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It suddenly hit me that he had chucked his murdered wife, Terry,into such a bag, I'd seen it, smelled it, when I was feasting on him.
Oh, hell with it. So he'd given me the idea.
There were a few pieces of cutlery around, though nothing thatwould allow a surgical or artistic job. I took the largest of the knives,carbon-steel blade, and went into the living room, deliberately without hesitation, and turned and looked at the mammoth statue.
The halogens were still shining; bright, deliberate beams in theshadowy clutter.
Statue; goat-legged angel.
You idiot, Lestat.
I went up to it and stood before it, looking coldly at the details.
Probably not seventeenth-century. Probably contemporary, executedby hand, yes, but it had the utter perfection of something contemporary, and the face did have the William Blake sublime expression梐nevil, scowling, goat-legged being with the eyes of Blake's saints andsinners, full of innocence as well as wrath.
I wanted it suddenly, would liked to have kept it, gotten it downsome way to my rooms in New Orleans as a keepsake for practicallyfalling down dead in fear at its feet. Cold and solemn it stood beforeme. And then I realized that all these relics might be lost if I didn't dosomething with them. As soon as his death was known, all this wouldbe confiscated, that was his whole point with Dora, that this, his truewealth, would pass into indifferent hands.
And Dora had turned her narrow little back to him and wept, awaif consumed with grief and horror and the worst frustration, theinability to comfort the one she most loved.
I looked down. I was standing over his mangled body. He stilllooked fresh, wrecked, murdered by a slob. Black hair very soft andmussed, eyes half open. His white shirtsleeves were stained an evilpinkish color from the little blood that oozed out of the wounds I'daccidentally inflicted, crushing him. His torso was at a hideous anglein relation to his legs. I'd snapped his neck, and snapped his spine.
Well, I'd get him out of here. I'd get rid of him, and then for along time no one would know. No one would know he was dead; andthe investigators couldn't pester Dora, or make her miserable. ThenI'd think about the relics, perhaps spiriting them away for her.
From his pockets I took his identification. All bogus, nothing withhis real name.
His real name had been Roger.
I knew that from the beginning, but only Dora had called himRoger. In all his dealings with others, he'd had exotic aliases, withodd medieval sounds. This passport said Frederick Wynken. Nowthat amused me. Frederick Wynken.
I gathered all identifying materials and put them in my pockets tobe totally destroyed later.
I went to work with the knife. I cut off both his hands, ratheramazed at their delicacy and how well-manicured were his nails. Hehad loved himself so much, and with reason. And his head, I hackedthat off, more through brute strength forcing the knife through ten-don and bone than any sort of real skill. I didn't bother to close hiseyes. The stare of the dead holds so little fascination, really. It mimicsnothing living. His mouth was soft without emotion, and cheekssmooth in death. The usual thing. These梩he head, and thehands桰 put into two separate green sacks, and then I folded up thebody, more or less, and crammed it into the third sack.
There was blood all over the carpet, which I realized was only oneof many, many carpets layering this floor, junk-shop style, and thatwas too bad. But the point was, the body was on its way out. Its decaywouldn't bring mortals from above or below. And without the body,no one might ever know what had become of him .. . best for Dora,surely, than to have seen great glossy photographs of a scene such as Ihad made here.
I took one last look at the scowling countenance of the angel,devil, or whatever he was with his ferocious mane and beautiful lipsand huge polished eyes. Then, hefting the three sacks like SantaClaus, I went out to get rid of Roger piece by piece.
This was not much of a problem.
It gave me merely an hour to think as I dragged myself alongthrough the snowy, empty black streets, uptown, searching for bleakchaotic construction sights, and heaps of garbage, and places whererot and filth had accumulated and were not likely to be examinedanytime soon, let alone cleared away.
Beneath a freeway overpass, I left his hands buried in a huge pileof trash. The few mortals hovering there, with blankets and a littlefire going in a tin can, took no notice of what I did at all. I shoved theplastic-wrapped hands so deep in the rubble no one could conceiv-ably try to retrieve them. Then I went up to the mortals, who didn'tso much as look up at me, and I dropped a few bills down by the fire.
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