The Cleopatra Murders

by Mic Palmer

  Fortunately for Jack, he was the boyfriend, which explains why the sleep walking episode kind of faded into the background. This you see was his first time, making everything else that happened that weekend kind of a blur.

  Thinking back on it, however, he recalled how spooked Janet seemed to be. As a matter of fact she refused to get back into the bed with him.

  “I was just lying there,” she told him, “all restful and happy, and then all of a sudden you started talking, just like you normally would. It was almost like you were making a point of some sort, only the words seemed made up, like another language, At first I thought you were kidding, especially when you got on top of me, but then I saw your eyes, all wide and distant. I’ll never forget it. It seemed you were looking right through me.”

  “Sorry,” Jack mumbled, somewhat incredulous.

  “There’s more,” she scolded, from the other side of the room. “I tried to talk to you, but you wouldn’t listen. Then you started saying the same thing over and over again. ‘Is this where I should be? Is this where I should be?’

  “Of course, I told you, but the response was the same. ‘Is this where I should be? Is this where I should be?’ Yes, I yelled, but you acted as though I wasn’t there.”

  Somewhat amused, Jack stretched out on the bed. “So what did you do?”

  “What should have I done? Sit there watching you go on like some kind of Zombie?”

  “I can’t believe it,” uttered Jack.

  “Just as soon as I could, I slid out from under you and locked myself in the bathroom.”

  “Is that when I went back to sleep?”

  “I wish,” said Janet. “Instead you got up and went down to the kitchen. I thought you were ok at that point, but when I asked you how you were doing, you again started talking gibberish, and yet somehow you managed to make a bologna sandwich, complete with coleslaw and mustard. You even took a glass of milk!”

  Given how harmless the episode was, all Jack could do was laugh, which was also the case weeks later, when he pretty much did the same thing.

  As seriously as he took some things at that age, he wrote off the whole sleepwalking affair to growing pains, new found urges, nerves. In addition to having begun his first “adult” relationship, he was moving to a foreign country for the singular purpose of determining whether he would amount to anything. The pressure, therefore, was enormous.

  “Why do you have to go so far away?” his father would often ask him.

  Part of it was that he was embarrassed. Having been rejected by all of the better art programs, he instead opted for something that sounded romantic and adventurous, hoping in some way to compensate.

  Mostly, however, it was to prove he hadn’t already given up. Going to a mediocre school in the United States seemed to him a first step on the road to failure. Mexico, however, would change all that, put him back into control, prove that he wasn’t ordinary, give him a chance to live up to his God given talent. To hell with everyone else; the only opinion that counted was his.

  That was then, however, and by the time he reached his early thirties, the formula had reversed itself: To hell with him; it was only the opinions of others that counted, especially when it came to himself.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Still looking into the mirror, Jack examined his jet black hair and unkempt beard. He was too distinctive, too memorable, and the fact was too many people had seen him like this, not the least of which Susan, whose cop husband might have been spilling the beans on him that very minute.

  He had no choice then. It was time for another metamorphosis.

  First he took care of the beard, which was a pleasure. Even in the cold weather, it could become hot and itchy, not to mention a trap for crumbs, lint, and even bugs. Worse yet, however, was when it doubled as a sponge, sopping up soups, gravy, and spilled condiments to the point where it sometimes stunk.

  Next was the hair, which he truly resisted. As difficult as it was to manage these days, he still hated to see it go, especially when he was not at all sure of whether it would grow back.

  The only way to begin therefore was to plunge right into it; running the buzzer across his scalp, he just began cutting and within seconds he was through. A once essential almost defining part of himself had been summarily relegated to the toilet. All that was left were a few lonely patches of course black stubble, which he quickly took care of with some shaving cream and a disposable razor.

  Now completely bald, his shiny cranium reflected the light from the ceiling fixture as if it were glass. Without hair, his features seemed to have grown, especially his nose and lips, which for the first time appeared rather large and conspicuous.

  “Oh boy,” he muttered, but after the initial shock wore off, he felt somehow unburdened, and the truth was he didn’t look half bad. Not at all lumpy or bulbous, his head was suited for it, especially now that he had lost a few pounds.

  Then again this wasn’t a beauty contest. What he needed was to become unrecognizable, and his most conspicuous feature were his bushy black eyebrows. Hesitantly, regretfully, painfully, he again applied the shaving cream.

  “My God,” he gasped. Now he had really done it. Without eyebrows, he appeared vacant, cold, dangerous, which again caused him to think about the vexing notion he had formed while staking out his former girlfriend.

  “Stop it,” he told himself, but the fact remained that if he were the psychopath, he’d probably be doing the exact same thing – shaving his head, removing his eyebrows, and convincing himself that he looked just fine.

  Gripping the sides of the sink, Jack girded himself, yet irresistibly he turned back to his reflection, which now appeared absolutely demented.

  His glassy alligator green brown eyes were at once vacant, wild, tormented, even while his expression was otherwise flat. He felt weak, almost disconnected.

  “I’m alone,” he told himself, “out of touch, warped. No brothers or sisters, no friends, no job, no wife, no kids, nothing.”

  Then he imagined the newscasters as they spoke of his propensity for fantasy and delusions of artistic grandeur.

  “ENOUGH!” he shouted.

  Splashing his face with ice cold water, he took a few slurps from the faucet and dried himself off.

  Through the familiar act of self flagellation, his mood quickly improved. “What kind of killer tortures himself like this?” he happily intellectualized.

  Gazing at the stranger in the mirror, he watched as yet again a crooked grin came over his face.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Loitering below swirling clouds of cigarette smoke illuminated by an old fashioned cast iron street lamp were three women dressed all in black. With spiked hair, heavily shaded eyes, purple lips, deathly pale skin, and silver rings adorning every finger, lobe, and nostril, they appeared to be taking a break from their jobs as waitresses at an English style pub called the Talbot Arms. What the Goth theme had to do with the tavern, Jack couldn’t even begin to imagine. Nevertheless, he was impressed with how much the area had changed. A century ago he would have been surrounded by a couple of hundred slaughterhouses, the thought of which momentarily filled his sinuses with the sweet aroma of freshly butchered steer. Now, however, all he could see were high priced restaurants and trendy bars, but that’s why he chose this particular spot.

  The crowd around there seemed self contained, insulated, harmless, which likewise was the case with the hotel he checked into. Teeming with frenetic twenty year olds, aging hipsters, and confused tourists, none of whom seemed to have the faintest idea of what was going on beyond their own rather tiny circle of personal involvement, it seemed the perfect place to disappear. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help but feel a bit self conscious.

  Absolutely hairless from the neck up – except for his sandy, almost invisible eyelashes – he had the look of a brainy foil to a superhero, and yet he was confident in the belief that no one would take notice of him, his proof being the pierced coven under the street lam
p. Puffing away on their cigarettes through black lipstick they attracted about as much attention as the aluminum pole around which they congregated.

  “This will do,” he thought to himself, while glancing at a rather old fashioned looking steakhouse. Having been forced to again change his appearance, move, and divorce himself from the first woman who showed any real interest in him in years, he felt entitled to a bloody piece of meat. “Why not,” he reassured himself.

  It was about five thirty in the evening and the place was nearly empty. Positioning himself at a table by the bar – just close enough to listen to the conversation, but not so near as to risk being involved in it – he surreptitiously took a few snapshots.

  When the waitress finally deigned to pay him a visit, she seemed annoyed that he was ready to order something.

  She was young and moody, with nebulous breasts and a butt designed for indolence.

  “You already know what you want?” she slurred, not willing to fully open her mouth.

  “Yeah, a Cheeseburger and fries.”

  She appeared as if she were about to die of boredom. “How would you like it?”

  “Medium.”

  The woman had small yet pretty brown eyes that wistfully glanced at the door. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “Just a beer please – does that come with French fries or onion rings?”

  This caused the waitress to squint and shake her head, as if the question was the work of a madman. “It comes with fries.”

  “Can I have onion rings instead?”

  “We don’t have onion rings.”

  “Fries are fine – and can you throw in a salad?”

  This almost seemed too much for her. “Dressing?”

  “Oil and vinegar.”

  “What?”

  “Just make it French.”

  “Alright,” she responded while walking away.

  “You’re welcome,” Jack whispered, not wanting a secret ingredient added to his meal.

  Looking around, he noted how small and dingy the place was. Consisting of less than a dozen rickety tables and a soot stained mahogany bar that seemed to have lost its sheen about a hundred years ago, it catered to working stiffs early on and drunken kids later in the evening.

  At the moment the bartender was talking to a couple of men named Big Al and Kurt. The former was about six three and a veteran of the Korean War. “I couldn’t wait to come home,” he told the younger man.

  “What’d you think of Truman not letting MacArthur bomb Manchuria?” asked Kurt.

  Big Al had a chewed up face and cataract tinged eyes, which although brown had a hazy blue hue to them. “I didn’t know nothing about that. I just went where they sent me.”

  Kurt ran his hand through his light blonde hair. In his mid forties, he had just been laid off as a real estate broker. “Doesn’t it bother you that we let in all those red Chinese when we didn’t have to?”

  “To tell you the truth I was out of it by then, so I don’t really know.”

  “What do ya mean you were out of it?”

  “I got hit,” responded the older man, as if he were recounting a fender bender.

  “Really,” commented a third man, whose name didn’t come up. He was about the same age as Kurt, but thinner and with a buzz cut. “Where?” he inquired.

  The old man pointed to his neck. “Went right through and took out a piece of my Jaw.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “Inchon.”

  Kurt was impressed. “You were at Inchon? Then you must have been under MacArthur.”

  “Technically, I guess, but like they used to say, my ass belonged to Chesty Puller.”

  By now the waitress had brought over Jack’s beer, which not surprisingly – as it was poured by her – was fifty percent foam.

  “Ketchup?” she asked.

  Jack waived his hand. “Just mayonnaise please.”

  This seemed to get a rise out of her. “Even for the fries?”

  “That’s all they use in Belgium, and that’s where they were invented.”

  Chewing what seemed like a pack of gum, she somehow managed to seem both interested and bored at the same time. “For some reason I always thought they were invented in France?”

  Jack bit his tongue. “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know. I must have read it somewhere.”

  Dumbfounded, he turned his attention back to the men at the bar. By now the conversation had shifted to ethnicity, and just as always the air was filled with empirical boasts and scientific aspersions.

  Kurt’s temper it seems was not the result his upbringing or parents but rather a heritage that produced clone like homogeneity. “Don’t get my Ukrainian up,” he proudly uttered, as if the rest of the world was blessed with implacable equanimity.

  “Here you go,” said the waitress, dropping Jack’s plate on the table without breaking stride.

  Watching her as she raced back to the kitchen, Jack became suspicious. “Suddenly she’s a dynamo?”

  Sure enough the patty was raw and the bun soggy.

  Taking on the same vegetative expression and attitude as the waitress, Jack tried to keep from exploding – apparently he too had a Ukrainian ancestor. “How the hell could a dump like this stay in business?”

  Just then he heard another snippet of conversation, which seemed to involve the assertion that Hitler was a genius.

  “What a surprise.” Jack thought to himself. In places like this there were always one or two regulars who couldn’t resist telling you how wise the Fuhrer was – just in terms of strategy of course.

  Kurt was a bit drunk at this point, meaning that whatever he was about to say was something he had already spoken of a hundred times. “Right from the start he knew that if he wanted to increase the population, he’d need more land. That’s why he went into the Soviet Union.”

  “Ya call that smart?” chimed in Big Al. “Russia had like triple the population.”

  “Yeah well a lot of that population wasn’t too happy. You forget, my family was from there.”

  The older man appeared flustered. “And they were for the Nazis?”

  “Well, like my grandfather used to say, ‘better Hitler than Stalin.’”

  “Sounds like a fuck’n idiot.”

  “Stalin killed a lot of Ukrainians.”

  “So did Hitler.”

  By now Jack had begun to eat his burger, which although bloody, was not at all bad. Surprisingly fresh, the nearly raw beef seemed to trigger some sort of ancient pleasure response. He felt relaxed, lethargic, sated, making the often times dopey conversation somewhat more palatable.

  “Well at least he slowed them down.”

  “Who?”

  “The Russians. Can you imagine what Europe would look like if they had won the war on their own?”

  “He’s the one who got them into it to begin with!”

  “I’m not defending the man, but come on. I mean look at what he did to the French. That move through the Ardennes Forest, that was his decision.”

  “Big deal, the French.”

  Kurt was swaying at this point. “And did you know he was an artist?”

  “A bullshit artist.”

  The man with the buzz cut put down his beer. “Maybe if he could have gotten somewhere with his painting, he wouldn’t have felt the need to slaughter everyone.”

  As the three men argued, Jack slid his plate to the other side of the table. Neither religious nor superstitious, he felt as though events were conspiring to tell him something.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Seeing his apartment on the news was strange, like home movies, except that instead of his father, a cop shot the footage.

  His first thought was that Susan had betrayed him, and he cursed her for it. Then again he had always figured the police would make the connection, whether he had spoken to her or not. Frankly, he was surprised it had taken this long.

  Rubbing the sleep from his eyes he propped
up his pillow and listened to Betsy Tanner go over the case against him.

  “Although we must caution that the police have only referred to him as person of interest, the circumstantial evidence continues to build. In case you missed our earlier report, thirty nine year old Jack Lorenz of Manhattan has been identified as the person seen arguing with Michelle Lawrence shortly before she was murdered. Furthermore, we have recently learned that during the weeks leading up to her death, Mr. Lorenz had been sending her emails in which he pressed her to go out with him.”

  Jack smacked his pillow. “I suggested dinner. She makes it sound like I was stalking her.”

  “Recently fired from his job as an investigator, Mr. Lorenz has also been linked to Janet Callenback, the last victim in what appears to be a related string of killings. Over the last three weeks Ms. Callenback along with three other women were found murdered in various parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. At the time they were discovered, all four were wrapped in carpets, which as most of you know by now is why the police began referring to the perpetrator as The Cleopatra Killer.

  “According to our sources, Lorenz and Callenback dated in high school, but had not been in contact with each other for over a decade…”

  Momentarily zoning out, Jack blankly took in the images of his former home. While he had always liked the place, the scenes before him made him wonder why. The space appeared cramped and impersonal. With empty walls, plastic looking furniture, and an overly vacuumed white shag carpet, it looked like the home of a serial killer.

  “What the hell’s this guy doing?” he mumbled to himself.

  Before him was a gloved police officer bagging something he had pulled from a stack of newspaper flyers, which Jack had saved for the coupons. Zooming in, the camera revealed an advertisement for an exotic rug store.

  “Why don’t they show the hundreds of other ads in the pile!” he shouted at the television.