Bad Girl and Loverboy

by Michele Jaffe

  “What do you think you are doing?” his father demanded.

  He stared at his father’s shoes, old black leather lace-ups with mud on the left toe. He said, “I’ve got to go to work.”

  “Can’t you see I’m talking to you? You can’t leave! Look at me when I talk to you.”

  The silliness was spreading. Be careful, he told himself. C-A-R-E-F-U-L. “Sorry, Dad.”

  He had reached to take away the untouched plate in front of his father but the man made a grab for his wrist. He twisted it hard. “You’re not even my son, are you? You’re a freak. A freak!”

  Being touched like this made him so silly. When he had been younger, what his father was doing hurt, but the boy now towered over the man. He brushed the hand off his wrist as if it were a fly. He took his father’s plate and set it in the sink.

  Dishes done, he changed into overalls, fastened his tool belt around his hips, and went to the door.

  “Good-bye, Dad. I should be back around midnight.”

  “Goddamn you,” his father said. “I hate you. You’re trying to drive me into an early grave.”

  “Have a nice evening,” he said, because you were always supposed to be polite. The door closed behind him with its familiar knock knock.

  Like usual, he’d headed straight for Big Bess. He crawled beneath her to lie down in his favorite spot, under the third left-hand curve. It was the sharpest, so it was where the girls always screamed the loudest. Sometimes boys screamed there, too, but they denied it later. He loved to hear them. It was his special place, and he saved it for when he was feeling very silly. He would slide his hand inside his overalls and let the screams wash over him, watch the machine whirl above him, around him, slide back and forth on top of him, down and around, down and around, until he felt like he would explode.

  That night, as though Bess knew he was upset, a rectangular card came fluttering down from between the tracks onto his stomach right as he lay down. It said Esmeralda’s Prophecy across the top, and then The path to happiness lies before you. You shall have all that you desire. Insert another quarter and I will tell you more.

  He knew it was destiny that the card fell down to him. If it had gotten caught in the tracks it could have jammed the gears, maybe even derailed a car. But it hadn’t. It had landed right on him. A gift, a special message.

  He had just crawled out from under the roller coaster and was dusting himself off, making sure he had not left a spot on the front of his overalls, when he heard the footsteps behind him.

  “Oh look, it’s Mopey Dick. Visiting your girlfriend, Mopey?” a voice sneered.

  Only one person called him Mopey Dick. It had started when he’d admitted in English class that Moby Dick was his favorite book. He liked to think of the whale. But it wasn’t cool to have a favorite book, or at least not one with such a provocative title, and Charles Tooley had branded him with the nickname that very day.

  If it had been anyone else, the nickname would have gone away, but not Charley Tooley. Charley lived in a big house with a mother and a father and a sister and always had the coolest records and the latest clothes. Tonight he was wearing a T-shirt and bright white Vans sneakers. He had a rust-colored Members Only jacket tied around his waist.

  Members Only. The boy loved the sound of that.

  “Hi, Charley,” he said. The silliness was gone. He felt totally in control. “Did you have a nice summer?”

  “Better than yours, I bet. What were you doing under there? Jacking off?”

  He didn’t blush, even though the circle of girls and boys around Charley tittered. He was careful. No one could have known.

  “Yes, it was great. You should try it.”

  “I don’t need to, Mopey. I’ve got a real girlfriend.” Charley reached out and pulled Bethany Samson toward him. She was pretty in a pinched way, but mostly she was graceful. When she grew up she was going to be a dancer; everyone said so. He himself had been dreaming about kissing her for two years.

  “Hi, Bethany.”

  “Hi,” she said.

  She had tiny eyes, so you didn’t really have to look at them, and really pretty hair and she smelled nice. He’d love to watch her hair swing around as she rode on the roller coaster. “Why don’t you all go on Big Bess?” the boy asked. “On me. Unless you’re chicken.”

  Charley said, “I don’t need your generosity, Mopey. My dad’s not a drunk loser.”

  The boy looked Charley up and down and made fists with his hands. He watched Charley’s ears and the sides of his neck go red. The Members Only jacket would look terrible on him like that.

  Charley said, “I’m not chicken, Mopey,” he began. “If you want to pay me to ride your girlfriend, I won’t say no.”

  “Charley,” Bethany objected, but Charley shut her up with a hard squeeze to her arm.

  “Come on, hon. We’re going on Big Bess.”

  “The rules say you have to leave anything that could fall off or dangle out here,” the boy told them. “If anything gets on the tracks, it gums up the works.”

  “Listen to him, talking about the rules. What a priss,” Charley said, but the boy knew he was just doing it to make himself seem bigger. Charley needed to learn about politeness.

  Pockets were emptied, sweaters tossed aside, and the boy watched as the Members Only jacket got hung on a peg of its own. Charley and his gang spent the time they were waiting in line pushing each other, while the girls who were with them giggled nervously. Bethany once looked shyly at the boy and gave him a little smile, and he knew that she would rather be with him than Charley. But even she didn’t notice when he left to go to check in for work at the maintenance trailer.

  It was the week after that when the crash happened. The boy waited nearby until they got on, to be sure, then went back to his job at the ring-toss booth across the fairground. Far enough away to have a good view, but close enough to hear the screams. He heard Charley’s, heard Big Bess’s. And over them all, Bethany’s. Her scream was special. Just for him.

  It was her last. As the local papers reported the next day and for weeks afterward, Bethany Samson, the only survivor of the Big Bess derailment, was paralyzed from the neck down and could neither speak nor move. Her doctors were confident that after a year or so of intensive physical therapy, she would be able to swallow on her own. Usually.

  It was a great tragedy for a local girl with such a promising future. That was his favorite line from the article.

  An inquest was undertaken, but no one could find any explanation for why the roller coaster flew off the track like that, apart from a few shreds of one of those cards that the Esmeralda fortune-telling machine spit out. The inquest did not report that there was no sign of Charley Tooley’s Members Only jacket either.

  The carnival never came back after that year. Bethany’s father became rich from the lawsuit and was now living in a nice house in Maui with his new family. He never visited his daughter, who was in an institution in Boston near her grandparents.

  She’d had one visitor recently, though. A handsome man who made all the nurses titter and say, “Isn’t that . . . ?” Bethany didn’t show any sign of recognition, but, of course, he was all grown-up now and looked different than he had all those years ago. He’d been in the area, feeling celebratory, and thought of her and couldn’t resist. He’d brought her a present and everything. And he’d given her a kiss.

  After all, he owed her for the jacket. And for the crucial lesson he’d learned that day: the closer you were to the screaming, the better it sounded. That’s what he’d been thinking about all day.

  He closed his eyes on the lights spread out in front of him and let his fingers trace the letters on the front of his scrapbook. F-A-M-I-L-Y-R-E-M-E-M-B-R-A-N-C-E-S. He was a lucky boy. He had so much to remember that the album was getting full. There were still a few blank pages but not many. And in two days, there would be one less.

  Unless Imogen started making more mistakes. Then things could go faster.


  CHAPTER 32

  10 days left!!

  “She went by Marielle, but her real name was Mary-Ellen Wycliffe, thirty-four, most recent address a P.O. box in Texas. The hotel will deny it, but it looks like she was here working the conventioneers. Pick them up at the tables, make a deal over drinks, then up to her room.”

  “Any I.D.s from the dealers?” Imogen asked the police detective, a woman a little older than she was.

  “A few saw her, mostly playing craps, but none of them noticed her companions. Those were the night shift, though, and the casino tends to be busier at that time. We’ve just started canvassing the day shift.”

  Imogen thanked the woman and went back to the medical examiner’s preliminary report. Marielle had been dead between one and four hours when they found her. She had taken part in consensual intercourse right before she died, possibly even while she was dying, during which she’d gotten a hickey. There were no signs of struggle, nothing under her fingernails, no signs of any filtered-off debris in the bathwater. The cause of death was strangling by hand. She was placed in the tub after her death.

  “About all I can tell you about this guy,” the ME told Imogen, “is that he’s got strong hands.”

  The crime-scene lab technician gave Imogen his report over the phone. He sounded like he was in his sixties, and he had a slight accent. Imogen looked at his card—Gianni Basso. “My family is from Bologna,” he said, pausing for a deep smoker’s cough, “and anytime we have leftovers we throw them all together in a dish with some pasta and béchamel and make a pasticcio. That’s what you’ve got here—the leftovers of a lot of hard nights.”

  There were dozens of fingerprints, all of which would be run through the databases but none of which would probably yield anything. The only item of interest were a few grains of powder stuck in the carpet beneath a slight indentation indicating a footprint.

  “What kind of powder?” Imogen asked.

  “We’re still running some tests. It looks like synthetic sweetener with something else.”

  “Could it have been a drug he used to subdue the victim?”

  “I don’t think so. Still, I wouldn’t put it in my pasticcio if I could help it. I got a match on the perfume too. It’s called Poison.”

  “Of course it is,” Imogen said. It would be.

  “Been around for a while. We didn’t find any in the vic’s room, so your guy might have brought it with him.”

  “Thanks.”

  Around lunchtime, with her team gathered in her suite, they got a break. One of the craps dealers not only remembered Marielle, but also her companion. “Good-looking guy, brown hair, tall,” Gordon Taylor, Boise, ID, explained, seated opposite Imogen at the big table that was her command center. “Wearing sunglasses. Nice jacket. I noticed the jacket because it’s the kind of thing you see in magazines, ‘What the well-dressed man is wearing on his yacht this winter.’ It was a light-colored sport coat. Very European. Anyway, he and this lady hit it off right away. If she wasn’t a working girl, then that guy was smooth. A charmer. Not two seconds and they’re making plans for a drink in her room.”

  At least they’d gotten the “charming” and “good-looking” parts of their Loverboy profile right. “What day was that?”

  “I was off yesterday and the day before, so it must have been Thursday.”

  The day Imogen arrived. She did not even have to tell Bugsy to bring her the security tape of her hallway from that day. He was already out the door.

  “Could you recognize the man again? Pick him out of a lineup?”

  The dealer shrugged. “I could try. I was looking at his clothes more than his face.”

  “Keep your eyes open for him in the casino and get in touch with one of us if you see him.”

  “Will do,” Gordon said. He glanced at the TV. “Hey, is that the invitational?”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. He, Harold, and Dannie were sitting in front of it having lunch. “It hasn’t started yet.”

  “I hope Benton Arbor wins. I’ve got a fifty riding on him. Great guy. Always tips big.”

  Imogen crunched a Tootsie Pop. Was it not possible for her to go through a day without someone pledging their undying love for Benton Arbor in her vicinity? She sat down in a chair with her back to the TV and started going over the old case files. Marielle’s killing was an aberration for Loverboy. None of the other victims had shown signs of sexual relations. The fact that Marielle had not struggled as her throat was crushed meant she was not afraid, that she had expected nothing of the kind from this man. She had gone to her room to have sex with him. This was even more telling if she had been a prostitute—women who made their living that way tended to be more careful with their companions.

  The perfume was odd too. He’d been so meticulous with the other killings, leaving no trace behind. But if he had brought Poison with him—was it a trigger? Was it just the name that turned him on?

  The two different kinds of killings suggested a split in Loverboy’s personality. On the one hand he was rigorously organized and controlled; on the other, the same man, but slightly undone. It was as if the effort of control required for the Loverboy killings took its toll and he had to find another outlet. As if he were acting a part.

  Unless his murder of Marielle had simply been a way to punish Imogen.

  Imogen closed her eyes and rubbed her temples with her fingertips. She needed to know if there had been others killed like Marielle. If there were others, it was part of his pathology, not something special he had done just for her.

  There was only one way to know. She made herself dial the number of the Boston Police Department before she could chicken out.

  CHAPTER 33

  A man’s voice on the other end of the phone answered. “Homicide, Detective Reginald Nottingham.”

  “Hi, Reggie? It’s Imogen. I’m glad to see you’re still working Sundays.”

  A beat. The voice, going husky, said, “Finally. I knew you would wake up and see that life without me is incomplete.”

  “You are absolutely right.” Imogen laughed. “And all I need to complete it is for you to do me a favor.”

  “Sexual or professional?”

  Imogen rolled her eyes.

  “I hear you rolling your eyes. That’s how well I know you.”

  “Reggie, do you remember the Louisa Greenway case last June?”

  “Of course. It was the last time you were here in Boston—the last time I had a happy moment.”

  “Right. Could you do some looking around for me to see if there were any other unsolved homicides at around the same time?” Reggie snorted with the derision of an overworked cop, and Imogen rushed to elaborate. “Any others involving women, probably under forty, who had recently had sex but were killed with no sign of struggle. Possibly killed during sex, possibly dumped in water, possibly with a hickey. Possibly with traces of Poison perfume on the sheets. I’m not sure how specific to get.”

  “You don’t want much, do you?”

  “I’ll return the favor sometime.”

  “Now you’re talking. I’ll see what I can find and call back. We’re a little busy here right now but I’ll fit this in for you. Or rather, your favors.”

  Imogen hung up and glanced at the television. She had never watched professional racing before, but from the jammed grandstands she might be the only person in America to have missed it. The invitational was not, as she had imagined, a single race, but an entire day of racing involving different categories of cars. She looked at the schedule at the bottom of the TV screen and saw that Benton’s race was the last of the day, after at least a dozen others. Her eyes began scanning the crowd. The speedway was packed with people, most of them families, and all of them cheering and laughing and smiling.

  Smiling.

  She started flipping frantically through the dossiers of Loverboy’s victims with one hand, making a list with the other.

  Rosalind Carnow had ridden on the Stratosphere roller coaster the day before she
disappeared.

  Benny Woolworth, the Oakwood victim, had tokens in his pocket from a video arcade.

  Steve Simon of Ecton had been moonlighting as a security guard at the Crocodile County Fairgrounds for four weeks, in order to buy his two sons mountain bikes for Christmas, before he failed to return home one night.

  And Kaylee Banks had attended a birthday party for her younger cousin at a miniature golf course two weekends before she was taken.

  That meant four of the six victims had been to amusement sites, places where people went to have a good time, right before the killer struck them. Places where people smiled. Could that be his hunting ground?

  Buried deep in the file on Pauline Dodd, Imogen found more suggestive evidence. Pauline’s bedside table contained a stack of paper tickets, like the kind you won at a carnival.

  She would have to have someone call Pauline Dodd’s sister, with whom the girl had lived, and ask if she had been to a carnival. They had buried her over a year ago. It seemed cruel to reopen the wounds, but Imogen had no choice.

  The only victim unaccounted for was Louisa Greenway. Imogen reread every word of her file but came up with nothing.

  Just a thread.

  Imogen called the FBI crime lab and asked to speak to someone in fibers.

  “Can you tell me what this”—she read the scientific name of the polyester thread found on Louisa’s clothing—“would come off of? Or, better, could it have come from a stuffed animal?”

  “Maybe. But not a fancy one. We’re definitely not talking FAO Schwarz.”

  “One from a carnival?”

  “Yeah, that would probably be about right. No promises, obviously, unless I’d seen the fiber and the animal, but I think you’re on the right track.”

  Imogen realized, as she hung up, that her mouth was filled with the taste of oranges.

  She looked up and saw Bugsy come in carrying the tape from the security office. “Bugsy, I need— Bugsy, are you listening to me?”

  He turned away from the television. “Sorry, boss. I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed the race.”