The Murder Channel

by John Philpin

  I wedged my knife between the hollow door and the jamb, then nudged the door with my foot. It swung open.

  “Are you a cop?” she asked.

  “I work with the police. Is there a public phone nearby?”

  “On the corner.”

  I handed her Bolton’s card. “Please call him. Tell him to get over here.”

  She took the card, vanished into her apartment, reappeared in a parka, and ran down the stairs.

  I stepped into Kirkland’s kitchenette. He had piled dishes in the sink, Kmart’s blue light specials encrusted with tomato sauce and bits of what might have been ground beef. Empty Ragu jars littered the counter.

  I moved to the right, into the dining-living area. A sofa bed was open, its stained gray sheets emitting a lethal smell. I avoided a coffee table strewn with empty beer cans and overfilled ashtrays. Kirkland lay on the floor between the table and bed, his nose and jaw broken, one eye closed, one oddly open. A single, large-caliber shot to the head had ended his pain.

  I retreated around the table and gazed into the room Kirkland used for an office. The space was a blizzard of discarded files, computer disks, notebooks, and photographs.

  Ray Bolton appeared in the doorway.

  “J-Cubed was right about your aftershave,” I said. “It precedes you.”

  “Saves the trouble of waiting to be announced.”

  “Looks like someone else had an interest in Kirkland’s theories,” I said.

  “Think they got what they came after?”

  “If he had it, he would have given it up when he saw the gun.”

  “This could have nothing to do with Zrbny,” Bolton said. “Kirkland wasn’t Mr. Popular.”

  “This shit looks like Pouldice’s study,” I said. “Braverman caught the big one with his head; so did Danny. You know how I feel about coincidence.”

  THE SMALL FIRE BURNED STEADILY.

  Two friends had joined Levana since my last visit. One, like my sister, was a disarrayed pile of bones. The second accounted for the lingering odor of decomposition. She had been in the dungeons for only a few months.

  My hands and fingers had warmed and I could flex them. I removed the matches from the plastic bag, neatly folded the scraps of Levant’s clothing that remained, and placed them in the bag. I lifted her skull from the bone pile and rested it on the soft clothes. Then I resealed the bag.

  When I was twelve and walked through the tunnels in search of my sister, I found her dead, her body punctured fifty-one times. I touched each wound as I counted, wishing that I could force the blood back into her body. I stayed with her that night, and told my father that I had wandered through Ravenwood searching for Levana. I kissed her forehead, held her hand, and wept for the last time in my life.

  I waited two years to hear her voice, to hear my lady of sorrow. Levana was the keeper of all tears and sighs, and all darkness inhered in her.

  I picked up my plastic bag and moved through the narrow hall to the main corridor and back to the great room. It was there that I heard the thrum of a helicopter and felt its steady pounding overhead.

  I entered the north tunnel and walked fifty yards to the circular iron stairway that led to the top of the lookout tower. I climbed slowly, testing the strength of the support pins driven into the stone wall a hundred years earlier. The rhythmic throb grew louder as I neared the observation area, and became deafening when I stepped out against the retaining wall. A police helicopter hovered at eye level, churning ice crystals and frigid air against my face, illuminating the field below with its halogen spotlights.

  Heavily armed and armored tactical officers jogged across the field on compact aluminum snow-shoes. They were prepared. The terrain would not swallow them, but the dungeons would.

  I descended the stairs, wound my way back to the great room, and climbed down the ladder into the cistern. Above me, boots clattered on the concrete, lights arced and flashed briefly. I waited until I heard an officer’s startled shout followed by radio chatter.

  I wound the top of the plastic bag around my hand and crawled through the conduit, dimly aware of the continuing noise behind me. Eventually all sound faded except the distant helicopter blades whipping the air.

  I SHOWERED, THEN LINGERED OVER A LONG breakfast in the hotel restaurant. One local paper had caught up with ZRBNY: FOUR DEAD IN JAMAICA PLAIN BAR. Another paper reported the SLAUGHTER ON HUNTINGTON AVENUE. Riddle’s was not on Huntington, nor was it remotely near a Tenth Avenue, and even if Richard Rodgers were alive I doubted he would do the score. Danny Kirkland made page two. There was no mention of the head in the hall outside my door.

  “BTT is still covering the bloodbath in Boston,” Bolton said as he joined me.

  He had grabbed a New York Times on his way in.

  “Same as the Globe,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “The Times owns the Globe.”

  “No way.”

  I shrugged.

  “Lucas, The New York Times does not own The Boston Globe.”

  “That fact seems to come as a shock to most people,” I said. “I thought I’d have to get Lane adult diapers when I told her. What time is it?”

  “When are you gonna get a watch?”

  “Never wore one in my life. Lane keeps giving them to me, and I keep shoving them in drawers. I refuse to be a slave to time.”

  “Then why are you asking me?”

  “Never mind,” I said, flipping open Hearst’s Boston effort.

  “Seven-fifteen.”

  “Plenty of time.”

  Bolton ordered ham and eggs. “Two officers injured last night,” he announced. “Like you said, no Zrbny.”

  “I want my half hour with him,” I said.

  “Lucas …”

  “I’m the bait. It’s my call.”

  “Suppose he walks in there and blows off your head.”

  “He won’t,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt.

  Bolton described how he would deploy his officers around the Public Garden. “The chopper will be to the east,” he said, “at a thousand feet above the Park Street Underground. There will be a marksman on a roof behind you, and another on Boylston Street.”

  “Did Pouldice survive the night?”

  “She left a message. Says she’s coming in this afternoon, that she had nothing to do with Braverman. She heard shots and ran.”

  “I have to be in the Public Garden at eleven,” I said, pushing aside the newspaper.

  “You trust Zrbny, don’t you?”

  “More than I trust The New York Times. Their management doesn’t like Noam Chomsky. I do.”

  “When I’ve had my coffee, I’ll ask who he is,” he said. “I know there’s no point trying to talk you out of—”

  “None,” I said.

  “I was going to suggest that I—”

  “No.”

  “—walk in with you.”

  I grabbed the newspaper and read Dilbert.

  “You get like this when you’re nervous,” he said.

  I looked up from the comics. “Astute,” I said. “I’d be a damn fool to not be nervous.”

  “Why do you keep doing stuff like this? Let me do my job.”

  I slapped down the comics. “When Zrbny reenters the system, the behavioral entrepreneurs with their questionnaires will be the only people who get to talk to him. Then there will be a spate of books, and a herd of former FBI something-or-others will hit the talk show circuit. They won’t know shit about Felix Zrbny, but they’ll toss labels like rice at a wedding, coin clever descriptive phrases, and borrow money against their royalty checks. You will be as locked out as everyone else while the public is led to believe crap that is more the product of a theorist’s ego than it is of Zrbny’s psyche.” I leaned across the table. “Ray, haven’t we had this discussion before?”

  “Twenty-five years ago,” he said with a wry smile. “In your kitchen.”

  WHILE BLITHELY WALTZING THROUGH MY conversation wit
h Bolton, I had managed to distance any sense of the reality of what my morning entailed. But as I emerged from the subway at the corner of Arlington and Boylston Streets, that reality hit me like an eighteen-wheeler.

  I walked to meet a killer, alone, on a park bench in the Boston Public Garden. No swan boats; no cops for a half hour. Before panic got its foothold, I told myself that if Felix Zrbny wanted me dead, I would be dead. He had held a gun on me twice, and one of those times for nearly three hours.

  Whenever I think about dying, I am comforted by the notion that there is nothing beyond life. I don’t want to deal with clouds and harps and angels, or demons and fires and pitchforks. I much prefer to simply hop on the Oblivion Express and have done with it.

  Also, despite Zrbny’s gift of Fremont’s head, I did not think he had summoned me to practice his precision anatomical work.

  Perhaps Zrbny could not help himself. Maybe he knew that, and maybe there were enough circuits still clicking upstairs for him to realize that he had arrived at the end of the line. He had created a stir that would remain in the media for weeks, certain to be followed by a televised trial on BTT.

  The city slowly returned to life. Trucks spewed diesel fumes. Automobile traffic strained more than usual to stop at lights. Cars slid into intersections, creating more than the customary din of bumper crunches.

  I entered the park and walked through the chill, late-morning air. A woman strolled hand-in-hand with her daughter. An old man in tattered tweed fed cracked corn to the pigeons. A young couple—I thought one male and one female—shared a joint and stared at the barren trees, the nearly frozen pond. The pond probably would not quite freeze; there was enough bacterial action going on in there to generate defensive heat.

  I looked back at the gate and counted benches. The man in tweed and white chin stubble tending the rock doves occupied number three on the left.

  “You the doc?” he asked.

  He looked like he had just tossed back his cardboard quilt for the day. “Lucas Frank,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet a man here.”

  “Great big guy.”

  I nodded.

  He stood. “You get the seat and the bag of corn. I’m gonna get some breakfast.”

  He walked toward Boylston Street.

  “That’s it?”

  “I’m hungry,” he shouted, and quickened his pace.

  The young couple—two men? two women?—on the next bench soared somewhere above the pond. Pigeons murmured, flurried a foot in the air, then settled back on the corn, their bobbing heads allowing them to visualize depth.

  “You’re a fucking miracle of nature,” I muttered to the birds. “Raccoons wash their food before they eat it. You shit on yours.”

  The police helicopter hummed in the distance, a black dot against a blue sky.

  Zrbny entered the Public Garden from Beacon Street. He moved easily through a gaggle of tourists. No heads turned.

  After three days of uninterrupted TV coverage, his was probably the most famous face in Boston. According to BTT, the city was under siege, its residents in a state of panic. Folks probably were terrified, I thought, but they were not observant. No one pointed, screamed, fainted, or dove into the pond.

  Zrbny sat next to me on the bench and placed a plastic garbage bag on the pavement between his feet. “Do you know what catgut is?” he asked.

  I looked at him. “Fishing line,” I said. “It’s single-strand, and strong. I used it mackerel fishing when I was a kid.”

  “Look at my right index finger.”

  He sat rigidly, as he had in his session with Randy Severance, his hands resting on his thighs. There was a monofilament loop secured to his finger.

  “That strand extends up my sleeve,” he said, “and attaches to the trigger on a nine-millimeter handgun that is secured to my chest and aimed at you. The action is already engaged. If I flinch, the gun fires. If the man on the roof behind us shoots, we both die.”

  Zrbny’s delivery was the same deliberate monotone I had registered on our drive from New Hampshire. Despite the chill, sweat beaded on the back of my neck.

  “What’s in the bag?” I asked.

  “My sister.”

  Zrbny was near the edge, teetering in a land where only he knew the terrain.

  “You have questions,” he said.

  As the midday break approached, a small army of office workers scurried past on the wet pavement. Bolton’s nightmare had come true. He wanted us out of the Garden before the lunch rush.

  I considered Zrbny’s preference for chronological accounts. Wherever I began, I would have to be content with his unfolding of events. I could not risk disrupting his flow, and I had little time.

  “You were eligible for release four years ago,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t have bothered. It was Wendy’s idea. She wanted my story. I wanted to know who killed my sister. She had been investigating Levana’s disappearance for years.”

  I took advantage of the pause, hoping that my statement did not require Zrbny to make any cerebral adjustments. “You two have known each other for years,” I said.

  “A few days after Fremont killed my sister, Wendy came to our house. We kept in touch. It was more her idea than mine, but I did call her the day I killed those people.”

  “I wondered about that.”

  “It wasn’t a secret. No one ever asked me.”

  “Do you remember what you told her?”

  “Of course. I said that Levana had spoken to me, that today was the day. Right here. Right now.”

  “Neville Waycross interrupted you.”

  “Does it matter now?”

  “I’m curious, only because there are three ladies of sorrow. You had killed three times.”

  A slight smile creased Zrbny’s lips. “You’re very good,” he said.

  “There were more?”

  “Continue with your questions.”

  As Ben Moffatt had said, Zrbny did not lie. He simply did not answer. I gazed into the distance, focusing on the helicopter dot.

  “Wendy Pouldice gave you Fremont.”

  “She could have given him to me sooner. When I saw him, I remembered him.”

  “What about the courthouse shootings?”

  “I didn’t know anything about that until the next night.”

  “Ralph Amsden told you.”

  Again I saw the hint of a smile.

  “Secure his window,” Zrbny said, “but don’t remove him from his room.”

  “That’s what I think will happen.”

  Zrbny took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “The police can’t prove any of this,” he said. “Wendy is clever, not your average TV airhead. She was impatient, didn’t want to wait for the system to release me. She knew I wouldn’t agree, so she said nothing and made her arrangements. She also didn’t want to be implicated in shooting up a courthouse. I was supposed to know what to do when the shooting started. Maybe I would have. I don’t know.”

  Zrbny could have climbed out Ralph’s window anytime. Instead, he had waited for the Commonwealth to free him.

  “The accident was … an accident,” he said, “one of those fortuitous events that no one can plan. What I did was up to me. I liked that. When I walked into Sable’s apartment, I thought it was an aquarium shop. I looked at her and I saw my sister.”

  He pulled his plastic bag onto his lap. “I still haven’t heard Levana’s voice. I thought I would.”

  Zrbny gazed at the blue sky. “My sister was not alone,” he said. “There are other remains in the dungeons.”

  I pointed at his bag. “Is that what all of this has been about?”

  He remained silent.

  Our lunch traffic had evaporated. My stoned androgynes were gone. Cruisers blocked the entrances to the Public Garden, and Ray Bolton approached on the path from Boylston Street. The police helicopter thrummed lower, closing on the pond. Tactical officers scaled the fences and moved through the deep snow.

  “Pouldice and Fre
mont,” I said.

  Zrbny released the catgut loop on his index finger.

  “I told you they were friends. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “You went to New Hampshire to kill her.”

  “She disappointed me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “For now,” he said, unzipping his jacket. “You take the gun. If I remove it, they’ll shoot me. I’m not ready to die yet.”

  BOLTON AND I WATCHED AS OFFICERS searched and shackled Felix Zrbny.

  “BTT has a camera crew on the roof,” he said, pointing at Boylston Street. “They’ve also got a parabolic microphone. I don’t know how good it is at this distance.”

  “Sure is a different world, isn’t it? I don’t think we’re any more violent than we ever were. We just get better media coverage.”

  A GUARD ENTERED THE CORRIDOR AND placed a chair opposite my cell. “Your lawyer’s here,” he said.

  I stood at the bars and waited. The short, stocky man who approached carried a battered briefcase in one hand, an Italian sandwich dripping olive oil in the other. He sat on the chair, dropped the briefcase, and filled his mouth with sandwich.

  “Fuckin’ good shit,” he said. “I’m Hensley Carroll.”

  His shirt had pulled itself loose from his pants, allowing his belly roll to spill from beneath his undershirt. He wore rubber boots with clips.

  “I’m your attorney,” he said. “I’m on the court record as representing you, so I gotta see you through the arraignment tomorrow morning. After that, the court will appoint someone else to represent you.”

  He took another bite from his sandwich. “Okay, I’ll do all the talking. Same as tomorrow. We enter a not guilty plea, you get remanded, we’re out of there in a half hour tops.”

  Carroll stared at his fistful of food. “Only problem with these fuckin’ things is all my ties look like they just had lube jobs. You’re gettin’ arraigned for offing the cop, the deputy sheriff, Finneran. Nice guy. Good family. Irish Catholic. Grew up in Jamaica Plain. Anyway, the rest of the shit will come later. You understand? You got any questions?”

  He hesitated only a moment. “Aces. I’m outta here.”