Carl hasn’t said a word about the scarf. I adjust it so it doesn’t drip into my coffee and slide the laminated menu back behind the sugar shaker. Our waitress is edging up the aisle with a tray, a couple of booths away.
All night, my head was flooded with faces. Lolita, Violet, Rachel, the anonymous girl in Carl’s suitcase surrounded by a flood of red sand. I picture her pretty hair, hanging in a black snake down her back, the curly tip flipped up like it was about to strike.
She’s one more enigmatic piece. One more possible victim.
I’m stuffed to the bursting point with Carl. Photographs, criminal evidence, psychiatric reports, rumors, supposition, anything and everything I could hunt and find on the killer sitting across from me in this crap diner.
The immense pressure of it rises into my throat.
I pick out one tiny thing.
“Why were you nicknamed the Rain Man?” I ask.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Just breakfast conversation.”
“Sure it is. I guess a little breakfast conversation doesn’t hurt anything. At one time, I was only shooting pictures in the rain. It turned out to be a dumb idea. Difficult and limiting.” He shrugs. “It was the period after someone I loved died in a storm.”
There isn’t a sliver of emotion on Carl’s face.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard the story. The prosecutor told the jury it was pure public relations fairy tale. Don’t be fooled. This isn’t a romantic man, folks.
Before I can follow up, Carl leans forward, his elbow scattering the six pills I laid out in a line in front of him on the blue-and-black-speckled Formica tabletop. “Let me make a little conversation. I’d remember if I ran around killing people. That’s what dementia patients do. They remember the past like it was fucking yesterday. I remember the first picture I ever shot, and I sure as hell remember what iced tea is supposed to taste like. So I’m pretty sure I’d remember what it was like to slit a throat.”
I involuntarily jerk my head so that my hair falls over my left eye and cheek. Since childhood, this has been my tell, the one nervous tic I can’t seem to control no matter how much I practice. Carl knows. He’s eyed my hair tosses before, at Mrs. T’s.
“Don’t worry,” Carl says. “Nobody’s listening. More privacy in an egg joint like this than on a computer. Me, I listen. I see every frame of life in pictures. Freeze here. Snap there. Can’t turn it off. The teenager in the booth behind me? She’s knocked up and wants an abortion. She’ll get it way before her belly pops up. The woman back of you? She got smacked again last night. Thinks she’s really getting a divorce this time. She won’t. By the way, I want a damn phone. Add it to my conditions.”
This is the longest speech Carl has made in my presence. It’s both intelligent and predatory. A week ago, Carl told me he couldn’t remember ever being a documentary photographer, or even exactly what one was. The next day, he’d topped his conditions list with Camera.
The diner is noisy, its booths packed. It was Carl’s idea to get right back out of the parked car at the motel and eat at this restaurant only steps away. Sixty-eight steps, to be exact. It bothers me, this new counting obsession of mine—of steps, of days, of money, of the pills that Carl is now tucking out of sight under the edge of his coffee saucer. Of the 4,566 days since Rachel vanished, the 94 days since my mother assured me she’d stopped drinking again, the 38 days since I signed my real name.
I need to wrest back control. “You can’t keep adding conditions, Carl. Where did you get the twenty-dollar bill you left on the bed at the motel?”
“Here you go, honey.” The waitress, interrupting, clanking down Carl’s breakfast.
“I remember you from somewhere,” he tells her. “Your name is Annette. No, Lynette. Pretty name. Pretty lady.” She flashes beige teeth. I want to shriek, It’s on your name tag, you idiot. He will eat you alive.
I’m watching Carl unfurl into catnip for an aging waitress wearing a button that says Don’t go bacon’ my heart. I feel a violent urge to mark out the apostrophe. I can tell that Lynette is unsure how to proceed with Carl because of me. Competition, she’s thinking, but what kind?
“This is my daughter.” Carl, helping her out.
“You sure you don’t want more than that little box of cereal?” she asks, refilling my coffee. “You’re such a tiny thing.”
“No, thanks. I’m good.” Being nice to me won’t get you into Carl’s jeans and out of that one-bedroom, Lynette.
I’m unsympathetic to her lifetime plight of picking dangerous men, to the teen who may hustle Texas out of an abortion, to the middle-aged woman alone with her black-no-cream-please cup of coffee whose head is softly brushing the back of mine, to myself for already feeling vulnerable when I’ve trained so very hard for this.
“Stop playing around,” I hiss at Carl as soon as Lynette moves down the row.
“What? You want me to lie about us, don’t you? She’s not my type anyway. Has one of those Shit Yous that barks like a girl. Drives a junker. Bad dancer.”
“How do you…? Never mind.”
“Dog hair on her pants, key to an ’87 Malibu hanging off that ring at her waist, which I also saw sitting in the parking lot. And she’s got high arches. They always come with some curly toes.”
Carl wets his $6.99 Texas Slamski liberally with blueberry syrup, forks a chunk of Polish sausage and pancake, and slathers it around. “Delicious,” he proclaims too loudly. “Mrs. T is a burnt Eggos woman.”
“Do not draw more attention to us,” I say.
“Not trying to.”
“Just keep your voice down.”
“I’ve been thinking. You could be another cop, tricking me. A reporter writing a book.”
“We’ve been over this. Do I look like a cop, Carl?”
At the word cop, the teenager flips a third of the way around, thinks better of it, and goes back to tapping on her phone.
“We made a deal,” I tell Carl. “You said you would try. That you’d be honest if I fulfilled your conditions. That you’d keep an open mind about our relationship.” He didn’t say any of these things.
“I’ll be as honest as you are, how about that. So far, you are two for thirty-one on the conditions. Maybe we should write a book. A man with dementia and his long-lost daughter toddle off on a road trip across Texas solving cold cases to figure out if he’s really a serial killer. Clint could play me in the movie. Or the Bridges brother, the younger one, The Dude. Elizabeth Taylor could play you if she had a nose ring and vanilla wafers for boobs and she was alive. I’d like to walk into the desert at the end. I know just the spot.”
He pours more syrup in the blank space where his pancakes were. With his spoon, he traces either a heart or Elizabeth Taylor’s boobs, then smears it all away.
The cheap material of the scarf is starting to itch the back of my neck. Send shivers.
Still, I don’t remove it. Still, Carl does not say a word.
“Is this just a big joke to you?” I hiss. “Women died.”
“How do you know, if no one ever found them? I’ve read a few things about me, too.”
Before this can register, Lynette is back, snagging up his plate, her chest murmuring against his shoulder. “Who gets the check?” she asks cheerfully.
“My daughter here will take that,” he says. “I’ll be leaving the tip.” He lays a ten in Lynette’s palm. Keeps his hand there for a few beats, marking her. When she’s gone, he starts popping the pills like they were peppermints she dropped off.
“A jury declared me guilty of taking pictures,” he says. “I’ve decided I have no reason to doubt them.”
My eyes are on Lynette, pulling away plates from a table of men in trucker hats. Breasts at work again. Money changing hands. I’m feeling bad about my snap judgment. Lynette is probably way less of a fool than I am.
She’s pausing at the register with her stack of dirty plates, now doing double duty as cashier. The woman who had been sitting behind me is paying her bill. Her pillowed waistline and Clarks shoes say mom. Her demeanor to Lynette says kind.
And if Carl’s right, the size of the square-cut diamond on her left hand says there’s a lot for her to lose. Carl and I, we’re into the details.
She’s slipping off sunglasses so she can sign her name, a bruise the color of blueberries under her right eye.
“Cute scarf,” Carl says.