by Diane Capri
Jason tapped on the door of 2C.
“Yeah, who’s there?” a male voice from inside called out, followed by a fit of coughing.
Jason waited until the coughing subsided before saying, “Mr. Avidon, my name is Jason Bower. I’d like a few minutes of your time, if you don’t mind.”
The door opened a crack. His ruddy face looked out. “What about?”
“About your wife, Judith, and your son.”
“I don’t have nothing to say about them. Not to you or anybody.”
On reflex, Piper grabbed Jason’s arm and squeezed. They had found their man. Now all they had to do was get him to talk to them.
“Mr. Avidon, it’s a matter of life or death,” Jason said.
“When ain’t it with those two?”
Piper covered her mouth with her hand.
“Whose life you talking about?” the man said, opening the door a bit wider. His bloodshot eyes found Piper’s. “Yours?” he asked her.
She nodded. “And Sybil Squire.”
He snorted and coughed, but this time he quickly got the cough under control. “So she finally got there, huh? That was all she ever wanted, to get back at her. Took her sweet time, her and the boy, but she was never one for rushing things. ‘Specially when it came to evening the score with the great Sybil Squire.”
“Mr. Avidon, let us in, please. Talk to us,” she said.
After a long pause he backed away from the door, leaving it ajar. Jason gently pushed it open. They entered, closing the door behind them. The room was small, the ceiling low and stained dark with water spots. It smelled of tobacco smoke, soiled clothing and sickness.
Avidon lit a cigarette. He offered the nearly empty pack to her and Jason. Jason refused. She took one. She had never wanted a cigarette so badly in her life. “Can I pay you for this? You’re almost out.”
“What’s one less before I die? Cancer sticks. Coffin nails. They ain’t kidding.”
Jason lit hers. The smoke burned her mouth and throat. Suddenly, it didn’t taste so good.
There was nowhere to sit except on the bed, a bed that was little more than a cot. She stepped to the open window and leaned against the sill.
“So whadda you want to know?” he said.
“What happened that day at the asylum?” Jason asked. “Who killed Sybil’s daughter? Did Judith kill Norma and pin it on the inmate?”
Piper saw something in his eyes, a look of bafflement or surprise by what Jason had asked. It suddenly hit her. Like a montage in film, flashing before her eyes, she caught bits and pieces of the movies Sybil had mentioned, the ones she was sure contained clues. Murder, greed, insanity, and revenge by a blood relative—all were women. Her breath caught in her throat. It wasn’t Sybil’s daughter who had died that day. It wasn’t Norma who had been bludgeoned to death, but someone else, and this man knew it.
“You don’t ease into it, do you? Go right for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Jason said.
Avidon licked his lips, sank down on the cot and said, “You’re on the wrong trail. But I ain’t surprised, ‘cause that’s what you’re s’pose to think.”
“Norma killed the nurse, Judith Neely,” Piper said. It was not a question. “Norma killed her and took her identity.”
Avidon’s eye’s stared into hers. “Okay, I’m gonna save you time and tell you what happened that day. I don’t have a lot of time myself. You guessed it. Only took forty years for someone to catch on. I don’t want no more people hurt or killed. I was in love with her. We was lovers in the sanitarium. When she told me she was pregnant, I knew I couldn’t let her have my kid in no nuthouse. She planned it all out. Judith Neely, the new nurse, was a loner and perfect for the switch. She didn’t have no family or friends to speak of. She was the same size and had the same coloring as Norma. Close enough to fit the bill, anyways. Soon as Norma laid eyes on her she knew what she was gonna do.
“Norma was good with makeup and hair. She got lots of practice making up the other inmates and even some of the nurses. Fact is, that very morning she dyed her hair the same color as that nurse’s. She wanted to be a makeup artist for the movies, y’know, and there was no shortage of supplies. Momma sent her anything she wanted. Momma took good care of the nurses too, gifts and such. Anyway, Norma studied that nurse. Studied the way she walked and talked, those little things people do with their hands and body, right down to the way she blinked and looked away when talking to folks. When she was ready, she faked a chest cold and got this nurse to bring her some cough medicine. Norma ambushed her when she came into the room, knocked her out. She switched clothes, pulled her own hair into a ponytail, the way Neely always wore hers, then in cold blood she proceeded to do a real number on that poor girl.”
It made sense, horrible sense. Judith Avidon was Sybil’s daughter. After all these years Sybil was being held captive and terrorized by her own daughter, a daughter thought to be dead.
He looked at her with red, rheumy eyes. “I didn’t have nothing to do with the actual killing. That was all Norma. But, hell, that don’t matter. I’m just as guilty. I knew what was coming and I didn’t try to stop it. Even did my part. Norma made me beat up her face, her eyes and mouth mostly, so they’d swell and make it harder for anyone to notice the switch. That was the hard part, hitting the woman I loved, and her being pregnant. Then she made me go get this other inmate from across the hall, a gal who’d picked on Norma a couple of times. Like I said, she always got even, always. Anyway, I dragged Wanda out of her room and into Norma’s. She’d seen the whole thing and was too scared to do or say anything. Norma smeared blood all over her, and cracked Wanda’s head and knuckles against what was left of the dead nurse’s face, her teeth in particular, to make it look like she’d gone crazy with rage and beat a fellow inmate to death. When the scene was all set the way Norma wanted it, she sounded the alarm. It was a cakewalk. Nobody really questioned it. With a nurse and a guard as eyewitnesses, it was pretty much over and done with.” He took a moment to rest; all the talking had made him short of breath.
“But why?” Piper said. It was all she could manage.
He cleared his throat. “Why’d I help her? Well take a good look at me. I ain’t no Cary Grant. Norma was the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on. Looked just like her mother, she did. I was nuts about her. If she asked me to pop the Pope, I would’ve. Damn straight I would’ve.”
Jason’s eyes met Piper’s. She saw disbelief in his expression. “No one noticed the switch? What about the hospital staff?” he asked.
“Not with her face all swollen and bruised. She played the hysterical witness to the hilt. Academy award performance. Like her momma, she could act. The next day she called in and quit. Who could blame her?”
“And you. Did you quit?”
“I stayed on for a while, so it wouldn’t look suspicious.”
Silence filled the room. She and Jason both trying to assimilate the information. Avidon lit another cigarette from the burning butt.
“Those two, my wife and son, are bad people. Psychopaths, I think they call people like them nowadays. She used me to break out of the asylum. We lived together on and off for about ten years—ten bad years. It got so I was afraid to close my eyes. Beer bottle,” he said, and pointed to a cut across his eyebrow, and one at the corner of his mouth. He unbuttoned his shirtsleeve, pushed it up to reveal a long white scar on his forearm. “Clam knife. She sometimes went off the deep end and when that happened, there was no controlling her. Lest ways, not by me. The only one who escaped her wrath was our boy, Tony. That one couldn’t do no wrong. She spoilt him something awful. We never got along, me and that boy. But I loved her. I know that sounds stupid, but I don’t know how to explain the spell she had over me. I wasn’t the only one she could put a spell on. Men fell for her, young men, rich men. She had somethin’ that drew em in.”
“Did she leave you?” Piper mashed out the cigarette in a
mound of dried bird droppings on the outer windowsill.
“Naw, that wasn’t her way. If she wanted to get rid of someone, she made it more permanent. She tried to poison me. Damn near succeeded. I caught her lacing my orange juice with anti-freeze. Made me sick as a dog, almost didn’t make it.” He clucked his tongue. “Now I wish she’da killed me. It woulda been faster, more merciful than going out this way.” He rubbed his chest. “Lung cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” Piper said.
He waved her sentiments away. “It ain’t that I don’t deserve it.”
“Will you tell the police what you just told us?” Jason asked.
“No. If you can stop her, that’d be good. But I can’t help you. Ain’t no way I’m finking on her and the boy. I just ain’t. If you go to the cops with what I told you, I’ll deny everything.”
“Without your statement, she’s going to get away with another murder,” Jason said.
“Then you best do what you can to stop her. I ain’t spending my last days in the joint.”
“Did Norma kill other patients under her care?” Piper asked.
“Don’t know about that. I wouldn’t put it past the two of them. She knows plenty about drugs and herbs and medicine that maybe won’t show up in a dead body.”
With Vera Wade’s heart condition, she was an easy target. “Why is she after her mother?”
“She hates her. Blames her for everything bad that happened to her in her life. It goes way back to when she was a little girl. Back to when her fag stepdad went berserk and slashed hisself up right in front of her. She was sent away like it was her fault. Then her mother replaced her with a new kid. Her mother didn’t pay much attention to Norma. She was only interested in her movies and getting new husbands, husbands that didn’t want to be a daddy to Norma. All Norma wanted was for someone to love her. Her mother never questioned Norma’s death in the asylum. Just closed the book on her.” Avidon chuckled. “Norma went to her own funeral. Made herself up like a hospital nurse and even offered a personal condolence to Sybil. Sybil thanked her and walked away.” He grinned. “Momma didn’t have a clue.”
Piper thought of Sybil’s words at the pool that day she’d invited her over: ‘… Family is everything. Love cannot thrive on deception and lies.’
“Do you know what she intends to do with her mother?”
“If the woman’s still alive it’s because she wants to make her suffer for as long as she can. There’s fifty-some years of payback behind that hate. You’d think killing the baby woulda’ been enough for Norma, but it was only the beginning.”
Piper felt numb. “What do you mean? What baby?”
“The little half brother. Norma hated that kid. Her momma walked in and caught her in the act. She caught her holding him under the water in the tub. Drowned him. That’s when Sybil had her put away in that asylum. Everyone thought Norma had a breakdown from grief or misplaced guilt. Ha. That woman has no conscience. None.”
Piper thought about that innocent little boy killed by the sister he adored because of hatred and jealousy. Norma might get away with her mother’s murder, too, unless they could stop it.
He began to cough again. When the cough turned into an uncontrolled fit, she and Jason let themselves out of the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Does she want help, Piper?” Jason asked when they returned to the car.
“What? Yes, she has to want help. Sybil tried to give me clues by way of her movies, four of them. I made the mistake of looking for specific messages in the body of the movies when I finally realized it was the content of the combined stories. As an editor, I should know I can’t do my job unless I know the plot first. The plots all dealt with one or more elements—murder, revenge, greed, and insanity within a family. It hit me moments before Avidon confessed.” She shook her head. “A confession that’s worthless to us.”
“Maybe not. If I can convince my captain that there’s something suspicious about the Norma Knoller death, LAPD might request to have the body of the woman murdered in the asylum exhumed.”
“Exhumed?” Piper asked, sitting up straight.
“He said the murdered woman was the nurse and not Sybil’s daughter. He claimed that Norma took the nurse’s identity. If that’s true, the body in that grave should have no DNA components similar to those of Sybil Squire or any of her descendants—meaning the daughter and grandson. It could be the break we need to substantiate that Norma is alive and may be impersonating her own mother.
“I hadn’t thought about that body.”
“On the other hand, if the exhumed body does exhibit matching DNA, then Norma Knoller died in the asylum that day and there’s no case.”
“We have to try.”
Jason nodded. “I agree.”
After their visit to the Tropical Palms, Piper felt a need shower again, to wash away the ugliness of, not Avidon’s deplorable living conditions, but his disturbing confession. What was happening to Sybil began fifty years ago, with the suicide of Norma’s stepfather. No, long before that, when Sybil was born. This nightmare began with Sybil’s mother who blamed her for everything bad in her life. First the mother and now the daughter. Sybil had been a victim all her life.
“I’m taking you to my place. I can’t let you stay right next to them.”
“I can’t leave Dr. J there alone. I’m responsible for him. Belle would be devastated if anything happened to him.”
“Okay, we get the bird and we’re out of there.”
Jason maneuvered through stop-and-go traffic. The sun was setting when they pulled up in front of the Vogt house.
His cell phone rang before they could exit the car.
“Bower,” he said.
He grasped her upper arm, holding her back.
“He’s still alive? Where? What hospital? Okay, I’m on my way.”
Piper’s pulse began to race.
“That was the desk clerk at the Tropical Palms. Avidon dove off the roof of the hotel. He’s still alive, but barely.”
“Oh my god.”
“He left a sealed envelope for me with the desk clerk just minutes before he went up to the roof.”
“A written confession?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Look, you go. I’ll grab Doc and take him to your house. I’ll need my car anyway.”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a house key, and handed it to her. “Call me as soon as you get there.”
When she opened the car door to exit, he pulled her back, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her. “No heroics. Don’t go up to the guesthouse. Get the journal and the bird and get out. Pronto.”
“Yes, sir. No heroics, I promise.” She kissed him back.
“Where’s the pepper spray?”
She patted her purse.
Piper didn’t wait for him to drive away, she was already dashing to the front door. She rushed in, disengaged the alarm, locked the door, and headed for the kitchen. Dr. J squawked and screeched from his tree-like perch outside his cage. Good, she wouldn’t have to coax him out to get him into his traveling carrier. Sometimes, when he was nervous or annoyed, he dug his talons in and refused to budge.
She grabbed Sybil’s journal from the kitchen table and stuffed it into her purse. Then she rushed down the basement steps to where Belle kept an assortment of travel carriers. She chose the clear crystal shuttle, one she knew he liked and would go into easily. On the way back to the stairs something in the space under the staircase caught her eye. A toolbox that she didn’t recall seeing there after Luke, or whatever his name was, had pumped out the flooded basement. She leaned down to read the name engraved into the metal. Luke Monte. Had Luke forgotten his tools in the Vogt’s basement? No, not likely. They weren’t Luke’s tools. Luke wasn’t the Vogt’s handyman. Not the man she knew as Luke. How had the phony handyman gotten his hands on the real handyman’s toolbox? She straightened up and looked around. On the staircase step, at eye level to
her, was a clump of moist dirt. Two steps down was another clump of dirt. Her gaze followed the clumps to the bottom of the staircase. The dirt trail led to the massive chest freezer directly in front of her.
She lowered the bird carrier to the floor and opened the freezer lid. Commercial butcher paper wrapped packages of frozen meat filled the entire chest from one end to the other. That was a lot of meat for two people. In the middle of the freezer, dirt marred a white package. She lifted it up, and then another and another, her heart pressing into her throat. Three layers down, she saw clear plastic sheeting with rivulets of dirt lining the creases and folds. Two more packages and she saw blue fabric. Buttons. A pocket. On the pocket was an oval patch. Stitched on the patch were letters. She leaned down closer. L-U-K-E. Luke. Her mind had difficulty grasping or making sense of what she saw. Maybe it was a bundle of clothes buried under the Vogt’s prime cuts of steaks and chops. But it wasn’t.
Upstairs, Dr. J squawked.
She removed another package. A pair of eyes, partially open and glazed over stared up at her. She breathed in the putrid odor that even the coldness of the freezer couldn’t mask. She gagged. It was the real Luke.
That’s when she heard him behind her. He caught her across the shoulders, smashed the chemical-soaked cloth against her nose and mouth, and held her tight against his chest. She couldn’t move. She held her breath for as long as she could, but she was no match for his size and muscle. The last thing she heard before everything went black was Dr. J screaming like a banshee in the room above.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Her head was splitting. The smell of chloroform filled her sinuses and burned the back of her throat. She opened her eyes to a spinning room and nausea. In the moments it took to regain her equilibrium, she tried to get her bearings. Her gaze settled on a pair of pale blue eyes. Sybil’s eyes. Why hadn’t she noticed how much his eyes resembled hers? How close his features were to hers, his own grandmother?
