Animal Appetite

mail service, Jack had delivered it to Randall Carey’s house. Jack’s note to Tracy would move her deeply. His compassion for Randall Carey moved me.
    “I still don’t understand,” 1 told Rita, “why Randall Carey was stupid enough to write that chapter about Jack’s murder. The book, I sort of understand. It was meant as a potboiler. He needed money, so he wrote a piece of sensationalist trash. But why draw attention to Jack’s murder when everyone thought it was solved?”
    “Think about it,” Rita said.
    “I have! What hits me is that the chapter was the one place I came across the idea that Jack’s signature on the insurance policy was a forgery. No one else so much as hinted that Shaun McGrath had forged Jack’s signature. I wondered about that. I even asked Randall Carey who’d told him, but he said he didn’t remember. If there’d been some question about who’d committed the murder, then maybe it would’ve made sense for Carey to strengthen the case against Shaun McGrath. But no one doubted Shaun’s guilt.”
    “You’re missing the point,” Rita said, “because Randall Carey’s whole psychology is so foreign to you. Let’s step back. Why plagiarize a dissertation he could easily have written himself?”
    “He didn’t have time. He had to hand it in so he wouldn’t have to pay another semester’s tuition.”
    “He could’ve cited the book, he could’ve used it, he could’ve acknowledged his indebtedness to it, he could’ve applied for a new student loan, he could’ve gotten a job to support himself while he finished his dissertation. He had dozens of options, and he would’ve known what they were. He did not have to plagiarize. If he lifted whole sentences and paragraphs, he did the same thing he subsequently did with the chapter on the murder.”
    “Which was?”
    “He flirted with getting caught."
    “Punishment,” I said. “The leather, uh, fetish.”
    “It ain’t called bondage and discipline for nothing. Remember what he said to you? When he gave you that collar and leash? When he—”
    “I don’t want to think about it.”
    “He said, ‘I’ve been a very bad boy.’ He said it to you, he said it in his plagiarism, he said it in the chapter about Jack Andrews’s murder.”
    “But, Rita, when he really did get caught, when Jack found out about his dissertation, when Professor Foley found out, when I did, he wasn’t exactly gratified. He murdered them, and he tried to murder me.”
    “Holly, he didn’t want the product, the actual outcome in reality. What he was driven to repeat was the process, the seeking, the emotional brinkmanship, if you will. Where the excitement lay, for him, was in creating and re-creating a perpetual tension between fantasy and reality. Reality would have spoiled the fantasy. As I said, he flirted with getting caught.”
    “Or, as Kevin said, the guy was a real nut case.”
    “I can’t say that I’d disagree,” Rita conceded. Speaking of disagreement! If I may quote Estelle Grant, chacun a son gout and all that, but I really never thought that Multitudes in the Valley of Decision would suit even a minuscule press that catered to readers with specialized tastes, never mind the two gigantic New York publishing houses that got into a major bidding war over the manuscript and drove the price up so high that Estelle received an advance that would support me and my dogs for the next century.
    Estelle has, of course, quit temping. She now devotes herself full-time to her new book, which is about monks and morticians. According to Estelle, it’s really about liberation from psychic bondage. She got the idea at Randall Carey’s memorial service. We went together. Ordinarily, I will do anything to avoid funeral rites of all kinds. I made an exception in the case of Randall Carey’s service because it seemed to me that if ever a departed soul needed prayers, it was his, and that even my insincere muttering about forgiveness would be better than nothing. Also, since it was a memorial service, not a funeral, his dead body wouldn’t be there. What was there was his mother. Alive. Until I saw her, I couldn’t imagine what sort of person would hold a memorial service for a double murderer. She was a huge woman with a fierce, hawklike face. She wore a black leather coat with gloves to match. Boots, too. Black leather boots.
    Still on the topic of souls, women, and all black, let me update you on Brat Andrews. After considerable