The Ethical Assassin

I asked him to let me out behind the motel, and I thanked him profusely. Then I knocked on Chitra’s door.

She didn’t look as though she’d slept much, if at all. Her eyes were sunken and red, and she might even have been crying.

“Lem,” she gasped. She pulled me into the room and then pressed her whole body against mine and squeezed hard. Under the circumstances, it was just what I needed.

The downside was that it seemed to me an inopportune time for an erection, and there was no way she didn’t notice, but if she found it distasteful, she was kind enough to keep it to herself. “Tell me what is going on.”

I told her as much as I could in a rambling fashion. I told her about Jim Doe and the drugs and the pigs and murders, though I left Melford out of it. It seemed to me too much to explain how it was that I knew Melford was a killer and hadn’t turned him in, how I’d become friends with him. It made no sense, so it was best not spoken of, particularly since she didn’t much trust Melford.

“We need to go,” I told her. “The Gambler’s not going to be happy to see me, and neither is this guy Doe. Let’s just call a cab and get out of here. It doesn’t matter where. They don’t want me around, will probably hurt me if they see me, but they won’t come after us. They just want me gone, and I mean to give them what they want.”

“Do you want to come with me? To my house for a few days, just to make sure they don’t come looking for you at yours?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “I want to go with you.”

We called the cab, and in ten minutes we went outside, determined to abandon whatever personal belongings- selling clothes and toiletries, mostly- were still in our rooms. Too bad for us. There was no way I was going back for that stuff.

Idling in front of the motel was a yellow Checker, but as we walked toward it, I caught the flashing lights out of the corner of my eye.

I saw in an instant, because I was getting good at that sort of thing, that it was a brown county car, not a blue Meadowbrook Grove car. And that was something. But it wasn’t much. I felt that jarring electric zap in my stomach. Not a loose wire zap, but a strapped to the electric chair with a black hood over your head sort of jolt. And for an instant I felt that I would start ru

The woman from the day before, Aimee Toms, got out of the car. Her face was blank, impassive, strangely appealing in its authority. “I need to talk to you,” she said to me. “I want you to come with me.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“I just want to ask you some questions.”

I turned to Chitra. “You go,” I said. “Go to the bus station and go home. I’ll call you. I’ll come see you.”

“I’m not going without you,” she said.

“You have to. Believe me, I’m in way over my head, but you’re not in any real danger if I’m not around, and I’ll be better off if I don’t have to worry about you.”

She nodded. Then she kissed me. I couldn’t say exactly what the meaning was, but I can tell you that I liked it a whole hell of a lot.

And then Officer Toms led me into the back of the police car and drove me away.

Chapter 35

AIMEE TOMS STARED STRAIGHT AHEAD- or I thought she did, but I couldn’t be sure with her eyes hidden behind her mirrored sunglasses. Even when she talked to me, she didn’t move her head. Sitting behind the passenger seat, I watched her firm lower jaw work its way over a piece of gum that I knew, without asking her or seeing it, would be sugarless.

“So, what’s your story, kid?” she asked after we’d pulled out of the motel.

I didn’t kill them. I was there, but I didn’t do it, and I couldn’t have stopped it. The words sat there, drew me in with their gravity well, tried to shape my answer the way tracks shape the path of a train. But I wasn’t going to give in. I was going to try to tough it out. And if things became too frightening, I could always break down later.

“I’m just trying to make some money to go to college,” I told her. “I got into Columbia, but I can’t afford it.”

“ South Carolina?”

“ New York.”

“Never heard of it. The school, not the city. You look kind of collegey,” she observed. “Which is why I don’t understand why you’re getting involved in all of this.”

“All of what?” My voice cracked like her gum.

“You tell me.”

“I’m really sorry I trespassed yesterday,” I said, “but you didn’t seem to think it was a big deal then. Why is it a big deal now?”

“Trespassing isn’t such a big deal,” Officer Toms agreed. “On the other hand, drugs and murder- now, that’s a big deal.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. It didn’t sound convincing because the fear wafted out of my mouth, the hot vapor of fear in the cold air-conditioning of the car.

“Listen, Lemuel. Lem?”

“Lem,” I confirmed.

“Listen, Lem. I’m a pretty good judge of character. I look at you, I talk to you, I see you’re not a bad guy. Believe me, I’ve been doing this long enough- and it doesn’t take that long, I’m sorry to say- to know that good people get mixed up in bad things. Sometimes they don’t understand what they’re doing. Sometimes they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But instead of coming forward, they hide and lie and break more laws to cover things up.”

All of this came uncomfortably close to the truth, and I knew there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t reveal that closeness. I looked out the window instead.

“All I’m saying,” she continued, “is that if you tell me everything that’s going on, I’ll do all I can to help you out, to see that you’re not punished for being a victim of circumstance. Even if you think it’s too late to talk, it isn’t.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “All I did was wander a little too close to a farm. I don’t see why it’s a big deal.”

“We can do it that way if you want,” she told me. She didn’t say anything else until we arrived at the station.

It looked like an old office building, and except for their uniforms, the cops inside might have been just generic weary civic employees. The air conditioner gurgled mightily but produced little cold air, and overhead electric fans turned slowly enough that documents would not dislodge from desks.

Toms had a hand on my upper arm and squeezed with a kind of firm sympathy. My arms were behind my back. She hadn’t cuffed me, but it seemed like a good idea to keep them back there out of respect or to acknowledge that I knew she could cuff me so there was no point in flaunting my freedom. As we walked down a pale green cinder-block-lined hallway, which looked like a forgotten a

Toms shook her head. “George Kingsley. You get a good look at him?”

“Enough to tell he’d slit my throat just for the fun of it.”

“Yeah, he’s like that. The thing is, Lem, I knew him when he was this smart little twelve-year-old. His father had all kinds of problems with the law, which was why I knew him, but his mother’s a good lady who saw he got to school and stayed out of trouble. But this kid did more than just follow the rules. He was always reading and talking about stuff. The ideas, the political ideas, you’d hear from him, a kid of twelve or thirteen. He was going to fix all the problems in the world. He was going to be a politician and help the black people. And he knew which laws he would repeal, which he would pass. It was incredible.”