awake. If I do not sleep, then I cannot dream. And if the dreams are more than dreams, then what have I become?

  That is why I am cataloging the ties. There seem to be fewer of them now than there were when Harold died. But there are so many. It is hard to be sure.

  Next time, I will know. I will have the list that I am working on, and I can check to be certain. If one is missing, then I will know. I do not know what I will do then.

  But that is then, and this is now. Now I believe that I will have a cup of coffee, very strong coffee. And then I will work on my catalog of ties again, beginning with that bright orange one there. Not quite as wide as the others, but certainly from the same time period.

  The 1970s were a very colorful era, and Harold was a man who liked color. He particularly liked that orange tie, which Dwayne gave him for Father's Day. He swung Dwayne into the air and said, "Blessed be the ties that bind, right, Dwayne?"

  Dwayne laughed and laughed, and Harold put him down, winking at me. I wonder if he somehow knew what I secretly thought about the ties. I wonder the ties bind us even now, but if they do, it is in a way that I do not care to think about any longer.

  I will make the coffee especially strong.

  And then I will look at the ties.

  King of the Night

  Elvis and vampires? As with the werewolf detective, I ask, why not?

  For as long as he could remember, Elvis had been a creature of the night.

  Maybe it had started back in the early days when he was recording for Sam Phillips at Sun and touring in the car with Bill and Scotty, driving to the gig (most likely some high school hop), playing till after midnight, driving home again, and getting to sleep about the time the sun came up. Even then he'd liked the way the world looked and smelled at night better than the day.

  He'd gotten on a different schedule in the Army, of course, and when he'd been making movies he'd had to live pretty much like everyone else except that he got up earlier, but during the Vegas years he'd gotten back into the habit of sleeping during the day and living his life after dark. It was easier that way, easier to avoid the crowds and easier to avoid the people who wanted something from him, which at times seemed to include just about everyone from the Colonel on down.

  Finally the night life began to seem like the only life, and for him the night time was the right time. It was the only time.

  He sat up in bed and looked at the digital clock radio on the nightstand. The green numerals read 6:33. Outside the cheap motel room, the sun was going down. He tossed back the sheet and sat up. Time to be thinking about breakfast.

  After he shaved and dressed, he sat down in the uncomfortable vinyl-covered chair at the round table by the window. Then he put on his bifocals and flipped through the copy of the Weekly World News he'd picked up at a convenience store the previous evening. He bought one every now and then to see what they were saying about him, to see if he was speaking from beyond the grave with "a special message for Lisa Marie" or whether he was going to be singing in some Baptist choir on Easter Sunday morning.

  This time the article claimed that within the year he would do a live performance of a song written by a reader of the Weekly World News. Several sample songs were printed on the page, and there was a big photo of himself. He didn't look like that anymore. He looked a lot like his daddy had, kind of skinny and mean. Giving up drugs and deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches really changed a man. That, and developing a severe case of male pattern baldness.

  He gave the songs only a cursory glance. He wasn't really interested in music these days except for the old songs. About the only singing he did was in the shower, and he never listened to the radio anymore, not since all you could hear was that rap shit, which he couldn't follow at all. He couldn't understand the words.

  What really interested him wasn't the article about himself, anyway. His eye had been caught by an ad on another page, offering something called Count Dracula's Pendant, filled with earth from the Count's birthplace in Transylvania. Only $39.95, shipping and handling included. There was a dragon emblem on the front, and Elvis thought it would have looked pretty good on his white jumpsuit back in the old days, not that he needed to carry around earth from Dracula's birthplace. But it was an interesting idea. It might explain a thing or two.

  He closed the paper, tossed it in the trash, and looked outside again. For a minute or so he watched the cars passing up and down Telephone Road. It was completely dark now, or as dar
k as it ever got in Houston, what with all the streetlights and the stores and the billboards. It was time to go looking for the one who called himself The King.

  ~ * ~

  He'd seen him first in Memphis, late one night after buying all the tickets for a movie so that he and the Memphis Mafia could have the theater to themselves.

  The man came in just as the movie was over and stood in the back of the theater, looking as if he thought he had a right to be there. One of the crew braced him of course. You didn't fuck around with Elvis. Too many people wanted to prove their loyalty or their manhood or something. It was Red, Elvis thought, who stood up this time.

  He could remember the conversation that echoed in the theater.

  "What the hell are you doin' in here, buddy?" Red asked. "Don't you know this is a private party?"

  "I wasn't aware that it was a party at all," the man said. His voice was cold and hollow. "I just wanted to see The King."

  "Well, he don't want to see you."

  Elvis remembered the man perfectly. He was tall, probably six-one, and pale. His eyes were red, like a cat's eyes after dark. His hair was jet black, and Elvis was impressed. Here was a guy who knew how hair should look. It was too bad that 'Cilla never caught on. Elvis had seen her on TV not long ago, and her hair was almost blond.

  "He might want to see me," the man said. "After all, he is using my name."

  "What, is your name Elvis?" Red glanced back over his shoulder to see if the Mafia appreciated his wit.

  The man smiled. "No. It is the other name I mean. I am The King. The King of the night."

  "Like hell you are." Red put a hand to the man's chest and shoved, but the man didn't even budge.

  "There is no need to be rude," he said, looking right straight at Elvis, and the next thing Elvis knew Red was tumbling down the aisle, ass over elbows. The guy had hardly even moved, and before anyone else could jump him, he was gone.