Agnes Among the Gargoyles (22 page)

   "No, I don't hate you."

   "We can't have the test tomorrow, you know. We have to wait six months. That's how long it takes for the antibodies to show up. Now do you hate me?"

   He doesn't reply.

   "Before you know it, everybody will be having AIDS tests," she says. "You're in the vanguard."

The newest waiter at the Crosskeys Diner on Woodhaven Boulevard stacks an order of lasagna, a bacon Swissburger, brisket of beef and eggs over easy up the length of his arm and limps out of the kitchen. The food is for a group of performers from a nearby parish theater. Fresh from a performance, they are still in their make-up. One of the men hasn't washed the gray dye from his hair. "It depends how fast you can do the bell kicks," another man is saying. He leaps to his feet and, taking advantage of the diner's scarcity of customers, demonstrates the choreography, almost knocking Bezel over.

   Everyone at the table laughs. They are still giddy from that evening's performance.

   "Fear not, sir, you shall have a second chance," booms Bezel. "I will be right back with the side dishes."

   He turns to the kitchen but Doris is already there with the monkey dishes of carrots and broccoli and a side of wheat toast. Plucky, cheerful Doris. Doris who won't leave him alone.

   "You didn't have to do that," says Bezel when the table is served.

   Doris is marrying half-empty bottles of ketchup. She never stops working. "You'd do the same for me. What goes around comes around."

   The hostess walks by them with the Frenchman and two other men. Bezel hasn't seen him since the last binge. He looks right at Bezel but says nothing. The hostess leads them to a table near the kitchen.

   "She chews that gum like a cud," says Doris of the hostess before bustling over to the table.

   "Good evening, gents," says Doris. "Since there's three of you, you might be more comfortable in the front. Frankly, this table is Siberia."

   "Thank you, lovely lady, but this is fine," says the Frenchman. "We're just having coffee."

   "Suit yourself. We've got the tables. No one's storming the doors tonight."

   She pours the coffee, then gathers up every sugar bowl in the diner. She has persuaded the boss to switch his brand of artificial sweetener. Bezel watches the Frenchman and his cronies. Soon they are joined by Mr. Parker—Mr. X—from the Blarney Castle.

   Bezel thinks back to that meeting in the cellar. A lot of crazy plans were made. He never thought anything would come of them.

   Perhaps, for once, the Frenchman is not full of shit. Perhaps there really is money to be made from his scheme.

   How did the Frenchman find out where he is working?

   Doris buzzes in Bezel's ear. She tells him about her daughter's plans for college. "She's applying to Creedmore—whoops, that's a mental institution, I think— well, that makes sense too, I guess—shoot! Bryn Mawr, that's the name of it. Lord, I swear it's Alzheimer's." She tells him about the problems of being a single mother. She tells him how hard it has been to balance family and career. "As you might say, mate, it hasn't been all porter and skittles. But we've pulled through." She pretends to strangle herself.

   As the four men file out, there are flecks of mischief in the eyes of the Frenchman.

   Doris buses the table.

   "Did those fellows leave you anything?" Bezel asks casually.

   "Nope. They're European. They're used to a service charge."

   Doris goes off to rewire the dishwasher or something. Bezel picks up the matchbook in the ashtray. There is a message written on the inside cover.

  Urgent

  20 min

  White Castle down the road
  parking lot
  near the moat

   Bezel takes off his apron and heads straight for Doris.

   "I have to go," he announces.

   "Why?"

   "I just got a call. It's an emergency."

   Doris freezes. "What is it?"

   "My brother's wife. She's been in an accident."

   "Oh my God!"

   He can almost hear the frenzied beating of Doris's worried heart.

   "There was a car crash, fire, I don't know...."

Doris is shaking.

   "Go!" she says, pushing him toward the door. "For God's sake, I'll explain what happened."

   "Thanks, Doris."

   "Do you need my car?"

   It is a tempting offer. She is really too trusting.

   "I'll get a cab," he says, and is out the door.

   The owner of the diner, who has just come in, asks Doris, "Where does that prick think he's going?"

   Doris explains the situation breathlessly. The owner is a dapper Greek gentleman with a small moustache and an addiction to mints and toothpicks. He listens, then delivers a succinct verdict on Bezel and his emergency.

   "Hmmph. More bullshit."

Who is John Speer, AKA Jack the Pinboy?

Is he really the Yuppie butcher?

   In a biographical story filed by Tollivetti, Speer's ex-girlfriend, securities analyst Pamela Z_______, says no. "Jack is a very gentle person," she says. "He'd make a great dad. I just never thought he'd be a very good husband."

   What about the date-rape stuff? When Speer was in college, a woman pressed charges. He had to see a court-appointed psychotherapist for a year.

   "That was just so much bulls__t," Tollivetti quotes Speer. "When her boyfriend walked in, what else could she say? I'm no rapist. Read the shrink's report."

   Tollivetti passes it along in a sidebar. There it is, over the signature of Dr. Janice Fedelke: "While exhibiting emotional immaturity, and some exhibitionist tendencies, the patient John Speer displays no symptoms of violent feeling toward women, and in my opinion poses no threat to them."

   Tollivetti asks: Why didn't you come forward?

   "Because I didn't do anything. I didn't kill anyone—not Babs, not Mrs. Bloch. I didn't go to the police because it would have been terrible for me at work. I assumed the cops would get to me soon enough anyway."

   Tollivetti asks: Is there anything you'd like to say?

   "Yeah. Why did the rabbi's kid Dov say I did it when he couldn't pick me out of a lineup? I'll tell you why. Because I hadn't been to Barbara's in weeks, and when he used to watch us having sex he only looked at her."

   The police would like that discrepancy cleared up. So would the rabbi, who seems mystified and ashamed of the trouble his son is causing. So would Dov himself, who appears on the verge of mental collapse.

   Dov will submit to hypnosis.

   The police are currently using a hypnotist named Aaron Patterson. Patterson does work for law enforcement agencies in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York; he also works county fairs as "The Hypnotist With a Twist."

   Dov is seated at a desk. On the desk are some paper and crayons, and a windup children's toy: a monkey playing the drums. This is the mechanism for focusing the subject's attention. "Watches swinging on chains went out with Bela Lugosi," Patterson tells Tommy.

   Kongo Starr plays a paradiddle. Patterson speaks to Dov in even, measured tones, like the instructor on a foreign language tape. Tommy fights drowsiness and the urge for a corn dog. Soon Dov's eyes are strangely lifeless. His face is flushed. His brow is streaked with sweat but his hands are clammy.

   "What's happening?" whispers Tommy.

   "He's entering a second-level trance," says Patterson. "Some call it the zombie-like phase."

   Patterson picks up a newspaper and scans a story about college basketball ratings. He issues Dov a key word to focus his recollections: "jumper."

   "When I say that key word, you will remember everything," says Patterson, highly dramatic.

   Jumper, jumper.

   Dov relives that night: the trip to the matchmaker, shopping for groceries, up on the roof. He watches the lovers in bed.

   "The Pinboy was there," says Whitey.

   Jumper, jumper.

   The sex is over. Dov claims to hear singing, and his eyes roll up in his head as he tries to determine spatial placement. The singing is coming from the street. In a reedy whisper, Dov sings the song.

   "The Pinboy was already out of the building," says Tommy. "He was on his way home."

   Jumper, jumper.

   Dov sees a man in Barbara's bedroom. A new man.

   "What kind of man?"

   "A man," says Dov. "A normal man."

   Dov describes the slaughter of Barbara. The man holds her from behind and cuts her throat. One, two. She falls. Dov sees his mother knocking on the halfopen bedroom door. She speaks to the man.

   "Oh, for a minute you frightened me," she says.

   Dov cries out twice at the memory of the two gunshots.

   Jumper, jumper. What did he look like?

   There is no answer. Dov's fedora slides off his head.

   "He's blocking it," says Patterson. "Jumper, jumper. Draw it, Dov."

   Dov complies. When the purple crayon falls from his hand, Patterson picks up the drawing. The detectives gather round.

   "Hypnotism is not unlike sleep," murmurs Patterson, "and often the emergent drawings communicate in the language of dreams—highly allusive and symbolic."

   Patterson explains the sketch. "I'd have to go with a nature scene," he says, using a mechanical pencil as a pointer. "Here's your craggy mountain. These are your trees. Note the stream here. Now look at the intrusion: this, I think, is a factory of some sort. Here are two plumes of smoke coming from the smokestacks. The factory could be a symbol of the guilt he feels at having failed to save his mother's life. That guilt is 'polluting,' if you will, his interior landscape."

   Tommy turns the drawing upside-down. The plumes of smoke become sidecurls. The craggy mountain turns into a wide-brimmed hat. The scene of nature befouled is actually a sketch of a bearded, hatted, bespectacled Hasidic face.

   "There's your normal man," says Tommy.

   Dov is guided out of his trance. An officer leads the rabbi into the room. With the rabbi is a girl in shapeless blue dress and woolen tights. She has a long, plain face. She seems terrified. This is Ruth, the young girl brought together with Dov by the matchmaker.

   The rabbi looks at the drawing. "One of us?"

   Tommy shakes his head. "More likely just dressed like one of you."

   Whitey Walker can't see the face. The drawing is like a maddening optical illusion that won't invert for him.

   "Start with the beard," advises Tommy.

   "I'm trying."

   The question of the Pinboy's guilt becomes academic when, thanks to a Post Office delay, a letter arrives at Tollivetti's office three weeks after it was mailed.

Dear Surs,

I am the Minotaur of the Labyrinth. I have done my thing.

I kill wimmin.

   Enclosed please find a square of the underwear the young Jewess was wearing in B'klyn.

   Wimmin are scum. They are stoopid. Even maggot Wegeman was saved by the Woman In The Business Suit and Reeboks.

   That underwear is my curriculum vitae.

   I am the MOL.

   Minotaur--2 NYPD—0

   The cotton weave matches Barbara's other underwear," Tommy tells Agnes. "The blood type will match too, just wait."

   "A serial killer," says Agnes. "Is that really possible?"

   Tommy and the other detectives are taking a lot of heat at work for wasting time with Jack the Pinboy. "And then my father called last night," says Tommy. "Even he wanted to know why we arrested Speer. I told him it looked good at the time. Everybody's an armchair quarterback."

   In a hotel room in Aruba, Dr. Janice Fedelke commits suicide: pills and vodka. Her death seems unrelated to the Speer case. She was having boyfriend trouble. The marriage proposal she thought was coming hadn't. Ironically, as she lay dying, her boyfriend was three towns over, buying an engagement ring. There was trouble with his Visa card, which delayed him.

   Dr. Fedelke was an intense woman. She was manic depressive.

   "I'm devastated," the boyfriend tells the local police. No suicide note was found. There will be an inquest. "But I guess it might have happened sooner or later anyhow. I feel terrible, but it's almost a relief to find out...but what I really am is devastated.

Sarah has decided to make a film about Wayne Torrence. She has him up to Agnes's for dinner. She makes kettles of rice and vegetables, soba noodles with tamari, a date-nut bread heavy as a doorstop.

   "I came out on the street willingly," says Wayne. He spears a slice of translucent eggplant. "I had shingles about a year ago. That's when I quit my job."

   "Which was?"

   "Word processor. I thought I'd be all right for a while, but my money ran out in seven weeks."

   Agnes goes white. "Seven weeks?"

   "I lived well and saved poorly. Sue me."

   "What did you do?" asks Sarah.

   "I went to the organizations. I surrendered to doctors and lawyers and advocates. Everyone was pulling for me at the PWA Coalition and the AIDS Discrimination Unit and the WPWA and the AZT Alternative and the HIV Collective and the ARC Transitional Association. They were all dying to help me. Slapped my landlord with an injunction so he couldn't evict me. Got a home care worker for six hours a day. Six hours to keep a studio clean. We could have rewired the place."