Wallflower j-3

by William Bayer

  He summoned the waiter, borrowed a ballpoint, made a quick sketch on his cocktail napkin. He turned it so Monika could see. "Something like that," he said.

  She stared at the sketch. "Didn't you tell me the portrait seemed bigger in the dream than in Aaron's photographs?" Janek nodded. "We know the portrait didn't change. It's the same one you saw. But suppose there was a piece of furniture just under it, something that because of its scale made the picture seem bigger than it was."

  Janek nodded. "Take that piece of furniture away, and the portrait would appear smaller. it's still life-size, but in the dream it looms over everything." He thought a moment. "Suppose it wasn't a real piano. Suppose it was a miniature or a model. That would be enou h to confuse the scale, at least at a quick glance. And if it was a miniature piano, she could have hidden it."

  "Hidden the relics, too, dispersed them around the room." "Yes..

  . the relics." Janek finished off his drink. "I like that word. Relics offered up to the image of her mother in the little chapel she constructed in her bedroom niche. Consecrated relics, you could say, or sanctified ones. Perhaps more than relies.

  Perhaps trophies, trophies of acts committed in her mother's honor.

  Mementos of sacrifices. Tributes offered in thanks or to appease."

  He looked at Monika, nodded. "You were right this afternoon when you used the word 'hieratic.' That bedroom was a fucking shrine."

  That night he didn't dream about the whole room, only about the portrait. In his dream the woman's face came alive, her eyes blinked open, and her mouth opened and shut mechanically like a doll's.

  He woke up drenched in sweat.

  In the morning he gulped his coffee, then hurried out to the terrace to draw. He sketched the painting and an underscale piano beneath it and then made X's on the piano's top. How many trophies had there been? He drew various quantities. When that didn't work, he took another approach. There had been seventeen Wallflower killings in all. He drew seventeen X's on top of the piano. Too crowded. But there had been only seven victim clusters. When he drew seven X's, the design looked right.

  He turned the page, started to draw on another sheet. He drew basic geometric shapes: cubes; boxes; cylinders; spheres. Then he started to put them together. The work possessed him. Soon he forgot where he was. He tried various combinations of shapes, filling a dozen Sheets by noon. Then, exhausted, he pushed back the pad and tried to look at his sketches objectively.

  He believed he had successfully rendered three of the relics, or trophies as he thought of them now. One was a sm all book, another a large book, and the third a piece of Paper with printing on it.

  Assigning them to the first, third, and fourth positions, he drew them into his master drawing, replacing the first, third, and fourth X's on top of the piano. Examining his master drawing again, he was pleased. The three trophies looked right, in their correct positions, too. He put down his pad and sat back exhausted. He had worked five hours straight.

  That afternoon, after making love, he and Monika followed steps, cut from stone outcroppings, straight down from their little house to the beach. It was only when he was in the water and tasted its saltiness that he realized his eyes hadn't teared up in the twenty-four hours since he'd started working with the crayons At the end of the afternoon, back on their terrace, relaxing with margaritas in their hands, he showed Monika what he'd accomplished in the morning.

  "Two books and a piece of paper. All rectangular and more or less flat," she commented. "You're doing fine, Frank, going about it methodically, working from abstract shapes. So far so good. But if you get stuck, you might want to give up control of your crayon, let it loose on the paper. It's a method I sometimes use to get patients to free-associate. You'd be amazed at the powerful material that spews out. Of course, if you do let yourself go, doodle or draw at random, it won't be the crayon that's guiding your hand; it'll be your subconscious." they drove down to Cozumel for dinner, choosing the same quiet fish joint they'd enjoyed their first night on the island. As they ate, Monika asked him what bothered him most about Kit and Aaron's explanation of the Wallflower crimes.

  "Too neat," he said. "Real life isn't like that. Real life, as you know, is very complicated, with all sorts of twists and turns, trails that split off and dead-end or tail back. But this Diana Proctor story comes out slick, almost like a novel. Whenever I see a structure like that, I ask myself, 'Who's the writer here?"' "Why do you call it slick?"

  "First, the way it was revealed. Right after the shoot-out, Aaron goes down to the basement. There he finds this incredibly complete paper trail in almost perfect secretarial order that accounts for each and every ice pick and Wallflower homicide. Diana flies into Seattle; the ticket stubs are there. She rents a car at the airport, returns it the following- morning; the receipt is neatly stapled to the ticket stubs. Aaron asks the Seattle cops to check the mileage between the airport and Cynthia Morse's condominium; the answer that comes back is exactly half the distance that shows up on Diana's car rental slip. That's the kind of perfection you don't usually find in real life." "She was a librarian. Librarians are organized."

  "Sure, but this is better than organized. Every time she went out she knew exactly where to go, never got lost, never made a slip. A killer working on her own, even a highly organized one, can't be that precise. But if she was working with someone else, war-gaming her missions, then such superb execution might be possible."

  "So it's the perfection that bothers you?"

  "And all the papers that back it up."

  "But Beverly couldn't know you'd go into her house and fight it out with Diana."

  "Of course not. And she also couldn't know how it would end up if we did. I could have injured Diana, in which case she'd have been available for questioning, and then Beverly's role, if she played one, would probably have come out."

  "What are you saying, Frank?"

  "That Beverly might have been planning to get rid of Diana, leaving the whole neat paper trail so we'd pin everything on the girl. By a fluke I got to Diana first. But that's speculation. There're other things that bother me, tm."

  "What?"

  "Why did Diana shave her head and body and go around in a wig? We're supposed to believe she was some sort of austere self-styled Ninja. It's possible. But maybe there's another explanation. Maybe the shaving was part of a system of control."

  "Beverly's control?"

  He nodded. "Then there're the victims. I've got a whole lot of problems with them. We can account for the homeless man, and we know Diana had some sort of relationship with Jess. But what about the three victim clusters connected to Beverly Archer? If Diana was operating on her own, how did she come up with those particular people?

  Did she choose them at random from the hundreds of names she found in Beverly's papers, or was there a reason she chose those particular three? Then you have to ask yourself how Beverly could have been so blind to what Diana was doing. Sullivan's people came up with a couple of cases where a serial killer committed murders while in treatment with a shrink. But this is different. Beverly was an experienced therapist who knew her patient very well. She'd been treating the girl for six years straight, had her living in her basement, was seeing her four times a week. You're a psychiatrist, Monika. Can you imagine being that familiar with a patient without sensing something bad was going on?"

  Monika thought about it. "Patients can be very deceptive. But you're right-it's extremely difficult to imagine that. I also wonder how someone as young as Diana could become so expert at subterfuge."

  "That's why I think Beverly was a collaborator, even the brains behind the whole series. The problem, of course, is to prove it. to do that, I have to know why, what she was up to, what her game was all about.

  "What do you think it was about?"

  "You read Beverly's paper on shaming incidents. She seemed to specialize in patients traumatized by shaming events in their pasts.

  Doesn't an obsession like that usual
ly come from within?"

  "It can, certainly. Shrinks who concentrate on homosexuals often are homosexual. Shrinks who specialize in sadomasochism tend to be haunted by that @ of fantasy.,,

  "Well, suppose Beverly was as traumatized by shaming incidents as any of her patients? Suppose, to rid herself of her obsession, she decided that the people who had humiliated her should be killed? Suppose she recruited Diana in Carlisle, created a dependency, then arranged for the girl's release so she could send her out on missions of revenge? The targets would be her old tormentors, even as far back as her childhood."

  "I thought Aaron said Beverly hadn't been in favor of Diana's release."

  Janek nodded. "There's another thing that's slick. It's like it was all a setup from the start. Beverly carefully laid down a paper trai I at the hospital that would throw police suspicions off, then laid down a second paper trail in Diana's room in the basement that would cinch the story the girl was acting on her own."

  "You're talking about something extremely fiendish, a conspiracy that goes back years."

  "Yeah." He grinned, "And now there's another character. The mother in the portrait, the one behind the piano altar, who gets trophies offered up to her of the people Beverly had Diana kill."

  Early the next morning, a Sunday, Janek hurried out to the terrace to draw. When his abstract geometric shapes didn't join into anything recognizable, he changed his approach and, employing Monika's method, freed his crayon from conscious control and let it loose upon the paper.

  At first he scribbled numerous spirals. When Monika looked in on him, she muttered something about double helixes and human chromosomes.

  He played with vertical spirals, then horizontal ones, then cylinders with spiral decorations. One of the last set looked fight, but when he couldn't make it coherent, he turned to Monika for help.

  "Which position is this one for?" she asked.

  "Number two." "The second killing?" He nodded. "That was the old schoolteacher in Flofida."

  "Bertha Parce."

  "Did you see pictures of her?"

  "About twenty slides."

  "Anything strike you?"

  "Just that she was a withered old lady living in a crowded single room in some horrible old folks' hotel on South Beach, Miami."

  "was she stabbed in her room?"

  He nodded. "She was asleep."

  "Anything else strike you?"

  "Just the wallflower. I remember the FBI briefing officer pointing it out. It was sort of leaning in the corner of the room."

  "Anything else?"

  Janek closed his eyes, trying to recall the photographs he'd pinned to his office walls in New York. "There was a lot of junk around, old lady's stuff." He hesitated. "Come to think of it He began to draw again, this time imposing his will upon the crayon. "I'm on to something… ." He continued to draw and in three minutes rendered an object that'fitted perfectly in position two. "That's it. Yeah, I'm sure it is." He turned his master sketch so she could see it."

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "A hair curler. Old Bertha Parce had a whole mess of them on the table beside her bed." He picked up a blue crayon, began to fill the curler in. "The one I saw in Beverly's apartment was made of light blue plastic," he explained.

  It took him until the end of the day to render the sixth trophy. The problem, which he only discovered late in the afternoon, was that it consisted of two objects rather than one. And that made sense when he remembered that the fifth victim cluster had consisted of two men, brothers named MacDonald, who shared a weekend house in northwestern Connecticut. In the end he drew two sticks side by side. But they weren't just ordinary sticks. There was something unique about them, portions that stuck out. Remembering Monika's questions from the morning, he began to ask similar questions of himself What was in the crime scene pictures? was there anything he'd seen in them that might resemble sticks?

  One of the brothers, he remembered, had been stabbed in his bed. The other, whose palms had home defensive wounds, had put up a struggle in the bathroom.

  Janek left the terrace, went inside the house, phoned Aaron at his home in Brooklyn.

  "Hi," he said when Aaron answered. "Good thing I caught you."

  Janek asked Aaron if he'd be willing to go into the office, even though it was a Sunday, and take a look at some of the pictures pinned up on their walls.

  "Jesus, Frank," Aaron said. "I thought you went down there to rest."

  "I am resting," Janek said. "I've been lying out on the terrace with a view of the sea, taking in the rays."

  "But you're still thinking about it?"

  "Doing more than that. Monika's got me working with crayons."

  "Jesus!"

  "I want you to look at the Bertha Parce pictures and see if you can tell if any of the hair curlers beside her bed are missing. Then check out the pictures at the MacDonald house. See if you notice anything missing there.

  Aaron agreed to drive into Manhattan, check the photographs, and call him back. The call came an hour and a half later.

  "Yeah, Frank, there's a box of old lady's hair curlers just like you remembered. But it's partially closed, so I can't tell if the set's complete."

  "What about the brothers?"

  "I'm standing in front of the shots right now. I don't see anything in the bedroom. It's minimal, neat and clean, not like the old lady's place. But it looks like they shared the bath. I see two of everythinghairbrushes, razors-you know, the kind of stuff guys use."

  Something in Aaron's voice told Janek he was holding back.

  "You do see something, don't you?"

  "Jesus, Frank! Even from Mexico you can read my mind." "What is it?"

  "No toothbrushes. Could they be the odd-shaped sticks you're talking about?"

  Janek turned to Monika. "Toothbrushes. A pair of toothbrushes, lined up side by side."

  "Sounds like you're getting excited," Aaron said. "I'll be a lot more excited when I get this whole thing figured out."

  "Still think Beverly was behind it?"

  "I know she was. We're going to prove it, too."

  He asked Aaron to spend the next few days working on the two non-Archer-connected victim clusters, the Wexler family in Texas and the Scottos in Providence. Aaron was to check by phone with people who knew them-survivors, friends, colleagues at work. And he was to be sure to inquire about both husbands and wives since they didn't know which family members were the intended targets.

  "What am I inquiring about?" Aaron asked.

  "What do you think?"

  "A Beverly Archer connection."

  "Of course, because if you find one, we'll know she lied to you. If she did know those people, just one member in each family, that's enough to go to Kit for authorization to reopen the case."

  "What authorization do I have to do this?"

  "You're wrapping up loose ends."

  "Maybe I should check out Diana, too, see if there's a connection to her."

  "Sure, go ahead," Janek said casually. "But you won't find anything. Beverty's the one."

  The next morning he drew and drew but couldn't get anywhere with trophy number five. One thing he knew: It wasn't a simple shape like a toothbrush, a hair curler, or a book. It was an elaborate object, larger than the others, something with parts that stuck out all over.

  "Some of the parts are like the hair curler," he told Monika as they climbed down to the beach. "It's got wheels and a handle. It's mostly metal, but I think the handle's made of wood. I even think there're gears on it." He paused. "What the hell could it be?" they made an encampment at the bottom of the rocks. She spread her beach towel on the sand, then lay down on her back. "If it's got moving parts, it must be some kind of machine," she said.

  "Yeah…" He looked at her. She was wearing a brilliant white bikini that contrasted with her lightly tanned skin.

  "Pretend for a moment you're Diana Proctor. You've been sent up to Providence to kill a person and bring back a trophy of your kill. Wha
t kind of trophy are you going to take?"

  Monika raised her head. "I won't know what I'm going to take until I see it. It'll be a spontaneous decision."

  Janek lay back and stared up at the sky. "Whatever it is, you're bringing it back to Beverly to put up on the piano altar for Mama. Won't you make a point of bringing back something you know will please your shrink? It can't be valuable. It can't be something that will be missed. And it certainly can't be an object that can be traced back to the people you've just killed. It's always something humble, like a hair curler, or a couple of toothbrushes, a piece of paper, a book. Something the victims have touched. Something almost… intimate, don't you think?" He turned to look at Monika. She was gazing past him. "Forgive me," he said, "I'm thinking out loud. I know it's tiresome. I'm sorry to go on and on."

  She stood. "It's okay, Frank. You told me you were a worrier."

  She looked out at the water. "I'm going to swim. Want to come?"

  He shook his head. "I'll just lie here and worry."

  She smiled, then started for the water. He watched as she ran across the beach, then high-stepped into the waves. When she was out far enough, she turned, threw him a kiss, and plunged. He watched her swim for a while, then lay back, closed his eyes, and tried to free his mind of the fifth trophy for a while.

  Think about something else, he told himself. Or better yet, don't think about anything at all. Just lie here and feel the sun.

  Breathe in the mellow aroma of the sea. Let the sweet winds of this tropical paradise caress your tough old urban hide.

  He must have drifted off. The next thing he knew droplets of water were dancing on his chest. He opened his eyes. Monika was leaning over him, vigorously drying her hair.

  "Good swim?"

  "Terrific." She spread out her towel. "I was bobbing around out there, trying to think what's made of metal, has wheels and gears and a wooden handle, and has parts that look like hair curlers. I came up with something." She lay down. "It's what you call a real long shot."

  He leaned toward her eagerly. "What've you got?"

  She grinned. "How does an old-fashioned eggbeater grab you?"