“Can’t wait,” I said.
Ted was right to get the shot now. We’d be freezing our asses off soon enough, and any lead time was a good thing. Still, he didn’t have to be so damn happy about it.
I couldn’t figure out why he hated me. The guy either wanted to jump my bones or was utterly repulsed. I couldn’t tell. Not really something you could discuss without sounding like a complete idiot, so I just let it all fester.
Half an hour later I stood sweltering in the parking lot, in a fur-lined Mad Pilot cap, a wool muffler, and Ted’s brown tweed overcoat. Tall, rangy Wilt was down on one knee next to me, just out of the shot. He had a British Invasion mop of hair and a Fu Manchu mustache. George Harrison on stilts.
“Wilton, man, you’re killing me,” I said as he blew another lungful of smoke through the tubing I held to the edge of my mug.
“America’s favorite health kick,” quipped Simon, snapping away.
The fingernails on our photographer’s chubby left hand were blackened by near-constant immersion in the developer Amidol. One of my more odious stepfathers had been a photographer. Same creepy manicure.
In all other respects, Simon reminded me of a Hummel figurine: big head and belly, dimpled pink cheeks and rosebud mouth, eyelashes longer than my arm. He was almost totally bald, but the dark strip of hair left to him was all fluffy, glistening curls, like the tonsure of a Disney monk.
Even his personality was pure kitsch—shy, cherubic, unfailingly helpful.
He spent most of his time in the Weekly’s basement, where the back-issue “morgue” and his darkroom were. He maintained an extensive photo archive down there, could turn his hand to virtually anything needed upstairs, from an eight-by-ten of the Miss Syracuse Diner under construction in 1932 to one of Mick Jagger backstage at the Carrier Dome.
His own photographs were the Weekly’s strongest feature. Never a grainy shot, never anything done in less than perfect focus and contrast. His blacks were dark inky voids, the mark of a true pro.
The only trouble was that he made everybody look psychotic, even the little kids in the back-to-school issue. And here I was all sweaty, squinting in Wilt’s fumes. There was no way around it, appearing in forty-two thousand free newspapers was going to hugely suck.
“You guys take a break,” said Simon. “I need a reflector.”
Wilt rocked back on his heels and then sat, stretching his legs out along the asphalt.
I put down the wretched cup and took off my hat and scarf, gulping down fresh hot air.
“Goddamn mittens,” I said. “Today I’ll really earn that $23.70 after taxes.”
“Today you should ask for a raise.”
“No way.”
Wilt tilted his head from side to side, cracking his neck. “Ted’s a pussycat.”
“You get high with him all day.”
“He likes you,” said Wilt. “Likes you fine.”
I rolled my eyes. “How’s Lee doing?”
Wilt was covering the mayoral race, had picked another doomed liberal favorite.
“Tanking,” he said.
“They do another poll?”
He shook his head. “That buffet yesterday,” he said. “No shrimp. Hotel Syracuse brings out the baked ziti, might as well go home.”
“No shit.”
“Such a drag, man. I’ve had my eye on Lee like forever. Good guy. But what can you expect from a place that reelected a mayor under indictment, twice?”
He shook out another Pall Mall. Lit it.
I sat on the ground next to him, Indian style. Might as well just jump in and ask him. “Hey, you were here in ’69, right?”
Wilt nodded.
“So, uh, you remember that double murder? Two chicks at the fair?”
“My first cover story.” He blinked and looked down at the cigarette, stoner-pinched between thumbnail and index finger. “The Rose Girls. Horrible.”
“What?”
“Comes from how they were found. They had, like, wreaths or whatever around their heads . . . blossoms all twined together. Garlands.” Wilt took a drag and held it for a second, leaned back to blow a ribbon of smoke straight up. It hung there, curling slowly outward in the thick air.
“Hell,” he said finally, “Simon can show you. He’s still got all the pictures.”
He looked back at me, then dropped his eyes just a notch.
I was covering my throat with both hands.
CHAPTER 6
Roses and Lapthorne. It wasn’t just the blossom he’d tucked behind my ear at that wedding—the connection went deeper.
Our great-grandmother Dodie had had several hundred rosebushes planted in the family cemetery after her husband Jake burned to death at sea—the victim of a purser’s arson on one of his passenger liners, the Glamis Castle.
The ship’s hulk ran aground at Atlantic City, floating up in the surf along with a couple of hundred charred and bloated bodies. They never identified his.
There was no other memorial for him, just that garden Dodie’d woven in amongst the crooked aisles of headstones.
When I was sent east in the summers, I spent hours there. It was a cool, fragrant haven overlooking Oyster Bay, and I’d memorized flower names from the little bronze plaques next to each bed.
Tipsy Imperial Concubine’s pink cabbage-head blooms hung drowsy on stems too weak to hold them upright. Paul’s Himalayan sprawled along the surrounding brick wall, a single plant encircling the whole acre. Ferdinand Pichard was a clear white, striped with crimson and purple, and bloomed all summer—a rarity in this collection of old garden roses, most of which had a big “flush” of flowers in the spring and a second smaller one in early fall.
When the blossoms were less profuse, well through July, the cemetery smelled of cool green boxwood. I could lie on the grass there just staring out across the bay, watching the tiny Junior Club catboats crossing back and forth as the young sailors rounded their marks in an afternoon race.
I had to see the flowers from which the dead girls’ garlands were made. If they had the slender pointed buds of hybrid teas, those scentless blooms you find in Miss America’s arms and FTD bouquets, I could breathe easier.
Darkroom chemicals gave the morgue a doctor’s-office reek. Wilt had told Simon what I wanted to know, so after lunch he was ready with a fat manila folder and an old Weekly laid out on his worktable.
He motioned me to take a seat next to him, then nudged the yellowed paper toward me with his black-nailed left hand.
It looked totally sixties, down to the journal’s name rendered in a font so Art Nouveau it might have been lifted off a pack of rolling papers.
I examined the cover photo. “This one of yours?”
Simon nodded. It had been shot indoors: rose petals scattered around a photo-booth picture strip, all on a background of seamless paper. Half the petals were glowing white, half must have been a true red, which photographs as black.
Two young women—one fair, one dark—appeared together in each little frame of the strip. In the first, they were as stiff and serious as that American Gothic farm couple. In the second, they had dissolved into a fit of giggles, the blonde making bunny ears with her fingers behind the brunette’s head. Frame three showed them vamping it up, one pursing her lips in a Marilyn Monroe shut-eyed smooch, while the other swooned, hand against her forehead, glamorous as a young Gish sister. In the last shot the pair just grinned—young, relaxed, and vibrantly enjoying themselves on a long-lost late summer night. Behind their heads was a cheesy banner reading “1969 New York State Fair” in bowling-alley-snackbar script. There wasn’t a rose in sight.
I’d been expecting bouffant That Girl flips, but these were slick-looking hippie chicks—long straight hair and middle parts. Syracuse had never been a fashion haven. Photos from here tended to look about five years behind those from downstate. The girls weren’t local.
The brunette was in a beautifully embroidered peasant blouse with big hoop earrings and a wide jet-beaded c
hoker, while the blonde wore a French sailor shirt and what looked like an ebony figa, a tiny carved fist, hanging from a short necklace of rawhide thong. In 1969, that’s the kind of stuff only rich city kids were wearing. Here in the outback, high school girls were still indistinguishable from Tricia Nixon.
Sure, they might have been downstate chicks who’d gone to SU, but then someone would have identified them in a heartbeat.
The headline read “Who Are These Lost Girls?” Who indeed?
“Where’d you get this?” I asked, pointing at the images of the pair.
“They gave out copies to everybody, all the papers. TV. Trying to identify the bodies.”
He leaned across me and carefully opened the pages to a section he’d marked with a strip of white paper.
“These are mine,” he said, tapping in succession shots of the cornfield, the farmer, the grove of trees encircled with crime scene tape, all laid out alongside Wilt’s text. He’d only touch the edge of each, as though the inked halftone renditions were still real prints that could be marred by the oil from his fingertips.
Not a one showed the bodies, the garlands. By the time he’d been given access, the coroner’s van was long gone.
As though he’d heard me thinking, Simon said, “Of course, these were shot after they’d, ah, finished processing the scene.”
So there was no way I’d be able to check out the roses.
“I guess you’ll want to read Wilt’s stuff,” said Simon, with a shy smile. He left the table, and I could hear him puttering behind me.
I started in on the text:
The Rose Girls
BY WILTON SHACKLEY
When Harvey Johnston set out to harvest his corn that morning, he wasn’t expecting anything other than a long day’s work, but as he came up an outside row, perched high atop the seat of his corn-picker at roughly 10 a.m., he saw something no one should have to.
Two girls lay side by side in a tiny grove along the western edge of Johnston’s acreage. They were on their backs, about a foot apart, and holding hands. Each girl wore a crowning garland of roses.
“At first I thought they were asleep,” he said. “They looked so pretty. It didn’t strike me for the longest time that their throats was cut. I guess I must have seen it, but just didn’t want to know.”
Johnston ran to call the police. Investigators were on the scene by eleven o’clock.
Officer Jack Schneider reports that the girls had been dead less than 24 hours when his crew arrived, and credits Mr. Johnston with having found them so quickly.
I glanced at a photo of Schneider in the margin. Brush cut and a grim face—his mouth drawn crooked, with no lips to soften the edges. Something wrong with the eyes, maybe too much ink?
“If he’d been finished harvesting,” said Schneider, “we might not have found them ’til spring. That patch of trees is hidden from the road.”
The girls have not been identified. Photos found in their possession place them at the New York State Fair the previous evening. Carnival workers saw the pair walking in the company of two Camp Drum soldiers.
Mrs. Ruby Finegarb, who operates the Whack-A-Mole game, said that the soldiers tried to win stuffed pandas for the girls by playing several rounds, but had not succeeded. “They was all laughing and giggling,” she said, “but they run out of dimes before they won a dang candy dish, and I couldn’t break a fifty. Them soldiers must have just got paid.”
Another man claiming to have seen the foursome is Archie Sembles, a silhouette artist working some hundred feet beyond Mrs. Finegarb’s booth. Sembles remembers cutting portraits of all four young people near the close of the fair that night. “I had one of the girls put her hair up with a Spanish comb, as I thought it would add to the elegance of the depiction. The other girl had lovely thick dark hair, and I asked her to braid it quickly and to pull the braid over the top of her head, imitating another old-fashioned style. They were all quite pleased with the results.” The silhouettes have not been found.
On the next page, bland police sketches accompanied the text—two guys in uniform. They seemed so generic that either could have been Lapthorne, really, or anyone.
. . . Police sketches of the two soldiers have been circulated but have not, thus far, led to any positive identification.
An enlargement of the last image from the girls’ photo strip was centered amidst the columns of print. Another image appeared below, one more shot of where the bodies had been found, a close-up.
You could see the police tape, some tree trunks, a few small rocks in the dirt—but not a single flower.
I closed the paper. Simon was behind me, rolling heavy file drawers open and shut.
“Hey, Simon, can I ask you something?” I looked again at the petals on the front page. “How did you choose these roses for the cover? Did you make them red and white just for the visual, or did the cops say what color the garlands were? Wilt doesn’t specify in the article.”
Simon walked to the table. In the fluorescent light, he looked like library paste. Dude needed to get out more.
“I thought Wilt explained in the parking lot,” Simon said. “I have all the photos.”
He sat next to me again, reaching for the manila folder that rested on the table’s far edge. He dragged it over but didn’t open it.
“What do you mean, ‘all,’ Simon?”
He looked down and away, a little more color coming to his cheeks. “I knew some guys. Cops. Buddy over there slipped me a set of his prints, for the archives.”
The real roses had to be in there, but Simon wasn’t letting go of the file. He started stroking it, running his fat hand across the cardstock. He sighed.
I crossed my arms, squeezing my hands against my ribs so I didn’t just rip the thing from him. His little paw went pat, pat, pat.
“Simon?”
He sighed again. “Sure you want to see these? They’re, ah . . . detailed.”
I nodded.
He lifted the cover to reveal a pile of eight-by-ten glossies.
The first had been taken from the cornfield, facing the grove. It was black-and-white, shot from the same perspective as one of Simon’s, only in this the girls were still there. While it was in sharp focus and well lit, it was done from such a distance that you couldn’t tell much about the bodies, other than that they were barefoot, and holding hands.
The second shot was from just to the right of their feet, giving a three-quarter view of them. The girls’ hair fanned out prettily along a bed of moss, as though carefully arranged. You could see the dark gashes in their throats, but the garlands were camouflaged—white against blonde, near-black against brunette.
There was something odd about the darker roses, an uncanny reflection, maybe moisture catching the light. Not enough detail to tell.
Next was an extreme close-up, in color, showing only glossy mahogany hair set off by cupped blooms in a deep red.
It hadn’t been the lighting. Each petal was limned with that narrow band of white known as a “picotée edge.” Unmistakable: Baron Girod de l’Ain, a French hybrid perpetual introduced in 1894.
Simon lifted the glossy carefully away. Beneath was a shot of blonde locks, tiny clusters of snowy rosettes. Félicité-Perpétue?
Didn’t matter. I was hip-deep in shit.
CHAPTER 7
I pushed my chair back from Simon’s worktable, sickened. Unless I could come up with compelling evidence to the contrary, I had to work from the premise that my cousin was a murderer.
I pictured myself going to the cops, pounding my fist on some bureaucratic Formica until they reopened the case because of my gardening know-how.
Cha. And then they’d crown me Homecoming Queen and drive me around in a convertible. Even when you threw in the dog tags and the blood-type stuff, it sounded crazy.
Simon was obviously expecting me to say something, but I just couldn’t. I mean, first because I was terrified that if I opened my mouth I’d puke, but mostly because I really c
ouldn’t tell what it would all sound like, bunched together.
Was I just being paranoid? Would anyone else see meaning in this weird little fistful of data? I was so shaky, I couldn’t tell.
It was another genealogical trip on my part, to be honest. I mean, in addition to the Indian killers and the nuke-the-commies-back-to-the-Stone-Age types, we were prone to delusion. Dad’s whole elaborate deal with the KGB agents sneaking around his camper, that Winthrop guy his wife had to keep in a cage, my paternal grandmother’s predictions of snowballing disaster, always taglined, “and then you’ll get to the hospital and the anesthesia won’t work.”
With genes like that, you want to keep a damn close eye on the things that make your guy-wires twang. Seek outside verification. Get a professional opinion.
Nip things in the bud.
Oh crap.
I really, really, really wanted to throw up.
“You okay?” Simon laid his black-nailed hand across mine and I flinched, yanked down from high orbit.
I swallowed bile, then took a deep breath. “It’s just horrible. Those girls.”
I could tell he expected more, but even though I was desperate to ask him what else he knew, I couldn’t trust my ability to sound detached. I needed to think this through, get some distance.
“Listen,” I said, standing up. “I’m, uh, really grateful you took the time to show me this stuff, but it’s kind of . . . I mean, I think I need some air.”
I was all wobbly and he smiled at me, suddenly beatific, his tiny white teeth wreathed in that fat pink blossom of a mouth.
He moved both hands to his lap, beneath the table, and for a second I had this flash of conviction that he wasn’t trying to be reassuring or sympathetic, that he was instead kind of into how freaked out I was—feeding off it.
And then I thought, Jesus, Madeline, will you just fucking get over yourself already, and started for the door.
A Field of Darkness Page 5
