One thing Bennie Durban had never done, and that was to fantasize about killing his mother. It was a disappointment, really. He’d read through a dozen or more serial killer books—always the factual ones, never the novels. He hadn’t fully understood the difference between “fiction” and “nonfiction” when he’d started to read on his own, and he’d been angry as hell to find out that some books were full of lies people just decided to make up—and one of the things he had noticed was that nearly all the great serial killers had had problems with their mothers. Bennie didn’t have problems with his mother as much as he had no use for her. She drank, and she hung around the house, and beyond that she didn’t seem to do anything at all. If there was a point to her life, he’d never discovered it.
Serial killers, Bennie had thought, when he had wrapped up work and got his jacket to go home, were secret geniuses. They were people who were really smarter than everybody else, but appeared to be more stupid. They were people who had not been properly rewarded for the good they had done in the world. They were people who understood that there was only one way to be really alive, and that was to live on the edge all the time, on the single point before destruction. That was the only time anybody was ever fully and completely real.
Except, Bennie had thought, he never felt like that. He never felt even a little real. He certainly didn’t feel real running a dishwasher or walking alone through the wet streets of Philadelphia to get back home. The waitresses always had boyfriends who picked them up at the kitchen door when their shifts were over. It was a brilliant example of the way in which the world was not fair.
It had been one thirty when Benny came around from Curzon Street and saw the police and the cordon and the crowd. He had stopped in his tracks. This wasn’t necessarily a bad omen. This was not a good neighborhood. Things happened here all the time. Maybe there had been a fight or a drive-by shooting or even an automobile accident. Bennie remembered once when a car coming around the corner at the kind of speed you usually saw in police chases had hit a woman jaywalking in the center of the block. There was blood everywhere, and ambulances, and for months afterward you could find flecks of black, dried blood on the pavement. He remembered when the guy in the top-floor apartment of the building across the street from his had thrown his girl-friend out the window five stories down. She’d hit the street skullfirst and burst open like a puffball mushroom.
He had sidled up to the edge of the crowd and asked the first person who didn’t look hostile, “What’s this? What’s going on here?”
It was not somebody he knew. He wouldn’t have asked somebody he knew. It was a tall black man with a head shaved bald, wearing the uniform of a UPS driver.
“It’s over at Kathleen’s house,” the man said. “You probably don’t know Kathleen. They say they’ve got a body from the Plate Glass Killer.”
“How can they have a body from the Plate Glass Killer?” Bennie asked. “Didn’t they just arrest the Plate Glass Killer?”
“An old body,” the man said. “A skeleton, or practically. I don’t know. I’m just standing out here watching.”
“It wasn’t just a body,” a woman had said. She’d been standing right in front of the UPS driver. Now she turned around. She wasn’t anyone Bennie knew either. “It was four or five bodies, maybe more. Skeletons, most of them. I went up to the line for a while and listened. But you don’t want to be up there. It’s nasty.”
“How do they know if they’re from the Plate Glass Killer if all they are is skeletons?” Bennie asked.
“Got cords around their necks,” the woman said. Bennie had thought she was white at first, but she was not. She looked black mixed with some kind of Asian. He wished people could decide what they were and stick to it. “Cords don’t disintegrate like flesh,” the woman said. “They’re made of nylon, aren’t they? Plastic. Everything is plastic. If he’d been smart enough to use a regular cord, that would have rotted away, too, and nobody would have been the wiser.”
“Wasn’t one of the tenants at Kathleen’s place picked up as the Plate Glass Killer once?” the UPS man said. “It was a long time ago, and they let him go. But he was picked up. I remember it.”
“The white boy,” the woman said.
“That’s the one,” the UPS man said. “I remember it. Kathleen had laughing fits for weeks, said the boy wasn’t bright enough to know when to come in out of the rain, never mind killing a lot of women without the police being able to pin him on it; but maybe she was wrong. Maybe he was the Plate Glass Killer all the time.”