“What are we having for dinner tonight, Trish?” I asked her.
“Spaghetti and meatballs. Why?”
“Would there be enough if I brought Twinkie home with me?”
“Is she all right? I mean she’s not climbing the walls or anything, is she?” Trish sounded a bit dubious.
“She’s fine, Trish. It’s one of her cutesy-poo days. She doesn’t get out very much, so I thought it’d be good for her if I invited her to dinner.”
“It’s fine with me, Mark. She’s a lot of fun to have around when she’s behaving like a normie. It’s when she’s bugsie that people get nervous.” Trish laughed. “Now she’s got me doing it,” she said. “I never used those terms until I met her. Bring her along, Mark. There’s plenty of spaghetti.”
And so it was that Twinkie joined us for dinner that evening, and she was a smash hit again, since she had the volume on cute turned all the way up. All in all, it seemed to me that it’d been a very good day for her.
I’d pretty much exhausted the possibilities of those Saturday chores around the house, so I spent the next day puttering around my little workshop down in the basement. It seemed to me that a workbench might be useful, along with some shelves for tools, since Charlie’s tools were stacked in one corner, James had his in another, and mine were scattered all over the place. Maybe if things in the shop were better organized, I wouldn’t have to spend so much time looking for a particular tool when I was right in the middle of a project.
I sketched out some plans and checked my supply of scrap lumber. I don’t know if I accomplished much that Saturday, but I managed to keep busy.
James had spent quite a bit of time in Everett during the holidays, and he’d told us that Mrs. Perry’s doctors were fairly certain that they’d caught her cancer in time. He seemed very relieved about that. “Cancer” is a word that you don’t want to hear very often.
At supper on Saturday James told us that he’d be making a run to Everett Sunday morning. “Now that Andrew’s sure that his mother’s going to recover, he thinks it might be time to check back in at Harvard.”
“I’m sure it’s still there,” Charlie said. “It’d probably take quite a while to pick it up and move it. Transplanting all that ivy could be a real bear.”
“What time does his plane leave?” Trish asked.
“About seven tomorrow evening,” James replied. “Why?”
“Why don’t you invite him to dinner here, then?” she suggested. “We’d like to get to know him.”
“I’ll give him a call and see what he has to say,” James agreed.
It was about noon on Sunday when James and his young friend arrived and joined us in the kitchen. Andrew Perry was a slender young fellow who didn’t seem to be overly impressed with himself the way some Ivy League students are. At least the word “Harvard” didn’t crop up in every other sentence. James introduced him, Erika poured him a cup of coffee, and he seemed to blend right in.
Trish had quite a few questions for him, naturally, and she seemed a little wistful when he told her the names of some of his professors. Every discipline has its celebrities, I guess, and Harvard seems to have more than its share of the heavy hitters on its faculty.
“James was telling us that this house is picking up quite a reputation at U.W.,” Andrew told us. “He said that just about everybody wants to live here.”
“All except for the party boys,” Charlie said. “They might lust after our ladies, but our prohibition policy turns them off. Party boys do like their booze.”
“We were lucky,” Erika said. “The right people showed up on the doorstep at the right time. And our assorted disciplines make for some interesting conversations at the supper table—especially Sylvia’s case history.”
“Oh?” Andrew said curiously.
“The Twinkie story,” Charlie told him. “Mark introduced us to a real-live nutcase. She’s a screwball, but she is sort of fun.”
James snapped his fingers. “I almost forgot something,” he said to Sylvia. “I think Andrew’s got the answer to one of your problems. He knows why Renata keeps talking about wolves howling after she has those nightmares.”
“Is this Twinkie person the girl whose sister was murdered in Forest Park a few years back?” Andrew asked him.
“That’s the one. Mark knows her family, and he introduced her to us during the fall quarter. Go ahead and tell them about it.”
“There’s not really a lot to tell,” Andrew said. “Our house isn’t far from Forest Park, and we all remember the night of that murder vividly. One of our neighbors has a kennel, and he’s been experimenting with a crossbreed dog—part Alaskan husky and part timber wolf. It’s not working out too well for him—the wolf keeps popping up, and wolves aren’t good house pets. Anyway, on the night that girl was murdered in the park, those wolf-dogs went absolutely crazy. They howled all night and kept at it even after the sun came up.”
“I never saw anything about that in the newspapers,” I said.
Andrew shrugged. “We told the police about it.”
“So that’s why Renata keeps moaning about wolves howling!” Sylvia exclaimed. “It didn’t make sense until now. We were right, Mark. Renata’s recurrent nightmares are a reliving of the night when Regina was murdered. I’ve got to pass this on to Dr. Fallon.”
I had a few doubts about that, though. If the sound of howling wolves terrified Twink, why would she play that unmarked tape with some woman singing along with the wolves for hours at a time? If wolf howls were part of nightmare city, she shouldn’t really be hooked on that tape. . . .
There were still some things that didn’t quite match up.
Sylvia was all fired up about what Andrew had told us, though, so I kept my suspicions to myself. I knew one thing for certain, however. By hook or crook I was going to get a copy of that tape.
Classes began on Monday the fifth of January, and not having that freshman English class hanging over my head was a pure joy.
My Hemingway seminar met for the customary two hours early on Monday morning and Faulkner followed hot on Hemingway’s tail. Now, that’s a stylistic jolt for you. Hemingway seemed to be hell-bent on writing one-word sentences, and Faulkner’s sentences wandered around to the point that it was virtually impossible to pinpoint the subject.
My schedule that quarter was a grad student’s dream. My classes were both in the morning, so my afternoons were free. I almost felt a little guilty about that—just a little.
I felt a slight sense of a vacancy, though, and it finally dawned on me that I’d miss seeing Twinkie’s face in the middle of a classroom four afternoons a week. I’d made a few smart-alecky remarks about foisting her off on James and Sylvia, but she was still my responsibility. Having her in my freshman class had given me the chance to keep an eye on her, but that chance was gone now, and I’d have to rely on secondhand reports—or spend most of my wonderful free time at Mary’s place.
That took a lot of the shine off my day.
Sylvia’s introductory class met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but James only had Tuesdays and Thursdays to cram several thousand years of philosophy down the throats of assorted underclassmen. Sylvia’s course, like mine, was pretty much required of all students, so she got more than her share of reluctant dum-dums. James, the lucky dog, taught an elective course, so his students hadn’t been dragged kicking and screaming through the door.
“Did Twink seem to be OK today?” I asked Sylvia at the supper table that evening.
“A little withdrawn, maybe,” Sylvia replied. “Of course, we weren’t there for long. All I do on the first day is gather the enrollment cards and give out a reading assignment. Nobody’s head is functioning on the first day of class, so I don’t waste time trying to get through to them.”
“The technical term for that is ‘goofing off,’ isn’t it?” Charlie suggested, grinning at her.
“No, it’s not!” she flared.
“Watch it, Charlie,” James caut
ioned. “Our Sylvia’s got a short fuse sometimes.”
“You know, I’ve noticed that myself,” Charlie agreed.
“I thought I’d noticed you noticing,” James observed.
After supper, James, Charlie, and I ran over to the Green Lantern to see if Bob had anything new and exciting to tell us about the Seattle Slasher.
“What’s the good word, Bob?” Charlie asked his brother when we’d retired to one of the back booths.
“There aren’t any, kid,” Bob replied sourly. “Did you want to hear a few bad ones?”
“I already know most of those,” Charlie replied. “Are you getting any closer to chasing down old ‘cut and run’?”
“Not really,” Bob admitted. “Do you remember that sailor who got carved up just before Christmas?”
“The black man?” James said.
“That’s the one. I think I told you guys that the department was all pissed off because the Navy refused to release the body for an autopsy, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” James replied. “Didn’t you say that the Navy doctors were going to do it themselves, then pass the results on to the Seattle police?”
“That’s the way it went. Our pathologists came up with egg on their faces about that one,” Bob said. “They were positive that the Navy doctors didn’t know the first thing about conducting an autopsy, and that turned out to be way off base. Those Navy boys are real pros. They ran tests that never would have occurred to our guys, and they turned up something that our medical examiners had totally missed.”
“Oh?” Charlie said. “What was that?”
“Have you ever heard of curare?”
“Isn’t that some kind of poison?” Charlie asked.
“Sort of. It’s a concoction of certain plant extracts that some Indian tribes in the Amazon jungle smear on their arrows. It paralyzes animals—or people—when it gets into the bloodstream. And there was a whole bunch of curare in that dead sailor’s blood.”
“So that’s why nobody’s ever heard any screaming when the Slasher starts cutting chunks off of people who ain’t dead yet,” Charlie said.
“You got it, kid,” Bob replied, “and after they’d found the curare in the sailor’s blood, those Navy doctors went over the carcass with a microscope. Guess where the needle mark was.”
“In the guys throat ?” Charlie demanded in a half-strangled tone.
“You guessed ’er, Chester,” Bob said. “Evidently, the Slasher carries a loaded hypodermic needle, and he nails the guy he wants to kill right straight in the gullet with the damn thing. After that we get these real quiet murders. The curare paralyzes the vocal cords and the lungs, so the poor bastard can’t even squeak while he’s getting all cut to pieces—and, of course, within seconds he can’t run or even raise his arms to protect his face.”
“Where could anybody get his hands on a supply of curare?” I asked. “That’s pretty exotic stuff, isn’t it?”
“Our pathologists tell us that it’s available in any well-stocked pharmacy. It’s a muscle relaxant, and doctors use it to bring a patient out of convulsions—usually when somebody’s having an epileptic seizure, but I guess there are some other things that cause convulsions as well.”
“Wouldn’t that suggest that the Slasher’s a doctor—or maybe a male nurse or a pharmacist?” James asked.
“Not necessarily,” Bob disagreed. “It almost has to be somebody who knows what curare does, but that could just be some guy whose sister or cousin was an epileptic. I mean, it’s not some great big secret. Anyway, after we found out that the Slasher was using curare, one of the guys ran a quick computer check, and the word ‘curare’ turned up in the burglary of a drugstore over in the Queen Anne district last October. It was unusual, because whoever broke in passed up all kinds of opiates and other feel-good products and only grabbed the curare.”
“It sounds to me like having the Navy doctors do the autopsy was a stroke of good luck,” Charlie noted.
“Come on, kid,” Bob protested. “Our pathologists have carcasses by the dozen they have to check out. Sometimes they get rushed, that’s all. They’re not going to start looking for poison in the body of a guy who’s been gutted out like a fresh-caught fish. The cause of death is pretty obvious, so our pathologists concentrate on pinpointing the exact time of death. Those Navy doctors weren’t rushed, so they could go into greater detail. They even started to get exotic. They took measurements on every single cut and scrape on that sailor’s body, and they came to a very peculiar conclusion.”
“Oh?” Charlie said.
“They seem to think that the Slasher’s using some kind of homemade knife. It’s got a blade that’s only about two and a half inches long, shaped like a hook. The Navy guys think that the Slasher stabs the point in and then pulls the blade through the meat—shoulders, throat, belly—wherever. The poor bastard getting carved up can’t move or make a sound—because of the curare—so the Slasher can drag it out and make it last for as long as he wants it to. If he’s halfway careful, it could take at least an hour for his victim to die.”
“Ouch!” Charlie said, wincing.
“Yeah, ouch,” Bob agreed. “We’ve got to get that maniac off the streets. A shooting, or a stabbing with a regular knife is one thing, but this Slasher isn’t satisfied with just killing somebody. He wants pain, and lots of it. I’ve got a hunch that in the right circumstances he’d do his very best to keep the guy he’s killing fully conscious for a week or more while he was getting this, that, and various other things cut away. And to make it even worse, the poor bastard can’t move a muscle or even squeal. That’s the part that raises the hair on the back of my neck.”
That first week of classes was a bit scrambled. It always takes a while to make the adjustment. I was reading Hemingway’s “Torrents of Spring” on Thursday morning, having a ball with that outrageous parody of the ponderous writing of the once-famous Sherwood Anderson. If we can believe Papa, he churned that one out in ten days, and it was one of the great literary swindles of the twentieth century. Hemingway’d gotten a very interesting offer from Scribner for The Sun Also Rises, but he was already under contract to Boni and Liveright—who were also Anderson’s publishers. In fact, Anderson was the heavy-hitter for Boni and Liveright, so when Hemmingway turned in the mocking “Torrents of Spring,” B&L wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. That freed Hemingway from the slave clause, and he immediately cut a deal with Scribner for much bigger bucks. Papa could be very shrewd sometimes.
It was about nine o’clock when Erika yelled up the stairs. “You’ve got a phone call, Mark,” she shouted.
“Be right there,” I called as I dashed downstairs.
It was Mary. “Ren’s flipped out again, Mark,” she told me.
“Damn! I thought she was getting over those.”
“Not really. She was going full-bore when I came home. I got about fifteen minutes of it on tape, then I zonked her out.”
“Did anything at all unusual show up this time?” I asked her.
“No, I think she’s going to keep doing these same things over and over until somebody—Fallon, or Sylvia—cracks the code. And I don’t think we should wait too long, because we can’t be positive about how many more of these blowouts she’s got left in her. The day’s going to come before too much longer when she won’t bounce back. At that point, it’s back to the funny farm, and this time, I don’t think she’ll graduate.”
“You might be right, Mary,” I agreed. “We’d better kick some butt and see if we can put Fallon and Sylvia into high gear. Time could be running out on us.”
“See if you can find Sylvia. Let’s get copies of this tape before I lose it.”
“I’ll get right on it, Mary,” I promised her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sylvia was on campus that morning, and I could probably have spent the whole day looking for her. I did have an alternative, though. I had an old dual-deck tape player-recorder that I’d retired when I’d replaced it with
a better sound system, so I dug it out of the back of my closet, stuck a couple of blank tapes in my pocket, and carried the heavy recorder downstairs.
“What’s up, Mark?” Erika asked me.
“Twinkie’s flipped out again,” I replied. “Mary got most of it on tape, and I want to run copies. Sylvia’s going to want one, and so will Doc Fallon.”
“That’s happening more and more frequently, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is. Mary seems to think that if we don’t get a handle on it pretty quick, Twink’s going to wind up back in the bughouse, and this time she won’t be coming back out again.”
“Damn!” Erika swore.
“At least damn,” I agreed.
Mary was waiting when I got to her place. “Where’s Sylvia?” she demanded.
“She’s on campus somewhere,” I replied, “and I don’t feel like chasing her down. I can run copies of your tape on this machine and hand them off to her when she comes home.”
“Good thinking,” Mary agreed. “Let’s set up in the kitchen. There’s room enough for that big recorder of yours there, and we won’t mess up the living room.”
“Sounds good to me,” I agreed.
I ran off several copies of Mary’s tape, and I was just about to pack things up and go home when I had an idea. “Has Twink ever played her favorite tape for you, Mary?” I asked.
“The one where there’s a woman singing along with a pack of wolves?”
“That’s the one. Does she play it very often?”
“Often enough to make me pretty sick of hearing it. Why?”
“You know the way she complains about wolves howling when she goes bonkers? Doesn’t it seem odd to you that she complains about it on her bad days, but listens to it when she’s a normie?”
“Now that you mention it, it does seem peculiar.”
“If she’s always listening to it, it’s probably in her tape player right now. If you can sneak into her room without waking her up, I’d like to run off a copy of that tape too. It might give Sylvia and Doc Fallon a few clues about what’s bothering her so much.”
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