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The Symphony

Written in blood on the shores of the great lakes

My story begins in the fall of 1980 in Buffalo, New York, when I was young and immortal. September, I think it was, but don’t hold me to that. I remember it was cool that night, but Lake Erie makes the climate fickle there. It can be chilly at night in the summer if there’s a wind blowing in off the lake. I suppose I could have looked up the old newspaper articles online and verified the month, but I tend to walk away from the past when I can. I’ll leave the research to you if you’re interested.

I was eighteen that year, just starting college and failing out. I worked part-time at the mall down the street. It seemed like I had plenty of time to waste. Of course, that’s me talking now, forty-one long-but-getting-shorter years later. Back then, the concept of how much time I could waste and what I’d do with my life hardly crossed my mind. The most planning I did was what I was going to wear out that night and whether I or one of my girlfriends could scare up a joint to smoke. I was kind of lost and drifting. I could give you an explanation why, but it’s not important to the story. Who wants to listen to a fifty-nine-year-old woman complain about how her life wasn’t working out when she was a kid? Nobody, that’s who. Besides, I found my way shortly afterward and things have worked out well for me in the intervening years.

One of my favorite hangouts was a bar downtown — Murphy’s — that was always packed with an interesting mix of people: kids from the local colleges, people who lived in the neighborhood, and run-of-the-mill drunks. The drinking age was eighteen then, and though I’d been sneaking into bars for the previous year, I was finally legal. My friend Sue and I would go to oldies night on Mondays to listen to the DJ play stuff like Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl and Green Onions by Booker T and the MGs, or to hear our favorite local bands on the weekends.

My father didn’t like us driving from our homes in the white bread suburbs to the seedy part of Buffalo where Murphy’s was located. The city felt dangerous that fall. Everything was in flux. Jobs were draining out of the area like water through a sieve. The steel plant was winding down, along with its promise of lifetime jobs with good pay and pensions. America had lived through the energy crisis and Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech, but Iran was still holding fifty-two of our citizens hostage, and it seemed like maybe America had reached its zenith and was on the downswing, starting with our own little corner of the just-starting-to-corrode belt. When Mount St. Helen’s erupted in May of that year, it was like a bad omen confirming our worst fears. It was easy to think the country was going to hell when even the earth was angry at us.

Then there were the killings.

Do you know that the term “serial killer” was probably first coined by an FBI profiler named Robert Ressler? Supposedly, Ressler was lecturing at a British police academy in 1974 when he heard someone talk about crimes occurring in a series, as in a series of robberies, murders, or arsons. Series, serial, serial killer.

In the late seventies and early eighties “serial killer” was still the sensationalized, shiny new penny of crime descriptions, and it seemed like there was a fascinating, bloody rampage across the nation. Bundy got caught in 1975 and eventually confessed to thirty murders. The Son of Sam killings set New York City on edge in ’76 and ’77, and a man dubbed the “Killer Clown” confessed in ’78 to killing dozens of men and burying their bodies on his property. The clown actually had his picture taken with the First Lady right around that time. She must have been shocked to hear she’d shaken the same hand that had stabbed or strangled or suffocated all those men.

In the summer of 1979, police found a hoard of more than a thousand photographs of women and young boys, saved in the storage locker of a man eventually convicted of killing seven women. Even now as I write this, numerous people in those pictures haven’t been identified. No one knows if they’re missing and murdered, or living out their ordinary lives unaware of how closely they brushed up against death. Amazingly, someone found footage of the murderous photographer appearing as a contestant on The Dating Game. When you learn you can’t trust Bachelor Number Two not to rape and murder you, it kind of makes you wonder if there might be a whole lot of people out there who did similar stuff and never got caught, right?

Soon there would be a serial killer in Buffalo, too.

When Sue called me to go out that night, Mom and Dad were having their ten millionth argument on the way to their soon-to-be divorce. She picked me up, and thirty minutes later we were on the west side of the city, looking for a place to park that was secluded enough to smoke a joint before we headed into the bar.

Sue and I fueled each other’s wildness. She was fearless. I never knew someone as willing as her to take a risk. She’d be working someplace like the Federal Reserve Bank, the kind of job people stayed at their whole lives because of the benefits and pension, and then she’d just up and quit to do something crazy like open her own restaurant. Or she’d decide that what she really wanted to do was take up cake decorating, or be an actress, or learn to play guitar and join a band. One minute she’d be hauling me into some sketchy apartment complex to buy tabs of acid off a guy having a violent argument with his wife over whether a blow job counted as cheating, and the next we’d be taking off to spend the weekend at a music festival upstate. She had an old Chevy Impala as big as a boat, and we sailed that car to a dozen rock concerts, and the beach, and up and down the New York State Thruway. I was a bit in awe of her. She was six years older, and I was a naïf compared to her. I’d met her through her sister, who was friends with my cousin. We all used to hang out together, but then her sister got married, and my cousin started spending all her time chasing after the guy she eventually married and divorced, and it ended up just me and Sue.

She was cute. A little bit chubby, with big boobs, sparkly brown eyes and a wild cloud of black curly hair she mostly let float around her head like a storm. The guys loved her. She’d flirt, and rub up against them, and promise them anything to get what she wanted at any given moment, but I only saw her really hook up with a guy once. Men were secondary, she would tell me. Didn’t I want to keep having fun and being wild, instead of tying myself down to a man and spending the rest of my life kissing his ass and having babies? It was hard to argue with Sue. She’d just smile and drag me off to the next adventure, and I’d follow.

I used to love to make her laugh. She had a laugh like music; it always reminded me of a child running her fingers up and down the keys of a piano and giggling. She always wore four coats of black, spikey mascara, and decorated her long fingernails with elaborate manicures: sparkly glitter, or psychedelic swirls, or glued-on rhinestones. I’d crack a joke or do something outrageous that I never would have done without her being there to egg me on, and Sue would laugh until she cried, wiping the tears from under her spiky eyelashes with those ridiculous, glittery fingertips, trying to stop her mascara from running down her cheeks. God, I loved her. I miss that laugh.

When we went to Murphy’s that night, we pulled down one-way Allen Street, found a parking spot on the left side of the street and lit up the joint I’d rolled. As we sat there smoking, a car pulled past us and parked on the other side of the street, two lengths ahead. A man got out of the driver’s side of the car and turned to glance at us. He was strange-looking: coke bottle glasses that made his eyes look huge, and a herky-jerky, stiff-jointed walk, as if he were a marionette being controlled by a puppeteer.

Neither Sue nor I said anything. We just exchanged puzzled glances as she handed me the joint, and went back to watching the man.

He walked around the car and opened the back door on the passenger side. He took out a case that was about twice the length of the kind of briefcases people used to carry back then, before the age of laptops and messenger bags. The whole time, he stared at our car, smiling a weird, gruesome jack-o-lantern smile. He laid the case on the trunk of his car, opened it, and took out a couple of long metal components that he snapped into one piece. Then he leaned on the car, and still grinning his pumpkin smile, raised whatever he had put together toward his face and pointed it at us.

I slid over and hugged the door, ducking my head. Sue put the car in drive and peeled out of our parking space and down the street, right past the herky-jerky man. He followed the car with his coke bottle gaze. We drove back to the suburbs in silence, not speaking until Sue pulled up to my house half an hour later to drop me off.

I asked her, “Was that what I think it was?”

Sue stared out the front window, looking kind of dazed and blank, like she was waiting for me to get out of the car so she could leave. “I don’t know. What do you think it was?”

“A rifle, Sue. It was a rifle, right? Haven’t you ever seen one of those movies where a sniper opens up a case and puts together a rifle to shoot someone from a rooftop? Was that guy going to shoot us? ” I could hear my speech getting louder and higher and I took a deep breath. I was shook up. “And did you see him? There was something wrong with him, right?”

“Maybe he had a flat tire and it was a jack or something. And there are plenty of weird-looking people in the world.” She turned in the seat to look at me. “Every time we go down to Murphy’s there’s a weirdo or two hanging out.”

When you’re stoned half the time, weird stuff starts to seem normal. Sue smoked a lot of pot.

“He didn’t have a flat tire, Sue. My Dad is a gun collector. He has lots of guns, including a rifle that breaks down to fit in a case like that. I think it was a gun.”

Sue lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. “I guess that makes you an expert then.” She smirked at me. “So… what are you suggesting? We should call the cops? Tell them what you think you saw?” She was doing that thing she sometimes did; mocking me until I either agreed with what she was saying or I just shut up. She took the barely-smoked joint that she’d stamped out in the ashtray after we left Allen Street — my last one — and tucked it into her cigarette pack. “C’mon, be serious. You know the cops would just treat us like a bunch of goofy stoners. Maybe even arrest us for the pot. I don’t need the hassle.” She turned the key in the ignition and started her car. “I’m going to take off. Some friends of mine from work said they’d be at The South Side Inn tonight.”

And just like that, Sue killed the idea of calling the police about the herky-jerky man. I knew she would. I said goodnight and went into the house. It was only eleven o’clock. The whole night hadn’t worked out the way I’d hoped. It was a real bust.

I called her three times the next day, but either she wasn’t home or wasn’t answering the phone. I think it was her way of underscoring that she didn’t want to talk about what happened; the subject was closed and we were going to forget the herky-jerky man. Sue could be a real bitch that way. She’d make up her mind and that was it. You could either go along or go away. Her way or the highway, if you know what I mean. Did you ever know someone like that? Someone that you really liked, until you got to know them better and their mask started to slip a little, and you realized they weren’t the person you projected them to be? Disappointing, isn’t it? I’ve known a lot of people like that.

Five days later she still hadn’t returned my calls.

Six days later there was a picture of Sue on the front page of the Buffalo Evening News. They’d found her in her blue Impala, down the street from Murphy’s in the early hours of the previous morning. A couple of people remembered seeing her drinking in the bar, but she’d left by herself. She’d been shot four times. I was home in bed when Sue was killed, listening to my parents fighting in the living room and wishing I were someplace else. I really think a little bit of me died with her.

Later on, the police surmised the shots that killed Sue came from a Browning SA-22 rifle. The average person doesn’t know much about guns nowadays, but I can tell you a Browning SA-22 breaks down into two pieces to fit in a case about twice the size of a classic briefcase. Easy as pie to snap it together. There are a lot of them around. My father had one. He gave it to me when I moved out. For protection, he said. A woman living alone should have protection.

I miss Sue. She was a disappointment, but she taught me a lot. Like how to get what you want from a man without giving him much in return. How to work people without them knowing they’re being manipulated. That’s how I got the herky-jerky man to do what I wanted. Joey was a janitor at the mall where I worked. He had some disability that gave him that weird gait. I can’t remember what it was anymore — it’s not really important, and neither was he — but it caused him to have to wear those coke bottle glasses, too. All it took was a little flirting, some empty promises, a few kisses, and a little tug or two in the right place, and Joey assumed I was his forever. The night we met so that he could return my father’s rifle to me, his forever ended. He became victim number two of the Park and Die Killer stalking Buffalo that year.

I had planned to tie up that loose end from the beginning, but I was even more certain I had made the right decision when the idiot aimed the rifle at Sue while I was in the car. I mean really, he could have shot me by mistake. I’d told him to wait until we came out of the bar; that I would make an excuse to go back in for a minute, and he should do it then. Instead, he screwed up and I had to playact with Sue to make sure she didn’t call the police that night, and Joey had to tail her for a week to find the right time to try again. Herky-jerky Joey was a disappointment.

After him, there were a few random others: red herrings who were just conveniently — for me, not them — in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not that I didn’t enjoy them. They were good practice, but they were just throwaways to confuse the police.

Then, right before I left Buffalo for good, there was Stephen. Victim number five. I mentioned him earlier. Remember me saying that I only saw Sue really hook up with a guy once? The hookup was Stephen. He was handsome and funny, and he had the bluest blue eyes, and long blond hair cut into a mullet that reached past his shoulders. I’m sure he’d appreciate that at least I saved him from having to look back at pictures of himself wearing that stupid haircut. I have to admit I was surprised when he walked right past Sue to talk to me when we’d first met him at the beach. He told me I was pretty, and sexy, and fun to be with, and soon he was my boyfriend. I was sure he was going to propose. But then Sue got him drunk and seduced him and it all fell apart. She never even apologized. She told me his betrayal should have proved to me that all men are bastards and that we should just keep having fun by ourselves, and forget about finding the perfect guys and settling down like all the other girls were doing.

Stephen was a huge disappointment.

One thing I’ve learned is that all disappointments in life come with valuable lessons. Don’t you agree? My disappointment with Sue taught me that it’s important to stick up for yourself. If somebody hurts you, you have to hurt them back ten times worse, no matter what it takes. The herky-jerky man taught me that if you promise to do something, you have to do it right or face the consequences. Stephen taught me the lesson that men can never be trusted. It’s better to hurt them before they hurt you. Those sweet little nothings whispered in your ear are just lies they tell you to get what they want.

My life has been a testament to those lessons, and I’ve put them to use thirty-six separate times since then. Or is it thirty-seven? It’s a little hard to keep track after so many. Their faces start to blur together. Am I remembering the final moments I shared with my son-of-a-bitch first husband, or reminiscing over the lesson I taught the guy in the Chicago bar after he chose the slutty blonde over me? Recollecting the shocked look on the face of the woman who cut me off in traffic, or recalling the pleading eyes of the whore who slept with the guy I dated in Cleveland? You know what they say. The first time is special. The thirty-seventh time? Not so much.

I still miss Sue from time to time when I’m feeling nostalgic. She was truly the first, even though I didn’t pull the trigger myself. I mean, she’d probably still be alive if it weren’t for me. Isn’t that what counts? Looking back after all these years, I think she was right. I didn’t need Stephen.

I didn’t need her, either.

So that’s my story. You’re probably wondering why I wrote it all down and sent it out into the world, but lately I’ve been feeling less immortal, and I don’t want to die without anyone knowing what my life has been about. I don’t want my life’s work to be like a symphony that nobody has ever heard played, you know what I mean? So I picked you for the audience.

I have to admit I’ve misled you a bit. I’ve changed the names to protect the… well… not so innocent. Think of it as poetic license. Nobody ever called them the Park & Die killings. I might have changed the city, too. There are a lot of cities on the Great Lakes, although I’ve spent some time in Buffalo. Twenty-three and twenty-four happened there, I think, but don’t hold me to that. I move around a lot. You’re welcome to try to connect the dots and attempt to find me. It might be an interesting challenge for both of us.

Just remember, I’ve still got that rifle.

This is a work of fiction. I’m not a serial killer, just a writer with a vivid imagination!

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