Read The Prettiest Feathers Online
Authors: John Philpin
The Prettiest Feathers (24 page)
Fuzzy’s voice faded, my eyes wouldn’t focus, and my head was pounding like a son of a bitch. I saw Fuzzy put his coffee down and start to reach for me. Then the lights went out.
The room was white.
And God—all seven feet of him—was very clearly black.
“This ain’t heaven,” I said.
“No, mon,” the grinning giant said. “Don’ be heaven, but be nice gig.”
“Hospital?”
He nodded.
“Are you really that big, or are you standing on something?”
“I eat only the right foods, mon. Grains. Fruit. Built me a very healthy body.”
“Why aren’t you playing for the Giants?”
“I play no silly game with puny guys. I’m in an elevator one time standing eye to eye with Shaquille O’Neal. He’s not used to that, now. No football. No basketball. I
bowl
.”
“Reach out and knock the pins down, huh?”
“Break
the pins, mon. Another hospital pay me five hundred dollars to play for them this year. Next year I renegotiate. Maybe this place gets wise.”
I was enjoying the big guy, but I had other things on my mind—namely, finding a way out. “What is this place?”
“Same one you break out of before. But not this time. You and me, we have a good time. I tell you the story of my hero’s life—Bob Marley—you fall asleep. Then I listen to my music.”
He held up a Walkman and a set of ratty-looking earphones.
“You sleep some more,” he said. “That way you stay out of four points.”
“Four points?”
Still grinning, he held up a leather strap. “Four-point restraint. They keep you in bed so you shit in a pan. You want to shit in a pan?”
“I want to go to sleep.”
“Good. Then I tell you about my hero, Mr. Bob Marley. Humble beginnings, that mon.”
“What’s your name? And what are you doing here?”
The grin disappeared. “I’m Lymann Murr. I’m hired as a special to make sure you don’t wander off. We understand each other?”
Just then Hanson appeared at the door and started in. For a big man, Murr was quick. Hanson’s face was about level with the guy’s breastbone.
“Who are you?” Murr asked.
Hanson was nonplussed. “Hanson. I’m the captain.”
“Show some ID,” Murr said.
Hanson did.
Murr wasn’t impressed. “You’re not on the list,” he said.
“I’m the captain—his boss,” Hanson said.
“Go away,” Murr said. “I don’t like violence.”
Lane came in then, and walked around Murr and Hanson.
“Lymann,” she said, nodding a hello.
“Hey, Lane. You want this guy in?”
Lane looked at Hanson. “Probably not a good idea right now, Captain,” she said. “The doctor’s on his way over, too. We’ll all have to leave.”
Hanson retreated.
“I stopped and picked up your mail,” she said, tossing it on the bed. “I also fixed your door.”
“Look, about last night.”
“Lymann, tell the little white man to shut up.”
“Lady said shut up, mon.”
“And it wasn’t last night anyway,” Lane said. “You lost a day.”
I’ve been drunk enough to miss out a few hours before, but never anything like this. I knew I’d been down at the waterfront. There was a hooker. I remembered bits and pieces, but couldn’t put the whole picture together.
“He keeps threatening me with a bedpan,” I said. “That your idea, too?”
“That’s for shooting Bert’s favorite clock. He says it was an heirloom.”
I looked at her. “I did that?”
She nodded. “You walk away from treatment, you face charges. That’s the deal.”
I fumbled through the mail that I hadn’t bothered to pick up for days. Bills. Ads. And a small package with no return address, just a postal cancellation from White River Junction. I couldn’t read the state abbreviation.
“I picked up all your notes,” Lane said. “Also got that notebook Chadwick sent you.”
“Good. Where’s White River Junction?” I asked.
“Vermont,” Lymann said. “Other side of the river from Hanover, New Hampshire, where I went to school.”
“You went to Dartmouth?” Lane asked.
“Studied music. I play synclavier. Bedpans aren’t my only gig,” he told her. “I thought you knew everything about me, cuz.”
“Cuz?” I said.
“I’m Lane’s mama’s sister’s boy,” he explained, grinning. “That makes us cousins.”
“Nice to know we’re keeping my confinement all in the family,” I said, as a book slipped out of the wrapping and onto the bed.
Rimbaud.
I opened the cover and stared at the bookplate:
From the Library of Maxine Harris
.
“This is the book that Sarah told me about,” I said. “The one I had gone to her house to get.”
My head was finally starting to clear. “Wolf’s name is Pease,” I said. “He has a sister named Sarah.”
I told Lane what I remembered from my conversation with the dispatcher in Vermont—that Wolf had grown up in Saxtons River, tried to kill his parents, and was believed to have died in Vietnam.
“Somebody has to get to the sister,” I said, pushing the blanket off and starting to get up.
“He’s had enough,” Lymann said, putting me right back where I was.
“There were notes and some stuff from the army on your desk,” Lane said.
“That’s what you need,” I told her.
“I’ll take care of it. You’re here for the duration.”
I leaned back, looking again at the volume of poetry, thumbing through the pages until I saw the highlighted lines. I read them aloud to Lane:
The wolf howled under the leaves
And spit out the prettiest feathers
Of his meal of fowl,
hike him I consume myself
.
“Christ, what are we dealing with?” she said.
I
flunked my polygraph.
One question did me in: “Do you know who killed Sarah Sinclair?”
My voice was saying, “No,” but my head was saying “Yes.” I knew that Wolf/Carver/Chadwick/Pease was our killer. I couldn’t even tell anybody what he looked like, but I knew that he did it. So when I said no, the needle jumped.
Fibs (that’s what we call the guy who runs our polygraph; his name is Gibbs) asked me the same question during three different trials, and each time it activated an emotional response. After the third try, he said, “Sorry, Lane. This isn’t working out.”
I didn’t even wait for Hanson to call me in. Monday morning, while he was out at a city council meeting, I walked into his office and put my badge and gun on his desk—along with a note reminding him that department policy required that I be placed on
paid
suspension.
Before I left, I gathered up everything that I thought I might possibly need: Xeroxes of all the scientific evidence
reports, the packet of faxes I had received from surrounding police departments, the stack of crime scene photos Benny took. To avoid being brought up on charges, I stuck a handwritten note in the case file, signing them out to an unreadable name.
I also picked the lock on Robert’s file drawer again. He had told me about the book and the gun that “Alan Carver” dropped off. I wanted the gun. Now that Hanson had my 9 millimeter, I wanted something with more firepower than the .22 I kept at my apartment.
Robert had known that the whole embassy story was a fraud, so the paperwork on the gun
had
to be fake. He’d even yelled at Sarah, telling her what a fool she was to fall for all the lies this Wolf character was telling her. But then it was days before he ran the serial number on the gun.
I found the report in Robert’s in basket, so I knew that he hadn’t seen it. The .32 had come back registered to Dr. Alan Chadwick of Hasty Hills, Connecticut. There was also a second gun in Chadwick’s name—this one a .38 (probably the gun he used on the two guys in the alley across from the bookstore).
I tucked the .32 into my cosmetics bag and headed home, where a fax from Pop was waiting. I sat down to read it while I waited for some coffee to perk.
TO: Lanie
FROM: Pop
Getting fired from a job that I’ve never accepted is a significant insult. But I see that despite my dismissal from the case, Lt. Swartz continues to view me as part of the team. And apparently he sees you the same way, despite your suspension (bad news travels fast). No wonder I like Swartz. The only authority he seems to respect is his own.
If I were to join this renegade investigative unit that you and Swartz have going, I suppose that you would be my boss. But then it’s always been that way, hasn’t
it? We need to talk about your managerial skills. I’ve already done a few hours’ work for you, but you haven’t even mentioned a benefits package. I’ll want 100% insurance, of course (including Rx and dental), and automatic vacation whenever the fishing looks promising. Any problems with that?
Although Lt. Swartz is continuing to fax information, he has warned me not to communicate with him at the office. He says I’m to run everything through your fax machine at home. He apologized for the inconvenience, but says it’s a necessity—“because Hanson suffers from rectocranial inversion.” I’m going to push for that to be included in the new
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
.
To business. Another photo for you to consider: #119 from the Harris case. It’s not a crime scene shot (she was found in a cemetery); it’s from the search of her apartment. Again, use a glass. Look at the saucer under the jade plant. If I’m not mistaken, that’s an epaulet feather from a red-winged blackbird. Your wolf has many signatures.
A friend at Cambridge PD checked for me on that strangulation homicide that the real Dr. Chadwick mentioned to your partner. No photos, but they still had the inventory taken at her apartment. There was a feather. It meant nothing, however, because she worked part-time at the Peabody Museum there. Also, re Chadwick’s young friend who fell (or was pushed) to her death: the final entries in her diary do refer to flying like a bird, but they are not the words of someone suicidal or psychotic. Quite simply, she was enchanted by the swallows that fly up among the buildings in Boston’s business district A “strange new friend” had taken her there. She wrote that she wanted to learn more about him, and she pondered what it would be like to fly like the swallows. It was rather
charming, really—not the end of the world, more like the beginning of something.
Wolf’s signatures change. They don’t represent the kind of linkage cops like to see. Because he knows about investigations,
he
changes.
Some victims are displayed; some are left where they fall. Some (apparently) are buried north of Hasty Hills. He enjoys manipulating the crime scene (before, during, or after the fact?). He puts things in, takes things out, or just moves things around. It’s not always the same.
I fear that all of your various pieces of evidence will lead nowhere. You’ll have names, places to check—and you have to do this, of course—but you won’t find him, and he knows that. Your federal friends will be content to focus on their suspect, waiting to see if there are any more killings with a similar MO, but I can’t accept that. They consider all the Wolf/Chadwick material to be a low priority right now because the information they feed into their databases doesn’t include the subtleties—this killer’s hallmark—that can be seen only in a close reading of the individual crime scene reports.
There
is
linkage. It may not be a conscious thing with Wolf (although I fear that it is), but it’s there. Rebecca Holbrook was the young woman who disappeared on her way to work at the bottling plant. A year before her disappearance, a man was killed in an industrial accident at the plant. Alan Chadwick, MD, was a member of the inspection team that spent three days evaluating the plant’s safety and medical response procedures. Coincidence?
A few months before her disappearance, Ms. Holbrook attended her tenth high school reunion in Pawtucket, RI. A secretary at that school, Paulette Carson (who had no connection to the reunion or Ms. Holbrook), was found strangled in her apartment.
Unsolved. No feather. But there was an audiotape in her cassette player that close friends insisted she would never have bought:
The Teardrop Explodes—
another Julian Cope incarnation. Coincidence?
Ms. Carson was originally from Ansonia, CT—the same town where Susan Cullen disappeared from a convenience store ten months ago. She’s the one who was found floating in the river. No music. No feather. But someone had broken into her apartment, fingered his way through a few drawers, helped himself to a bowl of soup, and walked away with a book—a collection of poetry. Coincidence?
I’m beginning to get a feel for this gentleman. I don’t like it. Never do. Something nags in one of the far corners of my mind. When it decides to make itself known, I’ll advise.
With the help of a friend at Social Security, I was able to locate Paul Wolf’s half-sister: Sarah Humphrey, 492 Devil’s Kitchen Road, Casselberry, Florida. Phone: (407) 555-6073. Go see her.
Pop
P.S. I would have expected Wolf to blow out the candles at Sarah’s house. Why didn’t he?
The coffee was ready, but I sent off an answer to Pop before pouring it.
Pop,
If you know about the suspension, you know about the polygraph. I walked out before Hanson had a chance to track me down. I don’t have time to deal with him. I’ve got a killer to catch. Rather,
we
do. So I’ll be camping out at Robert’s for a while. Right now, he’s getting checked out physically, then he’ll be transferred to Tranquil Acres for 28 days of withdrawal and soul-searching.
You’re
supposed to tell
me
why our boy didn’t blow out the candles. My guess is that he hung around, enjoyed the house for a while. We know that he took a shower. Luminal lit up the bathroom, especially the tub. Remember, by the time he was ready to leave, the candles had burned themselves down to nothing. More evidence that he was comfortable there?
Yes, I’ll go to Florida. The timing of your request (read “demand”) that I pay Sarah Humphrey a visit is perfect. The less I show my face around this town right now, the better.
Also, I’ll call Lt. Swartz and let him know that I’ll find a way to get your faxes to him. I know he’ll continue to work with us.
Keep on loving me. Think you can do that?
Lanie