In A Dry Season

Then they would clamp the metal skullcap on.

Vivian shook her head to clear the images. She felt dizzy, and she realized she was already a bit drunk. If anyone deserved this sort of end, she told herself, ambivalent as she was about the idea of capital punishment, it was probably Edgar Konig.

Vivian had been shocked when Banks told her the day after Frank’s arrest that Gloria’s murderer was not dead, but on death row in a Florida prison.

Did he think of Gloria now, Vivian wondered, now the end was so close? Did he spare a thought for a beautiful young woman all those years ago in a village that no longer existed, in a war long since won? And what about the others? How many had there been? Even Banks hadn’t been able to give her a definite number. Did he think about them?

If he was like most such killers she had read about in the course of her research, he probably felt nothing but self-pity and spent his last moments cursing the bad luck that resulted in his capture. What Banks had told her a few days after the scene at Hobb’s End did nothing to dispel that idea.

Banks’s FBI contact had interviewed Konig last December and sent in a report. Konig said he remembered the first one he did was in England during the war. He couldn’t remember her name or the circumstances, but he thought maybe she was a blonde. He did remember that he had been giving her stockings and gum and cigarettes and bourbon for more than a year and when he came to collect she didn’t show a scrap of gratitude. He’d been drinking. He remembered the way the pressure had been building and building in him all that time until he’d had too much that night and the dam finally burst. She wouldn’t have anything to do with him, a lowly PX grunt. Oh, no. She was fucking a pilot.

It was always the drink, he said. If it hadn’t been for the drink he would never have done any of them. But booze made something deep inside him just snap, and the next thing he knew, they were dead at his feet. Then he was angry at them for dying and he used the knife. It was like that with the second one. Berlin, 1946. When he didn’t get found out the first time, when he realized there wasn’t even going to be an investigation, he thought he must be leading a charmed life.

It was all her fault. If she hadn’t stopped to straighten her stockings as he was driving by, hiking her skirt up and showing those long, white legs in his headlights, then he would never have done her. If he hadn’t been drunk, too, which he wouldn’t normally have been while driving if he hadn’t known the lonely road like the back of his hand. If. If. If. His life was a tragedy of cruel ifs.

She was willing enough to go into the field with him. He hadn’t pla

The third woman, back Stateside in 1949, he didn’t really remember at all, and of the second one in England, all he remembered was something red happening in a barn. Again, it was the drink. Konig’s daddy had been a vicious alcoholic who regularly beat poor Edgar to within an inch of his life; his mother was a drunken whore who’d do it with anyone for a dime. All his life the drink had caused his problems; it made him do these evil things, and then he had the bad luck to be caught on that highway in California.

So went Edgar Konig’s story.

The drink. Vivian looked at her glass, then, with a shaking hand, she poured herself another tumbler of gin and grasped a fistful of ice cubes from the bucket on the bedside table, tossing them in the glass carelessly, so a little gin splashed on the table. An American habit she had picked up, that, ice in her drink.

It was almost time.

Edgar Konig, just turned seventy-six, was finally getting what he deserved. Vivian still felt a twinge of guilt when she realized that Banks was right, that she might have helped put an end to his killing all those years ago, after Gloria, the very first victim. She was partly responsible for Konig’s feeling that he led a charmed life of murder without consequence.

She had tried to rationalize it to herself so many times since Banks told her what had happened and turned his back in scorn that evening when the storm broke at Hobb’s End. Even if she had reported what happened, she told herself, they would have still probably arrested Matthew. He wasn’t well enough to face that sort of treatment. Though Banks was a little easier on her when they spoke the next day, she could still feel his censure, and it stung.

But what could she have told the police that would have pointed them specifically toward Edgar Konig? The whiskey and Lucky Strikes on the kitchen counter? They were hardly evidence. Gloria could have got them anywhere, and they could have been lying there on the counter for a couple of days. She and Gloria had known plenty of American air force officers in the area, and she had no reason at the time to suspect any of them of murder. It was all very well for Banks to say in retrospect that she was responsible for all those deaths, that she could somehow have stopped all this had she acted differently, but it wasn’t fair. Twenty-twenty hindsight. And who wouldn’t, given the chance, go back and change something?

Time.

The first shock would boil his brain and turn all the nerve cells to jelly; the second or third shock would stop his heart. His body would jerk and arch against the straps; his muscles would contract sharply, and a few small bones would probably snap. Most likely the fingers, the fingers he had used to strangle Gloria.

If he didn’t have a leather band strapped across his eyes, the heat would cause his eyeballs to explode. The death chamber would be filled with the smell of burning hair and flesh. Steam and smoke would puff out from under the hood. The hood itself might catch fire. When it was over, someone would have to turn on an air vent to get rid of the stench. Then a doctor would come, pronounce him dead, and the public would be informed.

Besides, Vivian told herself as she watched the people chanting outside the prison gates, others could have stopped him, too, if the system had worked properly. It wasn’t only her fault. She had acted only from the purest of motives: love of her brother. These past few weeks, she had read all the articles on Edgar Konig and his impending doom. There had been plenty of them.

Konig had finally been caught in California in the late sixties, when he was about forty-five, attacking a young female hitchhiker by the side of a lonely road. Fortunately for her, another motorist had happened along. Even more fortunate, this man wasn’t the kind who scared easily or who didn’t want to get involved. He was an ex-serviceman, and he was armed. When he saw a woman in trouble, he stopped and managed to disarm and disable Konig before calling the police. Already the girl was unconscious from strangulation. She had five stab wounds, but she survived.

Konig served nine years of a fourteen-year sentence. He was released early because of good behavior and prison overcrowding. A lot of people in the know opposed his release, regarding him as extremely dangerous and suspecting – but never being able to prove – his involvement in at least four murders. The prison officials said there wasn’t much else they could do at the time but let him go.

After his release in the late seventies, for years Konig was driven from one community to another as people found out what he was, trying to get work as a store clerk, more often than not failing and going on welfare. Just a few years ago he had finally settled in the small Florida town where it all came to a messy and predictable end.