“Then what do we do now?”
“It’s very simple, Counselor. We find her, and then we catch her.”
23
Jimmy Carfax was growing bored with model airplanes. He had gone through the phase already once in his early adolescence, shortly after his commitment to Sherman’s Crest, so in middle age he pursued the hobby with the sophistication of a connoisseur.
And that was part of the problem. The manual skills involved in assembling them were easily mastered and, considered abstractly, all balsa-wood models tended to be more or less the same. They were losing their challenge. Jimmy subscribed to some dozen magazines devoted to the subject, so he knew what was available and it had been some time since he had run across a kit he thought might be worth the trouble of sending for.
Because he did not build them as part of some fantasy about being an astronaut or a World War II bomber pilot, roles which, had he considered them at all, would have filled him with uncomprehending distaste. In fact, the 1:500-scale Concorde and the 1932 Silver Shadows he constructed with such painstaking attention to detail had for him almost no connection at all with external reality. If the genuine article had flown by overhead he would probably not have raised his eyes to look at it. The truth was that external reality was not a matter of very great interest to Jimmy. Life outside the institution—indeed, any life beyond the one he personally was living—hardly existed for him.
Still, that life was not without its pleasures. His lawyer had won for him access to some of the income from his maternal grandmother’s estate, which had been left to him in its entirety when he was not quite four years old—and his mother’s control over which had been the real if secret motive for murdering his parents—and money eased many constraints. He had his own phone line and his mail, while inspected, was generally not interfered with. Jerry, who had the night duty on the violent ward, was a compliant soul with an addiction to gambling, and he would supply any luxury for a price, even the services of a woman who normally worked in the kitchen but who once a week was smuggled into Jimmy’s room and, once he had submitted to being handcuffed to his bed, would provide him with a measure of entertainment. She was not young and she was by no means pretty, but she would do.
But the greatest of his pleasures came from his notoriety. He enjoyed attention. He enjoyed being the center of other people’s interest as he was the center of his own. In the four decades of his incarceration he had been interviewed by dozens of psychiatrists and eager young graduate students in Abnormal Psychology and even, once, some idiot from the National Enquirer. He had been the subject of numberless articles in professional journals, plus the odd squib in the popular press, reprints of which he collected. It was celebrity of a sort and he liked it. When he felt interest in his case beginning to wane he would grow depressed and slightly desperate. Once in his thirties he had even gone so far as to bite off another patient’s ear simply because he felt the staff were beginning to take him for granted and he needed to reaffirm that he was still a dangerous head case. The attack had been a mistake, because ever since he had been kept more or less confined and the security precautions imposed were something of a nuisance. He would have found sex more amusing without the necessity of the handcuffs.
And, besides, he had eventually figured out that the real source of his popularity among mental health professionals and other assorted cranks was less the fear that he inspired than his impenetrability. All the shrinks who had examined him, all the psychologists who had given him Rorschach and random-association tests, and the article writers who had asked him impertinent questions about his childhood, none of them had an inkling about what was really going on inside his head.
Frankly, he lied. He was not a fool—he was doubtless a good deal more intelligent than most of his examiners—and he found it a relatively easy matter to lead them to false and even contradictory conclusions. He had been diagnosed as everything from an infantile schizophrenic to a full-blown sociopath, and it was all nonsense.
Because Jimmy knew exactly what was wrong with him. Or right with him, since he himself regarded it as an asset rather than a deficiency. He was not insane because insanity implied that his perceptions of concrete reality were somehow flawed, and this was not the case. He was not delusional. He was actually remarkably clearheaded. It was simply that pity, compassion, affection, all the things that bind one person to another, had no place in his inner reality. Except as they impinged on his own life, he genuinely did not care about other people. Somewhere in his dark, chilly little soul the thread of human sympathy lay severed.
But in his view that was not a pathology. It was, rather, a freedom from weakness. He wasn’t a maniac. He was evil. There was an important distinction between the two, and the advantages were all on the side of evil.
It was actually rather restful not giving a damn about another living soul.
None of which, of course, implied a lack of discrimination in his dealings with his fellow mortals. He preferred some of them to others. For instance, he had enjoyed James Kinkaid enormously—just as he had enjoyed Angel Wyman.
At first he had been a little offended by Kinkaid, who had seemed neither afraid of him nor even particularly intrigued. True, the man had spent three days at a mental hospital, so perhaps some of the novelty had worn off, but it was just a little insulting to be regarded as apparently nothing more than an ordinary psychotic or, at most, an interesting witness. It was rather like having Angel back inside, and Jimmy had never enjoyed playing second fiddle.
But then he had realized two things. First, the man’s composure was studied. No one who had not actually eviscerated half a dozen small children could possibly have that much ice water in his veins. It was a good act—Jimmy had tried several different ways to shake his composure and had failed utterly—but it was an act. Perhaps that was being excessively harsh. It was a technique that had acquired something of the character of a habit. Kinkaid was not the type to let anyone see inside to inquire how the wheels and levers moved.
Well, Jimmy couldn’t fault him for that. He wasn’t any different himself.
And, second, Kinkaid hadn’t come up to this dark corner of the woods as any family lawyer. He had his own agenda.
“A little unfinished business,” he had called it, and his eyes had gone dark as he said it. The poor baby was all knotted up inside.
Which was all right. Jimmy enjoyed other people’s pain, and like a true gourmet he favored the soul’s anguish over all the more obvious varieties. His favorite scenario was that Kinkaid had been in love with Angel—he would have been about the right age ten years ago, before Angel committed whatever indiscretion had landed her in Sherman’s Crest, and heaven knew the girl was decorative enough.
Love, in Jimmy’s opinion, was a rather ludicrous weakness, the stuff of farce rather than tragedy. Lust was another matter. Lust was simple biology. On that score Jimmy was decidedly attached to his Emily—that was her name, God help us, Emily—who took off her clothes for him once a week and was so very, very careful to keep out of the way of his hands and teeth while she attended to business, but it never would have occurred to him to go all tender and sentimental about her. Emily was quite right to stay out of reach.
Yes, decidedly, he favored the Grand Passion Theory over all the other possibilities, perhaps because it made such an interesting contrast to Mr. Kinkaid’s outward calm. Still waters run deep and all that. Oh it was a perfectly delicious idea.
It just went to show to how much a pretty face and a nice set of tits can blind one, because he couldn’t have had an inkling about what she was really like.
Jimmy loved gossip, and he had his sources. Sooner or later he found out about everything, but for a solid year Angela Wyman was nothing to him except a tantalizing rumor. There was this spectacularly gorgeous addition to the vegetable garden over in Ward D. She was as beautiful as a rose and about as sentient. Anyway, that was the story. Jimmy knew she was having everybody on.
In t
hose days there was an orderly working at Sherman’s Crest by the name of Gladys Cornman. And Ms. Cornman loved her job, particularly if she happened to pull the night shift, where there was usually only one person on duty. Because Ms. Cornman, you see, was as queer as a goat and loved having her way with the girls. And then one morning she was found at the bottom of a stairwell with her neck neatly broken. It was her first night on Ward D.
A terrible accident everyone said—except if the poor dumb dyke had tried getting into the wrong somebody’s panties and that somebody had been sufficiently with it to take exception. It had always struck Jimmy as particularly significant that the pathologist had found so little bruising on the corpse. You would think that Ms. Cornman would have taken quite a beating on those concrete stairs, but there was hardly a mark on her.
And then, lo and behold, two weeks later Angel Wyman comes back to the Land of the Living. Dr. Werther practically had tears in his eyes. It was a miracle.
And then again, maybe not. Maybe Angel just got tired of pretending she belonged in a flower pot.
Seven or eight months passed before he got a peek at her, and well over two years before they had their first brief conversation—a suitably furtive business, achieved during one of his outdoor exercise periods.
Jimmy loathed the outdoors almost as much as he loathed even the thought of exercise. In his youth, when he was required to wear padded leg shackles to keep him from doing anything rash, it had been bad enough, but it was torture now. He was too old and too fat for this sort of thing. He was short of breath and his legs bothered him. Yet every afternoon it wasn’t actually raining or snowing this martyrdom was required of him.
“Pedro, if I’m not allowed to sit down I’ll stop your allowance. I mean it. I’m exhausted.”
His warders, thank God, were all pragmatic types with small salaries. Pedro was even content to leave him alone for short stretches, knowing that a man who weighs over three hundred pounds isn’t going to sprout wings and fly. He would go off and flirt with the nurses, taking Jimmy’s cane with him to guarantee that his charge wouldn’t wander from wherever he left him.
Thus it happened that that particular afternoon Jimmy was quite alone, taking his ease on one of the little wrought-iron benches that were scattered about the grounds at convenient intervals, when he noticed a flutter of cotton dress behind one of the ancient oak trees of which the hospital was so unreasonably proud. Some young lady was sitting on the grass, her back against the tree trunk, not twenty feet away, blissfully unaware of his presence. It was very provoking.
He was just beginning to think that perhaps he had a duty to teach her a little decent caution when she leaned to her right, supporting herself with her arm, and he saw the back of her blond head. He knew who she was even before she turned back to look at him.
She had deliciously cold eyes, and by their expression he saw that she had known all along he was there. She smiled mockingly.
“Run along, little girl, or I’ll bite your lips off.”
All Angel did was laugh. It was a sound as heartless as the wind at night. As he listened to it Jimmy knew with perfect certainty it had been the last sound that Gladys Cornman had ever heard.
“All right,” he went on petulantly, “be a spoilsport.”
“You’re James Carfax,” she said. “I’ve read your file.”
“And it isn’t a novel, my dear—every word of it is true,” Jimmy replied smugly. She had already stood up and was beginning to walk away before he realized the significance of what she had told him.
“Then you’ve got access to Records?” he shouted after her, but she never even turned around. In an instant she was gone, as if she had stepped behind a curtain.
That night as he lay in his bed, staring up up through the darkness at the invisible ceiling, he found himself wondering what she wanted from him.
That she wanted something he did not trouble to doubt. It had taken him only a second or two to confirm his suspicions about her. She wasn’t even twenty, yet the moment he had heard her laugh he had known she was as old as time itself. She was just like him, less a human being than a constant of nature. She was beyond pity or love or remorse or death.
They had understood each other immediately. She wanted something and she knew she would have to trade for it, so he had let him know that she had access to everyone’s secrets. She had the one thing he really wanted.
But what was her price? He had to wait three months to find out.
“Can you get into employee files?” he asked her, having once more sent Pedro off to amuse himself.
“It’s difficult, but not impossible.”
She was sitting directly at his feet. She was even teasing him with the view down the front of her dress. She wasn’t afraid to do anything.
“Then I want chapter and verse on one Vincent Tessio, the keeper of my kingdom if you must know. Now what do you want?”
What she wanted was so simple and obvious he was surprised he hadn’t guessed. She wanted a safe line to the outside.
Because a few years back Jimmy had gone through his computer phase, a fact which, like everything else unimportant about him, would be in his folder. He had bought himself a Macintosh with all the bells and whistles, but he had soon tired to it. Now he only used it to keep in touch with devotees of his many other hobbies.
And that was precisely the point—by implication, Angel had already told him something of the greatest interest. He knew that they kept records of his telephone calls, but since he never called anyone except his lawyer and various mail-order houses he didn’t really care. But when he wanted all the latest on, for instance, the current prices for baseball cards of the ‘50s and ‘60s he had only to log onto CompuServe, which was a local number but could connect him by electronic mail with anyone in the world. This was a fact which apparently had never occurred to his watchers.
Otherwise Angel would have found another way.
“Send messages for me from time to time,” she said. Then she slipped him a piece of paper.
He unfolded it and looked at what was written on it.
“Aren’t you afraid I might tattle on you, my dear?”
“Oh no. I’m not afraid of that, Jimmy. Because then I’d tell them about Emily.”
He never learned how she found out about that, and it didn’t really matter. In any case he had only been teasing. He would not have betrayed her.
So perhaps three times a month he posted something to a Peter Grayson, address number 24355,1717. Once Grayson, whoever he was, picked up his messages they were erased from the bulletin board’s memory, as if they had never existed. When Angel went over the wall there would be no way to trace her.
Because over the wall she meant to go—she didn’t even bother to conceal the fact. What would have been the point of trying?
“When I’m out I’ll send you a box of chocolates,” she told Jimmy, almost the last time he ever saw her. “What kind do you like best?” And, sure enough, a month after she disappeared he received a five-pound box of See’s nuts and chews, postmarked San Francisco.
Jimmy was not sentimental about Angel. Loyalty and affection were strangers to his nature; there were but two considerations that kept him from betraying her. The first was that while Angel was free she was not at Sherman’s Crest, which meant he had the place to himself—he did not fancy the idea of sharing his little domain with another predator. The second was that he enjoyed making mischief.
Thus, even while his model airplanes were beginning to pale, it still gave him pleasure to think of what he had helped to turn loose upon the unsuspecting world. He could not follow her progress, since Angel was far too clever to make it into the newspapers, but he knew she was out there. And he knew she was busy.
Well, now it would be perhaps even a little more interesting. Kinkaid was not one of the meat eaters, but he had strong nerves and there was nothing wrong with the contents of his mind. Even without Jimmy’s little hints he would have figured
out for himself that the girl buried in the hospital graveyard wasn’t Angel. He might even be smart enough to catch her—anything was possible.
Jimmy would enjoy this little battle of wits, even if he never heard another thing about it, but he also would like to be the one who decided how things turned out. And, on the whole, he preferred to leave Angel running around loose. It was fine if Kinkaid gave her a bit of a hard time, but he mustn’t be allowed to win.
So now it was time to redress the balance a little. A few days after Kinkaid’s visit, Jimmy fired up his Macintosh, logged onto CompuServe, and left the following text file in Peter Grayson’s electronic post office box: “Message from Jimmy. JK4 is busy adding up 2 and 2. Watch your attractive little derrière, sweetheart.”
Having finished, he turned the computer off and treated himself to half a pound of Gummy Bears. He had done his bit to make the world a little more dangerous—he only wished he could be there to see Angel’s face when she found out.
24
“I thought maybe you’d gotten bored with me.”
“Not bored—no, definitely not bored. Just busy and preoccupied.”
“A problem with your private life?”
“You’re my private life.”
She seemed to like that answer. She snuggled a little deeper under the covers, until her face was touching his chest. It was a delicious sensation to feel the tip of a woman’s tongue along your breastbone.
“Then what’s been keeping you away? Business?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what?”
“Archeological research. Spelunking into the darkest reaches of . . . Hey, you keep that up and I’ll lose my train of thought.”
“Wouldn’t that be dreadful.”
Following which, it was a good twenty minutes before he could have recalled even his own name.
Angel Page 23
