The Beauty of Death Vol.1

The Bitches of Madison County-2

There were four doors; the one he had just come in, the one leading to the bathroom, and two more that opened onto a standard closet. He opened this and found a fairly sparse collection of dresses, skirts and blouses, shoes stacked neatly on the floor, sweaters, T-shirts, and various purses and makeup cases folded and piled on the shelves above.

Harmon pushed the hangers aside, found the rear wall. He knew that this wall backed to a similar closet in another unit. That unit, as luck would have it, was unoccupied. He’d checked at the office of the complex, under the pretenses that he was interested in switching units.

Harmon looked at his watch, a gift from the magazine he’d given more than half his life to, and took a deep breath.

Seven hours and twenty-five minutes until Jayne returned home.

He had a lot to do.

Seven hours and two minutes later, Harmon exited the empty apartment behind Jayne’s, closed the door behind him, locked it. One of his projects that day was to replace the lock on this door with one of his own purchase, so that he’d have a key to get into his blind whenever he needed.

Picking up the toolbox, he walked around the corner, past the front door of Jayne’s apartment, smiled. He crossed the parking lot, walked up the steps to his own apartment, whistling quietly.

Inside, he cracked open a beer from the fridge, washed down a few Advil, then went into the bathroom and took a long, steamy shower. When he was finished, he slipped on a pair of boxer shorts and a white T-shirt. He crumpled his old clothes into a ball, a fine dust of white drywall powder and sawdust billowing from them, and plopped them into the washing machine.

A visit to the fridge for another beer, then Harmon sat at his computer. He placed the beer beside the keyboard, fired up a program. The screen sputtered like a TV tuned to a bad channel.

Harmon had cut through the adjoining wall from the empty apartment’s closet directly into Jayne’s closet. Through that hole, Harmon had introduced two small remote control video cameras, a digital still camera and an infrared camera, to see her when the room was totally dark. The remote control equipment he left in the closet of the empty apartment, connected to an old laptop of his with a wireless Internet connection. He could control the laptop from here, and thereby control the cameras without being in the apartment.

Now, he fired up one of the small video cams, panned it around the room. Excellent. The connection was working, the camera tracking and transmitting good images.

Jayne did not disappoint that evening. Her date for the night was dressed in a suit and a tie. A young man, a junior executive at the software developer Harmon knew Jayne worked for.

Harmon took a pull from his beer, his face lit by the flicker of the computer monitor, and settled in for the evening.

Two weeks later, Harmon was not so sure about the effectiveness of his blind. Jayne had not spotted it, had not given any clue that she knew that her watchers were now not limited to what she chose to show through the bedroom window.

Her activities were just as open, just as numerous, and just as energetic as they’d been before Harmon had planted the camera.

And that was the problem.

Harmon was not so much a p*****t as a pragmatist. He existed to capture that one moment, the place in time where a person exhibited something real and true. But this could take place only when that person didn’t know he or she was being watched, filmed.

Sex was usually that one time people forgot about themselves, forgot about their surroundings, lost themselves in the moment.

Not so with Jayne. Her s****l romps were, as he finally figured out, controlled and almost choreographed. Jayne knew what she wanted, and used the willing young men she brought into her bedroom as props; things to be used for a purpose, then put away.

Jayne was not uninhibited in the bedroom tableaus she unwittingly created for Harmon. She was not her secret, private self. Not a single one of these boys would see Jayne brush her hair, put her makeup on, make breakfast, read a book, paint her fingernails, make coffee.

Too many of the tiny details of Jayne’s life were occurring off camera.

Perversely, it was those tiny, myriad details of her life that she hid—and it was these intimate moments that Harmon found himself wanting to see.

That was where Harmon would find his moment.

But to capture these moments required Harmon to re-enter the empty apartment to remove the back of Jayne’s closet, so neatly cut out and put back earlier by him, its seams perfectly concealed. He’d have to find places to secret more tiny cameras—in the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen. When Jayne drank her morning cup of coffee, did her laundry, tweezed her eyebrows, read her latest National Geographic, Harmon wanted to be there.

So one morning after Jayne went to work, Harmon checked his toolbox, prepped three additional small video cams and their control units, prepared to make another house call.

Before he left this time, something—his training in filming other animals from blinds, a premonition—made him dig through his own closet.

He pulled away a few boxes, mostly papers, old slides, and old camera bodies, until he found the long cardboard tube he was searching for. He wrestled it out of the closet, set it onto the bed, pried open the cap at the end.

Gently, he inclined the tube until something slid into his waiting hand.

The rifle was long, its barrel thick and gleaming dully in the light of the bedroom lamp. It kept coming out of the cardboard tube, longer and longer until it seemed like a trick, a clown’s g*n drawn unendingly from its holster to the delight of the crowd.

But this was not a clown’s g*n. The barrel finally came to an end in an oversized stock of dark wood—ebony perhaps—that was carved with all sorts of little figures of romping antelope and plodding elephants.

It was an elephant g*n, ironically, given to Harmon by the chief of a Hutu tribe in Rwanda in the late 1970s, two decades before those people descended into g******e against their neighbors, the Tutsi. The g*n was a run-of-the-mill .500-caliber rifle that took shells nearly as thick as Harmon’s wrist.

The g*n was heavy, and he needed two hands to close it. He slid it back into the tube, shouldered the cardboard cylinder as if it were the rifle it concealed.

By 11:14 a.m., Harmon had pried the back wall of the adjoining closets out and had entered Jayne’s apartment. He’d placed the cameras in the living room and the kitchen, and was now taking his time placing the camera in the bathroom. It presented some problems, but he’d finally decided to clear a small hole in the silver backing of her mirror and place the eye of the flat lens behind this.

He was finishing this when he heard voices outside the front door.

Harmon froze.

He heard the metallic click of a key entering the lock of Jayne’s apartment, the wet sounds of kisses, the roll of the tumblers.

Acting quickly, he flipped the lights in the bathroom off, sidestepped into the bedroom, drew the door shut. He bet that she wouldn’t bother with the bathroom, that she’d take some time to get into the bedroom.

Harmon nudged his toolbox into the bedroom closet, stepped in, and drew the door partially shut. He backed into the darkness as far as he could. Beside Jayne’s dresses and clothing, a five-by-four section of drywall leaned askew in the closet.

And his g*n. He’d taken it from the tube, left it loaded and c****d leaning in the closet should he need it.

Instinctively, Harmon wrapped his right hand around the barrel.

What was she doing home?

Harmon took a long, deep breath.

He could hear their voices again, closer now, whispery.

“Wine?” came the reedy voice of a young man. “Isn’t wine at lunch against corporate policy?”

There was another sound. She was removing his tie. More wet kisses.

“Well, if you’re going to break corporate policy, you should do it in a big way.”

A zipper revved down.

“Oh,” she cooed. “And I can see that you are.”

This was followed by a tangle of bodies that as much fell into the room as entered it. Her partner was a thin and bespectacled young man. He fell onto her, into her, guided by her deft hands.

Experience made him patient. He assumed that this was an afternoon quickie, and that they had to return to work shortly. He could wait them out. He’d waited longer in blinds on many occasions.

He’d seen this played out many times before, so even the voyeuristic thrill of what was occurring mere feet from where he stood left him cold. He leaned on the rifle, and his thoughts drifted away.

A sound pulled him back. A hand on the closet door in front of him. A voice.

“Oh, you like dress-up, do you?” said Jayne. “Well, I’ve got an outfit in here that I’d be glad to slip…”

Her voice fell away on a puzzled note.

Harmon, rather than leaning back into the dark, moved forward, put his eye to the c***k between the wall and the closet door.

The dim afternoon light illuminated the room clearly, and Jayne was right before him, looking down.

Footprints in the carpet.

Drywall dust.

Harmon didn’t have time to curse.

Jayne opened the closet door.

Harmon’s hand closed instinctively on the barrel of the rifle standing at his side.

Jayne’s eyes started at the floor, moved up.

Harmon leaned back then, used both hands to bring the g*n up.

Jayne was inches from the g*n’s muzzle.

“Who are y…?”

There was a flash, a brilliant, deafening detonation of light and sound in the small room.

It blotted out all sounds from Harmon’s ears, but his eyes recovered quickly.

Quickly enough to see Jayne’s body fall backward in two pieces. The bottom half landed between the boy’s splayed legs. The other half slumped to the floor at the foot of the bed, flipped and disgorged its contents, like a spilled grocery bag.

The young man, who hadn’t had time for his mouth to open in horror, flashed into Harmon’s view, spattered with blood from the soles of his feet to his forehead.

Without thinking, Harmon took a step out of the closet, put the g*n to his shoulder.

It was heavy, long and unwieldy, and difficult to aim properly.

But the boy was stunned, probably wouldn’t move much if at all.

The boy, as if to prove his theory wrong, turned to leap from the bed, the beginnings of a long, high-pitched scream pushing past his numb lips.

Harmon tracked him with the g*n, pulled the trigger, surprisingly light for so large a g*n.

Another roar and blast of white, obliterating light.

The boy’s head, now disconnected from the rest of his body, tumbled end over end like a badly spiraled football. It struck the wall over the headboard, rebounded with a sound like a piece of steak being slapped onto the butcher counter, rolled onto the floor.

The previously bland and colorless room was now festooned with red streamers and polka dots, like a room decorated for Carnival or some Haitian voodoo ceremony.

Harmon stood there for a moment, breathing loudly.

His mouth was dry and hanging open.

He’d ruined his blind, blown his cover, had to put down his subjects before they turned on him.

It had happened before, to be sure.

But it had never prevented him from doing his job as a photographer.

From capturing the moment.

And it wouldn’t now.

It took until the next evening. When neither Jayne nor her partner returned to work that day or showed up for work the next morning, an alarm was raised. Calls were made. Harmon saw a few people park cars near Jayne’s, go to her apartment, and knock on the door. Harmon’s door camera was working, and he could hear their earnest voices.

“Jayne?” they called. “Ms. Fletcher?”

Another knock, then more hesitantly, “Tim? Tim Pratt?”

Three people made this trip, knocked, spoke words similar to this.

Three people left with knitted brows.

In the evening, the police showed up and quickly the scene changed.

Three squad cars eventually surrounded the area around Jayne’s car. An ambulance, a station wagon bearing the seal of the county coroner, and a homicide van all crowded around it. People milled all over—residents from the complex, cops, people trailing cameras and wires and lights.

He even saw the young night manager, standing in his baggy shorts and sandals, one hand atop his head, his mouth agog as they wheeled out one of the stretchers with a lumpy and misshapen body bag atop it.

The mortuary was locked, but really, who wants to break into a mortuary? It didn’t even have an alarm system.

Her casket was still conveniently in one of the parlors. The room was draped in peach-colored cloth and dotted here and there with brass urns and tasteful accessories. The casket was nearly lost in a spray of flowers that spread from it in a corona of multi-colored blossoms.

The casket was a peach-colored bronze, and Harmon wondered if this color was a personal favorite. If so, he mused, why hadn’t she used it in the decoration of her apartment?

Standing before the casket, he spent what he figured to be an appropriately respectful period of time. Then, he opened the top half of the casket. Her hair was up in a tight bun, and her face looked secretive and pinched. He opened the lower lid.

The upper half of Jayne’s body exposed by the open lid, terminated abruptly at the waist, artfully disguised by a drape of white lace and satin. Where the lower half of her body was supposed to be, though, there was a white satin bag, tied at the top with a cord. Through its sheer cover, he could make out the shape of her legs.

He hefted this out, a surprisingly heavy and awkward package, and took it to the lobby, found what appeared to be a janitor’s closet just off the main office, and stashed the bag there, behind a stack of orange traffic cones and cleaning supplies and boxes of “Funeral” window stickers.

Returning to the casket, he took stock once again of his supplies jostling around in his vest, checked the seating of his lens on the camera body, closed his fingers around the loose extra batteries.

He was set.

This was where being a small, slight man paid off, just as it had in the jungles.

He climbed into the casket, his head opposite Jayne’s. He lifted the padded batting she lay upon, scooted his legs underneath, all the way out. Even so, they came to just about Jayne’s shoulders.

Plenty of room.

He sat up, rearranged the pillows and veils on Jayne’s end, made sure his feet weren’t showing or knocking what was left of her body out of level. He closed the upper end first, then scooted down, closed the lower end.

It had been dark a long time now, and it was difficult to breathe.

Harmon had heard the early morning rustling, the lid of the casket opening and the mortuary attendants prepping Jayne. He heard the muffled words of the service, felt the casket tip and sway when the pallbearers hefted it into the hearse.

He felt the casket lowered, lowered, slowly, until it thumped onto the ground. Then the concrete shell that was settled over it, and the distant patter of earth that fell upon it, the sinuous twists of dust that squeezed through the space between the two lids.

He heard it all, but paid no attention.

The camera was to his eye, his hands grasping it lightly, his finger slick with sweat, pressed gently on the shutter button.

And he waited.

As the air thinned, and his shirt soaked with his own sweat, he waited.

He waited for the moment, the one place in time when he could be sure that she wasn’t aware of his presence, that she was her one, true, private self. There would be no brushing her teeth now, no making waffles or washing dishes.

Only this.

So, he put the camera to his eye and waited.

All was darkness circled by darkness.

But he could wait…oh, yes.

He could wait for it…the moment…

He could wait with the best of them.