The Traveller (43 page)

Then she turned and, still holding the gun, truly looked at Douglas Jeffers’ apartment.

‘I can feel it,’ she said out loud. She was flooded suddenly with visions from a hundred crime scenes and bloodied, decomposing corpses that she’d visited over the years. They came back to her as if in some parade from the Grand Guignol. The ghoulish sights and sickly, awful smells filled her imagination and for an instant she thought that there was a body there, in the apartment.

She shook her head as if to clear it and said, ‘Well, let’s look around.’

She moved from room to room gingerly, still holding the pistol. When she was finally convinced that she was alone, she began to assess what surrounded her. The first thought that struck her was that it was clean and orderly. Everything seemed in its place. Not so organized as to be oppressive, but straightened up and shipshape. The contrast with Martin Jeffers’ apartment was striking.

It was not a large apartment. There was a single bedroom and bathroom, a small kitchen and dining alcove, and a wide, rectangular living room. A half-bath off the living room had been transformed into a darkroom. The furniture was comfortable and stylish, but not to the extent that a designer had created a distinctive look. More that it reflected someone who understood quality and purchased an occasional piece. There were a few antiques, and in each

room there were knickknacks on shelves and bureau tops. Detective Barren picked up a shell casing from what she took to be a mortar round. There were small artifacts, a statuette from Central America, a fertility statue from Africa. She saw a large shark’s tooth encased in plastic and an old rock also encased. It bore a legend: olduvai gorge,

1977. TWO MILLION YEARS OLD.

She saw that Jeffers had a worktable - a draftsman’s bench, situated near the bank of windows which let the room fill with light. She saw the paraphernalia of a photographer: negatives, enlargers, paper, piled neatly about the table.

There was one large bookcase, which covered an entire wall in the living room.

The walls were white. There were two posters, framed: The Art of Photography, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and a Horn Gallery Exhibit of Ansel Adams.

Everything else was by Douglas Jeffers.

Or, at least, that is what she took them to be.

There were dozens of pictures covering all the walls. They were in all shapes and sizes, framed in different styles. She glanced in their direction, thinking: They are what I saw in the magazines. They’ll tell you everything and nothing at the same time.

But her eye was caught by one small frame, in a corner. She walked to it and stared. It was of a man on the near edge of middle age, but with a clearly contradictory youthful vitality. He was dressed in olive fatigues and blue workshirt, draped with cameras and lenses. The background was of some anonymous jungle. She could see tendrils and vines flowing from the twisted branches of a thousand interwoven trees. He was sitting on a stack of boxes marked with ammunition numbers. He was grinning widely out from the picture, his hand cocked in a mock pistol, making a shooting motion toward the camera. In a corner of the frame typed on a small white piece of paper, were the words self-portrait, 1984, Nicaragua.

‘Hello, Mr Jeffers,’ she said.

She took the picture from the wall and held it up.

I am your undoing,’ she said.

She replaced the picture and told herself to get started. She cautioned herself to be careful and systematic with this brother’s apartment. She turned toward the desk and saw, neatly placed in the center, a large white envelope. On it was written in strong black type: for marty.

Her hand shot out for it.

There had been much disagreement among the Lost Boys.

Opinions had ranged from Weingarten’s whining ‘Jeez, what could you do? I mean, ask ‘em to stop? But people do what they want anyway. You can’t just force them to do anything. I mean, I never could, and nobody could ever get me to stop …” to Pope’s stolid ‘If I knew somebody in my family was doing what I do, I’d shoot the fucker, real fast. Put ‘em out of their misery,’ to which Steele had interjected, ‘Are you in such misery? Dear, dear, you don’t act like it…’ And Pope had replied, ‘Watch out, faggot, before I fucking well do you.’ This, despite the integrity of the threat, had caused everyone to laugh. Killing a man such as Steele struck most of them as a great waste of time. This opinion was shared among the members of the group with great enthusiasm.

It seemed that they, who should have been experts, did not know what to do any more than anyone would.

Any more than I know what to do, Martin Jeffers spoke to himself.

He despaired inwardly.

He sat alone in his darkened office. Outside, the night had swept up and taken over the hospital grounds, throwing shadows across the stately lawns. He could hear an occasional shout, an infrequent cry, which were the sleeping norms of the hospital. The night awakens our fears, he thought, just as the day calms them.

He thought of all the things the Lost Boys had said. ‘You see,’ Parker had sputtered in the midst of the argument, ‘you got to do the right thing. But what is the right thing? What’s right for some cops maybe isn’t what’s right for your family: You go to the cops and they’re gonna want to

know everything and they sure as hell aren’t gonna be your friend. All they’re looking to do is bust somebody. And, man, you’re gonna give them your mother or brother or father or sister or anybody. Shit, even your cousin, man? Blood is thicker, you know …’

To which Knight had interrupted: ‘So you make yourself into an accomplice? You do. By being quiet, don’t you become as bad as the person doing the crimes?’

The room had filled with both agreement and disavowal.

He remembered someone saying, ‘If you know, and you stay quiet, you’re just as guilty. There ought to be a special prison for people like that!’

There is, he thought ruefully.

Acquiescing to the knowledge of crime is almost as bad as the crime itself. He thought of the Holocaust and remembered the particular problems at Nuremberg, dealing with the people who’d merely remained quiet in the face of depravity. It was easy to single out the performers and punish them. But those people who’d turned their backs? Politicians, lawyers, doctors, businessmen …

He wondered: What happened to them?

Jeffers considered the enthusiasm with which the group had greeted the issue. He wondered why he’d never posed the question before. What struck him was the idea that virtually everyone in the group seemed to have considered the problem that they themselves posed to their own families. How would they deal with themselves? They didn’t know.

He remembered the shouting back and forth through the sunlit day room. They’d run some twenty minutes over the regular end of the session. Finally he’d held up his hand.

‘We’ll continue this tomorrow. Everyone think over your responses and we’ll talk it over some more.’

The men had stood, starting to exit in their usual small knots, when Miller, the man Jeffers thought perhaps the least perceptive, turned and asked, ‘Why’d ya ask us? You got some reason?’

The men had stopped, looking back at Jeffers.

He’d shaken his head in negative, swiftly adopting his

usual exterior countenance of mildly amused intellectual curiosity, and the Lost Boys filed out in silence, without further comment. He thought: No one believed that denial. Not for an instant.

He looked out the window into the darkness.

I will not believe, he said to himself angrily, that my brother is a murderer! They arrested a man for the crime this detective hounds me on! Why is she here?

She isn’t, he said to himself.

Where is she?

When Detective Barren failed to call by noontime, he’d telephoned her hotel. There had been no answer in the room. He’d rung the desk clerk back and ascertained that she had not checked out.

He tried to toughen himself inwardly. Just wait, he told himself. Wait for the next development. She has a lot of explaining to do. Wait to hear what she has to say.

Then he thought: She’s not the only one who owes me an explanation.

He crumpled a paper from his desktop and threw it on the floor. He picked up a pencil and broke it in half. He looked around for something to punch, but saw nothing suitable. He turned to the wall and slapped his open palm against the whitewashed surface until he felt it redden, and he welcomed the pain, a sensation that replaced, if only for a moment, his frustration. He thought of the detective and felt a great, uncontrollable anger. He wanted to scream at her: I want to know!

Where the hell is she? he asked furiously.

And then his anger fled him and he had the awful thought: Where the hell is he?

Detective Mercedes Barren sat cross-legged on the floor of the living room in Douglas Jeffers’ apartment, surrounded by the mass of her search. She had turned on every light in the apartment, as if scared to allow any of night’s darkness to crawl in beside her. It was late and she was tired. She had systematically searched the entire place; from the toilet in the bathroom to the files of negatives in the darkroom. She had taken apart the couch and the bedding.

hunting for weapons, without success. She had pulled

everything out of the shelves in the kitchen. Every closet

had been emptied. Clothes had been rifled, drawers

dumped out, papers read and discarded. There was not

even a ticket receipt from the Miami trip. Not even a

picture postcard. The detritus of her search lay in piles

about her.

Useless, she thought.

She could feel tears of rage and despair in her eyes.

‘Nothing. Nothing. Nothing,’ she said out loud.

She knew that he must have a safety deposit box, or a locker or a room somewhere else. Some place that collected the residue of crime. Something somewhere that connected him to her niece.

She could barely stand the tension she felt in the room. That she was close to murder, she knew. She could sense it, smell it; it entered her body through every pore and orifice, covering her, absorbed within her. She recognized the sensation from a hundred crime scenes that she’d visited.

That he was the killer was obvious. A glance at the bookcase had told her that. Virtually every book on the shelves was about some aspect of crime. Novels, textbooks, nonfiction accounts — all lined up in row after row. She was familiar with many, but not all, of the titles. That had impressed her deeply. He is a man who knows his business, she thought.

But a literary interest in crime was not evidence.

It was something she could show the brother, and he would just deny that it was anything other than a slightly morbid preoccupation, and certainly nothing out of the norm for someone who’d photographed so much upheaval and death. She looked up from her seat on the floor at the pictures that covered the walls and she wondered angrily how anyone could stand to be surrounded by so many violent and disturbing images.

She had nothing. She pounded her fists on the floor.

Then she picked up the letter from one brother to another and read it for the hundredth time:

Dear Marty:

If you get this note, one of a number of possible scenarios has come to pass. I suppose you will be expecting some kind of explanation.

You don’t need one.

You know.it already.

Still, I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve caused you.

But it was unavoidable.

Or maybe inevitable.

See you in hell.

Your loving brother, Doug

p.s. What do you think of the pictures? Intense, no?

Detective Barren dropped the note to her lap. It told her nothing. She was overcome by a massive, enraged hatred. Her heart seemed to burn in her chest. Her throat filled with vile-tasting bile. She wanted to spit in the face of the murderer. She wanted to get her own hands around his neck, just as he’d done to her niece.

She wanted to say something out loud, but all that emerged from her throat was a growl, animal-like and savage.

Finally words formed: ‘It’s not over,’ she said. ‘I’m never finished with you. I will get you. I will get you. I will get you.’

She thought of her niece. ‘Oh, Susan,’ she moaned. But it was a sound less of sadness than of fury.

Her anger stiffened her and she rose to her knees in the center of the room. Her eyes suddenly fixed on the self-portrait that hung on the wall in the corner. All she could see was the mocking smile, as if it were laughing at the futility of her efforts. Her hand shot out and siezed the plastic-encased stone from the Olduvai Gorge, and, without thinking, without realizing anything save the rage that enveloped her, still kneeling on the floor, she wildly threw the artifact at the photograph.

The sound of the shattering glass instantly composed her.

She shut her eyes, took several deep breaths, and looked at the wall. She saw that the ancient rock had missed the picture of Douglas Jeffers, which still grinned in infuriating elusiveness out at her. Instead it had crashed into one of the other framed photographs, splintering the glass and knocking the picture from the wall to the floor.

She sighed deeply and got to her feet.

Feel better? she asked herself mockingly.

She stepped over to the shattered picture frame.

‘Well, just add this to the tab,’ she said. She had no intention of cleaning anything up. She poked at it with her foot. It was a full-color shot of a riot on a city street. In the deep background was a pillar of smoke and fire, and in the foreground a melee of policemen, firemen, and their vehicles. The lights seemed to blend hypnotically. She kicked at it. ‘A good shot,’ she said. ‘Not one of your best, but pretty damn good.’ As she started to turn away, she noticed that a corner of the picture had peeled back when the frame had buckled and come loose after falling.

She stopped then and looked down.

She did not know exactly what it was that caught her attention. Perhaps it was the odd contrast between the vivid colors of the picture and the muted gray of the paper behind. She still was unsure what she was looking at, but she thought that something was unusual. She tried to remember whether she’d ever heard of someone mounting a. photograph on top of another picture, the way some artists paint over earlier images on their canvases. She could not recall hearing of such a thing.