Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [66]
The length of Kimball’s next pause was painting the room with a distinct and palatable anxiety.
“It was a Shar-Pei,” he said.
I paused, taking this in. “That’s . . . even worse?” I asked meekly, and automatically took another sip of vodka.
“Well, it’s a very rare breed of dog and even rarer in this neck of the woods.”
“I . . . see.” I suddenly realized I had not hidden the vodka bottle. It was out in the open, sitting on my desk, half-empty and with its top off. Kimball glanced at it briefly before looking down at a page in his notebook. Sitting across from him I could make out a chart, lists, numbers, a graph.
“In the Vintage edition of American Psycho,” he said, “on pages one sixty-four through one sixty-six a man is murdered in much the same way that Robert Rabin was.”
A pause in which I was supposed to locate something and make a connection.
Kimball continued. “The man in your book was also walking a dog.”
We both breathed in, knowing what was coming next.
“It was a Shar-Pei.”
“Wait a minute,” I automatically said, wanting to stop the fear that kept increasing as Kimball neared the information he wanted to impart.
“Yes?”
I stared at him blankly.
When he realized I had nothing further to say he looked back at his notes. “A transient—named Albert Lawrence—was blinded last December, six months before the Rabin murder. The case remained unsolved but there were certain elements that kept bothering me.” Pause. “There were certain similarities that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at first.”
The atmosphere in the room had flown past anxiety and was now officially entering into dread. The vodka was not going to work anymore and I tried to set the mug back on my desk without trembling. I didn’t want to hear anything else but I couldn’t help asking, “Why?”
“Mr. Lawrence had been inebriated at the time of the attack. In fact he was passed out in an alley off Sutton Street in Coleman.”
Coleman. A small town about thirty miles from Midland.
“Mr. Lawrence’s account was considered somewhat unreliable due to the amount of alcohol he’d consumed, and we had very little to go on in the way of an accurate physical description of his assailant.” Kimball turned a page. “He said the man who attacked him was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase but he couldn’t recall any physical characteristics as to the man’s face, his height, weight, hair color, etcetera.” Kimball continued studying his notes before looking up at me. “There had been a couple of articles about the case in the local press but considering what was happening in Coleman at that time—the bomb scares and all the attention those were receiving—the attack on Mr. Lawrence didn’t really register, even though there were some murmurings that the attack had been racially motivated.”
“Racially motivated?” And bomb scares? In Coleman? Where had I been last December? Either drugged out or in rehab was all I could come up with.
“According to Mr. Lawrence, his assailant apparently used a racial epithet before leaving the scene.”
Kimball kept pausing, which I was now grateful for since it was helping me put myself back together after each new byte of information was handed out.
“So, this Mr. Lawrence . . . was black?”
After another pause, Kimball nodded. “He also had a dog. A small mutt that the assailant also attacked.” He glanced down at his notebook again. “The assailant broke the dog’s two front legs.”
I did not want it to, but the point of Kimball’s visit was becoming clearer to me.
“Mr. Lawrence also had a history of mental illness and had been institutionalized various times, and since Midland County doesn’t have a large black community, the theory that this crime was racially motivated didn’t really play out. And the case remains unsolved.” Kimball paused. “But, again, there was something about it that kept bothering me. It seemed like I had read about this case before. And”—Kimball opened the copy of my book that sat in his lap—“on pages one thirty-one and one thirty-two in