by Blake Banner
The inspector had his window open. The sky was very fresh and blue, and the birds in the plane trees and the oaks on Storey Avenue were getting a little over excited. But it was OK. They were getting a kick out of being alive, and that was something I could relate to just then.
I wasn’t sitting at the desk. Today I was an honored guest in his office, so I had one of his blue armchairs under the window, and a cool breeze was touching my face. Dehan had another armchair and the inspector was watching me from his big black leather seat, with a small frown of what I like to think was admiration.
“Well, John, I guess we all owe you an apology. You were right and we were all wrong. But, what I don’t understand is… well…” He made an elaborate shrug, opened his eyes wide and concluded, “…anything!”
Dehan smiled at me. “I have to say I’m pretty confused too. Who was doing the killing? Was it Jimmy, Wayne or Teddy? Or all three?”
Before I could answer the inspector nodded and added, “And, how did you know?”
I took a deep breath. “Well, the point is, as I kept telling Dehan, most of the time I didn’t know. I had the feeling right from the start that we were being maneuvered through a rat’s maze toward a conclusion that Wayne wanted us to reach. And it seemed pretty obvious to me that, if that was the conclusion he wanted us to reach, it was the wrong conclusion. So, I didn’t know, but everybody else thought they did know.”
He made a face like a shrug and said, “There were things that troubled you from the start. Yet, Wayne seemed to answer those doubts…”
I nodded. “Wayne was smart. If he hadn’t been so self obsessed…”
The inspector glanced at a file on his desk. “His therapist at Rikers said he was a narcissistic sociopath.”
“Yeah, that’s no surprise. If he had directed his attention more to what he was doing and less to how he looked and sounded when he was doing it, he might actually have achieved something. He enjoyed the game of playing with the cops and feeling he was smarter than us.
“But he was sloppy and lazy. For a start, the place where he said he lay and watched the murder take place made no sense. There was a comfortable, grassy knoll where he could have lain and been invisible from the road. And if you come through that gate, as he said he did, the path takes you right to that spot. There was no reason for him to go and lie on those rocks and prickly bushes.”
I paused, gathering my thoughts. “The fact that he then went to the trouble of explaining it, when it simply made no sense, told me he had gone away and thought it through and decided he needed to explain it to me. That meant one thing and one thing only, he was manipulating us. So I had to ask myself the question.”
The inspector frowned and nodded. “Why would he want to manipulate us? I see.”
I shook my head and saw Dehan smile. I said, “No, I try not to ask why, inspector. Why is too open. I asked myself, what: what would make him try to manipulate us? When you ask it like that, the answer leaps out at you.”
Dehan raised a hand. “Hang on, Stone. Aren’t we getting a bit too rarified here? He was simply covering the fact that he had been at the very spot where Angela died. He was covering the fact that he killed her.”
“Sure, and that is true. But it leads you back to the very first question. What made him tell us he had information in the first place? If he’d just kept his mouth shut nobody would ever have suspected he was there at all. A couple of years and he would have been out and nobody the wiser. The question was, what would drive him to tell us he had information in the first place, connect himself with the murders, but make it seem he was a witness?”
She made a face and grunted. “Yeah, that was the circle I was trapped in.”
“He needed us to know that he was there. He made that very clear from the start. And the fact that he lied about the place where he witnessed it from, made it clear to me that he had actually been on the grassy knoll, either killing her himself, or watching it.” I sighed. “Now, here is where it got a bit tricky. I began to feel there had to be more than one person involved. If he was just protecting himself, why draw attention to himself at all? He would only place himself at the scene if he was confident he could put somebody else in the frame.”
I paused and looked at them. They were both looking a little lost, but nodding. I went on.
“He confirmed this when we took him to the river and he showed us where the purse was. That was important for a couple of reasons. First of all, he needed to get up close to find the spot. How could he possibly do that if he had witnessed the hiding of the purse from almost a hundred yards away at night? There was only one way he could have known so precisely where it was—and recognize the spot by a close inspection—if he had put it there himself.” I paused and smiled. “To quote Sir Walter Scott, ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!’ It’s a web that tends to trap the deceiver sooner than the deceived. Because, when he realized that he had to explain this to me as well, he told me that it was he, and not Jimmy, who had hidden the purse. You remember he said he had done this to secure some kind of insurance.”
Dehan was very quiet. The inspector said, “Yes, I remember, on your recording.”
I gave a small laugh. “So how is it that his prints were not on Angela’s purse but Jimmy’s were?” They both frowned. I went on, “OK, follow me here. Jimmy has handled the purse, at the bar or wherever. His prints are on it. He takes Angela to the river. He kills her. The patrol boat shows up. He runs. Wayne goes to the body, picks up the purse, leaving his own prints on it, and then what? He wipes them off? How does he do that without wiping Jimmy’s prints off? So that means…?” I looked at them both. “He used gloves. So, what? He went to the river to smoke a joint and look at the stars, chose the most uncomfortable, inconvenient spot he could find and, in May, happened to take a pair of gloves along with him.” I shook my head. “No, it’s absurd, his prints should have been on the purse, and they weren’t, which meant this was another part of the manipulation.”
Dehan said, “I should have seen that.”
I had no answer. I agreed with her. So I went on.
“And that led me to a disturbing conclusion. As I said before, if Wayne was willing to admit that he had been at the scene and hidden the purse, he had to have some kind of ace up his sleeve, somebody to put in the frame, to prove that he had not committed the murder.
“To begin with, the question, why would he implicate himself if he was guilty, would be enough. But by this stage, when he actually knew the location of her purse, he needed something more. He needed proof positive that somebody else—the person he was framing—had done it. There was only one way to do that.” I glanced at Dehan. “You remember I told you I had a bad feeling something terrible was going to happen?”
She nodded. “Cherry Pie, Noelia Gomez.”
“Her murder was intended to confirm his story, but it actually confirmed my theory. There was somebody else, an accomplice. The pressure to get the killer caught, to get Wayne’s testimony, was such that you overlooked the obvious ways in which this was not the same MO. The key, central, defining characteristic of the previous murders was missing.”
Dehan sighed. “He didn’t dump her in the river. It crossed my mind several times, but everything else…”
I shook my head. “No. Not that. The point is that Angela, Rosario and Sonia—and who knows how many more—were murdered because they were nice, demure, respectable, middle class Catholic girls. He would never have preyed on prostitutes. And that meant that Noelia died simply to put Jimmy firmly in the frame. That is why she was not thrown into the river.
“The river had proved to be a very effective way of getting rid of forensic evidence. But now they wanted to preserve it. This body had to be found. So, instead of taking her the short two hundred yard walk across the playing fields to the river, where he could dump her in the water, he took her five hundred yards into the woods, where her body would be found in a very short time. Not on
ly that, but he went to all the trouble of wearing gloves so as not to leave his fingerprints, yet kindly donated his semen so that we could get a DNA profile on him. That murder was totally out of character with Angela’s killer. It was obviously a frame.”
They both looked embarrassed. The inspector nodded. “The results came back. It was Jimmy’s DNA. As you predicted.”
I shrugged. “Jimmy Fillmore was a nice guy who was a little simple. Like Wayne and Teddy, he had a thing about Hispanic women. But unlike Wayne and Teddy, he didn’t want to kill them, he just wanted to sleep with them. He didn’t have much success, he was described more than once as the kind of guy you just didn’t notice, so, often as not, he resorted to prostitutes. This was something that both Wayne and Teddy knew.
“So they paid Noelia, perhaps Zena—who knows?—to keep the contents of the condom.” I turned to Dehan. “You wondered why I asked where the semen was on Cherry’s clothes. Her skirt was rumpled up under her ass. There was no way the semen could have got there unless it was placed. It was stupid to go to the trouble of not leaving prints, then leave his semen and not dump her in the river, as he had done with all his other victims.”
The inspector sighed. “We should have seen it.” He frowned. “But why Jimmy? Why pick on Jimmy Fillmore?”
“It was one of those unfortunate coincidences, a series of unfortunate events, if you like. Wayne came to New York from Arizona, maybe he was running, maybe he was drifting, maybe we’ll never know. He said he didn’t like New York, but something made him stay. That something was that he happened to meet a fellow traveler, Teddy, somebody who shared his own peculiar fantasies. Another thing we will probably never know is whether either of them had killed before, or whether it was their friendship that gave them the impetus to turn their fantasies into reality. But one of the things that struck me was that, when I asked Teddy if he knew Wayne, he said he had never met him. It stuck somewhere in the back of my mind. Yet Wayne talked about Teddy as though they were old friends.” I sighed. “I was very slow to see that, even though it was staring me in the face.
“Trouble was, by then it had become urgent for me to find Jimmy, because I was aware that if Wayne and his invisible accomplice had set Jimmy up for the frame, obviously, they would have to kill him before we got to him.”
Dehan raised both hands. “Slow down. You still haven’t explained, why Jimmy in the first place.”
“Yeah…” I sighed again. It had been a couple of days, but my bruises still ached and I still had a throb in my head. “Jimmy was a surprisingly complex character, and he was invaluable to Wayne and Teddy. To most people he was the classic Mr. Cellophane: Mr. Invisible. That was how Pam described him, and how Teddy described him. But when you did stop to look at him, he was good-looking: He had those big brown eyes that so many women find attractive, and—and this was crucial—he was sincere and vulnerable. He was a fantasist, a dreamer, but he had no malice in him. He was one of life’s natural victims. And that was very appealing to one particular type of young woman.
“We’ll never know exactly how it went down. But at some point Teddy or Wayne, or both of them, realized that Jimmy was a magnet for those very girls that they were attracted to—that they fantasized about killing. Girls who would disdain Wayne’s brutishness and Teddy’s middle-aged, uncle-ish looks, would find Jimmy adorable. They would want to mother him. So they began to encourage it. Those were the photographs we saw. Friendly, fun evenings at the local family bar.
“And Wayne fancied himself as a bit of a natural psychologist. Maybe he did have a low, cunning grasp of people’s most basic motivations. So my guess is he began to encourage Jimmy’s fantasies and even feed them. And Jimmy began to pass these on to the girls. Remember, these girls came from sheltered backgrounds and were very naïve. If Jimmy told them his dad was a TV producer making him work his way through college, and Teddy and Wayne backed him up and vouched for him, they might well believe him. It wouldn’t be hard then to lure them in to a trap.” I shook my head. “Where they would never follow Wayne or Teddy—to an apartment, to some rendezvous—they might follow Jimmy, in all his simple innocence, without question. He was quite simply a perfect bait for the kind of girls that Wayne and Teddy liked to prey on.”
Dehan nodded. “You kept asking me if Wayne was attractive. I kept on saying, to some women he would be, but not to the Angelas and Rosarios of this world. Jimmy was cute, he lacked something, but like you say, to a nice, maternal family girl, he could be attractive.”
“Four things clinched it for me at Jimmy’s apartment: the fact that Jimmy shot himself with his left hand, which was simply impossible; the fact that none of the trophies in the box related to Rosario or Sonia, the two glasses…”
The inspector cut in: “They had, as you suspected, Wayne’s prints on them.” He frowned. “And Frank said to tell you there was rum in his belly.”
I nodded, “And the lipstick.”
Dehan narrowed her eyes. “You keep talking about lipstick. What is it with the lipstick?”
I smiled. “One of them, Wayne or Teddy.” I shrugged. “Perhaps both, was fixated with kissing and lipstick. We will eventually find the true trophies, and they will be the lipsticks. Maybe then we’ll get a real idea of how many girls they killed between them. All the girls had extensive bruising on their lips. Even Noelia, who was not the perfect profile for them, had her lipstick badly smeared and her lips bruised. Wayne’s description of Jimmy killing Angela focused almost obsessively on the kissing. And the one thing that was missing from Angela’s purse and from Noelia’s purse, was the lipstick. They were two, wicked, cruel men who hungered for a maternal woman’s kiss. We can only guess at what drove them to that depravity. Betrayal?” I shrugged again. “Teddy’s last words to me before he cracked me over the head, ‘They are not worth it. Even the sweet ones are whores.’” I shrugged. “I guess once they yielded to Jimmy’s advances, that branded them as whores in Wayne and Teddy’s minds, and that sentenced them to death.”
Dehan said, “If he had just sat out his sentence…”
I smiled. “But he was vain. That was one of the things that I began to realize early on. We kept asking, if he was the killer, why would he draw attention to himself? Well, the answer is simple. He was a narcissist. He wanted his deal to get out of prison, sure, but he also wanted to rub it in our faces that he was killing girls and getting away with it.”
The inspector nodded for a long moment, big slow nods. “A master class in detection, Stone. Very impressive. Well, I said it before and things went a bit pear shaped. But I certainly think you have earned a good few days’ rest.”
I nodded. “I think we are going to need it, sir.”
* * *
That evening we sat in Zack’s Bar & Grill in Stonington, sipping dry martinis and waiting for our fresh seafood starter, feeling bruised, ragged, but healing and happy. Dehan had been watching me for a while. With that smile she gets when she thinks she knows what I’m thinking.
“So,” she said, “You didn’t drive me all the way out here just to eat seafood. What’s the surprise?”
I raised an eyebrow and smiled back. “I thought tomorrow we could cross over to Fishers Island and spend a couple of days doing absolutely nothing.”
“Uh-huh…” She bobbed the olive in her martini a couple of times. “That’s nice. But that’s not it either.”
I gave my head a little shake. “You’re right.” I hesitated. “This may come as a bit of a surprise, Dehan, but I’m actually not a big risk taker. I’m pretty cautious. I take things very much one step at a time.”
She was frowning hard. “That doesn’t come as a surprise at all, Stone. I’ve known that for a long time. Where is this going?”
I heaved a big sigh and took a sip of martini, wishing I’d ordered a whiskey. “I would never do anything, Dehan, to jeopardize our…” I spread my hands. “Our whateveritis.”
“Our whateveritis?”
“Yeah.”
&n
bsp; “Calling it that is a pretty big risk, Stone.”
“I know. And I don’t want to call it that anymore.”
Her frown deepened. “What are you saying?”
I looked down at the tabletop, then looked into her eyes. “I almost told you once before, outside Teddy’s.” I gave my head a small shake. “I can’t do this anymore, Dehan. You are young, beautiful, modern. I am an old dinosaur. When Teddy told me he had killed you, it almost killed me. It’s too much. I need to end this…whateveritis.”
“End it?”
“Yeah. I want to call it something else. I want to call you something else. I don’t want either of us to die without my having called you my wife. I think that is what I most want in the world. Carmen, will you please marry me?”
I watched the tears spring into her eyes. She frowned, then gave a small laugh. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “Of course I will!”
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