Palindrome
Page 21
Dead air.
“I have a daughter now. It’s just me.”
Heart in my throat.
“Oh, Frank . . .” Helen finally says, whispering into the phone. “You have to tell me what the hell is going on. This is serious.”
“I know it’s fucking serious,” I pant, then force myself to take it down a notch. Courtney can hardly contain himself. “Helen, just trust me. I know what I’m dealing with here. She’s been ahead of me at every step. And if she finds out I’ve involved the NYPD, she has nothing to lose. She’s not stupid, she just doesn’t care.”
The mother of all sighs.
“Did she give you a deadline?”
“Sunday.”
Dead air. She must be chewing the hell out of her pen.
“Okay, listen. How about this: You know that most manhunts resolve in forty-eight hours or don’t resolve at all. I’ll try to find you what you want, and then you get until Thursday at midnight. It’s now Monday afternoon, so that’s close to fifty-fifty. If you haven’t figured out whatever you need to by then though, I’m taking over, okay? You’ll tell me everything you know, and I’ll go after your daughter, doing my best to keep it quiet. Deal?”
I click my tongue idly. I’m finding it a little tough to actually think anything over right now.
“Okay,” I say.
“Give me until tonight to dig into this. I’ll wait for most of the office to clear out.”
Tears of relief. “Thank you. Thank you so much. You don’t even—”
“It’s fine. And Frank? I’m sorry this is happening to you, okay? Really. I’m sorry.”
I hang up with shaky hands. I can taste cold salt on my lips.
“She’ll help?” Courtney asks.
I nod.
“Good.”
I stand up and wipe the tears away. Take a few deep breaths, try to focus on standing up straight.
“That was the easy part,” I say. “Now we have to find that fucking tape.”
WE SPEND THE rest of the day trying to suck any droplet of knowledge about the Beulah Twelve out of this town, talking to everyone in sight. Anyone who’s willing.
Helen calls that night, says she needs another night to get me the info, there’s a lot to comb through. I guess that’s good?
So the next day—Tuesday—I roll out of bed after a largely sleepless night in the zone. Determined not to waste a moment of time. Sadie’s time. I don’t dare call Greta until I can leave her the message I need to: We have it.
After forcing down some coffee and fruit, we cross the street and convince Ms. Anderson to let us go through Candy’s old room, which is off that cramped hallway, past the closet with the men’s clothing.
It appears to be untouched since being scoped by the cops the night after the accident; Candy now sleeps across the hall in a criblike thing beside Ms. Anderson’s bed. It’s weird to see how Candy decorated her room, because that person is essentially dead, replaced by whatever she is now. Posters of heavy metal bands hang on the brick walls (brick for interior walls?), and there’s a little vanity with mirror and half-filled tubes of nail polish and lipstick, clothes stuffed in the dresser that are mostly black. No windows in here, and the ceiling—painted gloomy grey—isn’t level; instead it slants, so that when you walk into the room you have to duck, but back by the closet I can’t touch the ceiling even if I jump.
Courtney insists that I not interfere while he probes every corner, wearing latex gloves and the kind of binocular-like eyewear that dentists sometimes use, complete with a built-in light.
“No offense, Frank,” he says, dusting the top of the dresser—for prints? “I just have a method.”
“Fine by me.” I sit on Candy’s bare mattress and watch Courtney slave away. “What are you looking for?”
“Heh. Well, wouldn’t mind finding the tape in here, for starters.”
My eyelids are heavy from exhaustion. Courtney’s method seems about as scientific as dowsing for water. He brushes areas and just stares at them.
“What are you doing?” I ask blearily. “Cops already turned the place over. Probably already wiped away prints.”
“Ah.” Courtney turns to me and grins, the weird illuminated binocular glasses and long, eager fingers making him look like a giant insect. “Indeed. I’m not looking for prints. People leave other indications when they touch areas more frequently than others. Oils, extremely fine erosion . . . classic example is a numerical keypad. Always easy to figure out which numbers are being pushed most often, and sometimes you can even figure out the order by the direction of the oil swirls.”
I leave the house to start canvassing neighbors, asking about the night Candy was hurt and the boy who was killed. When I return two hours later, Courtney has finally worked his way around the room to the brick wall behind the bed.
The metal posters are rolled up on the floor, and he’s inspecting the wall brick by brick, brushing and examining with the utmost care. I stand off to the side, not wanting to disturb him for a few minutes. Then he leans away from the wall and takes off his goggles.
“Find anything?” he asks.
“There’s one woman who said she’d talk to me, said to come back tonight. You find anything?”
“There’s one brick . . .” Courtney searches, then points to a red brick near the head of the bed, where he made a tiny scratch with chalk. “I thought I saw some buildup. Was waiting for you to come back to check it out.”
“A brick she’d been touching a lot?” I ask.
“Her or someone else. Probably her.”
“Check if it’s loose yet?”
Courtney shakes his head solemnly. “Didn’t want to without you here. Didn’t feel right. Just in case, you know, it’s in there.”
“Well I’m here now.” I take a deep breath, feel compelled to offer a silent prayer, but am not sure to whom I should address it. “Go for it.”
Courtney grips the edges of the brick with his latex-gloved hands and carefully, delicately pulls. The brick moves. It slides out.
Immediately Courtney drops it on the bed and we’re shoulder to shoulder, looking inside with the aid of Courtney’s head lamp. There’s some stuff rubber-banded together, which I eagerly pull out—before Courtney can chastise me for getting my prints all over it—and drop on the bed.
I tear off the rubber band. No tape. But banded together are letters from Silas and some diaries kept in soft-cover notebooks.
“Guess I can’t argue with your method, Court,” I say, sifting through the papers, arranging them on the bare mattress. “My technique would have been to get drunk and kick everything.”
We spend most of the afternoon going through the contents of Candy’s hiding spot. Between the diaries, letters and her personal belongings, we can paint a rough portrait of her before her dad took a shovel to her head: twenty-seven years old, commuted to Pueblo every day for a job in an auto parts store. Wore goth clothes, painted her nails black. Listened to heavy metal. Had some rage issues. A virgin by choice; never felt she met a man she could trust enough to let him bed her. Read about Silas’s trial on the internet and simply had to write him, felt she’d finally found the man she could trust—a man who shared her fascination with death. Didn’t take long for her to ask what she could do to please him: tattoo herself? Hurt herself?
Big surprise: He was more interested in nude pictures. Asked her to touch herself and think about him. According to her diary, she agreed on both counts. She had plans to visit him; was saving up enough money for what would have been one surreal fucking conjugal visit.
His letters are all typed. Courtney recalls Dr. Nancy saying he had some sort of learning disability, dyslexia or something. So we figure he probably had a friend help type them up for him.
They corresponded for about a year. Then he sent h
er his last letter, written in a totally different tone than the preceding ones. Before, he seemed collected, confident. This one oozes panic, desperation. Plus it seems he typed it himself, aided only with a bad spell check. Probably didn’t feel he could trust anyone, even a fellow resident, with the content:
My dearest candy firstly dove of my hearts please don’t recall me from thesis words of mien I am never to be culpable of giving in such a feeling as is in me from words wich is my needing to be seeing you in face and brushing eachothers skin but no I reef you are not to approach such me I amen’t in such disfortune that quite danger is near and feering four you the dove of hearts so your hearing forth tender Silas nearly ends my hearts and hands and feers grow week and no seeing you in face and brushing eachothers skin no longer but alac I leaf your tender heart not emptiness as inclosed a pears such tender item as I express yet bad as knife on yourskin.
Mydearestcandy take such tender item to dirtand put it as deeply down as can believe it is a knife that cuts hearts and need be hidden in dirt MYDEARSETCANDYDONTLITNES MDYEARSTCADNYDNTOTILNES MDARESCADONTSITNEL YMEARDETSDNCON
Courtney carefully folds the letter up with his latex-gloved hands and puts it in a Ziploc bag.
“ ‘My dearest Candy, don’t listen,’ ” he murmurs. “No question now. The tape was here.”
“But she did, probably, right?” I ask. “Listen?”
“Wouldn’t you?” he asks grimly.
It’s confirmed in her diary. A week after she describes her confusion and sadness at Silas saying he’ll never write again, something starts happening to the way she writes. First she only does it for a few words, but within two weeks of the date she received the tape, she’s writing a full mirror image—a palindrome—of each diary entry on the page opposite.
“What about the guy who wrote the same way at Orange’s?” I ask. “So he heard the tape somehow, somewhere—”
“Good Frank! Yes! Wait . . .” Courtney suddenly digs into his backpack for his notebook, flipping back to the day he wrote about meeting with Orange. “Okay, well, that guy came in to see Orange two months after the murder here. And Candy’s accident. And mentioned the Beulah Twelve. Which means . . .” He jerks the ends of his mustache growth so hard it looks like he might pull it out, pushing his frown down as far as it will go. It’s like he’s on coke but really not enjoying it. “Which means that probably, as we guessed, the Beulah Twelve took the tape with them wherever they went. And somehow this guy ended up hearing it.”
“Or he really was one of them, as he seemed to be implying when he confessed to killing that boy.” I shake my head. “How do twelve men just disappear when the whole country is looking for them?”
Courtney nods slowly, then sits back down on Candy’s old bed.
“So . . .” I ask. “Can we take this stuff? I mean, seems like it sort of belongs to Ms. Anderson, right?”
Courtney frowns. “It would cause her nothing but distress to see all this . . .” He sighs. “But I suppose you’re right. I’ll photograph it all, and then we’ll put it back.”
He takes his spy camera out of his bag but hesitates before starting his documentation.
“I just had a thought,” I say, staring at the letter sitting on the bed. “Remember how Silas told us that he didn’t know what was on the tape? Like he never heard it?”
“Right. Spewing nonsense.”
I suck on my teeth. “Yeah, except, when you read this letter, don’t you kind of believe him?”
“Kinda,” Courtney nods almost imperceptibly. “Yes.”
“And Greta scared the shit out of him. He sent the tape right after her visit, right before he tried to kill himself. It’s almost like he was trying to keep it away from her.”
WE’RE THE ONLY ones in the Ritz tonight besides the help. Different waiter: a portly, middle-aged man who seems to genuinely enjoy this work. I think he’s either one of the owners or a relative. I get a burger, am determined to eat. I need my strength. Do it for Sadie.
Courtney gets the nachos—hold the cheese—which as far as I’m concerned is like getting a glass of wine, hold the wine.
We split up after leaving Ms. Anderson’s house at around six. I spoke with two people: Harry something, the neighbor who heard the screams the night of the murder—plus weird sounds coming from the attic for a few weeks prior—and a girl, Ashley Potter, now fourteen, who was friends with the boy they sacrificed on that altar.
Courtney spoke to Linda Jones, wife—widow?—of Walter Jones, one of the members of the Beulah Twelve.
Courtney pores over my notes. He won’t find anything surprising, I assure him, but I know the day he takes my word on that is the day he hangs up the old PI license. Harry the neighbor basically recounted what Ms. Anderson told us. The girl, Ashley, only recalled that Todd was a nice boy, and she had no idea why they chose him as their victim.
I listen to the recordings of Courtney’s interview with Linda.
Walter Jones sounds like he was a pretty normal dude before the tape fell into Lincoln Anderson’s lap. He was hardly even friends with Lincoln—insofar as two people who have lived in this town for decades could not be friends. Walter was a doctor in Pueblo. Pediatrician. Lincoln was a logger. Not much in common there. Walter had three kids and a loving wife in Linda. Lincoln was a light drunk with a messed-up emo daughter who everyone correctly figured would end up in trouble eventually. Then Lincoln stopped by Walter’s house one night, asked Walter to come over for a “guy’s night”—have some beers, play some cards—and Walter was a little surprised but agreed.
For those ten days, between the offer and the murder, Linda didn’t see much of her husband. First couple days he went over to Lincoln’s right after work and didn’t come home until she was asleep. Then he called in sick to the office for a week (she only found this out after); didn’t even leave town. Just lived at Lincoln’s. Sure, Linda was worried and confused, but what could she do? There were other men in town doing the same thing. She talked to their wives or girlfriends. They were getting ready to either barge into Lincoln’s house or call the cops when they woke up and their men—along with a few trucks—were gone forever.
I listen closely to her conversation with Courtney through my headphones as I munch on the burger.
“Did you see Lincoln when he came over that first night to invite over Walter?”
“Briefly. I was in the living room, I walked over to see who Walter was talking to at the door, make sure everything was alright. He assured me it was. I only caught a quick glimpse of Lincoln.”
“How did he look? Notice anything unusual?”
“I . . . I’m not sure if at the time I really thought about it. Only after Walter . . . left. I thought back on that night. So I don’t know if it was real, or my imagination, but I have a memory of Lincoln’s hands shaking so badly that he put them in his pockets. And he looked really, really tired, I think.”
“Tired?”
“Yeah. His speech was sort of slurring like it gets when you’re really tired.”
“When was the last time you saw your husband?”
“The last time I saw him . . . It was three nights after Lincoln came over. Walter came home around three in the morning. I was in bed already. His footsteps coming up the stairs woke me up. I didn’t think it was him at first. We’d been married fifteen years. I knew his footsteps. And something was different. Slower maybe. He came into the room. He smelled funny—”
“Like alcohol?”
“No. Definitely not. Maybe like, spices of some kind? I remember thinking he smelled a little like cinnamon, only it wasn’t cinnamon . . .”
“Incense, maybe?”
“Could be.”
“So he came into your room.”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
“I . . .”
“I’ve never . . . I’ve really never talked about this ever. I knew the police would never find them. I could feel it. It felt wrong. But you, I want to believe you so badly. I want to tell you everything, it’s just so . . .”
“It’s okay. It’s okay, Linda.”
“I’m going to try.”
“Alright. When you’re ready.”
[Long pause]
“He . . . came in. And I turned over. I was awake. I asked him, ‘Walter, where have you been?’ I wasn’t mad, exactly. But he didn’t answer. He just started taking off his clothes. The smell I described earlier, it grew stronger as he took off his clothes, like it was clinging to his bare skin. I asked again. Nothing. I reached over to turn on the bedside lamp, but he grabbed my wrist to stop me. Hard. Harder than he’d ever touched me. He held onto my wrist as he pulled off the rest of his clothes. I said, ‘Stop,’ I think, or ‘Let go of me,’ but he didn’t respond. It wasn’t Walter. I mean, it was him, but it’s like there was someone else inside of his head, controlling him. He grabbed my other wrist, too, and pinned me to the bed, then . . .”
“It’s okay, Linda . . .”
“He, he . . . I didn’t want to. But he did anyways. I was trying to push him off of me. I was crying. It hurt. I stopped struggling eventually, I lost my strength. He kept going and going, silently, like he wasn’t even enjoying it. Just purely mechanical. He did that for over an hour—”
“An hour?”
“Yes. And in the end, he didn’t even, you know. Finish. He just decided to stop and rolled over and instantly fell into a silent sleep. I was so upset I didn’t know what to do. I went downstairs to sleep on the couch. When I woke up in the morning he was gone. I thought he went to work. He didn’t. Someone told me later they saw him walking into Lincoln’s house holding a bag of groceries. But that . . . that was the last time I saw him.”
“And you never told anybody?”
“I . . . I swear I was going to. I really was. I needed time to work up the courage. But before I could, he was gone.”