Wallflower j-3

by William Bayer

  "You're sure you want to hear it?"

  "I'm sure."

  "Okay, but just remember you asked for it. So don't complain."

  "I won't."

  "Let's start with this wallflower business." "Is that what it is? A 'business'?"

  "You know what I mean."

  "I'm not sure I do. I happen to be a wallflower." "No, dear, that's what you made yourself into. No one's born a wallflower. A wallflower creates herself. Something in you likes being a wallflower, so you have Tool leave those flowers beside the walls, as if-"

  "As if what, damn it, Mama?" "There, see, you're getting angry. You were always so touchy, Bev. You could never take the slightest bit of criticism." "Never mind that! Just tell me how I've made myself into a wallflower, since that seems to be what you think."

  "It's not just what I think, dear. It's the truth. And having Tool leave those homely, withered flowers by the bodies only reinforces your negative self-image. Which, frankly, you could remedy if you'd just ftnd yourself somebody who… you know."

  "Somebody to screw me. That's what you mean, isn't it?" "I knew this dialogue was going to turn unpleasant, Bev. I think it would be better if we stop talking."

  "Certainly, Mama, if that's the way you want it…

  There's a difference, Mama, a big difference between us. It's important for you to understand the difference and why, as much as I might like, I cannot be like you. For one thing, I don't have your looks. I know, I'm not really bad-looking. And I certainly don't feel sorry for myself. In this world, as I so often remind my patients, you've got to play the hand you're dealt. But you're beautiful, Mama. Just look at yourself, your eyes, complexion, bones, the marvelous planes of your face. There were those who called you the most beautiful woman in Cleveland. You played the part, too. Grand. Mysterious. Elusive. Even cruel at times. Not really cruel in the sense of mean or small, but cruel in the way that a great woman projects cruelty, becoming, as the poet said, a Lady of Pain. Mystical. Unfathomable. My nurturer and my nemesis.

  It was you who taught me the lines:

  Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel Hard eyes that grow softfor an hour, The heavy white limbs, and the cruel Red mouth like a venomous flower.

  Sometimes when I'm lying in bed, I look up at you and think: How could I, little me, be the child of such magnificence? I know I shouldn't run myself down. I am who I am and, as such, am as valuable as any other human on this earth. But it hasn't always been easy being your daughter. I never had your stature, your beauty, your compelling personality. I had to find my own way to power, and the way I found, the way of concealment and craft, is not nearly as attractive as yours. While you own. That won't be hard. All the receipts from her various trips, the paper trail as they call it, have been safely preserved on our orders in her room. And Carl Drucker will gladly testify that we resisted when he first broached release. The most important thing is to make sure the little lynx hasn't kept a diary or anything that can directly tie us to the crimes.

  Of course, we are tied to them indirectly: It was her insane obsession with us that pushed her to kill these various figures from our past.

  That's easily documented. All the information she needed was available in our personal files, to which she had ready access by virtue of living in the basement of our house. The plan is foolproof. Even if the cops suspect our influence, all the evidence will point to Tool alone. But we mustn't forget to move the trophies. they mustn't be in front of the portrait; rather, they have to be hidden away in various comers and drawers. The paper trail should nail her nicely, as will the wallflower trap we laid so carefully at Carlisle. We'll have to do it quickly. It will take all our courage, and we'll have only one chance to get it right. The staging must conform to the provocation: Tool tried to kill us; we struck back at her in self-defense. After all, she's a confessed killer. All we ever wanted was to help her adjust. She attacked us, her therapist and mother surrogate, just the way she attacked her own mother, with an ax.

  We managed to kill her only because she slipped. Another second and her ax would have split our skull. We defended ourself-, we had no choice. It was either her or us.

  Too bad, of course, but now that we gather she killed all those other fine people, whole families of them, it seems, and by so doing replicated her original crime against her own family-well, we can't help wondering if perhaps she's not better off dead. This may seem odd, coming as it does from a healer, but we truly believe there are times a person is truly better off in the grave than living possessed by the kind of demons that ravaged poor young Diana Proctor's tormented soul.

  Where are you, Mama? I need you now, need you so much! Why are you silent? Talk to me. Please, talk to me! Pleeeeeease!

  8

  The Trophies

  Janek repositioned himself against the soft white beach towel Monika had arranged upon the cushions of the chaise. It was not a tan he was after but heat. He wanted the sun to strike the center of his chest, wanted its dry hotness to enter his bared body and to spread.

  Anything to drive away the chill within that made him tremble even now in the middle of this hot, windless December afternoon on the Isla de Cozumel.

  The terrace where he lay exposed, naked except for a pair of green jungle-motif trunks Monika had bought for him at the airport, was just a few rock steps down from their came, perched sixty feet above the beach.

  From where Janek lay he could see nothing except a line of palms clinging to the curving shore and a vast expanse of blue divided cleanly by the horizon. Below the line was placid cyan sea, above it serene azure sky, and not a whitecap or a cloud marred these seamless surfaces.

  He turned to look at Monika. She lay topless on a matching chaise a few feet away, her oversize sunglasses on her nose, a German-language paperback open and face down on her belly. At first Janek thought she'd fallen off to sleep, but then he saw a smile spread slowly across her face.

  "How're you doing?" he asked.

  "Feeling dreamy," she said. "I love it here. How about you?"

  "I'm definitely feeling warmer."

  "Well, you should. You need more sunscreen." She rose, spread lotion onto her hands, came to him, and, standing behind, began to apply it slowly and evenly to his chest.

  He gazed up at her. "That's sexy."

  "It's meant to be." She brushed her fingers lightly across his nipples. "You're a very sexy man."

  "Thanks for saying that," Janek said, "but I don't feel very appetizing.

  Pale, middle-aged, scarred…"

  She spread the lotion very carefully over the wounds on his shoulder and his throat.

  "You look good, Frank. A few days down here and you'll start feeling good, too. It may take time, but sooner or later your mind will catch up with your body."

  He glanced up at her again, then turned away, feeling tears rising involuntarily to his eyes. This had been happening regularly since the stabbing, and he hated himself for not being able to control it. He was glad he was wearing sunglasses; he didn't like to expose his vulnerability. But when he remembered that Monika had been with him in Venice when Kit had called and told him Jess was dead, he knew it was absurd to feel embarrassed with her. He pulled his glasses off.

  "Either I feel cold and start to shake or else I tear up," he said, turning so she could see his eyes. "It's not because of pain or sadness, and certainly not remorse. I don't know why the hell it happens, Monika; but I don't like it, and I want it to stop.,, The police psychiatrist had told him the tears and shakes were delayed manifestations of stress. But there was a feeling that came with them, which he couldn't quite define. Monika wanted him,to let her help him explore it, but he felt he wasn't ready yet, that he had no words with which to express it. It was something dark that he had glimpsed which had entered his mind and gotten lost in the canyons of his brain and which now he feared because it made him feel cold or caused the tears to rise.

  She made herself a place to sit beside him, then gently kissed his eyelids dr
y. Then she took his glasses and set them back on his face, carefully arranging the temples behind his ears.

  "I never killed a woman before. Never even shot at one.

  "You know gender isn't the issue, Frank."

  "A woman. It feels strange."

  "You're chivalrous."

  He smiled. "I've only rarely been accused of that."

  "Oh, Frank…" She took his face between her palms.

  "to kill a person even in self-defense-I understand how difficult it must be to live with that. And I know that no matter what Kit and Aaron say-that you had no choice, that surely she would have killed you if you hadn't killed her, that she was a sociopath, a murderer-I know none of that means anything so long as you're haunted. That's why we're here, to rest, talk, perhaps reorder all those terrible events. In the meantime, remember you're not tainted by your deed, not soiled by it in any way. But you are changed on account of it. So now your task is to come to terms with this new Frank that you are, to understand him and come to love him again."

  He took her hand. "Thanks for saying that."' "I like being your lover-shrink. You know I do. Still, when the demons are within, only you can chase them out." She paused. "I love you. Please remember that." He brought her hand to his lips.

  "I won't forget." they had come into his room during the week he was in the hospital, first Aaron, then Kit, then Aaron again, then Aaron and Kit together. On each visit they told him the story, rotating the puzzle so he could examine it from every side. But no matter how many different ways they told it, it always came out the same. The basic story, well constructed because they were excellent detectives, seemed to him wrong and incomplete. He listene to them, nodded, asked questions, and took in their answers, but in the end he told them that good as their story was, he was not going to buy it.

  The facts were simple enough. The woman he had killed was named Diana Proctor. She was a librarian who paid a nominal rent to inhabit the basement apartment in Beverly Archer's house. Six years before, in Danbury, Connecticut, she had murdered three members of her family with an ax. Having been declared mentally incompetent, she'd been committed to Carlisle Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where, after five years of intensive treatment under Beverly's supervision, the entire hospital staff, led by its director, Dr. Carl Drucker, determined that she had made a full recovery and lobbied vigorously for her release.

  On this matter of the release there was an important point. Hospital records showed, and Dr. Drucker verified, that Beverly Archer had not been in favor of setting Diana Proctor free. Diana wasn't ready yet, she had written; perhaps a few more years of therapy were indicated. But the rest of the staff was convinced of her recovery, so in the end Beverly reluctantly went along.

  The girl seemed to function well in the city. She obtained a part-time job at the New York Society Library on East Seventy-ninth Street, where coworkers described her as congenial and her work as exemplary. She lived quietly in Dr. Archer's basement, undergoing sessions four times a week. She also joined the West Side Academy of Karate at Broadway and I 10th Street, where she became an accomplished martial artist. It was there that she met Jess Foy.

  Other students at the academy described them as friends. And it was Diana who referred Jess to Archer when Jess asked her to recommend a therapist. In addition, it turned out that Diana was the so-called English girl in the fencing photograph Janek had found taped to the wall of Jess's closet. She was the owner, too, of the bow and arrows Janek had tracked down through the Salvation Army.

  Mr. Yukio Katsakura, the sensei at the academy, described a violent match the two girls had fought in a private upstairs room the week that Jess was stabbed. The reason he hadn't mentioned this to Aaron, When he was interviewed early in the investigation, was that when he inquired about it, both women had smiled gaily and shrugged it off.

  Katsakura had assumed they'd just gotten carried away, a not infrequent occurrence among young, well-motivated fighters.

  One could only speculate as to why Diana had killed Jess. Possibly she became jealous of her friend, who was a superior athlete and martial artist and who she may have believed was favored by their therapist. Beverly herself theorized that Diana had made erotic overtures to Jess and, upon being rebuffed, had acted out her fury. But whatever Diana's rationale, the murderous act was part of the same insanity that had led her to slaughter her relatives one horrible Sunday morning six years before.

  It was the Archer connection to three of the other victim clusters (Bertha Parce; Cynthia Morse the MacDonald brothers) that struck Janek as the story's most peculiar feature. As best the detectives were able to reconstruct, Diana became so obsessed with her therapist that when Beverly was asleep, Diana rummaged through her papers and came up with these victims' names. Then, out of some strange, twisted, perhaps jealousy-driven madness, she methodically located them, flew to where they lived, executed them, and glued their genitals, always leaving her wallflower signature behind.

  There was no question that Diana thought of herself as a wallflower. She had described herself that way several times to friends at Carlisle.

  Carl Drucker turned over a note from Diana signed "Wallflower" which police handwriting analysts verified was in the girl's hand. Moreover, a huge trove of evidence was found in Diana's room: airline ticket receipts, motel receipts, car rental receipts, caulking guns, glue, ice picks, and, most important, a hit list bearing the names of all the Wallflower victims. Kit said the evidence was so convincing that had i Diana survived her encounter with Janek, she would i easily have been convicted of murder. Which still left several other killings to be explained: the homeless man, the two non-Archer-connected Happy i Families, Leo Titus, and the attack against Janek on the final night.

  The homeless man, according to Kit and Aaron's theory, was a practice shot in preparation for the later homicides. Diana, it seemed, was quite rigorous in her preparation. In addition to karate training, she worked out regularly at a local health club and two summers before had taken a ten-day course in commando tactics at a shadowy survivalist school in Colorado, where she learned the ice pick technique. (Aaron found the receipt in Diana's desk. Beverly had no knowledge of the foray; Diana had simply told her she was going white water rafung on her vacation.) In any event, it seemed consistent with such rigor that Diana would first try out her newly acquired skills on a relatively defenseless target in New York before venturing to distant cities in search of whole families to execute.

  As for what exactly had attracted Diana to the two non-Archer-connected victim clusters (the Robert Wexler family in Fort Worth and the Anthony Scotto family in Providence)-that, said Aaron and Kit, would probably never be known. Beverly Archer had her own theory-namely, that the very image of a family stirred up tremendous murderous aggression inside Diana, similar to the aggression that had exploded on the morning she killed her own core family with the ax.

  The stabbing of the cat burglar Leo Titus was easier to explain. By intruding into Beverly's house, he posed a threat of invasion to which Diana's hair-trigger mentality could only respond with an attack. Janek, of course, was another invader and thus had to be killed like the first.

  In her interview Beverly stated her belief that had Janek not succeeded in stopping Diana, she herself would have become a victim the moment she reentered her house. An extra irony of the affair was that the Archer-connected Wallflower victims (Parce, Morse, and the MacDonalds) were minor figures in Beverly's past, people with whom she'd been out of touch for years. She hadn't even known any of them were dead until Aaron showed her the FBI's victim list.

  The shrink seemed to have suffered something close to a nervous breakdown as a result of the discovery that her "best patient" had in fact not been cured at all but had, even while in intensive therapy, committed a series of horrible murders against these past players in her life. Beverly's suffering over her therapeutic catastrophe was demonstrated to Janek on the videotape of her interview with Aaron.

  While still in the ho
spital, Janek viewed this tape several times. In it the psychologist seemed truly shattered. The tight, withdrawn quality she'd displayed in her interviews with him were replaced in Aaron's interview by tearful eruptions of agony and remorse. Her cool half-smile was supplanted by haggard, tormented eyes, making for a portrait of a woman in despair. But after rerunning and studying the tape, Janek decided her performance was feigned. No matter her broken appearance and the apparent sincerity of her grief, he did not believe a word of it.

  The result was that no matter how many times Aaron and Kit told him their story and no matter how much evidence they carted into his hospital room to prove it, Janek insisted it was not complete. If, as all the evidence showed, Diana Proctor had physically committed the murders, then, Janek maintained, by some method he could not describe, Beverly Archer had put Diana up to it.

  "You're usually right about these things," Kit said. "But how can you be so sure?"

  "I feel it," Janek replied. "I don't care how many times Diana described herself as a wallflower or signed her name that way. For me Beverly Archer is the only wallflower in the case. The flowers left beside the walls at the murder scenes were her signatures, not Diana's."

  On their first day in Yucatdn, Janek and Monika settled into their rented caseta, then lay out on their terrace in the sun. When it grew dark, they drove into Cozumel, looking for a place to eat. they explored for a while, finally settling on a quiet thatch-roofed restaurant on the beach where the wine was good and the fish was fresh and well prepared.

  Afterward they took another walk through the town, passing various bars and clubs, pausing occasionally to listen to laughter or music playing within. Then Monika drove them back to their little blue and white house, where the garden was filled with orchids and hibiscus and the terrace overlooked the sea. Here they sat out as they had in the afternoon, staring across the water at a magnificent tropical moon, which reminded them of the moon that had lit their way not two months before in Venice.