The Dorchester Five

by Peter Manus

  I move silently among the furnishings, stepping from one rich, old carpet to the next. I pass the desk where I had spied upon Brewster Van Ness a day earlier, and, sure enough, I see now that there is a doorway with something heavy splayed half across it, and what appears to be a vast space beyond. The light, such as it is, emanates from here.

  I glide forward and observe the warehouse—the stacks of inventory, the mini-forklift, the distant exit sign glowing red. The thudding is louder in here and originates to my left where the place is its inky darkest. I hesitate, considering what I will do, and as I stand there a shadow before me on the cement floor begins to materialize into a more definite shape. I focus, and it is as if I have been playing a trick with myself, purposely avoiding looking at something that I have realized all along is the very thing I seek. It is a small mass, dense and uneven, perhaps some wrapping materials wound haphazardly around itself, or a rolled rug that has been dropped and partially unraveled. Near it, something catches the light of the distant exit sign. It is a puddle. It grows even as I stare across at it.

  I step across the floor toward this mound, which compels me. When I get close I can discern much more—a hand, a pair of glasses. A shoe that has been dislodged from its foot but remains tied. I move further forward, hungry to see. The little man’s throat is sliced, the blood still draining from him, but slowly, settling by his ear and in the hollow of his neck. In spite of the movement of blood, he is not dying—he is dead, and his eyes stare at a great nothingness. He is a middle-aged man with a cultivated moustache, elongated sideburns, one earring. I have never seen him before, although at times I have wondered if in death our faces take on a bland conformity, abandoning at the last moment the quirks of individuality that we value so much in life but need not at all when we enter the void. I scan his body quickly—for the last day of his life he has worn a cardigan sweater, frittered away to nothingness at a cuff and along the base, plus worn corduroy trousers and argyle socks, one with a run. Most importantly, for my purposes, he is not Brewster Van Ness. No one has cheated me of yet another of my deaths. I remain in business.

  I hear, then, the vehicles. They move fast but silently. They are wise to forego their sirens, but I will escape. I turn and flee quietly as they close in.

  It is from the relative safety of the bakery’s entryway that I watch them arrive. The blue lights pulse silently against the windows across the street as uniformed cops confer in silhouette, the yellowy splashes of light from their torches spiking out to snatch at walls and trees and occasionally the sidewalk just off from where I crouch. The spears of light do not, however, penetrate the dark that clusters round as if to protect me. An ambulance arrives, then another, and soon the antique shop’s interior glows, and for the cops it is the aftermath of murder.

  When the first gurney rolls out, I watch with interest. There is a man strapped down—his face is not covered. He is not still; indeed he complains angrily. This is Brewster. Care for him well, men in blue! They will take the anonymous corpse later, after photos.

  I slip from my spot and around the corner at a crouch. It is good to be back in the game.

  Très sincèrement,

  Nightingale

  TWENTY-SIX

  Marina Papanikitas’s Personal Journal

  Upstairs you sleep, Zoey, and down here I sprawl, laptop askew across my legs and the TV ablaze behind it, me with my eyes trained on my double layer of screens as simultaneously as I can manage. Taking in The Abominable Doctor Phibes at super low volume. Why I have a boner for Vincent Price right now, I cannot tell you, but it’s a feeling akin to my premmies and it’s driving me to suck down as much black comedy high-end slasher schlock from the sixties as I can handle. Right now psycho sidekick Vulnavia is doing her thing, decked out in ski resort get-up—all white, including the fur touches at wrists and boot rims. She’s just faked her auto breakdown and is luring dirty old gentleman number five to his icy demise. This junk is tripping synapses in my head, Zoey, but I’m not quite getting the connect I need.

  On the bright side, we can check the box on another of my only-useful-in-retrospect vishies—based on an anonymous tip received earlier tonight, Cambridge’s finest discovered Brewster Van Ness hog-tied inside the temperature-controlled stockroom he’s got built in his warehouse for storing rare valuables of a humidity-sensitive nature. Being as he’d been stripped to the skin and wrapped with duct tape, I’d say it’s pretty safe to cross off the visual from Pruddie Culligan’s attic. Now why at that moment, and why in that spot, would I pick up a vibe about an event that was to take place in another town and days later? If I understood that it could be a turning point in the case. Pondering all this, my love, is what’s got me hot-wired.

  Vulnavia is playing the white violin now—makes my stomach knot up. Goll-dang, I wish we’d done a better job at scaring professional fiddler Simon Love out of town.

  But first, my evening. Harry and I get a call about the assault on Brewster Van Ness as we’re leaving Concord and coast directly over to Boston Med, making good time only to flip our badges and get the usual Saturday night jaundiced response in the ER. Upstairs, we huddle with Brewster’s doc outside his room and pick up the basics: flesh wound across the forehead measuring eighteen stitches, plus some superficial pokes, nicks and slashes to his arms, apparently collected while deflecting random lunges inflicted by a frenzied but inept attacker. No permanent damage except perhaps the grudges the nurses and orderlies are likely to harbor—apparently our Brewster makes an imperious patient. One lucky gal on the ward got the honor of stabbing his ass with methohexital, with the result that he’s now a docile patient but not much of a witness. We peek in on him and find he’s wrapped pretty good and more coherent than I’d have figured. The nurse feeding him lemon ice chips is black with a cute side flip hairdo, glasses on a beaded chain, and no smile for anyone. That’s our Brewster.

  Nurse taps her wrist, setting a two-minute deadline as she leaves—not sure what happens then, but it turns out we don’t need to find out. Brewster tries gamely to be his supercilious self, but even he can hear himself slurring and so wisely keeps it brief. Essentially his claim is that he’d had some sort of meeting set up with a nun—not a joke, it turns out, but something about a charitable donation. Instead of a nun, a whore in grapeade-colored lip gloss came out of nowhere to attack him with a major blade, just as he was exiting the temperature-controlled storeroom. Sliced his face, then forced him to strip at knifepoint, trussed him with duct tape, and closed the door. Before leaving, she identified herself in dramatic fashion as the Nightingale.

  His tale is altogether tough to buy, I’m finding, even for a major Selina Kyle fan like me.

  Harry takes a more companionable tack. “Toughest part’s going to be telling your mom,” he says. “Lady Van Ness seemed very reliant on you when we spoke. She needs you, especially with your father gone only six, seven months.”

  He breathes for a while, mouth hanging slack and his one unbandaged eye closed, the lid trembling. I’m thinking we’ve lost him to the anesthesia when he opens his eye and gives me a look. Like what’d I do—I might have been thinking something vaguely uncharitable but it’s not like the guy can read my mind. “Mother,” he drawls, “is tougher than people think. Father…” Here he takes time to try to hitch himself up, without much success. “Father was more a burden than a support. House was hers. Money hers. Business…all hers.”

  Harry’s interested. “That so? Always thought of Hiram Myeroff as a market wizard.”

  Brewster almost musters a sneer. “Made a pile,” he admits. “Lucky to have died before the pyramid collapsed. Violent bully.”

  “It’s a type that often does well in life,” I say agreeably.

  “Least he’s dead,” Brewster slurs. “One decent thing he did for us.”

  Harry nods like now he sees. “Say, what happened to that crossbow?”

  “Ask,” he stutters, then reaches up to wipe the spittle from his chin, “Armand.”
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  “He doesn’t know.”

  “Then she took it. Nightingale. Said: ‘I am Nightingale.’ Did I tell you that? Swear, this was the line she planned I would die hearing.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Why didn’t I?”

  I gesture logically. “Die with the line ‘I am Nightingale’ in your ears.”

  He gives me a sidelong look, and I can tell he’s trying to muster up his contempt mojo but the drugs won’t let him. “After she said it, she looked…behind. Then left.”

  “Heard something, maybe,” Harry says, giving me a glance.

  I say, “You’ve been a big help, Brewster. Look, uh, there’s something else you need to know, so I’ll give it to you direct, the way you Van Nesses take your news.”

  He nods.

  “I think that noise this woman heard was Armand arriving. Response team found him dead out in the warehouse, not all that far from where you were found yourself. Attack matches yours, except he wasn’t so lucky.”

  He considers this for a long moment, then nods vaguely. We figure that for a signal that our time’s up and start backing out of there. Harry’s giving him a few words about healing and staying in touch, when he interrupts.

  “Something else,” he says. I look back and find it interesting that he’s aiming his gaze past Harry and at me.

  “What’s that?” I say.

  “Woman, when she heard the noise,” he manages, “she…said ‘merde.’”

  “What’s that?” Harry asks. “Didn’t catch you.”

  “That’s French,’’ I say, “for the world’s favorite expletive.”

  So, Zoey, as you can see, we’re on. Agnès, code name Nightingale, native tongue French, where are you? I’m going to junk Phibes—it’s just not getting me there. Next up: Theatre of Blood. Diana Rigg aids and abets Vincent Price’s frustrated nutcase. His murders mimic Shakespeare. Rigg wears a lot of wigs and changes persona a lot, so, you know—a couple of shades closer toward what we’re learning about our vengeful bird.

  P.S.—I keep thinking about Penny Dupris telling me that she’ll put on her wedding dress and march her fiancé into the church with a shotgun if necessary. Why is that giving me a premmie flutter? Why, why, why, Zoey?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I am Nightingale—

  He has attempted his life. A yearning for peace seduced him. Death, through which all pain dissolves—its soft call must thrill him. Or perhaps, instead, it is a yearning for justice that compelled him. Perhaps after his years of quiet misery he cannot tolerate the fleeting specter of joy with which he has been flirting—the moment when he and the instrument through which he speaks pour forth their joint soul, bringing those who listen to a collective ecstasy, if only for the moment before the chords fade. He does not deserve this, he thinks. It is simply too perverse, for him to bask even momentarily in the warmth of the public’s heart, when he escaped its wrath on that earlier occasion. If he had been punished he might have moved along, humbled by his sins. But, like an unclean magic, the law arranged for him to slip free of his absolution. And so he must prevent fate from further diluting the condemnation he craves.

  But neither of these explanations is the real reason he did it, you know. It is on my behalf that he attempted to take his life. He believes I am too weak to persevere. He dwells on the three lives cut down that will be rendered the random amusements of a psychotic, no more to be elements of a mission charioted on the one hand by terrible power of vengeance and on the other by the even more terrible power—love. He seeks to right the chariot, to put in my hands again the reins to carry me through. He is le naïf. Does he not have faith I will kill him in time?

  I never thought to lock my travel case once I was with him. Why would I? My money is his to take if he likes. But I did not see how close he was to the edge. And so he found my stash of poisoned pain relievers. When I come in from my fright at Brewster Van Ness’s shop, exhausted yet strangely energized, I see my case has been dragged from under the bed, and it gives me pause. Between us, Simon is the tidy one. But I do not get it, not yet.

  I drop my clothes and enter the steep-sided tub, then stand with my face under the erratic beat of the shower, thinking about that little man lying dead on the warehouse floor. There is no doubt that Brewster Van Ness killed this man, as I saw it myself just as I leaned over the corpse. Brewster stands with the box cutter unhidden—it must be that they use it often for opening packages. The man is complaining. He is saying, “When someone says fifteen minutes I don’t expect to wait forty-five. So when she came back I told her exactly that—well, you know me, I don’t mince words—and do you know what she had the nerve to say to my face? Oh, you’re going to love this…” Brewster thrusts the blade into his neck and rips it across, then steps back. It is a precise pairing of motions, balanced well between his feet—perhaps he trained in fencing. The little man continues with his story for several seconds, even as blood begins to spurt from his wound, and then he blinks, quite amazed. He fades to invisibility, and so for the remainder of the vision I see only Brewster. He steps forward and grasps something with an open palm, his fingers somewhat curved as if this object would be spherical, then raises his hand hard, toward his chest. I imagine that the injured man has spun away as he sinks into himself and that Brewster has now lifted the man to a standing position, grasping him by his forehead or perhaps his face, so that the smaller man’s spine is brought up against Brewster’s abdomen, and the back of his skull nests against Brewster’s chest. I watch Brewster cross over with the knife and slash it back with a great muscular rip. At this, his hands release. He has, perhaps, come close to decapitating the man before he allows him to fall to the floor.

  He looks at what he has done with a tiny smile, like an artist who dares, in seclusion, to gaze with open affection upon his own creation. There is nothing but this inquisitive pleasure discernible in his facial expression. Then he strips. Once naked, he begins rending his clothing with the blade and stuffing the pieces down a large rectangular drain in the cement floor just by where the body rests. His torso is muscular. Standing, he begins cutting his own arms, moving them as he does so that the jabs are shallow and jagged. The entire vision fades as he begins whistling. He is whistling “Dragostea Din Tei.” Is he aware, somehow, that I will have this fleeting vision? Is it he taunting me?

  I pull the shower curtain and reach toward my towel, and this is when I see Simon. He is outside the small kitchen window, his head leaning against it, his back to me. I have never seen him out there, sitting on the fire escape. It gives me a momentary start. Then I walk over, quite naked, and open the window. I say, “I could use a fuck. What do you say?”

  He slumps, then begins to fall backwards into the room. His violin is in his arms, and it slips free. I fumble to catch it. His body begins to slide and I grab at him so that for a moment his momentum stops and his head hangs, upside down, a foot above the floor. I heave at him, seeking to lift him back up, and as I do he vomits across his own face. It is a heavy vomit, thick as paint. It is black.

  I reverse direction then, dragging him to the floor and then across the room to the sink. I turn on the water hard and attempt to lift him up so that I may shove his head under the water. I cannot do it, though. He is not just dead weight, but he is also slippery and slides between my arms, so I switch directions once again and drag him to the tub. Here I am successful at rolling him up over the edge. I turn the cold tap and the water smacks down hard upon his face. He vomits again, and I see his eyes blink in response to the water. I turn from him and scramble through his kitchen cabinets, spilling items about, searching for I know not what. I give up, and instead run to his armoire, where I bully myself into a pair of his pants and his sweatshirt with a hood. I jam my feet into his shoes. I run, slamming the door out of my way and leaving it open behind me. A woman, old, Hispanic, opens a door as I clatter by.

  “Ambulance!” I say, pointing up the stairs as I continue down at a dangerous speed.
She stares stupidly. I do not wait for her reply.

  There is an all-night drugstore, I know, about ten blocks away. I run up the empty industrial boulevard, Simon’s shoes smacking loudly against the cement. I encounter nobody. After several blocks, I take off the shoes and hold one in each hand. I run faster.

  The drugstore is large and old. I have passed it many a time with its window filled with wheelchairs and walkers, the outdated mannequins wearing nurses’ smocks. I have lost one of the shoes, but I would not be pausing at this point to clad my feet regardless, and I throw the other shoe aside as I push through the folding doors. I race past the register—I catch only the smeared image of a heavy woman in a pink vest staring at me—and straight to the back where I slam my hand against the little bell rapidly until it shoots out from under my grip and cascades off somewhere. A man comes out, annoyed, putting on his white jacket. He is older, with a hooked nose and glasses.

  “What’s the damned rush…” he seems to be saying.

  “He has taken the poison! What do I give him?” My voice is hoarse, practically all rasp, from running.

  The man’s visage changes as he takes me in. “What form?” he says, but he is moving around the corner of the counter already.

  I follow him. “It is solid. The rat poison, maybe.”

  “Your child?”

  “A man. He has been vomiting.”

  He takes several things from his shelves and bundles them into my arms. I fumble for money but he pushes me toward the door.