Cape Cod Noir

WHEN DEATH SHINES BRIGHT

BY DAVE ZELTSERMAN

Sandwich



Michael Yarrow drove to the quaint little sandwich shop in the quaint little downtown section of Sandwich and found that they had closed at five o’clock and he was fifty-five minutes too late. He stood for a moment trying to decide what to do. He hadn’t eaten since that morning when he had finished the second half of the BLT that he’d brought back to his room the day before. It was December and these quaint little shops must close early in the off-season because the few other bakeries and cafés he had passed were also dark inside. He could go to the Daniel Webster Inn and eat in their tavern or spend twenty minutes and drive to Hyannis where he’d have no problem finding fast-food restaurants. There was also a chain donut shop and a chain convenience market a little past downtown. Michael Yarrow decided he didn’t want to sit down among other people and he didn’t feel like he had the energy to drive twenty minutes to Hyannis. He was also trying to limit the number of places he might be seen. The inn where he rented a room, the sandwich shop where he bought his food, and the liquor store where he bought beer. He decided he wasn’t that hungry after all, and that he could pick up a couple strips of beef jerky and a bag of potato chips when he bought his beer, and that would be enough.

Michael got in his car to drive the three blocks to the liquor store, which would also take him out of this postage stamp–sized downtown. The buildings were either restored Victorians or old Federal-style houses covered with weather-beaten shingles. A two-hundred-year-old church had been converted to a restaurant that was closed, and an even older church had been converted to shops. This was a town of money. Quiet, well kept up. But the first day Michael showed up, he had seen a couple of tiny cracks in the town’s veneer. A sign advertising psychic readings. Another advertising Gold Bought Here. Only slight, tiny cracks, but still, it made Michael feel better.

Up until three days ago when he had come down from Somerville, Michael had never been to Sandwich or Cape Cod. He told Cheryl he was going to Atlantic City for a week to decompress after his first semester at medical school, but instead he drove here. Cheryl was his fiancée, had been for three years now. A blond, attractive girl with clear blue eyes and a nice shape, although maybe ten pounds too heavy. She would love this town. Even though there were only a couple dozen shops, she’d love each one of them, with their shelves of antique dollhouses and rocking horses and teddy bears. She’d love the glass museum, and even in this frigidly cold December weather, she’d probably love the boardwalk and the beach. There wasn’t a chance that Michael would ever take her to Sandwich now.

The reason he was here was because of Fred Schwartz, one of his classmates at medical school. Schwartz and one of their other classmates, Joan Harris, would occasionally talk about Cape Cod, and Michael would eavesdrop on their conversations. Schwartz would always talk up Sandwich; about how quiet and peaceful it was, and how cheap this certain inn was during the off-season. Harris would always counter with Hyannis, about how much she enjoyed the bars and the rowdier atmosphere there. Hyannis sounded seedier to Michael, which was more to his liking, but when he decided to drive to the Cape, he thought he’d be better off in a quieter area. He knew there was a state forest nearby, as well as a scenic beach, and he had images of himself bundling up in the cold and taking long walks by himself in both the forest and along the beach so he could soak up the solitude they’d provide. The first day he was here, he drove out to where the boardwalk was, which looked like a good half-mile over marshlands. Most of the boards had inscriptions carved in them, quite a few with little hearts, and he walked over about a hundred of these before he decided he’d had enough, and returned to his car without bothering to see the beach. He hadn’t been back since then, nor had he bothered driving to the state forest, and instead spent most of his time in his room.

When Michael approached the liquor store he saw a scene that didn’t fit with this quaint little town. Standing in the shadows was a feral-looking man in his late twenties wearing a hooded sweatshirt. He was thin and unkempt, with scruffy facial hair and long greasy locks hanging out from under his hood. Michael couldn’t see the man’s neck because of his sweatshirt and the darkness, but he guessed it was covered with tattoos. There was a wild, hyped-up look in the man’s eyes, as if he was anxiously waiting for something. Seconds later the door to the liquor store opened and the girl who worked in the sandwich shop walked out carrying a package. She had taken maybe four steps when this man moved toward her. There was ill intent is his manner, and when the girl noticed him she froze, too startled to scream, not that it would’ve done her any good. Michael reacted without thinking, blasting his horn and then hitting the gas so he could accelerate forward and bring his car to a stop between the girl and the feral-looking man. The guy gave Michael a hard, angry, sullen looking before stepping back and disappearing into the shadows. Michael pressed the button to lower his passenger-side window.

“I hope I didn’t scare you,” he said, “but that didn’t look good.”

Her color had paled and she was visibly shaken. “Oh God,” she said. “That was so bizarre. I think he was going to attack me.”

“Do you know him?”

She shook her head.

Michael peered into the darkness where the feral sweat-shirted man had disappeared. “I think he’s gone, but I don’t want to take any chances. Can I drive you somewhere? Make sure you get home safely?”

“My car is three blocks away,” she said.

“At the sandwich shop.”

She squinted at him. As recognition hit, her lips pulled into a slight smile. “I thought you looked familiar. You’ve been coming to the shop the last couple of days. Sunday was turkey with havarti, yesterday was a BLT.”

“That’s right.”

She looked around quickly and shivered. “He might still be out there,” she said. “Sure, I’d like a ride.”

She got into the passenger seat, and Michael gave her a thin smile as he backed into the street. She was an attractive girl. Not really a girl, more like twenty-three, only a few years younger than him. Her long red hair was pulled into a ponytail. That and her slight build and thick glasses made her seem like a teenager, but she was still very pretty.

“I wouldn’t think street muggings would happen in a place like Sandwich,” Michael said.

Consternation momentarily ruined her brow. “This is a safe town. I’ve lived here all my life and never heard of anything like that happening here.” Her voice trailed off into a soft murmur as she added, “It doesn’t make sense, especially with the police station just down the road. Maybe he was only planning to panhandle money from me.”

Michael shrugged. He didn’t bother stating the obvious. As he drove he felt her again squinting at him.

“Why didn’t you come to the shop today?” she asked. “Did you find a better place to eat?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I tried coming to the shop, but I came too late and you’d already closed up for the night. So I was going to the liquor store to pick up some beef jerky. And you know what happened next.”

He pulled up in front of the shop where she worked, which had the appropriately quaint name The Sandwich Sandwich Shoppe. She hesitated for a moment before telling him that she would open up the shop for him and make him something to eat. “It’s the least I can do for saving me,” she said.

Michael didn’t argue. He was hungry, and he liked the idea of spending some time with her. After leaving his car, she stopped and held out her hand. It was a small, delicate hand and it was cold to the touch because of the weather, but it still felt nice when Michael took hold of it.

“My name’s Rachel,” she said.

“Matt,” he lied.

Once they were inside the shop, he told her he’d have a ham and cheese on a baguette, and she went about making him one, adding potato salad to the plate and also giving him a velvet chocolate cupcake, which she told him was their specialty. She also made him a roast beef and cheddar on a sourdough roll to take back with him to the inn. While he ate, she told him about life in Sandwich. After he was done, he offered to pay for his food but she told him it was on the house. “It’s the least I can do for you coming to my rescue,” she added, her eyes half-lidded and glistening.

He knew she wanted to spend more time with him, but he made an excuse for why he needed to call it a night, and he walked with her to her car to make sure she got to it okay. After that he went back to his car and drove again to the liquor store. This time he was able to buy a six-pack of Sam Adams lager without incident.

The inn where Michael was staying was less than a mile from downtown. The main house was an old restored Victorian, which had the nicer and more expensive rooms, but there was also, in the back, a row of connected single-room cottages. Michael had one of these cottage rooms, and it was pretty much generic—a queen-sized bed, a dresser, a chair, and a TV set, with a small attached bathroom that could barely fit a sink, toilet, and shower stall. While the rooms in the main house would be charming and more luxurious, the cottage had what he needed—it was cheap at thirty-nine dollars a day, which he paid with cash, and more importantly, it had its own entrance so there was less chance he’d be seen by other people every time he went in and out, which wasn’t often.

Michael had a beer while he sat in the single chair in the room and fantasized about what it would’ve been like if he had brought Rachel back. Most women found him attractive, except for those times when he wasn’t watching and something off would show in his eyes and his mouth would twist into something cruel. But usually he could keep that side of himself from other people. Cheryl had caught glimpses of him like that, but for whatever reason had chosen to ignore it.

Michael tried to imagine what Rachel would look like naked and what he would do to her body, but he was starting to feel too unsettled to hold that image in his mind. An anxiousness had been working in his stomach for days now and he was finding it harder to withstand. He hadn’t called Cheryl since supposedly leaving for Atlantic City three days ago, and as much as he dreaded calling her now he didn’t feel like he could put it off any longer. On his way to Cape Cod, he had stopped in Boston for a disposable cell phone. He used this to call Cheryl. When she answered, he apologized for not calling her earlier. “School put my head in a weird place. I needed some time alone to decompress and become human again,” he told her.

“Okay,” she said.

Her voice sounded so unnaturally brittle that it alarmed him. It was possible she was just sounding hurt because he didn’t take her with him on his supposed trip to Atlantic City, or because he hadn’t called her in three days, but it was also possible it was something else entirely. He felt his chest tightening as he waited for her to give him a clue which it was. When she didn’t, he told her he missed her.

“How about I come down then and keep you company?” she asked with that same painful brittleness.

“It wouldn’t be worth it,” he told her. “I’ll be home in a couple of days.”

There was another long hesitation, which he could barely stand. Was Cheryl sincere or was there something going on? A numbness filled his head as he tried to figure it out.

“How come caller ID is showing your cell phone as unavailable?” she asked.

“I lost my phone and bought a disposable one,” he lied. He still had his cell, and if everything worked out, he would tell her later how he found it in his car when he was driving home.

Her voice sounded normal again as she told him how she had tried calling him and was getting upset that he hadn’t returned any of her calls. So that was it. He couldn’t afford to keep his cell phone on since he knew he could be traced by it, so he didn’t know that she had tried calling him. He should’ve guessed that was the case. So the police hadn’t called her yet. He felt some relief realizing this, but only some. Still, he couldn’t help asking whether anyone was looking for him.

“Why would anyone be looking for you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe one of my professors or classmates.”

“No one has called for you.”

He told her he was hungry and was going to head down to the casino’s buffet for dinner, but that he missed her and was looking forward to seeing her soon, and she told him the same. After disconnecting the call, he had another beer and found himself absently rubbing his right wrist. He rolled up his shirtsleeve and saw that the scratches along his wrist were still red and ugly. Not nearly as bad as they had looked three days ago, but still pretty bad. He kept a tube of hydrocortisone cream near the chair, and he squeezed some out to rub on the scratch wounds. Hopefully in a few days they’d be gone.

The scratches were part of the reason he had taken off to the Cape without Cheryl. He couldn’t afford to let anyone see them, especially not her. But the trip had also been to get some breathing room, so that no one would know where he was in case the police were looking for him. If the story broke that they were after him, he wanted a chance to run. He wasn’t sure yet where he’d run, but he at least wanted that chance. He couldn’t imagine letting the police arrest him.

Michael opened another beer and drank it slowly as he thought about the woman he had killed. She’d been a dancer in a strip club in East Boston. Five foot one, ninety pounds, she’d been a dark-haired beauty with smoldering eyes that still remained remote and distant. It was clear why the patrons in the strip club would stare at her. With her near perfect body and face and long flowing black hair, she was a creature of pure sexual fantasy, and she received by far the most tips of any of the dancers. This was why Michael had picked her, although he also liked that with her diminutive size she’d be more easily intimidated by him and less likely to put up a fight.

Last Saturday after the club had closed, he had followed her, just as he had done two other times before. As she was cutting through a darkened alleyway from her car to the front door of her building, he was waiting with a knife to demand her money.

She should’ve just given it to him. When he’d robbed another strip club dancer four months earlier in Connecticut, she’d handed over her money and Michael had left her tied up but otherwise unhurt. The same would’ve happened Saturday, but this petite dark-haired beauty had tried to fight him, digging her claws into his wrist as she struggled for the knife. He’d reacted then without thinking, just flashing the knife out and somehow cutting her jugular. She’d stumbled backward onto the cement pathway, her life bleeding out very fast.

Michael panicked then. He hadn’t expected to kill her. All he’d wanted was her money. He hadn’t known if anyone had seen him or his car. After trying to brush any possible DNA evidence from under her fingernails, he’d taken her money and fled. It was only later that he’d realized she had bled over his coat, so he took it off and stashed it in the trunk of his car. He’d spent the rest of the night huddled in his car so Cheryl wouldn’t see him. Early the next morning, he’d surprised her with his impromptu trip to Atlantic City. She’d been groggy from sleep, and he explained away the night before by saying he had gotten too drunk to drive home after an end-of-semester party and had slept on a classmate’s sofa. This was an outrageous lie since he never spent any time socializing with any of his classmates. He still had his bloody coat stashed in the trunk, and planned to burn and bury it in the state forest before he left Sandwich.

One of the niceties that the inn provided was a complimentary copy of the Boston Globe each morning. When he’d killed her, Michael had only known the dancer’s stripper name, which was Brandi, but her murder was a big story in the paper, and he learned her real name then, and that she was a single mother to a three-year-old daughter and was going to community college to be an accountant. From what he could tell from the newspaper stories, the police had no leads, but they were following up on inquiries. Each evening he watched the local news, but they had nothing about the story then.

So now he was a murderer, holed up in a motel room as he waited to know whether the police had anything, all for twelve hundred dollars that he had planned to use for a gambling excursion, just like he did with the money he stole from that other dancer.

He tried not to think of any of this. Instead he finished off his six-pack, then turned on the TV and sat quietly as it droned over any thoughts buzzing in his mind.

The Globe the next morning had nothing new about the murder. This left Michael more unsettled than before. It would almost be a relief if the police were onto him. At least then his next step would be clear. This waiting around was killing him.

He thought it would be good to get some fresh air, and maybe this time make it all the way down the boardwalk to the beach, but as he started to push himself out of his chair, he felt too listless for that, as if he didn’t have the energy to move. Instead, he stayed holed up for another day. Around noon, he ate the roast beef sandwich Rachel had made him the night before, and then he just stared into space until six o’clock when he turned on the news. The top story was about breaking developments in the case of the dancer brutally murdered in East Boston four days before. Michael felt his insides freeze as he prepared to see his picture come up over the TV screen, but instead the police spokesman talked about how a former boyfriend had been arrested for the crime. When the camera showed a photo of this former boyfriend, Michael broke out laughing. The man was dark and swarthy, and had no resemblance whatsoever to Michael, which meant there were no witnesses. If he had been successful in removing any DNA evidence, he was in the clear.

He let out a loud exhalation. For the first time in days, he felt himself relax and the knots in his shoulder blades ease up. He still had to dispose of his bloodstained coat, and to be safe he should wait until his scratches were fully healed before heading home, but they were already much better. He had murdered a woman, but he would be a surgeon someday and would have the opportunity to save more than enough lives to make up for this.

He turned off the TV set and thought about what he had been through. He was honest with himself for the first time in weeks. He knew why that girl had fought him. He could feel the subtle shift in his features, and knew she had seen her death shining brightly in his eyes, even if it was only for a flash. That was why she had fought him, because she was fighting for her life, but she didn’t have a chance. At a conscious level he had only been planning to rob her, but on another level he had been planning more. The thrill he had gotten from robbing the strip club dancer in Connecticut hadn’t been enough. He didn’t realize that at the time, only now.

He thought about Rachel. During the day he had been fantasizing about her. It was too early to play out his fantasies now, he’d have to wait a few months, and he’d have to learn how to steal a car so he could drive back here anonymously, but once he did, it would be easy enough. He would pull up to her sandwich shop a little after closing time and lure her into the stolen car. She was clearly attracted enough to him where it wouldn’t be hard to do that, and he’d drive her someplace where no one would be able to hear her scream. He felt himself getting excited, and forced himself to take a deep breath and try to relax since it would be months before he’d be able to do this and see the fear shining brightly in her eyes as she saw her death shining just as brightly in his own.

It was twenty past six. Michael didn’t feel like being with other people but he did feel like drinking, so he left his room to head out to the liquor store. Like every other day around this hour it was bitterly cold, with an almost impenetrable darkness as clouds hid the moon and stars. When he got to the liquor store, he rushed inside to escape the cold. He was ten feet into the store before he realized something was wrong. The feral-looking guy from the day before was standing in front of him pointing a gun at the clerk, his eyes every bit as hyped up and twitchy as they had been before. At first he turned to Michael with a blank hostility, but as recognition hit him, an all too familiar look flashed in his eyes.

Michael wanted to run, but before he could move, he felt a bullet slam into his skull. In that flash before the gunshot, he had seen his death shining in this other man’s eyes, and before the darkness enveloped him, Michael knew what this ferallooking man was feeling. An overwhelming Godlike power over him. For the brief last moment that he was still alive he envied this man.