The Darkest Evening of the Year

than it really was.
    Sometimes months would pass between killings. And Billy could go a year, even two years, without having to waste a friend like Georgie Jobbs or a complete stranger like Shumpeter.
    Sure, in his line of work, every day required the commission of felonies, but mostly they were not capital crimes that could earn you a lethal injection and burial at public expense.
    Episodes of life seldom had the body count of good novels in the everything-is-pointless-and-silly genre, which is why Billy still read so many books even after all these years.
    Unnervingly, episodes of real life also were not reliably as meaningless as life was portrayed by his favorite writers. Once in a while, something would happen to suggest meaningful patterns in events, or he would encounter someone whose life seemed to be filled with purpose.
    On those occasions, Billy would retreat to his books until his doubts were put to rest.
    If his favorite books failed to encourage a full renewal of his comfortable cynicism, he would kill the person whose life had seemed to be meaningful, which at once proved that the meaning had been an illusion.
    The apartment remained silent, and finally Billy moved room to room, switching on lights.
    He disliked the minimalist decor. Too Zen. Too calm. Nothing here was real. Life was chaos. This decor was not authentic.
    Authentic decor was a deranged old lady living with fifty years of daily newspapers and thousands of bags of trash stacked throughout the residence, her husband dead twelve years on the parlor sofa, and twenty-six cats with various seizure disorders. Authentic decor was bombed-out shells of buildings, tenements full of crack whores, and anything Vegas.
    Billy loved Vegas. His ideal vacation, which he didn’t get to enjoy often enough, was to go to Vegas with two hundred thousand in cash, lose half of it at the tables, win the losses back, then lose the entire bankroll, and kill a perfect stranger chosen at random on the way out of town.
    In McCarthy’s annoyingly clean neon-free study, Billy unplugged the brain of the computer, carried it from the room, and stood beside the front door. When he headed for Santa Barbara, this logic unit would be in the trunk of his car. Later, he would flood it with corrosive materials and burn it in a crematorium.
    The architect had been instructed to take his laptop with him. Billy would have to destroy that machine after McCarthy was dead.
    In the study again, he searched the file cabinets and found the printouts of all the e-mails that Vanessa had sent to the architect over the past ten years. Although the waste can was tall, those files filled it to the brim, and he put them by the front door.
    Because McCarthy might have saved old e-mail files on diskettes when he updated computers, Billy searched boxes of those but found nothing that, judging by the labels, needed to be trashed.
    His purpose here was to eliminate anything that might, in the event of McCarthy’s disappearance, lead the police to Vanessa.
    In the study and bedroom, he also searched for a diary. He did not expect to find one.
    As with literature, authentic decor, ideal vacations, and so many things, Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.
    Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I’ve-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn’t want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.
    He did not find a diary in McCarthy’s apartment, but he did find scores of art-paper tablets full of sketches and detailed drawings, mostly portraits. This suggested that the architect secretly yearned to be not a designer of buildings but instead a fine artist.
    Pencil drawings littered the kitchen table. One of them was a striking portrait of a golden retriever. Some were studies of the dog’s eyes in different light conditions. Others were abstract patterns of light and shadow.
    Billy became at once fascinated by the drawings because he inferred that during their creation, the artist had been in emotional chaos. Billy was a connoisseur of chaos.
    He stood at the table, sorting through the pictures, and after a while he found himself in a chair without remembering