by Blake Banner
She stared at me for a long moment, blinking and frowning by turns. “Well,” she said, “I saw it.”
“Yeah, but you see, I put it to the test out there, and at that distance, in this light, even outside, you can’t tell if a car is dark blue or black or even gray.”
“My goodness. Well, I suppose I assumed it was blue because that’s the color Gibbs’ car is on NCSI.”
I smiled. “Of course, that must have been it. The other question I have is a little more complicated.” She was frowning uncertainly at me, as was Dehan.
I said, “How long have you known Mary Browne?”
NINETEEN
She sank back in her chair. Her face had gone very pale.
“What makes you think I know anyone called Mary Browne?”
“Do you?”
“It’s an extremely common name.”
“Not the way she spells it.” She didn’t answer, so I pressed her. “Are you telling me, Sandy, that if I get a court order to search your computer, I won’t find any emails from Mary?”
She closed her eyes and sighed. “I must say, your timing, Detective… I have known Mary for many years, more than I can remember. Since we were small children.”
“She bought the house on the corner.”
“Yes.”
“We found milk, eggs, basic necessities in the fridge. The electricity is on…”
“I look after the place for her. I sometimes… It’s convenient…”
“Because she bought it at the time you moved here, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, I helped negotiate the purchase.”
“Did it seem like an odd purchase to you at the time?”
She didn’t answer straight away but unraveled the handkerchief and screwed it up into a ball again. “Why would you say that?”
“Well, it’s the house where Sue was killed.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Who chose the house, Sandy, her or you?”
“I’m…” She shook her head several times. “I’m not sure. It was a long time ago. Maybe I did.”
“That’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Not really. I mean, her brother had lived in this neighborhood. He mentioned it to her. When I came, I naturally…”
“You naturally chose a house across the street from Giorgio.”
“I really don’t know what you’re driving at. I have just had the most appalling shock. I really need to rest.”
“Of course. We’ll leave you in peace. There is just one other question I would like to ask you before we go.”
She sighed loudly and seemed to slump. “What is it, Detective?”
“Are you related to Mary, or are you just friends?”
She swallowed hard and looked down at the floor. “These questions. I have tried hard to be civil and polite. I know you’re just doing your job, but I have to say I am finding these questions very intrusive.”
“She was kind enough to give me a piece of thread that she had just sucked in order to put it through a needle. There was enough saliva there to get a DNA profile.”
She stared hard at the floor, shook her head a couple of times. “No, no, this is wrong.”
“We know that whoever killed Sue was closely related to Mary.”
Again she shook her head but refused to look at me. “No.”
“Did you kill Fernando, Sandy?”
“I don’t like these questions. Please leave me alone.”
“I called a friend at the Bureau, asked him to check if you had a firearms license. I know you’re a very good shot. I don’t think many people realize just how good. But the way you shoot? That comes down to being really cold-blooded as much as anything else, doesn’t it? What throws most people’s aim in a critical moment is the emotions, their fear. But you don’t have that problem. You don’t feel that kind of emotion anymore, do you?”
“I don’t want to answer these questions. Please go away.”
“If I go away, I will have to take you with me.” I waited a moment. She didn’t say anything. I went on, “I understand that this was all about revenge. What I am not really clear about is whom you were avenging.” Her eyes shifted to meet mine. “I mean,” I said, “killing Fernando and Giorgio suggests that you were avenging Sue, but then, why did you kill Sue? If you killed her, what was to avenge?”
Again she didn’t answer. The room was quiet for a moment, with only the crackle of the fire.
“But then I realized, you weren’t avenging Sue at all, were you? You were punishing her.” I paused a moment and said, “What happened to your ear?”
Her left hand went automatically to the large, blue enamel flower she had over her left earlobe. We looked at each other for a long moment. Then I said, “Yes, that ear.” Still she didn’t speak. “Fernando pulled out your earring, didn’t he, when you stabbed him?”
She gave a couple of short nods.
“Why did you gut him?”
She spoke quietly, almost a whisper. “He deserved to be gutted, like a fish. He was so full of his own masculinity, always talking about how women loved his body. So full of his own sex, though he was actually bisexual. I wanted to cut it out of him and destroy it forever.”
“The same as Giorgio.”
“But Giorgio was worse. His big cock all over the place, making women love him, lying to them, lying with them, stealing their womanhood, lying on them, lying under them, lying inside them. He was the king of thieves. The king of liars.”
“I thought you loved him.”
“Not me.”
“And Sue?”
She looked at my hands. Then her eyes traveled slowly up to my face and I knew she was thinking about killing me too. “She stole him.”
“Everybody’s stealing.”
“Everybody is stealing from me.”
“Do you know who you are?”
“That’s a kind of crazy question.”
“DNA, you know, can be virtually identical with identical twins.”
“I know that.”
“But fingerprints…”
Her gaze drifted. “Oh…”
“Fingerprints are different, even with identical twins.” I waited a moment. “So do you know who you are?”
“I’m…” She took a very deep breath. “I feel very sleepy.”
“I gave you a pen, remember?”
“Yes.”
“And a card. You handled them both.”
“Yes.”
“I sent them to have the prints compared with the prints on Sue’s throat. Sue was raped by a man. A man who left his semen inside her, and strangled her. So, again, do you remember who you are?”
Again the deep breath, the drifting gaze, a slight smile. “I don’t always seem to be the same person.”
“Do you remember the trip to Geneva?”
“I saved up for that for a long time. I had money saved too, from when Mommy died.”
“You went to a clinic.”
“It was there or the U.K. I preferred Geneva. It seemed… cleaner.”
“You understand that changing your sex does not change your identity.”
She nodded. Then she shrugged. “But sometimes, changing your identity can change your sex.”
I turned to Dehan, who was sitting very quietly. “Get a couple of the guys, will you?” She nodded and stood. I stood too and looked down at Sandy. “Cyril Browne, Sandy Beach, I am arresting you on five counts of murder. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may and will be taken down in evidence and used against you in a court of law.”
EPILOGUE
The snow was coming down heavier. Through the window I could see the sidewalks blanketed in pristine white. There was not a soul on the streets and the cars looked like icing sugar castellations fringing the roads. The fire was burning in the grate and the room was warm and fragrant of roasting chicken. I turned as the back door opened and Dehan came in, stamping and puffing, with her
shapeless wool hat on her head and a big, brown box in her arms.
“I always think,” she said, “that a Christmas tree should look like a badly wrapped Christmas present. Over the top.”
She grinned at me as she kicked the door closed, approached and dumped the box on the sofa. “Mine’s a martini, plenty dry. And put some tunes on, will’ya? I like that playlist with Bing and Santa Baby. It reminds me of my dad. He loved all that…”
All this was said breathlessly as she opened the big carton and started pulling out armfuls of tinsel, intended for the big tree that stood by the window.
I went to my laptop, on the breakfast bar, and started searching while she pulled off her hat and coat and started hanging the first baubles. We were quiet for a moment. Then she stepped back, gazing at the big red ball she’d just hung, and sighed.
“I’ve been over it in my mind several times, Stone. I still don’t get how you knew, so early on, that Sandy was Cyril.”
The laptop started singing, “Booboom, booboom, booboom, booboom…” I went over to the sideboard and started mixing a martini, dry.
“I didn’t know until later, but I suspected. The first thing that alerted me was the fact that the killer had made no effort at all to hide his identity, his fingerprints and his DNA. If he had been caught immediately among the guests, or on CODIS or IAFIS, you just put it down to being stupid.” I handed her her drink. “But he wasn’t anywhere to be found. So that meant he wasn’t stupid. And if somebody who isn’t stupid is so brazen about their identity as to leave their prints and their DNA at a rape and murder scene, that can only mean they are extremely confident that they will never be found.”
She sipped and shrugged. “Put like that…”
“It was also pretty obvious to me from the start that it had to be Cyril. In your words, Dehan, entia non sunt multipilicanda praeter necesitatem.”
“Yeah, go on, throw it in my face!”
I smiled and poured myself a Bushmills. “So the question I was wrestling with pretty much from the beginning was, what had Cyril done to be so confident his DNA and fingerprints would not trap him? Merry run up to Christmas.”
We toasted and sipped. I went and sat, enjoying the sight of her dressing the tree.
“Logically, it had to be something so radical that it was tantamount to a total change of identity. A change that would make any detective discard the possibility that he had raped and murdered her, out of hand. Becoming a woman would obviously do that. I confess, the idea was so extreme that for a while I couldn’t accept it myself. That was why I was so keen to meet his sister and find out about his childhood.”
The tree was taking shape as she draped a long string of gold tinsel from the top down in a wide spiral.
“What we found in Elk Grove seemed to confirm my theory, such as it was at that stage. He and his mother had been very close, like any mother and son. But he had then witnessed his mother die, if not at the hands of his father, certainly as a result of his father’s rage. The experience had been deeply traumatic, and, as you saw yourself, his sister’s tender mercies were not exactly therapeutic.”
Dehan turned and nodded. “No, she seemed bent on destroying his identity, his self esteem and his independence.”
“We’ll never know for sure, but I suspect her father was a bit like that. The best way to control people is to destroy their belief in themselves. Poor Cyril had his belief in himself so deeply damaged that he turned to his dead mother to try and heal him. Consciously or unconsciously—probably both—he tried to follow her. In his words, he was trying to ‘come home’.”
“Come home to his mother.”
I nodded. “It’s an expression that is full of symbolic meaning. He wants to return to his mother, he wants to return to a place that is safe, where he is loved and respected. The years following his mother’s death, until he was finally able to leave home, must have been hell: a constant, systematic destruction of his self esteem, being told day in and day out that he was an incompetent fantasist. And the more he sought solace in the memory of his mother, the more he was punished by his sister.”
She sat on the arm of the chair facing me, with a strand of burgundy tinsel in her hands. “It’s hard to imagine what that must be like.”
“And I get the feeling that he was actually, potentially, an intelligent, motivated, able person. A fact which only added to the rage he was suppressing inside. By the time he got to New York, he was so badly damaged he didn’t know who he was or how to get out of the crippling, paralyzing state he was in. He needed a therapist or a friend, somebody to guide him. But his personality was so awful that he couldn’t make friends.”
Dehan shook her head. “Along came Fernando.”
“Yup, and he and Giorgio thought it was great sport to see him writhing in emotional agony as they dangled Sue in front of him. They could not have known that Sue was so similar to his mother. At first he adored her. But the more she flirted, however harmlessly, with Fernando and Giorgio, the more he relived the nightmare of his mother’s betrayal and her death.
“I had a talk with his psychiatrist the other day and he confirmed what I had suspected. In the end, Cyril’s need for his mother, his obsession with her, became so all-consuming that he actually became her, both psychically and, as far as he could, physically. But he never quite stopped being himself, either. On the one hand he had his own rage against his mother, like his father’s rage, for betraying him, for abandoning him, for leaving him at the mercy of his sister.
“But on the other hand there was the rage against Jose Rodriguez too, the journalist his mother had her affair with. Jose Rodriguez was the ultimate symbol of his own inadequacy and weakness. Jose Rodriguez was this big, neon sign that said, Cyril Browne is not a man.
“It’s not hard to see how he projected that onto Fernando and Giorgio. Sue, Fernando and Giorgio represented his darkest daemons, and he raged against all three of them.”
She had hung a large, acid-yellow ball and now stood staring at her warped reflection in it. “OK,” she said, “I get that. But first of all, why, after killing Sue, did he A, come back and B, wait twelve years to kill Giorgio and Fernando?”
“That is something his psychiatrist is trying to find out now, but my guess is this. As you suspected, Sue started befriending him, not realizing that this act of kindness would actually trigger his rage against her. Because one minute she was being sweet and nice to him, and the next moment she would be flirting with Giorgio and Fernando. They would be coming on to her in an overtly sexual way, and she would laugh. This is like his deepest, darkest nightmares coming to life in front of him. It’s his mother’s betrayal all over again. This is where his neurosis starts to turn into a full blown psychosis and his mother starts to come to life inside his own psyche. He loves her and needs her so badly, the only way to escape her betrayal is to become her. And this is where he decides that what he wants is to have a sex change operation, and he books a clinic in Geneva.
“I don’t know if he planned to kill her that Halloween. We’ll probably never know for sure, but Dr. Petersen speculates that the unconscious motivation was probably there, and that was what drove him to be at the party that night. It wasn’t part of a conscious plan, but it was an unconscious motivation that would strike given the opportunity.”
“Hence the apparent discrepancy between handing in notice and the opportunistic nature of the murder.”
“Exactly. So when she left, and he saw that Fernando had not stayed with her, he called on her, ostensibly to see if she was OK. She let him in. They were in the bedroom. Did she invite him in? Did he come on to her? The thing is, at some point that sexual charge was ignited, and he killed her. Ironically, exactly contrary to your theory, the only cure for his erectile dysfunction was to release his repressed rage.”
Dehan rolled her eyes. “Go Carmen. So he went home. His bags were probably already packed, and he went back to his sister’s place in a state of turmoil. He had satisfied his driv
e to kill Sue, but was now tortured by remorse.”
“Something like that, but his psychosis was driving him by now. Remorse was something that was fading in him. His psychosis drove him to fake his own death in Reno, and then fly to Geneva for his surgery. It was the fact that he left his jacket so conveniently to be found on the rubble, and so helpfully registered as having no next of kin, that made me suspect that he had not really committed suicide at all. I was convinced Joe White didn’t see him jump. He assumed he jumped, and then imagined that’s what he’d seen. At that distance, running in the dark, in a panic, trying not to trip and talking on the phone, he had no idea what he’d seen. Cyril threw something heavy into the cement, and jumped over the fence. That simple. He was very cold-blooded.
“I suspect that, at that stage, his fantasy was to return as Sandy Beach, and kill Giorgio and Fernando in the same place where he had killed Sue, back in her apartment in the Bronx. His hatred for Giorgio must have been very intense at that time, and these symbolic elements must have been very important to him. These were the psychotic, ritualistic elements to his killing which I mentioned in the beginning, which suggested a serial killer. But, curiously, by the time he’d had his operations and completed his transformation, it seems that his drive to kill Giorgio and Fernando started gradually to subside. It was as though it belonged to his previous self, to Cyril. By becoming his mother, he had found some kind of meaning and peace.
“So when he eventually returned to the Bronx, I think he did actually start to fall in love with Giorgio. Perhaps he was living out his mother’s need to have an affair with some kind of artistic, creative bad boy, like her journalist. Whatever the reason, his fantasy about killing them seems to have faded for a few years.”
“So why did he kill them?”
I nodded. “I have a theory about that. She had been hanging around Giorgio for about eight or nine years, but she didn’t know Fernando that well. I suspect that as she got closer to Giorgio, and they started having their little affair, she began to realize that he and Fernando were more than just friends. That must have stirred long buried feelings—feelings that belonged to Cyril—and when we came along and started digging things up, and she discovered that they were both dangerous, and involved with prostitutes, Cyril’s original hatred and murderous intent were fully reawakened. She desperately wanted Giorgio to be a man she could fall in love with, but he wasn’t. He was exactly the kind of man Cyril hated for taking his mother away from him. So he and Fernando both had to die.”
