Shame

by Alan Russell

  Feral started up his car and pulled away from the curb. He was taking his time scouting the exterior of the Amity Inn. He had already driven around the parking lot but hadn’t seen Queenie’s car. She probably had a new rental. Queenie had been suspicious enough to begin with, and after yesterday’s tête-à-tête, she would be even more so.

  Didn’t matter, he thought. She and Robert O. Pierce could compare notes in hell.

  Feral parked in the white zone in the front of the lodge. The Amity Inn wasn’t the kind of establishment that had bellmen waiting at the curb. It was designed for the long-term business traveler. Perfect for Queenie’s anonymity and his own as well. At a hotel there would have been more employees and guests milling about, more potential witnesses.

  From where he was sitting, Feral could see the lobby. He was tempted just to walk in and ask the clerk which room Vera Macauley was in, but he didn’t want to expose himself. The staff might be on alert to anyone asking for her, and even if they weren’t, most clerks were trained not to give out a guest’s room number. It was a suspicious world. Shame on it.

  No, Queenie was going to make this as hard as possible. Feral whispered from an Andrew Marvell poem: “‘Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.’”

  He would have liked to recite the words to Queenie herself. She was smart enough that she might even appreciate them. His former girlfriend had never liked his recounting couplets or ditties. She had thought him a pedant. That was one of her excuses for breaking up with him. Of course she hadn’t used the word pedant, not with her limited vocabulary. What she had said was, “You always talk about weird stuff, and creepy stuff.” He had accepted her rejection in a very understanding manner, but that had been easy for him to do. For rejecting him, Feral had known, she had to die.

  No woman was ever going to reject him again.

  Feral remembered a line from W. C. Fields: “’Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never even had the decency to thank her.” Feral felt much the same way. He had his girlfriend to thank for all the murders, but he hadn’t even had the decency to thank her. Instead, he had murdered her. And then he had emulated the Cave Man killings a second time. He’d killed again to allay potential suspicion. The second victim had been his insurance policy. Feral had known the Cave Man’s troglodyte luck would soon run out. But Feral thought it possible that after his capture the Cave Man might take credit for his murders, and if not, the murders could always be attributed to one of those pesky copycats.

  Funny how in such cases no one said imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.

  As it had turned out, the Cave Man had initially claimed the kills as his own but later recanted. The police were looking into his change of heart, and so was Queenie. Feral had been thrilled when he first heard she was coming to Denver to write a book on the Cave Man murders. Her timing had been impeccable. She had saved him from having to seek her out. And how ironic it was that she asked him for an interview. How positively delicious. She had no idea of their ties to one another. To her, he was just another grief-stricken loved one of a victim.

  Kismet had brought them together. When they had talked at his place of business, Feral had been tempted to drop hints of what he knew about her and make some allusions to their mutual past, but of course he hadn’t. He probably knew more about Queenie than anyone, for the detective who had researched his own history had also delved into hers.

  The PI’s snooping hadn’t stopped there. The dick had proved quite adept at surreptitiously tracking down half a dozen other individuals. All had a common denominator: each and every one of them had been sired by some notorious serial murderer. Feral had explained to the PI that he was writing a book called Cain’s Children. Not that the detective had really cared about anything except getting paid. But the detective’s competence was offset by his attitude. He had presumed an annoying familiarity with Feral.

  Feral still remembered the way the man had walked into his office and acted as if he owned it. The detective had finished all his background work and took pleasure in tossing his report down onto Feral’s desk. “Demon spawn,” he announced, showing him a cocky grin. “Everything you wanted to know about the children of serial murderers but were afraid to ask.”

  His report, though, was professional. The man had no couth, but he was thorough. How unfortunate that the detective had recently been killed by a hit-and-run driver. But as it was best expressed in Ecclesiasticus, “He that toucheth pitch shall be denied therewith.” The detective had apparently touched too much pitch. And hadn’t he said it?

  Demon spawn.

  30

  THE MORE ELIZABETH tried to discount Lola’s words, the more they came back to haunt her.

  The killer had manipulated her. He had known her weaknesses. And he had targeted her.

  Other nagging doubts surfaced. Her sorority sisters had been Parker’s ninth and tenth victims. So why had the copycat attacked her out of sequence? He’d tried to make her his fourth San Diego victim. And if he wasn’t a copycat...

  Maybe she was the target and had been all along. By doing her job well, Elizabeth knew, she had made her fair share of enemies, but there had been no overt death threats recently, unless you could count Ken’s poetry on talk radio.

  Poetry. The connection with her past made Elizabeth wonder if Ken might have been an invention, yet another ploy by the killer, another false trail for the police to follow in the event of her death.

  Caleb was right, she decided. The answers were in the past. She was the one who had been dragging her feet, afraid to look back. Now, unflinching, she needed to do just that.

  Lola applied another cold compress to Caleb’s forehead. He wasn’t as delirious now, though his temperature was still over 103.

  “Take another sip of this,” Lola insisted.

  Caleb dutifully took a sip. But he was only giving lip service, literally, to being there. Between the fever and listening to the recording, he had been drifting in and out of consciousness.

  At least he wasn’t doing those voices anymore, Lola thought. They had all but driven her from the house.

  “How about another sip for your Aunt Lola?”

  Caleb sipped again. And the MP3 player, and Elizabeth’s voice, played on.

  “Because Gray Parker had been tried for murder in the state of Florida, he had a bifurcated trial. The first part of the trial was the criminal hearing; the second part the penalty phase. With the overwhelming evidence against him, and because Parker had already admitted his guilt and was an advocate for his own death, there was little in the way of courtroom suspense, but the courtroom still proved to be anything but a dull place.

  “George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.’ Parker, with his Hollywood looks and lively mind, was one of the first serial murderers to gain celebrity status. Despite the heinousness of his crimes, he was inundated with suggestive mail from women. His cell smelled like a perfumery from all the letters sealed with perfumed kisses, and his cell’s wallpaper consisted of hundreds of revealing photos that women had sent him. The prison turned away as much as it delivered, returning items it deemed obscene, along with a warning notice to the senders not to send such material again.

  “Even seemingly respectable women lost their sense of reason when it came to Parker. Many felt they could save him with their love and were willing to forgive his horrid past. All of the attention amused Parker. He was even moved to write a poem about one woman’s proposition to him:

  “Got another offer of marriage in the mail today,

  Woman said she wanted my hand,

  Said wasn’t no big thing where my hands had been before,

  Said she could understand my strangling some no-good whore.

  This woman sent along a photo of her in the raw,

  Said it was worth a thousand words,

  She had a body that would drop any jaw,

  And said when I was sprung she’d let me eat
my words.

  All thousand of them.

  “But many women were not content to be only pen pals with Parker. They became regulars at his trials, spectators who swooned at his every glance, laughed too long at his every witticism, and cried too loudly at his reflections.

  “These trial groupies, what the press labeled as ‘Shame’s Dames’ or ‘Shame’s Gang,’ evidenced no respect for the victims or the families of victims. Their fawning over Parker mortified most observers. They appeared oblivious to reality. On those occasions when the prosecution took pains to detail the terrible things that Parker had done, their eyes remained dry and fixed on him even as the rest of the courtroom wept.

  “‘It was as if they were all hypnotized,’ said Lonnie Green, bailiff for most of the court proceedings. ‘They were kind of like that Manson Family, except instead of blindly committing murders, they blindly forgave them.’

  “To my mind the Shame gang were, and always will be, the ‘Tell Gray’ women. Because they knew I had access to Parker, virtually all of these women tried to enlist me as a go-between. ‘Tell Gray,’ they would always say to me. ‘Tell Gray.’ And though I reiterated time and again that I would pass on no messages, they never stopped asking me.

  “Leslie Van Doren was the most forward of the Shame groupies. Van Doren’s fixation on Parker was such that she had moved from her home state of Colorado to live in Florida for both of his trials.

  “Van Doren worked nights as a cocktail waitress, but by day she was a courtroom observer. Like so many other women in Shame’s Gang, she was quite attractive, a five-and-a-half-foot, curvaceous blonde. During the first trial her courtroom garb was very provocative. She liked wearing leather skirts and favored clinging, low-cut blouses. Van Doren rarely wore a bra. Usually she could be found leaning forward, showing off as much skin as possible, desperate to catch Parker’s eye.

  “Her shameless antics sometimes worked. When Parker would flash her a smile or wink at her, Van Doren would act as if she had received a boon from the gods. Notes were sometimes smuggled back and forth between the two of them. They acted like naughty schoolchildren who couldn’t wait for recess. But with no school playground available to them, there was only one alternative.

  “Van Doren became a frequent Death Row visitor at the penitentiary. At Raiford, the visitors’ room is hardly what you would call a romantic spot. There are no sofas, no easy chairs, and no dark corners. The room is institutional, with harsh fluorescent lighting. Tables and stools, the only furniture, are bolted to the floor. The room smells of desperation, with an unpleasant mingling of cigarette smoke and body odors and disinfectant.

  “The visitors’ room bathroom is even less appealing. The room is all concrete and cold. There is no door at the entrance and no windows inside. The stalls have no dividers and offer no privacy, and the toilet seat covers are made of metal. There are no mirrors, no place to primp. The bathroom is a step up from a hole in the ground, but not a big one. It is a place for bodily wastes.

  “And the place where Leslie Van Doren carried out her seduction of Gray Parker.

  “The Florida penitentiary system allows no conjugal visits, but the visitors’ room bathroom at the Union Correctional Institution was known by Death Row inmates as ‘the honeymoon hotel.’ For a hundred-dollar bribe the correctional officers would turn their heads and allow the visitor and prisoner a joint five-minute bathroom break.

  “It is hard to imagine a less romantic spot to engage in intimacy, but that is where Parker and Van Doren met for their silent and hurried assignations. Parker described their time together as, ‘Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am,’ but it wasn’t remembered that way by Van Doren, who, by description at least, managed to make a silk purse out of a shit hole.

  “Their passion, she said, was one for the ages. One for the wages might be more accurate. It was Van Doren who paid for their time together. She funneled the money to Parker, who in turn distributed most of it back to the guards. As for their weekly rendezvous, Van Doren painted a picture of their passion that even the most flowery romance writer would be loath to put a name to. But their intrigue did provide a number of diversions, not the least of which was Van Doren’s becoming pregnant.

  “Her pregnancy was showcased during the penalty phase of Parker’s trial. There, Van Doren tried to change her image from that of vamp to that of mother and apple pie. Gone were her racy outfits, all replaced by maternity clothes. With each passing day, her burgeoning belly drew that much more notice, a notoriety that Van Doren clearly relished and sought out. She made no secret of who the father was, proudly revealing her lover and the circumstances of the conception. It was difficult to tell who was more chagrined: Florida’s Department of Corrections or Parker’s wife, Clara. As a result of her pregnancy, a no-contact visiting area was established, with inmates and visitors separated by Plexiglas. But the deed, quite apparently, was already done.

  “As Van Doren’s pregnancy came closer to term, the tension in the courtroom increased. Parker’s long-suffering wife tried to ignore Van Doren, but she was a difficult woman to overlook. Every day she sat center stage in the gallery knitting blue booties, the modern-day and even more horrific version of Madame Defarge.”

  “A half-brother,” Caleb said. “I have a brother.”

  His voice sounded so different and so hopeful that at first Lola thought he was still delirious.

  “No,” she tried to tell him, but he wasn’t listening.

  “When I was growing up I always dreamed of having a brother or sister. I thought if I only had someone to talk to, someone to share the pain...”

  “You have no brother.”

  In the background Elizabeth’s voice continued to narrate.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Lola reached over and turned off the player. “That woman did have a baby boy, but he wasn’t any brother of yours, even though she tried to pass him off as one.”

  The momentary hope left Caleb’s face. His features became hard. “Whose baby was it?”

  “Whose baby wasn’t it? I don’t think they ever determined who the real father was. Miss Van Doren wasn’t the most discriminating of women.”

  “That speaks well of my father, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe it does.”

  “How so?”

  “Listen to the tape. It explains things. In his own way, your father tried to be responsible. I think he was trying to spare you and your mother.”

  “That’s bullshit. The man never thought about anybody but himself.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. You ever hear that old Johnny Cash song ‘A Boy Named Sue’?”

  Caleb shook his head.

  “It’s about a father who only stayed around long enough to name his boy Sue before leaving home forever. Because of his name, the boy had a terrible time growing up. With a name like that, you can be sure, other boys put him to the test. He had to constantly struggle and fight and stay strong. As an adult, Sue finally met up with his father. He’d waited for that moment his whole life. He wanted to hurt the man who had made his life so miserable. But the father said that he had named him Sue because he knew he wouldn’t be around to help the boy grow up. Your father knew that as well.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “That maybe your father gave you some things you’re not even aware of, or that you are not willing to accept.”

  Caleb’s face reddened, and not because of his fever. “Listen. You are a man who wears dresses and because of that you’ve seen a lot of headshrinkers, but that doesn’t mean you know what the hell you’re talking about. Serial murderers have no empathy for other people. None. They don’t feel the pain of their victims. And that’s what I was—just another victim.”

  “But isn’t it possible sometimes your father saw beyond himself, saw beyond his madness?”

  “That’s wishful thinking. My father saw nothing. He was a mimic. He mimicked the emotions of other people like I can mimic a noise or a voice, or the way you mimic
being a woman.”

  “I don’t think of myself as a mimic.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You’re a berdache.” Caleb’s voice hardened. “Tell me, do you squat when you pee?”

  “I’m sorry you’re hurting,” Lola said. “But lashing out at me won’t help you.”

  She stood up, but before leaving the room, she felt his forehead. “You’re still very hot. You need to rest.”

  “Not before the grand finale.”

  Lola looked at him quizzically.

  “My father’s death,” he explained. “It’s coming up.”

  Caleb hit the Play button.

  “...when Judge Irwin announced Parker’s death sentence, the nine-months pregnant Van Doren fainted in court. Three days later she delivered a boy, whom she called Gray Junior (not taking into account, or perhaps not caring, that Parker already had a son with that name). She did her best to make the birth of her son a media event and was shameless in using the baby to get center stage. At a press conference held just two days after giving birth, Van Doren held the newborn up as if he were a trophy and said, ‘The governor should show clemency to Gray Parker, the father of my baby.’

  “I was out in the audience, part of the media. I probably should have kept my mouth shut, but her crocodile tears prompted me to shout, ‘Isn’t that a bit like the story of the boy who shot his parents, then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan?’

  “Ms. Van Doren didn’t like the ensuing laughter. But the laughter didn’t stop there. I had come to the press conference prepared.

  “‘Can you tell me your blood type, Miss Van Doren?’ I asked.

  “‘My what?’

  “‘Your blood type.’

  “‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

  “‘Apparently not. For your information, your blood type is A positive. And your baby’s blood type is O positive.’

  “Standing at her microphone, she looked very confused. ‘So what?’