by Linda Barnes
She stiffened and drew her shoulders back as though I’d tried to hit her.
“I would prefer not to.”
“I’ll be leaving, then.”
She waited until I stood and took two steps across the room.
“You are right,” she said. “All Thea’s money goes to Beryl. It is not legal, not by law—because of Thea’s age, so young when she died—but I honor Thea’s wish. Beryl collects all Thea’s royalties.”
“Where?” I asked.
“No parent should outlive her children,” she murmured softly.
“Excuse me, but does that mean you want me to think Beryl is dead? Instead of mentally ill? In a cemetery instead of an institution?”
“I didn’t think you so cruel, Ms. Carlyle.”
“When a person’s left in the dark, Mrs. Cameron, sometimes she can be unintentionally cruel.”
Tessa turned her back, staring out a window overlooking the dark lake. I tried a few other questions, concerning Beryl’s current whereabouts, whether Dr. Manley might be considered an expert in recovered memory syndrome.
Through it all, Tessa Cameron sat as though caught in some fairy-tale spell, speechless, motionless. She didn’t react when I left. I stood silently near the bottom of the winding stair for five minutes, but heard no noise, not a single footfall.
Mooney drove me home. There was a single message on my phone. The Dover cab had taken Marissa Cameron directly to the United Airlines terminal, dropping her at 2:18 P.M. Wednesday, August 16. Yesterday—no, two days ago now. No one using that name had departed Boston on a United Flight Wednesday afternoon, evening, or Thursday morning. Gloria was checking other airlines. She’d put the word out to all Logan cabs: If a cabbie had picked up Marissa and her hunter green luggage at the airport and driven her anywhere in Metro Boston, Gloria would find out.
I managed to brush my teeth, but dropped into bed with my clothes on. Sometime during the night I must have unbuttoned my shorts and tossed them on the floor.
29
While fighting my way south the next morning on Route 95, America’s “technology highway,” a semicircular marvel snarled with perpetual traffic jams, I pondered Drew Manley, once and future client, Harvard, Class of ’54, Beryl’s psychiatrist, and Tessa’s lover. His phone number was not only unlisted, but unavailable through my usual sources. A bottle of Wild Turkey at Christmas used to buy better service at the phone company. Doctors normally have listed numbers. Highlighted in red. How the hell did Drew’s clients reach the man?
Was he truly “out of town” as Tessa had insisted? Something about her manner had been odd when she spoke the words, but considering the strain she’d been under, I couldn’t tell if she was lying. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she suspected her lover had lied to her.
I could phone every psychiatric institute in the commonwealth, ask to speak with Manley concerning an urgent matter. Oops. Hadn’t he described himself as retired? Damn, that would make it harder. And what about Beryl? Psychiatric hospitals are even less eager to name their patients than their staff. Let’s see … I could send a single rose to Beryl Cameron at ten, twenty different hospitals. I could learn that Beryl lived out of state, existed under an alias. Beryl Jade? Beryl Ivory? Beryl Franklin?
Had Manley ever seen Thea as a patient? How had he come to know her, to care about her so passionately?
Around eleven, Route 95—formerly and still referred to as Route 128 just to mess with tourists’ minds—takes an uneasy breather for less than an hour and then swamps with lunchtime travelers and mall-crawlers till the evening rush begins at three. Some technology. Four stalled lanes to choose from—five, counting the highly traveled breakdown-lane—each filled with cars inching along, exhaust pipe to front bumper, spewing environmental poison, each bearing a lone commuter inmate waiting for the wail of sirens, the cherry flashers of an ambulance, some clue as to why and when standstill became the norm.
I molded my backbone to the Toyota’s cushy seat, closed my eyes, and listened to strains of “Up on the Lowdown,” picturing Chris Smither onstage at Johnny D’s, playing that shiny blue Alvarez guitar. I’ve driven a cab on and off since college, don’t need my vision to tell me when traffic’s on the move. I tapped my foot to the rhythm and ticked off items on a mental checklist. Number One: Find Manley. Number Two: Find Beryl. Number Three: Locate Marissa Cameron. Of course the FBI would be on top of her disappearance, but I had an angle they lacked, if the motorbike mentioned by Emerson at Avon Hill was the same as the “scooter” the FBI honcho had heard in the woods near the spot where a box of Marissa’s severed tresses had mysteriously appeared.
And I had Gloria, always an ace in the hole.
I zipped into the passing lane ahead of a too-slow Ford Bronco whose owner thought size alone could intimidate. Frustrated, he sounded a derisive bellow on his horn. I ignored him. Give a driver the finger these days, and it might turn out to be your last act. I recalled the Cameron family plot set on its graceful hillside, the Mayhew statue next door. The fickle finger is not what I want engraved on my tombstone.
A partial manuscript seems important, then unimportant, but Mrs. Cameron can’t wait to throw money at me to take possession. No wonder, if the complete manuscript were as scurrilous as the accompanying note had painted it. The note that Tessa and Manley had burned.
I stifled the impulse to yell obscenities at erratic tailgaters until I reached the Walpole exit. With a nod to Mooney’s Gianelli-connected hitman, I scooted over three lanes within a scant quarter mile, used the breakdown lane, and made a two-wheeled screeching departure.
If anybody was tailing me, I’d know.
It’s illegal to change lanes without signaling in Massachusetts. It’s illegal to pass on the right. Not illegal enough to wind up where I was headed. Not by a long shot.
In the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts criminal sentencing is not so much a matter of time as it is a matter of place. In other words: A Concord sentence is not a Walpole sentence. The Concord Reformatory is such a relatively mild-mannered pen that it easily coexists with the venerable and wealthy town of Concord. In stark contrast, Walpole residents have finally gotten their penultimate wish: Walpole State Prison is now called Cedar Junction to differentiate it from the town proper in the hope that the value of Walpole’s real estate will rise as quickly as that of communities that boast malls and Main Streets instead of watchtowers and barbed-wire fences.
Most Walpole townies wish the prison would burn to the ground with all inmates present and accounted for while all guards, cooks, and personnel who earned a living off the prison but actually lived in town were mysteriously off-site.
Extremely violent offenders wind up at Walpole. The major leaguers of the crime world. When a judge gives “Concord time,” it usually means an automatic two-thirds off for good behavior. “Walpole time” ticks slowly.
The road cleared once I abandoned 95. I cranked down the window, enjoyed the hot breeze. The closer I got to the prison grounds, the emptier the road became.
Approaching the first guardhouse, I slowed to a crawl to give the uniformed watchman plenty of time to record my Mass. license plate and get a fix from the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Why make armed men nervous, I always say.
The guard checked my ID and made a phone call. Mentally, I prepared myself for a body search. I didn’t know if they had any female personnel available for a pat-down, although they certainly would if it were visitor’s day, which I sincerely hoped it was. My body may not be a holy temple, but I do what I please with it, and only what I please.
Considering bodies as temples led me straight to thoughts of Roz. How was she progressing with the artful aging of Thea’s photograph? How had she gotten hold of those pages from a vintage Harvard yearbook? Had she actually gained entry to Harvard’s Alumni Office, its Holy of Holies, where guardian gargoyles keep track of who’s donated sufficient dough to guarantee the admission of feeble-minded grandsons? Back in ’54, they wouldn’t have needed to
worry about dumb granddaughters, never imagining that Harvard would cease to be an all-guy preserve.
Guys. There were 834 of them where I was headed down a rutted road, 834 in space originally built to incarcerate 633.
All I cared about was one prisoner. Albert Ellis Albion, #72786537. Al-Al, they called him when they called him anything, Mooney had told me bright and early. Said the word was that Albert belonged at Bridgewater, the prison for the criminally insane. Overcrowding kept him at Walpole where he wasn’t much bother to the general population.
The guard nodded me down the road and I pulled into the pocket-sized paved lot, avoiding the space reserved for the warden. I’d dressed for the occasion. My goal would have been easier in wintertime: layers from L. L. Bean. The weather being hot enough to boil eggs, I exited the car wearing loose khakis and a shapeless oversized T-shirt, my hair tucked under a cap that was already making my scalp sweat. My “look,” if you could call it that, was deliberately asexual. Eight hundred thirty-four guys cooped up without conjugals is a lot of guys.
Al-Al hadn’t had a visitor, other than his court-appointed attorney, in eight years.
30
The yard was concrete—walled on two sides, barred on the third and fourth. Barbed wire topped the square like a misguided attempt at Christmas decoration. Forty men were out for morning exercise, most of them stripped to the waist, prison-blue shirts slung low around their hips, sleeves wrapped and knotted below their navels. They’d segregated themselves, whites to the left, dark-skinned blacks to the right, shades of coffee and cream in-between. Thanks to mirrored sunglasses, I could stare without fear of repercussion at some of the best pecs, abs, and biceps I’d ever seen.
What a country, huh? Nobody’s fit except the very rich and the hard-timers, sharing the twin luxuries of time and easy gym access. No swimming pools, saunas, personal trainers, or health spa extras for these guys, though—unless you counted the morning’s humidity as a steam bath. But their gym had to be stocked with serious machinery. Nautilus, I diagnosed by muscle definition.
In my sexless attire, I drew minimal attention. A black man wearing a kerchief headband dropped to the sweltering pavement and did five quick one-handed pushups for my benefit.
I walked briskly down the pathway indicated by the guard. Eyes seemed to pierce my skin.
Every doorway was a challenge, an airlock-type arrangement called a sally port. Into a tiny room, door clanging shut behind me, locking automatically. Questioning and identification procedures before the next barred door opened. Security cameras monitoring the entire business.
Concrete and steel. The sound of chains dragging along the floor, a man’s abruptly shouted command. My hands felt clammy. I tried not to think of prison riots, news articles naming the hostages.
I was treated well. No strip search. I was asked to sign a book, list my address, phone number, Social Security number, and the name of the prisoner I wished to visit. I had to formally declare that I carried no weapons. A metal detector backed my word. I wondered exactly who Mooney had called. Possibly, Albert’s public defender was held in high esteem. Maybe the guards were so surprised that somebody’d come to visit Al-Al after all these years, they were cutting me a little leeway, hoping for some action.
I fell into step behind two visitors, women dressed to display it, bright flowers in a sea of drab, a treat and a temptation to their men. Husbands, boyfriends, lovers? Fathers of their children? I couldn’t overhear more than a brief snatch of their conversation from the enclosed carrel to which I was led. A flat-voiced guard explained that my prisoner would be escorted to a corresponding carrel on the opposite side of the glass partition. We could speak via telephone hookup. No one would eavesdrop on our talk. We were not allowed to touch the glass.
A second guard with a bumpy boxer’s nose and wire-rimmed glasses steadied Al-Al with a two-fisted grip, one hand on each shoulder. Without help, Al would have toppled from the chair. I have seldom seen a sorrier specimen. He looked dried up, wrinkled as an old man. Mooney’d said his public defender had given his age as forty-two.
What had he looked like as a teenage killer?
At first I assumed he was drugged to the eyeballs. Thorazine, something that in large doses turned humans into extras from Night of the Living Dead. In a whispered throaty response, our first communication, he assured me he wasn’t taking anything. Unless it was in the food, he murmured conspiratorially.
“I want to talk to you about some things that happened a long time ago, Al,” I began. “Would you like me to call you Mr. Albion? Al? Albert?”
“Who told ya my name?”
“Your lawyer,” I lied. “Harve Kelton. The man who defended you at your trial. Remember him? He sometimes writes to you. He told me he represented you at a parole hearing this year.”
“Yeah?”
“Can you talk about your hat?” It wasn’t what I’d planned to discuss. I didn’t really want to know, to tell the truth, but the fact remained that I was chatting with a convict wearing headgear constructed of patchwork aluminum foil, possibly remnants from assorted chocolate bars, twisted and folded together to form a crude knight’s helmet.
“Pretty smart,” he said with a chuckle I can only describe as weird. It held no hint of humor.
“Your hat?”
“The rays,” he said. “Keeps out the rays.”
“They shoot X rays at you?”
“Particle rays,” he said. “They haven’t used that X-ray shit since the Aryan Brotherhood stole the machines.”
“Particle rays,” I agreed.
“Zap ’em. Particle-beam radiation fields. You can never tell when you’ll get zapped.” He nodded solemnly and his makeshift headgear took a dive, almost covering his nose. He hastened to right it.
I had to assume the headgear postdated the crimes or he’d be in Bridgewater no matter if they had to wedge him in with a shoehorn. Unless the guards believed he was feigning his mania, wearing the helmet as a gag, searching for a Catch-22 release to a better environment.
If Al-Al thought Bridgewater was better than this, given the latest round of budget cuts, he was crazy enough to belong there.
“I’m Carlotta, Al,” I said. “That’s my name.”
“Lawyer?”
“Investigator.”
“Like cop?”
“Something like a cop.”
“I ain’t done nothin’. I been here ’most forever.”
“I know, Al. You’ve been here a long time. Have they been shooting rays at you a long time?”
“Yeah, long time. Long time. Long time.” His voice turned singsong and his eyelids fluttered. Nap time. Great. I took advantage of the break to fish my tiny notebook out of my pocket. I’d recorded the names of Al-Al’s victims, the particulars of his confessions.
“Al,” I said loudly. His head jerked, knocking the headgear further askew. “Do you remember Anne Katon? The waitress? The woman you killed?”
“Oh, jeez. Oh, jeez,” he whispered. “I don’t wanna talk about her. She’s not mad with me or nothin’. I love her. I love her.”
“Anne?”
“Yeah, man, why you gotta say her name?”
“Did you know her?”
“Sure, I know her always. She was my girl. I watch her grow up. Are you protected from the rays? Your hat lined with foil or something?”
“Do you remember Thea Janis?”
“Is your hat lined?”
“Yeah. I’m safe. What about Thea?”
“What kinda name is that, Thea? Tay-ah. Tay-ah. Tay-yah.”
“How about Dorothy Cameron? Thea Janis. Dorothy Cameron. Do either of those names ring a bell?”
“Bells, bells, bells,” he chanted. “I like bells, bells in hell.” He giggled, muttered, “’S’cuse me very much.”
“Anne Katon,” I repeated.
“I’m sorry, Annie,” he keened. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Your mouth wouldn’t stop talking, wouldn’t stop talking, wouldn’t st
op talking, wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop.”
“Did Annie have yellow hair?”
“Brown hair, long hair, sometimes she let me touch it. Long braid. Let it loose, Annie, let your hair hang loose and soft.”
I consulted my notebook. Eileen Evans had been the third victim. Thea, the second. I’d try them out of order.
“Did Eileen have brown hair like Annie’s?” I asked.
“Eileen?”
“Eileen Evans?”
“Is that your name? You have nice red hair, Eileen. I’d like to touch your hair, but don’t you dare take off that hat. They’ll zap you for sure.”
“Did you go out with Eileen?”
“With Annie, Annie, Annie. Her name was Annie, not Anne, not Anne, Eileen.”
“‘Thea was small, just five feet tall, with brown hair in a long braid, and bare feet. She was waiting for me by the side of the road. She’d taken off her sandals.’” I was reciting from the man’s own confession, a document suspect if only for its perfect grammar. But you can never tell. Confessions are usually taped, and sometimes transcribers decide to pretty them up.
He didn’t react in any way.
“Did Thea have long brown hair?” I asked. “Did she look like Annie?”
He scrunched up his face. I stared at him for a good five minutes before he opened his eyes. I wondered if he thought he was under ray bombardment. Maybe I ought to scrunch my face too.
“Her,” he said abruptly.
“Thea,” I prompted. “Dorothy.”
Al gazed at me for a long time, adjusted his aluminum helmet. It looked a little like the Tin Man’s headgear in The Wizard of Oz.
After running his fingers over each wall and banging the telephone rhythmically on the ledge of the carrel, he said, “You won’t tell anyone?”
I said, “My hat lets me listen. It won’t let me tell.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding slowly.
“Ah,” I repeated, mimicking his nod.
“The five o’starfish was walking by the sand-oh. The five o’starfish was walking by the sand-oh. The five o’starfish was walking …”
