The Judas Child

by Carol O'Connell

  He had never appreciated the art in his own house, except for its cash value. Piece by piece, he had sold all of it. And now he was staring at the old familiar painting by Arthur Dove. It was a small work by a minor artist, but it had brought thousands at auction. He looked at every frame on a neighboring wall of photographs. Each image of a renowned person had been taken by an equally famed photographer, and one of them was a Stieglitz portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe.

  “Who’s the art collector in the family?”

  “My husband.” She turned slowly, surveying her own living room, as if seeing it through the eyes of a stranger. “Doesn’t fit with pumping gas and fixing cars, does it? When we were students, Harry had aspirations of becoming a starving artist—a photographer. Then his uncle died and left him a chain of gas stations and a big wad of money. That pretty much killed the idea of starving.” She shrugged. “Life can be cruel.”

  Rouge didn’t smile. He had a nodding acquaintance with cruelty and irony. None of the photographs in this room had been taken by Harry Green.

  The house was so quiet. He had expected to see a federal agent camped out in the living room with wiretap equipment. Who was screening the crank calls? Where were the hordes of reporters who filled up every local bed-and-breakfast? Why were these people so alone?

  “There’s a tap on your phone, right?”

  She nodded. “I signed the forms. The FBI came out and rigged up some equipment in the basement. I hope they’re not too pissed off. All that trouble for a phone that never rings.” Her voice had gone listless as she drifted over to the staircase.

  “It might take a few days before the newspeople get your unlisted number. Then your telephone won’t stop ringing.” He offered this as an excuse, as though giving a false compliment to a homely girl at the school dance.

  How had the reporters been sidetracked? The lawn should be crawling with camera crews.

  Mrs. Green was walking toward the staircase. “You want the tour? It only takes a few minutes. That’s how long it took the other cops. Sadie’s room is this way.”

  She led him up the steps and down a hallway lined with photographs from another century, family groupings and portraits of properly laced-up women and starched-collar men. All civility and gentility ended at the door where Mrs. Green was waiting for him. It was decorated with a gory poster for a vintage horror movie titled Freaks.

  He turned to the woman beside him, who seemed so normal.

  “You were expecting a poster for Little Women?” She opened the door. “Maybe Snow White?”

  She stepped to one side, and he walked into a bright collage of Halloween masks, fake vomit and bottles of liquid the color of blood. Monsters stared at him from picture frames ganged on every wall. The only nonviolent bit of space was directly over the child’s bed. Here was a carelessly tacked-up array of champion blue ribbons.

  “Those are for gymnastics,” said Sadie’s mother.

  Pride was absent from her voice, and Rouge found that odd, for there was not one second-place prize in the collection. “Your daughter must be quite an athlete.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, genuinely dubious. “Sometimes I think the blue ribbons are just a side effect of being fearless. You should see her on the parallel bars. She pushes off, flies through the air and never looks down. Cartwheels and back flips—she goes spinning across a room, and I keep thinking every second she’s gonna break her neck. Her father loves it. Harry goes to every single competition. Me? I can’t watch anymore.”

  He moved on to the next wall with its large bulletin board and an amazing selection of long-legged rubber bugs perched on pins. Half a dozen fake eyeballs stared up at him from an open egg carton on the desk. He perused a bookcase stocked with film cassettes. Most of them were in the horror genre of the thirties and forties, almost quaint, and a few were familiar children’s classics.

  Becca Green plucked out a tape which had one label pasted over another to read, “Heidi, original screenplay by Richard Hughes.” She peeled back the top label so he could read the screenwriter’s true title.

  “Eyeball Eaters From Hell?”

  “She marked it as a children’s film for my sake. My Sadie is not without compassion.”

  “You let her watch that stuff?”

  “Let her? Sadie is a full-blown person. She came that way—right out of the damn egg.” Becca Green was smiling again, obviously taking pride in this. “Seen enough?”

  She made it sound like a challenge for him to brave a look into the dark of the closet, or, if he had the stomach for it, perhaps a peek under the bed.

  “I’ve got the general idea.” He followed her out of the room and back down the stairs. The silence of the house still troubled him. “Mrs. Green, have you had any problems with the reporters?”

  She shook her head as she walked into the living room. “Just the opposite.” She pulled back the pale green drapes of the front window. “You see that guy sleeping in the car across the street? He’s the pool reporter. If Harry and I suddenly go nuts and run around the lawn naked, this guy has to share that with the other reporters. All the rest of them are over at the Hubbles’ place. He tells me they have their own pressroom with a bank of telephones, free booze and food.”

  Becca Green shrugged out of her coat and tossed it on the couch. She continued to stare out the window, this little round woman who probably cut her own hair. Rouge noticed the ends of her brown tresses were uneven at the back, and he found this endearing. He wished he could tell her that.

  “I feel kinda sorry for that little guy,” she said, nodding at the sleeping reporter in the parked car. “He’s missing all the big press conferences and the FBI bulletins. Maybe after lunch, I’ll run over there and flash my breasts for him. Just a quick one to give him a little thrill. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a damn shame you’re already married.”

  She turned to face him with a wide grin. “You lying bastard, I really like your style.”

  He heard the front door open and close, and now a man’s deep voice called out from the hall, “Becca?”

  “In here, Harry,” she yelled. In a lower tone, she said, “Don’t expect too much from my husband, all right?”

  A large, barrel-chested man filled up the doorway. Wind-whipped strands of light brown hair grazed the collar of an expensive bomber jacket. The multicolored scarf was obviously homemade and impossibly long; its fringed ends hung well below the knees of his blue jeans. Rouge wondered if Becca Green had knitted this scarf on the theory that longer was warmer. With only the evidence of this silly-looking garment, he knew that she deeply loved her husband, and volumes more were said by the fact that Harry Green actually wore it.

  The man’s dark eyes were vacuous and staring straight ahead in the manner of a ghost haunting rooms, seeing no one, only passing through. He padded slowly and silently across the thick carpet, heading in the general direction of his wife.

  “It’s not as bad as you think, Harry,” said Mrs. Green. “We kept our clothes on the whole time.”

  The man came awake to the sight of a tall policeman standing in his living room. And now he came all the way back to life with a faint smile for his wife. Gently, he passed one loving hand over her hair. He nodded to Rouge, and then his eyes went strange again as he ambled off to haunt some other room.

  Becca Green turned to the fireplace and picked up a sheet of paper from a stack on the mantel. She handed it to Rouge. “Harry made this flyer himself. He spent hours going over our scrapbooks—wanted to find just the right picture. Then he pasted it up for the copy shop. He took that photo of the kids on parents’ day at summer camp.”

  Rouge stared at the black-and-white image that filled half the sheet. Two little girls sat on a bench, arms wound around each other, Gwen’s head leaning on Sadie’s shoulder. They were staring off in different directions, each thinking their own thoughts. Long shadows slanted across the grass in the background. The camera had captured a quiet moment
at the end of a busy day, when the children were tired but content just to be with one another. Beneath this photograph was the one word PLEASE, hand-lettered with the bold, broad strokes of a marker.

  It touched him in a way he could not explain, for this was a work of art, and thus beyond his vocabulary; he only knew the price of art.

  Rouge handed it back to her.

  “No, you keep it. I’ve got hundreds of them. This morning, Harry took them all downtown to put them up in the stores, but every window was already plastered with these professional jobs.” She held up another sheet for his inspection. This one was made of more expensive glossy paper. “Nice, huh? Gwen’s mother had these done by a real printer.”

  Well, Gwen’s mother had screwed up royally.

  There was too much information given: the children’s height, weight, and every identifying mark on their small bodies—enough material to keep the sick crank calls going indefinitely. In the middle of the night, a whispery voice on the phone would tell the Greens the location of the mole on Sadie’s shoulder, and then the pervert would go on to describe things that would leave the parents screaming in pain. Rouge didn’t approve of the photographs either. They were candid shots, but selected to show the girls in frontal and profile views, like mug shots of tiny criminals.

  He folded Harry Green’s flyer into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I like your husband’s work better. Can I take a few more?”

  “You just made my day—and Harry’s too. Take ’em all.”

  When Rouge left the Greens’ house, he was startled to see Ali Cray sitting on the front seat of his old Volvo. There was no other car in sight that might belong to her. Except for the pool reporter’s rental, the only vehicles along the road were parked in private driveways.

  Did she mean to continue the conversation begun in Dame’s Tavern?

  He opened the door, and without a word or a look to say she didn’t belong there, he slid in behind the wheel and set the stack of flyers on the dashboard. She plucked one sheet off the top of the pile and stared at it.

  “What a heartbreaker,” she said, in lieu of hello.

  “Sadie’s father made them.” As Rouge put the key in the ignition, his eyes traveled over the quiet lawns of the cul-de-sac. Toys and bicycles lay abandoned on the grass of almost every house. Absent was the sound of Roller-blades and the slap of running feet on the sidewalk. There was no yelling, not one insulting simile to boogers, nor the high-pitched screams which did double duty for joy and outrage. Today, the boys and girls and all their noise had been hidden away indoors. Perhaps the neighbors didn’t want to taunt the Greens with an ostentatious display of precious children.

  He wondered if Becca Green had noticed this.

  Of course she had.

  “God, this is brilliant.” Ali Cray was still admiring Harry Green’s flyer. “You know he didn’t intend this for the public. It’s a direct communication to the pervert. Get enough of them up, and the monster will see them every day. It’s just a shame he isn’t human—no heart. Anyway, it’s too late for Green’s child.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.” Rouge put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb, assuming that she intended to stay with him awhile. “You may be the only one who’s given up on Sadie.”

  “Well, the mother did an amazing public relations job on the task force. Smart woman. She said you were all going to love her kid—and now you do. But that little girl has been dead for days, Rouge. Believe me.”

  “I can’t.” He smiled.

  Ali leaned over and touched the sleeve of his jacket. He saw a warning in her face. Her tone was very serious, but also gentle, aiming only to protect him. “Don’t fall in love with this kid. She’s dead.”

  The Christmas tree lane was lined with vans and cars. More vehicles filled the circular driveway. Rouge waved to the state trooper standing by the gate. Just beyond the ornate iron bars, a dog was being choked back on a leash, and this was enough to make Rouge dislike the animal’s handler, a middle-aged man with sparse blond hair, tiny darting eyes and the soft mouth of a girl.

  John Stuben? Yes, that was the name. Two dogs in the State Police Canine Corps had been purchased from this man’s kennel. According to newspaper accounts, both animals had been vicious attackers, going beyond the call of duty to maim every bit of flesh they touched. Four years later, New York State was still paying off lawsuits, and the kennel had gone bankrupt. Apparently Stuben had gone to work for the Hubble estate, for his jacket was well cut, expensive, but much too large, an obvious hand-me-down from his tall and wealthy employer.

  Perhaps Peter Hubble, the security fanatic, had hired the man because of his bad reputation and not despite it. So far, no one had ever walked away from an altercation with an animal trained by John Stuben.

  Rouge and Ali showed their identification again at the door. An FBI agent checked Ali’s name off a list of expected guests, then pointed them toward the ballroom, where the lieutenant governor was preparing for a press conference. They walked down the long gallery of marble floors and priceless paintings on paneled walls, passing the open door to a room where two women in blue jeans were feeding sheets of paper to a copier. Rouge pegged them for volunteers. Through the next doorway, he recognized an FBI man in a loosened tie, seated on a couch and speaking into the microphone of his headset. An array of wiretap equipment covered the coffee table. Another agent worked at her laptop computer. The volunteers and the agents all had the dragged-out look of a night without sleep. Rouge identified the people in the next room as reporters. His best clues were the cacophony of ringing phones, clinking glasses and the smell of food, booze and smoke.

  They were near the end of the gallery and closing on the main event, the governor’s press conference. A hundred independent conversations were growing in volume. A tall pair of handsomely carved wooden doors hung open, giving them a generous view of the grand ballroom. Folding chairs filled half the space, and a makeshift wooden platform was set against the back wall. Camera-men milled around with the glare of mobile strobes. More brilliant beams fell from stationary pole lights. Technicians and reporters were everywhere.

  A group of five men in dark suits stood to one side of the platform. They all wore earphones, and their gazes continually swept the room, roving from face to face in the crowd. Now all five pairs of eyes were trained on Rouge and his companion. He stopped at the door and held out his State Police identification for a trooper, who then nodded to the men on the other side of the room. They resumed their sweep, faces slowly turning left, then right with chorus girl precision. Behind a nest of microphones on the podium stood the governor, flanked by the taller figures of Senator Berman and the lieutenant governor—better known as Gwen’s mother. Makeup people moved from one to the other, powder-puffing and lipsticking the political stars.

  Rouge turned to Ali. “Why don’t you stick around for the show. I’m going to look for Peter Hubble.”

  She nodded, and he walked back toward the ballroom door. The trooper on duty directed him down a narrow hallway leading to the back of the house, where Peter Hubble had last been seen.

  This corridor opened onto a spacious, warm room with exposed brick and cherry wood cabinets. A collection of pans hung from a circular rack over a large butcher-block island, and the wash of sunlight from a row of tall windows made the copper gleam. A woman in blue jeans manned a coffee urn as her colleague stacked paper cups on a tray.

  Another woman, large and husky in her white uniform, appeared to stand guard over Gwen’s father. Peter Hubble sat at the table, eyes closed, face pillowed on his arms. An untouched platter of food had been pushed to one side.

  As Rouge moved closer to the sleeping man, the woman in white moved between them. He guessed she was a cook or a housekeeper, for this room was clearly her domain, and he was an intruder here. Everything in her face and stance said, Back off while you can, boy.

  “Hey, Rouge.”

  He turned around to see the familiar face of a
state trooper. This man had long been in the habit of stopping by the village police station once a week for coffee.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Lousy.” Rouge nodded toward Peter Hubble. “I guess the guy didn’t sleep last night.”

  “He stays out all night,” said the trooper. “Every night.”

  “Doing what?”

  “That’s what Captain Costello wanted to know. My partner and I had to tail him a couple of times. He drives around the back roads—just drives and drives. He’s looking for his kid. Ain’t that a bitch?”

  Peter Hubble raised his head, awaking with confusion in his eyes. When he looked at Rouge and the trooper, his face was full of hope, quickly followed by extreme fear. Rouge shrugged to tell him there was nothing to report, and Peter Hubble laid his head down again. His face was hidden, and he made no sound, but his shoulders heaved, his breath came in sputters, and they knew the man was crying.

  Hubble’s protector, the woman in white, was unfazed. Apparently, she had seen him do this before. But the man’s weeping drove the two police officers to backward steps. Then they turned in awkward silence and quit the room.

  Special Agent Arnie Pyle stood squarely in the path of the young psychologist, halting her progress toward the platform at the back of the ballroom. For a moment, he thought Ali Cray was going to walk around him—or over him. He flirted with the idea of little round puncture wounds in his back from her stiletto heels; some scars were more romantic than others.

  “Hello, Ali. No hard feelings?”

  “Arnie.” Her voice was light, almost sweet. “I’d kick you in the balls if I thought you had any.”