When you've finished beating someone to death, it's usually important to clean up properly. Vital, in fact. With messiness comes discovery, and for most people discovery proves to be a bad thing for their career prospects. It's very difficult to explain on the resume: "Yes, after I left the Fragrance and Beauté counter at Saks I spent some time crushing a man's skull with a bent aluminum baseball bat that I found behind a dumpster in the alley which, if you think about it, is kind of odd. I mean, how do you bend a baseball bat?" And then you're off into the overtalking portion of the interview, the torrent of babble that makes your lack of relevant experience painfully obvious. "But I really think using the bat demonstrates my ability to improvise and adapt to new situations, and it's important to be flexible, what with technology moving so fast, and the Internet."

Upholstery shops need a lot of plastic sheeting, apparently, because there was a great pile of the stuff farther down the alley next to the service entrance of Armando's Couches-N-More, enough to transform Devon into a corpse robusto with a fine polyvinyl wrapper. I folded him into the dumpster, which was, in fact, a Dempster Dumpmaster. Most people wouldn't be impressed by that, but I was. "Dumpster" is a genericized trademark now, like kleenex, but I put Devon to rest in a genuine, Knoxville-made Dempster Brothers Dumpmaster circa 1938, which really didn't belong in a Manhattan alley at all. It should've been in a museum, next to other fine examples of early twentieth-century industrial design.

All of the trace evidence linking Devon directly to me went into that vintage piece of waste management history as well. I didn't do that on purpose, of course. That's just what trace evidence does. It clings and accompanies, slides off and smears. Hair and fiber, epithelials, sweat, fingerprints and palm prints. Enough tiny bits of me so that even the dimmest of montage-driven lab rats would be able to prove my incontrovertible guilt before a jury of my bored and sweating peers. I made sure to leave my hand print on the bat handle, using Devon's blood for ink. I spat onto his plastic wrapping as well, not out of my contempt for Devon, but because I wanted even more linkage, big goobery gobs of DNA that would scream "Yes! Yes, he did it, that guy right over there, one in ten to the thirteenth against it being anyone else, and that's a very large number, isn't it?" Then there would be a commercial so you could go get another beer before the reading of the verdict and the dramatic twist at the end.

That won't happen to me. They'll find the prints and the spittle. If they're reasonably bright they'll review the camera footage from the ATM across the street, and see me pulling Devon into the alley. For an extra fillip of strange and some laughs, I think I'll take my blood-spattered summer linen separates in to the dry cleaner later this afternoon. I'll keep the ticket in my pocket so that the police might find it when they bring me in for questioning after they've positively matched the perfect fingerprints I've left all over Devon's translucent shroud.

I'll volunteer to give them a cheek swab immediately, so that they can get started on the DNA analysis. When they ask me where I was this afternoon, I'll say, "In the alley behind Armando's Couches-N-More, the one with the Dempster Dumpmaster in it." The two detectives will exchange significant glances, then tell me I'm free to go, without being entirely sure why they're doing so. They'll threaten me with the standard "Don't leave town" warning. And a day later, perhaps two, they'll show up at Saks and arrest me.

We'll all sit in the same room. The two detectives will do what they've been trained to do, in the way that they've been trained to do it. They'll be confident and contemptuous, because the evidence against me will be overwhelming. I can already hear the sound that Devon's post-mortem photos will make when the bad one slaps them down on the table, searching my face with his keen detective eyes, looking for the crack, the weakness that will confirm that he’s caught his man. "You know him?" the good one will ask, with his casual policeman's I-know-you-did-it voice.

"Sure," I'll say. "That's Devon Macabee." They'll want to know when I saw him last, and I'll say, "Just before I closed the lid of the Dempster Dumpmaster."

Then it will happen. That peculiar, silent, slow explosion of what I can only describe as the fuzzing of reality. For several long moments, everything in the room will acquire the pilled, lumpen texture of old wool. I'll watch the detectives' eyes become blank and hollow, as whatever they use for consciousness gets pulled out, stretched, bundled up, and stuffed back into their skulls. If there happens to be a fly in the room, as there was when I was arrested for pushing a pair of Mormons down the stairs, its flittering wings will slow to the speed of a heartbeat, and then freeze altogether.

The entire process will take just a few seconds, and when the world has resumed its natural progression through time, the detectives will ask me to repeat myself. I won't, I'll just say it directly: "I crushed Devon Macabee's skull with the bent aluminum baseball bat that you found next to the Dempster Dumpmaster in the alley behind Armando's Couches-N-More, then wrapped his body up in plastic and stuffed it into the aforementioned dumpster." They'll blink at me, they always do. I think it has something to do with whatever process is routing what I say out of their ears and into the ether, there to vanish into nothingness. "Did you know that 'dumpster' used to be a brand name? Like kleenex."

They'll probably be interested in that. We'll talk about it for a while. Eventually, they'll gather up the bloody photos of Devon's deformed and battered head, put them back into the manila folder, and, with something resembling embarrassment, apologize for detaining me. They'll tell me I'm free to go.

That's what will happen. I'm sure of it. For the past seventeen months, with no cause that I can identify, what I do has simply ceased to matter. Swipe a bottle of Clive Christian No. 1 Pure Perfume for Men from the locked display case behind my counter. Punch an Upper East Side dowager in the face for demanding to see the manager at once. Throw a bottle of obviously corked Cabernet at the head of an incompetent sommelier, with wet and brutal accuracy. Steal the entire contents of the teller's till at the Rockefeller Plaza Bank of America, using only a paring knife as threat of force. Twice.

The consequence of each has been the same: apprehension, accusation, presentation of irrefutable evidence of my guilt, confession...then, nothing. I can't even call it absolution, because that would require the recognition of sin. But there is no recognition of any kind. There are only empty stares, and that rippling, fuzzy wave as what passes for reality reorganizes itself around a complete inability to acknowledge the facticity of my crime.

Devon's death will confirm that the only limits I have left are those imposed by my imagination. Devon was insufferably dim-witted, thoroughly ignorant of his own vacuity, and stylish only because he had the inherited means to buy everything that appeared in GQ each month. He irritated me.

There are...many people who irritate me.