IN A MEN’S-ROOM STALL AT THE SHOPPING mall, Corky Laputa used a felt-tip marker to write vicious racial epithets on the walls.
He himself was not a racist. He harbored no malice toward any particular group, but regarded humanity in general with disdain. Indeed, he didn’t know anyone who entertained racist sentiments.
People existed, however, who believed that closet racists were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have purpose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.
For a significant portion of humanity, having someone to hate was as necessary as having bread, as breathing.
Some people needed to be furious about something, anything. Corky was happy to scrawl these messages that, when seen by certain restroom visitors, would fan their simmering anger and add a new measure of bile to their bitterness.
As he worked, Corky hummed along with the music on the public-address system.
Here on December 21, the Muzak play list included no Christmas tunes. Most likely, the mall management worried that “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or even “Jingle Bell Rock” would deeply offend [120] those shoppers who were of non-Christian faiths, as well as alienate any highly sensitized atheists with money to spend.
Currently, the system broadcast an old Pearl Jam number. This particular arrangement of the song had been performed by an orchestra with a large string section. Minus the shrieking vocal, the tune was as mind-numbing as the original, though more pleasantly so.
By the time that Corky finished composing pungent racist slurs in the stall, flushed the toilet, and washed his hands at one of the sinks, he was alone in the men’s room. Unobserved.
He prided himself on taking advantage of every opportunity to serve chaos, regardless of how minor the damage he might be able to inflict on social order.
None of the restroom sinks had stoppers. He tore handfuls of paper towels from one of the dispensers. After wetting the towels, he quickly wadded them into tightly compressed balls and crammed them into the drain holes in three of the six sinks.
These days, most public restrooms featured push-down faucets that gushed water in timed bursts, and then shut off automatically. Here, however, the faucets were old-fashioned turnable handles.
At each of the three plugged sinks, he cranked on the water as fast as it would flow.
A drain in the center of the floor could have foiled him. He moved the large waste can, half full of used paper towels, and blocked the drain with it.
He picked up his shopping bag—which contained new socks, linens, and a leather wallet purchased at a department store, as well as a fine piece of cutlery acquired at a kitchen shop catering to the crowd that tuned in regularly to the Food Network—and he watched the sinks fill rapidly with water.
Set in the wall, four inches above the floor, was a large air-intake vent. If the water rose that high, spilling into the heating system and traveling through walls, a mere mess might turn into an expensive [121] disaster. Several businesses in the mall and the lives of their employees might be disrupted.
One, two, three, the sinks brimmed. Water cascaded to the floor.
To the music of splash and splatter—and thinly spread Pearl Jam—Corky Laputa departed the restroom, smiling.
The hall serving the men’s and women’s lavatories was deserted, so he put down the shopping bag.
From a sports-coat pocket, he withdrew a roll of electrician’s tape. He never failed to be prepared for adventure.
He used the tape to seal off the eighth-inch gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold. At the sides of the jamb, the door met the stop tightly enough to hold back the mounting water, so he didn’t need to apply additional tape.
From his wallet, he extracted a folded three-inch-by-six-inch sticker. He unfolded this item, peeled the protective paper off the adhesive back, and applied it to the door.
Red letters on a white background declared OUT OF ORDER.
The sticker would trigger suspicion in any mall security guard, but shoppers would turn away without further investigation and would seek out another lavatory.
Corky’s work here had been completed. The ultimate extent of the water damage now lay in the hands of fate.
Security cameras were banned from restrooms and from approaches to them. Thus far he’d not been captured on videotape near the crime.
The L-shaped corridor............