by Janice Weber
“Of course. His apartment was an open house.”
“How did he meet Louis Bailey?”
“The young doctor? He heard Fausto on the BBC and introduced himself at a concert a few months after we settled in London. They became inseparable. Louis experimented with everything under the sun in an effort to cure Ethel. When she died, he took it personally. I think she was his first medical defeat.”
“How about Bobby Marvel?”
Varnas waved a frail hand through the air. “Nothing but a freeloader. I’m shocked he’s gotten as far as he has.”
“Jojo Bailey?”
“A harmless fool. He was terrified of only two things. His father and an empty Scotch bottle.”
“Bendix Kaar?”
Prolonged silence. When Varnas next spoke, her voice lost half its ballast. “Bendix was a classmate of Fausto’s at the Royal College. A repellent creature who fancied himself a composer. He clung to Fausto’s coattails, perhaps hoping a little talent might brush off. He was always backstage after a concert telling others what could have been improved.”
“Fausto played his sonata, though. I have a tape.”
“He performed it out of sheer pity. Deep down, Bendix knew he was inferior material. He resented his smarter friends and was a very bad influence on them. So cynical. I was always afraid of him.” Varnas’s voice almost disappeared. “I still am.”
“Why?”
After a moment she pointed to a photograph on the far wall. “Do you recognize that man?” Not really. He looked like a bullfrog with glasses. “That is Morris Morton.”
The name sounded familiar. I smiled vapidly. “A pianist?”
“He studied with me for ten years. He was far too intellectual for public performance. He became a great music critic instead.”
I waited. Nothing. “That’s nice.”
“Obviously you do not know that he was murdered in a most brutal manner. It happened two days after he wrote a scarifying review of Bendix Kaar’s opera.”
Now I remembered the name. Hey, write a killer review, expect a response. For the first and only time, my sympathy lay with Bendix. “That’s quite an allegation, Madame Varnas.”
“It’s the truth! Poor Morton’s body was found in Golders Hill Park with the eyes poked out and various pieces missing. Since he was homosexual and Golders Hill is a well-known meeting place, the police called it a sex crime. Never solved.”
“Wouldn’t Bendix have been a prime suspect?”
“Bendix was as clever as he was evil. He had a perfect alibi.” Varnas managed to shudder. “I believe Fausto and Louis had something to do with it. But those were dark times. Ethel had died and poor Fausto had just had his first attack. He was absolutely distraught.”
Dark and sick but true: my gut felt it. “Did you know Justine Cortot?”
“Little Justine? When I first met her, I think she was Louis’s girlfriend. They were both studying at Oxford. I think she slept with everyone, including that repulsive Bendix, before she finally went home. The girl was always a little too free with drugs and men.” Varnas checked the clasp on a massive brooch. “How do you know Fausto’s friends?”
“They’re in Washington. I’ve met them all.” Well, almost all.
“They were a wild group. So brilliant and arrogant! Inseparable until Fausto got sick. Then it all burst apart.” Overcome with history, Varnas said no more.
I stood to leave. “Thank you for seeing me. Fausto never told me about his past. Or about his friends.” I was beginning to understand why.
“Even when he was little more than a boy, he was complicated. You won’t get to the bottom of him for years.” Madame walked me to her door. “I’ve never told anyone what I just told you. I hope you will respect my confidence.”
“Promise.”
“Will you play with him again?”
“I hope so.”
“Such a loss. He could have had the world in his hands.”
What could I say? Fausto had lived up to expectations, albeit in a different way. Walking back to my car, I tried to imagine the dynamic of a group including four such colossal egotists as Fausto, Bendix, Louis, and Justine. If Louis and Fausto cared enough about Justine to pull a bullet out of her lover, why should they mind going a few steps in the opposite direction for Bendix? Laws were mere suggestions, unnatural and imperfect. Thirty years later, the attitude held: nothing had changed for these people but geography.
I called Maxine. “I’m in London for a few hours. Need details on a Golders Hill murder in the early sixties. Morris Morton was the victim.”
“The music critic. Sensational case. What does this have to do with Bailey?”
“I think he did it.” That shut her up. “Know anyone who can fill me in?”
“Osman Furshpan in Brighton would know. Used to be a police photographer until he started selling his material to the tabloids. He’ll have pictures and stories but they won’t come cheap.”
“I’ve got five hundred pounds.”
“That should do. Hold on.” She clicked off the line. “Osman’s ready to roll. Tell him Zazu sent you.”
I set out for Brighton, a seedy resort town on the south coast. I had played a concert in some kinky pavilion here several years ago but couldn’t remember what or with whom. The local attraction was flesh, and a lot of it was still cruising the sidewalks as I pulled onto the main drag a little after midnight. This seaside park attracted a strange subset of females, either overweight or distastefully scrawny, sporting huge manes of dyed hair, tight skirts, and platform shoes. In their wake slobbered a legion of shifty-eyed men who looked as if they had told their friends they were vacationing in Scotland.
Knocked on a bombproof door near a video arcade. A middle-aged baldie with ponytail answered the door. Eyes mean as a terrier’s. Perhaps, with a name like Osman, his destiny was foreordained. “Hello, big boy.” I was a good five inches taller than he. “Zazu sent me.”
Ozzy led me upstairs to a tastefully furnished flat. He poured me a gin then made the mistake of putting a hand on my thigh. In the ensuing scuffle his switchblade gouged a two-foot slit in his leather sofa. “You bitch!” he cried. “That sofa cost me two thousand quid!”
“I want pictures of Morris Morton,” I said, dropping onto a wooden chair. “Don’t give me a hard time or you’ll end up looking like him.” I dropped three bills on the table. “We’ll start with that.”
Osman disappeared into a back room. I wondered what he did by day. Probably wrote poetry. He returned with a large envelope. “There,” he said, whipping it across the coffee table.
Morris Morton had paid for his nasty reviews one hundred times over. The pictures of his remains looked cubist. All ten fingers cut off. Castrated. Eyeless head just about severed. Railway nails in his ears. Gutted, sort of.
Osman sidled next to me. “I took those shots. Thrilling, aren’t they?”
Only to a musician. I peered at the crushed grass. “Where’s his cock?”
“Nicely tucked in on the other side. I’ve got pictures of that, too.
“What about his guts? Liver, kidneys?”
“Gone. Maybe they got eaten.”
One person couldn’t have done this much damage. Two minimum, three likely. With four the odds of one wimp with pangs of conscience became too high. I threw the other two bills on the table. “That’s all I’ve got. Tell me about the case. You were still on active duty at the time, I presume.”
“Right. We got the call around noon. A dogwalker discovered the body. It had been there at least twelve hours.”
“Isn’t Golders Hill full of people?”
“They’re all busy with other things, if you know what I mean.”
“What had Morton been doing that evening?”
“He went to a concert then went to the paper to write the review. The operator remembered a call coming in. Morton left in a rush. A cab took him to Golders Hill.”
“Man or woman calling?”
; “Man, of course. Morton went directly to a hard-core section of the park. He preferred the rough trade. He was alive when the appendages came off, when the eardrums were punctured, the eyes gouged out.”
Hey, write murderous reviews, expect justice. “And throughout all this he didn’t make any noise?”
“If he did, it must have sounded like sex.”
“There were no hairs, body fluids, razor blades, needles, hatchets, bloody clothes, mad dogs, found at the scene?”
“Nothing. Mind you, a rainstorm swept through London just before dawn and washed most of the evidence away. Footprints and the like. The killers may have listened to the weather report before starting.” Furshpan thoughtfully pulled his goatee. “But they were smart to begin with. They wore surgical gloves. And they used professional instruments for the organ removal. That was carefully done. Odd bit is, they used kitchen utensils for the various amputations and disfigurings. Bloody crude work. As if they wanted Morton to suffer.”
“So there were two killers?”
“At the very minimum. One to harvest the organs, the other to mutilate him. That never got into the papers, of course. We didn’t want a panic on our hands.”
“Any suspects?”
“An Indian doctor who was in the body parts business. But that was a cold trail. We interviewed every gay surgeon in London. We hauled in every pothead peddling hallucinogens. We placed decoys in Golders Hill. Nothing.”
Of course nothing: these weren’t ordinary butchers. “Wouldn’t a music critic have a fair number of enemies?”
“Yes. We spoke with hordes of musicians. Very few of them were sorry that Morris was gone. We were rather suspicious of a young fellow at the Royal College of Music who had been the target of a particularly bad review. But he had a solid alibi.”
“So who do you think did it?”
“Could have been anyone. Morton lived by himself. He liked violent sex with strangers. He wrote reviews that made people very resentful. He abused waiters. From all accounts, he was a shit. And he could have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Furshpan sighed. “Wish I knew where the eyeballs ended up, though. I still have bad dreams about them.”
Looked at my watch. “Keep the pictures. Don’t walk me out.”
“Give my love to Zazu,” he called.
I drove like a maniac to London. Just managed to chuck the rental car and buy a ticket before the Concorde took off. As it pierced the clouds, I ached for Fausto.
Chapter Eleven
TOOK ALMOST as long to get from New York to Washington as it had taken the Concorde to bring me back to America. I got to my hotel around one in the afternoon and wasn’t surprised to find another bouquet of orchids waiting. Love from your fan in the ski mask, said the card. What a clown. Checked my messages. No word from Fausto, damn him. Rhoby wanted to meet ASAP. Gretchen wanted to go alligator shopping since her monkey had still not returned. Bendix wanted to take me to lunch. I called him back. “Am I forgiven?”
“I behaved abominably the other night,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Perhaps Fausto’s eyeballs were lying on the bottom of the Reflecting Pool. “Let’s have tea.”
Next door, Duncan was relaxing with the soaps. I knocked on his door. “Would you mind turning that down? I’m trying to think.”
The latch opened a few inches, revealing a face covered with green mud. “Where have you been? Sleeping with that fat slob again?”
I muted the television. “I thought you were on an NEA panel this week.”
“We ran out of money. My God, look at the time! I must get into the bath. Justine and I have a fund-raiser this afternoon.” Duncan twirled the spigots in the tub. “You look lousy,” he called over the thunder. “Why don’t you try some of this mask? It’s especially for tired skin.”
“No thanks. How’s your lady friend these days?”
“Overworked but blissfully happy.”
“With you?”
“That’s right. I’m the first person to make her laugh in thirty years.”
Laughter? Bliss? Why had Justine told Fausto that Duncan was becoming uncontrollable? More to the point, what was she supposed to be controlling? Didn’t make sense. “How’s your wrist?”
“Much better. Justine’s finally coming to Cleveland to meet my folks. We’ve been arguing endlessly about dates.”
“I thought you never had fights.”
“They’re scheduling conflicts, not fights! Something always comes up.” Duncan frowned. “Mom had to put her apple pie back in the freezer three times now.”
“Don’t tell me Justine puts her work ahead of you. That’s outrageous.”
“I finally put my foot down. It’s this weekend or never.”
“That’s one way to find out where you really stand,” I said, rolling off the bed. “I hope you’re prepared to eat crow instead of apple pie.”
“You’re the one who’s going to be eating crow,” he shouted after me. “Fausto Kiss serves it to all his friends.”
Duncan’s comments pushed me over a rickety edge so I called Fausto and let the phone ring fifty-one times before giving up. Bastard! Maybe he and Louis were waiting for me at the jail. I cabbed to that surreal Hilton overlooking the Congressional Cemetery. Guests here arrived in police cars instead of limos. They didn’t bring much luggage and they weren’t particularly happy to be signing in, nor was the staff any happier to be registering them. I joined a queue leading to a rotund woman in a bulletproof booth. “I’d like to visit Figgis Cole.”
“Coal?” She tapped her keyboard. “Like the stuff you burn in the backyard?”
“No, like Nat King.” I still had to spell it for her.
“No Figs Cole here.”
“He came in almost a month ago. September fifth.”
More typing, more staring at screen. “Removed.”
Goddamn it! “What does that mean? He went home?”
“Out September sixth, nine fifty-eight A.M. That’s all I can tell you.”
Louis hadn’t even been here for one day? “Look,” I said. “I’ve got to speak with him. Where’d he go?”
“That’s classified information.”
I reeled outside to a concrete bench and tried to remember the itineraries of criminals in the U.S. justice system. First they were caught committing a crime. Next they were taken to the police station, there to await arraignment by a judge who either set bail or let them go until the trial. Louis hadn’t made bail. He could have tapped any number of friends for the cash, but no: looked as if he wanted to stay behind bars, invisible, for a while. If no one knew Louis was in jail, then who had removed him?
A Department of Corrections van jerked to a stop in front of my bench. Two guards hopped out, unlocked the rear doors, and hustled a sullen passenger into her new lodgings. Before the driver pulled away, I knocked on his window. Good-looking kid, quick eyes, rich mouth, the type who could always use another gold necklace or a little spare cash on weekends. But maybe not. A lot of these sharpies belonged to the Nation of Islam now. “I wonder if you could help me,” I smiled. “Do you transport most of the prisoners around here?”
“Me and my buddies, yeah.” He looked me over. “My name’s Jason. What’s a nice lady like you doing in a place like this?”
Jason got one hundred bucks in his lap. “An inmate named Figgis Cole left here at ten in the morning on September sixth. I need to know where he went. Do you think you could have a word with your dispatcher?”
“I don’t think that would be a problem.”
I wrote down the information. “How soon can you find out?”
“My shift ends at two. I’ll try then.” He read the name. “Figs? Is this your man?”
He was. I tucked another hundred behind Jason’s ear. “Don’t make me wait too long.”
A promenade in the Congressional Cemetery was slightly less depressing than an hour’s wait outside the jail, so I walked a few blocks to the entry gates on E Street. One c
ar was parked in the shade; by yon crabgrass, a few tourists gawked at J. Edgar Hoover’s grave. Since my last visit the weeds around the chapel had grown another few inches. The garbage cans erupted with trash. When the breeze shifted, I smelled urine and rotting meat.
Over to the Kiss plot. On Ethel’s grave lay a dozen white roses, very fresh, left within the hour. The grass had been trimmed, the gravestones washed. Several plots away, two marines were sprucing up John Philip Sousa’s current address. “Was someone just here?” I asked. “A big fellow?”
“He left about fifteen minutes ago,” one of them replied.
Fausto had clipped the grass very short, as if he wouldn’t be returning for a while. My eyes kept returning to the numbers on the various headstones: yep, I had added right last time. Forty-eight was the average Kiss life span: not a lot of years in which to accumulate wisdom, but they all had probably started early. Who would take care of the plot after Fausto? Too bad he had never come to grips with marriage or reproduction. Both were tough calls for a philosopher.
On my way out, I saw the old gardener still trying to restore dignity to the bottom of the hill. “How’s it going?”
He stopped wrestling with either a root or a petrified anaconda. “I’m kind of surprised to see you back. One visit is all most people can take.”
Necrophilia was my hobby. “Lots of interesting stuff here.”
He returned to the root, I to the jail, where my new friend Jason waited for me. He had changed into a white polo shirt and two little gold earrings. “I was getting worried,” he said.
Sat beside him on the scorching hot concrete. “Any luck with your dispatcher?”
“A snap.” He read from a little rip of paper with block lettering. “September six, we picked up a single prisoner from here at 10:02 A.M. and moved him to Lorton.” That was a penitentiary ten miles southwest. Facilities for all ranges of miscreant plus a youth center for ten-year-olds who set their grandmothers on fire. “He was delivered to the maximum security area.”
Just great. “Thanks, Jason.”
“Eh—we could take a ride down to Lorton right now. I know the way.”
