by J. A. Kerley
When I arrived at the hotel, I patted my jacket for the electronic key, but it seemed to have disappeared. I recalled my stop for coffee, how I’d slipped the jacket off. It seemed the slippery plastic card had fallen out.
I’d run back inside the shop for a couple of minutes to grab a refill, leaving the jacket in the adjoining chair, but a thief would simply have taken the jacket. The card was probably laying beneath the chair, useless without the room number.
No harm done. I had the deskman generate a second key.
Sickened by events I hid in my room and wondered why Jeremy had targeted Folger. It was apparent that at some point when Jeremy was following me, he had seen Folger. She had flipped his switch.
It was my fault. I hadn’t figured he’d tail me.
What did he have planned for Folger? Was she already dead? And why had he killed the tenant so brutally? She, it appeared, had flipped his switch as well.
Jeremy was falling apart at a terrible rate.
I turned on a muted television for quiet company, something to keep me from being alone with the horror of my thoughts and culpability. I watched until the news show focused on Cynthia Pelham’s campaign and the rancor it aroused in many. Faces screaming soundlessly are even uglier than with sound. I turned off the idiot box, pulled the blackout curtains, and lay in the dark.
Several minutes passed and I became aware of an indefinable presence I could not identify, like a sound just past the edge of hearing. The sole light fell from the red LED clock numbers. I listened into the room until I fell into sleep.
Sometime later my eyes snapped open. I heard my last snore in the air. My heart was racing. Why? I looked for the clock but couldn’t see its display. The room was as black as a coal mine. My open eyes saw little more than my closed eyes.
I felt something in the room. A presence.
It’s standing by the bed, said my child’s mind.
Nothing’s there, the adult countered. You’ve felt this before. There’s never anyone there.
It’s coming closer, gasped the child. It’s above us!
I held my breath, ready to attack what I could not believe was there. Then, softly …a sense of movement. Followed by the most terrifying whisper I’d ever heard, hatred shredded through broken glass.
“A gun is aimed directly at your heart. I have night-vision goggles. Move and you die.”
“I’m not moving an inch,” I whispered.
“I’m going to restrain your arms,” the voice said. “Roll over and put them behind your back. This is the most dangerous moment in your life.”
I complied. Tape wrapped my wrists, ankles, my legs at my knees. I heard a chair pulled close to the bedside. The chair squeaked under weight. Another voice appeared in the air, light and conversational.
“Jesus, Carson. Can you believe the price of a good steak in this town?”
Jeremy. The room went silent save for the traffic on the street. I strained my eyes in his direction, but the room was lightless. I wondered if he was studying me through his goggles, making an inspection.
“I want to help you, Jeremy,” I said, as calm as I could muster. “The police might kill you on sight. You’ve got to go in and …talk with them. I’ll go with you, keep you safe.”
I felt his warm voice at my ear. “For sure you’re going to keep me safe, little brother. Timmy’s in the well.”
“Timmy’s in the …would you please make sense?”
“THINK ABOUT IT! Do you remember those old Lassie re-runs we used to watch? Lassie’s owner, that idiot Timmy, was always stuck in a cave or falling down a well. Little Timster depended on Lassie to bring help. Arf.”
It took scant seconds for the realization to sink in. “Folger’s dependent on you for food and water. Maybe even air.”
“I don’t get to her for a few hours …goodbye Alice.”
“What if something goes wrong and you can’t get back to her? I don’t want her to die, Jeremy.”
“Dear Carson, ever the hero on water and land.” His fingers scruffed my hair. “Obviously, it’s incumbent on you to keep me free.”
I heard his feet start away.
“Jeremy?”
“Si?”
“You held something over Vangie, right? Leverage?” Hoping against hope.
“Her idea, start to finish. Prowsie needed me to be her Sirius, Carson.”
“What are you talking about? Her serious what?”
“S-I-R-I-U-S. The brightest star in the heavens, Sirius. After all these years, Old Prowsie took the hots for her prize subject, wanted a big fling in the Big Apple.”
“I-I don’t believe that.”
“It’s what she croaked to me on the plane: ‘You’re my Seeeer-rius, Jeremy. I neeeeed you.’ Not that I’d have surrendered my virtue. I can’t imagine anything more disgusting than grunting over Prowsie’s ancient body. It would be like fucking a corpse.”
I heard the door open. Close. He was gone.
I struggled twenty minutes with the tape, stretching it enough to work free. My devious brother had swiped the key from my pocket. By the time I’d returned to the hotel and had a second key generated, he was already in my room, beneath the bed.
I fumbled toward the light switch, tripping over something on the carpet. I flicked on the lights and found a brown paper package, a folded-over grocery bag. I upended the bag over the desk.
A woman’s panties and panty hose tumbled out.
They were followed by a cheap postcard like ones sold across the city. It displayed a photograph of the Empire State Building. Above the building, in balloon type, were the words, WE’RE HAVING A FUN TIME IN NEW YORK CITY! On the reverse was a line written in purple ink. It said, simply,
Do what he says. Please.
Below that,
Alice
I held the postcard in my hand and stared out the window as the sun turned the sky to orange behind the skyscrapers. Alice Folger was alive. I had to hope Jeremy was in control enough to restrain his urges for now. His visit was to tell me that his capture meant Alice Folger’s death. My brother never made idle threats.
I dressed and went to the station, arriving at seven. I saw Perlstein doing paperwork at his desk.
“Yo, Perl …how’s the hunt for Ridgecliff?”
“Cluff finally bought in to your rich guy view. He pushed your hoity-toity take on Ridgecliff up a notch, thought Ridgecliff might be artsy. Guess what? We saw a guy looked a lot like a Portuguese Ridgecliff waltzing past a security cam at the Guggenheim yesterday.”
“That’s great,” I said, my mouth going dry. “Smart move.”
“We’re gonna shoot this fucker dead on the street, Ryder. Thanks for pushing us on to the right path.” He shot a thumbs-up and turned back to his reports.
Thanks to me, the cops would soon be breathing down my brother’s neck. Had I been smart enough, or less frightened, I’d have told Jeremy his disguise and habits were known. But all I’d been able to think about was his relationship with Vangie. It wasn’t until he was gone that I realized my plight. Folger’s plight. I had to somehow let my brother know the NYPD was on to his disguise.
Why hadn’t he told me how to make contact? It seemed an omission on his part.
I wandered out to the street to pull some energy from the sun now filling the streets. I passed a newsstand as a bundle of early-edition papers slapped the pavement beside the rickety kiosk. The papers had been tossed from a delivery truck, a flatbed piled high, a man on the back offloading bundles of the New York Watcher.
“Hey, buddy,” I called to the guy on the truck. “You know where the Watcher’s offices are located?”
TWENTY-SIX
Benny Mac slapped toast crumbs and clots of scrambled egg from the front of his shirt. The goddamn shirt had shrunk, buttons tight, belly hair pushing through the puckered openings. He was sitting at a small round table outside a coffee shop adjoining the entrance to the Watcher’s headquarters, the table his de facto office in decent we
ather. A half-eaten plate of bacon and eggs, pancakes and fried potatoes sat in front of him, as did two cellphones, three pens and a notepad.
He paused in shoveling food into his mouth to observe the approach of a skinny black man in a blue uniform and crocheted Rasta hat. The man grinned from the pavement side of the low wrought-iron fence separating the tabled section from pedestrian traffic.
“Hey, Jimmy Warbles,” Benny Mac said through a mouthful of egg. “S’up?”
Jimmy Warbles ran the cleaning services at City Hall, was one of Benny Mac’s best sources of hot political dish. Benny wiped his mouth with a piece of buttered toast, lowered his voice.
“You got anything, Jimmy?”
Jimmy Warbles set his elbows on the fence, leaned forward, eyes making sure there was no one near. “I t’ink a lady in archives is makin’ it wit’ another lady in archives. T’ey bote married ladies, sure enough. They go in a supply room. Close t’ door.”
“Muff divers!” Benny said, eyes widening. “You sure?”
“Ever’body know ’cept the two ladies, who don’t know anybody know.”
Benny Mac considered the situation. “Tell you what, Jimmy, you figure out when I can get in with a camera.”
“It can maybe happen. What it wort’?”
Benny Mac saw a 120-point headline on the cover of the Watcher: LESBO LOVE NEST IN CITY HALL.
“If it makes the front page, Jimmy, you get five hundred. Inside gets three.”
Jimmy Warbles snapped his fingers and grinned yellow teeth that would have done a horse proud. “Be back atcha, my man.”
Benny thought a second, amended his proposal. “Tell ya what, Jimmy. If I can get a shot of ’em kissing, you get a grand.”
A pair of lesbos kissing in City Hall. Magic.
Warbles’s fingers flicked across Benny Mac’s palm, deal. He pimp-walked away, hands in his pockets, the bright hat bobbing like a multicolored mushroom.
Benny Mac returned to his breakfast, eating with renewed vigor. He finished, set the plate on the clean table at his back. He looked at his phones, hoping a story would ring in. The lesbo deal wouldn’t pay off for a while. It’d been a slow news week and unless something came up, he’d have to hit the Watcher’s photo archives, make up another fucking space alien story.
Benny Mac sighed, turned his eyes to a man pulling out a chair at a nearby table.
I know that guy. Jeez, wasn’t he the one I took the picture of …
“Hey, buddy. I know you. I saw you at the crime scene of that real estate lady. You were with my good friend, Shelly Waltz. Come over to my table, lemme buy you a cup a coffee. Hey, you don’t sound like you’re from around here.”
You sound like a mush-mouth hickarooni …
“Really? Inner-departmental loan, sent up to learn from the NYPD? I’m sure you have plenty to teach us as well. You want something with that coffee? Bagel? Danish? And is it officer or detective? Hey, those ladies that got cut wide open, Detective …How the cases going? Tough ones huh? I know, you can’t talk about it.”
This hillbilly knows something …
“I know, bud. NYPD sees stuff most departments never will. A lot of my friends are NYPD dicks. Shelly Waltz and me are like this. He’s always telling me stuff on the QT. When I finally write the story I always run it by the NYPD first. I could do a rough draft on the belly slasher story, fax a copy to Shelly and you this very afternoon. How do you spell your name? No, I don’t have to use it if you don’t want …”
Come on, spill it …
“Oh sure, the United Nations can be a big problem. The immunity thing. It’s true, a person could commit a crime and nothing can happen. It’s like they’re always in their own country. Sick. They come here to rape and pillage and then glide home scot-free. You can’t dynamite them out of the homeland. The only way to get at them is the free press.”
Is Bubba suggesting someone with diplomatic immunity killed the woman? Please, what embassy? Please oh dear God …I can keep this on page one for a fucking month …
“That’s the way it is up here. If the guy hops a plane back to his home country, it’ll take a helluva legal wrangle to get him back over here, if ever. Happens all the time. Gotta watch the airports, that’s crucial.”
Did the hick just say NYPD’s staked out TAP Airlines? THAT’S PORTUGAL!
“It’s a sad thing the way these foreigners take advantage of our good nature. Hey, gotta run buddy. Nice seeing you again. Enjoy your stay.”
You idiot hayseed …
Every Southerner knows the thicker your accent, the more you’re viewed as a naïve bumpkin by anyone north of the Mason-Dixon. After using my most cartoonish twang to shovel shit into Benny Mac’s nonexistent lap, I walked the streets to burn off energy. I went up Lexington, crossed to Central Park, spanked pavement down Eighth Avenue to Greenwich Avenue – passing within two block of Folger’s house – walked Greenwich to Sixth and into Tribeca. I angled east to the Lower East Side and turned back uptown. I was only a dozen or so blocks from the precinct when my phone rang: Clair Peltier’s cell.
“Hi, Clair.”
“I tested the hair and fiber evidence from the NYPD. It’s strange and I don’t think it’s what you expected.”
Boom. That was Clair in work mode. Direct and focused, science all the way. One of the reasons she was one of the top pathologists in the country.
“Uh, expected what, Clair?”
“You said the hair and fibers found at the woman’s crime scene were from New York?”
“Local shops, salons, barbers. At least that’s what everyone figured. What’s wrong?”
“Let me walk you through it. We took what you sent and burned it all in the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer.”
“I don’t underst—”
“Hush your head and listen. NYPD was right, testing on an individual basis was out of the question, unless you’ve got a hundred technicians or a couple of months. So our top tox guy, Ward, loaded everything in the GCMS, flashed it, and we checked the results. It’s almost bizarre.”
“How?”
“We got an amazing spike on arsenic. A few of those hairs were loaded. We think it has to be the hairs, unless someone had spilled arsenic on a rug, say, the rug fibers then included in the fibers left at the crime scene. But there were a lot more hairs than fibers. On a weight comparison, I’d put it a hundred-to-one hair over fiber. So I think a hank of hair inside the bag was thick with arsenic.”
“Got you.”
“I checked with the CDC in Atlanta. There was an arsenic poisoning in Key West nine months back, a husband loaded his invalid wife’s meals with the stuff. But, being an invalid, would she have gotten her hair cut outside her home, where someone could gather her hair? There’s that to consider. Anyway, that’s all I found in the whole country. At first.”
I held my breath. “And?”
“An hour ago I got a call from the CDC. They found a case that hadn’t reached the official records yet, still being documented. They put me in touch with a county coroner who said that his department had just recently uncovered an arsenic poisoning, homicide. A woman had loaded her abusive husband’s vitamin supplements with an old but potent agricultural-grade rat poison. The guy was a bodybuilder type, fit and powerful.”
“So it took a lot of arsenic.”
“The guy got sicker and sicker but thought he wasn’t adjusting his carbs and fats or whatnot – a head case. So wifey keeps upping the dosage until the guy could probably kill rats by sneezing on them.”
“But he got a haircut during the poisoning, right?”
“Every week. He wanted to look tidy if the Mr Universe pageant called.”
My grip tightened on the phone. Maybe the hairs could provide a starting place to find the killer.
“The poisonings were in the New York area, right? Or maybe New Jersey?”
“No, Carson. Not quite.”
“Where, then?”
“A little town southeast of Jacks
on, Mississippi. Right here in our own back yard, so to speak. Does that change anything in your cases?”
I hung up a minute later, head spinning. There was no proof the hair in the NYPD evidence bag was from Mississippi, it could be a local poisoning in progress. But the Mississippi case was scant miles across the border from central Alabama, an hour’s drive to the Institute, to Vangie’s house, to the area where my brother and I had grown up …
It made no sense. Nothing made sense. I didn’t have long to ponder the anomaly. My phone rang. This time it was Waltz, brusque: “Get here now.”
I grabbed a taxi and was in his office five minutes later. He threw the afternoon edition of the New York Watcher my way. I snatched it from the air, saw the headline.
PORTUGUESE DIPLOMAT SUSPECT IN SLASHER SLAYING.
The accompanying photo showed a hapless member of the Portuguese legation denying everything. The story was attributed to “an unnamed source close to the NYPD”.
“Oh Jesus,” I said, hoping my face registered appropriate horror. “Where the hell did it come from?”
“‘Close to the NYPD’ usually means some janitor or civilian passing through the detectives’ room heard the words ‘slasher’ and ‘Portuguese’ and ran to the Watcher to trade the words for a hundred bucks.” Waltz sank into his chair. “The local TV and radio are gonna land on it like flies on horseshit. You know what this does, don’t you?”
I handed the paper back, nodded.
“It’ll push Ridgecliff underground.”
Waltz tossed the paper in the waste can. “Do you think this will set Ridgecliff off? If Folger’s alive, will this make him kill her?”
“If he’s kept her alive there’s a reason. Having his cover blown shouldn’t affect that reason.”
He walked to the open blinds and drew them tight. He turned to me.
“Nothing makes sense about why Ridgecliff is in New York. It’s a goddamn carnival of mirrors. You sure you’re telling me everything about him?” Waltz stared, as if studying my reaction.
“Why would I keep information under wraps, Shelly?”
“Did you ever talk to Ridgecliff’s people? His relatives? That kid, the one who disappeared – Charles. Did Jeremy Ridgecliff like him, hate him?”
