Dreams in the Key of Blue

by John Philpin

  Lily’s responses on the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a series of pictures that the client is asked to make up stories about, were of concern to the psychologist.

  When Henry Murray introduced the TAT at Harvard in the 1930s, he described Card 6GF as a young woman gazing backward at an older man. During my years of practice, I supervised many psychologists recently out of graduate school and eager to embark on a curing spree. They were ill equipped to succeed, having spent years studying statistics, research design, rats, and rhesus monkeys. They knew all that could be quantified, but lacked the ability to listen to a human.

  A few of the more sophisticated clinicians administered the TAT, and often read a client’s responses during case presentations in our sessions. It was common for a woman to attribute surprise, annoyance, or a startle reaction to the female in Card 6GF, as if the old guy intruded, crept up silently behind her, or said something shocking.

  Lily Dorman responded: “She sees him. He lives in her closet. He comes out when he wants to play. The game makes blood. It’s different this time because she’s older. She has a gun in her hand. She shoots him. If Lilith comes out of the shadows, she chops him up.”

  She saw the old man as a predator, a bogeyman. Like most of the monsters of childhood that specialize in victimizing children alone at night, he resided in the depths of her dark closet.

  When Harper Dorman wanted to “play,” blood flowed. He smeared the trailer’s walls; his daughter punctured her arms.

  Lily was fourteen when Penniweather administered the TAT. She was not “older.” In Card 6GF, only the woman’s right hand is visible, and she does not hold a gun. The child infused her story with her wishes and fantasies.

  If Lilith comes…

  Despite recent attempts to rewrite her story, Lilith was best known as a mythical tempest demon found in deserted shadows, abandoned haunts. Would a child of fourteen know this? Lily was bright, a reader, an abused child probably in desperate need of an avenging spirit.

  … she chops him up.

  Penniweather noted the child’s flat affect. Lily exhibited no feeling as she offered her interpretation of the picture. The psychologist prompted, “How is she feeling in that picture?”

  Lily was stumped. She had no idea.

  She split away all emotion in order to survive.

  “What about the man?” Penniweather persisted. “How is he feeling in the picture?”

  “Hungry,” Lily said.

  Penniweather cited another response, on Card 9GF: one woman ran along a beach, another watched the first from behind a tree. Lily stared at the picture and slowly moved her fingers over the tree trunk, a diagonal black band.

  “She’s swapping,” Lily said. “When she goes through the dark place, she’s this other girl.”

  The psychologist emphasized the response’s dissociative nature. Again, he probed for feelings and found none. Following the test administration, Penniweather asked Lily if she ever “swapped,” ever felt that she was some “other girl.” She did not respond.

  Penniweather’s recommendations included psychiatric assessment to rule out a dissociative disorder. His suspicions were justified, but tainted by clinical and cultural stereotypes of women who behave violently. Implicit in the diagnostic impressions was the assumption that when Lily Dorman scalded her father, she was “not herself.”

  The phone interrupted my reading. I glared at it, then thought that my caller might be Bolton or Jaworski, so I pushed myself up and grabbed the receiver.

  “There’s a package waiting for you,” a young woman said, her voice cold and hard.

  “Who is this?”

  She ignored my question. “You’ll find it on a concrete barrier in the municipal parking area behind the grocery store.”

  Whoever she was, I figured that she had a short agenda: deliver her instructions and hang up. I did not expect her to remain on the line, so I gambled.

  “I just returned from Bayberry Court,” I said.

  There was silence, then, “I know that. You had coffee with Ellie. Two cups. Leave now. You don’t have much time.”

  “Lily…”

  The line went dead.

  I DROVE INTO THE VILLAGE.

  Lily, if that was who had called, had concealed herself directly outside a window or the door while I sat, drank coffee, and listened to Ellie. She had probably followed me into the swamp behind the trailer park.

  As I turned the corner at Downtown Grocery and parked, Stu Gilman’s silver Jaguar streaked past on its way out of town. The car’s engine noise faded, and the downtown night slipped into silence. I watched Gilman’s taillights disappear in the distance. I walked through the dark alley between the grocery store and Wooly’s Ice Cream Castle and stepped into the municipal parking lot. As I surveyed what looked and felt like a scene from a 1950s horror film, a cold wind off the water churned through the corridor behind me.

  Black and white and gray.

  All that was missing was Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff, and eerie background music. I heard no sound but the wind, and felt as if I should be looking at a grainy picture flickering on a giant screen.

  No, not horror.

  This film was intended for Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. The trouble was that I felt more like Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones. Something was happening here, but I could make no more sense of the moment than I could of the last several days.

  A film shown in the outdoor theater that was the parking lot behind Downtown Grocery.

  A thin spiral of smoke coiled from a cigarette on the pavement. I could not smell the burning tobacco, but I could smell cordite. Someone had recently fired a gun back here.

  A small brown paper bag sat on the last concrete parking barrier. I picked it up and gazed in at a silver .22 caliber semiautomatic.

  “Money says it’s the murder weapon,” I muttered.

  A man sat in a compact car ten yards to my left. He leaned away from the open window on the driver’s side, his hand pressed against his face.

  As I stepped closer, I saw that he had tried to ward off what could not be stopped. There was a hole through his left hand. Black blood dripped from his ear and the corner of his mouth. There was another small, neat hole above his left eye.

  My hands dropped to my side as I stared at Wendell Beckerman, the drugged-out kid from Mellen Street.

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered, scanning the lot.

  When I had stood in the hall outside Beckerman’s apartment and questioned him about Harper Dorman’s murder, he had looked familiar, but I could not place him. I could now. I saw him walk into the Old Chapel with Amanda Squires to attend the memorial service for the three slain students.

  Headlights suddenly approached through the alley to my right. More lights arrived at the entrance to the municipal lot on the other side of Beckerman’s Toyota.

  Blue strobes throbbed on the roofs of both vehicles.

  Sounds and colors filled my film with a roar—engines, sirens, a man in uniform held a gun and yelled, blue pulses of light collided with the black corners of night.

  The cop crouched behind his patrol car door.

  This is a dream. This can’t be real. It is not happening.

  “Drop the gun and clasp your hands behind your neck,” the cop shouted.

  What gun?

  “Drop it now.”

  Then I remembered. The harmless-looking .22 in the brown paper bag. The gun I was convinced would link six homicides.

  How does he know that I have a gun?

  I dropped the bag and placed my hands behind my neck.

  Karen Jasper emerged from the shadows, lowered and cuffed my right wrist, then my left.

  “You’ve got some explaining to do,” she said.

  DARKNESS CONCEALED AND PROTECTED ME. I LOVE TO wrap myself in shadows.

  I stood in the Tradewind Cafe’s doorway and gazed across Main Street into the alley beside Downtown Grocery. I heard voices—real voices, radio voices—but I could not identify
words. Streaks of blue light banged against the buildings’ walls, careened silently across the damp pavement, and illuminated the night for brief, repeating fragments of time.

  He stood in the mercury-vapor glow, pushed his hand through his steel-gray hair. I knew what he was thinking. Someone had set him up, and he wondered where and how to begin unraveling the mystery.

  He did not have a prayer.

  When a mind has eyes, it does not rely on appealing to an empty sky.

  I stepped into Crescent Street and walked to the opposite corner. I watched a woman snap handcuffs on his wrists. Two uniformed men flashed their lights into the small car that contained a dead man.

  I watched with ebbing interest.

  Eliminating humans removes nothing of any significance from the world. Predators are vital to ecological balance. Farmers protest the resurgence of the timber wolf, but the wolves will return.

  People are unnecessary. They are excess baggage on a dying planet’s trip through a crowded universe.

  Extraneous people consume valuable oxygen, clutter the landscape, crack the sky with their foul emissions, while they commit atrocities on the bodies and souls of their offspring.

  Murder has purpose.

  A paring of the herd is essential.

  HERB JAWORSKI PUSHED A CUP OF COFFEE ACROSS THE table. “Black, right?”

  “Thanks, Herb.”

  State technicians had fingerprinted me, drawn blood, taken hair samples, and coated my hands with paraffin to determine whether I’d recently fired a gun.

  “Jasper says I should arrest you.”

  I glanced at Jaworski. He clenched his jaw, and his eyes bore back at me.

  “How about if you start at the beginning?” he said as he sat opposite me.

  I sipped the hot brew. “I’m not sure where that is.”

  “Then start at the end. How’d you manage to be standing in the municipal lot next to a homicide victim, with a bag of murder weapon in your hand?”

  “Why did your people get there when they did?”

  “Anonymous call. Jasper took it on my phone. Female, refused to give her name. She said we’d find a victim, a weapon, and a killer behind Downtown Grocery. We got it on the tape log. Jasper’s making copies.”

  “Sounds like my call. She directed me to the gun. I figured she was going to hang up, so I told her that I’d been at Bayberry Trailer Park this afternoon.”

  “You think it was Dorman’s kid?”

  “Whoever it was, she knew that I’d been at Bayberry. She was there, too. Watching me.”

  Jaworski chewed his cinnamon gum and listened as I told him the story of Lily Dorman. I recounted my conversation with Ellie and described the abuse that Lily and her mother had suffered.

  “I think I’m being set up,” I concluded.

  “By this kid?”

  “She’d be in her early thirties now,” I said.

  “The victim’s driver’s license says he lived in the Mellen Street apartment building in Portland.”

  “Wendell Beckerman. I talked with him about Harper Dorman. The kid was stoned. He didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I told you I thought I recognized him. I saw him enter the memorial service with a student from my seminar, Amanda Squires.”

  “Did you talk to Katrina Martin?”

  “She wouldn’t answer the door.”

  “Did the same thing to Norma Jacobs,” Jaworski said.

  At that instant, Jasper barged through the door.

  “Dr. Frank, your official involvement in this investigation is over. As far as I’m concerned, you are a suspect until cleared. At the very least, I will see that you are charged with obstruction.”

  Jaworski’s face reddened and he spun around in his chair. “We still believe in civility around here, Detective Jasper,” he growled. “And manners. We knock before we go charging through closed doors.”

  Jasper assumed a now familiar pose: her arms folded tightly across her chest. Her glare flew off the scale for withering power. I suspected that Jaworski had just joined the ranks of the insufferable.

  The chief returned his attention to me. “Who wants to set you up, and why?”

  “I don’t know. This young woman, Lily Dorman, but I don’t know why.”

  “She got any connection to MI?”

  I looked up, surprised, at Jaworski. “I don’t know.”

  “Chief,” Jasper said, with a cautionary edge to her voice.

  Jaworski waved his hand in dismissal. “Did you know that the feds were having a look at MI?”

  I had no idea what he was getting at. “They have an undercover operative in place at the college.”

  “Had,” Jaworski said. “Steve Weld.”

  I leaned back and absorbed Jaworski’s words.

  “If I were a cop,” Weld said, “I’d jump all over Stu Gilman.”

  Weld was a cop.

  Gilman lies; he uses the Clear Skies for meetings with MI clients.

  Two years earlier, Gilman’s guest had vanished from the campus and washed up on the beach.

  He has to be an encyclopedia because he works for Melanie Martin.

  “Steve, we’ve had two brief conversations, and both times you’ve left me with the feeling that all the closets around here are filled with skeletons.”

  Gilman had streaked out of town as I entered the alley.

  “You just may be as smart as they say you are,” Weld said.

  Jasper snorted her disgust with Jaworski’s egregious breach of law enforcement confidentiality and turned to stare out the window.

  “There’s a combined task force,” I said.

  Jaworski nodded. “Weld was DEA.”

  “You’ll have an army of feds on the way.”

  “They arrive tomorrow.”

  “Before Weld’s death, the feds didn’t see any connection between the murders and whatever they’re looking at.”

  “Guess they do now,” he said.

  Jasper whirled away from the window. “How the hell do you know all this?” she demanded.

  She was like a Florida mockingbird, pissed off because someone is mowing the lawn too near her nest. The black-and-white bird drops from the sky like a jet fighter and dives at the intruder’s head. If you want to mow that lawn, you find a football helmet.

  I glanced at Jasper, then focused my attention on Jaworski.

  “Melanie Martin wanted you out here,” he said. “She was familiar with your work, wanted you to teach a class, so the college issued an invitation, and MI picked up the tab. All of that makes sense. Within days of your arrival, three young women were murdered. One of them, Jaycie Waylon, was an MI intern.”

  I stood and walked to the windows on Main Street. My mind drifted as I stared down at a uniformed cop directing reporters and their battery packs, and kids with six-packs performing their nightly sidewalk ballet.

  “A left-handed person, between five-feet-six and five-feet-ten, killed the students,” I said. “Stanley Markham is both. I had doubts along the way, and now I don’t buy Markham as the killer.”

  I sat with Stanley Markham outside his jail cell.

  “Did you ever watch mothers and their kids at a playground?” he asked, lighting a cigarette. “It’s the most amazing thing. The moms talk to each other, have a regular conversation. They react to their kids at the same time, and they continue to talk without losing the thread of their conversation.”

  Markham was genuinely impressed. “It isn’t a learned behavior, Dr. Frank. Fathers can’t do it. They have to stop talking about the Celtics game, deal with the kid, then they’ve forgotten what they were talking about.”

  “Mothers spend more time with young children,” I said.

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with the kids,” Markham insisted. “It’s a difference in brain circuits. Men and women are wired differently.”

  I dismissed Markham’s amateur neuropsychology and did not think about it again until several years later when I read an article on gender-ba
sed parenting practices. The author believed that parental, social, and cultural conditioning tended to produce boys who acted on their environment in “single-task” mode, and girls who both acted and reacted in “multi-task” mode. Few of the boys in the study “accommodated themselves to environmental change.” The girls reacted to change and incorporated the environment into their strategies for task completion.

  I returned to my chair and sat. “I’m not comfortable even assigning gender to this killer,” I said.

  As soon as I spoke, I knew that I’d nailed what bothered me about the case from the first day.

  The crime scene reflected method, deliberate linear activity. It also reflected reactivity.

  “What are you talking about?” Jasper snapped.

  Again, I ignored Jasper.

  “You think we’ve got a woman serial killer?” Jaworski asked.

  “In the first few days, I thought that I was looking at the work of a conflicted killer, someone determined to murder but not entirely congruent with the act. The mix of rage and organization confused me. Then I saw the photos of Harper Dorman’s mutilated remains. Jacobs suggested and dismissed the two-killer scenario. I considered that, but we don’t need two, Herb.”

  “You’ve gone over the edge,” Jasper said, and paced the room. “We are looking for a white male.”

  “We’re looking for a woman who enjoys killing,” I said. “She is deliberate, and she is reactive.”

  You were not conflicted. You wanted to experience the pleasure of disposing of them, and the added delight of misleading the cops.

  “How do you explain what he did to Jaycie Waylon? If that sexual display wasn’t the product of a sadistic male fantasy, I don’t know what is.”

  “Explosive anger, rapid remission, then misdirection,” I said.

  “You’ve got an answer for everything. What about Harper Dorman?”

  “That was personal.”

  Jasper strode to the table and pushed her face close to mine. “I can’t think of a better way to obstruct an investigation,” she hissed.