Agnes Among the Gargoyles

by Patrick Flynn

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Who is John Speer, AKA Jack the Pinboy?

  Is he really the Yuppie butcher?

  In a biographical story filed by Tollivetti, Speer's ex-girlfriend, securities analyst Pamela Z_______, says no. "Jack is a very gentle person," she says. "He'd make a great dad. I just never thought he'd be a very good husband."

  What about the date-rape stuff? When Speer was in college, a woman pressed charges. He had to see a court-appointed psychotherapist for a year.

  "That was just so much bulls__t," Tollivetti quotes Speer. "When her boyfriend walked in, what else could she say? I'm no rapist. Read the shrink's report."

  Tollivetti passes it along in a sidebar. There it is, over the signature of Dr. Janice Fedelke: "While exhibiting emotional immaturity, and some exhibitionist tendencies, the patient John Speer displays no symptoms of violent feeling toward women, and in my opinion poses no threat to them."

  Tollivetti asks: Why didn't you come forward?

  "Because I didn't do anything. I didn't kill anyone—not Babs, not Mrs. Bloch. I didn't go to the police because it would have been terrible for me at work. I assumed the cops would get to me soon enough anyway."

  Tollivetti asks: Is there anything you'd like to say?

  "Yeah. Why did the rabbi's kid Dov say I did it when he couldn't pick me out of a lineup? I'll tell you why. Because I hadn't been to Barbara's in weeks, and when he used to watch us having sex he only looked at her."

  The police would like that discrepancy cleared up. So would the rabbi, who seems mystified and ashamed of the trouble his son is causing. So would Dov himself, who appears on the verge of mental collapse.

  Dov will submit to hypnosis.

  The police are currently using a hypnotist named Aaron Patterson. Patterson does work for law enforcement agencies in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York; he also works county fairs as "The Hypnotist With a Twist."

  Dov is seated at a desk. On the desk are some paper and crayons, and a windup children's toy: a monkey playing the drums. This is the mechanism for focusing the subject's attention. "Watches swinging on chains went out with Bela Lugosi," Patterson tells Tommy.

  Kongo Starr plays a paradiddle. Patterson speaks to Dov in even, measured tones, like the instructor on a foreign language tape. Tommy fights drowsiness and the urge for a corn dog. Soon Dov's eyes are strangely lifeless. His face is flushed. His brow is streaked with sweat but his hands are clammy.

  "What's happening?" whispers Tommy.

  "He's entering a second-level trance," says Patterson. "Some call it the zombie-like phase."

  Patterson picks up a newspaper and scans a story about college basketball ratings. He issues Dov a key word to focus his recollections: "jumper."

  "When I say that key word, you will remember everything," says Patterson, highly dramatic.

  Jumper, jumper.

  Dov relives that night: the trip to the matchmaker, shopping for groceries, up on the roof. He watches the lovers in bed.

  "The Pinboy was there," says Whitey.

  Jumper, jumper.

  The sex is over. Dov claims to hear singing, and his eyes roll up in his head as he tries to determine spatial placement. The singing is coming from the street. In a reedy whisper, Dov sings the song.

  Matty Groves , he lay down and took a little sleep

  When he awoke Lord Arnold was standing at his feet

  Saying, "How do you like my feather bed?

  How do you like my sheets?

  How do you like my lady wife who lies in your arms asleep?"

  "The Pinboy was already out of the building," says Tommy. "He was on his way home."

  Jumper, jumper.

  Dov sees a man in Barbara's bedroom. A new man.

  "What kind of man?"

  "A man," says Dov. "A normal man."

  Dov describes the slaughter of Barbara. The man holds her from behind and cuts her throat. One, two. She falls. Dov sees his mother knocking on the halfopen bedroom door. She speaks to the man.

  "Oh, for a minute you frightened me," she says.

  Dov cries out twice at the memory of the two gunshots.

  Jumper, jumper. What did he look like?

  There is no answer. Dov's fedora slides off his head.

  "He's blocking it," says Patterson. "Jumper, jumper. Draw it, Dov."

  Dov complies. When the purple crayon falls from his hand, Patterson picks up the drawing. The detectives gather round.

  "Hypnotism is not unlike sleep," murmurs Patterson, "and often the emergent drawings communicate in the language of dreams—highly allusive and symbolic."

  Patterson explains the sketch. "I'd have to go with a nature scene," he says, using a mechanical pencil as a pointer. "Here's your craggy mountain. These are your trees. Note the stream here. Now look at the intrusion: this, I think, is a factory of some sort. Here are two plumes of smoke coming from the smokestacks. The factory could be a symbol of the guilt he feels at having failed to save his mother's life. That guilt is 'polluting,' if you will, his interior landscape."

  Tommy turns the drawing upside-down. The plumes of smoke become sidecurls. The craggy mountain turns into a wide-brimmed hat. The scene of nature befouled is actually a sketch of a bearded, hatted, bespectacled Hasidic face.

  "There's your normal man," says Tommy.

  Dov is guided out of his trance. An officer leads the rabbi into the room. With the rabbi is a girl in shapeless blue dress and woolen tights. She has a long, plain face. She seems terrified. This is Ruth, the young girl brought together with Dov by the matchmaker.

  The rabbi looks at the drawing. "One of us?"

  Tommy shakes his head. "More likely just dressed like one of you."

  Whitey Walker can't see the face. The drawing is like a maddening optical illusion that won't invert for him.

  "Start with the beard," advises Tommy.

  "I'm trying."

  The question of the Pinboy's guilt becomes academic when, thanks to a Post Office delay, a letter arrives at Tollivetti's office three weeks after it was mailed.

  Dear Surs,

  I am the Minotaur of the Labyrinth. I have done my thing.

  I kill wimmin.

  Enclosed please find a square of the underwear the young Jewess was wearing in B'klyn.

  Wimmin are scum. They are stoopid. Even maggot Wegeman was saved by the Woman In The Business Suit and Reeboks.

  That underwear is my curriculum vitae.

  I am the MOL.

  Minotaur--2 NYPD—0

  The cotton weave matches Barbara's other underwear," Tommy tells Agnes. "The blood type will match too, just wait."

  "A serial killer," says Agnes. "Is that really possible?"

  Tommy and the other detectives are taking a lot of heat at work for wasting time with Jack the Pinboy. "And then my father called last night," says Tommy. "Even he wanted to know why we arrested Speer. I told him it looked good at the time. Everybody's an armchair quarterback."

  In a hotel room in Aruba, Dr. Janice Fedelke commits suicide: pills and vodka. Her death seems unrelated to the Speer case. She was having boyfriend trouble. The marriage proposal she thought was coming hadn't. Ironically, as she lay dying, her boyfriend was three towns over, buying an engagement ring. There was trouble with his Visa card, which delayed him.

  Dr. Fedelke was an intense woman. She was manic depressive.

  "I'm devastated," the boyfriend tells the local police. No suicide note was found. There will be an inquest. "But I guess it might have happened sooner or later anyhow. I feel terrible, but it's almost a relief to find out...but what I really am is devastated.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Sarah has decided to make a film about Wayne Torrence. She has him up to Agnes's for dinner. She makes kettles of rice and vegetables, soba noodles with tamari, a date-nut bread heavy as a doorstop.

  "I came out on the street willingly," says Wayne. He spears a slice of translucent eggplant. "I had shingles about a year ago.
That's when I quit my job."

  "Which was?"

  "Word processor. I thought I'd be all right for a while, but my money ran out in seven weeks."

  Agnes goes white. "Seven weeks?"

  "I lived well and saved poorly. Sue me."

  "What did you do?" asks Sarah.

  "I went to the organizations. I surrendered to doctors and lawyers and advocates. Everyone was pulling for me at the PWA Coalition and the AIDS Discrimination Unit and the WPWA and the AZT Alternative and the HIV Collective and the ARC Transitional Association. They were all dying to help me. Slapped my landlord with an injunction so he couldn't evict me. Got a home care worker for six hours a day. Six hours to keep a studio clean. We could have rewired the place."

  The windows in Agnes's apartment are rattled by a stiff wind. Wayne pauses instinctively to judge its force.

  "But there was too much negative energy," he says. "Too much paperwork, too much worrying about my possessions and about preserving the outward forms of my life. I had to let it all go. I'm a lot stronger with nothing."

  Sarah hands out the date-nut bread. She sips almond tea and burns her lip.

  "If this film makes any money, I can pay some people back," says Wayne.

  "How many student documentaries make any money?" says Agnes.

  "How many have the Wegeman resources behind them?"

  Sarah changes the subject. "We're doing the odyssey of one gay man. We'll take him back to his old hangouts. He'll tell his old friends he's sick, and we'll film the reactions."

  "I haven't seen anybody in years," says Wayne. "I've been so busy. I'm studying to be a bodhisattva."

  "That's so great," says Sarah. "I know someone who studied in Tibet with Guru Rimpoche, the 12th Trugpa Tulku."

  "Oh, he's marvelous," says Wayne.

  Drudgily, Agnes begins the dishes.

  Chapter Forty

  Some people call Dennis Quarque the Australian Ronald Wegeman. He favors bowler hats and Cuban cigars and trick shop gags on a rich man's scale: rubber Chateaubriand, whoopie cushions loaded with mustard gas, joy buzzers that could stop an infant's heart. He made his fortune in newspaper publishing by running lots of dirty pictures.

  Quarque took a bath on his last venture, the Sydney Reporter. The Reporter was a tabloid modeled on New York's old Daily News. Unfortunately, Sydney was too civilized a place for a grubby tabloid. There wasn't enough mayhem.

  So Dennis Quarque came to America.

  He ran into a bit of luck. He had acquired some factories in Red Hook for possible conversion to condominiums. In one of the warehouses he discovered the printing set-up of the long-defunct Sun: linotypes, rotary presses, rotogravure equipment. Much of it was usable. Here was an omen: Quarque would start the Reporter all over again, this time in New York, where he could do it properly. The paper would be a true rag, violent and dirty and scary and titillating, like a walk through an slum. It would be real. And he would do it all on the cheap, pinching pennies until they screamed—non-union help, child labor if he had to—so that he would never have to dilute his product to please his advertisers.

  As his secretaries in New York said, in their charming fashion, "Fuck 'em."

  The paper was now called the Graphic. Its strategy was simple. Stories that appeared in the Metro Briefs section of other newspapers, torture slayings of prostitutes, rank-and-file mob hits, decapitations of drug dealers, were examined by the Graphic in minute detail. Morgue photos were often included. The Graphic's approach was strangely democratic: now, murder victims need not be wealthy and white to achieve extensive coverage.

  Tollivetti descends the slippery concrete steps leading to the composing room of the Graphic. The compositors, mostly from Hong Kong, peck out the copy on Linotype machines. Quarque has bypassed the unions. He has set up his own distribution network and hired two Chinese gangs, the Winged Monkeys and the Dragon Kiln, to keep his offices and production facilities and drivers secure. The compositors and printers, delighted to be employed, work at a pace that hasn't been seen in a union shop in a century. Completed slugs drop into galleys like rain falling on the grass, and these boys are deadly accurate, too. "Twenty-six letters, fifty-two characters—that's not an alphabet, that's a cinch," says the Linotype foreman, Victor Shan.

  Tollivetti hesitates at the tea urn. In his pocket is the second letter from the Minotaur of the Labyrinth. It came to his house. Tollivetti's loyalties are divided. Action News is harassing him about his salary, so they're not getting it. He gave the first letter to the News, but they gave it to the police and never printed it. What kind of journalism is that?

  Quarque himself appears in the composing room. He puts his arm around Tollivetti and steers him to a corner. "What have you got?"

  "What would you do with a letter from the Minotaur?"

  In his fingers, Quarque spins an unlit Havana. "I'd run it on page one. I'd box it. I'd put out an extra edition. I'd use red ink. Stop me when you've heard enough."

  The smell of ink always makes Tollivetti lightheaded. He hears a violent grinding of metal, and a warning buzzer, and a stream of Chinese curses. Mr. Shan loses his paper hat when he runs over to deal with the problem.

  The letter is in a plastic bag. Tollivetti hands it to Quarque, along with a pair of rubber gloves.

  Dear Surs,

  I am the Minotaur of the Labyrinth. I have kilt woman, and I plan to do so more.

  I am a little peeved, frankly, at not seeing my first letter in print. I didn't actually ask you to print it, but I just assumed that was what was automatically done. Forgive me. I'm new at this.

  I am going to kilt again. You better tell the wimmin of NY to nail the shutters shut. No one nose how I chuse my viktims. I have a little plan, I have. I maled this to Tollyvetti because I think he can get the job done.

  Is there anything about the first job—by nife, by gun, by gum— that wasn't leaked to the papers? Yes. How about Mrs. Bloch's panty hose? She was wearing too sets, each with the opposite legs scissored off. I guess she cut off the legs with runs in them and wore two sets together to make one. It's an old Home Ec trick.

  Here is a piece of the kidne from the young one. T'other one I fryd and ate it was very nice.

  Sorry. I always wanted to say that.

  MOL

  "I'll do it myself," cries Quarque. Cheers ring out in the composing room. He fastens the letter to a Linotype easel and prepares to set the text in type. He rolls up his sleeves, parks his cigar. It would be a stirring moment if Quarque had ever worked a Linotype before. He stumbles, falters, searches the keyboard, curses, and sets but a few letters before losing patience with the whole enterprise. He runs his fingers down the keys and grins like a simpleton. The machine responds to his slapping and banging: etaoin shrdlu, etaoin shrdlu, etaoin shrdlu....

  "Shantih, shantih, shantih," says Mr. Shan.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Filming of Sarah's movie had begun on the Lower East Side. Sarah's crew consists of other film students from NYU. Bob Syker is also helping out. He and Sarah go way back. She has always been his favorite Wegeman.

  While Sarah sets up a shot with her cinematographer, Wu Heung, Wayne tells Syker and Agnes about his time studying in Thailand, and of his pursuit of the traits which distinguish the highly evolved bodhisattvas, the Ten Perfections: liberality, morality, wisdom, renunciation, energy, forbearance, truthfulness, resolution, good will and equanimity. The greatest barrier to his attainment of the Ten Perfections has always been his pursuit of corn-fed young men from the Midwest. "I have a Topeka fetish," he explains. But that phase of his life is over. He has conquered tanha, the ego's craving for temporal satisfactions. He will study and meditate, perhaps consult with a local guru, and eventually awaken fully and become a Buddha. He will move to another plane of existence.

  Syker can't believe his ears. "A Buddha, huh? That's a new one on me."

  Wayne fastens Syker with a penetrating gaze. "You're sick, aren't you?"

  "I've had a stomach
virus for a couple of weeks sure," says Syker. "How'd you know? I guess a couple of weeks is a long time to have a virus."

  "Do you know what Bodhidharma, the first patriarch, said?"

  "Uh, no."

  "He said that a firm stool is more precious than a pound of sapphires."

  "I think I have an ulcer," says Syker.

  "I can help you," says Wayne. He gives Syker one of his books. "These are some basic Yoga exercises. Nothing complex. No show-offy astral projection. Just exercises and meditation keys. Try it."