The Prettiest Feathers

by John Philpin

  “There must be thousands of them,” she said. “I come down here all the time, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “I thought you were a country girl.”

  “I am, but this is the city. I’ve never seen so many birds in the city before.”

  I started to move away.

  “Can’t we stay a few minutes? I want to watch them.”

  Again, I started to move on, but she put her hand on my arm.

  “Please wait,” she said. “Watch them with me.”

  I could feel her trembling. I looked up again at the swallows darting in arcs high above our heads.

  “It’s really cold,” I said. “We should be getting back.”

  Three days later the newspaper reported her death. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide: she had jumped from the roof of her dormitory to the pavement below, he said. She left no note, but the final entry in her diary described her desire to fly among the city’s buildings like the swallows. Metaphor is an integral part of the hypnotic, erotic dance just before violent death. That was true for her, and it will be true for Sarah. My nursing student flew from the roof. Sarah will fly from her body.

  Sarah reminds me of my nursing student. She looks at me with the same obvious interest. And there are other similarities: Sarah has a Robert (a well-armed ex-husband who, for all I know, still fancies himself in love with her), while my nursing student had a stable of boyfriends, one of whom refused to accept the medical examiner’s ruling. He told the police that he had seen me enter his girlfriend’s dorm on the day she died. He identified me from photos in the college yearbook.

  Men in suits—driving the requisite dark, four-door sedan—paid me a social call. I invited them in, and offered them mugs of coffee (instant, which I kept on hand for unwanted guests).

  “Yes,” I told them. “I was in the building that day. But I wasn’t there to see her. I had stopped by to see a friend, Harold Ford, on the second floor. You’ll have to ask him what time. Early afternoon, I think, but I’m not certain. I hadn’t seen her in three or four days, nor did I want to see her. She was scary. She talked real crazy.”

  Harold remembered my stopping by. He wasn’t sure what time, but he knew that it was the same day the girl dove off the roof. We talked, joked around, and I left. The cops flatly rejected the idea that I—or anyone else, for that matter—was capable of exhibiting such a relaxed, jovial manner just moments before, or after, hurling a young woman off the roof.

  But the boyfriend considered me a malevolent psychopath. He followed me around for days. I tried a gentle, sympathetic confrontation, but he wasn’t having any of it. Finally he made his move.

  He was carrying a Louisville Slugger when he cornered me in the men’s room at the bar.

  “You killed her,” he said.

  “She killed herself.”

  He took a swing. I stepped back, allowed it to pass, then grabbed the fat barrel of the bat and snapped it out of his hands. His momentum left him teetering in my direction, so I shoved him the rest of the way down. It was a tight fit between the wall and commode, but he made it. I lifted the toilet seat.

  “Hands on the porcelain,” I said.

  He was slow—confused—but complied.

  “It’s over,” I said. “The bowl is there to puke in.”

  Then I brought down the bat and broke both his hands.

  He made good use of the bowl, and never followed me again.

  I knew from experience that I would have to be careful about Robert Sinclair. He had a lot more than just baseball bats in his arsenal.

  Sarah

  My phone rang once tonight, close to eleven o’clock. Hoping it was John, I said “Hello” in the sultry voice I’d been practicing, but it was only Robert.

  “Where the hell you been?” he asked, then apologized for swearing.

  “Right here.”

  “Good old Sarah, the homebody.”

  “Don’t start, Robert, okay? I’m not in the mood.”

  “I seem to remember hearing that before.”

  “What?”

  “‘I’m not in the mood.’ That used to be your favorite expression, as I recall.”

  I sighed. “What do you want, Robert?”

  “Why do you always have to talk to me like that? Why can’t you be nice?”

  “I don’t know. Why can’t you call me when you’re sober?”

  Robert laughed. “Before any man takes you on, he needs a twelve-pack and a fifth.”

  “So what do you want?” Even when he’s drunk, Robert never calls without a reason.

  “Are you busy?”

  “No. But I don’t feel like listening to you ramble.”

  “Aw, Sarah,” he said.

  I didn’t respond.

  “Sarah,” he said again, his voice soft.

  I thought, here we go again. First he gets drunk, then he gets nostalgic and maudlin.

  “I’m up to my ass in cases,” he said.

  I still didn’t reply.

  “Remember that girl we found dead over at Pine Haven?”

  I knew who he meant, but I felt like giving him a hard time. “Pine Haven is a cemetery. Everyone there is dead.”

  “The one who was murdered, then propped up against a tombstone, naked.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, I got that one, plus five missing persons.”

  “What are you doing working missing persons?”

  “They sent the reports over to Homicide when Shorty retired. All the precinct had left was Corbin, and he’s on disability for at least six more months,” Robert complained, sounding more sober by the minute. But I knew that he had to be soused. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be talking to me about his work.

  “I was sittin’ here tonight, going over those reports, looking for someplace to start,” he went on, “when it hit me. Those might not be missings after all. Since when do five stable, employed, respectable women come up missing in less than a year? I think they’re dead.”

  That’s how Robert has always been: give him a cold, and he’ll call it pneumonia. Now he has some missings, and he’s calling them murders.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “The office.”

  “Do you want me to come and get you?” I didn’t want him driving home drunk. Internal Affairs had already given him three “final” warnings.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve switched to coffee. I’m on my second cup.”

  “Good,” I said. “So why did you call?”

  “I wanted to ask you about that girl—the one in the cemetery. Didn’t you say she was a customer of yours?”

  “She came in only once that I remember. What was her name—Harris?”

  “Right. Maxine Harris. What kind of books did she buy?”

  “Oh God, Robert, how am I supposed to remember that? It was months ago.”

  “It’s been longer than that since we made love, but I remember every detail.”

  I told him to have another cup of coffee—with Lane—then I hung up on him.

  The phone rang again right away. I answered, but only because I was hoping (again) that it would be John. There was no response. Just silence, except for what sounded like someone breathing.

  It was late, but I couldn’t sleep. I thought reading might help, so I pulled my copy of Rimbaud off the shelf. I noticed that it was pretty beat up; the cover was starting to separate from the spine. I hadn’t bought it new. A customer brought it in, wanting to sell it to Harry, but it was too ragged to suit him. When he turned it down, I offered the woman two dollars, and she took it.

  I have a special tape that I brought home from the shop. Harry buys it in bulk. It’s wide, clear, and strong—perfect for holding a book together. I placed a strip over the spine of my Rimbaud, then I opened the front cover to see how secure the pages were—and that’s when I noticed the bookplate glued inside: From the Library of Maxine Harris.

  John

  My next encounter with Sara
h was over lunch at a place called Harrington’s. It was close enough for her to walk there from the bookstore, but she had to pass from one ethnic pissing ground to another, making it unlikely that she would be seen by anyone she knew.

  From the moment she arrived, she was talkative, contributing a wealth of detail to the broad outline I had already sketched of her life. All in all, it was pleasant, although I was annoyed by her attempts to discover more about John Wolf than I wished to manufacture at that moment.

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “Landgrove,” I said, naming an upscale suburb in Connecticut.

  “That’s really out in the country.”

  “Birds in the morning and all that,” I agreed. “Why do you stay in the city? I find it such a dreary place. I’m reluctant even to come in on business when I have to—all the crime, the traffic.”

  She sipped her iced tea. “I’ve tried other places, but I always end up back here.”

  “What other places?”

  “Chicago for one. That was a strange time.”

  “How so?”

  “Have you ever been married?”

  “Divorced,” I lied.

  “Then you’ll understand.”

  Sarah told me about her paranoid ex-husband, the keeper of the arsenal, the elusive Robert Sinclair—homicide detective. I marveled at my ability to pick them. She went on about Robert’s dalliance with his partner, Lane Frank.

  “My doctor’s receptionist knew Lane—said she was a nice person, but with a hard edge,” Sarah said.

  She seemed to drift off into private thoughts, then added, “But she’s a cop. I wouldn’t have expected her to be running around in ruffles and lace. But even if she had, Robert wouldn’t have cared. If she had walked naked into his office, carrying her badge, the badge is the thing that would have turned him on. Cops are like that. They seek each other out, stick together.”

  “My ex is a psychiatrist,” I said. “She’d been involved with a colleague of hers for several months, thinking it was all some kind of intellectual thing between them. She told me about him right from the start—how much they had in common, the long talks they had. By the time she had it all straight in her head, I was seeing a psychiatrist, too, but I was paying mine a hundred bucks an hour.”

  “Lane’s father was some sort of psychiatrist, I think. He’s supposed to be famous or something.”

  “I went to see this guy named Street,” I said.

  I was watching for a reaction, and she didn’t disappoint me. It was momentary—just a change in her eyes—but it was there.

  “How did you handle things when you and Robert split up?”

  “Not well, I’m afraid,” she said. “It’s crazy, really. I thought I wanted to be alone, but once I was, I wasn’t so sure anymore.”

  Alone. What about the kid?

  “We didn’t have any children either,” I said. “It’s just as well, I guess.”

  “Robert and I did have a child,” she said, the color in her face draining away. This business of the kid was more of a minefield than Bob the cop.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “We had a daughter,” she went on. “But she died.”

  I think I managed to say most of the right things—sudden infant death, tragedy, loss, and all that. I’m pretty good when it comes to sounding sympathetic. With the mystery of the child solved, another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. But I still had a lot of unanswered questions, and didn’t want to waste a lot of time wailing over a dead kid.

  But Sarah had her own agenda. There was a lot of unfinished business surrounding the death of her daughter that she needed to deal with. No doubt she had bent Street’s ear about it, and I had accidentally reopened that can of boring worms.

  “You’d think in so short a time you couldn’t possibly become that involved with someone—an infant who’s hardly even a person yet,” she said. “But it happens. Her birthday’s on the eleventh, so she’s really on my mind. I’m thinking about going to visit her. I haven’t done that yet. Ever.”

  “Maybe you should,” I said, as if I cared.

  “I want to. But I also don’t want to.”

  I managed to move the conversation forward by offering to accompany Sarah to the cemetery.

  “I don’t want to intrude,” I said, “but if it would help, I’d be happy to go with you.”

  “I would like that,” she said.

  “What about Robert?”

  “He usually goes in the morning. If you don’t want to run into him, we can wait until afternoon to go. It’ll work out.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I told her. “I was wondering how he handles it—the loss of your daughter, I mean.”

  “He’s angry. Sometimes I think that’s the only feeling he knows. But I suppose he’s just protecting himself.”

  “You’re probably right,” I agreed. “I don’t know much about police work, but it must be hard on a person—especially if you’re investigating murders. I can’t imagine having to look at a dead body. You couldn’t pay me enough.”

  “He thinks he’s stumbled onto a serial killer,” Sarah said. Then she laughed, but stopped, quickly, to apologize.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s not funny—but, to understand why it tickles me, you’d have to know Robert. There’s nothing he loves more than a good conspiracy. He’s collected all the books about the Kennedy assassination—quotes from them like they’re biblical. And now he thinks there’s a serial killer slinking in the shadows.”

  “You mean he’s looking for a—I can’t think of his name, the guy they executed in Florida—that type of person?”

  “Bundy.”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “All it is, really, is a lot of unresolved missing person cases and one murder victim. The rest is in Robert’s head, except…”

  Sarah stopped. She was looking at my eyes.

  “Except?” I prompted.

  “Maxine.”

  I smiled. “I’m afraid I’m not following.”

  “Last night I found a book with her name in it. Maxine Harris. She’s the one who was murdered. She was a customer of ours.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “I’ve never known anyone who was murdered. I mean, besides Maxine, and I didn’t really know her either. She came into the shop Once, and I bought the book from her—Rimbaud, in fact.”

  Chaos theory—a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, a volcano erupts in the American Northwest—suggests infinite variety, but also an essential pattern, a connectedness, that is found upon microscopic and macroscopic examination. I could say that my selection of victims has been random, and that would be true to an extent. But such a statement ignores what roils beneath the level of the conscious mind.

  When I was in Maxine’s apartment, I walked around, looked at things, absorbed what the environment had to offer. She subscribed to Harpers Magazine and Utne Reader. She drank tea—English breakfast—not coffee. A half-written letter to “Ron” told me that marriage was in the cards for next summer in Minneapolis. In the yellow pages of her phone book she had circled “Emily and Others, Used Books Bought and Sold.”

  A butterfly had flapped its wings.

  “She was quiet,” Sarah said. “I think she said she’d moved out here from Wisconsin or Minnesota, some place like that. I should say something to Robert about the book, but it probably doesn’t mean anything, and I don’t think I can talk to him right now anyway.”

  “I think you should tell him,” I said. “It might be a clue.”

  She laughed. “A clue? What a quaint word. You must read a lot of mysteries.”

  “I watch the British ones,” I said. “On PBS, detectives still find clues.”

  “It’s like a feather blowing in the wind,” Sarah said. “They never catch killers anymore.”

  The next evening was to have been a final, pleasant evening of surveillance. I stood in the shadows of an alley across the st
reet from the bookstore, waiting for Sarah to carry the day’s receipts up the outside stairway to Harry in the massage parlor.

  The blow came from behind and caught me just above my left kidney. For so large a man, my Mike Tyson lookalike was surprisingly quiet, as stealthy as a jungle cat. The movement of the pipe through the still night air was the only sound I heard. The second blow hit just below my left shoulder, but I never felt that one. I had left my body, escaped, drifted away—knowing that what needed to be done would be done.

  I heard Slouch’s voice from deeper in the shadows. He sounded almost casual. “Don’t let him get to the piece.”

  When the big man—just shapes, shadows, and motion—stepped closer for the next swing of the pipe, a .38 was in my hand.

  My vision blurred, but I could still make out his knees—bent like Barry Bonds’s at home plate in Candlestick Park.

  I use silver tips plus P—magnum loads that fragment on impact. Typically, the exit wound is the size of a plum. To hit any joint is to render it a hash of muscle, ligament, and fragmented bone. The target always goes down.

  The report of my revolver echoed in the alley. My wannabe murderer grunted, wobbled a bit, then fell.

  Slouch never should have muttered, “Shit.”

  I aimed into the darkness six inches below where I knew his mouth was, and fired. I heard him drop.

  The big man was sitting, still clutching the pipe, when I pushed myself to my feet. His good leg was folded under him. The other extended out, bent at an awkward angle.

  I was close enough to see his face, smell his cologne. He didn’t seem to mind, didn’t object, when I thumbed the hammer back and aimed at his forehead. He was in shock. When the gun exploded a third time, I watched a slab from the back of his head decorate the wall behind him.

  I stumbled past Slouch’s body to the back of the alley, where I pulled myself over a wooden fence and headed for my car. I was behind the wheel before I heard the sound of sirens in the distance.

  Sarah

  I didn’t give Dr. Street a chance to say anything before I started in.

  “Why did you let me sit here a couple of weeks ago, rambling on and on about John Wolf, without even once mentioning that he was a client of yours?”