Talk (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 4)

by Laura Van Wormer

  "My office?"

  "At night, late. They did sexual acts in your office. I told you, Jessica, she was a whore, she was bad, she was going to hurt you. I heard them!"

  "Who was her boyfriend?" Jessica said.

  "I don't know," Leopold insisted.

  "What did he look like?"

  Kunsa looked at Hepplewhite. "A boyfriend." He said this as though the topic had been previously discussed.

  Hepplewhite frowned and looked at Agent Cole.

  And then the three of them turned away from the observation window.

  "What are you looking at?" Will demanded.

  "Nothing," Kunsa said. "What are you worried about?"

  "Nothing."

  They were all just standing there, looking at him.

  "Maybe we should talk for a minute or two, Will," Kunsa suggested.

  "Norm," Will said warningly.

  "Just for a minute," Kunsa continued. "In the next room." He pointed. "This way."

  Will looked at Agent Cole. "Debbie—"

  "If you've done nothing, Will, you have nothing to fear."

  "Certainly it will be helpful to talk to us before you leave for France," Hepplewhite added.

  "How do you know what Bea was doing in my office?" Jessica was asking him. No response. "Leopold," she said more sternly, "come away from that wall and sit down here at the table and talk to me." Amazingly, he did as he was told, chains clinking as he moved. "Now, tell me how you know about this boyfriend of Bea's."

  Leopold was looking dejectedly down at the table. "I could listen in. In your office. She didn't know. I put it in there one of the nights she let me into West End." He dared a quick look at her and looked back down, turning beet red. "The first time I thought it was you. I am so sorry, Jessica, I knew better, but for a moment I was very upset, but of course it was not you. I knew it was she, Bea Blakely, doing those things in your office."

  "Who was Bea's boyfriend?"

  "I did not know his voice."

  "You have to tell them about this, Leopold. They're blaming you for Bea's death."

  "I did not kill her," he said. "I did not lay a hand on her," he added, a mysterious shudder running through him.

  "We're going to have to think this through, Leopold," Jessica told him seriously, "or else they're never going to let you see me again."

  "The microphone should still be there," Leopold said. "In your office. It's voice-activated. And there's a laser-disc recorder in the air vent. There must be hours and hours of recordings on it."

  "Where in my office is the microphone?"

  "Inside the electrical socket near your big bookcase. I could get a radio playback from down on the West Side Highway. I just had to pull over and I could hear what was going on, or I could replay new parts from the recording disc."

  "You were fantastic, Jessica," Agent Cole said when Jessica emerged from the interrogation room.

  "Thanks. Where's Will?"

  "He's gone with Agent Kunsa," Cole said. "We've got a lot of new information to check out, thanks to you. They asked me to see you home and he'll call you later."

  "I'm glad you've given him something to do," Jessica said, looking around. "He's been so anxious to do something to help. Is there a drinking fountain?"

  "Down here," the agent said, escorting her. She glanced over. "You're shaking."

  Jessica held up her good hand to show the agent how, yes, obviously she was shaking. "Casualty of the profession. You sit there chatting with a murderer like he's any old interview for DBS, and then later it sinks in what you've been doing—hell, yeah, I'm shaking."

  She leaned over to take a long drink of water and then straightened up. "But I've got to tell you, I don't think he killed Bea."

  "We're already checking out what he said. About Bea having a boyfriend."

  "Good. Where's Slim? I need to go home and lie down."

  "We'll pick him up on the way out," Agent Cole told her.

  30

  “Why do you need your lawyer?" Agent Kunsa asked him.

  "Because you're crazy!" Will yelled.

  "Am I?"

  "Yes. "

  "Then why don't you just have a seat and relax while we wait for those tapes to be retrieved."

  "Because I want to see Jessica."

  "Oh, I don't think that's a very good idea at the moment, do you?" Kunsa said. "Why would you want to upset her?" "Kunsa, you are so off base—I'm telling you, you're going to owe me big time, buddy."

  "So when did it start?"

  Will glared at him. "What?"

  "You and Bea Blakely."

  "It never started. I scarcely knew her."

  "Were you doing her all along?"

  Will was shaking his head.

  "You were getting it on with her, weren't you? And then later, when it looked like Jessica was finally coming around, you tried to dump Bea."

  Will's mouth twisted in contempt.

  "You must have gotten a real charge doing it on Jessica's desk. We know you were obsessed with Jessica for years. I guess this was the next best thing to getting into her pants."

  Will rubbed his eyes with one hand and then used the same hand to point at the agent. "Fuck you, Kunsa. You leave Jessica out of this. You don't know what you're saying.""

  "Oh, I know what I'm saying all right," Kunsa said.

  "You have no idea how much I love Jessica. And you have no idea what I would do for her."

  "Well, obviously, we're beginning to, now. You'd write her notes, you'd engineer a crisis, you'd even· murder someone so Jessica would never know that you were screwing her secretary."

  "Forget it," Will said, abruptly crossing his arms over his chest. "There's no point in trying to talk to you. Get your stupid tapes and listen to them, knucklehead."

  But Kunsa would not stop with the questions and kept at him. And at him. For three hours.

  "Alexandra Eyes," Jessica said over the phone, "have you heard from Will?"

  "No."

  "He's somewhere with that Agent Kunsa, but I don't know where."

  "I don't, either."

  "Oh, come on, Waring, you're killing me with enthusiasm here. I haven't left yet, you don't have to be so cold."

  ''I'm not being cold," Alexandra said. "I'm trying not to cry."

  "What's interesting," Kunsa said, looking at a sheet of paper, "is rereading this police report about how you caught Plattener coming out of the runoff pipe. Knowing what I know now, your actions could be interpreted as something far from heroic, Rafferty. In particular," he said, looking at Will, "I'm still very interested in how you stole those plans so that we didn't know about that storm sewer."

  "I didn't steal your plans. I took them because you weren't using them and there wasn't time to discuss it."

  "The point is, Rafferty, we had over one hundred law enforcement officers at the scene, and you decided that you—and only you—could catch this guy."

  Will shook his head. "Not true."

  "We had one hundred law enforcement officers there. Federal agents, state police, Buffalo SWAT, and you choose a local rookie less than a month out of the academy."

  "He was the only one who would come."

  "If one reads this report carefully," Kunsa continued, "one can see how you were setting up an execution. That you were counting on the officer to shoot Plattener as he came out of the pipe and thus, could let Plattener take the rap for murdering Bea Blakely." He paced the room. "Which would leave you free to play hero with the object of your obsession." He paused. "And marry her." He paused again. "And take her to Europe, far, far away."

  "I took the plans and the cop because you guys had it in your heads Plattener was holed up in the complex—wedded to the ghost of his mother or something, and there was no time to try and disabuse you of your theory."

  Kunsa looked at his watch. "It's not going to wash, Will."

  Agent Cole popped her head in. "They've got the disc, Norm. It'll be here shortly."

  "Thanks." After th
e door closed, Kunsa turned to Will. "You might as well start talking. In the end, it's the only thing that's going to help you."

  "Can you believe that psycho Leopold expected to sit in prison for the rest of his life and watch me on TV every night?" Jessica demanded of Slim.

  "Yes," the big man said. "And he'd probably enjoy it."

  "Yechhh!" Jessica said, throwing a couch pillow across the room to bonk Slim on the head. "Some conversationalist you are." She looked at the clock. "Where the heck is Will? I'm beginning to think he's found another girl."

  "He'll be here," Slim said. He lofted an eyebrow. "How about some popcorn?"

  "Who's making it?" she asked suspiciously.

  "I will," he offered, standing up.

  Jessica turned her attention back to the TV. After a moment, she leaned back and called, "You know, we haven't discussed yet if you want to go to France with me and Will. Wendy says she'll go."

  "I don't speak French," Slim called back.

  She shrugged, turning back to the TV. "Bonjour, Monsieur Slee-mah.”

  The FBI technician plugged the laser recorder into the wall socket of the interrogation room. Kunsa's eyes moved over to watch Will.

  Will's eyes were on the recorder. He swallowed. His breathing picked up.

  Kunsa's eyes moved to Agent Cole.

  Her eyes were on Will Rafferty, as well.

  "Okay, all set," the tech said. "Press Play. Do you want me to do it?"

  "No, that's okay, thanks."

  The technician left the room.

  Silence.

  Kunsa sat down across the table from Will. "This is your last chance to cooperate. And I tell you this for one reason and one reason only. I believe you love Jessica Wright. And I honestly believe that you helped us to find her before it was too late. And that without you, we might not have gotten there in time."

  Will looked at him, jaw tightening.

  "But that doesn't let you off the hook for murdering Bea Blakely. I'm giving you this chance to help yourself. And I wouldn't be giving it to anyone else."

  "Will, he's telling the truth," Agent Cole said. "If you talk to us now, we can say that you came forward and confessed."

  Will shook his head. "No."

  "When I turn this tape on," Agent Kunsa said, "and I hear you and Bea Blakely going at it, my friend, that's it. There's no turning back. They'll go for murder one."

  Will only looked at him.

  "Last chance," Kunsa said.

  Will shook his head.

  Kunsa glanced at Agent Cole, then to the observation window, and then back to the laser-disc player. He punched the Play button.

  "No, no, this is what I want to do," a woman's voice said. It was Bea Blakely's, low, hoarse, in a rush. "I want to do it right here on her desk."

  There was a male grunting sound and the rustle of clothing.

  "Mmm, that's good," Bea panted. "Right there. That's goooood. Yeah." She sucked the air in between her teeth. "Yeah."

  "Oh, this is good, baby," the man said. "Oh, yeah, this is good. Right on that bitch's desk—fuck her."

  Bea giggled.

  "Yeah, like that, baby, good, good—" the man panted. "That's good, fuck me, fuck me—"

  Kunsa hit the Stop button and the room was silent. Slowly the agent raised his head. "That's Dirk's voice," he said in amazement.

  "Knucklehead," Will said, pushing his chair back to stand up.

  Epilogue

  31

  The DBS News three-hour special, “The Kidnapping of Jessica Wright,” was predicted to be the most watched program across the U.S. for the week of June 22. “This is one of the best psycho-thrillers produced in recent years,” The New York Times wrote in a preview. “The special has everything: sex, psychos, love, loyalty, betrayal, pain, violence, romance.” The Daily News reported, “The fact that it was the DBS Network’s own talk-show host, Jessica Wright, in the center of it all, is now only a dramatic accident of television history that has resulted in one of the finest documentary projects of the decade.”

  “With the full cooperation of almost all the players in the game,” The Washington Post wrote, “from Jessica Wright to the FBI and NYPD and the members of the special investigative unit of DBS News that helped to find her, the documentary also includes actual footage of the rooms where Jessica was held hostage and the eventful rescue itself.”

  “In the beginning,” host Alexandra Waring related into the camera during her opening monologue, “right after the kidnapping, the authorities were confused. But of course, at that point, they didn’t know it wasn’t just a stalker murderer-kidnapper they were after, but three different men involved in two different kidnappings, and not one, but two different murderers.”

  She explained how the story began some thirty-five years before in Niagara Falls, when an electrical engineer with the Niagara Project lay dying of cancer, and how in desperation and grief, his young wife came to believe in curative powers of water, and began strange cleansing rituals with her young son, James.

  "How could I forget?" an older man who had been their neighbor in Niagara Falls said when Alexandra questioned him about the Platteners. "It was maybe thirty years ago, but I remember it like yesterday. I went outside to get our dog and saw that she had that little boy outside in the cold. Stark naked he was, shivering on the ground in their backyard. I said, 'Mrs. Plattener, your little boy's going to catch pneumonia,' and she glared at me, yanked the boy off the ground and hurried him into the house. Later that night, my wife woke me up and said she was back outside again with the boy. Naked, with candles going, the little boy crying. This time I called the police." The old man shook his head. "She didn't do it again, at least not where we could see. Because we kept a sharp eye out."

  Shortly after that, Albert Plattener died, the young widow, Lillian, moved her son to Buffalo where she worked as a private nurse to Bruce Porterly, a diagnosed schizophrenic who had been suspected of molesting children. Unfortunately, Porterly's parents were multimillionaires who had succeeded in keeping their son on the loose for years.

  "Oh, my, my," an old lady with a faint Irish brogue said gravely, shaking her head, "it was a very sad situation for the little Plattener boy, if you ask me. I was the Porterly's housekeeper, you see, but I made it very clear I would have nothing to do with that son of theirs, that madman, Bruce, they kept in the guest house in the back. I should think the fact they had iron bars over the windows of that little house would have told the police everything they needed to know about the creature who lived in it. But she, that Lillian, the nurse, she spent whole days and weeks back there with him, and the little boy was there too." She shook her head again. "We knew that no good could come of it. We knew what that creature liked to do to little boys and little girls. But she didn't seem to care."

  The camera cut to Alexandra. "Didn't anyone say anything?"

  "Aye and indeed," the old lady said, "but it was my job at stake, you see, and a good one it was, and that Lillian Plattener was the only nurse the Porterlys could get to stay. They had a man come at night. But he wasn't any good the creature would get out. And then finally they put him away. If you ask me, they should have taken him out back and shot him the first time it happened."

  "The first time what happened?"

  "He attacked the little girl down the road—Mother of God, he did things that no human being could do to a child."

  "And it happened again?"

  “It happened and it happened and it happened. And don't imagine the little Plattener boy escaped it. I don't see how he could have."

  And so it seemed that young James Plattener had been sexually molested by Porterly from the time he was six to thirteen years old, possibly longer. And it was possible the mother even encouraged it as a means of controlling her charge.

  The Porterlys paid Mrs. Plattener handsomely for her services. When Porterly escaped a prison sentence for child molestation by pleading insanity, he was placed in the high-security ward of the Buffalo Psychi
atric Center, and Mrs. Plattener continued there as his private nurse. As for young James Plattener, he was already demonstrating a genius in the sciences, and often hung out at the insane asylum with his mother after school.

  "What was he like back then?" Alexandra asked an attractive woman in her late thirties who had been a classmate of Plattener's.

  The woman made a face. "I don't want to be unkind, but he was—Well, he was weird. He was little—he was, I don't know, three or four years younger than everyone in the class. And he was physically little. Stooped. He used to crouch over his desk, like an old man. I mean he was weird. He never spoke if he could help it. The guys used to taunt him unmercifully. I don't know what used to happen in the showers after gym class, but more often than not James' clothes would end up on the flagpole in the front of the school." The woman thought a moment, looking very grave. "If I felt bad then, I feel horrible now. I guess we made a monster out of him."

  Plattener graduated from high school at fifteen, got his bachelor's from Buffalo State at eighteen, and began his doctorate at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

  "He was brilliant," a retired professor said defiantly. "He could have been one of our great scientists."

  "What held him back?" Alexandra asked.

  He paused, as if debating what answer to give.

  "He was not good with people. He was, I think, afraid of them." Before he finished his degree, Alexandra explained that his mother, Lillian, became ill with severe asthma.

  The story then moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where the lonely, sexually confused, socially retarded young man dominated by his invalid mother became enamored with a talk-show host out of Tucson named Jessica Wright. Lillian, it seemed, shared his enthusiasm for the show and he drove her down to Tucson several times to be a part of Jessica's audience.

  "Once I saw pictures of him," Denny Ladler, Jessica's longtime producer recalled, "I remembered him right away. In those days we were syndicated, but the audience was still very small, and his mother needed oxygen close by, and so Plattener would wheel this cylinder into the studio. And then of course we'd see his mother outside smoking, and we wondered what the—" Denny shook his head. " Anyway, he was on our mailing list and used to come to all the audience appreciation days."