Beyond Recognition lbadm-4

by Ridley Pearson

  “You’re giving me gooseflesh, Mr. Garman,” Boldt said.

  “Scares the fool out of me,” he repeated. “Want to know why? Lemme ask you this: Does a guy light off two, three, four test fires-does he take all that risk-just to get Dorothy Enwright perfect?”

  “Does he?”

  “No way. It’s too risky. One fire, maybe. But four? Six?”

  “What exactly are you saying?”

  Garman reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew an opened envelope. He placed it before Boldt, who elected not to touch it. The address, written in blue ballpoint ink, was scripted in poorly formed block letters.

  “You’ve handled this?” Boldt asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “No. I’ve haven’t shown it to anyone.”

  Boldt found a pencil and expertly maneuvered the envelope to face him, curious but at the same time reluctant. “Why me? Why now?” he asked.

  Hearing the question clearly troubled Garman, and Boldt sensed he had prepared himself for the answer ahead of time. “How many of these do we all get? You get them, I get them. Quacks. Freaks. Tripsters. Former squirrels we’re not using any longer. Most of them end up in the can. I got a whole series from a woman once, following a TV interview I did. First one was a sexy letter. Second one was another letter and a photo. Third, was a letter and another photo, this time with her shirt off. By the fifth, she was stark naked on a bed, and I mean rude. The sixth, there wasn’t any letter, just a video. That was the last one. They stopped coming after that.” Garman wiped some perspiration off his upper lip. It wasn’t hot on the fifth floor, not compared to summer. “So, something like this comes, you file it under freak. But it arrived the day of the Enwright fire-addressed to my home, not my office.”

  “You brought it with you today to the meeting but elected not to show it,” Boldt reminded the man. “Why?”

  “I’m showing it to you now.” Garman had naturally red cheeks and a big smile when he allowed it.

  “Why show it to me and not your colleagues?” Boldt asked.

  “Those guys? I’m one of those guys. I know how they think. We investigate fires, Sergeant. They would have laughed me out of that room. This,” he said, indicating the envelope, “maybe it’s something, maybe it’s not. But it’s your thing, not mine, not those guys. If it means anything at all, you’re the guy for it.”

  “Am I really?” Boldt didn’t want the letter. He didn’t want the case any longer. Too many guys between him and the evidence, too much he didn’t know about and would have to learn. He realized that if the body was subtracted from the case, it wasn’t his. He briefly resented Dorothy Elaine Enwright.

  Seeming to sense this, Garman said, “Listen, it’s just a bunch of nonsense. That’s the other reason. It’s not a threat or anything. But it’s off the wall. Some plastic and a poem. So what? And then I’m thinking maybe it means something. Those stains on the envelope? I threw the thing out. It was in the trash for three days. I only fished it out this morning before the meeting, because it occurred to me the dates were the same.”

  “It’s mailed from Capitol Hill,” Boldt said.

  “Yeah, I saw that too.”

  Using a pencil’s eraser, Boldt carefully opened the back flap. He hoisted the envelope with the pencil and dumped out its contents. An unremarkable blob of what appeared to be melted green plastic slid out onto the desk’s surface. It was about the size of a poker chip.

  Using a second pencil, Boldt extracted and unfolded the note. His eyes fell to the crude drawing of a small headless man climbing a ladder. Boldt could imagine the figure a fireman. The fact that it lacked a head would require the interpretation of the department’s psychologist, Daphne Matthews. Alongside, in the same undeveloped handwriting as on the envelope, was written, He has half the deed done, who has made a beginning.

  After an excruciating silence, Boldt looked up at the big man sitting next to him and said dryly, “I don’t like this.”

  “No,” said the other. “I know what you mean.”

  5

  The psych profile was ready on Friday.

  Daphne Matthews, the department’s psychologist, notified Boldt by leaving a message on a piece of notepaper, accompanied by her trademark doodle of a smiling bird.

  Sight of her still stopped Boldt’s breath. Some things never changed. He wondered if it was because of her thick mane of chestnut-brown hair or the narrow face with the sharp features. Perhaps the slender body, the dark skin, and long fingers. She was a woman who could play a set a tennis, talk a suicide out of a window, or hold a press conference where no one shouted. Maybe it was those lips, red, pouty, that just had to taste sweet, had to be softer than warm butter. Her clothes helped. She wore smart clothes, not high fashion. On the morning of September twentieth, it was khakis, a hunter-green plaid shirt that she filled out deliciously, and a silver necklace with a jumping porpoise leaping below her collarbone.

  On her desk, a small plastic Charlie Brown held a sign that read THE DOCTOR IS IN-5 CENTS. A teapot with a twisting vine of soft blue flowers sat on a coaster next to a pile of multicolored file folders. Her ninth-floor office was the only one in the entire building that didn’t smell of commercial disinfectant and didn’t feel like something built by a city government. She had real curtains covering her window, and the poster art on the walls reflected her love of English landscapes and Impressionists. She had a red ceramic lamp with brass handles on the opposite corner from the phone. Vivaldi played from a small boom box on the shelf behind her. She turned down the music, pivoting in her chair, and smiled. The room seemed a little brighter.

  In the small stack of files were problems common to the department: the officer-involved drunken brawl at a downtown hotel that erupted after two of the men had entered the hotel pool, after hours and stark naked; the attempted suicide by a narcotics officer that followed the near fatal beating of his ex-wife; the evaluations of several officers in drug and alcohol rehab; a few repeat offenders; a few who couldn’t sleep anymore; and some others who slept too much, burdened by depression.

  Daphne Matthews was referred to as the staff shrink. She attempted to paste back together the cops who fell apart. She listened to those who needed an ear. She created psychological profiles of suspects based on whatever she could find.

  She poured him tea without asking, putting in one sugar and enough milk to make it blond. She stirred it and handed it across the desk. She didn’t ask why he was here-there were too many years between them for such formalities. “The green plastic in the envelope mailed to Steven Garman? I don’t know what it means. Money? Jealousy? Death? None of the above?”

  “The verse?” he asked.

  “He has half the deed done, who has made a beginning. It’s from a poem by Horace. Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Born in the century before Christ. Major influence on English poetry. One of the greatest lyric poets. Heady stuff. Our boy knows his literature. College educated, maybe a master’s. It’s either a cry for help or a threat.”

  “Our boy?” Boldt asked. “The killer? You think so?”

  “We play it that way, don’t we?” she said. “At least until you hand me someone different. The sketch is of a headless fireman going up a ladder. It talks about a deed being done.”

  “A confession?” Boldt asked, his heart beating strongly in his chest.

  “More of a warning, I think. He warned Steven Garman; it allows him to disassociate from the consequences of the fire.”

  “It’s Garman’s fault,” he proposed.

  “Exactly. Perhaps Garman is the headless fireman in the sketch-the guy up the ladder.” She explained, “I have to caution you that the handwriting, the block letters, the inconsistent spacing contradicts the notion of a well-educated individual. I’m not sure how to interpret that. He may be young, Lou. Let me run some numbers by you.” She picked up a sheet of paper on her desk. “Sixty-six percent of arson arrests are people under twenty-five years old. Juvenile
s account for forty-nine percent of those.” Her face tightened while reading.

  He asked, “What is it?”

  “Just a number.”

  “Daffy?”

  “Nationally the clearance rate is only fifteen percent.”

  Boldt sagged, literally and emotionally. Eighty-five percent of arsonists got away with it. “I don’t like those odds,” he admitted.

  Attempting a more upbeat note, she said, “This blob of green plastic is symbolic to him. Though without knowing what that symbolism is, we’re at a bit of a loss.”

  “If it’s significant, we run with it.”

  She asked, “Have you thought about testing the plastic to find out what it was before it was melted?”

  “That’s an interesting idea,” he admitted.

  “It would sure help me to know what it was.”

  “What about a fireman?” Boldt asked, stating what he believed an obvious question.

  “Certainly near the top of our list,” Daphne answered. “A disenchanted fireman. Someone turned down by the department. Discharged. Denied a promotion.” She clarified this. “It works for the sending of the note, but not for killing Dorothy Enwright. Why kill an innocent woman if you’re venting anger? You’d kill a fireman or fire inspector, wouldn’t you?”

  Boldt nodded but didn’t speak. He heard it in her voice, her words: This was bigger than Dorothy Enwright, bigger than anyone had foreseen.

  “We need the connection,” Daphne said. “The spark, if you will. The motive. It may be something as eclectic as the architecture of the house. It may tie in directly to Dorothy Enwright or Steven Garman.”

  Boldt experienced it as a dryness in his throat, a knife blade in his stomach. He didn’t want to ask the question of the psychologist because he feared her answer. Nonetheless, it had to be asked. “It isn’t over, is it?”

  She met his eyes; hers were filled with sympathy. “The note tells us that: He has half the deed done, who has made a beginning.” She asked rhetorically, “So what comes next?”

  6

  Nothing much changed. If Ben had one complaint in life, this was it. He felt powerless to change things himself, and, left to grownups, things remained too much the same. School was school; home was home. He felt pressure from Emily to give the social workers the evidence they needed, but he wasn’t about to give in, so in the end he blamed himself for his situation, and it hurt.

  He had Monday Night Football to thank for keeping Jack Santori away. His stepfather wouldn’t come home from work but, instead, would head directly to the bar for the game. He wouldn’t come home from the bar until late, because he placed bets on football and he drank heavily, win or lose. Sometime around midnight he would stumble in downstairs, bang around, and find his way to bed-if he was lucky-or more likely end up passed out on the couch with TV fuzz hissing back at him. By that same time, Ben would be safe, locked behind his bedroom door, having spent the late afternoon and evening with Emily.

  There had probably been a time when he had been afraid of the dark, though it had long since passed. He had other things he feared more. Jack had a way, with his eyes and voice, of terrifying Ben so that his legs suddenly went to Jell-O and his thoughts became tangled and confused. There were times when for no reason at all he would press Ben to the floor and, holding a pillow against Ben’s back, would beat him, hammering away with his drunken, reckless fists so that the bruises ended up buried deep inside Ben’s flesh, not on the surface where they might show. Ben’s pee stung for days in a row and his poo was tar black. “You’re going to do as I say, right?” Jack would ask, as he carried out this punishment. And if Ben was stupid enough to answer, stupid enough to open his mouth, the punishment continued until Jack grew physically tired or lost interest. For Ben to cry aloud was unthinkable.

  Ben liked Seattle in September. Less people than in the summer, fewer cars on the streets. Ben had heard it called a transition neighborhood: blacks, mostly; very few whites. Ben knew which streets to avoid, which hangouts to circumvent. Most of this he had learned the hard way, although being shoved around by a bunch of zit-faced bullies was nothing compared to things at home. Fear was like water: it sought its own level. For Ben, it took some kind of threat to make him afraid, discounting the effect of Jack calling upstairs, “You going to do as I say or not?” That was an entirely different kind of fear. One of these days, the guy would go too far. Emily kept warning of that.

  The neon sign in Emily’s window was lighted-YOUR FUTURE, YOUR PAST: AT LAST! — which meant she was home and open for business. She got a lot of customers in the evening. Her business was both repeats and drop-ins.

  There was a car parked out front, so Ben didn’t disturb her. He recognized the car as Denise’s, an Emily regular. He went quietly around back and tried the kitchen door and, finding it locked, sat down in the cool September evening and waited. The city hummed. Somewhere out there was his mom. He wondered for the thousandth time why she had left without taking him with her. Fear. He had Jack Santori to thank for that.

  After a few minutes he got lonely and bored and decided to climb the cedar tree. From the hastily erected platform high in the tree, he could see the traffic over on Martin Luther King. He saw the blinking lights of planes crisscrossing the sky. The downtown skyscrapers rose dramatically, creating a city skyline he knew by heart. He could point to and identify the various buildings like an astronomer with constellations.

  When the car below him started up and pulled out of the drive, he realized he had been daydreaming. He hurried down through a pattern of limbs he knew by heart: down, down, down. Monkey man, Emily called him.

  She greeted him as if she hadn’t seen him in months, when in fact it had only been a couple of days. She gave him a huge hug, told him how good it was to see him, and immediately insisted that he eat something. She was warming up some lasagna in the microwave when the doorbell sounded.

  “You go ahead and eat,” she said. “You don’t need to help me tonight.”

  “I want to,” he protested, jumping up and pulling open the drawer that contained their wireless radio system.

  She didn’t stop him. He tested the system by speaking softly into the walkie-talkie. She nodded at him that it was working. She checked her appearance in a mirror, pinched her cheeks, and headed out to answer the door. Ben slipped out the back.

  The vehicle parked in Emily’s short driveway was a beat-up blue pickup truck with a dented and chipped white camper shell. It had a cracked windshield and a broken outside mirror on the passenger side. Ben went around to the driver’s window, because from here he couldn’t be seen from the front door, allowing him to hide if the customer unexpectedly came outside. On the back bumper was a Good Sam Club cartoon of a stupid-looking guy with a halo over his head. Through the driver’s window he saw a pair of sunglasses on the dash, and a cardboard cutout of a nude woman hanging by a thread from the rearview mirror. A man, he decided. Light from the street penetrated the cab, but it wasn’t as if it were daytime; he couldn’t see much of the floor-and there was a lot of stuff down there, probably trash. The ashtray was filled with butts. “He smokes,” he said into the walkie-talkie. “Parking sticker on the windshield for Chief Joseph Air Force Base.” He strained to see the dash. “Nice music system, considering the condition of the truck. He’s into music.” How badly Ben wanted to open the door or, even more tempting, check to see if the camper shell was unlocked, but Emily had her rules. He was breaking no laws by simply observing. To enter the vehicle was a different story.

  There wasn’t much more to see. He stepped back, studying the camper shell. He mentioned the Good Sam Club to her, because maybe it would tell her something about the kind of person he was. He noticed the camper had a rooftop skylight that was partially open, and he could picture himself slipping down inside and finding out everything there was to know about the guy. He wanted to know everything there was to know. He wanted to give Emily something worthwhile. One of the lower limbs of the cedar tree
went out just above the camper shell, and he debated climbing out on this limb and trying to see down into the shell, but the skylight didn’t look like it was open far enough, and everything was too dark.

  He circled the vehicle once more and then crept quietly into the kitchen, taking up his favorite spot at a peephole that Emily had put into the wall just for this purpose. She liked to leave the room every now and then and spy on her customers to see what they did when she was gone; she claimed this could tell her a lot about a person. Ben placed his one good eye to the wall, blinked repeatedly, watched, and listened, his heart racing, his skin tingling.

  The guy was built solid, with wide shoulders, thick arms, hard features, and pinpoint eyes. His hair was buzz-cut down to nothing, blond maybe, and his jaw was square as if sawed off at the chin. Ben looked first to the man’s face and then at his right hand, which was ugly and hard not to look at. His last three fingers were fused together with pink, shiny skin so they looked like a small flipper. Ben, because of his glass eye, knew what it was like to be a freak, and rather than wince at the sight of this hand, he felt empathy toward the man. That hand would be a tough thing to live with.

  “Are you sure?” Emily asked her customer.

  “Yes, ma’am. Just October second. That’s all. Wednesday, the second. Just whether or not that’s a good day for me-you know, as far as the astrology stuff goes.”

  “Just that one day.”

  “That’s all. Whether or not it’s a good day for me to do some business.”

  “I’ll need to do a chart and then make a reading. It’s not something I can do just like that.”

  He said, “I understand. A girl I know is into the stars. How long?”

  “Four or five days. You’ll have to come back.”

  “That’s okay. I can get up to the city, no problem.”

  “I charge fifty dollars for a chart. But once it’s done,” she added quickly, “it’s just ten dollars a reading from then on-if you wanted more readings.”